WEBVTT - Part Two: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science

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<v Speaker 1>Alsome Media.

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<v Speaker 2>Ah, we're back. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast

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<v Speaker 2>about terrible people. And in part one of the story

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<v Speaker 2>of Robert Maxwell killing Maxwell's dad, he was pretty fucking rad.

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<v Speaker 2>And unfortunately we're now going into part two where it's

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<v Speaker 2>wild that this is like an episode where our bastard

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<v Speaker 2>commits several war crimes, and we're not angry about the

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<v Speaker 2>war crimes really like, it's the other stuff he's gonna

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<v Speaker 2>do that sucks well and with us once again is

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<v Speaker 2>the great Adam Conover. Adam, welcome back to the show.

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<v Speaker 2>How you doing, Thank you for having me.

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<v Speaker 3>I'm just so excited to hear more stories of our

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<v Speaker 3>cool friend Abraham Robert Ivan, private, private, private, yes, oh

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<v Speaker 3>oh oh. The best one was Leslie Leslie, yeah yeah.

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<v Speaker 3>And he's just a he's just a great guy. He's

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<v Speaker 3>just murdering a few more Nazis than you should. Yeah,

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<v Speaker 3>it's not great, but you know, you know, he's taking

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<v Speaker 3>his revenge.

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<v Speaker 2>It's forgivable, yes and understandable. Part two is going to

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<v Speaker 2>be less so, although don't worry, he still does get

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<v Speaker 2>to kill one more Nazi, so we've got that going

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<v Speaker 2>for us. So the immediate aftermath of the Big Dub

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<v Speaker 2>Dub Dose was a busy time for Robert Maxwell. He

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<v Speaker 2>taught himself Russian, assuming spycraft would be a lucrative part

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<v Speaker 2>of his future. He's like, number one, I'm pretty good

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<v Speaker 2>with languages. Number two, I bet living in Berlin knowing

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<v Speaker 2>Russian is going to be lucrative very soon. And he

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<v Speaker 2>is correct about that. And then he kind of goes

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<v Speaker 2>he takes like a break from his like like a

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<v Speaker 2>leave of absence, and travels alone to war torn Prague

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<v Speaker 2>to try and track down the survivors of his family,

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<v Speaker 2>and he gets nothing but bad news. Really, he is

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<v Speaker 2>particularly scarred to hear that his nineteen year old sister, Shinya,

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<v Speaker 2>had been arrested in Budapest and likely shot and then

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<v Speaker 2>tossed into the river. One older and one younger sister survived.

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<v Speaker 2>His younger sister was actually rescued directly by Raoul Wallenberg,

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<v Speaker 2>who we've covered in our one of our Reverse Bastards episodes. Yeah,

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<v Speaker 2>Wallenberg in Budapest was like writing, I think Swede. I

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<v Speaker 2>think of Swedish Swedish visas for everyone on every Jewish

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<v Speaker 2>person under fifteen, and just like lying, it's like they're

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<v Speaker 2>all citizens, like every one of them.

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<v Speaker 4>Oh my god, there's many Swedish people here.

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<v Speaker 2>Wow, a lot of Swedes in Budapest right now. And

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<v Speaker 2>he saved I mean he again, We've talked about this.

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<v Speaker 2>He saves like one hundred thousand people, and one of

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<v Speaker 2>them is Robert Maxwell's younger sister. So this is obviously

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<v Speaker 2>about as devastating a road trip as you can go on,

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<v Speaker 2>traveling through like the battle scars of Eastern Europe to

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<v Speaker 2>find out basically no one lived in your family. And

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<v Speaker 2>this is kind of the last time that he directly

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<v Speaker 2>acknowledges his Jewish roots for decades. When he returns to

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<v Speaker 2>occupied Berlin to work as an interrogator, he fully inhabits

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<v Speaker 2>Robert Maxwell, British officer. He's promoted to a captain at

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<v Speaker 2>this point, and it's not like hidden, like he doesn't

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<v Speaker 2>try to cover up his origins, but he doesn't tell

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<v Speaker 2>people he starts meeting now about them, and the vast

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<v Speaker 2>majority of people who know and work with him have

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<v Speaker 2>no idea that he's Jewish, that he grew up, you know,

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<v Speaker 2>in eastern Czechoslovakia, and he you know, it's one of

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<v Speaker 2>those things I don't think he was ever religious. So

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<v Speaker 2>I think Judaism was never like his his faith in

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<v Speaker 2>a meaningful way, because I think he's just kind of

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<v Speaker 2>a natural atheist. And I think after this, acknowledging that

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<v Speaker 2>that's his heritage is just too painful because his family

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<v Speaker 2>has been annihilated, right, and so he just really doesn't

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<v Speaker 2>for decades. He does take care of his sisters. He

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<v Speaker 2>sends them both to the United States, he sends his

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<v Speaker 2>younger he pays for his younger sister to go to college.

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<v Speaker 2>So he continues to take care of his family. He

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<v Speaker 2>just I think it's too painful for him to kind

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<v Speaker 2>of acknowledge his background in any way.

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<v Speaker 3>What kind of like documentation would one even have at

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<v Speaker 3>this point, you know, like how like what you know,

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<v Speaker 3>what is he a citizen of? And is there any

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<v Speaker 3>such thing as like given what's happened in.

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<v Speaker 2>Europe, Yes, so, but he is lucky for a lot

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<v Speaker 2>of people there aren't, right because of how many states

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<v Speaker 2>are destroyed and how chaotic the movement is. But he

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<v Speaker 2>enters the UK as part of the Dunkirk Landing, so

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<v Speaker 2>he has number one papers from France because he's enlisted

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<v Speaker 2>in the French Foreign Legion. And then he gets papers

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<v Speaker 2>because he enlists in the British military and so he

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<v Speaker 2>is an official citizen and he is able to get

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<v Speaker 2>papers for his family as a result, because he's now

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<v Speaker 2>a captain. He's fairly influential. He's good at meeting and

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<v Speaker 2>knowing people. He's a war hero, and he's able to

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<v Speaker 2>take care of his family because number one, his legal

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<v Speaker 2>status is super clear and he's a hero, right, and

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<v Speaker 2>he does take care of his family, though what little

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<v Speaker 2>is left of it. Now he is an interrogator now

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<v Speaker 2>in Berlin, and it is unlikely that his job as

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<v Speaker 2>an interrogator always stuck to the letter of international law,

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<v Speaker 2>by which I mean he probably tortured people. Right, this

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<v Speaker 2>is the start of the Cold War. He is in

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<v Speaker 2>Berlin interrogator people, and initially a lot of former Nazis.

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<v Speaker 2>But like, one has to assume there's some ugliness to

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<v Speaker 2>this job. Now, this is also a time nineteen forty

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<v Speaker 2>six when a foreign occupier could behave more or less

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<v Speaker 2>any way they wanted to among the captive German population,

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<v Speaker 2>and Maxwell certainly did for idea of like how because

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<v Speaker 2>everyone's starving in Germany, and also most of them had

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<v Speaker 2>been Nazis, so like for example, my grandpa is in

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<v Speaker 2>this at the exact same period of time and basically

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<v Speaker 2>the same area I have in my house, like two

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<v Speaker 2>grandfather clocks that he bought for like fifty cents each.

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<v Speaker 2>He bought like a shitload of these, like one hundred

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<v Speaker 2>and fifty year old grandfather clocks from starving Germans and

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<v Speaker 2>just shipped him back to the US because he was

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<v Speaker 2>as a poor Oklahoma boy. He's like, yeah, I'll take

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<v Speaker 2>all these formerly rich Europeans grandfather clocks for pennies, fuck them,

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<v Speaker 2>like hard to blame anybody for that. I consider them

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<v Speaker 2>more booty and Maxwell's Maxwell does the same thing, but

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<v Speaker 2>with so much more panache because so because he's he's

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<v Speaker 2>got this job where he's like interrogating old Nazis, he

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<v Speaker 2>meets Hitler's former dentist, which is first very weird connection. Yeah,

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<v Speaker 2>and so Hitler's old dentist tells Robert Maxwell, you know,

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<v Speaker 2>I know the guy who bred Hitler's beloved German shepherd Blondie.

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<v Speaker 2>That's the dog that he like like fed Cyanide to

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<v Speaker 2>when the bunker, like this is his pet. And there's

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<v Speaker 2>this dude who's like the dog, the Kinnel operator who

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<v Speaker 2>bred the dogs that like were Hitler's dogs, and so

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<v Speaker 2>Robert Maxwell's like I got to meet this motherfucker. So

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<v Speaker 2>he visits this guy.

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<v Speaker 4>Hitler must have just like the number of people.

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<v Speaker 3>Yeah. I was Hitler's optometrist. Yeah, yeah, you know I

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<v Speaker 3>used to scrub Hitler's pool.

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<v Speaker 2>Yeah, a lot of a lot.

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<v Speaker 4>Of personal services the guy needed done.

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<v Speaker 2>Yeah yeah, yeah, a lot of people working with Hitler

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<v Speaker 2>one way or the other.

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<v Speaker 3>Yeah.

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<v Speaker 4>I set up his aquarium. It was like really complicated.

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<v Speaker 3>Then he needed me to come out every two weeks

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<v Speaker 3>to clean Hitler's aquarium.

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<v Speaker 2>My aunt when she was like hitchhiking through Germany and

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<v Speaker 2>like the fifties, got picked up by a guy she

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<v Speaker 2>later found out was Hitler's photographer. Like, we have a

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<v Speaker 2>bunch of photos he gave her, like he just picked

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<v Speaker 2>her up on the.

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<v Speaker 3>Road photos of Hitler.

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<v Speaker 2>Yes, we have like a lot of weird Hitler photos

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<v Speaker 2>in my family that she was just like I didn't

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<v Speaker 2>know what to do with him.

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<v Speaker 4>You gotta go on antiques road show and.

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<v Speaker 2>With my Hitler picks, my god, yeah.

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<v Speaker 3>They never have the good shit on there. You got

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<v Speaker 3>to go on with the Hitler picks at the Grandfather clocks.

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<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, I prefer the Grandfather clocks to the Hitler picks. So,

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<v Speaker 2>but Maxwell's story is so much cooler. So he finds

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<v Speaker 2>Hitler's dog breeder and this guy is like on the

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<v Speaker 2>edge of destitution. Obviously the war was not good for

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<v Speaker 2>Hitler's dog guy. And he has one breeding male left, right,

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<v Speaker 2>this like one German, and he's his hope is that

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<v Speaker 2>like I can rebuild my business with this male, right,

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<v Speaker 2>you know, and maybe get my feet back on.

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<v Speaker 3>And it's like just like a guy that man, you know,

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<v Speaker 3>that downfall the Third riis and like the Holocaust and

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<v Speaker 3>all that really bad for my dog breeding business, Yes,

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<v Speaker 3>horrible for guys who sell German shepherds. Yeah, you know,

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<v Speaker 3>I sold German Hitler. I thought it was a good

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<v Speaker 3>bed at the time.

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<v Speaker 2>I thought it would keep going.

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<v Speaker 3>Seemed like he was on the way up. You know.

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<v Speaker 2>It was the MySpace of its day. How could it

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<v Speaker 2>have failed?

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<v Speaker 5>Go?

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<v Speaker 3>Why don't anybody think of how this affects dog breeding businesses?

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<v Speaker 2>Yeah, fucking Eisenhower kept awake at night. We never thought

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<v Speaker 2>of the dog breeders. So Maxwell, his biographers always say

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<v Speaker 2>that he buys the dog off this guy and reading

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<v Speaker 2>between the lines. I don't think he gave the breeder

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<v Speaker 2>a choice, right. I think he was like, I'm a

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<v Speaker 2>British officer, I have a weapon, I'm taking the dog.

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<v Speaker 2>And I believe this because within days of him taking

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<v Speaker 2>this guy's last dog, Hitler's dog breeder commits suicide.

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<v Speaker 1>And this story is so bizarre.

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<v Speaker 2>Maxwell he tells his like comrades, his like fellow soldiers this,

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<v Speaker 2>and he's like, ha in this fucking funny and they're

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<v Speaker 2>like horrified that he kind of killed Hitler's dog breeder.

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<v Speaker 3>Well, I mean, also, this man, his entire family was

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<v Speaker 3>murdered in the Holocaust. It's like and.

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<v Speaker 2>There the morality of this is, I don't know.

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<v Speaker 3>Hitler's dog breeder sounds like a side mission from Wolfenstein.

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<v Speaker 3>You know of someone you go murder, Right, you.

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<v Speaker 2>Gotta kill Hitler's dog breeder. He's got four arms and

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<v Speaker 2>like a Cerberus. Yeah, you need the mini gun for

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<v Speaker 2>that level.

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<v Speaker 4>So is it Hitler's dog? Is that what you're saying?

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<v Speaker 2>No, No, no, this would have been I think it was

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<v Speaker 2>like the sire of Hitler's dog, maybe at least related

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<v Speaker 2>to the sire Hitler's dog.

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<v Speaker 3>No, No, this wasn't Hitler's dog. No no, no, no no,

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<v Speaker 3>this was the sire of Hitler's Yeah.

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<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I stole Hitler's dog's dad.

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<v Speaker 3>Every Nazi owned dogs who were sired by this dog.

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<v Speaker 2>Yeah yeah. It's so funny that he's like, this is

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<v Speaker 2>a bragging point for him that I destroyed this man

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<v Speaker 2>and his like his colleagues are like, that's kind of

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<v Speaker 2>fun up.

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<v Speaker 3>And I also just have to say, if your biographer

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<v Speaker 3>is like starting a paragraph with and then he met

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<v Speaker 3>a dog breeder and arranged to purchase a dog, it's

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<v Speaker 3>not a good dog purchase story, Like.

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<v Speaker 2>There's not any of those really, Like a breeder dog purchases.

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<v Speaker 3>Don't make it.

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<v Speaker 4>I mean, yeah, you know, like Nixon's biography doesn't.

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<v Speaker 3>Spend a lot of time on checkers, you know what

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<v Speaker 3>I mean.

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<v Speaker 2>Right, So, yeah, he couldn't kill Hitler, but he got

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<v Speaker 2>the guy who made Hitler's dog. I guess wildlife.

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<v Speaker 3>He owned the dog, what do you do with the dog?

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<v Speaker 2>By all accounts, he cared about. He liked the dog, obviously,

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<v Speaker 2>not the dog's fault.

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<v Speaker 3>He takes revenge on literally everybody who had anything to

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<v Speaker 3>do with Nazi, just people who were just hanging around

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<v Speaker 3>in Germany for a day.

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<v Speaker 4>He slaughters them, but he's like the dog.

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<v Speaker 3>I like the dogs, the dog Bitler's dog's dad. That's

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<v Speaker 3>a Nazi I'm okay with.

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<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah. So Maxwell kind of around this period has

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<v Speaker 2>a fairly He works as a spy. He's kind of

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<v Speaker 2>like a contractor for six probably it's one of those

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<v Speaker 2>things where we don't know exactly who he's working for

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<v Speaker 2>one hundred percent because it's spy stuff and because of

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<v Speaker 2>some other things he does. Because he's always a little

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<v Speaker 2>involved in this world of espionage. This will be mythologized,

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<v Speaker 2>but what we can confirm is really cool, which is

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<v Speaker 2>that he befriends a Soviet colonel because he speaks Russian

0:11:30.760 --> 0:11:33.800
<v Speaker 2>really well, and you have to imagine they're very drunk.

0:11:34.000 --> 0:11:38.000
<v Speaker 2>He convinces the Soviet colonel to break into Georgie Zukov's

0:11:38.000 --> 0:11:43.080
<v Speaker 2>office so they can photograph his papers. Like so much

0:11:43.200 --> 0:11:47.040
<v Speaker 2>vodka has to have been part of this story to

0:11:47.120 --> 0:11:54.199
<v Speaker 2>get this colonel to like, yeah, fuck Zukov, insane. Yeah,

0:11:54.240 --> 0:11:57.440
<v Speaker 2>it's nuts. He also carries out clandestine surveillance of his

0:11:57.520 --> 0:12:01.120
<v Speaker 2>old homeland, Czechoslovakia, which is where he gets noted by

0:12:01.160 --> 0:12:04.160
<v Speaker 2>the Czech like foreign service is looking like a hotter

0:12:04.240 --> 0:12:08.199
<v Speaker 2>Clark Gable. He's also described by many who knew him

0:12:08.200 --> 0:12:10.160
<v Speaker 2>as being a bit of a dick. An article in

0:12:10.200 --> 0:12:13.280
<v Speaker 2>The Guardian at this time describes him as tall, brash

0:12:13.360 --> 0:12:16.200
<v Speaker 2>and not at all content with his already considerable success.

0:12:16.440 --> 0:12:19.000
<v Speaker 2>An acquaintance at the time recalled him confessing his greatest

0:12:19.000 --> 0:12:23.400
<v Speaker 2>desire to be a millionaire. So you know what else

0:12:23.480 --> 0:12:26.320
<v Speaker 2>is there after killing every night? Literally getting down to

0:12:26.320 --> 0:12:28.400
<v Speaker 2>the fact that you're down to Hitler's dog breeder, so

0:12:28.400 --> 0:12:29.960
<v Speaker 2>you got no more Nazis to kill?

0:12:30.280 --> 0:12:35.640
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I mean it just war affects everybody so differently.

0:12:35.679 --> 0:12:38.400
<v Speaker 3>You know, I would think that if I escaped the

0:12:38.480 --> 0:12:44.360
<v Speaker 3>miserable poverty of Central Eastern Europe and you know, and

0:12:44.480 --> 0:12:47.520
<v Speaker 3>the worst war in the history of humanity, yeah, killed

0:12:47.559 --> 0:12:49.920
<v Speaker 3>a bunch of people, managed to not die in either

0:12:49.920 --> 0:12:52.679
<v Speaker 3>the Holocaust or the fighting, Yeah, and then achieved a

0:12:52.720 --> 0:12:55.240
<v Speaker 3>position of social prominence, I'd say, you know what, maybe

0:12:55.280 --> 0:12:57.840
<v Speaker 3>I'll take a summer off, you know, maybe I'll just

0:12:57.920 --> 0:12:58.920
<v Speaker 3>like be content to be.

0:12:58.920 --> 0:13:04.840
<v Speaker 2>Alive, take a break, go to the sea. But ambition, man, Yeah,

0:13:04.960 --> 0:13:08.480
<v Speaker 2>like that he is like this ambition is and maybe

0:13:08.559 --> 0:13:10.240
<v Speaker 2>you know, he would never have admitted this, maybe there

0:13:10.280 --> 0:13:13.640
<v Speaker 2>is a degree that it's like, given what he's experienced,

0:13:13.640 --> 0:13:16.480
<v Speaker 2>he has to just keep moving right, like you can't.

0:13:16.520 --> 0:13:18.959
<v Speaker 2>You kind of can't just sit with what what's got

0:13:19.080 --> 0:13:21.960
<v Speaker 2>happened to you and what you've done. And that's certainly

0:13:22.040 --> 0:13:25.240
<v Speaker 2>like what one's left to interpret from where his life

0:13:25.280 --> 0:13:28.160
<v Speaker 2>goes next. So he talks a lot at the time

0:13:28.160 --> 0:13:30.319
<v Speaker 2>about how he's going to become a millionaire, and he

0:13:30.600 --> 0:13:34.160
<v Speaker 2>talks about specifically, I'm going to find a great unexploited

0:13:34.200 --> 0:13:36.520
<v Speaker 2>resource and find a way to put myself in the

0:13:36.559 --> 0:13:39.360
<v Speaker 2>middle of the distribution chain. Right. So again he has

0:13:39.360 --> 0:13:41.840
<v Speaker 2>this kind of eye for business, and he doesn't know

0:13:41.880 --> 0:13:44.880
<v Speaker 2>what he doesn't want to do anything in particular other

0:13:44.960 --> 0:13:48.240
<v Speaker 2>than find the next great resource and make himself key

0:13:48.320 --> 0:13:48.679
<v Speaker 2>to it.

0:13:48.800 --> 0:13:49.040
<v Speaker 3>Right.

0:13:49.640 --> 0:13:52.400
<v Speaker 2>He's probably thinking this way because both oil and uranium

0:13:52.440 --> 0:13:56.280
<v Speaker 2>have gotten way more valuable in very very recently as

0:13:56.320 --> 0:13:59.920
<v Speaker 2>a result of some things. But the resource that Maxwell

0:14:00.080 --> 0:14:02.520
<v Speaker 2>is gonna lasso and used to make his fortune is

0:14:02.600 --> 0:14:07.439
<v Speaker 2>more dangerous and more valuable than either of those. Raw knowledge.

0:14:07.679 --> 0:14:11.840
<v Speaker 2>So science is a discipline is given how crucial it

0:14:11.880 --> 0:14:14.560
<v Speaker 2>is to World War two by the time that war starts,

0:14:14.640 --> 0:14:17.880
<v Speaker 2>Like the concept of science as like a professional field

0:14:17.960 --> 0:14:21.560
<v Speaker 2>that like people go into is still pretty new, and

0:14:21.560 --> 0:14:23.920
<v Speaker 2>in fact, even in like forty five forty six, some

0:14:24.000 --> 0:14:26.840
<v Speaker 2>of the senior scientific minds in the world had grown

0:14:26.920 --> 0:14:29.600
<v Speaker 2>up and started their careers at a time when science

0:14:29.680 --> 0:14:31.720
<v Speaker 2>was something gentleman hobbyists did.

0:14:31.920 --> 0:14:32.080
<v Speaker 3>Right.

0:14:32.320 --> 0:14:35.080
<v Speaker 2>It wasn't like the product of a national educational and

0:14:35.080 --> 0:14:38.160
<v Speaker 2>an industrial apparatus, right, this was something like men who

0:14:38.200 --> 0:14:40.000
<v Speaker 2>are like the earl of such and such, and my

0:14:40.160 --> 0:14:43.680
<v Speaker 2>hobby is figuring out how heredity works or whatever. Like

0:14:43.880 --> 0:14:46.080
<v Speaker 2>that's kind of how things had worked not all that

0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:49.640
<v Speaker 2>long ago. And obviously things have professionalized a lot prior

0:14:49.680 --> 0:14:52.760
<v Speaker 2>to World War Two, but the field is still really

0:14:52.760 --> 0:14:55.280
<v Speaker 2>new and people are still figuring out stuff like how

0:14:55.320 --> 0:14:59.560
<v Speaker 2>are we going to disseminate and spread new discoveries around

0:14:59.600 --> 0:15:02.840
<v Speaker 2>the world. What is that infrastructure going to look like?

0:15:03.040 --> 0:15:03.240
<v Speaker 3>Right?

0:15:03.600 --> 0:15:06.680
<v Speaker 2>And the Manhattan Project is a major part of that. Right,

0:15:06.680 --> 0:15:10.600
<v Speaker 2>there's suddenly this understanding that like it's kind of dangerous

0:15:10.600 --> 0:15:13.320
<v Speaker 2>for countries to not be completely up to date on

0:15:13.360 --> 0:15:18.080
<v Speaker 2>what's happening scientifically, right, Particularly the British government is kind

0:15:18.120 --> 0:15:20.480
<v Speaker 2>of caught off guard a little bit by the success

0:15:20.520 --> 0:15:23.200
<v Speaker 2>the US has with the Manhattan Project and the scale

0:15:23.240 --> 0:15:25.320
<v Speaker 2>of the achievement, and even though like they're on our

0:15:25.400 --> 0:15:28.640
<v Speaker 2>side during this, they're like, well, fuck we are. We

0:15:28.680 --> 0:15:32.720
<v Speaker 2>do not have a scientific industry that's capable of competing

0:15:32.760 --> 0:15:34.360
<v Speaker 2>with the Americans in the way that we need to.

0:15:34.520 --> 0:15:37.880
<v Speaker 3>They're like, ah, we've been chemically castrating mathematicians. We got

0:15:37.920 --> 0:15:38.760
<v Speaker 3>shit over here.

0:15:38.800 --> 0:15:41.960
<v Speaker 2>Oh fuck, we really should probably stop doing that. Huh yeah,

0:15:42.120 --> 0:15:46.720
<v Speaker 2>stop poisoning our smart guys. As The Guardian writes, quote

0:15:46.760 --> 0:15:49.920
<v Speaker 2>top British scientists, from Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, to

0:15:49.920 --> 0:15:53.240
<v Speaker 2>the physicist Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin. We're

0:15:53.240 --> 0:15:56.040
<v Speaker 2>concerned that while British science was world class, its publishing

0:15:56.160 --> 0:15:59.000
<v Speaker 2>arm was dismal. Science publishers were mainly known for being

0:15:59.040 --> 0:16:02.440
<v Speaker 2>inefficient and constant broke journals, which often appeared on cheap,

0:16:02.480 --> 0:16:06.200
<v Speaker 2>thin paper, were produced almost as an afterthought by scientific societies.

0:16:06.480 --> 0:16:09.120
<v Speaker 2>The British Chemical Society had a month's long backlog of

0:16:09.200 --> 0:16:11.760
<v Speaker 2>articles for publication and relied on cash handouts from the

0:16:11.840 --> 0:16:15.080
<v Speaker 2>Royal Society to fund its printing operations. So there is

0:16:15.200 --> 0:16:19.040
<v Speaker 2>no money in scientific publishing. It's like they barely even

0:16:19.120 --> 0:16:21.880
<v Speaker 2>consider It's like, oh yeah, you figured out how nuclear

0:16:22.040 --> 0:16:24.400
<v Speaker 2>energy works. We should probably write about that at some

0:16:24.480 --> 0:16:26.400
<v Speaker 2>point in a place other people can read it, but

0:16:26.440 --> 0:16:29.600
<v Speaker 2>not a priority. You know, we'll just let that happen whenever.

0:16:31.120 --> 0:16:34.480
<v Speaker 3>Uh huh, you're writing each other handwritten letters and shit, gone,

0:16:34.560 --> 0:16:35.960
<v Speaker 3>I discovered something.

0:16:35.840 --> 0:16:41.560
<v Speaker 2>Yeah nukes, Yeah yeah yeah. So by late summer of

0:16:41.600 --> 0:16:44.600
<v Speaker 2>nineteen forty six, Robert Maxwell has talked himself and to

0:16:44.720 --> 0:16:47.960
<v Speaker 2>maybe the sweetest gig anyone gets during the Allied occupation

0:16:48.000 --> 0:16:50.800
<v Speaker 2>of Germany, which is he starts running the press section

0:16:50.920 --> 0:16:54.960
<v Speaker 2>of the Public Relations and Information Services Control Organizations. So obviously,

0:16:55.360 --> 0:16:58.200
<v Speaker 2>right after we occupy Germany, we're not letting the Germans

0:16:58.200 --> 0:17:01.000
<v Speaker 2>have newspapers of their own again that they're running, right,

0:17:01.000 --> 0:17:04.960
<v Speaker 2>because that didn't go well last time. Yeah yeah, German

0:17:05.000 --> 0:17:08.159
<v Speaker 2>media got a little out of pocket. So he is

0:17:08.200 --> 0:17:11.720
<v Speaker 2>basically put in charge of all German print media, right,

0:17:12.040 --> 0:17:14.840
<v Speaker 2>so as these as newspapers start up again, he is

0:17:14.960 --> 0:17:17.879
<v Speaker 2>like both the censor, so he's like approving everything that

0:17:17.960 --> 0:17:21.080
<v Speaker 2>goes out, but he's also figuring out how to make

0:17:21.119 --> 0:17:24.000
<v Speaker 2>these profitable. And he just turns out to be really

0:17:24.040 --> 0:17:27.000
<v Speaker 2>good at it, Like he's shockingly good at knowing how

0:17:27.040 --> 0:17:31.000
<v Speaker 2>to make a newspaper work financially. He probably got that

0:17:31.040 --> 0:17:33.080
<v Speaker 2>because he has no experience in this. He probably got

0:17:33.119 --> 0:17:35.880
<v Speaker 2>the job because he was trusted by the intelligence services.

0:17:35.920 --> 0:17:37.679
<v Speaker 2>You know, he's in with MI I six, and they're like,

0:17:37.880 --> 0:17:40.680
<v Speaker 2>probably good to have a guy who is with us

0:17:40.800 --> 0:17:44.760
<v Speaker 2>running the papers in post war Germany. But he launches

0:17:44.800 --> 0:17:47.479
<v Speaker 2>his first big paper as a social democratic paper that

0:17:47.600 --> 0:17:50.840
<v Speaker 2>like becomes wildly successful and makes a huge amount of money.

0:17:50.840 --> 0:17:53.159
<v Speaker 2>And it's like it's really hard in Germany, which is

0:17:53.160 --> 0:17:56.640
<v Speaker 2>devastated to get enough like ink and paper, and somehow

0:17:56.680 --> 0:18:00.280
<v Speaker 2>he manages to and no one really knows how. The

0:18:00.359 --> 0:18:03.639
<v Speaker 2>assumption is a mix of like bribery and his connections

0:18:03.640 --> 0:18:07.159
<v Speaker 2>with like organized crime, and just he he's also like

0:18:07.240 --> 0:18:10.080
<v Speaker 2>people will say, like he was scary. He'd killed dozens

0:18:10.119 --> 0:18:12.040
<v Speaker 2>of men and he was huge. So if he needed

0:18:12.080 --> 0:18:14.040
<v Speaker 2>something and he couldn't get it through other reasons, he

0:18:14.080 --> 0:18:16.720
<v Speaker 2>would just threaten to beat the shit out a few wow,

0:18:18.000 --> 0:18:20.119
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, I probably wouldn't have wanted to fight. Nineteen

0:18:20.200 --> 0:18:21.639
<v Speaker 2>forty six Robert Maxwell.

0:18:22.400 --> 0:18:25.880
<v Speaker 4>His articles are all like, it's great to murder Germans.

0:18:25.440 --> 0:18:26.879
<v Speaker 2>Actually pretty cool.

0:18:27.160 --> 0:18:29.720
<v Speaker 3>Blowing a mayor's brains out is a tank fired at

0:18:29.760 --> 0:18:31.359
<v Speaker 3>you is a heroic deed.

0:18:31.640 --> 0:18:37.480
<v Speaker 2>I wrote a poem about it. This paper, the first

0:18:37.520 --> 0:18:40.159
<v Speaker 2>paper that he's a social democratic paper that he starts,

0:18:40.240 --> 0:18:43.080
<v Speaker 2>is owned by a company, a publisher called Springer verloc.

0:18:43.880 --> 0:18:46.680
<v Speaker 2>You've heard of Springer if you've ever read an academic

0:18:46.720 --> 0:18:49.439
<v Speaker 2>publication or like, I think they do textbooks too, you

0:18:49.520 --> 0:18:54.199
<v Speaker 2>have seen Springer on a publication. Yeah, yeah, and this

0:18:54.480 --> 0:18:56.440
<v Speaker 2>is that company, right, and he gets to know the

0:18:56.480 --> 0:18:59.840
<v Speaker 2>owner of the company, an elderly man named Ferdinand Springer

0:19:00.200 --> 0:19:03.720
<v Speaker 2>quite well. Now, pre war, Springer had been the world's

0:19:03.800 --> 0:19:06.840
<v Speaker 2>largest publisher of scientific literature because Germany had been the

0:19:07.000 --> 0:19:10.119
<v Speaker 2>scientific center of the planet in many ways prior to

0:19:10.200 --> 0:19:14.120
<v Speaker 2>Hitler's rise to power. But once the war starts, science

0:19:14.240 --> 0:19:17.919
<v Speaker 2>kept going because obviously the Nazis still funded science, but

0:19:18.040 --> 0:19:21.240
<v Speaker 2>Germany was a pariah state and so they weren't publishing

0:19:21.320 --> 0:19:24.200
<v Speaker 2>anything for the rest of the world, and so papers

0:19:24.200 --> 0:19:27.040
<v Speaker 2>would continue to be written like sort of collecting the

0:19:27.080 --> 0:19:29.920
<v Speaker 2>whole history of like all of these scientific achievements being

0:19:29.960 --> 0:19:33.040
<v Speaker 2>made during the Nazi period, and they were just building

0:19:33.119 --> 0:19:35.600
<v Speaker 2>up in a warehouse that Springer had that he was

0:19:35.640 --> 0:19:37.679
<v Speaker 2>trying to keep, you know, far enough away that it

0:19:37.720 --> 0:19:40.199
<v Speaker 2>didn't get blown up by Allied bombs. So at the

0:19:40.280 --> 0:19:43.320
<v Speaker 2>end of the war, Ferdinand Springer is broke, but he

0:19:43.400 --> 0:19:48.160
<v Speaker 2>has sixty three thousand books filled with like the science

0:19:48.200 --> 0:19:51.679
<v Speaker 2>of rocketry, which the Nazis had developed to a massive extent,

0:19:51.920 --> 0:19:54.960
<v Speaker 2>and like advanced metallurgy and medical like all of this

0:19:55.160 --> 0:19:57.719
<v Speaker 2>really important, crucial science that's going to be a big

0:19:57.720 --> 0:20:02.440
<v Speaker 2>part of the space race. It's just sitting in springer warehouse, unpublished, right.

0:20:02.880 --> 0:20:06.600
<v Speaker 2>And Maxwell becomes this guy's friend, and so while they're talking,

0:20:06.640 --> 0:20:10.119
<v Speaker 2>Ferdinand explains to him how scientific publishing works. And he's like,

0:20:10.359 --> 0:20:14.520
<v Speaker 2>you know, so governments fund scientific research, as do universities,

0:20:14.560 --> 0:20:16.439
<v Speaker 2>and there's grants, and there's grants come from you know,

0:20:16.440 --> 0:20:19.639
<v Speaker 2>sometimes from governments, from different funds, from wealthy philanthropists, and

0:20:19.760 --> 0:20:23.639
<v Speaker 2>they pay for the science. And then the scientists produce

0:20:23.720 --> 0:20:27.840
<v Speaker 2>these papers about their findings and then publishers basically get

0:20:27.880 --> 0:20:33.680
<v Speaker 2>them for free. And Maxwell's like, wait a second, free,

0:20:33.720 --> 0:20:36.680
<v Speaker 2>the most like important valuable resource in the world. People

0:20:36.720 --> 0:20:41.320
<v Speaker 2>aren't even really charging for it. I got a motherfucking idea.

0:20:42.320 --> 0:20:46.320
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, part of his idea is that Springer can't

0:20:46.320 --> 0:20:49.480
<v Speaker 2>do anything with all these papers because German nationals are

0:20:49.520 --> 0:20:53.200
<v Speaker 2>not allowed to ship things overseas right now, Like, there's

0:20:53.240 --> 0:20:56.360
<v Speaker 2>a limited quantity that you can mail outside of Germany

0:20:56.359 --> 0:21:00.479
<v Speaker 2>as a German for obvious reasons. But Robert Mack can

0:21:00.520 --> 0:21:05.000
<v Speaker 2>mail whatever the fuck he wants, right Well, so he's

0:21:05.040 --> 0:21:07.760
<v Speaker 2>found his great resource and he's about to start exploiting it.

0:21:07.800 --> 0:21:10.600
<v Speaker 2>He starts a company with the goal of shipping Springer

0:21:10.680 --> 0:21:14.359
<v Speaker 2>scientific publications over to the UK and finding journals to

0:21:14.440 --> 0:21:17.760
<v Speaker 2>publish them. Right, he gets Springer, who again is broke,

0:21:17.800 --> 0:21:21.520
<v Speaker 2>hands him the worldwide distribution rights to all of German science,

0:21:21.880 --> 0:21:24.560
<v Speaker 2>right as long as he can find a way to

0:21:24.600 --> 0:21:27.639
<v Speaker 2>move it. Now, he maxwell's comfortable at this point, but

0:21:27.680 --> 0:21:30.879
<v Speaker 2>he's not rich, and sixty three thousand books worth of

0:21:30.880 --> 0:21:33.960
<v Speaker 2>stuff is you have to be rich to ship that somewhere.

0:21:34.440 --> 0:21:37.119
<v Speaker 2>We don't actually know how he pays for this, like

0:21:37.560 --> 0:21:41.520
<v Speaker 2>because it's expensive. He has no real customers. Initially for

0:21:41.760 --> 0:21:44.240
<v Speaker 2>years he'll have kind of claimed that, like, oh, my

0:21:44.280 --> 0:21:46.960
<v Speaker 2>wife's family has some money, so I use my savings

0:21:46.960 --> 0:21:50.280
<v Speaker 2>and theirs and that funded this. But his family is like, no,

0:21:50.400 --> 0:21:52.080
<v Speaker 2>he didn't really give him. We didn't like him, Like,

0:21:52.160 --> 0:21:54.680
<v Speaker 2>we didn't give him anything. Because his wife comes from

0:21:54.680 --> 0:21:57.159
<v Speaker 2>like kind of a bougie family and they do know

0:21:57.280 --> 0:22:01.080
<v Speaker 2>that Maxwell's like a poor Jewish kid from nowhere. They

0:22:01.080 --> 0:22:03.439
<v Speaker 2>don't care that he's like a war hero now so

0:22:04.359 --> 0:22:06.760
<v Speaker 2>we find out years later. We don't learn this until

0:22:06.840 --> 0:22:09.760
<v Speaker 2>after Maxwell dies in the year two thousand. A former

0:22:09.960 --> 0:22:13.760
<v Speaker 2>m I six officer claims that British intelligence, literally the

0:22:13.840 --> 0:22:17.879
<v Speaker 2>James Bond Agency, funds Maxwell's startup because he had been

0:22:17.880 --> 0:22:20.440
<v Speaker 2>working undercover for them and they considered it a potentially

0:22:20.480 --> 0:22:24.200
<v Speaker 2>valuable venture. M I six is intelligently like, probably good

0:22:24.200 --> 0:22:26.600
<v Speaker 2>to have a hand in all of scientific publishing. That like,

0:22:26.640 --> 0:22:29.480
<v Speaker 2>that might that might work out for us. Actually, here's

0:22:29.520 --> 0:22:33.200
<v Speaker 2>some money. And the the m I six officer who

0:22:33.359 --> 0:22:35.720
<v Speaker 2>reveals this says it's the only time m I six

0:22:35.760 --> 0:22:39.560
<v Speaker 2>ever like completely funded a startup. Maybe that's true, maybe

0:22:39.560 --> 0:22:43.160
<v Speaker 2>that's not. I don't credit a literal m I six

0:22:43.240 --> 0:22:46.360
<v Speaker 2>officer with necessarily being honest about everything.

0:22:47.560 --> 0:22:52.120
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, all those uh startups that make Jim's Bonzil.

0:22:51.720 --> 0:22:54.080
<v Speaker 2>Gadgets right right right, Yeah, there's gotta be a couple

0:22:54.080 --> 0:22:56.639
<v Speaker 2>of those, right, Q's gotta have some gotta have some

0:22:56.720 --> 0:23:01.560
<v Speaker 2>companies he's working with. So so, as noted earlier, Maxwell

0:23:01.600 --> 0:23:03.520
<v Speaker 2>start shipping the stuff to the UK, and while he's

0:23:03.520 --> 0:23:06.119
<v Speaker 2>doing this. His plan right now, His business is just

0:23:06.200 --> 0:23:08.280
<v Speaker 2>I want to get this over to the UK and

0:23:08.359 --> 0:23:10.200
<v Speaker 2>I'll figure out a way to make it work financially,

0:23:10.240 --> 0:23:13.520
<v Speaker 2>because there's obviously a hunger for this material. But the UK,

0:23:14.760 --> 0:23:17.280
<v Speaker 2>this just adds to the problem the country has, which

0:23:17.320 --> 0:23:20.680
<v Speaker 2>is the scientific publishing in the UK can't handle the

0:23:20.800 --> 0:23:25.000
<v Speaker 2>UK's backlog of unpublished science sixty three thousand books worth

0:23:25.080 --> 0:23:28.760
<v Speaker 2>of added stuff. It's just over massively overloaded the system

0:23:28.920 --> 0:23:32.920
<v Speaker 2>right per the Guardian quote, the British government solution was

0:23:33.000 --> 0:23:35.879
<v Speaker 2>to pair the venerable British publishing house Butterworths with the

0:23:35.920 --> 0:23:39.119
<v Speaker 2>renowned German publisher Springer. To draw on the latter's expertise.

0:23:39.480 --> 0:23:41.800
<v Speaker 2>Butterworth's would learn to turn a profit on journals, and

0:23:41.840 --> 0:23:44.160
<v Speaker 2>British Science would get its work out at a faster pace.

0:23:44.440 --> 0:23:48.280
<v Speaker 2>The Butterworth's directors, being ex British Intelligence themselves, hired the

0:23:48.320 --> 0:23:51.480
<v Speaker 2>young Maxwell to help manage the company, and another X spook,

0:23:51.520 --> 0:23:54.600
<v Speaker 2>Paul Rosbaud, a metallurgist who spent the war passing Nazi

0:23:54.680 --> 0:23:57.320
<v Speaker 2>nuclear secrets to the British through French and Dutch resistance,

0:23:57.480 --> 0:24:01.480
<v Speaker 2>as scientific editor. When Butterworth's decided to abandon the fledgling project.

0:24:01.520 --> 0:24:05.120
<v Speaker 2>In nineteen fifty one, Maxwell offered thirteen thousand pounds about

0:24:05.119 --> 0:24:07.960
<v Speaker 2>four hundred and twenty grand today for both Butterworth's and

0:24:08.000 --> 0:24:11.040
<v Speaker 2>Springer's shares, giving him control of the company. Rose Boud

0:24:11.119 --> 0:24:14.000
<v Speaker 2>stayed on a scientific director and named the new venture

0:24:14.080 --> 0:24:17.160
<v Speaker 2>Pergaman Press, after a coin from the ancient Greek city

0:24:17.200 --> 0:24:20.440
<v Speaker 2>of Pergamen featuring athena goddess of wisdom, which they adapted

0:24:20.440 --> 0:24:24.000
<v Speaker 2>for the company logo, a simple line drawing appropriately representing

0:24:24.040 --> 0:24:28.000
<v Speaker 2>both knowledge and money. So what starts as a British

0:24:28.080 --> 0:24:32.840
<v Speaker 2>program to like get scientific publishing up winds up entirely

0:24:32.960 --> 0:24:36.520
<v Speaker 2>in Maxwell and rose Boud's hands, because the company that

0:24:36.560 --> 0:24:38.600
<v Speaker 2>the British government contract with is like, ah, there's probably

0:24:38.640 --> 0:24:40.600
<v Speaker 2>not a lot of money in this. Yeah, we'll take

0:24:40.640 --> 0:24:44.600
<v Speaker 2>thirteen thousand pounds for now being in control of all

0:24:44.640 --> 0:24:48.040
<v Speaker 2>of scientific publishing for Germany and the United Kingdom. That's

0:24:48.040 --> 0:24:52.880
<v Speaker 2>where Maxwell's made himself. He's not thirty, Like.

0:24:53.040 --> 0:24:54.480
<v Speaker 4>He's not thirty years old yet.

0:24:54.680 --> 0:24:56.199
<v Speaker 2>No, No, he would have been. So he's twenty three

0:24:56.240 --> 0:24:57.479
<v Speaker 2>in the war ends, who'd have been like twenty eight

0:24:57.520 --> 0:25:01.040
<v Speaker 2>or twenty nine? Right now, I think, Wow, he's doing well.

0:25:01.680 --> 0:25:05.160
<v Speaker 3>I'm forty two and I haven't like murdered anybody.

0:25:05.440 --> 0:25:07.240
<v Speaker 2>Haven't murdered dozens of ss men.

0:25:07.400 --> 0:25:10.560
<v Speaker 3>I haven't killed any mayors. I haven't taken over the

0:25:10.640 --> 0:25:14.320
<v Speaker 3>scientific publishing of two entire nations yet, right, yeah, like

0:25:14.480 --> 0:25:17.159
<v Speaker 3>the last generation was just stronger and better.

0:25:17.400 --> 0:25:20.520
<v Speaker 2>I'm sorry. Yeah, the energy this guy had.

0:25:20.480 --> 0:25:21.639
<v Speaker 4>Because of the cell phone.

0:25:21.680 --> 0:25:24.840
<v Speaker 3>You know, that's why I haven't haven't murdered any Germans yet.

0:25:24.920 --> 0:25:27.160
<v Speaker 2>It's the cell phone I had had. A Robert Maxwell

0:25:27.280 --> 0:25:31.480
<v Speaker 2>secretly invented adderall. He was just keeping it from everybody

0:25:31.520 --> 0:25:35.160
<v Speaker 2>for a while, jumping it into his leg. Yeah yeah, yeah,

0:25:35.200 --> 0:25:40.320
<v Speaker 2>it's his only food. So while this business was starting

0:25:40.359 --> 0:25:43.359
<v Speaker 2>off with a bang, Maxwell is still a serial entrepreneur,

0:25:43.680 --> 0:25:46.280
<v Speaker 2>and most of his attempts at business don't work quite

0:25:46.280 --> 0:25:49.280
<v Speaker 2>as well as Pergaman does. A great example of this

0:25:49.320 --> 0:25:50.960
<v Speaker 2>would be a business deal he sets up in the

0:25:51.000 --> 0:25:53.639
<v Speaker 2>early fifties. So he gets in bed with his German

0:25:53.720 --> 0:25:56.280
<v Speaker 2>chemist and this chemist has set up a deal to

0:25:56.359 --> 0:26:00.560
<v Speaker 2>exchange chemicals shipped from Germany for glass China and goods

0:26:00.600 --> 0:26:04.000
<v Speaker 2>manufactured elsewhere. Right, because Germany doesn't have a lot of

0:26:04.000 --> 0:26:05.359
<v Speaker 2>stuff at the end of the war except for some

0:26:05.480 --> 0:26:09.080
<v Speaker 2>raw materials. A decision is made midway through the process

0:26:09.480 --> 0:26:12.359
<v Speaker 2>that we should probably send all of the stuff through

0:26:12.520 --> 0:26:18.919
<v Speaker 2>Argentina because Argentina can pay with pork bellies. Now, Like,

0:26:19.040 --> 0:26:21.280
<v Speaker 2>I'm not an economic expert, I don't know why this

0:26:21.440 --> 0:26:23.880
<v Speaker 2>made sense to them, but they decide like, oh, yeah,

0:26:23.880 --> 0:26:26.320
<v Speaker 2>pork bellies, that's better than cash. That'll really work out.

0:26:26.480 --> 0:26:30.720
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, these settlers of Katan logic.

0:26:31.119 --> 0:26:33.520
<v Speaker 2>Yes, And I know someone might be saying, well, pork

0:26:33.520 --> 0:26:36.200
<v Speaker 2>belly futures is probably what they were talking about. No,

0:26:36.200 --> 0:26:40.400
<v Speaker 2>no literal pork bellies. And this becomes obvious because when

0:26:40.400 --> 0:26:43.520
<v Speaker 2>they try to exchange these pork bellies to the British

0:26:43.560 --> 0:26:46.320
<v Speaker 2>government for cash, the British Government's like, well, these have

0:26:46.400 --> 0:26:51.160
<v Speaker 2>gone rancid. These are all rancid pork bellies. We don't

0:26:51.160 --> 0:26:56.960
<v Speaker 2>really want these, So maxwell they keep going. He keeps

0:26:56.960 --> 0:26:59.880
<v Speaker 2>trying to sell these rancid pork bellies to different countries,

0:27:00.400 --> 0:27:04.040
<v Speaker 2>and he finally finds a country that's like starving to death, Austria,

0:27:04.240 --> 0:27:08.480
<v Speaker 2>and Austria's like, yeah, we will literally take anything it's rancid. Fine,

0:27:08.560 --> 0:27:12.120
<v Speaker 2>we'll make it into sausage. We're doing so badly right now,

0:27:12.440 --> 0:27:17.960
<v Speaker 2>toxic pork is the best Austria can do, thanks Hitler. Yeah. Again,

0:27:18.320 --> 0:27:20.200
<v Speaker 2>there's like a if you've been to Berlin, you've had

0:27:20.240 --> 0:27:22.960
<v Speaker 2>like curry worst, right, which is like a Berlin dish,

0:27:22.960 --> 0:27:25.480
<v Speaker 2>and it's like curry on a sausage or a hot dog.

0:27:26.000 --> 0:27:28.920
<v Speaker 2>It got started because in this period of time they're

0:27:28.960 --> 0:27:32.119
<v Speaker 2>like sausages were like more than a fifty percent sawdust

0:27:32.520 --> 0:27:34.760
<v Speaker 2>and they had curry powder because the British were there.

0:27:34.800 --> 0:27:37.159
<v Speaker 2>So it was like people won't notice the sawdust as

0:27:37.240 --> 0:27:38.679
<v Speaker 2>much if we put curry on it.

0:27:40.840 --> 0:27:42.640
<v Speaker 3>Every time we eat a curry worst. Do you think

0:27:42.680 --> 0:27:45.840
<v Speaker 3>of Maxwell and his quest to take over all of.

0:27:46.240 --> 0:27:49.600
<v Speaker 2>Publishing, all of publishing in the rancid pork business?

0:27:50.080 --> 0:27:50.960
<v Speaker 3>Jesus Christ.

0:27:51.119 --> 0:27:53.440
<v Speaker 2>My favorite side fact about this is that they get

0:27:53.480 --> 0:27:56.760
<v Speaker 2>Austria to buy this rancid pork by pretending the meat

0:27:56.760 --> 0:28:00.479
<v Speaker 2>had come from a fake country called Oceania, and nobody

0:28:00.520 --> 0:28:03.639
<v Speaker 2>in Austria, like in the trade part of Austar or whatever,

0:28:03.880 --> 0:28:06.800
<v Speaker 2>recognizes that he just made up a country. This is

0:28:06.880 --> 0:28:08.879
<v Speaker 2>not real. Yeah, that sounds real to me.

0:28:10.280 --> 0:28:10.720
<v Speaker 1>Wow.

0:28:11.160 --> 0:28:13.600
<v Speaker 2>Again, we just got out of the Nazi period, not

0:28:13.760 --> 0:28:15.879
<v Speaker 2>super knowledgeable about the rest of the world.

0:28:15.920 --> 0:28:17.760
<v Speaker 3>Here, you guys don't even want to know what's what

0:28:17.800 --> 0:28:20.840
<v Speaker 3>happened in South America. Man, there's Oceania's taken over. They

0:28:20.880 --> 0:28:22.520
<v Speaker 3>make the best pork bellies.

0:28:22.840 --> 0:28:23.840
<v Speaker 4>Really want some.

0:28:24.160 --> 0:28:25.840
<v Speaker 2>The freshest pork bellies.

0:28:26.359 --> 0:28:26.760
<v Speaker 4>Yeah.

0:28:27.280 --> 0:28:31.679
<v Speaker 2>Wow, So in nineteen fifty five, back doing their pergaman business,

0:28:31.720 --> 0:28:34.240
<v Speaker 2>we're out of the pork belly thing. Maxwell and his

0:28:34.280 --> 0:28:36.680
<v Speaker 2>partner rose about it. I also just have to say

0:28:36.720 --> 0:28:40.280
<v Speaker 2>the fact that like this scientific publishing starts with like

0:28:40.400 --> 0:28:43.160
<v Speaker 2>the guy who murdered a significant portion of the SS

0:28:43.400 --> 0:28:46.640
<v Speaker 2>and the guy who smuggled nuclear secrets to the French resistance.

0:28:47.400 --> 0:28:49.680
<v Speaker 2>You'd think this would have ended cooler than it does.

0:28:50.600 --> 0:28:52.360
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, these guys sound awesome.

0:28:52.480 --> 0:28:56.160
<v Speaker 3>They are at this point, and they're arbitraging pork bellies

0:28:56.200 --> 0:29:00.440
<v Speaker 3>instead of money. By the way, maybe the first that

0:29:00.480 --> 0:29:02.240
<v Speaker 3>they're not as smart as we think they are that

0:29:02.280 --> 0:29:04.040
<v Speaker 3>they were like, hey, we could you don't be better

0:29:04.040 --> 0:29:06.600
<v Speaker 3>than being paid in money, being paid in pork belliesceiving

0:29:06.600 --> 0:29:09.480
<v Speaker 3>the pork bellies, and then having to travel around Europe

0:29:09.600 --> 0:29:13.600
<v Speaker 3>set reselling your rancid pork bellies for Austrian money. The

0:29:13.720 --> 0:29:15.040
<v Speaker 3>Austrian money can't be great.

0:29:15.280 --> 0:29:19.080
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that can't have been like a great profit margin. Right. Yeah,

0:29:20.320 --> 0:29:23.720
<v Speaker 2>So in nineteen fifty five, Maxwell and his partner Rose

0:29:23.720 --> 0:29:26.800
<v Speaker 2>Baud show up at the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses

0:29:26.840 --> 0:29:28.960
<v Speaker 2>of Nuclear Power. And this is kind of we've talked

0:29:28.960 --> 0:29:31.520
<v Speaker 2>about this before, one of like the inciting events to

0:29:31.560 --> 0:29:34.200
<v Speaker 2>what becomes the Plowshare program, where the US is like,

0:29:34.440 --> 0:29:37.200
<v Speaker 2>we should be using nukes to dig big holes and

0:29:37.360 --> 0:29:41.240
<v Speaker 2>hydraulically frack, you know. So they show up at this

0:29:41.240 --> 0:29:43.760
<v Speaker 2>big conference because there's all these scientists who are presenting

0:29:43.840 --> 0:29:46.280
<v Speaker 2>papers on like cutting edge nuclear research. So they run

0:29:46.360 --> 0:29:49.400
<v Speaker 2>an office nearby, and Maxwell spends the whole trip. He's

0:29:49.440 --> 0:29:52.920
<v Speaker 2>just like crashing seminars and luncheons and dinners and finding

0:29:53.080 --> 0:29:56.360
<v Speaker 2>every scientist he can who's got a paper out and

0:29:56.480 --> 0:29:59.360
<v Speaker 2>is like, hey, man, sign an exclusive contract with me.

0:29:59.680 --> 0:30:02.120
<v Speaker 2>I will give you money in exchange for the rights

0:30:02.160 --> 0:30:05.960
<v Speaker 2>to everything you publish. Right, And this isn't a lot

0:30:05.960 --> 0:30:08.440
<v Speaker 2>of money for him. I think he's giving these people

0:30:08.520 --> 0:30:11.360
<v Speaker 2>like hundreds to thousands of dollars. But these are like

0:30:11.440 --> 0:30:15.600
<v Speaker 2>scientists aren't like Richmond traditionally, especially in this period, and

0:30:15.880 --> 0:30:18.280
<v Speaker 2>paper publishing had never really been worth money before, so

0:30:18.280 --> 0:30:20.880
<v Speaker 2>they're like this is a great deal, right, you know, suddenly,

0:30:20.880 --> 0:30:24.120
<v Speaker 2>finally someone values my work. So Maxwell is just like

0:30:24.360 --> 0:30:26.840
<v Speaker 2>he's like he's basically just going door to door finding

0:30:26.840 --> 0:30:29.160
<v Speaker 2>every scientist and being like, what'll it take to sign

0:30:29.240 --> 0:30:31.680
<v Speaker 2>you right now? Right, Like, He's like, he's like a

0:30:31.720 --> 0:30:35.640
<v Speaker 2>Hollywood agent. But for nuclear physicists.

0:30:34.600 --> 0:30:36.880
<v Speaker 3>Going around the open MIC's handing that, handing out five

0:30:36.920 --> 0:30:38.040
<v Speaker 3>dollars bills.

0:30:37.800 --> 0:30:41.520
<v Speaker 2>Right, exactly, yes, And no one had ever done this

0:30:41.760 --> 0:30:43.640
<v Speaker 2>in the field of science, right, this is still a

0:30:43.720 --> 0:30:47.080
<v Speaker 2>gentleman's endeavor. And journals tended to be focused on what

0:30:47.120 --> 0:30:49.680
<v Speaker 2>they were interested in publishing, right, So they didn't like

0:30:50.000 --> 0:30:51.840
<v Speaker 2>seek people out. You know, if you were a nuclear

0:30:51.880 --> 0:30:53.960
<v Speaker 2>physicist and you had a paper, you'd go to the

0:30:54.040 --> 0:30:55.920
<v Speaker 2>journal that did that, and you would send them the

0:30:55.960 --> 0:30:59.200
<v Speaker 2>paper and maybe they'd get to it eventually. So Maxwell's

0:30:59.200 --> 0:31:02.120
<v Speaker 2>coming up with a fucking that shocking to people, right.

0:31:02.560 --> 0:31:06.560
<v Speaker 2>Don Frank, a competing publisher, considered this dishonest, but it worked.

0:31:07.320 --> 0:31:10.400
<v Speaker 2>What made pergam And so profitable was the fact that,

0:31:10.560 --> 0:31:12.760
<v Speaker 2>and this is something that he realizes as a result

0:31:12.800 --> 0:31:17.440
<v Speaker 2>of his conversations with Ferdinand, every university and every government

0:31:17.600 --> 0:31:22.400
<v Speaker 2>scientific organization in the entire Western world needs access to

0:31:22.560 --> 0:31:25.040
<v Speaker 2>all of the relevant research in their field as it's

0:31:25.080 --> 0:31:29.479
<v Speaker 2>being published. This means subscriptions to every relevant journal are

0:31:29.640 --> 0:31:30.360
<v Speaker 2>a necessity.

0:31:30.640 --> 0:31:30.840
<v Speaker 3>Right.

0:31:31.120 --> 0:31:32.840
<v Speaker 2>If you're a college and you have a bunch of

0:31:32.880 --> 0:31:35.640
<v Speaker 2>different scientific programs, you're going to be subscribed to basically

0:31:35.720 --> 0:31:38.880
<v Speaker 2>every journal there is, right. And the first thing Maxwell

0:31:38.920 --> 0:31:43.040
<v Speaker 2>realizes is like, well, they'll pay whatever I charge. Right,

0:31:43.600 --> 0:31:46.560
<v Speaker 2>If I have exclusive rights, no one else can publish

0:31:46.600 --> 0:31:49.240
<v Speaker 2>these things. I can charge as much as I want.

0:31:49.800 --> 0:31:52.880
<v Speaker 2>And obviously, once he makes money, competition enters. Other companies

0:31:52.880 --> 0:31:55.320
<v Speaker 2>start figuring this out. But he makes another prediction, which

0:31:55.360 --> 0:31:58.120
<v Speaker 2>is that this will work the opposite of the way

0:31:58.160 --> 0:32:01.440
<v Speaker 2>most things work. The more publishers there are putting out

0:32:01.640 --> 0:32:05.680
<v Speaker 2>more journals, the more money we will make, right, because

0:32:06.440 --> 0:32:10.200
<v Speaker 2>they can't not subscribe to everything, because all of the

0:32:10.240 --> 0:32:13.160
<v Speaker 2>research is unique, and in order to stay up to date,

0:32:13.360 --> 0:32:17.000
<v Speaker 2>they have to buy everything. And at this point in time,

0:32:17.160 --> 0:32:19.920
<v Speaker 2>all of these universities, all these government they're just being

0:32:20.000 --> 0:32:22.760
<v Speaker 2>funded by these massive amounts of like Cold War era

0:32:23.080 --> 0:32:27.160
<v Speaker 2>defense cash. So the money is unlimited, right, And that's

0:32:27.160 --> 0:32:29.640
<v Speaker 2>really what he realizes, Like, I can charge whatever I want,

0:32:29.840 --> 0:32:32.080
<v Speaker 2>I can put out as many journals as I want,

0:32:32.400 --> 0:32:34.960
<v Speaker 2>and there will be an endless amount of cash for me.

0:32:36.400 --> 0:32:38.320
<v Speaker 3>And this is not like a huge part of the

0:32:38.360 --> 0:32:41.680
<v Speaker 3>budget of any one university anyway. Now, So you could

0:32:41.720 --> 0:32:43.800
<v Speaker 3>charge you could charge an arm and a leg. Yeah,

0:32:43.880 --> 0:32:47.320
<v Speaker 3>but it's just gonna be some like the library has

0:32:47.360 --> 0:32:49.160
<v Speaker 3>to pay for a little bit of It doesn't cost

0:32:49.200 --> 0:32:50.240
<v Speaker 3>them as much as their mortgage.

0:32:50.320 --> 0:32:53.120
<v Speaker 2>It's one hundred dollars instead of ten dollars, right, yes,

0:32:53.200 --> 0:32:55.520
<v Speaker 2>And we're getting all this defense money anyway, because the

0:32:55.640 --> 0:32:59.880
<v Speaker 2>US government needs physicists right right now. It was his

0:33:00.080 --> 0:33:02.560
<v Speaker 2>business partner Rosebaud who had the idea that would truly

0:33:02.560 --> 0:33:04.880
<v Speaker 2>make Pergaman into a force to be reckoned with, and

0:33:04.960 --> 0:33:08.760
<v Speaker 2>Bob Maxwell rich beyond his wildest dreams. Per the Guardian quote.

0:33:09.160 --> 0:33:11.680
<v Speaker 2>As science expanded, he realized that it would need new

0:33:11.760 --> 0:33:14.960
<v Speaker 2>journals to cover new areas of study. The scientific societies

0:33:15.040 --> 0:33:18.320
<v Speaker 2>that had traditionally created journals were unwieldy institutions that tended

0:33:18.360 --> 0:33:21.480
<v Speaker 2>to move slowly, hampered by internal debates between members about

0:33:21.480 --> 0:33:24.800
<v Speaker 2>the boundaries of their field. Rosebod had none of those constraints.

0:33:24.960 --> 0:33:27.360
<v Speaker 2>All he needed to do was convince a prominent academic

0:33:27.360 --> 0:33:30.360
<v Speaker 2>that their particular field required a new journal to showcase

0:33:30.400 --> 0:33:33.040
<v Speaker 2>it properly and install that person at the helm of it.

0:33:33.320 --> 0:33:36.840
<v Speaker 2>Pergaman would then begin selling subscriptions to university libraries, which

0:33:36.840 --> 0:33:39.000
<v Speaker 2>suddenly had a lot of government money to spend. So

0:33:39.040 --> 0:33:41.720
<v Speaker 2>you're literally walking up to guys and saying, hey, what

0:33:41.760 --> 0:33:44.400
<v Speaker 2>you do seems new? You should have a journal, And

0:33:44.480 --> 0:33:48.600
<v Speaker 2>suddenly every college in the western world subscribes. Immediate profits

0:33:49.000 --> 0:33:52.920
<v Speaker 2>right there are so a really good magazine is working

0:33:53.000 --> 0:33:55.760
<v Speaker 2>on like a ten to fifteen percent profit margin, right,

0:33:56.120 --> 0:33:59.200
<v Speaker 2>and that's a magazine that's doing very well. His profit

0:33:59.240 --> 0:34:02.320
<v Speaker 2>margins on these journals are over fifty percent. Wow, Like,

0:34:02.360 --> 0:34:04.760
<v Speaker 2>it's insane how much money they make off of this.

0:34:06.120 --> 0:34:10.440
<v Speaker 2>Speaking of insane money, help us get some of that,

0:34:10.880 --> 0:34:14.520
<v Speaker 2>you know, so we can subscribe to scientific journals. No,

0:34:14.560 --> 0:34:17.400
<v Speaker 2>we use sy hub. Everyone use sy hub. Fuck these people,

0:34:17.440 --> 0:34:23.120
<v Speaker 2>fuck scientific publishing as an industry. Steal it not legal advice,

0:34:28.920 --> 0:34:33.040
<v Speaker 2>and we're back. Sihub is a website that collects most

0:34:33.280 --> 0:34:34.919
<v Speaker 2>of the journals you might want. If you like, find

0:34:34.920 --> 0:34:37.640
<v Speaker 2>a journal that's paywalled, you go to syhub. Google it.

0:34:37.880 --> 0:34:40.680
<v Speaker 2>There's a bunch of different mirrors. Put the doi number

0:34:40.840 --> 0:34:43.239
<v Speaker 2>or just the URL link to the study you want,

0:34:43.280 --> 0:34:48.160
<v Speaker 2>and syhub will generally return it for free. It's great anyway,

0:34:49.400 --> 0:34:51.480
<v Speaker 2>I'm pretty sure I'm not. That's not illegal for me

0:34:51.560 --> 0:34:51.919
<v Speaker 2>to say.

0:34:52.480 --> 0:34:55.359
<v Speaker 3>I mean, I think pretty much every grad student in

0:34:55.440 --> 0:34:56.600
<v Speaker 3>the world is using.

0:34:56.400 --> 0:34:59.200
<v Speaker 2>It right, right, right, and they should be and all

0:34:59.200 --> 0:35:00.240
<v Speaker 2>of this should be free.

0:35:00.320 --> 0:35:04.360
<v Speaker 3>Yes, yeah, because it's oh, you mean, a scientific knowledge,

0:35:04.400 --> 0:35:07.120
<v Speaker 3>the birthright of mankind that our tax is paid for,

0:35:07.360 --> 0:35:10.640
<v Speaker 3>the only, in fact, the only uh permanent and important

0:35:10.640 --> 0:35:13.439
<v Speaker 3>thing humanity does on the entire planet to discover how

0:35:13.480 --> 0:35:15.680
<v Speaker 3>the universe around us works. Yeah, that should probably be

0:35:15.680 --> 0:35:16.680
<v Speaker 3>a free public resource.

0:35:16.920 --> 0:35:20.960
<v Speaker 2>It should probably be everyone's property. Yeah, the collective genius

0:35:20.960 --> 0:35:25.600
<v Speaker 2>of mankind. I don't know anyway. So Roseboud he has

0:35:25.640 --> 0:35:28.759
<v Speaker 2>this idea which is very mercenary, but he also has

0:35:28.800 --> 0:35:31.200
<v Speaker 2>like a conscience. He is a scientist, and he starts

0:35:31.200 --> 0:35:35.160
<v Speaker 2>to feel ashamed as Maxwell runs with it and is like, ah, man,

0:35:35.200 --> 0:35:37.880
<v Speaker 2>I really don't I don't feel good being in business

0:35:37.920 --> 0:35:42.400
<v Speaker 2>with you and doing this. I maybe contributed terribly to

0:35:42.480 --> 0:35:45.640
<v Speaker 2>a great evil. And he leaves, and so Maxwell's in

0:35:45.719 --> 0:35:49.840
<v Speaker 2>sole charge of Pergama now, and once he grasps Rosebaud's idea,

0:35:50.120 --> 0:35:52.920
<v Speaker 2>he runs with it like fucking Ussane Bolt. He's launching

0:35:52.960 --> 0:35:55.439
<v Speaker 2>new journals off the strength of like somebody he's having

0:35:55.560 --> 0:35:57.680
<v Speaker 2>like drinks and some guy mentions a new idea and

0:35:57.719 --> 0:36:01.799
<v Speaker 2>he's like, bam, journal motherfucker if a researcher. Yeah, like that,

0:36:01.920 --> 0:36:05.200
<v Speaker 2>Like that's literally how it's happening. By the late fifties,

0:36:05.520 --> 0:36:07.760
<v Speaker 2>he brought us sort of sleazy. He's like the first

0:36:07.920 --> 0:36:11.400
<v Speaker 2>eighties guy, Like he's amazing, and he brings this energy

0:36:11.440 --> 0:36:14.759
<v Speaker 2>to scientific publishing. And the fact that he is this

0:36:14.840 --> 0:36:17.680
<v Speaker 2>way is so out of time that it's shocking to

0:36:17.760 --> 0:36:20.240
<v Speaker 2>his new peers. So who show up at these scientific

0:36:20.239 --> 0:36:23.520
<v Speaker 2>conferences in like these fine tailored Italian suits. He's got

0:36:23.520 --> 0:36:26.719
<v Speaker 2>his hair slicked back like a gangster. He described the

0:36:26.800 --> 0:36:30.040
<v Speaker 2>journals that he owned as you lambs and himself as

0:36:30.120 --> 0:36:35.439
<v Speaker 2>King David, like cutting them up for parts. Basically that's

0:36:35.480 --> 0:36:38.480
<v Speaker 2>such a Again, this is why Rosebaud quits in fifty

0:36:38.560 --> 0:36:40.800
<v Speaker 2>six is he's like, I don't know, maybe this feels gross.

0:36:41.040 --> 0:36:43.000
<v Speaker 3>I also have to say, like there's been a lot

0:36:43.040 --> 0:36:45.120
<v Speaker 3>of talk in the last twenty years about you know,

0:36:45.760 --> 0:36:48.400
<v Speaker 3>for profit journals and you know, all the problems in

0:36:48.400 --> 0:36:51.160
<v Speaker 3>scientific publisher I always thought that that profit motive was

0:36:51.160 --> 0:36:53.879
<v Speaker 3>relatively recent. I didn't realize it was rapacious even at

0:36:53.880 --> 0:36:54.919
<v Speaker 3>the dawn of this shit.

0:36:55.640 --> 0:36:59.480
<v Speaker 2>Yes, and it Maxwell invins it. Now obviously would something

0:36:59.520 --> 0:37:02.319
<v Speaker 2>similar mayby, but like it's him, He's the one who

0:37:02.400 --> 0:37:02.840
<v Speaker 2>starts this.

0:37:03.800 --> 0:37:07.880
<v Speaker 3>And presumably somebody could have started a version of academic

0:37:07.920 --> 0:37:11.759
<v Speaker 3>publishing that didn't work this way. That was like, you know,

0:37:12.840 --> 0:37:15.600
<v Speaker 3>a lot of people say, like, what if Jimmy Wales

0:37:15.640 --> 0:37:18.920
<v Speaker 3>had not started Wikipedia, right, we would have maybe had

0:37:18.960 --> 0:37:21.080
<v Speaker 3>a different business model. There could have been a business

0:37:21.080 --> 0:37:22.200
<v Speaker 3>model that went a better way.

0:37:22.920 --> 0:37:26.239
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you just don't know. And you know,

0:37:26.480 --> 0:37:30.640
<v Speaker 2>I think we're probably doing better with Wikipedia than most

0:37:30.640 --> 0:37:31.839
<v Speaker 2>things on the Internet these days.

0:37:32.680 --> 0:37:35.320
<v Speaker 3>I mean, that's a good example. If that hadn't existed,

0:37:35.360 --> 0:37:37.799
<v Speaker 3>something bad it could have taken its place. There could

0:37:37.800 --> 0:37:39.880
<v Speaker 3>have been a better version of scientific publishing.

0:37:40.160 --> 0:37:42.400
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, cost one hundred dollars a month or some

0:37:42.520 --> 0:37:45.280
<v Speaker 2>shit or whatever. Yeah, and it tells you that Elon Musk,

0:37:46.080 --> 0:37:49.600
<v Speaker 2>you're gonna get a hyperloop in your city soon or whatever. Yeah.

0:37:49.640 --> 0:37:52.960
<v Speaker 2>So the next Geneva conference, now working alone, Robert Maxwell

0:37:53.080 --> 0:37:55.800
<v Speaker 2>rinse a mansion on the lake and he starts whining

0:37:55.840 --> 0:37:58.400
<v Speaker 2>and dining the best minds of the scientific world. Again.

0:37:58.640 --> 0:38:01.440
<v Speaker 2>He's taking these guys who have spent their whole and

0:38:01.560 --> 0:38:03.680
<v Speaker 2>ladies who have spent their whole careers with their nose

0:38:03.719 --> 0:38:07.440
<v Speaker 2>in a book generally don't have much money begging for grants,

0:38:07.719 --> 0:38:10.920
<v Speaker 2>and he is treating them like movie stars or pop musicians.

0:38:11.440 --> 0:38:13.600
<v Speaker 2>Like at one point he gets a bunch of these

0:38:13.600 --> 0:38:16.040
<v Speaker 2>guys together to start a journal, and he puts them

0:38:16.040 --> 0:38:18.360
<v Speaker 2>on a chartered boat tour of the Greek aisles to

0:38:18.400 --> 0:38:21.040
<v Speaker 2>figure out how to make the journal. Like it is

0:38:21.080 --> 0:38:24.239
<v Speaker 2>like classic Hollywood erashit right where you're like, go go

0:38:24.280 --> 0:38:25.960
<v Speaker 2>hang out in Italy for three months and write this

0:38:26.000 --> 0:38:27.759
<v Speaker 2>movie together or something like that. Like that's what he's

0:38:27.800 --> 0:38:31.239
<v Speaker 2>doing with these scientists, and like yeah, they they're like

0:38:31.400 --> 0:38:33.680
<v Speaker 2>this is much better than being a poor scientist.

0:38:35.040 --> 0:38:37.839
<v Speaker 3>This would work on me. Yes, yes, of course if

0:38:37.880 --> 0:38:39.839
<v Speaker 3>I was a scientist, I'd be like this guy is

0:38:39.880 --> 0:38:42.759
<v Speaker 3>so great. He's treating me the way I deserve to

0:38:42.800 --> 0:38:46.120
<v Speaker 3>be treated. Of course, I mean, I study ants, but

0:38:46.239 --> 0:38:48.520
<v Speaker 3>of course I should go on a free, all expenses

0:38:48.520 --> 0:38:49.640
<v Speaker 3>paid trip of Europe.

0:38:50.040 --> 0:38:52.800
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And one thing people say, to be fair to Maxwell,

0:38:52.840 --> 0:38:56.520
<v Speaker 2>he introduces the mercenary capitalism to this, but he's always

0:38:56.600 --> 0:38:58.880
<v Speaker 2>centered on the science. And one thing the scientists he

0:38:58.920 --> 0:39:01.319
<v Speaker 2>work with will say is whenever we had a disagreement,

0:39:01.600 --> 0:39:05.480
<v Speaker 2>he would always ultimately side with the scientists. Right. So

0:39:05.560 --> 0:39:08.280
<v Speaker 2>it's after him that things do get much more evil.

0:39:08.360 --> 0:39:10.520
<v Speaker 2>And it's with another company, el Selvier, where things get

0:39:10.520 --> 0:39:13.560
<v Speaker 2>a lot worse. But he makes that process inevitable, even

0:39:13.560 --> 0:39:17.520
<v Speaker 2>though he is he is really dedicated to the scientists

0:39:17.560 --> 0:39:21.319
<v Speaker 2>in this period of time. And also I just want

0:39:21.360 --> 0:39:23.440
<v Speaker 2>to add to what Adam said, if anyone wants to

0:39:23.440 --> 0:39:25.359
<v Speaker 2>put me on a chartered boat tour of the Greek

0:39:25.400 --> 0:39:28.080
<v Speaker 2>Isles to start a journal, I'm in. You've got me,

0:39:28.400 --> 0:39:34.600
<v Speaker 2>you bought me, I'm paid for like yeah. So he

0:39:34.640 --> 0:39:37.920
<v Speaker 2>told his deputy director at Pergaman, we don't compete on sales,

0:39:37.960 --> 0:39:40.520
<v Speaker 2>we compete on authors, right, So this is a talent

0:39:40.640 --> 0:39:42.719
<v Speaker 2>driven business. And that's what again, it's very much it

0:39:43.000 --> 0:39:46.000
<v Speaker 2>feels very similar to like Hollywood, I don't like, at

0:39:46.080 --> 0:39:47.680
<v Speaker 2>least at this time. I don't know how much that's

0:39:47.719 --> 0:39:50.400
<v Speaker 2>an influence to him, but he is kind of working

0:39:50.480 --> 0:39:53.439
<v Speaker 2>that way. His attitude is that like drawing in more

0:39:53.480 --> 0:39:57.480
<v Speaker 2>authors exclusively means like more journals that he owns, and

0:39:57.520 --> 0:40:01.840
<v Speaker 2>thus more sales. In nineteen fifty nine, Pergama had forty journals.

0:40:01.880 --> 0:40:03.759
<v Speaker 2>By the mid sixties it would publish more than one

0:40:03.800 --> 0:40:06.520
<v Speaker 2>hundred and fifty, which is like almost like ten times

0:40:06.520 --> 0:40:08.959
<v Speaker 2>as many as el Selvier, which is again the most

0:40:09.000 --> 0:40:11.920
<v Speaker 2>evil of these companies today, but at this point is

0:40:12.040 --> 0:40:15.280
<v Speaker 2>just barely keeping up as like a competitor to Pergaman.

0:40:16.160 --> 0:40:20.319
<v Speaker 2>Maxwell is not like a particularly patriotic businessman. He does

0:40:20.360 --> 0:40:23.640
<v Speaker 2>not see national borders. He has really good connections with

0:40:23.719 --> 0:40:26.960
<v Speaker 2>the USSR. It's always considered weird and part of why

0:40:27.000 --> 0:40:30.560
<v Speaker 2>people are wondering about his spy credentials. Whenever he visits Moscow,

0:40:30.760 --> 0:40:33.040
<v Speaker 2>the Soviet government like puts him up in a mansion

0:40:33.280 --> 0:40:36.359
<v Speaker 2>like they really like him, and I think, I mean,

0:40:36.640 --> 0:40:39.840
<v Speaker 2>he definitely is doing some spying, and I'm sure they're

0:40:39.880 --> 0:40:41.960
<v Speaker 2>also putting them up in the mansion because it's like

0:40:42.040 --> 0:40:44.400
<v Speaker 2>wired and they want aspire out of him. But he

0:40:44.480 --> 0:40:47.560
<v Speaker 2>has really good connections too. He speaks really good Russian.

0:40:47.640 --> 0:40:50.040
<v Speaker 2>He knows a lot of prominent people in the Soviet Union.

0:40:50.360 --> 0:40:52.120
<v Speaker 2>And the evidence for that is that when like the

0:40:52.200 --> 0:40:58.240
<v Speaker 2>USSR launches Spudnik, he negotiates within days an English language

0:40:58.280 --> 0:41:00.640
<v Speaker 2>deal with the Russian Academy of Sciences to become the

0:41:00.920 --> 0:41:05.440
<v Speaker 2>exclusive English language publisher of like Russian science, right, all

0:41:05.440 --> 0:41:09.080
<v Speaker 2>of like these. Yeah, so he is connected.

0:41:09.480 --> 0:41:11.400
<v Speaker 3>He sounds like a blast to spend a weekend with.

0:41:11.800 --> 0:41:14.839
<v Speaker 2>He sounds like a shitload of fun. Yeah right, there's

0:41:14.880 --> 0:41:16.799
<v Speaker 2>so many quotes about this guy, Like all of the

0:41:16.800 --> 0:41:18.680
<v Speaker 2>scientists who work with him are like he was a

0:41:18.680 --> 0:41:21.439
<v Speaker 2>piece of shit. A lot of fun though, Like, yeah,

0:41:21.440 --> 0:41:24.279
<v Speaker 2>he was an asshole. Great parties, Yeah, like I really

0:41:24.400 --> 0:41:28.480
<v Speaker 2>enjoyed spending time with this guy who sucked. Yeah. Now,

0:41:28.520 --> 0:41:32.160
<v Speaker 2>obviously Maxwell does not make this, as I said, as

0:41:32.239 --> 0:41:34.520
<v Speaker 2>evil as it becomes, but the downsides of what he

0:41:34.560 --> 0:41:37.480
<v Speaker 2>starts are very obvious. Today. The modern field of scientific

0:41:37.520 --> 0:41:42.080
<v Speaker 2>literature is cripplingly expensive for institutions like libraries and colleges,

0:41:42.360 --> 0:41:44.840
<v Speaker 2>the latter of which passed their costs on to students.

0:41:45.120 --> 0:41:48.480
<v Speaker 2>And while Maxwell initially wowed scientists with promises of payouts,

0:41:48.600 --> 0:41:50.960
<v Speaker 2>by the mid sixties he'd helped to normalize a system

0:41:51.080 --> 0:41:54.680
<v Speaker 2>where individual researchers were more reliant on journals than journals

0:41:54.719 --> 0:41:58.080
<v Speaker 2>were on them. Per the Guardian, scientists create work under

0:41:58.120 --> 0:42:00.640
<v Speaker 2>their own direction, funded largely by guff and give it

0:42:00.640 --> 0:42:03.799
<v Speaker 2>to publishers for free. The publisher pays scientific editors who

0:42:03.920 --> 0:42:06.320
<v Speaker 2>judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar,

0:42:06.520 --> 0:42:08.960
<v Speaker 2>but the bulk of the editorial burden checking the scientific

0:42:09.080 --> 0:42:12.080
<v Speaker 2>validity and evaluating the experiments. A process known as peer

0:42:12.120 --> 0:42:15.280
<v Speaker 2>review is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis.

0:42:15.480 --> 0:42:17.720
<v Speaker 2>The publishers then sell the product back to the government

0:42:17.760 --> 0:42:21.439
<v Speaker 2>funded institutional and university libraries to be read by scientists who,

0:42:21.520 --> 0:42:24.400
<v Speaker 2>in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

0:42:24.760 --> 0:42:26.759
<v Speaker 2>It is as if the New Yorker or the economists

0:42:26.800 --> 0:42:29.440
<v Speaker 2>demanded that journalists write and edit each other's work for

0:42:29.480 --> 0:42:33.120
<v Speaker 2>free and ask the government to foot the bill. And like,

0:42:33.440 --> 0:42:35.960
<v Speaker 2>nothing works like this industry does. And that is, by

0:42:35.960 --> 0:42:37.000
<v Speaker 2>the way, description of how it is.

0:42:37.040 --> 0:42:40.640
<v Speaker 3>Now, that's an incredible summary of how it works. And

0:42:41.080 --> 0:42:45.200
<v Speaker 3>like peer review, you know, we're taught in college anyway

0:42:45.239 --> 0:42:48.239
<v Speaker 3>that this is a good thing. Yea. The fact that

0:42:48.280 --> 0:42:52.240
<v Speaker 3>it's free labor, and not just free labor for science,

0:42:52.280 --> 0:42:55.840
<v Speaker 3>but free labor for the journals themselves. Like it begs

0:42:55.840 --> 0:43:00.160
<v Speaker 3>the question, like what exactly is the publisher even doing

0:43:00.560 --> 0:43:04.120
<v Speaker 3>other than you know, hitting start on the printing press. Fuck,

0:43:04.280 --> 0:43:07.680
<v Speaker 3>which which is the easiest part. Like that's the like

0:43:07.719 --> 0:43:11.480
<v Speaker 3>fucking random house does that shit? Like, what what is

0:43:11.560 --> 0:43:16.080
<v Speaker 3>the what is the power that the that these companies have?

0:43:16.200 --> 0:43:19.400
<v Speaker 3>Like why why wouldn't a university system just start their

0:43:19.440 --> 0:43:21.320
<v Speaker 3>own journal and do this themselves?

0:43:21.640 --> 0:43:24.840
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, well, I mean they do. There are some cases

0:43:24.880 --> 0:43:27.400
<v Speaker 2>of that, but like you also you, I mean, it's

0:43:27.480 --> 0:43:29.200
<v Speaker 2>just how kind of everything works in capitalism. There are

0:43:29.200 --> 0:43:31.719
<v Speaker 2>economies of scale. By the time this gets underway, the

0:43:31.760 --> 0:43:35.279
<v Speaker 2>big companies are so big you and your dinky journal, like,

0:43:35.320 --> 0:43:38.000
<v Speaker 2>they'll probably just buy you, right, And if the college

0:43:38.040 --> 0:43:40.520
<v Speaker 2>gets offered money for our journal, well it's money.

0:43:40.560 --> 0:43:40.719
<v Speaker 3>Right.

0:43:41.000 --> 0:43:44.239
<v Speaker 2>Everyone's thinking short term about shit like this, not how

0:43:44.280 --> 0:43:47.160
<v Speaker 2>it fucks you in the long run, you know, And

0:43:47.280 --> 0:43:51.399
<v Speaker 2>again like, no industry works the way scientific publishing does.

0:43:51.480 --> 0:43:54.000
<v Speaker 2>It is such a fucking grift. It's all the grift.

0:43:54.000 --> 0:43:55.880
<v Speaker 2>It's a huge, fucking evil grift.

0:43:56.400 --> 0:43:58.279
<v Speaker 3>God, Dad, you got me mad. This is the kind

0:43:58.320 --> 0:44:00.520
<v Speaker 3>of thing I normally do segments about you got me

0:44:00.560 --> 0:44:01.200
<v Speaker 3>mad about it.

0:44:01.719 --> 0:44:04.200
<v Speaker 2>You can find very good quotes in articles about this,

0:44:04.239 --> 0:44:05.759
<v Speaker 2>including some of the world linked in the show notes,

0:44:05.760 --> 0:44:08.279
<v Speaker 2>where there are science like prominent scientists being like the

0:44:08.360 --> 0:44:12.759
<v Speaker 2>primary barrier to scientific progress is the way scientific publishing works, right,

0:44:13.120 --> 0:44:17.640
<v Speaker 2>Like it's I mean, maybe not right now, more administration's doing. Yeah,

0:44:17.680 --> 0:44:20.440
<v Speaker 2>these are a little older articles, but it's a massive problem.

0:44:21.040 --> 0:44:21.320
<v Speaker 3>Now.

0:44:21.760 --> 0:44:24.600
<v Speaker 2>The ultimate result of the system that Robert Maxwell built

0:44:24.719 --> 0:44:27.320
<v Speaker 2>is one in which, as long as the government maintains

0:44:27.320 --> 0:44:30.960
<v Speaker 2>a priority in funding sciences, the industry is super profitable,

0:44:31.040 --> 0:44:33.840
<v Speaker 2>right the US or whoever pays for research, YadA, YadA, YadA.

0:44:34.120 --> 0:44:36.560
<v Speaker 2>And so we'll see what happens to publishing now that

0:44:36.680 --> 0:44:41.080
<v Speaker 2>some of that's starting to change. But uh, yeah, it's

0:44:41.440 --> 0:44:42.440
<v Speaker 2>it's it's interesting.

0:44:43.040 --> 0:44:46.720
<v Speaker 3>It's also such a classic example of you know, rent seeking,

0:44:46.800 --> 0:44:49.920
<v Speaker 3>as economists you call it, because again, the government is

0:44:49.920 --> 0:44:53.440
<v Speaker 3>funding it, the journals are making money off of it.

0:44:53.520 --> 0:44:56.600
<v Speaker 3>Like Maxwell made so much money that his daughter is an.

0:44:56.480 --> 0:44:59.520
<v Speaker 2>Heiress billions, billions.

0:44:59.080 --> 0:45:01.600
<v Speaker 3>And so profiting off of it, but they do not

0:45:01.760 --> 0:45:04.719
<v Speaker 3>put money back into the system, like absolutely, Now they

0:45:04.719 --> 0:45:07.160
<v Speaker 3>are making money off of the production of science, why

0:45:07.200 --> 0:45:09.279
<v Speaker 3>not fund some fucking science. But they don't do that.

0:45:09.400 --> 0:45:12.239
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, why would they do that? Why would they

0:45:12.280 --> 0:45:14.360
<v Speaker 2>give any money to anybody that's not That's not what

0:45:14.400 --> 0:45:16.319
<v Speaker 2>they're going to do. They're going to take it to

0:45:16.560 --> 0:45:20.240
<v Speaker 2>as Maxwell's about to do, buy a palace. And again

0:45:20.600 --> 0:45:23.160
<v Speaker 2>he's the least he's not as bad as the guys

0:45:23.200 --> 0:45:26.080
<v Speaker 2>who replace him, right, because he does ultimately he makes

0:45:26.200 --> 0:45:28.120
<v Speaker 2>a lot of times he will make decisions that cost

0:45:28.200 --> 0:45:30.600
<v Speaker 2>him money because a scientist says it's the right thing

0:45:30.640 --> 0:45:33.399
<v Speaker 2>to do, and he does ultimately side with his scientists,

0:45:34.120 --> 0:45:36.200
<v Speaker 2>and there's and he's able to do that because there's

0:45:36.200 --> 0:45:38.600
<v Speaker 2>so much flex there's so much extra profit he can

0:45:38.640 --> 0:45:41.479
<v Speaker 2>afford to. But the guys who replace him aren't aren't

0:45:41.480 --> 0:45:44.000
<v Speaker 2>even going to have that little level of scruples, right,

0:45:44.000 --> 0:45:46.319
<v Speaker 2>They're just not going to give a fuck. And this

0:45:46.400 --> 0:45:48.120
<v Speaker 2>is going to disrupt the timeline of these episodes a

0:45:48.160 --> 0:45:49.880
<v Speaker 2>little bit. But in order to talk about kind of

0:45:49.880 --> 0:45:52.320
<v Speaker 2>where things are today with scientific publishing, I want to

0:45:52.400 --> 0:45:56.680
<v Speaker 2>quote once more from another Guardian article. The publishing business

0:45:56.719 --> 0:46:00.200
<v Speaker 2>is perverse and needless. The Berkeley biologist Michael i And

0:46:00.200 --> 0:46:02.200
<v Speaker 2>wrote in a two thousand and three article for The Guardian,

0:46:02.239 --> 0:46:05.280
<v Speaker 2>declaring that it should be a public scandal. Adrian Sutton,

0:46:05.320 --> 0:46:08.000
<v Speaker 2>a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists are

0:46:08.000 --> 0:46:11.000
<v Speaker 2>all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw

0:46:11.040 --> 0:46:13.919
<v Speaker 2>materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry

0:46:13.920 --> 0:46:16.360
<v Speaker 2>out the quality control on those materials, and then sells

0:46:16.400 --> 0:46:18.680
<v Speaker 2>the same materials back to the customers at a vastly

0:46:18.719 --> 0:46:22.280
<v Speaker 2>inflated price. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends

0:46:22.320 --> 0:46:25.480
<v Speaker 2>on being published, and professional success is especially determined by

0:46:25.480 --> 0:46:28.560
<v Speaker 2>getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow,

0:46:28.640 --> 0:46:31.400
<v Speaker 2>nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential

0:46:31.440 --> 0:46:34.440
<v Speaker 2>scientists of the twentieth century is no longer a viable

0:46:34.480 --> 0:46:38.480
<v Speaker 2>career option under today's system. The father of genetic sequencing,

0:46:38.640 --> 0:46:41.560
<v Speaker 2>Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades

0:46:41.600 --> 0:46:44.440
<v Speaker 2>between his nineteen fifty eight and nineteen eighty Nobel prizes,

0:46:44.719 --> 0:46:48.200
<v Speaker 2>may well have found himself out of a job. That's actually,

0:46:48.239 --> 0:46:50.879
<v Speaker 2>I think a really important point is that so many

0:46:50.920 --> 0:46:55.000
<v Speaker 2>of the foundational discoveries of modernity as we know it

0:46:55.040 --> 0:46:57.520
<v Speaker 2>were not the result of like a team of people

0:46:57.560 --> 0:47:01.839
<v Speaker 2>working in for for a company in order to make

0:47:01.840 --> 0:47:03.360
<v Speaker 2>a thing. It was the result of a scientists to

0:47:03.360 --> 0:47:06.879
<v Speaker 2>had an interest and kind of in a meandering way,

0:47:06.920 --> 0:47:10.799
<v Speaker 2>pursued it for decades until he changed life for every

0:47:10.880 --> 0:47:15.400
<v Speaker 2>human being. Right, Jonas sal Ketty personal crusade against polio.

0:47:15.840 --> 0:47:19.200
<v Speaker 2>You know, like that doesn't happen. It can't happen. And

0:47:19.239 --> 0:47:21.479
<v Speaker 2>this is part of why right, and that's really bad

0:47:21.520 --> 0:47:22.359
<v Speaker 2>for all of us well.

0:47:22.400 --> 0:47:24.719
<v Speaker 3>And part of it is the is the social or

0:47:24.760 --> 0:47:28.960
<v Speaker 3>career pressure of having to publish, which is an I'm

0:47:28.960 --> 0:47:32.640
<v Speaker 3>gonna guess is an entirely different problem like that. That

0:47:32.840 --> 0:47:36.000
<v Speaker 3>is the what scientists careers are based on, is the

0:47:36.000 --> 0:47:39.640
<v Speaker 3>pressure to publish. But it feeds again back into this system,

0:47:40.040 --> 0:47:42.960
<v Speaker 3>like you don't last long in a tenured position if

0:47:43.000 --> 0:47:44.520
<v Speaker 3>you never publish anything.

0:47:45.160 --> 0:47:49.680
<v Speaker 2>Right, exactly, Maxwell, we're back to him now. I just

0:47:49.719 --> 0:47:51.160
<v Speaker 2>I really felt we should go to like, yeah, this

0:47:51.200 --> 0:47:53.640
<v Speaker 2>is how bad things end. Yeah, right, But that's after

0:47:53.680 --> 0:47:56.319
<v Speaker 2>his death. So Maxwell moves out of London. We're still

0:47:56.320 --> 0:47:59.719
<v Speaker 2>in this in the sixties. Here he purchases the Headington

0:47:59.800 --> 0:48:02.799
<v Speaker 2>Hill whole estate in Oxford, which had been built in

0:48:02.840 --> 0:48:05.200
<v Speaker 2>eighteen twenty four and become one of the most iconic

0:48:05.280 --> 0:48:07.600
<v Speaker 2>residences in the country. I'll of Sophie pull up the picture.

0:48:08.040 --> 0:48:10.319
<v Speaker 2>The noble family who had to live there sold it

0:48:10.360 --> 0:48:13.440
<v Speaker 2>off in nineteen fifty three, and Maxwell buys it in

0:48:13.440 --> 0:48:16.720
<v Speaker 2>part because like again, he's not English, he's not naturally

0:48:16.719 --> 0:48:20.279
<v Speaker 2>part of high society, but by buying this palace he

0:48:20.640 --> 0:48:23.759
<v Speaker 2>can kind of force himself to be right. Now he

0:48:23.800 --> 0:48:26.000
<v Speaker 2>can throw these kind of parties that everyone in high

0:48:26.040 --> 0:48:28.919
<v Speaker 2>society will show up at. And he makes this both

0:48:28.960 --> 0:48:31.160
<v Speaker 2>his home and the headquarters of pergam And Press, right,

0:48:31.680 --> 0:48:33.560
<v Speaker 2>and you know, that's kind of the way things work

0:48:33.600 --> 0:48:35.840
<v Speaker 2>in the UK. I think still to this day that

0:48:36.000 --> 0:48:39.080
<v Speaker 2>like you can skip a bunch of levels of the

0:48:39.120 --> 0:48:41.280
<v Speaker 2>social hierarchy if you buy the right house.

0:48:41.480 --> 0:48:41.719
<v Speaker 3>You know.

0:48:44.040 --> 0:48:47.080
<v Speaker 2>He and Betty had nine children ultimately in nineteen and

0:48:47.320 --> 0:48:49.840
<v Speaker 2>this is his life is never his personal life is

0:48:49.880 --> 0:48:52.920
<v Speaker 2>never easy like this. For all that he's like a

0:48:52.960 --> 0:48:56.840
<v Speaker 2>wealthy monster, he really has a tough life. In nineteen

0:48:56.880 --> 0:48:58.960
<v Speaker 2>fifty seven, he and Betty lose their three year old

0:48:59.040 --> 0:49:02.720
<v Speaker 2>daughter to leukemia. In nineteen sixty one, their oldest son, Michael,

0:49:02.760 --> 0:49:05.080
<v Speaker 2>is in a car crash that leaves him comb abound

0:49:05.400 --> 0:49:08.520
<v Speaker 2>for seven years. He dies finally in nineteen sixty eight,

0:49:09.000 --> 0:49:11.880
<v Speaker 2>and that nearly a decade, And this is during his

0:49:12.200 --> 0:49:15.279
<v Speaker 2>most productive period as a businessman. His son is just

0:49:15.320 --> 0:49:18.160
<v Speaker 2>in a fucking coma die. It just it kind of

0:49:18.360 --> 0:49:21.520
<v Speaker 2>breaks everyone. Like his family is sort of ruined. As

0:49:21.560 --> 0:49:24.840
<v Speaker 2>a result of this, he and Betty stop talking really

0:49:25.200 --> 0:49:28.120
<v Speaker 2>like they don't. Their relationship is never the same. And

0:49:28.200 --> 0:49:30.000
<v Speaker 2>normally when we say that for a man this rich

0:49:30.080 --> 0:49:31.759
<v Speaker 2>it's because and he does cheat on her a bunch,

0:49:31.800 --> 0:49:34.600
<v Speaker 2>but like in this case, it's because, you know, it's

0:49:34.680 --> 0:49:38.400
<v Speaker 2>just this just breaks their relationship and it breaks their

0:49:38.440 --> 0:49:41.520
<v Speaker 2>ability to kind of care for their other kids, Like

0:49:41.640 --> 0:49:46.239
<v Speaker 2>he stops talking to his surviving children until And I

0:49:46.280 --> 0:49:49.799
<v Speaker 2>hate to make anyone sympathetic to Gilan Maxwell, but in

0:49:49.880 --> 0:49:54.640
<v Speaker 2>nineteen sixty one, his youngest daughter, Gilan, at age three,

0:49:54.800 --> 0:49:57.880
<v Speaker 2>tells her mother, Mummy, I exist in an attempt to

0:49:57.920 --> 0:50:02.520
<v Speaker 2>get attention because like after this accident, they're just ignoring

0:50:02.520 --> 0:50:05.600
<v Speaker 2>their kids so much. Like she has to like state

0:50:05.760 --> 0:50:08.959
<v Speaker 2>to her parents, I'm a person at age three.

0:50:09.880 --> 0:50:12.080
<v Speaker 3>So I reported this.

0:50:12.080 --> 0:50:14.800
<v Speaker 2>This was in his biography by Preston, and I believe

0:50:14.800 --> 0:50:17.160
<v Speaker 2>this was reported by one of the Maxwell brothers. And

0:50:17.200 --> 0:50:19.920
<v Speaker 2>again this is this is well before the scandal, so.

0:50:20.000 --> 0:50:22.200
<v Speaker 3>No, no, I know, I'm just like, well, Gillan wouldn't

0:50:22.200 --> 0:50:24.400
<v Speaker 3>remember this, and the parents don't know the kids exist,

0:50:24.400 --> 0:50:25.560
<v Speaker 3>so they probably wouldn't remember it.

0:50:25.719 --> 0:50:26.440
<v Speaker 2>His brothers are old.

0:50:26.480 --> 0:50:27.960
<v Speaker 3>One of the brothers like, oh man, that was a

0:50:27.960 --> 0:50:30.080
<v Speaker 3>real bummer when our three year old sister said, Mummy,

0:50:30.120 --> 0:50:30.600
<v Speaker 3>I exist.

0:50:30.719 --> 0:50:32.319
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that really fucked us all up.

0:50:32.360 --> 0:50:35.600
<v Speaker 1>Actually, yeah, I still don't bad for.

0:50:35.760 --> 0:50:38.440
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'm not saying you should feel bad for her,

0:50:38.480 --> 0:50:40.800
<v Speaker 2>but this this should tell you, like how bad things

0:50:40.840 --> 0:50:42.400
<v Speaker 2>are in his personal life.

0:50:42.440 --> 0:50:44.400
<v Speaker 1>Not great, still not for a bad for yeah.

0:50:44.560 --> 0:50:47.640
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. He does start to smother her with affection from

0:50:47.640 --> 0:50:50.319
<v Speaker 2>this point forward, right partly as a result of this,

0:50:50.840 --> 0:50:53.120
<v Speaker 2>and she's kind of the only one in his immediate

0:50:53.160 --> 0:50:55.600
<v Speaker 2>family that he acts with love towards. After this, he

0:50:55.640 --> 0:50:58.040
<v Speaker 2>will lash out at his son's and at his wife

0:50:58.040 --> 0:51:00.319
<v Speaker 2>for the rest of his days, but he never really

0:51:00.320 --> 0:51:03.960
<v Speaker 2>does it Gillen. She becomes coddled and is obviously his favorite.

0:51:05.120 --> 0:51:07.160
<v Speaker 2>So again, there we go, There we go. Sympathy ended.

0:51:07.200 --> 0:51:10.479
<v Speaker 2>We're good now, don't have to think about that sad

0:51:10.480 --> 0:51:14.960
<v Speaker 2>three year old anymore. Now. If you recall, Maxwell had

0:51:14.960 --> 0:51:17.160
<v Speaker 2>promised his future wife Betty that during the war he

0:51:17.200 --> 0:51:19.600
<v Speaker 2>would one day be rich and become the prime minister.

0:51:20.080 --> 0:51:22.080
<v Speaker 2>He had obviously already become rich, and in the mid

0:51:22.160 --> 0:51:25.120
<v Speaker 2>nineteen sixties he starts to work towards political power. In

0:51:25.200 --> 0:51:28.200
<v Speaker 2>nineteen sixty four, he runs for Parliament in the constituency

0:51:28.200 --> 0:51:31.239
<v Speaker 2>of Buckingham and he wins as a member of the

0:51:31.360 --> 0:51:34.400
<v Speaker 2>Labor Party. And this is a weird side He identifies

0:51:34.400 --> 0:51:36.120
<v Speaker 2>as a socialist his entire life.

0:51:36.680 --> 0:51:38.799
<v Speaker 4>Really, he identifies as a socialist.

0:51:39.120 --> 0:51:42.279
<v Speaker 2>Yep, he strongly identifies as a socialist.

0:51:42.360 --> 0:51:47.680
<v Speaker 3>So he thinks that like public goods should be available

0:51:47.680 --> 0:51:50.480
<v Speaker 3>to the public at low or no cost, subsidized by

0:51:50.480 --> 0:51:51.080
<v Speaker 3>the government.

0:51:51.640 --> 0:51:53.480
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, here's the thing.

0:51:53.560 --> 0:51:56.560
<v Speaker 4>But not scientific research, not scientific research.

0:51:56.640 --> 0:52:00.879
<v Speaker 2>That doesn't count. And also unions don't count. I think

0:52:00.880 --> 0:52:04.279
<v Speaker 2>he identifies as a socialist because his mom did and

0:52:04.400 --> 0:52:08.600
<v Speaker 2>he he isn't one. He never acts as one. But

0:52:08.680 --> 0:52:11.120
<v Speaker 2>I think that's just a part of his ego. Is

0:52:11.200 --> 0:52:13.520
<v Speaker 2>like he doesn't he knows his He probably knows his

0:52:13.560 --> 0:52:15.680
<v Speaker 2>mom would not like what he's done with his life

0:52:15.719 --> 0:52:19.279
<v Speaker 2>at this point. But yes, he is, and he is

0:52:19.280 --> 0:52:21.200
<v Speaker 2>a part of the Labor Party, and he is a

0:52:21.239 --> 0:52:23.600
<v Speaker 2>He plays a role in the switch from Labor to

0:52:23.719 --> 0:52:25.879
<v Speaker 2>New Labor Right, which is when the British Labor Party

0:52:25.960 --> 0:52:30.880
<v Speaker 2>jettisons the unions right, like Robert Maxwell is part of

0:52:30.880 --> 0:52:34.360
<v Speaker 2>that process. How what does he do we'll talk about that.

0:52:34.480 --> 0:52:38.080
<v Speaker 2>We'll talk about that. Speaking of things, we'll talk about

0:52:38.400 --> 0:52:50.200
<v Speaker 2>here's ads. So Robert has now gotten himself into parliament,

0:52:50.480 --> 0:52:52.880
<v Speaker 2>is part of Labor and you have to remember again

0:52:52.920 --> 0:52:57.000
<v Speaker 2>he's a socialist and he's also a business owner though,

0:52:57.080 --> 0:53:01.600
<v Speaker 2>and so he hates unions because they compete with his power.

0:53:02.120 --> 0:53:04.920
<v Speaker 2>And so when interviewed after the election, he tells everybody,

0:53:05.000 --> 0:53:07.440
<v Speaker 2>I come from a very far humble farm laboring family

0:53:07.480 --> 0:53:09.960
<v Speaker 2>and would rather cut off my arm than betray my class.

0:53:10.680 --> 0:53:12.480
<v Speaker 2>And it's true that he does come from a humble farm,

0:53:12.560 --> 0:53:15.480
<v Speaker 2>laboring family, but there is no bigger class trader than

0:53:15.600 --> 0:53:20.120
<v Speaker 2>this fucking guy. His political peers who knew him claim

0:53:20.160 --> 0:53:22.760
<v Speaker 2>that he also told them he wanted to become Prime Minister,

0:53:22.840 --> 0:53:25.360
<v Speaker 2>and one colleague, cited in the book fall later quoted

0:53:25.440 --> 0:53:28.360
<v Speaker 2>him as having admitted, well, of course I'm conservative, but

0:53:28.400 --> 0:53:30.600
<v Speaker 2>I'm not a member of the establishment, so I've got

0:53:30.600 --> 0:53:35.000
<v Speaker 2>to become labor, which is a very Trumpian comment, right that, Like,

0:53:35.600 --> 0:53:37.880
<v Speaker 2>I'm not a member of the establishment. I'm a billionaire,

0:53:38.239 --> 0:53:40.320
<v Speaker 2>I own all of science, but I'm not part of

0:53:40.360 --> 0:53:44.960
<v Speaker 2>the establishment fundamentally. So I'm a conservative, but I'm with labor, right,

0:53:45.000 --> 0:53:48.920
<v Speaker 2>I'm actually a progressive somehow. It's like an Elon Musk statement.

0:53:48.960 --> 0:53:52.000
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's an in group out group thing. I were

0:53:52.120 --> 0:53:54.560
<v Speaker 3>mean to me growing up. I'm not a lord. I'm

0:53:54.560 --> 0:53:57.440
<v Speaker 3>not a lord and lady. I'm not invited to social functions.

0:53:57.480 --> 0:53:59.560
<v Speaker 3>Therefore I must join this party.

0:53:59.760 --> 0:54:03.440
<v Speaker 2>Yeah yeah, And he also considers so a big thing.

0:54:03.480 --> 0:54:05.920
<v Speaker 2>Once he gets into labor is he telling He starts

0:54:05.920 --> 0:54:08.320
<v Speaker 2>telling everyone else we have to modernize the Labor Party.

0:54:08.320 --> 0:54:10.439
<v Speaker 2>And what he means by that is our pro union

0:54:10.480 --> 0:54:13.760
<v Speaker 2>attitudes are outdated. We have to stop being pro union

0:54:13.960 --> 0:54:18.359
<v Speaker 2>right now. This is not initially super popular. A lot

0:54:18.360 --> 0:54:21.319
<v Speaker 2>of unions voting in this period of time. Still they

0:54:21.320 --> 0:54:25.680
<v Speaker 2>have not been crushed by Thatcher entirely. Eventually, he switched

0:54:25.719 --> 0:54:28.359
<v Speaker 2>out his chauffeured Rolls Royce for an old land Rover

0:54:28.440 --> 0:54:30.480
<v Speaker 2>to try to portray himself as a man of the people.

0:54:30.760 --> 0:54:33.840
<v Speaker 2>And like, Buddy, a land Rover is still an expensive car.

0:54:34.200 --> 0:54:38.400
<v Speaker 2>Like that's like, no, I'm gonna trade my Maserati for

0:54:38.440 --> 0:54:41.000
<v Speaker 2>a Lambo so people know I'm a working man, right,

0:54:43.239 --> 0:54:43.719
<v Speaker 2>I don't know.

0:54:43.760 --> 0:54:47.000
<v Speaker 3>Man, is that chauffeurd? Now I just row over the

0:54:47.000 --> 0:54:48.680
<v Speaker 3>peasants under my own power.

0:54:48.960 --> 0:54:52.720
<v Speaker 2>Yeah yeah. So this did not have the intended effect,

0:54:52.760 --> 0:54:54.839
<v Speaker 2>and although he was re elected in nineteen sixty six,

0:54:54.880 --> 0:54:57.720
<v Speaker 2>he ultimately lost his seat in nineteen seventy and failed

0:54:57.760 --> 0:55:00.400
<v Speaker 2>to win it back during the next cycle. Still, Adam,

0:55:00.440 --> 0:55:02.719
<v Speaker 2>you'll be happy to hear this. He achieved the goal

0:55:02.800 --> 0:55:05.960
<v Speaker 2>of every politician in the sixties and seventies having an

0:55:06.000 --> 0:55:09.000
<v Speaker 2>awkward photo taken with Henry Kissinger. Just look at the

0:55:09.000 --> 0:55:11.480
<v Speaker 2>two of them. Just look and Maxwell's over in the

0:55:11.520 --> 0:55:13.759
<v Speaker 2>corner there, he's just like smiling in the corner, looking

0:55:13.800 --> 0:55:18.600
<v Speaker 2>like a mob boss next to Kissinger. Eh, I love

0:55:18.680 --> 0:55:19.280
<v Speaker 2>this picture.

0:55:19.719 --> 0:55:23.600
<v Speaker 3>That guy's a wheeler dealer. He's drunk already. He's like

0:55:23.640 --> 0:55:26.400
<v Speaker 3>I can smell him based on this photo. Does that

0:55:26.440 --> 0:55:26.879
<v Speaker 3>make sense?

0:55:27.360 --> 0:55:29.840
<v Speaker 4>Almost like mothballs and vodka.

0:55:29.960 --> 0:55:32.359
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, my end. Maybe a little aqua velve in there too.

0:55:32.480 --> 0:55:36.239
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, yeah, he smells like the back room of

0:55:36.280 --> 0:55:38.880
<v Speaker 2>an Italian deli that's actually a mob front.

0:55:39.000 --> 0:55:41.000
<v Speaker 3>He's going, how you're doing, sweetheart? He's like pat and

0:55:41.040 --> 0:55:43.239
<v Speaker 3>the waitresses ass like this guy is such a piece

0:55:43.239 --> 0:55:43.560
<v Speaker 3>of shit.

0:55:44.160 --> 0:55:46.880
<v Speaker 2>It's shocking to me again that he's like he's like

0:55:46.920 --> 0:55:51.799
<v Speaker 2>a Czech Ruthenian Jewish guy. Because if you had told

0:55:51.880 --> 0:55:55.000
<v Speaker 2>me this man was the most Italian fellow ever, I'd

0:55:55.040 --> 0:55:57.080
<v Speaker 2>be like, yeah, that guy is Italian as shit. Look

0:55:57.080 --> 0:56:00.000
<v Speaker 2>at him like he has the face of a mob boss,

0:56:00.440 --> 0:56:01.920
<v Speaker 2>Like you could have put him in the soprano.

0:56:02.120 --> 0:56:05.200
<v Speaker 3>It really is the twentieth century dream, right, Yeah, of

0:56:05.680 --> 0:56:09.520
<v Speaker 3>starting in this you know, little backwater and becoming a

0:56:09.560 --> 0:56:16.840
<v Speaker 3>sort of like poly national wheeler dealer, billionaire player asshole.

0:56:17.120 --> 0:56:19.919
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, he does it all, and he is, like again,

0:56:20.000 --> 0:56:22.920
<v Speaker 2>a monster, but the only guy I've ever heard of

0:56:23.239 --> 0:56:24.839
<v Speaker 2>who you can really say like, yeah, he is kind

0:56:24.840 --> 0:56:27.759
<v Speaker 2>of less a self made billionaire, like he did come

0:56:27.800 --> 0:56:31.719
<v Speaker 2>from nothing, Yeah, and then destroyed science.

0:56:32.160 --> 0:56:35.200
<v Speaker 3>Great, I think there's more. I think that was more

0:56:35.280 --> 0:56:38.600
<v Speaker 3>possible after an event like World War Two, where everything

0:56:38.600 --> 0:56:40.920
<v Speaker 3>gets scrambled and you can rush in and pick up

0:56:40.920 --> 0:56:41.920
<v Speaker 3>the pieces. Yeah.

0:56:42.120 --> 0:56:43.359
<v Speaker 2>Well, I mean yeah, I mean think about it. Both

0:56:43.400 --> 0:56:46.399
<v Speaker 2>Maxwell and Kissinger really are both like they both start

0:56:46.440 --> 0:56:49.960
<v Speaker 2>their lives as like shrapnel from this horrific conflict, persecuted

0:56:50.000 --> 0:56:53.680
<v Speaker 2>by the Nazis, and then the world of possibilities that

0:56:53.800 --> 0:56:56.439
<v Speaker 2>opens up in the wake of the Second World War

0:56:57.040 --> 0:56:59.839
<v Speaker 2>allows both of them to reach these incredibly high levels

0:56:59.840 --> 0:57:01.520
<v Speaker 2>of power. So yeah, I mean, I think you've got

0:57:01.520 --> 0:57:04.560
<v Speaker 2>a really good point there that, like the way the

0:57:04.600 --> 0:57:08.239
<v Speaker 2>world opens up after World War Two makes a lot

0:57:08.280 --> 0:57:11.160
<v Speaker 2>of these guys as improbable lives possible.

0:57:11.320 --> 0:57:12.640
<v Speaker 3>I can't wait for World War three.

0:57:12.920 --> 0:57:14.440
<v Speaker 2>It's gonna be great. It's gonna be thinking.

0:57:14.239 --> 0:57:16.560
<v Speaker 3>About just think about all the new billionaires we're gonna get,

0:57:16.600 --> 0:57:17.240
<v Speaker 3>and I'm gonna be.

0:57:17.160 --> 0:57:18.400
<v Speaker 4>Like, I wish I was a younger man.

0:57:18.760 --> 0:57:20.400
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I wish I was just trying to get my

0:57:20.440 --> 0:57:22.600
<v Speaker 3>start after World War Three, you know, after the Boks

0:57:22.680 --> 0:57:27.800
<v Speaker 3>go off and I could build the nuclear mitigation business.

0:57:28.080 --> 0:57:31.240
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yes, but maybe we'll maybe we'll get a chance

0:57:31.280 --> 0:57:33.200
<v Speaker 2>to fight some SS guys on a farm, you know.

0:57:33.480 --> 0:57:37.520
<v Speaker 2>You know, at least there's that Adam that happen It

0:57:37.560 --> 0:57:41.920
<v Speaker 2>could happen here. Yeah. Through the late nineteen sixties, Maxwell

0:57:41.960 --> 0:57:44.520
<v Speaker 2>repeatedly tried to expand his empire into news media. He

0:57:44.560 --> 0:57:46.880
<v Speaker 2>attempts to buy News of the World in nineteen sixty

0:57:46.880 --> 0:57:49.400
<v Speaker 2>eight and The Sun in nineteen sixty nine, and Rupert

0:57:49.480 --> 0:57:53.000
<v Speaker 2>Murdoch beats him both times. This enrages him. He considers

0:57:53.040 --> 0:57:56.560
<v Speaker 2>himself Rupert Murdock's nemesis. Rupert Murdoch is always like, oh

0:57:56.560 --> 0:57:58.040
<v Speaker 2>I I've never even heard of that guy. Who are

0:57:58.080 --> 0:57:59.520
<v Speaker 2>you talking about? Nemesis?

0:58:00.240 --> 0:58:04.600
<v Speaker 3>Nah, but not making him less sympathetic.

0:58:04.680 --> 0:58:08.920
<v Speaker 2>Though by this part nativism does play a role in

0:58:09.000 --> 0:58:11.680
<v Speaker 2>him losing News of the World because an editorial when

0:58:11.680 --> 0:58:14.000
<v Speaker 2>he's trying to buy it declares, this is a British

0:58:14.040 --> 0:58:17.360
<v Speaker 2>newspaper run by British people. Let's keep it that way.

0:58:17.760 --> 0:58:20.160
<v Speaker 4>What was he considered at the time He was British.

0:58:20.240 --> 0:58:22.720
<v Speaker 2>They knew, yeah, but they figured they found out he'd

0:58:22.720 --> 0:58:25.000
<v Speaker 2>been born Yon. He hadn't been born Yon, but that's

0:58:25.000 --> 0:58:25.520
<v Speaker 2>what they thought.

0:58:25.640 --> 0:58:26.800
<v Speaker 3>This guy's a Ruthenian.

0:58:27.160 --> 0:58:31.120
<v Speaker 2>He's a Ruthenian. Yeah, So his political career is uneven

0:58:31.160 --> 0:58:33.960
<v Speaker 2>at best. Business seemed to be a welcoming place for him,

0:58:33.960 --> 0:58:36.720
<v Speaker 2>at least until late nineteen sixty nine, after he negotiated

0:58:36.720 --> 0:58:38.840
<v Speaker 2>which should have been a great deal to sell pergam

0:58:38.840 --> 0:58:42.880
<v Speaker 2>And Press to a wealthy American investor, Saul Steinberg. Unfortunately

0:58:42.960 --> 0:58:46.080
<v Speaker 2>for our boy, Maxwell illegally concealed the true value of

0:58:46.120 --> 0:58:48.640
<v Speaker 2>the company, basically pretending it was a lot worth more

0:58:48.680 --> 0:58:51.920
<v Speaker 2>than it was via what writer Robert Philpott calls smoke

0:58:52.000 --> 0:58:55.600
<v Speaker 2>in mirrors accounting practices. He gets removed from the board

0:58:55.600 --> 0:58:58.040
<v Speaker 2>of directors in the UK starts an investigation in his

0:58:58.160 --> 0:59:01.800
<v Speaker 2>activities that concludes in seventy one after finding huge amounts

0:59:01.840 --> 0:59:04.360
<v Speaker 2>of fraudulent payments, moved from one department to another to

0:59:04.440 --> 0:59:07.080
<v Speaker 2>hide the cost of other investments that went bad, and

0:59:07.160 --> 0:59:09.560
<v Speaker 2>prop up segments of his business that were struggling. The

0:59:09.680 --> 0:59:12.800
<v Speaker 2>report concluded, Robert Maxwell is not, in our opinion, a

0:59:12.800 --> 0:59:15.680
<v Speaker 2>person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship

0:59:15.720 --> 0:59:18.200
<v Speaker 2>of a public company. And at the end of the story,

0:59:18.320 --> 0:59:22.400
<v Speaker 2>right obviously you know. Yeah. Now five years later he

0:59:22.400 --> 0:59:27.160
<v Speaker 2>takes control of Pergament again. He's running it all and

0:59:27.240 --> 0:59:30.160
<v Speaker 2>his sudden rise and fall earns him the nickname the

0:59:30.200 --> 0:59:34.800
<v Speaker 2>bouncing check like Czeh, which is not bad. It's not bad,

0:59:36.200 --> 0:59:41.040
<v Speaker 2>great work the British press good at some things. Yeah,

0:59:41.080 --> 0:59:44.840
<v Speaker 2>I love that shit. And for the next ten years

0:59:44.880 --> 0:59:48.040
<v Speaker 2>after this unprobable rise back, he goes from strength to strength.

0:59:48.320 --> 0:59:51.840
<v Speaker 2>He buys Europe's largest printing company, he becomes owner of

0:59:51.960 --> 0:59:55.200
<v Speaker 2>The Mirror, that Britain's largest left leaning paper. And now

0:59:55.200 --> 0:59:56.920
<v Speaker 2>that he finally owns a paper, this is how he

0:59:56.960 --> 0:59:59.200
<v Speaker 2>really plays a major role in the shift to new

0:59:59.240 --> 1:00:03.120
<v Speaker 2>labor because he starts using it the biggest left leaning

1:00:03.160 --> 1:00:07.840
<v Speaker 2>paper in the UK, to attack union organizers. He runs

1:00:07.840 --> 1:00:10.640
<v Speaker 2>what Socialist Worker what the Socialist Worker described as a

1:00:10.680 --> 1:00:14.200
<v Speaker 2>smear campaign against Arthur Scargill, head of the mine Workers union.

1:00:14.200 --> 1:00:16.080
<v Speaker 2>This is during a big fight between the mine workers

1:00:16.080 --> 1:00:19.760
<v Speaker 2>and Thatcher. I believe quote Scargill and the socialist values

1:00:19.760 --> 1:00:22.120
<v Speaker 2>he represented were seen as a barrier to the modernization

1:00:22.160 --> 1:00:24.480
<v Speaker 2>of the Labor Party. The vile attacks, which lasted for

1:00:24.520 --> 1:00:26.680
<v Speaker 2>the better part of a year, were baseless, yet they

1:00:26.720 --> 1:00:30.320
<v Speaker 2>did terrible damage. And he does this over and over again. Right,

1:00:30.400 --> 1:00:33.040
<v Speaker 2>he has like a one man war against the unions

1:00:33.080 --> 1:00:39.160
<v Speaker 2>in the UK, wielding the left wing paper to execute it.

1:00:39.400 --> 1:00:43.080
<v Speaker 3>He just has animus for unions because he's a business owner.

1:00:43.080 --> 1:00:44.440
<v Speaker 3>And that's the way the wind is blowing.

1:00:44.600 --> 1:00:46.360
<v Speaker 2>And that's the I think. The way the wind is

1:00:46.360 --> 1:00:49.360
<v Speaker 2>blowing doesn't hurt. I think he is a personal I

1:00:49.440 --> 1:00:51.520
<v Speaker 2>should be able to I know what's best. I should

1:00:51.560 --> 1:00:53.400
<v Speaker 2>be able to make all the decisions. And if you

1:00:53.480 --> 1:00:56.560
<v Speaker 2>got a union, the boss doesn't make all the decisions, right,

1:00:56.600 --> 1:00:58.120
<v Speaker 2>they're restricted to some extent.

1:00:58.280 --> 1:01:01.800
<v Speaker 3>Now, that's what anti us is fundamentally about. It's about

1:01:01.800 --> 1:01:04.880
<v Speaker 3>anyone else having power. Unions are about workers having power,

1:01:05.000 --> 1:01:06.880
<v Speaker 3>and right, the people on top don't want them to

1:01:06.920 --> 1:01:07.680
<v Speaker 3>have the power.

1:01:07.880 --> 1:01:12.280
<v Speaker 2>Right exactly, And Maxwell the socialist uses this big left

1:01:12.360 --> 1:01:16.120
<v Speaker 2>leaning paper as an engine to push labor against unions.

1:01:16.520 --> 1:01:19.240
<v Speaker 2>And unfortunately, while he does this, the paper grows in

1:01:19.320 --> 1:01:22.240
<v Speaker 2>circulation and becomes more profitable than ever because again he's

1:01:22.280 --> 1:01:24.840
<v Speaker 2>really good at the nuts and bolts of running a newspaper.

1:01:25.160 --> 1:01:28.160
<v Speaker 2>Like he's just he's like it's like he's like almost

1:01:28.240 --> 1:01:30.520
<v Speaker 2>like lebron right, Like he's just got this built in

1:01:30.720 --> 1:01:32.760
<v Speaker 2>skill he was bored with for knowing how to make

1:01:32.800 --> 1:01:36.480
<v Speaker 2>a paper profitable. I don't know why we.

1:01:36.560 --> 1:01:39.080
<v Speaker 3>Could use a little bit of that right now, to

1:01:39.120 --> 1:01:39.760
<v Speaker 3>be quite honest.

1:01:39.840 --> 1:01:41.880
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we need another one of those who's not evil.

1:01:42.120 --> 1:01:42.760
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.

1:01:43.040 --> 1:01:45.320
<v Speaker 4>Now he's got Bezos and Patrick soun Schong.

1:01:45.840 --> 1:01:50.840
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Right, So he buys more publications, he becomes a medium,

1:01:50.880 --> 1:01:54.160
<v Speaker 2>even on such a scale that Bob Bagdikian, the dean

1:01:54.200 --> 1:01:57.680
<v Speaker 2>of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, declared, neither Caesar, nor

1:01:57.720 --> 1:02:00.840
<v Speaker 2>Franklin Roosevelt nor any pope has commanded much power to

1:02:00.880 --> 1:02:05.200
<v Speaker 2>shape information on which so many people depend. Wow, and

1:02:05.840 --> 1:02:09.040
<v Speaker 2>Murdoch is obviously his rival at this time. But this

1:02:09.080 --> 1:02:11.360
<v Speaker 2>is kind of before Murdoch has done most of what

1:02:11.920 --> 1:02:14.560
<v Speaker 2>he's going to get famous for. Like Fox News isn't

1:02:14.600 --> 1:02:18.720
<v Speaker 2>really a thing yet. And Murdoch to a degree cribs

1:02:18.760 --> 1:02:23.400
<v Speaker 2>a little bit from this guy's notes in terms of like, oh, really,

1:02:23.160 --> 1:02:26.160
<v Speaker 2>like he's taking some notes, not that he's not doing

1:02:26.240 --> 1:02:28.640
<v Speaker 2>any of this before, but he's influenced a little bit

1:02:28.680 --> 1:02:31.600
<v Speaker 2>by the degree to which Maxwell is able to turn

1:02:31.640 --> 1:02:35.640
<v Speaker 2>these publications he owns to push his own agendas. And

1:02:35.680 --> 1:02:38.240
<v Speaker 2>he is a famously terrible guy to work for. Per

1:02:38.320 --> 1:02:41.320
<v Speaker 2>a biography in the Times of Israel. He bullied and

1:02:41.360 --> 1:02:44.920
<v Speaker 2>humiliated staff, relentlessly calling his ludicrously titled chief of staff

1:02:44.920 --> 1:02:47.560
<v Speaker 2>at four am one Sunday morning to ask him the time,

1:02:47.920 --> 1:02:51.000
<v Speaker 2>and instilled a culture of distrust and rivalry. He bugged

1:02:51.040 --> 1:02:53.960
<v Speaker 2>his staff, by which I mean he bugged them with

1:02:54.080 --> 1:02:58.280
<v Speaker 2>surveillance devices, spending hours alone listening to the recordings for

1:02:58.320 --> 1:03:04.360
<v Speaker 2>evidence of disloyalty, and even had them followed. Thank Christ.

1:03:04.680 --> 1:03:07.240
<v Speaker 3>Like, dude, you're obsessed with me. You're spending hours alone

1:03:07.280 --> 1:03:08.640
<v Speaker 3>listening to the recordings of me.

1:03:08.960 --> 1:03:11.600
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's kind of flattering, you are.

1:03:11.680 --> 1:03:14.680
<v Speaker 3>What you're really pulling into focus now, is this man

1:03:14.800 --> 1:03:16.640
<v Speaker 3>is a long lost succession character?

1:03:17.160 --> 1:03:18.840
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yes, nailed it.

1:03:18.960 --> 1:03:24.320
<v Speaker 3>Where is the Holocaust surviving Ruthenian Czech Jew you know

1:03:25.400 --> 1:03:28.440
<v Speaker 3>who managed to survive and build an empire on that show?

1:03:28.520 --> 1:03:29.520
<v Speaker 3>That's a wonderful character.

1:03:29.600 --> 1:03:31.520
<v Speaker 1>He would have He would have participated in boor on

1:03:31.520 --> 1:03:32.640
<v Speaker 1>the floor. There's no way.

1:03:32.720 --> 1:03:35.040
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, yeah, he sounds like he created or on the floor.

1:03:35.120 --> 1:03:36.600
<v Speaker 1>Yeah he is on the floor.

1:03:36.720 --> 1:03:41.240
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, the floor. We missed a flashback scene if

1:03:41.240 --> 1:03:47.040
<v Speaker 2>you have machine gunning the ss alas. So this is

1:03:47.280 --> 1:03:49.680
<v Speaker 2>and again to kind of play on the succession vibes.

1:03:50.000 --> 1:03:53.040
<v Speaker 2>His sons are he puts in his business right, and

1:03:53.080 --> 1:03:56.720
<v Speaker 2>he fires them. He fires his son Ian Maxwell because

1:03:56.760 --> 1:03:58.960
<v Speaker 2>like he doesn't have he's not like waiting for him

1:03:58.960 --> 1:04:00.720
<v Speaker 2>when he lands on a plane one day. He instead

1:04:00.760 --> 1:04:03.960
<v Speaker 2>like sends a chauffe a vehicle, and so Maxwell fires

1:04:04.000 --> 1:04:06.760
<v Speaker 2>his kid. And Ian's first words when he gets fired

1:04:06.840 --> 1:04:12.720
<v Speaker 2>or thank Christ, I'm finally out of the madhouse. And

1:04:12.760 --> 1:04:15.280
<v Speaker 2>then three months later he hires Ian back on half

1:04:15.320 --> 1:04:17.439
<v Speaker 2>his salary. He's just such a piece of shit.

1:04:17.600 --> 1:04:20.480
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, this is very success. You're in, you're out, you're up,

1:04:20.520 --> 1:04:23.080
<v Speaker 3>you're down. Yeah, Dad loves you. He doesn't love you.

1:04:23.080 --> 1:04:25.480
<v Speaker 3>You never know where you stand except you'll never be free.

1:04:25.760 --> 1:04:29.360
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, I definitely will never be free. Now. That

1:04:29.480 --> 1:04:32.040
<v Speaker 2>quote comes from a massive piece on Maxwell in the

1:04:32.040 --> 1:04:34.320
<v Speaker 2>Times of Israel, and The Times of Israel's covering him

1:04:34.320 --> 1:04:37.560
<v Speaker 2>in particular because in the mid eighties, after decades of

1:04:37.800 --> 1:04:41.160
<v Speaker 2>really ignoring his Jewish heritage, he meets a guy who's like,

1:04:41.200 --> 1:04:44.000
<v Speaker 2>you should go to Israel, and he becomes all in

1:04:44.280 --> 1:04:48.760
<v Speaker 2>and starts investing massively in the Israeli economy. His wealth

1:04:48.800 --> 1:04:51.920
<v Speaker 2>gives him instant access to the Prime Minister, Yitzak Shmir,

1:04:52.360 --> 1:04:54.480
<v Speaker 2>and he announces his intention, I'm going to put a

1:04:54.560 --> 1:04:57.120
<v Speaker 2>quarter of a billion dollars into Israel. And he normally

1:04:57.200 --> 1:04:59.960
<v Speaker 2>lies when he says stuff like this, but he does that,

1:05:00.720 --> 1:05:02.919
<v Speaker 2>and he uses his profits from the Mirror in order

1:05:02.960 --> 1:05:05.320
<v Speaker 2>to do this, and I'm going to quote from his biography.

1:05:06.040 --> 1:05:08.280
<v Speaker 2>Over the next four years, thanks to his mere group profits,

1:05:08.280 --> 1:05:11.520
<v Speaker 2>Maxwell pumped millions into the country, buying newspapers, investing in

1:05:11.600 --> 1:05:14.000
<v Speaker 2>high tech and pharma companies, and in the process becoming

1:05:14.000 --> 1:05:17.560
<v Speaker 2>the largest single investor in Israel's economy. Maxwell also began

1:05:17.600 --> 1:05:21.080
<v Speaker 2>to pass on useful information to the Masad, and boy

1:05:21.280 --> 1:05:24.680
<v Speaker 2>is he useful to the Masad. In nineteen eighty six,

1:05:25.080 --> 1:05:29.120
<v Speaker 2>he tipped, so there's this scientist, this Israeli scientist, Mordechai Venunu,

1:05:29.400 --> 1:05:32.560
<v Speaker 2>who's part of like Israel's nuclear program, that Israel still

1:05:32.560 --> 1:05:36.160
<v Speaker 2>does not acknowledge that they have nukes. Right, we know

1:05:36.200 --> 1:05:39.480
<v Speaker 2>they like everyone knows, but it's like kind of them. Now,

1:05:40.080 --> 1:05:42.640
<v Speaker 2>I don't believe. I still don't believe they've officially acknowledged

1:05:42.680 --> 1:05:45.360
<v Speaker 2>their nuclear capacity. I should actually double check on that.

1:05:45.400 --> 1:05:47.680
<v Speaker 2>I know it took a long time, but they have

1:05:47.760 --> 1:05:50.280
<v Speaker 2>not at this point right like they it is not

1:05:50.360 --> 1:05:54.280
<v Speaker 2>officially stated. It's just kind of a thing everyone knows.

1:05:54.440 --> 1:05:59.040
<v Speaker 2>And Mordecai goes to the British press with insight info

1:05:59.080 --> 1:06:02.160
<v Speaker 2>about Israel's newke Clear program, and one of the papers

1:06:02.200 --> 1:06:06.000
<v Speaker 2>he goes to is The Mirror, and so he leaks

1:06:07.040 --> 1:06:10.480
<v Speaker 2>to Maxwell's paper, and Maxwell gives him up to the

1:06:10.520 --> 1:06:13.760
<v Speaker 2>Massad and he's jailed for eighteen years, which is like

1:06:13.920 --> 1:06:16.000
<v Speaker 2>in journalism terms, bad.

1:06:16.920 --> 1:06:20.320
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, to give somebody up to a foreign intelligence service

1:06:20.360 --> 1:06:21.000
<v Speaker 3>and then they're.

1:06:20.880 --> 1:06:23.640
<v Speaker 2>Jailed, Yes, real bad.

1:06:23.920 --> 1:06:26.440
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, usually they try not to do that.

1:06:27.360 --> 1:06:32.240
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, bad publisher moved. Hey Robert here, and I just

1:06:32.280 --> 1:06:34.000
<v Speaker 2>wanted to come in and note that the story of Mordecai,

1:06:34.000 --> 1:06:36.240
<v Speaker 2>even who knew, was a lot more complicated than just

1:06:36.360 --> 1:06:39.160
<v Speaker 2>Robert Maxwell or The Mirror. The Mirror is not the

1:06:39.200 --> 1:06:41.960
<v Speaker 2>first publication that he linked to. I think he went

1:06:42.000 --> 1:06:46.480
<v Speaker 2>after the Sunday Times first, but Robert Maxwell is involved.

1:06:46.520 --> 1:06:49.680
<v Speaker 2>It's a little bit unclear. It seems like a situation

1:06:49.720 --> 1:06:51.680
<v Speaker 2>where web be more than one person kind of went

1:06:51.720 --> 1:06:55.080
<v Speaker 2>to the Masad about what he was saying. Uh, but yeah,

1:06:55.120 --> 1:06:59.680
<v Speaker 2>Maxwell definitely was involved when somebody else sold the story

1:06:59.720 --> 1:07:02.560
<v Speaker 2>to the Sunday Mirror and he went to the Masad

1:07:02.640 --> 1:07:06.680
<v Speaker 2>over it. So anyway, Mordecai is a very interesting guy, obviously,

1:07:06.760 --> 1:07:09.560
<v Speaker 2>very courageous guy. Story is really worth looking into. I

1:07:09.600 --> 1:07:11.880
<v Speaker 2>also did want to note because we had a question

1:07:11.880 --> 1:07:15.200
<v Speaker 2>about this earlier, Israel still does not officially admit that

1:07:15.240 --> 1:07:17.840
<v Speaker 2>they have nuclear weapons, although they're believed to have somewhere

1:07:17.840 --> 1:07:20.680
<v Speaker 2>between like one and four hundred warheads. It's that their

1:07:20.800 --> 1:07:24.440
<v Speaker 2>kind of official defense posture strategy is to neither confirmed

1:07:24.440 --> 1:07:27.760
<v Speaker 2>nor deny that they do. It kind of became clear

1:07:27.760 --> 1:07:30.160
<v Speaker 2>in the late seventies that they did, but this is

1:07:30.160 --> 1:07:33.440
<v Speaker 2>not something that is like officially admitted. So anyway, just

1:07:33.480 --> 1:07:38.880
<v Speaker 2>wanted to add that clarification. Now, there are allegations, unfortunately,

1:07:38.880 --> 1:07:41.040
<v Speaker 2>because he's involved in the Massad and he definitely is,

1:07:41.160 --> 1:07:44.560
<v Speaker 2>there's also insane allegations, right, like you can find every

1:07:44.640 --> 1:07:48.000
<v Speaker 2>conspiracy connected to this guy, and he's basically framed as

1:07:48.000 --> 1:07:50.760
<v Speaker 2>like having been a major massad agent, and that's just

1:07:50.800 --> 1:07:54.040
<v Speaker 2>really not accurate. One of the big things you'll hear

1:07:54.200 --> 1:07:56.760
<v Speaker 2>is that and this comes from the book Robert Maxwell

1:07:56.880 --> 1:08:03.520
<v Speaker 2>Israel Super Spy, which is say somewhat exaggerated. And they

1:08:03.560 --> 1:08:07.520
<v Speaker 2>alleged that he stole a piece of surveillance software called

1:08:07.600 --> 1:08:10.760
<v Speaker 2>Promise without an E, which was programmed to let law

1:08:10.800 --> 1:08:14.760
<v Speaker 2>enforcement agencies track criminals and having a backdoor installed in it.

1:08:14.920 --> 1:08:18.200
<v Speaker 2>And the Baltimore Sun sums up their argument. They report

1:08:18.200 --> 1:08:20.599
<v Speaker 2>that Maxwell sold the program to most of the important

1:08:20.640 --> 1:08:23.360
<v Speaker 2>government intelligence services in the world at a personal profit

1:08:23.400 --> 1:08:25.759
<v Speaker 2>of more than half a billion dollars. Into the program,

1:08:25.840 --> 1:08:29.439
<v Speaker 2>they write, Israeli technicians collaborating with Maxwell implanted an electric

1:08:29.600 --> 1:08:32.640
<v Speaker 2>trap door that allowed Israeli intelligence to tap many of

1:08:32.640 --> 1:08:35.439
<v Speaker 2>the highest state secrets of the Soviet Union, Britain, the US,

1:08:35.439 --> 1:08:39.760
<v Speaker 2>and other nations. And this is not true, and it's

1:08:39.760 --> 1:08:43.760
<v Speaker 2>also not true in a way that is blaming is

1:08:43.840 --> 1:08:47.040
<v Speaker 2>denying what the US government did, because Promise is a

1:08:47.080 --> 1:08:50.479
<v Speaker 2>real thing and it really was used to tap a

1:08:50.560 --> 1:08:54.280
<v Speaker 2>bunch of governments. But the US government was the inciting

1:08:54.320 --> 1:08:58.240
<v Speaker 2>agent here, right, this is one of ours. Now Maxwell

1:08:58.320 --> 1:09:00.600
<v Speaker 2>is involved, I'm going to explain what happened. So this

1:09:00.720 --> 1:09:04.120
<v Speaker 2>software was designed by a software developer in Washington called

1:09:04.120 --> 1:09:07.120
<v Speaker 2>inns Law, so prosecutors could monitor case records and keep

1:09:07.160 --> 1:09:10.000
<v Speaker 2>track of different people in the system. Right, Like, that

1:09:10.160 --> 1:09:12.400
<v Speaker 2>is the purpose, So prosecutors can monitor the progression of

1:09:12.439 --> 1:09:15.800
<v Speaker 2>cases against different acused criminals. It was developed under a

1:09:15.880 --> 1:09:18.600
<v Speaker 2>Department of Justice grants, so the dog was licensed to

1:09:18.720 --> 1:09:21.800
<v Speaker 2>use it. But the license said the government cannot modify,

1:09:22.320 --> 1:09:26.040
<v Speaker 2>create derivative versions of it, or sell it. And the

1:09:26.080 --> 1:09:29.000
<v Speaker 2>Reagan Administration's like, oh, fuck it, what do we just

1:09:29.000 --> 1:09:29.679
<v Speaker 2>do that anyway?

1:09:30.280 --> 1:09:30.479
<v Speaker 3>Right?

1:09:31.200 --> 1:09:33.439
<v Speaker 2>Per an article in The New Statesman, Under the Ronald

1:09:33.479 --> 1:09:36.799
<v Speaker 2>Reagan administration's covert intelligence initiative known as Follow the Money,

1:09:37.040 --> 1:09:40.479
<v Speaker 2>that the NSA misappropriated promise for sale to banks in

1:09:40.560 --> 1:09:43.000
<v Speaker 2>nineteen eighty two, the version of promise sold by the

1:09:43.080 --> 1:09:46.520
<v Speaker 2>NSA had been espionage enabled through a backdoor in the program,

1:09:46.560 --> 1:09:50.080
<v Speaker 2>allowing the agency to covertly conduct real time electronic surveillance

1:09:50.120 --> 1:09:52.639
<v Speaker 2>of the flow of money to suspected terrorists and other

1:09:52.720 --> 1:09:55.720
<v Speaker 2>perceived threats to US national interests. A letter from the

1:09:55.800 --> 1:09:58.479
<v Speaker 2>US Department of Justice in nineteen eighty five, later obtained

1:09:58.479 --> 1:10:00.800
<v Speaker 2>by ins Law because the company suits the shit out

1:10:00.840 --> 1:10:03.839
<v Speaker 2>of the government for this documented more plans for covert

1:10:03.880 --> 1:10:06.719
<v Speaker 2>sale and distribution of the espionage enabled version of Promise,

1:10:06.960 --> 1:10:09.320
<v Speaker 2>this time to governments in the Middle East, which would

1:10:09.320 --> 1:10:12.520
<v Speaker 2>surreptitiously allow the US to spy on foreign intelligence agencies.

1:10:12.720 --> 1:10:15.160
<v Speaker 2>The letter outlined how sales of the software were to

1:10:15.160 --> 1:10:18.759
<v Speaker 2>be facilitated by the late Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mafus

1:10:19.000 --> 1:10:23.360
<v Speaker 2>and the arms dealers Adnan Koshogi and manuchre Gorbanafar. Promise

1:10:23.400 --> 1:10:27.160
<v Speaker 2>should be delivered without paperwork, customs or delay, it stated,

1:10:27.200 --> 1:10:29.639
<v Speaker 2>and all of the transactions paid for through a Swiss

1:10:29.680 --> 1:10:34.280
<v Speaker 2>bank account. So number one, this is on us. The

1:10:34.320 --> 1:10:37.880
<v Speaker 2>Massad does not start this program and they don't put

1:10:37.880 --> 1:10:40.360
<v Speaker 2>the back It's not Israeli technicians. You put the back door,

1:10:40.360 --> 1:10:45.360
<v Speaker 2>and Reagan's guys do, right, A bunch of the shadiest

1:10:45.400 --> 1:10:47.320
<v Speaker 2>op Now, Israel does get involved in this, and they

1:10:47.400 --> 1:10:50.160
<v Speaker 2>do profit from this, but it starts with us. A

1:10:50.200 --> 1:10:52.880
<v Speaker 2>bunch of the shadiest operators in the nineteen eighties are

1:10:52.920 --> 1:10:57.040
<v Speaker 2>allowed to sell privated versions of Promise. Basically, the Attorney

1:10:57.040 --> 1:11:00.240
<v Speaker 2>General under Reagan ed Meese will give you the like

1:11:00.320 --> 1:11:04.400
<v Speaker 2>basically license you to sell pirated compromised versions of promise

1:11:04.439 --> 1:11:07.200
<v Speaker 2>to foreign governments if you're his friend. Like, that's how

1:11:07.479 --> 1:11:09.360
<v Speaker 2>that's part of how this works. It's like a way

1:11:09.360 --> 1:11:13.080
<v Speaker 2>the Reagan administration is like rewarding loyal people. Is like, hey,

1:11:13.560 --> 1:11:15.240
<v Speaker 2>you've got a good Hey you did us good and

1:11:15.280 --> 1:11:18.240
<v Speaker 2>you've got a good connection over in you know, Ecuador

1:11:18.320 --> 1:11:20.160
<v Speaker 2>or whatever. Why don't we let you sell this to

1:11:20.200 --> 1:11:22.439
<v Speaker 2>their government And then we get a backdoor into the government.

1:11:22.520 --> 1:11:24.760
<v Speaker 2>And this guy gets to make some money, right and

1:11:24.880 --> 1:11:27.839
<v Speaker 2>one of the people who gets tapped as a result

1:11:27.880 --> 1:11:31.080
<v Speaker 2>of this program because they want to sell promise to Iraq,

1:11:31.160 --> 1:11:34.280
<v Speaker 2>Libya and several other Middle Eastern countries and this is hard,

1:11:34.680 --> 1:11:37.120
<v Speaker 2>so they enlist the help of a Masad guy named

1:11:37.200 --> 1:11:39.800
<v Speaker 2>Rafi Eitan, And that guy in the Massad is like,

1:11:40.040 --> 1:11:42.040
<v Speaker 2>maybe a guy at the Massad isn't the best dude

1:11:42.040 --> 1:11:44.400
<v Speaker 2>to sell to Iraq, But you know who can sell

1:11:44.439 --> 1:11:49.680
<v Speaker 2>shit to anybody? Bobby Maxwell, baby, And that's where he

1:11:49.760 --> 1:11:53.280
<v Speaker 2>comes into this. Right now, Gordon Thomas, who's the author

1:11:53.320 --> 1:11:56.479
<v Speaker 2>of that Israel Super Spy book, will claim he's the one.

1:11:56.600 --> 1:11:58.360
<v Speaker 2>He's the source of the claim that Maxwell makes half

1:11:58.360 --> 1:12:00.920
<v Speaker 2>a billion in licenses doing this. I don't know how

1:12:01.000 --> 1:12:04.080
<v Speaker 2>much Maxwell really makes, but he doesn't start like he is.

1:12:04.280 --> 1:12:06.840
<v Speaker 2>He's kind of a middleman in the process, and Thomas

1:12:06.920 --> 1:12:09.679
<v Speaker 2>portrays him as like at the core of the process.

1:12:10.000 --> 1:12:12.080
<v Speaker 2>But this is like fucked up, and he does sell.

1:12:12.120 --> 1:12:13.960
<v Speaker 2>He sells, i think to the Soviet Union, he sells

1:12:13.960 --> 1:12:16.479
<v Speaker 2>to a shitload of governments that allows the US to

1:12:16.479 --> 1:12:18.960
<v Speaker 2>spy on them, and he profits personally from this. So

1:12:19.040 --> 1:12:21.519
<v Speaker 2>this is like a lot of skulduggery it's involved in.

1:12:21.880 --> 1:12:23.840
<v Speaker 2>It's just a lot more centered on ed Meeson the

1:12:23.880 --> 1:12:27.559
<v Speaker 2>Reagan administration than some of these other claims make. And

1:12:27.760 --> 1:12:31.320
<v Speaker 2>obviously Israel profits from this too because they are using

1:12:31.360 --> 1:12:34.679
<v Speaker 2>Maxwell to sell it to countries that they want intel on, right,

1:12:34.760 --> 1:12:37.160
<v Speaker 2>So that is happening. That is a part of this story,

1:12:37.640 --> 1:12:40.080
<v Speaker 2>it's just not the start of it. Now. There are

1:12:40.160 --> 1:12:43.640
<v Speaker 2>numerous allegations of Maxwell's fingers in arms dealers that the

1:12:43.680 --> 1:12:47.480
<v Speaker 2>Israeli government found useful to and some of these are true,

1:12:47.640 --> 1:12:49.920
<v Speaker 2>but it's not. It's often portrayed as he is an

1:12:50.000 --> 1:12:53.680
<v Speaker 2>arms dealer. He's not. He is a guy who knows logistics,

1:12:53.760 --> 1:12:56.800
<v Speaker 2>and so when a friend is like, hey, we need

1:12:56.800 --> 1:12:58.640
<v Speaker 2>the shipment to get through this port, He's like I

1:12:58.680 --> 1:13:01.679
<v Speaker 2>know guys there, I'll make sure it moves right. He's

1:13:01.720 --> 1:13:05.120
<v Speaker 2>a you know, that's the kind of thing he's useful for.

1:13:05.200 --> 1:13:08.080
<v Speaker 2>And so's he is connected to the Masad because he's

1:13:08.120 --> 1:13:12.160
<v Speaker 2>a powerful, rich businessman who desperately wants to prove his

1:13:12.280 --> 1:13:16.200
<v Speaker 2>loyalty to the country, to like to Israel, and has

1:13:16.200 --> 1:13:18.639
<v Speaker 2>connections everywhere, and that's kind of his use. And there's

1:13:18.680 --> 1:13:22.479
<v Speaker 2>a much more accurate look at his spying and his

1:13:22.560 --> 1:13:25.519
<v Speaker 2>involvement in intelligence agencies in the book Foreign Body, The

1:13:25.560 --> 1:13:29.280
<v Speaker 2>Secret Life of Robert Maxwell by Russell Davies, and Davies

1:13:29.320 --> 1:13:32.000
<v Speaker 2>outlines the dimensions of these shady dealings in a way

1:13:32.000 --> 1:13:34.120
<v Speaker 2>that I think is a lot more accurate, because he

1:13:34.200 --> 1:13:38.240
<v Speaker 2>argues it's hard to imagine Maxwell himself doing an arms

1:13:38.240 --> 1:13:41.599
<v Speaker 2>deal directly, right quote, but he could certainly have been

1:13:41.600 --> 1:13:44.120
<v Speaker 2>of use securing the cooperation of foreign governments when it

1:13:44.160 --> 1:13:49.280
<v Speaker 2>came to routing illicit cargoes through their unadvertised and outlawed destinations. Maxwell,

1:13:49.320 --> 1:13:52.320
<v Speaker 2>he argues, would have been insulted to have been accused

1:13:52.320 --> 1:13:55.200
<v Speaker 2>of working as a common spy or agent, because again,

1:13:55.439 --> 1:13:57.519
<v Speaker 2>he is on first a first name basis with every

1:13:57.560 --> 1:14:00.479
<v Speaker 2>Prime minister of Israel during this period of time, right, like,

1:14:00.720 --> 1:14:03.479
<v Speaker 2>he's not like an employee of the Massade. He is

1:14:03.560 --> 1:14:08.639
<v Speaker 2>incredibly he's way he's so highly connected. By nineteen eighty eight,

1:14:08.680 --> 1:14:11.920
<v Speaker 2>Maxwell estimated his own net worth at about four billion dollars,

1:14:12.200 --> 1:14:14.600
<v Speaker 2>and the parties he threw, attended by everyone who was

1:14:14.640 --> 1:14:18.840
<v Speaker 2>anyone in UK politics, were legendary. John Preston describes his

1:14:18.960 --> 1:14:21.280
<v Speaker 2>nineteen eighty eight birthday an event that had to take

1:14:21.360 --> 1:14:24.360
<v Speaker 2>three days because more than three thousand people attended. There's

1:14:24.439 --> 1:14:27.200
<v Speaker 2>like tiers of guests in terms of like which day

1:14:27.240 --> 1:14:31.559
<v Speaker 2>you're allowed to be at. Wow, it's it's it's fucked up.

1:14:32.760 --> 1:14:35.360
<v Speaker 3>It really seems like, you know, he did some bad shit,

1:14:35.479 --> 1:14:37.920
<v Speaker 3>but he wins me back with the parties. The parties

1:14:37.920 --> 1:14:38.479
<v Speaker 3>sound great.

1:14:38.760 --> 1:14:41.680
<v Speaker 2>The parties sound great. The arm stealing, the spying on

1:14:41.760 --> 1:14:44.160
<v Speaker 2>every foreign government in the world, for the CIA and

1:14:44.200 --> 1:14:47.479
<v Speaker 2>the Massade. I don't love that. But the parties. There's

1:14:47.520 --> 1:14:50.759
<v Speaker 2>one like Margaret Thatcher gives a speech at his birthday

1:14:50.800 --> 1:14:53.479
<v Speaker 2>this year where she talks about how awesome she is

1:14:53.479 --> 1:14:55.880
<v Speaker 2>because he doesn't like her. They're like enemies in public,

1:14:56.800 --> 1:14:59.320
<v Speaker 2>but she's like, I think he secretly likes me, and

1:14:59.360 --> 1:15:01.719
<v Speaker 2>then explains all the ways that she thinks she's cool.

1:15:01.840 --> 1:15:06.240
<v Speaker 2>Like it's such a fucking Thatcher moment. Oh that said,

1:15:07.080 --> 1:15:09.000
<v Speaker 2>it is sick. I want to read a quote from

1:15:09.040 --> 1:15:11.639
<v Speaker 2>John Preston's book that sort of gives you a description

1:15:11.720 --> 1:15:14.360
<v Speaker 2>of the vibe of this party. On the night of

1:15:14.400 --> 1:15:17.280
<v Speaker 2>the first party, guests passed down a receiving line where

1:15:17.280 --> 1:15:19.400
<v Speaker 2>they were greeted by Maxwell, Betty, and all seven of

1:15:19.439 --> 1:15:22.679
<v Speaker 2>their children. Some of the guests arrived bearing birthday presents.

1:15:22.840 --> 1:15:25.400
<v Speaker 2>The broadcaster David Frost turned up with a five hundred

1:15:25.400 --> 1:15:27.960
<v Speaker 2>pound bottle of wine. Unaware of how much it had cost,

1:15:28.200 --> 1:15:31.599
<v Speaker 2>Maxwell chef later tipped it into a beef stew. As

1:15:31.680 --> 1:15:34.320
<v Speaker 2>guests sipped their drinks, the band of the Cold Stream

1:15:34.400 --> 1:15:38.040
<v Speaker 2>Guards marched back and forth across the lawn. Before dinner started,

1:15:38.200 --> 1:15:40.679
<v Speaker 2>Robert and Betty made their formal entrance into the marquis

1:15:40.760 --> 1:15:43.879
<v Speaker 2>to an announcement from the Master of Ceremonies, Ladies and gentlemen,

1:15:43.920 --> 1:15:46.840
<v Speaker 2>would you please welcome your host and hostess, Robert and

1:15:46.880 --> 1:15:51.240
<v Speaker 2>Elizabeth Maxwell, and a fanfare of Harold trumpetears. Everyone stood

1:15:51.280 --> 1:15:53.639
<v Speaker 2>to applaud a lot with a row of medals pinned

1:15:53.680 --> 1:15:56.479
<v Speaker 2>to his black tailcoat. Maxwell was wearing a large white

1:15:56.600 --> 1:15:59.240
<v Speaker 2>enamel cross on a chain around his neck. This was

1:15:59.280 --> 1:16:01.920
<v Speaker 2>the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a decoration

1:16:02.040 --> 1:16:04.640
<v Speaker 2>normally given to foreign heads of state and recognition of

1:16:04.680 --> 1:16:08.639
<v Speaker 2>outstanding civilian or military conduct. Betty Maxwell wore a dress

1:16:08.680 --> 1:16:12.439
<v Speaker 2>made of gold embroidered tul over yellow taffeta silk. So

1:16:12.640 --> 1:16:17.000
<v Speaker 2>like parties, parties like real rich people parties.

1:16:17.680 --> 1:16:19.800
<v Speaker 3>See I missed the boat with World War two. If

1:16:19.840 --> 1:16:22.360
<v Speaker 3>I had just been able to murder a couple Germans,

1:16:22.400 --> 1:16:24.120
<v Speaker 3>a couple dozen Germans, I could have been on the

1:16:24.160 --> 1:16:27.360
<v Speaker 3>road to be being covered in silver taffeta. Yeah, and

1:16:27.479 --> 1:16:30.120
<v Speaker 3>having Margaret Thatcher sing my praises.

1:16:30.080 --> 1:16:34.200
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, kind of, we'll sing her own praises at your birthday. Yeah,

1:16:34.439 --> 1:16:37.920
<v Speaker 2>classic Thatcher. Make it all about her.

1:16:38.439 --> 1:16:40.080
<v Speaker 3>The greatest generation though.

1:16:40.840 --> 1:16:44.839
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, definitely the greatest generation. There's like a really funny

1:16:44.840 --> 1:16:47.439
<v Speaker 2>moment from this where like one of his friends goes,

1:16:47.520 --> 1:16:49.439
<v Speaker 2>like during this party kind of like finds his way

1:16:49.479 --> 1:16:53.200
<v Speaker 2>walking around like the back of the house outside of

1:16:53.200 --> 1:16:55.800
<v Speaker 2>like the areas they're supposed to be partying in, and

1:16:55.880 --> 1:16:58.760
<v Speaker 2>notices that, like, well, all the furniture outside of like

1:16:58.840 --> 1:17:01.040
<v Speaker 2>the big public areas kind of looks like shit and

1:17:01.080 --> 1:17:03.120
<v Speaker 2>all of the books on his bookshelf for fake, Like

1:17:03.160 --> 1:17:08.160
<v Speaker 2>they're made out of cardboard. They're like fake books. Now,

1:17:08.200 --> 1:17:11.559
<v Speaker 2>Preston says, only the books concealing hy stereo system were fake.

1:17:11.800 --> 1:17:17.400
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, but this is kind of evidence that

1:17:17.880 --> 1:17:20.360
<v Speaker 2>as rich as he was on paper, and this is

1:17:20.400 --> 1:17:22.679
<v Speaker 2>the thing, he's worth four point four billion on paper

1:17:22.920 --> 1:17:26.479
<v Speaker 2>or something like that, he's not actually doing as well

1:17:26.520 --> 1:17:30.400
<v Speaker 2>as it seems, right, And nineteen ninety eight is nearer

1:17:30.400 --> 1:17:32.320
<v Speaker 2>to the end of his time in the limelight than

1:17:32.400 --> 1:17:35.679
<v Speaker 2>the beginning. That year, the same year as this fucking party,

1:17:35.840 --> 1:17:39.360
<v Speaker 2>he spends two point six billion dollars buying US publisher McMillan,

1:17:40.320 --> 1:17:43.240
<v Speaker 2>and that's a billion dollars more than its own shareholders

1:17:43.280 --> 1:17:46.080
<v Speaker 2>value it at. Like he kind of as a musk

1:17:46.280 --> 1:17:48.040
<v Speaker 2>where he's like, I'll offer you a two point six

1:17:48.120 --> 1:17:49.559
<v Speaker 2>billion and they're like, we were not going to ask

1:17:49.600 --> 1:17:53.519
<v Speaker 2>for that much, but oh fucking k right. Yeah, he

1:17:53.560 --> 1:17:56.360
<v Speaker 2>had to borrow from forty four banks to afford it.

1:17:56.880 --> 1:18:02.120
<v Speaker 2>And he does this not because again he's got profitable businesses.

1:18:02.160 --> 1:18:04.840
<v Speaker 2>Preston says, this is out of desperation because Murdoch is

1:18:04.880 --> 1:18:08.479
<v Speaker 2>buying more and more publishers and he's like desperate to win.

1:18:08.680 --> 1:18:11.280
<v Speaker 2>He doesn't want Murdoch to get McMillan, so he kind

1:18:11.280 --> 1:18:14.439
<v Speaker 2>of endangers his entire empire buying it in order to

1:18:14.439 --> 1:18:18.040
<v Speaker 2>beat Rupert Murdoch. And again, all Murdoch will say about

1:18:18.040 --> 1:18:21.439
<v Speaker 2>this guy is like, who huh what guy?

1:18:23.880 --> 1:18:27.040
<v Speaker 3>That must make him even angrier. I don't know her,

1:18:27.320 --> 1:18:28.519
<v Speaker 3>says Rupert Murdoch.

1:18:28.680 --> 1:18:30.679
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, back

1:18:30.720 --> 1:18:35.800
<v Speaker 2>to being evil. In March of nineteen ninety one, he

1:18:35.880 --> 1:18:38.599
<v Speaker 2>started making a series of ill advised acquisitions in New

1:18:38.680 --> 1:18:41.439
<v Speaker 2>York media. He purchased the New York Daily News, which

1:18:41.520 --> 1:18:44.240
<v Speaker 2>was like the oldest daily paper in New York at

1:18:44.240 --> 1:18:48.320
<v Speaker 2>the time, but also in disastrous financial condition. There's like

1:18:48.360 --> 1:18:51.639
<v Speaker 2>a horrible strike going on. It is not a good bye.

1:18:51.680 --> 1:18:55.759
<v Speaker 2>It's such a bad buye. The owners pay him sixty

1:18:55.880 --> 1:18:59.120
<v Speaker 2>million dollars to take it, and they pay him that

1:18:59.600 --> 1:19:01.880
<v Speaker 2>because it's in a lot more debt than that.

1:19:02.280 --> 1:19:02.599
<v Speaker 3>Wow.

1:19:02.720 --> 1:19:05.000
<v Speaker 2>Right, it's such a bad buy.

1:19:05.400 --> 1:19:07.719
<v Speaker 3>So they're getting off scott free by paying a different

1:19:07.800 --> 1:19:08.479
<v Speaker 3>dude to own it.

1:19:08.680 --> 1:19:11.439
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yes, please take this shit and all of its

1:19:11.479 --> 1:19:13.040
<v Speaker 2>debts off of our fucking hands.

1:19:13.200 --> 1:19:13.720
<v Speaker 3>Wow.

1:19:13.760 --> 1:19:16.639
<v Speaker 2>And again his assumption is because in the past. Every

1:19:16.680 --> 1:19:18.559
<v Speaker 2>time he's got a paper, he's been able to turn

1:19:18.600 --> 1:19:21.040
<v Speaker 2>it around right and make it soup. He's got this skill.

1:19:21.800 --> 1:19:24.880
<v Speaker 2>So he sails his yacht, the Lady Gillin, named after

1:19:24.920 --> 1:19:27.880
<v Speaker 2>his daughter, into the City harbor to take control of

1:19:27.880 --> 1:19:30.519
<v Speaker 2>the paper. He gives us like grand speech on the street,

1:19:30.840 --> 1:19:33.200
<v Speaker 2>and like there's all these articles in New York papers

1:19:33.240 --> 1:19:35.880
<v Speaker 2>being like the savior of New York media, you know.

1:19:36.400 --> 1:19:38.280
<v Speaker 2>And there's also a bunch of people who had worked

1:19:38.320 --> 1:19:40.280
<v Speaker 2>for him in different papers in the UK, being like

1:19:40.520 --> 1:19:42.519
<v Speaker 2>he's actually a giant dick. No one can stand to

1:19:42.560 --> 1:19:44.719
<v Speaker 2>work for him. This is not going to end well

1:19:44.760 --> 1:19:48.120
<v Speaker 2>for any of you, and it sure as shit doesn't. Right,

1:19:48.760 --> 1:19:52.200
<v Speaker 2>So the eighties comes to an end, sadly, I know

1:19:52.200 --> 1:19:55.639
<v Speaker 2>we're all still mourning that. And suddenly there's a big

1:19:55.720 --> 1:20:00.120
<v Speaker 2>economic pop, right, and interest rates skyrocket and all all

1:20:00.200 --> 1:20:02.639
<v Speaker 2>of this debt that he had taken on to keep

1:20:02.680 --> 1:20:05.720
<v Speaker 2>building this. He's always robbing Peter to pay Paul, like

1:20:05.800 --> 1:20:09.439
<v Speaker 2>a certain guy that we all know about right now.

1:20:09.920 --> 1:20:12.840
<v Speaker 2>Like he's always in debt to a lot of banks

1:20:12.840 --> 1:20:15.360
<v Speaker 2>for all this stuff. And suddenly it gets a lot

1:20:15.439 --> 1:20:18.439
<v Speaker 2>more expensive to service that debt. And so in nineteen

1:20:18.520 --> 1:20:21.920
<v Speaker 2>ninety one. He has to sell pergam and press in order,

1:20:22.320 --> 1:20:26.519
<v Speaker 2>and that's his baby, in order to keep everything else afloat.

1:20:26.720 --> 1:20:30.040
<v Speaker 2>And that's also the profitable part of his empire. So

1:20:30.120 --> 1:20:32.880
<v Speaker 2>he has now sold the golden goose to pay for

1:20:32.960 --> 1:20:35.519
<v Speaker 2>the shit that's horribly in debt that he can't make

1:20:35.600 --> 1:20:39.200
<v Speaker 2>a profit on. Not a great move. So what do

1:20:39.240 --> 1:20:41.720
<v Speaker 2>you do if you're a guy who sucks ass and

1:20:41.760 --> 1:20:44.800
<v Speaker 2>hates unions and hates your employees and suddenly you're out

1:20:44.800 --> 1:20:47.040
<v Speaker 2>of money and you need to keep funding all of

1:20:47.080 --> 1:20:50.400
<v Speaker 2>this debt? Where do you go when interest rates are

1:20:50.400 --> 1:20:53.360
<v Speaker 2>fucked and you simply can't take any more loans from banks?

1:20:55.040 --> 1:20:57.360
<v Speaker 3>Racking my brain, where do you go?

1:20:58.360 --> 1:21:00.200
<v Speaker 2>Well, you know where. There's a lot of money in

1:21:00.280 --> 1:21:02.360
<v Speaker 2>any given company that's been around this long with a

1:21:02.439 --> 1:21:03.240
<v Speaker 2>large workforce.

1:21:03.439 --> 1:21:05.879
<v Speaker 4>The pension plan. He raids the pension plan.

1:21:05.760 --> 1:21:08.080
<v Speaker 2>He raids the pinch. He steals nearly half a billion

1:21:08.120 --> 1:21:09.679
<v Speaker 2>dollars from the pension plan.

1:21:09.880 --> 1:21:12.200
<v Speaker 5>Now I'm mad. Now I don't like him, Yeah, oh,

1:21:12.280 --> 1:21:15.919
<v Speaker 5>now I don't like him. He destroys so many people's

1:21:15.960 --> 1:21:19.680
<v Speaker 5>lives and retirements. He fucking robs this pension plan, right,

1:21:20.400 --> 1:21:23.000
<v Speaker 5>and it's not even enough because his debts are well

1:21:23.000 --> 1:21:27.040
<v Speaker 5>over a billion dollars. Banks are hounding him constantly. He

1:21:27.120 --> 1:21:30.200
<v Speaker 5>starts gambling and London casinos. All he'll do is like

1:21:30.720 --> 1:21:34.360
<v Speaker 5>gamble and then watch James Bond movies while leading takeout.

1:21:34.560 --> 1:21:38.040
<v Speaker 5>And this is kind of his mental state. He's in

1:21:38.080 --> 1:21:40.240
<v Speaker 5>this period of collapse. And also right around this time,

1:21:40.760 --> 1:21:43.320
<v Speaker 5>it becomes known that he is being investigated for war

1:21:43.400 --> 1:21:46.360
<v Speaker 5>crimes in World War Two because he wrote letters to

1:21:46.640 --> 1:21:49.719
<v Speaker 5>his wife and talked about him like to journalists about

1:21:49.760 --> 1:21:53.840
<v Speaker 5>like again I'm machined gun prisoners. Yeah, and again it's

1:21:53.920 --> 1:21:57.360
<v Speaker 5>the least bad thing he ever did. But so he's

1:21:57.400 --> 1:22:00.760
<v Speaker 5>got that too. He's got all these debts. Empire is

1:22:00.800 --> 1:22:03.200
<v Speaker 5>about to collapse. When he set sail on his yacht,

1:22:03.200 --> 1:22:06.439
<v Speaker 5>the Lady Gillen on November first, nineteen ninety one. He's

1:22:06.479 --> 1:22:10.479
<v Speaker 5>getting letters constantly from different banks being like, hey, this

1:22:10.600 --> 1:22:14.719
<v Speaker 5>is overdue. Can you even prove that you're solvent in anymore?

1:22:15.479 --> 1:22:18.120
<v Speaker 5>Swiss Bank is threatening to go public and it has

1:22:18.160 --> 1:22:21.160
<v Speaker 5>told the London police that he's broken a bunch of laws.

1:22:21.720 --> 1:22:25.080
<v Speaker 5>So he's in a lot of trouble. And around five

1:22:25.160 --> 1:22:29.639
<v Speaker 5>am on November first, I think it's November first, nineteen

1:22:29.720 --> 1:22:33.479
<v Speaker 5>ninety one, he falls overboard off the stem of his

1:22:33.600 --> 1:22:38.240
<v Speaker 5>yacht as it passes towards Tenerif, and his body is

1:22:38.439 --> 1:22:41.200
<v Speaker 5>fished out of the ocean about twelve hours later by

1:22:41.280 --> 1:22:48.599
<v Speaker 5>a Spanish National Rescue Service helicopter. Nobody knows precisely what happened.

1:22:48.960 --> 1:22:52.080
<v Speaker 5>The thing that you will encounter most commonly is that

1:22:52.120 --> 1:22:55.040
<v Speaker 5>the Masad had him killed. And I don't see any

1:22:55.080 --> 1:22:58.360
<v Speaker 5>reason to believe that. For one thing, he receives a

1:22:58.439 --> 1:23:02.439
<v Speaker 5>hero's funeral in Israel, like, attended by the Prime Minister

1:23:02.600 --> 1:23:06.360
<v Speaker 5>and the Israeli President Shimone Perez is there, right, They

1:23:06.360 --> 1:23:08.920
<v Speaker 5>give him like okay, so this is this is what

1:23:08.960 --> 1:23:11.879
<v Speaker 5>the Israeli president says at his funeral. Kings and barons

1:23:11.920 --> 1:23:15.719
<v Speaker 5>besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature.

1:23:16.320 --> 1:23:19.120
<v Speaker 5>But there are like allegations that basically he tried to

1:23:19.240 --> 1:23:22.280
<v Speaker 5>blackmail the Masade to get them to pay him four

1:23:22.320 --> 1:23:26.280
<v Speaker 5>hundred million dollars, and it, I don't know, doesn't seem

1:23:26.320 --> 1:23:28.160
<v Speaker 5>like the kind of move he'd have made. Again, he's

1:23:28.160 --> 1:23:30.000
<v Speaker 5>a steal the pension plan guy.

1:23:30.240 --> 1:23:34.680
<v Speaker 3>People treat these like spy agencies, as though like they

1:23:34.760 --> 1:23:38.040
<v Speaker 3>always have reason to kill anybody at any time. Yes,

1:23:38.120 --> 1:23:41.600
<v Speaker 3>that Like there's some they're like a dau Sex makina

1:23:41.640 --> 1:23:44.639
<v Speaker 3>that people use for a simple explanation to make themselves

1:23:44.680 --> 1:23:48.400
<v Speaker 3>seem smart, where like why would they why?

1:23:48.760 --> 1:23:52.080
<v Speaker 2>Why? Like for what they Israel wasn't angry at him.

1:23:52.360 --> 1:23:56.240
<v Speaker 3>It's the most annoying thing in the history analysis is

1:23:56.240 --> 1:23:59.559
<v Speaker 3>people making this claim, well the mesade Adam, why what

1:23:59.680 --> 1:24:01.080
<v Speaker 3>is that? You know?

1:24:01.479 --> 1:24:04.080
<v Speaker 2>Again, he was the number one investor over there. He

1:24:04.120 --> 1:24:07.519
<v Speaker 2>was extremely popular there. He had destroyed the pensions of

1:24:07.720 --> 1:24:10.799
<v Speaker 2>huge numbers of people in the UK. Like, if anyone

1:24:10.840 --> 1:24:13.600
<v Speaker 2>wanted to kill him, it's a bunch of them. Yeah,

1:24:13.760 --> 1:24:15.080
<v Speaker 2>and he was about to fuck up a lot of

1:24:15.200 --> 1:24:18.559
<v Speaker 2>US publishing. But like, yeah, it's just one of those

1:24:18.560 --> 1:24:21.280
<v Speaker 2>things where there are three different coroner reports and they

1:24:21.280 --> 1:24:23.680
<v Speaker 2>don't agree, and so that'll often get like and none

1:24:23.720 --> 1:24:25.840
<v Speaker 2>of the coroners could agree. But what the coroners can't

1:24:25.840 --> 1:24:28.880
<v Speaker 2>agree on is did he have a heart attack or

1:24:28.920 --> 1:24:31.640
<v Speaker 2>did he jump in? And both are he's sixty, he

1:24:31.680 --> 1:24:34.280
<v Speaker 2>was in bad health. It's also it's perfectly possible either

1:24:34.720 --> 1:24:37.000
<v Speaker 2>he knew that he was fucked and he wanted to

1:24:37.080 --> 1:24:40.160
<v Speaker 2>die right or that he had a heart attack because

1:24:40.160 --> 1:24:42.840
<v Speaker 2>he was super stressed out in sixty eight and not

1:24:42.960 --> 1:24:44.920
<v Speaker 2>in good health, and he fell off his boat.

1:24:45.280 --> 1:24:45.679
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.

1:24:45.760 --> 1:24:47.559
<v Speaker 2>Both of those are just likelier to me than like

1:24:47.600 --> 1:24:50.960
<v Speaker 2>the Masade poisoned him with an untraceable poison on his boat,

1:24:51.080 --> 1:24:55.080
<v Speaker 2>so it looked like he fell over. Why Like again,

1:24:55.240 --> 1:24:57.360
<v Speaker 2>he's being hounded by all of the governments. He knows

1:24:57.360 --> 1:25:00.240
<v Speaker 2>he's heading to prison. Maybe he kills himself. Maybe he

1:25:00.320 --> 1:25:02.679
<v Speaker 2>has a heart attack. I don't really have trouble bleeding either.

1:25:04.160 --> 1:25:07.280
<v Speaker 2>He is initially mourned as like this great figure because

1:25:07.439 --> 1:25:09.240
<v Speaker 2>all of this hasn't come out yet. But a few

1:25:09.240 --> 1:25:12.400
<v Speaker 2>weeks after his death, everything I've told you is published.

1:25:12.439 --> 1:25:15.160
<v Speaker 2>That he stole four hundred million pounds from pension funds,

1:25:15.560 --> 1:25:17.960
<v Speaker 2>that he there were seven hundred and sixty three million

1:25:18.000 --> 1:25:21.400
<v Speaker 2>British pounds missing from his companies. He has described as

1:25:21.439 --> 1:25:24.120
<v Speaker 2>the crook of the century by Newsweek magazine.

1:25:24.400 --> 1:25:26.760
<v Speaker 3>Wow and not up.

1:25:26.880 --> 1:25:29.200
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, maybe he's one of them.

1:25:29.160 --> 1:25:32.960
<v Speaker 3>Like things finally caught up with old Bobby Maxwell, murdering

1:25:33.080 --> 1:25:37.719
<v Speaker 3>the shared people, no share, destroying scientific publishing. Nah, he's fine,

1:25:38.400 --> 1:25:42.400
<v Speaker 3>but stealing pension funds that'll get you, which does suck?

1:25:42.560 --> 1:25:45.799
<v Speaker 2>Like that is really bad? Yeah, one of his worst things.

1:25:46.160 --> 1:25:49.160
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, no, absolutely no, that made me up until up

1:25:49.280 --> 1:25:52.160
<v Speaker 3>until now he was sort of like debonair and air dwell,

1:25:52.439 --> 1:25:53.320
<v Speaker 3>you know, yeah, I was.

1:25:53.640 --> 1:25:56.240
<v Speaker 4>I was enjoying the story. Now I'm now I'm pissed off.

1:25:56.360 --> 1:25:57.200
<v Speaker 2>Now I'm pissed off.

1:25:57.240 --> 1:25:57.439
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.

1:25:57.439 --> 1:26:00.599
<v Speaker 2>And so his sons, who are declared innocent of any

1:26:00.600 --> 1:26:03.479
<v Speaker 2>involvement in the conspiracy, maybe they were a part of it,

1:26:03.520 --> 1:26:05.320
<v Speaker 2>but I don't have trouble believing that he just didn't

1:26:05.320 --> 1:26:08.080
<v Speaker 2>respect his kids enough to tell them what he was doing. Right, Yeah,

1:26:08.080 --> 1:26:10.920
<v Speaker 2>of course they have to take over, and they're left

1:26:10.960 --> 1:26:13.519
<v Speaker 2>with like four hundred million pounds or so. They've got

1:26:13.560 --> 1:26:16.360
<v Speaker 2>to like figure out how to put together. His assets

1:26:16.360 --> 1:26:19.519
<v Speaker 2>are sold off, most of like the the what are

1:26:19.520 --> 1:26:21.679
<v Speaker 2>called the Maxwell pensioners, right, and these are the people

1:26:21.680 --> 1:26:24.400
<v Speaker 2>who lost their retirement savings, get half or less of

1:26:24.439 --> 1:26:26.519
<v Speaker 2>what they were owed, you know, as a result of

1:26:26.600 --> 1:26:30.000
<v Speaker 2>kind of this liquidation process. But Gillan stays comfortable for

1:26:30.040 --> 1:26:31.960
<v Speaker 2>a while, you know, a while.

1:26:36.040 --> 1:26:39.080
<v Speaker 3>Well, I didn't think. I didn't think I could end

1:26:39.080 --> 1:26:42.680
<v Speaker 3>with a lower opinion of Gillan Maxwell. I didn't anticipate

1:26:42.720 --> 1:26:43.040
<v Speaker 3>that this.

1:26:43.120 --> 1:26:45.160
<v Speaker 2>Is yeah shocking, right.

1:26:45.320 --> 1:26:48.320
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, Oh, she's also a criminal nipple baby.

1:26:48.520 --> 1:26:52.200
<v Speaker 2>Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also didn't really call her

1:26:52.280 --> 1:26:55.120
<v Speaker 2>dad being so cool up until age twenty three, because

1:26:55.120 --> 1:26:57.240
<v Speaker 2>he's really knocking it out of the park up until.

1:26:57.080 --> 1:26:58.200
<v Speaker 3>Age twenty three.

1:26:58.680 --> 1:27:02.600
<v Speaker 2>Great first act, like yeah, yeah, it's like one of

1:27:02.640 --> 1:27:05.400
<v Speaker 2>those movies that like really falls apart in the second half,

1:27:05.560 --> 1:27:09.000
<v Speaker 2>like he could have used more editing. I was really

1:27:09.040 --> 1:27:09.559
<v Speaker 2>on board.

1:27:10.120 --> 1:27:13.080
<v Speaker 3>Well, it's it's funny how much attracts sort of the

1:27:13.160 --> 1:27:16.840
<v Speaker 3>standard you know, the it's a citizen Kane or a

1:27:17.280 --> 1:27:19.800
<v Speaker 3>uh yeah, what's his face? From Succession style story where

1:27:19.800 --> 1:27:23.280
<v Speaker 3>it's like inspiring in the beginning, all turns wrong, you know,

1:27:23.439 --> 1:27:26.559
<v Speaker 3>larger than life, all these insane details. He's present at

1:27:26.600 --> 1:27:29.759
<v Speaker 3>every moment in history, like the sort of figure who

1:27:30.120 --> 1:27:31.760
<v Speaker 3>you know, if I read a novel about this guy,

1:27:31.760 --> 1:27:33.080
<v Speaker 3>I wouldn't believe it, you know.

1:27:33.200 --> 1:27:35.960
<v Speaker 2>No, no, no, no, yeah, it is like and again

1:27:36.000 --> 1:27:42.200
<v Speaker 2>he did lie about a lot of it unnecessarily. Yeah.

1:27:42.240 --> 1:27:46.000
<v Speaker 2>So uh that's uh, that's that's where we are, you know,

1:27:46.120 --> 1:27:48.639
<v Speaker 2>that's that's this guy's life. Thanks for sitting and learning

1:27:48.680 --> 1:27:49.040
<v Speaker 2>about it.

1:27:49.479 --> 1:27:52.920
<v Speaker 3>Incredible, he's what a what a bastard? I'm now behind.

1:27:52.720 --> 1:27:56.240
<v Speaker 2>Him, Yeah, yeah, we're now behind him. Well, got any

1:27:56.240 --> 1:27:58.439
<v Speaker 2>pluggables to plug. We've kept you here long enough.

1:27:59.880 --> 1:28:03.120
<v Speaker 3>I do I uh once again in my podcast is

1:28:03.120 --> 1:28:07.439
<v Speaker 3>called factually I do uh do that on YouTube or

1:28:07.439 --> 1:28:11.840
<v Speaker 3>ELSEO do video monologues and uh yeah, you can check

1:28:11.880 --> 1:28:14.519
<v Speaker 3>out my stand up special Unmedicated on dropout right now.

1:28:15.240 --> 1:28:19.000
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Awesome, Uh well, awesome check out that. Check out

1:28:19.120 --> 1:28:23.280
<v Speaker 2>drop out. And you know, if you're going to machine

1:28:23.280 --> 1:28:27.320
<v Speaker 2>gun the SS, don't go on to destroy scientific publishing

1:28:27.360 --> 1:28:29.400
<v Speaker 2>and then hundreds of millions of dollars in pension funds.

1:28:29.400 --> 1:28:30.960
<v Speaker 2>That's my advice to our listeners.

1:28:31.400 --> 1:28:34.280
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, and don't tell people you did it so proudly.

1:28:34.439 --> 1:28:36.400
<v Speaker 3>Don't be like I committed a war crime.

1:28:36.560 --> 1:28:40.360
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, maybe don't destroy your whole life. Competing with Rupert

1:28:40.439 --> 1:28:43.360
<v Speaker 2>Murdoch and being a dick is such a weird way

1:28:43.400 --> 1:28:49.000
<v Speaker 2>to blow your life up. Oh, man, so funny.

1:28:49.200 --> 1:28:52.200
<v Speaker 3>Competing in an asshole contest with Rupert Murdoch not a

1:28:52.439 --> 1:28:52.720
<v Speaker 3>way to.

1:28:52.720 --> 1:28:57.559
<v Speaker 2>Go and not even being noticed. Man was like, it is.

1:28:57.680 --> 1:28:59.479
<v Speaker 2>I I don't want to ever give it to Rupert,

1:28:59.520 --> 1:29:01.640
<v Speaker 2>But there's some Some of the great hater moments are

1:29:01.680 --> 1:29:06.800
<v Speaker 2>just Rupert being like, care we talking about all right?

1:29:06.880 --> 1:29:10.040
<v Speaker 2>Well that's the episode everybody good night and good luck.

1:29:10.160 --> 1:29:11.920
<v Speaker 3>Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome.

1:29:12.200 --> 1:29:14.680
<v Speaker 2>Thank you, Adam really appreciate you. Can't wait to get

1:29:14.680 --> 1:29:19.720
<v Speaker 2>these episodes out and we're done, goodbye.

1:29:20.920 --> 1:29:23.599
<v Speaker 1>Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

1:29:23.960 --> 1:29:27.240
<v Speaker 1>For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia

1:29:27.439 --> 1:29:30.639
<v Speaker 1>dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

1:29:30.720 --> 1:29:33.200
<v Speaker 1>Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:29:33.439 --> 1:29:34.719
<v Speaker 2>Behind the Bastards is now.

1:29:34.640 --> 1:29:39.439
<v Speaker 1>Available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe

1:29:39.439 --> 1:29:42.800
<v Speaker 1>to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the

1:29:42.840 --> 1:29:43.400
<v Speaker 1>Bastards