Speaker 1: Alsome Media.
Speaker 2: Ah, we're back. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast
Speaker 2: about terrible people. And in part one of the story
Speaker 2: of Robert Maxwell killing Maxwell's dad, he was pretty fucking rad.
Speaker 2: And unfortunately we're now going into part two where it's
Speaker 2: wild that this is like an episode where our bastard
Speaker 2: commits several war crimes, and we're not angry about the
Speaker 2: war crimes really like, it's the other stuff he's gonna
Speaker 2: do that sucks well and with us once again is
Speaker 2: the great Adam Conover. Adam, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2: How you doing, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: I'm just so excited to hear more stories of our
Speaker 3: cool friend Abraham Robert Ivan, private, private, private, yes, oh
Speaker 3: oh oh. The best one was Leslie Leslie, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And he's just a he's just a great guy. He's
Speaker 3: just murdering a few more Nazis than you should. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's not great, but you know, you know, he's taking
Speaker 3: his revenge.
Speaker 2: It's forgivable, yes and understandable. Part two is going to
Speaker 2: be less so, although don't worry, he still does get
Speaker 2: to kill one more Nazi, so we've got that going
Speaker 2: for us. So the immediate aftermath of the Big Dub
Speaker 2: Dub Dose was a busy time for Robert Maxwell. He
Speaker 2: taught himself Russian, assuming spycraft would be a lucrative part
Speaker 2: of his future. He's like, number one, I'm pretty good
Speaker 2: with languages. Number two, I bet living in Berlin knowing
Speaker 2: Russian is going to be lucrative very soon. And he
Speaker 2: is correct about that. And then he kind of goes
Speaker 2: he takes like a break from his like like a
Speaker 2: leave of absence, and travels alone to war torn Prague
Speaker 2: to try and track down the survivors of his family,
Speaker 2: and he gets nothing but bad news. Really, he is
Speaker 2: particularly scarred to hear that his nineteen year old sister, Shinya,
Speaker 2: had been arrested in Budapest and likely shot and then
Speaker 2: tossed into the river. One older and one younger sister survived.
Speaker 2: His younger sister was actually rescued directly by Raoul Wallenberg,
Speaker 2: who we've covered in our one of our Reverse Bastards episodes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Wallenberg in Budapest was like writing, I think Swede. I
Speaker 2: think of Swedish Swedish visas for everyone on every Jewish
Speaker 2: person under fifteen, and just like lying, it's like they're
Speaker 2: all citizens, like every one of them.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, there's many Swedish people here.
Speaker 2: Wow, a lot of Swedes in Budapest right now. And
Speaker 2: he saved I mean he again, We've talked about this.
Speaker 2: He saves like one hundred thousand people, and one of
Speaker 2: them is Robert Maxwell's younger sister. So this is obviously
Speaker 2: about as devastating a road trip as you can go on,
Speaker 2: traveling through like the battle scars of Eastern Europe to
Speaker 2: find out basically no one lived in your family. And
Speaker 2: this is kind of the last time that he directly
Speaker 2: acknowledges his Jewish roots for decades. When he returns to
Speaker 2: occupied Berlin to work as an interrogator, he fully inhabits
Speaker 2: Robert Maxwell, British officer. He's promoted to a captain at
Speaker 2: this point, and it's not like hidden, like he doesn't
Speaker 2: try to cover up his origins, but he doesn't tell
Speaker 2: people he starts meeting now about them, and the vast
Speaker 2: majority of people who know and work with him have
Speaker 2: no idea that he's Jewish, that he grew up, you know,
Speaker 2: in eastern Czechoslovakia, and he you know, it's one of
Speaker 2: those things I don't think he was ever religious. So
Speaker 2: I think Judaism was never like his his faith in
Speaker 2: a meaningful way, because I think he's just kind of
Speaker 2: a natural atheist. And I think after this, acknowledging that
Speaker 2: that's his heritage is just too painful because his family
Speaker 2: has been annihilated, right, and so he just really doesn't
Speaker 2: for decades. He does take care of his sisters. He
Speaker 2: sends them both to the United States, he sends his
Speaker 2: younger he pays for his younger sister to go to college.
Speaker 2: So he continues to take care of his family. He
Speaker 2: just I think it's too painful for him to kind
Speaker 2: of acknowledge his background in any way.
Speaker 3: What kind of like documentation would one even have at
Speaker 3: this point, you know, like how like what you know,
Speaker 3: what is he a citizen of? And is there any
Speaker 3: such thing as like given what's happened in.
Speaker 2: Europe, Yes, so, but he is lucky for a lot
Speaker 2: of people there aren't, right because of how many states
Speaker 2: are destroyed and how chaotic the movement is. But he
Speaker 2: enters the UK as part of the Dunkirk Landing, so
Speaker 2: he has number one papers from France because he's enlisted
Speaker 2: in the French Foreign Legion. And then he gets papers
Speaker 2: because he enlists in the British military and so he
Speaker 2: is an official citizen and he is able to get
Speaker 2: papers for his family as a result, because he's now
Speaker 2: a captain. He's fairly influential. He's good at meeting and
Speaker 2: knowing people. He's a war hero, and he's able to
Speaker 2: take care of his family because number one, his legal
Speaker 2: status is super clear and he's a hero, right, and
Speaker 2: he does take care of his family, though what little
Speaker 2: is left of it. Now he is an interrogator now
Speaker 2: in Berlin, and it is unlikely that his job as
Speaker 2: an interrogator always stuck to the letter of international law,
Speaker 2: by which I mean he probably tortured people. Right, this
Speaker 2: is the start of the Cold War. He is in
Speaker 2: Berlin interrogator people, and initially a lot of former Nazis.
Speaker 2: But like, one has to assume there's some ugliness to
Speaker 2: this job. Now, this is also a time nineteen forty
Speaker 2: six when a foreign occupier could behave more or less
Speaker 2: any way they wanted to among the captive German population,
Speaker 2: and Maxwell certainly did for idea of like how because
Speaker 2: everyone's starving in Germany, and also most of them had
Speaker 2: been Nazis, so like for example, my grandpa is in
Speaker 2: this at the exact same period of time and basically
Speaker 2: the same area I have in my house, like two
Speaker 2: grandfather clocks that he bought for like fifty cents each.
Speaker 2: He bought like a shitload of these, like one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty year old grandfather clocks from starving Germans and
Speaker 2: just shipped him back to the US because he was
Speaker 2: as a poor Oklahoma boy. He's like, yeah, I'll take
Speaker 2: all these formerly rich Europeans grandfather clocks for pennies, fuck them,
Speaker 2: like hard to blame anybody for that. I consider them
Speaker 2: more booty and Maxwell's Maxwell does the same thing, but
Speaker 2: with so much more panache because so because he's he's
Speaker 2: got this job where he's like interrogating old Nazis, he
Speaker 2: meets Hitler's former dentist, which is first very weird connection. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so Hitler's old dentist tells Robert Maxwell, you know,
Speaker 2: I know the guy who bred Hitler's beloved German shepherd Blondie.
Speaker 2: That's the dog that he like like fed Cyanide to
Speaker 2: when the bunker, like this is his pet. And there's
Speaker 2: this dude who's like the dog, the Kinnel operator who
Speaker 2: bred the dogs that like were Hitler's dogs, and so
Speaker 2: Robert Maxwell's like I got to meet this motherfucker. So
Speaker 2: he visits this guy.
Speaker 4: Hitler must have just like the number of people.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I was Hitler's optometrist. Yeah, yeah, you know I
Speaker 3: used to scrub Hitler's pool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of a lot.
Speaker 4: Of personal services the guy needed done.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, a lot of people working with Hitler
Speaker 2: one way or the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I set up his aquarium. It was like really complicated.
Speaker 3: Then he needed me to come out every two weeks
Speaker 3: to clean Hitler's aquarium.
Speaker 2: My aunt when she was like hitchhiking through Germany and
Speaker 2: like the fifties, got picked up by a guy she
Speaker 2: later found out was Hitler's photographer. Like, we have a
Speaker 2: bunch of photos he gave her, like he just picked
Speaker 2: her up on the.
Speaker 3: Road photos of Hitler.
Speaker 2: Yes, we have like a lot of weird Hitler photos
Speaker 2: in my family that she was just like I didn't
Speaker 2: know what to do with him.
Speaker 4: You gotta go on antiques road show and.
Speaker 2: With my Hitler picks, my god, yeah.
Speaker 3: They never have the good shit on there. You got
Speaker 3: to go on with the Hitler picks at the Grandfather clocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I prefer the Grandfather clocks to the Hitler picks. So,
Speaker 2: but Maxwell's story is so much cooler. So he finds
Speaker 2: Hitler's dog breeder and this guy is like on the
Speaker 2: edge of destitution. Obviously the war was not good for
Speaker 2: Hitler's dog guy. And he has one breeding male left, right,
Speaker 2: this like one German, and he's his hope is that
Speaker 2: like I can rebuild my business with this male, right,
Speaker 2: you know, and maybe get my feet back on.
Speaker 3: And it's like just like a guy that man, you know,
Speaker 3: that downfall the Third riis and like the Holocaust and
Speaker 3: all that really bad for my dog breeding business, Yes,
Speaker 3: horrible for guys who sell German shepherds. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I sold German Hitler. I thought it was a good
Speaker 3: bed at the time.
Speaker 2: I thought it would keep going.
Speaker 3: Seemed like he was on the way up. You know.
Speaker 2: It was the MySpace of its day. How could it
Speaker 2: have failed?
Speaker 5: Go?
Speaker 3: Why don't anybody think of how this affects dog breeding businesses?
Speaker 2: Yeah, fucking Eisenhower kept awake at night. We never thought
Speaker 2: of the dog breeders. So Maxwell, his biographers always say
Speaker 2: that he buys the dog off this guy and reading
Speaker 2: between the lines. I don't think he gave the breeder
Speaker 2: a choice, right. I think he was like, I'm a
Speaker 2: British officer, I have a weapon, I'm taking the dog.
Speaker 2: And I believe this because within days of him taking
Speaker 2: this guy's last dog, Hitler's dog breeder commits suicide.
Speaker 1: And this story is so bizarre.
Speaker 2: Maxwell he tells his like comrades, his like fellow soldiers this,
Speaker 2: and he's like, ha in this fucking funny and they're
Speaker 2: like horrified that he kind of killed Hitler's dog breeder.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, also, this man, his entire family was
Speaker 3: murdered in the Holocaust. It's like and.
Speaker 2: There the morality of this is, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Hitler's dog breeder sounds like a side mission from Wolfenstein.
Speaker 3: You know of someone you go murder, Right, you.
Speaker 2: Gotta kill Hitler's dog breeder. He's got four arms and
Speaker 2: like a Cerberus. Yeah, you need the mini gun for
Speaker 2: that level.
Speaker 4: So is it Hitler's dog? Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 2: No, No, no, this would have been I think it was
Speaker 2: like the sire of Hitler's dog, maybe at least related
Speaker 2: to the sire Hitler's dog.
Speaker 3: No, No, this wasn't Hitler's dog. No no, no, no no,
Speaker 3: this was the sire of Hitler's Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I stole Hitler's dog's dad.
Speaker 3: Every Nazi owned dogs who were sired by this dog.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. It's so funny that he's like, this is
Speaker 2: a bragging point for him that I destroyed this man
Speaker 2: and his like his colleagues are like, that's kind of
Speaker 2: fun up.
Speaker 3: And I also just have to say, if your biographer
Speaker 3: is like starting a paragraph with and then he met
Speaker 3: a dog breeder and arranged to purchase a dog, it's
Speaker 3: not a good dog purchase story, Like.
Speaker 2: There's not any of those really, Like a breeder dog purchases.
Speaker 3: Don't make it.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, you know, like Nixon's biography doesn't.
Speaker 3: Spend a lot of time on checkers, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 2: Right, So, yeah, he couldn't kill Hitler, but he got
Speaker 2: the guy who made Hitler's dog. I guess wildlife.
Speaker 3: He owned the dog, what do you do with the dog?
Speaker 2: By all accounts, he cared about. He liked the dog, obviously,
Speaker 2: not the dog's fault.
Speaker 3: He takes revenge on literally everybody who had anything to
Speaker 3: do with Nazi, just people who were just hanging around
Speaker 3: in Germany for a day.
Speaker 4: He slaughters them, but he's like the dog.
Speaker 3: I like the dogs, the dog Bitler's dog's dad. That's
Speaker 3: a Nazi I'm okay with.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So Maxwell kind of around this period has
Speaker 2: a fairly He works as a spy. He's kind of
Speaker 2: like a contractor for six probably it's one of those
Speaker 2: things where we don't know exactly who he's working for
Speaker 2: one hundred percent because it's spy stuff and because of
Speaker 2: some other things he does. Because he's always a little
Speaker 2: involved in this world of espionage. This will be mythologized,
Speaker 2: but what we can confirm is really cool, which is
Speaker 2: that he befriends a Soviet colonel because he speaks Russian
Speaker 2: really well, and you have to imagine they're very drunk.
Speaker 2: He convinces the Soviet colonel to break into Georgie Zukov's
Speaker 2: office so they can photograph his papers. Like so much
Speaker 2: vodka has to have been part of this story to
Speaker 2: get this colonel to like, yeah, fuck Zukov, insane. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's nuts. He also carries out clandestine surveillance of his
Speaker 2: old homeland, Czechoslovakia, which is where he gets noted by
Speaker 2: the Czech like foreign service is looking like a hotter
Speaker 2: Clark Gable. He's also described by many who knew him
Speaker 2: as being a bit of a dick. An article in
Speaker 2: The Guardian at this time describes him as tall, brash
Speaker 2: and not at all content with his already considerable success.
Speaker 2: An acquaintance at the time recalled him confessing his greatest
Speaker 2: desire to be a millionaire. So you know what else
Speaker 2: is there after killing every night? Literally getting down to
Speaker 2: the fact that you're down to Hitler's dog breeder, so
Speaker 2: you got no more Nazis to kill?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it just war affects everybody so differently.
Speaker 3: You know, I would think that if I escaped the
Speaker 3: miserable poverty of Central Eastern Europe and you know, and
Speaker 3: the worst war in the history of humanity, yeah, killed
Speaker 3: a bunch of people, managed to not die in either
Speaker 3: the Holocaust or the fighting, Yeah, and then achieved a
Speaker 3: position of social prominence, I'd say, you know what, maybe
Speaker 3: I'll take a summer off, you know, maybe I'll just
Speaker 3: like be content to be.
Speaker 2: Alive, take a break, go to the sea. But ambition, man, Yeah,
Speaker 2: like that he is like this ambition is and maybe
Speaker 2: you know, he would never have admitted this, maybe there
Speaker 2: is a degree that it's like, given what he's experienced,
Speaker 2: he has to just keep moving right, like you can't.
Speaker 2: You kind of can't just sit with what what's got
Speaker 2: happened to you and what you've done. And that's certainly
Speaker 2: like what one's left to interpret from where his life
Speaker 2: goes next. So he talks a lot at the time
Speaker 2: about how he's going to become a millionaire, and he
Speaker 2: talks about specifically, I'm going to find a great unexploited
Speaker 2: resource and find a way to put myself in the
Speaker 2: middle of the distribution chain. Right. So again he has
Speaker 2: this kind of eye for business, and he doesn't know
Speaker 2: what he doesn't want to do anything in particular other
Speaker 2: than find the next great resource and make himself key
Speaker 2: to it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He's probably thinking this way because both oil and uranium
Speaker 2: have gotten way more valuable in very very recently as
Speaker 2: a result of some things. But the resource that Maxwell
Speaker 2: is gonna lasso and used to make his fortune is
Speaker 2: more dangerous and more valuable than either of those. Raw knowledge.
Speaker 2: So science is a discipline is given how crucial it
Speaker 2: is to World War two by the time that war starts,
Speaker 2: Like the concept of science as like a professional field
Speaker 2: that like people go into is still pretty new, and
Speaker 2: in fact, even in like forty five forty six, some
Speaker 2: of the senior scientific minds in the world had grown
Speaker 2: up and started their careers at a time when science
Speaker 2: was something gentleman hobbyists did.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like the product of a national educational and
Speaker 2: an industrial apparatus, right, this was something like men who
Speaker 2: are like the earl of such and such, and my
Speaker 2: hobby is figuring out how heredity works or whatever. Like
Speaker 2: that's kind of how things had worked not all that
Speaker 2: long ago. And obviously things have professionalized a lot prior
Speaker 2: to World War Two, but the field is still really
Speaker 2: new and people are still figuring out stuff like how
Speaker 2: are we going to disseminate and spread new discoveries around
Speaker 2: the world. What is that infrastructure going to look like?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And the Manhattan Project is a major part of that. Right,
Speaker 2: there's suddenly this understanding that like it's kind of dangerous
Speaker 2: for countries to not be completely up to date on
Speaker 2: what's happening scientifically, right, Particularly the British government is kind
Speaker 2: of caught off guard a little bit by the success
Speaker 2: the US has with the Manhattan Project and the scale
Speaker 2: of the achievement, and even though like they're on our
Speaker 2: side during this, they're like, well, fuck we are. We
Speaker 2: do not have a scientific industry that's capable of competing
Speaker 2: with the Americans in the way that we need to.
Speaker 3: They're like, ah, we've been chemically castrating mathematicians. We got
Speaker 3: shit over here.
Speaker 2: Oh fuck, we really should probably stop doing that. Huh yeah,
Speaker 2: stop poisoning our smart guys. As The Guardian writes, quote
Speaker 2: top British scientists, from Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, to
Speaker 2: the physicist Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin. We're
Speaker 2: concerned that while British science was world class, its publishing
Speaker 2: arm was dismal. Science publishers were mainly known for being
Speaker 2: inefficient and constant broke journals, which often appeared on cheap,
Speaker 2: thin paper, were produced almost as an afterthought by scientific societies.
Speaker 2: The British Chemical Society had a month's long backlog of
Speaker 2: articles for publication and relied on cash handouts from the
Speaker 2: Royal Society to fund its printing operations. So there is
Speaker 2: no money in scientific publishing. It's like they barely even
Speaker 2: consider It's like, oh yeah, you figured out how nuclear
Speaker 2: energy works. We should probably write about that at some
Speaker 2: point in a place other people can read it, but
Speaker 2: not a priority. You know, we'll just let that happen whenever.
Speaker 3: Uh huh, you're writing each other handwritten letters and shit, gone,
Speaker 3: I discovered something.
Speaker 2: Yeah nukes, Yeah yeah yeah. So by late summer of
Speaker 2: nineteen forty six, Robert Maxwell has talked himself and to
Speaker 2: maybe the sweetest gig anyone gets during the Allied occupation
Speaker 2: of Germany, which is he starts running the press section
Speaker 2: of the Public Relations and Information Services Control Organizations. So obviously,
Speaker 2: right after we occupy Germany, we're not letting the Germans
Speaker 2: have newspapers of their own again that they're running, right,
Speaker 2: because that didn't go well last time. Yeah yeah, German
Speaker 2: media got a little out of pocket. So he is
Speaker 2: basically put in charge of all German print media, right,
Speaker 2: so as these as newspapers start up again, he is
Speaker 2: like both the censor, so he's like approving everything that
Speaker 2: goes out, but he's also figuring out how to make
Speaker 2: these profitable. And he just turns out to be really
Speaker 2: good at it, Like he's shockingly good at knowing how
Speaker 2: to make a newspaper work financially. He probably got that
Speaker 2: because he has no experience in this. He probably got
Speaker 2: the job because he was trusted by the intelligence services.
Speaker 2: You know, he's in with MI I six, and they're like,
Speaker 2: probably good to have a guy who is with us
Speaker 2: running the papers in post war Germany. But he launches
Speaker 2: his first big paper as a social democratic paper that
Speaker 2: like becomes wildly successful and makes a huge amount of money.
Speaker 2: And it's like it's really hard in Germany, which is
Speaker 2: devastated to get enough like ink and paper, and somehow
Speaker 2: he manages to and no one really knows how. The
Speaker 2: assumption is a mix of like bribery and his connections
Speaker 2: with like organized crime, and just he he's also like
Speaker 2: people will say, like he was scary. He'd killed dozens
Speaker 2: of men and he was huge. So if he needed
Speaker 2: something and he couldn't get it through other reasons, he
Speaker 2: would just threaten to beat the shit out a few wow,
Speaker 2: And yeah, I probably wouldn't have wanted to fight. Nineteen
Speaker 2: forty six Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 4: His articles are all like, it's great to murder Germans.
Speaker 2: Actually pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Blowing a mayor's brains out is a tank fired at
Speaker 3: you is a heroic deed.
Speaker 2: I wrote a poem about it. This paper, the first
Speaker 2: paper that he's a social democratic paper that he starts,
Speaker 2: is owned by a company, a publisher called Springer verloc.
Speaker 2: You've heard of Springer if you've ever read an academic
Speaker 2: publication or like, I think they do textbooks too, you
Speaker 2: have seen Springer on a publication. Yeah, yeah, and this
Speaker 2: is that company, right, and he gets to know the
Speaker 2: owner of the company, an elderly man named Ferdinand Springer
Speaker 2: quite well. Now, pre war, Springer had been the world's
Speaker 2: largest publisher of scientific literature because Germany had been the
Speaker 2: scientific center of the planet in many ways prior to
Speaker 2: Hitler's rise to power. But once the war starts, science
Speaker 2: kept going because obviously the Nazis still funded science, but
Speaker 2: Germany was a pariah state and so they weren't publishing
Speaker 2: anything for the rest of the world, and so papers
Speaker 2: would continue to be written like sort of collecting the
Speaker 2: whole history of like all of these scientific achievements being
Speaker 2: made during the Nazi period, and they were just building
Speaker 2: up in a warehouse that Springer had that he was
Speaker 2: trying to keep, you know, far enough away that it
Speaker 2: didn't get blown up by Allied bombs. So at the
Speaker 2: end of the war, Ferdinand Springer is broke, but he
Speaker 2: has sixty three thousand books filled with like the science
Speaker 2: of rocketry, which the Nazis had developed to a massive extent,
Speaker 2: and like advanced metallurgy and medical like all of this
Speaker 2: really important, crucial science that's going to be a big
Speaker 2: part of the space race. It's just sitting in springer warehouse, unpublished, right.
Speaker 2: And Maxwell becomes this guy's friend, and so while they're talking,
Speaker 2: Ferdinand explains to him how scientific publishing works. And he's like,
Speaker 2: you know, so governments fund scientific research, as do universities,
Speaker 2: and there's grants, and there's grants come from you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes from governments, from different funds, from wealthy philanthropists, and
Speaker 2: they pay for the science. And then the scientists produce
Speaker 2: these papers about their findings and then publishers basically get
Speaker 2: them for free. And Maxwell's like, wait a second, free,
Speaker 2: the most like important valuable resource in the world. People
Speaker 2: aren't even really charging for it. I got a motherfucking idea.
Speaker 2: And yeah, part of his idea is that Springer can't
Speaker 2: do anything with all these papers because German nationals are
Speaker 2: not allowed to ship things overseas right now, Like, there's
Speaker 2: a limited quantity that you can mail outside of Germany
Speaker 2: as a German for obvious reasons. But Robert Mack can
Speaker 2: mail whatever the fuck he wants, right Well, so he's
Speaker 2: found his great resource and he's about to start exploiting it.
Speaker 2: He starts a company with the goal of shipping Springer
Speaker 2: scientific publications over to the UK and finding journals to
Speaker 2: publish them. Right, he gets Springer, who again is broke,
Speaker 2: hands him the worldwide distribution rights to all of German science,
Speaker 2: right as long as he can find a way to
Speaker 2: move it. Now, he maxwell's comfortable at this point, but
Speaker 2: he's not rich, and sixty three thousand books worth of
Speaker 2: stuff is you have to be rich to ship that somewhere.
Speaker 2: We don't actually know how he pays for this, like
Speaker 2: because it's expensive. He has no real customers. Initially for
Speaker 2: years he'll have kind of claimed that, like, oh, my
Speaker 2: wife's family has some money, so I use my savings
Speaker 2: and theirs and that funded this. But his family is like, no,
Speaker 2: he didn't really give him. We didn't like him, Like,
Speaker 2: we didn't give him anything. Because his wife comes from
Speaker 2: like kind of a bougie family and they do know
Speaker 2: that Maxwell's like a poor Jewish kid from nowhere. They
Speaker 2: don't care that he's like a war hero now so
Speaker 2: we find out years later. We don't learn this until
Speaker 2: after Maxwell dies in the year two thousand. A former
Speaker 2: m I six officer claims that British intelligence, literally the
Speaker 2: James Bond Agency, funds Maxwell's startup because he had been
Speaker 2: working undercover for them and they considered it a potentially
Speaker 2: valuable venture. M I six is intelligently like, probably good
Speaker 2: to have a hand in all of scientific publishing. That like,
Speaker 2: that might that might work out for us. Actually, here's
Speaker 2: some money. And the the m I six officer who
Speaker 2: reveals this says it's the only time m I six
Speaker 2: ever like completely funded a startup. Maybe that's true, maybe
Speaker 2: that's not. I don't credit a literal m I six
Speaker 2: officer with necessarily being honest about everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all those uh startups that make Jim's Bonzil.
Speaker 2: Gadgets right right right, Yeah, there's gotta be a couple
Speaker 2: of those, right, Q's gotta have some gotta have some
Speaker 2: companies he's working with. So so, as noted earlier, Maxwell
Speaker 2: start shipping the stuff to the UK, and while he's
Speaker 2: doing this. His plan right now, His business is just
Speaker 2: I want to get this over to the UK and
Speaker 2: I'll figure out a way to make it work financially,
Speaker 2: because there's obviously a hunger for this material. But the UK,
Speaker 2: this just adds to the problem the country has, which
Speaker 2: is the scientific publishing in the UK can't handle the
Speaker 2: UK's backlog of unpublished science sixty three thousand books worth
Speaker 2: of added stuff. It's just over massively overloaded the system
Speaker 2: right per the Guardian quote, the British government solution was
Speaker 2: to pair the venerable British publishing house Butterworths with the
Speaker 2: renowned German publisher Springer. To draw on the latter's expertise.
Speaker 2: Butterworth's would learn to turn a profit on journals, and
Speaker 2: British Science would get its work out at a faster pace.
Speaker 2: The Butterworth's directors, being ex British Intelligence themselves, hired the
Speaker 2: young Maxwell to help manage the company, and another X spook,
Speaker 2: Paul Rosbaud, a metallurgist who spent the war passing Nazi
Speaker 2: nuclear secrets to the British through French and Dutch resistance,
Speaker 2: as scientific editor. When Butterworth's decided to abandon the fledgling project.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty one, Maxwell offered thirteen thousand pounds about
Speaker 2: four hundred and twenty grand today for both Butterworth's and
Speaker 2: Springer's shares, giving him control of the company. Rose Boud
Speaker 2: stayed on a scientific director and named the new venture
Speaker 2: Pergaman Press, after a coin from the ancient Greek city
Speaker 2: of Pergamen featuring athena goddess of wisdom, which they adapted
Speaker 2: for the company logo, a simple line drawing appropriately representing
Speaker 2: both knowledge and money. So what starts as a British
Speaker 2: program to like get scientific publishing up winds up entirely
Speaker 2: in Maxwell and rose Boud's hands, because the company that
Speaker 2: the British government contract with is like, ah, there's probably
Speaker 2: not a lot of money in this. Yeah, we'll take
Speaker 2: thirteen thousand pounds for now being in control of all
Speaker 2: of scientific publishing for Germany and the United Kingdom. That's
Speaker 2: where Maxwell's made himself. He's not thirty, Like.
Speaker 4: He's not thirty years old yet.
Speaker 2: No, No, he would have been. So he's twenty three
Speaker 2: in the war ends, who'd have been like twenty eight
Speaker 2: or twenty nine? Right now, I think, Wow, he's doing well.
Speaker 3: I'm forty two and I haven't like murdered anybody.
Speaker 2: Haven't murdered dozens of ss men.
Speaker 3: I haven't killed any mayors. I haven't taken over the
Speaker 3: scientific publishing of two entire nations yet, right, yeah, like
Speaker 3: the last generation was just stronger and better.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. Yeah, the energy this guy had.
Speaker 4: Because of the cell phone.
Speaker 3: You know, that's why I haven't haven't murdered any Germans yet.
Speaker 2: It's the cell phone I had had. A Robert Maxwell
Speaker 2: secretly invented adderall. He was just keeping it from everybody
Speaker 2: for a while, jumping it into his leg. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's his only food. So while this business was starting
Speaker 2: off with a bang, Maxwell is still a serial entrepreneur,
Speaker 2: and most of his attempts at business don't work quite
Speaker 2: as well as Pergaman does. A great example of this
Speaker 2: would be a business deal he sets up in the
Speaker 2: early fifties. So he gets in bed with his German
Speaker 2: chemist and this chemist has set up a deal to
Speaker 2: exchange chemicals shipped from Germany for glass China and goods
Speaker 2: manufactured elsewhere. Right, because Germany doesn't have a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff at the end of the war except for some
Speaker 2: raw materials. A decision is made midway through the process
Speaker 2: that we should probably send all of the stuff through
Speaker 2: Argentina because Argentina can pay with pork bellies. Now, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm not an economic expert, I don't know why this
Speaker 2: made sense to them, but they decide like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: pork bellies, that's better than cash. That'll really work out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, these settlers of Katan logic.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I know someone might be saying, well, pork
Speaker 2: belly futures is probably what they were talking about. No,
Speaker 2: no literal pork bellies. And this becomes obvious because when
Speaker 2: they try to exchange these pork bellies to the British
Speaker 2: government for cash, the British Government's like, well, these have
Speaker 2: gone rancid. These are all rancid pork bellies. We don't
Speaker 2: really want these, So maxwell they keep going. He keeps
Speaker 2: trying to sell these rancid pork bellies to different countries,
Speaker 2: and he finally finds a country that's like starving to death, Austria,
Speaker 2: and Austria's like, yeah, we will literally take anything it's rancid. Fine,
Speaker 2: we'll make it into sausage. We're doing so badly right now,
Speaker 2: toxic pork is the best Austria can do, thanks Hitler. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 2: there's like a if you've been to Berlin, you've had
Speaker 2: like curry worst, right, which is like a Berlin dish,
Speaker 2: and it's like curry on a sausage or a hot dog.
Speaker 2: It got started because in this period of time they're
Speaker 2: like sausages were like more than a fifty percent sawdust
Speaker 2: and they had curry powder because the British were there.
Speaker 2: So it was like people won't notice the sawdust as
Speaker 2: much if we put curry on it.
Speaker 3: Every time we eat a curry worst. Do you think
Speaker 3: of Maxwell and his quest to take over all of.
Speaker 2: Publishing, all of publishing in the rancid pork business?
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: My favorite side fact about this is that they get
Speaker 2: Austria to buy this rancid pork by pretending the meat
Speaker 2: had come from a fake country called Oceania, and nobody
Speaker 2: in Austria, like in the trade part of Austar or whatever,
Speaker 2: recognizes that he just made up a country. This is
Speaker 2: not real. Yeah, that sounds real to me.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Again, we just got out of the Nazi period, not
Speaker 2: super knowledgeable about the rest of the world.
Speaker 3: Here, you guys don't even want to know what's what
Speaker 3: happened in South America. Man, there's Oceania's taken over. They
Speaker 3: make the best pork bellies.
Speaker 4: Really want some.
Speaker 2: The freshest pork bellies.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow, So in nineteen fifty five, back doing their pergaman business,
Speaker 2: we're out of the pork belly thing. Maxwell and his
Speaker 2: partner rose about it. I also just have to say
Speaker 2: the fact that like this scientific publishing starts with like
Speaker 2: the guy who murdered a significant portion of the SS
Speaker 2: and the guy who smuggled nuclear secrets to the French resistance.
Speaker 2: You'd think this would have ended cooler than it does.
Speaker 4: Yeah, these guys sound awesome.
Speaker 3: They are at this point, and they're arbitraging pork bellies
Speaker 3: instead of money. By the way, maybe the first that
Speaker 3: they're not as smart as we think they are that
Speaker 3: they were like, hey, we could you don't be better
Speaker 3: than being paid in money, being paid in pork belliesceiving
Speaker 3: the pork bellies, and then having to travel around Europe
Speaker 3: set reselling your rancid pork bellies for Austrian money. The
Speaker 3: Austrian money can't be great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that can't have been like a great profit margin. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So in nineteen fifty five, Maxwell and his partner Rose
Speaker 2: Baud show up at the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses
Speaker 2: of Nuclear Power. And this is kind of we've talked
Speaker 2: about this before, one of like the inciting events to
Speaker 2: what becomes the Plowshare program, where the US is like,
Speaker 2: we should be using nukes to dig big holes and
Speaker 2: hydraulically frack, you know. So they show up at this
Speaker 2: big conference because there's all these scientists who are presenting
Speaker 2: papers on like cutting edge nuclear research. So they run
Speaker 2: an office nearby, and Maxwell spends the whole trip. He's
Speaker 2: just like crashing seminars and luncheons and dinners and finding
Speaker 2: every scientist he can who's got a paper out and
Speaker 2: is like, hey, man, sign an exclusive contract with me.
Speaker 2: I will give you money in exchange for the rights
Speaker 2: to everything you publish. Right, And this isn't a lot
Speaker 2: of money for him. I think he's giving these people
Speaker 2: like hundreds to thousands of dollars. But these are like
Speaker 2: scientists aren't like Richmond traditionally, especially in this period, and
Speaker 2: paper publishing had never really been worth money before, so
Speaker 2: they're like this is a great deal, right, you know, suddenly,
Speaker 2: finally someone values my work. So Maxwell is just like
Speaker 2: he's like he's basically just going door to door finding
Speaker 2: every scientist and being like, what'll it take to sign
Speaker 2: you right now? Right, Like, He's like, he's like a
Speaker 2: Hollywood agent. But for nuclear physicists.
Speaker 3: Going around the open MIC's handing that, handing out five
Speaker 3: dollars bills.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly, yes, And no one had ever done this
Speaker 2: in the field of science, right, this is still a
Speaker 2: gentleman's endeavor. And journals tended to be focused on what
Speaker 2: they were interested in publishing, right, So they didn't like
Speaker 2: seek people out. You know, if you were a nuclear
Speaker 2: physicist and you had a paper, you'd go to the
Speaker 2: journal that did that, and you would send them the
Speaker 2: paper and maybe they'd get to it eventually. So Maxwell's
Speaker 2: coming up with a fucking that shocking to people, right.
Speaker 2: Don Frank, a competing publisher, considered this dishonest, but it worked.
Speaker 2: What made pergam And so profitable was the fact that,
Speaker 2: and this is something that he realizes as a result
Speaker 2: of his conversations with Ferdinand, every university and every government
Speaker 2: scientific organization in the entire Western world needs access to
Speaker 2: all of the relevant research in their field as it's
Speaker 2: being published. This means subscriptions to every relevant journal are
Speaker 2: a necessity.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: If you're a college and you have a bunch of
Speaker 2: different scientific programs, you're going to be subscribed to basically
Speaker 2: every journal there is, right. And the first thing Maxwell
Speaker 2: realizes is like, well, they'll pay whatever I charge. Right,
Speaker 2: If I have exclusive rights, no one else can publish
Speaker 2: these things. I can charge as much as I want.
Speaker 2: And obviously, once he makes money, competition enters. Other companies
Speaker 2: start figuring this out. But he makes another prediction, which
Speaker 2: is that this will work the opposite of the way
Speaker 2: most things work. The more publishers there are putting out
Speaker 2: more journals, the more money we will make, right, because
Speaker 2: they can't not subscribe to everything, because all of the
Speaker 2: research is unique, and in order to stay up to date,
Speaker 2: they have to buy everything. And at this point in time,
Speaker 2: all of these universities, all these government they're just being
Speaker 2: funded by these massive amounts of like Cold War era
Speaker 2: defense cash. So the money is unlimited, right, And that's
Speaker 2: really what he realizes, Like, I can charge whatever I want,
Speaker 2: I can put out as many journals as I want,
Speaker 2: and there will be an endless amount of cash for me.
Speaker 3: And this is not like a huge part of the
Speaker 3: budget of any one university anyway. Now, So you could
Speaker 3: charge you could charge an arm and a leg. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it's just gonna be some like the library has
Speaker 3: to pay for a little bit of It doesn't cost
Speaker 3: them as much as their mortgage.
Speaker 2: It's one hundred dollars instead of ten dollars, right, yes,
Speaker 2: And we're getting all this defense money anyway, because the
Speaker 2: US government needs physicists right right now. It was his
Speaker 2: business partner Rosebaud who had the idea that would truly
Speaker 2: make Pergaman into a force to be reckoned with, and
Speaker 2: Bob Maxwell rich beyond his wildest dreams. Per the Guardian quote.
Speaker 2: As science expanded, he realized that it would need new
Speaker 2: journals to cover new areas of study. The scientific societies
Speaker 2: that had traditionally created journals were unwieldy institutions that tended
Speaker 2: to move slowly, hampered by internal debates between members about
Speaker 2: the boundaries of their field. Rosebod had none of those constraints.
Speaker 2: All he needed to do was convince a prominent academic
Speaker 2: that their particular field required a new journal to showcase
Speaker 2: it properly and install that person at the helm of it.
Speaker 2: Pergaman would then begin selling subscriptions to university libraries, which
Speaker 2: suddenly had a lot of government money to spend. So
Speaker 2: you're literally walking up to guys and saying, hey, what
Speaker 2: you do seems new? You should have a journal, And
Speaker 2: suddenly every college in the western world subscribes. Immediate profits
Speaker 2: right there are so a really good magazine is working
Speaker 2: on like a ten to fifteen percent profit margin, right,
Speaker 2: and that's a magazine that's doing very well. His profit
Speaker 2: margins on these journals are over fifty percent. Wow, Like,
Speaker 2: it's insane how much money they make off of this.
Speaker 2: Speaking of insane money, help us get some of that,
Speaker 2: you know, so we can subscribe to scientific journals. No,
Speaker 2: we use sy hub. Everyone use sy hub. Fuck these people,
Speaker 2: fuck scientific publishing as an industry. Steal it not legal advice,
Speaker 2: and we're back. Sihub is a website that collects most
Speaker 2: of the journals you might want. If you like, find
Speaker 2: a journal that's paywalled, you go to syhub. Google it.
Speaker 2: There's a bunch of different mirrors. Put the doi number
Speaker 2: or just the URL link to the study you want,
Speaker 2: and syhub will generally return it for free. It's great anyway,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure I'm not. That's not illegal for me
Speaker 2: to say.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think pretty much every grad student in
Speaker 3: the world is using.
Speaker 2: It right, right, right, and they should be and all
Speaker 2: of this should be free.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, because it's oh, you mean, a scientific knowledge,
Speaker 3: the birthright of mankind that our tax is paid for,
Speaker 3: the only, in fact, the only uh permanent and important
Speaker 3: thing humanity does on the entire planet to discover how
Speaker 3: the universe around us works. Yeah, that should probably be
Speaker 3: a free public resource.
Speaker 2: It should probably be everyone's property. Yeah, the collective genius
Speaker 2: of mankind. I don't know anyway. So Roseboud he has
Speaker 2: this idea which is very mercenary, but he also has
Speaker 2: like a conscience. He is a scientist, and he starts
Speaker 2: to feel ashamed as Maxwell runs with it and is like, ah, man,
Speaker 2: I really don't I don't feel good being in business
Speaker 2: with you and doing this. I maybe contributed terribly to
Speaker 2: a great evil. And he leaves, and so Maxwell's in
Speaker 2: sole charge of Pergama now, and once he grasps Rosebaud's idea,
Speaker 2: he runs with it like fucking Ussane Bolt. He's launching
Speaker 2: new journals off the strength of like somebody he's having
Speaker 2: like drinks and some guy mentions a new idea and
Speaker 2: he's like, bam, journal motherfucker if a researcher. Yeah, like that,
Speaker 2: Like that's literally how it's happening. By the late fifties,
Speaker 2: he brought us sort of sleazy. He's like the first
Speaker 2: eighties guy, Like he's amazing, and he brings this energy
Speaker 2: to scientific publishing. And the fact that he is this
Speaker 2: way is so out of time that it's shocking to
Speaker 2: his new peers. So who show up at these scientific
Speaker 2: conferences in like these fine tailored Italian suits. He's got
Speaker 2: his hair slicked back like a gangster. He described the
Speaker 2: journals that he owned as you lambs and himself as
Speaker 2: King David, like cutting them up for parts. Basically that's
Speaker 2: such a Again, this is why Rosebaud quits in fifty
Speaker 2: six is he's like, I don't know, maybe this feels gross.
Speaker 3: I also have to say, like there's been a lot
Speaker 3: of talk in the last twenty years about you know,
Speaker 3: for profit journals and you know, all the problems in
Speaker 3: scientific publisher I always thought that that profit motive was
Speaker 3: relatively recent. I didn't realize it was rapacious even at
Speaker 3: the dawn of this shit.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it Maxwell invins it. Now obviously would something
Speaker 2: similar mayby, but like it's him, He's the one who
Speaker 2: starts this.
Speaker 3: And presumably somebody could have started a version of academic
Speaker 3: publishing that didn't work this way. That was like, you know,
Speaker 3: a lot of people say, like, what if Jimmy Wales
Speaker 3: had not started Wikipedia, right, we would have maybe had
Speaker 3: a different business model. There could have been a business
Speaker 3: model that went a better way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you just don't know. And you know,
Speaker 2: I think we're probably doing better with Wikipedia than most
Speaker 2: things on the Internet these days.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's a good example. If that hadn't existed,
Speaker 3: something bad it could have taken its place. There could
Speaker 3: have been a better version of scientific publishing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, cost one hundred dollars a month or some
Speaker 2: shit or whatever. Yeah, and it tells you that Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: you're gonna get a hyperloop in your city soon or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the next Geneva conference, now working alone, Robert Maxwell
Speaker 2: rinse a mansion on the lake and he starts whining
Speaker 2: and dining the best minds of the scientific world. Again.
Speaker 2: He's taking these guys who have spent their whole and
Speaker 2: ladies who have spent their whole careers with their nose
Speaker 2: in a book generally don't have much money begging for grants,
Speaker 2: and he is treating them like movie stars or pop musicians.
Speaker 2: Like at one point he gets a bunch of these
Speaker 2: guys together to start a journal, and he puts them
Speaker 2: on a chartered boat tour of the Greek aisles to
Speaker 2: figure out how to make the journal. Like it is
Speaker 2: like classic Hollywood erashit right where you're like, go go
Speaker 2: hang out in Italy for three months and write this
Speaker 2: movie together or something like that. Like that's what he's
Speaker 2: doing with these scientists, and like yeah, they they're like
Speaker 2: this is much better than being a poor scientist.
Speaker 3: This would work on me. Yes, yes, of course if
Speaker 3: I was a scientist, I'd be like this guy is
Speaker 3: so great. He's treating me the way I deserve to
Speaker 3: be treated. Of course, I mean, I study ants, but
Speaker 3: of course I should go on a free, all expenses
Speaker 3: paid trip of Europe.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And one thing people say, to be fair to Maxwell,
Speaker 2: he introduces the mercenary capitalism to this, but he's always
Speaker 2: centered on the science. And one thing the scientists he
Speaker 2: work with will say is whenever we had a disagreement,
Speaker 2: he would always ultimately side with the scientists. Right. So
Speaker 2: it's after him that things do get much more evil.
Speaker 2: And it's with another company, el Selvier, where things get
Speaker 2: a lot worse. But he makes that process inevitable, even
Speaker 2: though he is he is really dedicated to the scientists
Speaker 2: in this period of time. And also I just want
Speaker 2: to add to what Adam said, if anyone wants to
Speaker 2: put me on a chartered boat tour of the Greek
Speaker 2: Isles to start a journal, I'm in. You've got me,
Speaker 2: you bought me, I'm paid for like yeah. So he
Speaker 2: told his deputy director at Pergaman, we don't compete on sales,
Speaker 2: we compete on authors, right, So this is a talent
Speaker 2: driven business. And that's what again, it's very much it
Speaker 2: feels very similar to like Hollywood, I don't like, at
Speaker 2: least at this time. I don't know how much that's
Speaker 2: an influence to him, but he is kind of working
Speaker 2: that way. His attitude is that like drawing in more
Speaker 2: authors exclusively means like more journals that he owns, and
Speaker 2: thus more sales. In nineteen fifty nine, Pergama had forty journals.
Speaker 2: By the mid sixties it would publish more than one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty, which is like almost like ten times
Speaker 2: as many as el Selvier, which is again the most
Speaker 2: evil of these companies today, but at this point is
Speaker 2: just barely keeping up as like a competitor to Pergaman.
Speaker 2: Maxwell is not like a particularly patriotic businessman. He does
Speaker 2: not see national borders. He has really good connections with
Speaker 2: the USSR. It's always considered weird and part of why
Speaker 2: people are wondering about his spy credentials. Whenever he visits Moscow,
Speaker 2: the Soviet government like puts him up in a mansion
Speaker 2: like they really like him, and I think, I mean,
Speaker 2: he definitely is doing some spying, and I'm sure they're
Speaker 2: also putting them up in the mansion because it's like
Speaker 2: wired and they want aspire out of him. But he
Speaker 2: has really good connections too. He speaks really good Russian.
Speaker 2: He knows a lot of prominent people in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: And the evidence for that is that when like the
Speaker 2: USSR launches Spudnik, he negotiates within days an English language
Speaker 2: deal with the Russian Academy of Sciences to become the
Speaker 2: exclusive English language publisher of like Russian science, right, all
Speaker 2: of like these. Yeah, so he is connected.
Speaker 3: He sounds like a blast to spend a weekend with.
Speaker 2: He sounds like a shitload of fun. Yeah right, there's
Speaker 2: so many quotes about this guy, Like all of the
Speaker 2: scientists who work with him are like he was a
Speaker 2: piece of shit. A lot of fun though, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: he was an asshole. Great parties, Yeah, like I really
Speaker 2: enjoyed spending time with this guy who sucked. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 2: obviously Maxwell does not make this, as I said, as
Speaker 2: evil as it becomes, but the downsides of what he
Speaker 2: starts are very obvious. Today. The modern field of scientific
Speaker 2: literature is cripplingly expensive for institutions like libraries and colleges,
Speaker 2: the latter of which passed their costs on to students.
Speaker 2: And while Maxwell initially wowed scientists with promises of payouts,
Speaker 2: by the mid sixties he'd helped to normalize a system
Speaker 2: where individual researchers were more reliant on journals than journals
Speaker 2: were on them. Per the Guardian, scientists create work under
Speaker 2: their own direction, funded largely by guff and give it
Speaker 2: to publishers for free. The publisher pays scientific editors who
Speaker 2: judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar,
Speaker 2: but the bulk of the editorial burden checking the scientific
Speaker 2: validity and evaluating the experiments. A process known as peer
Speaker 2: review is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis.
Speaker 2: The publishers then sell the product back to the government
Speaker 2: funded institutional and university libraries to be read by scientists who,
Speaker 2: in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
Speaker 2: It is as if the New Yorker or the economists
Speaker 2: demanded that journalists write and edit each other's work for
Speaker 2: free and ask the government to foot the bill. And like,
Speaker 2: nothing works like this industry does. And that is, by
Speaker 2: the way, description of how it is.
Speaker 3: Now, that's an incredible summary of how it works. And
Speaker 3: like peer review, you know, we're taught in college anyway
Speaker 3: that this is a good thing. Yea. The fact that
Speaker 3: it's free labor, and not just free labor for science,
Speaker 3: but free labor for the journals themselves. Like it begs
Speaker 3: the question, like what exactly is the publisher even doing
Speaker 3: other than you know, hitting start on the printing press. Fuck,
Speaker 3: which which is the easiest part. Like that's the like
Speaker 3: fucking random house does that shit? Like, what what is
Speaker 3: the what is the power that the that these companies have?
Speaker 3: Like why why wouldn't a university system just start their
Speaker 3: own journal and do this themselves?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean they do. There are some cases
Speaker 2: of that, but like you also you, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: just how kind of everything works in capitalism. There are
Speaker 2: economies of scale. By the time this gets underway, the
Speaker 2: big companies are so big you and your dinky journal, like,
Speaker 2: they'll probably just buy you, right, And if the college
Speaker 2: gets offered money for our journal, well it's money.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Everyone's thinking short term about shit like this, not how
Speaker 2: it fucks you in the long run, you know, And
Speaker 2: again like, no industry works the way scientific publishing does.
Speaker 2: It is such a fucking grift. It's all the grift.
Speaker 2: It's a huge, fucking evil grift.
Speaker 3: God, Dad, you got me mad. This is the kind
Speaker 3: of thing I normally do segments about you got me
Speaker 3: mad about it.
Speaker 2: You can find very good quotes in articles about this,
Speaker 2: including some of the world linked in the show notes,
Speaker 2: where there are science like prominent scientists being like the
Speaker 2: primary barrier to scientific progress is the way scientific publishing works, right,
Speaker 2: Like it's I mean, maybe not right now, more administration's doing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: these are a little older articles, but it's a massive problem.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The ultimate result of the system that Robert Maxwell built
Speaker 2: is one in which, as long as the government maintains
Speaker 2: a priority in funding sciences, the industry is super profitable,
Speaker 2: right the US or whoever pays for research, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 2: And so we'll see what happens to publishing now that
Speaker 2: some of that's starting to change. But uh, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: it's it's interesting.
Speaker 3: It's also such a classic example of you know, rent seeking,
Speaker 3: as economists you call it, because again, the government is
Speaker 3: funding it, the journals are making money off of it.
Speaker 3: Like Maxwell made so much money that his daughter is an.
Speaker 2: Heiress billions, billions.
Speaker 3: And so profiting off of it, but they do not
Speaker 3: put money back into the system, like absolutely, Now they
Speaker 3: are making money off of the production of science, why
Speaker 3: not fund some fucking science. But they don't do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, why would they do that? Why would they
Speaker 2: give any money to anybody that's not That's not what
Speaker 2: they're going to do. They're going to take it to
Speaker 2: as Maxwell's about to do, buy a palace. And again
Speaker 2: he's the least he's not as bad as the guys
Speaker 2: who replace him, right, because he does ultimately he makes
Speaker 2: a lot of times he will make decisions that cost
Speaker 2: him money because a scientist says it's the right thing
Speaker 2: to do, and he does ultimately side with his scientists,
Speaker 2: and there's and he's able to do that because there's
Speaker 2: so much flex there's so much extra profit he can
Speaker 2: afford to. But the guys who replace him aren't aren't
Speaker 2: even going to have that little level of scruples, right,
Speaker 2: They're just not going to give a fuck. And this
Speaker 2: is going to disrupt the timeline of these episodes a
Speaker 2: little bit. But in order to talk about kind of
Speaker 2: where things are today with scientific publishing, I want to
Speaker 2: quote once more from another Guardian article. The publishing business
Speaker 2: is perverse and needless. The Berkeley biologist Michael i And
Speaker 2: wrote in a two thousand and three article for The Guardian,
Speaker 2: declaring that it should be a public scandal. Adrian Sutton,
Speaker 2: a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists are
Speaker 2: all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw
Speaker 2: materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry
Speaker 2: out the quality control on those materials, and then sells
Speaker 2: the same materials back to the customers at a vastly
Speaker 2: inflated price. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends
Speaker 2: on being published, and professional success is especially determined by
Speaker 2: getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow,
Speaker 2: nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential
Speaker 2: scientists of the twentieth century is no longer a viable
Speaker 2: career option under today's system. The father of genetic sequencing,
Speaker 2: Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades
Speaker 2: between his nineteen fifty eight and nineteen eighty Nobel prizes,
Speaker 2: may well have found himself out of a job. That's actually,
Speaker 2: I think a really important point is that so many
Speaker 2: of the foundational discoveries of modernity as we know it
Speaker 2: were not the result of like a team of people
Speaker 2: working in for for a company in order to make
Speaker 2: a thing. It was the result of a scientists to
Speaker 2: had an interest and kind of in a meandering way,
Speaker 2: pursued it for decades until he changed life for every
Speaker 2: human being. Right, Jonas sal Ketty personal crusade against polio.
Speaker 2: You know, like that doesn't happen. It can't happen. And
Speaker 2: this is part of why right, and that's really bad
Speaker 2: for all of us well.
Speaker 3: And part of it is the is the social or
Speaker 3: career pressure of having to publish, which is an I'm
Speaker 3: gonna guess is an entirely different problem like that. That
Speaker 3: is the what scientists careers are based on, is the
Speaker 3: pressure to publish. But it feeds again back into this system,
Speaker 3: like you don't last long in a tenured position if
Speaker 3: you never publish anything.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly, Maxwell, we're back to him now. I just
Speaker 2: I really felt we should go to like, yeah, this
Speaker 2: is how bad things end. Yeah, right, But that's after
Speaker 2: his death. So Maxwell moves out of London. We're still
Speaker 2: in this in the sixties. Here he purchases the Headington
Speaker 2: Hill whole estate in Oxford, which had been built in
Speaker 2: eighteen twenty four and become one of the most iconic
Speaker 2: residences in the country. I'll of Sophie pull up the picture.
Speaker 2: The noble family who had to live there sold it
Speaker 2: off in nineteen fifty three, and Maxwell buys it in
Speaker 2: part because like again, he's not English, he's not naturally
Speaker 2: part of high society, but by buying this palace he
Speaker 2: can kind of force himself to be right. Now he
Speaker 2: can throw these kind of parties that everyone in high
Speaker 2: society will show up at. And he makes this both
Speaker 2: his home and the headquarters of pergam And Press, right,
Speaker 2: and you know, that's kind of the way things work
Speaker 2: in the UK. I think still to this day that
Speaker 2: like you can skip a bunch of levels of the
Speaker 2: social hierarchy if you buy the right house.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: He and Betty had nine children ultimately in nineteen and
Speaker 2: this is his life is never his personal life is
Speaker 2: never easy like this. For all that he's like a
Speaker 2: wealthy monster, he really has a tough life. In nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty seven, he and Betty lose their three year old
Speaker 2: daughter to leukemia. In nineteen sixty one, their oldest son, Michael,
Speaker 2: is in a car crash that leaves him comb abound
Speaker 2: for seven years. He dies finally in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 2: and that nearly a decade, And this is during his
Speaker 2: most productive period as a businessman. His son is just
Speaker 2: in a fucking coma die. It just it kind of
Speaker 2: breaks everyone. Like his family is sort of ruined. As
Speaker 2: a result of this, he and Betty stop talking really
Speaker 2: like they don't. Their relationship is never the same. And
Speaker 2: normally when we say that for a man this rich
Speaker 2: it's because and he does cheat on her a bunch,
Speaker 2: but like in this case, it's because, you know, it's
Speaker 2: just this just breaks their relationship and it breaks their
Speaker 2: ability to kind of care for their other kids, Like
Speaker 2: he stops talking to his surviving children until And I
Speaker 2: hate to make anyone sympathetic to Gilan Maxwell, but in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty one, his youngest daughter, Gilan, at age three,
Speaker 2: tells her mother, Mummy, I exist in an attempt to
Speaker 2: get attention because like after this accident, they're just ignoring
Speaker 2: their kids so much. Like she has to like state
Speaker 2: to her parents, I'm a person at age three.
Speaker 3: So I reported this.
Speaker 2: This was in his biography by Preston, and I believe
Speaker 2: this was reported by one of the Maxwell brothers. And
Speaker 2: again this is this is well before the scandal, so.
Speaker 3: No, no, I know, I'm just like, well, Gillan wouldn't
Speaker 3: remember this, and the parents don't know the kids exist,
Speaker 3: so they probably wouldn't remember it.
Speaker 2: His brothers are old.
Speaker 3: One of the brothers like, oh man, that was a
Speaker 3: real bummer when our three year old sister said, Mummy,
Speaker 3: I exist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that really fucked us all up.
Speaker 1: Actually, yeah, I still don't bad for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not saying you should feel bad for her,
Speaker 2: but this this should tell you, like how bad things
Speaker 2: are in his personal life.
Speaker 1: Not great, still not for a bad for yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He does start to smother her with affection from
Speaker 2: this point forward, right partly as a result of this,
Speaker 2: and she's kind of the only one in his immediate
Speaker 2: family that he acts with love towards. After this, he
Speaker 2: will lash out at his son's and at his wife
Speaker 2: for the rest of his days, but he never really
Speaker 2: does it Gillen. She becomes coddled and is obviously his favorite.
Speaker 2: So again, there we go, There we go. Sympathy ended.
Speaker 2: We're good now, don't have to think about that sad
Speaker 2: three year old anymore. Now. If you recall, Maxwell had
Speaker 2: promised his future wife Betty that during the war he
Speaker 2: would one day be rich and become the prime minister.
Speaker 2: He had obviously already become rich, and in the mid
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties he starts to work towards political power. In
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty four, he runs for Parliament in the constituency
Speaker 2: of Buckingham and he wins as a member of the
Speaker 2: Labor Party. And this is a weird side He identifies
Speaker 2: as a socialist his entire life.
Speaker 4: Really, he identifies as a socialist.
Speaker 2: Yep, he strongly identifies as a socialist.
Speaker 3: So he thinks that like public goods should be available
Speaker 3: to the public at low or no cost, subsidized by
Speaker 3: the government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's the thing.
Speaker 4: But not scientific research, not scientific research.
Speaker 2: That doesn't count. And also unions don't count. I think
Speaker 2: he identifies as a socialist because his mom did and
Speaker 2: he he isn't one. He never acts as one. But
Speaker 2: I think that's just a part of his ego. Is
Speaker 2: like he doesn't he knows his He probably knows his
Speaker 2: mom would not like what he's done with his life
Speaker 2: at this point. But yes, he is, and he is
Speaker 2: a part of the Labor Party, and he is a
Speaker 2: He plays a role in the switch from Labor to
Speaker 2: New Labor Right, which is when the British Labor Party
Speaker 2: jettisons the unions right, like Robert Maxwell is part of
Speaker 2: that process. How what does he do we'll talk about that.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about that. Speaking of things, we'll talk about
Speaker 2: here's ads. So Robert has now gotten himself into parliament,
Speaker 2: is part of Labor and you have to remember again
Speaker 2: he's a socialist and he's also a business owner though,
Speaker 2: and so he hates unions because they compete with his power.
Speaker 2: And so when interviewed after the election, he tells everybody,
Speaker 2: I come from a very far humble farm laboring family
Speaker 2: and would rather cut off my arm than betray my class.
Speaker 2: And it's true that he does come from a humble farm,
Speaker 2: laboring family, but there is no bigger class trader than
Speaker 2: this fucking guy. His political peers who knew him claim
Speaker 2: that he also told them he wanted to become Prime Minister,
Speaker 2: and one colleague, cited in the book fall later quoted
Speaker 2: him as having admitted, well, of course I'm conservative, but
Speaker 2: I'm not a member of the establishment, so I've got
Speaker 2: to become labor, which is a very Trumpian comment, right that, Like,
Speaker 2: I'm not a member of the establishment. I'm a billionaire,
Speaker 2: I own all of science, but I'm not part of
Speaker 2: the establishment fundamentally. So I'm a conservative, but I'm with labor, right,
Speaker 2: I'm actually a progressive somehow. It's like an Elon Musk statement.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an in group out group thing. I were
Speaker 3: mean to me growing up. I'm not a lord. I'm
Speaker 3: not a lord and lady. I'm not invited to social functions.
Speaker 3: Therefore I must join this party.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And he also considers so a big thing.
Speaker 2: Once he gets into labor is he telling He starts
Speaker 2: telling everyone else we have to modernize the Labor Party.
Speaker 2: And what he means by that is our pro union
Speaker 2: attitudes are outdated. We have to stop being pro union
Speaker 2: right now. This is not initially super popular. A lot
Speaker 2: of unions voting in this period of time. Still they
Speaker 2: have not been crushed by Thatcher entirely. Eventually, he switched
Speaker 2: out his chauffeured Rolls Royce for an old land Rover
Speaker 2: to try to portray himself as a man of the people.
Speaker 2: And like, Buddy, a land Rover is still an expensive car.
Speaker 2: Like that's like, no, I'm gonna trade my Maserati for
Speaker 2: a Lambo so people know I'm a working man, right,
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Man, is that chauffeurd? Now I just row over the
Speaker 3: peasants under my own power.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. So this did not have the intended effect,
Speaker 2: and although he was re elected in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 2: he ultimately lost his seat in nineteen seventy and failed
Speaker 2: to win it back during the next cycle. Still, Adam,
Speaker 2: you'll be happy to hear this. He achieved the goal
Speaker 2: of every politician in the sixties and seventies having an
Speaker 2: awkward photo taken with Henry Kissinger. Just look at the
Speaker 2: two of them. Just look and Maxwell's over in the
Speaker 2: corner there, he's just like smiling in the corner, looking
Speaker 2: like a mob boss next to Kissinger. Eh, I love
Speaker 2: this picture.
Speaker 3: That guy's a wheeler dealer. He's drunk already. He's like
Speaker 3: I can smell him based on this photo. Does that
Speaker 3: make sense?
Speaker 4: Almost like mothballs and vodka.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my end. Maybe a little aqua velve in there too.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, he smells like the back room of
Speaker 2: an Italian deli that's actually a mob front.
Speaker 3: He's going, how you're doing, sweetheart? He's like pat and
Speaker 3: the waitresses ass like this guy is such a piece
Speaker 3: of shit.
Speaker 2: It's shocking to me again that he's like he's like
Speaker 2: a Czech Ruthenian Jewish guy. Because if you had told
Speaker 2: me this man was the most Italian fellow ever, I'd
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, that guy is Italian as shit. Look
Speaker 2: at him like he has the face of a mob boss,
Speaker 2: Like you could have put him in the soprano.
Speaker 3: It really is the twentieth century dream, right, Yeah, of
Speaker 3: starting in this you know, little backwater and becoming a
Speaker 3: sort of like poly national wheeler dealer, billionaire player asshole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he does it all, and he is, like again,
Speaker 2: a monster, but the only guy I've ever heard of
Speaker 2: who you can really say like, yeah, he is kind
Speaker 2: of less a self made billionaire, like he did come
Speaker 2: from nothing, Yeah, and then destroyed science.
Speaker 3: Great, I think there's more. I think that was more
Speaker 3: possible after an event like World War Two, where everything
Speaker 3: gets scrambled and you can rush in and pick up
Speaker 3: the pieces. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean yeah, I mean think about it. Both
Speaker 2: Maxwell and Kissinger really are both like they both start
Speaker 2: their lives as like shrapnel from this horrific conflict, persecuted
Speaker 2: by the Nazis, and then the world of possibilities that
Speaker 2: opens up in the wake of the Second World War
Speaker 2: allows both of them to reach these incredibly high levels
Speaker 2: of power. So yeah, I mean, I think you've got
Speaker 2: a really good point there that, like the way the
Speaker 2: world opens up after World War Two makes a lot
Speaker 2: of these guys as improbable lives possible.
Speaker 3: I can't wait for World War three.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be great. It's gonna be thinking.
Speaker 3: About just think about all the new billionaires we're gonna get,
Speaker 3: and I'm gonna be.
Speaker 4: Like, I wish I was a younger man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wish I was just trying to get my
Speaker 3: start after World War Three, you know, after the Boks
Speaker 3: go off and I could build the nuclear mitigation business.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, but maybe we'll maybe we'll get a chance
Speaker 2: to fight some SS guys on a farm, you know.
Speaker 2: You know, at least there's that Adam that happen It
Speaker 2: could happen here. Yeah. Through the late nineteen sixties, Maxwell
Speaker 2: repeatedly tried to expand his empire into news media. He
Speaker 2: attempts to buy News of the World in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: eight and The Sun in nineteen sixty nine, and Rupert
Speaker 2: Murdoch beats him both times. This enrages him. He considers
Speaker 2: himself Rupert Murdock's nemesis. Rupert Murdoch is always like, oh
Speaker 2: I I've never even heard of that guy. Who are
Speaker 2: you talking about? Nemesis?
Speaker 3: Nah, but not making him less sympathetic.
Speaker 2: Though by this part nativism does play a role in
Speaker 2: him losing News of the World because an editorial when
Speaker 2: he's trying to buy it declares, this is a British
Speaker 2: newspaper run by British people. Let's keep it that way.
Speaker 4: What was he considered at the time He was British.
Speaker 2: They knew, yeah, but they figured they found out he'd
Speaker 2: been born Yon. He hadn't been born Yon, but that's
Speaker 2: what they thought.
Speaker 3: This guy's a Ruthenian.
Speaker 2: He's a Ruthenian. Yeah, So his political career is uneven
Speaker 2: at best. Business seemed to be a welcoming place for him,
Speaker 2: at least until late nineteen sixty nine, after he negotiated
Speaker 2: which should have been a great deal to sell pergam
Speaker 2: And Press to a wealthy American investor, Saul Steinberg. Unfortunately
Speaker 2: for our boy, Maxwell illegally concealed the true value of
Speaker 2: the company, basically pretending it was a lot worth more
Speaker 2: than it was via what writer Robert Philpott calls smoke
Speaker 2: in mirrors accounting practices. He gets removed from the board
Speaker 2: of directors in the UK starts an investigation in his
Speaker 2: activities that concludes in seventy one after finding huge amounts
Speaker 2: of fraudulent payments, moved from one department to another to
Speaker 2: hide the cost of other investments that went bad, and
Speaker 2: prop up segments of his business that were struggling. The
Speaker 2: report concluded, Robert Maxwell is not, in our opinion, a
Speaker 2: person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship
Speaker 2: of a public company. And at the end of the story,
Speaker 2: right obviously you know. Yeah. Now five years later he
Speaker 2: takes control of Pergament again. He's running it all and
Speaker 2: his sudden rise and fall earns him the nickname the
Speaker 2: bouncing check like Czeh, which is not bad. It's not bad,
Speaker 2: great work the British press good at some things. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I love that shit. And for the next ten years
Speaker 2: after this unprobable rise back, he goes from strength to strength.
Speaker 2: He buys Europe's largest printing company, he becomes owner of
Speaker 2: The Mirror, that Britain's largest left leaning paper. And now
Speaker 2: that he finally owns a paper, this is how he
Speaker 2: really plays a major role in the shift to new
Speaker 2: labor because he starts using it the biggest left leaning
Speaker 2: paper in the UK, to attack union organizers. He runs
Speaker 2: what Socialist Worker what the Socialist Worker described as a
Speaker 2: smear campaign against Arthur Scargill, head of the mine Workers union.
Speaker 2: This is during a big fight between the mine workers
Speaker 2: and Thatcher. I believe quote Scargill and the socialist values
Speaker 2: he represented were seen as a barrier to the modernization
Speaker 2: of the Labor Party. The vile attacks, which lasted for
Speaker 2: the better part of a year, were baseless, yet they
Speaker 2: did terrible damage. And he does this over and over again. Right,
Speaker 2: he has like a one man war against the unions
Speaker 2: in the UK, wielding the left wing paper to execute it.
Speaker 3: He just has animus for unions because he's a business owner.
Speaker 3: And that's the way the wind is blowing.
Speaker 2: And that's the I think. The way the wind is
Speaker 2: blowing doesn't hurt. I think he is a personal I
Speaker 2: should be able to I know what's best. I should
Speaker 2: be able to make all the decisions. And if you
Speaker 2: got a union, the boss doesn't make all the decisions, right,
Speaker 2: they're restricted to some extent.
Speaker 3: Now, that's what anti us is fundamentally about. It's about
Speaker 3: anyone else having power. Unions are about workers having power,
Speaker 3: and right, the people on top don't want them to
Speaker 3: have the power.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, And Maxwell the socialist uses this big left
Speaker 2: leaning paper as an engine to push labor against unions.
Speaker 2: And unfortunately, while he does this, the paper grows in
Speaker 2: circulation and becomes more profitable than ever because again he's
Speaker 2: really good at the nuts and bolts of running a newspaper.
Speaker 2: Like he's just he's like it's like he's like almost
Speaker 2: like lebron right, Like he's just got this built in
Speaker 2: skill he was bored with for knowing how to make
Speaker 2: a paper profitable. I don't know why we.
Speaker 3: Could use a little bit of that right now, to
Speaker 3: be quite honest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we need another one of those who's not evil.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Now he's got Bezos and Patrick soun Schong.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right, So he buys more publications, he becomes a medium,
Speaker 2: even on such a scale that Bob Bagdikian, the dean
Speaker 2: of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, declared, neither Caesar, nor
Speaker 2: Franklin Roosevelt nor any pope has commanded much power to
Speaker 2: shape information on which so many people depend. Wow, and
Speaker 2: Murdoch is obviously his rival at this time. But this
Speaker 2: is kind of before Murdoch has done most of what
Speaker 2: he's going to get famous for. Like Fox News isn't
Speaker 2: really a thing yet. And Murdoch to a degree cribs
Speaker 2: a little bit from this guy's notes in terms of like, oh, really,
Speaker 2: like he's taking some notes, not that he's not doing
Speaker 2: any of this before, but he's influenced a little bit
Speaker 2: by the degree to which Maxwell is able to turn
Speaker 2: these publications he owns to push his own agendas. And
Speaker 2: he is a famously terrible guy to work for. Per
Speaker 2: a biography in the Times of Israel. He bullied and
Speaker 2: humiliated staff, relentlessly calling his ludicrously titled chief of staff
Speaker 2: at four am one Sunday morning to ask him the time,
Speaker 2: and instilled a culture of distrust and rivalry. He bugged
Speaker 2: his staff, by which I mean he bugged them with
Speaker 2: surveillance devices, spending hours alone listening to the recordings for
Speaker 2: evidence of disloyalty, and even had them followed. Thank Christ.
Speaker 3: Like, dude, you're obsessed with me. You're spending hours alone
Speaker 3: listening to the recordings of me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of flattering, you are.
Speaker 3: What you're really pulling into focus now, is this man
Speaker 3: is a long lost succession character?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, nailed it.
Speaker 3: Where is the Holocaust surviving Ruthenian Czech Jew you know
Speaker 3: who managed to survive and build an empire on that show?
Speaker 3: That's a wonderful character.
Speaker 1: He would have He would have participated in boor on
Speaker 1: the floor. There's no way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, he sounds like he created or on the floor.
Speaker 1: Yeah he is on the floor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the floor. We missed a flashback scene if
Speaker 2: you have machine gunning the ss alas. So this is
Speaker 2: and again to kind of play on the succession vibes.
Speaker 2: His sons are he puts in his business right, and
Speaker 2: he fires them. He fires his son Ian Maxwell because
Speaker 2: like he doesn't have he's not like waiting for him
Speaker 2: when he lands on a plane one day. He instead
Speaker 2: like sends a chauffe a vehicle, and so Maxwell fires
Speaker 2: his kid. And Ian's first words when he gets fired
Speaker 2: or thank Christ, I'm finally out of the madhouse. And
Speaker 2: then three months later he hires Ian back on half
Speaker 2: his salary. He's just such a piece of shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is very success. You're in, you're out, you're up,
Speaker 3: you're down. Yeah, Dad loves you. He doesn't love you.
Speaker 3: You never know where you stand except you'll never be free.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I definitely will never be free. Now. That
Speaker 2: quote comes from a massive piece on Maxwell in the
Speaker 2: Times of Israel, and The Times of Israel's covering him
Speaker 2: in particular because in the mid eighties, after decades of
Speaker 2: really ignoring his Jewish heritage, he meets a guy who's like,
Speaker 2: you should go to Israel, and he becomes all in
Speaker 2: and starts investing massively in the Israeli economy. His wealth
Speaker 2: gives him instant access to the Prime Minister, Yitzak Shmir,
Speaker 2: and he announces his intention, I'm going to put a
Speaker 2: quarter of a billion dollars into Israel. And he normally
Speaker 2: lies when he says stuff like this, but he does that,
Speaker 2: and he uses his profits from the Mirror in order
Speaker 2: to do this, and I'm going to quote from his biography.
Speaker 2: Over the next four years, thanks to his mere group profits,
Speaker 2: Maxwell pumped millions into the country, buying newspapers, investing in
Speaker 2: high tech and pharma companies, and in the process becoming
Speaker 2: the largest single investor in Israel's economy. Maxwell also began
Speaker 2: to pass on useful information to the Masad, and boy
Speaker 2: is he useful to the Masad. In nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 2: he tipped, so there's this scientist, this Israeli scientist, Mordechai Venunu,
Speaker 2: who's part of like Israel's nuclear program, that Israel still
Speaker 2: does not acknowledge that they have nukes. Right, we know
Speaker 2: they like everyone knows, but it's like kind of them. Now,
Speaker 2: I don't believe. I still don't believe they've officially acknowledged
Speaker 2: their nuclear capacity. I should actually double check on that.
Speaker 2: I know it took a long time, but they have
Speaker 2: not at this point right like they it is not
Speaker 2: officially stated. It's just kind of a thing everyone knows.
Speaker 2: And Mordecai goes to the British press with insight info
Speaker 2: about Israel's newke Clear program, and one of the papers
Speaker 2: he goes to is The Mirror, and so he leaks
Speaker 2: to Maxwell's paper, and Maxwell gives him up to the
Speaker 2: Massad and he's jailed for eighteen years, which is like
Speaker 2: in journalism terms, bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to give somebody up to a foreign intelligence service
Speaker 3: and then they're.
Speaker 2: Jailed, Yes, real bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, usually they try not to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bad publisher moved. Hey Robert here, and I just
Speaker 2: wanted to come in and note that the story of Mordecai,
Speaker 2: even who knew, was a lot more complicated than just
Speaker 2: Robert Maxwell or The Mirror. The Mirror is not the
Speaker 2: first publication that he linked to. I think he went
Speaker 2: after the Sunday Times first, but Robert Maxwell is involved.
Speaker 2: It's a little bit unclear. It seems like a situation
Speaker 2: where web be more than one person kind of went
Speaker 2: to the Masad about what he was saying. Uh, but yeah,
Speaker 2: Maxwell definitely was involved when somebody else sold the story
Speaker 2: to the Sunday Mirror and he went to the Masad
Speaker 2: over it. So anyway, Mordecai is a very interesting guy, obviously,
Speaker 2: very courageous guy. Story is really worth looking into. I
Speaker 2: also did want to note because we had a question
Speaker 2: about this earlier, Israel still does not officially admit that
Speaker 2: they have nuclear weapons, although they're believed to have somewhere
Speaker 2: between like one and four hundred warheads. It's that their
Speaker 2: kind of official defense posture strategy is to neither confirmed
Speaker 2: nor deny that they do. It kind of became clear
Speaker 2: in the late seventies that they did, but this is
Speaker 2: not something that is like officially admitted. So anyway, just
Speaker 2: wanted to add that clarification. Now, there are allegations, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: because he's involved in the Massad and he definitely is,
Speaker 2: there's also insane allegations, right, like you can find every
Speaker 2: conspiracy connected to this guy, and he's basically framed as
Speaker 2: like having been a major massad agent, and that's just
Speaker 2: really not accurate. One of the big things you'll hear
Speaker 2: is that and this comes from the book Robert Maxwell
Speaker 2: Israel Super Spy, which is say somewhat exaggerated. And they
Speaker 2: alleged that he stole a piece of surveillance software called
Speaker 2: Promise without an E, which was programmed to let law
Speaker 2: enforcement agencies track criminals and having a backdoor installed in it.
Speaker 2: And the Baltimore Sun sums up their argument. They report
Speaker 2: that Maxwell sold the program to most of the important
Speaker 2: government intelligence services in the world at a personal profit
Speaker 2: of more than half a billion dollars. Into the program,
Speaker 2: they write, Israeli technicians collaborating with Maxwell implanted an electric
Speaker 2: trap door that allowed Israeli intelligence to tap many of
Speaker 2: the highest state secrets of the Soviet Union, Britain, the US,
Speaker 2: and other nations. And this is not true, and it's
Speaker 2: also not true in a way that is blaming is
Speaker 2: denying what the US government did, because Promise is a
Speaker 2: real thing and it really was used to tap a
Speaker 2: bunch of governments. But the US government was the inciting
Speaker 2: agent here, right, this is one of ours. Now Maxwell
Speaker 2: is involved, I'm going to explain what happened. So this
Speaker 2: software was designed by a software developer in Washington called
Speaker 2: inns Law, so prosecutors could monitor case records and keep
Speaker 2: track of different people in the system. Right, Like, that
Speaker 2: is the purpose, So prosecutors can monitor the progression of
Speaker 2: cases against different acused criminals. It was developed under a
Speaker 2: Department of Justice grants, so the dog was licensed to
Speaker 2: use it. But the license said the government cannot modify,
Speaker 2: create derivative versions of it, or sell it. And the
Speaker 2: Reagan Administration's like, oh, fuck it, what do we just
Speaker 2: do that anyway?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Per an article in The New Statesman, Under the Ronald
Speaker 2: Reagan administration's covert intelligence initiative known as Follow the Money,
Speaker 2: that the NSA misappropriated promise for sale to banks in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty two, the version of promise sold by the
Speaker 2: NSA had been espionage enabled through a backdoor in the program,
Speaker 2: allowing the agency to covertly conduct real time electronic surveillance
Speaker 2: of the flow of money to suspected terrorists and other
Speaker 2: perceived threats to US national interests. A letter from the
Speaker 2: US Department of Justice in nineteen eighty five, later obtained
Speaker 2: by ins Law because the company suits the shit out
Speaker 2: of the government for this documented more plans for covert
Speaker 2: sale and distribution of the espionage enabled version of Promise,
Speaker 2: this time to governments in the Middle East, which would
Speaker 2: surreptitiously allow the US to spy on foreign intelligence agencies.
Speaker 2: The letter outlined how sales of the software were to
Speaker 2: be facilitated by the late Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mafus
Speaker 2: and the arms dealers Adnan Koshogi and manuchre Gorbanafar. Promise
Speaker 2: should be delivered without paperwork, customs or delay, it stated,
Speaker 2: and all of the transactions paid for through a Swiss
Speaker 2: bank account. So number one, this is on us. The
Speaker 2: Massad does not start this program and they don't put
Speaker 2: the back It's not Israeli technicians. You put the back door,
Speaker 2: and Reagan's guys do, right, A bunch of the shadiest
Speaker 2: op Now, Israel does get involved in this, and they
Speaker 2: do profit from this, but it starts with us. A
Speaker 2: bunch of the shadiest operators in the nineteen eighties are
Speaker 2: allowed to sell privated versions of Promise. Basically, the Attorney
Speaker 2: General under Reagan ed Meese will give you the like
Speaker 2: basically license you to sell pirated compromised versions of promise
Speaker 2: to foreign governments if you're his friend. Like, that's how
Speaker 2: that's part of how this works. It's like a way
Speaker 2: the Reagan administration is like rewarding loyal people. Is like, hey,
Speaker 2: you've got a good Hey you did us good and
Speaker 2: you've got a good connection over in you know, Ecuador
Speaker 2: or whatever. Why don't we let you sell this to
Speaker 2: their government And then we get a backdoor into the government.
Speaker 2: And this guy gets to make some money, right and
Speaker 2: one of the people who gets tapped as a result
Speaker 2: of this program because they want to sell promise to Iraq,
Speaker 2: Libya and several other Middle Eastern countries and this is hard,
Speaker 2: so they enlist the help of a Masad guy named
Speaker 2: Rafi Eitan, And that guy in the Massad is like,
Speaker 2: maybe a guy at the Massad isn't the best dude
Speaker 2: to sell to Iraq, But you know who can sell
Speaker 2: shit to anybody? Bobby Maxwell, baby, And that's where he
Speaker 2: comes into this. Right now, Gordon Thomas, who's the author
Speaker 2: of that Israel Super Spy book, will claim he's the one.
Speaker 2: He's the source of the claim that Maxwell makes half
Speaker 2: a billion in licenses doing this. I don't know how
Speaker 2: much Maxwell really makes, but he doesn't start like he is.
Speaker 2: He's kind of a middleman in the process, and Thomas
Speaker 2: portrays him as like at the core of the process.
Speaker 2: But this is like fucked up, and he does sell.
Speaker 2: He sells, i think to the Soviet Union, he sells
Speaker 2: to a shitload of governments that allows the US to
Speaker 2: spy on them, and he profits personally from this. So
Speaker 2: this is like a lot of skulduggery it's involved in.
Speaker 2: It's just a lot more centered on ed Meeson the
Speaker 2: Reagan administration than some of these other claims make. And
Speaker 2: obviously Israel profits from this too because they are using
Speaker 2: Maxwell to sell it to countries that they want intel on, right,
Speaker 2: So that is happening. That is a part of this story,
Speaker 2: it's just not the start of it. Now. There are
Speaker 2: numerous allegations of Maxwell's fingers in arms dealers that the
Speaker 2: Israeli government found useful to and some of these are true,
Speaker 2: but it's not. It's often portrayed as he is an
Speaker 2: arms dealer. He's not. He is a guy who knows logistics,
Speaker 2: and so when a friend is like, hey, we need
Speaker 2: the shipment to get through this port, He's like I
Speaker 2: know guys there, I'll make sure it moves right. He's
Speaker 2: a you know, that's the kind of thing he's useful for.
Speaker 2: And so's he is connected to the Masad because he's
Speaker 2: a powerful, rich businessman who desperately wants to prove his
Speaker 2: loyalty to the country, to like to Israel, and has
Speaker 2: connections everywhere, and that's kind of his use. And there's
Speaker 2: a much more accurate look at his spying and his
Speaker 2: involvement in intelligence agencies in the book Foreign Body, The
Speaker 2: Secret Life of Robert Maxwell by Russell Davies, and Davies
Speaker 2: outlines the dimensions of these shady dealings in a way
Speaker 2: that I think is a lot more accurate, because he
Speaker 2: argues it's hard to imagine Maxwell himself doing an arms
Speaker 2: deal directly, right quote, but he could certainly have been
Speaker 2: of use securing the cooperation of foreign governments when it
Speaker 2: came to routing illicit cargoes through their unadvertised and outlawed destinations. Maxwell,
Speaker 2: he argues, would have been insulted to have been accused
Speaker 2: of working as a common spy or agent, because again,
Speaker 2: he is on first a first name basis with every
Speaker 2: Prime minister of Israel during this period of time, right, like,
Speaker 2: he's not like an employee of the Massade. He is
Speaker 2: incredibly he's way he's so highly connected. By nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 2: Maxwell estimated his own net worth at about four billion dollars,
Speaker 2: and the parties he threw, attended by everyone who was
Speaker 2: anyone in UK politics, were legendary. John Preston describes his
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty eight birthday an event that had to take
Speaker 2: three days because more than three thousand people attended. There's
Speaker 2: like tiers of guests in terms of like which day
Speaker 2: you're allowed to be at. Wow, it's it's it's fucked up.
Speaker 3: It really seems like, you know, he did some bad shit,
Speaker 3: but he wins me back with the parties. The parties
Speaker 3: sound great.
Speaker 2: The parties sound great. The arm stealing, the spying on
Speaker 2: every foreign government in the world, for the CIA and
Speaker 2: the Massade. I don't love that. But the parties. There's
Speaker 2: one like Margaret Thatcher gives a speech at his birthday
Speaker 2: this year where she talks about how awesome she is
Speaker 2: because he doesn't like her. They're like enemies in public,
Speaker 2: but she's like, I think he secretly likes me, and
Speaker 2: then explains all the ways that she thinks she's cool.
Speaker 2: Like it's such a fucking Thatcher moment. Oh that said,
Speaker 2: it is sick. I want to read a quote from
Speaker 2: John Preston's book that sort of gives you a description
Speaker 2: of the vibe of this party. On the night of
Speaker 2: the first party, guests passed down a receiving line where
Speaker 2: they were greeted by Maxwell, Betty, and all seven of
Speaker 2: their children. Some of the guests arrived bearing birthday presents.
Speaker 2: The broadcaster David Frost turned up with a five hundred
Speaker 2: pound bottle of wine. Unaware of how much it had cost,
Speaker 2: Maxwell chef later tipped it into a beef stew. As
Speaker 2: guests sipped their drinks, the band of the Cold Stream
Speaker 2: Guards marched back and forth across the lawn. Before dinner started,
Speaker 2: Robert and Betty made their formal entrance into the marquis
Speaker 2: to an announcement from the Master of Ceremonies, Ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 2: would you please welcome your host and hostess, Robert and
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Maxwell, and a fanfare of Harold trumpetears. Everyone stood
Speaker 2: to applaud a lot with a row of medals pinned
Speaker 2: to his black tailcoat. Maxwell was wearing a large white
Speaker 2: enamel cross on a chain around his neck. This was
Speaker 2: the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a decoration
Speaker 2: normally given to foreign heads of state and recognition of
Speaker 2: outstanding civilian or military conduct. Betty Maxwell wore a dress
Speaker 2: made of gold embroidered tul over yellow taffeta silk. So
Speaker 2: like parties, parties like real rich people parties.
Speaker 3: See I missed the boat with World War two. If
Speaker 3: I had just been able to murder a couple Germans,
Speaker 3: a couple dozen Germans, I could have been on the
Speaker 3: road to be being covered in silver taffeta. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: having Margaret Thatcher sing my praises.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of, we'll sing her own praises at your birthday. Yeah,
Speaker 2: classic Thatcher. Make it all about her.
Speaker 3: The greatest generation though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely the greatest generation. There's like a really funny
Speaker 2: moment from this where like one of his friends goes,
Speaker 2: like during this party kind of like finds his way
Speaker 2: walking around like the back of the house outside of
Speaker 2: like the areas they're supposed to be partying in, and
Speaker 2: notices that, like, well, all the furniture outside of like
Speaker 2: the big public areas kind of looks like shit and
Speaker 2: all of the books on his bookshelf for fake, Like
Speaker 2: they're made out of cardboard. They're like fake books. Now,
Speaker 2: Preston says, only the books concealing hy stereo system were fake.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but this is kind of evidence that
Speaker 2: as rich as he was on paper, and this is
Speaker 2: the thing, he's worth four point four billion on paper
Speaker 2: or something like that, he's not actually doing as well
Speaker 2: as it seems, right, And nineteen ninety eight is nearer
Speaker 2: to the end of his time in the limelight than
Speaker 2: the beginning. That year, the same year as this fucking party,
Speaker 2: he spends two point six billion dollars buying US publisher McMillan,
Speaker 2: and that's a billion dollars more than its own shareholders
Speaker 2: value it at. Like he kind of as a musk
Speaker 2: where he's like, I'll offer you a two point six
Speaker 2: billion and they're like, we were not going to ask
Speaker 2: for that much, but oh fucking k right. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: had to borrow from forty four banks to afford it.
Speaker 2: And he does this not because again he's got profitable businesses.
Speaker 2: Preston says, this is out of desperation because Murdoch is
Speaker 2: buying more and more publishers and he's like desperate to win.
Speaker 2: He doesn't want Murdoch to get McMillan, so he kind
Speaker 2: of endangers his entire empire buying it in order to
Speaker 2: beat Rupert Murdoch. And again, all Murdoch will say about
Speaker 2: this guy is like, who huh what guy?
Speaker 3: That must make him even angrier. I don't know her,
Speaker 3: says Rupert Murdoch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, back
Speaker 2: to being evil. In March of nineteen ninety one, he
Speaker 2: started making a series of ill advised acquisitions in New
Speaker 2: York media. He purchased the New York Daily News, which
Speaker 2: was like the oldest daily paper in New York at
Speaker 2: the time, but also in disastrous financial condition. There's like
Speaker 2: a horrible strike going on. It is not a good bye.
Speaker 2: It's such a bad buye. The owners pay him sixty
Speaker 2: million dollars to take it, and they pay him that
Speaker 2: because it's in a lot more debt than that.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Right, it's such a bad buy.
Speaker 3: So they're getting off scott free by paying a different
Speaker 3: dude to own it.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, please take this shit and all of its
Speaker 2: debts off of our fucking hands.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And again his assumption is because in the past. Every
Speaker 2: time he's got a paper, he's been able to turn
Speaker 2: it around right and make it soup. He's got this skill.
Speaker 2: So he sails his yacht, the Lady Gillin, named after
Speaker 2: his daughter, into the City harbor to take control of
Speaker 2: the paper. He gives us like grand speech on the street,
Speaker 2: and like there's all these articles in New York papers
Speaker 2: being like the savior of New York media, you know.
Speaker 2: And there's also a bunch of people who had worked
Speaker 2: for him in different papers in the UK, being like
Speaker 2: he's actually a giant dick. No one can stand to
Speaker 2: work for him. This is not going to end well
Speaker 2: for any of you, and it sure as shit doesn't. Right,
Speaker 2: So the eighties comes to an end, sadly, I know
Speaker 2: we're all still mourning that. And suddenly there's a big
Speaker 2: economic pop, right, and interest rates skyrocket and all all
Speaker 2: of this debt that he had taken on to keep
Speaker 2: building this. He's always robbing Peter to pay Paul, like
Speaker 2: a certain guy that we all know about right now.
Speaker 2: Like he's always in debt to a lot of banks
Speaker 2: for all this stuff. And suddenly it gets a lot
Speaker 2: more expensive to service that debt. And so in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one. He has to sell pergam and press in order,
Speaker 2: and that's his baby, in order to keep everything else afloat.
Speaker 2: And that's also the profitable part of his empire. So
Speaker 2: he has now sold the golden goose to pay for
Speaker 2: the shit that's horribly in debt that he can't make
Speaker 2: a profit on. Not a great move. So what do
Speaker 2: you do if you're a guy who sucks ass and
Speaker 2: hates unions and hates your employees and suddenly you're out
Speaker 2: of money and you need to keep funding all of
Speaker 2: this debt? Where do you go when interest rates are
Speaker 2: fucked and you simply can't take any more loans from banks?
Speaker 3: Racking my brain, where do you go?
Speaker 2: Well, you know where. There's a lot of money in
Speaker 2: any given company that's been around this long with a
Speaker 2: large workforce.
Speaker 4: The pension plan. He raids the pension plan.
Speaker 2: He raids the pinch. He steals nearly half a billion
Speaker 2: dollars from the pension plan.
Speaker 5: Now I'm mad. Now I don't like him, Yeah, oh,
Speaker 5: now I don't like him. He destroys so many people's
Speaker 5: lives and retirements. He fucking robs this pension plan, right,
Speaker 5: and it's not even enough because his debts are well
Speaker 5: over a billion dollars. Banks are hounding him constantly. He
Speaker 5: starts gambling and London casinos. All he'll do is like
Speaker 5: gamble and then watch James Bond movies while leading takeout.
Speaker 5: And this is kind of his mental state. He's in
Speaker 5: this period of collapse. And also right around this time,
Speaker 5: it becomes known that he is being investigated for war
Speaker 5: crimes in World War Two because he wrote letters to
Speaker 5: his wife and talked about him like to journalists about
Speaker 5: like again I'm machined gun prisoners. Yeah, and again it's
Speaker 5: the least bad thing he ever did. But so he's
Speaker 5: got that too. He's got all these debts. Empire is
Speaker 5: about to collapse. When he set sail on his yacht,
Speaker 5: the Lady Gillen on November first, nineteen ninety one. He's
Speaker 5: getting letters constantly from different banks being like, hey, this
Speaker 5: is overdue. Can you even prove that you're solvent in anymore?
Speaker 5: Swiss Bank is threatening to go public and it has
Speaker 5: told the London police that he's broken a bunch of laws.
Speaker 5: So he's in a lot of trouble. And around five
Speaker 5: am on November first, I think it's November first, nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety one, he falls overboard off the stem of his
Speaker 5: yacht as it passes towards Tenerif, and his body is
Speaker 5: fished out of the ocean about twelve hours later by
Speaker 5: a Spanish National Rescue Service helicopter. Nobody knows precisely what happened.
Speaker 5: The thing that you will encounter most commonly is that
Speaker 5: the Masad had him killed. And I don't see any
Speaker 5: reason to believe that. For one thing, he receives a
Speaker 5: hero's funeral in Israel, like, attended by the Prime Minister
Speaker 5: and the Israeli President Shimone Perez is there, right, They
Speaker 5: give him like okay, so this is this is what
Speaker 5: the Israeli president says at his funeral. Kings and barons
Speaker 5: besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature.
Speaker 5: But there are like allegations that basically he tried to
Speaker 5: blackmail the Masade to get them to pay him four
Speaker 5: hundred million dollars, and it, I don't know, doesn't seem
Speaker 5: like the kind of move he'd have made. Again, he's
Speaker 5: a steal the pension plan guy.
Speaker 3: People treat these like spy agencies, as though like they
Speaker 3: always have reason to kill anybody at any time. Yes,
Speaker 3: that Like there's some they're like a dau Sex makina
Speaker 3: that people use for a simple explanation to make themselves
Speaker 3: seem smart, where like why would they why?
Speaker 2: Why? Like for what they Israel wasn't angry at him.
Speaker 3: It's the most annoying thing in the history analysis is
Speaker 3: people making this claim, well the mesade Adam, why what
Speaker 3: is that? You know?
Speaker 2: Again, he was the number one investor over there. He
Speaker 2: was extremely popular there. He had destroyed the pensions of
Speaker 2: huge numbers of people in the UK. Like, if anyone
Speaker 2: wanted to kill him, it's a bunch of them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he was about to fuck up a lot of
Speaker 2: US publishing. But like, yeah, it's just one of those
Speaker 2: things where there are three different coroner reports and they
Speaker 2: don't agree, and so that'll often get like and none
Speaker 2: of the coroners could agree. But what the coroners can't
Speaker 2: agree on is did he have a heart attack or
Speaker 2: did he jump in? And both are he's sixty, he
Speaker 2: was in bad health. It's also it's perfectly possible either
Speaker 2: he knew that he was fucked and he wanted to
Speaker 2: die right or that he had a heart attack because
Speaker 2: he was super stressed out in sixty eight and not
Speaker 2: in good health, and he fell off his boat.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Both of those are just likelier to me than like
Speaker 2: the Masade poisoned him with an untraceable poison on his boat,
Speaker 2: so it looked like he fell over. Why Like again,
Speaker 2: he's being hounded by all of the governments. He knows
Speaker 2: he's heading to prison. Maybe he kills himself. Maybe he
Speaker 2: has a heart attack. I don't really have trouble bleeding either.
Speaker 2: He is initially mourned as like this great figure because
Speaker 2: all of this hasn't come out yet. But a few
Speaker 2: weeks after his death, everything I've told you is published.
Speaker 2: That he stole four hundred million pounds from pension funds,
Speaker 2: that he there were seven hundred and sixty three million
Speaker 2: British pounds missing from his companies. He has described as
Speaker 2: the crook of the century by Newsweek magazine.
Speaker 3: Wow and not up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe he's one of them.
Speaker 3: Like things finally caught up with old Bobby Maxwell, murdering
Speaker 3: the shared people, no share, destroying scientific publishing. Nah, he's fine,
Speaker 3: but stealing pension funds that'll get you, which does suck?
Speaker 2: Like that is really bad? Yeah, one of his worst things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, absolutely no, that made me up until up
Speaker 3: until now he was sort of like debonair and air dwell,
Speaker 3: you know, yeah, I was.
Speaker 4: I was enjoying the story. Now I'm now I'm pissed off.
Speaker 2: Now I'm pissed off.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so his sons, who are declared innocent of any
Speaker 2: involvement in the conspiracy, maybe they were a part of it,
Speaker 2: but I don't have trouble believing that he just didn't
Speaker 2: respect his kids enough to tell them what he was doing. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: of course they have to take over, and they're left
Speaker 2: with like four hundred million pounds or so. They've got
Speaker 2: to like figure out how to put together. His assets
Speaker 2: are sold off, most of like the the what are
Speaker 2: called the Maxwell pensioners, right, and these are the people
Speaker 2: who lost their retirement savings, get half or less of
Speaker 2: what they were owed, you know, as a result of
Speaker 2: kind of this liquidation process. But Gillan stays comfortable for
Speaker 2: a while, you know, a while.
Speaker 3: Well, I didn't think. I didn't think I could end
Speaker 3: with a lower opinion of Gillan Maxwell. I didn't anticipate
Speaker 3: that this.
Speaker 2: Is yeah shocking, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Oh, she's also a criminal nipple baby.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also didn't really call her
Speaker 2: dad being so cool up until age twenty three, because
Speaker 2: he's really knocking it out of the park up until.
Speaker 3: Age twenty three.
Speaker 2: Great first act, like yeah, yeah, it's like one of
Speaker 2: those movies that like really falls apart in the second half,
Speaker 2: like he could have used more editing. I was really
Speaker 2: on board.
Speaker 3: Well, it's it's funny how much attracts sort of the
Speaker 3: standard you know, the it's a citizen Kane or a
Speaker 3: uh yeah, what's his face? From Succession style story where
Speaker 3: it's like inspiring in the beginning, all turns wrong, you know,
Speaker 3: larger than life, all these insane details. He's present at
Speaker 3: every moment in history, like the sort of figure who
Speaker 3: you know, if I read a novel about this guy,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't believe it, you know.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, yeah, it is like and again
Speaker 2: he did lie about a lot of it unnecessarily. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So uh that's uh, that's that's where we are, you know,
Speaker 2: that's that's this guy's life. Thanks for sitting and learning
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 3: Incredible, he's what a what a bastard? I'm now behind.
Speaker 2: Him, Yeah, yeah, we're now behind him. Well, got any
Speaker 2: pluggables to plug. We've kept you here long enough.
Speaker 3: I do I uh once again in my podcast is
Speaker 3: called factually I do uh do that on YouTube or
Speaker 3: ELSEO do video monologues and uh yeah, you can check
Speaker 3: out my stand up special Unmedicated on dropout right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Awesome, Uh well, awesome check out that. Check out
Speaker 2: drop out. And you know, if you're going to machine
Speaker 2: gun the SS, don't go on to destroy scientific publishing
Speaker 2: and then hundreds of millions of dollars in pension funds.
Speaker 2: That's my advice to our listeners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and don't tell people you did it so proudly.
Speaker 3: Don't be like I committed a war crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe don't destroy your whole life. Competing with Rupert
Speaker 2: Murdoch and being a dick is such a weird way
Speaker 2: to blow your life up. Oh, man, so funny.
Speaker 3: Competing in an asshole contest with Rupert Murdoch not a
Speaker 3: way to.
Speaker 2: Go and not even being noticed. Man was like, it is.
Speaker 2: I I don't want to ever give it to Rupert,
Speaker 2: But there's some Some of the great hater moments are
Speaker 2: just Rupert being like, care we talking about all right?
Speaker 2: Well that's the episode everybody good night and good luck.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Adam really appreciate you. Can't wait to get
Speaker 2: these episodes out and we're done, goodbye.
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