Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Lord Aspinall: The Gambling King of London
Aired: 2023-11-16
Duration: 01:13:40


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=== Becoming the Gorilla's Friend (15:33) ===

[00:01:50]  And today is part two on our series on John Aspinall, the gambling king of London in the 50s and 60s.
[00:01:59]  Rocket Aye, that made him sound much cooler than he actually is.
[00:02:03]  Ah, he is fun.
[00:02:05]  He is fun.
[00:02:05]  Today, we're going to get a lot of stories about zoo animals maiming people.
[00:02:09]  So I hope everybody's ready for that.
[00:02:11]  And I hope our guest, Ed Zittron, is ready for that.
[00:02:13]  Ed, welcome back.
[00:02:15]  I'm ready.
[00:02:16]  I'm ready to hear about some violent zoo animals.
[00:02:18]  Excellent.
[00:02:19]  All right.
[00:02:19]  Well, here is the fucking story.
[00:02:22]  So, John Aspinall, you know, is kind of the 50s are starting to come to a close, is in a great, he's pretty happy, right?
[00:02:32]  He's running these rotating games of chance that are in this legal gray area.
[00:02:35]  He's making a lot of money doing it.
[00:02:37]  He's starting to collect, you know, wild animals, starting to build his private zoo.
[00:02:43]  But things are going to like kind of have a sudden shift for him.
[00:02:47]  And it's caused by his mom, right?
[00:02:50]  She is sort of, you know, one of the people who's kind of renting houses for their parties.
[00:02:55]  She's a kind of a key aspect of all this.
[00:02:57]  And the Lady Osborne makes a mistake one week in 1958, and she rents the wrong house for a shimmy party because it's outside of their usual range.
[00:03:07]  And it's under the jurisdiction of the Paddington police, who are not chill with what John Aspinall is doing for reasons that have never really been made clear to me.
[00:03:16]  But this is not a friendly police station.
[00:03:18]  I don't know why.
[00:03:19]  But yeah.
[00:03:20]  So there's, and part of what seems to have happened is I think they pissed off one of these rich people who loses a bunch of money at their games because it looks like he kind of drops a dime on them to the Paddington cops.
[00:03:33]  And so for the very first time, the police carry out a raid on one of these games he's playing.
[00:03:38]  And because this is the kind of game that it is, they arrest a bunch of like lords and ladies along with Aspinall and his friends.
[00:03:45]  It's this like big moment in high society because like there's footage, like pictures of the cops leading out all of these very, very highly born people and taking them into custody.
[00:03:56]  Very, this kind of gives you an idea of sort of the tenor of that night.
[00:04:00]  When the police enter the house, Lady Osborne demands a list of the charges against them.
[00:04:05]  And the police inspector says that they're being charged with keeping a common gambling house.
[00:04:10]  And her response is, young man, there was nothing common in this house until you entered it.
[00:04:17]  On his ass.
[00:04:18]  Got him.
[00:04:18]  Yeah.
[00:04:19]  I'm sure you love that bit.
[00:04:20]  I'm sure.
[00:04:21]  Koff was like, oh, Ans, perfect.
[00:04:24]  That makes sense.
[00:04:25]  Sorry.
[00:04:25]  Sorry about that.
[00:04:26]  What a baddie of a comment.
[00:04:28]  Yeah, it really is.
[00:04:30]  That's perfect.
[00:04:30]  That's classic England.
[00:04:32]  Now, that said, if you are an above-room temperature person, you're probably not surprised to hear that nothing happens as a result of this legal case, right?
[00:04:40]  Not only does Aspinall have money, but like they have arrested all of the people who are running the country.
[00:04:45]  So it doesn't go anywhere.
[00:04:48]  He's a little bit.
[00:04:49]  Yeah.
[00:04:50]  Yeah.
[00:04:51]  Not only are their charges dismissed, but the arrest of all these people kind of radicalizes a number of influential Britons.
[00:04:58]  And in 1960, Parliament passes what became known as Aspinall's law, the Gaming Act, which legalizes...
[00:05:05]  You never want a law named after you.
[00:05:07]  No, it's always a bad thing.
[00:05:10]  Like Eric's disease also a bad one.
[00:05:13]  Yeah, also a bad one.
[00:05:15]  But this makes it legal for people to run casinos in London, which is what this is why London becomes the gambling capital of Europe for a while, right?
[00:05:23]  It's because of Aspinall's law.
[00:05:26]  So the downside of this is that now he has competition, right?
[00:05:30]  Back when it was this gray area, he'd kind of figured out a sweet spot.
[00:05:33]  There was nobody else really running these chimney games on the same scale that he is.
[00:05:37]  Now anyone can run a chimi game.
[00:05:39]  So Aspinall has to kind of think bigger.
[00:05:42]  And on November 12, 1962, he opens his ultimate gaming hall, the Claremont.
[00:05:48]  Now, this is in like a neighborhood in London called Mayfair, which is like super rich neighborhood, right?
[00:05:54]  This is like a very central.
[00:05:55]  Yeah.
[00:05:57]  It's like a nice place to do this kind of shit.
[00:06:00]  And he, you know, he has this, if you look at videos from this gaming hall, it's like very high ceilings, huge chandeliers.
[00:06:08]  Like it's a place for the wealthy and the and the well-born to feel comfortable.
[00:06:13]  Like Crockford, he limits his business to a pretty select clientele.
[00:06:16]  Kind of as time goes on, he opens it up more to like new money.
[00:06:20]  But certainly at the start, it's really focused on the ancestrally wealthy.
[00:06:24]  And there's this kind of two-tiered membership structure.
[00:06:27]  That's also how the club is run.
[00:06:30]  The people who are kind of technically his employees, although he's not open about this, are called the blues.
[00:06:36]  And these are mostly, some of them are like highborn people who don't have a lot of money, but are good gamblers.
[00:06:42]  Some of them are like people of more common stock who are just really good gamblers, but they are his house gamblers.
[00:06:48]  And their goal is not to like win in order to get money.
[00:06:52]  Sometimes they do that, but it's largely if you're really good, you can kind of influence games to keep them running, right?
[00:06:58]  To keep them going longer, because the longer different games go on, the longer a hand goes on, the more money gets put in, right?
[00:07:05]  And since the house is taking a cut out of every pot, that works out better for you, right?
[00:07:10]  You don't need your house guys to win, but you need them to keep the game going so the pot is bigger and you get a bigger cut, right?
[00:07:16]  And so these guys, the blues, they get free membership in the club and they receive a basic salary for their work.
[00:07:23]  The reds are the marks, and these are the sons of power and prestige who he's going to rob blind, right?
[00:07:29]  Now, a couple of years after the Claremont opens in 1968, John Aspinall opens his zoo doors to, I say the public.
[00:07:36]  It's mostly, it is a private zoo, so you have to pay to get in, but it becomes like, this is the zoo you go to if you're rich, right?
[00:07:43]  You're not going to like the London zoo, right?
[00:07:45]  That's where common people go to look at endangered animals.
[00:07:49]  You're going to go to Aspinall Zoo, right?
[00:07:53]  Now, the fact that he's opened his home zoo to the public is against the express advice of like expert zookeepers he had consulted who didn't think that he had like the temperament to safely run a zoo, which turns out to be a wise concern.
[00:08:08]  But he also has this very unique view on the care of animals, right?
[00:08:12]  He thinks that they should be offered different food regularly so that they have like a varied diet and so that their diet is more exciting.
[00:08:19]  He thinks it bores them, which he's kind of right about.
[00:08:22]  And he also thinks that they need constant stimuli, which is true.
[00:08:27]  I'm also sorry, but I never really considered one's temperament a feature of a zoo, just because generally a zoo is not controlled by one person.
[00:08:37]  Yeah.
[00:08:38]  His is.
[00:08:39]  So he gets to that.
[00:08:40]  That's good.
[00:08:41]  Yeah, it's great.
[00:08:42]  It's good and it's bad.
[00:08:43]  The animals in his zoo, some people argue, seem to have been happier than like most other zoos at the time because he's feeding them.
[00:08:51]  Sometimes he'll bring them like he'll bring his gorillas gourmet food from the Claremont and shit.
[00:08:56]  And he and his zoo keepers spend a lot of time playing physically with the animals, which, as we'll talk about, is dangerous.
[00:09:04]  But the animals seem to be happier.
[00:09:08]  And the best evidence for this is John's peculiar history with gorillas.
[00:09:13]  He meets his first gorilla at the London zoo, this old silverback named Guy.
[00:09:18]  And because he's got money, he's able to basically like convince the zookeepers to let him try to hang out with Guy.
[00:09:24]  You know, he'll feed the animal and stuff.
[00:09:26]  But like Guy is an adult silverback, so he's not super like into being buds.
[00:09:31]  But meeting this animal that like won't be his friend makes John obsessed with the idea that like one day I will make an adult male gorilla be my best friend.
[00:09:40]  You're going to befriend a gorilla.
[00:09:42]  I am going to befriend a gorilla.
[00:09:44]  Yeah.
[00:09:44]  That is my life goal.
[00:09:47]  I've now, I've successfully defrauded a bunch of rich people.
[00:09:50]  Now I move on to defrauding a gorilla.
[00:09:53]  Yeah, I'm going to convince a gorilla.
[00:09:55]  Step one, become the gorilla's friend.
[00:09:57]  Yeah.
[00:09:59]  What a wildlife goal.
[00:10:02]  So he's going to make this gorilla his best friend.
[00:10:05]  So after he moves into Howlitz, you know, he gets this zoo started.
[00:10:08]  He uses some of his infinite gambling money to buy a gorilla.
[00:10:12]  And the first gorilla he gets, again, anyone can have any animal at this point in time if they have enough money.
[00:10:18]  So he finds a gorilla some other rich guy had owned named Kiva.
[00:10:22]  Okay, I was going to say, how does one purchase a gorilla?
[00:10:25]  It's through a gorilla dealer.
[00:10:27]  You know, you've got a guy.
[00:10:28]  Oh, my gorilla guy.
[00:10:29]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:30]  Yeah.
[00:10:31]  I got a gorilla guy.
[00:10:33]  Steve, you're going to gorillas this week?
[00:10:35]  Yeah.
[00:10:35]  Oh, I got some uncut silver, baby.
[00:10:39]  I got a lovely one coming in next week.
[00:10:41]  You love it.
[00:10:42]  He'll be your friend.
[00:10:44]  Unfortunately for John, and more unfortunately for this gorilla named Kivu, Kivu is an abuse victim.
[00:10:51]  This gorilla has PTSD.
[00:10:53]  It's deeply traumatized.
[00:10:55]  Now, to his credit, John recognizes this is a traumatized animal, and he uses human logic to try to comfort it.
[00:11:04]  And he's like, you know what makes a sad man happy is a woman.
[00:11:08]  So he gets a human woman, his mother-in-law, to like sleep in bed with this gorilla to try to soothe it.
[00:11:17]  That's his strategy.
[00:11:19]  Now, gorillas, not aggressive animals to people.
[00:11:24]  And so this doesn't go badly.
[00:11:26]  His mother-in-law doesn't get like hurt or anything.
[00:11:29]  He hates that woman.
[00:11:30]  Let's just start there.
[00:11:31]  Kivu does not seem to like, well, I think John may have disliked that woman.
[00:11:35]  And Kivu does not respond positively to this.
[00:11:39]  Like, again, gorillas are quite peaceful.
[00:11:41]  He doesn't like attack her, but he dies of depression a couple of months into this.
[00:11:46]  Man, that woman was very sad.
[00:11:48]  Women are evil, as we've established.
[00:11:50]  And that woman's.
[00:11:52]  Ow, Sophie.
[00:11:53]  I don't know that that's the lesson.
[00:11:55]  He died in the same way that Padme died in Star Wars.
[00:11:59]  He does.
[00:12:00]  He does.
[00:12:00]  He does a Padme.
[00:12:02]  She made that gorilla have depression.
[00:12:05]  I mean...
[00:12:06]  The gorilla was already depressed, Sophie.
[00:12:08]  And you made it worse.
[00:12:10]  Yeah, with her like horrible womanness.
[00:12:14]  I did not see this turn from you, Sophie.
[00:12:19]  Man, the subreddit's going to have a field day with this one.
[00:12:22]  No, they're finally going to be on my side.
[00:12:27]  So.
[00:12:28]  Wow.
[00:12:28]  You know, John is very sad for a while, but I think this is a commonly known thing.
[00:12:34]  When you lose a gorilla, the only thing to do is double down and get two gorillas.
[00:12:38]  Yeah, you need more gorillas.
[00:12:39]  You need more gorillas, right?
[00:12:40]  The problem was not enough gorillas.
[00:12:44]  The market, I imagine, is quite liquid at this time.
[00:12:46]  So a lot of gorillas floating around.
[00:12:50]  So he buys two more gorillas, a breeding pair, and he sets about making them happy enough to breed.
[00:12:56]  Now, this had been done at the people had bred gorillas at this point.
[00:13:00]  It is kind of considered one of like the brass rings of the zoo world is getting gorillas to breed in captivity.
[00:13:06]  It's not easy, right?
[00:13:07]  Like they are hard to make comfortable enough to be willing to.
[00:13:11]  It's tough to make a gorilla horny.
[00:13:13]  It's tough to make a gorilla horny.
[00:13:15]  So John works on these gorillas.
[00:13:17]  He spends a lot of time intimately with them.
[00:13:19]  He wrestles with them, right?
[00:13:21]  He'll like play games with them physically.
[00:13:23]  He'll cuddle with them at night.
[00:13:25]  And they do seem to come to view him as a friend.
[00:13:28]  And it gets comfortable enough that they start to breed, right?
[00:13:31]  Like he does succeed in making them happy enough that they are willing to make more gorillas.
[00:13:36]  So I guess that's a win for him.
[00:13:38]  He also grows closer with his bears during this period of time, which is an uneven process, right?
[00:13:44]  One day.
[00:13:45]  What a great other thing to happen in this story.
[00:13:49]  Of course, as he romances the gorillas, he successfully improves his friendship with the, it's like fucking like an RPG.
[00:13:58]  Unevenly, I should say, because one day he like enters the bear enclosure without sort of like, you know, there's a certain way you want to enter your bear enclosure to not spook them.
[00:14:10]  He doesn't do this and they maul him.
[00:14:12]  They nearly kill him, right?
[00:14:14]  Like he gets horribly injured by these bears.
[00:14:17]  And his mother around the same time has nearly murdered a wolf that he's trying to treat like a dog, almost rips her throat out.
[00:14:23]  Of course he's got a wolf.
[00:14:24]  Of course he's got a wolf.
[00:14:25]  Yeah, you're going to have a wolf.
[00:14:26]  You can't have a gorilla without a wolf.
[00:14:28]  Can't have a gorilla without a bear.
[00:14:32]  So his family narrowly escapes anything fatal.
[00:14:37]  But this mix of complete dissociation from reality, because he's this wealthy gambling maven, combined with spending all of his free time cuddling with wild animals, leads John to kind of believe that he's gone feral himself, right?
[00:14:50]  Sweet.
[00:14:51]  He would later say, sometimes when I'm pleased to meet a friend, I find myself purring like a tiger.
[00:14:56]  When I make love, I even grunt like a gorilla.
[00:15:00]  That's just how British people sound when they fuck.
[00:15:06]  Yeah, so that's good.
[00:15:07]  That's good.
[00:15:08]  He was so convinced that he has gained some secret insight into the lives of the gorillas that he's willing to bet his life on it.
[00:15:15]  At one point on Safari in Africa, a friend has to rescue him when a male lion starts roaring at the party.
[00:15:22]  And John, you know, there's a lion outside of your camp that's being aggressive.
[00:15:27]  You want to stay inside the camp, you know, where there's lights and men with guns.
[00:15:31]  John charges out into the night and he claims later, I wanted to reason with it.
[00:15:37]  I want to do like, yeah, yeah, that'll work on a lion.
[00:15:42]  That's fine.
[00:15:43]  Come on, mate.
[00:15:44]  Have a word with it.
[00:15:45]  Yeah, they love being reasoned with it.
[00:15:46]  Let me know how it goes.
[00:15:47]  I will be inside the car.
[00:15:49]  Yeah.
[00:15:49]  One of his friends basically has to like tackle him to stop him from getting murdered by this lion.
[00:15:54]  Don't you go down?
[00:15:56]  Let him cook.
[00:15:58]  Let's see what happens.
[00:15:59]  Yeah.
[00:16:00]  So as his collection.
[00:16:03]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:04]  That one mate who saves you from getting eaten by a lion.
[00:16:06]  No, no, I mean, your one mate who goes to try and reason with the lion.
[00:16:09]  Oh, who tries to talk it out with?
[00:16:12]  He's all fucking yelling at the lions, trying to reason with.
[00:16:16]  Steve, come down.
[00:16:18]  So his collection expands and Howlitz becomes, again, it's this kind of the private zoo of the ultra-rich.
[00:16:25]  And by the late 1960s, again, there's a degree to, he's very irresponsible in a lot of ways, but there is a degree to which he's good at this because by the end of the 60s, Aspinall has the largest captive-bred gorilla colony in the world.
[00:16:39]  Which is an achievement, you know, dubiously moral achievement, but that is a thing to have done, right?
[00:16:46]  I genuinely have to say this.
[00:16:48]  Yeah.
[00:16:48]  One through line with this is that this boy was raised kind of cruelly.
[00:16:53]  Yeah.
[00:16:53]  Like he went through the school system.
[00:16:56]  But weirdly enough, I have to wonder if a lot of these people, it's the wokest thing I'll say.
[00:17:03]  Genuinely, if a lot of these people didn't actually have good hearts, but were just torn up by this hellish system that Britain had created called Britain.
[00:17:11]  And just this is the result of this horrifying school system and this horrifying culture is that you just have this fucking nutter who is only able to really be nice to gorillas to make them fuck.

=== A Cruel Upbringing (03:13) ===

[00:17:23]  But he's so utterly broken that he does not know how to communicate with animals or humans alike.
[00:17:28]  He only knows how to exploit them.
[00:17:30]  Depressing.
[00:17:32]  Yeah, no.
[00:17:33]  Nothing about this is depressing.
[00:17:34]  Yeah.
[00:17:35]  It is like fascinating.
[00:17:37]  Like what if he had grown up like in an environment that was like both more nurturing and also where there was some degree of like rigor placed on like, you know, maybe he could have become like a normal wildlife expert, you know?
[00:17:53]  Yeah, he seems to actually have a talent.
[00:17:55]  He has some degree of a gift here.
[00:17:57]  It's just married to this inability to not be crazy about it, right?
[00:18:01]  Yes.
[00:18:01]  Yeah, because he's he's like effectively like a miniature deity like at this point in time, right?
[00:18:08]  Yeah, he thinks he's craving the hunter.
[00:18:11]  Yeah, it's it's something else.
[00:18:13]  So while he, again, there's this undeniable element of skill in what he does, his irresponsibility also gets people horribly, horribly injured and worse in the future.
[00:18:24]  And the first example of this, in 1970, he's got this friend, Annabelle Burley.
[00:18:29]  Annabelle is a social light.
[00:18:31]  She is an aristocratic lady.
[00:18:33]  She's married at that point to a businessman named Mark Burley.
[00:18:37]  And she comes to visit Howlitz with her young son, Robin, and her daughter.
[00:18:42]  She's close with the Aspinall family.
[00:18:44]  Their kids are going to hang out together.
[00:18:46]  And obviously being children, you take a bunch of children to a place like Howlitz.
[00:18:50]  They want to see the animals.
[00:18:51]  Of course.
[00:18:51]  That's what kids are going to want to do.
[00:18:53]  So Lord Aspinall, only too happy to oblige them.
[00:18:56]  Quote, and this is from Pearson's book, The Gamblers.
[00:18:59]  After seeing the gorillas, Aspinall was anxious to take them all to see one of his young female tigers called Zora.
[00:19:04]  Annabelle was not so keen on this and wouldn't let her daughter, India Jane, enter the cage with the other children.
[00:19:10]  Like Damien and Amanda, Rupert was used to the animals, but Robin was nervous, though Aspinall persuaded him to approach the tiger and stroke her.
[00:19:18]  Aspinall turned his back for just one moment.
[00:19:21]  In that split second, the tiger, sensing Robin's fear, rose on her hind legs, put her front paws on his shoulders, and pushed him to the ground.
[00:19:28]  Snarling, she shook the boy's head in her mouth.
[00:19:31]  Seeing what was happening, Aspinall leapt towards the tiger and with a show of strength somehow prized her jaws apart.
[00:19:37]  By doing this, he undoubtedly saved Robin's life.
[00:19:40]  Min Aspinall, that's his wife, meanwhile, was tugging at the tiger's tail, trying to prevent its rear claws tearing at the boy's body.
[00:19:47]  Somehow, between the two of them, they made the tiger drop her prey.
[00:19:50]  Rigid with fear at the nightmare taking place before her eyes, Annabelle watched as James Osborne rushed forward and picked up her son, who was still conscious.
[00:19:57]  Rupert and India Jane were terrified and screaming.
[00:20:00]  As James carried Robin out of the cage to safety, Annabelle could see that the lower left-hand side of his face was crushed past recognition.
[00:20:07]  His mouth had disappeared and part of his jaw was hanging by a thread.
[00:20:11]  So maybe don't let children in a cage tiger.
[00:20:15]  He lives.
[00:20:16]  He will make a recovery.
[00:20:18]  They like, he has to go immediately into surgery.
[00:20:20]  He has like scars.
[00:20:22]  A recovery of sorts, I think, is the way we describe that.
[00:20:26]  Probably some trauma.
[00:20:28]  One would assume PTSD from getting your six medicine.
[00:20:32]  Yeah.
[00:20:33]  Yeah.
[00:20:34]  It's very responsive.

=== Dangerous Animals and Scars (09:37) ===

[00:20:37]  Sounds like a story from like the 1800s, but this is alarmingly recent.
[00:20:42]  Yes.
[00:20:42]  This is like this is like Star Trek is on the air, right?
[00:20:47]  Like yeah.
[00:20:50]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:51]  It's it's it's pretty insane.
[00:20:53]  So despite this, like everyone is horrified by this kind of butt aspenall.
[00:20:59]  He's like, well, this tiger had a bad reaction to this kid.
[00:21:03]  Yeah, it's the tiger.
[00:21:05]  I'm going to keep having my tiger, Tara, sleep in bed with me and my wife, right?
[00:21:10]  That's the good tiger.
[00:21:11]  And, you know, most of his friends are generally loath to question his judgment because they're all in debt to him, right?
[00:21:17]  They're all gambling at the Claremont.
[00:21:19]  And he has a bunch of violent animals.
[00:21:21]  Yeah, he has dangerous animals.
[00:21:24]  Now, kind of by this point, the Claremont set has filled out.
[00:21:27]  Aspenall has made two additional friends to kind of complete his inner circle.
[00:21:32]  And one of these guys is the seventh Earl of Lucan, nicknamed Lucky Lucan after a particularly great gambling hall earlier in his life.
[00:21:40]  Now, Lucan, his like grandfather is the dude who did the charge of the light brigade, right?
[00:21:45]  That is the family that this guy comes from.
[00:21:47]  And as you might guess from the whole charge of the light brigade thing, his family has kind of a reputation for eccentricity.
[00:21:53]  Now, this is not always bad.
[00:21:55]  Lucan's father, who's the sixth Earl of Lucan, becomes like a massively influential Labor Party leader in the House of Lords and is like a very famous progressive in this period.
[00:22:06]  But his son, the seventh Earl of Lucan, does not get along with his dad.
[00:22:10]  He actually hates his father.
[00:22:12]  And part of what this means is that he goes far right, right?
[00:22:16]  Now, this makes him fit in very well because all of the old money set at the Claremont are right-wing guys.
[00:22:21]  But he isn't just like conservative.
[00:22:24]  He develops a specific fascination with the Nazis.
[00:22:27]  And in fact, after Bad Nights Gambling, he would calm himself down by reading Mein Kampf.
[00:22:33]  That's his safe place.
[00:22:35]  That's his putting on like Fraser at night to go to sleep.
[00:22:39]  He's like, Slay the Spire or MLP the Show.
[00:22:43]  Yeah.
[00:22:43]  Like just like something to chill out with, except he chose that book.
[00:22:47]  Yeah.
[00:22:47]  A little bit of Hitler to calm yourself down after a hard day.
[00:22:50]  That's his housewives.
[00:22:52]  That is insane.
[00:22:53]  Yeah, that's his desperate housewives.
[00:22:55]  It's nothing.
[00:22:55]  Married at first sight for him is Hitler.
[00:22:59]  Yeah, that's his chill out.
[00:23:01]  Exactly.
[00:23:02]  That's exactly what it is.
[00:23:03]  It's his married episode.
[00:23:05]  Yeah.
[00:23:06]  Wild.
[00:23:07]  So the other friend who joins their circle is this fellow, James Goldsmith.
[00:23:13]  Now, he's the son of a luxury hotel magnate.
[00:23:16]  He's not, he's not royalty, right?
[00:23:18]  In fact, he's a Jewish guy.
[00:23:20]  His family has to flee Germany ahead of the Nazis, right?
[00:23:23]  He's going to be one of these new money people who kind of remakes the ruling class.
[00:23:27]  You know, he's one of these sort of like guys who sort of, he comes in during this period and becomes one of the most powerful people in the entire country.
[00:23:34]  He's this, he's an Etonian, but he drops out before graduating because he's already is like a kid, a successful entrepreneur.
[00:23:42]  And he basically tells everyone, I'm too rich for this high society clout game bullshit, right?
[00:23:47]  I've made my money.
[00:23:48]  I don't need your approval now.
[00:23:49]  Now you have to get my approval because you're all going broke gambling and I have the fucking cash, right?
[00:23:55]  And he's got, he's a fascinating dude, actually.
[00:23:58]  Goldsmith, in his older adult life, Goldsmith is like this corporate raider dude.
[00:24:02]  He's stripping assets and like destroy.
[00:24:05]  He's one of the men who will destroy industry in Britain, right?
[00:24:08]  Because he's stripping all the and it like strips assets from all these companies.
[00:24:12]  He's this big offshoring guy.
[00:24:14]  He's going to like play a major role in killing, along with this other dude, a friend of his Slater, killing like industry in the UK.
[00:24:23]  But earlier in his life, he has this like wildly romantic and sympathetic backstory.
[00:24:28]  So as a young man, he falls in love with this woman, Maria Borbon.
[00:24:33]  And Maria is, her father is this indigenous Bolivian man, right?
[00:24:36]  Who like, as he's, he's a miner, basically, and he, he kind of lucks into buying this incredibly rich tin vein, which makes him an incredibly wealthy man.
[00:24:46]  And he then moves to the, to Europe because he knows that like the political situation in Bolivia is unstable.
[00:24:54]  And he buys himself a Spanish noble title, right?
[00:24:56]  So he is a, he comes from a very common, you know, he is, he's literally an indigenous man from South America, but he makes himself into a European noble.
[00:25:05]  And he does not want his daughter, Maria, to marry this Jewish man, right?
[00:25:10]  And in fact, tells him when James like tries to come to him for his approval to get married, he's like, we are not in the habit of marrying Jews.
[00:25:18]  Now, James is a piece of shit too.
[00:25:20]  And his response is, well, I'm not in the habit of marrying red Indians.
[00:25:24]  So you know, two racists negotiating a marriage.
[00:25:31]  Racist Uno.
[00:25:32]  Yeah, racist Uno.
[00:25:34]  Now, Maria's dad is insanely rich.
[00:25:37]  So when they try to get married anyway, he has his daughter kidnapped and put under house arrest.
[00:25:43]  Yeah, it's one of these.
[00:25:44]  And she like, there's this time where he's, he keeps searching.
[00:25:47]  He's traveling around the world looking for her.
[00:25:50]  Like she's being kind of locked away.
[00:25:51]  She gets free and they run to Scotland together, right?
[00:25:55]  And they start, they hide out in Scotland because the way the laws are at the time, if you've been in Scotland for two weeks, you can get married there.
[00:26:04]  Don't ask me why that's the rule, but that's the rule.
[00:26:06]  So they're like, and like at the same time, her dad, who like has mercenaries, travels to Edinburgh.
[00:26:12]  And so he's got like his mercenaries in private searching for them for two weeks as they're like hiding in the underground so that they can get married.
[00:26:19]  And it's one of those things, James, being a pretty savvy guy, he starts sending letters to a journalist, right?
[00:26:25]  Telling them what they're doing, telling him about the fact that they're, and this journalist starts publishing articles while they're hiding and while like their dad is putting out bounties for them.
[00:26:33]  And it becomes like the biggest story in the country, right?
[00:26:37]  It's this incredibly romantic tale.
[00:26:39]  This couple has eloped and they're being chased by this evil plutocrat and like they're hiding out in the Edinburgh underground.
[00:26:45]  Like everyone is obsessed with this story.
[00:26:47]  Couldn't be much more romantic, right?
[00:26:49]  It is a pretty cool story.
[00:26:50]  You could make a movie out of this.
[00:26:52]  It's actually really very cool.
[00:26:53]  I would watch a movie about that.
[00:26:54]  It is a dope story.
[00:26:56]  So, and they succeed, right?
[00:26:58]  They're able to kind of wait out long enough that they elope.
[00:27:00]  They have this like secret wedding.
[00:27:02]  And then, you know, there's nothing that Maria's dad can do about it.
[00:27:05]  So they're able to move back to London where they are, they're not just popular with the rich because they're like everyone loves them, right?
[00:27:12]  They're small.
[00:27:13]  Yeah.
[00:27:13]  This is, yeah, it's such a romantic story.
[00:27:16]  And then almost as soon as they get back, you know, she gets pregnant and dies horribly in childbirth.
[00:27:23]  So it is this guy.
[00:27:25]  Yeah, it's this really tragic, like high drama story.
[00:27:30]  It is like the most sympathetic backstory a dude would have.
[00:27:34]  And the rest of James's life is going to be killing all of the sympathy by becoming like the evilest corporate overlord of his day, right?
[00:27:43]  Yeah, it's something else.
[00:27:44]  Jokeify.
[00:27:46]  Yeah.
[00:27:46]  And some people will argue because he like his marriages are purely transactional after this point.
[00:27:52]  You know, he's got these mistresses, but he never like loves again.
[00:27:56]  Like this seems to have basically, some people will argue, this kind of kills his ability to care about people.
[00:28:01]  I don't know if that's the case.
[00:28:02]  Maybe he always would have turned out to be a piece of shit, but I think that it's hard to tell what's inside a man's heart, especially when he's British.
[00:28:09]  Yeah.
[00:28:09]  But it's definitely didn't help.
[00:28:11]  Yeah, it doesn't help.
[00:28:13]  And he's going to, again, he destroys kind of, he helps to destroy the cot like industry in the UK.
[00:28:18]  He makes a lot of his money in tobacco.
[00:28:20]  He's a big tobacco guy.
[00:28:22]  He makes a lot of his money in Indonesian nickel mines, which are not nice places.
[00:28:27]  He's buying and selling forests around the world, including in the U.S. for timber.
[00:28:31]  And he kind of, he's one of the dudes who will pioneer the modern concept of setting up shell companies and shadow assets so that he can basically secretly buy up controlling interests in companies without people realizing until it's too late that he's taken them over.
[00:28:45]  Like he helps to kind of pioneer how you do that in the modern era.
[00:28:49]  That is, that is this other buddy of John Harrison is so good at developing people like this.
[00:28:54]  Yeah.
[00:28:55]  It is a very British story, right?
[00:28:57]  And Lucan and Goldsmith are going to form the nexus of a far-right pull in Aspinall Social World.
[00:29:03]  And I say that everyone's pretty right-wing.
[00:29:06]  These are all rich people from like families that have always been rich.
[00:29:10]  But England at that time was pretty right wing anyway.
[00:29:13]  England is very right wing at this time.
[00:29:15]  And Goldsmith is, but Goldsmith and Lucan are like fascists, right?
[00:29:20]  And in fact, in 1994, like one of Goldsmith's first things, he's like the first Brexiter before the EU is even a thing.
[00:29:27]  He's like fighting like hell to stop the creation of the EU and to stop England from being a part of it.
[00:29:34]  That doesn't work.
[00:29:35]  And he gets, he's as kind of a response to failing to stop the EU.
[00:29:39]  He writes this book in 1994 called The Trap.
[00:29:42]  And basically the argument is the trap is that like US style attitudes of free trade, which bring with them mass migration, right?
[00:29:50]  Which open borders so that people can travel between borders is a trap because it will lead to non-white people taking over.
[00:29:58]  Right.
[00:29:58]  That's that's the yeah, that's get this is the great replacement guy.
[00:30:02]  Yeah, he's like a this is like the BC version of the great replacement theory, right?
[00:30:07]  Like it's a little bit underdeveloped when he starts it, but you can see the bones of it in the book that he writes.
[00:30:13]  Yeah.
[00:30:14]  Yeah.

=== Fighting the EU Trap (03:38) ===

[00:30:15]  So that's cool.
[00:30:16]  Anyway, you know who doesn't support the great replacement as a narrative?
[00:30:22]  This the podcast or the sponsors of our podcast.
[00:30:25]  Oh, okay.
[00:30:26]  Yeah, they don't do that.
[00:30:28]  So buy them.
[00:30:37]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:30:41]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:30:44]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:30:47]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:30:50]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:30:54]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:30:56]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:31:00]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:31:05]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:31:07]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:31:08]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:31:11]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:31:13]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:31:15]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:31:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:31:22]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:31:24]  Trust me, babe.
[00:31:25]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:31:34]  What's up, everyone?
[00:31:35]  I'm Ago Modern.
[00:31:36]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:31:44]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:31:47]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:31:51]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:31:56]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:31:58]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:32:00]  I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:32:02]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:32:07]  Yeah.
[00:32:08]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:32:10]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:32:12]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:32:20]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:32:23]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:32:30]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:32:32]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:32:33]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:32:35]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:32:43]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:32:50]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:32:55]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:32:58]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:33:02]  I doctored the test once.
[00:33:03]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:33:07]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:33:10]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:33:13]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:33:15]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:33:17]  Greg Oespi and Michael Marancine.
[00:33:20]  My mind was blown.
[00:33:22]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:33:23]  This is Love Trap.
[00:33:25]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:33:27]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:33:31]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:33:38]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:33:43]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== The Evolving Gorilla Mindset (14:48) ===

[00:33:53]  Ah, we are back.
[00:33:56]  We're having a good time over here.
[00:33:58]  So James Goldsmith is a mercantilist, right?
[00:34:02]  He feels basically that wealthy, and this is kind of the attitude of the Claremont set.
[00:34:07]  Wealthy business owners should hold all political power and the government should primarily be used to stop poor people from entering Europe through force, right?
[00:34:17]  That is the belief that this guy has.
[00:34:19]  Not an uncommon one today.
[00:34:20]  You see the descendants of Jimmy Goldsmith all over the place.
[00:34:24]  But this is weird because he's independent.
[00:34:27]  He and Aspinall are the two independently wealthy, like actually wealthy, not just inherited money and squandered it, members of the Claremont set.
[00:34:34]  So he is the only guy in this social circle who's willing to tell John, hey, your zoo experiments are insane.
[00:34:41]  Like, like you're a lunatic.
[00:34:44]  And in fact, on the day of tiger ripped someone's face off.
[00:34:48]  Yeah.
[00:34:50]  He tries to warn Annabelle the day her son gets maimed.
[00:34:53]  He's like, oh, I would never get in the cages with these animals.
[00:34:56]  They're wild animals.
[00:34:57]  If they get frightened, you never know what they're going to do, right?
[00:34:59]  Like you can't trust them with your safety.
[00:35:02]  She's just doing the jack-off gesture the whole time.
[00:35:04]  She ignoring it.
[00:35:06]  No, no, no.
[00:35:06]  Throw the kid in there.
[00:35:08]  Yeah, ooh, dude.
[00:35:09]  The tiger's fucking pricked.
[00:35:11]  It's wild.
[00:35:12]  So at the end of the 60s, Jimmy opens his school to, again, the public, provided that they can pay.
[00:35:18]  And he has expanded by this point to a host, a wide variety of animals.
[00:35:22]  He starts to get less interested in the Claremont at this point, right?
[00:35:25]  Gambling has kind of gotten boring, and nothing compares throwing down money, which he has plenty of, on a game, is not nearly as exciting as like cuddling with a tiger, right?
[00:35:36]  So at the start of the 70s, he sells the Claremont outright.
[00:35:39]  I think he sells it to Hugh Hefner.
[00:35:41]  I may be wrong about that, but he sells it so he can focus on his new passion.
[00:35:46]  Now, Aspinall is-nearly, nearly dying every day to animals, to wild animals maiming him.
[00:35:53]  Now, in sort of a period as he's gotten experienced with this zoo and kind of gotten bored of gambling, Aspinall has also begun to develop a peculiar set of theories about the world.
[00:36:05]  Based not just, yeah, some of them are based on Goldsmith and his buddy Luke and their outright Nazism has an impact on Aspinall, but Aspinall is also heavily influenced by his close contact with wild animals.
[00:36:17]  His idea, the idea that he comes to believe is this.
[00:36:20]  In the ancient past, human beings and animals had been equal, but then mankind had betrayed them, creating a world in which animals were little more than beasts of burden.
[00:36:30]  Aspinall saw himself as the appointed defender of the animal world from man.
[00:36:36]  And in his eyes, the oppression of animals was not caused by rich men like him who keep them in zeus or who like buy and sell forests like his buddy James Goldsmith, but it's caused by poor people, mostly non-white people, right?
[00:36:49]  Right.
[00:36:50]  Yeah, who are cluttering up the world with their filth.
[00:36:54]  And that somehow controls the animals.
[00:36:57]  Right.
[00:36:59]  I'm going to quote from an article in the Telegraph that's kind of writing about him.
[00:37:03]  He castigated the human race as a species of vermin and positively welcomed natural disasters as a means of reducing the plague of Homo sapiens.
[00:37:11]  He would gladly end his own life, he declared, if he could take another 250 million with him.
[00:37:15]  There was something to be said, he felt, for Hitler's ideas about eugenics.
[00:37:19]  Broadly speaking, he said, the high-income groups tend to have a better genetic inheritance.
[00:37:25]  And like, he meets, he becomes buddies with Richard Nixon at one point.
[00:37:30]  Obviously.
[00:37:31]  Of course, of course, he and Nixon are friends.
[00:37:34]  And, you know, they're hanging out one day in the Claremont, and Nixon's like, you know, we have some of their nuclear weapons we've got could kill 2 million people if they hit the right place.
[00:37:43]  And fucking Aspinall's response is like, well, that's not nearly enough.
[00:37:47]  We're going to have to up those numbers if we're going to get rid of enough people.
[00:37:51]  Let's get the work.
[00:37:52]  You Americans have gotten cocky.
[00:37:55]  Your atrocities are nothing compared to the British Empire.
[00:37:59]  Yeah.
[00:37:59]  It is good to know.
[00:38:00]  What a conversation that must have been.
[00:38:03]  Which one of the tigers nearly killed someone?
[00:38:07]  I sleep with the gorilla.
[00:38:08]  No, he doesn't like Americans.
[00:38:11]  Yeah, I do not think a gorilla would have a good reaction to Dick Nixon.
[00:38:17]  Yeah, this gorilla actually loved escalation in Vietnam.
[00:38:21]  Couldn't get enough of it.
[00:38:25]  So, oh man.
[00:38:26]  It was not only the poor that Aspinall's animal friends taught him to reject.
[00:38:31]  Pearson writes, quote, having identified so closely with his gorillas, he started to imitate their habits and showed a marked preference for the rules governing the world of animals to that of human beings.
[00:38:41]  From watching how the dominant old silverback gorilla ruled the females in his entourage, he concluded that the idea of women's rights and women's liberation was not only ridiculous, but also contrary to nature.
[00:38:52]  He'd also decided that an authoritarian, paternalistic setup was the natural model for a human family.
[00:38:59]  He's a literal gorilla mindset, dude.
[00:39:01]  He is quite literally a gorilla mindset, dude.
[00:39:05]  That's so funny.
[00:39:08]  The gorillas have taught me how human relationships ought to work.
[00:39:12]  Mike Sanovich is going to listen to this and be like, oh, wow.
[00:39:15]  Oh, he's got a point.
[00:39:16]  To be clear here, I'm not saying he's right about how gorillas treat women.
[00:39:20]  don't know much about gorillas yeah this guy is a disgraceful piece of shit and i will pans in hell but also he does kind of live his dream it's not like he's saying i have the gorilla mindset yeah and doesn't he owns these gorillas and indeed interacts with them cuddles what i think he believes is a peer yeah you have to you have to give him credit he's not a dilettante right he is committed to living like an animal so yeah i'll give him that I'm not saying that's a good thing.
[00:39:49]  I'm just saying.
[00:39:49]  You don't got to hand it to him.
[00:39:51]  You don't got to hand it to him.
[00:39:54]  He's not a casual.
[00:39:55]  Yeah.
[00:39:56]  There are, if you read interviews with him, I have read two separate interviews with him that he gives at his zoo with a journalist, two separate interviews where he is mauled by an elephant while giving the interview.
[00:40:10]  That happens twice.
[00:40:14]  Maul me once, shame on you.
[00:40:17]  Yeah, it's something else.
[00:40:20]  So I'm going to continue that quote.
[00:40:22]  From studying how the animal kingdom operated in the wild, he reached some even more alarming propositions.
[00:40:27]  The first of these was that just as the survival of the fittest seems to work in nature, we should willingly accept the position of the powerful and successful as natural leaders of modern-day society.
[00:40:36]  He also believed as firmly in selective breeding for humans as he did for animals and proclaimed that since animals had as much right to exploit the planet Earth as human beings, the time had come to cull something like a billion humans from what he called the urban biomass if the world as we know it was going to survive.
[00:40:52]  So that's great.
[00:40:53]  That's great.
[00:40:54]  That's good.
[00:40:55]  Yeah.
[00:40:55]  Now, his evolving gorilla mindset.
[00:40:58]  I imagine like Elon Musk dealing with any of these people.
[00:41:00]  They would kill him.
[00:41:02]  Yeah.
[00:41:02]  Actually.
[00:41:03]  Yeah, the gorilla.
[00:41:04]  The gorilla looks pretty epic to me.
[00:41:06]  Yeah.
[00:41:06]  He would try to cuddle with a lion and get his head crushed.
[00:41:09]  Just immediately die.
[00:41:10]  Which might have been the best thing, honestly.
[00:41:12]  This could save us all a lot of problems.
[00:41:14]  Yeah.
[00:41:16]  So his evolving gorilla mindset.
[00:41:18]  This is why he leaves his...
[00:41:22]  So he and his first wife split up.
[00:41:23]  She cheats on him and he decides to keep her.
[00:41:25]  He like locks her away from their kids, right?
[00:41:28]  Like she has no contact with the children.
[00:41:30]  So he marries this next woman who is like a wonderful partner.
[00:41:33]  She loves his animal.
[00:41:34]  She's like in every way a perfect match.
[00:41:36]  But she delivers a daughter with a heart defect who dies after birth.
[00:41:40]  So John dumps her because like, well, humans should only mate to breed because that's what gorillas do.
[00:41:46]  And obviously we can't breed.
[00:41:48]  So goodbye.
[00:41:49]  Yeah.
[00:41:50]  Okay.
[00:41:51]  Gross.
[00:41:52]  His third wife, who he marries because she has a famous ancestor and he wants those genes in his children.
[00:42:00]  Like this ancestor?
[00:42:02]  Was it like Merlin?
[00:42:03]  No, no, no, I wish.
[00:42:04]  It's ah, shit, I've forgotten.
[00:42:07]  I had it written down somewhere here.
[00:42:09]  But yeah, she has a famous ancestor that he admires.
[00:42:12]  And when they have their first kid, John waits until it's six months old and then he takes it into his gorilla enclosure and hands it to the dominant mother-father pair in the gorillarium, right?
[00:42:25]  And I'm going to quote from Pearson here.
[00:42:28]  The gorilla peered inside its nappy to see what sex it was, with the baby tucked under her arm, swung up into the trees and showed him to the other females in the community.
[00:42:37]  When all the female gorillas had thoroughly examined the baby bossa, his gorilla mother brought him down to earth and returned him safely to his human parents.
[00:42:46]  That was not how I thought that one was going.
[00:42:48]  No, it works out fine.
[00:42:51]  So that's great.
[00:42:52]  That's actually kind of strange.
[00:42:54]  Yeah, that's a wild experience to have as a baby.
[00:42:57]  Yeah.
[00:42:58]  It's a wild experience to participate in, even as an observer.
[00:43:02]  Yeah.
[00:43:03]  And it's wild.
[00:43:04]  Let me just send the baby off to the gorillas.
[00:43:06]  Sally marries him after this anyway.
[00:43:08]  She's like, yeah, fine.
[00:43:09]  Why not?
[00:43:11]  The baby was fine.
[00:43:12]  Nothing to complain about.
[00:43:13]  Jesus.
[00:43:13]  It works out fine.
[00:43:15]  So the early 1970s are a bad time for the Aspen Alls and they're rich friends.
[00:43:20]  But for reasons divorced from getting mauled by wild animals, the economy tanks at this point, right?
[00:43:25]  Aspinall, not just in the UK, but like Aspinall has gotten over gambling on gambling and is gambling in the U.S. stock market, and he loses his fucking shirt when the U.S. stock market takes a tumble in the early 60s.
[00:43:38]  A new kind of exploiter exploited him.
[00:43:40]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:43:41]  Circle of life.
[00:43:42]  Yeah.
[00:43:43]  And only.
[00:43:43]  No, really, it is just human beings will create new systems to exploit other human beings.
[00:43:48]  He created one and then another, and then someone created one to exploit him.
[00:43:51]  It's kind of beautiful.
[00:43:52]  It is.
[00:43:52]  It is.
[00:43:53]  It's like a magical way.
[00:43:55]  Yeah.
[00:43:55]  To quote George Lucas.
[00:43:56]  Yeah.
[00:43:58]  He's able to, he doesn't lose everything just because his friend Goldsmith, right, is still rich.
[00:44:03]  And Goldsmith basically floats him so he can keep paying for his exotic animals during this period.
[00:44:09]  The other members of the Claremont set do not fare as well.
[00:44:12]  The new membership of the club won't give them IOUs, right?
[00:44:15]  So these guys are all still horribly addicted to gambling because they never started businesses or zoos.
[00:44:20]  They have like Lord Lucan has nothing in his life but gambling and he's bad at it.
[00:44:25]  So he can't afford to gamble without Aspinall running the Claremont.
[00:44:30]  Now, Lucan is, this starts to kind of drive him crazy.
[00:44:33]  The fact that he is actually poor now, like he still has his fancy manor house.
[00:44:37]  He's still a lord, but he has no money.
[00:44:40]  That drives him crazy.
[00:44:42]  And then in 1974, a labor government takes over in the UK.
[00:44:46]  And that drives these guys, these Claremont members, into a sense of mania.
[00:44:50]  Because to them, Aspinall, the way Aspinall views this is this labor government, these are communists.
[00:44:56]  Communists have taken over and they are in the process of uprooting the natural order of society.
[00:45:01]  This is a conspiracy against the rightful ruling class based on my guerrilla studies.
[00:45:07]  Yeah, but the ruling class that got there through gambling on an insane game.
[00:45:12]  Yeah.
[00:45:13]  Yeah, it's something else.
[00:45:16]  They're not good rich people like us where we make money through gambling.
[00:45:20]  They're bad rich people who got it through some other method that I don't really understand.
[00:45:25]  They did something shady for it.
[00:45:27]  Now, no one's mind has degraded more by this point than the formerly lucky Lord Lucan.
[00:45:34]  His luck had turned sour years ago.
[00:45:36]  And again, he is broke now.
[00:45:38]  He's increasingly obsessed with fascism.
[00:45:40]  And this is all related to the fact that his marriage has collapsed, right?
[00:45:44]  And it's become clear like his wife is going to take the kids, right?
[00:45:49]  So he just is losing his mind increasingly.
[00:45:53]  And anytime he'll meet with his Claremont buddies with Aspinall, because they're all still hanging out, Aspinall will cite these theories based on guerrillas of how inferior women are.
[00:46:02]  So Lucan takes from that, he tries to force his wife into a mental institution so he can take the kids.
[00:46:09]  He does this several times.
[00:46:11]  This would have worked.
[00:46:11]  I think Aspinall probably, if Aspinall had wanted to force a wife into the mental institution, he had the juice to do it.
[00:46:18]  Lucan isn't good at anything.
[00:46:20]  So he can't even work this kind of evil scheme, right?
[00:46:24]  He's just, he's not even able, even with his like social position, to make this happen.
[00:46:30]  Thankfully, right?
[00:46:30]  That's good.
[00:46:31]  And also his rationale is based on gorillas.
[00:46:34]  Yeah.
[00:46:35]  It's based on his friend's gorillas.
[00:46:37]  Yeah.
[00:46:38]  So who told you?
[00:46:39]  Oh, the gorilla friend.
[00:46:40]  All right.
[00:46:41]  Okay.
[00:46:41]  Yeah.
[00:46:42]  So Lord Lucan, his mind is a mix of his buddies' guerrilla theories, and he buys this 1930s translation of Mein Kampf, which he reads feverishly.
[00:46:52]  After World War II as well.
[00:46:54]  Well after World War III.
[00:46:56]  It's like the losing guy's handbook to racism.
[00:46:59]  Yeah.
[00:46:59]  Yeah.
[00:47:00]  He does.
[00:47:00]  He has one other idol.
[00:47:02]  Unfortunately, that idol is Mustafa Kemal of Turkey, who is a dictator and one of the Armenian genocide guys.
[00:47:10]  Yeah.
[00:47:11]  And the book is called Gray Wolf, right?
[00:47:13]  Which is today the name of a fascist organization in Turkey.
[00:47:16]  So that's good.
[00:47:17]  Not good.
[00:47:17]  Yeah.
[00:47:18]  So these are his two buds, right?
[00:47:20]  Hitler and Ataturk.
[00:47:22]  Hitler and gorilla and dictator.
[00:47:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:47:25]  That's his like his like in his head, the fucking like, yeah, his idols are Hitler and Ataturk.
[00:47:33]  Including a gorilla.
[00:47:39]  So and you know, this says something about his wife, too.
[00:47:43]  She claims in interviews later, she didn't realize that he'd he'd taken a turn for the extreme right.
[00:47:48]  Although this is the exact quote from her.
[00:47:50]  I'm not sure I believe her here.
[00:47:52]  Quote, he did have very right-wing views.
[00:47:54]  Some might describe them as fascist.
[00:47:56]  I didn't know he was indulging in extremist reading matter in 1972, although I knew he listened to recordings of Hitler's speeches at Nuremberg rallies.
[00:48:05]  Well, was that not a warning sign?
[00:48:08]  Yeah.
[00:48:09]  Where do you think he got the ideas?
[00:48:11]  Did he just like walk down the street, he had someone talking about it?
[00:48:14]  Or was it his weird gorilla friend?
[00:48:15]  Yeah.
[00:48:16]  Yeah.
[00:48:16]  I also just like the gorilla man again.
[00:48:19]  I didn't know he was reading fascist books.
[00:48:21]  I just knew he listened to Nuremberg rallies a lot.
[00:48:25]  Wild.
[00:48:27]  So this increasingly conspiratorial obsession with race theory, communism, and communism, and the only possible solution to a labor government infected the whole Claremont set.
[00:48:37]  And I'm going to quote from a really interesting, interesting 2009 article in The Guardian here.

=== Fascist Beliefs and Rallies (05:42) ===

[00:48:42]  There is no suggestion that Lucan was in any way anti-Semitic or supported the final solution.
[00:48:48]  But he and his associates, who included casino owner and party host John Aspinall and the tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, were increasingly convinced Britain had fallen victim to a socialist conspiracy.
[00:48:58]  Daily Express journalist Charles Benson, one of Lucan's friends, said he was very right-wing and never watered it down in front of liberals.
[00:49:05]  He would talk about hanging and flogging and use the N-word in order to get a reaction.
[00:49:09]  One biographer, Patrick Marnum, said, Seen from the Claremont Club, the country was starting to resemble the less stable years of the Weimar Republic.
[00:49:17]  Sir James Goldsmith began to develop his theory of the communist infiltration of the Western media.
[00:49:21]  Over the smoked salmon and lamb cutlets, the talk turned to the pros and cons of a British military coup.
[00:49:27]  And that is what these guys are going to come to support.
[00:49:30]  Now, what if he was just the guy who claimed he wasn't right-wing, who walked around saying the N-word to get a reaction around a bunch of people who are kind of embarrassed to be around him?
[00:49:39]  Just a podcaster.
[00:49:40]  Yeah, just he's a podcaster.
[00:49:42]  Yeah, he would have been a great podcast.
[00:49:44]  He would have been like, he would have been a, he would have been on, was it Lex Friedman's podcast with a huge Friedman.
[00:49:50]  Yeah, so what is that you think?
[00:49:52]  Oh, the gorilla guy, huh?
[00:49:53]  Actually, no, a guy.
[00:49:55]  Seriously, a guy who's just like, yeah, I learned everything I learned about women from watching my gorillas.
[00:50:00]  That guy would be an insanely popular YouTuber.
[00:50:03]  Oh, yeah.
[00:50:04]  He would be huge.
[00:50:05]  Now, it's also, it's worth noting one of their good friends here.
[00:50:07]  When I talk about them supporting a military coup, a member of the Claremont set who's tight with all these guys is this dude Sterling, who creates the SAS.
[00:50:15]  And Sterling is going to make a private army in the UK with the goal of like using them as this sort of right-wing countervailing force.
[00:50:24]  It doesn't work out for a variety of reasons, but like these are their social set.
[00:50:29]  And by late 1974, things have gotten to a pretty toxic level.
[00:50:33]  And we're going to talk about what Lucan does next in this mind state.
[00:50:36]  But first, here's some ads.
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[00:54:02]  So, late 1974, the lucky Lord Lucan has grown obsessed with his need to rescue his children and destroy his wife, all of which fits in with his Nazi guerrilla beliefs about power and masculinity.
[00:54:13]  So he starts telling Aspen all he tells his friends.
[00:54:16]  He's open about like, they're like hanging out playing cards and he's like, gonna kill my wife, decided it, gonna murder her.
[00:54:21]  And they're all like, yeah, sounds like a good plan, man.
[00:54:23]  Like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

=== Obsession with Rescue (15:40) ===

[00:54:25]  I bet that'll work out.
[00:54:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:28]  There is some debate as to like whether they thought he was bullshitting or not.
[00:54:31]  And to be fair, I do think it's not uncommon for these guys to joke about murdering their wives.
[00:54:38]  Yeah, that's the kind of culture it is, right?
[00:54:41]  But also the culture is one where a guy owns multiple gorillas and beats them.
[00:54:46]  Anything could be happening.
[00:54:47]  I'm not saying they should have ignored.
[00:54:49]  I would believe it.
[00:54:50]  Yeah.
[00:54:51]  I'm just saying, I think I'm bringing this up not to like defend them, but more to say a lot of them talk about murdering women.
[00:54:57]  He's not the only one, right?
[00:54:59]  And there is evidence.
[00:55:00]  I mean, that doesn't surprise me.
[00:55:01]  They're a bunch of fucking ethno-fascist freaks.
[00:55:06]  We'll never know precisely, but Pearson's book makes a very strong case that, like, not only is he joking about this, but they provide him with resources to carry out a murder, right?
[00:55:18]  And again, some of this is up.
[00:55:20]  Obviously, these guys are not stupid enough to be completely open about what they're doing.
[00:55:25]  But one of his friends loans him a car that he's going to like use as like his getaway vehicle to dump his wife's body after he murders her.
[00:55:33]  One of them, like, he's broke and he figures he needs £10,000 sterling to bribe a guy with a boat to like dispose of the corpse, right?
[00:55:41]  There's a couple of bribes that need to be made, right?
[00:55:44]  And Goldsmith, interestingly, James Goldsmith, being the smartest of them, doesn't want to get involved in this.
[00:55:50]  He doesn't want to be directly tied to this murder.
[00:55:52]  So he's like, I will give you 10,000 pounds to commit this murder, which means that he doesn't have to give the money to him because as a noble in the aristocracy, you can't take a gift, right?
[00:56:04]  Lucan can't be given $10,000.
[00:56:06]  He has to be loaned it.
[00:56:07]  So his other friends loan him the money, right?
[00:56:10]  This is actually Goldsmith's clever way to not get tied to this is by offering it as a gift because then Lucan won't take it.
[00:56:15]  I don't know.
[00:56:16]  Wild culture.
[00:56:17]  Murder tax dodge.
[00:56:18]  What the?
[00:56:19]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  So Lucan gets a loan from other friends of his and he gets this car.
[00:56:24]  There's some other tools he probably gets.
[00:56:26]  And the plan he cooks up is like, I am going to kill my wife, like bash her head in, throw her in like a sack, drive her to this boat, and then the boat will like weigh down the sack and toss her in the fucking ocean, right?
[00:56:40]  Like that's that's the idea.
[00:56:42]  Pearson describes this not as just his plot, but as a conspiracy involving other members of the Claremont Club.
[00:56:48]  There's this anonymous financier who he calls Mr. X, I think because he's scared to bring this guy's name in that works as both a high-end leg breaker for gamblers and is like involved in organized crime.
[00:57:01]  This may have been Adnan Khashoggi.
[00:57:04]  I think it's possible, who is like this arms dealer, but that's not the only guy.
[00:57:10]  It could have been a lot of other guys, right?
[00:57:11]  There are a lot of guys involved in organized crime because Aspinall's a gambling Maven, right?
[00:57:16]  Obviously, he knows dudes who are dangerous criminals.
[00:57:19]  Some randomly violent fellows.
[00:57:21]  Yeah.
[00:57:22]  So the basic idea is that Lucan's going to murder his wife.
[00:57:25]  She's just going to disappear.
[00:57:27]  No one's going to know there was a murder because the body will go off.
[00:57:30]  Other than the people he's discussed it with while gambling.
[00:57:32]  Yeah, right.
[00:57:33]  Other than his gambling buddies.
[00:57:34]  And then he'll live happily ever after with his children, right?
[00:57:37]  This is his plan to save his life.
[00:57:38]  That type plan.
[00:57:39]  Yeah.
[00:57:39]  Perfect.
[00:57:40]  Now, the only hole in this perfect plan is that Lord Lucan is a useless rich kid who has never developed a skill in his life other than losing all of his money gambling.
[00:57:49]  So average conservative male.
[00:57:51]  Yeah.
[00:57:52]  He heads into his London home with this metal pipe wrapped in surgical tape and he swings it at the first small dark-haired woman to come down the stairs.
[00:58:02]  Unfortunately, well, I'm not going to say unfortunate.
[00:58:04]  This is all unfortunate, right?
[00:58:06]  Horrifying thing to do.
[00:58:07]  Just like not even the premeditated act, but then the slap, the weird, like slapshot nature of him.
[00:58:15]  He killed some other lady, didn't he?
[00:58:17]  He kills his maid, who people would say, now your house is dirty.
[00:58:22]  Yeah.
[00:58:23]  Yeah.
[00:58:23]  It's one of those like she kind of had a casual resemblance to his wife, right?
[00:58:28]  So he doesn't even look.
[00:58:29]  He swings, he shatters her skull and he kills her instantly, right?
[00:58:32]  This very brutal, horrible, horrible thing.
[00:58:34]  Oh, God.
[00:58:35]  Now, the lady Lucan is right behind her maid, and she comes down the stairs next.
[00:58:40]  And this is from Pearson's book.
[00:58:41]  When he heard Veronica, that's the lady Lucan, coming down the stairs from the sitting room to find out what was going on, he started attacking her as well, hitting her around the head as he had Sandra Rivet.
[00:58:50]  Somehow, she managed to slide down between his legs and grab his balls.
[00:58:54]  The agonizing pain made him stop.
[00:58:57]  And suddenly he seemed to come to his senses and realize too late what he was doing.
[00:59:01]  This was not a gamble or a lethal fantasy.
[00:59:03]  He had just battered to death his children's nanny and was now doing his best to do the same to their mother.
[00:59:08]  That is so cool.
[00:59:11]  It is pretty dope of her.
[00:59:12]  You got to give that to her.
[00:59:13]  That woman is hardcore.
[00:59:15]  Yeah.
[00:59:15]  Yeah, that is thinking on your face.
[00:59:19]  Good for you.
[00:59:20]  Good for you.
[00:59:21]  Honestly, also complete head on a swivel.
[00:59:24]  Also, she grabbed them so tightly that he was like, ooh, maybe I shouldn't commit missing.
[00:59:30]  Yeah.
[00:59:31]  This was the point at which Lucan did something that seems so incredible in the middle of a bloody murder that it actually becomes credible.
[00:59:37]  He apologized to his intended victim.
[00:59:40]  He did more.
[00:59:41]  He sat Veronica down and found himself telling her that they must talk to try to work things out.
[00:59:46]  Then, noticing blood was pouring down her face, he went to the bathroom to fetch a towel to help clean her up.
[00:59:52]  This gave her the chance she needed to make a quick escape.
[00:59:54]  Stumbling down the stairs, she got out onto the street and ran to the local pub, the plumber's arms, where she burst into the saloon bar screaming, help me, help me.
[01:00:02]  Somebody's just murdered my nanny.
[01:00:05]  Now, Lucan escapes after disappears.
[01:00:10]  You're defending that man?
[01:00:12]  She has suffered a head injury at this point.
[01:00:14]  I don't know what was clear to her.
[01:00:15]  Like, maybe it may have been a thing where like, because she gets hit in the head, she's not immediately aware.
[01:00:20]  She has to put it together.
[01:00:21]  I'm going to, I'll give a lot of grace to someone who's just been hit in the head with a pipe and had to fight their way free, right?
[01:00:27]  Who knows what's going on?
[01:00:29]  Also, it's very funny that he was like, yo, one minute.
[01:00:31]  Let me get a towel.
[01:00:32]  Yeah.
[01:00:33]  Let me get a towel, right?
[01:00:34]  I got a claw.
[01:00:35]  It's this.
[01:00:35]  She kind of.
[01:00:36]  Wait, right here.
[01:00:37]  I will not kill you.
[01:00:39]  She grabs his balls and it resets him back to like politeness.
[01:00:43]  It's like getting that little, getting like a pin for your, like to reset a device.
[01:00:49]  It's wild.
[01:00:50]  Yeah.
[01:00:50]  Good to know.
[01:00:51]  Lucan goes missing.
[01:00:53]  He is still missing to this day, right?
[01:00:55]  He's been declared dead at this point, obviously.
[01:00:58]  Nobody totally knows what happens to him, right?
[01:01:02]  It is generally agreed that he committed suicide.
[01:01:05]  The kind of most common story is he takes a boat out to sea and he drowns himself because that's like the most romantic, aristocratic way of killing yourself, right?
[01:01:13]  Is to like throw yourself into the ocean.
[01:01:15]  But we don't know that that's what happened.
[01:01:16]  And Lord Aspinall's mother, she gets, I think it's his mother or his wife.
[01:01:20]  She's interviewed later and she kind of insinuates that like his friends got rid of him, that he was murdered by his friends because he might expose them.
[01:01:28]  There's some suggestion that maybe he was fed to Aspinall's tigers.
[01:01:33]  That might actually not emboss.
[01:01:36]  I would absolutely believe that.
[01:01:38]  Yeah.
[01:01:38]  I would definitely believe that he was just like, yeah, go with the tiger.
[01:01:41]  I trained this tiger to protect from wives.
[01:01:44]  Yeah.
[01:01:45]  And it's unclear.
[01:01:46]  He could have killed himself.
[01:01:47]  Pearson's attitude is that like this was, he was too much of like a weirdo narcissist to kill himself.
[01:01:53]  I don't know if I think that's credible, but he does know more about Lucan than I do.
[01:01:57]  His suggestion is that like Lucan using these kind of like Mr. X and these other sort of overseas connections Aspinall has, Lucan gets spirited away to Switzerland.
[01:02:08]  But because he's the most famous murderer in Europe, he can't, he has to be stuck in a house for the rest of his life, right?
[01:02:14]  You can't let this guy out ever.
[01:02:15]  And Lucan can't handle that.
[01:02:17]  He still wants to get his kids back and like return to high society.
[01:02:21]  He kind of convinces himself someone else killed his wife.
[01:02:24]  And so Pearson's theory is that like, well, once these guys who are hiding him realize that he's a danger to them, he's going to expose himself somehow, they murder him, right?
[01:02:33]  Because they're like, well, this guy, we can't, we have, it's the only thing to do, you know?
[01:02:37]  That's also perfectly possible.
[01:02:39]  My theory is he probably died in some sort of stupid way.
[01:02:44]  It's like a Mr. Bean death, but friends, I hope it was the tiger.
[01:02:49]  Yeah, maybe that's more likely he pissed off one of the multiple rich and violent and crazy gambling people and was like, ah, I am lucky Lucan and then got killed by a guy in the street.
[01:03:04]  Totally possible.
[01:03:05]  He strikes me as the kind of guy who dies in a very boring and funny way.
[01:03:09]  Yeah.
[01:03:10]  Like he did, like in a, in a, a bar in Switzerland.
[01:03:14]  Yeah, yeah, he just gets drunk with the wrong people.
[01:03:17]  Now, I mean, but that, but think about it.
[01:03:18]  If he's this rich, racist, horrifying bigot who hates women, the people he's going to associate himself with, wherever he ends up, are going to be equally shitty and unreliable.
[01:03:31]  And also, yeah, someone probably fucking looked in the paper and went, hey, aren't you that famous murderer?
[01:03:37]  Yeah.
[01:03:37]  Who got like that?
[01:03:38]  The guy who sucks.
[01:03:39]  Yeah.
[01:03:41]  Fucking idiot.
[01:03:42]  Because also, but also, I would also fully believe that they all had him done in.
[01:03:47]  Yeah, totally possible.
[01:03:48]  Because his, his, Lucan's whole thing, even I'm 37 years old, so obviously the whole Lucan thing happened a lot long before I was born, but it's interesting.
[01:04:01]  His legend is still around, even though most people, myself included, until this podcast, did not know anything about how this happened.
[01:04:08]  Yeah.
[01:04:11]  Which is not a great story for him.
[01:04:14]  Yeah.
[01:04:15]  Yep.
[01:04:15]  Big, big no-no on most of this stuff.
[01:04:19]  Yep.
[01:04:20]  The gorilla stuff sounds interesting, though.
[01:04:22]  Yeah, the gorilla stuff's fine.
[01:04:24]  So, yeah, for his part, Lord Aspinall would never condemn his friend for murder.
[01:04:29]  He talks to journalists about that.
[01:04:30]  He's like, I get why he did it.
[01:04:31]  I think he was, I think he was within his rights.
[01:04:34]  You know, he did it for the good of his children.
[01:04:36]  Aspinall's attitude is he was only trying to save his children from the worst fate imaginable, being raised by a woman, right?
[01:04:43]  Well, as we established earlier in the pod, women be evil.
[01:04:47]  Yeah.
[01:04:48]  Now, and the other thing, so Lucan, because he, or Aspinall, because he kind of goes broke in 74, in 76, he starts another gambling hall, right?
[01:04:56]  Which he makes another fortune in.
[01:04:58]  And he sets up in the hallway these like busts of like famous gamblers from history.
[01:05:04]  And one of them is a bust of his friend, the murderer, Lord Lucan.
[01:05:07]  And like the initial inscription on it basically says he did it for his kids.
[01:05:12]  Something else.
[01:05:13]  This guy.
[01:05:15]  So after his friend's disappearance, Aspinall continues to devote most of his time to his zoo.
[01:05:21]  He makes a couple more fortunes.
[01:05:22]  We were talking millions, tens of millions each time.
[01:05:26]  But then he loses them, often by like pampering his animals, because it's just, it's expensive to run zoos like this.
[01:05:32]  They never make money.
[01:05:34]  He does open a second zoo a few years later.
[01:05:39]  So he has two zoos that he's operating.
[01:05:41]  And these become increasingly large and influential.
[01:05:44]  Through the 80s and 90s, he grows obsessed with the idea that his zookeepers, like him, can only do their job properly if they're getting, if they're willing to get dangerously close to the animals.
[01:05:54]  And this is a bad idea.
[01:05:56]  In 1980, he has two Siberian tigresses, and they viciously maul and kill two zookeepers in the same year, forcing him.
[01:06:06]  The only thing, yeah, that's his attitude.
[01:06:08]  He's angry that he has to shoot these tigers to death because these zookeepers got murdered by them.
[01:06:14]  Which, to be fair, not the tiger's fault, but it is your fault, dude.
[01:06:18]  Like you had them cuddling with them.
[01:06:21]  I mean, you also had tigers and put people in front.
[01:06:24]  I just.
[01:06:25]  Yeah.
[01:06:26]  That's not the end of it.
[01:06:27]  In 1984, one of his zookeepers is crushed to death by an Indian bull elephant.
[01:06:32]  In 1994, the head zookeeper at Howlitz is massacred by yet another Siberian tiger.
[01:06:37]  This fucking guy went into the 90s with this shit.
[01:06:40]  Oh, yeah.
[01:06:41]  Oh, yeah.
[01:06:42]  Right afterwards, another keeper, Damian Cockrell, is crushed to death by the elephant La Petit in its enclosure.
[01:06:50]  So he is running through these guys very quickly.
[01:06:54]  This is a deadly zoo.
[01:06:55]  I'm going to quote from The Guardian again.
[01:06:57]  In 1996, Aspinall won a high court case to maintain the controversial practice of keepers mingling with lions, even though in May of that year, a boy was awarded £132,000 because his arm was ripped off by a chimpanzee in 1989.
[01:07:12]  This is, again, at one of Aspinall's facilities.
[01:07:16]  And as irresponsible as all that is, he's still in some ways good at what he's doing because his second zoo, like his second zoo opens in, yeah.
[01:07:26]  Both Howlitz and his second zoo, Port Lymphne, are renowned breeding centers.
[01:07:31]  He produces 73 captive-bred gorillas and six black rhinos.
[01:07:35]  People die, but the animals fuck.
[01:07:37]  The animals fuck.
[01:07:38]  Yeah, it's wild.
[01:07:40]  And like by the time, like kind of in the 80s, zoo professionals who had sort of, who had rightfully been like, this guy is a maniac, started learning, like taking his lessons, some of his lessons on raising animals because he's got, by this point, 80 breeding species.
[01:07:56]  And he is, one of his projects in the Congo is the first to successfully introduce captive bred gorillas back into the wild.
[01:08:05]  So it's this mix of like wild incompetence that gets people killed.
[01:08:10]  And also like, this is the first program to get captive bred gorillas back into the wild.
[01:08:15]  So I don't know what lesson you want to take from that.
[01:08:18]  It's just a thing that happened.
[01:08:20]  Yeah.
[01:08:21]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  There you go.
[01:08:24]  I think the lesson I'm taking from this is we need to learn a little bit about gorillas from this guy.
[01:08:33]  Yeah.
[01:08:34]  This guy does.
[01:08:34]  Let's throw more people in front of gorillas just to see what happens.
[01:08:39]  It's kind of a bummer he doesn't die from like being eaten.
[01:08:43]  I thought that was where this was going.
[01:08:45]  I thought he was going to get killed by like a domestic cat.
[01:08:50]  It's literally the opposite of that because he does die of cancer in late June of 2000.
[01:08:55]  But his final regret in life is that cancer has made him too sick to like cuddle with his dangerous wild animals.
[01:09:04]  Anyway.
[01:09:05]  That's John Aspinall.
[01:09:08]  Aspers, as his friends called him.
[01:09:11]  Yeah.
[01:09:12]  There you go.
[01:09:13]  How you feeling?
[01:09:14]  I'm feeling great.
[01:09:16]  Yeah.
[01:09:17]  I love the fact that Britain, I feel like Britain's freaks are just very different to America.
[01:09:24]  This is a unique kind of freak.
[01:09:26]  Yeah.
[01:09:26]  But it's only something that could be created by the horrors of the colonial empire.
[01:09:32]  Yeah.
[01:09:32]  Just not just like the obvious repeated atrocities that to this day are visited upon the world as a result of the British Empire.
[01:09:40]  It's also just the insane, repressive, violent nature of Britain in that hundred-year period.
[01:09:51]  I don't even think has truly stopped.
[01:09:52]  We've just tamped down how violent and horrifying we are.
[01:09:56]  Yep.
[01:09:57]  And what's insane is nothing happened to this guy.
[01:09:59]  No.
[01:10:01]  Nakedly corrupt guy who led to the deaths of several people.

=== Colonial Empire Horrors (03:34) ===

[01:10:06]  He by proxy one maid.
[01:10:08]  Yeah.
[01:10:08]  And he's fine.
[01:10:11]  He died of cancer.
[01:10:13]  And his last thing was like, oh, yeah, I didn't get to cuddle with my animals as much as I wanted to.
[01:10:19]  I never got maimed one last time by a tiger.
[01:10:23]  Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't say, I'm not going to let God kill me.
[01:10:27]  My gorillas will do it.
[01:10:28]  Yeah, I'll make my gorillas kill.
[01:10:30]  You're really right there.
[01:10:32]  Yeah, it's like, I refuse to let God like this giant silverback gorilla I've been breeding specifically to kill me when I get cancer.
[01:10:40]  Yeah.
[01:10:40]  I mean, I will say, I'll say this for gorillas because I think it's important to push back on this myth sometimes.
[01:10:45]  Yeah.
[01:10:46]  The gorillas gorillas are going to fucking light us up in the they are not the animals that kill people, right?
[01:10:52]  Because it's actually like a silver, like gorillas, it's kind of hard to get.
[01:10:55]  Human beings do.
[01:10:56]  Yeah.
[01:10:57]  Established, just get take your mother-in-law and uh she'll depress the gorilla and that's it.
[01:11:04]  Yeah, yeah, so I guess that's the lesson here.
[01:11:06]  Everyone, go get a silverback gorilla, it's completely safe.
[01:11:10]  It's totally fine, you will be fine.
[01:11:12]  Yeah, buy one today.
[01:11:14]  Yeah, you have any uh pluggables for us, Ed just find me at where's your ed.in if you want to read some excellent tech journalism and if you want to hire a PR firm, easypr.com.
[01:11:26]  Yes, most excellent.
[01:11:28]  Um, easypr.com, check out where's your ed at.
[01:11:31]  And uh, yeah, that's gonna be it for us at Behind the Bastards this week.
[01:11:35]  You can subscribe ad-free to our shows at uh, what is it called, Sophie?
[01:11:39]  CoolerZone Media.
[01:11:40]  Yeah, do that.
[01:11:42]  All right, we're done.
[01:11:43]  Bye.
[01:11:46]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:11:49]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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