Part One: Ada Lovelace and Lord Byron: The First Computer Programmer, Child of the First Vampire

Margaret talks with Bridget Todd about the woman who invented software and her rather strange family.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast that sometimes is people who it's really
easy to say are cool, and sometimes are people who
it's really easy to say aren't boring. And someone who
is neither uncool nor boring is my guest, bridget Todd,
host of There Are No Girls on the Internet.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
How are you a bridget I'm great, thank you for
having me.

Speaker 4 (00:27):
I'm honored that you think I'm sometimes cool and maybe
not boring.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
I strive for both of those things.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
You do well at both, unlike some of the people
we're going to talk about this week, who managed some
of them and not the others.

Speaker 5 (00:45):
Is a complicated one. I am thank you. I know
who I like. I like a little moral ambiguity. I
like a complicated historical or cultural figure.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Okay, okay, well first I implicated historical figure is Sophie Lichterman,
who's been podcasting since the fourteen hundreds and apparently really
really old skincare fucking on point.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Your sun's green even if you're not going outside.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
Yeah, you're like one of those vampires who doesn't age.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
We're gonna talk about vampires this week.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Really, I didn't even know that she must have known that.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
No, this is just happy and our audio engineer is Danil.
Everyone knows is a Hi to Daniel, Hi Danel.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
I yea Hi Danel.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. So
not the last time we had you on, but the
first time we had you on, we were talking about
how computer used to be a job, right, And this
week I was like, let's talk about the origin of computers.
And by that I mean I want to tell a
story that involves vampires, poetry, revolution, and an almost unprecedented

(01:59):
amount of heatness to get access I'm using. Today, we're
going to tell the story of the first computer programmer,
a woman named Ada Lovelace who never met her father,
but her and her husband were obsessed with her father,
the infamous hedonist, the sex crazed class trader, the most
famous poet of his generation, and the first vampire lord Byron.

(02:24):
You familiar with much of this story.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
I am familiar with some of this story.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
I just I'm like quivering with excitement because when you
said a complicated person, I had a feeling. Then when
you said vampires, I was like, Oh, I think I
really know.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
I'm so excited to get into this cool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
No, I was like, I'm going to do Ada Lovelace
because I've just been doing a bunch of stuff that
revolves not revolves around but like Lord Byron is a
periphery figure skulking in the dark and drinking people's blood
or whatever. And I was like, all right, well, I
don't really want to specifically get into him, and so
I started doing Ada Lovelace, and then I more and
more realized that I actually think that understanding her father

(03:05):
is like a big part of it. And also not boring,
not a cool guy, maybe a cool guy. Really the
jury is out historically about this man.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
I think not boring is the perfect way to describe him.
I know that Ada Lovelace is somebody who had a
very complicated relationship with her family on top of being
a complicated person herself. And I like how you're coming
at this, like we do sort of have to talk
about her father or to really understand who she was.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, And I was also like, before I did too
much of this research, there's this thing where people kind
of talk about Ada Lovelace as if like she's like,
oh well, we kind of need to throw a woman
in there. When we're talking about early computers. No, like
she she's as important as Charles Babbage. There's no part

(03:55):
of me after reading all of this that doubts that,
if anything, she was more important.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
Totally agree.

Speaker 4 (04:01):
And I hate this perspective where people you can tell
the inclusion of traditionally marginalized people is like a footnote,
like they're like, oh, yeah, some women were there, some
queer folks were there, some transpoloks were there, black folks, whatever, whatever, whatever.
But that's so wrong because these people they were at
every I mean this literally, at every step of computers

(04:21):
becoming the ubiquitous forces they are in twenty twenty four.
Women were there, Queer folks were there, trans folks were there,
black folks were there. And so this idea that adding
them is like a little nod to diversity or something
that is so wrong because they wouldn't exist without us.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah. Absolutely, And it was really nice to like know
that by reading more about this story, you know, I
actually had this moment where I was like, am I
really going to do some fucking nobles? I like kind
of hate English nobility specifically, like a lot of what
we're going to be talking about happened around the same
time that England was Oh, I don't know, genocide in

(04:57):
Ireland and things like that. You know, I usually don't
like nobility. I usually am like whatever. But these folks,
their story is compelling enough that I decided it's worth it.
Although I've refuse to learn why marrying an earl makes
you a countess. I don't understand it, and I refuse

(05:18):
to learn. And if you know, listener, don't tell me.
I don't care.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Margarete Killso a hearty supporter of monarchies.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
And nobility, not traditionally a fan.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
No.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
So one thing that Ada Lovelacener father Lord Byron hav
in common is a shocking amount of secrecy. There's an
awful lot we don't know about them that we will
never know about them in their personal lives. And then
a lot of conjecture, and some of it based with
a lot of evidence. Right, we also don't know the
juiciest bits. So whatever we think we know, there's probably

(05:55):
something wilder. Lord Byron when he died, his friends burned
his wars, less history judge him as a monster.

Speaker 4 (06:03):
That's when you know you're really like when you're It's
like the old school equivalent of.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
Clearing your browser history. You can't burn their.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Papers, Yeah, totally, and they could have gotten a lot
of money for those papers. This man was famous, and
Lovelace didn't fare entirely better. There's a deathbed confession that
shocked her husband that we don't know.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
What do you think it was?

Speaker 2 (06:33):
I think it was a round cheating, but I don't
know because I also we'll get to it. I think
they were swingers. I think they knew each other as cheating.
So it's got to be something wilder than that, is
my personal guess. Unless he was just such a like
goody two shoes wife guy. Well, okay, we'll talk about
him later. We're gonna start chronologically with the father, Lord Byron.

(07:00):
Lord Byron was, for like one hundred years at least,
the archtypical bad boy, the anti hero. I'm not a
classic literature girl. I'm much more of a fantasy speculative fiction.
So I never heard anyone use the phrase byronic hero.
Had either of you heard this phrase before.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
I had heard it?

Speaker 4 (07:20):
I am a PhD in literature dropout. Unfortunately I have
heard that phrase. Don't ask me what it means. That's
why I'm a That's why I'm a dropout and not
a degree holder, but I have heard that phrase before.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
Okay, really cool, Yeah, no, let's dropout. I really excited
when I accidentally, like I knew that you know a
lot about computer things and the way that women are
talked about in the history of computing. I love when
I find out that I have the perfect guests for something.

Speaker 4 (07:52):
Uh, the perfect guest might have been a PhD holder.
I'll take it nonetheless now because then.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
If you're a PhD holder, he'd be like, Margaret, that's
not the way that it happened, Margaret.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
And if there's any moments like that, you should interject them,
because I didn't give a shit about Lord Byron until
he was in the background of all of these stories.
I did know and care about, and finally I was like,
all right, I need to know. A byronic hero is
an anti hero. It's a it's a fuck boy. It
is a Victoria pre Victorian fuck boy. And people would

(08:24):
throw that phrase around byronic the way that we might
talk about Orwellian or kafka esque today, not meaning the
same thing. But if you have like a brooding, sexy
anti hero, he has a byronic figure. He absolutely fucked,
he broke hearts. He spit on the conservative morals of
his society. He wrote poetry. It was that was like

(08:46):
the rock star job at the time, not the way
it comes across now. When you tell people that you
write poetry, which everyone should still do, mind you, but
it doesn't carry the same weight. It's like telling someone
you're a podcaster or something. You know. He spent his
fortune and his fame on revolution and liberation. He pissed
off an awful lot of people. Despite not being conventionally

(09:07):
attractive and being disabled, he was the most sexually desired
man in high society in London. This is literally the
guy who wrote Don Juan, or as he pronounced it,
don Juwan, I think, just because he was English, not
as like a weird Yeah, and it's semi auto biographical.
It's also semi auto biographic about his fuck up dad too,
because his fuck up dad was a lot like him.

(09:30):
He home wrecked constantly, He ruined lives, He was sleeping
with his half sister. He was not around to raise
his kids, although this was not entirely his fault always
he honestly could potentially have fathered hundreds of children. There's
only a few that we know about. He spoke up
for the working class when no one else would. He
went into exile because his sexuality was a capital offense

(09:52):
in his native country, the backwards, a little island called England.
Someone's going to get mad that England is actually the
name of a specific country, not the larger island whatever.
And he died young trying to free far off Grease
from foreign occupation. So people argue about him today. They say,
was he a hero? Was he a monster? Was he misunderstood?

(10:14):
I have come to the conclusion, and I'm curious your take.
He's all three of these things.

Speaker 3 (10:20):
Yeah, I agree with you.

Speaker 4 (10:21):
I think complicated person like I think trying to be like, oh,
he's just purely a hero, purely a monster. I think
his legacy is a little too complex to boil it
down in that way.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
I think all of these things.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Yeah. And the thing that I'm like, well, i'll get
into it. The way he specifically handled a few relationships
is the thing that I'm like, Wow, I wish I
had more details. I wish I kind of knew better.
But I mean it's like, who am I to sit
in judgment of these people who have been dead for
hundreds of years. But I'm like, that's literally my job
is to try and find entertaining ways to sit in

(10:54):
judgment of people who've been dead for hundreds of years.

Speaker 4 (10:56):
So I do think is like the way that he
showed up in reallyationships does relate to his work and legacy.
So it's not like we're just being petty and being like, oh, well,
he wrote this, but also he was a scoundrel.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Like those things are kind of related totally.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
He wasn't like writing about a wandering fuck boy out
of like an insul imagination sitting in his parents' basement.
You know.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
He was a.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Wandering fuck boy. And in seventeen eighty eight, Lord Byron
was born into minor nobility in the center of that
world spanning nightmarish hydra called the British Empire. His first
name was not Lord, it was George, but no one
as soon as he becomes Lord Byron, he's just Lord Byron, like,

(11:40):
which is a move. But he was born George Gordon Byron.
He was born in London to a Scottish heiress and
a father named mad Jack. To be fair, Lord Byron
named his own father mad Jack in like an obituary
of the aforementioned mad Jack. But that's the name that's stuck,
because Lord Byron, if he names something, that's the name

(12:01):
that's going to stick. Matt Jack was lived up to
his name. He fought against the American Revolution. He blew
all of his money gambling. He fucked around on his
wife with other married women. He left his second wife
and all of his kids to go live in France
with his own sister, whom he was probably fucking. Then
he died at thirty four, probably from friend of the

(12:24):
pod tuberculosis, but possibly by his own hand. Meanwhile, Young
Byron not quite yet Lord, although he's going to become
a lord at ten, which is not a thing you
should do to a child. He moves with his mom
to Scotland. He was born with a club foot. He
will walk with a limb his entire life. And he's
never able to dance, at least like in a way

(12:47):
that is presentable to high society. Through vagaries of inheritance,
I refuse to study in depth. My opinion about the
English nobility is already on record. A series of dead
airs mean that our young Lord Byron winds up inheriting
the title Lord Byron from his great uncle who is
named Lord Byron. The new young Lord Byron is ten

(13:10):
when he becomes the sixth Lord Byron, which is a baron.
He's a baron.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
Again, we don't really know how the titles work. I
don't know either, and I refuse to look it up.
So if you do know that, I feel like, keep
it to yourself.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Maybe.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah. So he suddenly becomes a character in a weird
old movie, only he predates old movies right by one
hundred years, so he's actually the things that they're all
based on. It becomes a baron of this estate called
Newstead Abbey in Nottingham, near Sherwood Forest and all that shit.
It is old and run down, so his mom leases
it out rather than living there, but he spends some
time there as a kid in the like we can't

(13:45):
afford to keep up our giant Gothic mansion, and he
has a Gothic nightmare of a childhood. His mother was
a drunk. A lot of biographers like to argue about
whether or not she was shitty to him. His nurse
was very shitty to him. The way that it's phrased
in history books. I specifically disagree with because his nurse

(14:06):
beat him regularly, sexually assaulted him regularly when he's like,
you know, ten or something, and then would yell at
him in scripture and you know, talk about what terrible
person he is or whatever. Right, And one reason it's
hard to piece out a lot of things is that
people dance around both the things that he had inflicted

(14:26):
upon him and that he inflicted upon others. People don't.
People are like sly and vague, And I think that's
like a British nobility thing, where when they talk about assault,
child abuse, incest, homosexuality and affairs, and they're all like
conflated as bad things, even though some of them are
perfectly fine and consensual and some of them are horrific,
nightmare things whatever. I'm not even going to repeat it.

(14:48):
I don't like the way that about half the histories
that I read about him refer to what he suffered
at the hand of his caretakers. He was very happy
to get sent way to boarding school. He called them
the happiest days of his life. He met a bunch
of his forever friends while he was at school. He's
probably started sleeping with boys. I understand why men at

(15:11):
the time talk slyly around homosexuality because it was a
public hanging offense at the time, and he falls in
love with girls a bunch too, and he's way more
public about that. By college, the school is like, oh,
you can't keep a dog in your room, and he's like, okay,

(15:32):
So he gets a bear.

Speaker 4 (15:35):
Wait where did he get a bear? Like, what do
we know about him obtaining this bear?

Speaker 2 (15:40):
I don't know enough. He keeps animals his whole life.
He always has like a menagere that follows him around
basically through all of his travels, and it's like whatever,
weird animals, But he specifically likes dogs and birds, like
giant birds, peacocks and eagles and stuff like that. Right,
But it's referred to as a tame bear, and I
refuse to like just say it was a tame bear

(16:01):
because I only half believe that that's a concept. You know.
I think you can have a trained bear. I think
that's true. And yeah, I it's just one of these
like rich European people things like every now and then
you read about like someone who lives in Europe and
they have a ton of money, so they have like
a leopard or whatever, you know.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
Yeah, if I you know that meme.

Speaker 4 (16:23):
I wouldn't tell anybody if I won the lottery, but
there would be signs I would definitely get all kinds
of weird animals.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Oh yeah, for sure. I mean I would treat them
well and have like specialists or whatever.

Speaker 4 (16:32):
Like.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
I wouldn't be you.

Speaker 4 (16:34):
Know, it wouldn't be one of those things where it's like, oh,
this person had a alligator in their studio apartment or something,
they would be well cared for. But yes, I get it,
this is something I understand.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, no, totally, And like, yeah, all of the birds
and stuff that he keeps, I'm like, yeah, I would
totally do that if I, like, if I got to
hire people to take care of things, you know, for me.
And while in school he got into poetry. His first
poems were terrible love poems for his cousin Margaret, which
I only included because I like the name Margaret and

(17:06):
Margaret did not want him. He self published two poetry books,
one of which he had to censor because of its
like frank eroticism. He's like from a very young age,
is like and then I like fucking you know, and
then the priests are like you shouldn't say that, and
he's like, and then I like vague metaphors, and.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
That's much better. Then I like intimacy.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now he's constantly talking about his like
intimate friendships with boys and then the like long curly
locks that go down the back of this boy's you
know back or whatever.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
I think we're picking up what he's putting down.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, totally. But it's funny because it took hundreds of
years for people to pick it up because they were
like and then late later spoiler, he leaves England because
he can't come back, and it's because of scandal, and
some of it's like kind of legit scandal. But he's
pretty open in his letters. He's like, I can't go
back becaus they hang me for having the sex that
I have.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
You know. Yes, this is.

Speaker 4 (17:59):
Something that I've seen time and time again from history
where the person they're writing about all but comes out
and says it and it's like, ooh, what was the
relationship here? And it's like, well, you can read what
they wrote where they talked about how they have it's
a sexual one, or he can act like it's like
very cloudy.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, we just do it as they do in Greece,
and we're buried next to each other, like uh huh.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
So he self publishes two poetry books, right, and then
his third book finds a publisher and it's called his
first published book by someone else's called Hours of Idleness,
and it's not particularly impressive. It is widely panned. People
are like, it's no good, it's derivative. I honestly didn't
totally love his poetry, so I'm not going to like
include much of it in this episode. I actually really

(18:45):
like a lot of his contemporaries poetry like Percy Shelley,
which I'm not going to quote in here. But anyway,
so he turned around and he wrote poems making fun
of his reviewers, and these were his first good poems
that people like, where his poems talking shit and if
you want to talk shit, you can talk shit about

(19:08):
are well, no, you should never talk shit about our advertisers.
We think that all of them are perfect in every way,
especially the ones that are about things that go exactly
against everything that we believe in. Here's Dad's and we're back.

(19:32):
So he won't dance for obvious reasons, but he is
an athlete. He is a fairly obsessive athlete. He's not
particularly talented, he's not particularly bad at it either, but
he's like always like swimming canals and doing all of
this stuff right his whole life. And he ends up
going to the same college, Trinity College at Cambridge, that
are later bisexual hero Oscar Wilde would go to almost

(19:54):
a century later, and they're both into boxing, and they
both self publish bad poetry while in college. And I
just we did an episode about him like a month ago,
and I just I'm going to forget the name Trinity
College like in three months, but for now it sticks
in my mind, top of mind. He gets out of
college and he starts doing what he's really good at,

(20:15):
becoming a wandering vagabond, and fuck boy, this is nit
his niche niche. How do you pronounce that word niche?

Speaker 3 (20:22):
I think I've heard both.

Speaker 4 (20:24):
I know, it's one of those words that whenever I
say on a podcast, I second guess myself.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
Yoh, I don't know tbd.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, he went on a grand tour like all rich
assholes do when they're like done the school, you know,
and they traveling around and now, don't get me wrong,
dropping out of college or finishing college and going and
wandering around for a couple of years or whatever. That's fine.
It's a rich asshole move when you have all of

(20:52):
your friends and servants in your meningerie with you, that's
that going.

Speaker 4 (20:57):
It's like what an artist, like a musician, goes on tour,
Like everybody's.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Coming with us.

Speaker 4 (21:03):
We've gotta cook, get a servant and a cleaner, and
everybody that I'm sleeping with all in one group.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yep, which is often for him an overlap between those
various positions.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
It actually doesn't sound bad. I'm not gonna know, it's not.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
He's lived a final life and like there's only one
thing that is gonna comp up in his life that
may not have been consensual on his part, and like
even that, honestly, I'm not so sure, at least in
everything that I've read. So he's off adventuring, and the
Napoleonic Wars have like shut down Europe to travel, right,

(21:37):
it's not a good idea to go wander around with
peacocks and like your lovers around Europe. So he goes
to the Mediterranean, and he also picked that area, and
he wrote about this, and again people didn't bother me.
They're like, oh, it's just the wars. He picked that
area because homosexuality is more tolerated and autumn and controlled
areas than European areas. He was also into like esoteric

(22:00):
shit and orientalism. He's pretty into like being a white
guy in a Sufi mysticism and all that shit.

Speaker 4 (22:06):
I feel like, I know guys like this. This is
as like you're just like this as a type. This
guy is still out there.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah, he is the first, and I was gonna say finest,
but I'm not sure. But I challenge if you are
listening to this and you're like, I'm kind of this
kind of asshole, commit your life and possibly lose your
life to progressive causes of liberation. That's what I'm gonna say.
That's the thing you should do, and always stay consensual.

(22:34):
The sketchiest thing that we can immediately point to is
that during these travels, and he's just out of college,
he is almost certainly fucking a fourteen year old boy
who's like with him on these travels, and he's also
in love with like every woman he meets, including three sisters,
one of whom is twelve. However, usually when people are
like he is in love with it means that he's

(22:56):
fucking them. I actually don't think he's fucking these sisters. Then,
the most part is that the only thing that's abnormal
about what I just described is that one of them
as a boy for the time. This is not to
say it was all right, but it wasn't a thing
that people bothered to note as weird. He starts writing
epic travelog poetry. His first successes came from a poem

(23:17):
called Child Harold's Pilgrimage, and this did real well, like
selling tens of thousands of copies right away. Byron says,
I awoke one morning and found myself famous. Anywhere you
go in England, someone has either read this or is
talking to someone who has read this. I can't imagine
poetry ever finding that same niche in society ever. Again,

(23:41):
I'm just gonna switch between niche and niche every single
time I say it. That's my plan.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
I like it. The only poem, the only poet that
I can think of like that is.

Speaker 4 (23:49):
Who's the poet who writes kind of sparse poems that
It's like.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
I'm going to embarrass myself by not knowing.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
Her first name is Rupee. She's very famous.

Speaker 4 (23:59):
Okay, she might have been dating Corey Booker for a while,
like like she's the last poet that I remember that like.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
Blew up everywhere, k A you are, and.

Speaker 4 (24:10):
Every every poem is like the lines, the breaks are
really interesting, so it'll be like the milk line break
in my heart line break. Like it's like very like
the poems are sparse and broken on the page in
a specific kind of way.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
These go on Instagram a lot, right.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yes, it's like Instagram famous poet.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, which is that's her name it? But I think
it's I think it's not Ruby.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
I think it's Rupee Rupee, Yes, thank.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
You, Yes, so yeah, check her out.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
I think that we've just hit this place where it's
just a media saturation thing where it's like because at
the same time you're like, oh, the novelist and you're like, oh,
which one. There's ten there are ten novelists available for
you to listen to to read, you know, and now
everyone can write novels and that's great, but it does
make it harder to become an overnight success. He was

(25:02):
writing basically pulp fiction adventure tales about different wandering fuck boys,
but in poetry form it has lots of Orientalism. Literally,
these are referred to as his Oriental tales, and his
particular obsession is with Greece and Albania. And since he's
a lord, as soon as he comes of age, he
goes and he joins the House of Lords. I again

(25:22):
refuse to know if this is automatic, but he is
now in government because because an uncle died, right, that's
how government should work. He gives three speeches total his
entire career, and all of them are super radical and
unpopular because he's politically he's really fucking cool. The first

(25:44):
speech he gives there I actually covered in the episode
about the Lattites. Basically, all of these people are rioters,
are destroying machinery that was destroying their livelihood. They didn't
hate technology, they hated specific technology that was putting them
out of a job. It's very applicable to a lot
of people. Right now, we're listening to this m HM
and the House of Lords was considering a bill that

(26:05):
they passed which was let hang everyone who breaks machines,
because that's England's solution to everything at this point. Hangings, yeah,
just public hangings, which to be fair is a lot
less gruesome than what England was doing to kill people
about two hundred years earlier. So he stands up and
he gives this long speech about like, hey, actually the
Luddites are kind of cool and at very least don't

(26:27):
murder them. His second speech in the House of Lords
was what if we treated the Catholics over in Ireland
a little bit better? Huh how about that? Doesn't that
seem like a good plan? That one was equally unpopular.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
Yeah, I can't imagine that going over well.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
No, and like, Okay, the one cool thing about an
inherent nobility is that every now and then you're just
gonna have this guy who's just like, I guess I'm
in government now, but I fucking hate all of you,
like because he's not trying to play nice with the
House of Lords. He doesn't care about any of this stuff,
you know. All he cares about is getting his dick

(27:04):
wet and like writing poetry and wandering around and actually
trying to be nice to everyone constantly, and like really
like he gives all of his stuff away constantly. He
is selfish romantically in some ways, but he's also he
doesn't care when the people he sleeps asleep with other people,
so I don't know. I don't So he spends four

(27:27):
years of his life in society, which is like I'm
gonna put in air quotes because he gets capitalized. This
is the rich asshole clique of five thousand people in
a city of one million that, like all of the
books and shit are all about. He is a rock
star when he enters society because he's just come back
from his grand tour and he's famous as hell, and
so he's invited all the fancy poets and he either

(27:49):
starts seducing or honestly, the way that most histories present it,
being sought after by everyone in society. Everyone is trying
to fuck this guy. Everyone's like mailing him blocks of
hair and like writing him weird letters and shit, Yeah,

(28:11):
this fucking guy.

Speaker 4 (28:12):
Like I mean, like it's like throwing a bra up
on stage or something, you know, like can't go anywhere
without people sending me.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
A weird letter totally, And like I remember when at
some point there's this like reckoning that will eventually happen
to the history of rock and roll, where we realize
that all of these men are like mass rapists, right
and people are like, well, if you can't just like
randomly fucked group is, why would you be a rock star?
Like I don't know, like make music and like change
people's lives and shit. And that's also say that you

(28:40):
can't have like wild consensual sex with lots of people.
But like, obviously the way that the rock stars were
doing it overall was not so good. Lord Byron starts
up an affair with a woman named Lady Lamb, which
is a funny name. Her name is Lady Caroline. Lamb
definitely pursued him. She sent him a bunch of letters

(29:02):
and lock of hair, and then she learned how to
copy his prose style and wrote him in his own
voice to try and get his attention.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
Whoa pretty intense, Lady Lamb.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
She is going to get way more intense. This is
the relationship that I like. I think they're just bad
for each other, but it's like the relationship where he
is either the worst person or she is either the
worst person, or they're both just really bad for each other.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
Oh my god, I know this relationship where it's like
both of y'all are really toxic and together it's like
unleashed something really wild.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Yeah, totally. You're like, well, yeah, no, he is absolutely
awful if in this context, and you're really awful in
his context too, And I wish he would just get
away from each other. She called him while she was
still pursuing him. She called him mad, bad, and dangerous
to know, which is like the quote about him that
it's not on his tombstone, but practically, and she wasn't wrong.

(29:59):
This relationship absolutely wrecks her. You could make the case
that she was emotionally abusive to him. You could make
the case that she was acting in the ways that
she was because of the way that he was acting
to her. I think I usually tend towards siding with
women in any such pairing. I couldn't tell you in

(30:19):
this case, and maybe that's because of there's entire books
written for hundreds of years arguing one side or the other.
It annoys me how much has been written about this, honestly,
even though I'm like, I wish I knew more about it,
but I wish I knew more about it without having
to read like all of these politicized triestises arguing one
position or the other. Lady Caroline Lamb was already married

(30:40):
to a future prime minister, but that did not stop
her and Lord Byron from having this very public affair,
which I think was kind of just normal in society.
I think it was all just swingers, but they all
had weird rules about it.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
I think so too.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah, she would do things like mail him her pubic
hair cut so close there's still blood on it. That
is a move, show up at his house, grab a
letter opener, and threaten to kill herself if he doesn't
date her, and she's mad that he's not faithful to
her even though she's married. On the other hand, I

(31:15):
think he's fucking her. Mother in law.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Is one messy.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Yeah, there's messy, then there's fucking mother he's getting He's
gonna get messier.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Both of them are going to get messier. What's messier
than mother in law? Half sister?

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Oh god, I think mother in law is messier.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
Okay, okay, wait, I'm I think his own half sister.
He is half sister.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
His half sister might up.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
With his wife, but we'll get to that. He's not
married yet at this point, sir. Yeah, So he hates
dances because he can't dance because of his club foot,
but he goes to dances with her, and he's embarrassed
because she dances with everyone else, and so eventually he's like,
if we go to these dances, you can't dance with
anyone else, which is him being controlling whatever. After he

(32:13):
leaves her, she gets wilder. At one point, he's getting
his portrait done, so she copies his style of writing
and writes the portrait artist and is like, oh yeah,
I'll like send somebody by to pick up that painting.
I'm totally Lord Byron.

Speaker 4 (32:27):
These people would have loved being in an era where
you could have digital drama, because like, yeah, like forging
someone's way of speaking, and then I guess the person's like, well,
sounds like him.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
I guess that's right.

Speaker 4 (32:37):
Like imagine the damage these two could have done to
each other with Instagram.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Oh absolutely, the friend's only close friends stories that these two.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
Were, stories with like quotes like oh my god, all
of Koe Kardashian style dramatic quotes.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
And they would be like screen capping I noticed you
saw my story but didn't heart react it and then
like sending that to each other nikes. So she steals
this portrait of him and won't give it back unless
he sends a lock of his hair. This is after
they're broken up, so he sends a lock of his
new lover's hair instead. I'm not sure whether it was like, haha,

(33:16):
fuck you is my new lover's hair, or if he
was pretending it was his own. Later he's going to
like straight up like write her back from like his
new lovers of address and shit, just to piss her off.
At one point, he runs across her at a dance
and she's like, well, I guess I can dance now,
ha ha ha, because I'm not dating you anymore. And

(33:37):
he's like, sure, because you dance with everyone in a
like you're a dirty slut kind of implied way. Right,
So she smashes a glass and starts cutting at her
wrist in front of everyone. She does not seriously wound herself,
but this is not great. So they're bad for each other,
and they're bad to be in the same society as
each other, and she wants him back to the end

(34:00):
of her life. None of the people who lives he
wrecking Balld stop spending the rest of their life even
after he dies, pining for him. I am guessing this
man could fuck yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:14):
I mean when the hold lasts longer than your actual
life on this earth when you've died, and they're still like, hm,
the one that got away.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
Yeah, that really says something.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, And he, like I does, I think on some
level genuinely cares for her, and he's like writing her
for a long time, but then like after they're breaking up,
he's like, oh, I should probably really stop writing her
and stuff.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
You know.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
At one point in desperation, she builds a huge bonfire
and makes all the servant women. It's like it's like
all of the women in town, but I think it's
like her town, because she's like, fucking she's a higher
up richer, noble, right, So it's like all the women
have to like come out and like burn all of
his shit, like all of the trinkets and letters and
stuff that he sent her in a big public spectacle.
And then and this far it's fun. I kind of

(34:55):
like this. She's like, fuck my own reputation, I am
going to write a novel about this man with a
thinly disguised chriacature of Byron named Lord Ruthven. Because she's
actually a really good writer on her own right, and
she writes this whole Gothic novel at a different point
that I haven't read yet but kind of want to.
It seems up my alley. So she puts this out

(35:16):
and it like torpedoes are standing in society. But it
kind of takes him down a little bit too. Right.
Of all the affairs he started, the most scandalous besides
the men that he can't admit he's fucking, is that
he is fucking his half sister Augusta. There's a lot
of like, oh, maybe he is fucking his half sister Augusta.
I'm going to go on a limb here, and this

(35:39):
is his father's kid from a previous marriage. It is
scandalous because it is incest, but it is not as
scandalous as it could be. I am not making I
am making a moral judgment. My moral judgment is separate
from the one that I am now describing. The moral
judgment of this pre Victorian English society is that it's
not as scandalous as it could be because they did
not grow up together, it did not really know each

(36:00):
other too well until they were adults, and because of
the fact that they had different mothers rather than different fathers.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Some Game of Thrones, ash ship Margaret.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah. The more I read history, the more I'm like,
George R. Martin was just just pulling on some he was.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Just he was just going off of what actually happened. Yes,
with some with some magic and some dragons mixed in.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah. God, I wish we.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Had dragons like that.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
I know.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
Oh, I would commit war crimes or a dragon. A dragon,
I would write a dragon and you're blonde.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
I am yeah, not a dragon.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, but I don't.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
But I'm not into the incest.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
Sorry, Oh you're not weird.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
I'm sorry. That's a firm modern sensibility, the incest dragon writing. Yes,
that's about it. So at this point, Lord Byron, who
was not successfully acquired a dragon, is like, I know,
He's like, I better get married to quell this scandal.
Plus I keep blowing all my money, so I better

(37:06):
marry someone rich. He refused to take money for poetry
because of like weird nobility ethics. But the cool thing
he did is that he gave away the copyright to
his works to like anyone who like needed money. Like,
instead of being like, oh, I made some money off
my work, here's the money for it, he just a
straight up like, ah, it's your poem. Now you can

(37:29):
sell it under my name. I don't care.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
That's kind of bad ass, I know.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Like his political ethics, I'm chill with. And I also
understand why, coming from the society that he does, he
spits on conventional morality. You know, I just think that
there's some babies in bathwater problem happening. But most people

(37:54):
paint this marriage as a marriage of convenience that he
ends up in.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
I see why.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
The two of them get along pretty well. He marries
a woman named Anna Isabella Millbank or Annabella for short,
who is mostly known to history as Lady Byron. She
is interesting in her own right. We're actually going to
talk about her more in the second half of this
particular episode. She is his opposite in all ways but politics.
She's like into non hedonism, and she likes math not poetry.

(38:24):
And she also said no the first time he proposed
to her, which probably just like is probably why he
was so into her.

Speaker 5 (38:31):
You know.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
They get married at his new wife's insistence, his half
sister and lover, Augusta, moves in with the couple. Okay,
most nights, Annabella is on the couch and Augusta's in
the marriage bed is the way that it is often phrased.
I think that there's a chance of that is a
triad and not talked about. And plus he's just running

(38:54):
around fucking other people. This marriage does not last. This
is going to be shocking.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Surprises me. What was that? A solid foundation?

Speaker 2 (39:04):
I know last less than a year. All that came
out of it was Annabella's life being like pretty fucked
up by it all. And they had a daughter named
Augusta Ada because Ada Lovelace is named after the half
sister that her dad is banging.

Speaker 3 (39:24):
It's pretty messy.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah. Shortly after Ada's birth, Annabella takes Ada and leaves
her husband, but Annabella doesn't stop loving and caring for
Lord Byron. Annabella is like, you are fucking insane. That's
what's happening here is you are non She was like,
my ex husband is neurodivergent in ways that are problematic.

(39:50):
Is the way she would have phrased it in her Instagram.
She would not have been messy on Instagram. Well she
would have had to be because he would have been
messy on Instagram.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Her.

Speaker 4 (40:00):
Yeah, you get you get pulled into this stuff, even
if you are not the kind of person who is
messy on Instagram. When you're in the orbit of people
who are you get pulled in.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yeah, Lord Byron never sees his daughter again, but he
like writes about her constantly in his poetry. This is
like the great loss in his life that he's not
more part of his daughter's life as far as I
can tell. And Annabella Mom continues to think fondly of

(40:30):
Lord Byron for a long time, but is like pretty like,
but you got to stay no influence. My kid cannot
end up like you. You're just a weird crazy man
that I miss and who's like soul. She's constantly trying
to say, she's really religious. So in eighteen sixteen, Byron
left England for good. Most accounts refer to the scandal

(40:52):
of the failed marriage, but his own correspondence was like, yeah,
I could get hanged for you know the way I
like to have sex, which is with men. But what
isn't a hanging offence is taking advantage of these sweet deals.
This is the worst one. This is the worst one

(41:13):
I've ever done. It's like Robert Evans level. I know,
I I try to rise above such it's because I'm
doing someone who isn't actually because I'm doing someone who
could easily be a bastard. That's why valid valid. But
that doesn't mean that these deals are bastards. The fact

(41:35):
that they are is completely unrelated. Here's the ads geesus.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
You you got there. I feel like you got there.
You laided the plane.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
So we're back, much like our wanderers, back to wandering.
This time I'm among his uh menoche. He brings a
Catholic personal physician named Polardari, whom he was probably fucking.
Who is a man, and he was probably fucking Polardari.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
No one. I don't try him to do anything else
when he's just consistently fucking all the time.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
You know.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
He writes about writing poetry as like it's like hard,
and he does that annoying thing where writers are like,
this is the hardest thing anyone's ever done. I am
forcing the muse out of me or whatever, you know,
because I think the thing that he actually enjoys, yeah,
is just having sex constantly. He was absolutely nagging and

(42:40):
monstrous to Polardari if they were dating. Whether or not
they were dating, he was absolutely just like pretty verbally
abusive to Polardari. And so that kind of implies that
that might have been. He has tempestuous moods, and so
I think a lot of the way that people are
behaving around him is like understandable in that context. You know,

(43:01):
he settles in Switzerland, where the most famous thing about
him happens. Well from the modern sense, at the time,
he was famous for like everything else. But at the time,
but now these days people are like, oh, yeah, the
guy whose fucking house Frankenstein was written at because he
was staying at some chateau or whatever the fucking Switzerland
for the summer. Because he's rich as fuck, you know,

(43:22):
he's like they're always like, oh, and then he was
like broken in debt, and they're like, there's noble rich,
and then there's like normal people like like there's noble poor,
which is way the fuck above like even like middle
class rich.

Speaker 4 (43:34):
Yeah, he's not broke, like like someone like me is broke.
I gu it's a different level of broke we're talking.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
About, Yeah, exactly. So he's at the chateau. I've covered
this a little bit on other things. The writers Mary
Shelley and Percy Shelley show up to his house in
Switzerland on the lake. They spend the summer and the
year without a summer there because the reason the year
was without a summers because some volcanos fucked up the weather.
Guests in the hotel across the lake would pay to
use telescope to spy on the famous rockstar poets over there,

(44:03):
and people like to conjecture about what they got up to,
and I suspect it was horny, but who knows. Mary
Shelley wrote Frankenstein there and invented science fiction. And Polodori,
the physician who was also there, who's never remembered because
he's a servant, because there's a ton of people there,

(44:23):
because they have fucking servants there, who are people people
You can get that.

Speaker 4 (44:28):
Fucking servants as in servants, they are fucking or fucking
servants like fucking servants.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
I you know, probably both in this kind of a
little bit of both. Yeah, Polodori started writing The Vampire.
If you want to hear me do a reading of
The Vampire, listen to Coolsone Media book Club. I read
it recently because it's about an evil, seductive vampire named
Lord Ruthven, the same name that Lady Lamb used to
make fun of Lord Byron and this Lord Ruthven, who

(44:55):
is clearly Byron, is traveling around with his friend around
year up especially the Mediterranean, and just fucking up people's lives.
And it is just the barest, most obvious. I am
traveling with a vampire. What the fuck is my life?
Which is to say, Lord Byron is the first vampire,
and therefore I can tie computers back to vampires. It's

(45:19):
the whole.

Speaker 4 (45:19):
Point, masterfully, that weaving is quite masterful.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Thanks with a ready yarn on a big bulletin board.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
When you're using your computer, think vampires.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, yeah, Bulladori is going to die young as hell,
probably by suicide. The toxicology reports are like, oh, it
was like some reason to think it might not have been.
His life was functionally ruined by Lord Byron. Or maybe
he died because he was sucked dry of all his
blood because Lord Byron is actually a vampire who's to tone.

(45:54):
After Switzerland, the vampire Lord Ruthven, sorry, Lord Byron went
on to where he slept his way into a secret
society trying to free Italy from the Austrians, which is cool.
Then he started a newspaper called The Liberal, which is
about revolution because they liberals were made different back then.
He studied Armenian. He wrote I think the first English

(46:16):
language Armenian grammar book, but I'm not sure, and he
wrote about the needs for Armenian liberation. He kept fucking
people's wives the whole time. Of course, he would write
a three thousand word letter to his publisher back in
England just talking about how he's fucking the wife of
some baker.

Speaker 4 (46:38):
Like like, his publisher is like, why are you telling
me this?

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Where are your pages?

Speaker 2 (46:44):
I know I can't publish this until you die, like,
and those letters are definitely published now because everything he
wrote that didn't get burned is published. But and meanwhile,
Greece is like, what have we didn't have Ottoman rulers anymore?
What if we were like Greece again? So you have
the Greek War of Independence that goes from eighteen twenty

(47:05):
one to eighteen twenty nine. In eighteen twenty three, pretty
early on, Lord Byron joins in accounts that dislike him
are like he was like, oh, I'm so special and important.
I'm going to go become the king of Greece and
I'm going to be a famous war hero because war
is fun, adventure and I like adventure. I think there's
some of that, But I think it's two things happening. One,

(47:27):
I think this man had a death wish. I think
he felt like his race was run at this point,
but I'm not sure that's my own conjecture. And Two,
the thing I know a little bit more about is
that Greek rebels were writing him, being like, hey, you
know how you like Greece and always write about us
and like exoticize us and made all your money writing
about it. Why actually he didn't take any money, made
all your fame writing about us, Why don't you come

(47:50):
throw down? And so they talk him into going, and
he's like, yeah, all right, I talk a big game.
Time to fucking put my money where my mouth does.
He's in his mid thirties at this point. He sailed
to Greece. He had to dodge Ottoman patrols in order
to do it. He spent his fortune retrofitting the Greek
navy and supporting the rebel cause. Like literally, he sells

(48:11):
his estate in England like he actually now he like
actually goes broke for something, and he gives all of
his money to the cause, and especially a younger man
who he was trying to fuck but who didn't love
him back? And then he gets sick. It's the nineteenth century.

(48:31):
Don't catch a cold in the nineteenth century. But his
doctors they tried everything, you know what they tried. They
tried everything. They tried blood letting, they tried animas, they
even tried bringing up blisters on his skin. None of that,
friend was working. No, not of it, which is funny
because Polodari his like personal physician. That was the thing

(48:52):
he was trained into. There's a word for it. I
forget the word for it, but it's like the like
doctors at the time or like we have to get
the bad out of you through whatever, which is like,
I mean, you can physically remove an infection from your
body in certain contexts, but really it's like really rare,
like like if you have like a cut that's infected,
you can kind of don't I'm not advocating anyone do this.

(49:14):
You can kind of like get all that stuff out
of there and clean it again, you know, like if
you catch it early enough. I'm not This is not
how you do medicine overall. There's every now and then
you can get the bad out of you. It is rare.

Speaker 4 (49:27):
So when they were like putting leeches on people, it
wasn't like completely crazy that it's not based out of
absolutely nothing that that was going to be effective.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
Maybe I know less about blood letting, okay, and I
only know a little bit about like removing like literally,
I mean, there's just some things that you're like, oh,
we're going to go in and cut out that tumor,
or we're going to you know, so they're at least
coming from a cause of like, oh there's a bad
thing in you, We're going to remove it, right. You know.
I want to know more about this stuff because I

(49:57):
think eventually the way that we currently look at medicine
and is going to look as silly as the Four
Humors did, you know?

Speaker 3 (50:03):
I totally agree.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
Yeah, they'll be like the way that we talk about
tuberculos is killing everyone and people are like, god this
people just didn't have antibiotics one day. If humanity survives
the current climate crisis, people are going to look back
and say that about cancer. You know, they're like Wow,
They'll be like given doing a history podcast and he'd
be like, you would't believe what this bitch died of
fucking cancer? Just everyone's just dying of cancer.

Speaker 4 (50:26):
Don't get cancer in twenty twenty four, y'all. I know
we're making like pithy little jokes about it, like we
are now.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah, exactly, and that will be good. I am glad that.
I mean, people still die of tuberculous all the time,
but that is a crime of poverty, not a anyway whatever.
So he's sick, and at one point he says there
are many more die of the lancet than the lance,
which is his pithy way of saying, I don't think
that all this blood letting is good for me. Later

(50:54):
doctors have been like, this is the reason he died
is they took out all of his blood while he
was trying to fight a cold. He died on April nineteenth,
eighteen twenty four, on the west coast of Greece, at
the age of thirty six. He never fought a battle
in Greece. He failed at uniting all the various factions
while he was alive. But while he was there he
did a fuck ton of humanitarian work for both Christians

(51:15):
and Muslims there, and he became a symbol and an
icon of Greek rebels, succeeding in death what he failed
to do in life, Like there's a suburb of Athens
that's named after him, and his friends immediately burn his
memoirs lest his reputation be forever tarred, tarred with what
I wish I knew, Like realistically, it's probably all the

(51:38):
stuff that I was like conjecturing about. But I don't know.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
I mean, that's what happens when you're dangerous to know.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Yeah, as he was dying, he said, let not my
body be hacked or sent to England. Both requests were denied.
His lungs or maybe his heart of read both were
like taken out and put in an urn in Greece,
so that Greece got to hold onto a little bit
of him their new hero, you know. And the rest
was sent to England. His body was sent to England,

(52:09):
and there was a place that was the most obvious
and logical place to bury him. In Westminster Abbey. There
was all the famous poets got buried at Poet's Corner.
The dean was like, this man is the devil. He
is not getting buried here, no fucking way. Probably didn't cuss.
It wasn't until nineteen sixty nine that a memorial was

(52:30):
placed for him at Westminster Abbey with all of the
other poets of his generation.

Speaker 3 (52:34):
Wow, that's so late.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
People did not the nobility did not like him for
a very long time. Instead, he was buried near his
own home, Nottingham, with a marble slab donated by the
King of Greece because Greece wins its independence. Although he
really win independence. He rand up by the king.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
But whatever.

Speaker 2 (52:59):
His friends mission to statue, but nowhere would take it
for a long time. I think eventually it ends up
at Cambridge to this college, but like for years they're like,
we made a statue of the guy, and everyone's like, nah,
we're good like that guy. He was kind of sketchy,
and it's like not for the right reasons, you know, Like,
but no one wants a statue to evil hedonism. He

(53:22):
was mourned by the working class of England and he
was spurned by the nobility because even the way he
wrote was like pulp adventure poetry. And almost two hundred
years since his death, some of us still don't know
what to make of him. That's where I land, like.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
Yeah, I mean, you promised a complicated character and you
sure delivered.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
I like my clean cut moral that's not true. I
always like it into the messy moral complexities of people,
but like, don't treat people the way he treated people.
But also like there's nothing in apparently wrong with like
sleeping with a bunch of people who want to sleep
with you, you know, and like the society telling him that
that was wrong, especially the society had told him that

(54:08):
he'd get hanged for. Like part of the scandal was
that he liked performing anal I don't like to usually
talk much about like specifics of sex because I'm kind
of a kind of a prude on my own podcast,
But he liked performing that on men and women, And
so women who I believe consentually had that kind of
sex with him would later like make a big deal

(54:32):
out of like this is why he's bad. Is he
likes this it's illegal. And then the other thing, I
actually don't know how it didn't end up in the script.
One of the things that Lady Lamb did to him
was through like clever, weird wordplay, blackmail him and be
like I know you like boys, so you should be
nice to me, you know, by like I think she

(54:52):
like wrote like remember me in one of his books.
That was like by a fame, a man who was
like famously gay.

Speaker 4 (54:59):
Something I don't like about the behavior here is people
who enjoy all different kinds of sets then turning around
and like using that to like blackmail or shame other
people that they've had that kind of sex with. It's
like you're getting down that way too, Like who are
you to point a finger?

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Yeah, totally, Or he was pressuring everyone into sex that
you know. It's like, I don't fucking know, you know,
And no one can talk honestly about it because of
the laws criminalizing sodomy and homosexuality. No one can actually
say what was happening. That's my somehow tie it all together? Takeaway?

(55:40):
I don't know, But there's your archetypical, mad, bad and
dangerous to no guy. Yeah, his daughter was really into
him and she basically invented software and we're gonna talk
about her and computers that I promised on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
This was a much more sexual episode than than I'm expecting.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
I love it, Okay, good, No, I like I again,
like I'm not like and I feel like I mostly
don't talk about the more details of this kind of thing,
but I feel like it's just necessary in this particular case, you.

Speaker 4 (56:22):
Know, absolutely, Like I feel like you need to know
that fact because I didn't know that about the anal sex,
and so it does help contextualize exactly how these how
these figures were interacting with each other.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Yeah, I really I think part of why I like
studying history so much because there's so many versions of
history that people like take what they currently believe in
project it backwards, like what we have is projections of
ourselves backwards, you know, and trying to figure out how

(56:55):
wild people were and weren't in the past is like
so fast to me because there's all these reads where
it was like, no, that was unheard of, no one
did that, And then there's other reads where like, well,
of course they did that. People have those bodies and
they go together in that you know, they can fit
that way, so of course people did it. You know.
It's like it's really interesting to me because I think
it says so much about you know, like like the

(57:18):
Victorians actually just trashed history because they just projected Victorian
values out to the past, and so we're still unpacking
all of the things that the Victorians tried to apply
retroactively and then it's annoying because it's like five thousand
rich white assholes in fucking London that the entire world's
history lives in the shadow of their moral values, and
it's so annoying.

Speaker 4 (57:40):
Anyway, Yeah, this is why it would be helpful of
some of this if there weren't laws that made people
squeamish about writing some of this stuff down.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Clearly, Yeah, totally. Well, if people want to, I don't
have a good way to transfer that into your plug
for your podcast. But where can people listen to you
talking about stuff?

Speaker 4 (58:01):
Anal Sex doesn't come up a lot, but if you
still want to hear the podcast, you can.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
Check it out.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
I come up on this show. I'm being like, I'm
blushing and defensive.

Speaker 3 (58:09):
Anyway, please kids, has it come up?

Speaker 4 (58:13):
But all other kinds of things do that are still
very interesting. The show was called There Are No Girls
on the Internet.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Please check it out, all right, and we'll be back
on Wednesday. By everyone.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the Iheard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts