Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast #451

Most people most of the time are polite cooperative and kind until they're not the following is a conversation with Rick Spence a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies Espionage secret societies conspiracies the occult and military history this is Alex Redman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends Here's Rick Spence you have written and lectured about serial killers secret societies Cults and intelligence agencies so we can basically begin at uh any of these fascinating topics but let's begin with intelligence agencies which has been the most

powerful intelligence agency in history the most powerful intelligence agency in history I mean it's an interesting question I'd say probably in terms of Historical longevity and consistency of performance that the Russian intelligence Services notice I didn't say the KGB specifically but the Russian intelligence Services going back to the zaris period are consistently pretty good not infallible none of them are of course there's a common Western way of looking at anything Russian uh very often I think it's still the case Russians are viewed in one of two ways Either they are bumbling idiots or they are

diabolically clever no sort of middle ground and you can find both of those examples in this so what I mean by that is that if you're looking at the Modern svr or FSB which are just two different organizations that used to be part of the one big KGB the AGB or its predecessors the Czech you're really going back to the late 19th century and the Imperial Russian intelligence Security Service generally known as the Okana or oranka it's really the department of police and the special core of garms their primary job was protecting the Imperial regime

and protecting it against Imperial or rather interior enemies revolutionaries for the most part and I got very very good at that by co-opting people within those movements infiltrating and recruiting Informers aent provocators in fact they excelled at the aent provocator person you place inside an organization to cost trouble usually maneuver them into a position of leadership and they provoke actions that can then allow you to crack down on them that is many to sort of lure or bring the target organization into any legal legal or open status that it can be more effectively suppressed they

were very good at That so good that by the early 20th century in the Years preceding the Russian Revolution in 1917 they had effectively infiltrated every radical party Bolshevik menik SRS great and small and placed people in positions of influence and Leadership to the point that arguably that is you can debate this but I think in the whole they could largely dictate what those parties did nothing was discussed at any Central committee Meeting of any revolutionary group that the Arana wasn't immediately aware of and they often had people in positions to influence what those decisions

were of course that raises an interesting question is that if they were that good and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled most of the opposition then how did the regime get overthrown by a revolutionaries the answer to that is that it wasn't overthrown by Revolutionaries it was overthrown by politicians that would then take us into a detour into Russian history but I I'll just leave it with this if you look at 1917 and you look closely this is one of the things i' would always tell my students is that there are two Russian revolutions in

1917 there's the first one in March or February depending on your calendar that overthrows Nicholas II revolutionaries are really not involved with that Bolsheviks are Nowhere to be seen trosky and Lenin are nowhere to be seen they have nothing to do with that that has to do effectively with a political conspiracy within the Russian Parliament the Duma to unseat an emperor they thought was you know bungling the war and was essentially a loser to begin with and it was a coup d'a a parliamentary couet the temporary or provisional government that that Revolution put in power

was the one overthrown by Lenin 8 Months later and that government was essentially one dominated by moderate socialists it was a government that very quickly sort of turned to the left you know the guy we associate with that is Alexander kensky Alexander kensky was a Russian socialist a politician he was the Quasi dictator of that regime he's the person not the Zar who's overthrown by Lenin uh So the the revolutionaries the end did not prove to be the Fatal threat to the zarus regime it was the zaris political system itself that did that what then

transpired was that the Okana and its method and many of its agents then immediately segued over into the new Soviet security service so one of the first things that lenon did in December of 1917 within a month of seizing power since the hold on power was Tenuous at best was that well you were going to need some kind of organization to infiltrate and suppress those pesky counterrevolutionaries and foreign imperialists and all of the other enemies that we have and so the extraordinary commission to combat counterrevolution and sabotage that Chaka was formed you put a veteran

bolik Felix zinski at the head of that someone you could politically rely upon but dzinski Built his organization essentially out of the okon I mean there you know there were all of these informers sitting around with nothing nothing to do and they were employed um in the early 20s the kind of ranking file of the chcka might have been 80 to 90% former Imperial officials those were gradually decreased over time so why would they do that well they were professionals they also needed to Eat and and things were somewhat precarious so if your job is

to be an aent provocator if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations and lead them astray you do that for whoever pays you that's part of the professionalism which goes in and under the Soviets the Soviet intelligence services are also very good at that they are very good at infiltrating people into to opposing organizations and I guess the one Example I would give to demonstrate that or the Cambridge five the British Traders Soviet standpoint Heroes who were recruited no most notably Kim filby guy Burgess Donald mlan Anthony blunt and there may have been well more

than five but you know that wasn't bad out of just Cambridge uh and placing those people in high positions the the ultimate goal of course is to get your people into Positions of leadership and influence in the opposing intelligence service and so they did of course it all fell apart and they ended up in you know philby ended up living the last part of his life in Exile in Moscow but they got their money's worth out of him and you can also find this in KGB infiltration the CIA the FBI the AL Rich Ames uh

Hansen cases of course we we were infiltrating by we I mean the Americans in the west Managed to infiltrate our moles as well but if it came down you know someone could dispute this but I would think if you were going to come down to a kind of like a a who had the most mol Super Bowl probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that so the scale of the infiltration the number people and uh the skill of it is there a case to be made that the Arana and the Chaka orchestrated both the

components Of the Russian Revolution as you described them well there's an interesting question for me I mean there are all kinds of questions about this I mean one of the questions is whether or not lenen was an Okana agent okay I've just said heresy uh some people I'll do that quite often because I am a heretic and proud of it great um why why would you possibly say that Lenin could have been an Okana agent well let's look what He managed to do so you had coming into the 20th century a a single nominally a

single Marxist movement the Russian Social Democratic labor party and bolik and menik majority ites and minority ites are merely factions of that party and they always agreed that they were all marxists and we we all believe in dialectical materialism and the the rise of so we're All we're all socialist comrade uh the difference was the the Tactical means by which one would attain this and uh what lenon wanted was a a militant small-scale Vanguard party wanted a revolution it wanted to seize power seize control of the state and once you have the state then you

induce socialism from above whereas the majority of the people the so-called menix the minority ites who are oddly enough the vast majority Of the party that's one of the first things how do you lose that argument okay how do how do the how does the minority get to grab the name majority I but lenon did that so what L wanted was a a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually seize control of the state and induced socialism from above there were other Russian marxists Who thought that that sounded

vaguely totalitarian and not really Democratic and not even terribly socialist and they oppose that ineffectively from the beginning outmaneuvered every step of the way the menix are a case study in failure of a political organization that too will be heresy to some people but look they lost now so what linen managed to do starting around 1903 continuing on this is he managed to Divide to take what had been a single Marxist party and split it into angry contending factions because he and his bulvik on one side advocating a much more militant conspiratorial policy the discombobulated

menix were over and the other and in between were a lot of people who really didn't know where they stood on this I mean sometimes they kind of agreed and he seems to be making sense today no no I Don't think he's making sense in that day but but he managed to completely dis unify this organization now who could possibly have seen benefit in that they now whether or not they put him up to it whether or not in some way they helped move him into a position of leadership or encouraged it or encouraged it

through people around him whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of the Zara secret police he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they have Wanted and I find that suspicious it's one of those things that it's it's so convenient in a way is that I'm not necessarily sure that was an accident there's also this whole question to me as to what was going on within the Okana itself now this this is one of these questions we might come to later about how intelligence agencies interact or serve the governments to which they are Theoretically

subordinate they do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power after all their main job is to collect information and that information could be about all kinds of things including people within the government structure itself and they also know how to leverage that information in a way to get people to do what you want them to do so an argument can be made again an argument not a fact merely an opinion Which is mostly what history is made out of of opinions is that at some point between about 1900 and 1917 people with

in the Okana were playing their own game and that game took them in a direction which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor specifically to Nicholas II was no longer part of that to me in a way it seems almost during the events of 1917 that one you had an organization that was very effective when it did that suddenly just becomes ineffective doesn't really disappear these things don't go away because it will reappear as the oaka basically fairly quickly but it raises the question to me as to what degree there were people within the organization

who allowed events to take the course they wished I always wonder how much Deliberate planning there is within an organization like aana or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence that happens well one of the key elements in any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization need to know so rarely do you have an occasion where everybody everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and and we Discuss all of the secret operations that are going on no no you never do that um only a very limited number of

people should know about that if you have a person who is a a case officer is controlling agents he's the only one who should know who those people are possibly his immediate superiors but no way do you want that to be common knowledge so information within the organization itself is compartmentalized so you don't need Everybody to be in on it you don't even need necessarily the people who are nominal at the top for instance the Okana the real boss of the Okana was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior the minister of the interior in fact

but minister of the Interior had no real effective control over this at all I mean to the point was that at one point early on they actually organize the assassination of Their Own Boss they uh have their agents among the Revolutionaries kill the minister of the Interior because he'll just be replaced by another one he is an imperial bureaucrat he's is not really part of their organization you know it's like a director of an intelligence agency appointed by the president maybe he's part of the organization maybe he isn't maybe he is not one of us

so you've got different levels different Compartments within it and and who's actually running the show if anyone is I don't know that's never supposed to be apparent well that's a fascinating question I me you could see this with nkvd it's obviously an extremely powerful organization that starts to eat itself where everybody's pointing fingers internally also as a as a way to gain more power so the question is in organizations like that that are so Compartmentalized where's the power where's the center of power because you would think think given that much power some individual or a

group of individuals will start accumulating that power but it seems like that's not always a trivial thing because if you get too powerful the snake eats that person well if we go back again to the uh the founder of Soviet Secret Police Felix zinski dzinski dies in 1926 Keels over after giving a heated speech to a party meeting now the common view what you usually read which is was ke for the time is that you know clearly Stalin had him whacked because anytime someone died it was almost always it and I think a lot of

times he did but in some cases Stalin's probably getting blamed for things that he didn't actually do the jinsky wasn't even opposed to Stalin so it's not clear why He but this was the you know Stalin died you know obviously he was poison something happened it was an unnatural death somebody goes in for an operation you know gets a little too much anesthesia Stalin killed them uh somebody tips over in a canoe in Upstate New York Stalin killed them there's actually a case about that so that itself can be kind of useful where every time

someone dies they think you killed them that's that's kind of an Interesting uh method of intimidation in that regard but suspicion is nonetheless there dzinski had been he was the Grand Inquisitor he was seemingly firmly in control of the organization of course maybe he wasn't maybe he was my guess would be is that if doin's death was not natural causes that he was probably eliminated by someone within his own Organization and then you look at the people who take over um his immediate success is uh veslav meniny who's really kind not really a secret policeman

more a kind of intellectual diletant but if you look behind him you notice the fellow is Henrik Yoda and Yoda will really sort of manage things from behind the scenes until meniny dies in 1934 and then you go to will hold on Until he's a victim of the purges I think in in 37 or or 38 uh Yoda is um ambitious murderous and if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had zinski whacked it would be him and for the purposes simply of advancement that's the uh you know the person to

look out at any kind of corporate organization is your immediate subordinate the person who could move Into your job because more than likely that's exactly what they're planning to do yeah just one step away from the very top yeah somebody there will probably accumulate the most power you mentioned that the various Russian intelligence agencies were good at creating agent provocateurs infiltrating uh the halls of power uh what does it take to do that well there's a interesting little acronym called Mice m i and it's you generally used and it's just the way in which you

would acquire how do you get people to work for you well m stands for money you pay them people are greedy they want money you know if you look at Aldrich Ames he had a very very expensive wife with expensive tastes so he wanted money I is for ideology so during particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s the Soviets were Very effective in exploiting Communists you know people who wanted to serve the great cause even though that that's initially not really what they wanted to do because the idea was that if you recruit Agents from

among let's say American Communists you compromise the party because exactly what your enemies are going to say is that all Communists are Soviet spies they're all traitors in some way so you would really want to Keep those two things separate but ideology was just so convenient and those people would just work for you so well they were you could get them to do anything betray their grandmother they would go ahead and do that for the greater good so ideology can be a motivation uh and that can be you know someone who is a u who

is a devoted Marxist leninist it can also be someone who's a disgruntled communist because you know there's there's no Anti-communist like an ex-communist okay you know those who lose the faith um can be become very very useful uh for instance if if you look in in the case of American intelligence the the people who essentially temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the US Post World War II were people like Whitaker Chambers uh Lewis buen Elizabeth Bentley all of those people had been Communist Party members they had all been part of the red faithful

they all for one reason or another became disillusioned and um Turned rat or Patriot whichever case you may want to uh put in that regard what does the sea in the E stand for the C is for coercion that's where you have to persuade someone to work for you you have to pressure them so usually you blackmail Them you know that could be they have a gambling habit uh you know and they old days it's very often because they were gay okay gets them in a position where they can be compromised and you can get

them to do your bidding that those people usually have a certain amount of control here's an interesting example of how the Okana tended to handle this and I think it's still largely used um you'd round up a bunch of revolutionaries on some charge or Another Distributing revolutionary literature running any illegal printing press you bring a guy into the room and you say okay okay you're going to work for us he of course have refused to do so they go well if you refuse we'll we'll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while

you know maybe beat them with a rubber trenching or so and then we're just going to let you go we're just going to put you back out On the street and if you don't work for us we will spread the rumor through our agents already in your organization that you are and then what will your comrades do how long are you going to live so you see you have no choice you're ours and you're going to cooperate with us and the way that that uh Effectiveness would be ensured is that you you have multiple agents

within the Same organization who don't know who each other are that's very important and they'll all be filing reports so let's say you have three agents inside the Central Committee of the SR party and there's a committee meeting and you're going to look at the reports they file they all better agree with each other right if one person doesn't report what the other two do then perhaps they're not entirely doing their job and and They can be liquidated at any time all you do is drop the dime on them and this was done periodically in

fact in some cases you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate to the the organization this happened in one particular particular case um around 1908 the fellow who was the head of the of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization which wasn't bolik but the so-called socialist Revolutionaries they actually the biggest revolutionary party the SRS who AR even actually marxists more anarchists but they they went all in for the propaganda of the deed they really like blowing people up and carry out a and carried out quite a campaign of terrorism the fellow who was the

head of that terrorist organization was a was a fell of the name of yevo azf and yevo azf was guess what an Okana agent everything he did every Assassination that he planned he did in consultation with his control so he'd kind of run out his string there was increasing suspicion of him he was also asking for a lot more money uh so the Arana itself arranged to have him write it out and what did that do well what do you do in your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist Brigade was a

secret police agent it SED consternation and mistrust nobody in the party would ever Trust in you couldn't tell who you were sitting around uh I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on Bor sov who was a Russian revolutionary and and the second in command within the terrorist organization ation by the way the guy that wanted Oz's job so bad he could taste it well on the one level he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent and will he should because Sanov was a police agent too see they already had the

number two waiting in the wings to take over but he was legitimately shocked he didn't really suspect that uh so it's it's a way of manipulating this and then finally we come to the E that I think is the most important ego sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they Receive the sheer kind of mavelli and joy in deceit an example of that would be Kim filby one of the Cambridge 5 now now philby was a communist and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the Communist cause but

he also made this statement uh I think it's in the the preface to his autobiography and he says one never looks twice at the offer of service in Elite Force he's talking about his recruitment by the nkvd in the 1930s and he was absolutely chuffed by that the M fact that they would want him what he considered to be a First Rate organization would want him satisfied his ego and if I was to take a guess as to whether it was ideological motivation whether it was the romance of Communism or whether it was the appeal

of ego that was the most important in his career of Treason I'd go with ego and I think that figures into a lot you know people don't someone doesn't get the promotions that they wanted again if you look at something like Aldridge am's career particular you've got these kind of his his career in the CIA was hit or miss um he didn't get the postings or promotions that he wanted his evaluation he never felt that he got credit for Doing that and that's the type of thing that tends to stick in someone's craw and can

lead for egotistical reasons an added incentive to betray yeah that there's a boost of the ego when you can deceive sort of not play by the rules of the world and just play with powerful people like they're your pawns you're the only one that knows this mhm you're the only one that knows that the person who is Setting across from you to which you have sworn your loyalty you were simultaneously betraying what a rush that must be for some people I wonder how many people are susceptible to this I would like to believe that people

have a lot of people Haven the Integrity to at least withstand the Mi the the money and the ideology the pull of that and the ego it can also be a combination of the two I mean you you can create a uh a recipe of these things Certain amount of money ego and the little push of coercion that if you don't we will'll rat you up you'll be exposed what are some difference to you as uh we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence in the CIA

if you look at both the oana and the KGB one of the things that you find consistent is that they a single organization handled foreign Intelligence that is spying upon enemy or hostile governments and also internal security so that's all part of it whereas if you look at the US models that evolves you you eventually have the FBI who under Hoover qu insists that he's going to be The Counter Intelligence Force okay if they're you know they're commi spies earning around America it's the FBI who's supposed to far at them out the CIA is not

supposed to be involved in that And the uh the charter the basic agreement in 1947 did not give the CIA any you it's often said they they were borred from spying on Americans which isn't quite quite true you can always find a way to do that what they don't have is they don't have any police or judicial powers they they can't run around in the country carrying guns to use on people they can't arrest you they can't interrogate you they can't jail you they Have no police or judicial powers now that means they have to

get that from someone else that doesn't mean that other agencies can't be brought in or local police officials corn or whatever you need you can eventually acquire but they can't they can't can't do that directly so you've got this division between foreign intelligence and domestic Counter Intelligence often split Between hostile organizations the relationship between the FBI and the CIA I think it's fair to say is not chummy never has been there's always been a certain amount of of rivalry and and contention between the two and it's not to say that something like that didn't exist

between the domestic Counter Intelligence and foreign intelligence components of of the KGB but there would be less of that To a degree because there was a single organization they're all answerable to the same people so that gives you a certain greater amount I think of of leeway and power because you're controlling both of those ends I remember somebody telling me once that and he was a retired KGB officer there you go retired one of the things that he found amusing was that in in his role one of The things that he could be is that

he could be anywhere at any time in any dress which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time he was authorized to do that so more freedom more power I think one of the things that you would often inter view is that well the Russians are simply you know naturally meaner yeah there's there's less respect For human rights there's a greater tendency to abuse power that one might have I mean frankly they're all pretty good at that they're probably it is fair to say that there is probably

some degree of of cultural differen is that it not necessarily for institutional reasons but cultural reasons there could well be things that Americans might bulk at doing more than You would find on the Russian or Soviet side of the equations the other aspect of that is that Russian history is long and contentious and bloody uh one of the things it certainly teaches you never trust foreigners every foreign government anywhere any country on your border is a real or potential enemy they will all at some point have given the chance invade you therefore they must always

be treated with great Suspicion that goes back to something that I think the the British observed is that countries don't have friends they have interests and those interests can change over time well the CIA is probably equally suspicious of all other nations that's your job you're supposed to be suspicious your job is not to be trusting yeah the basic job of an intelligence agency is to safeguard your secrets and steal the other guys and Then hide those away are there laws either intelligence agencies that uh they're not willing to break this a basically Lawless operation

to where you can break any law as long as it accomplishes the task well I think uh JN k give his pen name he talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence and one of the things he remember being told UPF front was if you do this you have to be willing to lie And you have to be willing to kill now those are things that in ordinary human interactions are bad things generally we don't like it when people lie to us we we we expect that people will act honestly towards us you know whether

that's being businessman you're involved with your employers we're often disappointed in that because people do lie all the time for a variety of reasons but but honesty is generally Considered to be it but but in uh in in a realm where deception is a rule dishonesty is a virtue to be good at that to be able to lie convincingly is good is one of the things you need to do and killing also is generally frowned upon you know put people in prison for that they're otherwise executed but in certain circumstances killing is one of those

things that you need to be able to do so what he felt he was being told in That case is that you know once you enter this realm the same sort of moral rules that apply in general British Society do not apply and and if you're squeamish about it you won't fit in you have to be able to do those things I wonder how often those intelligence agencies in the 20th century and of course the natural question extending it to the 21st Century how often they go to the assassination how how often they go to

the kill part of that versus just the Espionage let's take an example from from American intelligence from the CIA 1950s 1960s into the 1970s MK Ultra that is a secret program which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control which really means messing with people's heads and what was the goal of that well there seem to have been lots of goals But there was an FBI memo that was I recently acquired quite legally by the way it's Declassified but it's from 1949 so this is only two years after the CIA came into existence

and it's an FBI memo because the FBI of course very curious to what the CIA is up to and the FBI are not part of this meeting but they have someone in they're sort of spying on what's going on so there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York so it's not held in any kind of it's It's essentially never really happened because it's in somebody's house but and there are a couple of guys there from the CIA one of them is cleave Baxter cleave bter is the um the great

Godfather of the lie detector uh pretty much everything that we know or think we know about Li detectors today that youo to Cle Baxter uh he's also the same guy that thought that plants could feel but which somehow Was a derivative of his work on lie detectors so these guys are there and and they're giving a t talk to some military and other personnel and uh there are certain parts of the document which are of course redacted but you could figure out what it is that they're talking about and they're talking about hypnotic suggestion and

all the wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion and two of the things they Note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people's minds and implant false memories that would be really Keen to do that just imagine how that would be done so here to me is the interesting point they're talking about this in 1949 MK Ultra does not come along until really 1953 although there all sorts of you know art of Choke and others everything is sort of leading up to that it's simply an

an elaboration of Programs that are already there I don't think that It ultimately matters whether you can implant memories or erase memories to me the important part is they thought they could and they were going to try to do it and that eventually is what you find out in the efforts made during the 1950s and 60s through MK Ultra MK search MK Naomi and all the others that came out that's one of the things they're working for um and among the few MK Ultra era documents that survive there's that whole question is that can you

get someone to uh put put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger and then remember it later yeah you could interestingly enough so nondirect violence controlling people's minds controlling people's minds at scale and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that one person put it that the basic argument there or the basic thing you're after was to Understand the architecture of the human mind how it worked how it put together and then how you could take those pieces apart and assemble them different ways so this comes this is where hypnosis comes in

which is a was then still is fairly spooky thing nobody's ever explained to me exactly what it is the idea was that could you you think of the whole possibilities in this case could you create an alternate personality and use that alternate Personality in an agent role but then be able to turn it on and off so subsequently the the person which that personality inhabited was captured and interrogated tortured you know had their fingernails torn out they would have no memory of it they couldn't give any kind of secret away because it was embedded in

some part of their brain where there was a completely different person I mean you can just imagine the the possibilities that you Can dream up and again it's not I think the question is to whether you that is possible or whether it was done although I suspect that both of those are true but that you would try to do it then imagine the Mischief that comes out of that and one of the big complaints from a legal standpoint about MK Ultra and the rest is that you were having medical experiments essentially being carried out on

people without their knowledge and against their will which is you know A no no yeah the fact that you're willing to do m medical experiments says something about what you're willing to do and I'm sure that same Spirit Innovative Spirit uh persist to this day and uh maybe less so I hope less so in the United States but probably in other intelligence agencies in the world well one thing that was learned and the reason why most MK Ultra and similar records were destroyed On order in the early 70s around the time the CIA became under

a certain amount of scrutiny now the mid-70s were not a good time for the agency because you had the church committee breathing down their neck you had all these assassin you know people were asking lots of questions and so you need to you need to dump this stuff because there's all kinds of because you were committing crimes against American citizens so let's let's eradicate it and the Important lesson to be learned is that never do these type of thing again where at least in any way in which the agency's direct fingerprints are placed on it

you can pay people you can subsidize research you can set up Venture Capital firms you got plenty of money and you can funnel that money into the hands of people who will carry out this research privately so if something goes wrong you have perfect Deniability and the the topic of mice on the topic of money ideology coercion and ego let me ask you about a conspiracy theory so there is a conspiracy theory that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein at a high level if you could just talk about that is that something that's at all

even possible that you have uh basically this would be for coercion you get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous and then you collect evidence on them so That you can then have leverage on them well let's look at what Epstein was doing uh he was a well he was a businessman who then also developed a very lucrative sideline and being a a high level procur basically in supplying young girls and he also filmed much of that activity um I think his partner in this galain and I'm hope I'm pronouncing her name Correct

I think it's galain gain well I've heard it both ways gilain or galain whichever it may be I think her argument at one point was that well we did this to protect ourselves but this type of thing has been done before there's nothing new about this getting influential people in compromising situations and filming them uh I could give you another historical example of that in late 1920 actually early 1930s just pre-nazi Berlin there was a very prominent uh sort of wouldbe psychic and occultist by the name of Eric Yan hanison uh he had a private

yacht I think it was called the seven sins uh and he hosted parties he also had a whole club called the Palace of the occult which hosted parties where things went on and and there were cameras everywhere he filmed important people you know guys like the brownshirt chief of Berlin in various states of undress and sexual Congress and he did that for the purposes of blackmail so in Epstein's case he is a procurer of young girls to wealthy men largely and many of those events were were recorded now even if it wasn't his intention to

use them for blackmail Think of what someone else could do because people know about this so you could raise a question is this not you know Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert but through his greedy perversion he's now collecting information that could be useful who could that be useful to who would like dirt on Prince Andrew on the CL think of all the people who were there and the these you know There were important people who you know went to Lolita Island so if it isn't Epstein directly it he might have been being

I'm not trying to let him off the hook because I have anything for him he was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front for that I mean I I think we're kidding ourselves we trying to pretend that's not what was going on so you think you an American intelligence agency Uh would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that well you know American politicians could ultimately end up in a position to oversee things like intelligence budgets one of them might even become director you

never know you can never tell what some crazy president might do it could be very one of the guys who understood the was was J Grover Jed Grover spent a long time collecting do dossier and politicians how do you think He'd remain director of the FBI as long as he did because he systematically collected dirt on people so there is a history of this type of thing and again he could argue that's partly for his protection to keep his job to protect the the sanctity and security of of the bureau you can find a million

different ways to to justify that it's really dark well there is that side to human nature Let's put it that way whether it's the CIA or the Arana maybe that's what the president of the United States sees when they show up to office is all the stuff they have on him or her and say you that that there's a internal mechanism of power that you don't want to mess with and so you will listen well whether that internal mechanism of power is the military-industrial complex or whatever the the bureaucracy of government contuct of the deep

State the Deep the Entrenched bureaucratic well it's been said and I think it's generally true that uh bureaucratic creatures are like any other creatures it basically exists to perpetuate itself yeah and and to grow I mean nobody wants to go out of business and and of course then you get all of these you know things like pizzagate and accusations of one form another but here's an interesting thing to consider okay and I want to argue that I'm not Saying that pizz gate in any way was real or q and onand is but but where do

they get these ideas from so let's ask ourselves do pedophiles exist yeah do organized pedophile organizations exist yeah they they share information pictures they're out there on the dark web they cooperate so does child trafficking Exist yeah it does so in other words whether or not specific conspiracy theories about this or that group of organized pedophil cultists is real all the ingredients for that to be real are there pedophiles exist organized pedophilia exists child and human trafficking exists at some point at some time someone will put all of those together in fact certainly they already

have we'll jump around a little bit but Your work is so fascinating uh and it covers so many topics so let's if we jump into the present uh with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg gr bilderbergers uh so the elites as I think you've referred to them so this Gathering of the elites uh can you can you just talk about them what is what is this well first thing I have to point out is that Bohemian Grove is a place not an organization it's where the Bohemian Club meets it's that 2700 acre old growth redwoods

near you know North of San Francisco the Bohemian Club began I think way back to the 1870s it's its initial members were mostly journalists okay in fact supposedly the name itself comes from it was a term for an itinerate journalist who move paper to paper was called the Bohemian and although I think there may be Other reasons why that particular term was was chosen as well but I I think the original five members there were you know there were like three journalists there was a a merchant and there was a vent guy owned a Vineyards

California House surprising none of them terribly wealthy but they formed an exclusive men's club was and still is nothing terribly unusual about that at the time but it became fashionable and as it became Fashionable more wealthy people wanted to become part of it and the thing about getting rich guys to join your Club is what do rich guys have money and of course it's one of those Rich guys that bought Bohemian Grove where now you build your your old boy summer camp which is what it is they got cabins with Goofy names they go there

they perform skits they dress up in costumes yeah true some of those skits look like Pagan human sacrifices but you know it's just A skit what's really going on there so on the one hand you can argue look it's it's it's just it's a rich guys Club they you know they like to get out there that the whole motto of the place is weaving spiders come not here so we're we're going to talk about business bus we just want to get out into the woods put on some robes you know burn a couple of effigies

in front of the owl have a good time probably get drunk a lot what's with the robes why do they do Weird creepy why do they put on a mask and the robe and the and do the plays and the the owl with the and then sacrificing I don't know whatever why do you have a giant owl I mean what why do you do that what is but what is that in human nature cuz I don't think the rich people are different than and uh not rich people what what is it about wealth and power

that brings that out of people well part of it is the ritual aspect of it and that clearly is a ritual and Rituals are it's pretty simple rituals are just a series of actions performed in a precise sequence to produce an effect that describes a lot of things it describes plays Symphonies every movie you've ever seen a movie is a ritual it is a series of actions carried out in a precise sequence to produce an effect with an added soundtrack to cue you to what emotions you're supposed to be feeling it's a great idea so

the rich people should just go to a movie or Maybe just go to a Taylor Swift concert like why why do you have to well why the all part of it is to create this kind of sense I suppose of of group solidarity you know you're you're all going to appear and also a way of sort of transcending yourself in a way you know when you put on the robe it's like putting on a uniform you are in some way a different or more important person it's a ritual okay the The key ritual that beomi

and Grove is a thing called The Cremation of care and cremation and that's what it's supposed to be it's it's a we're going to put all of our you know we're rich important people we have to make all of these critical decisions life is so hard so we're going to go out here in the woods and we're going to kick back and we're all going to get gather on the lake and and then we're going to carry you know it it it's it's wicker it's not a real Person and how would you know and then

we're going to and we're going to and this is The Cremation of our Char but it's a ritual which is meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among those people who were there the question comes down with the rituals is how seriously do you take them how how important is this to to the people who carry them out and the interesting answer to that is That for some people it's you know for some people it's just boring I mean there probably people standing around the owl who think this is ridiculous and can't wait

for it to get over with there are other people who are kind of excited about it you get caught up into it but other people can take it very seriously it's all the matter of the intention that you have about what the ritual means and I don't mean to suggest by That that there's anything necessary Sinister about what's going on but it it is it is a it is clearly a ritual carried out for some kind of group reinforcing purpose and you're absolutely right you don't have to do it that way that's not I mean

I've gone to summer camps and we never carried out mock sacrifices in front of an owl all right you know we did all those other things um we didn't even have any robes either so it goes beyond merely a a rich Guy summer camp although that's an aspect of it but it also I think often obscures that focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club ignores that the club is around all the time that's what's at the center of this it is the club and its members so despite all the talk about no

no weaving spiders coming around here what are the other features of the summer meeting are things called Lakeside talks uh this often people are Invited to go there and and one of the people who was invited I think around 1968 was Richard Nixon who was making his political comeback and he was invited to give a talk where very important people are listening and Nixon in his Memoirs realized what was going on he was being auditioned as to whether or not he was going to be read he recognized that that was really the beginning of his

second presidential campaign he was being Vetted so one of the main theories call it a conspiracy theory or not about the Bohemian Club in the Gatherings is that people of wealth and influence gather together and whether or not it's part of the agenda or not inevitably you're going to talk about things of interest but to me the M of fact that you invite people in political leaders and to give Lakeside talks means that there there are weaving spiders which are going on And it is a perfect private venue to vet people for political office I

mean yeah where else are you going to do it if you're interested in vetting if you're interesting in powerful people selecting well see here's the question are these guys actually picking who's going to be president is that the decision which is being made or are they just deciding what horses they're going to back right I think the latter is the simpler Version of it but it doesn't mean it's the other way around but these are the kinds of you know I mean Nixon was you know there was the whole 1960 thing so he's he's the

new Nixon remember this and this this is where the new Nixon uh apparently made a good impression on the right people because he did indeed get the Republican nomination and he did indeed become president well there could also be a Much more innocent explanation of really it's powerful people getting together and having conversations and through that conversation influencing each other's view of the world and and having a legitimate discussion of policies why wouldn't they I mean why would you assume that people are not going to do that it's the owl thing with the with the

robes like what why the owl and why the robes um which is why it becomes really compelling when guys like Alex Jones uh forgive me but I have not watched his documentary I probably should at some point about the Bohemian Grove where he claims that there is uh uh Satanist human sacrifice of I think children um and I think that's quite a popular conspiracy theory or is lost popularity it kind of like transformed itself into the konon set of conspiracy Theories but I mean can you speak to that conspiracy let's put it this way the

general public rich people are inherently suspicious yeah okay let let's put it that way uh first of all they've got all that money and and and exactly how did one obtain it and uh I do not of necessity adhere to the view that behind every great Fortune there is a great crime but there often are you know there there are ways in which it's acquire but I think It's one of the things I think that can happen is particularly when when people require a huge amount of money and I won't name any names but let's

say there are people who perhaps in The texere Who coming from no particular background of wealth suddenly find themselves with $600 billion well what this is the question you would have to ask yourself why me because you're one of the rare tiny group of human beings who will ever had That kind of wealth in your hands even if you are a convinced atheist I think at some point you have to begin to suspect that the cosmic muffin Providence whatever it is put this money in your hands to do what achieve great thing just think of

all the stuff so you're going to start a foundation and you're going to start backing all the things that you you like this is yeah I think there's an element of ego that Comes in with it as well and again it may not be so much what the rich person with a huge amount of money at their disposal and a lot of fuzzy ideas about what to do with it can be influenced by others it's always that question as to who's actually manipulating these Events what's what's going on in that regard in some way they

they can be a very useful sucker you know find somebody with a lot of money and get them to finance the thing that you want them to do the Bohemian Club is I don't think in of itself inherently evil or Sinister but it means that there are lots of different people in it who have different agendas it goes back to what I said about how somebody feels about The Cremation of care ritual this is either just a waste of time it's just some sort of silly thing that we're doing or it is something of great

importance perhaps even mystical or religious importance because that's ostensibly what it's pretending to be it's always this question is to what degree you begin to play and the play becomes serious that tends to happen a lot You've studied a lot a lot of Cults and uh occultism what do you think is the power of that mystical experience well what is broadly referred to well we get into what what's a ult is and what's the occult ult is the hidden that's all it really means specifically hidden from sight and the basis of it is the idea

that what is hidden well what is hidden from Us is most of the world most of reality so the basic concept within occultism basic concept within most religions which are approved forms of occultism is that the world the physical world that we are aware of is only only a very small part of a much larger reality and that what the methods and practices of occultism arguably do is to allow someone to either enter into this larger reality or to access that larger Reality for purposes to be exploited here the most interesting statement about and it

ke element of this becomes the thing called Magic now we all know magic you know it's a guy standing on stage performing a trick but the interesting thing about a stage magician is that a stage magician is we know when we're watching this that it's a trick yet we can't really figure out if he does it well how that trick is being Accomplished because it seems to defy physical laws and that's what's fascinating about it so even though you know it's a trick if you can't figure it out it it has this kind of power

of Fascination but it's mimicking something stage magic is mimicking real magic so it's real magic well let's go back to Alistar Crowley because you know he he always has to come we knew I knew he was going to come up at some point in This earlier than that cuz he always does all roads lead to alist all roads lead to Alistar Crowley um Alan cley and I've said this enough that I should be able to get it right but I'm paraphrasing here he goes magic which of course he spelled with a K to you know

or C um is the the Art and Science of causing change to occur in Conformity with Will so in a way that's sort of mind Over matter but it's the idea that one can through will through intention Bend reality to make something happen somebody wants to put it this way it's tipping the luck plane so you know you got some kind of a level plane what you're trying to do is just tip it just a little bit so the marble rules rolls over one side or or another now that presupposes a lot of Things that

is there a luck plane I don't know but you know it's it's a good sort of idea to have but and here again don't become overly bothered trying to figure out whether you actually can bend reality become bothered by the fact that there are people who believe that they can and will go to great efforts to do so and will often believe they have succeeded so it's this effort to make things occur in a particular way Maybe just to sort of nudge reality in one little way or another and that's where things like rituals come

in rituals are a way of focusing will and detention we're all there we're all thinking about the same thing and you have to imagine just how you know the pervasiveness of what could be called that that kind of magical thinking every have is everywhere so let me give you an example you ever attended a high school football Pepperell M think Of what's going on there okay your team is going to is going to battle the other team you've now assembled everyone in the gymnasium you've got people who are dancing around in animal totem costumes and

and what are you chanting everyone is supposed to chant that you know that the other team dies okay that you will be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious that is a Magic Ritual the idea is it becomes into this idea it's very popularly about visualizing things visualizing manifesting I don't know this term where you need to manifest your success well that's just magic that is trying to cause change in Conformity with Will so these things can happen without you you being even consciously aware of what's going on and you don't need to

be because if you're all a part of the Of the mob which is there in the gymnasium and you you get into this and you get worked up and a cultist would argue what you're doing is you're creating a huge amount of energy all of these people are putting energy into something and that energy go somewhere and maybe you can maybe just maybe you actually can slightly increase the chances of your team's victory of course your opponents are having their own ritual at The same time so whoever has the bigger Mojo will apparently win on

the team so that's a I would say trivial example of that uh but a clear one but I do believe that there's incredible power in groups of humans getting together and morphing reality I think that's probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is groups of people being able to believe a thing and bring that belief into reality yes that's your examp L Right bring to conceive of something and then through intention will to manifest that into this realm and of course the that power of the collective mind can be leveraged by

charismatic leaders to do all kinds of stuff where you get Cults that do you know horrible things or any anything there might be a cult that does good things I don't know it depends we usually we don't call those Cults exactly without endorsing this entirely An interesting you know one of the questions what's the difference between a cult and a religion and it has been said that in the case of a cult there's always someone at the top who knows what's going on generally who knows it's a scam in a religion that person is dead

so see I've just managed to insult every single Rel and but that's it it's an interesting way of of thinking about it Because I think there is some degree of of accuracy in that statement do you think actually the interesting psychological question is in Cults do you think the person at the top always knows that it's a scam do you think there's something about the human mind where you gradually begin to believe believe your own yes that'ss that again is part of magic I think is believing your own um it doesn't necessarily mean That the

the head of the cult realized but there's someone maybe the second you I always sort of look in in the lieutenant someone probably has an idea about what's going on uh the other thing that seems to be a a kind of dead giveway for what we would call a cult is is what's called e excessive reverence for the leader people just believe everything these people Say I I give you an example of the first time I ever encountered anything like that was in um was in Santa Barbara California in the 1970 I was going to

grad school and there was a particular cult locally which I think was Brotherhood of the son and was the same there was some guy who was you know among the other things followers were convinced to hand over all their money And personal belongings to him I believe he used part of that money to buy a yacht with u anyway a lot of it went to him and then of course working for free upon different cult owned business enterprises of which there were several and there was a person I knew who became a devoted follower of

this and it was all I could think of at one point was ask them what the hell is the matter with You I mean have you lost your mind why why would you what is it that this person can possibly be providing it that that you essentially are going to become a slave to them which was which is what they were doing and I actually give that credit in a way of sort of sparking my whole interest in things like secret societies and here again as a disclaimer I am not now nor have I ever

been the member of any fraternal organization secret Society or cult that I know of and that's what interest me about them because I I'm just always trying to figure out why people do these things like I said why the robes in the owl why yeah why do you do that and it it's trying to figure it out I mean I couldn't even hack the Boy Scouts okay that was too much of because to me you join an organization and the first thing comes along as there's somebody there are rules and someone is telling you What

to do okay I don't like people telling me what to do spent much of my life trying to avoid that as much as possible and join a cult there's going to be someone telling you what to do um join the Bohemian Club and there's going to be someone telling you what to do and obviously a lot of people really get something out of that it it it becomes in some ways it's sort of necessary for them to function but I do not understand it and my study of it Is a personal error to try to

understand why people do that and there are so many reasons uh primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong yes and uh the dark forms that takes throughout human history recent human history is uh something I'd love to talk to you a bit about if we can go back to the beginning of the 20th century on the German side you've described how secret societies like the Tuli Society lay the Foundation for Nazi ideology can you uh through that lens from that perspective describe the rise of the Nazi party

well I guess we could start with what on Earth is the Tuli Society so the Tuli Society was a small German occult society that is they they studied metaphysics another fancy word for occultism that uh appeared in Munich um around 1917 1918 the key figure behind it was a uh German esotericist by the name of Rudolph folendorf okay not his real name his real name was Adam Rudolph glow he was adopted by a German no nobleman and got the name f zebot andorf and I like to say that name so I have this real thing

about vague mysterious characters who show up and do things and and trying to figure out who these People are so we're working up in the Years sort of prior to the first world war so the decade or so prior to World War I he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire turkey there was know then the the Ottoman Empire uh which was a fairly tumultuous place um because in 1908 1909 there was a the Young Turk Revolution and uh you had a kind of military coup which effectively Overthrew the ottoman Sultan and installed

a military hun which would go on during the first world war to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian Genocide eventually he created a genocide military regime which would lead the country into disastrous first world war which would destroy the Ottoman Empire out of which modern turkey emerges yada yada Y and by the way we should take a tiny tangent here which is Uh that you refer to the intelligence agencies as being exceptionally successful and uh here in the case of The Young Turks being um also very successful or uh in doing the genocide meaning

they've achieved the greatest impact even though the impact on the scale of good to evil tends towards evil it's one of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations revolutions Always always always seek to make things better don't they we're going to take a bad old regime you know the the sultan is you know and the sultan was bad I think it's fairly St Abdul Hamid II was not a uh wasn't called the red Doon because of his favorite color type of thing and the idea is that they were going to uh improve they

were now going to you know the Ottoman Empire was a multinational Empire they were going to Try to equalize and bring in the different groups and and and none of that happened it became worse okay in the same way that you could argue that the goal of Russian revolutionaries was to get rid of the bad old incompetent medieval zaris regime to bring in a new great shining future and it became even more authoritarian and the crimes of the Imperial Russian regime pale in significance of what would follow in the Same way that the crimes of

Abdul Hamed pale to when you get to The Young Turks but that wasn't necessarily the intention but VAB buttorf is a German businessman who's who's working in this period and the whole point here is that the ottomate Empire in this period is is a a a hot bed of of political Intrigue you know all kinds of interesting things about it the Young Turk Revolution is essentially a military coup but it is Plotted in Masonic lodges okay I know technically Masonic Lodgers are never supposed to be involved in politics but they are uh or you know

the lodge meeting breaks up and then you plot the revolution so same group of people but it's it's not technically but yes and there's there's the the Macedonia Resort Lodge in Tessalon was Ground Zero for plotting this military coup That was supposed to improve the Empire zabot andorf is in one way or another mixed up in all of this or at least he's an observer of it plus he's initiated he's initiated into the Masonic lodges um and and interestingly enough the fell who initiates him into one of these Eastern lodges is a Jewish Merchant by

the name of Tudi and who's also a cabalist and invol so zorf is very very interested in the occult he's initiated Into Eastern Masonic lodges in a period when those same lodges are being used as a center for political Intrigue he also apparently is involved in gun running which which in Revolutionary periods is you know there's a lot of money to be made off of that so he's connected to various dark businesses in a tumultuous time with connections to politicized Freemasonry and the Occult now in the course of the first world war he returns to

Germany he just shows up and it would be my operative suspicion or theory that zabot andorf was working for someone I don't think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord why does he leave the Ottoman Empire and return to that place who's behind him well maybe no one but maybe someone because he does seem to have money at His disposal and he comes into Munich and he basically takes over this small sort of occult study group now the interesting thing is that the Tuli Society is really just a branch of another existing

what's called an ariosophy order a thing called the German order or the Gan ORD which is centered in Berlin but for some reason he he doesn't want his group to be connected by name with the germanen Orden so Tuli Society Tuli in this case is a reference to supposedly a mythical Arctic homeland of the Aryan race okay apparently they were all snow people who wandered out of the snow at some point it's kind of like a frozen Atlantis so I mentioned these people the Aros sophists who which is you have to practice saying that so

what are they well they're a kind of racist dramatic offshoot of theosophy and I know I'm explaining one Thing to explain something up but there's no other way to do this so theosophy was uh 19th century very popular and widely modeled ult belief that was founded by a Russian woman by the name of Helena blavatsky uh she was a medium psychic she's supposed to channelings from the ascended masters the basic story there they all of the ascended masters which are mystical beings that may or may not have once been human they live inside The Himalayas

or they float among them on a cloud and and they guide the spiritual evolution of humanity what blony did was to take Western esotericism and blended with Hindu and Buddhist esotericism which became very very sexy in the west still is you know you know Buddhism attracts a lot of people because well it's Buddhism it's different see so you know the the mahatmas the Ascended masters were sending her messages despite the fact that she was later proven pretty much to be a fraud and writing the letters herself nevertheless people still went along with this Doctrine and

it's been widely modified and copied since then so and idea in theosophy was that human spiritual Evolution was tied to physical Evolution so in you know in the case of lovasi lavasi never said that Aryans White people anything out this were Superior she talked about you know a the different root races but it's just her version of it it's just total gobbley goop that seems to include everyone and I had to defy you to make much sense out of it but in the early 20th century there were different sort of you know one of the

things that became fashionable you know not terribly popular these are small movements with The idea that well you know Germany is a new upcoming country and and part of this I think was really trying to Define who the Germans were because remember the German Empire Germany as a political State doesn't come into existence till 1871 prior to that Germany was a geographic expression a vague one which described a large area in Central Europe where a lot of people who you Know wore leather shorts and uh or something like that and spoke similar German dialects were

nominally Germans but they might be prussians or bavarians or you know they came in all sorts of varieties in relig there was no German identity something very similar happened in Italy in the same period I mean you know there weren't Italians there were sardinians and there were Romans and there were Sicilians Umbrians spoke again dialects of a similar language but had never lived you know not since the Roman empire under a single state and really didn't think of themselves as the same so you have to create this artificial thing you have to create Germans there's

now a Germany with an emperor and so we're all going to be Germans well exactly what is that much of it is is an artificial creation You know you have to decide upon some sort of standard dialect okay we'll decide what what that is you know often dialect that only a few people actually speech and then it will be drilled into children's heads through State schooling programs so I think this is the the kind of milu that it comes out of people were trying to figure out what on Earth Germans actually were and the need

for some sort of common identity and you know that leads to everything Like vagian Opera Rickard Vagner wanted to create a German mythical music so he went back and strip mined old German myths and cobbled them together into a lot of people standing on stage singing and that was his purpose he was he was a nationalist he was in many ways a kind of racialist Nationalist and this was his idea of trying to create out of bits and pieces of the past a new fangled form of of German identity So on the more mystical end

of this you had the ideas that well Germany must have been created for some special purpose because the Germans must be very special people and we must have some sort of particular Destiny and then out of this you know the direction this is heading well we're all part of some sort of Master race uh with with some sort of ties to some sort of great civilization in the past call it Tulie call it whatever you want to be they basically Just invent things and try to attach those to the past and so ariosophy was the

aryanized version of theosophy and what this did was to take the idea that spiritual and physical Evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings which were the arens and the most advanced group of them were of course the Germans and this attracted and like keep in mind again this was not a mass Movement this was very much a fringe movement most people weren't aware of it and weren't particularly interested in it but it had an appeal for those who already had a kind of esoteric bent in some form or another and this

is where things like the Gan order the German order and their other groups it was only one of many sort of grew out of and what it was that the two society as a branch the Tuli gazelle shaft was Supposed to do was to study this it it was it was an esoteric study group and so people would get together and they'd talk about things probably make more stuff up and all sort of work around this this idea of of German Aryans is the most advanced type of human beings and all the wonderful things that

the future would hold and the mid the fact that this was in the midst of war in which Germany was again you know fighting as They saw it for for its its existence heightened those kinds of those kinds of tensions as well so my suspicion again is that Zol andorf in terms of who was behind him that he was essentially called back to Germany to work either for the Prussian political police or for some aspect of German intelligence and security to try to mobilize occultism or Esotericism for the war effort because again this is 1918

the the war is it's gone on way too long within a few months Germany will collapse and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population so this is almost like uh to help the war effort with a kind of propaganda a narrative that can strengthen the will of the German people strength the will of some people some people when you have you have to try to appeal to different Aspects of this but the the mystical aspect is one of those things that can be it can have a very powerful influence and the

idea is that if we we can come up with some kind of of mystical nationalism maybe that's one to put it a kind of mystical nationalism that can be exploited for the wiers at this point you're you're kind of grasping at straws and this this is a whole period when the Germans are marshalling the last of their forces to Launch a series of offensives on the Western Front the peace offensive which will initially be successful but will ultimately fail and and lead to a a collapse in morale but among the leadership of Germany it was

a recognition was that National morale was flagging and one of the other things that was kind of raising its head was what had happened nearby a year well the Russian Revolution which had now brought The idea which brought another solution to all of this the idea of revolutionary Marxism here we need to remind ourselves as where Marxism comes from not Russia Germany where was the largest Marxist party in Germany and Marx probably expected the Revolution to begin in Germany where else I mean the Soviet Union is not very industrialized Germany is and so that's where

it would probably Russia 5% of the population is a dustrial workers in Germany 40% of the Population is inou so if any place was like made for Marxism it was Germany I think that's why caught on in East Germany so well because it had kind of come home um and you know it was it was a it was a local belief it wasn't something imparted imported by the Russians it was that was it was a German invention so the Tuli Society one of the things you can see in this is the Tuli Society was particularly

involved in sort of Anti-marxist or anti-bolshevik agitation they saw themselves the Bon Source saw them as this whole move it was a counter to this it was a kind of counter Marxist movement can we sort of try to break that apart in a nuanced way so so uh it was a nationalist movement the occult was part of the picture occult racial theories so there's a racial component like the Aryan race so it's not just the nation of Germany and You take that and contrast it with Marxism did they also uh formulate that in racial terms

did they formulate that in National versus global terms like how do they see this Marxism formulates everything by class okay people are categorized by class you're either part of the proletariat or part of the Bourgeois or just you know you're either part of the proletariat or just some sort of scum really needs to be swept into the dust bin of History Only workers count and that was what would take someone who was a nationalist would sort of drive them crazy because their ideas we're trying to create a German people you know we're trying to create

a common German identity but what the marxists are doing is they dividing Germans against each other by class German Workers hate the German Bourgeois German proletariat is opposed to German capitalist we're all you know we're all trying to fight this war together so that was why Marxism in the form particularly in the form of bushism was seen as unpatriotic and of course was opposed to the war as a whole you know the idea that you know parting Lenin was that the war was an imperialist War and the only thing that was good that was going

to come out of it is that The imperialist war through all of the crises it was creating would eventually lead to a class war and that would be good because that would reconcile all of these things but think of this the two very different versions of this the the bolshevist version or let's just call it the the Marxist version of Germany was going to be a class society in which we're going to have to have some kind of civil upheaval which will Have German fighting Germans whereas the the kind of mystical nationalism the almost kind

of religious nationalism that zabot Andor from the Tuli Society had hitched its wagon to held that Germans are all part of a single racial family and that's what must be the most important thing and that these can be different ways of trying to influence people it comes down to a matter of of political influence so in a sense I think that What zabot Andor from the Tuli Society was trying to do at least within Munich was to use this idea of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying point for some part of the population to oppose

these other forces to keep people fighting the war is lost though uh by the in November you know the Kaiser abdicates and essentially the Socialists do take over Germany that's things come very very close to following the Russian Model and you even get the Russian version or take on the Bolsheviks which are the spartacist who try and fail to seize power early on but you do essentially end it with the Socialist Germany and that then leaves in the aftermath of the war the tul Society is sort of the the odd man out although they're still

very closely connected to the Army and here's one of the things that I find interesting when you get into 1919 who is it that's paying so Endor bills it's the Army the one thing the German Army is absolutely determined to do is to preserve its social position and power and they're perfectly willing to dump the Kaiser to do that that's sort of this deal which is made um in November of 1918 Kaiser's abdication the proclamation of a German Republic which you know you just had this guy declare It it wasn't really planned uh there's the

the aert Groner pact Groner is the chief of staff general staff at this point uh fedick aert is the chief socialist politician basically and they make an agreement and the agreement basically is that the Army will support abert's government if aert supports the Army in particularly that means the continuation of the officer Corp and the general staff in one form or another so a deal Is made and that of course is what will eventually help defeat the spartacist uprising now was the Army doing the similar kinds of things that you we've talked about with the

intelligence agencies this kind of same kind of uh trying to control the direction of power the German intelligence landscape in the first world war is a is obscure in many ways there there are lots of things that are going on you've got Germany has an a military in Intelligence service called AB tyong or section 3B that's just plain Military Intelligence you know they they're constantly trying to collect military information you know before the war about the weaponry and plans of the enemies and then about what the operational plans were during the war doesn't really go

much beyond that though the German foreign office runs a kind of political intelligence Service and that's the one which is much more involved in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia which is one of the things that the Germans sign on to fairly early little diversion here in 1915 there is a Russian revolutionary who's lived much of his life in Germany um who goes by the code name of parvis and he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople interesting Enough in Turkey he's hanging around there the same time as Bendorf is there which I find Curious

so parvis or Alexander heland to give his actual name comes him and he goes look uh there's a lot of revolutionaries in Russia and there's a lot of mistrust with the regime we think that the war will increase the contradictions in Russian society and if you give me a lot of marks I can Finance this revolutionary activity and through subversion I can Take Russia out of the war well the Germans are facing two front war that sounds great we'll use money in order to but notice what they're doing the German general staff a very conservative

organization not a bunch of revolutionaries are going to finance revolution in an opposing country they are going to finance revolutionary subversion to take Russia out of the war which Basically works so that gives you another idea as to what the German military is willing to do they're not revolutionaries but they'll pay revolutionaries to subvert another regime now you've got the problem is that the Revolutionary regime that your money helped bring to power is now threatening to extend into your country MH so the whole question for the Army and for others in Germany in 1919 is

how To keep Germany from going Bolshevik from in a sense being hoist by your own patard so the Tuli Society I don't think is a huge part of this program but it is a part of it and it's all an effort to try to keep control and that's why the Army is financing them that's even why the Army at some point then supplies them with its own propagandists so the Tuli Society begins to create under saboten leadership what he called the rings of Tuli and these Are satellite organizations that aren't the Society of so but

they're they're kind of controlled and inspired by it and one of those is thing called the German Workers Party and the German Workers Party again is local it's not large it's not terribly influential but what does it aspire to be it aspires to be a party that will bring German Workers away from the seductive influence of the Bolsheviks and into a more patriotic position a patriotic and the way that I describe this is that it's not an anti-communist organization it's a counter communist organization so you don't create something which completely opposes it you create something

which mimics it which is ultimately what the German Workers Party will become is the National Socialist German Workers Party known as that term Socialist and that is in my view what Nazism is from the beginning it is a counter communist movement and by the way for people who don't know the National Socialist German Workers Party is also known as the Nazi party so how did this Evolution happen from those that that complicated little interplay we should also say that a guy named Adolf Hitler is in the Army at this time yes well he's going to

come into this Because I remember said the Army was going to supply its own propagandist to help the German Workers Party and the Tuli Society do their work and the propagandist they Supply them with is a is a man who the army trains sends to classes to learn the artart of public speaking and propaganda and that fellow is corporal Adolf Hitler so how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers Party well he' been in the army during the war the only Regular job that he' ever had kind of liked it so you often get

the views that well at the end of the war he joined millions of other German soldiers who didn't have job no no he stays in the Army he stays in the Army till 1921 he's on the army payroll at the very time in which he is help to set this up what appears to have happened is this Sabol andorf had organized the Tuli society that didn't had you know that That had tried to oppose there's actually a brief period of time in which the Communists actually take over Munich um the Bavarian Soviet Republic which doesn't

last very long and eventually the Army and volunteers put this down uh while that's going on by the way Hitler is actually sitting in the uh barracks in Munich wearing a red armband because he is technically part Of the soldiers who have gone over to the Bavarian Soviet Republic he seems to have had flexible interests in this case um so once order is restored so to speak the Army comes in and decide that well one of the things we need we need to have people who can lecture true soldiers on on patriotic topics and so

there is a particular Captain by the name of Carl Meyer who sort of spots Hitler he later describes Him as uh like a stray dog looking for a master uh Hitler has a knack for public speaking other soldiers will listen to him now some people can do that some people can't Meyer decides that he's a good candidate for further training and so yes they bring him in they turn him into a what's called a veon a kind of liaison man uh he's an army propagandist and then you've got this little outfit Called the German Workers

Party and essentially what happens is that Hitler is sent in to take over leadership of that which is what happens he shows up he attends a meeting there are like 50 people there by the way that the topic of that the the first meeting he's at is how and why capitalism should be abolished okay which is not what you might well expect and because remember the German Workers Party is trying to cast itself as a counter bolshevism so it's not saying that capitalism is great which is important now capitalism is evil we agree upon that

we just agree it it's it has to be destroyed from a nationalist point of view as opposed from some sort of Strange internationalist point of view so Hitler is essentially as I see it sent in by the Army as their trained man to assume leadership within this small Party and to use it for the Army's patriotic propaganda campaign and he succeeds in doing so even to the name change to the National Socialist or German Workers Party I mean really what sounds more red than that so the interesting thing is uh from where did anti-Semitism seep

into this whole thing it seems like the way they try to formulate counter Marxism is by saying the problem with capitalism and the problem with Marxism is that uh it's really judeo capitalism and quote judeo bolshevism from where did that ideology seep in well that's a huge topic where does anti-semitism come from let's start with that term itself a term which I have really grown increasingly to dislike because it doesn't actually say what it means anti-Semitism is anti- jewi ISM that's all it is I'm not sure Whether there has ever existed a person who hated

Jews Arabs and males equally okay I that's kind of hard to imagine I don't know but that's that's technically what that was with me because let's face it most semites are Arabs so if you're an anti-semite then you don't seem to distinguish Jews from Arabs makes no sense the origin of the term is invented by I guess what an anti-semite okay a um guy in the 1870s German journalist by the name of vilhelm Mah who is wouldn't You know it part Jewish himself and decides that you really need a better term than yudas Jew hate

which was the term that because that just sounds so you know inelegant doesn't it okay what do you want to call yourself a Jew hater or an anti-semite see anti-Semitism it's got that ISM part in the end of it which means it's a system of belief anything that has an ism must somehow be scientific and important it's all part Of the 19th century obsession with bringing trying to bring science into something one or the other so we're going to get rid of Jew hate and we're going to turn it into anti-Semitism and we're only going

to be talking about Jews but we'll never actually say that and somehow the invention of a Jew hater to disguise the fact that he's a Jew hater even though he's partly Jewish by inventing the term anti-Semitism worked Because everybody has bought it repeated it ever since so and I don't know I you know maybe just because anti-sm would just be is that is it too Direct in some way is it do we have difficulty confronting actually what it is that we're talking about I do wish terms were a little bit more direct and self-explanatory yeah

Jew hate is is a better term well the question then comes what exactly do you hate about Jews and a lot of this has to do with if you go back prior to the 19th century if Jews were hated they were hated for religious reasons in Christian Europe they hated because they weren't Christians and they existed as the only kind of significant religious minority but but other than that they tended to live separately they had little economic influence Jews tend to live in Shettles in the East ghettos elsewhere you they were some were involved in

banking and Business but they they they sort of remained segregated from much the society that changes when you get to the 19th century and with what's called Jewish emancipation and that means that between about 1800 and 1850 most European countries dropped the various legal or social restrictions against Jews they are assimilated into the general Society so ideally you stop being a German Jew and you become a Jewish German those are two very different important Concepts and what that does of course is that it opens up the professions business World elsewhere so Jews move who had

been largely within those Realms to begin with they already had a good deal of experiencing and experience in banking business and they move into those areas and professions and become quite Visible and that's what then creates anti-semitism because in some way that is seen as part of the of the of the changes that that have taken place and there are a lot of things going on here part of it has to do with the kind of wrenching social and economic changes that took place with industrialization so one of the things to keep in mind is

that in the process of Industrialization just like today whole classes of people were were extinct economically Craftsmen for instance so when factories came along and began to produce things with machines all the crafts people who had made those things previously are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor in in factories so there are winners and losers in industrialization and what people saw in Germany and elsewhere is that among this New sort of RIS in capitalist elite among these new professions among the bureaucrats that are coming out of these burgeoning states there were visibly

a fair number of Jews so in some way the rise of Jews in the minds of many people were connected to all of the other bad things that were going on you know the world was changing in a way we don't like and seemingly the Jews are prospering while I am not And that was true in Germany elsewhere Jews became highly visible in the professions they became very visible in banking they became visible in legal profession they became visible in the medical profession and those are people that a lot of people would come in contact

with bankers lawyers and doctors they were not the majority there but you know vastly over represented in terms of the general population and and and especially Within the cities so in that sense the roots of anti-Semitism to me is that Jews in Germany and elsewhere and not just in Germany by any means France Britain everywhere else became identified with the bad changes that were that were taking place and but you also found that uh Jews were not only prominent among capitalists they were also prominent among in the Socialist movement as well Well so one of

the things you could look around if we returned to Germany in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I and you look around in Bavaria or elsewhere you tend to find that there are a lot of Jews inv visible positions on the German left Rose Luxembourg is but but one example of that you know oan LaVine some of them came in from Russia you know when the Soviets send a representative to Germany in this period it's Carl Rodek a Jew so it wasn't difficult to exploit that to argue that just as the ranks of capitalism

was full of Jews the ranks of bolshevism or of the Revolutionary left were full of Jews because you could easily go around and distinguish a great many of them again they don't have to be the majority they just have to be numerous prominent and visible Which they were so this provided you a you know in the case of the propaganda of the German Army the type of stuff that Hitler was spute out they could put all the anti- capitalist rhetoric in there wanted to the Army was never going to overthrow capitalism and the capitalist knew

they weren't going to do it so go ahead you know talk about us we don't really care that's not going to because we know that the Army would prevent that from Happening the way to then undermined the Real Enemy it was the scene the the Revolutionary left was to point out the the Jewish influence there I mean look at Russia well Len is not but trosy there he is look there there there's a Jew there's one rodic is a Jew it wasn't hard to find them in that regard you gave a lecture on the protocols

of the Elders of Zion it's why they considered to be the most influential work of anti-Semitism ever Perhaps uh can you describe this text well the protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is probably one of the most Troublesome and destructive works of literature that has ever emerged and yet its Origins remain obscure so you get a whole variety of stories about where it came from so the one story that is often is that it was it was the work of the Okana the Russian secret police and in particular it was all crafted in 1904

and 1905 uh in uh in in Paris and there's a whole description of u p rovski who is the supposedly the chief of the okran at the time was the man behind it another fellow by the name of matv golinski was the drafter of it and that they they had this document uh written by a a French political writer from some Decades back called dialogue in Hell between makavelli and monu which they were then adapting that usually it's argued that they they plagiarized it into the protocols and and and none of that is is is

really true I mean the first part about it is that at the time this supposedly took place Raj Co he wasn't working for the Okana he hadd been fired and he wasn't in Paris and the whole situation which is described couldn't have taken place because the people who did it weren't there it's a story but it provides a kind of explanation for it so the protocols emerge so you always have to go back this is one of the things that I have found always useful in research is go back to the beginning find the first

place this is Mentioned or the first version or the first iteration where does it start so you go back to St Petersburg Russia run 1903 there is a small right-wing anti-semitic newspaper published there called zamia banner and it publ lishes in a kind of Serial form a work doesn't credit with any original author and this is the first version of The protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion but what it's actually describing is a judeo masonic plot to rule the world those two terms are always combined together and I fact in the earlier version there's

far more mentions of Freemasons than there are are Jews and it's you know the publisher namia it's it's closely connected to a thing called the union of the Russian people the union of Russian men which Was um ostensibly existed to defend the Empire against subversion and particularly against what I thought was Jewish subversion when they also argued that the prominence of Jews and revolutionary movement somehow proved that this was in some a a Jewish Revolution but again this is this is not a mainstream newspaper it's not appealing to a mainstream population very few people saw

it but this is where it appears now keep in mind that's two Or three years before it's usually said to have been written or the other version is that there's this crazy priest by the name of Sergey Nelis and he wrote it or attend actually attended it as an appendix to his work in 1905 now it was it was around before that so neis didn't create created wasn't drafted in Paris in 1904 or 1905 it was serialized in an obscure right-wing Russian newspaper 1903 and by the way we should Say that these are 24 protocols

well it varies it varies uh that are I guess supposed to be like meeting notes about the supposed cabal where the Jews and Freemasons are planning together a world domination but it's like meeting notes right protocol which are Russian term basically for notes of a meeting yeah well as notes of a meeting these are the goofiest things I've ever seen because what you've got here it's it's Not notes no one takes notes from a meeting that way what you've got is like the exposition of a bond villain all right it's all of this boy all

then we're going to do this and then okay the last thing you want to do is lay out your if you got a plan for world domination my suggestion would be don't write it down so it's not notes of a meeting it's it's a it's again it's another sort of narrative or story that's being Told it Bears no resemblance to the dialogue on Hell between melli and monu but what it is the best thing it's it's not particularly readable in some ways uh there was an Italian writer by name of cheser Mikus uh who wrote

a book translated in English called the non-existent manuscript and what it is is that he takes the different versions starting with the 1902 1903 versions and looks through the other ones and and he tries To in the process to reconstruct what he thinks the original might have been but the other thing he does which was fascinating to me is that he takes this whole sort of initial text and in in bold type he indicates the paragraphs but more often sentences or phrases that appear to be identical from the Jolie work and they're just scattered throughout

it there's no particular Rhyme or Reason to it you don't plagiarize that way I mean who Does that uh sentence here sentence there which has led to a peculiar theory of mine which of course I will have to expound upon which is that I think that the original author of the protocols was the same Maurice Jolie I think what someone stumbled across was a work which he wrote and never published and which he just drew it's exactly what someone would do working from your own kind of Material because I've you know I've written things and

then taken what I've written and then sort of repackaged that into something else sentence here sentence there yeah and the same sort of thing comes out only sort of bits and pieces of it remain so Hawai would Jolie have done that Jolie was uh we're talking about a man whose career basically spaned the 1850s to 1870s he's an obscure figure I'm not even totally sure he existed I Mean it but it's one of those things you go looking for him I love that you're a scholar of people that just kind of emerge out of like

the darkness they just they just come from nowhere and and there's the Arana there also we should also say this was I guess the original would be written I mean what what's the language of the original Russian Russian but my hunch is that that's adopted from a French version first of all they're constantly harping on Freemasons which Wasn't nearly as a big idea as there if you go back to France in the 1890s MH there's some big scandals well there's the DFA Scandal we got that all right where you've got a Jewish officer on trial

for being a traitor all right so that was Pro so you bring in the whole Jewish element Jews is disloyal drus case 1894 earlier you had the Panama Scandal which was this huge investment Scandal when the Panama Canal company in Paris Collapsed and again many of the major players in that work Jewish Finance ear and then you've got the taxel hoax so the taxel hoax was the work of this guy his real name was I think Zan P he was kind of a French journalist he I know he started out writing porn so I mean

he wrote things like sex lives of the popes and you know the erotic Bible and various things of that kind he was a Catholic broke with the Catholic Church wrote bad stuff about the pop And uh apparently became a Freemason for a while and then supposedly recanted his evil ways went back to the church and then under the name Leo taxel began writing these whole series of Articles basically arguing that there was a masonic satanic conspiracy run by the way by an American Albert Pike and this also included child sacrifice it's got pizza and it

is wealth by a high priestess Diana vau and so there's like child sacrifice you know weird Roby Bohemian Grove stuff and the Freemasons are devil worshippers going back to the Knights Templars and so there's a thing called The Devil in the 19th century and the secrets of Freemasonry and this became a bestseller in France so France is just obsessed with all these all these kinds of conspiracies so evil satanic Freemasons Evil Jewish financiers dfus this this is the Brew where all of this comes I want to figure out how Freemasons and Jews get connected together

France is the place where this happens now taxel or Zan P eventually pulls another interesting thing in this around 1897 critics argue that he's making this stuff up and demand that he present Diana vau supposed satanic High Priestess toddler Killer and he says oh we're going to have a press conference she'll appear and say all of this stuff as she returns to the church and you know possibly becomes a nun and so people show up you know High figures in the Catholic Church shows up and he does no dianon and Doan p goes it's all

a hoax I made it up you're all a bunch of idiots for believing it okay you you members of the church especially just just what gullible you know morons you are and That's it he confesses it to this day however you will find people who will insist that it's actually true because they desperately want it to be true MH but this is I think the milu that I like that word apparently that that this that this comes out of and this is this is this whole kind of unhealthy yeah mix so France to me is

the only place that in the decade preceding it that something like this would be concocted so it was either created by Some sort of unknown person there but I still think that even though he dies in like 1879 that that and in in morce Jolie's troubled career he went from being an opponent of French Emperor Napoleon III which is what his which is what the whole dialogues was written against and then he was for a Time time a close political Ally of a French politician by the name of Adolf Creu so Adolf Crux what's he

got going for him well he was kind of a radical politician he was an opponent of Napoleon III he was a Freemason oh and he was Jewish in fact at one point I think he was actually the head both of the Scottish right in France and and I an important figure in the aliance Israelite okay the Jewish organization in France so he was Publicly very prominently Jewish and Masonic so someone else who would have linked them together Jolie as he did with Vally everyone this is a guy whose life largely consisted of dual threats and

fist fights so he gets he gets angry at creu and it's exactly the type of thing that he might write to vent his spleen about it but he died probably a suicide that's kind of difficult to Tell in obscurity his son seems to have inherited most of his literary works and his son then worked for new became a journalist work for newspapers in France in the 1890s but was also associated with some people on the fringes of the Okana or the Russian press in France so one of the little things that uh had happened by

this time is that France and Russia had become allies even though their political systems are completely incompatible and so the Russians were using money to subsidize French newspapers that were championing the alliance between the two Russian meddling okay no they're just paying to have the right kind of newspapers come out so there's this whole connection between the kind of Russian journalistic World and the French journalistic world And all of these scandals which are going on and Jolie's son and then you know 10 years down the road this thing pops up in a newspaper in St

Petersburg that's where I think the origins lay why do you think it took off why do you think it grabbed a large number of people's imaginations and even after it was shown to be not actually what it's supposed to be people still believe it's real well It doesn't take off immediately okay never receives any kind of wide I mean nobody much reads the first edition of it when it's reedited it keeps getting there are something like 18 or 19 different versions as it goes through I mean it gets get you know people leave this protocol

out or leave another one as time goes on there's more and more emphasis on Jews and less and less on Freemasons so it's sort of and The whole thing could have begun as an anti-masonic tract mm I mean you could leave Jews out of it entirely and just turn it into a masonic plot to rule the world but let's just throw them in as well since the the two things are already being combined elsewhere it doesn't become a big deal until really after the first world war because the initial versions of it are all in

Russian and you know let's face it well that's widely read in Russia It's not much read anywhere else it's a different alphabet nobody can even see what it means so it has no particular influence outside of Russia but then you get to 1919 and you get all these different versions of it so Sly you get two English versions in the US another English version in Britain a German Edition a French Edition a Dutch Edition everybody is coming up with these things so it's Not until the immediate aftermath of the first world war that this metastasizes

and it begins to show up in all of these different foreign additions um and I think that just has to do with the changes that have taken place during the War uh one of the things that people began looking for was said why was there a war and we have just had this whole disastrous War and the world has been turned upside Down so there has to be some kind of explanation for that I don't know and and one of the things this offered to see there's this evil plan there's this evil plan that has

been put into motion and this could possibly explain what's taking place the reason why the protocol s were I think widely bought then and why they still are in many ways is the same reason that the taxel hoax I was talking about was Because it told a story that people wanted to believe so in France in the 1890s there was widespread suspicion of Freemasons it was seen as a somewhat Sinister secretive organization certainly secretive and there was also you know the same sort of generalized prejudices about Jews clannish distinct too much influence all of the

things that went on So you could it was sort of easy to combine those two things together and even though taxel admits it was a hoax there were those who argued that this is just too it's too accurate it describes things too completely to be a hoax and then you get the same arguments in fact I've heard the same arguments with the protocol I don't even buy this is as an example of plagiarism because you Can't actually prove what's being plagiarized in any sense to me the protocols are a prime example of what I call

a turd on a plate these things crop up I have to explain that now but I after what is a turd on a plate well a turd on a plate is a turd on a plate suppose you come in and there's a plate sitting on the table and there's a turd on it yeah now the first thing you're going to what is is is that a turd is it a human turd where Did it come from who's why would someone poop on a plate they're all these questions that come to mind it makes no sense

but that's what you come it's just there right I don't know where it came from I don't know why but there's a turd on a plate and that's what the protocols are they're just there but the reality is just like with a Turret on a plate you take a picture of that in modern day and it becomes a meme becomes viral and Becomes a joke on all social media and now it's viewed by tens of millions of people or whatever it becomes popular so wherever the tur came from it did Captivate the imagination yeah it

did speak to something because it seem to provide an explanation can you just speak to uh hatred is it just an accident of History why was it the Jews versus the Freemasons is it uh the collective mind searching for a small group to blame for The Pains of civilization and then Jews just happen to be the thing that was selected at that moment in history it goes all the way back to the Greeks let's blame them so one of the first occasions you find the idea that Jews are a distinct mean-spirited nasty people goes back

to an a Greco Egyptian historian named Mano this is around I think 300 BC early can't even rope the Romans into this one so Mano is trying to write a history of the dynasties of Egypt I think his history of dynasties of Egypt still is one of the basic Works in this but he tells this whole story which essentially describes the kind of first blood lials that the you know the Jews to celebrate their you know various religious holidays would Capture Greeks and fatten them up in the basement and then slaughter them and eat them

or drain blood or do something yeah it's just the sort of earlier version of that kindy uh also I think it repeats the sort of Egyptian version of The Exodus out of Egypt which is quite different than the biblical version um in this case the Egyptian you know they they they worked as you know They stole all the stuff out of the Egyptians houses and ran off into the desert the Jews th all the stuff and in all yeah Hebrews Hebrews robbed the Egyptians they they were taken in and you know we took them in

and sheltered them gave them jobs and then they like stole all the jewelry and ran away we didn't even chase them we were glad to see them gone so it's a different it's a different narrative on that story uh but it essentially portrays the Jews as Being as being hostile you know that they don't like other people um they're contemptuous of other people's religions the rest of it and see the Greeks tended to think of themselves as being extremely Cosmopolitan now the Greeks run across people worshiping other gods they go well those are just our

Gods under different names okay every everything was sort of adjusted into their landscape so you end up with that kind Of of hostility which was there at the time and that was probably influenced also by some of these earlier rebellions uh that had taken place in Egypt you know and during the Roman period you you not only have the Judean rebellion in 70 AD but you have a couple of other uprisings in North Africa and they're very bloody Affairs and in some cases Jews begin massacring other people around them they start killing the Greeks the

Greeks start killing them so there was a fair amount of from that period on a certain amount of Bad Blood of mutual contempt between Greek or between Helens between the people who became heniz as the Romans would be and the Jews and the Romans also seems to have developed much of that idea you know they consider judaist being you know horrible place to have to govern inhabited by a a stubborn obnoxious People um not well-liked so that's really where you see the earliest version of that and the reasons for it would [Music] be complicated what

you could say is that going back to mano and the Roman period Jews judeans frequently experience difficulties conflicts with other people living around Them and part of that probably had to do with the diaspora which was the movement well you know you get the idea the Romans came in and kicked everybody out which they didn't Jews had been leaving Judea since it was a poor limited area and moving into areas like North Africa Egypt serica all the way into southern France they move widely around the Roman Empire so that sense of both distinctness and hostility

existed since ancient Times so it wasn't just the attitude of the church towards Jews was mixed by well one of the ideas of course is that uh at the end of time you know just before the second coming one of the signs how we going we know that that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end well the Jews will all convert there will there will be a mass conversion they'll sort of see the light now so there have to be Jews around to do that or we won't you know it's

like a Canary and a coal mine you you you have to have them there to tip it off so that was one of the arguments as to why within the church as to why Jews would not be forcibly converted beyond the fact that it's just kind of bad policy to forcibly convert people because you don't know whether it's sincere but they need to be preserved as a kind of artifact which will then redeem Itself at the end of time it's not something which is encouraged it predates Christianity and then Christianity of course in its own

way just sort of plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing doesn't it I mean I hesitate to use that term but that's what you do it's just like well we're the Jews now okay you used to have a unique relationship with God but now it's been passed over to us and so You know thanks thanks for the Bible you know I can remember that and my mom's side I was periodically exposed to Sunday school and and pretty much the Old Testament was always presented as if somehow it was the you know the history of like with lack

of a better term you know Europeans in some way it was it was sort of a Christian history it was all the preal to that and there'd be some sort of a knowledge the he first the Term Hebrew was always used never Jews so you know the ancient Hebrews and somehow the Hebrews just sort of became the Christians and I don't know the Jews just got let they didn't get a memo or something so it's basically like Christianity the prequel is the the Old Testament yeah but they just sort of to take over okay we

we have the special dispensation now thank you very much um you're an Artifact so it's interesting so this this whole narrative uh that I would say is kind of like a viral meme started as you describe in 300 BC it just carried all carried on various forms and morphed itself and arrived after the Industrial Revolution into in a new form to the to the 19th and 20th Century and then somehow captivated everybody's imagination I think that modern anti-Semitism Is very much a creation of the modern world and the Industrial Revolution it's it's largely creation of

Jewish emancipation it's the nasty flip side of that okay all of the restrictions are thrown off but now also you become the focus of much more attention than what you had what you had before you know prior to that you had the the kind of ghettoization which worked both way I Mean there were rabbis who praise the ghetto is is is a protection of Jews against the outside world because inside we can live our life as we wish and we are unmolested whereas if we were the great fear is that if we were sort of

absorbed into this larger World we'll lose our identity that sort of question comes up in the 18th century and things like the uh hasala movement in Germany cuz the German Jews were always at the sort of Cutting edge of assimilation and modernity Moses melon was an example of that arguing that you know we just need to become Germans so you know as much as possible synagogue should be look like Lutheran Churches um everything you things should be given in good German and and that's the way we we need to become Jewish Germans we don't we

don't want to become a kind of group of people who are who are part in That way and that he created great tensions ever since you know one of the essential points that seems to me in anti-Semitism anti- jewi ism is that all the Jews are in it together isn't that one of the things okay they're always talking about as if they're Collective Jews this Jews that as if it's it's a single undifferentiated mass of people who all move and speak in the same the same Way from my personal experience not being Jewish I've it's

incredibly diverse in many ways really one of the things that anti-Semitism proposes is a continuity or a singularity of Jewish identity that never existed just like you said in one hand there's a good story in the other hand is the truth and often times the good story wins out and there's something about the a that there's a cabal of people whatever they are in This case our discussion is Jews seeking world domination controlling everybody is somehow a compelling story it gives us a direction of a people's to fight of a people's to hate on which

we project our pain cuz life is difficult life for many for most is full of suffering and so we channel that suffering into hatred towards the other maybe if we can just zoom out what do you from this particular discussion learn about human nature that We that we pick the other in this kind of way and we divide each other up in groups and then construct stories and like constructing those stories and they become really uh viral and sexy to us and then we channel the hatred we use those stories to channel our hatred towards

the other well you know Jews aren't the only recipient of that I mean any anytime you hear people talking about Jews this or That white people this or that black people this or that Asians this or that where they're an undifferentiated Mass yeah who apparently all share something in common well nobody's really thinking and the other thing you'll find is that people who will Express those views when press will argue that oh this you know if if they actually know anybody from those groups those are okay mhm you know it's like Nazis they all They

go H this isn't okay Jew they're all right they were they would always be constantly making exceptions and one for you know but they actually met an actual human being and they seem to be fairly normal well they were okay so what it was that they they hated weren't actual people for the most part it was just this kind of vision that they had of them you're not even talking about real people uh I don't know what does that Tell you about human nature well okay in 70 odd years what have I learned about my

fellow creatures one I don't actually understand them any better than I ever did in fact less so okay I would say this when I was 17 I thought I had the world much more figured out than I do now completely deluded but you know it seemed to make much more sense and I could categorize things BAS Bic take Upon human beings most people most of the time are polite cooperative and kind until they're not and the exact Tipping Point and moment in which they go from one to the other is unpredictable God that's brilliantly put

speaking of the Tipping Point you gave a series of lectures on murderers crimes in the 20th century one of the crimes that you describe is the Manson family Murders and that combines a lot of the elements of what we've been talking about and a lot of the elements of the human nature that you just uh described so can you just tell this story at a high level as you understand it the Manson villing well you begin with Charles Manson who's the key element in this and Charles Manson for most of his life up until the

time that he's around 33 is an unexceptional Petty criminal in and out of Prison reform school from an early age not really associated with violent crimes he did stuff like steal cars write bad checks became an unsuccessful pimp and drug dealer so around 1967 he gets out of his latest stint in federal Lockup in terminal Island there Los Angeles California uh by that time time he's learned how to play the guitar has Ambitions to become a Musician and uh also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist not that he ever seems to have pra but that's what

he would claim that he was kind of you know self-educated himself in in prison to a certain degree and so when he gets out of of prison in ' 67 he was a model prisoner he behaved himself you know and and seemed can sort of Imagine his life is going in a completely different direction and and Here again I'm going to say something kind of good about Charles Manson which is that he actually was a decent singer if you really sort of listen to some of the stuff he did he you know he's not a

great singer but he could have you know other people got recording contracts with less Talent than he had and he could play guitar uh The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him how would you evaluate Hitler's painting on Compared to Charles Manson well you're supposed to say it's terrible okay okay it looks average to me yeah it's landscape I mean if you didn't know it was Hitler yeah would it would it would it would you I I don't know what people say about it um I'm sorry for the distraction it's just

you know it's just it's an average painter that's what it was something like crazy genocidal Maniac paintings you don't have really Have those so Manson you know he could could have done that he probably could have you know he made certain inroads into the music industry and if he hadn't been such a weirdo he might have gotten further with it but his life could have taken a different turn so this is one of the questions I have where did a guy who becomes who's an unexceptional career Petty criminal suddenly emerge into some sort of criminal

mastermind a Svengali who Can bend all of these people to his will and get them to go out and commit murder that's a that's a real shift that you have so the first thing it kind of could tell you that something odd is going on is he gets out of prison in LA county and he's supposed you know he's on parole you know par leaves are supposed to have a job not supposed to leave the jurisdiction of their parole he heads Straight for the Bay Area violates parole right off the bat two weeks later he

drifts into the parole office in the bay area whereupon he should have been arrested and sent back to terminal Island but instead they just assigned him a pro I don't know maybe things were easier then in some way so he gets assigned to parole officer Michael Smith Michael Smith is initially handling a number of Peres but after a while once he takes on Manson he only Has one parole Le he's supervising Charlie Manson which is odd then you also find out that Michael Smith in addition to being a parole officer is is a graduate student

at the University of California uh studying group dynamics especially the influence of drugs on gangs and groups and he's also connected to the hayatt Ashbury free clinic which is a place where the influence of because he Ashbury had lots Of drugs and lots of groups so you know Charlie Manson never gets a regular job hangs around with un with young girls EXC cons engages in criminal activity is repeatedly arrested but nothing ever sticks for the you know next couple of years so who gets that type of thing who gets a get out of jail free

card Informance so here is what again this is speculation but Manson at some point after he got out of prison is getting this treatment because he is recruited as a confidential informant for who for who that's the interesting question so probably not for any local police departments uh my best suspicion is probably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics precursor to the DEA you know Federal parole Federal parole officer come graduate student in drugs and group dynamics and eventually with permission he goes back down to LA and what is he part of when he's there well he's

on the fringes of the music industry not so much you know he those the Wilsons and elsewhere which also brings him to the fringes of the film industry so one of the things If you're sort of looking in terms of Hollywood Music Industry Elites and the flow of oh And he's also dealing in drugs mhm and girls so an early version of Jeffrey Epstein yeah uh Manson attracted lots of underage runaways and train them use them also associating with biker gangs who produced the drugs Etc so that's that's part of what he's he's an he's

an informant in the movement of drugs basically within the film music Industries and he's given pretty much a kind of free reign at that Point what then happens in August of 1969 is that there are these murders you know first Sharon Tate and her friends in SEO Drive I think everybody is probably pretty much heard that story before and of course the question is why SEO Drive why Sharon Tate frosi and the rest him that he have some Manson was familiar with the place he had been there before members of the family had been there

before So he knew where it was it wasn't an easy place to find I mean the way that that house the house the original house is no longer there but the same sort of property in a house is built there and if you didn't know where it was it's it's not someplace let's just go for a drive in the Hollywood Hills and murder people in a house well that isn't the one that you would come across there are lots of connections there uh voytech fski who was one of the People killed at the clo Drive

housee was involved in drug dealing that's that's a possible connection between the two probably a fairly likely one probably not unfortunate Sharon Tate at all she was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time her husband might have been you never know uh and then the next night uh after the the slaughter there which by the way Manson is not at so this is one of the interesting things about is Charles Manson doesn't kill any of these people his crime is supposedly or ing the killings to be done he supposedly um thought that the

killings at the Tate house were sloppy and he was going to give everybody a crash course and how you apparently commit seemingly random murderers so the next night he takes group of people over to the LA Bianca's house in a different section of LA and you got Leno and rosemary lanca guy's a grosser his wife runs a dress shop upper middle class and uh you know they're bound and gagged and hacked to death and uh as as at the uh Tate residence various things like Piggy are written you know various messages in blood things that

are supposed to look like cats paws because one of the groups trying to be framed for this was the idea was the Black Panthers so the general story that comes Out in the subsequent trial is that this was all a part of something called Helter Skelter which Manson supposedly was an IDE that that sounds like a beetle song that's where he got it from he thought the Beatles were talking to him through their music and that there was going to be an apocalyptic race war and this was all part of a plan to set this

off so this is why the Black Panthers were trying to be implicated in this Although how it was supposed to do that is never really explained here is what I think was really happened what really happened and now I think it fits together before Sharon Tate and her friends or the law Biancas were killed there was a Murder By members of the family of some of the same people involved in the later killings of a musician drug manufacturer by the name Of Gary Hinman so Manon again was involved in the drug trade and Hinman made

them he was a cook basically and he brewed them up in his basement sold the drugs to Manson who sold them to biker gangs like the straight satans which was one of the groups that he used and they distributed them elsewhere well one day the straight Satan show up and complain that the last Batch of meth or whatever it was that they got from Manson had made some of their brothers very very ill and they were quite unhappy about that and they wanted their $22,000 back Manson had gotten those drugs from Gary Henman so he

is unhappy and he sends Bobby BOS and couple of the girls over to him's place to get the money from him as the story is later related I think by Susan Atkins Hinman denied that there was anything wrong with this drugs and refused to pay up which led to a interrogation torture session in which she was killed yeah and the idea was here what are we going to do with that well one of the other groups that Hinman had sold drugs to were guess what people associated with the Black Panther so we'll leave these things

up and it will make them that they will do it so it's Bobby BOS who then takes hinman's car and decides to drive it up the coast by the way with a bloody knife with henman's blood and hair on on it and blood on the seats in the car and then he pulls it off the road and you decides to sleep it off and he gets busted right so find hinman's Body find BOS in henman's car with a bloody knife with him yeah he gets arrested so BOS was very popular with Some of the girls

there's consternation in the family that Bobby has been arrested so how can we possibly get Bobby out of jail copycat killings so if we go kill more people and we make it look the same then see Bobby couldn't possibly have done it no see he just borrowed the car okay he stole the car but the knife was already in he didn't have anything to do with this so that to me makes the most sense out of what followed how often do people talk about That theory that's an interesting Theory well it's it's there it's just

not the one that that b wanted to go with helter SC because it was again it was a story that people could understand yeah and it was Sensational and it would catch on also another probable issue in that was that his star witness was Linda caban Linda caban she was present at both the Tate and La Bianca murders she didn't participate in the killings according to Her she sort of drives the car but everybody else talked about what had happened well okay she turns state evidence and gets total immunity and it's largely in her testimony

that all the rest of the case is based now if you start throwing into the equation that she proclaimed her love for Bobby bosle and this could and that she according to others was the chief proponent of the copycat Killings well then that would get messy now there's one guy that's at the center of this it's Charles Manson he ordered all of this done to ignite a race war even though how would any of that do it okay so that doesn't make sense but he is nevertheless at the center of this because he's the glue

of the family right he exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control over them how was he able to do that Sergeant TR how like What because he said he was a petty criminal it does seem he was pretty prolific in his Petty crimes like he he did a lot of them he had a lot of access to LA D okay okay which he started getting at the free clinic you in San Francisco so lots lots of it floating around um some descriptions of the family at spawn Ranch is that people were basically taking acid on

a daily Basis which by the way was also a potential problem with Linda cassian's testimony since she also admitted to being high most of the time and also thinking she was a witch all right so you want to put her okay okay where do you want to go with that see if Manson wasn't Manson if he hadn't acted like such a complete if he hadn't actually acted like the crazed hippie psycho goofball that bugliosi painted him as being then cavan's testimony wouldn't Have been as strong because you could I mean the first thing against her

is you've got an immunity mhm for for telling the story The prosecution wants you know that's a little iffy and we won't even bring in the witch and the drugs and being in love with Bobby BOS they AR so if Manson had you know been dressed like you sitting there in a suit and tie and you know and and behaved himself and spoken normally things might this isn't to say that he Wasn't guilty as hell so what he supposedly did was to inspire all of these killings and I think that's probably you know sort of

beginning with the Hinman killing he told them to go over there and get the money one way or the other I don't know whether it's clear whether he told him if you don't get the money kill him but henman's dead and Then you might also seen the value in terms of having copycat killings as a way of throwing off any other kind of blame the other story you get is that one of the people who had lived at the SEO house for Sharon Tate was before was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher

meler supposedly is the general Story Goes had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of a record contract you know he he screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal and Manson wanted To get revenge and sent and sent them to kill everybody in the house which again doesn't make much of sense one Manson knew that meltra wasn't living there anymore he probably knew where melshire was living if he wanted to get melshire he could could have found him it wasn't that difficult to do and um so that's it's not revenge on

Terry melshire that Drew him there he was Familiar with the house so the idea was to Simply commit random killings that would throw it would muddy the whole Waters with the Hinman killing then you might pick some place you knew of you knew the place with running out there would be someone there and you really didn't care in the same way that the L Bianca seemed to have been Manson was familiar with that because it supposedly had been the scene Of uh creepy crawling this is little interesting things that the family would be taught to

do creepy crawling it's when you sneak into somebody's house at night while they're there asleep or when they're not there and you move things around so when they get up in the morning or they come home they'll suddenly notice that someone has been in their house which will freak them out which is the whole point of that but it Doesn't seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was the what creepy crawling made it be it doesn't seem like the murder like some of the other people you've you've covered like the Zodiac Killer the murder

is the goal maybe there's uh some Psychopathic kind of artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that yeah but it seems like with the the as at least the way you're Describing it with the Charles Manson family the murder was just um they just had a basic disregard for human life and the murder was a as a consequence of just operating in the drug underworld so Manson set up a kind of Base I thing called the Spawn movie Ranch which was an old movie Ranch out in the Northwest Edge

of LA and they just kind of camped out there um he used the girls in particular squeaky fro to get the owner operator um I think George spawned to Let them hang out there and basically she slept with him and he was perfectly happy to let them hang out they also had a place out in the desert that they had they dealt in credit card fraud stolen cars it was kind of a chop shop that they ran out of the place so he he had a fairly good little criminal gig going which with the protection

he had probably would the one thing they couldn't cover him on was murder so you think there was if he was An Informer you think there was still a connection between de FBI CIA whatever with with him throughout this until he come murder the real question is there is a book written on this by Tom O'Neal called chaos I'm not necessar saying it's the easiest thing to get through there's a lot of material there I don't think O'Neal necessarily knows what to make of some of the stuff he came up with but he does a

very good job of sort of demolishing the whole buosi Narrative and one of the people he mentions is a name that I had run into elsewhere and so I really paid attention to it when I saw it again and the name is reev witson reev witson shows up on the fringes even though he has no no judicial function he sort of hangs around buosi in in the prosecution he's some sort of advice he's just kind of there in the same way that he was one of these guy you know he Grew his hair kind of

long wore bell bottoms hung around the music community and elsewhere in Hollywood but no one could tell you exactly what he did I know what he did later but a decade later he shows up as a CIA officer in Central America hm so reev witson later in his career at least is Cia what was he in 1969 what is he doing in This uh the other thing about it is he appears to have been the person who called there's whole question of when the bodies at SEO Drive are discovered so the general story is that

Sharon Tate's housekeeper shows up around 8:30 in the morning finds the bloody scene and goes screaming next door but there was another fellow who knew I think the owner of the house is a photographer last name may be hatami he gets a call earlier in the morning Saying that there have been murders there and the person he recalls calling him is Reef Whitson so someone had been at the house before the bodies were discovered and they had not called the police so I don't know what's going on there but it's a um it's a curious

kind of of situation and Manson in a lot of ways Just kind of self- imiles himself I mean his behavior at the trial is bizarre it's threatening it's disruptive you know he's got his girls out in the street carving x's in their forehead carrying knives one of the attorneys initially his attorney Ron Hughes becomes van halton's attorney and he figures out that the three girls supposedly on Charlie's insistence are going to confess and they Confess that it was all their idea and Charlie had nothing to do with it and Hugh doesn't like this because his

defense for her is that she was under his influence MH and therefore not responsible for her own actions he he was in having psychic control so he refuses to go along with it there's a break in the trial he goes camping up in the mountains with some friends disappears during a rainstorm and then some months later his Decomposed remains are found now rumors always the rumors okay what would history be without rumors mhm held that ah see members of the family they they were they were pissed off at Ron Hughes because he messed up Charlie's

idea to get him off and so they killed him oh maybe they did maybe he drowned that's that's absolutely impossible to say you got that kind of story there's a guy named Juan Flynn who was an employee at the spawn Ranch Didn't like Manson held Manson responsible for the murder of his boss he would testify that Manson told him that he had ordered all the killings and that Manson also admitted that he had killed 35 people maybe he did on the other hand Juan Flynn didn't like him and he had no other than his word

had no real proof of what he was saying so please understand me in this case is that unlike some people who Argue that Charles Manson got a raw deal I don't think that's the case I think that he influenced tremendous influence over the people there through drugs through sex was another frequent component in it um he had a real whammy over a lot of these people's minds I'm not sure how that that still kind of puzzles me he was a scrawny guy and he Wasn't physically intimidating I mean even a lot of women wouldn't be

physically intimidated by him but he nevertheless had this real psychological power and and there were and if you look around him the the male followers he had wasn't were fairly big guys so he could get people to do what he wanted and again to me the simplest explanation for this is that it began with the Hinman killing and probably on Manson's instigation the others were copycat killings to throw off what was going on that would if I was a cop that's what I would focus on because that seems to make the most sense it still

is fascinating that he's able to have that much psychological control over those people without having a very clear ideology so it's a cult yes the great the great focus on Charlie the leader the the excessive devotion but there's not like a maybe there's not an Ideology behind that like there something like Scientology or some kind of religious or some kind of I don't know uh utopian ideology nothing like this no I I think that Manson again was essentially a criminal he had a sociopathic mindset and he hit upon a pretty good deal yeah but like

how do people convince anybody of anything with a with with a cult usually you have either an ideology or you have maybe personal Relation like you said sex and drugs but underneath that can you really keep people with sex and drugs you have to kind of convince them that you love them in some deep sense like there's a un like a commune of love you you have a lot of people there in the cult they don't they have some sort of what we like to call dysfunctional families yeah uh a lot of the females in

particular seem to have come from you know more or less middle class families but those are Full of dysfunction uh you know their parents didn't love them they were semi- runaways and now they had this whole family uh you know a lot of the younger women had children you know some of them by Manson some of them by the others they sort of bonded together and again when we return to that uh that pull towards belonging that gets us humans into Trouble so it does seem that there was a few crimes around this time so

the Zodiac Killer well California what I'm from okay sorry remember this period vividly okay so by the way the the Tate La Bianca killings occurred on my birthday the year I graduated from high school so I remember this happy birthday a term which has been used for that uh there's a writer by the name of Todd wood who's toyed I wish I'd come up with this killer Fornia and which is just sort of a Chronicle of the serial killers and disappearances uh in the late 60s and 70s so you've got the Zodiac you've got other

ones I mean you know I hate to say it I'm not trying to be flipping about it but I mean young female hitchhikers were disappearing at an alarming rate in Northern California um there are bodies that have never been attributed some think that the The Zodiacs victims but it was a Dangerous time uh Edmund keer you know The Co-Ed Killer was was another one there were a lot of uh creepy Psychopaths running around I don't know if there was something in the water or what was going on but it was a menacing in some cases

um hitchhiking especially if you were alone and female was not something you wanted to do in much of the Golden State certainly not of around the Bay Area so a lot of these Strange sort of killings that were going on the zodiac is it's one of those things where they you have these people who have theories about it and if you don't share their Theory then you know you're part of the problem in some form or another so I'm not sure for instance the Zodiac killings R all committed by the same person I think there

might have been multiple people involved and you know the first killings are all of couples it's very sort of Clear that they I remember on my examination of it one of the one of the things I was looking at specific you what else is there to say about the Zodiac killing so what I was going to look at is that there are all of the accusations that there was an occult aspect to it there was some sort of ritualistic aspect so I looked at different things locations victims phases of the moon that's always worth looking

At and I didn't find much correspondence in any of those uh in one of the killings I think the one at Lake beresa he does appear in this kind of weird hooded costume you know he's got his symbol that sort of compass or aiming reticle you know circle with a cross through it it can mean mean a variety of things he used guns and he used knives but he certainly had a think for couples except in the last of the killings which is of a cab Driver in downtown San Francisco who he shoots in full

view of witnesses which is completely atypical and also when he was stabbing the victims it it doesn't seem like he was very good at it or if the goal was to kill them he wasn't very good at it because some of them survived yeah he doesn't he's not particularly thorough about it he seems to have had much more more the violence seems to be directed at the females and the Males so I mean there's a there's a couple questions to ask here first of all did people see his face there's a composite drawing of his

face which I think is based upon the the Stein killing the cab driver killing where there were people who saw him or who claimed they saw him the other ones were all when it was fairly dark right I'm not sure that anyone else got to look at his face the one that occurred in the daylight at beresa he was wearing a Mask so there's something in common initially in the targeting of victims which doesn't in the last case then after that there's just these different cases of where there's a pretty good case to be made

of a woman who claims I think she was she and her a small child were picked up her car broke down she got a flat tire and she was picked up by this guy who she got a very sort of strange vibe from who eventually just let her Go well you know that might have been the Zodiac it it might not have been you uh you do this kind of rigorous look saying like Okay what is the actual facts that we know like reduce it to the thing that we know for sure and uh in

spe about his motivation he uh he said that he was collecting Souls souls for the afterlife for the afterlife that's kind of a culty yeah I mean that's what I believe is it the Vikings or the Romans they believe This in battle you're essentially making sacrificial victims and they will be your ghostly servants in the afterlife you think he actually believed that who knows I mean here here's the question was he making that up just to be scary or is that what his actual that's what he's saying his motivation is so let's take him at

face value rather than trying to wish that into the corn field that is to to get rid of It let's just take it to so he's claiming that he's he's killing these people in order to acquire slave servants in the afterlife he will subsequently go on to claim many more victims I'm not sure 44 or eventually he will have before he just kind of vanishes one of the really interesting Clues to me when I was looking at that case which I didn't find anybody else that tended to make much of it of is That it

all has to do with this kind of Halloween card that he sends to the press in San Francisco and it's talking about sort of rope by gun by fire and there's this whole sort of wheel you know like the zodiacs but what was this drawn from where he got this from is from a Tim Holt Western comic book published in 1951 and you see the same thing in the cover it's Wheel of Fortune but with different forms of grizzly death on it and all of the things that He mentioned are shown on the cover of

this so whoever put together that card saw that comic book well that's kind of an interesting clue so does that mean he's a comic book collector when would he have I mean that is one and also but where he got the idea from he's incorporating these things from the then there are of course his codes which people have you know which aren't all that difficult to decipher probably because they weren't meant to Be the other thing that you find often with serial or Psychopathic hillers is are toying with the Press I mean this goes all

the way back to Jack the Ripper and they get attention and then he just disappears uh why do you think he was never caught I think they knew what to look for there's nothing much to go on mean there was a guy who was long a suspect and then eventually he tested his DNA and find that didn't T match any Of the things that they'd found uh again it goes back to I'm not even sure that it's one person as a responsible for all of them well there so one of the interesting things you kind

of bring up here um and our discussion of Manson inspires this but there does seem to be um a connection I shared inspiration between several Killers here the Zodiac the Son of Sam later and the the monster of Florence so is it is it possible there's Some kind of like an underworld that is connecting these people well you take the Zodiac and you get his claim that he's collecting souls for the afterlife there are other things that are occultish connected to that he may have picked some of the killing sites due to their physical location

to their position on in a particular place uh if you look at the Son of Sam Case of course David burkowitz will on and off claim that the he was part of a satanic cult that was carrying out again these killings um mostly of couples and young women similar to to the Zodiac and that he had only committed some of them and was Witnesses at others and that has really created the whole idea that yes there is this some kind of satanic cult which engages in ritual murders then if you go all the Way to

Florence uh you've got murders who go on on and off for a long period of time again focusing on couples in isolated areas which Italian prosecutors ultimately tried to connect to some kind of satanic cult although I'm not sure they ever made a particularly strong case for that but that element comes up in all three of them so you can with a little imagination argue that those similarities that those things should Come up in each of those cases in different places either suggest that oddly enough Psychopathic criminals all sort of thinking the same way or

that there is some sort of higher element involved in this that there's some kind of common inspiration here got you come back to something similar we're talking before about do pedophiles exist do pedophile okay so Do do satanic Cults exist well they do okay there was one in my hometown apparently quite harmless as far as I know never did anything to you know but there there are people who you know robes Here We Come Again robes cut the head off a chicken naked woman is an alter you know you can get off on that I

suppose if that's your thing so profess Satanist exal exist satanic Cults exist serial killers exist ritual Murders exist are those things necessarily connected no could they be connected yes okay there's there's nothing don't ever tell me that something is just too crazy for people to do because that's that's crazy talk all right you've studied secret societies you've gave a lot of amazing lectures on secret societies uh it's fascinating to look at human history through the lens of secret Societies cuz they've permeated all of human history you've talked about from everything from the nights Templar to

Illuminati Freemasons like we brought up Freemasons lasted a long time uh Illuminati as you've talked about in its uh sort of main form lasted a short time but it's Legend never gone away never gone away so maybe like Illuminati is a really interesting one who what was that well the Illuminati that we know uh started in 1776 in fact you can pin it down to a day the 1 of May May Day 17776 in ingel Germany founded by a professor Adam viop it wasn't initially called the Illuminati because that's not really the name of the

organization was called The Order Perfect bists apparently that changed visoft would say things like never let our organization be known under his real name anywhere which leaves wondering what's its real Name so Illuminati is simply the plural of illuminus which means one who is illuminated one who has seen the light so in Roman times Christian converts were Illuminati because they had seen the light anyone who thinks and there have been organizations called illum that that the term is not trademarked not copyrighted anybody who thinks they've seen the Light about anything is an Illuminati so it

it defines nothing uh the symbol of the order was an owl which interestingly enough is almost identical to the owl which is the emblem of the Bohemian Club oh boy make of that what you will I don't make that much out of it because one owl looks pretty much like another owl to me but compare them you know you got to kind of wonder About there's a little just a little thing maybe there's some kind of connection there so but that supposedly has to do with the connection to the goddess manura and the owl was

sacred to her and the end the order and the order was the the men of all the person who was brought in uh the number of levels changed over time there was a higher level to the order that people at the lower level Didn't know about pretty typical for this but the thing about vial was that he was quite he was a uh voluminous correspondent with members with his Illuminati both during the time that it legally existed in Bavaria and later on so Visos himself lives I think until 1830 uh dies in go which was

ruled by an Illuminati Prince and so nothing ever happens to these no no Illuminati has ever put to death or arrested impr prison for any period of time what Happens is that their plan well what was his plan his plan was to essentially replace all existing religions and governments in the world with a one world order governed by the Illuminati so to do this you had to subvert and destroy all the existing order and you know he argue the purpose for this is to uh we wish to make men happy and free but first we

must make them Good all right so that's what the the order is all about of course he also said things like oh man is there nothing that you won't believe okay so myth would be used in that also thought women should be brought into it had a rather interesting view about that was that we should appeal to women uh in part because women have a chip on their shoulder because they're left out of things so we should appeal to their vanity on that point and offer That in the future all things will be open and

they will be emancipated so we should hold out the prospect of female emancipation to attract them because he argued in the short term there's no better at a way to influence men than through women get women on our side by promising them emancipation but it made sure we'll never actually deliver it to them because the future world will be a boy club so he talks about these things Fairly openly uh and this is where you get this idea of some sort of a new world order which is to be based upon the destruction of the

existing order so there are those who argue that there is a trail of descent that leads from Vice Hoff's Illuminati to The Communist Manifesto and in fact communism itself that Marxism was simply a further restating of this idea and you can draw some sort of K I mean the idea never Entirely goes away the Bavarian government gets a hold of the order's inner texts so the story is there they're delivered to them I I think that Vice gave them to him I think he engineered the exposure of his order because it gave him publicity by

being exposed in Bavaria you gained great Renown and they continued to recruit after this and the Bavarian government actually bans the Illuminati four different times why cuz apparently the first three times didn't work so the fourth one does you can notice that it's like pap bands on Freemasonry and they just go on and on and on because this clearly isn't working and you actually highlight the difference between U speaking of publicity that there's a difference between visibility and transparency that a secret society could be visible it could be known about it could Be quite popular

but you could still have a secrecy within it you have no idea what's going on inside yeah it's like a black box if I set a black box on this table we can see that there is a black box what's in the Black Box a cat who knows in fact the secrecy might be the very thing that makes it even more popular Adam Vice out again there is no more more thing convincing than a concealed mystery give people a concealed mystery in the so we need to Make the order mysterious for that exact reason always

hold out the possibility that knowledge special knowledge that no mere mortals have other than you will have in that way so he senses a lot of things uh the use of of vanity and ego to recruit people to influence both men and women it's it's quite sophisticated and as you might expect from a professor of canon law trained by Jesuits so I certainly don't think that it Ceased when it was banned in Bavaria because everybody just scatters and goes elsewhere like Paris and then you have the French Revolution so the idea of the Illuminati the

to put a crudely The Branding is a really powerful one it and so it it makes sense that it can there's a thread connecting it to this day that a lot of organizations a lot of secret societies can sort of AD adopt the brand anybody can call it you can go and form a club And call it the Illuminati and if you are effective at it I think it does attract it's the chicken or the egg but powerful people tend to have gigantic Egos and people with gigantic egos tend to like the exclusivity of secret

societies and so like there's a there's a it's a gravitational force that pulls powerful people to these societies exclusive only certain and you also notice something goes back to we were talking about much Earlier we talking about intelligence remember mice ego ego means of Recruitment and control that's a great Achilles eel in human beings the exploitation of ego and of course if we go back to the conversation of intelligence agencies it would uh be uh very efficient and beneficial for intelligence agencies to infiltrate the secret societies right like because that's where the powerful people are

Yeah or the secret societies to infiltrate the intelligence agencies oh boy well I mean that's actually in in all the lectures I kind of had a sense that intell agencies themselves are kind of secret societies right well it comes down I give you my definition of secret societies what they come down to one is that generally their existence isn't secret it's what they do is secret it's what's in the box is opposed to the Existence of the box so one of the most important Criterion is that they are self- selecting you just don't join they

pick you they decide whether or not you're going to they admit you and they sometimes they will sort of recruit you uh once you have been recruited you have to pass tests and initiations and you also have to swear Oaths of loyalty those are always very very Critical so broadly speaking what entrance into an intelligent organization does they they decide whether you get in you just don't automatically get the job you have to pass tests of one AI detector test for instance field training tests a whole variety of tests and then you're sworn to secrecy

you never talk about what you do ever or there will be dire consequences so the method is very much The same and also this idea of creating a kind of insular group you this the organization is us and everyone else is outside of that we are guardians of special knowledge see this is the type of thing that would generally happen if you question whatever any kind of intelligence agency did well we know things that you don't why because we're the organization that knows things we collect information we know the secrets We guard the secrets therefore

if we tell you you must believe us I have this sense that there are very powerful secret societies operating today and we don't really know or understand them and the conspiracy theories in spirit might have something to them but are actually factually not correct so like you know an effective powerful secret society or intelligence agency is not going to uh let you know anything that it doesn't want you to Know right they'll probably mislead you if we get that close so I think you know the question is what's the most powerful or important secret society

probably the one you don't know about one that doesn't advertise its existence the one which is never known anywhere under its real name you've got things like the Bohemian Club you've got the Builder bers which is another sort of you know formed in the 1950s largely the creation of a guy by the name of Yosef retinger polish mysterious Pier at of nowhere a schemer for years a man expelled from Britain France and the United States at one point or another long active in the Mexican labor movement all okay readinger is mysterious figure in fact his

I think there was even a book written about him called imanance GRE gray Eminence the fellela the frontman for the Bilderbergers was uh Prince barard of the Netherlands who was at one point a Nazi and then a Dutch Freedom Fighter all right take your pick but uh reinger is is the moving hand behind the whole thing and I'll be damned if I can figure out who retinger is so the idea is that well you get like influential people in media business politics and you bring them together just to talk to try to find common answers

or Are common questions it's all very much sort of Western Europe Anglo European I me all very closely sort of connected to Nato the whole concept of a kind of atlanticist world which is essentially the anglo-american combine combined with Western Europe but you got a bunch of these things I mean the council and Foreign Relations is Very similar to that and the bilderbergers and there's an overlap with the Bohemian Club and then you've got the pan Circle or Le Circle which is more military but also linked to the so-called secret gladio you know the idea

if the Soviets overran Western Europe there would be a stay behind organization called gladio there' be these Freedom Fighters so the question I have about that is that how many secret Organizations do you need I mean why all these separate groups which often seem to have the same people into them yeah there's a and the closer I look the more I wonder the same question we asked about the Russian intelligence agencies is where's the center of power it seems to be very hard to figure out does the secrecy scare you well I guess on one

level I'm comforted that there's somebody actually making Decisions as opposed to T I mean what what do you want do you want chaos or do you want everything kind of rigidly controlled and I don't put much stock in the idea that there actually is some small group of people running everything because if they were it would operate more efficiently I do think that there are various disperate groups of people who think that they're running things or try To and that's that's what concerns me more than anything else well I hate to go back to them

again guess for bringing up you go back to the nazzis they had their whole idea about a new world order and they only had 12 years to do it and look what a mess they made I mean look at the damage the physical damage that can be done by an idea inspiring a relatively small group of people controlling a nation based upon some sort of racial or Ideological fantasy that has no real basis in reality and yet guides their actions it's it's this differentiation that I always make and I would try to get across the

students between always be clear about what you know and what you believe you don't know many things you know your name you know when you were born you probably know who your father is but that's not absolute unless you've Had a DNA test and only if you trust DNA tests so you know who your mother is you believe this man is your father why because your mother told you he was so you believe things generally because someone has told you this is to be true but you don't really know for sure well because we know

so little we tend to go by beliefs so we we we believe in this or We Believe even that you know you believe that uh your cult leader is the is the is the answer to Everything and it seems to be very very easy to get people to believe things and then what happens is that whether or not those beliefs have any real basis in reality they begin to influence your actions so here again regrettably in some ways to bring it back to the Nazis what were the Nazis convinced of they were convinced that Jews

were basically evil aliens that's what it comes down to they were some they weren't really Humans there's some sort of evil contamination which we must eradicate and they set out to do that and then they were sure that there's just a few problems that can be solved and once you solve them that you have this beautiful Utopia where everything would be just perfect it' be great and we can just get there and I think this really strong belief in a global Utopia it just never goes right it seems like impossible to know the Truth for

some reason not long ago I was listening on YouTube to Old wobbly songs internet the uh workers of the world um I don't know why I I didn't know there was a whole album of wobbly songs but um and there was one of them called Commonwealth of toil and it's like most of them they're sort of taken from gospel songs and it's talking about in the in the future you know how wonderful everything will be in the Commonwealth of Toil that will be and now these are you know revolutionary leftists in this case wobblies but

nonetheless it it's like it's like a prayer for for communism everything now in in the future everything will be good because the Earth will be shared by the toilers and and you know from each his abilities each according to his need and and it's and it's this kind of sweet little song in some way but I'm just Sort of imagining this you know if I was going to Stage that I'd have like this choir of children singing it with a huge hammer and sickle behind them because that's that's what it's combining and that you can

think that the sentiments that are Express in that song which you know are legitimate in some way of of all the horrors that that that thing leads to it is fascinating about humans a beautiful Idea on paper an innocent little idea about a utopian future can lead to so much suffering and so much destruction and total the unintended consequences that you see describe La of unintended consequences and we learn from it I mean that's why history is important we'll learn from it hopefully do we slowly or slow Learners I'm unconvinced of that but perhaps is

speaking of unconvinced uh What gives you hope if uh human beings are still here maybe expanding out into the cosmos A Thousand 5,000 10,000 years from now what gives you hope about that future about even being a possible future about it happening most people are cooperative and kind most of the time and that's one of those things that can usually be dependent upon you know and usually you you'll get back to what what You put into it uh another thing that I have like a weird fascination of watching are people who have meltdowns on airplanes

because that's just bizarre that's fascinating watch the people who will you know there's some sort of psychotic break that occurs and and they'll and it's always going to end the same way the cops are going to come on and drag you off the plane now true They'll you and you're going to inconvenience everybody there and and usually at some point they don't care about that that's that's the one little sense of power that they have so they have some sort of loot sense of powerlessness and if their only way of power is just to piss

off everybody else on that plane they're going to go ahead and do it even though it's going to lead nowhere for them and there's Similar sometimes psychological behavior in uh in traffic oh the road rage thing the road rage yeah it's fascinating and I bet the most there again those are all people who up to some point were cooperative and and kind and polite and then they snap so those are all part of the human makeup as well but also part of the human makeup difference between humans and chimps is the ability to get together

Cooperate in a mass scale over an idea create things like the Roman Empire did laws that uh prevent us and protect us from crazy human behavior manifestations of a man type of human beings are just weird animals not getting on it's just completely peculiar I'm not sure that we're allog together natural but I think we are all together beautiful there is something magical about humans and I hope humans stay here even as we get Advanced robots walking around Everywhere more and more intelligent robots that claim to have Consciousness that claim they love you that increasingly

take over our world I hope um this magical things that makes us human still persist well let us hope so Rick you're an incredible person so so much fascinating work and uh it's really annoy I've never had anybody ask me as as many interesting questions as you have so thank you so much or as many questions this was so fun thank you so Much for talking today well thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Spence to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you

with some words from John F Kennedy the very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open Society and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies to secret Oaths and to secret proceedings we decided long ago that the Dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it thank you for listening and hope to see you next time