#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies

Rick Spence is a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep451-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/rick-spence-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Rick’s Website: https://www.uidaho.edu/class/history/faculty-staff/richard-spence Rick’s Courses: https://bit.ly/40dIZbw SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-ep451-sc NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/netsuite-ep451-sc BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/betterhelp-ep451-sc MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod https://lexfridman.com/s/masterclass-ep451-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep451-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (09:04) – KGB and CIA (23:21) – Okhrana, Cheka, NKVD (38:53) – CIA spies vs KGB spies (45:29) – Assassinations and mind control (52:23) – Jeffrey Epstein (59:15) – Bohemian Grove (1:11:09) – Occultism (1:22:20) – Nazi party and Thule society (2:02:38) – Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2:35:43) – Charles Manson (3:02:30) – Zodiac Killer (3:13:24) – Illuminati (3:20:48) – Secret societies PODCAST LINKS: – Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr – Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 – RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ – Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 – Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips SOCIAL LINKS: – X: https://x.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://instagram.com/lexfridman – TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://facebook.com/lexfridman – Patreon: https://patreon.com/lexfridman – Telegram: https://t.me/lexfridman – Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 0:15Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got AG1 for nutrition, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, MasterClass for learning, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a bunch of different kinds of reasons, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too.

• 0:52Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. A drink I have not been consuming for the last few days because I'm traveling, and it's a thing that makes me miss home. I'm in San Francisco, allowing myself to be surrounded and inspired by some incredible software engineering that's going on here, and putting all the other mess of politics and social bubble stuff aside. So I'm doing a lot of programming and having a lot of really highly deep technical conversations. But I definitely miss Austin. I miss Texas. I miss Boston, walking the halls of MIT. Really, it's the university I intimately know now.

• 1:37Lex Fridman?

  And there's something about a university where you can shut off all the mess of the outside world and focus on ideas, on learning and on discovering. Plus, the fearless energy of undergraduate and graduate students just boldly going forward, thinking they can completely revolutionize a field. That's really inspiring to be surrounded by. And in Texas, the thing I love the most is there's a simple kindness to the hello, to the nod, to the aimless and wonderful conversation that you might have at a coffee shop or when you meet a stranger. I don't know.

• 2:22Lex Fridman?

  I've really fallen in love with Texas.

• 2:26Lex Fridman?

  And the long runs along the river, which I consume AG1 after. Sometimes I forget there's a sponsor read going on. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drink AG1.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. That's the other thing about San Francisco that I'm reminded of, that there is these incredible businesses that are born. Just a couple of founders and they're quickly hiring a few folks, especially engineering-heavy teams. And they're all dreamers and they're all pushing forward. They're all trying to do the craziest shit they can.

• 3:10Lex Fridman?

  Yes, there is a San Francisco bubble. Yes, there's a bit of a tunnel vision going on in many ways. But on the pure desire to build something cool, something that has a positive impact on the world. I don't know. That's a truly inspiring desire. But of course, sort of from my perspective, I share in that desire. But there's a great cost to it as well. And it's something that is a constant tension in my heart. I would like to do more building than talking. And I'm reminded of that when I'm here. Anyway, there is a bit of a mess, a complexity to the scaling of business and the running of a business. And that is what NetSuite can help you with.

• 3:55Lex Fridman?

  They manage all kinds of messy stuff. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.

• 4:17Lex Fridman?

  They figure out what you need to match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. I'm reminded of the work and of my conversation with Carl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and appreciator of the beauty in the world. What a wonderful human being. Also Paul Conti. These are all friends of Andrew Huberman. And what just deep and interesting people they are. I would venture even to say very different, but both just incredible analysts of the human mind. And what a mystery the mind is. I've been reading a lot of mechanistic interpretability work,

• 4:58Lex Fridman?

  which is this whole field of analyzing neural networks and trying to understand what's going on inside. And there is just wonderful breakthroughs in that field. But whenever I'm reading the papers, I can't help but be caught by the thought that I wish we had this kind of rigor or the possibility of rigor in studying the human mind. Sort of neurobiology, neuroscience is too messy. There's too many variables. There's too much going on and you can't do control experiments like you can on neural networks. So anyway, the human mind is a beautiful and mysterious thing. And if you want to untangle the puzzles going on in there,

• 5:42Lex Fridman?

  check out betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by MasterClass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Phil Ivey on poker, for example, great, great masterclass. There's another guy who I don't believe has a masterclass, although he should, Phil Hellmuth. And I got a chance to meet him and hang out with him and it was a... What a cool experience. I just love that this world can produce such interesting,

• 6:21Lex Fridman?

  distinct, unique characters. And they are unapologetically true to themselves. Beautiful. I love it. Anyway, there's a lot of such characters on masterclass.com, and you can learn from them. So like I said, I love Phil Ivey's Masterclass, Aaron Franklin on barbecue, probably somebody I'll talk to eventually. I actually watched a couple of episodes of a barbecue show on Netflix. That's pretty good, but not as good as the Masterclass. I just love the science and the art that goes into the whole thing. Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod.

• 7:04Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I set one up miraculously at lexfemin.com/store. I think about the countless stores that are enabled. I think about the countless stores that are enabled by Shopify and the machinery of capitalism. Now, I was thinking about that when I was talking to Bernie Sanders. And what a genuine human being Bernie is. First of all, still firing on all cylinders in terms of the sharpness and the depth and the sort of the horsepower of his mind. He's still there at 83 years old, still got it. And also

• 7:44Lex Fridman?

  just has not changed for many, many decades. I wish there would be more politicians with that kind of integrity. Agree or disagree with him, the man has integrity. And as we head into this election, I think about the kind of politicians and human beings I would love to see lead our world. And to me, integrity is one of the character traits that is of the highest importance, because the pressures when you're at the top, leading a nation are immense. And I would like someone who refuses to ever for any reason sell their soul, for

• 8:23Lex Fridman?

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• 8:39Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Freedom Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now to your friends, here's Rick Spence.

• 9:05Lex Fridman?

  You have written and lectured about serial killers, secret societies, cults, and intelligence agencies. So we can basically begin at any of these fascinating topics. But let's begin with intelligence agencies. Which has been the most powerful intelligence agency in history?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  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,

• 9:40Speaker 01

  that the Russian intelligence services, notice I didn't say the KGB specifically, but the Russian intelligence services, going back to the Tsarist period, are consistently pretty good. Not infallible. None of them are.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Of course, there's a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. 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, or the KGB, or its predecessors, the Cheka. You're really going back to the late 19th century and the Imperial Russian

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Intelligence Security Service, generally known as the Okrana or Okranka. It's really the Department of Police, the Special Corps of Gendarmes. Their primary job was protecting the imperial regime and protecting it against imperial, or rather, interior enemies. Revolutionaries, for the most part, and they got very, very good at that. By co-opting people within those movements, infiltrating and recruiting informers, agent provocateurs, in fact, they excelled at the agent provocateur. Person you place inside an organization to cause trouble, usually maneuver them into

• 11:18Speaker 01

  a position of leadership, and they provoke actions that can then allow you to crack down on them. That is, many sort of lure or bring the target organization into an illegal, 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: Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRS, great and small, and placed people in positions of influence and leadership.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  To the point that arguably, that is, you can debate this, and 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 Okrana wasn't immediately aware of, and they often had people in positions to influence what those decisions were.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  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 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'll just leave it with this. If you look at 1917 and you look closely, this is one of the things I'd 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.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Trotsky 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'etat, a parliamentary coup d'etat. The temporary or provisional government that that revolution put in power was the one overthrown by Lenin eight 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.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  You know, the guy we associate with that is Alexander Kerensky. Alexander Kerensky was a Russian socialist, a politician. He was the quasi dictator of that regime. He's the person, not the czar, who's overthrown by Lenin. So the revolutionaries, they did not prove to be the fatal threat to the czarist regime. It was the czarist political system itself that did that.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  What then transpired was that the Okhrana 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 Lenin did in December of 1917, within a month of seizing power, since the hold on power was tenuous at best, was that, well, you're going to need some kind of organization to infiltrate and suppress those pesky counter-revolutionaries and foreign imperialists and all of the other enemies that we have. And so, the extraordinary commission to combat counter-revolution and sabotage that Cheka was formed. You put a veteran Bolshevik,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Felix Dzerzhinsky, at the head of that, someone you could politically rely upon. But Dzerzhinsky built his organization essentially out of the Okhrana. I mean, there were all of these informers sitting around with nothing, nothing to do. And they were employed in the early 20s, the kind of rank and file of the Cheka 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 things were somewhat precarious. So, if your job is to be an agent provocateur, or if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations

• 15:41Speaker 01

  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 opposing organizations. And I guess the one example I would give to demonstrate that are the Cambridge Five. The British traitors.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Soviet standpoint, heroes who were recruiting, most notably Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, and there may have been well more than five, but you know, that wasn't bad out of just Cambridge. And then 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.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  And you can also find this in KGB infiltration, the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich Ames, Hanson 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 moles, Super Bowl, probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that.

• 17:24Lex Fridman?

  So the scale of the infiltration, the number of people and the skill of it, is there a case to be made that the Okhrana and the Chaka orchestrated both the components of the Russian revolution, as you described them?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  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 Lenin was an Okhrana agent. Okay, I've just said heresy. Some people, I'll do that quite often because I am a heretic and proud of it.

• 17:58Lex Fridman?

  Great.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Why, why would you possibly say that Lenin could have been an Okhrana 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.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  And Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, majorityites and minorityites are merely factions of that party. And they always agreed that they were all Marxists and we all believe in dialectical materialism and the rise of so we're all socialist comrade. The difference was the the tactical means by which one would attain this. And what Lenin wanted was a militant small scale vanguard party. I wanted a revolution. I wanted to seize power, seize control of the state. And once you have the state, then you induce socialism from above.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks, the minorityites, 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 did how did the how does the minority get to grab the name majorityites? But Lenin did that. So what Lenin wanted was a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually seize control of the state and induce socialism from above. There were other Russian Marxists who thought that that sounded vaguely totalitarian and not really democratic and not even terribly socialist.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  And they opposed that ineffectively from the beginning, outmaneuvered every step of the way. The Mensheviks 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 Lenin managed to do, starting around 1903, continuing on to this, is he managed to divide.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  To take what had been a single Marxist party and split it into angry, contending factions. Because he and his Bolsheviks were on one side advocating a much more militant conspiratorial policy. The discombobulated Mensheviks were over on 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 he managed to completely disunify this organization. Now, who could possibly have seen benefit in that? The Ocrana.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  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 Tsar's secret police, he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they had wanted. And I find that suspicious. It's one of those things that 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 Ocrana itself.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Now, this is one of these questions when I 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

• 22:24Speaker 01

  mostly what history is made out of, opinions. Is that at some point between about 1919 and 17, people within the Ocrana 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 at what it did, that suddenly just becomes ineffective. Doesn't really disappear. These things don't go away because it will reappear as the Ochaka, basically, fairly quickly.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  But it raises the question to me, is to what degree there were people within the organization who allowed events to take the course they wished?

• 23:21Lex Fridman?

  I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Ocrana, or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  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 we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that. Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case officer or is controlling agents, he's the only one that should know who these people are, possibly his immediate superiors, but no way do you want that to be common knowledge.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  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 nominally at the top. First is the Ocrana, the real boss of the Ocrana was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior, 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 organized the assassination of their own boss.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  They have their agents among the revolutionaries kill the Minister of the Interior.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Because he'll just be replaced by another one. He is an imperial bureaucrat. He's 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.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  So you've got

• 25:16Speaker 01

  different levels, different compartments within it. And who's actually running the show? If anyone is, I don't know. That's never supposed to be apparent.

• 25:27Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's a fascinating question. And you could see this with NKVD. It's obviously an extremely powerful organization

• 25:37Lex Fridman?

  that starts to eat itself, where everybody's pointing fingers internally also 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?

• 25:55Lex Fridman?

  Because you would 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.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Well, if we go back again to the founder of Soviet secret police, Felix Turgenski. Turgenski dies in 1926. Heals over after giving a heated speech to a party meeting.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Now, the common view, what you usually read, which was key for the time, is that, you know, clearly Stalin had him whacked. Because anytime someone died, it was almost always that. And I think a lot of times he did.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  But in some cases Stalin's probably getting blamed for things that he didn't actually do. Zhirinsky wasn't even opposed to Stalin, so it's not clear why he would be. But this was the, you know, Stalin died, you know, obviously he was poisoned, something happened, it was an unnatural death, somebody goes in for an operation, you know, gets a little too much anesthesia, Stalin killed them. Somebody tips over in a canoe in upstate New York, Stalin killed them, is 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 kind of an interesting method of intimidation in that regard.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  But the suspicion is nonetheless there. Zhirinsky 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 Zhirinsky'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. His immediate successor is Václav Menjinsky, who's really not really a secret policeman, more a kind of intellectual dilettante.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  But if you look behind him, you know, this fellow is Henrik Yagoda. And Yagoda will really sort of manage things from behind the scenes until Menjinsky dies in 1934. And then Yagoda will hold on until he's a victim of the purges, I think, in 37 or 38. Yagoda is ambitious, murderous, and if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had Zhirinsky whacked, it would be him, and for the purposes simply of advancement.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  It's the, 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.

• 28:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just one step away from the very top.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:01Lex Fridman?

  Somebody there will probably accumulate the most power. You mentioned that the various Russian intelligence agencies were good at creating agent provocateurs infiltrating the halls of power. What does it take to do that?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Well, there's a interesting little acronym called MICE. M I C E.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  And it's 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.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  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 and that can be, you know, someone who is a, who is a devoted Marxist laninist. It can also be someone who's a disgruntled communist because, you know, there's, there's no anti-communist like an ex-communist.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Okay, you know, those who lose the faith can be become very, very useful.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  For instance, if you if you look 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, Louis Budins, Elizabeth Bentley, all of those people have been Communist Party members. They had all been part of the Red Faithful. They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned and turned rat or patriot, whichever case you may want to put in that regard. What does the C and the E stand for?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  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, like it be they have a gambling habit. You know, in the old days, it's very often because they were gay. Okay, get them in a situation where they can be compromised and you can get them to do your bidding. Those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here's an interesting example of how the Okhrana tended to handle this. I think it's still largely used. You'd round up a bunch of revolutionaries

• 32:16Speaker 01

  on some charge or another distributing revolutionary literature, running an illegal printing press. You bring a guy into the room and you say, okay, you're gonna work for us. He, of course, would refuse to do so. And they go, well, if you refuse,

• 32:34Speaker 01

  we'll we'll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while. You know, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so, and then we're just gonna let you go. We're just gonna 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 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.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  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 that 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 case around 1908. The fellow who was the head of the of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization,

• 34:02Speaker 01

  which wasn't Bolshevik, but the so-called socialist revolutionaries, they actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who are 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 say, and it carried out quite a campaign of terrorism. The fellow who was the head of that terrorist organization was a was a fellow by the name of Yevno Azef. And Yevno Azef was, guess what? An Okhrana 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.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  There was increasing suspicion of him. He was also asking for a lot more money. So the Okhrana itself arranged to have him ride 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's consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust, and you couldn't tell who you were sitting around.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on Boris Sevinkov, who was a Russian revolutionary and the second in command within the terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azov'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 well, he should because Sevinkov 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. So it's a way of manipulating this. And then finally, we come to the E. That, I think, is the most important. Ego.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive. The sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five. 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, I think it's in the preface to his autobiography. And he says, "One never looks twice at the offer of service in elite force."

• 36:41Speaker 01

  And he's talking about his recruitment by the NKVD in the 1930s, and he was absolutely chuffed by that. The mere 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 treason, I'd go with ego. And I think that figures into a lot. People don't, someone doesn't get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like Aldrich Ames' career in particular, you've got these

• 37:26Speaker 01

  kind of, his career in the CIA was...

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Hit or miss.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  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 and added incentive to betray.

• 37:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that there is a boost to 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.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  You're the only one that knows this. You're the only one that knows that the person who is sitting across from you, to which you have sworn your loyalty, you are simultaneously betraying. What a rush that must be for some people.

• 38:18Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how many people are susceptible to this. I would like to believe that the people have, a lot of people have the integrity to at least withstand the MI, the money and the ideology, the pull of that and the ego.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  It can also be a combination of the two. I mean, you can create a recipe of these things. Certain amount of money, ego and the little push of coercion that if you don't,

• 38:49Speaker 01

  will rat you out. You will be exposed.

• 38:54Lex Fridman?

  What are some differences to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence in the CIA?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  If you look at both the Ochrana 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 eventually have the FBI, who under Hoover, who insists that he's going to be the counterintelligence force, okay, if they're commie spies running around America, it's the FBI who's supposed to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  And the Charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any... It's often said they were barred from spying on Americans, which isn't 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 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 do that directly.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  So you've got this division between foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence, 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 rivalry and contention between the two. And it's not to say that something like that didn't exist between the domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence components of the KGB. But there would be less of that to a degree, because there was a single organization.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  They're all answerable to the same people. So that gives you a certain greater amount, I think, 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 his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere, at any time, in any dress.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time. He was authorized to do that.

• 41:53Lex Fridman?

  So more freedom, more power.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  I think one of the things that you would often have the view is that the Russians are simply, you know, naturally meaner.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  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's probably some degree of, of cultural differences that it not necessarily for institutional reasons, but cultural reasons. There could well be things that Americans might balk 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.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  One of the things it certainly teaches you never trust foreigners.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  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 was that countries don't have friends, they have interests and those interests can change over time.

• 43:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, the CIA is probably equally suspicious of all other nations.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:37Lex Fridman?

  Are there laws, either intelligence agencies, that they're not willing to break? Is it basically lawless operation to where you can break any law as long as it accomplishes the task?

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think John L. Corre, give his pen name, talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence. And one of the things he remember being told upfront, well, if you do this, you have to be willing to lie and you have to be willing to kill.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Now, those are things that in ordinary human interactions are bad things. Generally, we don't like it when people lie to us. We expect that people will act honestly towards us, you know, whether that's being a 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 honesty is generally considered to be it. But, but in a realm where deception is a rule, dishonesty is a virtue, to be good at that. To be able to lie convincingly

• 44:53Speaker 01

  is good. It's 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 if you're squeamish about it, you won't fit in. You have to be able to do those things.

• 45:30Lex Fridman?

  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 often they go to the kill part of that versus just the espionage?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Let's take an example from American intelligence, from the CIA, 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s. MKUltra. That is a secret program which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control, which really means messing with people's heads.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  And what was the goal of that? Well, there seemed 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.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  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 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 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 Cleve Baxter. Cleve Baxter is the, the great godfather of the lie detector.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Pretty much everything that we know or think we know about lie detectors today, they owe to Cleve Baxter. 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 talk to some military and other personnel. And there's 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.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Just imagine how that would be done.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  So here to me is the interesting point. They're talking about this in 1949. MKUltra does not come along until really 1953, although there are all sorts of, you know, artichoke and others. Everything is sort of leading up to that. It's simply an elaboration of programs that were already there.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  I don't think that it ultimately matters whether you can.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  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 MKUltra, MKSearch, MKNaomi, and all the others that came out. That's one of the things they're working for. And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there's that whole question is that you get someone to put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger and then I remember it later. Yeah. You could, interestingly enough.

• 49:02Lex Fridman?

  So non-direct violence, controlling people's minds, controlling people's minds at scale and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Well, 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 in 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?

• 49:48Speaker 01

  And use that alternate personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off. So subsequently, 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?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Well, 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 MKUltra 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.

• 50:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the fact that you're willing to do medical experiments says something about what you're willing to do. And I'm sure that same spirit, innovative spirit, persist to this day. And maybe less so, I hope, less so in the United States, but probably in other intelligence agencies in the world.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Well, one thing that was learned, and the reason why most MKUltra 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 of these assassins, 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 this type of thing again, where at least in any way in which the agency's direct fingerprints are placed on it.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  You can pay people. You can subsidize research. You can set up venture capital firms. You've 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.

• 52:23Lex Fridman?

  On 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.

• 52:40Lex Fridman?

  At a high level, if you can just talk about that, is that something that's at all even possible that you have, basically, this will 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?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Well, let's look at what Epstein was doing. He was a businessman who then also developed a very lucrative sideline in being a high-level procurer, basically in supplying young girls.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  And he also filmed much of that activity.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I think his partner in this, Ghislaine, and I hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly.

• 53:30Lex Fridman?

  I think it's Ghislaine.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Ghislaine? Well, I've heard it both ways, Ghislaine or Ghislaine, 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.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  I could give you another historical example of that. In late 1920, actually, early 1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin, there was a very prominent, sort of would-be psychic and occultist by the name of Eric Jan Honnison. He had a private yacht, I think it was called the Seven Sins, and he hosted parties. He also had a whole club called the Palace of the Occult, which hosted parties where things went on, and there were cameras everywhere. He filmed important people, you know, guys like the brown shirt chief of Berlin in various states

• 54:30Speaker 01

  of undressed 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 recorded.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Now, even if it wasn't his intention to use them for blackmail, think of what someone else could do it because people know about this. So you can 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 plane? Think of all the people who were there and these, you know, there were important people who, you know, went to Lolita Island. So if it isn't Epstein directly, it, he might've been being, I'm not trying to let him off the hook because they have anything for him.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  He was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front for that. I mean, I think we're kidding ourselves if we're trying to pretend that's not what was going on.

• 55:51Lex Fridman?

  So you think even American intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Well, you know, just in case, 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, I love, one of the guys who understood the part was, was J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover spent a long time collecting dossiers in 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.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  And again, you could argue that's partly for his protection, to keep his job, to protect the sanctity and security of the bureau. You can find a million different ways to justify that.

• 56:55Lex Fridman?

  It's really dark.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Well,

• 57:00Speaker 01

  there is that side to human nature. Let's put it that way.

• 57:04Lex Fridman?

  Whether it's the CIA or the Corona, 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 that there's a internal mechanism of power that you don't want to mess with. And so you will listen. Whether that internal mechanism of power is the military industrial complex or whatever, the bureaucracy of government.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Kind of actually the deep state.

• 57:31Lex Fridman?

  The deep.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  The entrenched bureaucratic. Well, it's been said, and I think it's generally true, that bureaucratic creatures are like any other creatures. It basically exists to perpetuate itself.

• 57:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  And to grow. I mean, nobody wants to go out of business. And of course, then you get all of these, you know, things like Pizza Gate

• 57:52Speaker 01

  accusations of one form or another. But here's an interesting thing to consider. Okay. And I want to argue that I'm not saying that Pizza Gate in any way was real or QAnon had to say that. But where do they get these ideas from?

• 58:04Speaker 01

  So let's ask ourselves, do pedophiles exist?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do organized pedophile organizations exist? Yeah, they they share information, pictures, they're out there on the dark web. They cooperate.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  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 pedophile 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.

• 59:09Lex Fridman?

  We'll jump around a little bit, but your work is so fascinating and it covers so many topics. So let's, if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Bilderbergers.

• 59:23Lex Fridman?

  So the elites, as I think you've referred to them. So this gathering of the elites. Can you, can you just talk about them? What is, what is this?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  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 2,700 acre old growth redwood near, you know, north of San Francisco. The Bohemian Club began back in the 1870s. Its initial members were mostly journalists. In fact, supposedly the name itself comes from, it was a term for an itinerant journalist who moved paper to paper was called the Bohemian. And although I think there may be other reasons why that particular term was, was chosen as

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  well, but I think the original five members, there were, you know, there were like three journalists. There was a merchant and there was a vintner guy who owned a vineyards, California. How 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.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  They go there. They perform skits. They dress up in costumes. 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 guy's club. They, you know, they like to get out there that the whole motto of the place is weaving spiders come not here. So when we're going to talk about business, 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.

• 1:01:33Lex Fridman?

  What's with the robes? Why do they do weird creepy shit? 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.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Why do you have a giant owl? I mean, what, why do you do that?

• 1:01:49Lex Fridman?

  What is, well, what is that in human nature? Cause I don't think that rich people are different than, uh, not rich people. What, what is it about wealth and power that brings that out of people?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Well, part of it is the ritual aspect of it. And that clearly is a ritual. And rituals are pretty simple. Rituals are just a series of actions performed in a precise sequence to produce an effect.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:33Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:02:40Lex Fridman?

  Why the owl?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Part of it is to create this kind of sense, I suppose, 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, the key ritual that be Homie 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 the, 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 gather around the lake and, and then we're going to carry, you know,

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  it, it's, it's wicker. It's not a real person. And

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  how would you know? And then we're going to, and we're going to, and this is the cremation of our care. But it's a ritual which is meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among those people who are there.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  The question comes down with the rituals is how seriously do you take them? How important is this 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 are probably people standing around the owl who think this is ridiculous and can't wait for it to get over with. There are the people that are kind of excited about it, you get caught up into it. But other people can take it very seriously. It's all a matter of the intention that you have about what the ritual means.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  And I don't mean to suggest by that that there's anything necessarily sinister about what's going on, but 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, yeah, we did all those other things. We didn't even have any robes either. So it goes beyond merely a, a rich guy's summer camp, although that's an aspect of it. But it also, I think, often obscures it. Focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club ignores that the club is around

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  all the time. That's what's at the center of this. It is the club and its members.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  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? And 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 whether or not he was going to be right. He recognized that that was really the beginning of his second presidential campaign. He was being vetted.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  So one of the main theories, call it a conspiracy theory or not, about the Bohemian Club and 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 mere fact that you invite people in, political leaders, to give Lakeside Talks, means that there are weaving spiders which are going on. And it is a perfect, private venue to vet people for political office.

• 1:06:31Lex Fridman?

  I mean, yeah, where else are you going to do it? If you're interested in vetting, if you're interested in powerful people selecting?

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:06:48Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  So he's the new Nixon. Remember this? And this, this is where the new Nixon apparently made a good impression on the right people. Because he did indeed get the Republican nomination. And he did indeed become president.

• 1:07:16Lex Fridman?

  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 war. And just having a legitimate discussion of policies.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Well, why wouldn't they? I mean, why would you assume that people are not going to do that?

• 1:07:37Lex Fridman?

  It's the owl thing with the, with the robes, like what?

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Why the owl and why the robes?

• 1:07:44Lex Fridman?

  Which is why it becomes really compelling when guys like Alex Jones, 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 a Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children.

• 1:08:07Lex Fridman?

  And I think that's quite a popular conspiracy theory. Or it has lost popularity. It kind of like transformed itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But I mean, can you speak to that conspiracy?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Let's put it this way, the general public, rich people are inherently suspicious.

• 1:08:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Great, let's put it that way.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  First of all, they've got all that money and exactly how did one obtain it? And 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 are ways in which it's acquired. But I think it's.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  One of the things I think that can happen is particularly when when people acquire a huge amount of money.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  And I won't name any names, but let's say there are people who perhaps in the tech sphere, 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 have 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 is. So you're going to start a foundation and you're going to start backing all the things that you you like.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  This is, 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? I think in some way they can be a very useful sucker, you know, find somebody with a lot of

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  money and get them to finance the things that you want them to do. The Bohemian Club is, I don't think in and 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.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  There's always this question is to what degree you begin to play and the play becomes serious? That tends to happen a lot.

• 1:11:09Lex Fridman?

  You've studied a lot, a lot of cults and occultism. What do you think is the power of that mystical experience?

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Well, what is broadly referred to, well, we're getting to what, what's occultism? What's the occult? The occult 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, the 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 a very small part of a much larger reality.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  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 a key 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.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  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 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 Aleister Crowley, because, you know, he always has to come. We knew he was going to come up at some point in this, earlier than that, because he always does.

• 1:13:19Lex Fridman?

  All roads lead to Aleister.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  All roads lead to Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley, 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, or CK, "is 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.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Bend reality to make something happen. Somebody once put it this way, it's tipping the luck plane. So, you know, you got some kind of a level plane of what we're trying to do, just tip it just a little bit. So the marble rules rolls over one side or another. Now that presupposes a lot of things that is there a luck plane? I don't know, but you know, it's a good sort of idea to have, but.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  And you have to imagine just how, you know, but the pervasiveness of what could be called that, that's kind of magical thinking every day is everywhere. So let me give you an example. Ever attended a high school football pep rally?

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Think of what's going on there.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  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 what are you chanting? Everyone is supposed to chant that, you know, that the other team dies. That you will be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  That is a magic ritual.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  The idea is, it comes into this idea that's very popular about visualizing things, visualizing, manifesting, I love 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 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.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  All of these people are putting energy into something and that energy goes 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.

• 1:16:57Lex Fridman?

  So that's a, I would say trivial example of that, 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.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Yes, that's, you're exactly right. Bring to conceive of something. And then through intention, will, to manifest that into this realm.

• 1:17:34Lex Fridman?

  And of course, 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.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  There might be a cult that does good things. I don't know. It depends.

• 1:17:54Lex Fridman?

  We usually don't call them.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  We don't call those cults.

• 1:17:56Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Without endorsing this entirely, and interesting, you know, one of the questions, what's the difference between a cult and a religion? And it has been said.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Then 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 religion. And, but it's, it's an interesting way of, of thinking about it because I think there is some degree of, of accuracy in that statement.

• 1:18:38Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Begin to believe your own bullshit?

• 1:18:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  Yes, that's.

• 1:18:54Lex Fridman?

  That seems to be.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  That again is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the, the head of the cult realized, but there's someone, maybe the second, you know, 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 giveaway for what we would call a cult is, is what's called 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 1970s.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  So I was going to grad school and there was a particular cult locally, which I think was Brotherhood of the Sun. And it was the same, so 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.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Anyway, a lot of it went to him. And then, of course, working for free upon different cult-owned business enterprises, of which there are 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 would you? What is it that this person can possibly be providing 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.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  And here again, as a disclaimer, I am not now nor ever, ever been the member of any fraternal organization, secret society, or cult that I know of. And that's what interests me about them. Because I'm just always trying to figure out why people do these things. Like I said, why the robes and the owl? Why?

• 1:21:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Why do you do that? And it's trying to figure it out. I mean, I couldn't even hack the Boy Scouts. Okay, that was too much of that. Because to me, you join an organization and the first thing that comes along is 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. 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 becomes, in some ways, it's sort of necessary for them to function. But I do not understand it.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  And my study of it is a personal error to try to understand why people do that.

• 1:21:59Lex Fridman?

  And there are so many reasons. Primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:11Lex Fridman?

  And the dark forms that takes throughout human history, recent human history is 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 Thule Society lay the foundation for Nazi ideology. Can you, through that lens, from that perspective, describe the rise of the Nazi Party?

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Well, I guess we could start with what on earth is the Thule Society?

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  So the Thule Society was a small, German occult society, that is, they studied metaphysics, or their fancy word for occultism, that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Zebotendorf. Okay, not his real name, his real name was Adam Rudolf Glower.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  He was adopted by a German nobleman and got the name von Zebotendorf, and I like to say that name. So I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who show up and do things, and trying to figure out who these people are. So we're working with 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 none, and the Ottoman Empire, which was a fairly tumultuous place, because in 1908 and 1909, there was the Young Turk Revolution.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  And you had a kind of military coup, which effectively overthrew the Ottoman Sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the First World War to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian genocide. Eventually, he created a genocidal 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, yada.

• 1:24:33Lex Fridman?

  And by the way, we should take a tiny tangent here, which is that you refer to the intelligence agencies as being exceptionally successful. And here, in the case of the Young Turks, being also very successful 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.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  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 Sultan is, you know, and the Sultan was bad. I think it's fair to say Abdulhamid II was not a, wasn't called the Red Sultan because of his favorite color type of thing. And the idea is that they were going to improve, they were now going to, you know, the Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire, they're going to try to equalize and bring in the different groups. And, and, and none of that

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  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 Tsarist regime and 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 Abdulhamid pale to when you get to the Young Turks. But that wasn't necessarily the intention. But von Zabundorf is a German businessman who's, who's working in this period. And the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is, is a hotbed of, of political intrigue.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  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 lodges are never supposed to be involved in politics, but they are. Or, you know, the lodge meeting breaks up and then you plot the revolution. So same group of people, but it's not technically. But yes, and there's the Macedonia Ressortal Lodge in Tessaloniki was ground zero for plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the empire.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Zebotendorf is in one way or another mixed up in all of this, or at least he's an observer. Plus he's initiated, he's initiated into the Masonic lodges.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  And interestingly enough, the fellow who initiates him into one of these Eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Termodi.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  And who's also a Kabbalist. And also Zebotendorf 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.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  He also apparently is involved in gun running, 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.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Now, in the course of the First World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  And it would be my operative suspicion or theory that Zabodendorf 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? Now, 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 Thule Society is really just a branch of another existing what's

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  called an Ariosophist order, a thing called the German Order or the Germanen Orden, which is centered in Berlin. But for some reason, he doesn't want his group to be connected by name with the Germanen Orden. So Thule Society, Thule 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 Ariosophists, who, which is, you have to

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  practice saying that. So what are they? Well, they're a kind of racist Germanic offshoot of theosophy. And I know I'm explaining one thing to explain something else, but there's no other way to do this. So theosophy was 19th century, very popular and widely modeled occult belief that was founded by a Russian woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  She was a medium psychic. She supposedly got channelings from the ascended masters. The basic story there, there are 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 Blavatsky did was to take Western esotericism and blend it with Hindu and Buddhist esotericism, which became very, very sexy in the West, still is. You know, Buddhism attracts a lot of people because, well, it's Buddhism. It's different, see? So, you know, the Mahatmas, the ascended masters were sending here messages.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  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, an idea in Theosophy was that human spiritual evolution was tied to physical evolution. So, in, you know, in the case of Blavatsky, Blavatsky never said that Aryans, white people, anything out this was superior. She talked about, you know, the different root races, but it's just, or a version of it, it's just total gobbledygook that seems to include everyone. And I defy you to make much sense out of it.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  But in the early 20th century, there are different sort of, 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.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Because remember, the German Empire, Germany as a political state doesn't come into existence until 1871. Prior to that, Germany was a geographic expression, a vagueness, which described a large area in Central Europe where a lot of people who, you know, wore leather shorts and, 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 and religions. There was no German identity. Something very similarly happened in Italy in this same period. I mean, you know,

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  exactly what is that?

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  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 milieu 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 Wagnerian opera. Richard Wagner wanted to create a German mythical music. So he went back and stripped mine old German myths and cobbled them together into a lot of people

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  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 idea 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 with with some sort of ties to some sort of great civilization in the past, call it Thule, call it whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things and try to attach those

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  to the past. And so Ariosophy was the Arianized 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 Arians, and the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans. And this attracted appeal. Like, keep in mind, again, this was not a mass movement. This is 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

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  the Germanan 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 Thule Society, as a branch, the Thule Gesellschaft, was supposed to do was to study this. 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 Arians is the most advanced type of human beings and all the wonderful things that the future would hold. And the

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  myth, the fact that this was in the midst of a 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.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  So my suspicion again is that Zbolkendorf, 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 or security to try to mobilize occultism or esotericism for the war effort. Because again, this is 1918, the war has gone on way too long. Within a few months, Germany will collapse, and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population.

• 1:37:14Lex Fridman?

  So this is almost like to help the war effort with a kind of propaganda, a narrative that can strengthen the will of the German people.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  It will strengthen the will of some people.

• 1:37:26Lex Fridman?

  Some people.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  You have to try to appeal to different aspects of this. But the mystical aspect is one of those things that can be, can have a very powerful influence. And the idea is that if we can come up with some kind of mystical nationalism, maybe that's one to put it, a kind of mystical nationalism that can be exploited for the way, because at this point, you're kind of grasping at straws. And this is a whole period when the Germans are marshaling 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 lead to a collapse in morale.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  But among the leadership of Germany, it was a recognition, it 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.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Here we need to remind ourselves as to where Marxism comes from. Not Russia, Germany. Where was the largest Marxist party in Germany?

• 1:38:44Lex Fridman?

  And Marx probably expected the revolution to begin in Germany.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Where else?

• 1:38:51Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the Soviet Union is not very industrialized. Germany is, and so that's where it would probably.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Russia, 5% of the population is industrial workers. In Germany, 40% of the population is in that. So if any place was like made for Marxism, it was Germany. I think that's why it caught on in East Germany so well, because it had kind of come home. And, you know, it was, it was, 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 Türling Society, one of the things you can see in this is the Türling Society was particularly involved in sort of anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  They saw themselves, the Böhm-SSO saw them as this whole movement, it was a counter to this. It was a kind of counter Marxist movement.

• 1:39:46Lex Fridman?

  Can we sort of try to break that apart in a nuanced way? So 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 formulate that in racial terms? Did they formulate that in national versus global terms? Like, how do they see this?

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  Marxism formulates everything by class. Okay, people are categorized by class. You're the part of the proletariat, or you're part of the bourgeoisie, or just, you know, you're the part of the proletariat or just some sort of scum, really? Needs to be swept into the dustbin 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're dividing Germans against each other by class. German workers hate the German bourgeoisie. German proletariat is opposed to German capitalists. We're all, you know, we're all trying to fight this war together.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  So that was why Marxism, particularly in the form of Bolshevism, was seen as unpatriotic and, of course, was opposed to the war as a whole. You know, the idea that parroting 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 Bolshevist version, or let's just call it 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,

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  which will have Germans fighting Germans. Whereas the kind of mystical nationalism, the almost kind of religious nationalism that Zabotendorf and the Thule 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 political influence. So in a sense, I think that what Zabotendorf and the Thule Society was trying to do, at least within Munich, was to use this idea of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  point for some part of the population to oppose these other forces, to keep people fighting. The war is lost, though, in November. You know, the Kaiser abdicates, and essentially, the socialists do take over in Germany. 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 Spartacists, who try and fail to seize power early on. But you do essentially end up with a socialist Germany.

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  And that then leaves in the aftermath of the war, the Thule Society is sort of the the odd man out, although they're still very closely connected to the army. Now, here's one of the things that I find interesting. When you get into 1919, who is it that's paying the boat and doors the 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.

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  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. There's the the Abert Groner Pact. Groner is the chief of staff, general staff at this point. Friedrich Abert 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 Abert supports the army, and particularly that means the continuation of the officer

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  corps 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.

• 1:44:48Lex Fridman?

  Now, was the army doing the similar kinds of things that we've talked about with the intelligence agencies? This kind of same kind of trying to control the direction of political power?

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's the German intelligence landscape in the First World War is obscure in many ways. There are lots of things that are going on. You've got, Germany has a military intelligence service called Abteilung, or Section 3B. That's just plain military intelligence. You know, 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.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  Little diversion here, in 1915, there is a Russian revolutionary who's lived much of his life in Germany, who goes by the codename of Parvus. And he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople, interesting enough, in Turkey. He's hanging around there the same time as the Botendorf is there, which I find curious. So Parvus, or Alexander Helpand, to give his actual name, comes up and he goes, look, 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 Marx, I can finance this revolutionary activity.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  And through subversion, I can take Russia out of the war. Well, the Germans are facing a 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.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  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. 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 petard.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  So the Tully Society, I don't think is a huge part of this program, but it is a part of it.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  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 Thule Society begins to create, under Sibotendor's leadership, what he called the Rings of Thule. And these are satellite organizations that aren't the society as though, but they're, they're kind of controlled and inspired by it. And one of those is a 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?

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  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 patriarchy. 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. Notice that term, socialist.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  And that is, in my view, what Nazism is from the beginning. It is a counter-communist movement.

• 1:49:40Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, he's going to come into this because remember that the army was going to supply its own propagandists to help the German Workers' Party and the Thule 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 art of public speaking and propaganda. And that fellow is Corporal Adolf Hitler.

• 1:50:28Lex Fridman?

  So how does Adolf Hitler connect with the German Workers' Party?

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Well, he'd been in the army during the war, the only regular job that he'd ever had. Kind of liked it. So you often get the view is that, well, at the end of the war, he joined millions of other German soldiers who didn't have jobs. No, no, he stays in the army. He stays in the army until 1921. He's on the army payroll at the very time in which he is able to set this up. What appears to have happened is this, Sobotendorf had organized the Thule Society. That didn't have, you know, that had tried to oppose. There's actually a brief period of time in which the communists actually take over Munich, the Bavarian Soviet

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Republic, which doesn't last very long. And eventually the army and volunteers put this down. While that's going on, by the way, Hitler is actually sitting in the 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. 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 soldiers on patriotic topics. And so there is

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  a particular captain by the name of Karl Meyer, who sort of spots Hitler. He later describes him as like a stray dog looking for a master. Hitler has a knack for public speaking. Other soldiers will listen to him. 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 Wehmann, a kind of liaison man. He's an army propagandist.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  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, the topic of that, 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.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  We agree upon that. We just agree it is, 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 it's a season doing so, even to the name change, to the National Socialist or German Workers' Party. I mean, really, what sounds more red than that?

• 1:53:48Lex Fridman?

  So the interesting thing here is, from where did antisemitism seep into this whole thing? It seems like the way they tried to formulate counter Marxism is by saying, "The problem with capitalism and the problem with Marxism is that it's really Judeo-capitalism, and quote Judeo-Bolshevism." From where did that ideology seep in?

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  Well, it's a huge topic. Where does antisemitism come from? Well, 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.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewism. That's all it is. I'm not sure whether there has ever existed a person who hated Jews, Arabs, and Maltese equally. Okay, that's kind of hard to imagine. I don't know. But that's technically what that would mean, 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, guess what, an anti-Semite. Okay, a guy in the 1870s, a German journalist by the name of Wilhelm Maher, who is, wouldn't

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  you know it, part Jewish himself, and who decides that you really need a better term than Judenhass, 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 at 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 or 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

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  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 and repeated it ever since. So, I don't know, maybe just because anti-Jewism would just be, is it too direct in some way? Do we have difficulty confronting actually what it is that we're talking about?

• 1:56:30Lex Fridman?

  I do wish terms were a little bit more direct and self-explanatory. Yeah, Jew hate is a better term.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  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're 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 tended to live in shtetls in the east, ghettos elsewhere. They were, some were involved in banking

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  and business, but they, they, they sort of remained segregated from much of 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

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  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, in banking and business, and they move into those areas and professions and become quite visible. And that's what then creates antisemitism. Because in some way, that is seen as part of the, of the, of the changes 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.

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  So one of the things to keep in mind is that in the process of industrialization, just like today, whole classes of people were made extinct economically. Craftsman, for instance. So when factories came along and began to produce things with machines, all the craftspeople who had made those things previously are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor 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 rising capitalist elite, among these new professions, among the bureaucrats that are coming out of these

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  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 and 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.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  They were not the majority there, but vastly overrepresented in terms of the general population, and especially within the cities. So in that sense, the roots of antisemitism to me is that Jews in Germany and elsewhere, and not just in Germany by enemies, France, Britain, everywhere else, became identified with the bad changes that were taking place.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  And but you also found that Jews were not only prominent among capitalists, they were also prominent among in the socialist movement as well. So one of the things you could look around, we return 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 in visible positions on the German left. Rosa Luxemburg is but but one example of that. You know, Eugen Levine, some of them came in from Russia. You know, when the Soviets send a representative to Germany in this period, it's Karl Radek, a Jew.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  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 spewed out, they could put all the anti-capitalist rhetoric in there, wanted to.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  The army was never going to overthrow capitalism, and the capitalists knew they weren't going to do it. So go ahead, you know, talk shit 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 undermine the real enemy, it was a scene, the revolutionary left, was to point out the Jewish influence there. I mean, look at Russia. Well, Lenin is up at Trotsky, there he is. Look, there, there, there's a Jew, there's one, Radek is a Jew. It wasn't hard to find them in that regard.

• 2:02:38Lex Fridman?

  You gave a lecture on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's widely considered to be the most influential work of antisemitism ever, perhaps. Can you describe this text?

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  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 Okhrana, the Russian secret police, and in particular, it was all crafted in 1904 and 1905. In in Paris, there's a whole description of Pyotr Roshkovsky, who was the supposedly the chief of the Okhrana at the time, was the man behind it, and other fellow by the name of Matvei Golovinsky was the drafter

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  of it, and that they they had this document written by a French political writer from some decades back called Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which they were then adapting. Usually it's argued that they plagiarized it into the protocols, and none of that is really true. I mean, the first part about it is that at the time this supposedly took place, Roshkovsky wasn't working for the Okhrana, he'd 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.

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  So you go back to St. Petersburg, Russia, around 1903. There is a small, right-wing, anti-Semitic newspaper published there called Znamya Banner. And it publishes 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.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  And in fact, in the earlier version, there's far more mentions of Freemasons than there are Jews. And it's, you know, the publisher of Znamya, it's closely connected to a thing called the Union of Russian People, the Union of Russian Men, which was ostensibly existed to defend the empire against subversion, and particularly against what it thought was Jewish subversion, when they also argued that the prominence of Jews in revolutionary movements somehow proved that this was in some way a Jewish revolution. But again, 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.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  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 Neelis, and he wrote it, or actually appended it as an appendix to his work in 1905. Now, it was around before that. So Neelis didn't create it, it wasn't drafted in Paris in 1904, 1905. It was serialized in an obscure, right-wing Russian newspaper in 1903.

• 2:07:01Lex Fridman?

  And by the way, we should say that these are 24 protocols.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  Well, it varies.

• 2:07:09Lex Fridman?

  It varies. 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?

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  Protocol, which are, Russian term basically for notes of a meeting.

• 2:07:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  Well, as notes of a meeting, these are the goofiest things I've ever seen. Because what you've got here, 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. Right? It's all of this, boy, all of them are gonna do this. And then, okay, the last thing you want to do is lay out your, if you've 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, again, it's another sort of narrative or story that's being told. It bears no resemblance to the dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  But what it is, the best thing, it's not particularly readable in some ways. There was an Italian writer by the name of Cesare Michailis, who wrote a book, translated in English, called The Nonexistent 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 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 bold type, he indicates the paragraphs, but more often, sentences

• 2:08:59Speaker 01

  or phrases that appear to be identical from the Joly 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? Ah, it's a sentence here, a 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 Joly. I think what someone stumbled across was a work which he wrote and never published,

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  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 repackage that into something else. Sudden sear, sudden sear. Yeah, and the same sort of thing comes out, only sort of bits and pieces of it remain. So why would Joly have done that? Joly was, we're talking about a man whose career basically spanned the 1850s to 1870s. He's an obscure figure. I'm not even totally sure he existed. I mean, but it's one of those things you go looking for him.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  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 there's the Ochrana there also. And we should also say this was, I guess, the original would be written. I mean, 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 they're. If you go back to France in the 1890s, there are some big scandals. Well, there's the Dreyfus scandal. We got that. All right. Where you've got a Jewish officer on trial for being a traitor. All right. So that was probably. So you bring in the whole Jewish element, Jews is disloyal, Dreyfus case, 1894.

• 2:11:07Speaker 01

  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 worked Jewish financiers. And then you've got the Taxol hoax.

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  So the Taxal hoax was the work of this guy. His real name was, I think, Jean-Pierre Pajet. He was kind of a French journalist. He started out writing porn. So when 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 Popes. And 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 Taxal, began writing these whole series of articles, basically arguing that there was a Masonic Satanic

• 2:12:08Speaker 01

  conspiracy. Run, by the way, by an American, Albert Pike. And this also included child sacrifice. It's got pizza gate in it as well, by a high priestess, Diana Vaughn. 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 of these, all of these kinds

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  of conspiracies. So evil Satanic Freemasons, evil Jewish financiers, Dreyfus. This, this is the brew where all of this comes. So want to figure out how Freemasons and Jews get connected together? France is the place where this happens. Now, Taxal, or Jean-Pierre Pajet, eventually pulls another interesting thing in this. Around 1897, critics argue that he's making this stuff up, and demand that he present Diana Vaughn, supposed Satanic High Priestess, toddler killer.

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  And he says, oh, we're gonna 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 know Diane Yvonne and Dogan Pessie 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 what gullible, you know, morons you are. And that's it. He confesses to this day, however, you will find people who will insist that it's actually true because they desperately want it to be true.

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  But this is, I think, the milieu that, I like that word apparently, that this, that this comes out of. And this is, this is this whole kind of unhealthy 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 in, in Maurice Joly's troubled career,

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  he went from being an opponent of French Emperor Napoleon III, which is what his, which is what the whole dialogues was written against.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  And then he was, for a time, a close political ally of a French politician by the name of Adolph Kramer. So Adolf Kramer, well, 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

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  in France and an important figure in the Alliance Israélite, okay, the Jewish organization in France. So he was publicly, very prominently Jewish and Masonic. So someone else who would have linked them together. Joly, as he did with basically everyone, this is a guy whose life largely consisted of dual threats and fistfights. So he gets, he gets angry at Kramer.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:16:03Speaker 01

  In obscurity, his son seems to have inherited most of his literary works.

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  And his son then worked for new, became a journalist, worked for newspapers in France in the 1890s, but was also associated with some people on the fringes of the Ocrana or the Russian press in France. So one of the little things that 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, now they're just paying to have the right kind of newspapers come out.

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  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 Joly'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.

• 2:17:24Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't take off immediately. Okay, it never receives any kind of wide, I mean, nobody much reads the first edition of it when it's re-edited. 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.

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  As an anti-Masonic tract. 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 two things are already being combined elsewhere.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  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 suddenly 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, I mean, the immediate aftermath of the First World War, that this

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  metastasizes, and it begins to show up in all of these different foreign editions.

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  And I think that it just has to do with the changes that have taken place during the war.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  One of the things that people began looking for was that, why was there a war? And we've just had this whole disastrous war, and the world has been turned upside down.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  So there has to be some kind of explanation for that, I don't know. And, and one of the things this offered is, 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.

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  The reason why the protocols were, I think, widely bought then, and why they still are in many ways, is the same reason that the Taksil hoax I was talking about was, because it told a story that people wanted to believe.

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  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. Clanish, 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 Taxol 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.

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  And that you get the same arguments, in fact, I've heard the same arguments with the Protocol. I don't even buy this as, 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 have to. 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. 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?

• 2:21:33Speaker 01

  There are all these questions that come to mind. It makes no sense. But that's what you come, it's just there. 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, that they're just there.

• 2:21:51Lex Fridman?

  But the reality is, just like with the turd 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 turd came from, it did captivate the imagination.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:11Lex Fridman?

  It did speak to something.

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  But it seemed to provide an explanation.

• 2:22:15Lex Fridman?

  Can you just speak to Jew hatred?

• 2:22:20Lex Fridman?

  Is it just an accident of history? Why was it the Jews versus the Freemasons? Is it the collective mind searching for a small group to blame for the pains of civilization? And then Jews just happened to be the thing that was selected at that moment in history?

• 2:22:42Speaker 01

  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 Manetho. This is around, I think, 300 B.C. Early. Can't even rope the Romans into this one. So Manetho is trying to write a history of the dynasties of Egypt.

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  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 libels, 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 their blood or do something. Yeah, it's just the sort of earlier version of that kind. Also, I think it repeats the sort of Egyptian version of the Exodus out of Egypt, which is quite different than the biblical version. In this case, the Egyptian, you know, they, they worked as, you know, they stole all the stuff out of the Egyptians' houses and ran off into the desert.

• 2:24:12Lex Fridman?

  The Jews stole all the stuff and ran off?

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hebrews. Hebrews robbed the Egyptians. They, they were taken in, 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. But it essentially portrays the Jews as being, as being hostile, you know, that they don't like other people.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  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, oh, those are just our gods under different names. Everything was sort of adjusted into their landscape. So you end it with that kind of hostility, which was there at the time.

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  And that was probably influenced also by some of these earlier rebellions that had taken place in Egypt. During the Roman period, 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, a certain amount of bad blood, of mutual contempt between Greeks or between Hellenes, between the people who became Hellenized, as the Romans would be, and the Jews.

• 2:25:56Speaker 01

  And the Romans also seems to have developed much of that idea. You know, they considered Judea as to being, you know, a horrible place to have to govern, inhabited by a stubborn, obnoxious people.

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  Not well-liked. So that's really where you see the earliest version of that.

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  And the reasons for it would be complicated. But you could say, is it going back to Menehto and to the Roman period, Jews, Judeans frequently experienced difficulties, conflicts with other people living around them?

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  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 and he 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, Sireneca, all the way into Southern France. They moved widely around the Roman Empire. So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times.

• 2:27:15Speaker 01

  So it wasn't just, the attitude of the church towards Jews was mixed by, well, one of the ideas, of course, is that at the end of time, you know, just before the second coming, one of the signs, how are we going to know that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end? Well, the Jews will all convert.

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  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 in a coal mine. You, you would 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.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  which will then redeem itself at the end of time.

• 2:28:18Speaker 01

  It's not something which is encouraged. It predates Christianity.

• 2:28:26Speaker 01

  And then Christianity, of course, in its own way, just sort of plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing, doesn't it?

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  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 like, a better term, you know, Europeans in some way, it was, it was sort of a Christian history. It was all the prequel to that. And there'd be some sort of, you know, like, the, first, the term Hebrew was always used, never Jews. So, you know, the ancient

• 2:29:19Speaker 01

  Hebrews, and somehow the Hebrews just sort of became the Christians. And I don't know, the Jews just got, they didn't get a memo or something.

• 2:29:26Lex Fridman?

  So it's basically like Christianity, the prequel is the, the Old Testament.

• 2:29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. But they just sort of take over. Okay, we, we have this special dispensation now. Thank you very much. You're an artifact.

• 2:29:40Lex Fridman?

  So it's interesting. So this, this whole narrative that I would say is that was kind of like a viral meme started, as you described in 300 B.C. It just carried, carried on in 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.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  I think that modern antisemitism is very much a creation of the modern world and the Industrial Revolution. It's, it's largely a 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 of, what you had before. You know, prior to that, you had the, the kind of ghettoization, which worked both ways. I mean, there were rabbis who praised the ghettos is, is a protection of Jews against

• 2:30:51Speaker 01

  the outside world, because inside, we can live our life as we wish, and we're unmolested.

• 2:31:02Speaker 01

  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 in things like the Haschala movement in Germany, because the German Jews were always at the sort of cutting edge of assimilation and modernity. Moses Mendelssohn 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.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  Everything, you know, things should be given in good German. And that's the way, 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 a part in that way. And that has created great tensions ever since. You know, one of the essential points, it seems to me, in antisemitism, anti-Juism, 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 a single, undifferentiated mass of people who all move and speak in the same, in the same way.

• 2:32:16Speaker 01

  From my personal experience, not being Jewish, I've, it's incredibly diverse in many ways, really. One of the things that antisemitism proposes is a continuity or a singularity of Jewish identity that never existed.

• 2:32:37Lex Fridman?

  Just like you said, in one hand, there's a good story. In the other hand is the truth. And oftentimes, the good story wins out. And there's something about the idea 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, because 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 you can just zoom out, what do you, from this particular discussion, learn about

• 2:33:22Lex Fridman?

  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 viral and sexy to us. And then we channel the hatred. We use those stories to channel hatred towards the other.

• 2:33:47Speaker 01

  Well, Jews aren't the only recipient of that. I mean, any time 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. Who apparently all share something in common.

• 2:34:05Speaker 01

  Well, then nobody's really thinking. The other thing you'll find is that people who will express those views when pressed will argue that, oh, well, this, you know, if they actually know anybody from those groups, those are okay. You know, it's like Nazis, oh, they go, ah, this isn't okay, Jew, they're all right. They were always be constantly making exceptions. And one for, you know, what they actually meant an actual human being and they seem to be fairly normal, well, they were okay. So what it was that they hated weren't actual people for the most part. It was just this kind of gollywog vision that they had with them. You're not even talking about real people. Uh, I don't know. What does that tell you about human nature?

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  Well, okay, in 70 odd years, what have I learned about my fellow creatures?

• 2:34:57Speaker 01

  One, I don't actually understand them any better than I ever did. In fact, less so. I would say this, when I was 17, I thought that I had the world much more figured out than I do now.

• 2:35:11Speaker 01

  Completely deluded, but you know, it seemed to make much more sense and I could categorize things.

• 2:35:17Speaker 01

  Basic take upon human beings, most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative, and kind. Until they're not.

• 2:35:31Speaker 01

  And the exact tipping point and moment in which they go from one to the other is unpredictable.

• 2:35:41Lex Fridman?

  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 they described 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 described. So can you just tell this story at a high level as you understand it?

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  Manson family. 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, near Los Angeles, California. By that time,

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  he's learned how to play the guitar, has ambitions to become a musician, and also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist. Not that he ever seems to have practiced, but that's what he would claim that he was. Kind of, you know, self-educated himself in prison to a certain degree. And so when he gets out of prison in 67, he was a model prisoner. He behaved himself, you know, and seemed, you can sort of imagine his life is going in a completely different direction. 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

• 2:37:29Speaker 01

  sort of listen to some of the stuff he did, he, you know, he's not a great singer, but...

• 2:37:35Speaker 01

  He could have, you know, other people got recording contracts with less talent than he had and he could play guitar. The Beach Boys actually do record one of his songs without him.

• 2:37:47Lex Fridman?

  How would you evaluate Hitler's painting compared to Charles Manson?

• 2:37:51Speaker 01

  Well, you're supposed to say it's terrible.

• 2:37:53Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:37:53Speaker 01

  Okay. It looks average to me.

• 2:37:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, landscape.

• 2:37:56Speaker 01

  I mean, if you didn't know it was Hitler.

• 2:38:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:00Speaker 01

  Would it, would it, would it, would you, I don't know what people say about it.

• 2:38:05Lex Fridman?

  Sorry for the distraction.

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  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, he 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've 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.

• 2:38:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  And he's supposed, you know, he's on parole. You know, parolees 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 assign him a parole, 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 parolees, but after a while, once he takes on Manson, he only has one parolee he's supervising, Charlie Manson, which is odd.

• 2:39:42Speaker 01

  And he also found out that Michael Smith, in addition to being a parole officer, is a graduate student at the University of California, studying group dynamics, especially the influence of drugs on gangs and groups. And he's also connected to the Hayat Ashbury Free Clinic, which is a place where the influence of, because Hayat Ashbury had lots of drugs and lots of groups.

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  So, you know, Charlie Manson never gets a regular job,

• 2:40:14Speaker 01

  hangs around with young girls,

• 2:40:19Speaker 01

  ex-cons, engages in criminal activity, is repeatedly arrested, but nothing ever sticks for the, you know,

• 2:40:28Speaker 01

  next couple of years. So who gets that type of thing? Who gets a get out of jail free card? Informants.

• 2:40:40Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:40:59Speaker 01

  That's the interesting question.

• 2:41:02Speaker 01

  So probably not for any local police departments. My best suspicion is probably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, precursor to the DEA.

• 2:41:15Speaker 01

  You know, federal parolee, 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, these, 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 in the flow of, oh, and he's also dealing in drugs and girls.

• 2:41:50Speaker 01

  So an early version of Jeffrey Epstein.

• 2:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Manson attracted lots of underage runaways and

• 2:42:02Speaker 01

  train them, use them, also associating with biker gangs who produce the drugs, etc. So that's, that's part of what he's, 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 rein 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 the Cielo Drive.

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  I think everybody has probably pretty much heard that story before. And of course, the question is, why Cielo Drive? Why Sharon Tate, Frakowski, and the rest of them that he has? 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 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.

• 2:43:09Speaker 01

  There are lots of connections there. Wojtek Frakowski, who was one of the people killed at the Cielo Drive house, 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.

• 2:43:33Speaker 01

  And then the next night, 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 ordering the killings to be done.

• 2:43:51Speaker 01

  He supposedly thought that the killings at the Tate house were sloppy.

• 2:43:58Speaker 01

  And he was going to give everybody a crash course in how you apparently commit seemingly random murders. So the next night, he takes a group of people over to the La Bianca's house in a different section of LA.

• 2:44:09Speaker 01

  And you've got Lena Rosemary La Bianca, guy's a grocer. His wife runs a dress shop, upper middle class. And, you know, they're bound gagged and hacked to death. And as, as at the 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.

• 2:44:37Speaker 01

  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 idea that that sounds like a Beatles 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.

• 2:45:13Speaker 01

  Here is what I think was really happening. What really happened and how I think it fits together.

• 2:45:21Speaker 01

  Before Sharon Tate and her friends or the La Bianca's were killed,

• 2:45:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:45:38Speaker 01

  So Manson 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.

• 2:46:00Speaker 01

  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 $2,000 back.

• 2:46:20Speaker 01

  Manson had gotten those drugs from Gary Hinman.

• 2:46:24Speaker 01

  So he is unhappy and he sends Bobby Bosale and a couple of the girls over to Hinman's place to get the money from him.

• 2:46:33Speaker 01

  As the story is later related, I think by Susan Atkins.

• 2:46:38Speaker 01

  Hinman denied that there was anything wrong with his drugs and refused to pay up, which led to a interrogation torture session in which he 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 Panthers. So we'll leave these things up and it will make them, they will do it. So it's Bobby Bosale. Who then takes Hinman's car and decides to drive it up the coast. By the way, with a bloody knife with Hinman's blood and hair on it. And blood on the seats of the car. And then he pulls it off the road and decides to sleep it off and he gets busted. Right?

• 2:47:24Speaker 01

  So find Hinman's body, find Bosale and Hinman's car with a bloody knife with him. Yeah, he gets arrested. So Bosale 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 it. 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.

• 2:48:10Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's there. It's just not the one that, that, but we obviously wanted to go with Helter Skelter 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 Kasabian. Linda Kasabian, 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 states evidence and gets total immunity.

• 2:48:50Speaker 01

  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 Bosale, and this could end 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?

• 2:49:25Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:49:32Speaker 01

  He exerts a tremendous amount of psychological control over them.

• 2:49:35Lex Fridman?

  How was he able to do that? Sorry, Tim travel. Like what? Cause he said he was a petty criminal. It does seem he was pretty prolific in his petty crimes. Like he did a lot of them.

• 2:49:44Speaker 01

  He had a lot of access to LSD.

• 2:49:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:49:48Speaker 01

  Okay, which he started getting at the free clinic in San Francisco. So lots and lots of it floating around. 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 Kasabian'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. 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,

• 2:50:32Speaker 01

  then Kasabian's testimony wouldn't have been as strong because you could, I mean, the first thing against her is you've got an immunity

• 2:50:41Speaker 01

  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 Bosale. All right. So if Manson had, you know, been dressed like you, sitting there in a suit and tie and, you know, and had behaved himself and spoken normally, things might, this isn't to say that he wasn't guilty as hell.

• 2:51:05Speaker 01

  So what he supposedly did was to inspire all of these killings.

• 2:51:12Speaker 01

  And I think that's probably, you know, sort of beginning with the Hinman killing.

• 2:51:21Speaker 01

  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 them, if you don't get the money, kill him. But Hinman's dead. And then

• 2:51:33Speaker 01

  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 Cielo House for Sharon Tate was before was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher. Melcher supposedly, as the general story goes, had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of a record contract. He screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal and Manson wanted to get revenge and sent them to kill everybody in the house.

• 2:52:11Speaker 01

  Which again, doesn't make it much of sense. One, Manson knew that Melcher wasn't living there anymore.

• 2:52:17Speaker 01

  He probably knew where Melcher was living. If he wanted to get Melcher, he could have found him. It wasn't that difficult to do.

• 2:52:24Speaker 01

  And

• 2:52:28Speaker 01

  so that's, it's not revenge on Terry Melcher that drew him there. He was familiar with the house, so if the idea was to simply commit random killings that would throw, that would muddy the whole waters with the Hinman killing, then you might pick someplace you knew of, you knew the place was rented out, there would be someone there and you really didn't care. In the same way that the La Bianca seemed to have been.

• 2:52:58Speaker 01

  Manson was familiar with that because it supposedly had been the scene of creepy crawling.

• 2:53:05Speaker 01

  This is little interesting things that the family would be taught to do. Creepy crawling is 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.

• 2:53:28Lex Fridman?

  But it doesn't seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was the creepy crawling may be, but 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 some psychopathic kind of artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that.

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:52Lex Fridman?

  But it seems like with the, at least the way you're describing it with the Charles Manson family, the murder was just the, they just had a basic disregard for human life and the murder was a, was a consequence of just operating in the drug underworld.

• 2:54:07Speaker 01

  So Manson set up a kind of base, I think, called Spawn Movie Ranch, which was an old movie ranch out on the northwest edge of LA. And they just kind of camped out there. He used the girls, in particular Squeaky Frome, to get the owner or operator. I think George Spawn 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.

• 2:54:47Speaker 01

  So he had a fairly good little criminal gig going, which with the protection he had probably would have. The one thing they couldn't cover him on was murder.

• 2:54:58Lex Fridman?

  So you think there was, if he was an informant, you think there was still a connection between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever with, with him throughout this?

• 2:55:07Speaker 01

  Well, the real question is, there is a book written on this by Tom O'Neill called Chaos. And that sort of thing is the easiest thing to get through. There's a lot of material there. I don't think O'Neill 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 Bugliosi narrative.

• 2:55:28Speaker 01

  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 Reeve Whitson.

• 2:55:41Speaker 01

  Reeve Whitson

• 2:55:43Speaker 01

  shows up on the fringes, even though he has no judicial function. He sort of hangs around Booley Osi 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.

• 2:56:08Speaker 01

  I know what he did later, but a decade later, he shows up as a CIA officer in Central America.

• 2:56:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:56:18Speaker 01

  So Reeve Whitson, later in his career at least, is CIA. What was he

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  in 1969? What is he doing in this?

• 2:56:33Speaker 01

  The other thing about it is he appears to have been the person who called. There's a little question of when the bodies at Cielo 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.

• 2:56:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  And the person he recalls calling him is Reeve Whitson.

• 2:57:12Speaker 01

  So someone had been at the house before the bodies were discovered and they had not called the police.

• 2:57:23Speaker 01

  So I don't know what's going on there, but it's a um, it's a curious kind of of situation.

• 2:57:34Speaker 01

  And Manson, in a lot of ways, just kind of self-immolates himself. I mean, his behavior at the trial is bizarre, it's threatening, it's disruptive. You know, he's got his girls out on the street carving X's in their forehead, carrying knives.

• 2:57:52Speaker 01

  One of the attorneys, initially his attorney, Ron Hughes, becomes Van Houten'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.

• 2:58:12Speaker 01

  Hughes doesn't like this because his defense for her is that she was under his influence and therefore not responsible for her own actions. 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,

• 2:58:33Speaker 01

  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? Hell, that, ah, see, members of the family, 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 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.

• 2:59:20Speaker 01

  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

• 2:59:50Speaker 01

  drugs, through

• 2:59:55Speaker 01

  sex was another frequent component in it. 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 nonetheless had this real psychological power 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.

• 3:00:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:00:46Lex Fridman?

  It's still fascinating that he's able to have that much psychological control of those people without having a very clear ideology. So it's a cult?

• 3:00:56Speaker 01

  Yes. The great, the great focus on Charlie, the leader.

• 3:00:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:59Speaker 01

  The excessive devotion.

• 3:01:02Lex Fridman?

  But there's not like a, maybe there's not an ideology behind that. Like something like Scientology or some kind of religious or some kind of, of, I don't know, utopian ideology, nothing like this.

• 3:01:15Speaker 01

  No, I, I think that Manson again was essentially a criminal.

• 3:01:20Speaker 01

  He had a sociopathic mindset and he hit upon a pretty good deal.

• 3:01:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but like, how do people convince anybody of anything with the with the cult? Usually you have either an ideology or you have maybe personal relations, 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 like a commune of love.

• 3:01:45Speaker 01

  You know, you have a lot of people there in the cult. They don't, they have some sort of, we like to call dysfunctional families.

• 3:01:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:02:03Speaker 01

  You know, their parents didn't love them. They were semi-runaways and now they had this whole family. 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.

• 3:02:20Lex Fridman?

  And again, we return to that

• 3:02:24Lex Fridman?

  that pull towards belonging that gets us humans into trouble.

• 3:02:30Lex Fridman?

  So it does seem that there was a few crimes around this time. So Zodiac Killer.

• 3:02:40Speaker 01

  Well, California. Where I'm from. So I remember this period vividly. Okay. So by the way, the Tate La Bianca killings occurred on my birthday, the year I graduated from high school. So I remember this.

• 3:02:55Lex Fridman?

  Happy birthday.

• 3:02:56Speaker 01

  A term which has been used for that. There's a writer by the name of Todd Wood, who's coined, I wish I'd come up with this, Killer Fornia.

• 3:03:05Speaker 01

  And which is just sort of a chronicle of the serial killers and disappearances 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 flippant about it, but I mean, young female hitchhikers were disappearing at an alarming rate in Northern California. Their bodies that have never been attributed, some think that they're the Zodiac's victims, but it was a dangerous time.

• 3:03:36Speaker 01

  Edmund Kemper, you know, the Coed Killer was, was another one. There were a lot of creepy psychopaths running around. I don't know whether it was something in the water or what was going on, but it was a menacing in some cases.

• 3:03:55Speaker 01

  Hitchhiking, especially if you were alone and female, was not something you wanted to do in much of the Golden State, certainly not if around the Bay Area. So with a lot of these strange sort of killings that were going on, the Zodiac is, it's one of those things where 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, that the Zodiac killings were all committed by the same person. I think there might have been multiple people involved.

• 3:04:29Speaker 01

  And, you know, the first killings are all of couples. It's very sort of clear that they, I remember under my examination of it, one of the, one of the things I was looking at specifically, yeah, what else is there to say about the Zodiac killings? So what I was going to look at is that there are all of these accusations that there is an occult aspect to it, that 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. In one of the killings, I think the one at Lake Barriessa, he does appear in this kind

• 3:05:09Speaker 01

  of weird hooded costume, you know, he's got his symbol, the sort of compass or aiming recticle, you know, circle with a cross through it, it can mean a variety of things. He used guns and he used knives, but he certainly had a thing 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.

• 3:05:39Lex Fridman?

  And also, when he was stabbing the victims, 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.

• 3:05:50Speaker 01

  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 than the males.

• 3:06:00Lex Fridman?

  So, I mean, there's a, there's a couple of questions to ask here. First of all, do people see his face?

• 3:06:05Speaker 01

  There is a composite drawing of his face, which I think is based upon the Stein killing, the cab driver killing, where there were people who saw him or who claimed that they saw him. The other ones were all when it was fairly dark.

• 3:06:19Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 3:06:21Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that anyone else got to look at his face. The one that occurred in the daylight at Bariessa, he was wearing a mask.

• 3:06:29Speaker 01

  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 the different cases of where.

• 3:06:40Speaker 01

  There's a pretty good case to be made of a woman who claims, I think she was, she and her small child were picked up. Her car broke down. She got a flat tire. She was picked up by this guy,

• 3:06:52Speaker 01

  who she got a very sort of strange vibe from, who eventually just let her go.

• 3:06:57Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that might have been the Zodiac. It, it might not have been.

• 3:07:02Lex Fridman?

  You, 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 in speaking about his motivation, he, he said that he was collecting souls.

• 3:07:20Speaker 01

  Souls for the afterlife.

• 3:07:22Lex Fridman?

  For the afterlife.

• 3:07:23Speaker 01

  That's kind of a culty.

• 3:07:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, that's what I believe. Is it the Vikings or the Romans? They believed this in battle.

• 3:07:31Speaker 01

  You're essentially making sacrificial victims and they will be your ghostly servants in the afterlife.

• 3:07:37Lex Fridman?

  Do you think he actually believed that?

• 3:07:39Speaker 01

  Who knows? I mean, here's the question. Was he making that up just to be scary? Or is that what his actual, that, that's what he's saying his motivation is. So let's take him at face value. Rather than trying to.

• 3:07:57Speaker 01

  Wish that into the cornfield, that is to get rid of it. Let's just take it to face. So he's claiming that 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. Forty-four eventually he will have before he just kind of vanishes. One other really interesting clues to me when I was looking at that case, which I didn't find anybody else intended 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.

• 3:08:35Speaker 01

  And it's talking about sort of rope by gun, by fire, and there's this whole sort of wheel, you know, sort of 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 on the cover. It's Wheel of Fortune, but with different forms of grisly 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?

• 3:09:15Speaker 01

  When would he have? I mean, that is one. And also, but where he got the idea from, that's why he's incorporating these things for me. 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 killers is they're toying with the press. I mean, this goes all the way back to Jack the Ripper. Now they get attention. And then he just disappears. Why do you think he was never caught? I think they knew what to look for. There's nothing much to go on. There was a guy who was long a suspect.

• 3:09:57Speaker 01

  And then eventually he tested his DNA and find that it didn't match any of the things that they'd found. Again, it goes back to, I'm not even sure that it's one person who's responsible for all of them.

• 3:10:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's one of the interesting things you kind of bring up here. And our discussion of Manson inspires this, but there does seem to be a connection. A shared inspiration between several killers here. Zodiac, the Son of Sam later, and the Monster of Florence. So is it possible there's some kind of underworld that is connecting these people?

• 3:10:38Speaker 01

  Well, you take the Zodiac, and you had 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 in a particular place. If you look at the Son of Sam case, of course, David Berkowitz will on and off claim that he was part of a satanic cult that was carrying out, again, these killings, mostly of couples and young women similar to the Zodiac, and that he had only committed some of them and

• 3:11:21Speaker 01

  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, you've got murders who go 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.

• 3:11:58Speaker 01

  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 are 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.

• 3:12:28Speaker 01

  Here you come back to something similar we were 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.

• 3:12:43Speaker 01

  Apparently quite harmless, as far as I know, they never did anything, you know, but there are people who, you know, robes, here we come again, robes, cut the head off a chicken, naked woman is an altar, you know, you can get off on that, I suppose, if that's your thing.

• 3:12:58Speaker 01

  So professed Satanists exist, satanic cults exist, serial killers exist, ritual murders exist. Are those things necessarily connected? No. Could they be connected? Yes.

• 3:13:16Speaker 01

  Okay, 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.

• 3:13:24Lex Fridman?

  All right. You've studied secret societies, you've gave a lot of amazing lectures on secret societies.

• 3:13:31Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating to look at human history through the lens of secret societies, because they've permeated all of human history. You've talked about from everything from the Knights Templar to Illuminati, to Freemasons that we brought up, Freemasons lasted a long time. Illuminati, as you've talked about, in its sort of main form lasted a short time, but its legend.

• 3:13:53Speaker 01

  Never gone away.

• 3:13:54Lex Fridman?

  Never gone away. So maybe like Illuminati is a really interesting one, who, what was that?

• 3:14:00Speaker 01

  Well, the Illuminati that we know.

• 3:14:04Speaker 01

  Started in 1776, in fact, you can pin it down to a day, the first of May, May Day, 1776, in Ingolstadt, Germany, founded by a professor, Adam Weishaupt. It wasn't initially called the Illuminati, because that's not really the name of the organization. It was called the Order Perfectibilists. Apparently, that changed. Weishaupt 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 Illuminatus, which means one who is illuminated, one who has seen the light.

• 3:14:47Speaker 01

  So in Roman times, Christian converts were Illuminati, because they had seen the light. Anyone who thinks, and there've been organizations called Illuminati, that the term is not trademarked, not copyrighted. Anybody who thinks they've seen the light about anything is an Illuminati. So it defines nothing. 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

• 3:15:28Speaker 01

  looks pretty much like another owl to me, but compare them, you know, you gotta kind of wonder about this 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 Minerva, and the owl was sacred to her, and the order, and the order was the Minervall, the person who was brought in. The number of levels changed over time. There was a higher level for the order that people at the lower level didn't know about. Pretty typical for this. But the thing about Weishaupt was that he was quite, he was a womanist correspondent

• 3:16:09Speaker 01

  with members with his Illuminati, both during the time that it legally existed in Bavaria and later on. So Weishaupt himself lives, I think, until 1830?

• 3:16:23Speaker 01

  Dies in Gotha, which was ruled by an Illuminati prince. And so nothing ever happens to these men. No Illuminati is ever put to death or arrested in 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, the purpose for this is to, we wish to make men happy and free, but first we must make them good. Oh, right.

• 3:17:06Speaker 01

  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. He had a rather interesting view about that was that we should appeal to women, 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 way to influence men than through women.

• 3:17:47Speaker 01

  Get women on our side by promising them emancipation, but he made sure we'll never actually deliver it to them because the future world will be a boys' club. So he talks about these things fairly openly. 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 Weishaupt's Illuminati to the Communist Manifesto. And in fact, communism itself, that Marxism was simply a further restating of this idea.

• 3:18:29Speaker 01

  And you can draw some sort of, I mean, the idea never entirely goes away.

• 3:18:37Speaker 01

  The Bavarian government gets a hold of the order's inner texts. So the story is they're delivered to them. I think that Weishaupt 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.

• 3:19:07Speaker 01

  Why? Because apparently the first three times didn't work. So the fourth one does. You can notice that it's like papal bans on Freemasonry. And they just go on and on and on because this clearly isn't working.

• 3:19:19Lex Fridman?

  And you actually highlight the difference between, speaking of publicity, that there's a difference between visibility and transparency, that a secret society can be visible. It can be known about. It can be quite popular, but you could still have a secrecy within it.

• 3:19:35Speaker 01

  You have no idea what's going on inside.

• 3:19:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:37Speaker 01

  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?

• 3:19:45Lex Fridman?

  In fact, the secrecy might be the very thing that makes it even more popular.

• 3:19:48Speaker 01

  Adam Weishaupt, again, there is no more, more thing convincing than a concealed mystery. Give people a concealed mystery in the fuss. 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. The, the use of vanity and ego to recruit people, to influence both men and women. It's, it's quite sophisticated.

• 3:20:24Speaker 01

  And as you might expect from a professor of canon law trained by Jesuits.

• 3:20:30Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:20:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:20:48Lex Fridman?

  So the idea of the Illuminati, to put it crudely, the branding is a really powerful one. And so 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 adopt the branding.

• 3:21:06Speaker 01

  Anybody can call it, you can go out and form a club and call it the Illuminati.

• 3:21:10Lex Fridman?

  And if you're 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.

• 3:21:30Speaker 01

  Exclusive, only certain, and you also notice something goes back to when we were talking about much earlier, when we were talking about intelligence, remember mice? Ego.

• 3:21:39Lex Fridman?

  Ego, yeah.

• 3:21:40Speaker 01

  Ease of recruitment and control. That's a great Achilles' heel in human beings, the exploitation of ego.

• 3:21:48Lex Fridman?

  And of course, if we go back to the conversation of intelligence agencies, it would be very efficient and beneficial for intelligence agencies to infiltrate the secret societies, right? Because that's where the powerful people are.

• 3:22:03Speaker 01

  Where the secret societies infiltrate the intelligence agencies.

• 3:22:06Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy. Well, I mean, that's actually, in all the lectures, I kind of had a sense that intelligence agencies themselves are kind of secret societies, right?

• 3:22:20Speaker 01

  Well, it comes down, I'll 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 as opposed to the existence of the box. So one of the most important criterions 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 then oftentimes they will sort of recruit you. Once you have been recruited, you have to pass tests and initiations.

• 3:22:54Speaker 01

  And you also have to swear oaths of loyalty. Those are always very, very critical. So broadly speaking, what interests 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, one, a lie 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.

• 3:23:36Speaker 01

  And also this idea of creating a kind of insular group. Now, 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.

• 3:24:12Lex Fridman?

  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. It's like, you know, an effective, powerful secret society or intelligence agency is not going to let you know anything that it doesn't want you to know, right?

• 3:24:40Speaker 01

  They'll probably mislead you if you can say it 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.

• 3:24:59Speaker 01

  You've got things like the Bohemian Club. You've got the Bilderbergers, which is another sort of, you know, formed in the 1950s, largely the creation of a guy by the name of Josef Rettinger. Polish, mysterious, appears at a 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. Okay, Rettinger is mysterious figure. In fact, his, I think there was even a book written about him called Eminence Grease, Gray Eminence, the fellow who's a, the front man for the Bilderbergers was Prince Bernhard

• 3:25:42Speaker 01

  of the Netherlands, who was at one point a Nazi and then a Dutch freedom fighter. All right, take your pick. But Rettinger is, is the moving hand behind the whole thing, and I'll be damned if I can figure out who Rettinger 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 common questions. It's all very much sort of Western Europe, Anglo-European. I mean, it's all very closely sort of connected to NATO.

• 3:26:22Speaker 01

  The whole concept of a kind of Atlanticist world, which is essentially the Anglo-American Combine combined with Western Europe. But you've got a bunch of these things. I mean, the Council on 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 Penne 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.

• 3:27:07Speaker 01

  There'd be these freedom fighters.

• 3:27:10Speaker 01

  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?

• 3:27:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a, I mean, the closer I look, the more I wonder, the same question we asked about the Russian intelligence agencies is where is the center of power? It seems to be very hard to figure out. Does the secrecy scare you?

• 3:27:35Speaker 01

  Well, I guess on one level, I'm comforted that there's somebody actually making decisions. As opposed to, 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 disparate 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.

• 3:28:18Speaker 01

  Well, I hate to go back to them again, because what you're bringing up, you go back to the Nazis, 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 to students between always be clear about what you know and what you believe.

• 3:29:03Speaker 01

  You don't know many things.

• 3:29:07Speaker 01

  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 believe in this, we believe in that. You know, you believe that your cult leader is the answer to everything.

• 3:29:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:30:26Lex Fridman?

  And 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'd 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.

• 3:30:48Speaker 01

  For some reason, not long ago, I was listening on YouTube to old wobbly songs. You know, internet. The Workers of the World. I don't know why. I know there was a whole album of wobbly songs. But, 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.

• 3:31:22Speaker 01

  That will be. And now, these are, you know, revolutionary leftists, in this case, wobblies, but nonetheless, it's like, it's like a prayer for communism, everything. Now, in the future, everything will be good because the earth will be shared by the toilers. And, you know, from each's abilities to each according to his need. 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.

• 3:32:04Speaker 01

  And that you can think that the sentiments that are expressed in that song, which, you know, are legitimate in some way, of all the horrors that that then leads to.

• 3:32:19Lex Fridman?

  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 totally the unintended consequences that you see described.

• 3:32:34Speaker 01

  The law of unintended consequences.

• 3:32:36Lex Fridman?

  And we learn from it. I mean, that's why history is important, we'll learn from it, hopefully.

• 3:32:40Speaker 01

  Do we?

• 3:32:41Lex Fridman?

  Slowly, or slow learn.

• 3:32:44Speaker 01

  I'm unconvinced of that, but perhaps it's.

• 3:32:48Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of unconvinced, what gives you hope? If human beings are still here, maybe expanding out into the cosmos, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 years from now, what gives you hope about that future? About even being a possible future, about it happening?

• 3:33:10Speaker 01

  Most people are cooperative and kind, most of the time.

• 3:33:18Speaker 01

  And.

• 3:33:22Speaker 01

  That's one of those things that can usually be depended upon. You know, and usually you'll get back to what you put into it.

• 3:33:32Speaker 01

  Another thing that I have like a weird fascination of watching are people who have meltdowns on airplanes.

• 3:33:42Speaker 01

  Cause that's just bizarre.

• 3:33:47Lex Fridman?

  Fascinating to watch, yeah.

• 3:33:48Speaker 01

  The people who will, you know, there's some sort of psychotic break that occurs 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, and you're going to inconvenience everybody there. And usually at some point, they don't care about that. That's the one little sense of power that they have. So they have some sort of sense of powerlessness. And if their only way of power is just to piss off everybody else on that plane,

• 3:34:17Speaker 01

  they're going to go ahead and do it, even though it's going to lead nowhere for them.

• 3:34:23Lex Fridman?

  And there's similar, sometimes psychological behavior in traffic.

• 3:34:27Speaker 01

  Oh, the road rage thing.

• 3:34:28Lex Fridman?

  The road rage, yeah. It's fascinating.

• 3:34:30Speaker 01

  And I bet the most, there again, those are all people who up to some point were cooperative and kind and polite. And then they snap.

• 3:34:41Speaker 01

  So those are all part of the human makeup as well.

• 3:34:44Lex Fridman?

  But also part of the human makeup. Difference between humans and chimps is the ability to get together, cooperate on a mass scale over an idea, create things like the Roman Empire did, laws that prevent us and protect us from crazy human behavior, manifestations of a man's.

• 3:35:05Speaker 01

  Well, human beings are just weird animals. It's not getting around. It's just completely peculiar. I'm not sure that we're altogether natural.

• 3:35:13Lex Fridman?

  But I think we are altogether beautiful. There is something magical about humans and I hope humans stay here even as we get advanced robots walking around everywhere. The more and more intelligent robots that claim to have consciousness, that claim they love you, that increasingly take over our world. I hope this magical things that makes us human still persists.

• 3:35:38Speaker 01

  Well, let us hope so.

• 3:35:40Lex Fridman?

  Rick, you're an incredible person.

• 3:35:42Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 3:35:43Lex Fridman?

  You've done so, so much fascinating work and it's really an honor.

• 3:35:47Speaker 01

  I've never had anybody ask me as, as many interesting questions as you have, so.

• 3:35:51Lex Fridman?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:35:52Speaker 01

  Or as many questions.

• 3:35:54Lex Fridman?

  This was so fun. Thank you so much for talking today.

• 3:35:56Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 3:35:58Lex Fridman?

  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.