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Rick Spence
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“Everywhere else became identified with the bad changes that were taking place. 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, if 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 The German left Luxembourg, but one example of that, Eugen Levine, some of them came in from Russia when the Soviets send a representative to Germany in this period, it's Karl Radek, a Jew. So it wasn't difficult to exploit that, to argue that Just as the ranks of capitalism was full of Jews,”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Now, the world was changing in a way we don't like, and seemingly the Jews are prospering. While I am not. And I was through in Germany, and I swear Jews became highly visible in the professions. They became very visible in banking. They became visible in legal profession. They became visible in the medical profession. And those are people that a lot of people would come in contact with. Bankers, lawyers, and doctors. They were not the majority there Vastly overrepresented in terms of the general population. And especially within the cities. So, in that sense, the roots of anti-Semitism to me is that Jews in Germany and elsewhere, and not just in Germany by any means,”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of things going on here. Part of it has to do with the kind of wrenching social and economic changes that took place with industrialization. So, one of the things to keep in mind is that in the process of industrialization, just like today, whole classes of people were made extinct economically, craftsmen, for instance. So when factories came along and began to produce things with machines, all the craftspeople who had made those things previously 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 burgeoning states, they were visibly. Fair number of Jews”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That changes when you get to the 19th century and with what's called Jewish emancipation. And that means that between about 1800 and 1850, most European countries dropped the various legal or social restrictions against Jews. They are assimilated into the general society. So ideally, you stop being a German Jew and you become a Jewish German. Those are two very different important concepts And what that does, of course, is that it opens up 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 in banking and business. And they move into those areas and professions and become quite visible. And that's what then creates anti Semitism. Because in some way that is seen as part of the Of the changes that have taken place”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 were hated because they weren't Christians. And they existed as the only kind of significant religious minority. But other than that, they tended to live separately. They had little economic influence. Jews tended to live in Shtetles in the East ghettos elsewhere, and they were somewhere involved in banking and business, but they sort of remained segregated for much of society.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 antisemitism worked because everybody has bought it repeated it ever since. So I don't know. Maybe just because anti Jewism would just be that is it too direct in some way? Do we have difficulty confronting actually what it is that we're talking about?”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really need a better term than Judenhas, Jewhate, which was the term, because that just sounds so inelegant, doesn't it? Okay, what do you want to call yourself a Jew hater or an anti-Semite? See, anti-Semitism, it's got that ism part in the end of it, which means it's a system of belief. Anything that has an ism must somehow be scientific and important. It's all part of the nineteenth century obsession with Trying to bring science into something on one or the other. So we're going to get rid of Jew hate and we're going to turn it into anti Semitism. And we're only going to be talking about Jews, but we'll never actually say that. And somehow”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a huge topic. Where does anti-Semitism come from? Let's start with that term itself, a term which I have really grown increasingly to dislike because it doesn't actually say what it means. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewishism. 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. It makes no sense. The origin of the term is invented by guess what? An anti-Semite, a guy in the 1870s, a German journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who is, wouldn't you know it, part Jewish himself. And who decides that.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is the 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?”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the meeting. There are like 50 people there By the way, the topic of the first meeting he's at is how and why capitalism should be abolished, which is not what you might well expect. And because remember, the German Workers' Party is trying to cast itself as a counter Bolshevism. So it's not saying that capitalism is great, which is important. Now, capitalism is evil. We agree upon that. We just agree it has to be destroyed from a nationalist point of view, as opposed from some sort of strange internationalist point of view”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barracks in Munich wearing a red armband because he is technically part of the soldiers who have gone over to the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Seems to have had flexible interests in this case. So once order is restored, so to speak. The army comes in and decides that one of the things we need, we need to have people who can lecture soldiers on patriotic topics. And so there is a particular captain by the name of Carl Meyer, who sort of spots Hitler. He later describes him as 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. So, yes, they bring him in, they turn him into what's called a Weimann, a kind of liaison man. He's an army. Propagand”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you've 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, 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 has helped him to set this up. What appears to have happened is this Subotendorf had organized the Thule Society that had tried to oppose. There's actually a brief period of time. Which the communists actually take over Munich The Bavarian Soviet 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”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's going to come into this because I remember the army was going to supply its own propagandists to help the German Workers' Party and the Thule Society do their work. The propagandists they supply them with is a man who the army trains sends two classes to learn the art of public speaking and propaganda, and that fellow is Corporal Adolf Hitler.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you don't create something which completely opposes it. You create something which mimics it, which is ultimately what the German Workers' Party will become is the National Socialist German Workers' Party, known as that term. Socialist And that is, in my view, what Nazism is from the beginning. It is a counter communist movement.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Tule Society begins to create under Sabotendor's leadership what he called the rings of Tule, and these are Satellite organizations That aren't the societies, though, but they're kind of controlled and inspired by it. One of those is thing called German Workers' Party. The German Workers' Party again is local, it's not large, it's not terribly influential. But what does it aspire to be? It aspires to be a party that will bring German workers away. From the seductive influence of the Bolsheviks. And into a more patriotic position, a patriotic. And the way that I describe this is that it's not an anti-communist organization. It's a counter-communist organization.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a bunch of revolutionaries are going to finance revolution in an opposing country. They are going to finance revolutionary subversion to take Russia out of the war which Basically works. So that gives you another idea as to what the German military is willing to do. They're not revolutionaries, but they'll pay revolutionaries. To subvert another regime. Now you've got the problem is that the revolutionary regime that your money helped bring to power is now threatening to extend into your country. 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. The Thule Society, I don't think, is a huge part of this program, but it is a part of it.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who goes by the code name of Harvest? And he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople, interesting enough, in Turkey. He's hanging around there the same times as Boetendorf is there, which I find curious. So Parvis, or Alexander Hellpand, 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. 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, 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 Abtilung or Section 3B. That's just plain military intelligence. You know, they're constantly trying to collect military information before the war about the weaponry and plans of the enemies and then about what the operational plans were during the war. Don't really go much beyond that though German foreign office. Runs a kind of political intelligence service. And that's the one which is much more involved in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia. Which is one of the things that the Germans sign on to Fairly early Little diversion here in 1915, there is a Russian revolutionary who's lived much of his life in Germany.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the Ebert Groener Pact. Groener is the chief of staff, general staff at this point. Friedrich Ebert is the chief socialist politician. Basically, and they make an agreement. 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 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And that then leaves in the aftermath of the war, the Thule Society is sort of the. Odd man out, although they're still very closely connected to the army. Here's one of the things that I find interesting. When you get into 1919, who is it that's paying Zubot endorse the bills? It's the Army. 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. Do that. As sort of this deal In November of 1918, Kaiser's abdication, the proclamation of a German republic, which you just had this guy declare it. It wasn't really planned.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas the kind of mystical nationalism, the almost kind of religious nationalism that Zabotendorf from 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 Zubotendorf from the Thule Society was trying to do, at least within Munich, was to use this idea of mystical nationalism as a potential rallying point for some part of the population to oppose these other forces, to keep people fighting. The war is lost, though, 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was why Marxism, particularly in the form of Bolsheism, 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 what eventually lead to a class war, and that would be good because that would reconcile all of these things. But think of 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, which will have Germans fighting Germans.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marxism formulates everything by class. People are categorized by class. You're the part of the proletariat or you're part of the bourgeoisie. You're either part of the proletariat or just some sort of scum, really? Needs to be swept into the dustbin of history. Only workers count. That was what would take someone who was a nationalist was sort of drive them crazy because their idea is we're trying to create a German people. 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. We're all trying to fight this war together.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russia 5% of the population is industrial workers. In Germany, 40% of the population is industrial. So if any place was 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 it was a local belief. It wasn't something imparted by the Russians. It was a German invention. So Thule Society, one of the things you can see in this is the Thule Society was particularly involved in sort of anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation. They saw themselves, the bolt and source saw them as this whole movie, it was a counter to this. It was a kind of counter. Marxist movement.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one of the other things that was kind of raising its head was what had happened nearby a year, well, the Russian Revolution, which had now brought the idea, which brought another solution to all of this, the idea of revolutionary Marxism. Here we need to remind ourselves as to where Marxism comes from, not Russia, Germany. Where was the largest Marxist party in Germany?”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strink the will of some people You have to try to appeal to different aspects of this. But the mystical aspect is one of those things that can be. It can have a very powerful influence. And the idea is that 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 Wickers. At this point, you're kind of grasping at straws. And this is a whole period when the Germans are marshalling the last of their forces to launch a series of offensives on the Western Front, the peace offensive, which will initially be successful, but will ultimately fail and lead to a collapse in morale. Among the leadership of Germany, it was a recognition that national morale was flagging”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to mobilize occultism or esotericism for the war effort. Because again, this is 1918. The war is gone on way too long. Within a few months, Germany will collapse and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was to study this. 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 idea of German Aryans as the most advanced type of human beings and all the wonderful things that the future would hold. And the fact that this was in the midst of a war in which Germany was, again, fighting as they saw it for its existence, heightened those kinds of tensions as well. My suspicion That Botendorff, in terms of who was behind him, that he was essentially called back to Germany to work either for the Prussian political police or for some aspect of German intelligence and security to”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this attracted appeal. 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. This is where things like the German Orden, 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 Gazelle, was supposed to do.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the more mystical end of this, you had the ideas that, well, Germany must have been created for some special purpose because the Germans must be very special people, and we must have some sort of particular destiny. And then out of this, you know, the direction this is heading. Well, we're all part of some sort of master race with some sort of ties to some sort of great civilization in the past, call it Tule, call it whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things. and try to attach those to the past. And so Aryosophy was the Aryanized version of theosophy And what this did was to take the idea that spiritual and physical evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings, which were the Aryans and the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, that leads to everything like Wagnerian opera. Ricardo Wagner wanted to create a German mythical music. So he went back and stripped mined old German myths and cobbled them together into a lot of people standing on stage singing. And that was his purpose. He was a nationalist. He was in many ways a kind of racialist nationalist. And this was his idea of trying to create... Bits and pieces of the past a new fangled form of German identity.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have to create this artificial thing. You have to create Germans. There is now a Germany, with an emperor. So we're all going to be Germans. Well, Exactly what is that? Much of it is an artificial creation. You have to decide upon some sort of standard dialect. Okay, well decide what that is. Often dialected, only a few people actually speak, and then they will be drilled into children's heads through state schooling programs. So I think this is the kind of milieu that it comes out of. People who are trying to figure out what on earth Germans actually were and the need for some sort of common identity.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 vaguen, which described a large area in Central Europe where a lot of people who wore leather shorts or something like that and spoke similar German dialects were nominally Germans, but they might be Prussians or Bavarians or they came in all sorts of varieties and relationships. There was no German identity. Something very similar happened in Italy in this same period. I mean, 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 the Roman Empire under a Single state and really didn't think of themselves as the same.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in the case of Lavaski, Lewasky never said that Aryans, white people, anything out this were superior. She talked about the different root races, but it's just her version of it. It's just total gobbledygoop that seems to include everyone. I defy you to make much sense out of it. But in the early 20th century, there were different sort of, you know, one of the things that became fashionable, not terribly popular. These are small movements with the idea that, well, Germany is a new upcoming country. And part of this, I think, was really trying to define who the Germans were.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they guide the spiritual evolution of humanity. But 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. Buddhism attracts a lot of people because, well, it's Buddhism. It's different. See? The Mahatmas, the Ascended Masters, were sending here messages, despite the fact that she was later proven pretty much to be a fraud in 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I know I'm explaining one thing to explain something up, 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. She was a medium psychic. She's supposedly got channelings from the ascended masters. The basic story there, they're all of the ascended masters which are mystical beings that may or may not have once been human.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really just a branch of another existing what's called an Areosophist order. Thing called the German order or the German Orden, which is centered in Berlin. But for some reason he doesn't want his group to be connected by name with the German ordin, so Tuli Society, Tuli in this case is a reference to supposedly a mythical Arctic homeland of the Aryan race. 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, you have to practice saying that. So what are they? Well, they're a kind of Racist Germanic offshoot of philosophy.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. In the course of the First World War he returns to Germany. He just shows up And it would be my operative suspicion or theory that 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? Maybe no one. Maybe someone, because it 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”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, you know, launch 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 Resorta Lodge in Thessaloniki was ground zero. For plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the empire. The Bodendorf is in one way or another mixed up in all of this, or at least he's an observer, plus he's initiated into the Masonic Lodges. And interestingly enough, the fellow who initiates him into one of these Eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Termudi. Who's also a Kabbalist? And also, Swentorf 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it became even more authoritarian. And the crimes of the imperial Russian regime pale the significance of what would follow in the same way that the crimes of Abdullah pale when you get to the young Turks. But that wasn't necessarily the intention. But once the Buttendorf is a German businessman who's working in this period, and the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is a hotbed of political intrigue. 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”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolution is 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 fairly stated. Abdul Hamid II was not a, wasn't called a 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 the Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire. They were going to try to equalize and bring in the different groups. And none of that happened. It became worse 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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, you 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess we could start with what on earth is the Tuli Society? The Thule Society A small German occult society, that is, they studied metaphysics, their fancy word for occultism. That appeared in Around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolph von Zebotendorf not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolph Glauer. 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 in the years sort of prior to the First World War. So the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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, and my study of it is a personal error to try to understand why people do that.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I actually give that credit in a way of sort of sparking my whole interest in things like secret societies. And here again, as a disclaimer, I am not now nor have I ever been the member of any fraternal organization, secret society or cult that I know of. And that's what 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?”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the same, so there was some guy who was, 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. 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? Is it that this person can possibly be providing that you essentially are going to become a slave to them, which is what they were doing?”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That again is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the head of the cult realized, but there's someone, maybe the second, you know, I always sort of look in the lieutenant, someone. Has an idea about what's going on. The other thing that seems to be a kind of dead giveaway for what we would call a cult is what's called excessive reverence for the leader. People just believe everything these people say. Give you an example of the first time I ever encountered anything like that was in In Santa Barbara, California in the 1970s when he was going to grad school, and there was a particular cult locally. Which I think was Brotherhood of the Sun.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without endorsing this entirely, and interesting, one of the questions What's the difference between a cult and a religion? And it has been said. 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. A religion. That person is dead. So, see, I've just managed to. Insult every single religion. But it's an interesting way of thinking about it because I think there is some degree of accuracy in that statement.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's, you're exactly right. Bring to conceive of something And then through intention, will to manifest that into this realm”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An occultist would argue what you're doing is you're creating a huge amount of energy. All of these people are putting energy into something and that energy 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.”
2024-10-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source