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

1. 0:00 – 0:37

   Introduction

   1. RSRick Spence0:00

      Most people, most of the time, are polite, cooperative, and kind, until they're not.

   2. LFLex Fridman0:13

      The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Spence.

2. 0:37 – 14:54

   KGB and CIA

   1. LFLex Fridman0:38

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

   2. RSRick Spence0:55

      The most powerful intelligence agency in history. I mean, it's an interesting question. I'd say probably in terms of historical longevity and consistency of performance, that the Russian intelligence services, notice I didn't say the KGB specifically, but the Russian intelligence services, going back to the Czarist period, are consistently pretty good. Not infallible. None of them are. Of course, there's a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. Uh, very often, I think this is still the case, Russians are viewed in one of two ways: either they are bumbling idiots, or they are diabolically clever. No sort of middle ground. And you can find both of those examples in this. So what I mean by that is that if you're looking at the modern SVR or FSB, which are just two different organizations that used to be part of the one big KGB, the KGB or its predecessors, the Cheka, you're really going back to the late 19th century and the Imperial Russian intelligence security service, generally known as the Okhrana or Okhranka. 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, agents provocateurs. In fact, they excelled at the agent provocateur. A person you place inside an organization to cause trouble, usually maneuver them into a position of leadership and they provoke actions that can then allow you to crack down on them. That is, many 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 and 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, to the point that arguably, that is, you can debate this, but I think on the whole they could largely dictate what those parties did. Nothing was discussed at any central committee meeting of any revolutionary group that the Okhrana wasn't immediately aware of. And they often had people in positions to influence what those decisions were. Of course, that raises an interesting question is that if they were that good and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled most of the opposition, then (laughs) 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- I'll just leave it with this. If you look at 1917 and you look closely, this is one of the things that I would always tell my students, is that there are two Russian revolutions in 1917. There's the first one in March, or February depending on your calendar, that overthrows Nicholas II. Revolutionaries are really not involved with that. Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen. 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'état, a parliamentary coup d'état. 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. You know, the- 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. Uh, so the- the revolutionaries, they end- did not prove to be the fatal threat to the Czarist regime. It was the Czarist political system itself that did that. 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 were gonna need some kind of organization to infiltrate and suppress those pesky counterrevolutionaries and foreign imperialists and all of the other enemies that we have. And so, the extraordinary commission to combat counterrevolution and sabotage, the Cheka, was formed. You put a veteran Bolshevik, 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, you know, there were all of these informers sitting around with nothing, nothing to do, and they were employed. Um, in the early '20s, the kind of 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- and things were somewhat precarious, so if your job is to be an agent provocateur, or if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations and lead them astray, you do that for whoever pays you. That's part of the professionalism which goes in. And under the Soviets, the Soviet intelligence services are also very good at that. They are very good at infiltrating people into opposing organizations, and I guess the one example I would give to demonstrate that are the Cambridge Five, the British traitors, Soviet standpoint, heroes, who were recruited. You know, most notably Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and there may have been well more than five, but, you know, that wasn't bad out of just Cambridge. Uh, 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, uh, Philby ended up living the last part of his life in exile in Moscow, but they got their money's worth out of him. And you can also find this in KGB infiltration of the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich Ames, uh, Robert Hansen cases. Of course, we- we were infiltrating, by we I mean the Americans and 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, we're gonna come down to a kind of like a- a- a who had the most moles Super Bowl, probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that.

   3. LFLex Fridman8:57

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

   4. RSRick Spence9:14

      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. (laughs) Uh, some people, I- I'll do that quite often-

   5. LFLex Fridman9:28

      Mm-hmm.

   6. RSRick Spence9:28

      ... because I am a heretic and proud of it.

   7. LFLex Fridman9:31

      Great. (laughs)

   8. RSRick Spence9:33

      Um, 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. And Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, majority-ites and minority-ites, 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, we're all socialist, comrade." Uh, the difference was the- the tactical means by which one would attain this. And, uh, what Lenin wanted was a- a militant, small-scale vanguard party. Wanted a revolution, wanted to seize power, seize control of the state, and once you have the state then you induce socialism from above. Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks, the minority-ites who are, oddly enough, the vast majority of the party, I, that- 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 majority-ites? But Lenin did that. So what Lenin wanted was a- 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, 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, 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 in the other, and in between were a lot of people who really didn't know...... where they stood on this. I mean, sometimes they kind of agreed, and he seems to be making sense today. No, no, I don't think he's making sense in that day. But, but he managed to completely disunify this organization. Now who could possibly have seen benefit in that? The Okhrana. 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 Tsarist 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, 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 Okhrana itself? Now this, this is one of these questions we might come to later about how intelligence agencies interact or serve the governments to which they are theoretically subordinate. They do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power. After all, their main job is to collect information, and that information could be about all kinds of things, including people within the government structure itself. And they also know how to leverage that information in a way to get people to do what you want them to do. So an argument can be made, again, an argument, not a fact, merely an opinion, which is mostly what history is made out of, opinions, is that at some point between about 1900 and 1917, people within the Okhrana 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, w- 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. It doesn't really disappear. These things don't go away 'cause it will reappear (laughs) as the Ochakaa, basically, fairly quickly. But that raises the question to me as to what degree there were people within the organization who allowed events to take the course they wished.

3. 14:54 – 30:26

   Okhrana, Cheka, NKVD

   1. RSRick Spence14:55

   2. LFLex Fridman14:55

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

   3. RSRick Spence15:07

      Well, one of the key elements in any kind of intelligence organization, or operation, is compartmentalization, need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody, everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and, and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that. Um, only a very limited number of people should know about that, and if you have, uh, a person who is a, a case officer who's controlling agents, he's the only one who should know who those people are. Possibly his immediate superiors. But in no way do you want that to be common knowledge.

   4. LFLex Fridman15:45

      Mm-hmm.

   5. RSRick Spence15:47

      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. For instance, the Okhrana, the, the real boss of the Okhrana was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior, the Minister of the Interior, in fact. But the Minister of the Interior had no real effective control over this at all. I mean, to the point was that it, at one point early on, they actually organized the assassination of their own boss. They, uh, have their agents among the revolutionaries kill the Minister of the Interior. Of course, 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. So you've got different levels, different compartments within it, and, and who's actually running the show, if anyone is? I don't know. That's never supposed to be apparent.

   6. LFLex Fridman17:00

      Well, that's a fascinating question, and you can see this with NKVD. It's obviously an extremely powerful organization that starts to eat itself, where everybody's pointing fingers internally also, as a, as a way to gain more power. And so the question is, in organizations like that that are so compartmentalized, where's the power? Where's the center of power? Because you would think given that much power, some individual or 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 (laughs) eats that person.

   7. RSRick Spence17:43

      Well, if we go back again to the, uh, the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky dies in 1926, keels over (claps hands) after giving a heated speech to a party meeting. Now the common view, what you usually read, which is, was key for the time, is that, you know, clearly Stalin had him whacked because anytime someone died, (laughs) it was almost always that... And I think a lot of times he did-... but in some cases, Stalin's probably getting blame for things that he didn't actually do. Dzerzhinsky wasn't even opposed to Stalin, so it's not clear why he would. But this, 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. Uh, somebody tips over in a canoe in Upstate New York, Stalin killed them. There's actually (laughs) a case about that. So that itself can be kind of useful, where every time someone dies, they think you killed them. That's, that's kind of an interesting, uh, method of intimidation in that regard. But the suspicion is nonetheless there. Dzerzhinsky 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 Dzerzhinsky's death was not natural causes, that he was probably eliminated by someone within his own organization. And then you look at the people who take over. Um, his immediate successor is, uh, Vyacheslav Dzerzhinsky, who's really kind ... Not a really a secret policeman, more a kind of intellectual dilettante. But if you look behind him, you'll notice the fellow is Henryk Yagoda. And Yagoda will really sort of manage things from behind the scenes until Dzerzhinsky dies in 1934, and then Yagoda will hold onto ... Well, he's a victim of the purges, I think, in, in '37 or, or '38. Uh, Yagoda is, um, ambitious, murderous, and if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had Dzerzhinsky whacked, it would be him, and for the purposes simply of advancement. That's the, uh ... You know, the, the person to look out 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.

   8. LFLex Fridman20:31

      You're just one step away from the very top.

   9. RSRick Spence20:34

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman20:34

       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. Uh, well, what does it take to do that?

   11. RSRick Spence20:53

       Well, there's a interesting little acronym called MICE, M-I-C-E. And it's, you know, generally used, and it, it's just the, 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, (laughs) 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.

   12. LFLex Fridman21:46

       Hm.

   13. RSRick Spence21:46

       'Cause 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 wanna keep those two things separate, but ideology was just so convenient, and those people would just work for you so well. They were tr- you could get them to do anything, betray their grandmother. They would go ahead and do that for the greater good. So ideology can be a motivation, uh, and that can be, you know, someone who is a, um, who is a devoted Marxist-Leninist. It can also be someone who's a disgruntled communist because, you know, there's, there's no anti-communist like an ex-communist.

   14. LFLex Fridman22:24

       Mm-hmm.

   15. RSRick Spence22:25

       Okay? You, you know, those who lose the faith, um, can be, become very, very useful. Uh, for instance, if you, if you look in, in the case of American intelligence, the, the people who essentially temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the US post-World War II, were people like Whittaker Chambers, uh, Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley. All of those people had been Communist Party members. They had all been part of the Red Faithful. They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned and, um, turned rat, or patriot, whichever case you may want to, uh, put in that regard.

   16. LFLex Fridman23:12

       What does the C and the E stand for?

   17. RSRick Spence23:14

       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, they could be they have a gambling habit, uh, you know, in the old days, it was very often because they were gay. Okay? Gets them in a position where they can be compromised and you can get them to do your bidding. Tho- those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here's an interesting example of how the Okhrana tended to handle this, and I think it's still largely used. Um, you'd round up a bunch of revolutionaries on some charge or another, distributing revolutionary literature, running 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 then you go, "Well, if you refuse, we'll, we'll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while, you know, maybe beat them with a rubber 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, uh, effectiveness will be ensured is that you, you have multiple agents within the same organization who don't know who each other are. That's very important. And they'll all be filing reports. So let's say you have three agents inside the Central Committee of the SR party and there's a committee meeting, and you're going to look at the reports they file. They all better agree with each other, right? If one person doesn't report what the other two do, then perhaps they're not entirely doing their job and, and they can be liquidated at any time. All you do is drop the dime on them. And this was done periodically. In fact, in some cases, you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate the, the organization. Uh, this happened in one particular case, um, around 1908, the fellow who was the head of the, of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization, which wasn't Bolshevik, but the so-called Socialist Revolutionaries. They actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who aren't 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 as I 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. There was increasing suspicion of him. He was also asking for a lot more money. Uh, so the Okhrana itself arranged to have him ratted 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 sowed consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust and you couldn't tell who you were sitting around. Uh, I know that a, a fellow I wrote a biography on Boris Savinkov, who was a Russian revolutionary and, and the second-in-command within the terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azef'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 Savinkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the number two waiting in the wings (laughs) to take over. But he was legitimately shocked. He didn't really suspect that. Uh, so it's, it's a way of manipulating this. And then finally, we come to the E that I think is the most important, ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive, the sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five. Now, now Philby was a communist and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the communist cause but he also made this statement, uh, I think it's in the, the preface to his autobiography, and he says, "One never looks twice at the offer of service in an elite force." 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 of treason, I'd go with ego. And I think that figures into a lot... You know, people don't, someone doesn't get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like Aldrich Ames' career in particular, you, you've got these kind of... Uh, his, his career in the CIA was hit or miss. Um, he didn't get the postings or promotions that he wanted, his evaluation, and he never felt that he got credit for doing that. And that's the type of thing that tends to stick in someone's craw and can lead for egotistical reasons an added incentive to betray.

   18. LFLex Fridman29:24

       Yeah, that there's 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.

   19. RSRick Spence29:36

       You're the only one that knows this.

   20. LFLex Fridman29:38

       Mm-hmm.

   21. RSRick Spence29:39

       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.

   22. LFLex Fridman29:51

       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, the money and the ideology, the pull of that, and the ego.

   23. RSRick Spence30:08

       It can also be a combination of the two. I mean, you, you can create a, uh, a recipe of these things. Certain amount of money, ego, and a little push of coercion that if you don't...... "We'll, we'll rat you out. You'll be exposed."

4. 30:26 – 37:02

   CIA spies vs KGB spies

   1. RSRick Spence30:27

   2. LFLex Fridman30:27

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

   3. RSRick Spence30:37

      If you look at both the Okhrana and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent is that they... A single organization handled foreign intelligence, that is spying upon enemy or hostile governments, and also internal security. So that's all part of it. Whereas if you look at the US models that evolves, you, you know, you eventually have the FBI, who under Hoover, who insists that he's going to be the counterintelligence force, okay? If there, you know, if there are 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. And the, uh, the charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any... You know, it's often said they, 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, right? 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, whatever you need you can eventually acquire, but they can't, they can't do that directly. So you've got this division, uh, 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, of rivalry and, 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, of the KGB. But there would be less of that to a degree because there was a single organization. They're all answerable to the same people. So that gives you a certain, uh, greater amount, I think, of, of leeway and power because you're controlling both of those ends. I remember somebody telling me once that, a- and he was a retired KGB officer. There you go, "retired."

   4. LFLex Fridman33:06

      (laughs)

   5. RSRick Spence33:08

      One of the things that he found amusing was that in, in his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere, at any time, in any dress, which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time. He was authorized to do that.

   6. LFLex Fridman33:26

      So more freedom, more power?

   7. RSRick Spence33:29

      I think one of the things that you would often get the view is that, "Well, the Russians are simply, you know, naturally meaner." You know, 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 are 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. Uh, one of the things it certainly teaches, you never trust foreigners. Every foreign government, anywhere, any country on your border is a real or potential enemy. They will all, at some point, if given the chance, invade you. Therefore, they must always be treated with great suspicion. Now, it goes back to something that I think the, the British observed is that countries don't have friends, they have interests. And those interests can change over time.

   8. LFLex Fridman34:54

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

   9. RSRick Spence34:58

      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 guy's, and then hide those away.

   10. LFLex Fridman35:10

       Are there laws, either intelligence agencies, that, uh, 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?

   11. RSRick Spence35:24

       Well, I think, uh, John le Carré, I think was his pen name, was talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence. And one of the things he remembered being told upfront was that, "If you do this, you have to be willing to lie and you have to be willing to kill." Now, those are things that, in ordinary human interactions, are bad things. Generally, we don't like it when people lie to us. We, we, we expect that people will act honestly towards us, you know, whether that's being 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, but honesty is generally considered to be a... But, but in, uh, in, in a realm where deception is a rule, dishonesty is a virtue. To be good at that, to be able to lie convincingly is...... good. 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, or 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, o- once you enter this realm, the same sort of moral rules that apply in general British society do not apply. And, and if you're squeamish about it, you won't fit in. You have to be able to do those things.

5. 37:02 – 43:56

   Assassinations and mind control

   1. RSRick Spence37:03

   2. LFLex Fridman37:03

      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 o- how often they go to the kill part of that, versus just the espionage.

   3. RSRick Spence37:21

      Let's take an example fr- 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. And what was the goal of that? Well, th- 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. So this is only two years after the CIA came into existence. And it's an FBI memo, because the FBI, of course, very curious to what the CIA is up to. And the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone in, they're sort of spying on what's going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York. So it's not held in any kind of a, you know, it's- it's essentially never really happened because it's in somebody's house, but ... And there are a couple of guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Baxter. Cleve Baxter is the, um, the great godfather of the lie detector. Uh, pretty much everything that we know or think we know about lie detectors today, they, you owe to Cleve Baxter. Uh, he's also the same guy that thought that plants could feel, but (laughs) 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, uh, there are certain parts of the document which were, of course, redacted, but you could figure out what it is that they're talking about. And they're talking about hypnotic suggestion and all the wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion. And two of the things they note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people's minds and implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that. Just imagine how that would be done. So here to me is the interesting point. They're talking about this in 1949. 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- an elaboration of programs that were already there. I don't think that it ultimately matters whether you can implant memories or erase memories. To me, the important part is they thought they could-

   4. LFLex Fridman40:00

      Mm-hmm.

   5. RSRick Spence40:01

      ... 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. Um, and among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there's that whole question is that could you get someone to, uh, put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger and then not remember it later? Yeah. You could, interestingly enough.

   6. LFLex Fridman40:35

      So non-direct violence.

   7. RSRick Spence40:38

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman40:38

      Controlling people's minds, controlling people's minds at scale, and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.

   9. RSRick Spence40:45

      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, think of the whole possibilities in this case, could you create an alternate personality and use that alternate personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off? So subsequently, the- the person which that personality inhabited was captured and interrogated, tortured, you know, had their fingernails torn out, they would have no memory of it. They couldn't give any kind of secret away because it was embedded in some part of their brain where there was a completely different person. I mean, you can just imagine the- the possibilities that you can dream up. And again, it's not, I think, the question as to whether you, you, that is possible or whether it was done, although I suspect that both of those are true, but that you would try to do it. Then imagine the mischief that comes out of that. And one of the big complaints from a legal standpoint about 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.

   10. LFLex Fridman42:25

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

   11. RSRick Spence42:50

       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. You know, 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 assassin- you know, people were asking lots of questions. And so you need to, you need to dump this stuff because there's all kinds of ... because you were committing crimes against American citizens. So let's, let's eradicate it. And the important lesson to be learned is that never do these type of thing again where, at least in any way in which the agency's direct fingerprints are placed on it. You can pay people. You can subsidize research. You can set up venture capital firms. You got plenty of money, and you can funnel that money into the hands of people who will carry out this research privately. So if something goes wrong, eh, y- you have perfect deniability.

6. 43:56 – 50:48

   Jeffrey Epstein

   1. RSRick Spence43:56

   2. LFLex Fridman43:57

      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. At a high level, if we can just talk about that, is that something that's at all even possible? That you have ... Uh, basically this would be for coercion. You get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous, and then you collect evidence on them so that you can then have leverage on them.

   3. RSRick Spence44:31

      Well, let's look at what Epstein was doing. Uh, he was a ... Well, he was a businessman who then also developed a very lucrative sideline in being a, a high-level procurer, basically in supplying young girls. And he also filmed much of that activity. Um, I think his partner in this, Ghislaine, and I hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly. (laughs)

   4. LFLex Fridman45:03

      I think it's Ghislaine. Yeah.

   5. RSRick Spence45:05

      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. Uh, I could give you another historical example of that. In late 192- actually early 1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin, there was a very prominent uh, sort of would-be psychic and occultist by the name of Erik Jan Hanussen. Uh, he had a private yacht. I think it was called The Seven Sins. Uh, and he hosted parties. He also had a whole club called The Palace of the Occult, which hosted parties where things went on and, and there were cameras everywhere. He filmed important people, you know, guys like the Brownshirt chief of Berlin in various states of undress and sexual congress. And he did that for the purposes of blackmail. So in Epstein's case, he is a procurer of young girls to wealthy men, largely. And many of those events were recorded. Now, even if it wasn't his intention to use them for blackmail, think of what someone else could do because people know about this. So you could raise the question, is this not ... You know, Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert. But through his greedy perversion, he's now collecting information that could be useful. Who could that be useful to? Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew, on the Cl- you know, think of all the people who were there. And th- these, you know, there were important people who, you know, went to Lolita Island. So if it isn't Epstein directly, it, he might have been being ... I'm not trying to let him off the hook because they have anything for him. He was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front for that. I mean, I- I think we're kidding ourselves if we try to pretend that's not what was going on.

   6. LFLex Fridman47:24

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

   7. RSRick Spence47:33

      Well, you know.

   8. LFLex Fridman47:36

      Just in case.

   9. RSRick Spence47:36

      Ameri- American politicians could ultimately end up in a position to oversee things like intelligence budgets. One of them (laughs) might even become director. You never know. We can never tell what some crazy president might do. It could be ver- I ... L- one of the guys who understood the per was, was J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover spent a long time collecting do- dossiers on politicians. How do you think he remained director of the FBI as long as he did? Because he systematically collected dirt on people. So, there is a history of this type of thing. And again, you could argue that's partly for his protection, to keep his job, to protect the, the sanctity and security of, of the bureau. You can find a million different ways to, to justify that.

   10. LFLex Fridman48:28

       That's really dark. (laughs)

   11. RSRick Spence48:31

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

   12. LFLex Fridman48:37

       Whether it's the CIA or the Ǧáʔáṉa, maybe that's what the president of the United States sees when they show up to office, is all the stuff they have on him.... or her, and say you, th- that there's a internal mechanism of power that you don't wanna mess with. And so you will listen, whether that internal mechanism of power is the military-industrial complex or whatever, the, the bureaucracy of government.

   13. RSRick Spence49:02

       Kinda actually the deep state.

   14. LFLex Fridman49:04

       The deep s- AKA.

   15. RSRick Spence49:05

       The entrenched bureaucratic... Well, i- i- it's been said, and I think it's generally true, that, uh, bureaucratic creatures are like any other creatures-

   16. LFLex Fridman49:12

       (laughs)

   17. RSRick Spence49:13

       ... is it basically exists to perpetuate itself-

   18. LFLex Fridman49:15

       Yeah.

   19. RSRick Spence49:15

       ... and, and to grow. I mean, nobody wants to go out of business. And, and, and, and the question then you get all these, you know, things like Pizzagate and accusations of one form or another. But here, here's an interesting thing to consider. Okay, and I want to argue that I'm not saying that Pizzagate in any way was real, or QAnon, and does anything like that. But, but where do they get these ideas from? So let's ask ourselves, do pedophiles exist? Yeah. Do organized pedophile organizations exist? Yeah. They, they, they share information, pictures. They're out there on the dark web. They cooperate. So does child trafficking exist? Yeah, it does. So in other words, whether or not specific conspiracy theories about this or that group of organized 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.

   20. LFLex Fridman50:42

       We'll jump around a little bit, but (laughs) because-

   21. RSRick Spence50:43

       Yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman50:44

       ... your work is so fascinating. Uh, and it covers so many topics.

7. 50:48 – 1:02:42

   Bohemian Grove

   1. LFLex Fridman50:48

      So let's, if we jump into the present, uh, with, uh, the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg group.

   2. RSRick Spence50:54

      Bilderbergers.

   3. LFLex Fridman50:56

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

   4. RSRick Spence51:06

      Well, first thing I have to point out is that Bohemian Grove is a place, not an organization.

   5. LFLex Fridman51:11

      Mm-hmm.

   6. RSRick Spence51:12

      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, I think way back in the 1870s. Its, its, its initial members were mostly journalists. Okay? In fact, supposedly the name itself comes from, it was a term for, uh, uh, an itinerant journalist who moved paper to paper was called a Bohemian. And although I think there may be other reasons why that particular term was, was chosen as well. But I, I, I think the original five members there were, uh, you know, there were like three journalists. There was a, 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, and nothing terribly unusual about that at the time. But it became fashionable, and as it became fashionable, more wealthy people wanted to become part of it. And the thing about getting rich guys to join your club is what do rich guys have? Money. And of course, it's one of those rich guys that bought Bohemian Grove, where now you build your, your old boy summer camp, which is what it is. They got cabins with goofy names. They go there, they perform skits. They dress up in costumes.

   7. LFLex Fridman52:36

      Yeah.

   8. RSRick Spence52:37

      True. Some of those skits look like pagan human sacrifices, but you know-

   9. LFLex Fridman52:41

      (laughs)

   10. RSRick Spence52:41

       ... it, it's just a skit. (laughs) What's really going on there? So y- on the one hand you can argue, look, it's, it's, it's just a, 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 what, when, we're never gonna talk about business. We just wanna 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.

   11. LFLex Fridman53:06

       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 the, and do the plays, and the, uh, the owl with the... and then sacrificing, I don't know, whatever.

   12. RSRick Spence53:19

       Why do you have a giant owl? I mean, what's the-

   13. LFLex Fridman53:22

       Exactly. (laughs)

   14. RSRick Spence53:22

       Why do you do that?

   15. LFLex Fridman53:22

       What is... but 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?

   16. RSRick Spence53:33

       Well, part of it is, is the ritual aspect of it. And yeah, that clearly is a ritual. You know, rituals are, it's pretty simple. Rituals are just a series of actions performed in a precise sequence to produce an effect. That describes a lot of things. It describes plays, symphonies, every movie you've ever seen. A movie is a ritual.

   17. LFLex Fridman53:57

       Yeah.

   18. RSRick Spence53:58

       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.

   19. LFLex Fridman54:06

       It's a great idea, whi- 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 put... (laughs)

   20. RSRick Spence54:12

       Well-

   21. LFLex Fridman54:13

       ... why the owl thing? (laughs)

   22. RSRick Spence54:16

       Part of it is to create this kind of sense, I suppose, of, of group solidarity. You know, you're, you're all going to appear, and also a way of sort of transcending yourself in a way. You know, when you put on the robe, it's like putting on a uniform. You are, in some way, a, a different or more important person. It's a ritual, okay? The, the, the, the key ritual at Bohemian Grove is a thing called the cremation of care. And cremation, a- and that's what it's supposed to be. It's, it's a cre- and we're gonna 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 gonna go out here in the woods and we're gonna kick back-... and we're all gonna gather around the lake and, and then we're gonna carry, you know, it- it- it's wicker, it's not a real person, and (laughs) how would you know? And then we're gonna, and we're gonna... And this is the cremation of our char... But it's a ritual which is meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among those people who were there. The question comes down with the rituals is how seriously do you take them? How, how important is this to, to the people who carry them out? And the interesting answer to that is that for some people it's, you know, for some people it's just boring. R- 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 other people who are kind of excited about it and 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. And I don't mean to suggest by that, that there's anything necessarily sinister about what's going on. But it, it is, it is a, it is clearly a ritual carried out for some kind of group reinforcing purpose. And you're absolutely right, you don't have to do it that way. That's not an... I mean, I've gone to summer camps and w- we never carried out mock sacrifices in front of an owl, all right? You know, we did all those other things, um, we didn't even have any robes either. So it goes beyond merely a, a rich guy summer camp, although that's an aspect of it, but it also, I think, often obscures that focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club ignores that the club is around all the time. That's what's at the center of this. It is the club and its members. So despite all the talk about, "No, no weaving spiders coming around here," one of the other features of the summer meeting are things called Lakeside Talks. Uh, 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 to whether or not he was going to be president. He recognized that that was really the beginning of his second presidential campaign. He was being vetted. So one of the main theories, call it a conspiracy theory or not, about the Bohemian Club 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 in, to give Lakeside Talks means that there, there are weaving spiders which are going on, and it is a perfect private venue to vet people for political office.

   23. LFLex Fridman58:04

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

   24. RSRick Spence58:10

       Well, see the, 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?

   25. LFLex Fridman58:21

       Right.

   26. RSRick Spence58:22

       I think the latter is the simpler version of it, but it doesn't mean that it's the other way around. But th- these are the kinds of... You know, I mean, Nixon was, you know, there was the whole 1960 thing, so he's, he's the new Nixon. Remember this, and this, this is where the new Nixon, uh, apparently made a good impression on the right people, because he did indeed get the Republican nomination, and he did indeed become president.

   27. LFLex Fridman58:49

       Well, there could also be a much more innocent explanation of really it's powerful people getting together and having conversations, and through that conversation, influencing each other's view of the world-

   28. RSRick Spence59:00

       Mm-hmm.

   29. LFLex Fridman59:01

       ... and, and just having a legitimate discussion of policies, foreign policy-

   30. RSRick Spence59:06

       But why wouldn't, why wouldn't they? I mean, why would you assume that people are not going to do that?
8. 1:02:42 – 1:13:53

   Occultism

   1. RSRick Spence1:02:42

      happen a lot.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:02:43

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

   3. RSRick Spence1:02:52

      Well, what is broadly referred to, well, again, to what, what's occultism? And what's the occult? 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. 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, and, and a key element of this becomes a thing called magic. Now, we all know magic. You know, it's a guy standing on stage performing a trick. But the interesting thing about a stage magician is that a stage magician is... We know when we're watching this that it's a trick. Yet we can't really figure out, if he does it well, how that trick is being accomplished, because it seems to defy physical laws. And that's what's fascinating about it. So even though you know it's a trick, if you can't figure it out, it, it has this kind of power fascination, but it's mimicking something. Stage magic is mimicking real magic. So what's real magic? Well, let's go back to Aleister Crowley, 'cause, you know, he, he always has to come. We knew he's... I knew he was gonna come up at some point in this.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:04:49

      (laughs)

   5. RSRick Spence1:04:49

      Earlier or later-

   6. LFLex Fridman1:04:50

      (laughs)

   7. RSRick Spence1:04:50

      ... 'cause he always does.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:04:51

      All roads lead to Aleister Crowley.

   9. RSRick Spence1:04:52

      All roads lead to Aleister Crowley.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:04:54

       (laughs)

   11. RSRick Spence1:04:54

       Um, Aleister Crowley, and I've said this enough so I should be able to get it right, but I'm paraphrasing here, he goes, "Magick," which of course he spelled with a K, to, you know... Or CK, um, is the, "The art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will." So in a way that's sort of mind over matter, but it's the idea that one can, through will, through intention, bend reality to make something happen. Somebody once put it this way, "It's tipping the luck plane." And so, you know, you got some kind of a level plane, and what we're trying to do is just tip it just a little bit so that the marble rules, rolls over one side or, or, or another. Now, that presupposes a lot of things that... Is there a luck plane? I don't know. But, you know, it's, it's a good sort of idea to have. But... And here again, don't become overly bothered trying to figure out whether you actually can bend reality. Become bothered by the fact that there are people who believe that they can and will go to great efforts to do so, and will often believe they have succeeded. So it's this effort to make things occur in a particular way, maybe just to sort of nudge reality in one little way or another. And that's where things like rituals come in. Rituals are a way of focusing will and attention. We're all there, we're all thinking about the same thing. And you have to imagine just how, you know, the, the pervasiveness of what could be called that, that kind of magical thinking that everybody has everywhere. So let me give you an, an example. Have you, you ever attended a high school football pep rally?

   12. LFLex Fridman1:06:55

       Mm-hmm.

   13. RSRick Spence1:06:56

       Think of what's going on there. Okay, your, your team is gonna, is going to battle the other team. You've now assembled everyone in the gymnasium.You've got people who are dancing around in animal totem costumes. And, and what are you chanting? Everyone is supposed to chant that, you know, that the other team dies, okay, that you'll be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious. That is a magic ritual. The idea is, it becomes into this idea that's very popular today about visualizing things. Visualizing, manifesting, I love this term. Where can, you need to manifest your success. Well, that's just magic. That is trying to cause change in conformity with will. So these things can happen without you, you being even consciously aware of what's going on. And you don't need to be because if you're all a part of the, of the mob which is there in the gymnasium and you, you get into this and you get worked up... 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.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:08:30

       So that's a, I would say, trivial example of that, uh, but a clear one. But I do believe that there's incredible power in groups of humans getting together and morphing reality. I think that's probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is. Groups of people being able to believe a thing-

   15. RSRick Spence1:08:52

       Hmm.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:08:52

       ... and bring that belief into reality.

   17. RSRick Spence1:08:54

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

   18. LFLex Fridman1:09:08

       And of course, the, that power of the collective mind can be leveraged by charismatic leaders to do all kinds of stuff, where you get cults that do, m- y- you know, horrible things, or any- anything.

   19. RSRick Spence1:09:24

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

   20. LFLex Fridman1:09:27

       We usually don't call them cults.

   21. RSRick Spence1:09:28

       We don't call those cults.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:09:29

       Exactly.

   23. RSRick Spence1:09:29

       Well-

   24. LFLex Fridman1:09:30

       (laughs) 100%.

   25. RSRick Spence1:09:31

       Um, without endorsing this entirely, an interesting, you know, and one of the questions, what's the difference between a cult and a religion?

   26. LFLex Fridman1:09:36

       Mm-hmm.

   27. RSRick Spence1:09:39

       And it has been said that in the case of a cult, there's always someone at the top who knows what's going on, generally, who knows it's a scam. In a religion, that person is dead. So see, I've just managed to insult every single reli- and, and, and it, but a- a- that's it, it's an interesting way of, of thinking about it because I think there is some degree of, of accuracy in that statement.

   28. LFLex Fridman1:10:11

       Do you think, actually this, 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 your-

   29. RSRick Spence1:10:24

       Begin to believe your own bullshit?

   30. LFLex Fridman1:10:25

       Yeah.
9. 1:13:53 – 1:54:11

   Nazi party and Thule society

   1. LFLex Fridman1:13:53

      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, uh, through that lens, from that perspective, describe the rise of the Nazi party?

   2. RSRick Spence1:14:10

      Well, I guess we could start with, what on Earth is the Thule Society? So the Thule Society was a small German occult society, that is, they, they studied metaphysics, another fancy word for occultism, that, uh, appeared in Munich, um, around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it was a, um, German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Sebottendorf. Okay? Not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolph Blaur. He was adopted by a German nob- nobleman and got the name von Sebottendorf. And I, I like to say that name. So I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who show up and do things and, and trying to figure out who these people are. So we're working up in the years sort of prior to the First World War. So, um, in the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, it was known in the, the Ottoman Empire, uh, which was a fairly tumultuous place, um, because in 1908 and 1909, there was a, the Young Turk Revolution. And, uh, you had a kind of military coup, which effectively overthrew the Ottoman sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the First World War to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian Genocide. And ca- they eventually 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.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:16:06

      And by the way, we should take a tiny tangent here-

   4. RSRick Spence1:16:08

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:16:08

      ... which is, uh, that you refer to the intelligence agencies as being exceptionally successful, and, uh, here in the case of the Young Turks being, um, also very successful for, uh, in doing the genocide. Meaning they've achieved the greatest impact even though the impact on the scale of good to evil tends towards evil.

   6. RSRick Spence1:16:33

      It's one of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolutions always, always m- always seek to make things better, don't they? We're going to take a bad old regime, you know, the, the sultan is, yeah, (laughs) and the sultan was bad, I think it's fair if we say that Abdulhamid II was not a, uh ... wasn't called the Red Sultan because of his favorite color type of thing. And the idea is that they were going to, uh, im- 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 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 Czarist regime and bring in a new great shining future, and it became even more authoritarian. And the crimes of the Imperial Russia 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 Sebottendorf was a German businessman who's, who's working in this period, and the, the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is, is a, a hotbed of, of political intrigue. And 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. Uh, or, you know, the, the lodge meeting breaks up and then you plot the revolution. So same group of people, but it's, it's not technically th- But yes, and there, there's the, the Macedonia Resursa Lodge in Thessaloniki was ground zero for plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the empire. Sebottendorf 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, um, and, and in- th- interestingly enough, the fella who initiates him into one of these Eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Tamoudi and who's also a Kabbalist and involved. So Sebottendorf is very, very interested in the occult.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:19:11

      Mm-hmm.

   8. RSRick Spence1:19:11

      He's initiated into Eastern Masonic lodges in the period when those same lodges are being used...... as a center for political intrigue. He also apparently is involved in gunrunning, which, you know, which in revolutionary periods is, you know, there's a lot of money to be made off of that. So he's connected to various dark businesses in a tumultuous time, with connections to politicized Freemasonry and the occult. Now, in the course of the First World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up. And it would be my operative suspicion or theory that Sebottendorff was working for someone. I don't think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord. Why does he leave the Ottoman Empire and return to that place? Who's behind him? Well, maybe no one, but maybe someone, because he does seem to have money at his disposal. And he comes into Munich and he basically takes over this small sort of occult study group. Now, the interesting thing is that the Thule Society is really just a branch of another existing what's called an Ariosophist order, a thing called the German Order or the Germanenorden, which is centered in Berlin. But for some reason, he doesn't want his group to be connected by name with the Germanenorden, 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, uh, you have to 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 a 19th century, very popular and widely modeled occult belief that was founded by a Russian woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky. Uh, she was a medium, psychic, she 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, 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?

   9. LFLex Fridman1:22:29

      (laughs)

   10. RSRick Spence1:22:30

       So, you know, the, the, the Mahatmas, the ascended masters were sending her messages, despite the fact that she was later proven pretty much to be a fraud and writing the letters herself. Nevertheless, people still went along with this doctrine, and it's been widely modified and copied since then. So an idea in Theosophy was that human spiritual evolution was tied to physical evolution. So in, in, you know, in the case of Blavatsky, Blavatsky never said that Aryans, white people, anything like this, were superior. She talked about, you know, a, the different root races, but i- i- it's just com- Her version of it is just total gobbledygook that seems to include everyone, and 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, uh, fashionable, you know, not terribly popular, these are small movements, was the idea that, well, you know, Germany is a new upcoming country, and, and part of this I think was really trying to define who the Germans were, because remember, the German Empire, Germany as a political state doesn't come into existence till 1871. Prior to that, Germany was a geographic expression, a vague one, which described a large area in Central Europe where a lot of people who, you know, wore leather shorts, (laughs) and, uh, uh, or something like that, and spoke similar German dialects, were nominally Germans. But they might be Prussians or Bavarians or, you know, uh, uh, oh, they came in all sorts of varieties and really, there was no German identity. Something very similar happened in Italy in the same period. I mean, you know, there weren't Italians. There were Sardinians and there were Romans and there were Sicilians, Umbrians, spoke, again, dialects of a similar language, but had never lived, you know, not since the Roman Empire under a single state, and really didn't think of themselves as the same. So you have to create this artificial thing, you have to create Germans. There is now a Germany with an emperor, and so we're all gonna be Germans. Well, exactly what is that? Much of it is, is an artificial creation. You know, you have to decide upon some sort of standard dialect. Okay, we'll decide what, what that is. You know, often a dialect that 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, the kind of milieu that it comes out of, people who 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 strip-mined old German myths and cobbled them together into a lot of people standing on stage singing. And that was his purpose. He was, he was a nationalist. He was, in many ways, a kind of racialist nationalist. And this was his idea of trying to create, out of bits and pieces of the past, a newfangled form of, of German identity. So on the more mystical end of this, you had the ideas that, "Well, Germany must have been created for some special purpose because the Germans must be very special people, and we must have some sort of particular destiny." And then out of this, you know, the direction this is heading, "Well, we're all part of some sort of master race, uh, with, with some sort of ties to some sort of great civilization in the past." Call it Thule, call it whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things and try to atta- attach those to the past. And so Ariosophy was the Aryanized version of Theosophy. And what this did was to take the idea that spiritual and physical evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings, which were the Aryans, and the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans. And this attracted people. Now keep in mind, again, this was not a mass movement. This was very much a fringe movement. Most people weren't aware of it and weren't particularly interested in it. But it had an appeal for those who already had a kind of esoteric bent in some form or another. And this is where things like the Germanenorden, 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, it was, it was an esoteric study group. And so people would get together and they'd talk about things, probably make more stuff up and all sort of work around this, this idea of, of German Aryans as the most advanced type of human beings and all the wonderful things that the future would hold. And the midst... 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 existence, heightened those kinds of, those kinds of tensions as well. So my suspicion, again, is that Sebottendorf, 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 w- the war has, you know, it's gone on way too long. Within a few months, Germany will collapse, and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:28:48

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

   12. RSRick Spence1:28:57

       Yeah. Well, it would strengthen the will of some people.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:28:59

       Some people.

   14. RSRick Spence1:28:59

       I mean, you have, you have to try to a- appeal to different aspects of this. But the, the mystical aspect is one of those things that can be. It can have a very powerful influence. And the idea is if we, we can come up with some kind of, of mystical nationalism. Maybe that's one way to put it, a kind of mystical nationalism that can be exploited for the ............................ At this point, you're, you're, you're kind of grasping at straws, and this, 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, and lead to a, a collapse in morale. But among the leadership of Germany, it was a recognition, i- 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 of which, for another solution to all of this, the idea of revolutionary Marxism. Here we need to remind ourselves just where Marxism comes from. Not Russia, Germany. Where was the largest Marxist party? In Germany.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:30:17

       And Marx probably expected the revolution to begin in Germany.

   16. RSRick Spence1:30:23

       Where else?

   17. LFLex Fridman1:30:24

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

   18. RSRick Spence1:30:29

       Russia, 5% of the population is industrial workers. In Germany, 40% of the population is industrial. 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 did kind of come home.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:30:44

       (laughs)

   20. RSRick Spence1:30:44

       Um, and, you know, it was, it was a, it (laughs) was a local belief. It wasn't something imparted, imported by the Russians. It was, that was, it was a German invention. So the Thule Society, one of the things you can see, and this is the Thule Society was particularly involved in sort of anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation. They saw themselves, the ............................ saw them as this whole move... It, it was a counter to this. It was a kind of counter-Marxist movement.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:31:19

       Can we sort of try to break that apart in a nuanced way? So, uh, it was a nationalist movement.... the occult was part of the picture, occult racial theories. So there's a racial component, like the Aryan race. So it's not just the nation of Germany. And you take that and contrast it with Marxism, did they also, uh, formulate that in racial terms? Did they formulate that in national versus global terms? Like, how do they see this?

   22. RSRick Spence1:31:51

       Marxism formulates everything by class.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:31:54

       Mm-hmm.

   24. RSRick Spence1:31:54

       Okay, people are categorized by class. You're either part of the proletariat or you're part of the bourgeoisie, or just, you know, you're either part of the proletariat or just some sort of scum, really, needs to be swept into the dustbin of history.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:32:05

       Mm-hmm.

   26. RSRick Spence1:32:05

       Only workers count. And that was what would take someone who was a nationalist, would sort of drive them crazy because their idea is, "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 pro- proletariat as opposed to German capitalists. "We're all," you know, "we're all trying to fight this war together." So that was why Marxism in the form, particularly in the form of Bolshevism, was seen as unpatriotic and, of course, was opposed to the war as a whole. You know, the idea that, you know, 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 it this, there's two very different versions of this. The, the Bolshevist version or the, let's just call it the, the Marxist version of Germany was going to be a class society in which we're going to have to have some kind of civil upheaval, which will have Germans fighting Germans. Whereas the, the kind of mystical nationalism, the almost kind of religious nationalism that Sebottendorff 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, of political influence. So in a sense, I think that what Sebottendorff and 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, uh, by the, in November. You know, the, the Kaiser abdicates and essentially the socialists do take over in Germany. That's, things come very, very close to following the Russian model. And you even get the Russian version or take on the Bolsheviks, which are the 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, 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 Sebottendorff's 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. There's sort of this deal which is made, um, in November of 1918, Kaiser's abdication, the proclamation of a German republic which, you know, you just had this guy declare it, it wasn't really planned. Uh, there's the, the Ebert-Groener Pact. Groener is the chief of staff, general staff at this point, uh, Friedrich Ebert is the chief socialist politician basically, and, and they make an agreement. And the agreement basically is that the army will support Ebert's government if Ebert 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.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:36:21

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

   28. RSRick Spence1:36:30

       Well, it's... The German intelligence landscape in the First World War is a, is obscure in many ways. There, there are lots of things that are going on. You've got... Germany has an, a military intell- intelligence service called Abteilung or Section IBII. That's just plain military intelligence, you know? They, they're constantly trying to collect military information, you know, before the war about the weaponry and plans of the enemies and then about what the operational plans were during the war. It doesn't really go much beyond that though. The German Foreign Office runs a kind of political intelligence service and that's the one which is much more involved in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia, which is one of the things that the Germans sign onto fairly early.... little diversion here. In 1915, there is a Russian revolutionary who's lived much of his life in Germany, um, who goes by the codename of Parvus. And he essentially comes to the Germans in Constantinople, interestingly enough, in Turkey. He's hanging around there the same time Sbotendorf is there, which I find curious. So Parvus, or Alexander Helphand, to give his actual name, comes him and he goes, "Look, uh, there's a lot of revolutionaries in Russia and there's a lot of mistrust with the regime. We think that the war will increase the contradictions in Russian society. And if you give me a lot of marks, I can finance this revolutionary activity, and through subversion, I can take Russia out of the war." Well, the Germans are facing 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. 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 the power is now threatening to extend into your country.

Episode duration: 3:28:19