Behind the Bastards

There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.

Part One: A Complete History of the Illuminati

Part One: A Complete History of the Illuminati

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 11:00

Robert sits down with Garrison Davis and Margaret Killjoy to talk about the birth of the Illuminati, the Secret Society behind every modern conspiracy theory.

(6 Part Series)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen to Episode

Copyright © 2023 iHeartPodcasts

Read Episode Transcript

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hers. And in Sava's house we'll like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or Reverend AirPods. What's up y'all, I'm Guillermo Diaz and I played hook on Scandal. And I'm Katie Loes, aka Quinn Perkins, and we're the hosts of Unpacking the Toolbox, the Scandal Rewatch podcast where we're talking about all the best moments of the show. With guests like Tony Goldwyn who always amped up the fire as President Fitzgerald Grant. Grab your Scandal swag, your DuBelay, and join us on Unpacking the Toolbox every Thursday. Listen to Unpacking the Toolbox on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian train astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I don't know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Balls Mahoney! This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every week we celebrate famed wrestler, Balls Mahoney, who's career started in the late 80s and ran through the 90s before his tragic death at age 44 of a heart attack. Here to talk about Balls Mahoney, Margaret Killjoy, Garrison Davis. How are y'all doing? How are we feeling about Balls Mahoney? This show has really changed in the scopes since last time I've been on, huh? I am very excited about this person that I totally believe is a real person. Oh, it is. It is a real person. It is a real person. His all of our faces were like, Robert. Y'all aren't killed on Balls Mahoney. Honestly, I know very little about him other than that he's a wrestler. He died very young and he has one of the funniest names I've ever heard. He's a really photo of him. He is bleeding from the forehead and both of his wrists have been covered in duct tape. It's incredible. Anyway, that was a little bit of fun for all of our wrestling fan listeners. I've often said professional wrestling in SCA are the only remaining forms of art in the world. There actually isn't argument for that. Yes, it's an argument on make. This is behind the bastards. It's a podcast about bad people and also Balls Mahoney. And about lying to the audience at the start of the introduction. Garrison, Margaret, how are you doing today? You know, I am all right. I spent all morning plumbing. And I haven't destroyed anything yet. That's good. I guess it's my turn to talk. Yeah, that's generally how it works in a conversation. Yeah, I'm doing great. I have my oat milk coffee and ready to learn about some fascinating historical figures. Wow, I just got a lot of work to do with coffee. Yeah, I just don't know if we could have moved on if we didn't know what kind of milk you were using. Yeah, the wokest. So we would be judging you for any other milk. How do y'all know about the Bavarian Illuminati? Oh, that's something I've been, that's something I've heard been screamed about. With like a folks and like fascist rallies before. Yes, most, most of the time I've, most of the time that I've heard the words the Bavarian Illuminati. It's coming from some unhinged woman who has choice opinions about Jewish people. Yeah, yeah, generally people, generally the folks who feel strongest about the Bavarian Illuminati also have opinions about like the root races. That's not positive. No, no. Margaret, do you know much about the Bavarian Illuminati? Or just a secret society? Is that the secret society? It's the original Illuminati. I once read a book about the origins of the Illuminati is influencing the anarchist movement called the occult origins of anarchism or something. It's an anarchist. It's a great book. Yeah, nice. Some of my knowledge is that someone said that there's a through line. There is a through line. We're going to be talking about that today. This is going to be a bit of a weird one. In episode on this matter, kind of ever since we started the podcast, last year we did a live show that touched on the discordians and Operation Mindfuck, which is kind of the end point of this story. But telling it all really properly requires, well, it took me about 16,500 words. So, so this is a problem. Dig right in. No, this will be a little more than a two-parter. It's important not because just by the way, in case you're listening here wondering like has Robert gone crazy? Is it going to start telling us about how the Illuminati have put machines in our teeth that talk to us when we sleep? Obviously, that's been done. We all have those machines in our teeth. But it has nothing to do with the Illuminati. No, the Illuminati, the original Illuminati are not particularly bad guys. There are people who made some choices that have wound up carrying down through the ages in an unexpected way. And a lot of that's been negative. We're getting behind the bastards in this one in that like what we're all talking about today, the story that begins in Europe in like the 1700s leads directly to QAnon, right? It leads directly to every aspect of modern conspiracy culture. Because the Illuminati are what create the first like uber conspiracy, you know, the first conspiracy that loops in all of the other conspiracies. The way that it all works now, right? Where if you believe that like the government is trying to keep you from drinking raw milk or forced vaccines on you to poison you, or if you believe that there are lizards at the center of the world, or if you believe that, you know, the elite are drinking the blood of children, you can all of those can become part of the same conspiracy. And in fact, generally are because of the way that how the syncretic nature of modern like uber conspiracies. And this all starts with the Illuminati. They don't do it on purpose, but they do kind of cause it by recklessness. And so we're going to start by talking about the Illuminati. But actually, we're going to start a long ass time earlier than that Margaret and Garrison. Because how long would you guess like secret societies have been a major factor in like human civilization? Since before civilization. I mean, that is for a long long long time. Like yeah. I was surprised looking at this how far back the research on this goes. Because it's as Margaret said, it's pre civilization. And in fact, a good example of like one of the first secret societies we have any kind of decent evidence of. Comes from the Chumash people who have lived on the California coast and around that area for about 15,000 years. Or so, obviously, you're never going to get an exact date on there, but at least like 15,000 years. And starting at around 6,000 BCE, give or take a couple of centuries, they started making really good canoes, which came to be known as tummels. And these craft, they like, you know, they got better and better at making canoes over time. And kind of reached their most advanced, perfected form at around 1,300 years ago. And this was a really involved process. They have all of these different pieces that allow them to be like tummels are generally considered to be maybe the best canoes that existed before like really modern materials. And they're ingenious devices. And obviously they took a lot of experimentation and development in order for people to like figure out how to make them the best way. They're made out of redwoods, they're glued together with tar. They used shark skin as sandpaper, which I didn't realize you could do, but kind of make sense. And because these were so good, the task of making one took about 500-ish days if you were like a skilled manufacturer. And it required specialized knowledge that's kind of like about on the level of what it would take to be like a good auto mechanic. So that knowledge was valuable because as the people on the coast started making these tummels and getting better at them, it became like hugely advantageous to have one, both in military terms, because they could allow you to raid your enemies really effectively, and they could allow you to fish into trade a lot better. There was a lot of money or resources at least locked up and having access to these things. And the people who made them realize like we have this knowledge that's not widespread, and if we keep it secret just amongst ourselves, then we can build a lot of power and wealth for ourselves and our families. Yeah, exactly. The brotherhood of the tummol held a pretty more or less a monopoly over the creation and piloting of these craft for, I mean, we'll never know exactly how long, but for an extremely long time. And this allowed them to become quite comfortable themselves. A passage from the book First People's Populating the Planet charts out how things went from there. A bearskin cape worn only by the elite of canoe owners and village chiefs marked the beginnings of class distinctions, ad-sedded burials, which were far more elaborate for the wealthy and their children than for commoners. Members of the brotherhood of tummol were often buried with parts of their canoes. Perhaps most offensive to the egalitarian and independent Juhuanse who were neighbors to the Chumash would have been the emergence of a permanent and hereditary political elite among the Chumash. High-ranking Chumash chiefs who inherited their positions through the mail line, exercised control over a number of communities, but each village also had its own chief, some of whom were women, these political leaders, all of whom were also canoe owners, led their people in war, presided over religious rituals, and regulated the flourishing trade that followed the invention of the tummol. And I find that fascinating. The idea that among this society, class distinctions emerged as a result of the creation of this and the kind of the sequestering of this knowledge among an elite chunk of the population. I hadn't really thought about it occurring that way, but it makes sense. As soon as you mentioned that they specifically kept the information about how to make them seclude it, and on one hand, undeniably, secret societies are kind of cool. Everybody wants to be in the ingroom. Everyone wants to have access to secret knowledge. On the other hand, just the existence of that will by itself create conditions of inequality and goes against ideals of open access to information and how everyone should have the opportunity to learn anything that they can. Yeah. But that does create a very interesting dynamic. But you can also use the same thing to keep information going that would otherwise be lost, especially when you talk to people who don't have writing systems or have different types of writing systems. Like oral tradition stuff being able to preserve information because of how secret it is. Yeah. So I mean, not just gatekeeping, it's also preservation. Yeah. And I don't want to be preserved. I'm not like saying the brothers of the tumult are the first bastards. It's much, yeah. It's all obviously. This is all, we're taught these are, this is like a complicated thing and it had positive and negative impacts. It's fascinating to me. And it's going to be interesting how many things from as far back as the existence of the brotherhood of the tumult carry through to modern day secret societies and in weirdly specific ways. But I, it's one of those things I kind of wonder. Obviously we don't have a lot of written records from the people, the tumult people in like 5,000 BC or whatever 4,000, 3,000 BC. But I kind of wonder like where their conspiracy theories about the canoe people in their secret society running things like because that's a thing people do. Yeah. So it's interesting. And what it, because it's kind of like you can almost imagine people talking about this like people today talk about like the free energy suppression conspiracy theory, like Donald Trump knows that like the someone's keeping free energy from American people for the like, yeah, it's a, I wonder. I wonder if we use magnets to spin something, but with magnets more, more energy comes out that goes in. That's right. That's right. That's why I throw magnets on the side of my car, improve the gas mileage. One of these days it's going to work. So secret societies were wanting to know how they work. Yeah. They are the secret gatekeepers of all of all knowledge. They're the brotherhood of the tumult of the modern era. So one of the things as I was reading about these guys that I found out that I hadn't realized is that there's actually like a really strong vein of research by anthropologists into the existence of secret societies across all of Neolithic humanity. This is a thing we do everywhere there are people. And it's a thing that occurs in societies when they hit what's often described as kind of a middle level of development between wandering bands of hunter gatherers and like we're talking bands here, not like large moving like tribes of people. And then like what we broadly call ancient like pre-civilization where you have some settled communities maybe, but you at least have much larger groups of people moving and interacting even if they're still kind of nomadic. And it's kind of in that that inner stittle period between sort of like groups of I don't know 10 people wandering around the wilderness to actually starting to make towns and cities that you see the development of of of ancient secret societies. In a lot of cases like the American Pacific Northwest, what is today the American Pacific Northwest. Common for adults to pick societies based on their talents and most common vocation. And one of the things that this did is societies existed often across tribal and family lines. So in addition for being away for people to kind of gatekeep knowledge and sort of build wealth between within communities and along like lines of family descent, they provided a back door method of diplomacy and allowed for different tribes that might have often been in conflict over stuff like hunting grounds and other resources. And then you also have a way in times of disaster to cooperate on something that sort of approached the level that a nation state could do it because you have, you know, maybe sometimes one tribe is fighting the other, but all of the people who know how to make this important thing have some sort of like occasionally will meet and engage in these secret religious observances together and talk shop and talk trade. So after hits, they're able to communicate with each other because they have this kind of this kind of brotherhood. Now when anthropologists use the term secret to refer to these, these secret societies, which are often called like guilds and groups. That's because all of these societies tended to enforce the isolation of their members for periods of time. That's what they mean by secret. Like no one knew the brotherhood of tomorrows existed. It's that part of the way it worked is members would sequester themselves away from everyone else and have conversations and engage in rituals that other people were not allowed to see. Some of these rituals would have been mystical. Some of them would have been doggedly mechanical like instruction on the best way to make canoes, but all of them were secret. Many Neolithic peoples also practiced matrilineal descent. So one way in which one very prominent way in which secret societies developed was because it was traditional for men to move in with the family of their partner, which was not just an emotionally complex experience, but also led presumably to a lot of like frustration on behalf of some of these men. So secret societies were often very male dominated and it's just like a frackle. Yeah, exactly. So we were though to blow off steam, right? No, but in a pretty literal way, right? Well, we're fraternal societies that became frets come out of all of this and actually like mutual aid organizations and just come out of all of this. We will be building to that. It's just interesting to me how deep it goes. I'm really into this shit. I'm really excited about it. Yeah, that's why I wanted to do on this. So I want to quote read a quote now from an American anthropologist named Walter Goldschmidt. There is always a magical religious aspect to such groups. They are characterized by ritual induction or initiations by secret rights and ceremonies and by a system of mythological justification. Often they also have a power function uniting the senior men, the adults are some especially selected group has against the women and children or all outsiders. Occasionally, there are countervailing women's organizations and that's also it's interesting to be how deep like you can see shades of this and like some of the weird in cell communities online and like fucking Andrew Tate's little clubhouse. It's so weird to me how far back this shit goes. What is this perceived lack of power? Us men don't have any power. They're saying. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So many ancient societies were either made of high status individuals or became that over time as their coordination allowed them to marshal resources more effectively than other segments of society. And so secret societies they drove stratification and created it but they also kind of resulted from stratification. It's obviously this is a very complex topic so it's not just one or the other. Secret religious societies or cults were ubiquitous during the late period of the Roman Empire as well and the early Empire. In this case, they offered places for the elite to socialize and organize out of public view. And in fact, our modern term for cult was initially applied to different like religious sects. A cult was not, oh, you you've fallen in with some weird charismatic guy. It's like, yeah, we decided to worship this goddess from Egypt to it became suddenly hip like in Rome to worship this goddess. You know, she's foreign and different. So like all the cool kids are in this cult now. And it's like just the thing that we did together. Well, they're just like me. Yeah, Kirsten. You would have you would have gotten on quite well. Yeah, it's interesting to me. In the long history of European secret societies, the most infamous before the Illuminati was probably the order of the temple of Solomon that are known today as the Knights Templar initially founded by veterans of the first crusade. This was an organization of lay people who took monastic vows and like the first thing that they did was basically act to protect as kind of a policing manner pilgrim routes of the Levant. Right. So you've got these pilgrims heading forward to the newly reconquered holy land during the brief period that it was reconquered. And you know, there's bandits and shit. So the Knights Templar are kind of volunteering to aid the the trains it of pilgrims by by helping to protect them. They also had a regular army and would fight in battle at periods of time as a regular army over time. And that way that you do the crusades went less well. There was much less call for Templars out in the holy land. And so they got into banking and became deeply woven into life across much of Europe. This disturbed traditional elites like King French King Philip the fourth. And in 1307 the order was purged in a you know, you'd call it an orgy of violence. It was a pretty pretty solid violence orgy. And it was like about calling them Satanist or something because they always say this for demons come from or something like bottom that or something. There's I think that's a part of it. There's a lot of things happening at once that kind of feed into it. But yeah, the Templars get accused of depot worship and accused of plotting for the overthrow of governments and trying to like make them say. And like make themselves the you know, the like overthrow kind of the the settled power in Europe. Which there's not really any evidence of yeah. Yeah, they're really just they're really just like ancient bank of America. Maybe more like an ancient credit union. But yeah, is she credit you didn't with like a military. Yeah, they don't primarily annex like racist violence. Yeah, all modern banks. Everyone, every one with a military primarily annex racist violence in this period of time. They're not really different from the French in that regard. So during the mid 1600s Europe experienced a rather sudden burst of religious creativity. The overwhelming control of the Catholic Church splintered and suddenly you get your Lutherans and your Calvinists and all these all these Protestants start popping up all over the fucking place. This coincided with what's called the Age of Enlightenment, which by the 1700s is in full swing bringing a newfound understanding of the scientific method and the value of rationality over dogma. Obviously broad terms like the Age of Enlightenment exist to describe complex periods and very simple and very broad terms. The so-called Enlightenment was not evenly distributed. And it arrived I think a little later in Bavaria because Bavaria stays extremely Catholic, which is in contrast to much of the rest of what we now called Germany. But when it did hit the term that gets used in the area is a off-Clure which I think just means Age of Enlightenment, but in that silly language people speak in Bavaria. Is there a Southern Germany? I believe so. Yeah, it's like the most conservative and the most Catholic part of Germany. Okay. Which is the part that didn't vote for the South because I think it yeah, it borders Austria because that's where Hitler finds himself when he leads his home in Austria. Yeah, East and I mean it is a lot of South too. I'm just trying to position myself. Yeah. Yeah, it's like borders. So yeah, it's it borders like Lichtenstein, Austria, all that good shit. Yeah, and it's an interesting interesting part of Germany for that. And it's going to be a lot more conservative than than the rest of the area. So the Enlightenment's going to hit it in kind of a more controversial way. And I want to quote now from an Italian sociologist named Massimo in Throving. The Bavaria of the second half of the 18th century, a Catholic Ducci, the Duke's Elector would take the title of kings only in 1805, and a predominantly Protestant Germany, was where in Europe the spirit of the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque Age was best preserved. Education and culture were dominated by the Society of Jesus, and the former Jesuits remained influential even after the papal suppression of their order in 1773. The Ducs resisted the reforms initiated in the neighboring Austria, although the latter was also Catholic and the influence of the Catholic Church remained pervasive. Trying to preserve this situation, the Catholic Church erected a barrier against the Enlightenment. Many books by Enlightenment philosophers, which circulated freely in the rest of Germany, were banned in Bavaria. The Protestant against the Catholic Church and the Ducs happened, the protest against the Catholic Church and the Ducs happened mostly in the universities, where a number of professors were sensitive to Enlightenment ideas. In turn, students often kept in contact, particularly through the college fraternities, that at this time began to gain importance with their colleagues in the Protestant German states. So Bavaria is kind of Florida, right? They're very much in Florida. They're more horrifying sentence, thinking of the Florida Illuminati, the next like in like 1500 years, this conspiracy, the Florida Illuminati, terrifying. Yeah, and the Florida Illuminati is like two guys with a single history textbook. But that is very much kind of what's happening here, right? There's this progressive, you know, left wing and right wing, those terms I think kind of useless when we're talking about the situation in Europe in this period of time. But it's certainly like a very progressive and secular way of sweeping a lot of the rest of Germany. But Bavaria is like rebelling against it. And one of the ways they do it is by banning books and cracking down. And one of the ways in which educated elites fight back and push Enlightenment values is through these little fraternities, these secret societies. Now, it is kind of worth noting because we've just talked about how it's sort of the Florida of Europe. But Bavaria does produce some of the most creative thinkers of the whole Enlightenment, including Adam Liebnitz, who independently discovered calculus alongside Isaac Newton. And then they had a little bit of a falling out with each other. He's also a wizard, which is cool. But so is everybody who does anything cool with science. It's so exciting. So is Isaac Newton. They're both wizards. They're wizards who used to be friends and then fell out over calculus. That is such a piece of it. It happens all the time. On February 6th, 1748, 32 years after Liebnitz's discovery of calculus, a baby boy named Adam Vyshopped is born or comes into the world. Now, his parents to the boy. Wait, wait, wait. It's not actually part of the world. What are you? Okay, you know what I mean. Did you just like pop out? What is? Well, I mean, yeah, Garrison. Probably. Yeah. When two cabbages love each other very much. Yeah, I drew a diagram for you about this the other day. Okay, great. Yeah, you can you can refer to that. So we need to give it to you. Garrison, you can you can refer to that book of worm impregnation fetish pornography. Oh, yes. You last night. Okay, that's most of the basics. Twitter can help you out with the rest. Got it. All right. We'll do. So Adam Vyshopped comes into the world. Is born, whatever. And yeah, little baby. And he's in an interesting situation. He comes from kind of the upper class. His family has a decent amount of money. His parents had been born and raised as orthodox Jews. But they had decided to convert to capitalists or to a Catholic Catholicism. It was a little bit of a slip of the tongue there. They become Catholics because like, it's a lot easier to be Catholic in Bavaria than it is to be an orthodox Jew, right? That makes sense. That should not surprise anybody. Yeah. And because they're kind of like we should probably make his clean a break from our past as possible, Adam's parents enrolled him in a school that was helped like run by a monastery as soon as he could walk. So he's taught by monks. Now, he has a childhood that's, I don't think it's not an abnormal amount of turbulent for a kid in the mid 1700s. His dad dies when he's just five. And since single moms, that's not an encouraged thing, especially if you have any kind of like money in this period of time. His dad's coworker at the University of Ingolstadt where he was born moves Adam into his household and takes him out of the monastery school and sends him to one run by Jesuits. And boy, howdy, talking about Jesuits, that's going to take a second. So why don't we first talk about some products and services? The Jesuits society would like to appreciate you for listening to this podcast and if you would like to join us, then you can find us at, that's the Jesuit ad. That's the Jesuit ad. Stop and then the first thing that comes up is get chungled. Yeah, there you go. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things, but sometimes life gets you bogged down and you might feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything. Life throws at you and life's throwing a lot at all of us these days. So if you think therapy might be worth a try, BetterHelp could be a great option for you. It's convenient, flexible, affordable and entirely online. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com slash behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com slash behind. Again, visit BetterHelp.com slash behind today to get 10% off your first month of BetterHelp online therapy. This is what it sounds like inside the box card. I'm journalist and I'm Morton in my podcast, City of the Rails. I plung into the dark world of America's railroads, searching for my daughter Ruby, who ran off to hop train. I'm just like stuck on this train, not where I'm gonna end up and I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters living outside society, off the grid and on the edge. I was in love with a lifestyle and the freedom, this community. No one understands who we truly are. The Rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history, and the thing we call the American Dream. It's the last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme. You're either going to die or you can have this incredible rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the City of the Rails. Listen to City of the Rails on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Or cityoftherails.com. It's 1967, the Cold War, and Joseph Stalin's daughter, Stet Lana, the princess of the Kremlin, has just fled Mother Russia. Her new home, a place where the roads are paved with gold and people bake apple pies out of baseballs and freedom, a place called America. Hello, everybody. I am very happy to be here. That story alone would be worthy of a podcast, but this one, Svetlana Svetlana, is about what comes next. And it's the craziest story I've ever heard. It has KGB agents, mystics, and a Frank Lloyd Wright commune, destiny, immortality, and unbreakable cycles. Weird sex stuff, weird money stuff, weird dances, three Olga's, two Svetlana's, and one neurotic gay playwright who won't shut up about it all. Guess which one I am. Listen to Svetlana Svetlana on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And we're, we're thinking about the Jesuits. Now, when I was a kid, there was a Jesuit school called Jesuit right next to my school. And it was where the rich kids went to school, or at least the rich kids who were Catholic. It was called Jesuit. Yeah, it's called Jesuit. Oh, the big one in Portland is also just called Jesuit. And it was, I don't know if this is... That's very Jesuit in concept. Two Jesuits. Yeah. Sorry. Now, I don't know if it's the same with other Jesuit schools, but in the Dallas area, those were the kids you bought drugs from. Right? Because they got the cash, their parents are too busy to really pay any attention. The Jesuit boys were, you know, that's where you get your weed, it's where you get your acid. You know, when you're young, it's probably where you get your fentanyl today. You, you, you, you genzy kids in your fentanyl. Anyway, at this point in time, I don't know if the Jesuits have access to much fentanyl, but they are something of a secret society. And they've been like, they're all of these Jesuits are like kind of members of an order that's been banned. So they're technically officially not Jesuits anymore. Which makes the church... It's Catholic cooler. Yeah, it is cooler. There's a, there's so many conspiracy theories about the fucking Jesuits. But like, I think the best way to describe them is nerdy Catholics. Like, their job, like the thing they're supposed to do is make more people Catholics and also learn and teach. So there's a lot of Jesuit schools. They are historically pretty good schools. And yeah, anyway, and they're also again, at the center of quite a few conspiracy theories. So because he's got the benefit of this Jesuit education, Adam is going to learn at a level that's kind of a lot beyond what most boys in that place in time can expect. And he takes to it like a duck to... You know the thing that ducks do. Um, Quacken. No, no, no, much worse than that. Anyway, but the time, yes, exactly, Garrison. Okay. By the time he was an adolescent, he spoke German, Czech, and Hebrew fluently. Oh, okay, great. Okay, cool. Yeah, he's here. Yeah, he learns ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian, and next. Yeah, he is insufferable. Yeah, he gets admitted to university at age 15, which is, yeah, he's one of those kids. I wish there's a lot. He should have been. He should have been schooled at age 15, but I don't go around bragging about it on podcasts. Yeah, you don't speak ancient Greek either, Garrison. Yeah. I'm learned I'm trying because I need to get a lot better with my Greek for the Greek magical papyri stuff. And it's hard because all of the, all of the, all of the, like, the consonants sound weird, but anyway, yes, continue. Yeah, they say every family was, how to say, Spanicopita, Hota Stee-Dee. That's good. Spanicopita without cheese. That was all I needed to get by in Greece. Hot, or vegan Spanicopita. Love that. Now, here's a question for you, Garrison. You're getting, you're getting your PhD in magic shit right now from that, from that online school that I have paid for. Among other magic things that I've ever had, yes. Sure. How closer are you to that PhD, buddy? I'll get it within the year. You'll get it within a year. Well, that's, honestly, I've had other developments in my magical study that is slightly more impressive and reputable than that school. So we'll see, we'll see. Yeah. Well, if you don't finish it within the next few months, Garrison, then you'll get your PhD much later than Adam White shopped because he gets his doctorate five years later at age 20. So I can still get it by age 20. I can do it. Yeah, well, you better move fast. So he spins his teenage years buried in books at the University of Ingleshnotz Massive Library, which has 4200 books. Now, for a bit of perspective, I have more than half that. That's more than all of Florida. Well, it is, it is now after they ban all the books. Yeah, that's a lot of books for Florida. I just, I find it interesting, like the difference in what a lot of books was in, you know, this period of time, the late 1700s, kind of the start of the print era. Like, for example, today, the internet archive has 2 million modern books and more than 36 million books and texts. Yeah. It's just, that's kind of neat. That's a neat achievement, although a lot of those books are trash. So, but they were trash back then, probably too, a lot of the time. Anyway, Adam's a big reader, very smart kid. He becomes enthralled with a lot of enlightenment ideas and a lot of enlightenment philosophies as much as he can access while it's sort of banned in his area. Now, he does very well at the school. He gets promoted as soon as he graduates, basically, to insist, assistant instructor to the chair of Canon Law. And while I don't really know what that job would entail, and I don't care to learn, Adam was the first non-jezouette to hold it in this century. This does not go over well with the Jezouettes. They are not thrilled about this. And I'm going to quote next from a book by the Charles River editors. This prompted a stir of furwing brows within the Jezouette community. Still, Adam's hot streak was anything but over. In 1775, when the 27-year-old was main dean of the faculty of law, the Jezouettes sputtered their drinks and slammed their fists on their tables. The Jezouettes had had enough. They barged into the university boardroom and demanded Adam's paycheck be withheld until he complied with the university's principles. So, you know, that's not going to go well for them. Adam, they accused him of basically promoting off-chloron, the Enlightenment, and teaching banned topics that, like, different Enlightenment philosophers are calling. Yeah, he's talking about secularism, the idea that maybe the Catholic Church shouldn't run everything. They don't like this. And this pisses off Adam, right? The fact that he's has me to fight against these kind of regressive Jezouettes and their attitudes towards religion. It really pisses him off. And whenever he would come across a bump on the road, across like some sort of stumbling block that was put up by these old-timey monk-type assholes, he would think back to the words of one of his favorite philosophers, Jean Jacques Rousseau. One quote in particular stood out to him. The only practice that went on to teach children is that they should never submit. Which is, you know, that's based. Yeah, yeah. Adam Vyshock says, Youth Liberation. Based, based, based youth liberationist. Yeah, you should hear this guy's attitude on bedtime discourse. Oh boy. I got to go. So... Some of Adam's colleagues who were too frightened to stand up for him against the Jezouettes, but who were sympathetic to his aims, reached out to tell him like, Hey man, I know you're dealing with this secret society who are being real assholes. There's another secret society you might want to join because they can give you some support in your fight against the Jezouettes. And that secret society was the Freemasons. Now, people talk a lot about the Freemasons. They sure do. They sure do. They will never stop. And it's core. The Masons are exactly like the secret societies we started this episode talking about. These kind of neolithic organizations. It's like a guild. Yeah, it's a guild. Right down to the fact that a big part, one of the big things about the Brotherhood of the Tomole is that you get these very nice elaborate funerals. A big thing that the Masons provided was like life insurance that came with burial benefits for Masons. Like, that was a major reason to join the Masons. There's also it was a big part of it is for all that like people talk about the rituals and the magic stuff. A huge part of it is like, their members are mostly middle class and like upper middle class professionals. And if you remason, you get like a 10% discount at all Mason affiliated stores. So it's like triple A. Yeah, it's like triple A. It's like triple A and kind of like USAAA where it's like you get discounted life insurance. That's a lot harder for people who aren't in this organization to get. It's very much like a triple A. It's very much like a triple A. I had to actually sacrifice a goat to get them to jump my car the other week. Yeah. Imagine in 500 years this conspiracy is about to triple A. This secret group that's running the AI dystopia. In 100 years we'll have forgotten the secret of electricity so the their ability to jump cars will just seem like magic. Your esoteric knowledge. Somebody finds like an old triple A car that has like the fucking maintenance handbook for a Toyota Corolla. Start to worship it. The secret test. It was passed down through the litigages. You rise to the order unlike new passages of the manual. Just a thousand people sitting in front of an old Toyota and you do that thing where you like turn the key slightly and open the door so it starts making that sound. They all just help that's the home of the future. Meditate to the sound of the car alarm. Back then they could figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy from when they moved from one region to another to join a different sect of the triple A. The free masons were not an old organization at the time Adam was advised to join them. They had started in kind of and we don't know exactly when they start because there's actually not ever going to be an exact date for when they started because they emerge out of a bunch of different kind of independent groups that are all sort of similar in the early 1700s. It was like a tiny organic. Yes. There's all these independent groups doing the same thing and I think in 1715 and like I believe it was Scotland is the first time like a bunch of them all kind of merged together and say like hey we're going to be the free masons. But yeah, it's a very organic process. And by the late 1700s they'd spread from the Isles down to Bavaria. And Adam decides okay I'll dip my toes in masonry. I would like some backup against these weirdo Jesuit fucks. And he does a little bit of mason stuff but he's kind of turned off by all their weirdo occult rituals. He is like I want to share and trade in band knowledge and you guys are like dressing like sultans and tapping each other with toy swords on the shoulder. Like a lot of mason rituals are like racist costumes and silly little plates. You can go to mus, you can go to mason museums. There's one in Los Angeles that's really interesting and you can see there's silly little outfits. It's like high school theater grade level of construction and I assume it was not much different back at the 1700s. Have you tried to buy old swords? Some of the only swords from the 19th century that are available are some of the mason swords and they look like fucking Renfair garbage. Yeah, they look like shit. Yeah. Terrible swords from the fucking mason. Now I'm sorry for all this mason slander. If any mason's are out there feel free to hit me up. Yes, I will join. Oh, I could have joined at one point. My grandpa was a mason but it seemed like a complete waste of time. I don't know. Yeah, hit us up masons. Hit us up grand masonic conspiracy. I have better swords and we can talk. Yeah, I'm already a member of multiple secret societies. I will be happy to add another one to the roster. Yeah, great. So these rituals in addition to being cringey existed to provide the men there with a sense that what they were doing was hidden and separate from the regular world. And I want to read a quote from an anthropologist Janet Burke describing them. There is no question that the adoption lodge initiation rituals were designed to heightened dramatically the sense of friendship based on virtue among members. They contained all the consciousness changing elements of traditional rights of passage found in many cultures throughout history. Each ceremony began with seclusion of the candidate and a reflection chamber. The main part of the initiation revolved around the imparting of knowledge and it closed with integration into the larger group as a full-fledged member. Knowledgeable leaders imparted secrets, extracted oaths and demanded humility. Employed strong symbol laden words and instruments and authority from a distant past candidates were required to pass through a series of degrees and master each before moving on towards the font of final knowledge, the perfection promised by the organization, which was again a 10% discount at certain restaurants. It's so cool. It is really funny. When I go to the army, it's going to flash my base in. This is what the enlightenment is really for. If you want free meals, wear a circle A and then go to where, go to one of those towns where every service class working person is an anarchist. And I have you up. I have joined a secret society that rules the world and as the result every fifth trip that I take to the sizzler is free. So funny. Now, if you want to get free trips to the sizzler, maybe that's what is being advertised next on our podcast. You don't know. It might be listen in, sizzler heads. Garrison, have you ever been to the sizzler? No. Second question related. What's the most shrimp you've ever vomited up? Probably not much. Maybe like five or six shrimps. Okay. Sophie, we're taking a work trip to the sizzler. I'm down. Got a got a pill. Garrison on eating rancid shrimp at the sizzler buffet. Oh boy. All right. The rest of you pill yourself on these ads. This is what it sounds like inside the box. I'm journalist and I'm Morton in my podcast City of the Rails. I plunged into the dark world of America's railroads searching for my daughter Ruby who ran off to hop train. I'm just like stuck on this train. Now that's where I'm going to end up and I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters living outside society off the grid and on the edge. I was in love with the lifestyle and the freedom this community. No one understands who we truly are. The Rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history and the thing we call the American dream. It's the last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme. You're either going to die or you can have this incredible rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the city of the Rails. Listen to city of the Rails on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast or city of the Rails.com. It's 1967, the Cold War and Joseph Stalin's daughter, Stetlana, the princess of the Kremlin has just fled Mother Russia. Her new home, a place where the roads are paved with gold and people bake Apple pies out of baseballs and freedom, a place called America. Hello, everybody. I am very happy to be here. That story alone would be worthy of a podcast. But this one, Stetlana Stetlana, is about what comes next. And it's the craziest story I've ever heard. It has KGB agents, mystics and a Frank Lloyd Wright commune, destiny, immortality and unbreakable cycles, weird sex stuff, weird money stuff, weird dances, three Olga's, two Stetlanas and one neurotic gay playwright who won't shut up about it all. Guess which one I am. Listen to Stetlana Stetlana on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. I'm Peter Toman. And we know you've been pining for a brand new podcast hosted by an internationally beloved comedy superstar and television icon from the 90s. Yeah, and I did talk radio for over 25 years more. Come on, build yourself up a little. This reflects on me. Build it up. What should I say? I've created a show. Come on, five days a week. I was on five days a week. We could show thousands of interviews. Yeah, but shining star. You're a shining star. Say you're a shining star. I'm a shining star. You know what? I'll ignore all this because you actually told everybody the name of our podcast, which is really, really good. And then formative and funny show that seeks to answer the things that make Peter and I say, really? No, really? Jason, we'll ask the question that everybody wants to know the answer to, but we'll get answers that just may surprise you, inspire you, but we'll absolutely entertain you. So join us. You'll laugh, you'll learn. And me and the shining star over here might actually get paid. It's really, really with Jason Alexander and Peter Toman. On the I Heart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Where else would they get them? We're back. We're talking about times that we and our loved ones have all vomited at the sizzler. Nothing like a sizzler parking lot for puking in front of like some family of four and like having these little kids just watch you hurl. And it's such a good time. There's nothing I love more than strangers, children seeing me vomit out in public. It's a beautiful experience. See, I'm surprised you didn't go for the outback with this bit. Oh, I vomited in many an outback parking lot. You see puking is kind of my magic and I'm very much exoteric with that sort of thing. No, I'm a vomit mage. Good stuff. I am saying I am not inviting you to watch. If you cannot afford the cleaning bill, we have very little on funds. That is a constant problem with secret societies. So Adam goes through this initiation ritual and he thinks it's kind of stupid. I have no idea what he's going to wind up doing. I see he's the eliminate. His issues are like number one. He's like these fucking free masons are too new. They pretend to be an ancient society, but they're not even a hundred years old. They're making me spend a bunch of money on stupid costumes for this bullshit. The other problem he has is that it feels like it's too accessible to the public. A lot of regular people are masons. Not super poor generally, but pretty normal dudes. I want to trade and forbidden knowledge. I don't want to be hanging out with the butcher that lives four doors down. That's not a good secret society. He starts sketching out what he wants to do. He makes a plan to create a better secret society. His plan is basically he wants to make an invisible web of what he calls wisdom schools that will promote the molding of morals, scientific and human progress. He's come to the sort of acceptance of the scientific method over religious dogma is the path to happiness for the human race. That's what he wants to spread. And he wants to spread it through this like network of secret wisdom schools. So on May 1st, 1776, 28 year old Adam Weishaupt founded the Covenant of Perfectibility. He's calling it that because the idea is we're going to perfect the human race through knowledge. And this is the only thing that happened in 1776. Yeah, that's it's famously the year where nothing occurred. But the fact that this happens in 1776 is going to become the core of about a million stupid conspiracies. What a horrible timing. Horrible timing, Adam, mother fucker, pick a different year. So he decides after a brief period of time that the covenant of perfectibility kind of a dog shit name stupid. So stupid name. So he renamed the society the Ordo Illuminati Bavariancis or in English, the order of the Bavarian Illuminati. Yeah, much better name. You got to give it to him. This is why we do a B testing. Doesn't doesn't the Illuminati mean like the enlightened ones are something we are. We're talking about what we'll talk about that kind of that there's a couple of debates. So Adam specifically picks it because of there was a Spanish organization called the Olumbrados, which also means illuminated ones. He also likes the French term illuminés. There had been a number of little secret societies that had versions of that in their name. But his Latin. His was Latin. The sort of why they're all using variants of Illuminated is that kind of in the Latin, it means more like spiritual and mental than it does like literally illuminating a space with light. Yeah. Yeah. And he he wants his his interest here is not to create a mystic society. He is not super into like the weirdo ritual stuff. But he comes to the conclusion just based on his low opinion of the people around him that quote of all the means I know to lead men the most effectual is a concealed mystery. So he decides he's going to wrap this network of schools in like a skin of the skin of a mystic organization because he thinks that will draw in more people and people who can fund what he's doing. From the beginning, he recognized that mostly men want a way to feel like they're special. Somehow separate from the rest of their peers in the greater mass of humanity. Secrets societies have always offered versions of this. But in the new modern age that was being built, a sense of connection to the mystic was more valued than ever. Adam's goal was to free society from the domination of cults like the Jesuits. But to do it, he was going to have to create a cult himself. That is such cases. The only way to stop a bad cult with a weird, the legit political hierarchy is a good cult. Yeah, it's not going to work right. So Adam starts talking with his colleagues at the University of Ingolstadt about his plans. And they all are on board because again, not much is happening in the late 1700s. The first one of the first people who kind of buys into his idea is an 18 year old student named Anton von Massenhausen. And Anton suggests that he model the structure of his secret society off of college fraternities. Now, these are not the frats of the modern era entirely, which are based more around partying than other things. But fraternity is kind of an enlightenment concept. It actually means something very important in this period of time. It's a codification effectively of the systems of mutual aid that had existed within secret societies forever. Like this concept of fraternity is like a buzzword that's going around at the time. And it kind of goes beyond just like simple concepts of community mutual aid. Famed sociologist E.J. Hobbesbaum noted that societies like the Massens elicited a sense of fraternity in part due to the heightened alternate reality of secret religious ceremonies that they carried out. So basically, some of the, there's this sense of fraternity in part of how you inculcate that is by making people feel like they're privy to a secret understanding of the world that everyone else doesn't have. The first totally not how radical politics work. It's totally separate than when someone becomes an anarchist or a communist or completely different. Or a fascist for that man. I know. Not the same thing. Oh, maybe fascist to it, but definitely not the left. Yeah, definitely not. No one else. No one else. Yeah. This is not effectively the same thought process that has made Twitter so fucking insufferable. Completely different. So the first official meeting of the Illuminati consisted of Adam Vyshopped and four other dudes, all young students of law that Vyshopped had either tutored or just decided were good kids that he could kind of manipulate. Their first order of business was to create their own special symbol, a wreath to medallion featuring a wide eyed owl. By the way, this is why there's a big owl at the, the fucking, the, the, what is it? That gathering in the woods in Northern California that all the rich people go to burning met. No way. That's no, no, no. Oh, the one that I don't actually know much about because I'm, yeah, you could not call burning man a secret society. Yeah. Although there's elements of this here. No, the fucking. I think I learned about your podcast, honestly. I can't believe I've forgotten the fuck. Yeah, Bohemian Grove. Yeah, Bohemian Grove. Bohemian Grove. Yeah. Bohemian is not that far away from Bavaria. No. It sure isn't. It's very far away from California. Not, not meant, yeah, probably. So, yeah, it, so one of the things that they do at the end of every Bohemian Grove, which is like all of the rich people, rich and powerful people go and party with Henry Kissinger for like a week. They stage ridiculous little plays and they carry out a ritual and kind of the crowning moment of it all is the cremation of care where they burn a 40 foot tall owl. Anyway, interesting. How, how, how, how, and again, this is part of where the conspiracies come from is that like a lot of this shit gets passed down for whatever reason this kind of image of an owl becomes. You know, as iconic as the Mason's eye, glyphs that they would put in shit that like winds up on the US dollar and stuff. Now, in that first meeting, the, the, the, this point five member illuminati listed their objectives as to stimulate a human and sociable vision support virtue where it may be threatened or oppressed by vice to promote the progress of all people and foster and benefit those deprived of education. Now, that sounds pretty nice. Yeah, not a bad list of things to do. Yeah. Adam additionally promised that he would protect his followers from persecution or oppression and that he would tie the hands of any kind of despotism by building a society that was capable of working between national lines. Yeah, his goal is to get as many intelligent and influential people to secretly join his illuminati as possible so that they can kind of take over and manipulate the levers of power in Europe. At the time he starts the illuminati out of his move beyond his simple desire to like support these enlightenment attitudes that were pro science and pro religion and he's gotten increasingly radical. He started toying with deism and he kind of gets piled on atheism and starts to believe that like not only is atheism a more rational way to look at the world, but we should we should push people in power in Europe who are atheists to kind of take more power away from the church. And you know what? It actually seems like this whole monarchy thing that we're doing across Europe is a bad idea and maybe everything should be a republic. So he this is when I talk about like he's trying to push these secret values what he's trying to push is like secularism and the idea that people get to vote. Now, this is very rapid 1777. It is some 1776 shit. So obviously it's illegal for him to talk about this where he is living. Other parts of you know what becomes Germany you can talk about this, but he cannot in Bavaria. So he borrows from the masons and he creates a strictly tiered ranking system for the illuminati. I'm going to quote from Massimo in Trovin here again. Although it counted only five members, the order was already divided into an aerial pagus consisting of vice-shopped, mass and housing and another student, Max Murr's, whose members knew the order was a brand new creation. And a circle of novices who were left to believe that the illuminati had instead centuries of history existed outside of Ingolstadt and had mysterious leaders above the professor of law. So what the first decision he makes is we have to pretend we're like a thousand years old and across the world and secretly rule the world. That is where it starts like the illuminati creates the illuminati conspiracy theory so people won't think they're silly. Yeah, that's a good way to prove that you're not silly. This is where it all begins. Vice-shopped felt the need to hide the truth from his followers, which eventually extended to pretending the lawyer was much larger than it needed to be. Now this was justified by the needs of secrecy, but mainly by the fact that what Adams trying to push is extremely boring. The actual center levels of the illuminati when you like get through all of the initiations and gain all of the rank, there's no more rituals. He just hands you a couple of illegal books about like maybe it would be cool if the Catholic church didn't run things. Like that's the center of you get to the center of it and it's like you know it'd be neat voting. Like that's literally the core of the illuminati's teachings. It's like building this unen of protection and secrecy around that because this actually is illegal. Yeah, exactly. And I feel like people might actually take a few notes here as not only more information gets made illegal like certain books or not being allowed to be shared in schools, but also stuff like HRT and stuff like access to abortion stuff. Right. As all these things get more and more legal, these types of secret society tactics get used again because they've been stuff they've been things that we've been doing for a long, long time, depending on the circumstances. Although in this case, you might want to learn from some mistakes that they're about to make. So from yeah. So lower level members members are promised that all of these rituals they're doing all of this magic has this like central explanation that's revealed the higher level members, but Adam has no, no like plans of actually letting most people in on this because again, it's really risky. So most of the plan is to kind of keep people string them along doing the silly rituals and hoping that that keeps enough of them happy that like the cream will rise to the top so to speak. I love the hypocrisy of that. This is all that's in enlightenment and teaching people. So we have to lie to these guys. Yeah. It's also one of the reasons why they do this, which is very practical and smart, but extremely funny is I'm actually just going to quote again from an intro in here. The order counted on Bavarian provincial notables indispensable for the dues they paid, but who would affiliated themselves, but thinking of joining a kind of free masonry in small towns where either there was no Masonic lodge, they did not know where to find them. They'd likely heard of alchemy and secret rights and hoped that they would be revealed to them, while they would not be particularly interested in barren to old whole box anti religious philosophy, even if it were revealed to them, which had of prudence it was not. Vyshop's quasi-masonic imitations were pedantic and uninspired. The answer he invariably gave to the disappointed was that as in free masonry and the Illuminati, the first three degrees were preparatory to further initiations where the true ritual mysteries would be revealed. Big part of this is I need rich people's money and they want to pretend they want to feel like they're alchemists, so I've got to like, I've got to fake that. So we can fund the illegal book trade, like he's conning rich people out of money by convincing them they've become wizards in order to buy illegal books and trade them around Europe. I mean, I mean, that sounds alright. That is also very cool. That's also been a core component of wizardry for a long time. A big part of figure wizard is lying about alchemy and taking rich people's money. That's the real magic. It's that and also getting sick and dying off of metal fumes being boiled in like an unventilated room. Those are the two main components of doing alchemy. At least witchcrafts just sell us crystals. See, I want to go back to my favorite meme, the two guys from Predator shaking hands and have it be wizards red necks in the south with a backyard workshop in hailing metal fumes and getting a metal flume fever. Margaret, you got anything to plug? Yes, if you inhale books, illegal books that only the secret, if you can find where to purchase escape from in some island, then you're on the in crowd. And I'll give you a hint. That code tangled wilderness.org or wherever you purchase books. That's my most recent book. You can get it there or you can actually listen to several of us enact escaping from in some island. If you listen to the strangers in the tangled wilderness podcast, there's a live play of a role playing game based on based on my book escape from in some island. That's what I got. We all played it. It was really good. You also have a podcast on this very network. Oh, shit, I do. If you like cool people who did cool stuff. And then you can find where to it's called cool people to cool stuff. It's on cool zone media. It comes out every Monday and Wednesday. It's sort of the inverse behind the bastards. Not that I would ever do anything on original derivative. Now if you really want to be a cool person who does cool stuff, what you should do is weld galvanized steel without wearing any kind of mask or respirator. Yeah, the Zinc is what the cool yes, like the wizards do. Yeah, Zinc is really positive. I see it at the grocery store, zinc pills. So clearly the most effective way to get zinc is to well, Calvin, I steal without a mask. When I used to be like really anxious and I was doing jewelry work, I would like start freaking out and calling like my doctor friend as soon as I like I like soldered something that had some galvanized on it. And I was like, I'm about to die. But then again, what do I metal worker friends did almost die from accident doing some shit to galvanized so. And that means he's in the coolest secret society of all. So the action order of nearly killed my lungs by welding galvanized steel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sure. I recently wrapped up a four part series on the defending Atlanta forest and stop cop city movement in Atlanta, Georgia. That can be found on the it could happen here podcast feed. Yeah, it's it's four episodes at this point, could probably binge all of them all in a row. Yeah, it covers a lot of the stuff from the past the past few months and the recent killing of a fleet of a forced defender by the Georgia state patrol. So it's a kind of some kind of some heavy stuff, but also talking about I think things that are important you get to hear from people that are on the ground throughout the series. That is the that is the most recent kind of large project that I have that I finished. Hell yeah. Very cool. Almost as cool as in hailing metal fumes. So I will say near like us of us of a few blocks away from the anarchist community center inside it inside Atlanta. There is a free miss in building just just like right right down the street. So that is between them. There is one is a front from the other possibly possibly. Almost certainly all right everybody come back next time when we will hear the exciting conclusion of the story of the Bavarian illuminati and eventually all of the other luminities that that come after it leading to QAnon and the probable destruction of western civilization. Anyway, have a good have a nice day. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media from more from cool zone media. Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hersse. And inside his heart is like a lot of goods, but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Fans of the hit TV show scandal can now revisit every episode on unpacking the toolbox scandal rewatch podcast hosted by the cast members behind Quinn Perkins and Huck. So gladiators grabbed him getty's burger and relive scandals most iconic OMG moments. We would be in like 110 degrees in a wool coat. I mean the chasing that was going on in my pencil skirts. I deserve all the acting awards people. Listen to unpacking the toolbox a scandal rewatch podcast on the I heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow. Hoping to become the youngest person to go to space. Well, I don't know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.