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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What's creating my occult belief systems that, if you scratch deep beneath the surface, are fundamentally anti-Semitic and racist. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ******** the podcast where we have increasingly long and incoherent introductions. But this one does tie into the theme of the episode. What it doesn't tie into is my guest today, Chris Crofton. Hey, how are you? It's in there. I'm doing good. I always expect the sorns. Yeah. Yeah. It's OK to be eating a croissant. You continue eating that croissant, and I will introduce you as a comedian, a musician and an advice columnist. I hope you finished the croissant now. Yeah, I'm done. Fantastic, that's all true. I write an advice column called the Advice King for the Nashville scene, which is like there. Alt Weekly there, and it's kind of a comedic advice column, but I get mad about stuff a lot, so I mean. This this podcast seems like to me a good fit. Like, you guys get mad, don't you? Ohh yeah, yeah, we do get mad. This is gonna be there's gonna be some anger here. There's gonna be also a lot of confusing here. This is a weird episode to bring you in on for your first episode of ********. I'm ready for anything. This might be the weirdest one we've done yet. Have you ever heard of a guy named Rudolph Steiner? You know, honestly, he sounds familiar, but I don't. I can't figure out why. Well, let me ask you a follow-up question. Do you know anyone who ever went to a Waldorf school? I don't think so. That's OK now. He's not a huge name anymore. A lot of their Waldorf schools are pretty common. They're an international chain of very progressive, uh, schools that have good reputation for, like, particularly the arts. Jennifer Aniston graduated from Waldorf school. Rutger Hower graduated from Waldorf School. So Justin Thoreau and Big Sean Umm, you know, there's there's a lot of different people went to Waldorf schools, and the Waldorf school was the brainchild of Rudolph Steiner. Among other things, now most people again haven't heard of Mr Steiner. He also invented organic farming. And was an influential mind behind the development of Nazi ideology. Yeah, I was thinking he sounded like a Nazi. I mean, his name's Rudolph, after all. Yeah, he he was not a Nazi. Although, weirdly enough, he ties in directly to another Nazi named Rudolph. It's quite the tale. Yeah. Well, the Waldorf school. OK, so that's a chain of, like, progressive. Yeah. High schools for rich people who think they're just high schools. But yeah, chain of progressive schools for rich people. Yeah. OK yeah. So that makes sense that I would not have heard of those. Yeah, I'm from Connecticut. And we, uh, actually, no. You know what? Connecticut. There's definitely a wall. Yeah, I just did. OK. I'm not from. I didn't have enough money to be in that loop. But yeah, I'm sure I knew people who I'm sure I actually grew up with a lot of people who probably were going to those things or, you know, people in. Yeah. New Canaan, CT. I'm from New Canaan, Connecticut, which is the dude of L Paul Bremer. The the third who dismissed the Iraqi army went to went to my, my, my school. Yeah. And I know what kind of trimmer. I know those kind of people. Yeah. Yeah. He's Paul Bremer's, the kind of guy who would send his kid to a Waldorf school, which is nothing against, actually, like, I I have friends who went to Waldorf schools. I I know somebody who teaches at one. We're going to be talking about their origins today and some things that still go on at some of them that are pretty dark, but a lot of them are just kind of normal progressive schools. So if you went to a Waldorf school, we're not calling you a Nazi. But there's there's about to be some Nazi **** up in this, so, well, strap in. I mean, I'm not. I'd like to. I'm already mad at the Waldorf school for turning Justin Thoreau loose on us. I mean, I feel like 1 Rutger Hauer like equals out like 1 1/2 just in thoreaus that's true. I mean, I'm very grateful for Rutger Howard, and I'm very equally ungrateful for for old Thoreau. Yeah, yeah. So like we we can we can both, we have, we have like the the tears in the rain speech from the end of Blade Runner to think Waldorf schools for, but also Justin Thoreau and a lot of friends. So yeah, it's tough, you know? I'm going to read a Wikipedia summary of what a Waldorf Steiner school is, just so that we can kind of get on the same page about how they build themselves. So this is kind of the the the the basic description you'll get of 1 from our most trustworthy randomly edited encyclopedia. Waldorf education, also known as Steiner Education, is based on the educational philosophy of Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. It's pedagogy strives to develop pupils and intellectual, artistic and practical skills in an integrated and holistic manner. The cultivation of pupils, imagination and creativity is a central focus. So that doesn't that doesn't give you a lot of details, right the, the other than that it's like, you know, it's focused on developing people, kids, intellectual and artistic skills, which like you'd hope any school would do. The mention of Anthroposophy is, is, is probably the one stand out there which have you ever heard of anthroposophy? No. Could you say that part again of that description where he said where it said anthroposophy? Yeah yeah. It just says that he's the founder of Anthroposophy as well as uh the educational philosophy behind. Waldorf school. Well, OK, that's unusual. Yeah, I've never heard of that. Yeah, yeah. You don't run into the phrase anthroposophical a lot. Is that still a thing? Is that the thing where you judge someone's character by the shape of their head or, like, lumps lumps in their head? That's phenology. That's phrenology. Yeah. Yeah, that's phrenology. Although I will say probably a lot of anthroposophists were phrenologists back in the day. They're like, sitting around feeling each other's heads and drinking cognac. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah, yeah. None of that sounds inherently bad, but obviously this is behind the ******** and it's going to get terrible, right? So let's first delve into Rudolf Steiner's life. Rudolf Steiner was born at 1861 in a tiny Austrian village whose name I am about to butcher. Kraljevic. His father is generally described as a what? You don't even know if that's wrong, Sophie. You don't know Austrian villages. No, you probably got it right. That's the funny part. Well, our Austrian listenership will let me know if I'm wrong. Uh. His father's generally described as a mid level railway official in the Austro Hungarian Empire. Once among the world's great powers, the old empire was in a state of advanced decay for much of Rudolph's life. It was also one of the world's major crossroads, an incredibly ethnically and culturally diverse melting pot encompassing the Balkans, much of Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean. His hometown is currently part of Croatia. So, like, I guess if you're Croatian and listening, you'll know if I've pronounced crouchback wrong. He was born in Croatian melting pot. Well, but it was Austrian at the time. OK, yeah, you'd get shot for being Croatian back at those days. That's what's a white melting pot. Yeah, I mean, they didn't consider them all white at that point. If you were from that Far East in Europe, they were like, that's not a white guy. Yeah, he's from the Balkans, OK. Italians were still earning the right to be called White when he was born. Yeah, so he spent most of his childhood and youth and Vienna, as well as places with names like Steiermark and Burgenland. As a young man, he showed a strong interest in mathematics, physics, and Natural History. He eventually enrolled at age 18 in the Technical University in Vienna. He started attending lectures by famous philosophers of that era, one of whom was Franz Butano. Now Brentano was the influential mind behind a number of concepts in philosophy that I don't find interesting, and one in which I kind of do the theory of perception. The key line here was perception is Miss Ception. In short, Britannia believed that our external senses could not tell us anything concrete about the existence of the world because we might just be hallucinating or whatever. As such, all we could know for certain was our internal perception. So if you smell a rose, you can't know that a rose is actually in front of you, but you can know that the scent of a rose is in your nose. That's may seem pedantic, but it had a big influence on Rudolf Steiner. And again, this was the 1880s, so people had nothing else to do, right? Yeah. But so speculate a lot of speculation going on instead of the Internet. There's a lot of just like, thinking, yeah, yeah, that that's literally what people had instead of the Internet, which sounds like a nightmare. They were like, I think roses are actually a figment of our imagination. While they were like sitting around doing nothing, that was their Twitter. That's cool. God, we. Yeah. Thank God we have the gram now. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if which. I think I know which is worse by a long shot. Actually. I think speculating about whether roses are invisible or not is a better pastime than playing Candy Crush. All right. Well, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. When Rudolph was 21, in 1882, a germanist scholar named Karl Schroer attacked him with helping to publish Gertha's works on Natural History. Now, Gertha was a free thinker who considered himself a Christian, but thought all Christian churches were more or less nonsense. He was notably an anti nationalist, but is also widely considered to be one of the founding minds behind the idea of germanness. As Steiner was working through Bertha's catalog, he also grew involved in the burgeoning Pan German movement. The German state had only been founded about a decade earlier, at the end of the Franco Prussian War, and a lot of people in central Europe with backgrounds similar to Steiner were super excited about this hip new concept called being German. You started churning out articles for the Austrian Pan German press and essentially tried to push the idea that Austria ought to be a part of this new Germany thing. So it's very into the idea of Germany, which I don't know if you're aware, has been kind of a mixed bag historically. Yeah, I mean. Then yeah, I mean, it was like the narrative of of the modern world was like emerging at that time, like along with industrialization. So it was, I guess, I mean, I actually don't know what I'm talking about. Cold Brew just made me say industrialization. Yeah, no, they had a lot to do with industrialization. Yeah, they have. Like, they were just establishing the narrative of of like of like a modern. Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, I get. I mean, I'm just thinking about they're doing OK. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's happening right now is they're moving past the idea of these countries that were countries because some dude had conquered an empire 300 years before. And we're moving towards this idea of countries based on ethnic groups. So, like, the like the Roman Empire that like ethnicity didn't it was like there would stop hire. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like they're there. Woodstock racist. I think maybe I'm pan German. Yeah. Maybe all the people who don't look exactly like me are worse and I should just live in a country. For people like me, right, right, right, yeah. So that's sort of the the developing idea. Cultural shift, a cultural shift. A big one, yeah. From 1884 to 1890, Steiner made a living as the private tutor of a rich businessman and an encyclopedia writer. Uh. He also worked on his pH. D At the University of Rostock. His thesis had an appropriately boring title, the basic question of epistemology, especially in relation to fix philosophy of science. I have no idea what it's about, and I'm not going to learn. Up through the 1890s, there was little reason to believe Steiner would ever be a particularly influential or interesting human being. During the late 1890s he started editing literature, magazines, and the trade papers for the German Stage Association. He became prominent among the German typesetters and printers associations, and during the early 1900s he lectured increasingly on history, literature, and the art of speaking to various audiences. But sometime around the turn of the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner had a profound spiritual experience. And it's kind of unclear what exactly happened, but he just sort of became convinced that he could see into the spirit world and communicate with celestial beings. He has opium, they're all smoking opium. It ******* opium or something? Uh, some some Steppenwolf ********. Yeah. Now, I wish I had a more exciting answer for the actual event that like, flipped his brain on here. But yeah, it might have been ******* opium. So he went through. He really did. Truly. He he thought in some way that he had had a supernatural or was us. Yes was he had a supernatural awakening? That would be a fair way to say it. He had a supernatural awakening and became convinced that he could communicate with this. Spiritual world outside of the regular world. Wow. Yeah. So that's where Steiner's head goes in this period of time. That's that's odd. That doesn't happen to everybody. No, it does not happen to everybody, thankfully, because we really could not handle that many more Rudolf Steiners in our no, that happens to a lot of, like, the worst. People have those kind of epiphanies. People like Jim Jones and stuff like that don't have epiphanies. That's one of the leading messages of this start never have you are. Touch with the spirit world or whatever you might wanna settle down because you're probably about to do something bad eventually. Stick to drugs that just dole your sense of the supernatural. The Taco alcohol? Exactly. Chewing tobacco, yeah, yeah stick to chewing tobacco. Keep those ghosts out of your head. Yeah, just be normal. Settle down. Settle down, early 1900s guy. Yeah, yeah, if only so. In 1901, Count and Countess Brockdorff, a pair of Austrian nobles with a deep interest in the occult, listened to some of Steiner's increasingly weird lectures on history and spirituality and got interested in the guy they invited him to speak at the Theosophical Society. I know about that. Yeah. What do you know about the Theosophical society that doesn't have anything to do with Madame Blavatsky? It sure as **** does. That's where we're headed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I am very excited to talk about Helena Blavatsky. Uh, we have not talked about her on the show yet, and I think, yeah, you've obviously heard of her, which is great. I'm gonna guess a lot of listeners haven't. She's one of the most important people who ever lived for some terrible reasons and isn't a neat tale. We'll do an episode on her someday. Well, she tied. Did she have anything to do with Rasputin? Yeah, I think there's some rumors to that effect. I haven't. I I don't know exactly that, but I can tell you she had a **** load to do with some Nazi. OK, I didn't really know that. OK, ohh yeah, yeah, not directly, but in terms of like, her ideas. Sure, Helena Blavatsky was about 30, some odd years older than Rudolf Steiner, and while she never lived to see the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, her ideas were utterly critical to the formation of what those of us in the Nazi study and business call esoteric Hitlerism. She was a foundational mind behind the new age movement too, and her influence extends to **** like goop and your local vaguely witchcraft themed store. One of Helena's big ideas was the concept of root races. And this is where we get the term Arians first being used in a context similar to how the Nazis used at Helena. Blavatsky is the person who, like, invented sort of the modern context with which the word ariens is used. But, and by modern, I mean racist. I did not know that. Yeah, there's an actual area, an ethnic group that, like, went up through India and, like into China. That's like a thing that, like, you know, if you're an anthropologist, you're gonna study the Aryans. And then there's like Nazi Arians, like this idea because she was. Russia, right. She was not. Yeah, I think so. So she wasn't trying to. If she was talking about Arians, she was probably talking about just some, like, supernatural race or something like that, but not necessarily German. And then the Germans. Probably not. Oh, that's us. Yeah. Yeah. She was not talking about Germans, but she was talking about Arians in a way that, like, some Germans really latched on. And then, yeah, that's developed her ideas more. Yeah, that sounds like us. Yeah. So she believed in this concept of root races, and she believed that modern peoples. Their descendants from these different races. And in her philosophy, the extinction of Native Americans was a matter of what she called karmic necessity as a result of the will of spiritual masters who secretly organized and ordained all human progress. So Helena blavatsky's like Arians are a thing. Whenever races get wiped out, it's good. It's ghosts making it happen because of Karma. So that's why genocide happens. Ghost Karma now the spiritual. That's ******* ghost. Armas, that Scientology. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's a little bit of that in here. And Blavatsky like, you know, Blavatsky had an impact on, Umm, uh what's his ******* name? The satanist guy? Alistair Crowley. Yeah, Crowley. Crowley had an impact, a significant impact on the, the development of L Ron Hubbard. Yeah. So like, all of these, all of these people are tied together. Ideology. Have you talked about Jack Parsons on this show yet? A little bit. We talked a little bit about him and the L Ron Hubbard episode. We didn't get much into, like, the the ghost baby or the the devil. Maybe, or whatever they and L Ron Hubbard tried to **** into that Lady. Yeah, it's a wild tale. Yeah. Scarlet woman. Hmm. Yeah, all of this stuff is tight. So Helena Blavatsky like, like I said, she's in the intellectual chain of custody for Nazism as well as like kind of modern Satanism and as well as like just like random books on tarot that you pick up at like your local corner store, like all of this **** is that she was very influential. And how did Rudolph find out about her? Well, she was just a big like he he gets invited to speak at the Theosophical Society. OK Umm. And the the Helena Blavatsky was the founder of the Theosophical Society. So she's like the the intellectual guru behind this cult that he first gets invited to speak at and then finds himself being drawn into. So that's where he gets like taken in by all these ideas of root races and like spiritual masters and karmic necessity. I should I should note the spiritual masters that Blavatsky and then Steiner talked about. They're like vague non human entities, possibly from space. You wouldn't be far off to lump them in with HP Lovecraft's concept of the old ones. They're they're not wildly dissimilar. So on the outside at least, the Theosophy society presented itself as a group of freethinking intellectuals asking questions about the nature of the universe and spirituality. But it's actual organization was fundamentally authoritarian. Only Blavatsky and her chosen successor, Annie Besant, could receive the secret truths from their otherworldly patrons. Ergo, all power in the organization. Descended, by necessity, from those people in a pretty straight line. Now, of course, Madame Blavatsky didn't just receive her wisdom from direct conversations with the old ones. That would be silly. She also benefited from the astral equivalent of a Public Library, the Akashic record. These indestructible tablets of astral light held the entirety of the human past, present, and future in them. By studying the tablets, one could discover perfect knowledge of the world and history. Now anyone, theoretically, could access these records. Sort of like Wikipedia, but since they were astral projections, the desires and biases and fears of an individual viewer could lead them to make the mistake of thinking that like they were reading the wrong thing on their records. Which is why only trained occultists could be trusted to derive useful information from the Akashic record record in a building. It's in space. It's in space. Oh, so this was like, it was. It was not public domain. It was it was like, I mean, they OK, it's space ghost Wikipedia, right? So it's something they said. Existed and everybody took their word for it. Kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Kind of like the gold tablets that told old what's the name of the guy who founded Mormonism? Myth. Yeah. Yeah. Joseph the old. I saw, I have. I found a tablet that said I can have sex with your wife and they're like, where is it? It exploded. Yeah, it's like that. But less physical because no one even pretends that the Akashic record was ever a physical thing. I just love that Joseph Smith got away with that. I I just. I get. I give it to him just for. Hotspur, just to say, you know, where is the tablet? I wanna see this tablet. Listen, you can have sex with my wife. I just want to see the gold tablet. It exploded. It's like I always say, Chris. Great minds who want to have sex with 15 year olds think alike. God, it's I mean. So that that that's interesting, Madame Levitsky. OK, so this, this smells to me of just rich kids. I mean, this just sounds like rich kids. They are. They're just a bunch of rich kids and they got they like to do weird **** which is the. Not a lot of day laborers among the Theosophical society. Yeah, exactly. Construction wherever peasant was like making bricks out of **** while these people were, like, getting ready to die in World War One. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So like eating, eating like root vegetables and getting ready to die in World War One while these ******** are in some mahogany room? Talk to choose. Yeah, being like, I I am the only one who could access the invisible library and **** like that. The Ghost Library and space. It's fun. I've been to rich people's parties. They're fun. I mean, you know. I think they've replaced all the spiritualism has been replaced with cocaine. Now. That might be a step forward, actually. It's less, it's less dangerous. It's just 100% ******** that goes away in the morning. I will say Sigmund Freud was also in the city at around this time, so these people were probably doing a lot of cocaine as well. God, like this is the period in which people realize how awesome cocaine is. So I'm gonna guess actually a lot of this is explained that that might be why Steiner had his spiritual awakening. So these guys go ahead. No, no, continue. Oh, I was just gonna say, like, anyway, this sounds like a lot of fun. I mean, in a way, you know, if it didn't go bad, I mean, like the idea of, like, getting together and I feel like I was born at the wrong time. I think I would have had a great time. And these things being like, I think that. You know, I think if I have a little another bump of cocaine, I bet I can see my grandma projected on up. Yeah, or like I'll start spitting out, what's that stuff that they used to? Uh, uh, what's the stuff that looked like pasta that they were always, but it turned out it was like cheese cloth. They were during seances. Ectoplasm. Oh, Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That that's how they would fake. Echo was love. Yeah. I would just be like, oh, I'm about to produce ectoplasm. That'd be a way to *** **** back again. I would just like this guy. He he produced his ectoplasm. It's awesome. You would just try to be there Coke dealer and see if I could get get them to let me tell lies about the Akashic record if I gave them enough blow. Like can I see it yet? Can I see it yet? My boyfriend just let me know when I'm there. My boyfriend says he produces ectoplasm, but I think it's cheesecloth. I don't even know what. Jeez, that's what they always say in the, in the, in the descriptions. They're like, like, you know, the debunkers are like, it was always cheesecloth. I'm like, I'm never clear on what cheesecloth is. Anyway, I think those debunkers may not know because they weren't there at those coke. I mean, like, given the amount of blow these guys were probably doing, they might just have been Hawking up big wads of, like, congealed mucus and cocaine that would look like it was Oh my God, it's just all the excess coke that couldn't get absorbed in that case, I bet. Justin throws produced quite a bit of ectoplasm. Yes, yes. And Speaking of ectoplasm, you know what's a lot like ectoplasm, Chris? What? The products and services that support this show. Oh, cool. Yeah, this is an ad break. All right. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. Always felt like an ambassador. For speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle. The hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. You get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Hey, it's Chuck Wicks from love country. Talk to Chuck where we bring you, what's really happening in the country music family. We also if you love country, here's the deal. If you love country music, you can be on the podcast. So if you're a fan, got your music, well you can call in anytime. Like, I want to talk about this. Hulk Hogan called in season one. He's like Chuck hulkster. I love your podcast. I mean, Jason Aldean, Jimmy Allen, Carly Pierce, Lauren Elena, so many huge. Cars have been on love country. Talk to Chuck season 2. It's gonna get even better. Gonna have the same big giant huge stars. But I think it's time bring some people in the studio right off the street. You love country music? Fine. Come talk to Chuck. That's how cool we are. I'm just saying it. I'm saying it out loud. Listen to new episodes of love Country. Talk to Chuck every Monday and Thursday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. We're back. We're back. Sophie's proud of me. I'm proud we're we're we're rolling right along into the tail of Rudolph Steiner. So, like I said, only trained occultists could be trusted to derive useful information from the Akashic record. And as soon as he starts speaking at the Theosophical Society, he you know, Steiner almost immediately afterwards joins the society, and he very quickly rises to become one of those experts. In 1902, barely a year after his start lecturing there, he was asked to become the general Secretary of the German Theosophical Society. The one term he attached to taking the gig was that he would be allowed to lecture and teach about the results of his own spiritual investigations. So they're like, well, you run the German branch of this weird ghost Society of ours and he's like, I'll do it, but you got to let me say that I'm able to read the Ghost Encyclopedia, too. Wow. So that's his is a solid grift. Well, it's also a solid job. What a great job. I wonder what a salary was. I want to know what the salary was for, for the, you know, the head of the Russian division of the. Theosophical society that's what I'd like to know. I'm I'm gonna guess it was like an uncomfortable amount of money, but also barely enough money to buy lunch today. Like back then it would have been a fortune and today it's like a rap in downtown LA that that's my guest for his salary. Yeah. Now early in his studies Steiner studies. Most of those investigations focused on Atlantis and Lemuria. He was way into Atlantis and Lemuria. And I should say in some occult circles, Lemuria is just another name for it. Atlantis. But in Steiner's conception, they were two different sunken continents, both home to different root races of humanity. Now, he wrote a number of books on these topics, and they are all complete and utter nonsense. Wow. I'm just going to quote one paragraph from one of these books where Steiner explains that human beings started out as a gender creatures capable of ******* themselves. So. We're definitely capable of ******* ourselves. Yes. Yes, we're proving that now, but not the way he pay attention. He didn't foresee climate change, but yeah. When we study the Akashic records, we see that at a period in the far past, human forms appear soft plastic, and quite unlike those of later times, they still retain an equal measure. The nature of man and woman. As time passes and matter densifies, the human body appears in two forms, one of which resembles the man's later form, the other the womans. Before the appearance of these differentiated forms, every human being could of itself bring forth another, the fructification was no outer process, but one which took place within the human body itself. When the body took on a male or female form, it lost the possibility of self fructification. Cooperation with another body was necessary in order to produce new human being. Fructified. Wow, that is some *********. That's the kind of **** I mean. It's yeah, that's how I would describe the beginning of the human race. You guys have no idea how much easier this podcast would be if I could just say that I was basing all of my write ups on a ghost encyclopedia like Sophie. Wouldn't have to put sources up. I wouldn't have to cite anything. I could just lie would be so much easier. That's exactly also how an 8 year old. Would say that the human race started. Yeah. How did you figure this out? I saw it in the ghost book that nobody else can read. Yeah, there's always it's always something that nobody else can have access to. Yeah, that's where the best evidence comes from. By 1912, Steiner's own theories about the universe and the Space Ghost Library had deviated enough from the Theosophical movement that he was forced to create his own weird cult. I'm going to quote now from Anthroposophy and Eco fascism by Peter Stoudenmire, the title of which sort of spoils where this story is heading. Quote he broke from mainstream Theosophy in 1912, taking most of the German speaking sections with him when Besant and her colleagues declared the young Krishna Murti a boy they discovered. India to be the reincarnation of Christ. Steiner was unwilling to accept a brown skinned Hindu lad as the next spiritual master. What had separated Steiner all along from Blavatsky, Besant, and the other India oriented Theosophists was his insistence on the superiority of European esoteric traditions in the wake of the split. Steiner founded the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. Shortly before the outbreak of World War One. He moved the fledgling organization's international headquarters to Switzerland. Under the protection of Swiss neutrality, he was able to build up a permanent center in the village of Door Knock. So that's that's the move that he makes. Doorknock, yeah, I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. Switzerland, man. Their neutrality has caused a lot of ******* trouble. It is. They need to choose a side. Hmm. So that is very interesting. But by the way, just quickly, Hindu lad is a great name for an indie rock band. Yeah, it would be. And that's this, like, so part of like one of the. There's a couple of weird things to do with Hinduism in here. One of them is that, like, one of the most influential fascist philosophers in this. Was an Indian woman. Another of these weird facts is that, like, yeah, the Theosophical Society was very much oriented towards India because India was in fact where like. The Earth, the actual Arians, like, moved through and stuff and like, settled and whatnot. The Indo Aryan peoples. Yeah. And there was a belief even among the Nazis that, like, you could find some of, like, the the, like, Aryan bloodlines in India. And the Nazis sent a number of expeditions happened to like, Tibet and ****. And I know about that. That's so ******* weird. It's weird. And what's worth noting here is that while the Nazis were willing to accept that, like, India might have, like, there might be Aryan bloodlines in India, Steiner was too racist for that. OK, so that's that's the guy. Yeah, that's the guy who would look at the Nazis and their ideas towards India and be like, y'all are too open minded about this **** right? So I'm just thinking about a guy in Hollywood who's playing bass in a band called Hindu Lad. What are you up to? One of those bands were like playing bass. Every song on their set list is. 11 minutes or longer, yeah, they're all white. Yeah, they're all white. They opened for Van de Graaff generator once in the 70s. Ohh book. That's deep Steiner. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. We can talk about the mean. I'm gonna guess. To be honest, a lot of this story has influenced different prog rock albums. Rock overlap with with racist, early 20th century racist philosophy, esoteric. Yeah, that's cool. If I were to read this out to the founder of King Crimson, he would just nod his head and be like, of course, like, I know that. Ready? You think I don't know that? Why do you think I picked up the guitar? If it wasn't for Rudolph and his theories, I would never have started playing the guitar. So Steiner declared his new occult philosophy to be anthroposophical spiritual science, which he called human science in the broadest sense, or who? Boy Geist swishing shaft in 1912. Yeah, thank you. His 1912 his followers created the Anthroposophical Society and imitation of the Theosophical Society. This was the beginning of anthroposophy, a thing which is very much still around today. Now here's where I point out that this episode is going to wind up being a little bit disordered because both the beliefs of anthroposophy. Had its impacts on society are incredibly wide-ranging. So at this point I'm going to talk a little bit about anthroposophical medicine. All right, so we're we're we're pulling out of the time stream a little bit to talk about one of the impacts of Rudolf Steiner's beliefs. So Steiner was not a doctor, never had any medical training, but his spiritual revelations informed him of several critical things. And I'm going to quote now from a good write up in quackwatch that summarizes some key facts of anthroposophic medical beliefs. Good health is achieved when the physical Organism is properly aligned with three non physical bodies that manifest during a humans lifetime. The etheric body, a set of life forces, the astral body, higher soul forces, and the eye a spark of divine selfhood or ego that separates true humans from animals and subhumans. Real warning on that subhuman thing? Yeah, yeah. Bad health, on the other hand, often reflects the working out of 1's karmic destiny if one enters this world carrying spiritual impurities resulting from sins and errors committed in previous. Lives disease can serve as a rite of passage, purging evils from one's bodily spiritual system. Thus, medical intervention is often a bad idea. A Doctor Who cures a patient with drugs, etcetera, may be blocking the patient's karmic self healing process. No, no way. That could be problematic. Yeah, that's that's yeah. We shouldn't help that person because they're going, they're going to need to die. Yeah, they're going to. They need to die as part of their journey. This dysentery sucks for them now, but when they die and come back in another life, they're going to be so much happier. Yeah, it's just simple. Also the simple, you know, like, whatever you have, whatever bad **** is happening to somebody is their own fault. It's like whenever someone drinking with my friends, I try to trick them. The drinking Everclear at the end of the night so that they vomit and then they feel better the next morning? Yeah, which is why I'm a doctor too, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. No, now what? Not a doctor. I am. Sophie says. You're not a doctor. I am, absolutely. I'm a doctor, Reverend. And, well, if this guy's a doctor, you're a doctor. We're all doctor. Thank you. See? Exactly. And actually, shockingly, there are a terrifying number of doctors who believe this. Like, actual doctors. Every trust fund kid in Europe in the beginning of the 20th century thought they were a doctor. Apparently I'm. Yeah. And unfortunately, that hasn't stopped a Lemurian Dr yeah, a Lemurian Dr with access to a ghost. Library where he learned medicine. *** ****. And then there were people just working. Yeah. Yeah. Then there's people, like, dying in a field. There's just some regular people who are working and eating ******* gruel. Yeah, yeah. Excuse me, laborer. Have I told you that? The Ghost Library, they're like, my boys got the Jeep keys going to death in tomorrow. Yeah, don't care your son's illnesses, Delos. Go some $5 for him in the future. Now, Peter Stoudenmire, uh is an associate professor of German history at Marquette University, and he's written out a lot of stuff about this. He's maybe the world's foremost expert on on on Rudolf Steiner, and I'm going to quote him now talking about Anthroposophic medicine quote Steiner's doctrine of reincarnation, embraced by Latter day anthroposophists the world over holds that individuals choose their parents before birth, and indeed that we plan out our lives before beginning them to ensure that we receive the necessary spiritual. Lessons if a disembodied soul balks at its own chosen life prospects just before incarnation, it fails to Incarnate fully, the source, according to anthroposophists, of prenatal defects and congenital disabilities. So if you're born with, like, an arm that doesn't work, like, you got one of those, like, shrunken arms, or if you're born with, like, you know, paralyzed from the waist down, that's because ghost you is a coward. Yeah. So it's see, that's fine. That's a healthy thing to believe. It's it's all. Yeah, well, I don't know if all these philosophies end up being this basically, like, I don't want to pay taxes thing, but that's what it really adds up to. It's just like that guy with no arm. It's his own fault. I I I don't. It's just always justifying why if you feel good, you don't have to bother with anybody who feels bad. About 70% of occult beliefs historically are rooted in rich people wanting to explain why it's fine that things were great for them while everyone else was dying in a field. Yeah, it's just like libertarianism. Except it's just got ghost libraries. And like, in fairness to the occult, that's also like, most of early Christianity. So yeah, yeah, it's just always the same. It's such a hack message, too. It's just like, yeah, it's just like, what's the most esoteric reason we can come up with for not giving a **** about anybody? Yeah, I guess, but not early. Like middle Christianity. Like once the church becomes an institution, it starts being like, This is why the people who are rich and powerful should be rich and powerful. Yes, it's always the best. It's always the same ******* message. Yeah, it's always the same message. Like at the start you get a guy who's like Jesus and is like, I'm gonna beat the **** out of people at banks because they're ********. And then 150 years later it's turned into like, no, no, no, the people with banks are the people God likes the best. Yeah, we just never pull away from that belief system. This is the this is the occult version of that. Yeah, yeah. Now, as ****** ** and blatantly anti medical as all of this sounds, there are a shocking number of actual MD's today who practice anthroposophical medicine. And in a little bit of fairness, they do use and prescribe real drugs. They are actual doctors. They also use natural and holistic remedies and therapies, though, some of which work and some of which are nonsense. Woo ********. I'm going to quote now from the National Institute of Health. Quote currently, there are approximately 24 anthroposophic medical institutions, which include hospitals, departments and hospitals, rehabilitation centers and other inpatient health care centers in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States and Germany. Three large anthroposophic hospitals provide accident and emergency services within their requirement plans. Of the German Federal states, two of them are academic teaching hospitals linked to neighboring universities. So this is a thing today. There are doctors who believe this **** today. And wonder where in America? Actual MD. Yeah, they're they're exactly where but they exist. Yeah, I'm going to guess there's a **** load of them in Malibu. You throw a ******* rock in Malibu, you'll hit an anthroposophic Dr telling you that your kid's birth defects are because his ghost was scared. Have you tried an anthroposophic Dr. They're amazing. They tell your kid it's his fault. They're incredible. Yeah, they failed my validate. Your belief system. Yeah. There's a lot of people who will say that anthroposophic doctors are just doing a slightly different kind of medicine, and they're perfectly good doctors. And maybe that's true. I haven't met any. But I am skeptical of the idea that any of them could be truly good doctors. For one thing, most of them are anti vaccine. See, Rudolf Steiner believed in reincarnation, and he thought disease was part of a patient's karma. So if you treat illnesses, or if you prevent an illness, you just force that person to get sick again in a future life during one of his lectures. Doctors, Steiner said this of the smallpox vaccine. If we destroy the susceptibility to smallpox, we are concentrating only on the external side of karmic activity. See, it's not a full treatment to stop someone from getting smallpox, because you're not dealing with the actual root of the problem, which is space goes, which is like a character flaw. See? Yeah, it's a character flaw from the past, yeah. So that the doctor, that's why you shouldn't get vaccinated. The doctors, the Doctor's job is converted from helping someone live to letting them die. I mean, letting them die because, whatever, it's their own fault. I mean, there's some process. It's like some learning curve or learning, like, you need to get sick. Yeah, or else you're not going to. Yeah, you're not going to. You're not gonna die like you're supposed to because you're a bad person. It's literally you need to get sick. Because when you were a ghost you decided you were going to get like smallpox at age 7 and you have to learn the lessons that will you will be taught by getting smallpox at age 7. You picked this, so don't complain. So Steiner, this guy Steiner must not have had any ailments. I guess he never got a cold or anything. He must have thought he was I, because this seems like the kind of philosophy that would end up killing you. You know, it's one of those things I feel like I don't have. I wish I had more information about his early life. I just don't. Umm, I it's I. He either was lucky and had none of those problems, or he had all of the ******* diseases as a kid and he just grew up thinking like, well, everybody should have to go through this ********. And he, like, came. He came out of him and he's like that. Yes. And like I it's been a character builder for me and it should be a character builder for everybody else. My guess is one of the two. Either he didn't get sick at all or he was like the sickest *** ** * ***** when he was a little kid. And he just grew up thinking that that was normal. Yeah. What, everybody. Some people. But he's like, instead of pulling himself up by his bootstraps, he pulled himself up by his diseases. Yeah, exactly. His disease straps, which were etheric and existed on the astral plane. So yeah, we we just talked about. Yeah. So Steiner said that, yeah, if we destroy the susceptibility to smallpox, we're concentrating only on the external side of karmic activity. So he believed that he also believed that dark Wizards might try to create evil fake medications that would cut humanity. Off from its spiritual roots. Yeah, we got some Wizards. Wow, uh quote. Endeavors to achieve this will be made by bringing out remedies to be administered by inoculation. Only these inoculations will influence the human body in a way that will make it refuse to give a home to the spiritual inclinations of the soul. So evil wizard doctors are going to give you vaccines that make your body refuse your soul. Hmm. Rudolf Steiner? Yeah. So again, it's like, seems like a bold stance to take based on nothing. Yeah, it's a bold stance to take based on nothing in a weird stance, to be the basis of a type of medicine that, again, a significant number of actual MD's believed today. So there are a lot of websites out there dedicated to defending Rudolph, Steiner and Anthroposophy, and we're going to hear from a couple of them a few times. One such site assures US, quote anthroposophical doctors reject nothing in the toolbox of conventional medicine. A priori, every option is considered for its appropriateness in a specific instance. Antibiotics are used when necessary, but so are homeopathic remedies. Physical therapy is prescribed, but so is curative eurythmy, which is movement, exercise to balance the forces within the body. It's like dancing medicine. So, you know, we'll give people antibiotics when they have infections, but we'll also give them water with nothing in it that's been like waved around. A route that we say cures things. That's a good doctor. Now. That, like, seems, I guess, not the least like that. That's not the craziest thing in the world given like the the wide Galaxy of stupid things people will do because they think that it's better for their health than traditional medicine. But Steiner's own words are even less reasonable than that. He told his followers that the heart was not a pump and that blood just circulates on its own, presumably by magic. He was also insistent that the brain was not involved in thought or cognition. He prescribed mistletoe for cancerous. Humours. And he was in general a complete ******* quack. So I'm going to quote from Quackwatch again, talking about the doctors that Steiner inspired. Anthroposophical physicians do not appear to conduct double-blind controlled experiments, so it is almost impossible to evaluate their success rates. All doctors witnessed mysterious declines as well as mysterious recoveries. Believers in anthroposophical medicine relate tales of highly successful treatments, but whether the alleged cures resulted from the treatments. The body's natural healing processes are overly optimistic. Reporting cannot be determined. Using ineffective alternatives instead of necessary science based care can have serious consequences. On waldorfcritics.org, Robert Smith Hall describes how he suffered. While being raised by Anthroposophists, they believe that sickness is the sole incarnating and also that it has to do with karma. They don't believe in inoculation. So I had all the child diseases going around some twice. Smith Hall reports that he was constantly ill throughout his childhood and that the primary treatment that his anthroposophical doctors prescribed was little white sugar pills called incluido and buckets and buckets of horsetail tea and also chamomile tea. What the Hell's horse tail tea? It's like a plant. OK. Those real horse tail. No, no, no, no, thanks. Put me out of that one. I'm quitting that. I'll quit that religion based on I'm not having some tea made out of a horse tail. I mean that would that. I suspect that would work better than chamomile tea. Maybe horses are full of healthy diseases. I guess you know, that's true. OK, yeah. Now certain foods made him sick, so he was required to eat great quantities of these very foods. The feeling that my parents had was that I should eat more of it as I obviously needed to Incarnate through the food. So I grew up being force fed food that was making me sick. As an adult, having broken away from Anthroposophy Smith, Halt was examined by a conventional Doctor Who correctly diagnosed his wheat intolerance. He's been improving ever since. Does this, Angela? Is this? Is this Angelina Jolie's kid? You kind of get the feeling, right? Yeah. This kid grew up in Malibu. Yeah. Yeah, like, Brentwood somewhere with rich people. And, like, his parents were like, ohh, he gets sick whenever he eats wheat. And the doctor was like, that means you gotta feed this kid as much weed as he can ******* stand. Yeah. Yeah. Never stop pouring wheat into the boy. What a bummer. Yeah, it sucks. I mean, that's terrible. I mean, I'm lucky he didn't have a peanut allergy or he would have died right away. You get the feeling that some kids with peanut allergies and anthroposophic. Doctors didn't make it. Yeah, the right away they would die. Have more peanuts. Ohh they're dead. Well, you know when they were Ghost donated, they were jerks. When they were ghosts. Look, I know it's sad, but your kid picked this when he was a ghost. You know he's a ghost again. A jerk and a weakling your kid was when he was a ghost. Yeah. Now, excuse me, I'm a doctor. Don't don't excuse me. Me, I'm a doctor. You know, my School of Medicine is great because it's founded by a guy who never went to medical school. Why don't you take a look at the Ghost Library if you're so smart? Oh, I'm sorry. Have you read the space encyclopedia? Wow. Yeah. So we're going to talk some more about anthroposophic medicine and its impact on European vaccination rates, and I'm gonna have some more cold brew. This is this is great. I love this show. I mean, this is very exciting stuff for me. This is my. I love this stuff. Yeah, it's fun. This is what I do in my spare time. But I just don't have a show to. I don't get to talk about it. I'm all by myself. This is great. This is what I did in my spare time until I had a show, and now it's what I do in my spare time. But now, Sophie. Yells at me and I get money. It's great. So it works out. Yeah. So we are gonna get back to anthroposophic medicine. But before we get there, we're gonna have to peel back a little bit and talk about the founding of the first Waldorf school. So for the sake of fairness, I'm going to quote from a Pro Steiner website. Now Waldorf answers quote in 1918 when a revolution took place not only in Russia. Note by me, the Russian Revolution started in 1917, but also in Germany and threatened to disintegrate. Social fabric. Steiner presented suggestions for a conscious threefold differentiation of society as a path for the future. It focused on the development of freedom in the cultural sphere, equality in the sphere of politics and legislation, and a globally oriented brotherhood in the sphere of economy. Steiner lectured widely on this topic, leading to a movement for Social 3 folding. That sounds nice, right? Yeah. In 1919, this led to the founding of the first Free Waldorf school in Stuttgart at the initiative of Immelt molt, the CEO of Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory. The school became the model for the Waldorf movement, leading to the building and development by 2009 of some 1600 Waldorf kindergartens and 994 independent Waldorf or Rudolph Steiner schools worldwide offering educational activities from early childhood through high school and in some cases programs for adults. So, Chris, yes, can you think of a better way for a school? Start then a cigarette factory pain started in. Oh, it's it was paid. Paid for. But I thought it was in a cigarette. An old zit? No. The CEO of the cigarette factory decided he liked the cut of Rudolph Steiner's jib and was like, yeah, let's make a ******* school, right? Well, it makes sense. Some rich guy. Yeah. If you if you own a cigarette factory, you gotta be doing pretty good. So you probably got nothing to do. So then you wanna think about things that are, you know, you got nothing to think about. So you're gonna start thinking about how I want to think about something exciting. How about this ********? And then you make a school. Yeah, let's make a school. I got nothing to do. Let's make a school. Yeah, let's make a I got a bunch of money, kids, that cigarettes are critical for human health. I'm gonna guess that Rudolf Steiner was very supportive of cigarettes as a health remedy. Which should be fair. Most people were at this time. Now you know what actually is good for your health, Chris. What's that? The products and services that support this show. Oh, I see what you did. Guaranteed to cure your diseases. Every product, whatever, whatever happens to be advertised will cure whatever you happen to have. That's the guarantee I make. We we are all doctors. I come from the the Evans School of Medicine. Going by Rudolph's rules were all doctors. Hmm. You just gotta Incarnate that ****. You tell me, Doctor Crofton. I'm the. I'm the anthropomorphic whatever, but I'm like, I've got a school of dilettantism, yeah. All right, pretty. Books. 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Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month, and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet. Very happy at Mint mobilcom. Behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight True crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador. First speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle. The hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Hey, it's Chuck Wicks from love country. Talk to Chuck where we bring you what's really happening in the country music family. We also if you love country, here's the deal. If you love country music, you can be on the podcast. So if you're a fan got your music, well you can call in anytime. Like, I want to talk about this Hulk Hogan called in season one. He's like Chuck hulkster. I love your podcast. I mean Jason Aldean, Jimmy Allen, Carly Pierce, Lauren Elena, so many. Huge. Cars have been on love country. Talk to Chuck season 2. It's gonna get even better. Gonna have the same big giant huge stars. But I think it's time to bring some people in the studio right off the street. You love country music? Fine. Come talk to Chuck. That's how cool we are. I'm just saying it. I'm saying it out loud. Listen to new episodes of love Country. Talk to Chuck every Monday and Thursday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. We're back, we're back, and we're talking about the cigarette factory that started a school. Now, as you might guess, a school founded by the CEO of a cigarette factory did not portend great things for the future of human health. Doctor Edzard Ernst has determined that between 1999 and 2010, ten outbreaks of measles in the UK, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany have centered around Waldorf schools, all of which had immunization rates lower. And 10%, there are more than 800 Waldorf schools in the world. Today, many of these are well regarded institutions and a huge number of famous people have graduated from them a lot of folks who work at these schools are I'm sure find people and educators, but there are also some really ******* dark stories from these places. Sharon Lombard, a parent whose daughter was enrolled at a Waldorf School had this experience when her kid got sick quote the anthroposophic doctor made a diagnosis. My child had lost the will to live, he announced one of the potential cures. We were to give our daughter, red, yellow. An orange crayons to color with. I looked at my husband in disbelief. When the doctor instructed us to make the sign of a flame out of orum cream over my child's heart at bedtime, I was dumbfounded. He told us to apply the gold cream from below the heart upwards towards the sky. So that's, well, that's medicine. How did this? Alright, but why did this? Did this woman not have any idea that the school was weird? Well, that's The thing is, like, how do you wake up in a Waldorf school if you're not already a crackpot? But it's got a great it's got a great reputation for, like, the arts and stuff. And like they do, like a lot of really famous actors and musicians and stuff went to Waldorf schools. They seem to be good at encouraging creativity in kids, so they're willing to, they want the networking for their kids and they're willing to kill them and if if they. I I don't think they really look into it that hard. Right. They don't know what anthroposophic medicine is really, but they know that the doctor there is an actual MD with medical degree. Yeah, that makes sense. How people get people into cults, they they they tell them what one thing about it. They just don't tell the other thing about it. Exactly. And, like, in this particular love, the Waldorf school, it's so great. It's all about creativity. And also, they won't give you any medicine. But we're not gonna. Yeah. If your daughter is sick, they'll give her crayon. Yeah, we'll give you. Yeah. I mean, that's that's that's the way that stuff works. That's true. Now, this woman's daughter was eventually hospitalized and she did recover under the care of normal doctors. And if the only impact of Waldorf schools was a few sick and presumably a couple of dead kids, I might not be writing this episode. But the rabbit hole of weird here goes a lot deeper. And this is where things get racist as **** ****. Forgot about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot. It was really hard to, like, figure out the like, how to pattern this out time wise because there's just so much to get to so. That we're going to be jumping around a little bit more than usual in this episode. Well, I got caught up in that I was already mad at Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer for, for, for. Oh, he's the worst people that get sick. And now I forgot all about the racism. Yeah, so I found a fascinating write up by a former Waldorf student also on quackwatch. This student points out that the vast majority of Steiner spiritual beliefs and the ideas behind anthroposophy itself were actually hidden from the students at the school. They don't talk about these beliefs. Like to the kids quote. The Waldorf I attended was lovely, with caring teachers and pleasant, carefully selected classmates. For the most part, I enjoyed my years there. Waldorf was small, 20 or so students at each grade level. The ambiance was close and comfortable as Steiner would have wanted. Waldorf was a religious school, but with A twist. It hid its faith. The school presented itself as a progressive, ultra modern learning institution, and in some ways it was. But the secular kind of framing of this was a disguise quote we students. Memorize no passages from holy books. We sang from no hymnals. Yet a strange aura hung about the school. There was a pervasive but unspoken spiritualistic vibe in almost every lesson, in almost every activity. It was hard for most patients to detect, but we students felt it to 1 degree or another. It was in the air we breathed. It defined the tenor and subtext of our days. Ultimately, it shaped and colored our education as effectively as if priests were delivering sermons to us. So you don't state this stuff out, right, but you kind of try to teach these kids some of the spiritual lessons of your beliefs, like covertly, without sort of directly proselytizing or talking about the actual **** Steiner believed. Later on in the write up, this student gives a deeply unsettling example of what precisely lurked beneath the surface in 12th grade. This happened to him in a biology class taught by the school headmaster, a guy named Gardner quote. He explained that the various races stood at different levels of moral development. Each was forging its own destiny. He said these things sympathetically, with no hint of condescension. Yet the vibe was in the room that morning. The terms he used were more metaphysical than biological. The Oriental races, he said, are ancient, wise, but vitiated. The African races are youthful, unformed, childlike, he said, standing near the center of humanity's family, are currently the most advanced races. The whites, he said. Where is this? Is there any references to where the school is? There. I think this one. Yeah. This one's in the United States. I believe it's on the East Coast. This is during, like, the 1970s, I think, when this happened now. Yeah. The author of this article also recalled an unsettling botany class with the teacher named Hertha Karl, who also taught German and Earth science, whatever that is. Can we find her on Facebook? I think she's dead now. She would have been a mature adult in the 70s. Yeah. Of all the Waldorf faculty, she made the least effort to disguise her devotion to Steiner. She drew figures of eight. On the blackboard and lectured us about lemniscates, the Mystic interaction of the telluric and etheric forces, which is the basic structure of nature, she said. During one day's main lesson, she veered off topic to warn us to never receive blood transfusions from members of other races. Blacks and Orientals have blood types that are physically different from ours, she taught us, and receiving such inferior blood would diminish our Arian qualities. Hmm, yeah. Nothing, nothing, nothing coded about that. Yeah, nothing, nothing coded there. So Rudolph Steiner did not live a particularly fascinating life. He mostly wrote and lectured and taught people crazy **** throughout the early 1920s. He did thousands of lectures, 330 alone, from January to September of 1924. He died in March of 1925, and his followers suggests that he basically exhausted himself with his workload. How old was he? His he? Well, he was 1860. He would have been like in his 50s or 60s, I think now. He did not have what I would call a particularly compelling life by the standards of other cult leaders. Like L Ron Hubbard, like when it just comes to the details we know about his existence. It's not super wacky or fun to listen to. There's no creating forcing a bunch of kids onto boats, and like searching for treasure in the ocean for 13 years. But Rudolph Steiner is something of an iceberg. What you can see above the water line looks more or less respectable, or at least nothing. No darker or sillier than like, you know, your friend with a tarot deck. But below that is where things get ****** ** very quickly and where we run under the weird race science stuff like Madame Blavatsky. Steiner believed that Native Americans were, in his words, dying out of their own nature. He believed they were one of several lower races of humans. Most aboriginal and non white races fell into this category in Steiner's mind. They were. Closer to animals than higher races of humanity, anthroposophy teaches that many of these races are descended from degenerate remnants of the Lemurian root race and are thus devolving into literal apes. Steiner called. For example, Australian Aboriginal people quote stunted men whose descendants still inhabit certain parts of the Earth today, as so-called savage tribes. Now, Steiner believed that they don't understand. I mean, I can't believe people. I mean, it's just like there's just, you can just make. I mean, this is all made-up, just made-up. I mean, just make it up. I mean, it's unbelievable. You just ******* just start just spouting off about and you wear spectacles or whatever and have a ******* Ascot on and then that's about it. It's all theater. It's like theater and racism combined. I mean, it's only theater and racism if you don't believe he really read from the ghost. Encyclopedia in space, right? Yep. Who believes that? Who are these? Ohh God, I would like to. I mean ghosts. Librarians, for one. I guess so. Yeah. Yeah, they got to work. Yeah. Now, Steiner believed that Japanese, Mongolian and Inuit people were descendants of Atlantis, and he had a broadly positive attitude. Well, a more positive attitude towards them than, you know, Native Americans or obviously black people. The best race, of course, was the Aryan race. I'm going to quote from Rudolph Steiner. Now we are within the great root. Face of humanity that has peopled the earth since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundation of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean race began slowly to disappear at the Great Aryan race has been the dominant one on Earth. If we contemplate ourselves. We here in Europe are thus the 5th subrace of the Great Aryan Root race. I wonder how I felt about frogs because frogs are from the water. Yep. I wonder if you thought they were like wise men or something. He might have agreed with Alex Jones on the subject of frogs and their sexuality. It's hard to say. Frogs are some like remnant. Race that's on the way out like that did bad stuff when they were ghosts. Yeah, frogs were terrible as ghosts. That's why they gotta live in swamps now. Rudolph believed that every race or Volk had its own special aura that best fit in its own specific homeland. He believed in something called Volks Geist, a natural spirit embodied by an etheric being that spiritually LED that group of people. Now, if you have studied your naziism, that's essentially naziism missing one or two. That one more time, yeah. Volkes Geist is a national spirit, the spirit of a nation, of a specific homeland, of a racial people that's evokes Geist. Like the Volks Geist is a national spirit that embodies like, the spirituality of a group of people, like an etheric being who is like the soul of the German people, for example. Right. OK, yeah, yeah. So the Nazis didn't believe. Obviously, Hitler was not an etheric being, he was a real person, but the Nazis did very much believe that he. Was the embodied national spirit of Arianna Ness of Germany. So again, Steiner isn't was not literally a Nazi. He died in 1925, and was probably only broadly aware of Hitler and his party. But Hitler's own, like the actual beliefs that the Nazis inculcated once they came to power were basically the same thing Rudolf Steiner's teaching except for, with instead of it being an etheric being. It's literally Hitler. But it's the same idea I've read a lot of person. Yeah, birth. What happened? What led into Nazism and. It's like, if you wanna if you wanna be like a dictator, you look, you search around for justifications and there was this soup of convenient ******** for them to pick from in in that that was that was happening around that time. So yeah, it was like convenient, like without this guy was a *******. But this, this other person, just if Hitler may have even thought this guy was a **** *** but he used him as a you know what I mean? I mean, it's just. This all becomes useful. Like, these philosophies become useful to someone who puts them all together and says, here's why I need to do this bad ****. Yeah, and it's, you know, Steiner's not the only guy saying stuff like this and lead up to the Nazis, like the Theosophical Society saying similar. Like he's, he's part of like a constellation of thinkers who prepares the intellectual soil in Germany for the kind of beliefs that the Nazis introduce. Like he helps ready the soil. Although, again, I want to make it very clear. It was not a Nazi himself, was not a follower of Hitler's. Now back to racism. I'm going to quote again from that Stoudenmire write up. That's the professor from Marquette University who's done a lot of the research on Rudolf Steiner. Quote. Steiner propagated a host of racist myths about *******. He taught that black people are sensual, instinct driven, primitive creatures ruled by their brainstem. He denounced the immigration of blacks to Europe as terrible and brutal, and decried its effects on blood and race. He warned that white women shouldn't read ***** novels during pregnancy, otherwise they'd have mulatto. Children in 1922, he declared the ***** race does not belong in Europe, and the fact that this race is now playing such a large role in Europe is, of course, nothing but a nuisance. But the worst insult, from an anthroposophical point of view, is Steiner's dictum that people of color can't develop spiritually on their own. They must either be educated by whites or reincarnated in white skin. Europeans, in contrast, are the most highly developed humans. Indeed, as Steiner said, Europe has always been the origin of all human development, which I think some people I know in the Middle East would be a little bit ****** to hear that. But that's an argument for another day for Steiner, and for anthroposophy. There is no doubt that whites are the ones who develop humanity. In themselves, the white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race. Now, this is all very ****** **. The good news is that most anthroposophists beliefs are, you know, hidden away from the students at Waldorf schools. This stuff is not like the general curriculum at a Waldorf school. And a lot of Steiner's work has been edited to make it fit into the modern era, and it's been pruned of its racism and just kind of turned into a more generically harmless, weird kind of a cult. New agey mishmash of nonsense. The influence these deeper racist, occult beliefs has on modern Waldorf schools is not consistent from country to country or from institution to institution, but it is still definitely present in some areas. In 2014, the BBC reported that diversity training was instituted on one Waldorf campus. After quote 4, White teachers asked to tick a box, giving their ethnicity ticked every box. They believed that they had ascended through all the races. Now that's not a harmless. Belief because that means that if you have a student who is, say, black or Hispanic or you know, any other kind of non white race, you don't just believe that like you know what it's like to be them because you live that in the past life. You believe that you're better than them because you ascended past their level of existence and that they're going to have to live and die before they can come back as a better skin color. Yeah, it's ******* horrible. This is all horrible, absolutely horrible. It's awful. Now, their reporting was based on the Department of Education memo on this school in the UK, which revealed that at least some Waldorf campuses were teaching children that Atlantis was a real thing. And if those kids were being taught sterners ideas about Atlantis, they were probably being taught at least a few of his ideas about a racial hierarchy. And again, this is in 2014 in the United Kingdom. Wow, yeah. In response to this, the Steiner Waldorf School's Fellowship, an umbrella group representing the community of Waldorf schools, said this, while the superficial reading of a handful of Steiner's voluminous. Extensive lectures present statements that appear racist in modern terms. None of these occur in the educational writings. So the the idea that like that that was the the the the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, which is a group that represents these schools collected and they're spokesman Chris Angel. Yeah. Look, now it's like, OK, superficially me saying that black people are a less evolved race and are degenerating into an ape like species. That sounds racist superficially. But just superficially. Well, boy voices depressing. Yeah, it's bad. Now, SWF, which is that that umbrella groups guidelines published in 2011, noted that in order to be considered a Waldorf school, an institution needed to be able to show that quote. An anthroposophical impulse lies at the heart of planning for the school, and they're sure as **** is racism in Rudolf Steiner's writings on anthroposophy. So it does seem like there's got to inherently be some racism in any of these schools that actually, like, stick to the heart. Of anthroposophic teachings. That said, Waldorf schools are very decentralized. They aren't part of a strict hierarchy, and there's a lot of variance between different schools. If you went to a Waldorf school, that seemed totally fine. I'm not trying to say that you imbibed a bunch of stealth racism. That said, maybe come through your memories and see if there was some weirdness that you learned, like never quite made sense to you. Because there might be. If you meet a rich kid who's who's a racist and has smallpox, yeah, you have the Waldorf. School system to think I'm just saying maybe we should check in with Jennifer Aniston. I mean, it's so annoying, it's so stupid. It's all it's ******* rich people have nothing ******* to do, so they fill their time with a bunch of nonsense because they got nothing to ******* do. Yeah, it's really true. It's just a simple matter of spare time. You got nothing to ******* do and everything's going right. So you just make up a bunch of **** to to cause some trouble because you're bored out of your *** **** mind. I mean, that's where this all comes from. I'm sure a lot of students today in Waldorf schools, there's a lot of rich kids, but I'm sure there's also a lot of like middle class and working class kids whose parents just sacrifice because they're like, well, look at all of the great. My kid wants to be a dancer and a bunch of great dancers don't try and sell me on Waldorf schools being good. I'm not trying to say high. Tools. I'm trying to point out like I I'm I'm sure there's a bunch of parents who are who like and I'm sure it works out for some of them. A lot of great dancers go to Waldorf, Robert. It takes me. It takes. First of all, we don't need anymore dancers. Second of all. Robert, Robert, you have no idea how easy it is to make me decide that I ******* hate something. I'm so mad already. I wanna go. You know, I wanna write as soon as I'm done with this podcast, I'm gonna drink even more cold brew and just go to the nearest Waldorf school and find out what the **** is going on. Yeah, just find out what the **** is going on. Like, see these racist dancing smallpox people? I I was going to defend the people going there a little bit, but I it sounds like more fun to declare, like essentially an intellectual jihad on the concept of dancing. So let's do that. I'm just, let's just ******* rich people ******* you know, not just adjusting to the fact that. Life is essentially random. One note situation. You ******* live and then you die and there's no ghost libraries and and as much as it's fun to poke around with the idea that maybe there I I believe in ghosts, actually, sort of, but well then why not a ghost library? Well that's The thing is like, it's like, but just keep it within. Realize that this is something that you're doing as a hobby because you're bored. Don't take it seriously, for God's sake. For it's one thing to think maybe go surreal because you got a day off and you got nothing better to do. But to ******* take that and run with it till you establish a school, then you're an absolute moron. I mean, that's The thing is you're actually a *******. The whole idea that you would take your musings, the musings of a bored human, go every which way possible, and the fact that you would codify them and make a school out of your ******* musings while you're bored is just so madding to me. And also a perfect example of the egos of these wealthy people that they decide that their own ******* musings. They're actually true. I mean, the things that cross people's minds, you know, are the fact that, Ohh, God just makes me mad anyway. No, I mean, I I agree with you about Steiner and the original people who cooked this up and the people who believe seriously in this stuff. Yeah, it does seem like most of the parents at these schools know none of this stuff. Like, I'm going to be willing to bet if you, like, ask a bunch of parents at Waldorf schools. What's anthroposophy they wouldn't be able to give you, like, an answer. I don't have any kids, so I'm mad at parents, too. Just generally. Ohh yeah, like you said, everybody. Involved in this whole story. If you send your kids to an alternative school, you should make sure that a guy who was like 10 steps away from a Hitler didn't come up with the philosophy behind how it's taught. But yeah. Anyway, like I said, if you went to a Waldorf school, I'm very curious for your experiences. But you may not have imbibed any racism. Yeah, that's interesting. From this podcast, if you get response from people who want to all those, sure, we see if they got through it and just are great answers. And no racism. Yeah, I'm. I'm sure they will. But there there are. There are. There is. Documented evidence of eruptions, of dangerous racist ******** within them. Or, or there's just a ******* every dancer he sees a racist with smallpox. All dancers are racist and disease. Yep, that is the that's the official stance I noticed. You're a good dancer, you ***** ** ****. You ******* Nazi. Ohh yeah, I'm gonna quote from Peter Stoudenmire again or professor Stoudmire again. Quote in 1995, there was a scandal in the Netherlands when it became publicly known that the Dutch Waldorf schools were teaching racial ethnography, where children learn that the black race has thick lips and a sense of rhythm, and that the yellow race hides its emotions behind a permanent smile. In 1994, the Steiner write lecturer Reiner Schnurr at one of his frequent seminars for the Anthroposophists. Adult school in Berlin give a talk with the rather baffling title overcoming racism and nationalism through Rudolf Steiner. According to a contemporary account, Schnur emphasized the essential differences between races, noted the infantile nature of blacks, and alleged that due to immutable racial disparities, no equal in global system can be created for all people on Earth, and that because of the differences between races, sending aid to the developing world is useless. What year was that 1994? Wow. And that was in. In Amsterdam, that's in Berlin. Oh, Berlin. ******* slick willies, the president in the United States and you're in Berlin and like, yeah, that's the kind of **** people are saying. Steiner supporters, when they acknowledge his racism, tend to try to write it off as him being a product of his time, and that's not an inherently unfair argument. There's a lot of great thinkers who believed racist **** because it was the accepted wisdom in their day, and we shouldn't discount all of a person's ideas just because they grew up in a time where people like didn't know things were ******** that are ********. After all, people today believe in the moon and we wouldn't want future generations to ignore all of our philosophers just for that. However, the product of his time argument doesn't hold water in the case of Rudolf Steiner. Remember, according to Anthroposophic belief, he was reading all of this **** off of the Akashic records which transcend time and space. So if Anthroposophists truly believe what their guru wrote down about the source of his revelations, then when those revelations took place can't matter if you actually are anthroposophists, who believes in all of this stuff. Literally. That means that you have to take his race science stuff literally because he's not influenced by the bias of his times. He's reading what the record says about the nature of the black race. And the yellow race and like, whatever racist terms that he came up for, for them, right? You can't like, say both things. You can't say you believe him and then you also think he's a product of his times. Yeah, exactly. Because he's not a product of his times. You think he's invested with some sort of supernatural. Yeah. Yeah. He can't be a product of his times because he's reading the ghost books from. Yeah. You're giving you're you're you're allowing this guy a extra normal power. I mean, part of this belief system is to believe that this man had some sort of supernatural power. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's supernatural site. Yeah. And that that these, these race things he's talking about are somehow, you know, not only not only true. But but sort of sort of like, you know, like in the written in the, in the in the ether. I mean, it's even more like it's even worse. It's like, this is this is definitely, this isn't even coming. He's basically a vessel for this stuff. This is like divine truth. Yeah, it's divine, like inherent truth. It's not even based on his deep theories. Yeah, that's cult ****. Yeah, that's that's yeah. Oh, it's definitely cult ****. Yeah. Wow. So This is why people like Professor Stoudmire will argue that anthroposophy. Is the covert curriculum. Those are his words of most Waldorf schools. There is evidence that an internal forum discussions online anthroposophists educators have been caught talking about their belief that karma and reincarnation is, quote, the basis of all true education. And just as children choose their parents before birth, many anthroposophists teachers believe that teachers and students choose one another ethereally as well. I'm going to quote from Peter Stoudenmire one more time. The curriculum at Waldorf schools is structured around the stages of spiritual maturation. Posited by anthroposophy from one to seven years the child develops his or her physical body, from 7 to 14 years the etheric body, and from 14 to 21 the astral body. These stages are supposed to be marked by physical changes. Thus, kindergarteners at Waldorf schools can't enter first grade until they've begun to lose their baby teeth. In addition, each pupil is classified according to the medieval theory of humors. A Waldorf child is either melancholic, choleric, sanguine, or phlegmatic. The categorization is in part based on the child's external physical appearance and is treated accordingly by the teachers. We all know the medieval humor philosophy of her was absolutely correct, which is why people lived so long in the medieval era. The nurses are famous for the nurses office at their schools. Like just just a bunch of leeches in a jar. It's an axe on a table. Yeah, yeah, I don't want to go to the nurse. She puts that snake on me. Send me to the crayon Dr instead. Yeah. Now, I can't and won't speculate on how all this might have influenced famous Waldorf grads like Jennifer Aniston. I can say, yeah, I'm deeply curious. I wanna know. OK, first of all, I've always wanted to be a fly. I mean, I would give my right arm to hear just 45 minutes of conversation between Justin Thoreau and Jennifer Aniston, you know, at dinner. I mean, I would normally, like, just because I can only imagine how ******* stupid it would be very not because they're necessarily stupid, but because they're in this bubble that would just makes what they would talk about be so. Uniquely weird that there's a certain level of fame and exclusion from normality where you can't talk about things that don't sound like insane ******** to anybody who worries about. I already figured listening to Justin Theroux and Jennifer Aniston would be fascinating. You know, in a way that would be, you know, fascinating in the sense of like, holy ****. These people are out of touch, but to then to imagine them having I just want 40, can anyone who's listening to this podcast does anyone have 45 minutes of overheard? I asked our listeners to wiretap a lot of different people, so maybe add Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux to the wiretap Jennifer Aniston dated. Can you imagine their breakup? They probably said that it was to do with some kind of past, like kashyyk. The Akashic Records wrote about that decades before it happened. Yeah, they're like, it was like Jennifer exact to break up with you, because I I think my ghost child was. Yeah, I don't know. It just wasn't up to snuff. I mean, she's like, what? And it's entirely possible if, like, if Jennifer Aniston listened to this podcast, she would just be going like, what the ****? For real? Oh, that's why that one teacher said that weird thing about root races. Like, you do get that? Maybe, yeah. Yeah. So yeah. One Waldorf school in Kings Langley, England, was shut down in 2017 following a series of failed safety inspections, a Department of Education report noted they pupils say that they are safe, but they are not because of flaws in the school. Systems and procedures for safeguarding and child protection. So it does seem like again, and this is something like the former students who are critical of the schools do say I, we all really enjoyed our time there. It seemed like a really good place. It was only kind of later that you started to realize there was some weird **** going on. In this case, the closing seems to have been due to the school's failure to abide by basic safety rules and not directly due to their wacky occult beliefs. But Waldorf school in Garden City, Long Island, however, was nearly shut down. That's my dad's hometown vehicle beliefs. Yeah, Garden City. Long Island is my hometown. That's where I went to Thanksgiving every year growing up. Yeah, the the student that we read about who was talking about, like, how some of his teachers would drop weird **** about race science and stuff. That's where he went. OK, so Rich town long. It's a rich town school. Oh yeah, yeah, in 1970. 9 The New York Times published this very fun article titled Psychic X Students Influence Shakes Waldorf School. Yeah, it's a great ******* headline. The issue started by talking about the Garden City Waldorf schools teacher training program, which trained roughly 20 student teachers per year to take positions in one of the dozens upon dozens of Waldorf schools operating at the time. Quote. What was described by one parent as internal chaos began when Mr Walton, who has said that he is able to communicate with certain beings in the spiritual world, allegedly used these powers to advise school officials on matters ranging from language curriculum to what music to play at a school dance. As his influence reportedly grew among leading faculty members and with John F Gardner, a former headmaster and at the time director of the Waldorf Institute, other staff and faculty members became resentful, called a meeting, and voted to seek the resignations of those who accepted his suggestions. So we see a couple of things here. One is that the student basically claims to have the same thing happen to him that happened to Steiner, where suddenly he can talk to spirits and like a bunch of high level teachers go along with him and change the school's policies based on this. Guys, what this guy says, Ghost told him, right? So it was like he was like the Rasputin. Of of the Waldorf school. Yeah. But in in what you you gotta point out a couple of times, just for the sake of fairness, other members of the faculty were like, this is ******** and like, yeah, made him resign and stuff. So, like it it is a scandal and it's in it. It is emblematic of some problems within the Waldorf schools. It also suggests that a number of the the staff and faculty are not howling lunatics who believe in ghost libraries. So I do want to be fair. This is a long time past Steiner's death, and there's evidence that, like some, a lot of them don't believe the craziest parts of this belief system. Now, in spite of the scandal, the Garden City Waldorf School continued to operate and is still teaching students to this day. It is one of 1000 operating Waldorf schools on the planet. There are 150 in North America. Wow. Some parts of the world, yeah, that's 3. Some parts of yeah, that is 3 estate. Now, in some parts of the world, like the United Kingdom, several of these institutes even receive public funding. At any given point in time, several 100,000 children are enrolled in taking classes using lesson plans based in Anthroposophy a fundamentally racist philosophy. And it gets worse, because racism is not the only horrifying thing at the core of anthroposophy. See, Rudolf Steiner was a very influential academic in Germany during World War One. He'd been a friend of Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the German General Staff, until his death in 1916. There's no sorry, there's just nobody. There is no, there are no people in the world who who ******* were more dangerous than German academics during ohh yeah, the War One. Ohh yeah. I mean, yeah. If we go back in time and take all the ******* academies of of Germany during World War One and just dump them into a volcano, we'd be better off. Yeah, maybe. Like all of the people with any position of power whatsoever in Germany in World War One and Dublin. It's just so funny that that was a danger guy. The people who are like. Philosophizing in Germany during World War One or. Terracan dangerous ************* yeah. Now, after von Moltke's death in 1916, Steiner continued to channel his ghost and ask it for advice. As badly as this sounds, he was held in not insignificant influence among the German leadership, of course, is this? Yeah, of course not. Why would he? Yeah, I know. He's got. He's talking to our old general. They're ghost phone. They're ready. They're ready for it. That's fine. As these stuffy older aristocrats and their ridiculous hats watched the Bolshevik revolution sweep through Russia and listen to Woodrow Wilson sketch out his ideas on self determination. Rudolf Steiner was hard at work providing them with an alternate theory for how the world could be reorganized after the war. He called this the tripartite structuring of the social Organism. Modern anthroposophists call it social 3 folding or the threefold Commonwealth. Here's how Staudenmayer describes what that is quote the three branches of this scheme, which resembles both fascist and semi feudal corporatist models are the state, political, military, and police functions, the economy and the cultural sphere. It's less fear encompasses all judicial, educational, intellectual and spiritual matters which are to be administered by corporations, with individuals free to choose their school, church, court, etcetera. Anthroposophists consider this threefold structure to be naturally ordained. Its central axiom is that the modern integration of politics, economy, and culture into an ostensibly democratic framework must falter because, according to Steiner, neither the economy nor cultural life can or should be structured democratically. The cultural sphere, which Steiner defined very broadly. Is a realm of individual achievement, where the most talented and capable should predominate and the economy was never be subject to democratic public control because then it would collapse. Steiner's economic and political naivete are encapsulated in his claim that capitalism will become a legitimate capitalism if it is spiritualized this is dinner. Still, this is the same guy is the same ******* guy. He had so many ideas and they're all terrible. I mean, they're so they're very much like. I mean, I guess maybe we'll get to this later. But the? The fact is that what's going on in the American Government right now is, is that there's that that **** is going on like that. This whole, I mean charter school belief of like, get rid of public education and like this. You know, I'm not saying charter schools are necessarily associated with racism or but. But the idea of what's her face? What? Who's the head of the Education Department? Betsy DeVos? Yes. Like, I would not be surprised if eugenics played some, you know, whether she realizes it or not, her and her brother, Eric Prince, they have these ideas of like, judeo-christian. Values that are under attack. And I mean there's a lot of that kind of mysticism under it's, it's, it's, it's, it's it's underlying modern conservatism as well. In America, they don't call it mysticism, they call it a make America, you know, great again. But this, this, this make America great again. But this great again has a sort of mystical quality to it because it's they can't really define what that means. And it has a lot to do, of course, or is entirely to do with race, but, you know, make America great. Again, is is a mystical slogan because it doesn't. It's not grounded in reality. It's just, it's it's it's something that's open to interpretation. Yeah, I mean, it's it's the whole shining city on a hill idea of America is a mystical ********. People love that **** and it's it's interesting. I would not be surprised if Betsy de Vos. Has read this man. Is it Rudolph Steiner? You know, to be honest, I'm going to guess the the the person in American politics right now who he had a lot more influence on than Betsy DeVos. Is Marianne Williamson. And we are going to talk about that and Rudolf Steiner's history with the Nazis and how we invented organic farming in Part 2 of this. Jesus Christ, this guy was relentless. This dude had. There's still so much gas left in the tank, man. It's ******* wild. Yeah, but you know what? It's time for now. What? It's for time for you to plug your plug cables. Oh, is it right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the end of the first episode on Steiner. OK. God, I've had this ******* sinus infection for well, it's not even a sinus infection. It's just like endless sinus **** for a month anyway. You can hear me complain about my sinuses on Twitter. Hmm. At the Crofton show or on my Instagram. Chris under score Crofton, and I do my famous coldbrew got me like series on there, which is just. Very important. And and I write an advice column called the Advice King for the Nashville scene, and you should Google the advice King and read all of them. There's like 200 and they're all ******* good and you should go listen to my record. Hello, it's me, which came out last year and got a 7.4 on Pitchfork. And you can find me not on Pitchfork, but often brandishing a pitchfork at passers by on the highway. I just. I love pitchfork. And it's a it's an art as much as it is a science. You can find this podcast on the Internet at behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter. That ********* pot. You can find me on Twitter at I write. OK, you can find Waldorf schools in the real world by finding a rich kid who wants to dance well. Yeah, shouting that out of him, so. That's the end of the episode until Thursday and Part 2. I just want everyone to remember that at one point in his life, Joe Biden almost got into a knife fight with the guy nicknamed Corn Pop. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREA. Ker.com want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know because after listening to stuff you should know. 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