Garrison Davis and Margaret Killjoy trace secret societies from the Chumash "Brotherhood of the Tamal" in 6,000 BCE to the Knights Templar's 1307 purge. They detail how Adam Weishaupt, disillusioned by Freemasonry's exclusivity, founded the Bavarian Illuminati on May 1, 1776, at the University of Ingolstadt. Using a deceptive tiered ranking system to mask radical goals like secularism and voting rights, Weishaupt manipulated students and notables with alchemical promises. Ultimately, this historical deception established the structural foundation for modern conspiracy theories regarding censorship and information control. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money Memo for Moms00:02:01
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Okay.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip because a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Why did you get heart seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you done.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Secret Canoe Societies00:15:07
Balls Mahoney.
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every week we celebrate famed wrestler Balls Mahoney, whose career started in the late 80s and ran through the 90s before his tragic death at age 44 of a heart attack.
Here to talk about Balls Mahoney, Margaret Killjoy, Garrison Davis.
How are y'all doing?
How are we feeling about Balls?
Balls Mahoney.
This show has really changed in the scope since the last time I've been on, huh?
I'm very excited about this person that I totally believe is a real person.
Regretting the new podcast because all of our faces were like, Robert.
Because y'all aren't pilled on Balls Mahoney.
Honestly, I know very little about him other than that he's a wrestler.
He died very young and he has one of the funniest names I've ever heard.
But the only photo of him, he is bleeding from the forehead and both of his wrists have been covered in duct tape.
It's incredible.
Anyway, that was a little bit of fun for all of our wrestling fan listeners.
You know, I've often said professional wrestling and ska are the only remaining forms of art in the world.
I mean, there actually is, there is an argument for that.
Yes, yes.
It's an argument I'll make.
This is Behind the Bastards.
It's a podcast about bad people and also Balls Mahoney and about lying to the audience at the start of the introduction.
Garrison, Margaret, how are you doing today?
You know, I am all right.
I spent all morning plumbing and I haven't destroyed anything yet.
That's good.
I guess it's my turn to talk.
Yeah, that's generally how it works in a conversation.
Yeah, I'm doing great.
I have my oat milk coffee.
I'm ready to learn about some fascinating historical figures.
You're woke coffee.
Yeah, I just don't know if we could have moved on if we didn't know what kind of milk you were using.
Yeah, the wokest.
So we would be judging you for any other milk.
So how do y'all, what do y'all, what do y'all know about the Bavarian Illuminati?
Oh, that's that's something I've been that's something I've heard been screamed about with megaphones at like fascist rallies before.
That is most most of the time, I've most of the time that I've heard the words the Bavarian Illuminati, it's coming from some unhinged woman who has choice opinions about Jewish people.
Yeah, yeah.
Generally, people, generally, the folks who feel strongest about the Bavarian Illuminati also have opinions about like the root races.
That's not positive.
No, no.
Margaret, do you know much about the Bavarian Illuminati?
Or just is this distinct from the regular Illuminati or is this Illuminati?
Ah.
Unless you believe the.
Yeah.
I once read a book about the origins of the Illuminati as influencing the anarchist movement called The Occult Origins of Tatism or something.
Yeah, teachers of anarchism.
Great book.
That is the sum of my knowledge.
It's a cool book.
Someone said that there's a through line.
There is a through line.
We're going to be talking about that today.
This is going to be a bit of a weird one.
I've been wanting to do this, an episode on this matter kind of ever since we started the podcast.
Last year, we did a live show that touched on the Discordians and Operation Mindfuck, which is kind of the end point of this story.
But telling it all really properly requires, well, it took me about 16,500 words.
So dig right in.
No, this will be a little more than a two-parter.
But I think it's important, not because, just by the way, in case you're listening here wondering, like, has Robert gone crazy?
Is he going to start telling us about how the Illuminati have put machines in our teeth that talk to us when we sleep?
Obviously, that's been done.
We all have those machines in our teeth, but it has nothing to do with the Illuminati.
No, the Illuminati, the original Illuminati, are not particularly bad guys.
They are people who made some choices that have wound up carrying down through the ages in an unexpected way.
And a lot of that's been negative.
We're getting behind the bastards in this one in that, like, what we're all talking about today, the story that begins in Europe in the 1700s, leads directly to QAnon, right?
It leads directly to every aspect of modern conspiracy culture because the Illuminati are what create the first like Uber conspiracy, you know, the first conspiracy that loops in all of the other conspiracies, the way that it all works now, right?
Where if you believe that, like, if you believe that, like, the government is trying to keep you from drinking raw milk or force vaccines on you to poison you, or if you believe that there are lizards at the center of the world, or if you believe that, you know, the elite are drinking the blood of children, you can, all of those can become part of the same conspiracy.
And in fact, generally are, because of the way that how the syncretic nature of modern like uber conspiracies.
And this all starts with the Illuminati.
They don't do it on purpose, but they do kind of cause it by recklessness.
And so we're going to start by talking about the Illuminati, but actually, we're going to start a long ass time earlier than that, Margaret and Garrison, because how long would you guess like secret societies have been a major factor in like human civilization?
Since before civilization.
I mean, that is for a long, long, long time.
Yeah.
I was surprised looking at this how far back the research on this goes.
Because it's, as Margaret said, it's pre-civilization.
And in fact, a good example of like one of the first secret societies we have any kind of decent evidence of comes from the Chumash people who have lived on the California coast and around that area for about 15,000 years or so.
Obviously, you're never going to get an exact date on there, but at least like 15,000 years.
And starting at around 6,000 BCE, give or take, a couple of centuries, they started making really good canoes, which came to be known as Tamils.
And these craft, they like, you know, they got better and better at making canoes over time and kind of reached their most advanced, perfected form at around 1300 years ago.
And this was a really involved process.
They have all of these different pieces that allow them to be like Tamals are generally considered to be maybe the best canoes that existed before like really modern materials.
And they're ingenious devices.
And obviously they took a lot of experimentation and development in order for people to like figure out how to make them the best way.
They're made out of redwoods.
They're glued together with tar.
They used shark skin as sandpaper, which I didn't realize you could do, but kind of makes sense.
And because these were so good, the task of making one took about 500-ish days if you were like a skilled manufacturer.
And it required specialized knowledge that's kind of like about on the level of what it would take to be like a good auto mechanic.
So that knowledge was valuable because as the people on the coast started making these tamoles and getting better at them, it became like hugely advantageous to have one, both in military terms, because they could allow you to raid your enemies really effectively and they could allow you to fish and to trade a lot better.
There was a lot of, you know, money or resources at least locked up in having access to these things.
And the people who made them realized like, we have this knowledge that's not widespread.
And if we keep it secret just amongst ourselves, then we can build a lot of power and wealth for ourselves and our families.
Yeah, the term that...
Yeah, exactly.
The Brotherhood of the Tamal of Tamal held a pretty more or less a monopoly over the creation and piloting of these craft for we I mean, we'll never know exactly how long, but for an extremely long time.
And this allowed them to become quite comfortable themselves.
A passage from the book, First Peoples Populating the Planet, charts out how things went from there.
A bearskin cape worn only by the elite of canoe owners and village chiefs marked the beginnings of class distinctions, ad burials, which were far more elaborate for the wealthy and their children than for commoners.
Members of the Brotherhood of Tamul were often buried with parts of their canoes.
Perhaps most offensive to the egalitarian and independent Juhuansi, who were neighbors to the Chumash, would have been the emergence of a permanent and hereditary political elite among the Chumash.
High-ranking Chumash chiefs, who inherited their positions through the male line, exercised control over a number of communities.
But each village also had its own chief, some of whom were women.
These political leaders, all of whom were also canoe owners, led their people in war, presided over religious rituals, and regulated the flourishing trade that followed the invention of the Tamal.
And I find that fascinating, the idea that among this society, class distinctions emerged as a result of the creation of this and the kind of the sequestering of this knowledge among an elite chunk of the population.
I hadn't really thought about it occurring that way, but it makes sense.
Yeah, as soon as you mentioned that they specifically kept the information about how to make them secluded, I'm like, but on one hand, like undeniably, secret societies are kind of cool.
Like everybody wants to be in the in-group.
Everyone wants to have access to secret knowledge.
On the other hand, just the existence of that will by itself create like conditions of inequality and goes against like ideals of like open access to information and how everyone should have the opportunity to learn anything that they can.
Yeah.
And yeah, but that does create a very interesting, interesting dynamic.
And you can also use the same thing to keep information going that would otherwise be lost, especially about people who don't have writing systems or have different types of writing systems.
Like oral tradition stuff being able to preserve information because of how sacred it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, not just gatekeeping, it's also preservation.
Yeah, yeah.
And I don't want to be preserved.
I'm not like saying the Brotherhood of the Tamal are the first bastards.
It's all obviously this is all we're taught.
These are this is like a complicated thing and it had positive and negative impacts.
It's just it's fascinating to me and it's going to be interesting how many things from as far back as the existence of the Brotherhood of the Tamal carry through to like modern day secret societies and in weirdly specific ways.
But it's one of those things I kind of wonder.
Obviously, we don't have a lot of written records from the people, the Chumash people in like 5000 BC or whatever, 4,000, 3000 BC.
But I kind of wonder like were there conspiracy theories about the canoe people in their secret society running things?
Because that's a thing people do.
It's interesting.
Totally.
And what it, because it's kind of like, you could almost imagine people talking about this, like people today talk about like the free energy suppression conspiracy theory.
Like Donald Trump knows that like the someone's keeping free energy from American people for the like, yeah, it's uh I wonder if we use magnets to when we spin something, but with magnets, more, more energy comes out than goes in.
That's right.
That's right.
That's why I throw magnets on the side of my car, improve the gas mileage.
One of these days it's going to work.
So secret societies want you to know how they work.
Yeah, they are the secret gatekeepers of all of all knowledge.
They're the brotherhood of the Tamal of the modern era.
So one of the things as I was reading about these guys that I found out that I hadn't realized is that there's actually like a really strong vein of research by anthropologists into the existence of secret societies across all of Neolithic humanity.
This is a thing we do everywhere.
There are people.
And it's a thing that occurs in societies when they hit what's often described as kind of a middle level of development between wandering bands of hunter-gatherers.
And like we're talking bands here, not like large moving like tribes of people.
And then like what we broadly call ancient like pre-civilization, where you have some settled communities maybe, but you at least have much larger groups of people moving and interacting, even if they're still kind of nomadic.
And it's kind of in that interstittle period between sort of like groups of, I don't know, 10 people wandering around the wilderness to actually starting to make towns and cities that you see the development of ancient secret societies.
In a lot of cases, like the American Pacific Northwest, what is today the American Pacific Northwest, it was common for adults to pick societies based on their talents and most common vocation.
And one of the things that this did is societies existed often across tribal and family lines.
So in addition for being a way for people to kind of gatekeep knowledge and sort of build wealth between within communities and along like lines of family descent, they provided a backdoor method of diplomacy and allowed for different tribes that might have often been in conflict over stuff like hunting grounds and other resources to also have a way in times of disaster to cooperate on something that sort of approached the level that a nation state could do it.
Because you have, you know, maybe sometimes one tribe is fighting the other, but all of the people who know how to make this important thing have some sort of, like occasionally will meet and engage in these secret religious observances together and talk shop and talk trade.
And when a disaster hits, they're able to communicate with each other because they have this kind of this kind of brotherhood.
Now, when anthropologists use the term secret to refer to these secret societies, which are often called like guilds and groups, that's because all of these societies tended to enforce the isolation of their members for periods of time.
That's what they mean by secret.
It's not that like no one knew the Brotherhood of Tamal existed.
It's that part of the way it worked is members would sequester themselves away from everyone else and have conversations and engage in rituals that other people were not allowed to see.
Some of these rituals would have been mystical.
Some of them would have been doggedly mechanical, like instruction on the best way to make canoes, but all of them were secret.
Many Neolithic peoples also practiced matrilineal descent.
So one way in which one very prominent way in which secret societies developed was because it was traditional for men to move in with the family of their partner, which was not just an emotionally complex experience, but also led presumably to a lot of like frustration on behalf of some of these men.
And so secret societies were often very male-dominated and often.
Bavarian Catholic Enlightenment00:11:11
It's like a frat cliff.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
It's a way for them to blow off steam, right?
No, but in a pretty literal way, right?
We're like, we're fraternal societies that became friends come out of all of this and actually like mutual aid organizations and shit.
Yeah, come out of all of this.
We will be building to that.
It's just interesting to me how deeply.
I'm really into this shit.
So I'm really excited about it.
Yeah, that's why I wanted you on this.
So I want to read a quote now from an American anthropologist named Walter Goldschmidt.
There is always a magico-religious aspect to such groups.
They are characterized by ritual induction or initiations, by secret rites and ceremonies, and by a system of mythological justification.
Often they also have a power function, uniting the senior men, the adults, or some especially selected group as against the women and children or all outsiders.
Occasionally, there are countervailing women's organizations.
And that's also, it's interesting to me how deep, like you can see shades of this in like some of the weird incel communities online and like fucking Andrew Tate's little clubhouse.
It's so weird to me how far back this shit goes.
Well, it's this perceived lack of power.
Us men don't have any power, they're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting, huh?
So many ancient societies were either made of high status individuals or became that over time as their coordination allowed them to marshal resources more effectively than other segments of society.
And so secret societies, they drove stratification and created it, but they also kind of resulted from stratification.
It's obviously, this is a very complex topic.
So it's not just one or the other.
Secret religious societies or cults were ubiquitous during the late period of the Roman Empire as well and the early empire.
In this case, they offered places for the elite to socialize and organize out of public view.
And in fact, our modern term for cult was initially applied to different like religious sects, right?
A cult was not, oh, you've, you've fallen in with some weird charismatic guy.
It's like, yeah, we decided to worship this goddess from Egypt who it became suddenly hip like in Rome to worship this goddess.
You know, she's foreign and different.
So like all the cool kids are in this cult now.
And it's like just a thing that we do together.
Wow, they're just like me.
Yeah, Gears.
You would have gotten on quite well.
Yeah, it's interesting to me.
In the long history of European secret societies, the most infamous before the Illuminati was probably the Order of the Temple of Solomon, better known today as the Knights Templar.
Initially founded by veterans of the First Crusade, this was an organization of lay people who took monastic vows.
And like the first thing that they did was basically act to protect as kind of in a policing manner, pilgrim routes of the Levant, right?
So you've got these pilgrims heading forward to the newly reconquered Holy Land during the brief period that it was reconquered.
And, you know, there's bandits and shit.
So the Knights Templar are kind of volunteering to aid the transit of pilgrims by helping to protect them.
They also had a regular army and would fight in battle at periods of time as a regular army.
Over time, in that way that you do, the Crusades went less well.
There was much less call for Templars out in the Holy Land.
And so they got into banking and became deeply woven into life across much of Europe.
This disturbed traditional elites like King French King Philip IV.
And in 1307, the order was purged in a, you know, you'd call it an orgy of violence.
It was a pretty, pretty solid violence orgy.
And it was like calling them Satanists or something because they're always Satanists.
Where demons come from or something?
Like Baffin or something.
I think that's a part of it.
There's a lot of things happening at once that kind of feed into it.
But yeah, the Templars get accused of devil worship and accused of plotting for the overthrow of governments and trying to like make themselves the, you know, the like overthrow kind of the settled power in Europe, which there's not really any evidence of.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're really just, they're really just like the ancient Bank of America.
Maybe more like an ancient credit union.
But yeah.
Asian credit union with like a military.
Yeah, they primarily enact like racist violence.
I mean, all modern banks.
Everyone with a military primarily enacts racist violence in this period of time.
They're not really different from the French in that regard.
So during the mid-1600s, Europe experienced a rather sudden burst of religious creativity.
The overwhelming control of the Catholic Church splintered, and suddenly you get your Lutherans and your Calvinists and all these Protestants start popping up all over the fucking place.
This coincided with what's called the Age of Enlightenment, which by the 1700s is in full swing, bringing a newfound understanding of the scientific method and the value of rationality over dogma.
Obviously, broad terms like the Age of Enlightenment exist to describe complex periods in very simple and very broad terms.
The so-called Enlightenment was not evenly distributed, and it arrived, I think, a little later in Bavaria, because Bavaria stays extremely Catholic, which is in contrast to much of the rest of what we now call Germany.
But when it did hit, the term that gets used in the area is Aufklürung, which I think just means Age of Enlightenment, but in that silly language people speak in Bavaria.
Bavaria is again southern Germany.
I believe so.
Yeah, it's like the most conservative and the most Catholic part of Germany.
Okay.
Which is the part that didn't vote for the South because I think it, yeah, it borders Austria because that's where Hitler finds himself when he leads his home in Austria.
Yeah, East and I mean, it is a lot of South, too.
I'm just trying to position myself.
Yeah.
It's it like borders.
So yeah, it borders like Liechtenstein, Austria, all that good shit.
Yeah.
And it's an interesting part of Germany for that.
And it's going to be a lot more conservative than the rest of the area.
So the Enlightenment's going to hit it in kind of a more controversial way.
And I want to quote now from an Italian sociologist named Massimo Introvin.
The Bavaria of the second half of the 18th century, a Catholic duchy, the duke's elector would take the title of kings only in 1805 in a predominantly Protestant Germany, was where in Europe the spirit of the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque Age was best preserved.
Education and culture were dominated by the Society of Jesus, and the former Jesuits remained influential even after the papal suppression of their order in 1773.
The Dukes resisted the reforms initiated in the neighboring Austria, although the latter was also Catholic, and the influence of the Catholic Church remained pervasive.
Trying to preserve this situation, the Catholic Church erected a barrier against the Enlightenment.
Many books by Enlightenment philosophers, which circulated freely in the rest of Germany, were banned in Bavaria.
The Protestant against the Catholic Church and the Dukes happened, the protest against the Catholic Church and the Dukes happened mostly in the universities, where a number of professors were sensitive to Enlightenment ideas.
In turn, students often kept in contact, particularly through the college fraternities that at this time began to gain importance with their colleagues in the Protestant German states.
So Bavaria is kind of Florida, right?
Like they're very much in a horrifying sentence.
Thinking of the Florida Illuminati being like the next, like in like 1500 years, there's conspiracy about the Florida Illuminati.
Terrifying.
Yeah, and the Florida Illuminati is like two guys with a single history textbook.
But that's that is very much kind of what's happening here, right?
There's this, there's this progressive, you know, left-wing and right-wing.
Those terms, I think, kind of useless when we're talking about the situation in Europe in this period of time.
But it's certainly like a very progressive and secular wave sweeping a lot of the rest of Germany.
But Bavaria is like rebelling against it.
And one of the ways they do it is by banning books and cracking down.
And one of the ways in which educated elites fight back and push Enlightenment values is through these little fraternities, these secret societies.
Now, it is kind of worth noting because we've just talked about how it's sort of the Florida of Europe.
Bavaria does produce some of the most creative thinkers of the whole Enlightenment, including Adam Leibniz, who independently discovered calculus alongside Isaac Newton.
And then they had a little bit of a falling out with each other.
He's also a wizard, which is cool, but so is everybody who does anything cool with science.
So is Isaac Newton.
They're both wizards.
They're wizards who used to be friends and then fell out over calculus.
Many such cases.
It happens all the time.
On February 6th, 1748, 32 years after Leibniz's discovery of calculus, a baby boy named Adam Weishaupt is born or comes into the world.
Now, his parents had been born.
He comes to the world.
What are you?
Okay, you know what I mean.
Did he just like pop out?
What is well?
I mean, yeah, Garrison, probably.
Yeah.
When two cabbages love each other very much.
Yeah, I drew a diagram for you about this the other day.
Okay, great.
Yeah, you can, you can, you can refer to it.
Sophie vetoed giving it to you.
Garrison, you can refer to that book of worm impregnation fetish pornography that I sent you last night.
Okay.
That's most of the basics.
Twitter can help you out with the rest.
Got it.
All right.
We'll do.
So Adam Weishaupt comes into the world.
Is born.
Whatever.
And yeah, a little baby.
And he's in an interesting situation.
He comes from kind of the upper class.
His family has a decent amount of money.
His parents had been born and raised as Orthodox Jews, but they had decided to convert to capitalism or to a Catholic Catholicism.
Oops, a little bit of a slip of the tongue there.
They become Catholics because, like, it's a lot easier to be Catholic in Bavaria than it is to be an Orthodox Jew, right?
That makes sense.
That should not surprise anybody.
And because they're kind of like, we should probably make as clean a break from our past as possible, Adam's parents enrolled him in a school that was run by a monastery as soon as he could walk.
So he's taught by monks.
Now, he has a childhood that's, I don't think it's not an abnormal amount of turbulent for a kid in the mid-1700s.
His dad dies when he's just five.
And since single moms, that's not an encouraged thing, especially if you have any kind of like money in this period of time.
His dad's co-worker at the University of Ingolstadt, where he was born, moves Adam into his household and takes him out of the monastery school and sends him to one run by Jesuits.
And boy howdy, talking about Jesuits.
That's going to take a second.
So why don't we first talk about some products and services?
Jesuit Financial Legacy00:02:40
The Jesuit Society would like to appreciate you for listening to this podcast.
And if you would like to join us, then you can find us at the Jesuit ad.
Stop and then the first thing that comes up is, get your gold.
Yeah, there you go.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities, not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the market, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
And that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Lingoria.
I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
Beating the Odds00:06:59
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back and we're thinking about the Jesuits.
Now, when I was a kid, there was a Jesuit school called Jesuit right next to my school, and it was where the rich kids went to school, or at least the rich kids who were Catholic.
It's called Jesuit.
Yeah, it's called Jesuit.
The big one in Portland is also just called Jesuit.
And it was, I don't know if that's...
That's very Jesuit in concept.
Yes.
Sorry.
Now, I don't know if it's the same with other Jesuit schools, but in the Dallas area, those were the kids you bought drugs from, right?
Because they got the cash.
Their parents are too busy to really pay any attention.
The Jesuit boys were, you know, that's where you get your weed.
It's where you get your acid.
You know, when you're young, it's probably where you get your fentanyl today.
You ginzy kids and your fentanyl.
Anyway, at this point in time, I don't know if the Jesuits have access to much fentanyl, but they are something of a secret society.
And they've been like, all of these Jesuits are like kind of members of an order that's been banned.
So they're technically officially not Jesuits anymore.
Because the Catholic Church.
It's a little cooler.
It doesn't cool.
Yeah, it is cooler.
There's so many conspiracy theories about the fucking Jesuits.
But like, I think the best way to describe them is nerdy Catholics.
Like their job, like the thing they're supposed to do is make more people Catholics and also learn and teach.
So there's a lot of Jesuit schools.
They are historically pretty good schools.
And yeah, anyway, they're also, again, at the center of quite a few conspiracy theories.
So because he's got the benefit of this Jesuit education, Adam is going to learn at a level that's kind of a lot beyond what most boys in that place in time could expect.
And he takes to it like a duck to, you know, the thing that ducks do.
Quacking.
No, no, no, much worse than that.
Anyway, by the time, yes, exactly, Garrison.
By the time he was an adolescent, he spoke German, Czech, and Hebrew fluently.
And he quickly thereafter.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, he's too.
Yeah.
He learns ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian next.
Yeah, he is insufferable.
He gets admitted to university at age 15, which is, yeah, yeah.
He's one of those kids.
He's pushed down the stairs a lot.
I should have been at age 15, but I don't go around bragging about it on podcasts.
Yeah, you don't speak ancient Greek either, Garrison.
Yeah.
I'm learning.
I'm trying because I need to get a lot better with my Greek for the Greek magical papyri stuff.
And it's hard because all of the consonants sound weird.
But anyway, yes.
All I learned was how to say Spanikopita horiziri.
That's good.
Spanikopita without cheese.
That was all I needed to get by in Greece.
Host order of vegan Spanikopita.
Now, here's a question for you, Garrison.
You're getting your PhD in magic shit right now from that online school that I have paid for.
Among other magic things that I'm working on, yeah.
Sure.
How close are you to that PhD, buddy?
I'll get it within the year.
You'll get it within a year.
Well, that's Garrison.
I've had other developments in my magical study that is slightly more impressive and reputable than that school.
So we'll see.
We'll see.
Yeah, well, if you don't finish it within the next few months, Garrison, then you'll get your PhD much later than Adam Weishaupt because he gets his doctorate five years later at age 20.
So I can still get it.
Fox ticking.
I can still get it by age 20.
I can do it.
Yeah, well, you bet you better move fast.
So he spends his teenage years buried in books at the University of Ingolstadt's massive library, which has 4,200 books.
Now, for a bit of perspective, I have like half of Florida.
That's more than all of Florida.
Well, it is now after they banned all the books.
Yeah.
That's what I'm.
Yeah, that's a lot of books for Florida.
I just, I find it interesting.
like the difference in what a lot of books was in, you know, this period of time, the late 1700s, kind of the start of the print era.
And like, for example, today the Internet Archive has 2 million modern books and more than 36 million books and texts.
It's just, that's kind of neat.
That's a neat achievement.
Although a lot of those books are trash.
But they were trash back then, probably too, a lot of the time.
Anyway, Adam's a big reader, very smart kid.
He becomes enthralled with a lot of Enlightenment ideas and a lot of Enlightenment philosophies, as much as he can access while it's sort of banned in his area.
Now, he does very well at the school.
He gets promoted as soon as he graduates, basically, to assistant instructor to the chair of canon law.
And while I don't really know what that job would entail, and I don't care to learn, Adam was the first non-Jesuit to hold it in a century.
This does not go over well with the Jesuits.
They're not thrilled about this.
And I'm going to quote next from a book by the Charles River editors.
This prompted a stir of fur-wing brows within the Jesuit community.
Still, Adam's hot streak was anything but over.
In 1775, when the 27-year-old was made dean of the Faculty of Law, the Jesuits sputtered their drinks and slammed their fists on their tables.
The Jesuits had had enough.
They barged into the university boardroom and demanded Adam's paycheck be withheld until he complied with the university's principles.
So, you know, that's not going to go well for them.
Adam, they accused him of basically promoting Aufklörung, the Enlightenment, and teaching banned topics that like different Enlightenment philosophers.
Exactly.
Yeah, he's talking about secularism, the idea that maybe the Catholic Church shouldn't run everything.
They don't like this.
And this pisses off Adam, right?
The fact that he's having to fight against these kind of regressive Jesuits and their attitudes towards religion, it really pisses him off.
And whenever he would come across a bump on the road, across like some sort of stumbling block that was put up by these old-timey monk-type assholes, he would think back to the words of one of his favorite philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
One quote in particular stood out to him.
The only practice that one ought to teach children is that they should never submit.
Fighting Regressive Jesuits00:06:46
Which is, you know, that's base.
Yeah, yeah.
Adam Weishock says youth liberation.
Faith-based, based youth liberationist.
Yeah, you should hear this guy's attitude on bedtime discourse.
Oh, boy.
I got it.
So some of Adam's colleagues who were too frightened to stand up for him against the Jesuits, but who were sympathetic to his aims, reached out to tell him, like, hey, man, I know you're dealing with this secret society who are being real assholes.
There's another secret society you might want to join because they can give you some support in your fight against the Jesuits.
And that secret society was the Freemasons.
Now, people talk a lot about the Freemasons.
Sure do.
They sure do.
They will never stop.
At its core, the Masons are exactly like the secret societies we started this episode talking about, these kind of Neolithic organizations.
It's like a guild.
Yeah, it's a guild.
Right down to the fact that a big part, one of the big things about the Brotherhood of the Tamal is that you get these very nice, elaborate funerals.
A big thing that the Masons provided was like life insurance that came with burial benefits for Masons.
Like that was a major reason to join the Masons.
There's also, it was a big part of it is for all that like people talk about the rituals and the magic stuff.
A huge part of it is like their members are mostly middle class and like upper middle class professionals.
And if you're a Mason, you get like a 10% discount at all Mason-affiliated stores.
So it's like just like a, yeah, it's like a lot like AAA.
It's like AAA and kind of like USAA, where it's like you get discounted life insurance that's a lot harder for people who aren't in this organization to get.
It's very much with Triple A are really cool too.
Yes, they are.
They are.
I had to actually sacrifice a goat to get them to jump my car the other week.
Yeah.
Imagine in 500 years, there's conspiracies about AAA, the secret group that's that's running the AI dystopia.
In a hundred years, we'll have forgotten the secret of electricity.
So their ability to jump cars will just seem like magic.
To your esoteric knowledge.
Somebody finds like an old AAA car that has like the fucking maintenance handbook for a Toyota Corolla.
They start to worship it.
The secret text.
And once you pass down through the lineages, you arise to the order, unlock new passages of the manual.
Just a thousand people sitting in front of an old Toyota.
And you do that thing where you like turn the key slightly and open the door so it starts making that sound.
And they all just hump.
That's the om of the future.
Meditate to the sound of the car alarm.
Back then, they could figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy from when they moved from one region to another and join a different sect of the AAA.
So the Freemasons were not an old organization at the time Adam was advised to join them.
They had started in kind of, and we don't know exactly when they start because there's actually not ever going to be an exact date for when they started because they emerge out of a bunch of different kind of independent groups that are all sort of similar in the early 1700s.
It was very organic.
It wasn't.
Yes.
There's all these independent groups doing the same thing.
And I think in 1715 and like, I believe it was Scotland is the first time like a bunch of them all kind of merge together and say like, hey, we're going to be the Freemasons.
But yeah, it's, it's a very, as you said, it's a very organic process.
And by the late 1700s, they'd spread from the isles down to Bavaria.
And Adam decides, okay, I'll dip my toes in masonry.
I would like some backup against these weirdo Jesuit fucks.
And he does a little bit of Mason stuff, but he's kind of turned off by all their weirdo occult rituals.
He is like, I want to share and trade in band knowledge.
And you guys are like dressing like sultans and tapping each other with toy swords on the shoulder.
Like a lot of mason rituals are like racist costumes and silly little plates.
You can go to Mason museums.
There's one in Los Angeles that's really interesting and you can see their silly little outfits.
It's like high school theater grade level of construction.
And I assume it was not much different back in the 1700s.
If you try to buy old swords, some of the only swords from the 19th century that are available are some of the Mason swords and they look like fucking Renfair garbage.
Yeah, they look like shit.
Terrible swords for the fucking Masons.
Now, I'm sorry for all this Mason slander.
If any Masons are out there, feel free to hit me up.
Yes, I will join.
Oh, I could have joined at one point.
My grandpa was a Mason, but it seemed like a complete waste of time.
I don't know.
Yeah, hit us up, Masons.
Hit us up, grand Masonic conspiracy.
Have swords and we can talk.
Yeah.
I'm already a member of multiple secret societies.
will be happy to add another one to the roster.
Yeah.
Great.
So these rituals, in addition to being cringy, existed to provide them in there with a sense that what they were doing was hidden and separate from the regular world.
And I want to read a quote from an anthropologist, Janet Burke, describing them.
There is no question that the Adoption Lodge initiation rituals were designed to heighten dramatically the sense of friendship based on virtue among members.
They contained all the consciousness-changing elements of traditional rites of passage found in many cultures throughout history.
Each ceremony began with seclusion of the candidate in a reflection chamber.
The main part of the initiation revolved around the imparting of knowledge, and it closed with integration into the larger group as a full-fledged member.
Knowledgeable leaders imparted secrets, extracted oaths, and demanded humility.
They employed strong symbol-laden words and instruments and authority from a distant past.
Candidates were required to pass through a series of degrees and master each before moving on towards the font of final knowledge, the perfection promised by the organization, which was again a 10% discount at certain restaurants.
It is really funny.
It's like when I go to the RV, it's going to flash my mason card.
This is what the Enlightenment is really for.
If you want free meals, wear a circle A and then go to one of those towns where every service class working person is an anarchist.
And I have you up.
I have joined a secret society that rules the world.
And as the result, every fifth trip that I take to the Sizzler is free.
So funny.
Free Sizzler Trips00:03:01
Now, if you want to get free trips to the Sizzler, maybe that's what is being advertised next on our podcast.
You don't know.
It might be.
Listen in, Sizzler heads.
Garrison, have you ever been to the Sizzler?
No.
Second question related.
What's the most shrimp you've ever vomited up?
Probably not much.
Maybe like five or six shrimp.
Okay.
Sophie, we're taking a work trip to the Sizzler.
I'm down.
Gotta pill Garrison on eating rancid shrimp at the Sizzler buffet.
Oh boy.
All right.
The rest of you pill yourself on these ads.
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I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, What are you going to do?
Creating a Secret Cult00:16:06
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
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Ah, we're back.
We're talking about times that we and our loved ones have all vomited at the Sizzler.
Nothing like a Sizzler parking lot for puking in front of like some family of four and like having these little kids just watch you hurl.
And it's such a good time.
There's nothing I love more than strangers' children seeing me vomit out in public.
It's a beautiful experience.
See, I'm surprised you didn't go for the outback with this bit.
Oh, I vomited in many an outback parking lot.
You see, puking is kind of my magic, and I'm very much exoteric with that sort of thing.
I'm a vomit mage.
Good stuff.
I am not inviting you to the lodge.
We cannot afford the cleaning bill.
We are very low on funds.
That is a constant problem with secret societies.
So Adam goes through this initiation ritual and he thinks it's kind of stupid.
I have no idea what he's going to wind up doing.
I assume he found the Illuminati.
His issues are like: number one, he's like, these fucking Freemasons are too new.
They pretend to be an ancient society, but they're not even 100 years old.
Like, and it's, they're making me spend a bunch of money on stupid costumes for this like bullshit.
The other problem he has is that he feels like it's too accessible to the public.
A lot of like regular people are masons, like normal, you know, not like super poor generally, but like pretty normal dudes.
And he's like, I want to, again, I want to trade in like forbidden knowledge.
I don't, I don't want to be hanging out with the butcher that lives like four doors down.
That's not a good secret society.
So he starts sketching out what he wants to do and he makes a plan to create a better secret society, a perfect secret society.
And his plan is basically he wants to make an invisible web of what he calls wisdom schools that will promote the molding of morals, scientific and human progress, and like this belief he's come to that the sort of acceptance of the scientific method over religious dogma is the path to happiness for the human race.
That's what he wants to spread and he wants to spread it through this like network of secret wisdom schools.
So on May 1st, 1776, 28 year old Adam Weishaupt founded the covenant of perfectibility.
And again, he's calling it that because the idea is we're going to perfect the human race through knowledge.
And this is something that happened in 1776.
Yeah, yep, this, that, that's, it's famously the year where nothing occurred.
Yeah.
Um, by the fact that this happens in 1776 is going to become the core of about a million stupid conspiracies.
Yeah, Jesus.
What, yeah, what horrible timing.
Horrible timing, Adam, motherfucker.
Pick a different year.
Um, so he decides after a brief period of time that the Covenant of Perfectibility, kind of a dog shit name.
Stupid name.
So stupid name.
So he renames the society the Ordo Illuminati Bavarinsis, or in English, the Order of the Bavarian Illuminati.
Yeah.
Much better name.
You got to give it to him.
This is why we do A-B testing.
Doesn't the Illuminati mean like the enlightened ones or something?
We are.
Yeah, we're talking about, we'll talk about that.
Kind of.
There's a couple of debates.
So Adam specifically picks it because there was a Spanish organization called the Olumbrados, which also means illuminated ones.
He also likes the French term illumines.
There had been a number of little secret societies that had versions of that in their name.
But his Latin.
His was Latin.
And part of why they're all using variants of illuminated is that kind of in the Latin, it means more like spiritual and mental than it does like literally illuminating a space with light.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he he wants his interest here is not to create a mystic society.
He is not super into like the weirdo ritual stuff, but he comes to the conclusion, just based on his low opinion of the people around him, that, quote, of all the means I know to lead men, the most effectual is a concealed mystery.
So he decides he's going to wrap this network of schools in like a skin of the skin of a mystic organization because he thinks that will draw in more people and people who can fund what he's doing.
From the beginning, he recognized that mostly men want a way to feel like they're special, somehow separate from the rest of their peers in the greater mass of humanity.
Secret societies have always offered versions of this, but in the new modern age that was being built, a sense of connection to the mystic was more valued than ever.
Adam's goal was to free society from the domination of cults like the Jesuits.
But to do it, he was going to have to create a cult himself.
Many such cases.
The only way to stop a bad cult with a weird religio-political hierarchy is a good cult.
Yeah, it's not going to work great.
So Adam starts talking with his colleagues at the University of Ingolstadt about his plans, and they all are on board.
Because again, not much is happening in the late 1700s.
One of the first people who kind of buys into his idea is an 18-year-old student named Anton von Massenhausen.
And Anton suggests that he model the structure of his secret society off of college fraternities.
Now, these are not the frats of the modern era entirely, which are based more around partying than other things.
But fraternity is kind of an enlightenment concept.
It actually means something very important in this period of time.
It's a codification, effectively, of the systems of mutual aid that had existed within secret societies forever.
Like this concept of fraternity is like a buzzword that's going around at the time.
And it kind of goes beyond just like simple concepts of community mutual aid.
Famed sociologist E.J. Hobsbawm noted that societies like the Masons elicited a sense of fraternity in part due to the heightened alternate reality of secret religious ceremonies that they carried out.
So basically, some of the, there's this sense of fraternity, and part of how you inculcate that is by making people feel like they're privy to a like secret understanding of the world that everyone else doesn't have.
That's totally not how radical politics work.
It's totally separate than when someone becomes an anarchist or a communist or joins a person.
It's completely different.
Or a fascist for that matter.
I know.
Not the same thing.
Oh, maybe fascist to it, but definitely not the left.
Yeah, definitely not.
No one else.
No one else.
This is not effectively the same thought process that has made Twitter so fucking insufferable.
Completely different.
So the first official meeting of the Illuminati consisted of Adam Weishaupt and four other dudes, all young students of law that Weishaupt had either tutored or just decided were good kids that he could kind of manipulate.
Their first order of business was to create their own special symbol, a wreathed medallion featuring a wide-eyed owl.
By the way, this is why there's a big owl at the fucking, the, what is it, that gathering in the woods in Northern California that all the rich people go to?
Burning man?
No way.
That's.
No, no, no.
Oh, the one that I don't actually know much about because I'm.
Yeah, you could not call Burning Man a secret society.
Yeah.
Although there's elements of this here.
No, the fucking I think I learned about it from your podcast, honestly.
I can't believe I've forgotten the fucking.
Yeah, Bohemian Grove.
Yeah.
Bohemian Grove.
Yeah.
But Bohemia is not that far away from Bavaria.
No, it sure isn't.
It's very far away from California.
Not yeah, probably.
So, yeah, so one of the things that they do at the end of every Bohemian Grove, which is like all of the rich people, rich and powerful people go and party with Henry Kissinger for like a week and they stage ridiculous little plays and they carry out a ritual.
And kind of the crowning moment of it all is the cremation of care where they burn a 40-foot-tall owl.
Anyway, interesting how, and again, this is part of where the conspiracies come from is that like a lot of this shit gets passed down for whatever reason, this kind of image of an owl becomes as iconic as the Mason's eye glyphs that they would put in shit that like winds up on the US dollar and stuff.
Now, in that first meeting, at this point, five-member Illuminati listed their objectives as to stimulate a human and sociable vision, support virtue where it may be threatened or oppressed by vice, to promote the progress of all people and foster and benefit those deprived of education.
Now, that sounds pretty nice.
That's not a bad, yeah, not a bad list of things to do.
Yeah.
Adam additionally promised that he would protect his followers from persecution or oppression and that he would tie the hands of any kind of despotism by building a society that was capable of working between national lines.
Yeah, his goal is to get as many intelligent and influential people to secretly join his Illuminati as possible so that they can kind of take over and manipulate the levers of power in Europe.
At the time he starts the Illuminati, Adam has moved beyond his simple desire to like support these Enlightenment attitudes that were pro-science and pro-religion.
And he's gotten increasingly radical.
He started toying with deism and he kind of gets pilled on atheism and starts to believe that like not only is atheism a more rational way to look at the world, but we should push people in power in Europe who are atheists to kind of take more power away from the church.
And you know what?
It actually seems like this whole monarchy thing that we're doing across Europe is a bad idea and maybe everything should be a republic.
So he, this is when I talk about like he's trying to push these secret values, what he's trying to push is like secularism and the idea that people get to vote.
Now, this is very radical.
This is 1776 to me.
It is some 1776 shit.
So obviously, it's illegal for him to talk about this where he is living.
Other parts of, you know, what becomes Germany, you can talk about this, but he cannot in Bavaria.
So he borrows from the Masons and he creates a strictly tiered ranking system for the Illuminati.
I'm going to quote from Massimo Introving here again.
Although it counted only five members, the order was already divided into an Areopagus consisting of Weishaupt, Massenhausen, and another student, Max Murz, whose members knew the order was a brand new creation, and a circle of novices who were left to believe that the Illuminati had instead centuries of history, existed outside of Ingolstadt, and had mysterious leaders above the professor of law.
So the first decision he makes is we have to pretend we're like a thousand years old and across the world and secretly rule the world.
That is where it starts.
Like the Illuminati creates the Illuminati conspiracy theory so people won't think they're silly.
That's a good way to prove that you're not silly.
This is where it all begins.
Weishaupt felt a need to hide the truth from his followers, which eventually extended to pretending the lawyer was much larger than it needed to be.
Now, this was justified by the needs of secrecy, but mainly by the fact that what Adam's trying to push is extremely boring.
The actual center levels of the Illuminati, when you like get through all of the, not all of the initiations and gain all of the rank, there's no more rituals.
He just hands you a couple of illegal books about like, maybe it would be cool if the Catholic Church didn't run things.
Like that's the center of it.
You get to the center of it and it's like, you know, it'd be neat voting.
Like that, that's literally the core of the Illuminati's teachings.
Yeah, but it's like, it's like it's like built, it's like building this onion of protection secrecy around that because this actually is illegal.
Yeah, exactly.
And I feel like people might actually take a few notes here as not only more information gets made illegal, like certain books are not being allowed to be shared in schools, but also stuff like HRT and stuff like access to abortion stuff, right?
As all these things get more and more illegal, these types of secret society tactics get used again because they've been things that we've been doing for a long, long time.
Yeah.
Depending on the circumstances.
Although in this case, you might want to learn from some mistakes that they're about to make.
So true.
Yeah.
So lower level members are promised that all of these rituals they're doing, all of this magic has this like central explanation that's revealed to higher level members.
But Adam has no like plans of actually letting most people in on this because again, it's really risky.
So most of the plan is to kind of keep people string them along doing the silly rituals and hoping that that keeps enough of them happy that like the cream will rise to the top, so to speak.
I love the hypocrisy of that.
This is all about setting enlightenment and teaching people.
So we have to lie to these guys.
Yeah.
It's also one of the reasons why they do this, which is very practical and smart, but extremely funny, is I'm actually just going to quote again from Introvin here.
The order counted on Bavarian provincial notables, indispensable for the dues they paid, but who had affiliated themselves thinking of joining a kind of Freemasonry in small towns where either there was no Masonic Lodge or they did not know where to find them.
They had vaguely heard of alchemy and secret rites and hoped that they would be revealed to them, while they would not be particularly interested in Baron de Holbach's anti-religious philosophy, even if it were revealed to them, which head of prudence it was not.
Weishopp's quasi-Masonic imitations were pedantic and uninspired.
The answer he invariably gave to the disappointed was that, as in Freemasonry, in the Illuminati, the first three degrees were preparatory to further initiations, where the true mysteries would be revealed.
So a big part of this is I need rich people's money and they want to pretend that they want to feel like they're alchemists.
So I've got to like, I've got to fake that so we can fund the illegal book trade.
Like he's conning rich people out of money by convincing them they've become wizards in order to buy illegal books and trade them around Europe.
I mean, I mean, all right, all right, that sounds all right.
That is also been that's also been a core component of wizardry for a long time.
A big part of being a wizard is lying about alchemy and taking rich people's money.
That's it's that's the real magic.
It's that and then also getting sick and dying off of metal fumes being boiled in like an unventilated room.
Those are the those are the two main components of doing alchemy.
Yeah, at least witchcraft, they just sell us crystals.
See, I want to go back to my favorite meme, the two guys from Predators shaking hands, and have it be wizards, rednecks in the south with a backyard workshop, inhaling metal fumes and getting metal flume fever.
Inhaling Metal Fumes00:03:51
Margaret, you got anything to plug?
Yes, if you inhale books, illegal books, that only the secret, if you can find where to purchase Escape from Incel Island, then you're on the in crowd.
And I'll give you a hint.
It's a code, tangledwilderness.org or wherever you purchase books.
That's my most recent book.
You can get it there.
Or you can actually listen to several of us enact Escaping from Incel Island.
If you listen to the Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness podcast, there's a live play of a role-playing game based on my book, Escape from Incel Island.
That's what I got.
We all played it.
It was really good.
You also have a podcast on this very network.
Oh, shit.
I do.
If you like cool people who did cool stuff, and then you can find where to, it's called Cool People Did Cool Stuff.
It's on CoolZone Media.
It comes out every Monday and Wednesday.
It's sort of the inverse of Behind the Bastards.
Not that I would ever do anything on original or derivative.
Now, if you really want to be a cool person who does cool stuff, what you should do is weld galvanized steel without wearing any kind of mask or respirator.
Yeah, the zinc is wizard.
Yes, like the wizards do.
Yeah.
Zinc is really positive.
Well, you know, I see at the grocery store zinc pills.
So clearly the most effective way to get zinc is to weld galvanized steel without a mask.
When I used to be like really anxious and I was doing jewelry work, I would like start freaking out and calling like my doctor friend as soon as I like I like soldered something that had some galvanized on it.
And I was like, I'm about to die.
But then again, one of my metal worker friends did almost die from accidentally doing some shit to galvanized.
And that means he's in the coolest secret society of all.
So the ancient order of nearly killed my lungs by welding galvanized steel.
Yeah.
Garrett, do you have anything you'd like to plug?
Yeah, sure.
I recently wrapped up a four-part series on the Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia.
Hell yeah.
That can be found on the It Could Happen Here podcast feed.
Yeah, it's four episodes.
At this point, you could probably binge all of them all in a row.
Yeah, it covers a lot of the stuff from the past few months and the recent killing of a force defender by the Georgia State Patrol.
So it's kind of some kind of some heavy stuff, but also talking about, I think, things that are important.
You get to hear from people that are on the ground throughout the series.
That is the most recent kind of large project that I have, that I finished.
Hell yeah.
Very cool.
Almost as cool as inhaling metal fumes.
So I will say, near like a few blocks away from the anarchist community center inside Atlanta, there is a Freemason building just like right down the street.
So that is all between them.
Which one is a front for the other?
Possibly, possibly.
Almost certainly.
All right, everybody.
Come back next time when we will hear the exciting conclusion of the story of the Bavarian Illuminati and eventually all of the other Illuminatis that come after it, leading to QAnon and the probable destruction of Western civilization.
Anyway, have a nice day.
Illuminati to QAnon00:02:11
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