Behind the Bastards - Part One: A Complete History of the Illuminati

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Robert sits down with Garrison Davis and Margaret Killjoy to talk about the birth of the Illuminati, the Secret Society behind every modern conspiracy theory. (6 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here to talk about Balls Mahoney, Margaret Killjoy, Garrison Davis. How are y'all doing? How are we feeling about Balls Mahoney? This show has really changed in the scope since last time I've been on, huh? I am very excited about this person that I totally believe is a real person.

Regrettably, it is not a radio podcast because all of our faces were like, oh, 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 bit of fun for all of our wrestling fan listeners. I've often said professional wrestling and ska are the only remaining forms of art in the world. I mean, there actually is an argument for that.

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 and ready to learn about some fascinating historical figures. Wow, I just don't know. Your 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. Yeah, we would be judging you for any other milk. What do y'all know about the Bavarian Illuminati?

That's something I've heard been screamed about with megaphones at like fascist rallies before. 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 the folks who feel strongest about the Bavarian Illuminati also have opinions about the root races. That's not positive. No, no. Margaret, do you know much about the Bavarian Illuminati? Is it distinct from the regular Illuminati?

It's the original Illuminati. I once read a book about the origins of the Illuminati as influencing the anarchist movement called The Occult Origins of Anarchism or something. The sum of my knowledge is that someone said that there's a through line. There is a through line. We'll 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 we should probably 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 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 like the 1700s, leads directly to QAnon, right? It leads directly to every aspect of modern conspiracy culture.

Because the Illuminati are what create the first, like, Uber conspiracy. You know, the first conspiracy that loops in all of the other conspiracies. The way that it all works now, right? Where if you believe that, like, the government is trying to keep you from drinking raw milk, or 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, 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 Tommels. And these craft, they, like, you know, they got better and better at making canoes over time, and kind of reached their most advanced, perfected form at around 1,300 years ago.

And this was a really involved process. They have all of these different pieces that allow them to be, like, Tommels 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 Tommels 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 and 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, that makes sense. Yeah, exactly. The brotherhood of Tommel held a pretty, more or less, a monopoly over the creation and piloting of these craft for, I mean, we'll never know exactly how long, but for an extremely long time. And this allowed them to become quite comfortable themselves. A passage from the book First 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, adsided burials, which were far more elaborate for the wealthy and their children than for commoners. Members of the Brotherhood of Tommel were often buried with parts of their canoes. Perhaps most offensive to the egalitarian and independent Juwanzi, who were neighbors to the Chumash, would have been the emergence of a permanent and hereditary political elite among the Chumash. High-ranking Chumash chiefs, who inherited their positions through the mail line, exercised control over a number of communities. But each village also had its own chief, some of whom were women.

These political leaders, all of whom were also canoe owners, led their people in war, presided over religious rituals, and regulated the flourishing trade that followed the invention of the Tommel. 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, but on one hand, undeniably, secret societies are kind of cool.

Everybody wants to be in the in-group. Everyone wants to have access to secret knowledge. On the other hand, the existence of that will by itself create conditions of inequality and goes against ideals of open access to information and how everyone should have the opportunity to learn anything that they can. Yeah, but that does create a very interesting dynamic. But you can also use the same thing to keep information going that would otherwise be lost, especially when you're talking about people who don't have writing systems or have different types of writing systems.

Oral tradition stuff, being able to preserve information because of how secret it is. So it's not just gatekeeping, it's also preservation. Yeah, yeah, and I don't want to be preserved. I'm not saying the brothers of the Tommel are the first bastards. Obviously, this is like a complicated thing and it had positive and negative impacts. It's fascinating to me and it's going to be interesting how many things from as far back as the existence of the brotherhood of the Tommel carry through to modern-day secret societies 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 Chumash people in like 5000 BC or whatever, 4000, 3000 BC. But I kind of wonder where there are conspiracy theories about the canoe people in their secret society running things. Because that's a thing people do. Yeah, totally. Because it's kind of like you could almost imagine people talking about this,

like people today talk about the free energy suppression conspiracy theory. Like Donald Trump knows that someone's keeping free energy from American people. Like, yeah, I wonder. We use magnets to spin something, but with magnets, more energy comes out and goes in. That's right. That's right. That's why I throw magnets on the side of my car to improve the gas mileage. One of these days, it's going to work. So, secret societies...

That's why ICT doesn't want you to know how they work. Yeah, they are the secret gatekeepers of all knowledge. They're the brotherhood of the Tommel 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 we're talking bands here, not large, moving tribes of people. And then what we broadly call ancient 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 interstitle period between groups of, I don't know, ten 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, well, 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 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. Just like a fratcliffe. Yeah, exactly. So we were going to blow off steam, right? No, but in a pretty literal way, right? We're fraternal societies that became frets come out of all of this and actually like mutual aid organizations and come out of all of this.

We will be building to that. It's just interesting to me how deep it goes. I'm really into this shit, so I'm really excited to learn 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 rights 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 and 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. What is this perceived lack of power? Us men don't have any power, they're saying.

Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So many ancient societies were either made of high status individuals or became that over time as their coordination allowed them to marshal resources more effectively than other segments of society. And so secret societies, they drove stratification and created it, but they also kind of resulted from stratification. It's obviously this is a very complex topic, so it's not just one or the other.

Secret religious societies or cults were ubiquitous during the late period of the Roman Empire as well, and the early empire. In this case they offered places for the elite to socialize and organize out of public view and in fact, our modern term for cult was initially applied to different like religious sects, right? A cult was not you've fallen in with some weird charismatic guy. It's like, yeah, we decided to worship this goddess from Egypt to it became suddenly hip like in Rome to worship this goddess, you know, she's foreign and different. So like all the cool kids are in this cult now and it's like just the thing that we do together.

Wow, they're just like me. Yeah, you would have you would have gotten on quite well. Yeah, it's interesting debate 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 a policing manner, pilgrim routes of the Levant, right? So you've got these pilgrims heading forward to the newly reconquered Holy Land during the brief period that it was reconquered

and you know, there's bandits and shit. So the Knights Templar are kind of volunteering to aid the the transit of pilgrims by by helping to protect them. They also had a regular army and would fight and battle at periods of time as a regular army over time. And that way that you do the crusades went less well. There was much less call for Templars out in the Holy Land. And so they got into banking and became deeply woven into life across much of Europe. This disturbed traditional elites like King French King Philip 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 always say it was for demons come from or something like bathroom or something. There's I think that's a part of it. There's a lot of things happening at once that kind of feed into it. But yeah, the Templars get accused of 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 the settled power in Europe. 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. Is your credit union with like a military? Yeah, they primarily enacts like racist violence. I mean, all modern banks. Everyone with a military primarily enacts racist violence at this period of time. They're not really different from the French in that regard. So during the mid 1600s, Europe experienced a rather sudden burst of religious creativity. The overwhelming control of the Catholic Church splintered and suddenly you get your Lutherans and your Calvinists and all these all these

Protestants start popping up all over the fucking place. This coincided with what's called the Age of Enlightenment, which by the 1700s is in full swing, bringing a newfound understanding of the scientific method and the value of rationality over dogma. Obviously, broad terms like the Age of Enlightenment exist to describe complex periods and very simple and very broad terms. The so called enlightenment was not evenly distributed and it arrived, I think a little later in Bavaria, because Bavaria stays extremely Catholic, which is in contrast to much of the rest of what we now call Germany. But when it did hit, the term that gets used in the area is Aufklärung, which I think just means Age of Enlightenment. But in that silly language, people speak in Bavaria. Is Bavaria 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 Nazis. 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 pretty... Southeast. A lot of South, too.

I was just trying to position myself, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It borders like Liechtenstein, Austria, all that good shit. Okay. 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 Introvine. 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, and a predominantly Protestant Germany was where in Europe the spirit of the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque age was best preserved. Education and culture were dominated by the Society of Jesus, and the former Jesuits remained influential even after the Papal suppression of their order in 1773. The 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 protest 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? They're very much in... Horrifying sentence, thinking of the Florida Illuminati being the next...in like 1500 years, this conspiracy is about the Florida Illuminati, terrifying. Yeah, and the Florida Illuminati is like two guys with a single history textbook. But that is very much kind of what's happening here, right? There's this progressive, you know, left-wing and right-wing, those terms I think kind of useless when we're talking about the situation in Europe in this period of time. But it's certainly like a very progressive and secular 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 in this period of time. So is Isaac Newton. 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 comes into the world. Now, his parents had been born. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, wait, he's not actually born. He's not actually born. He's come into the world.

What are you? Okay, you know what I mean. Did he just like puff out? Well, I mean, 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 refer to that.

Sophie vetoed giving it to you. Garrison, you can refer to that book of worm impregnation fetish pornography that I sent you last night. 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 in his he's in an interesting situation.

He comes from kind of the upper class. His family has a decent amount of money. His parents were had been born and raised as Orthodox Jews. But they had decided to convert to capitalist 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 you that. 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 held like run by a monastery as soon as he could walk. So he's taught by monks. Now he has a childhood that's I don't think it's not an abnormal amount of turbulent for a kid in the mid 1700s. His dad dies when he's just five. And since single moms, that's not an encouraged thing, especially if you have any kind of like money in this period of time. His dad's coworker at the University of Ingolstadt, where he was born, moves Adam into his household and takes him out of the monastery school and sends him to one run by Jesuits. And boy, howdy talking about Jesuits.

That's going to take a second. So why don't we first talk about some products and services? The 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 that's the Jesuit ad. The Jesuit ad. Stop. And then the first thing that comes up is get jingled. Yeah, there you go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 was called Jesuit? Yeah, it's called Jesuit. The big one in Portland is also just called Jesuit. That's very Jesuit in concept. 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 Gen Z 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. Which makes them cooler. Yeah, it is cooler. There's there's so many conspiracy theories about the fucking Jesuits. But like, I think the best way to describe them as 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. Good for you. Yeah, he learns ancient Greek, Latin and Italian next. Yeah, he is insufferable. He gets admitted to age 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 school at age 15, but I don't go around bragging about it on podcasts.

Yeah, you don't speak ancient Greek either, Garrison. Yeah, I'm learned. I'm trying because I need to get a lot better with my Greek for the mathematical papyri stuff. And it's hard because all of the, all of the, all of the consonants sound weird. But anyway, yes. Yeah, they say everything. All I learned was how to say spanikopita hodostiti. That's good.

Spanikopita without cheese. That was all I needed to get by in Greece. Hot. Or vegan spanikopita. Love that. Now, here's a question for you, Garrison. You're getting your PhD in magic shit right now from that, from that online school that I heard paid for. Among other magic things that I worked on, yes.

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, honestly, other, I've had, 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 Y. Shopped because he gets his doctorate five years later at age 20. So clock's ticking. I can still, I can still get it by age 20. I can, 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 that many. That's more than all of Florida. Yeah, that's more than all of Florida. Well, it is, it is now after they banned all the books. Yeah. That's the, that's what. 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, like for example, today, the Internet Archive has 2 million modern books and more than 36 million books and texts. Yeah. It's just that's kind of neat. That's a neat achievement, although a lot of those books are trash. So, but they were trash back then, probably to 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 an 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 are not thrilled about this. And I'm going to quote next from a book by the Charles River Editors. This prompted a stir of furwing brows within the Jesuit community. Still, Adam's hot streak was anything but over. In 1775, when the 27-year-old was main dean of the Faculty of Law, the 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 off-clo-rung, the Enlightenment, and teaching banned topics that, like, different Enlightenment philosophers. Time is a flat circle. 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 asking 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. Which is, you know, that's based. Yeah, yeah. Adam Weishach says, youth liberation. Based youth liberationist. Yeah, you should hear this guy's attitude on bedtime discourse. Oh, boy. I gotta go.

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. Right down to the fact that a big part, one of the big things about the Brotherhood of the Tumul is that you get these very nice, elaborate funerals.

A big thing that the Masons provided was life insurance that came with burial benefits for Masons. That was a major reason to join the Masons. There's also, a big part of it is, for all that people talk about the rituals and the magic stuff, a huge part of it is their members are mostly middle class and upper middle class professionals. And if you were a Mason, you get like a 10% discount at all Mason affiliated stores. So it's like AAA.

Yeah. It's 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. And the rituals with AAA 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, imagine in 500 years this conspiracy is about AAA. The secret group that's running the AI dystopia. In 100 years we'll have forgotten the secret of electricity. So their ability to jump cars will just seem like magic. Your esoteric knowledge. Somebody finds like an old AAA car that has like the fucking maintenance handbook for a Toyota Corolla.

You start to worship it. The secret test. And once you pass down through the litigants, you'll rise through 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 keys slightly and open the door. So it starts making that sound and they all just hope that's the home of the future. Meditates to the sound of the car alarm.

Back then they could figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy from when they moved from one region to another to join a different sect of the 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. Yes. Yes. There's all these independent groups doing the same thing. And I think in 1715 and like I believe it was Scotland is the first time like a bunch of them all kind of merged together and say like, Hey, we're going to be the Freemasons.

But yeah, it's a it's a very, as you said, it's a very organic process. And by the late 1700s, they'd spread from from the aisles down to Bavaria. And Adam decides, OK, 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 banned 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 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 at 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. Yeah, terrible swords for the fucking Mason. Now, I'm sorry for all this Mason slander. If any of these 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. Mason's hit us up. Grand Masonic conspiracy. Have better swords and we can talk. Yeah. I'm already a member of multiple secret societies.

I will be happy to add another one to the roster. Yeah. Great. So these rituals, in addition to being 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's so cool. It's amazing. It's so cool. It is really funny. It's like, when I go to the Arby's, I'm going to flash my Mason card and get this. 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.

I have you up. I have joined a secret society that rules the world, and as the result, every fifth trip that I take to the Sizzler is free. So funny. Now, if you want to get free trips to the Sizzler, maybe that's what is being advertised next on our podcast. You don't know. It might be. Listen in, Sizzler heads. Garrison, have you ever been to the Sizzler?

No. Second question related. What's the most shrimp you've ever vomited up? Probably not much. Maybe like five or six shrimp. Sophie, we're taking a work trip to the Sizzler. I'm down. Got to pill Garrison on eating rancid shrimp at the Sizzler buffet.

Oh, boy. All right. The rest of you pill yourself on these ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced,

cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic

and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. We're talking about times that we and our loved ones have all vomited at the Sizzler.

Oh, 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. 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 launch. We cannot afford the cleaning bill. We have 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 said we 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 a hundred years old. And they're making me spend a bunch of money on stupid costumes for this bullshit. The other problem he has is that it feels like it's too accessible to the public. A lot of regular people are masons, like normal, not super poor generally, but pretty normal dudes.

And he's like, again, I want to trade and forbidden knowledge. I don't want to be hanging out with the butcher that lives four doors down. That's not a good secret society. 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 the only thing that happened in 1776. Yeah, it's famously the year where nothing occurred. But the fact that this happens in 1776 is going to become the core of about a million stupid conspiracies. What horrible timing. Horrible timing, Adam, motherfucker. Pick a different year.

So he decides after a brief period of time that the Covenant of Perfectibility kind of a dog shit name. Stupid name, yeah. Stupid name. So he renames the society the Ordo Illuminati Bavarensis. Or in English. Much better.

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. OK. 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 illuminés. There had been a number of little secret societies that had versions of that in their name. His was Latin. His was Latin. And a part of why they're all using variants of Illuminati, 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 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, many such cases.

The only way to stop a bad cult with a weird, religious, 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, there's this sense of fraternity and part of how you inculcate that is by making people feel like they're privy to a secret understanding of the world that everyone else doesn't have. Which is totally not how radical politics work. It's totally separate than when someone becomes an anarchist or a communist or joins anything else. Completely different.

Or a fascist for that matter. 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 we're 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... What is it? That gathering in the woods in Northern California where people go to?

Burning? No, wait, that's... No, no, no. Oh, the one that I don't actually know much about. 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. Bohemian is not that far away from Bavaria. No. It sure isn't. It's very far away from California.

Not... Yeah, probably. 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... You know, as iconic as the mason's eye glyphs that they would put in shit that like winds up on the U.S. 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. That sounds pretty nice. That's not a bad... Yeah, not a bad list of things to do. 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. He's gotten increasingly radical. He started toying with deism and he kind of gets piled on atheism and starts to believe that like, not only is atheism a more rational way to look at the world, but we should 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. 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 for Bavaria. It is some 1776 shit. So obviously it's illegal for him to talk about this, where he is living. Other parts of what becomes Germany, you can talk about this, but he cannot in Bavaria. So he borrows from the Masons

and creates a strictly tiered ranking system for the Illuminati. I'm going to quote from Massimo Introvine here again. Although it counted only five members, the order was already divided into an Areopagus consisting of Weishaupt, Massenhausen, and another student, Max Merz, 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. Yeah, that's a good way to prove it. 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 get through all of the initiations and gain all of the rank, there's no more rituals. He just hands you a couple of illegal books about maybe it would be cool if the Catholic Church didn't run things. That's the center of it. You get to the center of it

and it's like, you know, it'd be neat voting. That's literally the core of the Illuminati's teachings. Yeah, but it's like building this union of protection and secrecy around that because this actually is illegal. Yeah, exactly. And I feel like people might actually take a few notes here as not only more information gets made illegal, like certain books 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 legal, these types of secret society tactics get used again because they've been things that we've been doing for a long, long time, depending on the circumstances. Although in this case, you might want to learn from some mistakes that they're about to make. So true.

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 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 sitting in enlightenment and teaching people. So we have to lie to these guys? Yeah. It's also one of the reasons why they do this, which is very practical and smart, but extremely funny, is I'm actually just going to quote again from a trophy in 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 bearing to whole box anti-religious philosophy even if it were revealed to them, which out of prudence it was not. Weishaupt'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 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. Alright, that sounds alright. That is also been a core component of wizards.

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 like, oh, it's that. And that's the real magic. It's that and also getting sick and dying off of metal fumes being boiled in like an unventilated room. Those are the two main components of doing alchemy.

See, at least witchcraft, they just sell us crystals. See, I want to go back to my favorite meme, the two guys from Predator Shaking Hands. And have it be wizards, rednecks in the south with a backyard workshop, inhaling metal fumes and getting a metal flume fever. Margaret, you got anything to plug? Yes, if you inhale books, illegal books,

that only the secret, if you can find where to purchase Escape from Insel 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 Insel 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 Insel 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 Cool Zone 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 what the cool... Yes, like the wizards do. Yeah, zinc is really positive. 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 really anxious and I was doing jewelry work, I would start freaking out and calling my doctor friend as soon as I soldered something that had some galvanized on it. And I was like, I'm about to die. But then again, one of my metalworker friends did almost die from accidentally doing some shit to galvanized.

And that means he's in the coolest secret society of all. The ancient order of nearly killed my lungs by welding galvanized steel. Yeah. Gary, 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 Cops City movement in Atlanta, Georgia. Hell yeah.

That can be found on the It Could Happen Here podcast feed. Yeah, it's four episodes. This point 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 forced defender by the Georgia State Patrol. So it's 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 finished. Hell yeah. Very cool. Almost as cool as inhaling metal fumes. I will say, near a few blocks away from the Anarchist Community Center inside Atlanta, there is a Freemason building just right down the street. There's a tunnel between them. Which one is a front for the other?

Possibly, possibly. Almost certainly. Alright 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. Day. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.