#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies

The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG one for nutrition, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, master class for learning, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a bunch of different kinds of reasons, go to lexfriedman.com/contact. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by AG one, an all in one daily drink to support a better health and peak performance. A drink I have not been consuming for the last few days because I'm traveling, and it's the thing that makes me miss home. I'm in San Francisco, allowing myself to be surrounded and inspired by some incredible software engineering that's going on here and putting all the other mess of politics and social bubble stuff aside. So I'm doing a lot of programming and having a lot of really highly deep technical conversations, but I definitely miss Austin. I miss Texas. I miss Boston. And walking the halls of MIT, really, it's the university I intimately know now. And there's something about a university where you can, shut off all the mess of the outside world and focus on ideas on learning and on discovering, plus the fearless energy of, undergraduate and graduate students just boldly going forward, thinking they can completely revolutionize a field. That's really inspiring to be surrounded by. And in Texas, the thing I love the most is there's a simple kindness to the hello, to the nod, to the aimless and wonderful conversation that you might have at a coffee shop or when when you meet a stranger. I don't know. I really fallen in love with Texas and the long runs along the river, which I consume a g one after. Sometimes I forget there's a sponsor read going on. They'll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up @drinkag1.comslashlex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all in one cloud business management system. That's the other thing about San Francisco that I'm reminded of, that there's these incredible businesses that are born. Just a couple of founders, and they're quickly hiring a few folks, especially engineering heavy teams, and they're all dreamers and they're all pushing forward and they're all trying to do the craziest shit they can. Yes. There is a San Francisco bubble. Yes. There's a bit of a tunnel vision going on in many ways, but on the pure desire to build something cool, something that has a positive …