American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - CIA Brainwashing & Charles Manson: Hidden History (ft. Tom O'Neill)

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Thank you to Founders Fund, Michael Solana and Hereticon for today's episode! Subscribe to Pirate Wires at https://www.piratewires.com In today's episode of American Alchemy, Jesse Michels sits down with Tom O'Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. They uncover chilling connections between Manson, CIA mind control experiments like MK-Ultra, and the counterculture of the 1960s. This eye-opening conversation challenges the official narrative and reveals how hidden forces may have shaped a darker side of the 1960's and American counterculture. Support American Alchemy by Becoming a YouTube Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify DISCORD ➤ https://discord.gg/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Personal) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Show) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] Original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 #history #ushistory #historyfacts #jessemichels #charlesmanson #1960s #mansonfamily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work.

Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. It was a cult, and their leader was a man named Charles Manson, and he had 10 or 15 wives. Manson believed that there was an impending race war, and the murders were committed to shock the world, and they left signs that they hoped were going to implicate the Black Panthers. The four victims that were stabbed were stabbed more than 200 times.

There was blood writing on the wall. It was a real horrific crime scene. How did Manson get these young women in underwomenes? a year to go out and kill complete strangers for no other reason than he told them to and to have no remorse and to actually laugh about it. Jolly West reported to the CIA in 1955 he had developed the technology to implant false memory in a person and remove true memories using drugs and hypnosis. We have a lot of evidence that government knew more about this stuff. Manson was almost being tracked by authorities before he killed.

tape. There was NK. Ultra research going on at all those places that he was at. When you're in war, you're in war, mister. You don't make no change without bloodshed. Charles Manson and the history of government mind control. I have Tom O'Neill here, and Tom is an incredible journalist and really is kind of a tribute to a bygone era of journalism where he was just going to write a routine article about Charles Manson and it turned into this 20-year saga where he uncovered a whole plotline in the most famous murders in American history, the Manson murders, that involve CIA brainwashing, government mind control, all sorts of craziness. And so we are very excited to be here today.

And I want to start just with some basic kind of, you know, setting the table, scaffolding. Tom, what is MK Ultra? A lot of people here might not know that the CIA even had mind control program. Yeah, MK Ultra was a brainwashing program that was developed by the CIA, into the 40s, into the early 50s. It was originally created as a defensive program because intelligence in the United States learned that the Soviet Union and the Chinese and North Koreans had developed these techniques to brainwash people to get them to make false confessions. and they were using drugs, sensory deprivation, a bunch of different technologies. So the United States wanted to learn how to defend against that, particularly for airmen who got shot down overseas and were captured.

And what began as a defensive program quickly evolved into an offensive program when they realized how effective it could be. The ultimate goal was to create a programmed assassin, people who could be pretty much hypnotized, to go out and kill somebody for no reason in their mind or no recollection of being programmed to do it. They had programs for mass conversion where they would try to control groups of people, thousands of people using media, other kinds of technology. They wanted to be able to implant information in service people's minds that they could courier to cross enemy lines, deliver, bring back, and ultimately what they play with the most was memory. They wanted to be

able to control people's memory. They want to be able to implant false memories and people without their knowledge take away true memories using initially sodium pentothal and then LSD and then other drugs that we still don't know about. The program was exposed by a whistleblower in about 1975. It was quite sensational. The CIA had to acknowledge that they did it. It was not just illegal. The CIA, by law, is not allowed to operate on U.S. soil, but also it was horrific because they were using, they were doing human experiments on people without their knowledge or consent. And they began in prisons and jails, and then they started doing it with service people. They even set up what they called safe houses in San Francisco and New York City, where prostitutes would lure

Johns into rooms where two-way mirrors would be set up. The prostitutes would administer L.S.D. to them, and then they'd observe behaviors and see what they could do with the Johns while they were under control. So this went on until about 73, 74. Watergate was happening. Richard Helms at that point was running the CIA, and it looked like Nixon was going to leave office. A lot of stuff was going to get discovered and they had to hide it as fast as they could and as effectively as they could. So Richard Holmes ordered all of the files destroyed. And nobody would have known about this program if it wasn't for a guy named John Marks, who was a State Department official, who found files, financial files in 74, took it to a congressman and that began congressional

investigations. When I began this book about a murder case, a Charles Manson murder case, I'd never heard of MK Ulcha. People here probably know more about it now than I did when I began this. And when I first heard about it, I thought it was a fantasy that it couldn't have been real, but you can see the congressional record. There were three different hearings. The church hearings were the longest, but there was also a congressional combined Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye hearings. Testimony's entered into the record. The CIA lied. They said that it hadn't been effective, that they allowed themselves to look like fools. And they said, None of this stuff worked.

We shouldn't have done it. It was inhumane. Ha, ha, ha, stupid us. We're not going to do it again. Sorry. And Congress let them get away with that. In fact, a lot of it was effective, a lot of it worked. And I found out a little bit about what they'd done that had never been reported before that bled into this famous story about Charles Manson and the murders that occurred there.

So that's kind of like the two-minuteer, fine. Yeah, you go on forever. I mean, it's insane how. widespread of a program it was like it was like hundreds if not thousands of psychiatrists you had outposts in canada this guy you and cameron doing torturous techniques on people right you had andre puhrich and he had his roundtable institute in main he had an outpost in upstate new york where they had these space kids where they were trying to like communicate with you know these these otherworldly beings and actually star trek jean roddenberry like that was channeled via this woman

named Phyllis Schlaefley. It's a really crazy kind of counter history. And then you have all the you know kind of Manchurian candidate political stuff a little bit. And the notorious criminals like Whitey Bolger, who we found out, or he found out, laid into his life in prison that he had volunteered for medical experiments in prison in the 50s. And he later found out that they were MK Ultra brainwashing experiments. Ted Kaczynski. Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber voluntarily went into an MK Ultra experiment at Harvard, right? Yeah. Okay, so we have this crazy CIA mind control history that, you know, was not super well known.

Do you want to just set the table and give some basics on what happened? The Manson murders, obviously, they're extremely famous, but, you know, younger people might not know. Yeah, and you wouldn't think these two subjects would approach, merge, blend together. The history of my investigation of all this was, like Jesse said, I got a magazine assignment in 99 that was going to commemorate what was then going to be the 30th anniversary of the Tate La Bianca murders. So on August 8th, 1969, Sharon Tate, the eight-month pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, and two of her house guests, Foychevorkowski, a Polish cameraman who was friends with Roman, Abigail Folger, well-known coffee eras from the Folger family, Jay Sebring, the celebrity

hairstylist in Hollywood. were all in the house, and there was a home invasion. Nobody knew who did it, but they slaughtered all of them, plus a visitor to the caretaker's house in the back, a 19-year-old kid named Steve Parent. Three months later, they captured a group of hippies who lived communally first at the Spawn Ranch, which is outside Los Angeles in a place called Chatsworth,

broken down horse ranch, and then they had migrated out to Death Valley. the early reports were that it was a cult and their leader was a man named Charles Manson, 32-year-old ex-con, short like 5-5 or 5-4, and he had 10 or 15 wives, kids. They didn't know who were the parents of which kids. Everyone were raised communally. And what became then the first sensational trial in Los Angeles, really, until OJ, there had never been that kind of attention.

They tried them and convicted them. And what the mystery was, why were these people killed in this house? What was the connection of these hippies? What were they looking for? It wasn't a robbery. What the prosecutor Vince Boliosi learned through his investigation was, and this is the official narrative of the story, was that Manson believed that there was an impending race war,

which he called Helter Skelter after the Beatles song. And it was taking too long, He wanted to trigger it. So he ordered his followers to go to this house where he had a relationship with a music producer who had lived there previously, but no longer lived there named Terry Melcher. And the murders were committed to shock the world. And they left signs that they hoped were going to implicate the Black Panthers and turn the world against the blacks. And then Manson had prophesied. And the prophecies came from Beatles lyrics, Beatles songs that he thought were written.

to communicate these orders to him. And then the Old Testament, the Book of Revelations, it's just this whole mismatch. Anyway, the murders happened. All of a sudden, these hippies were brought back to Los Angeles from Death Valley, the ones who weren't arrested in charge, held visual outside the courthouse every day for a year.

A year, and whatever Manson did in court, the women who were tried beside him, three women, and then another man separately text-wise. Tex Watson would mimic. So he'd carve X in his forehead, show up at court. The next day, the women defendants would have X's, and everybody outside, the family who were sitting in circles and singing and praying all had X's in their foreheads. I got to sign this story, and I didn't know what the angle was. This had been written to death. It had, you know, the book that the prosecutor wrote Helter Skelter, to this day is the best-selling true crime book of all time. I didn't want to do

I needed a job, though. It was supposed to be three months. I began it, and I was trying to find an angle, which can be fun, but it can also be scary, because you don't want to write a boring story. And the angle that I kind of settled on was, how did Manson get these young women in under a year to go out and kill complete strangers for no other reason than he told them to, and to have no remorse and to actually laugh about it. And that was something that kind of,

I think that's why people became so obsessed with the case and people still make movies about it and write books about it, not because it was a horrific murder. Those kinds of murders all the time. And not even because it was a famous actress, married to a famous director, who was out of the country when it happened, I should say.

But because nobody had ever seen anything like this before, where young kids just killed for the joy of killing and then laughed about it afterward. So I began to try to find out what Manson had done, how he had learned, where he had gained this knowledge to get these kids to do this in under two years, for the majority of them, under a year for about a half dozen of them. And that's what led me to this program, M.K. Ultra, which I didn't know would be connected to them. But I ended up finding out. that there was a psychiatrist named Louis J. West, J. West, Jolly West, who was working out of the Hayd Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in 1967, where Manson had begun this group, the cult,

and he was doing his research there with LSD on hippies. And when the M.K. Ultra program got exposed, he was alleged to have been part of it. And he told the New York Times he had nothing to do with it. They'd approached him. He wouldn't use L.A. SD on humans and he said he didn't want to do it. He had died right after I got the assignment. I got access to his papers at UCLA and after months and months and much of really tedious digging,

I was looking for a needle in a haystack and I found it. He was writing using an alias for Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the program at the CIA. He was called the Poisoner in Chief about all the experiments he was going to do and all of this stuff paralleled his arrival in San Francisco, Manson's arrival in San Francisco,

the two of theirs traveled down to Los Angeles, and it was during that period that Manson turned into exactly what the CIA had been trying to create for 15 years at that point. So I present in the book a case that... Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back.

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I haven't proven it, absolutely. But I make a case that these two men intersected and Manson was experimented with, what the girls were. You say there's no smoking evidence, no smoking gun, rather. But you have this kind of, you know, Manson pre-1967 Hayd Ashbury,

who is this petty criminal he's like we have five foot five or something he's not particularly charismatic and he keeps getting you know caught for these petty crimes and he goes into this parole officer rogers smith and roger smith and roger smith specializes in amphetamines and lSD and their effect the parole officer who's also a criminology student at berkeley and a drug researcher and his special field of research was adolescent kids who join gangs that become violent while using drugs. So he's going into this guy constantly who specializes in this stuff. And then David Smith as well, right, ran the Hayd Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

And we know now from the Church Commission that they had this thing called Operation Midnight Climax where they would bring in people like Manson and they would sort of dose them up. You have this word confluence of people around Manson and then you have this kind of line in the sand of Manson as this like not super charismatic petty criminal into this sex god cult leader guru guy. And it's all in the span of basically a year. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that that's fairly, that's fairly compelling. And then Jolly West himself, just to you guys have a sense of how pervasive MK Ultra was,

was the head of the UCLA psychiatry. Plenty of reputable psychiatrist, psychologist, studied under him. And so it's pretty fast. Yeah, if you go to UCLA, there's an auditorium named after him. He was also the head of the neuroscience center there. He started the first neuroscience center at University of Oklahoma in the 50s after he left the Lackland Air Force Base, which is where he began his first experiments on prisoners at the base and then went through Oklahoma, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and had connections. He was kind of like a zealig. When Jack Ruby was arrested and charged for shooting Oswald, he became Ruby's psychiatrist.

not right away. He tried to get on the case right away, but the judge wouldn't let him. He actually requested to be on. The defense attorney wasn't sure what was going on. So Ruby got convicted at trial within a year of the Oswald shooting, never testified, only told the media. He had a story to tell he wanted to tell it. Well, he was getting a second trial. And at the same time, they were finally going to take his testimony, the Warren Commission. All of a sudden, Wes got assigned to the case, goes in and spends about an hour alone with Ruby at the county jail and comes out and holds a press conference and says within the preceding 48 hours, Jack Ruby has had a psychotic break from which he'll never recover. He has auditory and visual hallucinations. He thinks

there's people in the room. He hears what he says are the cries of Jewish children being boiled alive outside his jail cell at night. From that day forward, Ruby only lived three more years. He could never string three coherent sentences together. Now, West's specialty, among his specialties, was inducing insanity in a person without their knowledge. And the Warren Commission was never told that, that this guy was actually hit a conflict of interest.

He was working for the CIA at the time. And, you know, are these coincidences or is there something more to a... That doesn't sound like a coincidence to me. So you have, just to rehash it for everybody, you have Lee Harvey Oswald, who supposedly was this lone gunman who, you know, took out JFK. That was like kind of conventional narrative. You have Jack Ruby killing him. And by the way, when Jack Ruby shot him, he goes, what are you doing? I'm Jack Ruby to the cops who were arresting him, almost as if he didn't recall having killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

Well, he didn't. You know, his original defense was he wasn't sure why he was there. He had, his lawyers said he had an epileptic fit. and he had no memory of this. And then he's seen by Jolly West in a jail sale with no camera is present and goes nuts. Right. Right outward. So I think that's a pretty interesting fact pattern.

But going back to Banson, other possible pieces of evidence that he was an MK. Ultra patient, his whole life was kind of modeled off of this sci-fi novel, A Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, this 1968 bestseller. and he called this, his son was like Don Valentine, right? Michael Valentine. Michael Valentine's, his first born child. And then Roger Smith, his parole officer, was Jew ball, this protector character. So if you're not familiar with a novel, in the 1960s, everyone read that book, especially hippies.

And so, but Manson was supposedly illiterate. So it brings up this, like, really interesting question was he, like, dosed up with LSD, read this thing that then became like the narrative for his life. because in it, you know, it involves this race war or whatever. Like a lot of this stuff that he's talking about in his life. And it's about a leader who is born on Mars dispatched to the earth to start a new society of offspring. And he has communal wives. And he has someone who protects him in the legal system who is called Jubal.

And Roger's nickname from Manson and the girls was Jubal. There's a lot of spooky figures that kind of. were on the periphery of Manson's life. For the two years, he was free between 67 and his arrest in 69. There's like a half dozen of them, and it's kind of a real cornucopia of characters that I present in the book that were really hard to find to get information on. A lot of them have no records. I did CIA FOIA request for the two or three that I was sure.

We're affiliated with the CIA, and you got what's called the glomer response. We can neither confirm nor deny any relationship with the jury. the CIA, which means, yeah, they win the CIA. And these people kind of traveled and followed Manson. And when Boliosi came in and did his prosecution, he erased them from the story. He removed any trace of them having anything to do with the group. It's a really crazy wild story. Crazy.

So you have, and yeah, you have a lot of compelling evidence that you write about that Manson was almost being tracked by authorities before he killed Tate. Spawn Ranch was actually raided and bugged. So it was like they could hear. Like Manson sort of plotting out the murder. And Reeve Witson, this mysterious guy who would tell everybody, you know, his friends and family that he was CIA, knew about the murder? No, he wouldn't actually say that. Okay.

He would say he worked for the government, but he couldn't say who he worked for. Oh, okay. And it wasn't until a year or two before he died. He told about three or four, five people who were very close to him. His daughter, his lawyer, who told me reluctantly that he had said to him. them that he was working in an undercover operation where he had infiltrated the Manson family for this government agency. And his dying regret was he could have prevented the murders from happening. And he said, I was there at the crime scene the night of the murders. He said,

I wasn't there when they occurred. I came after and saw the aftermath and left before the police came. And there's actually sound evidence and other physical evidence that shows there was somebody at the property. Manson did go back and he's never said who he went back with. So yeah, you're dealing with a lot of kind of shady crazy shit. To say the least. Yeah, but it all kind of falls into place. We have a lot of evidence that maybe government had, you know, knew more about this stuff. And maybe, maybe Manson was some sort of construct. The question is like motive. Like, Like why would you kill a beautiful pregnant movie star in the form of Sharon Tate who, you know, America loved? He's knocking on the chaos door and the Cointel Pro door.

Exactly. So the CIA had another operation called Operation Chaos, which began in 1967 in San Francisco. And it was set up to do what the FBI also had a program doing called Cointel Pro. and it was all investigated. The agencies admitted they did it. Cointel Pro and chaos were designed to neutralize the left wing movement and the black militant movement in the United States in 67. So by 67, the Panthers were becoming really powerful, the Black Panthers.

The anti-war movement was real. The war was escalating. People didn't trust the president Johnson. And Johnson and Edgar, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. believe that the biggest threat to the United States at that time was internal, that the youth was going to overthrow the country and take over, and they needed to do something to stop it. So chaos was started, and Cointel Pro were started, and they would get agents to infiltrate the groups, and then do, among other things, get them to provoke the groups, to commit crimes

that they could actually get shot and killed by agents waiting in the course of the crimes, like a bank robbery or gun theft stealing guns. Also, they were trying to provoke them to kill one another, particularly the Black Panthers who were splintering a lot. There was a lot of rivalries among different Panther groups in different cities, and there were other black militant groups. In Los Angeles, there were something called the U.S. slaves. There were two black U.S. slaves killed at UCLA campus in 68, which the FBI admitted when another whistleblower came out in the 70s, that those two murders had been pretty much orchestrated by FBI agents on the orders of the people in Washington. About six, seven months before the Sharon Tate murders,

which if you don't know, it was a horrible, horrible murder. I mean, it's bad enough that she was eight and a half months pregnant, but the four victims that were stabbed were. step more than 200 times. There was blood writing on the wall. It was a real horrific crime scene. And the Tate House kind of represented liberal Hollywood. It was a party house. The white celebrities in L.A. were starting to support the Panthers financially. They were doing fundraisers. They actually had a group. I forget what the name was now. Not called the White Panthers, but it was Friends of the Panthers. And famously, you know, Jane Fonda, Gene C. Leeburg, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Don on Sutherland.

They were having meetings. Hoover wrote a memo to the head of the LA field office in November of 68, saying, what we have to get these white supporters of the Panthers to fear is that when the revolution finally happens, they're going to be lined up against the wall and slaughtered with the rest of the white population. And then that August, you know, five white people were slaughtered in a house. It really was probably the embodiment of the left-wing Hollywood establishment. Manson himself, he was an aspiring musician, right? There's actually on YouTube, there's one of his songs, I think it's like, look at your game girl. Is that right?

It's like got over 2 million views. And it's like eerily like not that bad. And he was also living with Dennis Wilson. one of the beach boys. There's a lot of different chapters to the story. You know, Manson infiltrated of the rock and roll world in 1968 through the drummer for the beach boys,

Dennis Wilson, who became mesmerized by him, allowed the girls in Manson to live in his house in the Pacific Palisades for about two months until they trashed the house, trashed his roles, gave him VD, stole his money, and he threw them all out. And so the overall point is

if you're trying to co-opt counterculture, what do you do? You have this construct of a guy that looks like and acts like a hippie, kind of a counterculture revolutionary type, and you make him do some really bad, savage stuff. And you have Donna Tart, famous author writing August 8, 1969,

you know, that was the day the 60s ended. Like the hippie movement was sort of torn apart by this. And there's also speculation that I think M.K. Ultra occurred in Laurel, as well. And so you have the, you have the like quotes at the time, Abby Hoffman, who's this famous hippie. He was like, we were just upright Berkeley, you know, students doing our normal kind of hippie thing and protesting very peacefully. And you had these flower children from Laurel Canyon with their guns and their drugs and they're trying to kill each other or whatever. And it kind of

marginalized the whole movement. Yeah. It's funny because a lot of those guys of the yippies, Hoffman and them were paranoid and did think that they had been infiltrated by people who were, trying to set them up. And what happened with the Manson case was within a week of his arrest, there's on the cover of every newspaper in the world, a magazine. And it was confusing because the women are 17, 18, 19. They're wearing love bees. They have long hair. They've got babies breastfeeding. And they look like the hippies you saw in Life magazine. But these women are accused of being a murderer, savage murderers, and they're kind of playing into it to the reporters.

And overnight people became terrified of hippies. They wouldn't pick them up hitchhiking anymore. It really, if the chaos and Cointel Pro's goal was to make society fear the left wing and fear what was happening, they accomplished it with that act, those murders. What do you think Manson was taught? Because even until until the end, like, I think he had this interview with Charlie Rose, right? And he was like, there's like a reality warp. Like there's this like weird effect that he has.

And he was dating like a beautiful, I think, woman in her mid-20s, like at the end of his life while he's in prison. So he is able to have some like magnetic weird culty pull on the outside world while he's in prison. So Star was a woman who came from Ohio just like a million women before her. Manson was free, she was drawn to him, she was beautiful, and she became his girlfriend. She lived outside the prison gates. We don't have conjugal visits in the state of California, so she could only go in and hold his hand and sit with him, and she had a relationship with him until he found out that she was also fucking Grey Wolf, who was his guy outside the wall, who managed his publicity and everything. So Star ended up drifting away. Charlie,

A friend of mine who was very close to Charlie said it was the only time he ever heard Charlie Charlie cry because he was so brokenhearted that Star had cheated on him with his best friend. Star is now either engaged to or married to an actor named Vincent Gallo. Who she lives with the Malibu. Is Buffalo 66? Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Crazy. Who was obsessed with Manson has the largest collection of Manson art, memorabilia. and wanted to play him. There were several movie projects that were being developed. And if you know the guy, you can see why he'd be perfect to play Charlie. And I met him at a party just this past fall and introduced myself. And I asked him if it was true because I'd heard the rumor. And he said, yeah, yeah, stars with me.

What's the tip of the spear on your research now? Jolly West reported to the CIA in 1955 that he had, had developed the technology to implant false memory and a person and remove true memories using a combination of drugs and hypnosis without that person's knowledge and it would be permanent. And that was in 1955. So that's like five, six, seven years into the program.

It went another 10 or 12 years. When they had the congressional hearings, the CIA said they were gonna turn over all the documents they had, which weren't a lot, a lot because they destroyed most of the things. Well, they summarized West's report, and I had West's original report. It's one of the documents I found at UCLA, and in the original report, he makes that pronouncement to them, that he has successfully done really the most important thing that they needed to do. When they, the document that ended up at Congress and is in the

record, that paragraph is missing. They took that out. They censored it. They didn't redact it. They just acted like it never existed. They redrafted his document. I think that there'd be idiots not to still use it. I have no evidence. I don't report on anything after like the 70s because I'm doing a second book, a follow-up, and I'm still just trying to stick to the 1940s through about 75, and I'm looking real hard at Manson's life in prison before he was released. He was in federal institutions from the time he was 12 or 13. And in the institutions he was in, starting out in the East Coast in Ohio and Pennsylvania,

Washington, D.C. National Boys School. There was N.K. Ultra Research going on at all those places that he was at. And they were looking for adolescents and boys who were prone to crime and prone to violence who had no families, no network of support outside that would be concerned about, what happened to them and that was Charlie that's who he was. Should we open it up to Q&A? Sure if anybody has a question. You mentioned that MK Ultra may have had an objective of subverting sort of hippie culture and making it seem like a threat. Does that assume a level of competence of government entities that is realistic? You know they took the fall for it. They look like fools but that was what the sacrifice they had to make to keep it going and to protect what they had. Hi, could you speak a little bit about the alleged connection between the Grateful Dead, the CIA, and MbK Ultra? Because that's fascinating to me.

Yeah, yeah. So the Dead were early distributors of LSD, free LSD, and the hate at their concerts in Golden Gate Park. And Osley Stanley was the one who was the chemist who was making it. I haven't looked a lot into that since my book came out. You know, I get lots and lots of people contacting me with information. and I've kept the file on the people who have the Osley Stanley was a CIA agent and the dead knew what he was doing and why he was doing it. But I don't have any real personal, original reporting on that. It's just stuff I'm starting to collect now.

Okay, awesome, guys. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks very much for indulging. Yeah, yeah.