Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 314: Charles Manson Part 3 - Hippies in the Canyons

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

A secret 3rd Manson Episode is brought to you by Alex while Mike and Jesse are dragged further into chaos. TOP SECRET STICKERS: https://theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati/products/top-secret-stickers-vol-1 MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Thank you to - GhostBed ZocDoc HeroForge All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Sources: NEW SOURCES https://allthatsinteresting.com/george-reeves-death https://www.johnwharding.com/the-violent-death-of-ramon-novarro/ https://lennybruce.org/2020/10/13/high-times-greats-the-trials-of-lenny-bruce-high-times/ https://laghosttour.com/the-wonderland-house/ https://derangedlacrimes.com/?tag=edward-durston https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2GjY8DN-7I https://headpress.com/product/weird-scenes-inside-the-canyon-special-edition/ https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/secret-celebrity-mansion-military-cold-war-18459922.php https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-12-04/mystery-in-laurel-canyon-william-de-rothschild https://allthatsinteresting.com/valentine-michael-manson https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helter-skelter-vincent-bugliosi/1004765613 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BGly0gcu-8 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chaos-tom-oneill/1129822092?ean=9780316477543 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwoA7NvaacI https://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/5/26/charles-mansons-hollywood-part-1-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-the-manson-murders https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/manson/mansonchrono.html https://www.charlesmanson.com/vicinity-crimes/barker-ranch/ http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/dbjypb.int3.html

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chuluminati podcast, episode 314. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin. joined today by my two friends who I saw in the flesh just days ago. He saw our flesh. I saw your flesh. He glimpsed my flesh. I glistened in the moonlight. He saw it like a malnourished walrus with no hair walking past him in the night.

I'm like the malnourished rat in the background. Mathis is such an interesting roommate. he's he's uh i feel i get the sense that he like gets up to things in the night like i get the sense that he like does little expeditions and dude if one night you heard a loud noise it's literally because i forgot that there was an end table near the tv and my legs under it and i moved my legs quick and it just went wham and just knocked over everything i actually i actually didn't hear that i actually had i had no like sounds to give it away i just the way that you the way that you operate i just get the sense that you like once the door closes that's like you're

domain in there and you're free and I would yeah yeah sure yeah it's yeah night it's that like I think that like what they call it revenge bedtime sit like we're like everybody goes to bed I finally feel like I can calm down and like chill and like that's the time yeah chill and like that's the time since I worked in restaurants because I would work to like close to like one in the morning and so getting home at one in the morning when everybody's asleep was like the only time I had especially if I worked like a double on a Saturday yeah late night that's the time that I work on Shulamani podcast. I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. That's the feeling that I'm after all the time on Shulminati is the revenge bedtime. So we're here for. We're gonna enable it. Ecstasy of revenge bedtime. The ecstasy of revenge bedtime. Jesse, why are you shaking your head? There's no, like, you've never done, like...

In my mind, you really are up to, like, gnomish goofery at night. I wish. Like what? Like, you were, like, running down to the street to, like, get a little delivery. That's what I'm saying. Like, you're going out. You're, like, you know, stealing... A little dead drop.

action. Yeah, yeah, you're like, people got something in their front yard and you're taking it just because. I feel like you would be massively disappointed with my nighttime activities. I, you know, I don't believe that for a minute. I go outside. When I'm home, I go outside and I look at the stars a lot. And I had a neighbor actually asked me if I was okay the other day because I was just like

my friend you're just out looking. Yeah, just looking to see if I see anything. Our gazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I don't want to disturb Alex or anybody there as well. So I don't, like, leave the room for the most part. No, exactly. Nighttime.

I, yeah, yeah. I, I, when I'm, when I'm at that time of night, I'm like, I wonder if there's any, like, cartoons or television shows from 1970 to 1989 that I never heard it before that I want to watch a three-hour documentary about. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why that's what happens, but that's what happens. That's kind of what happened with me when you were, like, put on the Hamilton's pharmacopoeia thing and then you were like, well, I got to go to bed after this.

And then, like, two and a half hours later, you're like, well, I got to finish it. It's a good show. Yeah, it was very good. Is a great little show that was on Vice. It's about a guy who, like, does Anthony Bourdain, but drugs, hard, like psychedelic drugs. Yeah, and he's like a chemist-level intelligence to, like, what they fucking do. He's, like, the right guy to be doing it. Yeah.

Guys, are you guys ready for one more? No. Yes. Well, you think you are, but you're not. No, I'm just kidding. Guys, welcome back to L.A. month here on the show, as it's been now for over a month. and what a month it's been so far. I just realized, yeah, it's September now.

What happened to us? Yeah, it's been a long L.A. month. We're almost done with L.A. month. There's been all kinds of guests and surprises. Our first ever listener calling show happened last week, which was really fun. Shoutouts to everybody who was there. Shoutouts to Let's Get Haunted. Shoutouts to Spooky Foodie.

I heard like half of you. That was pretty good. Yeah, you did pretty good. Shoutouts to Dean for fixing the audio afterward. Shoutouts to Dean for making that shit listenable. I feel so bad. There was a moment where I could no longer hear the audio. So whenever you guys said anything, I go, yeah.

Oh, definitely, man. Yeah, yeah. I was just trying. Jesse, that's just called being a professional. From the audience just pretty like, thank you. Whatever you said, thank you, I go, thank you. That's all I can do. From the audience's perspective, it was flawless.

We also had a merch drop by your top secret Chulomani stickers from Dory's Doodles now, by the way. It's so sick. The packaging for it is super sick. Head over to the eddy.com slash Illumini. It's all that and more. You can get a link to it if you click shop at Shulminati. Pod.fm.fm also. It's a little easier to remember. But the surprises are not yet over. First of all, if you haven't yet, head over to our subreddit, R-slash Chulamati Pod, which has been popping off lately with a bunch of lively activity. Lots of fun. Listener stories have been going crazy. People have been interacting with the concept of L.A. Month. And while you're there, I invite you to check out our all-new official Chiluminati L.A. Month play. list, which was inspired by a post from user don't steal.

We're going to pin that on the community highlights to go up with the episode. So that'll be up. It features a list of tracks curated by myself, which not only sound great in order, but also have some sort of connection to Los Angeles. And even further, the great tapestry of mystery that we're weaving here this month. So you'll see some famous names and faces from our stories in the playlist. And second, I mentioned him briefly in the LA listener story episode we did with Brett from Super Beard Bros, who I've been doing a show with forever and ever and ever.

But our final guest for L.A. Month for the final true episode of L.A. Month is Kurt Maloney from Dropout. He's going to be here next week. So that's another little surprise announcement for LA Week. So get ready for one last woo-hoo for the Pullman and a good chill time with one of my funniest and oldest friends coming up. But that's next week. For now, we bring ultimate closure, perhaps, and a baton pass, if you will, to what's next, with a mushy little episode about a bunch of stuff that sounds absolutely insane, but in an almost even more absolutely insane way. I'm looking at you skeptics. It really mostly isn't.

It's mostly just true. It's just the conclusions that are hard to stomach. Now, yes, as I hinted at the end of Manson Part 2, this is a secret backdoor third episode in the Manson trilogy, but I would say it is only... Manson 3 in so much as you should really go listen to the first two Manson episodes before listen to this one. Otherwise, you don't really get the context. But beyond that, the episodes don't have that much in common with each other, which is why this episode is actually called Hippies in the Canyon, and the Manson 3 part is only in the subtitle. Hippies in the Canyon,

Manson 3, and more. Now, originally, this episode was titled Dark Laurel Canyon, because Laurel Canyon was sort of the culture center of the free-spirited progressive love-oriented movement that in many ways encompasses both Manson and the people surrounding them in this story both good and bad, dead and alive,

as well as, in another way, everyone who's ever gotten judged by their loved ones or friends with Manson's actions as the justification. So anybody who's ever been like a cool long-hair person and had to deal with a conservative person telling them, you're not going to be like that Manson, that crazy hippie Manson, are you?

This is for you. But the history goes back much, much farther than that. That's right. For thousands of years, before Spanish ranchers arrived in the 18th century and absolutely shattered the vibes. Laurel Canyon was home to the Tongva tribe of California indigenous peoples. Like we can call like the conquistadors and all them, just like vibe killers. Is that like, we're just.

Shatterers, let's call it. Five shatterers. That's what they said back then, too. Yeah. It's the home to the Tongva tribe of California indigenous peoples, which thanks largely to the year-round water, which was supplied by a spring-fed stream. And honestly, if I could change it back to the way things were then, I would. That's it.

But like I said, a little over 120 years ago, the Spanish came, messed it up pretty bad with their sheep, livestock, they settled, messed up the land. And then, after the American War, America really came and messed it up. Government took ownership of some of the land. They settled the area pretty hard because good water source means good money. and what was once a free and beautiful thing became a commodity, which really is the beginning of the end

of basically anything if you think about it. Capitalism, Bad. Thank you so much to Ghostbed for sponsoring today's episode. Ghostbed has been basically my go-to pillow for how long have I been talking about these guys now but they've been working with us like over a year, and that Ghostbed pillow is still the only pillow I use. It is always cool to the touch.

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This was basically the vibes at that time. And people just went up the canyon on like a mule or like walked or whatever for like 50 years until 1907 when the 82 mile road that eventually became Laurel Canyon Boulevard was built out of dirt and which split off away from the main artery at Lookout Mountain Road where another fork went up off to the Lookout Mountain Summit and a year later the area was purchased by Lookout Mountain Park and Water Company and it was marketed almost like a mountain vacation homes like Big Bear or Lake Arrowhead or something like that since at the time LA as we knew it wasn't really like a huge fucking city yet and there was a lot more like low key quaint vibes going on up there

it's still pretty nice up there it's just like literally touching city on all sides but by 1910 they had now built the famous lookout mountain inn and which burned down in like 1923 but it was there and roads that linked everything to like newly developed areas there was bungalow land wonderland park and a famous 16 passenger trackless trolley line think about that. First of all, bungalowland. Imagine living in a time when bungalows were so tight that you named some shit after it being in a bungalow and you were like, this is worse than a house. There was also a 16 passenger trackless trolley line. It ran from Sunset Boulevard to the tavern, which was at the top of Lookout Mountain Road. And it ran until it wasn't

really needed anymore in 1924, like I said, because the inn burned down the previous year. And like, the city was coming. Like, at that point, there was a lot more roads and ways to get around. so you didn't really need a 16-man trolley line to get up the mountain. And speaking of the tavern, it was built in 1915 and eventually became rather famous if you're like a rock historian as the like log cabin. It's called the log cabin. It's a mansion with a huge like front room like a tavern

at 2401 Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I think it's an empty lot now because it burned down in the 80s. But originally after it became the tavern, Tom Mix, the silent film star, ended up living there for a while. And then it went on the market for many years, but in less than 60 years, it would become almost like the grand symbol of a new type of Laurel Canyon denizen, like the people who were in that log cabin. When in 1965, the same year that America started seeing their kids off to Vietnam, the first boots on Vietnamese soil, the wooded hillsides, the isolated geography, the rustic vibes, the light elitism, all of those things began to attract major figures of the rock and roll hippie counterculture scene in America. who quickly filed in, began to take root, claim the neighborhood as their own. And, like, I say they drew hippies in.

It's almost like they drew people in, and then the hippies came. The hippies started, like, coming out of the canyon. Like, they're almost, it's almost like the home turf of the hippie. It provided, like, a visual look, like a fashion look and an aesthetic for the death of the beautiful, disgusting cultural construct known as Pax Americana or American town shah, depending on how you want to look at it. Of course, they didn't know that when it. started, which explains why Mr. Tamburine Man, which is not a Bob Dylan song in this

case, but also the debut album of The Birds, which kind of served the loyal, it was like the Laurel Canyon calling card was this album, Mr. Tanbrine Man by the Birds, produced by Terry Melcher, by the way. And from there, releases from bands like Mamas and the Pappas, love, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Buffalo Springfield, the doors, folk stars like Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstat type people, all those people, it broadened the scope of the sound, made it go from something like kind of happy and light. It's a small world type stuff to more,

you could go to dark places, it could go to psychedelic places, it can go to philosophical places, it could go to heavier places than rock music had gone before, really. And of course, as we've seen again and again with this type of attention comes legend, comes history, comes intrigue, comes confusion.

And that, coupled with an oddly ominous sort of mystical aesthetic is why Laurel Canyon is still so famous today, so visitable today, so interesting today. You can still go there now. You can go to the Canyon Country Store, which is like a really kind of neat place out of time. And it feels very similar probably to the way that it felt back then. There is not a lot of visual cues that make you feel like you're in the modern day besides the cars. It's pretty cool. Go get a soda, go buy a bottle of wine. They have an amazing wine program up there. But also, the reason I changed the title to hippies of the canyons with an S is that technically the Tate House, which we have discussed very much,

where the murders went down. It wasn't even in Laurel Canyon. It was in Benedict Canyon, which, you know, just like Runyon Canyon or Nichols Canyon or Franklin Canyon or Beachwood Canyon, they're all sort of like next to each other in one kind of big sort of geographically complicated area right above Hollywood, right? It's like the canyons, if you want to call it that. But hey, just like everything else in these stories, don't let a little factual discrepancy stop you. Come on.

And anyway, my point is... Yeah, when does that stop anything we've ever done? Never, not once. Yeah, exactly. My point is, Laurel Canyon was also the name of a scene. It's like a trigger word that people understand what it means. That is a scene that is based around that area, which to this day probably extends around the whole planet,

depending on who you are, what you listen to, what you do, how you live your life. and, without a doubt, everyone that we've been discussing in our larger L.A. Month narrative have all definitely touched or been a part of the Laurel Canyon scene in some form. So I still feel like calling this scene Laurel Canyon, even though Cello Drive is in Benedict Canyon, is fine. Which is why, when I first found the book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan, which will be linked in the show notes, by the way, I was really excited because it seemed like a nice little grabbag collection of weird stories. all of them are different all strange in their own way it has the vibe of like that guy you know who's old and has a guitar and plays in the bar and like knows all the stuff and like has like one story that connects him to like some rock and roll star it's like that guy like told you a bunch of stories about laurel canyon it's a really good kind of vibe but the one thing that ties them all together of course all these weird things they take place in the canyon and i thought it was going to be like a great sort of like repository for all these sort of like other big stories but you know i only really got like half of what i expected because

yes there are a lot of different strange ideas floating around in that book they all definitely take place in and around laurel canyon for the most part but nothing ever really amounts to anything completely focused there's not really conclusions in the book it kind of just gives you the info and then goes uh and in fact magowan even kind of like addresses this at one point himself in the book saying quote the question that naturally arises here i suppose is this what do you suppose the odds are that all of that just came together purely by chance when early in Installments of this story were posted online. I received a fair amount of negative feedback. Among other things, I was accused of inferring, quote, guilt by association, and of a gauging, end quote,

character assassination. One rather strident respondent complained that it was unfair to take a few isolated facts about an individual and use them to paint a sinister picture. To some extent, these are valid complaints. And yes, it is fairly easy to gather together a few different isolated facts and use them to paint a much different portrait of these artists and pen an impassioned defense of any of them. But what I ask is that you try to stand back and take in the big picture and then ask yourself the following question. Exactly how many coincidences does it take to make a conspiracy? And that's kind of the question that I'm asking you to. And I don't want to just totally break the fourth wall here because I rarely do that on this show. But it's this

quote here that kind of inspired me in the first place to use the notorious time slice convention in the first place, right? Like, probably you guys both kind of feel this when you guys write episode outlines too, but just for the listener who maybe doesn't do this kind of research that often, at some point, when you read tons and tons of different stuff all about the same thing and they don't really cancel each other out, but they don't really completely match with each other either, you start to realize that with all the contradictions, you start to realize that with all the contradictions and different opinions and strange inconsistencies, it really starts to seem silly that a single piece of anything, any single written piece could contain the entirety

of something that is in reality so chaotic and still alive. You know, things are still, people are still, people who are there are still deciding. You go to these like Facebook comments and stuff that you see or Reddit threads that you'll find about books and things like that. And you'll see people in there in the comment section like, hey, I was like living in this apartment building while this was going down. Here's how I feel. And like, the story is just always, it's still happening. That's the point.

The point is somehow the story will always still be happening, at least for a while. At some point, these types of things, whether it be like, you know, the mans and stuff, true crime, there's a certain line where it seems to cross into the public, like, greater thought, like greater mind, very much into the public consciousness. Yes. And from that point on, like, there will always be new people who've never heard of it before as they grow up and it's such a big thing

and it's grown into this like you said chaotic own mass, its own living thing that it forever has like it's ever green to be fed on the further into history it gets

the more mythical and mystical things start to get for people. Exactly. It's like even now with like, you know, being like a middle age guy

and in hearing a younger Gen Z talk about shit that like they weren't around for in a way that's almost versus the cowboy times for us. Yeah. Exactly. So much more fantastical to cowboys.

And even back then, Like this was a kind of a weird, like, Manson was like a weird mystical, like, not in a good way, but like this kind of like... There was so much less media, the idea of hippies for like a weird square in middle America. It's like impossible to imagine that there's like a guy, dude. It's like everybody was straight laced. Everybody looked like stepperd.

And so stuff like that really like fucked the world up. Like America thought they were the, like America came out of the war like with extra money to spend, extra vibes, lots of political power. And they thought, well, this is how our life should be. The best Nazis. Yeah. That's what we came out of the war with. Apparition paperclip.

You're not wrong. Yeah. Just crazy thing you say. I don't want to lock that into this point that I made. Thank you so much to today's sponsor, Zoc Doc. And hey, you remember that doctor's appointment you were supposed to make a while ago? I'm looking at you. I see you.

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appointments mark and go to Zock.com slash chill to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's ZO-C-D-O-C.com slash chill. Zock-D-O-C-com slash chill. And look, and look, and look, I realize that some of you out there did not love the time-slice conceit. I didn't even ask you guys what you thought of it because you guys don't get a choice. But of course, it's not the way I'm going to like do episodes going forward, right? It's more a narrative quirk that I'm, that I invented for this Manson's story to prove a specific point, right?

But the point is, to answer a question I keep asking you guys, no, I don't think that writing about something can change reality. I've been asking it a lot. I don't think that writing something can change reality. But just as reality is different for everyone and a unique version exists within us all, I do think that words still work. I think it's the reading of stuff that can change your. reality. I think when you read stuff,

you reset your understanding of something if there's new information, right? You literally change your own reality. That's the hope anyway. It's like that people read something new and they're like, oh, maybe I should change my mind about this. Yeah, because you're then being convinced of it yourself. You're actually deciding to believe it. And you yourself is the only person who can decide what's real for you anyway in the end, right? Like, there's always this wall of inside and outside.

So if I can, I think, I think less the less focus on the reading, more focus on the, I mean, less focus on the right more focus on the reading. So by telling you things that did happen in the time slice format, instead of telling you exactly what it all means, right? It's like writing of every version of the story at once in everybody's head, letting them make what they want to make out of the facts. And instead of laying out what exact truth to believe, you have the freedom out there to draw your own conclusions about what every single little piece of information means. And I know what I think happened, right? I know what I think happened, but I'm not going to

come down on a conclusion because I don't think it makes sense. If a common understanding of the story forms on its own, because the facts that I put out there are so obviously telling us one story, that's cool, but that's not me doing that. That's like the circle of life. That's reading and writing, doing what it needs to do. People decide whether it's real or not or, you know, like something like what happens during a thing that nobody was there for, but somehow there's like an official version of it. That just happens from people reading stuff, right? But somehow people think they know what happened in the Manson House, even though all we have is what Susan Atkins said happened later when she was on drugs. You know what I mean? Like, or, you know, whatever. There's a million different accounts and they're all a little different.

We don't even know whose fucking glasses of those were that they found. They found a pair of glasses that they have no idea who it is. They're on the ground. Nobody, they don't belong to anybody. That's so fucking crazy to me. And the ways writing comes into this process are still mysterious and inscrutable. And just as I was kind of suspected, writers themselves might not. be all that important in the end. Though, you know, of course they are. Uh, and yes, obviously,

speaking of writing, I also read a bunch of shit and listened to a couple podcasts making this show, including weird scenes in the canyon by Dave McGowan, Helter Skelter by Vincent Blyosie, chaos by Tom O'Neill, the films based on both of those Manson books and that you must remember this season four series, Charles Manson's Hollywood. There are many more links than that in the description as well, but I'm combining what I believe to be the most true version of what happened out of these various versions, and then I will frame them. them with authentic glimpses into a mostly chronological timeline, though honestly, the machine is a poet, so sometimes there's a glitch, and there might be some reasonable license

taken to engage you or to resonate some themes with you. I didn't do that that much this time. This one's just more about how everything's all over the place. So yeah, to give you an idea of what's going on today on the episode, we're going to do a couple little dives off into the mysteries of Laurel Canyon, which I just told you about, just like we've been doing with the time slices, but with a slightly leaner, more arcade-y feel, if you will. We're going to be finishing the story of Manson also, in its entirety, as I intend to tell it. And hopefully, by the end, your curiosity has been sated. You'll glimpse some sort of divine order to all these concepts we keep throwing your way.

Your sense of wonder for the world will be topped up. And we're only one topic away from L.A. Month's fabulous and wonderful end, which will be a nice little chaos, magical bow, on top of a full season or two of slightly related and yet uniquely interesting topics. I was just talking to math about that. Mathis about that earlier that somehow we ended up writing like an essay about like personal willpower in our, you know, like from American Folk Magic to next week or actually probably till after that, a couple weeks after that. I must stress. I just want to put this out there in the ether. Um, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart. Uh-huh. I hate chaos magic. I hate the concept. I hate the idea. I hate that we spent so long on it. I do not like it. Sem I am. You don't even get it. You really don't even get it. And that's okay. I get it. I get it. I don't think. It sounds like... There's no reason to hate it. Anything can be chaos magic.

Yes. Which means nothing is chaos magic. No. Because it's a dumb concept. That's like saying everything could be math, so nothing is math. It doesn't even make fucking sense what you're saying. But this is a listener beware right now. Math is a real thing.

Chaos magic is, well, that's chaos magic. No, that's chaos magic. Yeah, math is a real thing. Right. This is a listener beware. Now, right at the top. Right at the top. I'm giving you a listener.

Usually I'm the one fighting back, but I don't like, I'm just enjoying, I'm just going to stay quiet. I can't enjoy. It goes against everything I believe. I hate it. I got to say one last time for the people in the back. It's true for almost every episode that we do here. And in fact, it is exactly the thing that makes a mystery in the first place. But just so that we're all clear, hear me when I say this.

This story that I'm about to tell you today only really has an ending in your own imagination. Not even the book, Chaos by Tom O'Neill has a nice, clean ending. So don't ask me to spoon feed you an ending just because you feel like you should get one. isn't one. It would be irresponsible to the complexity of the truth for me to do so. And if you're still not happy, tell you what, go get an AI, have it read you Wikipedia,

you're a loser. When you have your own cool podcast script, when you have your own cool podcast scripts to write, you can go make yours boring, I won't even stop you, and in fact I don't even know you, and this is all just a courtesy. I wrote this script days ago in the middle of the night by myself in my underwear. Alex is not.

That's true. I'm like math. I'm like math. Today, I'm just reading you a script. I wrote it earlier. A warning. This show contains generous graphic descriptions of consensual sex, both group and solo, various dangerous, as well as less dangerous drugs, some seriously violent crimes against both humans and animals, including murder, kidnapping, multiple incidences of sexual assault. And if you're listening to the show and there's kids in the room, I'm just sorry. I'm just sorry, you know, that seems like a lot of work in this world that we live in today to have kids. Just do whatever you need to do. I don't care what happens to the kids. You earned it. Just do whatever you need to do. And also on top of

of that. We're also going to be making jokes. What's happening? We're going to be making jokes about this. I don't know what's going on right now. I don't either. I feel like he's spiraling like on his own. What are you talking? This is like a math this episode. It's wild. This is just information. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a hell of an intro. We're going to be making jokes about dark stuff. Even worse,

some of it's probably going to be factually wrong. Even though I promise, I tried my goddamn best to do a good job. I'm just a video game, YouTuber comedian, game show host who likes to be mysterious online. Please don't judge me like you would an expert. That's like saying milk would be a good wine. No, it wouldn't, you idiot. That's disgusting. Anyway, this first Laurel Canyon segment is called Meet the Parents, where we meet the parents of some of Laurel Canyon's most famous stars, starting with Jim Morrison.

Jim Morrison, Mysterious Lizard King, you probably know who this is. He's the Lizard King. Lead singer of the Doors, turns out he has a bizarre family secret. And though the book just boldly goes so far as to say it likely did have an effect on his meteoric rise and his mysterious death without explaining how that's possible, I will simply say, that it is both unexpected and remarkable to realize that though he often lied in interviews and said that his parents were dead, Jim Morrison, the Doors guy, his actual father is Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was in command of his flagship, the USS Bon Am Richard on August 4, 1964, when the U.S. military falsely claimed they were attacked in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin

by North Vietnamese forces, in a move that was used to jump. justify further U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. There were two attacks. One happened. America didn't respond. And they decided they would have liked to have responded. So they made up another attack to react to. That was under Jim Morrison's father.

Jim Morrison's father was in charge of that. They just want war. There's no war that the government won't just like keep prolonging for as long as possible. I mean, the mystery is not that the Gulf of Tonkin was a, like, it's not even a false flag. It just didn't even happen. There's no mystery there. We've known that since 2003 for sure. General, what's his name, like, came out and said it was, uh, uh, there was no attack.

He like, you know, decades later admitted it. Morrison's dad also did classified work at the White Sands Missile Range, where they detonated the first ever atomic bomb while filming the documentary Oppenheimer. And he also went to kindergarten with someone that will meet in a second called Adelaide Sloatman. And he went to high school with Papa John Phillips and Mama Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Pappas. Go figure. More on Mr. Mojo Rising later.

What? Okay. You know the Mamas and the Pappas? Not the name, but... Like... You said Mojo Rising's from them? No, Mojo Rising is... Oh, okay.

Is Mr. Jim Morrison himself. Okay, okay. Moms and the Pappas is like one of the most important folk rock groups of all time. They have, uh, they have... What's like the big songs? That's, yeah, okay. Like, their biggest hits are like So fucking important, are they?

Dude, do you know Mama Cass? No. Do you know Cass? No. Well, I definitely know 100% you know. California dreaming. Monday, Monday. Yeah.

I think so. Yeah. Spanish Harlem. Hey, this is dedicated to the one I love. Yeah, or fucking, there's a million songs they've released. On such a winter's day. You know that.

I stopped in. To a church. You know that song. Yeah. Take it easy. Oh, wow. I didn't know they also did dream a little dream of me. I didn't know that.

They did a cover. They did a cover of it. Oh, okay. All right. I was about to say, like that. Yeah. They did a lot of stuff. So they all went to high school together.

That's crazy. Now we're going to talk about Frank Zappa, number two on the list. Frank Zappa was a strange, freaky figure seen by many to be the father of Laurel Canyon. Like I said, after he took over the log cabin that Tom Mix used to live in, that tavern. that was across that's that you know it's not there anymore but it was like

this really strange house made a wood that like it just became a halfway house for like every single cool person ever to show up in the area like if you're from England

you're the Beatles or whatever you show up you go there you're the beach boys you roll in anybody's there at the log cabin it was like a cultural center

he was creating his own labels there started various versions of his band the mothers of invention while he was in the canyon and Frank Zappa absolutely hated hippies

he fucking hated the concept of hippies, hated the idea of hippies. He preferred his signature style, which many in the canyon saw as hippie fashion, to be referred to as freak. And in fact,

Lord. Many have described his pro-military views and authoritarian controlling nature as anathema to the vibes of the scene that he surrounded himself with. And maybe that is because his father, Francis Zappa, was a chemical warfare specialist

at the Edgewood Arsenal, which is, as you know, the home of M.K. Ultra. As well as Edwards Air Force Base in California, which among other very, very big things, administers, homie airport, aka Groom Lake, aka Area 51. So that's Frank Zappa's dad was involved with all that. Also, Frank Zappa's manager, Herb Cohen, was a former U.S. Marine who supplied arms to

Patrice Lomba in the Congo in 1960. This guy's just got military connections all over the place. quote, in defiance of the CIA, and also Zappa's wife, Gail Zappa, used to be called Adelaide Sloatman, aka Jim Morrison's Naval Kindergarten Buddy, who herself briefly worked for the Office of Naval Research and Development, and also has a dad who works on classified nuclear stuff for the Navy. Of course. That's another crazy one. Now, let's go back to the Mamas and the Pappas for a second, talk about Papa John Phillips.

John Edmund Andrew Phillips, aka Papa John Phillips, not a. only fronted the Mamas and the Pappas, co-founded the Monterey Pop Festival, and wrote the song by himself, If You're Going to San Francisco, you know, sung phenomenally by Sean Connery in the movie The Rock. Yes. Sean Francisco. That song probably brought more hippies to the hate in San Francisco than any other single piece of culture. It was like a, it was like a Piper song that like led all of the like sad,

chill, like teenagers to San Francisco. What's your Piper song that? No matter what happens, you could not resist. Yeah, but also Papa John Phillips was the son of U.S. Marine Corp. You kind of stop calling him Papa John Phillips because, like, I know what you're doing. He makes pizza, and he says the N-word. But you keep saying Papa John, and I'm like,

the pizza guy? That guy's so sweaty. He does Coke. He says the N-word. Let's talk about Captain Claude Andrew Phillips. He does that a heated gaming moment, bro. Yeah, let's talk about Captain Claude Corporal Cap, Corp Captain Claude, Andrew Phillips, sorry. And his mother, Edna Gertrude, another lifelong government employee who claimed to be a psychic telekinetic. And after going to several top-tier military prep schools, we're talking about John Phillips.

He eventually ended up at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, which is like the one. His wife, Susie Adams, worked at the Pentagon with his sister Rosie. His wife was directly descended from John Adams, like President number two, John Adams. and her father, James Adams, Jr., carried out classified intelligence ops in Vienna, Austria. After the Naval Academy, John himself went off to Cuba during the Cuban Revolution as a, quote, concerned private citizen, supposedly, quote, fighting for Castro against the CIA. So that's John Phillips. Stephen Stills is the next person that we're going to talk to.

Stephen Stills is wild because he's not only a founding member of both Buffalo Springfield and obviously Crosby Stills Nash and I guess if you want to be. Serious. And Crosby's still Nash in Young. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's also the lead singer of Sexpabom. Just kidding. Actually, he wrote songs like for what it's worth.

You know that song? But there's something happening here. Yeah, that song. He also wrote Love the one you're with. He also wrote the song Bluebird. Yeah, he wrote Bluebird, which according to the book is also the original code name for what, Mathis? Shit, I don't remember. MK Ultra.

Safe guess. I was going to say, probably, yeah, safe answer is always. Fucking M.K. L. That's probably just a coincidence, but it's still worth mentioning. But what's not a coincidence, though, is that his father, Bill Stills, took his military family all over Central America after his service with huge parts of Stephen's life being spent in places like El Salvador and Costa Rica and even the Panama Canal Zone, where though his father's military record is not easy to find, let's put it that way. It's pretty clear to anyone looking, including Dave McGowan, author of this book, that his dad was doing less and above board stuff to spread, quote, peace in those countries down there at any cost. in a very peacemakery way if you catch my meaning. Also, strangely...

Strangely, Stills claims to have spent time running around in Vietnam for the USA. Now, as I just mentioned, our first boots on the ground at Danang was in 1965, right? So that's impossible because... Supposedly, yeah, like supposedly.

We know that... Well, there were already Americans in Vietnam. Don't get me wrong. We were just called advisors, right? But that would be weird if Stephen Stills was one of those. but we know that he was already touring and releasing music a year before

troops landed at Danang. So unless he was there briefly in secret or in an advisory capacity, he wouldn't, like, I just can't see him doing that and then going and like touring. Like, how could he be in both of those things? I don't know. Clones.

Just a strange thing. And then finally we're going to talk about in this segment, David Crosby, who just recently passed away. All right. As you may already know, up until his very recent death in 2023, this man had a great Twitter.

David Crosby wasn't just a co-founder of the Birds who had five albums actually produced by Terry Melcher, by the way, not just the first one. And CSNY, Crosby's still Nash and Young, another one in there. He was also the son of Major Floyd Delafield Crosby, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer, most famously for a bunch of Roger Corman movies. And also, Major Floyd Crosby took his military family

around to places like Haiti, where in 1927, at the time that he was there, it was currently also under the occupation of U.S. Marines, including Papa John Phillips's dad, Captain Claude Andrew. However, even more than just film and military connections, Krause has some serious bona fides in the world of old money, as his father was related to the extremely wealthy Van Rensselaer family, and his mother, Aleph was actually Ailf Van Cortland Whitehead, and I'll let McGowan explain why that's important further, because I don't actually know that much about New York High Society. Suffice it to say that the Crosby family tree

includes a truly dizzying array of U.S. senators and congressmen, state senators and assemblymen, governors, mayors, judges, Supreme Court justices, revolutionary and civil war generals, signers of the Declaration of Independence and members of the Continental Congress. It also includes, I should hasten to add, for those of you with a taste for such things, more than a few high-ranking masons. Stephen Van Rensler, the third, for example, reportedly served as grandmaster of masons for New York. I was literally about to be like, this sounds like the masons. Yeah. And if all that isn't impressive enough, according to the New England Genealogical Society, David Van Cortland Crosby is also a direct descendant of founding fathers and federalist

papers author Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. If there is, as many people believe, a network of elite families that has shaped national and world events for a very long time, then it is probably safe to say that David Crosby is a bloodline member of that clan, which may explain come to think of it why his semen seems to be in such demand in certain circles. Because if we're being honest here, it certainly can't be due to his looks or talent, which is a fucking shitty to say in a book. Yeah, it's like Jesse to register. I was watching Jesse's face the whole time the moment you said that. I mean, because he said it like it meant nothing. Yeah, like he said it already before. Like you just, I feel like we're skipping over a truly insane

statement. Well, this isn't the first time that you're going to go some crazy that we're going to this, well, this is the first time today. We're not going to, well, we're not going to talk about the fact that somewhere someone wants Crosby Seaman. This isn't the last time today that we'll talk about how getting semen and actually becoming a descendant of a wealthy billionaire family, you know, could actually get you in there. We're going to talk about. Okay, can I, can I just say, once again, it is so fucking obvious. We've never left utilism ever. We just fucking renamed shit from like barons and dukes to CEOs and board members and people are

still trying to bloodline their way in to generational wealth and power like you would in Crusader Kings 3 looking to take the king's throne from a fucking cousin and it's shit is in we still live in it we're just not merchants anymore we're entertainers middle class is just the merchant class

it's fucked we still living the shit we're court jesters let's be real that's exactly what we are we don't even make the bread we're like look at me my lord Yeah, point is, if America had royalty, then David Crosby would be like a Duke or a prince or something. Rothschild, are they like in there? We'll talk about the Rothschilds in a minute, actually.

All right. So that's our segment, unexpected parents. I know it doesn't seem like any of it's really related to anything else in the story yet. But before you write it off, consider this other quote from McGowan about it, which I thought was pretty interesting. Also, shout out to our Mason listeners. I know we have a few. If you want to send me the secrets of all your shit, just let me know. I want a cookie recipe from the masons.

I don't want anything unless you're a 33rd degree mason, in which case we could be friends. Yeah. That's friends. Let's suppose this is a quote from McGowan. You're like a fifth degree? Like, dude, I could be a fifth degree Mason. Yeah, that's like a black belt, bro.

Here's a quote from McGowan about this whole situation with the parents. Let's suppose, hypothetically speaking, that you happen to be Jim Morrison and have recently arrived in Laurel Canyon and now find yourself fronting a band that is on the verge of taking the country by storm. Just a mile or so down Laurel Canyon Boulevard from you lives another guy who also recently arrived in Laurel Canyon, and who also happens to front a ban on the verge of stardom. He happens to be married to a girl that you attended kindergarten with, and her dad, like yours, was involved in atomic weapons research and testing.

Her husband's dad, meanwhile, is involved in another type of WMD research, chemical warfare. This other guy's business partner is a spooky ex-marine, who just happens to have a cousin, who, bizarrely enough, also fronts a rock band on the verge of superstardom. And this third rock star on the rise also happens to live in Laurel Canyon, just a mile or two from your house. Just down a couple of other streets, also within walking distance of your home, live two other kids who, wouldn't you know it, also happen to front a rock and roll band that's new. These two kids happen to attend the same school as you in Alexandria, Virginia, that you attended, and one of them also attended Annapolis, just like your dad did, and just like your kindergarten

friend's dad did. Though almost all of you hail from the Washington, D.C. area, you now find yourselves on the opposite side of the country in an isolated canyon high above the city of Los Angeles, where you are all clustered around a secret military installation, which we'll talk about in a minute. Given his background in research on atomic weapons, your father is probably familiar to some extent with the existence and operations of Lookout Mountain Laboratory, as is the father of your kindergarten friend. The question that naturally arises here, I suppose, is this.

What do you suppose the odds are that all of that just came together purely by chance? And I'm going to come back to Lookout Mountain Laboratory a little later in the episode, so there's more to say about that. But it's something we're thinking about, right? He doesn't say a conclusion, but there sure is a lot of stuff here to think about. Anyway, this next segment that we're about to do is indeed the beginning of Manson Part 3, but at this point we're so far in, you won't barely find any Charles Manson himself in it at all. So to get things started and explain how that's even possible,

here's a quote about it to kick us off from Tom Neal, the author of chaos. When Manson died in November of 2017, the moment aroused little feeling in me. My investigation orbited around him, but he mattered hard. hardly adult to me. At some point, as a cottage industry rose up around him and he became a true crime icon, he'd been made brittle, toothless. His image had become a repository for our fears. Everyone preferred the idea of him to the reality. And in the, and in death, he was more ideal than ever, the killer hippie from the 60s, a decade that feels further removed from the present than many that occurred before it. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of the vibe with Manson. He's kind

of besides the point now. Yeah. But now onto the time slices we are once again. Which and hates. He hates not being the fucking center of attention. But he is. He's a patsy. He's just a patsy. Exactly. Now, uh, well, according to this story. Yeah. On to the time slices where once again, we are in 1999 viewing a slice, courtesy of the Chulamunati Biopham Institute, by the way, of chaos author Tom O'Neill, interviewing Sharon Tate's photographer friend again, Shirok Hatami, Iranian-born guy. He was there that day. You remember the day where Manson came by to the backhouse and he was walking out and Shirok saw him.

and maybe Sharon saw Manson somehow at that point. We've talked about that before. But this time, in talking about that, there's something else that we haven't heard before. Sharokatami tells O'Neill about his friend who is called Reeve Witson, who called him 90 minutes before the maid showed up at the house and told him that Sharon and her friends were all murdered.

The maid, by the way, the person found the bodies. So he called before that. And there wasn't even anything on the radio yet when Chirok turned the radio on, his girlfriend was there. They were like, what are you talking about? And then they all got weirded out when like an hour and a half later, all the radio started talking about it. So how the fuck did Reeve Witson find out about it?

But Reeve Witson was born in Chicago in 1931, but he grew up in Kendallville, Indiana, as the son of a family act dancer and acrobat and went straight into theater, first as the lead actor in productions at Indiana University, and eventually moving to L.A. to be a company member, at the Pasadena Playhouse. Nobody's exactly sure when that switched

into a career spying and government operative gig type stuff. But more than one person, O'Neill interviewed, mentioned that a formative story in that saga may have been when Reeve's mentor, Pete Lewis, who got him involved in like secret ops tangentially

in the first place through acting, was killed by somebody using the old poison dart in the umbrella trick. So his mentor was actually killed by that. Yeah. In the 60s, he briefly married a woman from Sweden, moved to New York with her while working undercover as a journalist at a communist newspaper,

traveling the world on classified missions and secretly meeting with Polish and Russian nationals. And he even had a daughter with this Swedish woman. But when the Cuban missile crisis went down in 1962, he sent them back to Sweden so they wouldn't get nuked. And eventually, he demanded that they get divorced under threat of legal action, and she didn't see him for 15 years

until he came back to make things right about the Tate case in the early 80s, since apparently his mom and Sharon Tate's mom were super close. However, if he did anything to, quote, make it right, it's news to the general public. So who knows why he came back. Witsen, who is not mentioned once in Helter Skelter, appeared four times in testimony at trial, all from Atami. So it didn't seem like Bouliosi really wanted to bring up Witson either. Hatami, who wasn't even sure it was Manson that he saw that day, really, was threatened with deportation to Iran by Reeve Witson himself when he said he didn't feel comfortable corroborating Altabelli's account of Manson coming by that day. And we have a quote from chaos about that.

The defense suspected that Bouliosi and Witson had indeed coerced Atami's story. They called on Boliosi to explain himself at the trial. Under oath, but out of the presence of the jury, Boliosi tried to answer for the fact that he interviewed Hattami without a tape recorder or a stenographer. Who was in the room when Hattami talked? Just Reeve Witson, myself, and Mr. Hottami, Boliosi replied. The judge decided that Hattami couldn't testify to having seen Manson. The jury heard only that he was at the house when a man came to the door

and that he sent that man to the guest house. But of course, Boliosi had forgotten that he'd supplied Whitson's name under oath. Witson wanted it that way. He served it his purpose and then disappeared. Atami said, like, a piece in a chess game. So why was this guy wrangling witnesses for Bliosi in the first place, though?

Everybody O'Neill asks about Reeve Witson says they were sure he was some kind of undercover government agent, but they weren't sure if it was the FBI or the CIA or what. They just knew that he was like spooky in some way. O'Neill interviewed special effects legend Richard Edland, who said of his friend, who also knew and was friends with Sebring, Polansky, and the Beach Boys, even before the murders. That's Reeve Witson. He was friends with all those people before the murders. His friend, Richard Edland, said, quote, Reve was among those, if not the one, who broke the Tate case. He operated in the

CIA. I believe he was on their payroll. Reve was the guy who, because of his background, he still wouldn't turn the inside of light of his car out. So when he opened his door, the light wouldn't go on because he had it that you never know who's looking. He used his thumbnail to tear the top right hand corner of every piece of paper he handled to mark it. Can't shake old ways, he used to say. O'Neill interviews former NBA player

Bill Sharman, who was also the GM of the Lakers for a little bit along with his wife Joyce. They knew Whitson from 1980 till he died in 1994. They said he had a photographic memory and that he actually told them he was working as part of the investigation for the CIA

and that the secret things he would tell them always sounded so, so impossible until they turned out to be true later in the news or whatever, right? I wonder what they have to say about chaos, the documentary. I would be interested to know. O'Neill then interviews former MGM head, Frank Rosenfeld, who'd be friends with Witson since 19, who'd been friends with Witson since 1975, and called him, quote, the strangest guy in the world. And then I have a kind of condensed quote from Rosenfeld from the book where he says, he didn't lie. He did not put himself in a position where he told you something and you could disprove it. If he had some intel connection, no doubt about it, he would call me for

hours. I always wondered, who the hell's paying the bills? And always from a phone booth on the street. Reeve knew a lot about the Manson situation. He indicated that if they had listened to him that a lot of people may have not been killed, he was heavily involved. I think he meant whoever was looking into it should have listened. The federal people, law enforcement people, he implied he gave them a lot of suggestions. He was involved and they didn't listen to him. He was bitter about it. Thank you so much to Hero Forge for sponsoring today's episode. and if I sound sultry and sexy about it, I am, and I don't know why. Head over to heroforge.com right now, and if you play tabletop minis or a mini collector

or any of that kind of thing, this is the website you want to go to. If somebody who's been playing tabletop RPGs now for fucking, oh my God, 20-something years, I just have a huge collection of minis. And one of the most problematic things back in the day when I was collecting minis was finding the right minis, the exact minis to represent a particular character or an NPC, if you were telling the story. It was very difficult to find the right thing and kind of just settled for close enough and went with it. But baby, we live in the future. And while the world may be falling apart, your fantasy one doesn't. If you head over to heroforge.com right now, you can customize

your minis with hundreds and thousands of combination options and have premium plastic, colored plastic, grays, gray plastic, bronzing, all kinds of stuff, mini statuettes, minis for your thing. And if you have a 3D printer at home and you don't want to like buy the full figure, you can buy the file to then print the mini at home for way cheaper that and you can still do all this stuff at hero ford. Listen, you can go over to hero forge right now and actually just for free mock up a mini. See if you can get something that you like. If you want it, you know, check out what they can do. Like it's all there for you to use as a free tool just to kind of visualize things. And I don't know of a company that would do that unless they're super confident in their product

and somebody who's gotten a load of stuff from Hero Forge now, not only just from working with them, but having used them for years, I think you're going to be pleased. So head over to heroforge.com right now, and on checkout, use Cochill and get a little off on your purchase and you support the podcast. Thank you again to HeroForge.com for a checking, and thank you again to HeroForge for sponsoring today's episode. I love you. This was because, according to one of his closest friends since the mid-80s, lawyer Neil

Cummings, Witson was a serious customer with training and how to kill, and at the time of the murders, he had the Tate House under surveillance and that he probably, quote, knew more than anyone else. And according to O'Neill, this hinted at the answer to a question he'd been wondering about since his investigation began, saying, quote, I was flummoxed. For a year, I'd been hearing of a rumor from people inside and outside the case that Manson had visited the CLO House after the murders, that he'd gone back with someone unknown to rearrange the scene. This would have accounted for discrepancies in the positions of the bodies. The killers left them one way and the police found them in another. There were pools of Tates and Sebring's blood on the front porch, splatters on the

walkway in the bushes, but according to the killers, neither Tate nor Sebring had ever left the living room where they died. The coroner described blood smears on Tate's body as if she'd been dragged, again, never mentioned by the killers. Those in the area, including a private security officer, had hurt gunshots and arguing hours after the killer said they left. And Manson himself had claimed on a few occasions that he'd gone back to the house with an unnamed individual to quote, see what my children did. And O'Neill actually interviewed Whitson's cousin Linda Ruby to see if she could corroborate that notion, and here's what he got. Quote, in August 1969, Ruby told me Witson was living with his parents in L.A.

On the day the bodies were discovered at the Tate House, she said, he went missing. His father, her uncle Buddy, had told her this story. The morning after the murders, around the same time Witson would have placed his call to Hatami, Buddy woke up and discovered that Reeve hadn't come home at night. When news of the murders flashed on the radio, Buddy got nervous. He knew that Reeve had planned to visit the Siello House the night before, and early reports said that one of the bodies there had yet to be identified. Fearing that his son had been murdered, Buddy Whitson called the cops who sprang into action.

The police set up a nerve center at their house, Ruby said. They remained there, manning the telephones until Reeve finally returned home late that night, at which point the police eagerly debriefed him. Pretty fucking weird. While reading an extremely rare unpublished manuscript from 1974 and 1975 called Five Down on Cello Drive, which was co-written by the leader of the LAPD investigation, Lieutenant Robert Heldor, Sharon Tate's father, Colonel Paul Tate,

and an unofficially involved FBI agent helper person called Frenche La Janesse, who assisted the LAPD. O'Neill found reference to a mysterious other person called Walter Kern, who, according to the book, was a police groupie who got a pass for being almost completely anonymous

in having no known background, simply because he always had money to spend and was so well connected and useful to both Paul Tate and the official police investigation. So he was welcome at the huge famous parties that Mama Cass had at her house. He was cozy with rock stars and their producers. And apparently...

One of your question really quick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you mean... This is one of those things like pirate ghost. Do you mean he was a police officer who was a groupie or a groupie who acted like a police officer? Walter Kern, according to this book, was a guy who showed up to help the police out of nowhere.

He was like, into the police. police. So he's kind of like Sherlock Holmes? Yes. Yes. Sort of. Sort of. You know, you know. Yeah. Sherlock shows up and the police were like this guy. Yeah. In his relationship to the police, yeah. He was cozy with rock stars and he was even there in the shadows. Apparently, Walter Kern was there that day at Paramount Studios when Roman Polanski was talking

to that guy V told about stuff before he agreed to speak to the police. You remember that? So, however, though, according to Frenche La Janesse, Tate and recurring character LAPD detective Mike McGann, who we've seen in other episodes. This Kern guy actually wasn't a guy. He was actually just Reeve Whitson and that Walter Kern was a pseudonym given to him by the LAPD,

which is a strange thing for them to do for a private citizen, especially because apparently Witson wasn't even getting paid for his work. He was just like a Sherlock Holmes type. He was just showing up and helping and they gave him a code name. Pretty interesting. However, when O'Neill called Paul Tate in 2000,

While he admitted Whitson was his biggest helper, he balked at the idea that he could have stopped the murders from happening, refused to say who Whitson was working for, and angrily ended the call when O'Neill rather indelicately invoked the memory of the victims without remembering who he was talking to. He basically said, come on, out of respect for the victims, and he was like, me, Paul Tate, respect for the victims? Fuck you.

My daughter died, you bitch. Yeah, like. Yeah. So that's what happened with that. But he wouldn't say who Whitson was working for. wouldn't say anything about Witson really. After the murders, Whitson had been involved

in everything from German steel to the production of the child safety cap on pill bottles to starting the Miss Universe pageant to building a train from Vegas to Pasadena to developing a fucking

Brigadoon theme park in Scotland. But all these things seemingly fell through on his side. He was never like given credit for any of those things. I don't think they made the Brigadoon theme park. Yet he always had money.

He always paid with stacks of cash that he kept in the freezer, and in the end of his life, he was bitter, poor, or even as the book says, quote, rueful, and he died in a hospital at 63, citing everything from a spider bite to lymphoma as the cause of death, and leaving behind a medical debt to the tune of half a million dollars. Yikes. According to his daughter, Lisa, the Swedish girl, though things weren't exactly as they may have seemed at the end, saying, quote, I think he committed suicide.

His greatest fear was to be a vegetable. So that's what she said. and then according to O'Neill, he says, quote, at a certain point, I felt like I'd learned everything I could about him without tapping official resources. I'd attempted to find his tax records and asked reporters with stronger connections at Langley if they could look him up.

They never found anything. FOIAs to the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, the ATF, the IRS, and the military, all got responses that said they'd had nothing to do with him. It was only the CIA that gave me the, quote, neither confirmed nor deny response. And later, responding to my appeal, it wrote that Whitson had, quote,

no open or officially acknowledged relationship with a central intelligence agency. Isn't that interesting? One guy with all those deaths on his shoulders with the knowledge that he could have stopped it if he wanted to, but he didn't, boggles the mind. But now, speaking of death, we're going to take a break from Manson Circle,

now that you know about Reeve Whitson and circle back to flesh out the Laurel Canyon scene at large a little more. So let's take a glimpse at some other notorious local deaths in the area to see if what happened at Cello Drive that night feels more like a wild fluke or just another day and one of the most celebrity murder-dense areas in modern civilization with a segment that we're calling five more facts about Laurel Canyon, Death in the Canyon.

We're going to start with George Reeves. George Reeves was the original nationally famous screen Superman, the old school one, who got the role after being discharged from the military after World War II and doing a few small roles. He was in Gone with the Wind as one of the suitors from the beginning. You've probably seen him in that, but that was before the war. But when he got out, he was doing odd acting jobs, digging ditches on the side. He was offered the role for the TV show Adventures of Superman in June of 1951, and he was really, really hesitant about it, but he accepted it, even though he was sure he'd pigeonholed himself into stupid kitty roles for the rest of his life, because superheroes on screen in the 50s is not the same big money that it was today.

It was very hokey, child-oriented, like baby child-oriented. Little Ricky and I Love Lucy wore his Superman costume when Reeves was on. And the entire time he did the show, he got more and more down on himself about never really being taken seriously, even as the show took him everywhere from nationally distributed government propaganda films to I Love Lucy. And test audiences couldn't watch him in anything else without seeing Superman on the screen. So Reeves at the time was having an affair with this actress, Tony Mannix, after he'd been divorced for like eight years.

Tony Mannix was also the wife of MGM general manager Eddie Mannix. but it wasn't like a secret. It was like Eddie was also fucking a bunch of chicks. It was fine. It was not a big deal. But once he met the sexy socialite, Leonor Lemon, who was like a Batman character name, he decided that it was time to go for a wife again. And he like broke Tony, Tony, Tony.

Time to go for another wife. God, Lemon. He broke Tony Manix's heart and went for Leonor Lemon. And they got together. But then Lemon didn't realize that Reeves wasn't as rich as you think he might be as Superman. and slowly their relationship became a lot more about resentment and drinking than like being hot and having a good Hollywood time. So one night late at his house after Leonor was shitting on his guitar playing in front

of all his friends, he went upstairs to sleep, only coming down briefly at 1 a.m. to tell everyone to shut up. On his way, back up the stairs, Leonor was talking to her friends again, joking that he went up there to shoot himself, and then she heard a small sound and said it was the drawer with a gun in it, and then she heard a loud sound and said it was the loud sound and said it was the bullet. But when they went upstairs and found him 45 minutes later, he had a hole in his head and a luger on the floor. She said she was just kidding about all that and she didn't know he was going to kill himself. The death was ruled a suicide. But the fact that the police never

checked Reeves finger for firing residue or looked into the strange bruises, he seemed to have gotten on his head and body. Not to mention that the famous lawyer or his mother hired to look into the case suddenly stepped down and backed off after like a few days. At least people feeling like this might have been a murder. Maybe it was jealous Eddie Mannix after all. Maybe Tony Mannix was sad and wanted to get back at him in her way. But while there's plenty that's been said about this death, including an entire movie about it, we'll probably never know. Shout out Hollywood land. So that's George Reeves.

That's the first guy. First Laurel Canyon death. Next one is going to be Ramon Navarro. Ramon Navarro was born Jose Ramon Gil Samanegos. He was a movie star in the 20s. He was the first classic, like, Mexican heartthrob movie star in Hollywood, where him being Mexican was a part of his vibe and not just like playing a bunch of of Italian and, like, Arabic guys for some reason, like Rudy Valentino, but he was actually brought in to, like, be the Rudy Valentino of MGM. And then when Rudy Valentino died, he was,

like, going to be the new Rudy Valentino. But after playing a bunch of these, like, ethnic heartthrob roles, he finally was given the role of Judah Ben Hur in the 1926 version of Ben Her, which, like, locked him in as a fucking movie star. And he even made it across the talkie, like singing in the rain gap into the era of pictures with synchronized audio. And, he never let go of being Mexican he would even like throw out his publicity shots and spend his own money for like

glamour shots in like Mexicano garb and like styling and like uh would kind of eschew the popular Hollywood fashion and he would still for like decades was like leading movies and he even went on international concert tours because he really liked to sing but Ramon was also closeted gay

and in a place like early Hollywood that was like a no-go. That is a career killer. Yeah, and he spent his lavish riches on a nice private, sexy life, living in Hollywood between smaller bit parts and TV and international roles that he played in the 50s and 60s. And he just kind of had a nice little quiet life going for himself. But sadly, though, on Halloween Eve, 1968,

after getting his number from a sex worker he'd had over earlier, two brothers, Paul and Tom Ferguson, age 22 and 17, respectively, called him on the phone, offering him sex, and Navarro said, sure, and invited them over, believing he had hit, well, he thought that it was like, he thought it was like sex workers calling him and that was his way, that was his way of doing things. And so he said, sure, let's do it. So believing that Navarro had hidden a bunch of money somewhere in his house, when they got there, they immediately tortured him for several hours, trying to get him to reveal where it was, even though there wasn't any money anywhere. And they beat him so badly that he eventually choked to death on his own blood and stole the 20 bucks out of his bathrobe that he was wearing and left. But the brothers were arrested. but released on parole a few years later before they both got even worse sentences for worse crimes that they did later. And then that put

them back in jail forever. Tom killed himself in 2005 and Paul was beaten to death in 2018. Paul had raped someone and was killed for that. So that's Roman Navarro with another death in Laurel Canyon. Now we're going to talk about Lenny Bruce.

Hey. Yeah. If you don't know about Leonard Alfred Schneider, aka the comedian Lenny Bruce in 2025, you are either younger than a Gen X person or you didn't watch the marvelous Miss Maisel. But just for a quick background, Bruce was one of the most important stand-up comedians ever to do it literally. He

was proudly and openly Jewish in a time when that made your life way harder. He did hella drugs. He talked shit. He was hilarious. And he pioneered that type of like anecdotal storytelling stand-up that we see in contrast to like Borschbelt like, hey

when I was born, my doctor slapped my mother. You know, like quick gags gone. He was doing storytelling, like a modern Comedy Central style comedian today. He was like the guy who kind of invented that. He's also famous for pushing the boundaries

of censorship and media at the cost of his own personal life. Famously, he was arrested all over the country in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Miami, in Philadelphia, New York for saying things like he said cock sucker on stage and got arrested. He was mixing in Yiddish Shwheres with his jazz slang on stage.

and the cop was Jewish and understood him and he arrested him. He was talking about doing drugs on stage. He got arrested. He did a gig on November 22nd, 1963, where he opened the gig by getting on stage and being like, I feel so bad for all this JFK impersonators. Like, he did a joke like that.

He also pissed on the floor of a stuffy party where he got arrested. He also was regularly busted for drugs. She's like a shitball in the media, like a Lindsay Lohan, Pete Davidson type. hatred in the media for him until eventually, by the end of his career, he had almost no money

at all, and he couldn't book a serious gig anywhere outside San Francisco for like two years. He was even deported from England and Australia over his career. Apparently, on August 3rd, 1966, while mired in legal troubles and living off the kindness of famous fans of his, like Phil Spector

and Hugh Hefner and Steve Allen, the Tonight Show guy, Lenny Bruce received a foreclosure notice in his mailbox, and later that day, he was found dead in the bathroom of a morphine overdose by his roommate, John Judnick, who pulled his pants up before the police arrived. However, when they did get there, the police then dragged him out of, into the hallway, took all his clothes off, and surrounded him with syringes to take the pictures.

But actually, fucking Phil Spector, who was like a teenage wonder boy at the time, making like so much money that he had no idea what to do with it, he came in and he bought all the negatives to keep him out of the press. And also, it's worth mentioning, even though I don't see it anywhere besides this book, that apparently there's rumors that he was whacked for some reason or another. Though even though Dave McGowan does not know why, he just fucking said it, which is annoying. But after his death, Frank Zappa got possession of and released a bunch of his posthumous material on his label. So that's another way it ties in.

Though I'm not implying, I don't think that Frank Zappa had him killed to get his material. That's not what I'm saying. And that's Lenny Bruce. You should check out Lenny Bruce. Real quick, Lenny Bruce in high school was the first, we had to do a book report on someone who was like dead. That was the first book, that was the first, like, thing I did. Spoiler. George Carlin was like, oh, Lenny Bruce was the guy I realized, if you watch, go back, take some time if you're into George Carlin or know who that is. You might think

of him as like wearing a turtleneck or like something with the ponytail. Before that, suit and tie. And there was a moment where he saw Lenny Bruce and was like, oh my God, I don't have to do this comedy. I can do this comedy and be fine. And so he no longer wore suit and tie. And he like did edgy stuff. A bunch of comedians. Yeah. Yeah. And it defined. who he was. Yeah, that's the, that's Lenny Bruce's like thing. Like, I don't think comedy would be what it is in America today or as exciting as it is today if, if it wasn't for Lenny Bruce. Next, we're going to talk about Diane Linkletter. Diane Linkletter is more famous for her death than her life. She was the young daughter of famous Canadian comedy personality, Art Linkletter,

who was on House Party for 25 years on CBS Radio Television and was on People Are Funny for like another 19, 20 years on NBC, I think. But Diane was barely getting started. She was fucking a teenager. She was doing a bunch of summer stock theater, which is like summer seasonal theater. She was in a sketch on the Red Skelton show one time when she was 19, and then she went to Europe with her father to perform for the troops for a while. But at 9 a.m. on October 4th, 1969,

just a little bit after the Tate La Bianca murders and two weeks before her 21st birthday, at her apartment in Shoreham Towers, which are still standing on the just north of the strip, just south of the canyon, kind of behind the comedy store, if you know where that is. she threw herself from her sixth floor balcony and landed still alive on the sidewalk

before silently succumbing to her injuries on the way to the hospital. And according to her father and, like, urban legends for decades, she was the one who you've probably heard about who jumped off the balcony because she was high on LSD and thought that she could fly. And the reason that we think that that story exists is because the director slash car salesman, Edward Durston,

who was there with her that night and was the last person to see her alive, said that's what happened, said she dropped acid and they talked all through the night till morning before she jumped. However, no drugs were found in her system during the autopsy. And Durston, and while Durston was taken in and given a polygraph and released, no foul play was suspected. 16 years later in 1985,

Durston was also the last person to see his vacation companion, the famous Johnny Carson sketch actress Carol Wayne alive, while on a vacation with her in Mexico. He said that they had had an argument, and when she didn't come back to the hotel, he went back to L.A. without her, which is fucking crazy. But just a short while later, she was found drowned in a shallow bay in water that was less than one foot deep with no drugs or alcohol in her system, which is a pretty wild coincidence for Mr. Durston. So who knows what happened there?

Art Linklater was like she had an acid flashback and jumped off a balcony because she thought she could fly. I feel like maybe this guy Durston got away with something. Yeah, I'm about to say, like that is, if I was a cop, that's the first thing I would look into. Yeah. So that's Diane Linkletter. And now finally for this segment we're going to talk about the Wonderland murders which you probably heard of. There's a movie about

there's like two movies about them. On June 29th, 1981, four drug addict drug dealer type guys the kind that shit where they eat and do drugs and sell drugs and usually turned to thieving and violence broke into the home of LA nightclub owner and organized

crime figure Eddie Nash. You've probably heard of Eddie Nash if you're an L.A. history buff. They robbed him and they shot one of his bodyguards in injuring him very badly. And that same day, the porn star, John Holmes, had been in and out of Nash's house, leaving the door unlocked, and one time possibly was even spotted wearing some of Nash's jewelry by one of Nash's bodyguards.

So the next day, we don't know exactly what happened, but the next day Liberace's partner, Scott Thorson was at the house because he was buying some drugs from Eddie Nash, and he walked by a room, and he said he saw John Holmes in there tied to a chair getting the shit beat out of him like in an old James Bond style interrogation. And then the next morning on July 1st, an unknown number of dudes carrying pipes and hammers entered the condo at 8-763

Wonderland Ave where the thieves supposedly lived and beat the shit out of Ron Lanias, the ringleader, his second-in-command, Billy DeVarrel, Billy's girlfriend, Joy Miller, who was also one of the targets, and Barbara Richardson, who wasn't even involved in the crimes, but happened to be at the house because she was dating David Lynde

who was involved in the crimes and wasn't there at the time. And also, Tracy McCourt dodged a bullet because apparently they had another house somewhere that they were staying at that night. So they didn't get killed either. Ron's wife, Susan. Ron Lonius's wife, Susan was also on the premise and had the shit beat out of her. But somehow she fucking lived and eventually recovered, though she wasn't ever the same. She lived a long full life, though. Nobody called the police for over 12 hours after this went down because loud yelling and banging sounds were common coming from this apartment because they were always throwing crazy drug parties and just like debauchery.

And if you have ever been on this street, Wonderland Avenue or whatever it is, you'll see this apartment there. If you're like a murder junkie, you'll see it. It's so small. Everybody had to hear this. Like it couldn't have been, it couldn't have been muffled very much. And it wasn't until some movers in the apartment next door heard Susan moaning that anyone thought to even try and get help.

There was just like bodies in there and Susan was in there like, like just dying of her wounds. but she got out. She lived. There was about a million dollars worth of Coke and stolen goods in the apartment when the police got there. And apparently, after finding John Holmes's bloody handprint at the house, they arrested him, the porn star, as a suspect. Though at trial, he was found not to have participated, but only led the killers there and stood by as they did their business. He served 110 days in jail, and the house is rumored to be haunted to this day. All right. And that is death in the canyon. I hope that it's painting a pretty well-rounded. I hope it's painting a pretty well-rounded picture of the scene at large.

And maybe while you were listening, your paranoia bell started to go off. I'm not sure. But let's put that aside now, because at this moment, we have a slightly bigger, possibly even crazier fish to fry. And one last time, we're going to check back in with Tom O'Neill and his search for the truth behind Manson, because amazingly, you still ain't seen nothing yet. Okay.

So next... So next, we return to where we left it at the end of part two, with O'Neill contacting his eight. agent to tell him that M.K. Ultra and the JFK assassination may actually be a bigger part of the Manson killings that anyone ever realized. Now that we know all the other stuff that we know about this area and this thing, we're ready to hear what he found, which is that in San Francisco during the period we covered last time in which the two Smiths, Roger and David Smith, the parole officer and the like psychological experiment guy, were at the hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic

seeing Charlie fairly regularly either as his corrupt parole officer. officer, or maybe kind of studying him or giving him drugs or whatever they were doing, amoral, asynchronous human drug trials involving hippies and speed and psychedelics, whatever way they wanted to see it. That whole time, there was also a third doctor who had been keeping an office there, a man called Dr. Lewis Joylin West, though most people who knew him called him Jolly because he was both fat and boisterous. Jolly West was born in 1924 in Brooklyn, New York, and during World War II, he rose all the way through the Army Air Force to the rank of colonel. Shortly after that,

at Cornell University, he made his mark researching the possibility of controlling human behavior, and during the Korean War, he used that research to help, quote, deprogram prisoners who had allegedly been, quote, brainwashed into confessing that they had used illegal biological weapons against the Koreans. So he was like, oh, see, they'd been brainwashed. So that was actually just all brainwashing so they're that didn't america didn't do that fake news dude then though on one hand through the 50s and into the early 60s we know that this guy jolly marched with people like he marched with dr king and charlton heston for black rights which is cool we also know that he was heavily rumored to be working on military bases in texas and oklahoma researching the effects of lsd and

hypnosis on subjects who weren't aware they were being experimented on and even crazy easier, he was also the psychiatrist who examined Jack Ruby, just moments before his testimony was due before the Warren Commission, and found that he had suffered a, quote, acute psychotic break, which made everything Ruby said seem insane. At 1965, he wrote a paper about how hypnosis could cause people to, quote, violate their moral codes in service of the crazy people who mind control their followers to commit crimes with no memory of what occurred, even moments afterwards, which included a case study of a, quote, hypno-programmed man. killing two people in Denmark as well as, stop it.

Hypno-programmed dog. Which included a case study of, quote, stop it. Go. No barking. You'd be sorry. Yeah, that's right. Which included a case study of, quote, hypno-programmed man killing two people in Denmark, as well as several similar accounts on U.S. military bases,

which occurred during official experiments that were still too high clearance for him to share specific details in the report, but which he heavily implied to be either involved with or having special knowledge of. Just after this, 1966, he accepted a position at the free clinic after being invited by David Smith himself to help him recruit LSD research subjects, and in 1967, he'd written a chapter in a psychiatry book, a textbook called hallucinogens, where he'd both praised LSD's mind control potential and warned of the potential for violent cults to spring up in the American counterculture based around its repeated use and populated by kids with quote a pathological

desire to withdraw from reality who crave shared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging in the 70s he was also repeatedly linked to mk ultra and the CIA mind control program we've covered on the show extensively and which i hopefully don't have to get super into today thanks to it kind of finding its way back into the conversation over the years thanks to rediscovered but initially forgotten paper records that escaped destruction during the document purge that happened in the wake of M.K. Ultras discovery by the public in 1973, not to mention the four entire episodes of this very show that Mathis has already spent on it. So if you really want to know more about it, go listen to those. But West denied literally everything, and he continued to all throughout

the decades he spent at UCLA heading the Neuroscience Center there, getting an auditorium named after him there, until his assisted suicide, which he had his son help him with since he was dying from a tacit cancer. Sorry, metastatic cancer, 1999. The information that O'Neill uncovers at this point brings him extremely close to the point where he's buying into the type

of unfounded conspiracy theories that we both love and hate so much on this show. But he brings it all into the book anyway because on the front page of an issue of the New York Times from 1977, despite his repeated denials, Jolly West is listed as one of seven scientists who had participated in the MK Ultra program

under academic cover. According to O'Neill, the Times ran a total of 27 stories about MK Ultra, and this story was one of eight of them that made the front page. But even though the article promises a huge government investigation into its horrors, this never materializes. Even for people like Sidney J. Gottlieb, the leader of it all, who admitted publicly

in front of the Senate to destroying government records and later, even when O'Neill investigates it himself, anybody that he talks to who's close to this, he's only met with like confusion, forgetfulness, deflection, people being like, I have no recollection, stuff like that.

So that's like, as far as O'Neill could go down the like, why didn't they investigate M.K. Ultra. But nevertheless, it causes O'Neill to revisit the story of Jolly West's career with a fine-tooth comb, and this is what he finds. He finds it on July 4th, 1954, just outside Lackland Air Force Base, the same base where Jolly West is stationed, a three-year-old girl goes missing from her parents' car while they're at a bar

grabbing a drink inside. An hour later, the search party finds her underwear on a car door, and some construction workers find this guy Jimmy Shaver walking out of the woods shirtless nearby, soaked in blood and covered in scratches. Normally, Jimmy Shaver is like a nice, good normal guy. He has a wife, he has two kids, no criminal record of any kind, nothing like that. But today, they say he's confused. He's in a trance state almost.

Doesn't know where he is or what's going on. And shortly after that, they find this girl violently raped with a broken neck and her legs ripped open. And Shaver is the number one suspect. The next day, when his wife comes in, he does not recognize his own wife and can only remember vague images of a blonde man with tattoos who may have been involved. He has no memory of the event, but signs a statement taking full responsibility anyway, because it has to be him in his mind, right? However, two months later, in comes Jolly West,

who's going to evaluate Jimmy Shaver and see if he was sane at the time of his murder. After taking him around to the scene again and injecting with several doses of sodium pentothal, Shaver suddenly has the realization... Wait, true serum? Yes. In fact, Jolly West is one of the guys

who, like, stooped for its use. Schaever suddenly realizes that seeing the girl brought back memories of his cousin Beth Rainboat, who sexually abused him as a child, and that God had whispered in his ear that he should go kill her. Even though... Death, rain, don't.

Even though this account was supposed to help the defense establish a claim of temporary insanity, all it actually did was get Jimmy Schaever sentenced to death and executed by the electric chair in 1958, even though he appealed, was found to have been given an unfair trial, and tried again,

maintaining his innocence the entire time. When O'Neill looked into it, he found that Shaver had been treated regularly for excruciating migraines, the same base hospital or West regularly treated airmen for neurological disorders, and that Shaver had been recommended for an experimental two-year program there by an anonymous doctor. Not that it's necessarily connected, of course, but later, when O'Neill checks the hospital records

to see if West had actually ever a previously treated Shaver, he was unable to definitively tell because even though all the other records for 1954 were still fully maintained at the hospital, just one file was missing, and that file was for SA to ST, the only file missing the entire records. next he finds West in front of a crowd at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City in 1962 where in an attempt to induce a sort of rudding madness found in male pachyderms he injects Tusco the 7,000 pound elephant with two he injects him with 2,800 milligrams of acid and this after five minutes yeah and after five minutes this elephant quote trumpeted collapsed fell heavily onto his right side defecated and went into

status epilepticus, which is a respiratory caesar, which killed the elephant. Yeah, absolutely tragic story. Yeah, insane. Apparently, though, according to Roger Smith, the parole guy, this story was seen at the time as more of a funny story than a sad story because people did not give a shit about animal rights at this time. And Jolly West apparently loved telling this story over and over again. According to his successor at the University of Oklahoma, where West worked for a while,

Dr. Decker, not everyone thought it was so hilarious. There's a quote from Dr. Decker. When the elephant died, the department was worried. How in the world are we going to pay for that? All Jolly would say to anybody was that he would find a way to pay for it. I learned then when I became chair that the source was payment from the CIA. So that's insane. Just the amount seems not even like scientifically viable.

Like why? Right. No, it's just absurd. It's like, it's like, mad science level shit. Yeah. Literally. The very next year on November 2nd, I'm sorry, November 2nd. 22nd, 1963, as I have gone through now in several episodes, I'd say several times I've gone

through this now. JFK was shot and killed, most likely by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. We know this. Two days later, on his way from under the police station to an armored car, Lee Harvey Oswald is then shot dead by Nightclub odor Jack Ruby, who emerges from the crowd out of nowhere. And according to his own account of the moments immediately following the shooting, he has no idea what he's doing there or why every police officer in Texas was currently dogpiling on top of him, and according to his own attorneys, this was because he'd experienced a, quote, fugue state with subsequent abnesia or a blank spot in his memory. And by the way, one of his lawyers was Melvin Belli, who was the guy who was on the phone

with the zodiac. So full circle. Apparently, Jolly West tried to get himself involved the moment the assassination hit the papers. Like, faster than it makes sense for a doctor to reach out and try and get involved in a crime. Even going so far as to approach Judge Joe B. Brown, who'd impaneled Jack Ruby's grand jury and asked if he could be appointed to the case as an expert. He was like, give me in there. Give me in there, coach. No real official motive was ever given, but according to some documents that West himself submitted, he'd been, quote, asked by, quote, someone to go and try and get the judge to appoint him to the case, quote, a few days after the assassination.

That's all. The judge said no. And if you just think about that sentence structure for a minute, it's pretty weird. It is, yeah, what? Yeah. A few days after the assassination is what his orders said. It said, somebody told me to go get the judge who appointed me to the case a few days after the assassination.

The sentence almost presupposes the assassination. It's pretty weird. Anyway, after Ruby was given the death penalty, he'd fired his attorneys and hired Dr. Hubert Smith, who had already helped his case as an expert psychiatrist during the appeal. But immediately, Dr. Smith's first act was to do. to have Ruby submit to an evaluation by who else, but Dr. Louis Joylin West, who he apparently brought in on the strength of his work

with Korean War POWs. However, according to O'Neill, it is at least worth mentioning that a few years later, Smith then received a teaching position himself at the University of Oklahoma, so who knows, who knows, who knows? West eventually carries out his private evaluation of Jack Ruby on April 26, 1964, and that evening, West comes out of the jail

saying that sometime in the last 48 hours, Ruby has gone, quote, positively insane and that it was probably for good. Here's a quote about it from the book. In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakable belief that a new Holocaust was underway in America. Last night, West wrote, the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered.

This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible. for all the trouble. The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he'd seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams, the orders for this terrible, quote, pogrom must have come from Washington. West said that the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby's jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. he rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little

merthiolate on it that's all mercy late yeah but amazingly though I'm not sure we'll ever know if he recognized him as the weirdo who tried to be appointed um I'm sorry but amazingly though I'm not sure we'll never will ever know if he recognized him as that weird guy who tried to get put on the case like super early judge Brown did not like this he did not like this diagnosis from Dr. West he'd seen Ruby so many times in the past five months never once that he seemed crazy. He'd been in and out of court several times, so he orders a second opinion. And the doctor, William Beavers, who knew nothing about West or anything else, agrees

that there's something wrong with Ruby for sure now, confirming his mention of the voices outside his cell, but also writes, again, without any knowledge of Jolly West history, quote, the possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained, but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation, which means that the only reason that he doesn't think the guy was induced into psychosis by a drug is that nobody had access to him. Right. But of course we know

one person did and that that person is obsessed with controlling people's minds with drugs. Next, he finds Jolly West taking a sabbatical from the University of Oklahoma in 1966 where he was working undercover to encourage socially palatable changes within the mind of teen gangs

as part of his Project Mass Convergent. This is a real project. Project Mass Conversion which was funded directly by Sidney J. Gottlieb, by the way. Of course. He took a sabbatical from that to spend a year at Stanford, apparently. But O'Neill never finds any record of him even arriving at Stanford

and instead opting to take it to the streets at the clinic in the hate, the free clinic, and rebranding himself from a buddy Holly, Don Draper-looking motherfucker to a grungy, unshaven hippie who wears tattered clothes. He literally did that. He finds similar to... Wow. He finds similarly disguised scientists at the clinic. in David Smith and his students, which, you know, we talked about last time.

David Smith was also doing something similar to this where he was pretending to be a hippie. He's able to open an office there and eventually takes over an old, like, dilapidated Victorian, like, full house style spot nearby to turn into the building version of this. He calls it a, quote, semi-permanent observation post, all with that sweet, sweet laundered CIA research funding, where on the surface, it looks like some kind of, quote, hippie crash pad where passerbyes can come by and chill and fuck and do drugs or whatever. But just behind the scenes, six graduate students

who also lived there in disguise, studied them, and lured them back with drugs and sex for repeat visits. So, according to O'Neill, the costumes that West was wearing were, like, cynical. Like, he didn't have a lot of, he didn't take hippies very seriously. Like, he was

wearing, like, Halloween costume hippie clothes. And the graduate students of his weren't having the most legit time either. According to Kathy Collins, who was one of those graduate students. And she says, quote, when Crashers showed up, no one made much of a point of finding out about them.

What the hell have I got myself into and what the hell is Jolly doing? It's like a zoo. Is he studying us or them? The rest of us tended to look to them in trying to understand what we were supposed to do or what Jolly wanted.

Their general reply was that this was a good opportunity to have fun. I gather that they did. They spent a good deal of time stoned. I really don't know whether to laugh at Jolly or take him seriously. I feel like no one is being honest and straight and the whole thing is a gigantic put on.

What is he trying to prove? He's interested in drugs. That's clear. What else? So that's one of the actual students that was there who just had no idea what the fuck they were even doing there. Anyway, O'Neill keeps digging deeper into this guy, partially because he already interviewed him just purely by coincidence years earlier as an expert in an article about celebrity stalkers. And then one day on August 25, 2001, while looking through some research papers by Jolly West in the UCLA library, he finds a stack of letters in the midst of a bunch of a bunch of, bunch of other things. He finds a stack of letters between Jolly West and somebody who seems to be

his CIA handler going by the name Sherman Grifford, which you may be able to guess by the initials was a known and established cover name for Sidney Gottlieb himself. So this is a bunch of letters between Jolly West and the literal head of M.K. Ultra. This is not like, oh, he might be involved. He is fucking writing letters to the man. In one letters and everything. It's pretty In one letter from 1953, he describes wanting to discover effective methods of hypnosis and drug-assisted interrogation on unwilling subjects and using similar methods for inducing amnesia or modifying the subject's memory of such events afterwards, or even implanting entirely new false memories, which could be used for everything from confusing a subject's account of events to making them unwitting secret message carriers to,

quote, inducing in them specific mental disorders. Really all it accomplished was making a few people fucking, like, lose their grip on reality and somebody almost, I think killed themselves. Or he changed history in the course of the JFK investigation and destroyed hippies off his earth. He even described wanting to permanently reverse someone's loyalties and ideology. And even more, he enthusiastically pushes in the letter for, quote, practical trials in the field and mentions the desire to, quote, cut down considerably the number of people who can properly call me to account. as well as some sort of legal carte blanche. That's what he wants. This is all happening too because they're fucking convinced Russia has already figured it out.

Yeah. They truly believe Russia already unlocked mind control. And that's what they're fucking telling the government anyway. And that's why this is all during the Cold War and shit. You know what's even crazier about that is when you think about it looking back, we did all of this insane shit. Like all these weird testings and all was trying to like mind control goats and all sorts of weird drug stuff. All of this wasn't.

even though it was definitely sold as America we have to defend our way of life but our way of life the what we were defending and what we were willing to do anything for was just we were scared of communism capitalism is the way to go money money

was the root of all of that insanity was just like we don't want them to ruin capitalism like the rich don't want to have to share their wealth with people like that's crazy what do you think about it it wasn't about America and like freedoms is money. No. It took 200 years

to give rid of cigarettes. Right. He also, in this letter, he also mentions both paying servicemen for their time as experimental subjects and also experimenting on others

who may be unwilling, unwitting, or both for free, especially as a means of getting around red tape and saving money. Gottlieb, for his part, writes back, saying he'll give him

everything he needs and more, adding that, quote, my good friend. I had been wondering whether you're apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real. You have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this, I am deeply grateful. We have developed quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.

And this is just the beginning. By 1954, the letters reveal that West has lied his way into a concurrent position as head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, while he's still working for the government, does work for Gottlie both on base and on campus as a civilian at the same time, which is not cool to do off the record. And within two years,

he claims in a paper, which O'Neill notes was marked classified, that he has discovered a way to replace someone's real memories with fake ones. A different, redacted version of this same paper, which leaves out West as the author and the fact that he actually achieved it, is publicly available right now at the National Security Archives,

and weirdly, it seems to directly claim the opposite truth, saying, quote, the effects of LSD and other drugs upon the production, maintenance, and manifestation of disassociated states has never been studied. Which is just, if you don't believe anything else that I've been telling you for the last two episodes, we can agree all of us that somebody was studying the effects of LSD on people's brains.

Period. Period. Just to underline it, though, here is a quote from the part that they left out. of the paper. It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and through hypnotic suggestion bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different fictional event actually did occur. That's what he says he did. So did we have the breakthrough? Maybe we did. And maybe

it was Jolly West. And maybe we've seen evidence of it being used all throughout our history in very, very obvious ways that we just can't believe because it's such a crazy thing. And probably similar to the way some of you feel that UFOs and UAPs have been handled by the media. O'Neill is troubled by the implications. Writing, quote, despite testimony to the contrary, the CIA had, in fact, learned how to manipulate people's memories without their knowledge. Agency officials claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading newspapers to

run mocking headlines like the gang that couldn't spray straight. it could have been exactly what the agency wanted for the world to assume M.K. Ultra was a bust and forget the whole thing. And we know that they're doing that with other stuff. So it's not that out of the question. And in further clippings, O'Neill finds evidence that West had been, quote, inducing insanity in subjects from Portland sometime in mid to late, 1963, while he's doing all this other stuff, by the way,

listing LSD, sleep deprivation, and hypnosis as a, effective methods of producing, quote, temporary mental illness effects in normal people. Fifteen years later in the New York Times, West would claim that his LSD research wasn't affiliated with the CIA and was done primarily on animals. But as we know, that's just not fucking true. And finally, he finds a proposal from West in 1972, where he wanted to build a lab in an abandoned base in the Santa Monica Mountains to study human violence by experimenting on prisoners, which was a initiative that was heavily endorsed. by Governor Ronald Reagan,

but ultimately denied by common sense-thinking democracy for its intention to stick electrodes and small experimental machinery into prisoners' brains to see what happens. Fucking crazy. Morals have been harrowed since.

Oh, absolutely. Was the fact that this LSD mind control hypnosis hippie cult leader regularly... Okay, so look, let me just ask you this question real quick. Oh, wait, we got

We got more to say first. So we know all this stuff about Jolly West. O'Neill finds it all out. But even with all this evidence, O'Neill is struggling to directly connect West to Charles Manson. He interviewed a sunset strip club manager, Bill DeNeyer, which is a hilarious last name, who was like a local legend.

I saw a couple accounts in... Question again. Yeah. Another Piracos situation. Is this a sunset strip club or sunset strip? club owner. Sunset strip club. Thank you. But maybe a sunset strip

strip club. Possibly. Bill D. Knight, he was also landlord, a lot of other things. I saw some comments from some people on Facebook about this guy as I was Googling him. He was kind of creepy vibe. But he'd become a local legend because he said that he learned hypnosis in the Navy. And O'Neill confirmed this.

He said he taught it to Charles Manson, which was an anecdote that was corroborated by D. Nyer's daughter, who literally was there watching them do it, him and Charles Manson. So we know where the hypnosis came from. But what about the LSD dosing and suggestive mind control techniques? Where did that come from? Was the fact that this LSD mind control hypnosis hippie cult leader regularly visited his LSD mind control parole officer who had an office with another LSD mind control

researcher and where there was also the MK Ultra brainwashing expert who was a distinct who was disguised as a hippie to study hippie LSD and mind control in a shady free clinic secretly fronted by the CIA enough to give you an idea maybe of where Manson may have gotten his LSD brainwashing techniques. Do you think it's possible that we might know the answer to that question or do you think that's all the implication is that big Manson learned how to do what he did to his children, his cult through this? Look, one of one of Dr. Smith's aides went and lived with them for months and, like, fucked a bunch of girls and stuff. They were talking about breaking the law in order to get things to happen.

We know that the government was somehow keeping these people out of jail for some fucking reason involving this guy, Roger Smith, from this free clinic. You know, when they all got arrested, he sent his guy out to, like, get them. He adopted the baby. Like, somebody's taking care of these people, but maybe he taught, maybe they taught him to see he would do with it, rather than for him to do it to his own ends, right? Like, there's not really any confirmation about any of this, but just that situation, right? Charles Manson is there.

Three different guys are there who are all LSD mind control guys. One of them is the guy who has speed dial with Sidney Gottlieb from MK Ultra. They all study LSD. We know that their whole op is funded by the CIA. We know that they've all done a bunch of other stuff that's been funded by the CIA. and we're like, how did Charles Manson get involved in this? What is the truth of this? I think honestly things to keep in mind,

Charles Manson talked a lot of shit. He said a lot of things about himself that just weren't true. True. And I also think it can be true that maybe that aspect of like MK Ultra may have had an interest in him and like maybe met with him,

but we're probably like maybe not him. Every person with authority in that entire free clinic is in CIA-funded LSD psychological mind control researcher. Yeah, well, they also were running a literal brothel house that M.K. Ultra was.

Yeah. When Manson went, when Manson went to L.A., Smith's research assistant housed all the girls that he left behind and continued to look out for him even after he left San Francisco. All the stuff about the parole shit, all the stuff about getting them off for all the crimes that they've been doing,

that was after they left San Francisco. That was all after that. The San Francisco stuff was in 67, and then for two to three years after that, these guys were keeping them out of jail, letting them do what they want to do, even while they were murdering people and doing arson and kidnapping the fucking police chief son

who's 15 and getting him fucked up on drugs and fucking the shit out of them. It just doesn't make sense. That's all I'm saying. And that's the point. Because to answer the question that I'm asking, we are at the point where we have to leave men. which is a quote from Tom O'Neill,

which looks simultaneously both backwards at things we've discussed in the show already and things we'll discuss soon on the show in the future and fuck it. Let's just have Mathis read this one because it's Mathis time. We're almost done here, guys. We've got one more section left.

Libra Don DeLillo's 1998 novel about Lee Harvey Oswald features a character named Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst tasked with internally reviewing the agency's conduct in the JFK assassination. once and for all. The assignment swallows him for 15 years. The agency pays for the construction of a lavish, fireproof home office, which becomes to Branch the book-filled room, the room of documents, the room of theories and dreams. He reposes in a glove-leather armchair surrounded by shelves

and filing cabinets bursting with folders, cassettes, legal pads, and books. Branch sits in the day to spew of hundreds of lives. He comes to feel that the past is changing as he writes. and his ultimate subject he knows isn't crime or politics it's men in small rooms. Yes, we're all just now studying what each other think about something rather than Manson having anything to do

with the situation anymore and we're talking about Manson as if he doesn't exist or never exist like he's like a force, it doesn't even matter. We already know he didn't kill anybody by himself that we know about. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But like, you know, he's just involved, you know,

the story of a nightclub owner teaching him hypnosis off the sunset strip tracks. There's just a million, there's like a million books about Manson. We're all fighting against each other for the truth. I don't have an answer for this, but I'm looking all at established facts and just telling you what it seems like. And so one last time before we move on and let Manson rest, I ask you, with a dramatic pause to follow, can words change reality? Yes, 100%. Yes. Yeah. You don't even need to include LSD in the mix. Like, yes, of course. yeah pretty fucking propaganda that's what propaganda is yeah and now that that's done we're left in a pretty different headspace about this whole situation hopefully than we were when we started and if I'm lucky somewhere in your head right now you're thinking something like damn is that true it doesn't seem possible that the government would get up to something like that with someone like Manson well maybe you're right maybe you're not

but just in case you want to dive even further into the dark canyon we're going to finish out the day with one last segment which is called five more facts about Laurel Canyon pullable threads. Ready? This first one brings us back to something that we were talking

about briefly earlier, the Lookout Mountain Laboratory. So, amazingly, first things first, in terms of undeniably weird shit that's 100% backed up and substantiated and true. And in this case,

something that I've also seen with my own eyes, by the way. 1941. Oh, you were alive that long ago? Yeah, I'm old as fuck. On two and a half acres at 8-935 Wonderland Ave, the U.S. Air Force built what at the time was meant to be some sort of fortified defense center.

And just to be clear, this is nestled in the middle of Laurel Canyon neighborhood. It's next to a school. They built something that was supposed to be a fortified defense center. But by 1947 became a secret installation hidden from Clearview and surrounded by electric fences, which bizarrely included a full self-contained movie studio. According to McGowan, this place had over 100,000 feet of floor space, which includes, quote, sound stages, screening rooms, film processing labs, an editing facility, an animation department, 17 climate-controlled film bolts, a helipad, and a bomb shelter.

And apparently, quote, retained as many as 250 producers, directors, technicians, editors, animators, and other film staff, all with top security clearances, including people like John Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Howard Hawks, Ronald Reagan, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, all of them came to work there, all through the late 40s, the 50s, the 60s, possibly even beyond, even though the place officially shut down in 69. Eventually, this place produced 19,000 classified movies, including those from 1953's Operation Ivy Initiative, which was aimed at influencing public opinion and developing much of the tech that we still use today for things like 3D effects, CGI, film processing, all that stuff was figured out here at this. laboratory on the top of Lookout Mountain on Wonderland Drive in Laurel Canyon. Even some footage from Dr. Strangelove was filmed there. And somehow, even more incredibly, nobody in the public realm even really knew it actually

existed until the early 90s, outside of local neighbors who saw these crazy supply shipments and vehicles coming through all the time. And rumors of a secret CIA movie studio in fully quiet residential Laurel Canyon at the literal quote, epicenter of hippie culture, as McGowan puts it, sounded a lot crazier back than than it does now, now that we know that it exists. And it gets even weirder because in 2015, famous actor and weirdly not too in trouble sex cult leader, Jared Leto, bought the entire compound.

How's he in Tron, man? I know. I know. I know. I know. He bought the entire compound. He bought this. And he lives there. That's fantastic.

He lives there. And in an article from SFGate. You think it's 2013 in there? Huh? You think it's 2013 in there? Yeah, I hope it is. In an article from SFGate, even though there really isn't evidence for what he's claiming.

Letto says, quote, There are so many crazy rumors about this place. Everything from part of the moon landing was filmed here to. They used to keep prisoners downstairs. They had laboratories. They were doing all kinds of God knows what. So he loved it. And just, okay, let's re-contextualize Laurel Canyon for a second now that you know about this thing.

Right. Now you know there's a giant movie studio media place that we know worked on campaigns to influence public opinion in a secret way. Right? We know that exists in Laurel Canyon. And we got all these high-ranking top-secret classified officials who have children who are now the rock stars in this world. And they all came at the same time and they all got famous at the same time. And the whole situation happened. And then Charles Manson like turned the hippies from good to evil.

You know? And it all is located all within like a 20-mile radius of this base that's used to manipulate media. And they edited all the nuke films there. And they just did all kinds of shit in this place. All the media They don't do that anymore All that the, well, they don't need that much space anymore. That's true, that's true.

But that's the lookout mountain laboratory. So that's, that's crazy. Now we're going to talk about Billy Byers Jr. So, and I think I've talked about this guy briefly so. I think I've talked about it for a second before. I'm not sure. Also kind of involving the government, but definitely in a more intimate private way

in the late 60s and into the 70s, molecular biologist, porn producer, an oil money inheritor, Billy Byers Jr., who owned the strange, Boy Love Friendly Lyric International Studios at, which is an age 12 to 20 male physique photography company, whatever the fuck that is. Dude, dude, do not like that at all. That was headquartered on the Samuel Golden Lot, by the way. This guy, Billy Bars, was part of the first ever big, giant public child pornography ring that went public in the 70s, which likely included his unofficial brothel on the mountain, which he kept, quote, at the summit of Laurel Canyon.

And apparently, Jay Edgar Hoover himself, who was also. friends with Billy's father, the oil baron, Billy Byers Sr., was one of his biggest clients. With him and his second in command, possible romantic partner person, Clyde Tolson, who you probably know about, were known as Mother John and

Uncle Mike, respectively, up at the brothel. And according to some of the sex workers who gave their testimony in the 1973 child porn bust, they were there a lot. Normally, it's hard to give these types of stories any credibility, but Byers and Hoover's relationship is extensively reported on. Tolson and Hoover's relationship is like almost fact at this point.

And Byers is often also referenced by JFK assassination theorists because in the summer of 1964 and 1965, while staying with J. Edgar Hoover at the Hotel Del Chado in La Jolla, California, where he was also likely supplying Hoover with sexy boys. Byers claims- At least they were keeping those boys in crisp mountain air, like all good sexy boys need. Sure. I asked him, I asked him, do you think. I asked him, do you think Lee Harvey Oswald did it?

And he stopped and looked at me for quite a long time. Then he said, if I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our whole political system could be disrupted. That's all he said. And I could see he wasn't going to say anymore. So that's Billy Byers. So now we know also that Jay Edgar Hoover, whenever he was in L.A., because he came for horse races every year, he was in the same area near the secret base

getting like sex workers and there was a whole child porn ring going on up there also. Next one, next, next, next, next subject that we're going to talk about is, Nick, a glitch out of the child porn

are, are the doors a serious version of the monkeys? That's the next question, the doors. What? Okay. Because I told you we were going back to Jim Morrison. This is, uh, we're jumping. Uh, now, first, before we get into all of this, let me read this quote to you from McGowan, who is commenting on the

fact that Jim Morrison ended up fronting one of the most popular rock bands of all time as someone who never cared about music, never sang, never went to concerts, or even really played an instrument. So here we had a guy who had never sang, who had, quote, never even conceived of the notion that he could open his mouth and make sounds come out, who couldn't play an instrument and had no interest in learning such a skill, and who had never much listened to music or been anywhere near a band even just to watch one perform. And yet he somehow emerged virtually overnight as a fully formed rock star who would quickly become an icon of his generation. Even more bizarrely, legend holds that he brought with him enough original songs to fill

the first few doors albums. Morrison did not, you see, do as other singer-songwriters do and pen the songs over the course of the band's career. Instead, he allegedly wrote them all at once before the band was even formed. As Jim once acknowledged in an interview, he was quote, not a very prolific songwriter. Most of the songs I've written I wrote in the very beginning about three years ago. I just had a period where I wrote a lot of songs. And crazily enough,

there isn't really any answer to how this is possible. But McGowan goes out of his way to explain that he does not just mean lyrics that Morrison turned into songs. They weren't like poems.

They were fully written songs like music. And that at the same time, Morrison quickly changed out his preppy square college boy look for something sexy and mysterious that captivated entire venues

before eventually getting fat and bearded like me and losing pretty much all interest in music altogether. So to me, this alone sounds like trying to guess someone's mind without evidence, which kind of skews me out. But I think it's worth mentioning here because while all the other bands in the canyon were pretty legit at music and incestual and would like spend all their time like jamming out

with each other and hanging out and making new bands together and getting good at that and becoming a band again, Jim Morrison and the rest of the doors came together after a meeting at a transcendental meditation class. And at the admission of their own producer, Paul Roth, child, not those Rothschilds, but another guy called Rothschild, there's no S in this one, he said that they weren't even good musicians, saying, quote, the doors were not great live performers musically. They were exciting theatrically and kinetically, but as musicians, they didn't make it. There was too much inconsistency. There was too much bad music. Robbie would

be horrendously out of tune with Ray. John would be missing cues, and there was bad mic usage, too, where you couldn't hear Jim at all. And unlike other bands who constantly swap people out and collaborated with other acts and tried new stuff, the doors just sort of existed exactly as they were right up until Jim Morrison allegedly died. But that is a mystery for another day, which we will not get into because he died in Paris. And that is just, we'll talk about Jim Morrison, we'll talk about celebrities that may not be dead at another time.

So you hit the whole episode. Yeah. For now, as much as I love their music, let me just leave you with this quote from Prince David Crosby himself and ask you, where did they get all that juice from? Who was the real talent? And how did they hold on to it? here's the quote they're making little cardboard cutouts they hire producer they hire riders and in the current stuff now they don't even bother getting people to play don't bother with

that guitar player bass player drummer nonsense the people in those bands can't write play or sing and i know that sounds weird but if you don't believe me google the wrecking crew and you're off to the races on that one and you'll see exactly what i'm talking about it's not completely i mean milly vanilly right isn't they're like uh milly vanilla was like they go out and like yeah but it was like fake right like the voices were somebody else's though but that's not what what the doors is. The doors is like they got somebody to write the band. And the wrecking crew is like a real thing. You'll know, you, you've probably heard of the wrecking crew. If you're like a music historian, they're like a group of ringers that people would keep around that would come in and

like play the song for you when you weren't good enough to play the song, right? Like when you needed to get it good on the album, because people were going to listen to it over and over again, you bring in the wrecking crew. People on the wrecking crew, you know half of their names. They're, you know, tons of people have been in the wrecking crew over the years. Like the wrecking crew played like pet sounds you know like they played so like they're they're all over music from this time um so look that up looking at that's cool maybe the doors aren't a real band next subject is are hippies a sciop finally we're just going to come out and ask the question that we've all been wondering about as like the kind of summation of this whole question are hippies

a sciop like is it really possible that the storied sons and daughters of some extremely decorated, infamous, and prominent military figures, organically created this scene that they have so little in common with. Like, what about talented people who don't have military parents? Like, where are they at? No, because there's so much evidence that the government actively trying to kill the hippie movement, and they succeeded multiple ways. Think about it this way.

If the government NEPO kids did come to Laurel Canyon as a simple act of rebellion against their upbringing, where were the protest songs, where was the activism? Why did they downplay their origins instead of forsake them openly. Well, I mean, common wisdom. If you're a rich Nepo kid, you're going to act out, but then you want, you still want that

cash. You still want money. But if you think about hippies who aren't famous, right, common wisdom tells you that the hippies sprung up to protest Vietnam, like, as a response to it. Like, like, they sent half the kids off to Vietnam. So hippies were like, hey, man, like, what about love and understanding, right? But really, in his book

hippie, counterculture expert Barry Miles explains that while there were some anti-war hippies at protests. Quote, on the whole, the movement activists looked on hippies with disdain. And in fact, the documentary hippies from the pre-A Ancient Aliens History Channel goes even further down this road, explaining that, quote, some on the left even theorized that the hippies were the end result of a plot by the CIA to neutralize the anti-war movement with LSD,

turning potential protesters into self-absorbed naval gazers. So with those, that line of thinking, what you're saying, it goes exactly along with it, right? Like, maybe the hippie as we know it is the end result of a PSIOP to take the teeth out of the left. And in fact, it's too, it's like when you look at the left now.

There are people who are like, hey man, we got to, you know, change this, this and this. And then there are other people who are like, yeah, but the person you put in charge, I don't agree with them, so I don't agree with you. Like, there's like, they always fractured.

The left loves to fight within each other because of purity tests. You think that's an accident? No, I think it is the government. I think the government actively pitted factions of the left against each other. And so you could say, like, oh, yeah, the counterwar people and the hippies, because the hippies are just getting stoned all the time. Like, they aren't even try. They aren't even in this movement, man.

Right, right. And actually, Abby Hoffman, you know who that is? He's like that activist guy from the Chicago 7. Yeah. He agrees. He agrees with you. He says, quote, there are all. these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, white panthers, all trying to stop the war and

changed things for the better. And then we got flooded with all these flower children who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from? The answer, of course, is Laurel Canyon. And finally, for our very last segment of the entire day, I wanted to do a more recent and totally captivating mystery that's not even, it's still developing as of now. just to show you that this Laurel Canyon weirdness is not a retro thing and that you could still go there today and get a huff of this if you want.

It's very much alive and well lurking around all the bends up there and those weird windy roads. There's tons of weirdness up there. On November 2020, 24, there was a small fire in the home of an elderly Laurel Canyon resident known to his neighbors as William de Rothschild

of the European billionaire Rothschilds that Mathis was talking about earlier. who like Crosby's family or the Romanobs are just one of those families with a lot of fakers who are claiming to be on the tree as a ploy for some kind of inheritance or some kind of privilege or something like that. However, after a closer look, William wasn't in the official genealogy of the Rothschild. An investigator soon discovered that a man whose real name is William Alfred Kaufman changed it to William Alexander de Rothschild in 1985 explaining, quote, in the paperwork, quote, I want to take my family name that I prefer to Kaufman. It would simplify my life greatly, taking the name from my mother's side, which no one ever really challenged him on.

And he also more recently claimed to have donated a bunch of cars, the Peterson Automotive Museum on Wilshire and Fairfax. But they have no record of any donations of any kind from him. The LA Times, the LA Times was able to contact Kaufman's estranged brother Richard in Oregon, who was surprised to find that his long-loss brother hadn't died closer to to the period in the 60s when he disappeared. So his brother's been missing for about 50 years, though he could see him taking the name for what it's worth.

And also for what it's worth, all of Williams' neighbors mostly just saw him as a polite, educated man who carried himself with the slight air of aristocracy and eliteness, and nobody ever had any trouble believing he was from such a wealthy background because over the years, he'd owned something like 50 classic cars. So even if he wasn't a Rothschild, somehow there was money there. He bought his house on Lookout Mountain,

in 1972, right near Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Cass Elliott Houses, and only called his brother one other time in the early 80s for some kind of weird-ass call. We're here with Richard, his brother, explaining that he didn't explain where he'd gone. I was very surprised. I told him he should get in touch with our parents because they were getting a little older, and he never did. The house is now obviously burnt and fucked up, but it was already quite run down at the time of the fire, though at one point, the two-bedroom that he lived in was valued at about a million bucks.

And as far as anyone knew, he never really used his name for any sort of like access or financial gain, though talking about how much money he had and all those cars he had, he did marry Margo Merkin, who was the heiress to the budget rent-a-car fortune, who operated their drive-a-dream facility in Beverly Hills back in 1999. So is it possible he was renting cars from the expensive car rental service and making it seem like he had 50 cars? Very possible. strangely though most people who knew Merck and herself today were led to believe that she was not Williams's wife but actually his sister or his cousin like that was what the thinking was with all the neighbors because she actually didn't live in his house she lived up the street a little bit and she though she is still alive did not reply to any interview requests and has not commented on the fire or the subsequent situation so that's weird and with that folks we are done with Laurel Canyon for now And we will be retreating north to the hills of Pasadena real soon. So for now, let's leave with a quote from science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, another prominent Laurel Canyon resident, who is a favorite of everyone from David Crosby to Frank Zappa to Manson himself, who even named his son with Mary Brunner, Michael Valentine Manson, after, after the main character from Heinleyn's most famous book, Stranger in a Strange Land, which Elon Musk also likes and named his AI after, Grock, which is a word from Arsian.

the Martian language in that book. And, of course, every little secret is real. Look up the Manana Literary Society, if you don't believe me. And anyway, here is a quote for Jesse to read to close us out from Robert A. Hindley. Alex, do you know, I'm trying to find, I'm looking at Laurel Canyon right now online,

but I'm trying to find, what's that famous Japanese restaurant that's like on top of the hill in... Yamashiro? In Hollywood? Yamashiro. Is that near Laurel Canyon or am I wrong? It's not far from it.

Like, it's in Hollywood. Like, let me, let me look on a map. So, I was trying to think of a way to describe, like, little canyons up in the mountains. There's not much actually there, but houses. But, like, around it is this weird mix of, like, the best way to describe it when you think restaurants around. I'd say it's kind of on the east side of the cany. Like, it's kind of on the eastern edge. But, like, that restaurant is a great example.

There's another one that's kind of, like, imagine all the booths are actually their own little cubby. where there's a lot of restaurants like that there where it's you go to dinner and it's very you can close a curtain if you like so no one can see what you're doing it's that vibe there's a lot of like yeah yeah yeah richy richy rich biz if you don't know where the Laurel Canyon is

just in case like if you want to just know if you're not that familiar with LA geography the sunset plaza do you know where that is it's like where the sunset strip like begins and it's like that like kind of big intersection used to be a big McDonald's there that's now been like zeroed out and they're it's like the corner where the the sunset three is the silver the silver naked ladies statue thing that there's like four naked ladies and they're holding up it's like a pavilion that's on that's on

that's on that's on that's on hollywood but sunset it's like one block up from there yeah like it's it's it's it's literally it's literally like a it's where the sunset three is the the landmark theaters it's like right there you just kind of L.A. people talking I mean, like, literally, if there's Hollywood, it's right above where Hollywood is, in the mountains. Gotcha. It's like, if you're in Hollywood and you see mountains, it's that direction. You know where the Trader Joe's is, like where Walcano is, Laugh Factory?

It's like right next to Laugh Factory. Laurel Canyon Boulevard is like right there and you just like turn up into it and you like go into the mountains. Yeah, there's up in the mountains and it is windy and the roads are tiny and it's houses that are more money than we will ever see in our entire lives. and it's absolutely crazy. One of the most notorious streets in America goes right into the feeds on.

Crazy. It's a weird place. It definitely is like as you drive through there, if you do, if you ever come to L.A. And you do like a little driving tour thing. Drive through there and just look at the people. Like they're on another level of existence.

That is just what wealth can get you. It's crazy. If you want like a real wreck, go eat at Mel's Diner. Mel's driving On sunset And then like walk To like walk to like the rainbow bar

You'll go down You'll walk down like a huge strip of the Like a huge piece of the sunset strip You'll see like the whiskey You'll see the viper room You'll see all these like really famous sites It'll give you that 70s vibe It'll feel good

It's a good touristy thing to do and you should do it Yeah But stars trash Hollywood in general trash You know what? Hollywood is better than it seems like as a tourist, but you kind of have to live there to get the vibes. Read this quote from Robert Heinland, if you will. Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship.

When any government or church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, this you may not read, this you may not know. The end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed To control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion Contrerewise? Contrary wise No amount of force can control a free man

Whose mind is free No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything You can't conquer a free man The most you can do is kill him And that is something that you can live by Mathis get us out of here. Thank you guys so much for being important us

and watch from back next week with a brand new episode. We're off to go to a minisode at patreon.com slash Jluminati pod. We appreciate you. More on Reeve Whitson in the minisode, by the way.

We'll see you there. All right. Bye. Bye.