Julian Dorey Podcast - #312 - MK Ultra Expert on CIA’s “Truth Serum,” Assassination Program, & JFK Files | John Lisle

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ John Lisle has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas, where he is now a professor of the history of science & expert on CIA's MKUltra Experiments. JOHN's LINKS: X: https://x.com/JohnLisle WEBSITE:https://johnlislehistorian.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – MKUltra, Tom O’Neill, Stanley Lovell, OSS, WW2, Napalm Bats 10:01 – Brainwashing, Truth Serum, Sidney Gottlieb, Ewen Cameron, Clean Slate 17:53 – OSS to CIA, Allen Dulles, Louis Jolyon West, False Memories 30:41 – CIA Secrecy, MKUltra Hidden, Structural Flaws 39:21 – James Schlesinger, CIA “Family Jewels,” Plausible Deniability 47:18 – John Kiriakou, Joby Warrick, Ford CIA Slip, Assassination Program 58:17 – Operation Midnight Climax, George White, Gottlieb-Lovell Link 01:08:19 – MKUltra Origins, 149 Subprojects, Frank Olsen Death 01:24:47 – Animal Experiments, LSD Insanity, KUBARK Manual 01:38:52 – Mind Control, CIA Interrogation, JFK Files 01:49:43 – Counterculture, Hippie Movement, Jolly West, Helter Skelter Debunked 02:04:12 – Jack Ruby, Jolly West, CIA & LSD Motives 02:14:03 – Library of Congress, Archives, MKDelta, Family Jewels, Lumumba Plot 02:25:29 – Gottlieb Retirement, MKUltra Regret, Female Patient Breakdown 02:35:47 – Intelligence Agency Evil, Child Victims, Operation Fantasia 02:43:45 – History of Science, Isaac Newton, Alchemy 02:49:56 – Paradigm Shifts, Conspiracy, Cults 03:00:31 – Galileo Trials, Catholic Church CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 312 - John Lisle Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We know a lot about MKUltra, a lot more than people think we do. And I looked at some of the experiments they were doing. Sidney Gottlieb hires George White to hire to slip Ellis to their unwitting clients while George White is watching behind a one way window drinking martinis that he bought off CIA funds. The idea is we want to determine whether this is a kind of truth. Will it make these people spill their secrets? And then Project 94 animal experimentation.

What are they trying to do here? I mean, it worked at the end of the documents, it says, our ultimate goal is to apply this to humans, basically, which is obviously like assassination attempt. And at one of these experiments at Deep Creek, Sidney Gottlieb and his underling, Robert Lashbrook, another chemist, they decided we're going to dose every moment and see what happened.

Frank Olson is one of the people who got the M.D. that night. Shots for everyone. The rooms start spinning. They start seeing hallucinations. They start laughing uncontrollably. And then they go to sleep. But he can can't he seems to have some kind of psychotic break and then that night they go to the stapler hotel in new york 2 30 in the morning he jumps out the window and he dies actually one of the more moving cases it was called operation fantasia

have you heard of this before fantasia so hey guys if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Okay. Ultra guys here. That's right. I'm a little afraid what we're going to find out today, John. Well, it's going to be some interesting things that I can, that's the least, you know. Yeah. This, this book you just wrote, it was,

I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just to find out today, John. Well, it's going to be some interesting things that I can, that's the least, you know. Yeah. This book you just wrote, I was really glad you reached out. This is coming out on Tuesday. Thank you for the copy, by the way. Yeah, no problem. But we have talked about, obviously, MKUltra in passing on the podcast before.

Some people have added a little more color when they know some more. But we've never really like dug all the way into it, kind of like the Tom O'Neill kind of treatment or something like that. So I'm very fascinated by that. And we'll get deep into that today. You also had another book called The Dirty Tricks Department. It's like you know me as far as what I'm interested in. So this is about the OSS and World War II and secret warfare.

I imagine that's a lot of John Dulles stuff. Not so much John Dulles. This is about, that was about a group of scientists within the OSS, they were in charge of what's called the Research and Development Branch, who is in charge of making the secret weapons, disguises, documents, forged documents, you know, that kind of thing to equip secret agents.

So it's the scientists who were doing all those, creating all those things. How did you come across that story? That was your first book, but how did you even, like, start to research that? What was the first thread? That is a good question. The historian in me kind of looks back on the past and, you know, even with these books, thinks,

how does anything really come together? You know, as soon as you identify the cause of something, it's like, well, that was caused by something else that is just as integral. You know, so when I you identify the cause of something, it's like, well, that was caused by something else that is just as integral. You know, so when I look back on my own history, I think, well, I can tell the story of how I got interested in the Dirty Tricks department. I was, you know, reading... I think I might have been reading John Marx's The Search for Meant...

The Manchurian Candidate, and he mentions Stanley Lovell in there, the main character of this book. And I think that's kind of how I learned about it. And since then, I guess he's been in the back of my mind. When I was in grad school, I was doing my dissertation on some scientists who had connections to the intelligence community. So...

You did your dissertation on that. Yeah, yeah, not on that book. It was a separate topic related to that. That's cool. Yeah, and so I think always in the back of my head has been an interest in scientists in the intelligence community. And then I also had the knowledge of, oh, there's this one guy, Stanley Lovell, who

did some interesting things. And so somehow that kind of came together. And I thought, I'm going to write a book about this. Who was Stanley Lovell? He was a Boston chemist. And a bad start. Take your fucking chemistry set. Yeah. Take your fucking chemistry set. Yeah, and he got, during World War II,

basically recruited to join the OSS. He was pretty close with this guy named Vannevar Bush. I don't know if you've heard of Vannevar Bush before. He was kind of the unofficial science advisor to FDR during World War II. He's the guy who kind of told FDR really about the potential for an atomic bomb. People like to talk about this letter that Albert Einstein wrote to FDR really about the potential for an atomic bomb. People like to talk about this letter that Albert Einstein wrote to FDR saying, oh, the Germans, that's not

really what got the project started. What really got the project started is the British had this committee, the MOD committee, and they wrote a report about the potential of uranium to have some kind of nuclear chain reaction. And the important thing about the MOD report was saying that you don't need a ton of uranium to do this. It's possible to do this, you know, with enough uranium that you could actually isolate, U-235. And so, Vannevar Bush got ahold of this MAD report and was pretty nervous about it. And so, he's the one who approached FDR during World War II, saying,

we might need to do something about this. So that really got FDR to start this program. And he was connected to Lovell Howe again? Yeah, he was also from New England. And so they kind of knew each other. They were both scientists growing up in that milieu. So Vannevar Bush was also friends with William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS. Yeah, Wild Bill.

Wild Bill Donovan, exactly. And Donovan was looking for someone to lead the research and development branch to create the secret weapons and documents disguised as that kind of thing. So Vannevar Bush suggested you should hire this guy, Stanley Lovell. So that's how Lovell got the job.

And so during the war, obviously, in the middle of all this is what we all know, the Oppenheimer creation of the bomb. But there was all kinds of other stuff going on because you're dealing with Nazi Germany that was experimenting with biological weapons. They had an insane rocket program and stuff like that. So some of these scientists that you were looking into,

whether it be Lavelle or some of the other ones, like what were the other important things that we kind of miss in history that they were, I don't know, involved in missions for related to science during the war. Yeah, well, one of the things that attracted me to this story is that it's a lot of the projects that Lovell in particular is working on are very absurd. So it's kind of naturally not a funny story

because what they're doing is not really funny, but it's so absurd that it is kind of humorous, like what they're doing, for example. You might have heard of this, the concept of bat bombs during World War II. We're gonna strap incendiary devices to bats and release them over Japan. And, you know, the idea behind this was that,

well, instead of dropping incendiary bombs that, I mean, they're not targeted, they just land wherever they land. The wind can blow them one way or another. Bats will roost in buildings. And so if we drop this over a, you know, drop a bunch of bats who have napalm strapped to them over buildings, they're gonna roost inside the buildings and we can time delay the napalm to explode.

And so this will be like a targeted attack. We can directly hit their cities with this incendiary devices. That's the kind of thing Stanley Lovell was doing. That never actually went into the field, obviously. However, there were some field trials with it where Stanley Lovell, you know, he got this guy named Louis Pfizer, who was a chemist at Harvard. Uh-oh, Pfizer. Pfizer had invented napalm.

So this is where napalm comes from. Is that the Pfizer? I don't know if it's the Pfizer that this is the company's named after. That's a hell of a coincidence, but keep going. But yeah, so Pfizer invented napalm while he was at Harvard. In fact, when he was inventing napalm,

he would go to the Harvard soccer field and detonate his bombs. That was like just where he would practice doing this. level of course thought that was great and he recruited Pfizer to join the rnd branch and so he he challenged Pfizer i need you to invent a napalm device that's small enough we can attach to a bat so he did that meanwhile level got some bat experts to capture some bats from carl's bad caverns and elsewhere and round them up and you know they did some tests on this and during one of the tests you tests, you had to cool down the bats so that they would kind of go

into an artificial hibernation state so that you could put them in the planes and transport them. So they were doing this over a desert. They cooled down the bats, they put them in the plane, but they cooled them down too much. And when they dropped them, they just never woke up and they plummeted down into the desert.

So that was how one test ended. Another test was, I mean, even more destructive. They were doing live tests with these bats. They attached one of these napalm bombs to it, and they had put it in this hibernative state, and they were taking some pictures of it, but it woke up too quickly and it started flying off, and it actually flew into a barracks and into a control tower.

Some other bats flew into a control tower. They detonated and burned it all down. So it actually worked. You know, the weapon did work, but we never used it. By that by the time that it was kind of finished, the atomic bomb was ready. And so there was really no need for it. When you're looking at through the lens of something like that, where they're working on all these things during the biggest war in the history of the world, right? And there, there is nothing's ever perfect. But there is certainly an aspect of good versus evil there.

You have two regimes that are just, you wanna talk about like human rights abuses between the Nazi Germans and obviously in Japan, what was going on there. And it's like, you know, these tricks we're doing are almost seem like crazy and psychotic to a lot of people, but through the lens of studying it, do you wonder, do you ever like weigh the morality of what we're doing are almost seem like crazy and psychotic to a lot of people, but through the lens of studying it, do you wonder, do you ever like weigh the morality of what we're doing versus the loss of not doing that? If you understand what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's a good point, because one of the main things I initially wanted to do in my first book, the Drudgy Turks department about Stanley Lovell, I actually wanted this to be a book about Stanley Lovell and Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of MKUltra, because what they were doing was really, really similar to each other. And then your publisher said, that's two books. Well, yeah, it wasn't my publisher who said that.

I actually got the advice of some other professors at UT, kind of asking them, and they thought, this might make more sense, as I split it up. However, the similarities between them are kind of uncanny. During World War II, Stanley Lovell in the OSS is developing these secret weapons, documents, disguises. He's also doing truth drug experiments. So he's using mostly like marijuana. He's getting soldiers this marijuana and giving them weed to try to get the truth. Giving them weed to see if it'll lower their inhibitions and maybe he can a weed to try to get the truth? Giving him a weed to see if they'll... It'll lower their inhibitions,

and maybe he can get them to admit things. Um, so there are these truth rug trials going on. He's also involved in planning, plotting assassination attempts on foreign leaders, okay, during World War II. How can we kill Hitler? You know, what can we do to sneak a, you know, a weapon in there somewhere? That's right. Or, or... This is one of the crazier stories,

but one of his ideas was that he was going to take some female sex hormones and get the gardener who works close to the eagle's nest, where Hitler often was, and we're going to inject some of these hormones into the vegetables that Hitler eats. And then these vegetables, you know, Hitler, they're going to wind up on Hitler's plate. He's going to eat them.

And then it's going to, like, alter his masculinity. He's going to start growing breasts, and he's going eat them, and then it's gonna, like, alter his masculinity, he's gonna start growing breasts, and he's gonna become feminine, and somehow that's gonna win us the war. He starts crying and getting emotional. There's too much death. But those are the kinds of things that Level is doing during World War II.

During the Cold War, and so that's during a hot war. This is during the most destructive war in history. During the Cold War, Stanley, or Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, is doing a lot of that same stuff. He's involved, he eventually becomes the head of the Technical Services Division, which is the division within the CIA that's responsible for creating weapons and gadgets,

just like Stanley Lovell was doing. He launches this MKUltra program, which was trying to develop truth serums, just like Stanley Lovell was doing during World War Two. And so I kind of knew in the back of my mind, what they're doing is so similar, surely there's like a connection between them. And so that's what I wanted originally the book to be I want to, you know, describe,

compare these two people and show how what they're doing similar and see if there's some kind of connection. I eventually found a connection. But I split it into two books. The way the first book ends is basically a brief description of MKUltra in alluding to Sidney Gottlieb, and the second book picks up with Sidney Gottlieb and then briefly referring back to Stanley Lovell. One of the great things about this new book, Project Mind Control, is that the sources that I'm using for it to talk about MKUltra are a series of depositions that I found that

run to... I mean, Sidney Gottlie series of depositions that I found that run to, I mean, Stanley, or Sidney Gottlieb's depositions alone are about 800 pages. And this was part of a lawsuit that the victims of MKUltra sued the CIA in the 1980s. Yeah, late about 79 is when it started, but it went into the 80s. And as part of these lawsuits, the lawyers who were representing the plaintiffs, Joseph Rao and James Turner, they took the deposition of basically everyone involved. Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, all their underlings who were working for them,

and also the victims of some of these MKUltra subprojects. So you have both perspectives. This is, I mean, there's a court reporter in there, word for word, verbatim, typing what they're saying. So I have 800 pages of interviews of Sidney Gottlieb, him telling what he's doing. You imagine being that court reporter like, what the fuck? Well, one of the great things,b, him telling what he's doing. You imagine being that court reporter, like, what the fuck?

Well, one of the great things, I interviewed the court reporter for this book. No way. Yeah, I found her and interviewed her, and I sent her the depositions after the fact to see, to, you know, hey, do you remember, can you tell me, like, what was the ambiance in there? What was it like?

Did he talk more than, you know, other people or less? And she said, he talked way more. I couldn't believe it. Like, you know, usually when you get into a deposition, you want to just say kind of what you have to, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But for some reason, she says, Sidney Gottlieb just kept elaborating.

And then I interviewed the defense attorney who was representing the CIA for Sidney Gottlieb. And he said the same thing. He said he was a terrible witness. He wouldn't shut up. He is not the kind of person you want. So what ended up happening with these depositions, those lawsuits were settled out of court.

And so they never got submitted to the court. So they wound up in the papers of Joseph Rau, this attorney who was on the case. And he passed away and his papers got donated to the Library of Congress. There wasn't a gang order on them or anything? Like there wasn't a confidentiality agreement upon the settlement?

About the settlement? No, no, because the plaintiffs, they walked away with $750,000. That wasn't confidential. You know, it came out. That's it? Yeah. That's all they got?

Yeah. Just split among them, and there were about eight or nine of them. Oh. Yeah. I got to fuck you on the way out the door. Yeah. And there's actually several of the children of the people who were part of one sub project.

Their children are currently trying to sue, I don't know if it's the Canadian government or whatever, sub project 68, Ewan Cameron, his stuff. The children of the victims of that are still currently trying to sue them for... What was that sub project? What? I never heard of that. It's... Ewan Cameron was this psychiatrist up in Montreal, and he was sponsored by MKUltra for several years.

He was trying to... Independently of MKUltra, he was trying to determine whether he could cure all mental illness. He wanted to break a person down to their... to basically a blank slate. His theory of mental illness was that he was a behaviorist. So he thought that all behavior is the result of learned patterns, you know?

From your environment, you learn everything that you do. that all behavior is the result of learned patterns, you know Yeah from your environment you learn everything that you do, you know And so if we could break those learned patterns we could teach you how to behave in a proper way and that would cure your mental illness Why are you schizophrenic? It's because that pattern has been ingrained in you from your environment So if we could bring you back to the blank slate and give you a new environment that would build you up to be a normal Non-schizophrenic person meaning if I'm understanding this correctly, in some ways you'd kind of have to forget who you are. Yes. It's like a reset button on the computer. Yes, exactly. One of the analogies that's used in a report that the Canadian government did is like

almost a telephone switchboard. You unplug the wires and then you plug it back in their proper places. They've been plugged in wrong and now you have to plug them back in. So you have to undo them first and put them back in properly. But yeah, so you and Cameron, that was his theory of mental illness, where it springs from. Again, the way he thought you would cure this is by inducing enough stress in a person that they forgot basically who they are, they forgot their learned patterns and they could relearn other patterns. The way he did this, the different kinds of experiments

that MK Ultra funded, is one of them, the most prominent one he's known for, is called psychic driving. This is where you would replay repeated audio messages in someone's ear thousands and thousands of times, for hours on end, for weeks on end, and they would listen to this thing over and over and over. The way he found out about this is he was recording

one like session that he was doing with one of his patients, just a therapy session. And she said something that kind of triggered her to have a negative reaction. I think it was something about, oh, my mom used to tell me when I was young and then she said it. And so he clipped that quote out of the audio

and he just replayed that over and over. And each time he did, she would say, I don't wanna listen to that, you know, turn that off, turn that off. And the more he did it, the more agitated she got. And he thought, maybe this is a way to break a person down, make them listen to repeated audio messages of negative things. Sounds like torture. Well, it kind of is torture. So that's one way.

Another way he tried to break people down is through sensory deprivation. So he would put, like, cardboard tubes over their arms, and, you know, earmuffs over their ears, a visor over their eyes so they couldn't see they had to lay down in bed with white noises playing. They would be there for weeks. For weeks. For weeks doing this, yeah.

What do you feed them? Well, they would eat, you know, whatever. Occasionally, they would wake up and go to the bathroom and do whatever. Take the cardboard off and, you know. Well, another thing kind of related to that is he would also do chemical comas. So he would put people in comas. So he would put

people in comas for weeks on end. I mean, they would wake up once or twice a day to go to the bathroom and to eat and then under their pillow, he would play these psychic driving messages so that in their dreams, he thought maybe this will help break them down while they're in it. Another thing he did kind of the most brutal of them was this just doesn't stop. It doesn't stop. Electroshock therapy. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So, you know, electroshock therapy has been around for a while, but he did it much more intense than basically anyone else, and much more repetitions

than basically anyone else. And again, trying to break down the brain to some kind of blank slate. And then the idea was that once they were the blank slate, he would replay, he would play for them positive psychic driving messages that he would record himself. Okay, so now something nice,

and he would make them listen to that, and surely that would make them in my image, basically. It's kind of like playing God with these people. But that was his idea. MKUltra, the CIA's program in mind control, Sidney Gottlieb ahead of it, they're interested in this for obvious reasons. Is it possible to change the behavior of a person

through some of these techniques? Is it possible to induce amnesia in someone through some of these techniques? That's what they're interested in. So that's why they were interested in his work. Can we actually take a step back for a second to get the timeline here? Because like, one of the things I always have trouble thinking about, no matter how much I read this history, and what it is, is the fact that you had this organization, the OSS, basically formed during

World War II as a wartime intelligence agency. But after the war, the same people, the OSS exists and then the same people in the couple years after the war basically just changed the name to CIA, maybe add some extra extensions to what they can do around the law, that kind of thing, and create this organization that seems to me like, it's almost like we called it the OSS in World War II,

but it was basically CIA. Is that, first of all, is that fair to say? It is, the OSS is the precursor to the CIA. It's not like the CIA grows out of the OSS. The OSS is terminated and then the CIA is created in 1947 with the National Security Act. But you're right, it is a lot of the same people. In fact, if you just look at a list of CIA directors over the years, a lot of them came

from the OSS for the majority, for a lot of the first few decades of the CIA, they're just directly from the OSS. Right. So the reason I bring that up is when you look at the history of say, Alan Dulles, like let's pick on him for a second. He and his brother, John John Foster actually had long business relations from the private sector before OSS with Nazi Germany, because Nazi Germany

was a burgeoning economy, so they had some business as corporate lawyers there, which, as crazy as that sounds, almost makes sense for a minute, just because they were such a big economy at the time before the world was taking them seriously as what they really were. But when they went to war, when you read these accounts, whether it be Devil's Chessboard by Talbot or other ones I've read, researched on by like Henry Abbott, and who sourced a lot of things there, like, it's almost like they went to war like, well, all right, they declared war on us. All right, we'll go fight the Nazis for you. But they weren't like that excited about it. And I say this because what they were,

what they seemed to always be the most worried about in the back of their mind was the Bolsheviks and the USSR. And they felt like that was gonna be, you know, what became the Iron Curtain and stuff like that. And we're gonna be in an ideological war, ideological war, West versus communism in the East. And so they kind of like got through World War II as the OSS translated into the CIA

and the mission from the very beginning was, oh, we're in a Cold War now, let's do the shit that we think the Russians are doing or that we wanna beat them to. Like, is that a fair assessment? It is, yeah, yeah. It's very soon after World War II or even at the end of World War II, the thinking, especially in the intelligence community, quickly becomes,

yeah, we need to keep tabs on the Soviets, especially to see what they're doing. And in the case of MKUltra, the idea was that maybe they possess methods of mind control. That's what spurs MKUltra in the first place, is that not even the Soviets, but just communists in general, maybe the Koreans, maybe the Chinese, if they have these methods of mind control, then we should be able to figure out how they're doing it to defend against it.

But also once the CIA starts getting into that, well, maybe even if they're not doing that, we should develop these anyway for our own sake. Yeah, so that's kind of the turn. You start to rational, that's the thing, like this is the downfall of humanity. You may start something for the right reasons because you're like, well, they're bad, objectively even.

You know, we don't want that in their hands. Therefore, we need to learn how to do it. And then once you get a hold of that power, potentially, if you do, now you're like, well, we're the good guys. We could use it for the right reasons, right? We could be the judge of that and it becomes this major,

major slippery slope. But what was the, did they have, looking back at the evidence that they were using to try to say that like the Soviets were, had access to those types of powers or whatever, does any of that hold water today? Or was it, they were just scared and they're like, oh, maybe that's it right there.

Yeah, it's not as if the Soviets or Chinese or Koreans possess some kind of mind control technique that MKUltra was looking for. They thought they did. So originally, what led Alan Dulles to create MKUltra and put Gottlieb in charge of it was the Korean War. There were several pilots who had been shot down during the Korean War and captured as prisoners of war. And they confessed to committing biological warfare against the Koreans. They said, Yeah, our planes had anthrax and typhus and bubonic plague and all kinds of stuff, germ bombs,

and we were dropping them over the Korean people. And so the thinking in the CIA is, why would these pilots say this? Like, why are they saying this? That's not true. What's going on here? And so the thinking was, they must be manipulated into saying that. The Koreans or the Chinese or whoever must be doing something, what could they possibly be doing?

Well, maybe it's hypnotism or drugs or whatever. It turns out that it's, you know, the traditional methods of coercion. They're being tortured, they're having sleep deprivation, they're having food deprivation, but it's very ironic too, because several of the people who eventually become involved at MKUltra are the ones who figured out that it was, like, sleep deprivation that's happening to the Koreans.

For instance, Jolly West, who is... Oh, boy. Yeah, he's mentioned in, you know, Tom O'Neill's Chaos, I know y'all know about. Um, he's one of the main psychiatrists who's evaluating these prisoners of war. And, you know, I have a quote in the book where he where he says basically there's only one thing that caused these people, you know to confess to crimes They didn't commit and it was lack of sleep. Okay. Well, that doesn't sound like anything like MK ultra and yet it's ironic

he becomes it's because he had Investigated these Korean POWs that Sidney Gottlieb recruited him because Sidney Gottlieb thought, okay, well, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't these esoteric methods of mind control, drugs or hypnotism or something that got the Korean soldiers or the American soldiers in Korea to admit to something they didn't do, but maybe that's still possible. And maybe we should see if Wes knows anything about that. So they recruit him to do that. Yeah. I mean, we even obviously know now when you'll look at regular criminal cases in the United States that have happened over the years,

and unfortunately continue to happen, where people will just, you know, they'll be put in a holding interrogation room for a long time, talk to people for a weekend, and not even necessarily sleep deprived, but there's just psychological fallacies that we are all capable of as humans that lead to some people giving false confessions, things that never happen.

Like there's something about being in there and the person they're talking to and the methods of interrogation used that eventually they're like, yeah, I know, I did this. And we it's really tragic when you see these cases. But I would imagine in addition to some of the more, I guess, like traditional war crime type methods you discuss, like torture and stuff like that. I would imagine there were probably also guys who maybe gave that up because they're just being interrogated for weeks at a time. And eventually they're like, you know what?

I think I did drop typhus on everyone. And they actually believe it. Yeah, yeah, I have no doubt that like false memories could be implanted like that. In fact, one of the things that Jolly West, you know, this guy who is mentioned in Tom O'Neill's Chaos, he's very interested in false memories and trying to induce false memories

through hypnotism. The ironic thing, well, he says he is able to induce some of these false memories. The ironic thing for me is that there are a lot of conspiracy theories that kind of come out of MKUltra after the 1970s, once it's revealed to the public. People claiming that I was an MK Ultra sex slave and the government, you know, did all this stuff, and they said, I have memories.

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. They say they have memories of all these presidents have used me and vice presidents and governors and foreign leaders and all kinds of stuff. None of it's, it's not true. But I actually think that they might think that it is true. I think that the memories that they have are not genuine memories in the sense that they experienced it,

but I think they think that they're genuine memories. One of the reasons why is because, you know, there's one woman in particular who says that her husband, um, recovered these memories for her with hypnotism. And this is right after the satanic panic in the 1980s. And one of the main things of the satanic panic is that people were having hypnotism done on them to recover these supposed memories of being involved in the satanic rituals where we would sacrifice the devil out of you.

Yeah. And so in fact, her husband, you know, who supposedly recovered these memories, he says that he learned how to recover memories through several people who were involved in recovering memories during the satanic panic and got sued for falsely recovering memories of people and lost their medical licenses. One woman claims she won over $10 million in a lawsuit when she sued against him for you know doing this to her. One woman claims that one of these guys who was involved in this organization, he implanted

this false memory that she had been impregnated by aliens and was forced to abort the fetus and then cannibalize it and all kinds of stuff. But, and then, you know, the husband of this MKUltra conspiracy there is, he says, I learned how to recover memories from him. So, to me, it's like, I feel like the, you know, this woman in particular I'm talking about, about the MKUltra conspiracies,

I feel like she's a victim of this. I feel like she's been induced these memories into her, you know, so supposedly recovered them. So, I don't blame her that much, but I do think they're not genuine memories. Right, it's so strange, because there's a couple of things here. Number one, and this relates to anything,

not just like MK Ultra claims or stuff like that. The internet allows so many people to say whatever they want to the point that a lot of people will either say stuff that they genuinely believe because something's happened to them and they want to the point that a lot of people will either say stuff that they genuinely believe because something's happened to them and they're not well, or say things that just they know patently aren't true. And therefore it creates like a boy who cried wolf scenario because there's so much noise of people doing this

that the very small, 0.01% of people who maybe are making a claim about X, whatever that is, are actually making a real claim, but they're stuck in all the noise of everyone else. And I can tell you, if I were a gatekeeper to, you know, whatever it may be, whether it's government or not government involved, just a gatekeeper to some sort of nasty secret or something that's wrong that's happening, some sort of conspiracy, if you will, that would be my best weapon. It's just a bunch of crazy people saying a bunch of shit,

because I'm like, yeah, there's nothing to see here. They're all crazy. And you get to throw out the 0.01% baby with the bathwater. It's funny you say that because at the very end of the book, that's the exact point that I make. Uh, you know, I make this exact point about how it almost serves, in some cases, the CIA's best interest

to have these people out there spreading these, spreading these lies. I don't know if they actually think they're lies, but I think they're lies, you know, spreading this misinformation or whatever it is, because it gets trapped in this cycle called censorship through noise, you know, which is what you're explaining. There's so much noise out there. No one knows what to believe. And so we develop a kind of apathy. Well, if there's just too much to wade through, I can't determine what's true. Therefore, I don't care. I'm just not going to look into it. I don't know. So, you know, that's harmful to legitimate researchers who are trying to expose these real abuses that happen because many of the abuses,

especially of MKUltra, are so sensational in themselves. The idea that we would hire prostitutes to drug unwitting victims with LSD or something. It sounds like the kind of thing that would be made up. So when there are a lot of other false claims out there that are just as sensational, it just seems like the kind of thing that would be false. So how should I actually believe this? Or maybe I should actually believe those things too, because this thing was so sensational. Maybe those are. So it muddies the waters of how do we actually determine what they did and what they didn't do. So yeah, I quote an intelligence officer in this book

where he makes this point basically saying it's in the CIA's best interest to facilitate these conspiracy theories by what he calls the kooks. The more kooks out there, the less people can actually wade through what actually did happen. Even when you look at people who haven't had something allegedly traumatic happen to them, like being an MK Ultra experiment to you

or something like that, when you look at people online who don't even have to be a conspiracy or something, they just run with some sort of wild information, whatever it may be. And they know at the beginning, consciously, this is bullshit, right? But then they say it enough, just from behind a keyboard every day

is a part of a way to griff their way through this, that eventually, I've seen this enough online over the years through so many people, I think a lot of those people actually maybe make themselves mentally sick and actually do believe it after a while. So, you know, what does that say about the people who have some sort of actual psychological trauma and then just believe other things happen to them?

Like, the possibilities with that are endless. What was that term you just used? Censorship through noise? Censorship, yeah. That's great. I'm gonna use that. That's actually perfect, because that's exactly what it is. It's like, you know, if you can just... If you can have a way bigger crowd of people where you can't hear any of the individual voices,

that's easier to control than the individual voice who's got a microphone. Exactly, yeah. It's a lot easier to do that, to drown out the noise than to try to silence all the noise. You can't ever silence all the noise, but if we drown it out, then it doesn't matter if there's noise

there in the first place. Right. Nobody's gonna hear it. All right, so the beginning of MK Ultra history here. Let's go deep into this. Okay, yes. So this whole timeline, try to separate fact from fiction. And I know there's a lot of stuff like in doing the research, it's like it's TBD, there's not enough there to be able to say this was this way or that way. So when that happens, no worries. Although I do have a

point about that, please, where I actually think we know a lot about MK Ultra a lot more than people kind of think we do. There's this concept about MK Ultra that in 1973, Sidney Gottlieb, the head, he destroyed most of the files. That's nice of him. Yeah, so- Right before the church commission. Exactly, exactly.

So if people know about MK Ultra, sometimes they've heard this story about Sidney Gottlieb destroyed these files, and so we can't really know what it was, but I kind of have the opposite opinion after looking at all this. I think we can have a really good idea about what it was. He destroyed a lot of the files, which would have been great to have. But at the same time, we've recovered thousands

of files that he didn't destroy that we know. And since then, there were a lot of lawsuits that you had all these depositions I found thousands of pages, there were the Church Committee investigations, the Pike Committee investigations in the house, there was the Rockefeller Commission, which uncovered some stuff. There have been institutional records that have been released. There have been government reports that have been. It's like, to me, it's like, we almost have more documentation of MKUltra

than like any other secret project I can think of. I should have said that better. It may be the dwarf among midgets with things we look at as far as having information. We do have a lot of information about. Obviously, we've done the research in uncovered stuff. But I'm saying since files on anything like this always get destroyed, there's always stuff lost to history

and exact stories and who really, who were the exact victims and stuff like that that we can't know. It's not like they just, there was a Truman show taping all this and we can go watch that on a loop and figure out what it is. But to your point, unlike other alleged like things that maybe the CIA or other espionage

organizations have been involved with where we can't really even point to the, well, that was the date it started. This is who was really involved because we literally have no files. This one we do. And like they had to like over the years, obviously through litigation, basically admit that this existed and this is a real thing. I mean, even if you pull up the CIA's greatest organization, Wikipedia, like they have a page called MK Ultra where they admit it.

And the lady who wrote that at Langley and had everyone, I'm kidding right now, obviously. But you know what I mean? The CIA, for a while, it had its own like internal Wikipedia and telepedia. Internal? I think it's external now, too. It was like an internal system to be able to have

like this open source ability for people who have the designated clearance to be able to write about a particular topic. So you could write something and say you have top secret clearance, then you could make it top secret, and then whoever has that clearance will be able to log on and see that information You know, so it's called in telepedia and they help you're not helping right now but they had a they had a

They had an article on MK ultra and it's since been declassified and it doesn't say anything really that the you know That's not in the public domain, you know that hasn't hadn't been in the public domain before that But it was a pretty cool experiment. I guess you know to have anything really that's not in the public domain, that hadn't been in the public domain before that. But it was a pretty cool experiment, I guess, to have this crowdsourced information for intelligence things within the CIA. I don't know what happened to it exactly, but it didn't get going too far.

I think it ended after a few years. Can you imagine just being like Linda Langley, you put in like 21 years so far to death, the best thing you get to do is watch footage of some drone that just blew up fucking wedding halfway around the world But one day you come across this file that says top secret But now it's like declassified and you're like, oh, that would be perfect for the page. You just type in MK ultra We mind control people through fucking LSD and then burned all the files. Click! And then like, it's just, oh yeah, that's our internal little system.

What a world. What a world. All the, I would just love to be a fly on the wall in CIA whenever they have that, those meetings where they're like, ah, this is all the shit we're never gonna be able to talk about. So, you know, you walk in this room, it's like the closed skiff or whatever.

They're like, here's the aliens or whatever. Yeah. I'm sure, especially at the highest levels, that kind of thing takes place where, OK, we need a rundown of what are the major secret operations that are going on right now. However, one of the problems with the structure of the CIA, which is an inherent flaw, it's not

like it can get beyond this to a degree, is that it is so heavily compartmentalized that even if you work within the CIA, you don't know what's going on in the CIA. So with MKUltra, there might've been a dozen people who knew this was going on. I think in an organization- A dozen, that's it? Maybe, maybe. Wow.

I mean, you have Alan Dulles, Richard Helm, Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, John Gittinger, and several other chemists who are working on this. There aren't that many other people who are involved with this. That's an amazing point too, because there could even be people who were like tasked with one little bullshit thing that has no context.

They're like, hey, can you just tell me what this chemical is right here? They fucking type it in their report, give it to somebody and then that's used. And they have no idea what that's used for. So I mentioned toward the end of the books, what are some of the structural flaws of the CIA that enabled something so abusive to happen like MKUltra?

And that's one of them, the heavily compartmentalized nature of the organization means that there are few internal checks because who can be able to check this if no one can know about it? That's supposed to be the purpose of the inspector general, the CIA inspector general, should have the ability to see what's going on and stop it if it's illegal or unethical. There were several inspector general investigations into MK ultra one in 1957 one in 1963. The

one in 1963, the inspector general john earman, he said, I think this is illegal and unethical. And yet he didn't stop it. One of the reasons why later, there was another Inspector General, Lyman Kirkpatrick, and he wrote the report in 1957. He says, I was afraid to lose my job. You know, if I said recommended that this stop or something. So he said, I was just trying to see what the limits were that I could do and not lose my job. You know, so the Inspector General was impotent.

The heavily compartmentalized nature of the CIA prevented that. And then the bad record keeping practices compartmentalized nature of the CIA prevented that. And then the bad record-keeping practices prevented anyone from kind of following the paper trail. So Sidney Gottlieb destroys the files. So all these kind of internal checks that were supposed to be there failed. So you have to then rely on external oversight

of the intelligence community, which falls to Congress. But that basically didn't exist throughout much of the Cold War. So, okay, if there's no external oversight, then you kind of have plausible deniability to anything you want. You think you're going to spy on the spies? Like, that's what that's what I always ask. I'm like, OK, you think this asshole in Congress

who's taken money under the table openly at like the steakhouse down the street is going to be able to hold anything over these spies who are trained to spot things like that, like not to be overly cynical, be overly cynical, but there's a reason why Frank Church lost his election immediately after the Church Committee or Commission, whatever the term is. You can justify a lot of the compartmentalized or uncomportmentalized, you can justify a lot of things to yourself with the right intentions in the name of national security. And that can be the road to hell where you're doing bad things. And you don't, it's like people want to make this simple and be like, that's just because

they're evil and they know they're, it's not that simple. It's just human fallacy. You think you're doing the right thing and if we got to cut this corner, right, it'll be worth it. And that's the nature of what it is. But your point about compartmentalization is perfect. And it's something that every guy I've had in here who either, you know, reports on CIA or the government or has been within it, they all say the same thing.

It's like, it's a need to know basis. And that allows you to do your job without thinking about the millions of pieces in the picture. Even Shawnee Delaney, who was in here, who was DIA, right? She wanted her, she spent a lot of time in Afghanistan in the years leading up to Bin Laden. And she was actually an integral person in the hunt for Bin Laden.

But she knew that, but she didn't know the specifics of it. Because the way they did the Bin Laden hunt was there was basically a central resource that you uploaded your information to and you saw no other information that was going in there. You had no idea whether what you just uploaded, they could quickly vet and be like, hey, nice job getting that, but that's not anything. Or if it's like, holy shit, that's big,

that connects this other puzzle piece over here. So, I mean, you know. The reason why I say it's an inherent flaw of the intelligence community that there's this compartmentalization, because you have to have it to some degree. Secrets have to be kept. I mean, there are legitimate secrets of national security that can't get out. So, you do have to have that in some degree.

Um, one of the prime examples of where this can go wrong, at least from the perspective of the CIA, um, would be like the family jewels, you know, that are released. This is, this is a... Can you tell people about this? Yes, this is, this is a document that's compiled together. Schlesinger, that's a hard name to say, James Schlesinger, I think that was his name. He was the director of the CIA. I think in the, maybe this was like the late 60s, early 70s. And he and William Colby, who was kind of his deputy under him,

who eventually replaced him, they had this idea that we should compile all of the skeletons in our closet, in the CIA's closet. That way we can get ahead of any new stories that might come out, you know, because one of the things that prompted them to do this is Seymour Hersh contacted them about Project Azorian, which was an attempt by the US, by the CIA,

to get a ship and go to the middle of the ocean and drop a giant claw from it and retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine that had nuclear missiles on board, because we wanted to, you know, figure out what kind of their technology was. And so Seymour Hersh figured out this was going on. So he told them, I'm gonna publish this story, And William Colby was able to kind of negotiate with him, can you delay a little bit longer, whatever. And so after that, Colby and Slesinger realized that we need to figure out like what other taking time bombs there are in the CIA so that we can

either prevent them from getting out or whatever. So they send out a directive to all past and present CIA personnel, whether you were a janitor or a secret agent or whatever. And they say, if you were involved in anything illegal during your time here, can you tell us like what it was? So they compiled this huge document, you know, it's called the family jewels and it leaked to Seymour Hersh.

So, you know, that's the opposite of compartmentalization. We're gonna compile all this in one place. And that's where it goes wrong from the intelligence perspective, because it's like, well, now that it's all in one place, And that's where it goes wrong from the intelligence perspective, because it's like, well, now that it's all in one place, it makes it so easy to get into the wrong hands. There were sludge and insure instituted this purge of personnel at the CIA started firing everybody and one of these disgruntled personnel just gave it to Seymour Hersh or a chunk of

it. Oh my God. Yeah. So that's, that's why you do need compartmentalization, you know, because you want to prevent something like that from happening if there are legitimate secrets of national security you're holding. But at the same time, you know, it's a it's a it's a delicate balance. It's a very delicate balance. And it's like, you know, it's easy to look at all the bad shit CIA has done. And there's a long list of that. And want to say disband it, get rid of it. I have to be a realist, though, which

is to say, Yeah, if we didn't have a spy organization in America for three days, there'd be a problem, right? So, you know, you also don't wanna be a bootlicker and be like, therefore, let them do what they do. I think that's fucking crazy, but it's always like the buck is gonna stop somewhere, and whoever controls that buck is gonna have flaws. And I think because of the nature of what they do

and the reaches of what they do and the reaches of these people, you know, it's like, they're there forever. Sometimes they're there for 3040 years, or they're there for seven, and then they walk out to get their paycheck in the private sector and immediately walk in the office on Monday with their own desk. Now they just work for Lockheed Martin, but they're ready to you know what I mean? So it's like a revolving door of private and public sector within this very secret organizations, like not just CIA, whether it be Pentagon or NSA,

all that stuff, that's constantly like just slushing around with all this talent and information and compartmentalization and national security, national security, national security, that there are going to be times where that gets bastardized. And we've unfortunately seen it over and over again. MKUltra was kind of, from the very beginning though, it was like the ultimate warning of, all right, this is how bad it could get.

And secrecy kind of breeds secrecy. So once you grant an agency some amount of secrecy, it's very difficult for it not to assume even more. In the book, I call this the vicious cycle of secrecy. For me, the cycle seems to be, you start with secrecy, it's granted. Secrecy leads to plausible deniability, because if nobody can really know what you're up to,

well, then you're not really accountable to anyone. So once you have plausible deniability, that often leads to risky behavior. Something like MK Ultra, you start doing something that you wouldn't otherwise have because you have that plausible deniability. So secrecy leads to plausible deniability, plausible deniability leads to risky behavior.

Risky behavior in many cases leads to embarrassment. You're gonna get found out. Seymour Hersh is gonna get the copy of the Family Jewels and he's gonna publish it on the front page of the New York Times. And embarrassment leads to secrecy. Now our secrets got out there, we need to clamp down and really make sure

they don't anymore. Okay, now you start the cycle again. Now you have secrecy, plausible deniability, and so on. Crazy man. Yeah, this is one of those I think about at night a lot. It's just like, I don't, you know, it's easy to spot problems. It's hard to find solutions, right?

And I don't like just being one of those guys saying, that's a problem, someone else figured out. I can't say I have a really great solution there. Like if suddenly every single thing we were doing from an espionage perspective had to actually not just in theory, but quite literally without any obstruction be overseen by Congress, that'd be a disaster. But at the same time, when you don't by Congress, that'd be a disaster. But at the same time, when you don't oversee it, it could be a disaster.

It's like, which way do we go? Oh, sorry. No, no, please. I was gonna say, there were some reforms instituted to try to bulk up external secrecy of the intelligence community, especially after 1975, the church committee was exposing these past abuses. Some of that was, okay, the president

should have to sign off on covert actions, you know, so that eliminates his or her plausible deniability. Okay, so, you know, the president have to, if you have to sign off on a covert action, now you're inextricably linked to this thing now. So that's one way to try to reduce the plausible deniability in that vicious cycle. Another was to create specific committees within Congress, you know, to monitor the intelligence community, but that didn't work out too well for a while. There are some people who said it was more akin to like whining and dining sessions.

So like the CIA was required to inform these committees on what it was doing a certain number of times a year. And when they would get together, they would really just kind of wine and dine them and you know, whatever. And they made like once a year and that was it. Yeah, yeah. So also like it humanizes everything too.

So you're like, I know Jeff. Jeff would never do that. Jeff's out there like fucking sticking a syringe and like some fucking Filipino child like, ah, it's just for national security. Yeah, so I think the, I mean, I think you have to incentivize Congress to actually want to be the watchdog. How to do that is difficult, but I think it has to do something

with realigning the incentives of elections, you know, whether it be a different kind of voting, like rank choice voting, or proportional representation, or ending gerrymandering, or something. If you can realign the incentives of the elected representatives to actually care more about governance than getting reelected, or that's always gonna be important,

but to care more about governance maybe. So if you can realign those incentives somehow, then I feel like that's at least the avenue that I see that you can try to have a stronger external check on the CIA. But other than that, I'm not sure. A strong free press and free speech. William Colby said he was the, eventually became director of the CIA. He was asked, what keeps you from abusing people like me? Some reporter asked him and he said, it's the external checks, it's Congress, these congressional committees. and he said, and the press.

You know, so it's like the press exposing these abuses, the ability for them to speak truth to power, you know, an integral part of that vicious cycle of secrecy or something that can try to help stop it is the embarrassment portion. You know, you... You know, whenever some abuse happens and it can be exposed, it should be exposed.

We should be able to expose something when that was illegal or whatever. So that it plays on a check of the intelligence community. They know how to play that game though really well. I mean, a friend of mine's John Kiriakou, who's been in here. We've done four episodes, but they were both, he was here twice and we just did two episodes each time.

You familiar with his story? No, I'm not. So John was a high-level CIA guy like very high-level He eventually towards the end of his career was the guy who led the mission that got Abu Zubaydah in early 2002 right after 9-eleven who was at the time believed to be the number three in al-qaeda and you know when in 1991 he was the chief historian for CIA on Saddam Hussein He's like briefing HW Bush before we go into Desert Storm. So the guy his story is insane, but he leaves CIA and I want to say like

506 something like that and Towards the end of his time at CIA obviously was the post 911 era. And one of the things they instituted right away, as you know, is the Enhanced Interrogation Program. So someone comes up to him as a high-level guy after they secretly instituted this program and said, hey, we got this new program. It's called Enhanced Interrogation. We want to train you on it so that you can be one of the guys. And John looked at it and said, this is torture.

And they're like, well, no, it's enhanced. He's like, no, no, this is not constitutional, it's torture. So behind the scenes, they would call him in the hallways at Langley, like the human rights guy, which was not a compliment to him. But fast forward in 07,

and there's a whole backstory with this that makes it even worse, but Bush administration is obviously just burning out at that time, presses all over them, and they're at war with CIA over whose idea this was to do enhanced interrogation. And so John gets wind that they are going to try to pin the enhanced interrogation on him when he was like the one guy actually fighting against it. So instead of turning on those people, he goes and does an interview with ABC where he actually, even though he knew it didn't work and didn't support it

He defended them and said oh we got so much information from the enhanced interrogation program Like these are Patriots, whatever and long story short five years later Illegally actually like how it happened they have all the emails, but they reopened a case into him It was an old rival from CIA instructed Eric Holder to reopen a case holder didn't want to do it He said no, please open the case. They did. John ends up going to jail, taking a plea deal for two years and becomes a total dissident, obviously.

But, you know, he talks about how the press is actually something that they can totally manipulate because they can give them a sacrificial lamb and change the narrative of the story or give them something far more simple. Another guy I've had in, Joby Warwick. Are you familiar with him? No, I'm not. Joby's a Pulitzer winner, been the national security reporter

for the Washington Post forever, written several books, great guy. But he, the very first time he was in here, he's been in here three times, but episode 134, like he talks about this. It was like 50 minutes in that podcast. He was like, you know, there's a difficult thing that happens where we'll work on a story,

get it all the way towards the finish line, be talking to people, and then we'll get a call from our friends, right? Because you know these guys, you're friendly with them at CIA or wherever it is, and they're like, hey, you guys are on the right path here, but if you report this fucking 150 people are gonna die, here's why, here's how, please don't do that.

And he says, we then have to go into a conference room, just a bunch of human beings, and ask ourselves to play the guessing game of, are they just fucking with us because they don't want this out? Or is this real and are we gonna have blood on our hands? And that is not... that is not a conversation that I would be envious of, you know, having to have. Yeah, there are a couple instances in this book where that kind of thing happens.

I mentioned Seymour Hersh. William Colby personally asked him, can you delay the story on Project Azorian? There's another instance where Gerald Ford, President Ford, is meeting with some editors of the New York Times, and he accidentally let slip that the CIA might have been involved in assassinations, you know, because they ask him, well, what other skeletons are in the CIA's closet? And he says, oh, I don't know, stuff like assassinations.

And as soon as he says it, he says, that's off the record. So the editors kind of meet afterwards, and they feel like they have a moral obligation to not go to press with it, and so they stay quiet for a while. But one of them lets it slip to a CBS News reporter whose name I'm blanking on. And then he eventually airs the story on TV. And then it becomes a big deal. Yeah. So there are a couple instances in this book where yeah, some the editors at least have to make some kind of decision. Should we do this or not? It's a strange world the whole off-record thing, you know

Did you run into that just like writing the book and talking with people and interviewing them? Did you run into somewhere some guys are like, hey this parts off-record. No, I didn't because basically all these people are dead You saw that I didn't I didn't It's it's helpful in the sense that I don't have that dilemma, but it's unhelpful in the sense that I want to talk to them I want to get more information, you know? So, yeah, Sidney Gottlieb died, you know, 20-some-odd years ago. Yeah, someone's granddaughter calls you up like,

why'd you do it? Fuck your grandpa, he's dead. -♪ POPPY MUSIC PLAYINGa-mahal laughing. -♪ Well, I'm happy to say, at least for the, my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, Stanley Lovell, that guy in the OSS, I mean, he's long dead, but I interviewed his grandkids, but, um, before the book, and afterwards, they wrote back to me saying,

we really like the book. And I thought, ah, you know, I'm glad they enjoyed it. It's not as if I changed the book because I wanted to please them. I interviewed them and I wrote the book, but they enjoyed the book and they thought it was an accurate representation of who he was.

And I thought, oh, good. Yeah, it's like, what's the tone? I haven't read it yet, obviously, but like you look at anything in that type of scenario, it's like, well, what tone do you take? Are you trying to be like scathing for the sake of being scathing? Or are you reporting the facts as you found them and where that lands at lands?

And I think a lot of people, especially people who aren't directly involved, like they can respect that. I've heard those stories before. I especially think with this project mind control, the second book, Sydney Gottlieb, I'm, this second book, Sidney Gottlieb, I'm not out to denigrate Sidney Gottlieb. You know, I think he did a lot of unethical things,

and I think a lot of what MKUltra did was unethical, but I think he really was having moral dilemmas about what he was doing, especially after he was done with it. And I think he did think this was in the best interest of the country, and, hey, this is for the greater good. The ends justify the means. I've got to do this. I don't think he was a particularly sadistic individual, but I think he did some sadistic things.

Now that being said, I do think there are at least one character in particular in this book who was just out to do it for the fun and you know, who was sadistic. His name is George White. George White. He was in charge of Operation Midnight Climax. Are you familiar with that?

Yes, but can you please refresh our audience on Midnight Climax? Are you familiar with that? Yes, but can you please refresh our audience on Midnight Climax? Yes, Sidney Gottlieb hires George White to basically run these safe houses. One is in New York and then it quickly shifts to San Francisco, he has a couple there. And at these safe houses, he would, especially in San Francisco, hire prostitutes

to slip LSD to their unwitting clients while George White is watching behind a one-way window, one-way mirror, seeing what's happening, and he's recording it sitting on a toilet that he has, a portable toilet that he bought, drinking liquor martinis that he bought off CIA funds. So, that's, you know, what he's doing. The idea is we want to determine

whether this is a kind of truth drug. Can we give this drug to people who obviously have secrets to spill, and will it make these people spill their secrets? So that's kind of the purpose of Midnight Climax. Was he often the only other one on the other side of that window? There was one of his accomplices is a guy named Ike Feldman. He's probably the most colorful character in the entire book.

He's got some... He's passed away now. But there was a guy who did an interview with him and the quotes He has are just insane. What do you say? He's talking about how I always wanted to be a pimp and a heroin dealer And so I finally got to work with these prostitutes and my body is just goes on and on talking about This crazy stuff see something's almost like sociopathic there. Yeah. Yeah, so so George White he's in it for the fun I think I mean after MK ultra ended operation midnight climax his subproject He wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlieb and here it is verbatim

He said I toiled in the vineyards because it was fun fun fun Where else could a red-blooded American boy lied cheat steal rape and pillage and with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest? With the sanction and blessing of the all High... Yeah, he's an associate pastor. Yeah, but he was also really into the sex scene in San Francisco, and so he was drugging people to try to get them to join in orgies with him and... Well, that was the question I was gonna ask. I'm not asking this to be funny, but the guys like this,

like Ike Feldman and, and what was it, George White? Yes. You know, you mentioned he's like on a toilet on the other side sometimes drinking liquor, Like was there, is there any evidence to show that there was also like a sexual proclivity maybe involved with them wanting to do this type of experiment that was driving that? I don't know if he ever did anything sexual with the people in the other room. Or watching them. You know how it is.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah, watching them, you know how it is. Oh, oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. Yeah, watching them, I'm sure there's something to that. I, again, it's not like I have, I don't know, but based on the personality of who I think George White was, I'm sure that's some kind of component. One of his friends who is in like the adult scene said of George White that he would often hire, you know,

prostitutes to wear high heels because he had this high heel fetish and they would whip him on the bed and all kinds of stuff. And he, again, he wouldn't try to get people to join into orgies with him by giving them LSD. One of these women named Clarice Stein, she and her friend were over at a party at George White's. Her husband had previously been at these parties,

but he was away on a business trip. And she had her, like, baby with her that she had brought just to stop by and say hi to everyone. He dosed her with LSD and she kind of went into this manic state. She ended up going home and she had like this psychotic break. She calls George White on the phone asking kind of what's going on with me, you know, something's happening. And he says, ah, you'll get over it. And she eventually gets committed to a psychiatric institution. She lives with her parents for a while. Her husband comes back from this trip

and she's a different person. She's cowering in the corner of the room, doesn't know what's going on. She ends up committed to the psychiatric institute where she has electroshock therapy done to her and all kinds of stuff. And she ends up dying. I think it's right before the church committee exposes

that this kind of thing was going on. So she never really learned what was happening. Right after the church committee, there was something set up called the victims task force that tried to find the unwitting victims of George White's drug experiments. And they identified several people and told them what had happened to them

so that they would have the opportunity to sue the CIA. And she died right before that. So she never learned what happened. Yeah, that's not an officiate at all. Died right before. That's the thing. Like that's not a fishy at all died right before That's the thing like there's a lot of people who die right before they're gonna say something when it involves this stuff and you You're not a you're not a tinfoil hat person to be like, you know walks like a duck quacks like a duck fucks like a duck It's usually a duck. You know what I mean? Like That's what's really frustrating. I understand that when you get embarrassed

and some things are coming out of the hopper, like that you don't want, you wanna try to cover that up. But like, you're also just perpetuating that narrative over the years. Like it's just kicking the can down the road when people disappear. Once in a while, yeah, I'm sure someone actually is, goes nuts from what happened to him and does die. But like, every time you see one of these cases,

oh, she just, like, you know, Virginia Roberts-Choufray, who's been fucking talking to everyone for the last six years, seven years longer than that, she just committed suicide. No worries, you know, we didn't get the Epstein files a few months ago, like they said, they keep saying they're gonna put him out, and she just commits suicide. She got hit by a bus before that, you know, we didn't get the Epstein files a few months ago. Like they said, they keep saying they're gonna put him out, and she just commits suicide. She got hit by a bus before that, you know, like just coincidentally a month before,

that didn't finish the job, so now she killed herself. In this particular case... It's not true. Well, in this particular case, I will say, I don't think she was, like, assassinated or something like that, because when this victim's task force was set up, they didn't know who these people were.

They had to go to George White's diaries that had been donated to an electronics museum in California for some reason and the guy who was in charge of it, Frank Lobbinger, he had to find who these people were. Whether it's a family member, friend, or furry companion joining your summer road trip, enjoy the peace of mind that comes with Volvo's legendary safety. During Volvo Discover Days, enjoy limited time savings as you make plans to cruise through Muscogee or down Toronto's bustling streets. From now until June 30,

lease a 2025 Volvo XC60 from 1.74% and save up to $4,000. Conditions apply. Visit your GTA Volvo retailer or go to volvocars.ca for full details. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders.

Shop now at nofrills.ca. Hoping that maybe George White wrote their names down in these diaries, he ended up finding this one woman who was there with Clarice Stein when she was drugged and through her, he learned that Clarice had died years before that. So, but the CIA didn't even know who she was. Well, I hate to play devil's advocate on it,

but what was that guy's name? Frank Labanger. He's the guy who found- Frank Labanger have a wife? He have kids? I don't know, I don't know. Okay, well if he he did that's not hard Oh, you want to see your kid again. You want your kid and not get hit by a bus. What's that name?

You found right there. It's not easy I mean, I have to be a spy to fucking figure that out You know what? I mean like there are people you said it a few minutes ago, and it's just it's true It's a human nature who believe their intentions are so good that they will do things that they believe are with the right Intentions that are straight-up evil and like falling on the shield because they feel like something like this is gonna get exposed and making sure that You know some lifeless hooker goes away Of course, they're gonna do stuff like that. I'm not saying that's what happens every time. Sometimes someone really just does die It's it's not like the internet, wherever goddamn thing

is, you know, they're getting killed or whatever. But the idea that that doesn't happen sometimes, or the idea that like multiple of these people just happen to die right before they're going to go before some commission or testify, like you can't look at that and say that's not at least very, very suspicious. Yeah. And in fact, there's an instance in this book, I'm talking about the church committee and people who were testifying before it, talking about some of these abuses of the past. And one of these people, I forget his name, but he was a mobster, and he had been somewhat involved

in an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro, and he was gonna be questioned, like, the day after he died, and he was shot in the back like five times, and then turned over and shot in the head. And then the next day, William Colby, who is the former, you know, head of Central Intelligence, after he died and he was shot in the back like five times and then turned over and shot in the head. And then at the next day, William Colby, who is the former head of central intelligence, he said, and we had nothing to do with it.

You know? Yeah. It's just that, yeah. While we were on the subject of George White, this guy, at the beginning of the podcast, you mentioned kind of the link between these two books, Stand the Devil and Sidney Gottlieb. One of the things I wanted to mention

is that Sidney Gottlieb hires this guy, George White, to dose these people, you know, use these prostitutes in these safe houses to dose these people with LSD. How did Sidney Gottlieb know about George White? Because during World War II, Stanley Lovell, the head of this program in the OSS, he had hired George White to dose people with marijuana. That's the guy who is doing it.

So it's like, oh, there's a connection between Sidney Gottlieb and Stanley Lovell right there. Sidney Gottlieb in these depositions I found, I wanted to make this direct connection to Stanley Lovell. Like how did they know each other? Was Sidney Gottlieb inspired or something? When I was in the Library of Congress where these depositions were, I found them and I was taking pictures of them real quick. So I couldn't read through them because I only have a limited time in the archives. So I didn't, you know, I wanted to take these pictures. As I'm turning through them, I see have a limited time in the archives. So I didn't, you know, I wanted to take these pictures as I'm turning through them. I see the name Stanley level and I think, oh my gosh, there's his name, but I

couldn't stop and read it, you know? So later I go into the depositions when I actually have some time. And it turns out this attorney, Jim Joseph Rowe asked Sydney Gottlieb. Um, who's a Stanley level. Do you know about this guy? And he says, oh yes, when I was getting started with MK ultra, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know anything about mind control. I mean, I getting started with MK Ultra, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know anything about mind control. I was tasked with

this program and I didn't know what to do. So how did I kind of learn what to do? I went into the files of the OSS and I looked at some of the experiments they were doing. So it's like, oh, there's my connection right there. He says it in the depositions. So that was a good connection. And then he goes and hires George White, who Stanley Lovell was using to do these drug experiments in World War II. When you find that, you gotta be like, -"Oh, my God." -"Yeah, I was super excited." When I saw the name on the deposition, I knew, ah, there's something to this. Yeah, great.

Whoa. All right, so back at the beginning, with MK Ultra, when they started, we went on an amazing tangent here. So... So what is MK Ultra? Yeah, so you had already said it was based on them trying to figure out how Korean prisoners of war maybe were turned and told some truths on things.

But Gottlieb is involved from day one. You've mentioned some of the other people who are involved. You've mentioned that it's compartmentalized. But what do we know, like, the exact year when they first started and what that looked like when they did? Yeah, 1953. Yeah, there are actually some precursor projects before that. One was called Bluebird because the goal was to develop a truth drug using either sodium amytal

or some kind of other drug. And it was called Bluebird because they wanted to make these prisoners sing like a bird. So there was another one a little bit after that called artichoke. Bluebird kind of got morphed into artichoke and that was similar trying to develop truth drugs and interrogation methods. And then pretty shortly after that, it's not like artichoke morphed into that artichoke kind of died out. And then in 1953, Alan Dulles signed MK Ultra into being.

So that's when it started. In fact, right before Alan Dulles creates MKUltra, Richard Helms recommends that he does this. Richard Helms is kind of spearheading this. He eventually becomes director of the CIA. Right before Alan Dulles signs this paper kind of establishing MKUltra, he gives a speech at an alumni conference at Princeton University,

which is to a group of alumni, which is crazy to me. And it's on brainwashing. And he talks about how the Soviets, they have all these techniques and we need to develop a program ourselves to be able to understand what they're doing and all this stuff. And it's like, I couldn't believe that

you actually are saying this just in a speech to some alumni. And so right after that, like three days later, he creates MKUltra. So it wasn't exactly completely, I guess, secret, you know, what his interest was, but that's when it starts, and shortly afterwards, Sidney Gottlieb is put in charge of it, and then he kind of runs it from there,

establishing ultimately 149 sub-projects. So it's... MKULTRA is the Umbrella Program, the name of it, and it's composed of 149 sub-projects. George White's Operation Midnight Climax, that's one. You and Cameron and doing all that stuff in Montreal, the psychic driving and electric shock therapy, that's another one.

Now, it's not that there was 149 total. I mean, there were 149, but many of those are kind of duplicates. Like if you're gonna renew a sub-project, it might get a new sub-project number. So it's not as much as it kind of seems, but there are a lot of these. Whoa.

So they don't all develop day one though, right? Like this is over a period of time. They develop over like a decades long period. Yeah. Okay. Who was, what's Sidney Gottlieb's story? Like how did he even end up there? Long before this happens, like who was he? Where did he come from?

What made him tick? You know, obviously you spend a lot of time basically being a biographer, him in a way to write this book. So what, what was he? Where did he come from? What made him tick? You know, obviously, he spent a lot of time basically being a biographer, him in a way, to write this book. So what was he all about? Yeah, he is a chemist from Brooklyn. Or from the Bronx, I think, from the Bronx. And he was a brilliant chemist.

He had gone to several different universities. The University of Wisconsin was one of them. And then he got his PhD in bio-organic chemistry from Caltech, so he was very bright. He got his PhD in bio-organic chemistry from Caltech. So he was very bright. He got his PhD right during World War II. And he wanted to volunteer to go fight in World War II, but he had a club foot. And so he was denied the ability to do that because of his physical ailment. So he couldn't fight in World War II. And he always kind of felt not a resentment for that, but he felt like he owed a debt to his country to...

I need to make up for this thing that I wasn't able to do. His parents were immigrants from Hungary, Jewish immigrants from Hungary, and he felt that he owed a debt to this country to, you know, uh, pay something back for the life that he was able to get, because his parents were able to come here. So he did felt... He owed this debt to his country in a way.

He always felt like an outsider. It seemed to me that the first chapter of this book, because his parents weren't able to come here. So he did felt... He owed this debt to his country in a way. He always felt like an outsider, it seemed to me. The first chapter of this book is called The Outsider, kind of his backstory. He was born with a stutter and this club foot, so he was always kind of picked on, made fun of. He didn't really fit in, and he was Jewish going into the CIA. The kind of joke about the CIA is it's like Yale, male and pale.

Right. So... So that's kind of who he was. He was this chemist looking to make a name for himself. And Alan Dulles took a liking to him pretty early on. I think Dulles was born with a club foot too. So I think they bonded over that a little bit. And then Dulles put him in charge of MKUltra. He was this brilliant chemist. Before he was put in charge, he worked in the chemical branch of the TSS, the technical services staff. And he was in charge of helping to do things like secret writing, what are different inks that we can develop to make them disappear on the page, stuff like that. And then he got put in on this.

Okay. So do you think he had, you mentioned he was a little different, a little bullied and stuff growing up. Do you think there was an aspect of the, I don't know, almost like mad scientist experimentation he was doing across all these different projects that was based on him feeling a sense of power? I, I hesitate to say that. One of the reasons why is because the structure of MKUltra isn't what many people think that it is.

So it's not as if Gottlieb is doing these experiments. For the most part, he's funding people who are already doing these experiments. This is what sometimes people don't realize about MKUltra. It's not George White in Operation Midnight Climax being the main exception. What mostly is happening with these subprojects is that there are researchers at universities and prisons and hospitals that are already doing these experiments. And they're already publishing about them,

even though it's kind of crazy to think about. You're dosing these people with drugs. Sometimes they aren't really giving informed consent, and you're publishing about this. But that's what they were doing. And Cindy Gottlieb sees this. And so he decides to fund them. So they continue doing that so he can learn whether it leads to anything. So that's kind of the structure. It's not that MKUltra initiates all of these experiments. In many cases, it's just trying to make sure that these experiments

continue happening. So, um, right. But if you're doing things like some of those 149 projects where you're, you know, there's a power dynamic to it. Midnight Climax is just the best example. You know, you would think that the person who's running that, I'm not saying it means it, but you might be suspicious that there's a level of, you know, pleasure they get from that. Like basically almost like I'm here in the ivory tower and all these types of people who would have made fun of me, they're just the regular plebs of society and we'll do what we want to try to show them how the big boys run society. You know?

Yeah, yeah. That might be a part of it. And also, I wouldn't discount what you mentioned. They're kind of the pleasure of it. In many instances, not necessarily the sub projects that he's not doing himself, but in many instances, it does seem like he is trying to be one of the boys, you know, he's trying to, let's do this funny prank on this guy, because it'll be fun at the office. For example, let's put some LSD into the punch bowl at the holiday party and see what happens. And then a guy drinks it and he ends up like going insane for that night and running around and they can't find him and he almost gets hit by hit by a car. So that's the kind of thing.

That was a Wyrmwood guy, wasn't it? No, that wasn't Frank Olson. Yeah, this is a different thing, but it's similar, similar to that kind of story. But yeah, it is kind of Sidney Gottlieb story. I do think he's trying to fit in a lot of ways. And if, hey, they're joking around with each other, here's a practical joke I can do.

I can place LSD within some of this stuff. And at the same time, I can see how they react to it, so I can learn something about it, and I can justify this by saying, oh, I'm just for national security. But really, yeah, you know, I'm trying to be one of the boys. Did you, we were talking about that off camera. You saw that Wormwood documentary on Netflix several years ago, right? So what was that guy's name?

Frank Olson. Frank Olson. And what was the story there again for people who haven't seen that? Yes, he was a bacteriologist in what's called Fort Diedrich. That's the country's biological warfare installation. So he was in charge of kind of developing biological weapons that could be dropped if need be, whether they be anthrax bombs or something else.

So his specialty was the airborne distribution of pathogens. So he was involved in several experiments like that. He and a group within the Fort Diedrich called the Special Operations Division, a group of scientists mostly, who were involved in that kind of stuff. They occasionally met with the people

who were involved in MKUltra from the CIA. So they would meet at this retreat called Deep Creek and they would exchange information. They often cooperated with each other. If the CIA needed some kind of biological something, they would get it from Fort Diedrich. And if they needed information about how someone reacted to whatever, they would get it from the CIA.

So they would share information about their experiments. And at one of these experiments at Deep Creek, Sidney Gottlieb and his underling, Robert Lashbrook, another chemist, they decided we're gonna dose everyone with LSD and you're gonna see what happens. So they pour some LSD, they put some LSD into the liquor and they started pouring, you know, bottles for everyone or shots for everyone. Except for a couple people, one guy had a heart problem so they didn't give it to him and another one was a

reformed alcoholic and they thought well, we're not gonna give him any either. So a few people were spared, but Frank Olson is one of the people who got the LSD that night and you know, in this book, I have, during the depositions, got Leevin Lashbrook, or a question in depth about, you know, how it all went down, how they poured it, and all this stuff. So if anyone's interested, there's a lot more detail that they give to how that night went down. But Frank Olson gets this LSD, and most of the people who are there, they... the room starts spinning, they start seeing hallucinations,

they start laughing uncontrollably, and then they go to sleep, but he can't. He seems to have some kind of psychotic break. He leaves this retreat, he goes back home to his wife, Alice, and she knows that something is off with him. Something doesn't seem right. She's asking him, what's wrong, what's wrong? And all he says is, I made a terrible mistake, and something went wrong, you know, I ruined the experiment,

and he won't elaborate on what that is. And so she's really concerned about him. The next day he goes to work and his boss, this guy named Vincent Ruit, who was at that retreat, he tells his boss, I think you should fire me. You know, like I don't deserve this job. I ruined the experiment, something. And his boss is saying, what are you talking about? Like you haven't done anything wrong. And the next day he says the same thing. He comes back to his bosses off and no, I think you should fire me. Something's wrong. So he seems to be having some kind of mental instability or something's happening precipitated by this LSD being put in his

drink. So Ruett is worried about him. So his Lashbrook and Gottlieb, they decide they're going to send him to a guy named Harold Abramson in New York, who is kind of a CIA affiliate. So he knows that these LSD experiments go on. but he's also, I think he's actually like an allergist, but, you know, they say he's a psychologist or something, maybe he can help them in some way. So they send them to Abram, they send Olson to Abramson, and they start talking for a while. It turns out they had known each other from World War II.

They had worked on a couple of projects and knew each other from that. And then Lashbrook accompanies him up there. Once Lashbrook leaves the room, Olsen says, I think they're trying to put stuff in my food and drink. You know, I've got this paranoid, he's paranoid. He's breaking. He's breaking, exactly.

Yeah, so the next day is Thanksgiving. So they decide, well, we're gonna take Olsen back to, you know, back to Maryland where he's from to spend Thanksgiving with his family. So they fly back to Maryland. Once they get there, they haven't even gotten home yet, but he gets off the plane and he says, I have something's wrong.

I think, you know, the police are out to get me. Just send me to the police station. They're looking for me anyway. What are you talking about? Nobody's looking for you. So they decide, well, he's really not in the state to go be with his family right now. So one of the people who are accompanying him,

they go tell Alice that we're gonna take him back to New York. They end up taking him back to New York after that to meet with Abramson again. And Abramson decides we need to commit you to like a psychiatric hospital because, you know, something's wrong. He agrees to it, but the psychiatric hospital doesn't have any spare beds. And so they need to wait an extra day before they can go down to it. Okay, so they spend the next day in New York, they're kind of wasting time. And then that night they go to the Statler Hotel in New York, him and Robert Lashbrook, they spend, uh, they're going to, you know, stay in the room together. And at 2 30 in the morning, he jumps out the window and he

dies. He falls 10 floors to the seventh Avenue sidewalk and he dies. So that's the story of Frank Olson. There are a lot of, there are a lot of potential explanations of what was going on. Frank Olson's son, Eric Olson, thinks that his father was murdered. He thinks that this was like a planned thing. The CIA wanted to kill his father, potentially because his father had moral qualms about what they were doing. Maybe they were kind of releasing biological agents somewhere,

had harmed some people. Maybe they really had released biological agents on Korea during the Korean War, and he was having these pains of conscience, and maybe he was gonna go public about it or something like that. And so they offed him. So that's what Eric Olson thinks. I'm kind of skeptical of that.

In fact, I am skeptical of that. I don't think that's what happened. I think Frank Olson did have some kind of psychotic break and I do think he jumped out the window. Could you see why they think he was killed though? Oh yeah. Because he had access before any break like this. He had access to some of the...

There's certainly motive. There's certainly motive there. Yeah, it's just a question of did anyone act on that motive. I don't think they did. One of the explanations that people will often give about how another supposed piece of proof that the CIA was involved in this and they killed Frank Olson is that in 1953, the year that this happened, there is a primer on assassinations that is created by the CIA talking about what are the best ways to kill someone. And one of the best ways it says is to push them out from a tall place so they can fall.

And then he gets out of the window. Yeah, and that's what happened. Yeah. So that's one of the links people will use. Oh, well, obviously they knew this was a method of assassination that could potentially not lead to anyone being found out about it. So obviously this must have been what happened to him. It doesn't mean guilt. That's a hell of a coincidence. Yeah, it doesn't mean guilt.

But actually, in their defense on this one, that's not exactly a generational idea right there. I feel like that's been done throughout human history. You know, people fall, can't fly. For me too, you know, one of the things is, they didn't know that Frank Olson was gonna wanna go back to New York when they took him to Maryland. You know, so, okay, so they're gonna have to set all this up

and then one day that he decides, no, actually I wanna go back to New York and- Or he didn't. Yeah, or he didn't. Yeah, yeah, that could be the case. And they say, yeah, he wanted to go back. What do you know? Yeah. Oh, then he died.

That could be the case, yeah. Yeah, we tried to bring him. What do you know? Oh, then he died. Sorry. Yeah, we tried to bring him back to Maryland. He didn't want to do it. Yeah. Well, I'm skeptical of that. But another thing, too, with Frank Olson, something that makes me think that it wasn't an assassination, a murder, is that a lot

of the other people who were surreptitiously dosed with LSD under these same projects reacted in the same way as Frank Olson did. You know, so I mentioned that woman, Clarice Stein, she had the exact same kind of psychotic break. There are a few other people. I don't... But was she threatening?

And I don't know if he was either. I can't remember the case. Was that woman, Clarice, saying anything like, what we're doing is wrong and people need to find out about this or something like that. Because I think, if I remember, it's been a while, I think that was the implication he was saying, Frank was saying stuff like that to people

behind the scenes, like what we're doing is wrong. So they're worried, like you said, that he might say something. But the other people, maybe they weren't saying that. Yeah, she was not, because she didn't know about any of this. She was just some random woman who happened to be at the wrong party and got dosed with this stuff.

So that would be different, potentially. But see, what I think of is, well, I don't even know if Frank Olson was actually saying that, you know? So his son says that, you know, he was having these pains of conscience. But was he? I don't know if he was. Like, I don't know. Yeah, how old was his son again when he died? He was maybe nine years old, something like that.

He was very young. So he wouldn't have, like, heavy conversations with his dad at that time. No, no. At least, yeah, I'm assuming not about his work. Yeah, not something he would understand or be able to process for sure. Yeah, that's interesting,

because also, like, Cy Hirsch, who's at the middle of that story, he tracked that for decades. But, you know, Cy is one of those guys, he builds some cases that are amazing, and, you know, works on them for years, and multi-sourced to the gills and everything, and it's like, oh, maybe there might be something here.

And then there's other cases where, you know, he'll write five, 6,000 words on one source, you know, anonymous, and it's not to say it's wrong. It's just like, you know, every time he's reporting on something, it's something insane. It's like, are all these true? Probably not. But some of them are. And it's, it's kind of your best guess. But in his defense, like that's whenever you're reporting on these types of places, these agencies, that is how it is. You're going to get somewhere. It's like this might actually be happening.

And others like, yeah, maybe there's another explanation. And there's so many, you know, I mean, I mentioned there are 149 sub projects. I have one chapter that's called sub projects where I try to briefly explain some of the ones that I can't go into a lot of detail because I can't have a chapter on every single one. That's why you're on the podcast.

Let's go into some detail. I wanted to bring up one of the more absurd ones. Um, sad ones, it involves animal experimentation, but they were planning on putting... Oh, not planning, they did put electrodes into the brains of animals and stimulating in them in such a way that they can control their movements. So, this was done with dogs and rats

and several other kinds of animals. But, um, this is a project 94 but you would implant this electrode and You would stimulate the like pleasure center of the brain is what it says in the in the kind of description of the subproject And you actually I mean it worked you actually could get a dog like to walk in the pre-desired direction so if there was you know, the the Research who who's responsible for this would go to like a grass field and kind of plot out in his mind like an invisible path that the dog doesn't know, but okay, I want him to do a loop

here and then go this way. And so, you know, if the dog goes in the correct direction, the desired direction, you would stimulate that part of the brain, the pleasure center as positive feedback. And so it would continue. If the dog moves in a different direction, you would stop the stimulation. And so the dog would continuously search for where the stimulation is. Once it finds it, it would then hone in on the correct path and go forward. So by doing this repeatedly, you could get it to walk in a pre-desired path. You could do those with rats too. It was done. And some of the crazier documents that I found about MKUltra involves this subproject

where they're trying to explain, what are they trying to do here? So in these documents, they mentioned that ultimately we wanna use this for, and this is their quote, executive action type operations, which is obviously like assassination attempts. And they say, we wanna try to put biological and chemical weapons on these animals

and then steer them in the desired direction to get close to a target. And then that's gonna kill them in some way. What animals are wanting to be used? They said bears and yaks are the most desirable animals because they can carry really heavy payloads. So if we can get a bear, I'm guessing it might... How do you get a bear close to a president?

Well, I have no clue if this is the thing. Not that this was actually done, but in the documents, they're kind of speculating on what our desired thing is. And then at the end of the documents, it says, our ultimate goal is to apply this to humans, basically, we want to see if, you know, we could do this, not that they ever did. But that was kind of the ultimate goal. This is like the real life Manchurian candidate can we stimulate someone's brain in order to make them move in a desired direction like a marionette? Yeah, so that was

one of the crazier sub projects. The idea, though, at the beginning of MK Ultra, like you said, was they had a suspicion that Koreans were controlling minds or something in the war when they were torturing prisoners. And as you put it, and everyone said this, like, that turned out not to be true. That said, is it possible that maybe there's some things they figured out in MK Ultra that we don't know about,

that like this is a bit of a facade to put up, like, yeah, we tried this thing, it was fucked up, we had to admit about it, and yeah, it's ancient history now. But, you know, there's another section called MK Ultra Plus Plus, where, you know, they actually did figure out how to fucking control the mind and have been doing stuff like that. Yeah, there are a couple things to say about that. Mind control is possible, but not in the way that have been doing stuff like that. Yeah, there are a couple of things to say about that. Mind control is possible,

but not in the way that MKUltra thought it would be. So I'll touch on that in a second, because at the very end of the book, I say, Sidney Gottlieb may not have developed methods of mind control, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. And here's kind of how they do. So let me, I'll talk, return to that in a second. I was concerned, by the way,

when you were saying animals, that you were gonna say pigeons. Oh, is that like your favorite animal or something? You know, the conspiracy theory, pigeons are just drones. So, like, they walk right up next to you, you know? I'm a big pigeon defender, by the way, so I don't think that, but my buddy Mark Gagnon... The birds aren't real kind of dynamic?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's always like, they're not real, and pigeons are very dumb, and I'm like, no, they're actually very smart, you know? So, you never know, but please continue on what you were saying. I don't think it's the case that MK Ultra found methods of mind control in the sense that you could make someone do something you wanted them to do actively.

Like if we wanted to make someone assassinate someone else, they didn't find ways to make someone do that, like against their will or something. What they did do is find ways to discredit someone or make them go insane or seeming like they went insane by slipping them LSD. One of the one of the plots that Sydney Gottlieb is involved in, besides all the assassination plots on Fidel Castro, there's one plot to why don't we gift him cigars that have been laced with LSD right before he's going to give a big speech or something. So he's going to, you know, suck

on these cigars. He's going to get hit with this stuff. He's going to go on an acid trip and he's going to start spewing all this nonsense and people are going to lose their faith in him because this guy's crazy. Like how can we trust him? He's going insane. So you can make someone appear insane like that. You can manipulate them in that way, but not in a controlled way to make them do something, at least not with the methods that Sydney Gottlieb is involved in, especially drugs

and hypnosis. That being said, there were some useful things like active positive things, not positive in the sense that good positive in the sense that you could actively do it, that came from MKUltra. One of them had to do with a sub project that's conducted by this psychologist named Martin Orne, and it involved interrogations. How do we get someone to reveal the truth in an interrogation? The goal of MKUltra was to develop a truth drug, but it turns out there's not really a truth drug that all of a sudden you're gonna take it

and now I'm gonna spill all my secrets. You can lower someone's inhibitions, you know, and you can, I mean, people have known for thousands of years you can do that with wine, just some alcohol and you're gonna lower your inhibitions and they might say something they otherwise might not have. However, there's no like targeted truth drug, but Martin Orne realizes that either with a truth drug

or with hypnosis, you don't necessarily have to do it for it to be effective. So you don't actually have to put someone in a hypnotized state to make them hypnotized in order for hypnosis to be effective. So this is kind of an ironic thing, but he says, if you can make them think that they've been hypnotized,

or make them think that they've taken a truth drug, then that might lower their inhibitions by thinking, well, they've given this thing to me and basically, you know, I have no choice in the matter because it's going to work anyway. So I might as well just spill my secrets. So if you can induce the belief that they're hypnotized or that the belief that this truth drug is effective, even if it's not, that might be effective in itself because you lower their inhibitions and make them think, I might as well just say, I have no choice. I mean, they gave me this truth drug. What am I going to do?

That's next level mindfuckery right there. There's a there's a report. I think it gets released. I think it's created maybe in 1963 called kubark counterintelligence interrogation and kubark is the CIA. It was the CIA's cryptonym for itself. So, you know that like MK ultra is a you know, a cryptonym, the CIA is cryptonym for itself was Kubark for a long time. And so this is on inter bar K, you be a RK, you know, so if you wanted to refer to the CIA, but not the CIA, it would be Kubark, or at least was it's not anymore. What a terrible name. I don't know where that derives from. But this manual gets released in 1963. And they're talking about interrogation methods. And this is one of the things they point to, you know, they say torture, it talks about torture a little bit, but it says,

in large part, it's not that effective. Because if you resort to torture early in an interrogation, then the interrogate, he is going to realize that you have no other options left, you know, and so if they can just hold out for a little while longer, then you're probably going to stop and they're probably right. You know, so it says that's not useful. If you resort to torture at the very end of an interrogation after doing everything else, then they're going to realize that you're at your last resort. And so they're going to know, if I can just hold on a little bit longer, then I'm done with whatever they can do. What was it KSM used to like count the seconds while he was getting waterboarded as to when they had to stop? Oh, really? I didn't know.

waterboarded as to when they had to stop. Oh, really? I didn't know. Okay. Yeah, keep going. So this Kubach report, it references this work of Martin Orrin saying, you know, this is the potential for a proper interrogation method that might actually work better than torture at least induce the state of, if not hypnosis, the belief that the state of hypnosis has been induced. So that's where some of this was actually turned into a useful thing that got

acknowledged by the CIA and put in this report about interrogation methods. All right, real fast. I gotta go to the bathroom. You're blowing my mind though. That's crazy. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. That is interesting, by the way, when you were saying back in there that there's documentation of the torture not necessarily working because people are just going to say what you want and stuff and that is decades before they actually try The enhanced interrogation program. So it's interesting just either the cognitive dissonance or whatever that is to then be like no But it'll it'll work this time That's such a good point and I try to make that at the end of this book too because these MK ultra methods they try to make them work through drugs or hypnosis

or whatever and it's kind of a failure. You know, they don't aren't really able to make someone spill the beans in the interrogation or whatever. However, during, you know, the war on terror, you have these enhanced interrogations, these torture. The reason why the CIA was trying to develop these MKUltra methods is because it was trying to get away from that.

What are methods that actually work? So it's so ironic that we eventually end up going back to torture once, isn't that what we were trying to develop these alternative methods because the original ones didn't work and now we're gonna return back to those because well, if MKUltra doesn't work, I guess we'll just stick with what we've done before.

Mind control is better. That's better. It's nice that you can clean that one up a little bit and say, well, we're not torturing them. We're just getting the truth, you know? Yeah. It's an easier sale. Yeah, and you know, with the phrase even,

enhanced interrogation at the beginning of this book, I mentioned several of these euphemisms within the intelligence community. They even go down a long list of different presidential administrations. Instead of saying assassination, well, we don't see assassination. It's targeted killing or it's lethal direct action or it's liquidation or something like that.

So the intelligence community is filled with these kinds of euphemisms, which is kind of Orwellian. And I think it's politics in the English language. George Orwell writes about euphemisms within the state and how, you know, we call it pacification, but what is it really? Like, when you look at it, it's, you know, killing these innocent children and whatever. Okay, yeah, but we'll call it pacification. Like, it's pacifying, you know, we're just calming things down.

But, yeah, so that's pretty rife within the intelligence community. Well, yeah, and it's rife everywhere. It's window dressing. I mean, I've heard Edward Snowden talk about, like, the prime example of the Patriot Act. You pass something called the Patriot Act right after 9-11. It's, like, got the name Patriot in it.

Like, it sounds fucking amazing. It might as well be called Save the Puppies Act. No one's gonna vote against it just on the title. But if you read the fine print, you're like, wait a minute, this is... Hold on a, the Constitution is not going to exist after this. And that's the you know, why would it be any different in the spy world, because they do have to look out for when certain programs may actually come public or something like that. It's interesting, though, because, you know, there was like a lot of hoopla with the whole JFK thing getting

released. I mean, I appreciate that we got something something right? Like no one's ever done that before. As a historian, the more documents, let's see. Have you poured through them at all? No. So I guess it's like 80,000 documents or something. I haven't personally poured through them. I've talked to some people have gone through a lot of them, but it's like, you know, they're not.

I, my Andy Bustamante, who's an ex-CIA spy, I always put that in air quotes, he talks about how, and I think he's right, unfortunately, he's like, if there were ever even documents created about this that could point anything back anywhere near the CIA or Pentagon, I can assure you, if they were even created, they were destroyed shortly thereafter or immediately.

And you have to wonder, if you're able to go through, to bring this back to MKUltra, if you're able to go through and find some depositions where like Sidney Gottlieb, like the Godfather, this is actually talking, that's amazing because we at least have something. If we were able to get some admission of that through the Church Commission and things like that, like that's amazing, that's something. But you do wonder about all the things that we're never Commission and things like that. Like, that's amazing. That's something but you do wonder about all the things that we're never going to know about that they did. Like you say 149 sub programs. That's a lot.

Yeah, maybe it was maybe there was a zero behind that. And we don't you know what I mean? Yeah, like that's got to be stressful to think about when you're when you're researching this because it's like, man, I got such a big picture here. But am I just looking at the dot on the page and there's actually a whole galaxy out there? We're missing you ever think about that. I do but I think that is kind of a slippery slope because you can always say Well, it could have been this or it could have been that yeah

It could have been anything but I'm not you know as a historian. I don't know could have as I do what was what was the case? What can I show you was the case? So what are the documents that lead me to say this anything could be true? But I have to determine what was as far as I can prove. So this is especially rife within some of these conspiracy theorists that I talk about in the very last chapter of this book, where they especially point to the fact that since Gottlieb destroyed these MKUltra files, thousands of them, that kind of opens the door for them to paint MKUltra as anything they want to of their wildest imagination.

Yes. Maybe it was involving sex slaves and maybe they did actually have vice presidents hunting people for sport inside of military enclosures. And maybe it really does control pop star Britney Spears or this other thing. So, you know, the conspiracy theorists especially will latch on to the idea that we can't know everything about MKUltra, therefore it could have been this too. The problem they run into though, from my perspective, is that they don't have anything to prove what they're saying, so it's not verifiable. And then when you point out that they don't have anything, they'll say, well, of course we don't, like it was destroyed. Of course, of course we don't, like the CIA is not gonna release that stuff.

So any, you know, it's lacking proof, it can't be proven, but it also can't be disproven. So it's like, it's not falsifiable, but it's also not verifiable. It's like, it's a win-win for them either way. And anything that, any kind of theory that that's way that you can never be wrong, I'm kind of skeptical of that. No, that's a great point.

And you know what's interesting? You're kind of like in the middle here. Like you're a middle man in a way, not intentionally, but it's a useful place to be because you're reporting on something that actually did exist. We know that, that was bad. And you're also finding new information

that was available out there in the public domain to kind of put the story together more so you can point to this is where, you know, lack of oversight and compartmentalization goes wrong. But you're also trying to just, you know, like a lawyer, stay with the facts. What do we know? It doesn't mean all these other things aren't true. But if you make a leap on the 5% and then say, no, no, that means it's 100%. Well, you've just made a 95 percent leap without evidence and that

even if you want to rip the CIA on stuff which we all do like In a court of law at least like you can't do that if you're making a real case So I can understand that and like some people get pissed off by that because they want to believe every fucking thing ever Is a conspiracy and yes, like I said earlier there are some stuff where it's like, okay This part all these people died right before they were going to testify, stuff like that. There's certainly something there, but it gets tough because, you know, the tracks get covered, documents get destroyed. And, you know, we kind of have to operate like we don't know what we don't know, live in that state of suspicion. And once we learn enough about MKUltra, we find these documents and

depositions and, you know, all kinds of other records. I feel like we can know enough about it to know what it wasn't. So we can't know everything about what it was, but we can know about what it wasn't. And here's an analogy that's helpful for me to think of to make that make sense a little bit more. If, you know, if I'm to ask someone, what's the shape of the Earth, they'll hopefully say a sphere, you know, something like it's spherical. But that's not quite right. It's not really a sphere. You know, it spins, and so it bulges on its act, it bulges, you know. So, it's an oblate spheroid, you know, it's thicker in the middle than it is at the top and bottom, so it's an oblate spheroid.

But that's not quite right either, because it has this complicated topography. There are mountains and valleys and all that. We can't ever know the exact shape of the Earth, you know. But we can have a really good approximation of what it is. A sphere is a really good approximation. We can know enough the exact shape of the Earth, you know, but we can have a really good approximation of what it is. A sphere is a really good approximation. We can know enough about the shape of the Earth

to know it's not flat, you know? So, we can't know exactly what it is, but we can know enough about it to know it's not that. The same with MKUltra. We can... We can't know everything that happened under MKUltra, but we can know enough about it to know that it doesn't involve presidents using jelly beans to control these people into sex slaves or whatever, which is what one of these people claims. So, you know,

that's kind of my two cents. It's tough though, too, because we're living in a time where people have access to so much and then start to like we were saying earlier in a similar conversation, start to get ideas in their head that they're married to. You cannot convince them otherwise. You see this again and again. And it's, you know, I always give the example of like, imagine, let's assume for a second, that wall back there actually were pure white.

Someone out there would be like, well, it's technically whatever. Assume it was actually pure white for a second. You could bring back, with certain people, you could bring back the fucking ghost of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo for the scientific and artistic perspective of why this wall is white.

They could give a dissertation on it for 25 minutes and some guy will nod along and at the end of that be like, fuck that, it's black. It's just how it is. You're not gonna convince everyone. So that's just, you know, especially in the type of seat I am where we talk with different people about ideas

and whatever, it's always, you know talk with different people about ideas and whatever. It's always, you know, you're never gonna make everyone happy. There's gonna be people who are like, that guy was full of shit. And there's gonna be people who are like, there's nothing that guy said that was wrong. And, you know, I think that's just, you know, in the free speech environment, that's kind of what we gotta operate in.

And one thing to keep in mind too is, it's not like I think these people aren't smart or something like that. I think they're very rational in a way, because if you start from a false premise, if we start from the premise that this wall is black, we can rationalize different ways to make that real for us. You know, if you start from a false premise, humans are really good at rationalizing things. So we can rationalize the world to start with a premise that even if it's false, we can, if we believe it, we can make everything make sense of that false premise. The trick is to start with true premises. You know, what are the premises we can start with and derive

other things from and know that's true. But if you start from a false premise, you being rational sometimes is a bad thing in that case, because you can rationalize anything, because we're so good at reasoning, I can think of a reason for of course, that wall isn't white, it's black, you know, there must be some chemical in the air that's making me see white because you're trying to trick me into thinking that I can rationalize anyway. You know, so at the end of the book, I try to explain a way to hopefully get around this. And it's by asking a few questions and the most important of which is what's more probable, you know, you always have to go with the probability. So for any given set of evidence, there is always going to be a potential infinite amount

of explanations or interpretations of that evidence. The example I sometimes give is, if my keys are on my nightstand when I go to sleep and I wake up and they're not there, then that's the evidence. But what's the interpretation of that evidence? One interpretation is that aliens beamed it up into their spaceship and it's gone. Another is that someone broke into my house and stole it and were very quiet and I didn't hear them awake up. Another is that my wife took him and is off, you know, in my car doing something.

So how do I determine between those explanations? I can't appeal to the evidence itself because they all account for that same evidence. You know, I can't say, well, my keys are gone. Obviously my wife took them. No, but the alien thing accounts for why my keys are gone, too. I have to appeal to what's more probable between those. Well, I have examples of my wife doing it in the past. You know, she's taking my keys off my nightstand, whatever. I don't have any examples

of the aliens. It could be that. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means it's a less probable one. So you got to go with the probability. That's fair. I don't disagree with that. But one of the things in the middle of MK ultra that gets discussed a lot that I think you went into in your book I got to find out when I read it But we were at least talking off air a little bit about it was the whole hippie movement and like the time That this was going on because you had You know You had like the Great Awakening happening in the 60s, the countercultural movement, rock music,

peace, love and drugs, the whole bit. A lot of the, let's say the vibe or politics of the hippies and the people there were more along the lines of say, Marxist, which is not a perfect way of putting it, but at least if you were from the traditional US standpoint, that's how they looked at these people. And, you know, Tom O'Neill wrote this pretty unbelievable book that was 20 years in the making when he put it out called Chaos, and people have heard that Rogan podcast,

he's been on Danny Jones and other shows as well since then. But, you know, essentially he started with this investigation that was supposed to be, I think it was, he was gonna work on it for three months, but, you know, essentially he started with this investigation that was supposed to be, I think it was, he was gonna work on it for three months, it was supposed to be a piece just commemorating the 30-year murder for Esquire magazine or something, the 30-year anniversary of the Manson murders.

And it turned into this whole thing where he basically was like destitute for a while even, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and became this book, and he probably has another book in him. But part of what he seemed to get at, when there were a lot of different pieces to this was that Manson was maybe linked to MKUltra and that the CIA and government organizations wanted to basically infiltrate the peace and love hippie movement because they were concerned about the political ramifications of something like that getting out of control.

Did you look at any of this in your investigation related to MKUltra? Yeah, I have a chapter on Jolly West, who was in charge of one of the sub-projects, and he's the main guy that Tom O'Neill says was involved in either doing some kind of experiments with Manson or on Manson or something like that So I have a chapter on Jolly West I didn't look really into Manson myself because he already has that book and you know, that's not really the thrust of my book

I only have one chapter to do this and so that didn't become a big part of mine Can you tell everyone about Jolly West who's not for yes Jolly West is this? He's this psychiatrist who was working at Lackland Air Force Base. He was the guy, I think I mentioned at the beginning of this, that was interviewing these servicemen who were prisoners of war in Korea and trying to determine whether they would be being mind-controlled

or something else. Tom O'Neill makes the connection that Jolly West, and later in his career, went to UCLA and he was doing some experiments over there. Jolly West had this connection with Sidney Gottlieb. They have this correspondence that's in Jolly West's paper at UCLA. Gottlieb goes under a pseudonym

and the correspondence Sherman Grifford, but it's Sidney Gottlieb. West says that, I would love to do some experiments, and MK Ultra starts funding him to do some of these. A lot of it's like hypnotism experiments, trying to implant false memories, something like that. And O'Neill tries to make this connection between West and Manson. You know, they were kind of at similar locations

at about the same time. I like his book for a couple reasons, and I don't like it for one reason. But the writing is phenomenal. And the best part about the book, to me, content aside, I love Gonzo journalism, where he's like, it's the person there doing the thing. I'm reading his story of how he came to find out about this.

I love the behind the scenes. Let's get in the archives. Tell me about the interviews, how they went, how you found this person. He does such a good job of that, telling his own story of finding out about this. So that was my favorite part of the book. The second part of the book,

it's kind of three different books. That's one book. The next part is about Manson, like the Manson murders. And there was a previous book about the Manson murders, Helter Skelter, by this guy, Bouliosi. And Tom O'Neill writes about a lot. Yeah, he kind of takes that apart saying, you know, Bouliosi's saying that Manson did this because he wanted to spark a race war and all this guy, Bouliosi. And Tom O'Neill writes about a lot. Yeah, he kind of takes that apart, saying, you know, Bouliosi's saying that Manson did this

because he wanted to spark a race war and all this stuff, but O'Neill picks that apart and says, that's not what's happening here. Bouliosi was crazy, man. That was a... he was a demented guy. Yeah, and the third part of the book is O'Neill making this, or trying to make this connection between Jolly West and Manson.

Maybe Manson was involved in this some way. Maybe he was a victim of one of these experiments. Maybe that led him to do certain things or manipulate certain people. Maybe he learned how to do something from this. I don't really see that. O'Neill himself admits in the book that he never really found the smoking gun evidence that these two people ever interacted or around each other. They're kind of in the same place. It's possible that they did. But again, for me, possible, something about that word just doesn't sit right, you know? In history, I always try to stay away from words like maybe,

probably, might be, could be, should be, possibly. Those are unsure words, and I want to be sure of what I'm saying. There was a documentary made based on chaos. I think it's called Chaos on Netflix. And again, in that documentary, O'Neill says, yeah, you know, I think there's a connection somewhere in there, but I wasn't really able to make it. And to me, it's like, okay, it's a good book.

I like learning about all three of these things, but I just don't see how they coalesce together that well. Like, what's the connection? If it's not, if there's not specifically, as Tom O'Neill seems to admit as well, a smoking gun that say Jolly West was in the same room with Charles Manson or something like that, wasn't the case though that he makes of the clear of the, I forget the guy's name, but the probation officer for Manson just repeatedly with no explanation, letting him off and also having direct connections to CIA.

And then even going back to Manson's times in juvenile where he was in trouble and living in Juve Hall and there's evidence to say he was experimented on. Wouldn't that alone without the Jolly West smoking gun scenario point to a strong possibility that a hippie like Manson who had a lot of pre-existing problems, was someone who clearly could have been targeted for a program like this, similarly to how they targeted, you know, people with hookers in rooms behind, you know, double-sided glass?

Yeah, it's possible, but it gets, again, to that question of what's more probable. So on that documentary, I don't know if this was in the book, but it's in the documentary, which I think it was a good inclusion. They interview one of the cult members. He was convicted of murder. It wasn't the like Sharon Tate, it wasn't those murders.

It was a drug deal gone bad, I think it was. And Bobby Boussolais, I think was his name. And they interview him and he says, what was this all about? How did he get did he get these people to, you know, kill Sharon Tate in these? Or why were they going to that place in the first place? He says, well, there was this guy who denied him like a recording contract or something like that,

and he thought he lived there, and so he sent these people to kill them, and he wanted his underlings to go do it because Manson wanted them to get dirt on their hands so they would be subservient to him. He wanted to have dirt on them so that, you so that they would be under his control even more. So to me, it seems like, well, yeah, that's kind of like a more probable explanation.

That seems to happen a lot, not necessarily in the same circumstances where all these murders are gonna happen, but yeah, people are gonna manipulate other people and they hold a grudge against someone and so they wanna get retaliation. To me, that seems like the possible explanation. The irony for me, with Tom O'Neill,

is that he talks about, uh, Bouliosi's book and tears it apart and does a really good job at it, saying the reason why, you know, Helter Skelter, this race war, you know, Bouliosi apparently says that, you know, Manson's wanting to spark this, and, uh, O'Neill thinks that Bouliosi did that so he could sell books. This is obviously very sensational. If Manson really did want to do that, then, yeah,

that's like the biggest story in the world, then this is gonna sell a ton of books, and it did. It sold a ton of books. For me, the irony is that, you know, O'Neill is making this connection to MK Ultra, and to me, it seems like it's kind of sensationalizing it, too. I think there's this more probable explanation, and I don't really see the connection.

I don't think he's doing it because he's trying to sensationalize it to sell books. I think he's putting that in his book, even though there's not like that clear direct evidence that there's a link, because he did all this research for 30 years or however long it was. And it's he kind of falls victim to the fallacy of sunk costs. I did all this research looking up this guy, Jolly West, because I thought there was a connection. And even though I didn't find a direct one,

there still might be something there. So I don't want this to go into the scrap bin. So I'm going to put it in the book, too. So I don't think there was a nefarious intent in it. I think he's doing it because, hey, he does all this research. And I want people to know what I was researching. And I like that part of the book, like the research and what he's doing.

But I was just not convinced of the connection that he is drawing. It's been a while And I like that part of the book, like the research and what he's doing, but I was just not convinced of the connection that he is drawing. It's been a while since I read that book and it's been a while since I listened to podcasts with him on it. So some of the details I can't remember right now. There, to me, a part of it that really made it compelling though,

was, and I can't remember some of the specifics, I wish I could, but maybe some people in the comments can know about, was when he, you know, he met with Bugliosi a bunch and then the guy was like threatening him as well, he was a real psychopath and able to uncover that, but when he went through the case and all the things that Bugliosi was almost like,

I forget what the psychological term, but you know how when you're like, ooh, look everyone, a big bad thing right here, wow. And you're like, all right, don't let them see that. He was basically doing that by making this helter skelter and making this all about blood, guts, and gore. And the guy's just a crazy cult leader murderer. So that, oh yeah, we're not gonna talk about

the probation officer and stuff like that. Meaning like either he's a part of it or some people have leaned on him and said, hey, hey, Mr. Prosecutor, no one can know about this kind of thing. And that was very compelling to me. Again, it doesn't put necessarily Jolly West in the room with Manson.

And again, I gotta go back and look at it and see exactly what he said, but it does make it certainly interesting considering all the perfect things that were in place, like Marxist hippie movement, you know, you have a terrorizing event in Hollywood, by the way, with a model star who's married to like the hottest director at the time

before he did, you know, and all that. And it's like, it is reasonable to say that the day that the 60s ended, figuratively, and the day that the actual full-blown hippie movement ended, was when the tape murders happened. So if you are... If you are... And again, this is playing in some probabilities,

rather than pointing to an exact piece of evidence right now. But based upon the CIA's, at least internal documents, talking about the hippie movement and having concerns about that, if you are the CIA and everything you hate exists in communism or anything that could be even slightly traced to it, that's a very good outcome for you. If something horrific suddenly takes these peaceful, yay, you know, hippies and makes them this evil cult that you're like, oh, wait, I don't want my kids involved with that or even this kid's like, I don't want my kids involved with that. Or even as kids, you're like, I don't want to be involved with that. I'm scared of that. My mom talks about she was like six and she had dreams like Charles Manson was going to

come to get her. You know, like there was a real there was a real psychological effect on society here. So I don't know, it does. It does tie together very perfectly like a bow. And I think it's reasonable again, without without having seen the evidence recently, for you to say, well, maybe there's some things where there could be a leap, because it's based on, you know, it seems like it could be, and we don't really have anything to prove that that happens. Well, let me play devil's advocate against myself. Sure.

There are... There's one main story of Jolly West in this book that I put, where he does seem to interfere in some kind of interrogation. It's a really sad story. It's this guy named Jimmy Shaver at Lackland Air Force Base. He's this air officer, and he kidnaps and abuses this young girl and kills her. And Jolly West is put in charge of trying to get the story

out of this guy. Obviously, afterwards, he doesn't want to talk about anything. He says, I had nothing to do with that. Whatever. And there's like blood over his clothes and everything. So Wes decides he's gonna perform some of these interrogation methods that he's been talking about with Sidney Gottlieb

and their correspondence. So he drugs him, he does some hypnosis on him. And during the interrogation, the guy opens up a little bit about, well, okay, maybe it is the case that, you know, she got in the car with me and maybe we did go down to this gravel pit, but that is the case that, you know, she got in the car with me, and maybe we did go down to this gravel pit, but that's all, like, you know, I don't know what happened.

I blanked out, I can't remember. Um, and then there's a cut in the... in the recording of the interrogation for about 30 minutes or so, and then it picks right up. And then afterwards, when it picks back up, uh, Jolly West says to Jimmy Shaver, okay, so now I want you to tell everyone what we just talked about in that... in that session, and he starts talking about how, okay, so now I want you to tell everyone what we just talked about in that session.

And he starts talking about how, okay, maybe I did do this and maybe whatever, and it's like, well, what happened during those 30 minutes? He starts, West starts asking all these leading questions to him, like, now isn't it the case that you abused her in this way in particular and all that? And leading questions, and then Shaver

kind of goes along with it. So for me, it's like, what's going on in those 30 minutes? Something it almost seems like. He. To me, it almost seems like he was telling Jimmy Shaver, you're going to get the death penalty if you keep saying what you're saying, or, you know, you're going to get the death penalty.

Your only shot here is to plead insanity. There's a long record of Jolly West being completely against the death penalty. Really? Yeah, yeah. Completely. He's a humanitarian. Yeah, so he has a lot of written stuff how, you know, it's a terrible thing. It takes away from a person their own autonomy and that's the one thing you actually should have, you know. So he's against the death penalty, you know. So I think it's possible that during those 30 minutes, he was trying to negotiate with Shaver, basically, like, admit to this stuff, and we can make you out to look insane. I'm gonna ask you some leading questions

about how God came to you and all this stuff and told you to do this, and, you know, there's this, your evil, I think it was like his evil cousin or something when he was young abused him and made him do this stuff, or, you know, it affected him in such a way. So, that might be some tampering right there that I think Jolly West was fully capable of. Where that gets interesting again, is he always sought out sensational legal cases. He really wanted a high profile for himself. He liked being in the spotlight. One of those was Jack Ruby. And so the words right out

of my mouth. Yeah. So when Jack Ruby is in jail, a lot of hours with him. Yeah, yeah. So Jack Ruby ends up going insane, you know, and they're the judge in the case. This is for the murder of the Harvey Oswald, the judge in the case asked that there be a psychiatrist that evaluate Jack Ruby to determine whether he's sane or not. And so one of the psychiatrists who does this is Jolly West. Yeah, they just sent him.

Yeah, he was the guy. Yeah. And then afterwards... There were no other psychiatrists. Afterwards, the judge says, I want somebody really disinterested to go and do it. And so Jolly West is put to the side, and another psychiatrist goes in, and the other psychiatrist says, yeah, you know, he's insane. There's no way...

It doesn't seem to me like this could have been, you know, it seems legitimate. Like it wouldn't have been on set randomly or something unless somebody drugged him or whatever, and nobody had access to him. Well, it's like, well, Jolly West had access to him right before that. So I don't know if that's true,

but to play devil's advocate against myself, I think it's possible that West was trying to manipulate these cases in a certain way. Yeah, how does he, and even at the front end of that, though, I make the joke about it, but in all seriousness, judge orders this, it's the biggest case in the world at that time. How does he end up being the first psychologist

who goes in there, of the probably million psychologists that exist at least within a flight's time away to get there? He's the guy? That's awfully coincidental. He is one of the most famous in the country. And this might be a situation of confusing correlation with causation. I don't know. But it could be the case that the reason why he's involved in MK Ultra and this trial and Patty Hearst is because he was already really famous

from the Korean War stuff. So is it correlation? Like everyone wants him to be involved because he's famous or do they want him to be involved because there's something going on? You know, so I don't wanna confuse correlation and causation, but you know, it's something to think about. That's the devil's advocate to the devil's advocate of devil's advocate. That's the next level shit.

All right, can we actually pull this up, Alessio, because I'm glad you brought that up. Jolly West, Jack Ruby. Let's see what CIA and PDS says about this. There's a lot on this one. Okay, a lot? Yeah, it like popped up before I even typed it in. By the way, did you like in,

because you did one chapter on this, but did you look into Jolly West's origin story on a similar way that you looked into Gottlieb? No, not really. I, the opposite in fact, his son wrote a book about West's death because West committed suicide with the help of his son. His son helped him kill himself by downing pills. He had cancer all throughout his body.

And, you know, I mentioned that he was against the death penalty, Jolly West was. And so he eventually wanted to take that autonomy into his own hands and he got his son to help him kill himself. And then a couple years later, his son helped... His son killed his own mother, again, in like this, you know, assisted suicide type thing. And then a few years after that, the son killed himself. So there's some weird stuff going on.

Not that that's like a, you know, a conspiracy or something. It's just, his son wrote a book about this. So the son wrote a book about how he helped his parents kill himself. All right, let's do, let's start with the Fox 2 and then we're gonna come back to the six floor museum. So yeah, let's start with that one. That says we're going to come back to the 6th floor museum.

So yeah, let's start with that one. That says, psychiatrist, what was the title there? Psychiatrist, 1960s LSD mind control experiments come back to haunt America. Last month's U.S. National Archives release of thousands of previously classified documents collected as part of U.S. government review in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 has raised questions about a prominent psychiatrist who assessed Jack Ruby, who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged killer of Kennedy before Oswald got to trial. The December 15, 22 release of the documents has resurrected attention to the late Louis

Jolly West, a California psychiatrist who was funded by the CIA to conduct LSD experiments in the 50s to 70s. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International Mental Health Industry Watchdog said it also raises concerns about the military psychedelic drug research being conducted today. According to Wes' written assessment, Ruby was quote, technically insane unquote, and in need of immediate psychiatric hospitalization. Those are conclusions that puzzlingly, puzzlingly, no one who had spoken to Jack Ruby previously

had reached. That's funny. Ruby had seemed perfectly sane to the people who knew him. Louis West pronounced him crazy, according to a recent news report, but West was a prominent player in the now infamous MKUlt Ultra program in which CIA doctors gave powerful psyche psychiatric drugs to Americans without their knowledge again, you're starting it now You're getting more 3d with what's evidence and what's speculation and it's really speculation because this is the craziest murder in modern history Or whatever you want to say, but West always denied his affiliation with the CIA

He said there was never anything, you know There's never anything. And yet we have these letters between him and Sidney Gottlieb's pseudonym, Sherman Grifford. So it's like, of course he did. Yeah. And the most famous experiment that Jolly West was involved in was in Oklahoma. After, you know, in later in his career, he was at the University of Oklahoma. He gave LSD to an elephant, Tusco the elephant at the zoo. And he gave a really big dose,

which of course an elephant is a much bigger body mass, so of course you're gonna increase the dose. But apparently he increased it even more than just accounting for body mass. This elephant started having a seizure, fell over, defecated, and then died. So he killed this huge elephant, Tusco the elephant, and it's not like he could keep this hidden or anything,

this is like front page news. This elephant all of a sudden dies. And he wrote a report about this experiment. And at the very end of which he says something like, it seems like the elephant is highly susceptible to LSD. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. I wonder why. Yeah. So yeah, he didn't keep that hidden. And then his colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, I was looking at what they were saying about this. They were all freaking out at the time, because they thought, how are we going to get rid of this elephant? Where are we going to get the money to pay for this and do what everything? And later, the head of the department who became the head, he learned

that, oh, it was CIA money that eventually kind of cleared all this up so that, you know, they didn't have to pay anything. What was the initial, I don't think we talked about this on camera, initial I don't think we talked about this on camera but what was the initial idea to jump to LSD as the experimental drug of choice? Why did they do that? Yeah for a couple reasons. One of the obvious reasons is that it has an obvious psychological effect. So you know we're looking for something that can alter a person's personality or behavior. This obviously does that. You know, anyone just takes a little bit, it does something. Another reason is because in the early 1950s, there is a poisoning that happens in France

in this small little city. There's a bakery that has ergot fungus on a lot of the bread. And a lot of the citizens of this town, they eat this bread and they go insane, for a couple of days. Five people end up dying from this. People are like ripping off their clothes and jumping into the water and doing all kinds of stuff.

And the question is, what happened to these people? And it turns out it's this ergot fungus, but it's similar to LSD and its effects. And so the idea is that if this can happen in a small city, imagine what the Soviets could do if they release this kind of thing like LSD in the water supply. What if they do it, you know, at a military base or just the water supply of a major city? Well, we need to

understand like what the effects of that are going to be. If it can cause these people to go insane in France and multiple people die from it, then we've got to know. So that's another one of the catalysts for studying LSD in particular. And what other drugs did they use in this program? You mentioned weed. Every drug you could think of. So a couple of the sub-projects happened at prisons. One was at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. This was by Carl Pfeiffer. And the other was at what's called the Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky.

And Sidney Gottlieb would send them all kinds of drugs from, you know, not just like normal drugs, heroin and LSD and marijuana, but also reject drugs. So pharmaceutical companies would test certain drugs and they wouldn't want to use some because they had too bad of side effects or whatever. So he would send these reject drugs to try on these prisoners. One of the things that was going on in Atlanta... Involuntarily, right? Oh, it... Yes. They were strongly advised. Well, they actually, the prisoners did sign consent forms. So they knew, and on the consent forms, it says LSD, you know, you're going to get this LSD, whatever.

It's a question of informed consent. Do they actually know the repercussions? It's not like they can know what all these drugs are going to do to them. So at the narcotic farm in Lexington, the guy who is in charge of it is named Harris Isbell. The narcotic farm was a place where prisoners and addicts could go, um, to get reformed, you know? So if you're a drug addict, you can check yourself into the narcotic farm, into this prison, basically. And you can go through some programs and try to get off.

Heroin is the main thing they're curing people are trying to cure people of. Although at the same time, you could volunteer for these experiments under Harris Isbell and you would take these drugs. And so a lot of the, a lot of the people who would do this is just repeat customers. You know, they would get their fix of drugs as part of these experiments. They would leave. And then after a while they would run out of their own supply. They would check themselves back in. They would get these drugs. And here's the crazy thing as payment for participating in this drug experiment, this, uh, this MK ultra sub project Harris is bell. You can have a couple of things. You could get like a positive letter for the

parole board. So maybe if you're in prison, you can get a reduced sentence or something like that, or you can go to the drug bank, stick out your arm and get an injection of heroin straight into it. So it's like they're trying to cure these people of their addiction and as payment for this sub project, they're giving them heroin. Oh my god God there's so many layers to this Did I've exhaust you in researching this like you're constantly finding like oh, here's another angle

Uh in a way, but I like this I mean, I like finding the nitty gritty like I want to I like the detective hunt of it I mentioned that I kind of like the gonzo journalist style of writing because I want to kind of live it through these people, you know, whoever's writing it, the journalist. Um, for me, the really fun part of researching and writing a book like this is not just the writing, it's the researching. You know, I like going to the archives, I like interviewing people, I like trying to put it all together and saying,

oh, this is a great example that can fit there. I see it as kind of a detective hunt, you know, so I'm a historian, but in a lot of ways, there are similar methods that I, or techniques that I try to use. I'm trying to put together evidence and form a coherent story and the most plausible explanation of what went on. So to me, it's fun. I really like this stuff.

Where were some of the cool places you traveled to do your research on this? Yeah, these depositions, which form kind of the main basis of the book, are at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Joseph Rao, the attorney, his papers got donated there after he died. And so they were there. So that's where I went.

There are a few other people's papers who were at the Library of Congress. The National Archives, you know, they have a lot of government records. So I've been there a lot for either my dissertation or my first book or this book. So I spent a lot of time there. I've gotten records from UCLA where Jolly West was, from Georgetown University has paper, Williams Donovan's papers are there. The Army Heritage, I forget what it's called,

the Army Medical Heritage Association, it's something like that or whatever. I got records from there. I don't know, there's a lot of places. How long did it take to put this together, this book? I probably started working on these two books, because I kind of started working on them at the same time, because I initially thought it was going to be one book.

So, I'd say I started in 2018. Oh, wow. So, wow. And the first one came out in 2023. This one's 2025. So, you know, I finished grad school in 2019. So I kind of finished my dissertation for the most part, and I still had a year. I was still doing research and kind of putting the final touches on my dissertation, but I thought,

I got some free time, I'm gonna go ahead and start writing this book. So I was kind of double-dipping my department, the Department of History at UT. They would, you know, I might get a grant or something to go to visit an archive, and I would say, yeah, you know, I might get a grant or something to go to visit an archive. And I would say, yeah, you know, I'm gonna research for my dissertation. But on the side, while I'm there, you know,

I did research for these books, so that helped. Yeah, it's cool how they translated right into each other, too, like kind of seamlessly as well, even from a timeline perspective. But did you, you know, we've been talking about all these different things they do, the 149 subcategories of MK Ultra that you found out. And a lot of it has to do with things that were here, whether it be in prisons or, you

know, the, the operation midnight climax or even putting LSD in the punch bowl at, you know, the CIA party. Did we do any of this internationally though, too? Yeah. What did that look like? The international part of MK Ultra was called MK Delta. Oh, that's a nice name. I like that. Yeah, there are a lot of these MKMH. So, in fact, MKUltra after 1963 became MK Search.

And it was MKUltra but continued for a few years. So, there are a lot of kind of cryptonyms that are used. We don't know too much about the international uses of these drugs. The Church committee talks about several administrations that happened as part of interrogations of prisoners. We don't know too much about them as part of that artichoke program that was a little bit before MKUltra. Which one was that again? That's kind of the precursor to MKUltra. They're basically doing interrogations with drugs. There is some descriptions of the interrogations that happen. There are two spies that are caught and they're given, I think it's sodium amytal or something like that. And it

describes kind of, it actually says that they revealed a lot of information that these people probably shouldn't have and they start using some of these substances. And one of the quotes from the officers who's doing this is that this is like the drugs that's going to open our minds. This is going to allow us to do everything we want to. So they see the LSD and sodium amytal and all this stuff. This is like the greatest thing in the world because it's going to allow them to get the truth from anyone they want to.

So the interrogations actually seem to be pretty useful or pretty positive. They're able to get a lot of information. As far as the international side, though, those happen internationally, which is why I mentioned them. Sydney Gottlieb, the main thing internationally he does is... there is an attempt to discredit the...

one of the people who's running to become president of the Philippines. And not too much is known about this, but there are... and you kind of have to triangulate that it was actually the Philippines, but I think that's where it was that this was happening. But there was an attempt to put some LSD into the water of one of these political people who was sympathetic

to the Soviets, to the communists, in order to, like I mentioned with Castro, in order to make them seem crazy right before a political rally. So that whenever they started talking, they would seem crazy. So, um, that's the one kind of international use of this in order to make them seem crazy right before a political rally. So that whenever they started talking, they would seem crazy. So that's the one kind of international use of this I can think of,

besides those interrogations, several interrogations. But there could have been other stuff we just don't have a record of it. Yeah, so Stephen Kinzer wrote a biography of Sidney Gottlieb called Poisoner in Chief. Yes, excellent. And in there, he talks about this place called Camp King in Germany. And it's this camp where interrogations occurred,

and he says that this was kind of part of MKUltra. They were using drugs to basically torture these people. They were doing all kinds of stuff to these, you know, I don't know, prisoners or whatever they were. I think that kind of thing happened. There were interrogations that happened at Camp King, but again, I don't, I've never seen any link to MKUltra. You know, so I don't really talk about it that much in this book,

because it's not that it didn't happen, it's that it doesn't really have, to me, it doesn't really have much to do with MKUltra. So I'm telling the story of MKUltra here, I don't really see a connection. Um, so, you know, I don't talk too much about that in this book because of that. But he thinks that there is this international connection

with that, these interrogations that are happening at these prisons, like in Germany, Camp King. Yeah, whenever I hear something like, yeah, we ended that, it's like, yeah, maybe there was something else spun off or whatever. But we've been alluding to like, kind of how this blew up all day. You've mentioned, you know, Gottlieb destroyed files in 1973. Later, there were depositions,

and obviously the church commissions in the middle of that in 75, 76. But what was the initial... Was it the Family Jewels document that blew it on this? Yeah, that pretty much, that's the main thing. The Family Jewels gets leaked to Seymour Hersh. He publishes part of it in the New York Times, not even about MKUltra, but about how the CIA had tried to infiltrate some groups

that were protesting the Vietnam War. Right. So that became big news. Can't have that. Yeah. And so there were several of these kinds of stories, and the family jewels had partially gotten leaked. And Gerald Ford and his administration

is very worried that the rest of that's going to get leaked. And so they set up, which includes, like, assassination attempts on foreign leaders. Sidney Gottlieb is involved in multiple. He sends anthrax to the Congo to try to kill this guy named Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister. Oh, we did a podcast on it. Oh, did you? Oh, great.

Yeah, yeah, Stuart Reed, that's his last name, right? Yeah, you got it. That was episode 165, I think. Nice, and good memory with the numbers on that. Yeah, he wrote a whole book called The Lumumba Plot, which is excellent. Yeah, I've used that for this book. That was helpful. Yeah, part of... Oh, that's cool. So I was in a bibliography.

He, like, that's a case that's just totally ignored in history. It was a proxy war between the intelligence of KGB and the intelligence of CIA, and there's Gottlieb right in the middle. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And one thing, I don't know if he includes this in this book, because I think it only comes out in the depositions that I found. In fact, in his book, I think he says that the substance that was used to try to kill Lumumba was... I don't remember what it was, some substance.

But I think that was wrong. I think it's actually anthrax, because in these depositions, Gottlieb reveals for the first time how he tried to do it with anthrax that he got from Fort Diedrich, you know, where that special operations division was. And yeah, so anthrax was the thing that was kind of an exciting thing to find in the depositions. But I mentioned... Exciting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me as a historian, maybe not for Lumumba. Um, you know, the idea was to put some of this or at least some kind of substance in his toothpaste that he would brush his teeth with and it would kill him. And the joke about Lumumba was that he never brushed his teeth because he feared an assassination attempt. So, you know, the joke was that he never brushed his teeth because he feared an assassination attempt. So, you know, the joke was that he preferred

bad breath to no breath at all. Oh, yeah. That's a bar. I mentioned Lumumba because we were talking about how this eventually came out with the church committee and all that. So there was these assassination attempts that the Ford administration did not want to get out

to the public, the idea that the CIA could possibly be involved in this kind of thing. And so Ford sets up a commission, the Rockefeller Commission, the Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. And the commission is supposed to investigate abuses by the intelligence community of the past. Really, one of the main things they're doing is,

we'll reveal some stuff that we want you to know, but we wanna make sure that nobody else investigates like this other stuff. A Rockefeller would never cover anything. Yeah. OK. Let's just put that out there right now. So we want to make it look like we're really investigating

and getting everything out in the open. But the purpose is to make sure that Congress doesn't launch their own investigation. Because if the executive branch, if we launch an investigation, we can say that, yeah, we're going to release this stuff. And it might just wade Congress from launching a joint investigation or a simultaneous investigation. And they could reveal stuff that the executive doesn't want to get out there.

It turns out that the executive branch are the Congress launches its own investigation anyway, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee in the House Church committees in the Senate Pike committees in the House. And what was the pike? I don't know much about that. Yeah, it was kind of analogous to the church committee. It was more, instead of focusing on the specific abuses that happened in the past, a lot of what it did is focused on the culture of the CIA that enabled these things, and that led to a lot of intelligence failures. So the CIA failed to predict a lot of things, the Tet Offensive and the first nuclear tests

of certain countries and everything. Failed to predict it or had a little hand in making sure it happened? Well, Pike is saying, the Pike committee says theyailed to predict it or had a little hand in making sure it happened? Well, Pike is saying, you know, the Pike Committee says they failed to predict this stuff and what allowed or what enabled the CIA to miss this stuff, how did that happen? They offer a lot of critiques of it, you know.

So that's what the Pike Committee mostly was doing. So these committees come out, these congressional committees and they're investigating these past abuses and they have an incentive to find a lot of dirt because it's got people on them like Ronald Reagan, and they wanna make their names. Church wants to make his name because he wants to run for president.

And I think Reagan was actually on the Rockefeller Commission, I think I messed that up, sorry. But Church was, you know, they wanna make a name from the South, so they wanna get some sensational headlines that they can use. And so they start investigating not only

the stuff about the Vietnam War dissidents who are protesting, but they realize the family jewels, you know, includes a lot more things, the potential assassination, you know, plots. It's ironic. Gerald Ford sets up this Rockefeller commission because he wants to prevent this concept of assassinations, the idea that the CIA might be involved in that

from entering into the public. But ironically, he's the one that lets it slip because it was at that meeting with the New York Times editors that he said, you know, I mentioned earlier, he said something to the effect of what other skeletons are in our closets, assassination, stuff like that. That's off the record. He lets it slip. And so it's because Daniel Shore is the CBS News correspondent that eventually gets to shore runs a story about this. And now the Rockefeller Commission has no choice but to investigate it because it would like like, how could you possibly

investigate abuses and not that. And so he kind of forces their hand even though that was the very thing he tried to prevent from happening. That's crazy. What's it can we actually pull up Family Jewels so I can get a timeline in my head just exactly because there's a lot going on in this So I can get a timeline in my head just exactly because there's a lot going on in this Handful of years there. Yeah, the 70s especially for the this 1975 is called the year of intelligence So the end of 74 is the Rockefeller Commission 75 is the church and Pike committees, right? So investigative journalist Seymour Hirsch Alright, this is what I want revealed some of the contents of the family jewels in a front page New York Times article in December, 1974. This is why I wanted to check it.

Because Gottlieb destroys documents in 73. So long before Hirsch presumably gets ahold of this. And got- What led him to do, do we know like what the thought process was there? I think I do because these depositions, thankfully. Please tell us. So in 1973, Sidney Gottlieb is retiring from the CIA.

So he's retiring. So he's leaving. And so is Richard Helms, who is the director of the CIA. Richard Nixon was kind of pushing Richard Helms out. And so Gottlieb goes to Richard Helms and asks him, what are we going to do with all this stuff? Because Richard Helms had been a big proponent of MK Ultra throughout its career. And they both agree that they're going to destroy with all this stuff? Because Richard Helms had been a big proponent of MKUltra throughout its career.

And they both agree that they're going to destroy the files before they retire because now that they're not going to be there, they don't want anyone to leak this to the press. So they basically have them incinerated. They take them to a CIA record center and the archivist at the record center writes a note saying, over my stated objections, Richard Helms, you know, directed Sydney Gottlieb to have me destroy these files. So you know, we have the document of the archivist saying, I didn't want to do this, but I was directed to do this.

So they destroy the files in 1973. Then all this other stuff happens. Rockefeller, church, Pike committee. And as part of that, Sydney Gottlieb is subpoenaed and he has to testify in front of those. And he's in India at the time. He's working at like a leper colony. He comes back, he testifies, he doesn't say that much. But in these depositions, he says a lot more. Joseph Rao, this attorney, presses him and Richard Helms, his deposition I also found. He presses them asking...

Helms was in that too. Yeah, Helms. And the CIA really tried to prevent Helms' deposition from happening. And even when it did happen, they tried to prevent Rao from keeping a copy. They said, oh, he accidentally released classified information. We're gonna have to take your copy of that. Conveniently.

Yeah, Rao said, there's no way. Because the thing they said was classified was the location of a CIA, some building or something, which had already been published in the Washington Post. And it's like, it's already public information. Yeah, I'll try that. Yeah. And what year was this again? already public information. Yeah, don't try that. Yeah. And what year was this again?

This is like 79 is when it starts, but the depositions mainly happened in 80 to 83. Okay, so early 80s. But where did they take place again? Mainly in like Virginia and DC. Okay. Yeah. Where most of these people are. But I was saying, oh, in the depositions,

Joseph Rowell, this attorney, who's a fiery attorney, he gets into arguments with them. He is so combative. He starts like bad mouthing the other attorneys in there. He's a great character for the book. And at this point, he's an older gentleman. He had been involved in like the civil rights movement and he had faced a lot of things over his career.

And so he wanted this to kind of be the last notch on his belt. He asked Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Helms, "'Why'd you destroy these files?' Obviously it seems like he wanted this to kind of be the last notch on his belt. He asked Sydney Gottlieb and Richard Helms, why'd you destroy these files? You know, obviously it seems like he wanted to cover something up. At first, Gottlieb gives this excuse of an explanation. He says, well, the CIA was drowning in paper. We just had so much of it that, you know, we were trying to downsize a little bit. And so we had to destroy these files just to get rid of so much paper

that we couldn't hardly move. Yeah. So obviously, he's just saying this. So Rao keeps pressing him. You got to be kidding me. You know, so Richard Helms says, well, one reason we did it is because we wanted to protect sources and methods. That's our prerogative, as disclosed in the National Security Act, we got to protect sources and methods. These documents have the names of people on there

and what we're doing, you know, so we have to protect sources and methods. And Rao pushes him like, you couldn't just keep them secret? Like, how does destroying them protect sources and methods when keeping them secret doesn't? You know, just don't give them to the public. You know, you can protect sources and methods without destroying every file you have. So that doesn't really go over to well with Rao. And then in a deposition with Sydney Gottlieb again, he asks him, he really pushes him, really, what's going on here? Like, why? And Sidney Gottlieb basically breaks

down during the deposition and he says, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed about what we did. He came to have regrets because he realized it didn't amount to hardly anything. They didn't really learn anything from MKUltra. They spent millions of dollars in harmed, untold numbers of people causing lasting abuse throughout their lives. In some cases, like Frank Olson, causing them to die and what came of it, basically nothing. And so Sydney Gottlieb was embarrassed about it. And so he didn't want anyone to know because he didn't want it to cause backlash to the CIA, but also to him. So he destroyed them. And it could go deeper than that, but we don't know. That's why it's, it's another one of those. It's like,

go deeper than that, but we don't know. So it's, it's another one of those. It's like, Oh man, I wish I not even on camera. I wish I could just sit with a guy like that. Who's obviously dead now long dead, but like you just sit with them in a room like this for a few hours and pick his brain and see what they're about. Cause you know, people say you're long enough with people and usually it's for the better to be honest with you. Cause I'm lucky I'm mostly really, really great people come through here, but you get to know who people are. You see what they're about. You see what makes them tick. And things like that. And you... I'd love to think,

as an American, if there were some serious mistakes made and things that were done totally wrong in a program like this, that the people who did it would have recognized that and would have voluntarily tried to stop it and it wouldn't have just been like a cover-up campaign. But that's probably wishful thinking with some of these people and he is at the top, so he's certainly suspect when you look at this. Like, okay, I understand you're protecting yourself, but why are you destroying others'

documents? And then it's very interesting to hear you talk about the depositions and how open he was and how much he wanted to talk about it. That's almost psychotic in a way. I think he changed. I think he really came to regret MKUltra. Oh, you think he regretted it?

I think so. At the time he was doing it, I think he thought this was in service of national security. And after it was over, I still think he thought that was a legitimate cause, but I think he came to realize that it didn't do anything and you harmed all these people. Toward the end of his life, he was well known throughout his community for volunteering

at all kinds of places. And a lot of the people who knew him, they were interviewed afterwards and they said like, we always thought he was trying to absolve himself of past sins or something like that. Ah, there it is. And I think he did have pangs of conscience. Like I said, he was in India volunteering

at a leper hospital for a long time, for a couple of years before he came back. And yeah, I think he really came to regret it. Well, that's nice. You know, there's something good there, I guess. But you know, along the way, and we keep on talking about it in different examples, but there are victims of things like this.

There are victims in things like midnight climax. There are people. They're among the plaintiffs in a case like that in the early 80s. But I forget, you had said you talked to... You talked to some victims, some alleged victims in your interviews or... I have the depositions of several of the victims.

I think all the victims are probably dead by this point. Right, because this was a while ago. But are there family members that... I don't know much about. But are there family members, I don't know much about this, are there family members who are publicly speaking out about what their dead relatives told them, you know, happened in this?

And those dead relatives are actually people who are traceable to real cases, and it's not just, you know, someone yelling on Twitter? Yeah, it's hard. There is, like I mentioned, a lawsuit that the children of people, they claim to be the children of people who are in this sub-project by you and Cameron in Montreal.

Um, I haven't really looked into that, so I don't know. So, you know, I don't know too much about that, but I know those children are trying to sue the Canadian government, I think, because the Canadian government was also giving funds to you and Cameron, like, grants and things. Um, so I know that's going on. But when I talk about the victims in this book,

it mostly comes from the depositions that happened, because not only, you know, were the perpetrators of MKUltra deposed in this, but the victims talk about everything that they went through in these depositions. One of the more moving cases is of this woman named Mary Moro. She was one of the patients of Ewan Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, a victim of psychic driving and sleep deprivation and especially electroshock therapy. The ironic thing with her story, which makes it such a good story to illustrate what's going on in these experiments, is that she had been one of the residents in training at the Allen under you and Cameron doing these things to other people. And she said, you know, so her story is really sad. She had gone to medical school. She wanted to be a neurologist. She developed anorexia. She wasn't able to pass her neurology exams. And so the person who got her the position that she really wanted the head of the neurology department at St. Mary's

Hospital, he eventually had to take all her patients because she couldn't, you know, handle them, because she failed her exams, she didn't have her license. She eventually tried to kill herself, and then she went to a hospital basically to try to get better. And while she was there, Ewan Cameron comes and he says, I'd like you to come back to the Allen,

but not as a resident, but as a patient. So she had been on one side of it and then she goes back as a patient. And so she talks about what it was like being on the other side. She doesn't remember that much because the main thing that was done to her was the electric shock therapy.

And so what eventually happened to her was her sister and her mother would talk to her on the phone after these sessions. And she was obviously incoherent and not in her right mind. And so her mother told her sister, you go down there and like figure out what's happening. So her sister barges in and they try to prevent her from seeing Mary Morrow.

And she says, I'll call the police. I don't care. I'm seeing my sister. So she goes to see her sister and her sister doesn't even recognize her when she walks in the room. Or Mary Morrow doesn't recognize her sister. And her sister walks in.

She doesn't know how to put on her clothes anymore. She can't put on makeup or do her hair or anything. She is, you know, just completely gone. Over time, she eventually recovers some, but she eventually tries to commit suicide again. She tries to sue you and Cameron, but she's prevented from doing so, mostly because he has, you know, connections with all the people who are in Montreal, basically. And, you know, he's preventing them from giving her a job and preventing them her from going forward with this and you know it's just a really sad story but it's it's a it's a good light through which to view this these experiments in particular since you she was on both

sides of it yeah wow that's that's like a full circle one right there but you know this is kind of an impossible question and you're a historian looking at this and it's wouldn't even expect you to have a good answer. But when you look at history of trying to do the right thing, right, doesn't just have to be MK Ultra or something like that because obviously there's a lot where we figured out here we were wrong. So it really didn't work out. But there's this constant dynamic of people who have access to the worst information and

the worst threats in the world and whatever and they'll rationalize, you know, let's put a blanket term on it, having a few casualties or something like that for the greater good, you know, and this gets really dark when you start thinking about this. But do you ever find yourself, whether it's looking at cases like this or other cases you've examined in the past or just in general, thinking about if there is, I don't want to say like a good explanation, but if there is a moral way that people in power could determine that, you know, if we got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet here, it's gonna be worth it for the whole in the future, meaning people along the way are gonna be lost to the cause.

Do you think there's ever scenarios where that doesn't end just completely tragically? It's hard to say. I find it hard to believe, partly because you can only determine whether it was actually worth it after the fact. So it's like you have to go in blind to some degree if you're gonna do that. And another thing to take into consideration when you're doing the moral calculus of is this

justified or not, it's not just is this justified because we're gonna end up, you know, you know, let's say we have to kill two people and we save 10 people. Okay, okay. On that very narrow moral calculus that might seem justified because obviously, you know, maybe save 10 people, okay? Okay. On, on that very narrow moral calculus that might seem justified because obviously, you know, maybe all 10 people are going to die if we don't do something or whatever. But at the same time, you have to think you're committing an act. And it's not that that act is in isolation. Now there's potential backlash from the fact that you did that. So you've completely undermined your reputation. So even if it is in the greater good morally, in the long run, you completely undermine your reputation from doing anything

in the future. So it's like that might actually put it in the negative in a moral situation because it might prevent you from doing something in the future that isn't necessarily immoral, but that people don't trust you because of. This is one of the huge things about MKUltra and a lot of other things the CIA has been involved in, its reputation is completely shot. Who trusts it? You know, who's gonna trust it? And that's not to say it doesn't do good things, but like, who's gonna trust it

after knowing that this was possible in the past? That question is always going to be open now that if you did that, you could be doing something. Now, as a historian, I like to think, well, I don't wanna speculate that you could be doing something. Of course, you could be doing something. I wanna know what you are doing

But because something in the past some abuse has taken place it always opens the door for anyone to distrust you now and that Morally that that might be a worse thing than having to do something bad to get some even greater good Because now you've produced an even greater harm if now you can't protect someone for some reason, you know So the the reputational blow, uh, has to be factored into that calculus in some way. That's a great answer. And also, you know, there's the human fallacy of someone else will deal with it in the future. You know what I mean? I'm here right now at this situation at hand. We'll figure this out. Yeah, it'll be blow back. I'm sure we'll figure that out.

And you keep doing that again and again and again, and eventually you don't have any reputation at all other than a bad one. And I think that's kind of where the CIA is at this point in a lot of the public domain because we're always gonna pay attention to the bad shit that happens, right? It's just how it is. You know, when the CIA stops a terror attack and you know, from Taylor Swift concert,

having something horrible happen to it, it's not like we're like, yay, CIA! But like, that's pretty cool. They stop potentially tens of thousands of people dying. I think John F. Kennedy said, he has a quote we're like, yay, CIA. But that's pretty cool. They stop potentially tens of thousands of people dying. I think John F. Kennedy said, he has a quote something like, talking to the intelligence community, your victories are unsung, your mistakes are heralded.

That's right. You know, some of them are published, something like that. So in a certain way that is right. There could be great things we don't know of. Yeah, that's great. There also could be some bad stuff we don't know about. Exactly right. Now, do we have any evidence of programs, not necessarily the same thing,

but, I don't know, children programs of something like this that could have existed afterwards or even exist today? I don't know about MKUltra in particular. There are... Let me think. about MKUltra in particular. There are, let me think, there, I don't know about MKUltra in particular. There were some radiation experiments that dealt with children, I forget where it was, but I don't know if it was connected to MKUltra or if it was something independent. So there are some kind of experiments. I think it was like the the cereal or something was laced with some kind of low form of Lowly irradiated something like that and I think children were involved in that some way

Um, I don't know much about that, you know, obviously because i'm stumbling because i'm not too sure about what exactly went on As far as mk ultra Um, I don't think so. I can't recall off the top of my head. I, you know, I can't recall. Was there anything in your research that was more shocking than everything else you found that really stood off besides, you know, finding the depositions and realizing that existed? Yeah, that, you know, I mentioned the remote control animals.

That was pretty shocking to me. That was one of the... You know, if... Going back to my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, one of the craziest experiments I've ever heard of, I mentioned the bat bombs, but there was another involving foxes. And it was called Operation Fantasia. Have you heard of this before, Fantasia? So, okay, the idea is that we're fighting the Japanese,

and we need a way to defeat the Japanese. In fact, what's a better way than to militarily defeat the Japanese? What if we can get the Japanese to lay down their own arms and just give up? Maybe we can do that. How are we gonna do that? Yeah, with foxes somehow. So, the idea is that in the Shinto religion, there are these, what are called kitsune,

like these spirit beings that can be omens, either good omens or bad omens or something, and foxes are one of the main ones. They're like these glowing foxes that apparently represent portents of doom in some cases. Portents of doom? Yeah, like something bad is going to happen in some cases. Portents of doom? Yeah, like something bad is going to happen in the future.

What a wine, I like that. Yeah, so there was a guy named Ed Salinger in the OSS who was working with, you know, Stanley Lovell and these other guys I talk about in the book. And they wanna do some kind of psychological operation where what if we get these foxes and we coat them in this radioactive paint that glows in the dark and we release them in Japan? The Japanese are gonna see these glowing foxes

and think it's a Katsumi, and they're gonna think that this represents a portent of doom that's coming. Obviously, it must mean we're about to lose the war, therefore, we might as well give up now before that happens. So, the foxes were never released in Japan, but there were several experiments with them. One of them was to take these foxes to Rock Creek Park near Washington, D.C., and release them

to scare Americans, because the idea was that, well,es to Rock Creek Park near Washington, D.C., and release them to scare Americans. Because the idea was that, well, if Americans are scared by these things, surely the Japanese are gonna be even more scared. So they released these foxes, and sure enough, there's a write-up in the paper, you know, a few days later saying, the glowing foxes, people are running with the screamy-jimies.

I think it was a word they used. Another experiment with the foxes was to, you know, coat them with this paint and drop them into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay to see if they could swim to shore. Because how are we gonna get these foxes to Japan? We're gonna have to throw them overboard. Come on, you know, they're gonna have to swim to shore and they'll scare people.

So we got to see if the foxes can swim, you know, can foxes even swim? We don't know, we have to figure it out. So they roll them out to the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, they throw these foxes overboard. They swim to shore, but the paint had washed off in the water. So they determined that that's probably not going to work.

Oh, my god. I never heard of that before. Operation Fantasia? Fantasia, yeah. And it gets even crazier than that, to be honest. Wow. With Fantasia, they realized that these foxes aren't going to work, these live foxes.

But what if we can create fake foxes? What if we create fox balloons that look like foxes and they float in the sky? We paint them with this paint, they're glowing. And then from those, we can put a human skull where the head goes of the fox and have the fox body, and we could put a speaker inside the mouth of the skull and have it blasting like propaganda. And they're gonna think there are these kind of floating foxes

glowing in the dark saying this portent of doom stuff is happening. So that was another kind of part of Operation Vantage. Oh my god. Can't say they're not creative. Yeah, it's something. You've got to give them that. There's a lot of creativity happening in these offices

where they're coming up with spy shit. It's amazing work, though, man. There's a lot of things you brought up today that like, you know, I enjoy looking at this stuff, but I've never heard of it. That's crazy. But you also, we were talking before, you teach a bunch of classes at UT Austin.

I do. And you're, it's very interesting, like your road to even get into researching this because you were telling me your background was like researching like the history of science. That's it, yeah, the history of science. How'd you get into that? Yeah, I've always loved the history of science.

I didn't even know it was a field growing up. I always liked it. I didn't either. I actually, I mean, this, I never liked reading growing up. I didn't like it. Now, ironic, I'm writing books now. But I hated reading growing up. It was so boring and whatever.

But I think it's because my teachers always wanted us to read fiction books. They would assign, you know, fiction, whatever. But I don't, I didn't like fiction as much. I didn't realize it until later. But whenever I would be given like know, fiction, whatever. But I don't, I don't, didn't like fiction as much. I didn't realize it until later, but whenever I would be given, like, a science book, now that's something I could read. That was interesting.

So, it's not that I didn't like reading. I realized it's that I like reading nonfiction. I like reading books about the history of science. So, I would always read biographies of certain scientists. And then when I was in college, I realized that the history of science was a field, because there was a professor, Anthony Stranges, at Texas A&M where I did my undergrad, and he taught courses on the history of science. And a lot of the textbooks for those courses, I had already read. It's like, this is stuff I read in my free time. This is great. So I realized there's a professor who's teaching this

course, and this is the subject that I like. So I could do that. That's how I kind of decided that, oh, I could be a professor who teaches this stuff. He's doing it. Like, I want that job. So that's how I got into the history of science. That's what I specialized in in my PhD at UT. There's a, I guess, a subset of the history department you specialize in different fields. My field was the history of science, technology and medicine. And my dissertation was on scientists in the intelligence community. But now I teach courses on the history of science. I have courses really from the ancient Greeks to the present. Oh, so you're going all the way back.

Yeah, yeah. Whoa. And you were telling me like you did a lot of work on Isaac Newton? Yeah. Is that something you teach classes on? Yeah, of course, specifically on Newton. Yeah, it's fun.

He was an interesting character. Talked about some weird people. He had a lot of odd ideas. You wanna elaborate on that? Yeah, alchemy and theology. He was an anti-Trinitarian. He didn't believe in the Trinity. He was a very devout Christian.

He wrote basically more about religion than he did about science. A lot of it was in his personal notes. He never published, but after his death, it was found out that he was doing this stuff in private. So he didn't believe in the Trinity. He thought there were a lot of corruptions introduced into the Bible over time.

So one of these is called the Johnning Comma, in a letter of John's. Uh, there's this section that talks about, I don't know the exact warning, but, you know, it lists kind of three things, and it says, you know, the Father, the Son, Holy Spirit, something like that. But he thought that was an introduction, something that had been introduced by scribes later on. And to support this, he was actually a really good historian.

Like, his spade work that he does is incredible. He looked at the earliest commentators on that passage to see when they quoted it from the scriptures that they were using, you know, from the copies that they had, would they include certain passages or not? So it turns out that the earliest commentators that he looks at doesn't include one of these quotes about the Trinity, and the later ones start using it.

So it's like, if all the earlier ones don't use that, then obviously that must have gotten introduced over time. So that's the kind of thing he's looking at. But he, yeah, he gets really into the weeds of this stuff. He has a list of just all the commentators he references, and there's just like dozens of them. You know, he goes to... He was a very obsessive personality

that shows obviously in his science, but also in everything else he's doing, whether it's alchemy or theology. But yeah, very obsessive. What was his work in alchemy? Like, what was he doing there? Yeah, so the goal of alchemy, as it's generally seen, is to develop like the philosopher's stone.

Can you turn something into... Can you turn one element into another? Not that they actually knew about specific elements, but can you turn something into gold, like lead into gold or whatever? So that's the pursuit of the alchemists. It's kind of sad in Isaac Newton's case, because it seemed to really affect his brain in later years. So he writes a letter to John Locke, this is in his later years,

and in that letter, he basically says, why were you trying to get these women to seduce me and all this weird stuff? And it's like, he wasn't doing any of that stuff. And later, Newton writes him back saying, I'm sorry for that, I don't know what came over me. And his hair has been tested, you know, locks of his hair after he died,

and they had high levels of heavy metals. And so it seems like that really affected his mind in later years. Yeah, I always wonder what it's like, what it must be like to be a total genius thinking about, like, the meaning of it all and having the scientific and mathematical means to constantly assess that at the highest level

and just going about your day and looking around and not driving yourself fucking nuts, you know? It's like, where's the fault from? Well, he might have been nuts. Right? That's what I'm saying. Like, a lot of these people, they go nuts. Yeah, he... I don't think he was actually, like, insane It's like, where is this all from? Well, he might have been nuts. Right? That's what I'm saying. Like, a lot of these people, they go nuts. Yeah, he... I don't think he was actually, like,

insane or something like that, but he was... He was certainly odd, like I said, uh, very hyper-focused on things. Very much recluse. He didn't really... It doesn't seem like he did much of his work because he wanted the recognition for it, even though, kind of secretly, I think he didn't want

recognition for what he's doing. But a lot of the stuff he he worked something out and then he puts it in his drawer and he doesn't publish it for a while and he has to be prompted to even publish something. So for example, the most famous example of this is Isaac Newton is able to derive that if you have an inverse square law, so if the strength of a force falls off according to the square of the distance, then you can derive conic sections like you can derive ellipses, you know, which that's the shape that this planet's moving and ellipse. This is a huge deal. Like he can now explain why the planets move in ellipses because we have this inverse square law.

He's derived from that, that you can get elliptical shape. And so he does this calculation. He puts it in the drawer of his desk and he just kind of sits there. And then Edmund Halley of Halley's comet comet's fame, he visits Newton and he asks him, you know, he there's this mathematical problem that everybody's working on at the time and he decides to go visit Newton and ask him about it and he says, if you were to assume an inverse square law, you know, the strength of the force falls off proportional to the square of the distance, then what shape could you derive from that if you had

a body moving according to that? And Isaac Dune says, Oh, an ellipse, obviously. And Halle, whoa, that's exactly what we've been trying to do and trying to do the math to figure that out. Do you have your, you know, proof of that? And he says, yeah, it's in a desk here somewhere. And he looks for it and he can't find it. And then he becomes hyper-focused on this problem now, now that Halle's kind of inserted it into his mind again. And he ends up writing, based on that,

The Principia Mathematica, like the most influential and important science book ever written. And that's the spark. Yeah. What was the most impressive to you, like the most impressive time period? Obviously, like we continually improve science and get farther and farther along. But considering the resources that were available or lack of resources that were available depending on the time period and what was discovered

and what that led to. What was the most overlooked or even like the most impressive part of... of, you know, scientific history? Mm-hmm. I think maybe the most important time period would be the Scientific Revolution. I mean, it's called the Scientific Revolution for a reason. This is when many of the methods that we associate

with modern science kind of coalesced into one thing. It's not as if people weren't doing experiments in agent history, they did experiments. It's not as if they weren't using math to describe certain things, but it's during the Scientific Revolution, which is really mostly in the 17th century, when this kind of coalesces into the process of science

that we know it today. So this is the time of Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Galileo. Isaac Newton is typically seen as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution. It's typically seen as starting in 1543. That's when Copernicus publishes his big book on the motions of the heavenly spheres.

You know, so this heliocentric idea, the idea that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the opposite, Ptolemy had said that spheres. You know, so this heliocentric idea, the idea that the earth goes around the sun and not the opposite. Ptolemy had said that the, you know, the earth is the center of the universe and everything goes around the earth. Copernicus kind of upends that in 1543. And from there you have Kepler

who improves upon Copernicus' ideas in many ways. So in fact, Thomas Kuhn is, he's this philosopher of science. He wrote this book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He also wrote another book called The Copernican Revolution, in which he talks about Copernicus and how, you know, where the shift from a mindset, from a Ptolemaic view to a heliocentric view, from geocentric to heliocentric. But even in this book called The Copernican Revolution, Thomas Kuhn kind of ends it by saying, and the real revolutionary was Johannes Kepler, like, because Copernicus kept a lot of the things from this ancient Ptolemaic system. So the Ptolemaic system was the idea that the earth is the center of the universe and

things revolve around it in perfect circles. Copernicus, he liked the aesthetic of these perfect circles and he didn't want to get rid of that. It was Kepler who was the revolutionary in saying, we just can't account for perfect circles with our observations. And so he realizes that the shape that the planets actually seem to be moving in his ellipses. So Kuhn identifies that as that's like the real break from the past. Whoa. Yeah, it's so interesting because technically like the greatest scientists of all time are just they're always moving the ball forward a little more and to a frontier of shit we didn't know.

And in reality, like a lot of it over time is gonna eventually be proven to not be right, but it got us on the right track. So it's like, strange that your life you're constantly trying, you're moving it forward and you're getting it wrong, but you're getting closer to the truth and that's the job. Yeah, approximations. Yeah. Science is cumulative in the sense that we do learn more over time, but our approximations get better and better.

In fact, tying this into Thomas Kuhn, who I just mentioned, this philosopher of science in the 20th century, his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, tries to explain how science changes over time. What is a scientific revolution? He says that the traditional view of the history of science is that it's just a linear cumulative process.

We learn something about the world, then we learn something else, and now we know more. And then we learn something else, and now we know more, and we kind of see that as science. We're learning things, we're observing the world. But he says that's not how it actually works. What actually happens, Kuhn says, is scientists operate within a paradigm, like a worldview.

So our paradigm, it could be the Ptolemaic system. Our paradigm could be general relativity, whatever science you run, it could be evolution by natural selection. He says scientists operate within a paradigm, a worldview that they share among the experts in their field. So we all agree that general relativity is true, something like that. Within our paradigms, what we really try to do is what he calls puzzle solving, or normal science. We're trying to, in a sense, prove the paradigm. We're trying to solve these little puzzles that show that our paradigm is right. There might be something that crops up and we do a little experiment and determine the motion of the planet and look,

that corresponds with what we know our equations of general relativity. While doing normal science, occasionally, Kuhn says, an anomaly pops up. There's some observation or experiment that goes against the paradigm. It's an anomaly. And what do we do when an anomaly crops up? Kuhn says, the traditional view of scientists is that they're revolutionaries. They want to change their mind. They want to absorb evidence and use it to inform their theories.

He says, that's not what happens. What really happens, an anomaly pops up, and we try to rationalize it in a way to fit it with the paradigm, because we have our paradigm. And it's not illogical to do. There are a way to fit it with the paradigm, because we have our paradigm. And this is, it's not illogical to do there are good reasons to have your paradigm if our paradigm is, you know, the Copernican system or something, you know, the heliocentric system that the Earth goes around the sun, there might be some good reasons to have that. And, you know, we have these perfect circles that Copernicus is talking about, but Kepler is saying this stuff about

ellipses. But should we really believe Kepler? How do we know what he's saying is true? We have this good thing with the Copernican system. Should we really change our beliefs just because this guy Kepler says so? So, you know, there are reasons to stick with the paradigm but when anomalies crop up, a lot of the time Kuhn says what happens is we try to rationalize them or we kind of ignore them and we stick with our paradigm. But over time, we discover another anomaly and another one and another one and eventually more and more start popping up. And we realize that, he says, the scientific community enters a crisis period. There's a crisis when we realize that the paradigm can't be right. And so what happens there, it leads to the opportunity for

someone to introduce a new paradigm. So for the Ptolemaic system, it makes these great predictions of where the planets will be. But now if we upgrade to the Keplerian system with elliptical orbits, we can get rid of a lot of the stuff that was not very satisfying with the Ptolemaic system, and we can use it to make even better predictions. And it seems to explain the observations even better. So it opens the door, these anomalies, to us rejecting our current paradigm

and accepting a new paradigm. And what happens when we have the new paradigm? We start doing normal science. We start doing puzzle solving. And then we uncover anomalies occasionally. And then we kind of rationalize that, you know, that's not whatever. Surely that conforms to the paradigm in some way

and more and more crop up. And that's the cycle continues. So that's kind of a brief overview of this Kuhnian paradigm shift, the structure of scientific revolutions. I haven't heard of Kuhnian paradigm shift. Yeah, paradigm shift. That's kind of a popular phrase, but it comes from this. Yeah. Interesting. And you like it. Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say there's actually a tie in between that and something that I talk about in

this book. In Project Mind Control, I ended by talking about the conspiracy theorists, control. I ended by talking about the conspiracy theorists, you know, that kind of this conspiracy theories that come out of MK Ultra. And one of the things I mentioned is kind of this cognitive dissonance, you know, that how is it that they're holding kind of two incommensurate ideas in their heads at the same time. And the person who coined this term cognitive dissonance is this guy named Leon Festinger. He was a psychologist. And in the 1950s, he saw a newspaper advertisement saying that the world is going to end in, you know, December 12th, I think, or 21st, 1956. I can't remember the exact date. But there was this cult. And the cult predicted that the world is gonna end on this day.

God is going to destroy the world in a massive flood. And so, Festinger thinks this is a great opportunity to try to understand human psychology. What happens when the cult makes a specific prediction, on this day the world is going to end and it doesn't happen. So we're gonna infiltrate this cult, not infiltrate, they're allowed to go in there, the cult lets them, the psychologists.

So they're in, and they're just observing these people, what happens when the day comes and goes and there's not even a light rain? They know, like they're supposed to be a massive flood but nothing happens. Is the cult going to abandon their beliefs or something else? What happens some some of the cult members do leave the cult afterwards, but the ones who have invested the most in the cult, they've given up their jobs or their families or something, they rationalize it. Yep. So they find creative ways to make it conform to, no, it's not that our prediction was wrong. Our prediction was right. What actually happened was God is rewarding us

for believing in the destruction of the earth. It's because we believed it was going to be destroyed. He decided to spare us. So the evidence against them turns into evidence for them. It can never be disproven, you know? So what's the evidence that they're wrong? Of course, it would be this failed prediction, but they can't be wrong because they failed prediction is now evidence that the prediction was right So Wow fest in your calls this cognitive dissonance. Yep They they predicted that the world was gonna end and it didn't this is the dissonance that we have these two Incommincernate ideas and how do we rationalize them? That's what the this cult member these cult members do

The reason why I bring that up after Kuhn is because it seems like with what Kuhn is saying, this is similar to what scientists do. And it's not because they're scientists, it's because they're humans. This is just what humans do. Whenever we have a paradigm, and we have these anomalies that contradict the paradigm, what do we do? We keep the paradigm.

And again, there could be good reasons to keep the paradigm, because it makes good predictions, or we have a lot of evidence for it. Should we really abandon this thing that has allowed us to know so much? But it's similar kind of psychology. So it's ironic that you have these two completely, predictions or we have a lot of evidence for it. We really abandoned this thing that has allowed us to know so much. But it's similar kind of psychology. So it's ironic that you have these two completely what we would typically think of as diametrically

opposed groups like occult and scientists. Colts isn't this like, you know, a religious fervor or something scientists aren't they supposed to be empirical and rational and all this stuff. They seem diametrically opposed and yet it's human psychology. I think you're onto something there. That is that that explains beyond just science that explains so much that's wrong in society. Now with a lot of themes we've talked about today

and I've had some really high level scientists in here been privileged to have some of them who have introduced new ideas or paradigm shift and you hear the response is basically tantamount to you're not allowed to ask the question. Does it not even like, of course you're wrong, but like not even let's look at this and evaluate if it's right or wrong. No, no, no.

Why are you questioning this? What? That's that this is just how it is. Like Claudia Duran was just in here. She's, she's brought on new ideas about gravity and broke that down. It was extremely meta, like everything she's looking at. And to her, I'm going to way oversimplify this, but the variable that she's discovering

with the effect on gravity on the universe, she's like, oh my god, it's been there the whole time. It's right there. We can see it. But the response to her bringing up this theory over the years is like, you're fucking nuts. We know what gravity is. Don't question it.

And to me, I'm like, but that's anti-science. And it also, by the way, you're saying it with science and cults. It's a concept of like science and religion, because cult is religion in a lot of ways. You are religiously a zealot to this idea, so much to the extent that you will practice the craziest tricks of cognitive dissonance

as you're pointing out to stick to this, no matter how that is shaped up and how ridiculous it might be. And when you look throughout history at what those terms are actually supposed to be, science and religion, they're both trying to accomplish the same thing. Science is trying to explain the scientific reasoning behind why it's all here and what the meaning of everything is and religion is trying to explain the spiritual meaning behind why we're all here and what it is. So it's a different means trying to get to the same ends and yet as humans we've created this trick on ourselves. It's really tragic in my book throughout a

lot of history and I'm sure you've looked at this. I think you even teach a class on science and religion but it's like we've created this trick in our minds where science and religion are opposed to each other rather than working together. That's very fascinating to me. Yeah, throughout the history of science, it's quite the opposite because most of these scientists, obviously, are religious, especially in the scientific revolution. They are mostly Christian. There is a lot of Islamic science that's going on before the 1200s, especially. But in the scientific revolution, it's in these European countries and all these scientists are religious. And there's a famous quote by Galileo. Actually, there's people who

said it before him, but he's famous. It's attributed to him mostly, where he says something like, the Bible teaches you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Wow. But there's this concept that many of these scientists have that's the idea that God has written two books. They believe that God has written two books, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature, and they both should be read. So, if you want to understand the Book of Scripture, someone like Kepler, it's kind of a little condescending. He thinks that, well, God only grants the eyesight to be able to see the book of nature to a certain select few like him, of course, you know,

the mathematicians who are able to understand the inner perfections of the geometry that God used to create the world. And then we have the book of scripture for the normal people who aren't able to understand that. But the concept is that God has written two books, the book of Scripture, the Book of Nature, or the Word and the World. And these two books cannot contradict one another because they're by God and God doesn't make errors. And so if you think there's an apparent discrepancy between them, there's something that doesn't seem commensurate, there is some error, there's some way that they don't line up. It must be that you've interpreted one of them wrong. So for many of these scientists, it's not that we can interpret the world wrong. I mean, the world is the way it is. It looks the way it is. We must be interpreting scripture wrong. So this plays a big part with Galileo.

Galileo gets in trouble with the Catholic Church. And the main reason he gets in trouble, it's not because he's saying that the earth moves. That's by proxy, he gets in trouble because of that. What the church is really upset about is he's challenging their authority by saying that the earth move, he is interpreting scripture. When the book of Joshua says that God commanded the sun to stand still, the church has interpreted that literally. Okay. The sun must be moving and it stood still. So the earth must be stationary. The sun must be moving and stopped in the sky. But Galileo is saying, no, the Earth is moving, the sun is stationary. Okay, but you just have to reinterpret the Book of Joshua.

But no, no, no, Galileo, you don't get to interpret. You know, the Council of Trent determined, who is the official interpreters? It's the Church and the Church Fathers. You're neither of those, Galileo. Who are you? So you're usurping the authority of the Church by gaining to interpret a passage? So that's the real kind of beef that Galileo and the church have.

Who are you to interpret scripture? You're just a scientist. You're just a scientist. You're just a guy looking at all of them, trying to find evidence. It's crazy to me. That gets even deeper than that. With any of these topics,

you can get really into the weeds, but the Galileo trial is an especially interesting one, because Galileo was warned about this. He's warned, you need to not hold or defend these views. You know, you can't hold or defend the idea that the earth goes around the sun. Obviously, this contradicts scripture. So the guy who tells him this, Galileo receives a verbal kind of order from this guy named Cardinal Bellarmine, who tells Galileo, you're not allowed to hold or defend these. In fact, he has a written letter

Galileo gets from Bellarmine saying, don't hold or defend these views. And that's gonna play a role in a second. Then the current Pope dies, and after another Pope or so, one of Galileo's friends becomes Pope, Maffei Barberini, he becomes Pope Urban VIII. And he kind of tells Galileo,

you know, if I had have been Pope, we wouldn't have really come down maybe as hard on that stuff. So Galileo thinks this is great. Like he's kind of giving me the green light and he's my friend. Like who's going to come after me? I've got the Pope on my side. So he decides I'm going to write this big book, the dialogue on the two chief world systems. It's a dialogue between these characters, but they're talking about, you know, the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system and which one's better. And he has the smart guy, you know, it's there's three characters in this book. The guy who's like Galileo's mouthpiece mouthpiece is called Segredo. It's called Salviati.

And then there's kind of like the middleman named Segredo. And then the Ptolemaic guy who Galileo disagrees with, he's called Simplicio. So you can kind of see like Galileo's bias there. So Simplicio gets three families. Yeah So Simplicio gets destroyed in this book. And Galileo publishes it and it starts causing a big stir. The Pope actually, one of the things that Galileo does, he puts in the mouth of Simplicio one of Pope Urban the Eight's arguments that he had made when he was Mephio Barbarini before he became Pope. And so this kind of makes Barbarini, the Pope, mad a little bit and Galileo is gonna get in trouble.

But what happens is Galileo is called before the Inquisition in Rome. He goes there and someone goes into the archives in the Vatican and they pull out this document that says, we told you, you are not allowed to hold teacher to fend this view, the Copernican, and you just publish this book and that's exactly what you seem to be hold teacher defend this view of the Copernican and you just published this book and that's exactly what you seem to be doing. You seem to be

teaching Copernicanism. That's what this book is about, isn't it? And Galileo pulls out his letter from the fail, Barberini are from a from Cardinal Bellarmine. And he says, you didn't tell me I couldn't hold teach or defend. You told me I couldn't hold or defend. You never said anything about teaching. So I'm just teaching it in this book. I'm not defending it. I'm not saying it's better than the other one." And so there's this kind of back and forth argument about who is right or not.

Eventually, Galileo recants. He says, I was wrong. The Ptolemaic system is right. And, you know, he is sentenced to house arrest, basically, for the rest of his life. Um, but, yeah. So, by proxy, the disagreement with Galileo and the Church is about whether the Earth moves, but it's really about authority

and who has the right to interpret it. Control, yeah. It's always about control and power. That's the cynical way to look at how our world runs and the truth we've been told. And, you know, it can get dangerous because then you question everything when you start to see what human beings do

when they get their hands on a place of, you know, being higher than other people. And that's not really fair because there's plenty of things that get found. And it's like, yeah, that is what it is. But then there's other stuff like, you know, maybe some of the MK Ultra things that aren't exactly what they are. But by the way, I'm seeing on the back here, some of the people you had vouch for your last book, this is insane, man. You got HW Brands. Yeah, he's like UT, you know, he's a dream guest. Tell him we'd love to get him here.

He's like one of the greatest historians to ever live. He does podcasts occasionally. I see him on YouTube. People upload lectures of his and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you read some of his stuff? Yes, yes. His one book on the Revolutionary War, our first civil war, incredible.

I mean, and he's another one, like his bibliography is insane. It's just like the guy. Yeah, I don't know. He pumps out a book a year, which I don't know how that's possible but it's like every different like Era, you know what I mean? And it's like it's dense too. Like when you read these books, they're really dense He doesn't he doesn't like I had Martin Dugard in here recently who's amazing. He writes his is like a thriller, right? He tells a story. That's like his skill. H.W. Brands paints a beautiful picture and it's entertaining to read, but it's

not written like a thriller. It's written with really, you know, examining historical fact and everything. So you're going to get the full picture, whatever that is. But he's done so many and the research is nuts. I took a writing course with him when I was in grad school. He offered a course on writing. That was a really good course. I felt like I learned a lot. That's the GOAT. And, you know, at the beginning of each course, there weren't that many students in there

because it's a grad course. There might have been six or seven of us. So at the beginning, one person would read, like, a section of what they were writing, and then we'd talk about and kind of critique it for a while. And then we'd talk about the reading for that week, whatever. But one week, he, instead of the students reading their own work, he decided, okay, I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read for y'all this time,

and we can critique my own stuff. So he read, I think it was the preface or something to the book that he was working on. It was the one about Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, the zealot versus the emancipator. He read out loud to us the preface of that and the way he spoke. I thought, oh my gosh, like, this is in a different level than what we've been hearing. Yeah. Yeah. His narration is really good too. And that is part of what makes him such a good speaker. He's very dynamic and he knows so much about the topic that he's talking about that he can, he can always, you know, find a way to

meander his way to the point. And at first you might think, oh, he's, he's going into this kind of backstory. You were asked this simple question, but then he, you know, he brings it around. I remember the weave, the weave. I remember he was giving a talk at book people, this bookstore in Austin. It was on one of his books. It was on a history of the West. I think it was. And so I went to it. I think I read that one actually. Yeah. Dreams of El Dorado is what that book was called. I think I'm pretty sure I read that. But someone asked him about the Transcontinental Railroad, I think it was. And then he went back to like the, he went back like 100 years before and then he starts meandering

his way. And by the time he got to it, I kind of forgot that he had asked about the Transcontinental Railroad. And then he said, and that's why, blah, blah, you know, like, oh my gosh, just the weaving action. Yeah. So that way, yeah, he's really good at that. Yeah, that's why, blah, blah, you know, way connected. Oh my gosh, just the weaving action. Yeah, so that way, yeah, he's really good at that. Yeah, that's amazing. You took a course with that guy. That's cool. You're gonna tell your grandkids about that.

Yeah, it was good. He's good, especially a good speaker. You know, everyone's fainted. I don't think he wants his students to take notes in class. I've been in there before where he says, don't take notes, I want you to listen to this. And so he talks and, you know, facilitates the discussion, but it was good.

Yeah, because I've looked at that in the past. He goes to a lot of events. He's done some podcasts like on zoom and stuff. He hasn't really done any major podcasts. So like in person, I'm like, that's, I mean, now we've actually got to get on this with you right after because now people are going to hear this, they're all going to try to get them in right away. But I would love to get that guy in if, if, if you know him like that, he's awesome. But also, I mean, you got Tim W Weiner, who wrote Legacy of Ashes, which is one of the all-time books on CIA here. Yeah, he's got a new book coming out on the CIA in the 20th century.

So it's like a sequel to Legacy of Ashes. There we go. I think it comes out like next month or something. Very cool. All right, I'm gonna have to check that out. But dude, this has been awesome. I gotta read this book. We've all been saying this behind the scenes.

We gotta read this. This is out. This will be out now once we put this podcast out But everyone can check it out link in the description project mind control We'll also have a link to your first book the dirty tricks department, which you talked about today But there's a lot there also with like science and religion and you're studying of that history. That's very fascinating to me We do a whole podcast on that. I know yeah, I really enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for giving me the time Thank you so much for coming up man.. Sorry you had to fly into Newark. It actually worked out. Joe put up a story this week where he's like,

the one air traffic controller left at Newark. And it's like, it's that scene from Breaking Bad, where the air traffic control guy has all the planes crash because he's losing his mind. Let's hope that doesn't happen. Let's get it fucking figured out, Nord. But John, thank you so much and congrats on the new book. Thank you. All right, everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought, get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.