Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 485: MK Ultra Part IV - App-opp-alypse

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

Diving even deeper into the history of MK Ultra, we reach the story of Dr. Sidney Gotlieb and Ewan Cameron, who pushed the Mind Control experiments into even darker, more twisted territories.

A roast as dark as the night, perfect for fueling the cryptid research and mad ravings required for your podcasting. Don't mind the red eyes, he's just trying to warn you of the bridge! The bridge! Finally, from the caffeine-addled brains of Spring Hill Jack Coffee and Last Podcast on the left, we bring you Mothman's Red Eye Blend. Yes, delicious Panama beans, go to lastpodcastmerch.com to order yours today! Hey, what's up everyone? How you doing? Ben Kissel here with Henry Zabrowski. Yeah, it's me, man!

Yeah, bro, Henry Zabrowski is smoking some of that sweet last podcast on the left, babe. Go out there and purchase yourself some. I hope you enjoy it. We have sativa, we have indica, and we have a hybrid, and I have to tell you, from my personal experience, they are wonderful. Super tasty, live resin, you really get the delicious, weedy taste, which is what I like, and three different experiences. You go to your local vape store and get it! Absolutely, thank you all so much for supporting the show. We absolutely love you. Can't wait to see you on the road and get that vape, put it in your brain, and have a good time. And if you want to set your favorite weed store, give them a call and ask for them by name.

Last podcast on the left, it's weed. Hail yourselves, everyone! Hail Satan! There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that?

What are frogs? Um, what are frogs? Not a knob. We mean what's not enough. At this point, I am now so shredded. It's an interesting question. I'm so shredded. It's very interesting. I mean, I'd say it's a valid question.

You know what's not enough. You know what's not enough? Switch the O, make it an A. An appetizer. Oh, I thought you were going to say an app. No, no, no more apps. No more apps. You can still trust a motstick, you can still trust a buffalo chicken, you can still trust a quesadilla, baby.

It depends on who's serving them to you and where you're at in the context of eating these so-called appetizers. What are we teasing? Invasion? I could actually argue that appetizers could be an app, because if you look at the quality of fast food over the last couple of decades, you can see that the quality has dropped precipitously. Therefore, I believe that it's quite possible that the American government is getting us used to a lower quality of food that will one day result in us eating cockroach cubes. They want us to live. I completely agree.

This is what's happening, and that's why we need to start changing it from appetizers to appetizers. The Oppenheimer appetizer. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, everyone. I am Ben, hanging out with Henry and Marcus. This episode is officially the most powerful we've ever done, because now I can't even trust cheese. See? We broke him. Am I still Henry?

I don't know anymore. Because if I'm just the framework of Henry, and you would never know the difference if you just had an actual sort of walking avatar version of myself, and hiding a fucking assassin. You know what the moment would be where we would realize that that's not the real Henry Marcus? Remember when we were in Scotland? We passed a dude playing the fiddle, and all of us, our knees started moving, and we just started instinctively white person dancing. I felt my racial history come through the generations. If we are walking with you, and we find out, and we pass a fiddle, and we see them knees not moving, that's not Henry, man.

Please, you better be there to pull the plug. Absolutely. Alright, everyone, let's get into MKUltra, part four. Oh, yeah. Now by this point in our series, I wouldn't blame you if the sheer amount of information we've conveyed about MKUltra is causing your head to spin. Welcome to the fucking party, alright? Fucking head on the level. Catch up.

I feel like I'm on the gravatron. So we figured it might be helpful to do a small recap of how we got to this point, and we also thought it would be helpful to address why MKUltra is such a slippery and confusing subject. Now the operative words here are secrecy and arrogance. The roots for MKUltra lay in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA that we covered in episode one. Their freewheeling style of doing whatever they felt was right, no matter what anyone else said or did, gave the CIA, let's say, an independent streak. I learned it from watching you. Whoa, man. What are you talking about?

Is that why you masturbate by pushing it in until it gets hard and then you stroke it, huh? I wish you had covered up them keyholes, Papi. Oh, man. Because I knew them keyholes were going to show me things that I didn't want to know, but I kept coming and looking. I learned from watching you. And since the higher ups at the OSS were all men of privilege and great wealth from the richest families in America. Coincidence? Mm-hmm.

I think really what it is more than that, it's a certain masters of the world arrogance that got baked into the CIA's DNA, along with a healthy disdain for people that they considered lesser than. Again, it's not necessarily conspiracy. It's just classism. It's just straight up classism that is just baked in. It is not a bug. It is a feature. Absolutely. I can just see them in the cafeteria line, looking at the cookie tray, be like, there's no raisin cookies.

We love raisin cookies. And could you please just bring back more raisin cookies? That's how you know how to get out of here. That's how you know you're a member of the black nobility is that you like raisins in your raisins in your cookies. Please God. I fucking love oatmeal raisin cookies. They're foul. The oatmeal kind of changes it a little bit.

It gives it a working class flair. So after World War II and the OSS came the Cold War against the Soviet Union in the CIA. And Americans decided that the Soviets were both an all powerful enemy with agents everywhere and an inferior state with a political belief system that no American would ever willingly choose. They got two opposite ideas in their head. Right. And while the Soviets were indeed legally clever and dangerous, make no mistake, they were nowhere near as powerful as we made them out to be. And while Soviet communism was indeed a bad idea poorly executed, communism is not evil in and of itself. We looked at them as if, and we projected a fantasy villain onto their substructure in terms of this realm of villainy.

The idea of brainwashing, behavior modification. And what we did was that we created the villain that we wanted to see in our own minds and then decided to out joust that fake villain for supremacy in the world of behavior modification when there was no competition to begin with. And of course, communism as we learned from the movie Clue is just a red herring. Also communism, it's just a, it is just a. It's an economic system that talks about like the idea, you know, which is there's things to be learned from it. It's a government system, an economic system, and in itself it is just a tool, but humans make it impossible to achieve. We're the bad ones. Also, this reminds me of the time that in the military for the Russian military, they would have parades and they would fly the same planes over and over and over again.

And the US would be like, they have to have thousands of them, but it was just the same four. Yeah. And it just kept on refilling. So, yes, it was exaggerated the power of the Soviets. They are, they weaponized show business. They really did. They really did. Yeah.

Well, since many in the American government and the American public believed in the power of the Soviets, and to be honest, the Soviets cultivated that belief to great effect. It generated a level of paranoia that led to some terrible decisions. Biggest example, the Vietnam War. But that paranoia did not just fuel foreign policy. It also contributed heavily to the projects pursued by the CIA, who, as Henry said, had come to erroneously believe that the communists, both Soviet and Chinese, had developed mind control techniques. Oh man, the word erroneous has been ruined by earnest goes to camp. Eggs erroneous. Eggs erroneous.

So, building off previous research done by the Nazis and by the OSS, the CIA began experimenting on humans in a series of projects that would fill this nonexistent mind control gap, starting with Operation Bluebird. So, you mentioned, Marcus, that don't the Nazis do a bit of what you like to do, research? Wow. Isn't that interesting that we all have something in common? It's coming from inside. I'm really starting to think he is the appetizer, and I am the entree of America. Maybe I'm not the CIA. Oh, I'm sorry, my mott sticks are done. Yeah, you know, it's a you and a Paul Pot. You both do that thing. It's called breathing. Isn't that interesting?

Isn't that interesting? I don't even know anyone named Paul, and I would never trust anyone with the last name Pot. There has to be a burlesque dancer, like a bloodless dancer named Paul Pot. Oh, my God, that's so funny. It's very offensive, but funny. And so, as the Cold War escalated, so too did the CIA's research into mind control, and with each iteration, the experiments got more intense and more widespread. Project Bluebird morphed into Project Artichoke, which itself became MKUltra.

And once MKUltra was established, the gloves were off, where he's before the subjects in these mind control experiments were mostly confined to foreign nationals, MKUltra expanded the subject pool to American citizens. Some were forced into participating while others, quote unquote, volunteered. But none had any idea that many of these experiments were tailor made to destroy their minds forever. So over the last... The variousness of MKUltra experiments cannot be understated. And if we talk...

So to sum up, the last three episodes were the rise of the OSS and the creation of the OSS using research that we purchased from the Nazis, various things, in order to start the trails into the world of a truth serum, and how that became Project Artichoke, and then it became MKUltra. And what I forget is the... I've now been reading this material for two months, and we had a call yesterday. Marcus and I were talking yesterday.

One fourth of the year. It's a lot. It's a lot, but you start to... Oh my God, I'm bad at math. Like when I was doing Alistair Crowley... One sixth of a year. I don't know. It's a lot of the years I was in.

I'm concentrating on fractions right now. There's no time for fractions right now. I'm sorry. Come on. I'm sorry. So I forget that you as a listener are not reading the same material I'm reading for two months. So I was saying like as when we were doing Alistair Crowley episodes, by the time I got to Libre 4, it all started to kind of click in my mind.

They started to kind of see the substructure that Alistair Crowley really was the master of and why I ended up kind of like gaining more and more respect for him as a thinker as the episodes went because I really started to see the structure as a whole. Same thing with MKUltra. I would recommend to you, if you really want to know what's going on, and this is not just a plug for our show,

listen to these episodes several times. Start to see the map of where the obstacles go. This is a great sire. This is real. This is real. Get your fucking yarn board out, man. Seriously. We talk about the octopus of malice for a reason.

It's because it really is difficult. Marcus is now going to explain why it's so difficult to kind of put this all together in a timeline because it's purposely obfuscated. What we need you to do as a listener is do your fucking homework and get into the shit. If you want to learn about Project Monarch, which we're going to get to next episode,

you're going to need to start doing the walk yourself to understand how you get to Project Monarch from the OSS. And that is what we're desperately trying to contain in an audio way here on the show. And yeah, Natalie walks away from me when I try to explain to her the PAS system, right? Natalie walks away from me when I try to explain how they put children in cages and then feed them chocolate

in order to rip apart their minds. Absolutely. Well, I don't understand why. I'll tell you what. You know, you mentioned homework. There is a French candidate right now who happens to be a communist who's running on a platform of no homework,

but he is running to be the leader of the country, not the leader of a middle school. Yeah. Now, as to why the subject of MKUltra is so slippery, we know for a fact that MKUltra existed and engaged in human experimentation on a large scale, but most of the CIA files pertaining to MKUltra were destroyed decades ago.

The reason why we have the particulars, however, is because many MKUltra experiments were done out in the open at universities and mental hospitals, both in America and abroad, and the results were published in dozens, if not hundreds, of scientific journals that anyone could read. The hidden scandal of MKUltra is that the CIA, and therefore the American public,

secretly paid for all of it, commissioning hundreds of studies and experiments that practiced near Nazi levels of cruelty in the vague hope that all of it would somehow add up to mind control. Your tax dollar's hard at work. Just cut to a kid, just like... Is that tying to a bed with ping-pong balls

on his fucking toilet tape to his face while he's just screaming about his mother? One of the most interesting parts of MKUltra is that these scientists would have been doing all of this highly unethical research, even if the Cold War wasn't happening. It's like if we never got an ad deal for last podcast. Yeah, we'd still be doing it.

Because very few of these scientists even knew that their funding was coming from the CIA because the money had been laundered through other agencies. In the 50s and 60s, the CIA funded projects at 44 universities, including the universities of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Denver, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, Rochester, and Indiana, as well as Harvard, Berkeley, City College of New York,

Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Baylor, Emory, George Washington University, Cornell, Florida State, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, and Tulane. Yeah, man, and it's all over the place. And then not even talk about all the various anthropological groups that took money to find out how we can... The term was international stressors. And the idea was to try to figure out what stresses out other people. What stresses you out?

Today we're going to practice tickling. Don't tickle me! Don't tickle me! Thank you! Also, don't forget all the experimentation involving crystal meth with our community colleges. I mean, that seems to be a lot of those... A lot of those brave, all the peers.

It was pretty intense. They really took it upon themselves. Yeah, I think South Plains University in Levelland, Texas, was like one of the top crystal meth research labs in the entire country, at least from 2001 to 2006. And I went to community college. I know. But because of the CIA's laundering of MK Ultra funds,

we have no way of knowing the full scope of how many universities actually furthered the CIA's quest for mind control. Nor do we know how many lives were destroyed as a result. Fritz Springmeier says over 3.5 million people were programmed to be sex slaves. Don't fucking bring Fritz Springmeier into this goddamn episode. You wait until next week before you bring that crank into this. Hey, he was only arrested for salt and robbery one time. Come on, man. Can I just have the happy meal, please?

Can we just get out of this drive-through for McDonald's? We'll go to the awakened meal, son. Oh, man. Well, for an example of how far the octopus of Malus inserted its tentacles into academia, the infamous Milgram shock experiments, in which regular people were commanded by men in lab coats to torture people with an escalating series of electric shocks, they were funded by the Office of Naval Research,

which was funded in part by MKUltra. And also what's fun is that we'll get into a little bit of detail here, is that they would fund many legit things as well. Legit, quote-unquote, not MKUltra involved businesses and research groups and all this kind of shit. Was that the official title? It's not MKUltra. Not MKUltra. Wink, wink, wink. With all the emojis.

And they would do that to buy an air of legitimacy, like, who here not the CIA? Would we talk about everybody's favorite color of Eminem in this massive campaign to choose a new color of Eminem? Would we dare? How would the CIA possibly be involved in that? Eminem is a sire, I believe. Well, outside of laundering money through other governmental agencies, though, there were men, actually, Ben, you do, I can't let this go. The man who actually created the term,

melts in your mouth, not in your hand, was also responsible for one of the very first times that an advertising campaign got involved in a campaign, in a presidential campaign, for Dwight D. Eisenhower's campaign. And one could say that advertising is what run American politics forever, which could be a part of an overall control structure that the people in charge might have put into place so we would no longer have any sort of fucking freedom

over our goddamn government ever again. Well, there you go. It's conspiracy. Branding, baby. Branding. I love when a dog meets here. I love it when you meet somebody. That was Dogby right there, he came out with fangs. Yeah, man, fucking Eminems.

You are correct. Well, outside of laundering money through other governmental agencies, there were men who were not only aware of where their money was coming from, but actively assisted the CIA in funding other MK Ultra sub-projects. One of these men was a neurologist named Harold Wolfe. Harold Wolfe? Might as well. His title was that he was an expert in the leading field researcher in pain.

In pain? In pain. In trying to leave pain. This is completely true. Correct. Just in pain. The idea of, yes, pain management, that's a part of it. Okay.

But it's also the source of pain. Like, he is a pain doctor. Wow. Yeah, that's what we're going to get into a lot on this episode, is men who know the source really well. Like, they know the negative side of it really well. And they figure that as far as the solution goes, they'll figure that out later. But you really got to figure out the source first.

We'll do it in post. All right. We'll do it live. Well, Harold Wolfe had come into the CIA's orbit when he treated the son of CIA director Alan Dulles. After Dulles' son suffered permanent brain damage from shrapnel during the Korean War. Again, that most likely fueled Alan Dulles' hatred of communism. But as Dulles got to know Wolfe, he became aware of a theory dreamed up by Dr. Wolfe called human ecology.

Basically, Wolfe believed that with a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation, one could wipe a mind clean and open it up to programming. Which, of course, was one of MK Ultra's main goals. But our minds are filled with all these pesky memories. Right. It's difficult. And skills that we've learned. All of these things.

Crew personality. You don't even know how many gigs of brain space your personality takes up. So what you really have to do is, delete it. You just delete it. And then you've got all this other room for activities. Well, it's funny. It's just unbelievable to think that this is something, and I believe it's still happening to this day, but it sounds, it reads like a cheesy horror movie.

It reminds me of this new movie, Severance, which is out now. It's just. It's not a paid plug. It's not a paid plug. No. But it's just, it's amazing that this is government funded, which should be in a Hollywood studio, but this is government funded idiocy, but taken very seriously. And is it idiocy?

Anyway, go on. Well, what we're going to get into, Ben, is that it's not necessarily as government funded as you think it is. The CIA found these guys already doing this stuff. They just gave them more money to do more of it. They got a raise. Sweet, we're going proud. Well, after Dulles found out about all this human ecology stuff, all this mind wiping stuff,

he connected Wolf to Sidney Gottlieb, head of MKUltra, and together they formed a research foundation that would appear to be independent, but would actually be a conduit through which MKUltra money could be funneled directly to physicians, psychologists, chemists, and scientists. Thus, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was founded with Dr. Wolf as the president and Sidney Gottlieb as secret director. It's also known as the Human Ecology Fund, correct, Henry? Absolutely.

And this was the legit description and the 1961 directory of the Encyclopedia of Associations. This is what it was called, what they said the Human Ecology Fund was for, to stimulate and support studies of man's adaptation to the complex aspects of his environment, conducts investigations at universities and research centers, and such subjects as psychic and physical brain function impairments, sudden environmental change on the health and attitudes of a large immigrant population, undergraduate adjustments, and ethno-psychiatry, which ends up turning into a whole thing of like, how can we control everybody? Right.

So you guys are going to put that glass tube in my p-hole, huh? Oh, just to see what it does. Yeah. It hurts, man. Fascinating. Fascinating. Wow. So they are hiding in plain sight, but with creative, intellectual language.

So maybe the layman doesn't understand that they're just saying, we're going to fuck with your brain quite a bit and see how it works. Or they just kind of wave it off. Like, oh, I guess that- That's a part of it. Yeah, whatever. That's a part of it. You guys are all dodgy.

You guys are all missing the point here. That's the problem. It's just a part of the experiments. Well, Ben, I do think you do make somewhat of a point. Like, I think when they say all these words that sound very academic and very, you know, and very impressive, I think most people just went, oh. It's interesting. It really is just like-

You pass the yams. Oh, yeah. Hot rod ring, yeah. Well, them Rams. Go Rams. They are a football team. They are perfect. Well, under Gottlieb's guidance, this organization, the Human Ecology Fund, funded dozens of MK

Ultra sub-projects, both bizarre and nefarious. In one study, they lured 100 Chinese refugees into an experiment with the false promise of academic fellowships, then tested them to see if they could be reprogrammed to return to China to commit acts of sabotage. Ben, they're all just like, what do you want? What do you want? Well, guess what will come? All of this could be-

We'll bring orange chicken there. Sure, yeah. What do you want to debilitate your entire economy? I mean, all of this could have just been done with corn dogs, man. Yeah. You guys just got to just be like, do you love them? Like, corn dogs and county fairs, that's what brainwashes people to hate where they come from.

Well, they- Butter. All butter-related things. Well, technically, yeah. Just give them butter and they'll be like, I'm never leaving again. That was their version of brainwashing, ostensibly, the North Korean and Chinese version of it was to do that. They'd be like, you could live like this where they show them a village and a supplyant woman

comes out and she just goes like, I'll massage you and you set up this scenario where like, you could be pretty nice to live over here. But make no mistake, not every MK Ultra sub-project was a large-scale undertaking with dozens of subjects being tortured and experimented upon. Other sub-projects under the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the Human Ecology Fund, included studies of the Mongoloid skull, the effects of owning a fallout shelter on foreign policy views in the movie. I mean, it does seem to make you kind of tight-lipped about leaving town.

Honestly, I grew up with a fallout shelter in my backyard and it definitely, it fucks with you a little bit when I was finally told like, oh yeah, they built that because this house was built during the Cold War and you know, Abilene is one of the number one targets for nuclear bombs, yeah, people built fallout shelters just in case, that kind of fucks with you a little bit. Yeah, I believe it. But it was also the place where my dad would store prickly pears for prickly pear margaritas. So it was a fun little, it was a fun little concrete box.

Well, very nice. He made the Cold War fun. Yes. So if there's any journalists out there listening when it comes to our new current perhaps conflict, don't give out all their safe spaces because I was watching journalists be like, if the bombs go off, they're going to come right here. They're going to go to this cathedral right here, so if you want to bomb that too. And also one more small sub-project, the emotional impact of circumcision on Turkish boys.

They love it. Yeah. That is what they found is they absolutely fucking adored it. Cut more. Cut more. Wow. I just feel like we have so many, what about cancer research? Have we gotten to that?

It was about causing cancer. Okay. Actually, it was about causing cancer, there were other projects that were not a part of MKUltra, they were just a part of American governmental research where we gave a cereal laced with uranium to mentally challenged children. How'd it go? They died. It was a success.

Wow. And that's where we came up with the worst cereal of all time. I'm just going to say it kicks. Nice. Yeah. Don't like kicks. Just fucking laced with uranium since fucking 1987. But all these small sub-projects, in my opinion, this shows just how scatter shot and piece

meal MKUltra really was. And that is part of what makes it so hard to cover and so hard to understand. Because they did not fully have an end game with any bits of any of this research. Really it was a giant data aggregation of front where they were just trying to get as much data about every single thing that could possibly be attached to mind wiping, assassination, the effectiveness of psychotropic drugs, all this type of thing. It was all just kind of seen like throwing spaghetti against a wall and see what sticks. And would you say that's because of competence or total incompetence?

Because the point was to be confusing, right? So was it competent for them to not dot every i and cross every t and put a period of every sentence? Sydney Gottlieb called the Human Ecology Fund the eyes and ears of MKUltra. So within that contra, basically MKUltra itself was supposed to be about soldiers being experimented on and trying to weaponize soldiers into creating like quote unquote the Manchurian candidate and then super soldier super spice. But the rest of this is just about like, we need to feed the beast with more information.

So this is really like, they all became guilty by association, some more guilty than others because of what they were already doing when MKUltra arrived with a checkbook. But the rest of them were like, most of the time working when having no clue that they were working for the CIA, and they were just generating kind of like these random ass experiments and just been like, okay, I'll give it to this guy with his briefcase that to who's like codename bullshit, and I guess it must be something from the university. Yeah, codename bloke, I was I was really wishing they weren't going to codename me bloke, but I am codename bloke.

I am bloke. Unfortunately, it's also hard to see exactly what the plan was because it's quite possible that the overall plan was in those MKUltra files that were destroyed. There might have been a much better plan than we think, but from what we see now, it seems to be extremely scattershot. Okay. But out of all the scientists who got funding for their insane projects from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, none fueled future conspiracy about MKUltra more

than Dr. Ewan Cameron. Can we get a lightning crash, like a thunder crash, like we need a four soundboard for that. Ewan was the pioneer of the cruelest and most damaging sub-project in all of MKUltra, psychic driving. Now, in the psychic driving process, subjects were forced to listen to continuously repeating audio messages on a looped tape in the hopes that those messages would somehow alter the patient's behavior.

This would be done in conjunction with medically induced sleep therapy and electroshocks, which all together were supposed to cure all manner of mental illnesses, most specifically the oft misdiagnosed schizophrenia. Because again, the idea is to create a green space for other people's ideas to go into, right? That's the MKUltra's, that's their main goal. The brain, the green space in the brain? Yes.

You're trying to create a little like a belt line, like people in Atlanta know what I'm talking about. They're trying to create a belt line in your brain that will then allow little shops to spring up, like one's called like, here's how to poison people, and another one's like, how to be gay for pay in the Soviet Union. You mean like, there's so many different things that you could see on your brain belt line once it's been manufactured, but in order to get there, you sort of have to destroy all the condos that are there, that are your memories.

So much like Atlanta, the Beltway, that there are the art installations, all of the different jobs that you might do, is it? But Dr. Ewan Cameron understood. We just have to break you down to build you back up. Yeah. What's the thing? Is it like, just for a little bit about the word schizophrenic, keep in mind that when we say schizophrenia in this episode, much like in our lobotomy series, we're talking

about the mid-20th century diagnosis of schizophrenia. Back then, schizophrenia was a catch-all term for everything from bipolar disorder to severe depression to actual schizophrenia. Therefore, it's hard to know whether these experiments we're about to get into were done on actual schizophrenics. Now, ultimately, Dr. Ewan's goal with psychic driving was not to create an MK-Ultra-agent. Rather, driven by ambition and a need to be recognized, Cameron really wanted to cure schizophrenia and win a Nobel Prize for it, no matter what the cost.

He believed that through psychic driving, he could standardize the treatment for schizophrenia to the point where a patient could check in at nine and check out at five with a clean bill of mental health. And much as we, when we discussed during our episodes on lobotomies and like the idea of like the rise of lobotomies, again, when you treat the human body, especially the mind, as if it's a flat tire that you can fix, a lot of times what it does is completely jack up everything inside of you, everything, because the wobbly fucking powder, the jelly that's in our brain make up every single thing that we know about the universe.

But as it just so happened, Dr. Ewan's goals dovetailed with the CIA's. Incredibly, Cameron had been performing his experiments for years before the CIA even showed up. Their starting points, however, had been the same, because both believed that their ultimate goals were completely justified. It's like when Macaulay Culkin met the old lady in Home Alone 2, and they had turtle doves. Especially when Kevin started waterboarding her with the tape of her saying, my mother

didn't love me enough, my mother didn't love me enough, that was a wild thing. But before we get into the specifics of psychic driving, let's get to know the man who created the technique, Dr. Ewan Cameron. Dr. Cameron was born in Scotland in 1901, and grew up insular and moody, obsessed with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We have a lot of Scottish Goths that listen to this show, I know for a fact that we do, and you really need to think about where you're headed in your fucking life. They're doing great.

We all have, every one of us has commiserated with Frankenstein's monster at some point. When we felt like another, separate. The only problem I had with Scotland was that one bar that had a bunch of carpet on the ground because it was disgusting. It was gross, yeah. That's the thing, Henry, is that Ewan Cameron was not identifying with Frankenstein's monster. He was identifying with Dr. Victor von Frankenstein. Frankenstein!

That's how you know you're incorrect. You should never identify with the doomed doctor. Right. He learned all the wrong lessons. Instead of taking the obvious lesson of what comes of intellectual hubris and arrogance, Cameron came to believe that there were no barriers when it came to science. Holy shit, I can't believe what lightning can do. He literally is Chevy Chase in dirty work where it's like, you bet on Mr. T to win?

He just did not understand Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at all. I feel bad for Mary Shelley if she could just be like, you mor- it's also like- She loves the fucking attention. But also, it reminds me of Catcher in the Rye with Chapman, where it's just like, you got it all wrong, man. Oh, yeah. Please don't shoot anyone because of a book or do mass experiments because of Frankenstein. Hey, no one's ever done anything because of fucking Da Vinci code.

I'll tell you what, Da Vinci code is inspired by no murders. No, but maybe they kiss- look at Tom Hanks and you kiss your wife a little bit. That's what people do. I guess. That's fucking weird. I don't like black hair long-haired Tom Hanks. I don't like that. Well, by the late thirties, Dr. Cameron's imagination was captured by some of the more

experimental scientists in the field of mental health, men who would have made Dr. Victor von Frankenstein proud. At the University Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Rome, Cameron observed Umberto Castelli in some of the first experiments in electroshock treatment. Castelli was unable to explain how or why electroshock therapy worked, but he was confident that it worked all the same. I mean, you have an idea how unbelievably difficult it is to electroshock somebody through all of that hair product.

It's a lot! Italy, it's like their brains are immune to microwaves. It really is possible. Also, what was it? The University of what? The University Hospital for Nervous Diseases. Did they all look like Woody Allen? I literally just see a bunch of future comedians.

I put the emphasis on the wrong word. It's more University Hospital for Nervous Diseases, not Nervous Diseases. All right. Okay. Well, in addition to electroshock, Castelli also strapped patients to chairs so he could spin them around at incredibly high speeds until they passed out, and in this, you really see the willingness to try anything, no matter how stupid, in the men who served as Dr. Ewan Cameron's inspiration, because they felt like, you know, because the idea is that we'll

see what it does. There's a part of me that understood, like, love is the imagination. That's like, yeah, man, spin them around, see what we're talking about, I mean, we got funding just so I can do it. But then it's just hard because people are in there. Right. You know what I mean? Like, people are experiencing these things, and then all you do is make them super confused,

and then it's like, afterwards you're like, so we've learned nothing, and you're destroyed, and then it's a guy just go like, I saw a whiskey, I could have learned like a single, like a single, single thing, like it could have been worth something in their life. It could have been. Yeah, unfortunately, you know, you're just going to have to deal with the drama. Here is a, here's some orange juice and a cookie. Well, also, you're 50 cents off your next coffee in McDonald's. Yeah, it's not an episode of Schoolhouse Rock, is it?

No, no. Cameron was also a follower of Dr. E. Gazz Moniz, pioneer of the lobotomy. We talked about him so fucking much in our lobotomy episode. You want to know more about him? Go listen to that series. But in other words, Dr. Cameron was not concerned in the least with the consequences of human experimentation, just so long as they could be justified with results of a sort. Now, even though Cameron sounds like a crank, he was actually highly respected in the field

of mental health. He served as the head of multiple psychiatric organizations, including president of the American Psychiatric Association and president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, America the early fifties, Canada late fifties. This is all during this psychic driving shit. Yes. And if you listen to his, the people that were, the people that were researchers during the same time, like the people that were all doing the same shit all around, and the way

they bend over backwards to validate what they were all doing for so long. Like I was reading, I was watching that fifth the state documentary that was like the first time all of this should have been revealed. And it's just all like, it's just guys with like weird Canadian ass scots going like, well, you know what there wasn't a reason for it. We would not done it. And you're like, all right, Canadian, you know, no, you come over here, you'll think you guys got things pretty special down there, but I'll show you how to drive.

What do you want to be doing when you're psyched? Oh my God, I'm going to die. Drive from your grave. But before being president of all those associations, though, Cameron had been one of the several psychiatrists asked to attend the Nuremberg trials to analyze Rudolf Hess in 1945, after Hess fled to the Allies to negotiate a peace treaty behind Hitler's back. Now, for some reason, studying the psychology of Nazis opened a new area of thought to Dr. Cameron.

For one, he believed that every German over the age of 12 needed to be electroshocked to, quote, burn out any remaining vestige of Nazism. I think we missed the point. That'll do it. No, electroshock, that'll do it, yeah. But his main takeaway was that he began to believe that mental illness was an ailment that could be treated like a broken bone, a one and done deal, and his theories from then on were mostly based on this hunch, because remember, it's a hunch, and that's all.

Now, by the time World War II ended, Dr. Cameron climbed the ranks of the psychiatric profession to become head psychiatrist at the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal, which was funded, of course, by the Rockefeller Foundation. Correspondence? Maybe, maybe. We'll talk about it in a bit. I don't know. I don't know.

Well, specifically, Cameron's Institute, where all of the psychic driving experiments were performed, was set up in a creepy old mansion called Raven's Crag, which, yes, it gives off a bit of that Resident Evil vibe. I'm starting to think that MK Ultra is just a fucking umbrella corporation, with creepy ass mansions all over the world. More lightning strikes, more lightning strikes, the cloud cover, you can see it all. This is where you can just see the old car pulling up to the front gate, like, oh, nothing bad could happen in there.

It's about set and setting. Damn. Now, at that time, talk therapy was considered to be the future of psychiatry. But as we know, talk therapy is a time-consuming process, sometimes taken years to see any sort of meaningful breakthrough, although it is absolutely worth it. It just takes a really long fucking time. But for Cameron, the slow pace of talk therapy was unacceptable. Remember, Cameron was after a streamlined, one-size-fits-all mental health cure.

Well, you know, I mean, that's all you need, you're not naked anymore, you're dead for your man. Well, that's the ridiculous- He was an extremely quiet, soft-spoken man. He was not a screaming- You got to get! Look at your fucking teeth! I knew this was coming, I knew this was coming, I'm cutting it off now!

Not a screaming, insane Scotsman. I knew it was coming. Well, it sounds like a screaming, intense Scotsman to me. You got to get like a couch. So basically, this is the medical equivalent of when you order a shirt and they're like, one-size-fits-all, and then you get it and be like, doesn't fit me. Because they're always extra-larges, so it's always too big or too small. It's like the Scorpion costume I bought from the Halloween town.

Yeah, it is like, oh, that fits you pretty well. So in the pursuit of this one-size-fits-all medical cure, Dr. Cameron began experimenting on patients at Raven's Crag to find a process to mentally stun them out of their afflictions. Like for example, popping a dislocated shoulder back into the socket with a swift tug. Yeah, what do I handle it here for you? Okay, you've been crying about being sexually assaulted, eh? Let's just get it, let's just pop it back in. That didn't help.

Let's just pop it back in. This is horrible. You need a care of practice. Oh my God. When his early experiments, Cameron placed naked schizophrenics under a red light for eight hours a day for eight months. What the fuck? Well, this was based on the discovery that red light promoted growth in plants and lab

rats. So he thought, maybe, could work for schizophrenics. It also cooks rotisserie chicken. What are we trying to do here? I just remembered the episode of Seinfeld with Kramer in the sun. None of them did well in that. Fourteen patients were subjected to these experiments, with results that were at best inconsistent.

Moving on, Cameron tried another experiment in which patients were placed into an electric cage and overheated until their body temperature reached 102 degrees. Yeah, what happened then? Deemed inconsistent. Oh, okay, that's just great. Some people liked it. Some people like, oh, this is like Florida. And then some people were like, this is like Florida.

I'm more of a snow bird. Oh my gosh. Eventually, though, Cameron began experimenting with electroshock combined with what amounted to medically induced near-comas, which led to the discovery of a process called de-patterning. De-patterning is one of the most. This is also why, in the next episode, we will get to whatever it is, whatever Project Marnurka is, whether it is real or whether it is fake, this is the shit that allowed all of that to grow.

The idea of destroying your personality is real. Yeah. Now, de-patterning was a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It wiped a patient's mind clear of not only mental illness, but also everything else that made them a human. Then, theoretically, the patient's psyche could be reshaped into a healthy mind with a process called repatterning. Cute.

Yeah. But, since you can't repattern a mind until you de-pattern a mind, Cameron got to work on the former first without any idea of how the latter could be achieved. Hey, man, if you don't have a pie tray, how are you supposed to make apple pie for Thanksgiving, Marcus? I guess, man. I mean, basically, Cameron's process was akin to someone deleting Windows from a computer then trying to rewrite Windows from scratch without any knowledge of coding nor any understanding

of how a computer actually works. Now, de-patterning was a three-stage process. The first was memory loss, but with an awareness from the patient as to why they were in the hospital. So, they couldn't remember the last couple of days, but they remembered why they were there. The second was a complete loss of what Cameron called space-time image. Space-time image.

Jeez. Yeah. He had a whole set of fucking jargon terms that he made up himself. In the loss of space-time image, a patient didn't know who they were, where they were, or why they were there. And they did that by blindfolding you, literally taping ping-pong balls to your eyeballs. They'd say limit your ability to communicate, which means put a gag in your mouth. They would tie you to a bed.

They would shut off all the lights and shit, and they would sit there and wait for you to not know who you were anymore. Finally, the patient would achieve a loss of their anxieties that also came with complete amnesia. That's the thrown out of the baby with the bathwater. And thus, the patient could be repatterned. But Cameron, of course, never came close to figuring that part out. Now, the most famous example of de-patterning came from a woman named Lauren G. Lauren G

had been referred to Dr. Cameron by her family doctor because her life was in shambles and she'd suffered a mental breakdown after suffering from sustained insomnia combined with an eating disorder. So, Dr. Cameron put Lauren G. on a drug cocktail of thorazine, nimbutol, secondol, verinol, and fenergan for 30 days, making sure that she was almost constantly unconscious. She was unconscious, so she was fucking asleep for 30 days. Am I wrong to get comparisons to our exorcism series where science is a new religion and they're like, well, exorcisms are ridiculous.

I don't think so. Let's center it. Let's center it. They're going to Ravencrawl. Yeah, I don't think they're incorrect. But when Lauren wasn't unconscious, Dr. Cameron was waking her up from a near coma to be electroshocked in the midst of a confused, medicated haze. Now, commonly, electroshock was done at 110 volts for a fraction of a second, once every

other day. When in Dr. Cameron's depatterning process, he cranked the voltage up to 150, shocked his patients five to 10 times for a full second each time, every session, and did two to three sessions a day. Oh, man. And this was also, like, what he also pioneered was putting a little, like, turkey thermometer inside of their belly, so when you hit him with a private amount of volts, it pops up and shows that they're done.

Is that true? No, no, no, no. You could tell me anything right now and be like, this is what I'm saying. I mean, you never, yeah, he's like, ah, it sounds like he's, like, in spinal tap, like, turn it to 11, but it's not music. He's torturing this board. Did you see him? What's going to happen?

Oh, man. Now, after a month of this, Lauren G. found that her anxiety had indeed receded. Oh, yeah, she wasn't anxious anymore. Really? No. Yeah. But what else had receded was everything that made her a person, meaning that Cameron had achieved full de-patterning at the cost of Lauren's personality.

She had to be retodd how to use the bathroom. She had to be retodd how to walk. She had to be retodd how to communicate. She says, in this very harrowing interview I saw with her, she talks about how, like, she opens up a family book and she's like, I know these are my kids because someone has told me that these are my kids. But she doesn't know. I don't remember their birth.

I don't remember any of these memories. Like, she's going to stuff, it's like, just fucking Dana Carvey'd her from Clean Slate. Clean Slate. Yeah. I got it, baby. And with this, we bring ourselves back to the goals of MKUltra. We're back. Whoa, great.

Now, this wiping of a personality was exactly what the CIA was looking for because it was the next step towards creating agents that could carry out missions without any knowledge of what that mission was. And what this story here is, is a direct example, because in our series for MKUltra, right, the last couple of episodes, we've just been trying to show examples much like the way the John Marks book did and the Poisoner-in-Chief book did, right? Sydney Gallup, yeah. Yeah.

We're just showing examples of, like, this is what we, quote-unquote, know about MKUltra, these scenarios, where this is how the mechanism works, which is now that MKUltra is active and moving, it's that they are going to bring Dr. U. and Cameron under the fold of the Human Ecology Fund so that they can use whatever the fuck it is that he's already been doing as a hobby for the U.S. government. And what they can do is they can take the research that he's done and they can direct it in the ways that are useful to them. Is the theory to make someone to wipe a brain so they could be the best operative possible?

Is it like Johnny Depp in the movie Blow or is it like when you're carrying five gallons of cocaine through the airport, you have to pretend like you're not, right? That's the idea, of course. That's the basic idea. That's one of the tenets. Where it's like if they don't, if they are too ignorant to understand how severe the consequences are for what they're doing are, they'll do it. Oh, yeah.

Partly. Yeah. Partly. And another part of this is that they could use it to erase memories of missions undertaken at the CIA's behest because from what Henry was telling me, the CIA had and still has a bit of a retirement problem on their hands. You can't retire these guys. You can't retire them.

What do you mean? They go on MSNBC every day. They are continuing to be CIA officers. What? No. Henry, it says X. It says X. They are never retired because guess what?

If they're retired, and I believe this, if they are actually retired, they're not talking to you. They're not talking to a camera. They're not anywhere talking about this shit. Most of them die in obscurity. Like now, you have any emails I've gotten from people who talk about their grandparents or somebody being involved in this type of shit? The real guys don't talk about it.

The ones that are talking about it are still on some level shape or form employed by the CIA. What are you talking about? My grandpa didn't talk about it at all. Oh, oh. Son of a bitch. Oh no. Oh my god.

Damn it. You did it again. Now, it's difficult to pin down exactly when the CIA became aware of Dr. Cameron's work. Cameron's de-patterning experiments began in the early 50s, but Cameron did not accept any MK Ultra funding until 1957. Cameron had, however, run in CIA circles since World War II, and in fact, one agent remembered that Cameron was one of the few non-CIA men who attended CIA parties. I just like the little cocktail hot dogs.

Yeah, those are good. We also know that the CIA laundered money through other organizations, and as we said, the Rockefeller Foundation funded Cameron's Institute from the start. Extrapolating from this, it's hard to say that it's merely a coincidence that Cameron just happened to be doing work that lined up perfectly with what the CIA was hoping to accomplish with MK Ultra. But if we look at the human element here, it could very well be that because Dr. Cameron and the CIA hung out together socially, these parallel ideas might have come from simple

shop-talk at parties. And that is the mechanism of what conspiracy theorists could call the quote-unquote secret government, the idea of an entire covert government that does things underneath the auspices of the United States quote-unquote government, the idea of what they would do, and that all of these decisions are made something like, you know, we want to get into Bohemian Grove, where it's just a big gay, everybody sucks each other's dicks party, right? Like, that's really what it is. But while you're sucking Richard Nixon's fucking cock-and-balls-

Well now, why do we have to do it like that? I'm just saying- Why do you say it like that? While we're all hanging out and doing what we did. But you are going to make fundamental decisions about things that these various organizations do, but you're doing it off the record. I'm doing it outside of the buildings where you'd have your conversations recorded, where you'd have to put them in the various minutes of the various places you work within the

government. The two words that are said the most at these parties that follow some of the most nefarious conversations of all time are- More punch? Yeah, like seriously. What's more punch? Yeah, we're going to invade. We're just going to have an invasion in Cambodia.

More punch? More punch? I mean, it's not even necessarily people making decisions. So what are you working on? And it follows from there, you know? I mean, hell, this fucking show came from conversations at parties. So many things come from like drunken conversations, and then you fucking wake up the next day, barely remember what you talked about, but still have that little inkling of an idea

in your head that you fucking run with. That's why you guys seem to leave your houses more, because you never know what comes out of just hanging out. Oh, you have to hang out. It might just be MKUltra, but it might be an improv group. It could be. In which case, get out of it. Get out of it.

Man, I'm getting- It's a good tool. It is a good tool. We use it every time. I'm using it right now. When Alan Dulles of the CIA and Sidney Gottlieb, head of MKUltra, when they learned that Cameron's experiments were bearing fruit, they gave him funding through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and put him in charge of MKUltra subproject 68 in 1957.

Did that make sense? Was that clear? Yes. I mean, if you want to look at money funnily, if you want to look at money funnily and look at the NRA, for example, they're a classic money laundering organization. It happens all the time. The Lincoln Project, there's a lot of stuff out there that is anything where it's like, I'm giving you money, but then I don't see anything tangible, all of that's called money

laundering. Was think tanks. Yeah. No, it's a think tank. Yeah. Now, as I said earlier, Dr. Cameron had already been doing these experiments for years by the time the CIA showed up, and what the CIA wanted from Dr. Cameron was for Dr. Cameron to do all of his experiments all over again, but this time for the CIA.

Oh, my God, what, we're on season two? We're on season two. No, no, this is a reimagining as if the first season didn't happen. So this is the female Ghostbusters. It's a recoil. Okay, great. Yeah. Awesome.

And it's just as infamous. It is. Fantastic. Well, mostly these experiments for the CIA focused on psychic driving, which was developed for years before the CIA came on board, so let's go back to 1953 and cover the evolution of psychic driving before Dr. Cameron even heard the words MKUltra. So everyone, we're all on board. We're right here.

We're in 1953. Dr. Cameron's not working for the CIA. He's just a man that's trying to find a cure for schizophrenia and doesn't care how many people he has to kill to get it. And as we describe psychic driving and what he does, these actual processes are the actual processes that will be lifted and used by the U.S. government in order to, which I am now, I am kind of swung to the other side to actually hypnotize people to do various shit.

And it just kind of depends on the severity. I do not believe that it is possible in any way whatsoever. We will both go on record. That's our belief system. I'm just now, I am, huh, huh. Yeah, because you've been reading that crazy fucking Fritz Havamiyer book for the last fucking... Fritz Havamiyer, don't you dare.

He'll come for us. Mom? Dad? I just, can I... You've been in life for an hour and a half. This is the problem too, is I got these emails like from people that are professional hypnotists too and the way that they kind of talk about it, because I'm going to bring it back up.

I'm going to bring this back around. Because they need job security. Of course. They have to say to me. I know. Big hypnotism is huge out there. No violence. Look at you.

How easily you flip. From never trust a magician to... I got all these emails from all these professional hypnotists that really sound like they're on the ball. And this one guy... I feel like I am losing my mind. And he made such an impelling case, I gave him $10,000. Henry, you were scammed, man.

No. All right. I ain't no flopper, because that's what they call them guys very easily hypnotizable. Is that right? 1953. Now, the seeds for the psychic driving concept were planted when Cameron was in the middle of a talk therapy session with a young woman who was recounting a traumatic sexual relationship that she'd had with her father.

Fascinating. Oh, God. Oh. See, Cameron liked to tape sessions for posterity, but during this session, his patient said something that was highly traumatizing to the patient, but fascinating to Cameron. So Cameron rewound the tape and replayed it for the young woman, then he did it again. And again. And again, until finally the patient fled the session in distress.

What is more difficult than hearing your own voice for the first time, and then especially in this scenario? He actually addresses that in his paper. He said, that's actually the most traumatic thing for most people is to hear their voices played and because it's an alienness of we don't, you don't ever hear your voice the way other people hear your voice. So it's like you actually finally hear yourself talking to yourself. Absolutely.

But instead of realizing that he'd done something wrong, Cameron decided that he discovered something worth pursuing here. He thought that since the patient reacted to the playback so viscerally, then whatever she'd reacted to should be exactly what he should focus on. I don't know. Basically this realization linked with his theory that mental illness could be treated like a broken bone. In effect, the traumatizing statement was the broken bone.

And if he could heal these deep-seated emotional wounds with a kind of psychic surgery, then he could conceivably cure their mental illness. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. Ba-da-boom, ba-da-boom. Get a guy who comes over here, he ain't sad, no more wants to give him a little more mental spaget. You know, maybe charging, maybe charging her father with rape would have helped to get that man incarcerated or something like that.

And that's where Dr. Her, you and Cameron accidentally stumbled into Scientology, which is an entire science, a whole wing of Scientology, which is ideas that you numb yourself to the trauma, that you just say the trauma again and again and again, because that is what, when you guys are spoke, when you go do, um- Calis. Your emeters? When you go do emeters, when you go to do all of your fucking, your sessions, it's all about you no longer having an emotional reaction to you saying something traumatizing.

I mean, who else did it? Keith Ranieri. He's also the same thing that he did with their test sessions. So you're allowed to have emotional reactions to trauma. It's a part of grief. No. Coping with it. No.

I will not. I built a strong wall. Yeah. But there's no, no. It's okay too. We're all suffering. Seems resistant. That's mean.

Well, as it was, Cameron was about to develop nothing more than a technological lobotomy, removing personality with sustained torture in lieu of cutting out the cerebral cortex with a scalpel. And like lobotomy, he needed a catchy name to sell the procedure, and he settled on psychic driving. Now, a simple form of psychic driving was first used on a manic depressive woman in June of 1953. Cameron conducted and recorded an initial interview, then edited the recording to find

key phrases that could be played back to maximize disturbance in the patient. Get the gun. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Oh yeah. Fucking Ozzie. The point, Cameron figured, was to desensitize the patient to her own trauma, which would cause her to lower her defenses and allow the doctors to identify and reorganize her neuroses.

So after editing the initial interview, Cameron rejoined the woman and played back her own traumatizing recollections, mostly involving her mother over and over and over again. On the 11th playthrough, she cried out that she hated the process, which to Cameron was a revelation. He made the assumption that because the patient resisted, he was moving in the right direction. By the 19th playthrough, the patient was crying and trembling, saying that she hated the sound of her own voice. By the 30th, she was hyperventilating, moaning that she hated her mother.

At 35, she simply started shouting, I hate, I hate, over and over again. At 38, she begged Cameron to stop, and finally at 45 playthroughs, she was reduced to a whimpering mess. And with this, Cameron wrote in his notes, he had successfully penetrated the woman's defense system. What are we doing here? And in his notes, he would always next to her name, he'd write T.F.U., which was his scientific, is it scientific adjudication that she was totally fucked up?

Well, that's kind of what he said. In his paper, he said that what he thought, he did have an idea of, quote unquote, repatterning of what he thought would happen with this specific branch of psychic driving. Is that he thought- But he didn't build her back up at all. Well, he thought that basically, we start like this, and then you start to come around. Like what we'll do is truly make you numb to it, and that eventually you won't feel it.

And that the reason why some people are hyper-resistant is the various reasons, all of his other bullshit, we calling them weak, saying that like they couldn't handle it or they weren't ready. And so that's why he needed to add other things to rope-a-dope your personality to get it ready to be less resistant. And that's when we start the torture. That's when we start the torture. I feel like we're kind of, this is just fucking being tortured by your own podcast. The only problem was that Cameron felt that he needed to go further with constant repetition

over sustained periods of time, days and weeks, months and years. But that wasn't feasible in a hospital setting. In addition, sitting in a room himself and playing a tape over and over again got him no closer to the streamlined mental health process that he was after. But he did discover a solution, and it came in the form of the cerebrophone. The cerebrophone was a device consisting of a speaker that could be placed inside a pillow connected to a tape containing foreign language lessons. Supposedly you could listen to this tape night after night while you slept, and eventually

you'd just wake up one day knowing Spanish, learn why you sleep. One of the most nefarious uses of the cerebrophone was when you two put their album on it without telling anybody. And then they made us all listen to it. Oh my god, it reminds me of Garfield when he taped all the books to himself and he said I'm learning through osmosis. Yes, I remember that bumper chicken. Now this was a really stupid idea that didn't work at all.

But the technology of replaying a tape through a speaker in a pillow opened up new worlds for Dr. Cameron because that meant that he could play messages for his patients on a constant loop as much as he wanted without anyone being present. This is great. I get to be like Jim Jones. Also, what you could do is put someone to sleepy time for a very long time and put that little speaker right under their head while they're doing sleepy time. And so eventually, as they've been asleep for a month, they'll start you'll put thoughts

into their head while they're asleep. And Cameron needed a lot of help in setting up these experiments. So he hired an Englishman with a cockney accent and no formal medical training named Leonard Rubenstein to essentially be Igor to Cameron's Dr. Frankenstein. Yeah, really? Someone's got to be. He's a writer. I suppose.

Tall and thin, Rubenstein wore a lab coat and walked around Raven's Crag delivering one-liners and an impression of Groucho Marx as he sidled past heavily sedated patients pissing themselves in the hallways. Hey, how you doing there? I wouldn't have belonged in any club. It would have me as a member. I see you pissing yourself. Well, that's kind of fun.

Let me taste it. That's an apple juice. I don't need this. I don't need a patch, Adams. In there. Well, why not? A bit of a synchronicity there. I watched Duck Soup for the first time yesterday.

Really? A classic satire of government and war. So check out Duck Soup if you haven't seen it. What a good plug for an ancient film. Yeah. It was maybe before World War II. Well, eventually Cameron's Igor got his own Igor in the form of a Polish-born engineer with no medical qualifications named Jan Zelinski.

It's Jan. We are going down the Russians. It's fucking Jan. We are going down the Russian doll of Igor's, so now each one's going to get more Igor. Yeah. Yeah, it's a task rabbit. That's what he is. Well, in a way, Zelinski was the creepiest one of all.

He rarely spoke, and he peered at patients with huge, owlish eyes. Just having bulk and muttering as you're sitting here, like, wondering whether or not you're fucking not schizophrenic anymore. I mean, like, I was pretty mad about the Marlins losing last week, and all of a sudden, you know, I've been lobotomized, all of a sudden, I'm here, I'm being driven everywhere, which is kind of a... I mean, it sounds like, oh, you have a fear of jump scares, huh? We're going to put you right here in this haunted house.

Seriously. And it sounds like this place would make you insane if you went in without any medical issues whatsoever. Yeah, Jan Zelinski just sounds like fucking riff-riff. Well, I mean, the things that the people that went in, like I said before, like, when I say schizophrenic, I'm going by the mid-20th century diagnosis, meaning that a lot of these people were in there just because they were going through a bout of depression, or because they were anxious, or because they were bipolar.

Postpartum depression is a big one. Postpartum depression is a huge one, yeah. Now once Cameron began fiddling with the psychic driving process, he found that he got better results if the messages played to the patients on a constant loop were custom made and recorded by Cameron himself. Cameo. Now, these messages were targeted, and each one was recorded with a specific goal in mind. The first set of messages played to the patients were known as negative psychic driving sessions,

in which the patient would be tortured by their own neuroses. Oh, man. This is an example of one of those messages recorded by Dr. Cameron for a patient named Madeline. Madeline, you let your mother and father treat you as a child all throughout your single life. You let your mother check you up sexually after every date you had with a boy. You haven't had enough determination to tell her to stop it.

You never stood up for yourself, against your mother or father, but would run away from trouble. They used to call you crying Madeline. Now that you have two children, you don't seem to be able to manage them and keep a good relationship with your husband. You're drifting apart. You don't go out together. You have not been able to keep him interested sexually.

Is this from Cosmo? Oh, man. I hate this new season of serial. It just begins to feel like you're being gaslit by commercials. Over and over and over again. That same message over and over and over again, weeks, months. But while many of the messages were long and specific, some were short and more general, but no less maddening.

One said, you are an angry person. You are angry at the doctors. You are angry at the nurses. Why are you so angry? Is it because you hate your mother? No, it's because I fucking hate you, man. Get out of here, dude. Get out of here.

Get me out of here. I want a mod stick right now. Give me a mod stick right now. Seems to be resisting. But how brilliant is that? What? Because it turns it around, because of course these people are extremely angry at the doctors. They're extremely angry about the nurses, but what they're doing is they're fucking

with your reality. They're showing you that you're not angry at them, you're angry at your mother. It's turning it inward again and again and again. It's just comedy. It's torture. You just flip the thing at the end. It's just comedy. It's very simple.

And naturally, the patients didn't want to listen to these messages over and over again, because it was, in effect, torture. Therefore, they made every effort to avoid them. But Cameron had a particularly cruel method to get around this avoidance. He developed a football helmet with speakers wired into the ears, which would be locked onto the patient's heads. So they had no choice but to listen to Cameron's messages day in, day out. Somebody's getting the talking hat.

Oh, I don't want the talking hat anymore. This is horrible. I'm not Aaron Rodgers. I'm not a football player. This is awful. Actually, that's where I got the idea. He got the idea from football, from coaches giving plays to quarterbacks. He's like, oh, that's perfect.

Yeah, not quite in the earphones yet, but yeah, all right. Yeah. Cameron also discovered that if the recordings were modified to sound like bad radio reception with varying pitch, tone, and volume, the patients would involuntarily listen more attentively. Literally resident evil. Oh my god. Shit.

It's patterning. It's weird, man. Right? I mean, they've done this on purpose. Of course, man. The only thing that would be cool if you actually got Bill Cooper or some cool AM radio stations and you can rock out to that. Some of those people might have done VO for the MK Ultra and not know.

Who knows? Yeah. Now, when the patient sedation wore off while they were wearing these helmets, they would often bang their heads against the walls to try to break the helmets off, but to no avail. In response, Cameron would put these rowdier patients into drug-induced comas where the helmet would be left on, playing messages endlessly for up to a month. God, that is horrifying.

You are an angry person. Yeah, you're fucked up. You are angry at the doctors. You are angry at the nurses. Why are you so angry? Is it because you hate your mother? Oh my god. Again, you're an angry person.

You're angry at the doctors. You're angry at the nurses. Why are you so angry? Is it because you hate your mother? You hate your mother. I don't even remember who she is anymore. But after Cameron decided that the patient had enough of the negative psychic driving, the tapes were switched to positive psychic driving, which would go on from anywhere between

two and five weeks. Here's an example of a positive one, which I think tellingly is a lot shorter than the negative one. Oh yeah. You mean to get well. To do this, you must let your feelings come out. You know, it is all right to express your anger. You want to stop your mother, bossing you around, begin to assert yourself first in

little things, and soon you will be able to meet her on an equal basis. What if I just choke you to death? You will be free to be a wife and mother, just like other women. I'm going, I don't know which one I hate more. Yeah, I don't know. Just like other women. And then, I knew that would be your reaction too, didn't I? I knew that you would find them both equally distasteful.

Yes, because the thing about the mean one is, at the very least, you can be like, no, like, fuck you, and then this, I want to strangle, strangle. You have an opportunity to be a wife and a baby factory. Yeah, you're going to fucking sell me a timeshare as well. Now, while psychic driving was the stuff of nightmares and nothing to be proud of, Cameron promoted psychic driving in Canadian publications like Weekend Magazine, referring to the technique as beneficial brainwashing. Like I said, all this is out in the open.

Oh, and you're going to want to read that over the weekend. Ah, you're going to want, that's not during the week. That's a week. Weekends for the stock market. Now, as far as where psychic driving occurred in Raven's Crag Mansion, most of it happened in a dormitory of 20 beds kept in semi-darkness, terrifyingly called the sleep room. Man, can we just call it like fun time big room? Just something that can...

I think that's worse. Like, you don't like the positive messaging. If you called it like, like, bongo's fun hut and that's where the psychic blade destroyed you. It's something that I could laugh with or add or something. Each morning, nurses would enter the sleep room to dispense hundreds of pills and inject hundreds of syringes into patients, most of them strapped with psychic driving football helmets.

Oh, man. Some had their helmets removed for bouts of electroshock, while others simply took it lying in their beds as their psychic driving tape repeated itself from a speaker inside their pillow. After that, the sleep room became a gallery of shuffling zombies wearing football helmets. All of them oblivious to anything except what played through their speakers. You go, you want some water? You want some gum?

You crazy yet? You remember everything? Oh, we need to keep you in the helmet a little bit longer. Yeah. You're right. But you're some skittles. With any luck, they'll learn how to be a wide receiver or an offensive lineman. If only.

Yeah. Football? Probably. It's Canada. I think at the time they were doing, this is before the CFL, right? Yeah, way before the big fields kind of. Sometimes patients would be taken out of the sleep room and placed in the isolation chamber. Oh, man.

Now, this was a padded prison cell, the classic rubber room built to, quote, remove the patient from their distressing surroundings. Yeah, like chairs. I'm so distressed by having a table, a toilet. I'm just so distressing to me to have a point of leave. See Cameron believed that sometimes mental illness was caused by disharmony between a patient and their environment. So he would place patients in the isolation chamber for weeks, months, sometimes years.

All while recordings, sometimes of their own voices, were played back at them. And we will see how this directly influenced things like the Cubark interrogation manual for the CIA and understanding that the first thing you've got to do is strip a POW of any single thing that would remind them of who they are as a person. So you have to strip them down, you've got to shave their head, you have to fucking hit them with the hose, and you've got to put them in a room with no stimulus because eventually they begin to unmore in a way that allows you to manipulate them more easily. Now, as far as who was in charge of the sleep room, that task was left to Cameron's egos,

Leonard Rubenstein and Jan Zelinski. They came in and out of the room at all hours to change tapes or put helmets on uncooperative patients, but neither man had any grasp on what it was they were actually doing. Rubenstein was said to walk in and hit on the nurses in the sleep room amidst a torrent of awful jokes and bad impressions, punctuated with self-amused laughter. As a nice butt, it'd be a shame if something happened to it. And remember, he's got a cockney accent as well, and he's very loud and laughs really hard at all of his jokes.

This is just the 1950s, so all of the parents of these people are just like, well, Barbara is getting her help at the hospital. Oh yes, very much so. And Barbara was just cut to Barbara wearing a fricking football hoodie and screamed at by a hacky hugo, by a hacky Marks brother. Because she just probably expressed dissatisfaction with being a wife and a mother. Zelinski, meanwhile, almost never spoke and just walked into the room to observe everything like, as one of the nurses put it, a barn owl.

That's a lot. Now after Dr. Cameron began to receive MKUltra funding in 1957, his work with psychic driving began to reflect the goals of the CIA more and more, because he was then doing experiments at their request. Specifically, the CIA supplied Dr. Cameron with LSD, and Cameron began adding unsupervised acid trips to the psychic driving torture. No, no, no. If you research anything into what's called crypto hypnotism, right, like this idea that

like... That Matt Damon commercial? Yes, yes. You got him. You got him. There we go. I'm back. I'm back.

But the idea of like, this is really where the twain come together, because what they have discovered is that what you can do is make someone highly susceptible to any form of hypnotic messaging by dosing them without their knowledge with a psychedelic. Like it really helps them to dissociate from who they are as a human being, especially if they don't know that they're taking it. And then what you do is you do that where like, in my mind, you can kind of see the direct correlations to how something like an operational setting working with soldiers where you do a version of talk therapy with soldiers where you interview them.

You'd probably, we say talk therapy, they mean interrogation, they go in, they find out information about our boys, right? And then they use their specific settings in order to create a kind of a comforting frame in order to hypnotize you using your own voice. I would have ground my teeth into my gums. You have a football helmet on, you're hearing your own words, and you're tripping on acid. It's a lot. That is horrifying.

But Ben, I remember one time, didn't you trip acid and like listen to roundtable episodes for like seven hours? Yeah, but I have a football helmet on. Yeah, he didn't have a football helmet on, he couldn't, he couldn't laugh down melanin. That's slightly different. Also, roundtable was quite funny and humorous, and the only person that laughed at their own jokes was Eddie. He, he loves his jokes.

It wasn't Igor. Well, by 1960, Dr. Cameron was moving on to sensory deprivation techniques, building off the work of Dr. Donald Hebb. We talked about him last episode, but unlike Hebb, Cameron was trying to find ways to use sensory deprivation specifically to irreversibly scramble a person's brain. That was on the request of the CIA. Oh my God. For this, Cameron had a simple box built behind the hospital, and he kept a 52 year

old woman inside that box for 35 days. From then on, she was called Tupperware Tanya, and no one knew where she got the nickname from. I have no idea. What the hell was the point of this? Ah, well, he followed that with comatose sleep therapy, then rounded it out with psychic driving for 101 days. According to Cameron's report, quote, no favorable results obtained.

You're just going to have to put another TFU next to this. Here we go. Oh my gosh. I could have just told him that was going to happen before the experiment. Perhaps inspired by the work of Sidney Gottlieb, Cameron also got into the poison game, proposing a sensory deprivation test to the CIA that involved a poison called curary that paralyzed body functions at low doses. Simple paralysis experiments were done on patients with this drug, most likely with

LSD. But again, no favorable results. Nothing fair. Okay. I would also like to point out, we haven't really even said that we haven't gotten to the woo-wee-woo territory. We're going to get into that a little bit more next episode, but this idea that constantly diving into the subconscious, maybe even the collective unconscious with these barbaric

systems of just torturing us, I think it could have affected like everybody. It could have. Yeah. I think it fucked us up real bad. Yeah. You moved the gravestones, but you didn't move the bodies. I feel like somebody's been fucking pissing in the collective unconscious and it just fucking pops up everywhere.

Seriously. Either that or it was all the lead. Can it be both? It can. It can. We have. There's room for everyone in my house. Exactly.

Is it a dinner without an appetizer or a main course and a dessert? No. I don't think so. Appetizer. It all goes together. So by 1963, the CIA had come to conclude that Dr. Cameron's research wasn't giving them what they wanted. So the grants from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology stopped and the CIA cut ties

with Cameron completely. So Cameron began begging for funding wherever he could, but by the next year, he very suddenly resigned. Perhaps not so coincidentally, his resignation came immediately after the Canadian Psychiatric Association adopted the Helsinki Declaration governing ethical rules for medical research. You know something's wrong with your practice when you have to stop after that is passed. Oh yeah. Then you realize you'll be like, oh, I feel like, I really think it might be, I think

the temperature's changing. The therm's gonna hot. Gotta put a wrench in what we're doing here. Within 24 hours of Cameron's resignation, all deep patterning and psychic driving projects were shut down. His laboratory was closed and dismantled, and all of Cameron's methods were banned in Canada. Four years later, Cameron died of a heart attack, having answered for not one bit of the torture

he'd caused hundreds of people. There you go. Sometimes a heart attack is a good thing. Hey, sometimes it's a nice warning to make sure you change your diet. Yeah. Oh, that's a good point too. Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, I'm taking it back.

It would have been nice if there was some justice. Yeah. And some of his patients did get a payout years and years later. $100,000 each. And the sad thing is they delivered it inside of a football helmet. And I just feel like, why trigger them like that? Why trigger them? I don't need a gift package.

Most of them, however, most of the people in that lawsuit weren't able to get payouts because they weren't able to prove that they had been a part of these experiments because they don't know. Of course not. They're messed up, man. They destroyed the records. They buried the whole fucking program. I can't prove where it was on Super Bowl Sunday.

That's a mistake. Every day you should take a picture with yourself next to a newspaper every day so you know. You've been somewhere. But notice that I said that Cameron's techniques were banned in Canada. Even though Cameron's depatterning, repatterning project had been a bust overall, his legacy was felt in the CIA for decades after in both experimentation and interrogation. Using Cameron's research, the CIA rebuilt Cameron's isolation chamber at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda, Maryland for one of the more bizarre experiments of

the Cold War, Operation Resurrection. Yes, it's sweet. Using bogus radio techniques created by Cameron's assistant, Leonard Rubenstein, scientists adapted radio frequencies so that radio energy could be beamed directly into the brains of disturbed and violent animals. Hank the tank. Oh my god. It's a fucking victim of MK Ultra.

We should talk about this. Hank the tank. It's possible. He has been weaponized. Re-hank the tank, okay. The animals were then decapitated. Then their heads were transplanted onto the bodies of other animals to see whether the energy from the radio frequency could bring the animals back to life.

This is what they did to Sarah Jessica Parker's character in Mars Attacks. I can't believe this is the CIA funded this. I guess I can't believe it. Did it work? No. Oh what? If it didn't work, how do you explain Martha, my goat wife? Yeah, that's right.

She's also part dog. Head of a goat, pussy of a woman, body of a horse. Doing that then. You tell me she's not real. Of course. That was mostly done on monkeys. It was a monkey experiment. Oh monkey.

Breathe him alone. Concerning monkeys. Let's take a quick side quest into monkey experimentation, shall we? Oh do we have to? I just a bit. I don't know if you're... They should have figured out... I'll tell you what, they should have figured out how to use weapons if they didn't want

to be experimented on. Well... I put it on them. I victim blame. I've seen some footage of use. It was very funny. The CIA also tried enlisting the help of a doctor named John Lilly, who had devised a method of connecting electrodes directly into a monkey's brain.

Through this method, Lilly discovered the parts of a monkey's brain that caused pain, fear, anxiety, and anger, and he could activate those centers through electrodes. Famously, Lilly connected an electrode to a monkey's orgasm center, then connected the other end to a button that the monkey was given control of. Monkey thereafter pressed the button at least once every three minutes for 16 hours a day. That monkey knew it was good. I actually... This is my pussy wet button?

Yeah. That was fucking huge, man. I was that monkey. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Got my boners rigor. This guy, but John Lilly also famously would go on to have sex willingly with a dolphin. That is true.

That was him? That was him. John Lilly was a man with... That was him. Hold on a second. Wait a minute. He fought outside of the box. He was a very creative guy.

What do you guys talk about on your phone calls? On your phone calls? Because Marcus's reaction to that, and then he went to fuck a dolphin, and he was like, yep, that's right. What are we talking about here? He's an interesting guy. I just knew a bit of the history of dolphin fucking. Give it also.

Let's not forget that we should still be shocked by it. Otherwise, we just end up like the doctors. That's that bone leaf in the harbor. With my sanity and my taste. There it goes. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. It's never been there.

By day, he makes monkeys come, and by night, he makes dolphins come. Jesus. The thing is that Lilly, the CIA wanted Lilly for mind control projects, but Lilly insisted that all of his work remain unclassified, which made the CIA think about him a little suspiciously. So Lilly wasn't actually a part of MKUltra, although they wanted him to be a part of MKUltra. But that doesn't mean that the CIA did not use his technology. In 1968, American forces anesthetized a group of Viet Cong prisoners in Saigon and implanted

tiny electrodes into their brains through a hinged flap that they cut into the back of their skulls. Oh my fucking god, it's Dr. Satan, man. It really is Dr. Satan. When the prisoners awoke, they found that they had been placed in a room filled with knives, and scientists behind a fucking one-way mirror observed and pressed buttons connected to the implanted electrodes for a week because they thought that they could activate the violence and aggression centers in the men's brains and make them kill each other.

When all it did was give the prisoners a massive headache, they were all executed by Green Berets. That is just such an example of our foreign policy and what we do. Like it's just such an example of American thought. It's really fucked up to just think that you could do all of that and then just kill them. And also to think that this started with jerking off a dolphin. You know what I mean, like that's where it started, and then it ended in that.

Yeah, so we're in 1968, so in 1953, we're football helmets, someone's screaming in the ear and by 1968, we're testing this on human beings. It's just horrible. Well, concerning Dr. Cameron's work on humans, though, the CIA tried continuing his experiments and spent $700,000 on research at Georgetown University. There, they tested whether Cameron's psychic driving techniques could be replicated on the mentally challenged and terminal cancer patients. Leave them alone.

They could not replicate. Learning nothing, Dr. Cameron's research was replicated and used again during the Vietnam War, when doctors attempted to use deep patterning to change the political views of Vietcong prisoners. After three weeks, they ended up killing every single one through thousands of electroshock treatments. Got a little impatient. We could have brought them to America and just given them like McDonald's, like the OG McDonald's.

And they would have just been like, this is incredible, we'll just stay like, they could have just brought them to like, they could have brought them to beautiful sunny California and like put them in a convertible and shit like they could have done a lot of things. They could have just brought them in Arby's and Arby's could have popped up over there. I mean, this is, I mean, American culture. This is when, this is before we realized all that we have is culture as an export. And that's what we should have done. And weapons though.

Well, yeah. And our versions of little government and our versions of little dictatorships, we create those too. We are wonderful weapons dealers. The CIA also tried deep patterning and psychic driving on a KGB defector, starving him and playing a cacophony of sounds through earphones for up to 23 hours at a time. All while they injected massive amounts of amphetamines, barbiturates and LSD into his veins.

He liked it though. Got it. These KGB guys, these KGB guys are hardcore. Look at Putin. They like this type of shit. They like the, because then it kind of feels like now I'm KGB. Now we can come. Yes.

Now we can officially ejaculate. Now all of this, I'd describe it as absolute fucking bonkers to say the least, from the monkey driving to the push button violence to the monkey head swapping, saw weird shit going on here. But those experiments were but one part of the widespread MK ultra experimentation that occurred during the 1950s. Yeah. Cause this shit's also got to go wide.

You're still talking about POWs, mental patients, like people that are now like, they're niche and they are highly vulnerable and they are what they could get, right? They are what they could get. But what they also understood inherently, the main like crux of MK ultra is that it needs to work in the wild. It needs to work out there and with little control, like it needs to be able to work. So what can we discover if we just turn our sore on eye onto us? So this is still, this is just a long, this is just a long spring training.

They haven't even played the game yet. Well, this is, this is the real, the groundwork for them eventually going live with it, I guess. And they never truly went live with it, not necessarily, but what they did do was open up experimentation to the general public with Operation Midnight Climax. This is the famous one. And honestly, it's wild. I'll get, I guess that's a part of it too, is that with the re going through this topic

is that it really is that and more just like re checks me and just how wild this time period was and what the fuck they just, what they did. Like it's, it's just, oh, wow. All right, what's Midnight Climax? Operation Midnight Climax was an extension of the project started in Greenwich Village by former narcotics detective George Hunter White. Remember him? He was the menacing bowling ball with the massive appetite for sex and drugs that we

discussed in a previous episode. Yeah, he's the fun guy. He's the cool guy. He's the guy in the know. He loves spaghetti. He's a fucking big fat piece of shit. Right, right. So in 1955, George Hunter White had taken a promotion that moved him from New York City

to San Francisco. So Sidney Gottlieb saw an opportunity to create a new safe house where the program would be extended from just LSD dosing to LSD dosing combined with sex. No, it's the sexual component that I think is why conspiracy theories also went fucking crazy because they started to understand that the true vulnerable spot of a human's life is right before and right after you fucking come in a bed that you think is secure. Right? Like it's this thing where people willing to open themselves up in a way that you might

take it might take months to psychically drive them to this point of vulnerability where sometimes if you, you might never see a guy fucking cry until you can make him shoot. I don't know what kind of sex you're having, but that's it. No, absolutely. They're most vulnerable. Thinking himself highly clever, George Hunter White himself named this undertaking Operation Midnight Climax. It's how you know it sounds like a fucking orgasm.

I get it. Thank you. It sounds like it's an orgasm. It's pretty on the nose, don't you think? Fuck you. Okay, I'm just saying. What is this? Fucking the New Yorker?

You want me to come with you? I'm not the New Yorker. No. I should be like, uh, that's what Ukraine said. So you're just going to make people come right around midnight. Yeah. Damn. Got it.

Thank you. So he opened his new safe house at 225 Chestnut Street on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. As author Stephen Kinzer put it, this apartment was decorated in bordello chic with pictures of can-can dancers on the walls, red curtains, and large mirrors, scattered amidst a selection of porno and 1950s sex toys. Ironically, Chestnut was how most days ended. This is the New Yorker. We'll put in a little comic, put a little comic, come all over someone's chest.

That's what Ukraine said. Yeah. Oh, that's what they are. In addition to massive amounts of acid, the apartment was also well-stocked with liquor, and George Hunter White could often be seeing, quote, drinking from a pitcher of martinis while sitting on the toilet. That's the guy who's in charge of the CIA operation. He's drinking, see who he where the boss is.

He is drinking a Marg, eating chips on the toilet. Not a Marg brother. He said a martini. Martini. So he was drinking, that is just vodka. Yeah. He was just drinking a pitcher of straight vodka. I feel it.

I feel it. It's a martini. Look, that was not. The pitcher part of it is what eliminates the martini part of it. You can't just drink a fucking olive and be like, it's a martini. It's like, no dude. No. That's a martini.

Oh, that's funny. So it got Leib's direction, White put together a team of sex workers who would bring clients to the safe house. There the Johns would be dosed with LSD or any number of other drugs before sex, all while the CIA recorded every moment. In essence, the goal of Operation Midnight Climax was to study how sex and combination with drugs could be used not to make men talk against their will, but to see how much information a man would voluntarily let loose after he blew his load.

I trust someone who has been water boarded more than a man before he has come during You know you never know sometimes you get caught it's like the guy fucking when the one tactic they used to do is like When you're fucking you get him real hard and be like So we're going to Russia next week Wondering if we can trust the information received from a man pre during her post orgasm Assisting white in the recruitment of sex workers was a former military intelligence officer named Ike Feldman Feldman paid each woman between 50 and a hundred bucks for every John they brought in and Provided a get-out-of-jail-free card printed with whites phone number that could be used in future bus

Honestly, not a bad gig. It's not a bad gig. It's great to be here, but uh Like I kind of kind of want you Do you think you want to oh you want me to be the one of the first girls? Now after watching a fair amount of these poor dopes having sex through a one-way mirror Ike Feldman was a man. Ike Feldman was amazed with how freely men spoke about anything and everything under the influence of drugs After sex to him it got to the point where he was almost convinced it was preferable to traditional interrogation He said quote if it was a girl you put her tits in a drawer and you slam the drawer, right?

If it was a guy, he took his cock and he had it with the hammer And they would talk to you of course, but now with these drugs you can get information without ever having to abuse people Oh, well, honestly this it could be totally Utopian with this is literally just we just jerk you off. You tell us the truth Man, that would have been a nice scandal as opposed to what we have You have to remember this is also being you're being dosed on without your knowledge. So that's the other thing too It's not just post not clarity. It's like you have been there's either aerosol They would spray literally acid into the room because she would go like she'd have a waiting for how did the where she

Don't not get messed up. She'd go into the bathroom And then they dose the dude or she would have a hyperdermic needle and she would slice it through the cork Of a wine bottle and squirt LSD into it pour him a glass say I'm gonna go clean up He goes drinks and all of a sudden he's driven. That's the that's the movie. I want to see oh, yeah I'm gonna see the sexgales doing all the CIA work now white and Feldman arranged for these sex workers to stay with clients for Hours afterward and they immediately observed that having a sex worker stay after sex boosted the man's ego It's much like how an exotic dancer will tell you that you're not like the other losers who usually come in here Because they're just trying to build you money

No, Ben you're not like the other I'm not talking about you you're not like the other losers who go in there It's not you. No, I don't meet you have just become the sex worker All I do is I heard I'm not like the other boys Mine comes up being like you're different. You're different Well, this is an ego boost and white and Feldman found that it made the subject feel Vulnerable and the longer the sex worker stayed the more this guy felt like he was a big man The more he felt like he was a big man the more he wanted to prove that he was a big man And how he proved that he was a big man was talking about his fucking business. Yeah, but also exaggerating correct

So sure. Oh, yeah, there's mixed of all of that intelligence in general though That's just like I mean that's well the thing is about is that it's trying to find the kernels of truth It's basically finding leads like you're just asking you're having this guy talk about and then you check on the lead And you see where else that leads you so going off the success of the first San Francisco safe house They opened up another in Marin County that was nowhere near as fun as the one on Chestnut Street In the second safe house Sidney Gottlieb head of MK ultra and so-called Poisoner-in-Chief provided George Hunter-White with stink bombs sneezing powders and

Diarrhea Inducers to be tested on unwitting John's did we all just get into a time machine and make this as if we met in Seventh grade. Yeah We're gonna do to miss this kills dog man. I got stink bombs, bro It's all like Tom Green remote bits. It's like what they did to people where you'd go in because that's the thing too This one is like you think you're about to have awesome sex But instead of the LSD kind of makes you all loose and fun She puts a poo-poo fucking drug in your wine and then you spend the rest of it But you're re-enacting the scene from dumb and dumber

She's gonna be like so we're like through the door. So where you're gonna be in Russia next week while he's Oh, I really can use 4TB Gottlieb's compounds would be introduced with such fun CIA spy toys as drug-laced swizzle sticks the ultra thin hypodermic needles that Henry mentioned And glass capsules that released stinky dinkies when they were crushed underfoot Faw eggs Stinky-dinky-o-o-o Watch the intro of the past But it is

That's my Manchurian candidate. Like that is what I'm gonna start. Yeah Must kill the queen even though she's been dead for three months. Apparently she might be. She's fucking yeah Well, these dosings in San Francisco, however, weren't just relegated to safe houses In 1957 a deputy marshal named Wayne Ritchie attended a Christmas party at the federal building in San Francisco In attendance at that Christmas party was George Hunter White and Ike Feldman They're not just doing this shit on johns. They're doing it on whoever they feel like fucking with After several drinks, Wayne Ritchie became disoriented grabbed his two revolvers And left the party for a bar in the Fillmore district there

Ritchie inexplicably aimed his pistols at the bartender and demanded money in an lsd haze Stopping only when a customer knocked him out from behind Ritchie's sudden madness was baffling because remember this guy is a deputy marshal Marshal he pled guilty to armed robbery although the judge let him off without prison time He spent the rest of his life in a depression and didn't put the pieces together as to what happened to him until he read a story about lsd dosing 22 years later sound familiar. Wow Now sydney gotlebe's motivation for operation midnight climax are to say the least suspect According to Ike Feldman gotlebe was quote

cock crazy Yeah, and the safehouses gave him ready access to sex workers, which he would regularly visit and never pay We'll build the government. You gotta pay We'll build the government Oh my god That's literally your tax dollars hard Hard and is cock hard at work Furthermore Ike Feldman remembered sydney gotlebe having sex with george hunter white's wife in the san francisco safe house

while white was passed out on the bathroom floor And according to Feldman this happened many many times This is really where you see how an unhinged it had become and just how Fucking like we keep using the word slapdash and like all this like just how Little they were even like thinking about the how was gonna come out like no one gave a fucking shit Like they were just now Living the they were all living in the the fantasy roles that they had created for themselves It reminds me of I well I forget where the reference is from but it's like you're so fucking dead

And you don't even know it yet. These guys were just in the middle of it, right? Yes, they have no clue what they're even thinking. This is also stupid and crazy and Horrible. Yeah, but the safe houses were scaled back in 1963 following a report by cia inspector general John earman, which strongly suggested closing both the san francisco and new york locations by 1966 Both were gone completely Now it seemed like the good times were coming to an end for mk ultra But not without a fair amount of assassination attempts And that my friends is where we'll conclude our series on mk ultra next week with fidel castro

The creation of 60s counterculture and exactly how mk ultra came to be public knowledge as well as of course Kathy O'Brien. We're not gonna skip her folk. Don't worry. Oh, yes, we're gonna talk about Kathy O'Brien Maybe a little bit of candy jones. We're gonna talk about whatever project monarch is whether what did what the fuck that is If that's even closely resembling what mk ultra really was or it's if it's just total fanfiction Uh, it is you know, this is a lot and it really sits up mk ultra frame mine, baby That's what you got to get yourself into you want to fucking get on my level you want to figure out what any of this It means you got to just give up reading things for pleasure and only consume mk ultra content for a period of time

And it'll it'll affect things kind of like Tammy from 600 pound sisters or a thousand pound sisters been like you want to Die like me for a day. I don't know if anyone wants to get in your headspace, Henry I meant hey man It's helping me see a little bit more clearly hold my friends a little bit more dearly and understand And we are a part of a fucking a pop up a list and an apocalypse of ops And we are just the center of I love it. Well, this is thick if it was a book It would be a they would call it an old they would call it a bible blister They would smack a blister with it and pop remember that I had one on my head

We um had more um, I think we've used more sources in this series than any other series that we've ever done trying to put Together the storyline. Yeah, and then yeah, I think we used three more books on dr. Cameron today Uh, we'll post them somewhere, but yeah, I'm gonna do it. I want you to also Yeah, and I want to put up all of my evil books so you can guys also see what I've been yep All of the information came directly from the pentagon. So you can trust us in no way Is this also an opp? All right, did you say app opholips? App opholips. Yes

I tried opholips I didn't write that down. I came up with it. That's all we do Thank you all so much for listening. Um, all right. We hope you're doing great out there We're gonna be in chicago and we can't wait to be inside of chicago So we will see you early march. You guys have those dates next week next week next week It's happening very quickly. I can't wait. Also check out the z2 comic book Also, check out soul plumber number five is out in the stores right now It is released and thanks to everyone who listened to our w episode on serious radio open lines

Thank you all for calling in. We have a really fun topic for you this next monday. Oh, yes Yes, we do. We will be out there yet monday 4 p.m PST 7 p.m EST faction talk 103 come and join us as we're gonna talk to you live. Let me hear and we change our voices Oh, yeah, we start doing more of a sluggo. I'm going sluggo It's like kevin and the bean. No, we're the exact same as always. Yeah faction talk 103 serious xm radio this monday 7 p.m Tune in ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna have a wild time Check out the let out get the letter

We are the exact same whether we like it or not and keep on supporting all the shows here in the last podcast network Oh, we're keeping you up to date on what's going on the best weekend with the top hat and of course you have a new um You have a new uh, no no dawg coming out It's coming out soon as a word, but we're still it's under wraps, but it's coming We're about to record episode two uh next week So we're we're about to start getting released an episode once you got a bit of a backlog I hope you love a five-parter on Steve winwood

My go-to is all right everyone. Thanks so much for listening Hail yourselves Be safe out there Hail seed. Well, and how game y'all and open up again My goose deletions. Steve winwood man. Hail Steve winwood, dude. Yeah, sure. Why not? I hope he didn't beat his wife or anything right? I don't believe Steve Oh No, no, I don't know. He's working. He's out to her right now. Okay. Yeah

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