The Joe Rogan Experience - #2183 - Norman Ohler

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Norman Ohler is an author and screenwriter whose books include "Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany," "The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis," and "Tripped: Nazi Germany, The CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age." www.normanohler.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. My website, joerogan.com, is powered by Squarespace, and it has been for a long time. I choose it because it helps us build something that looks good quickly and honestly just works. From cutting edge features like the Blueprint AI guided system and SEO discovery tools that help people discover us, buy products and stay in touch. Squarespace makes it easier than ever to build the exact website you need. Check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash joe to save 10% off your first purchase

of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Being an MMA fighter takes a lot of different skills. You need to be strong and durable and quick and if you really want to be good, it helps to master all different kinds of moves from different types of sports, from wrestling, boxing, jiu-jitsu and more. Having that mix of skills is a real help in the ring. But that's true for any job. If you're hiring, you probably know just how valuable it is to find people with a mix of skills and specialties.

A great place to find those people is ZipRecruiter. And right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash rogan. ZipRecruiter can help you find qualified candidates fast. More importantly though, when you find a strong candidate you want for your team, it can connect you with them right away. With ZipRecruiter's pre-written invite to apply message, you can personally reach out to potential hires and even encourage them to apply sooner. In the fight for top talent, ZipRecruiter is undefeated. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to ziprecruiter.com slash rogan to try ZipRecruiter

for free. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash rogan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Joe Rogan podcast, checking in. The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. There we go. Pleasure to meet you. I'm very happy to be here. I'm actually quite thrilled. I'm quite thrilled to have you here.

This is your book. It's called Tripped, Nazi Germany, the CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. First of all, how did you get involved in studying this? Well, this had a lot to do with my previous book, which is called Blitz, Drugs in the Third Reich. And I mean, the Nazis were really into math, basically. They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can change the war effort. They basically doped their soldiers. So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitz and also I spoke about Hitler's consumption,

which is quite outrageous actually. And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives because I'm not a historian. I usually write novels. I started out writing three novels and then suddenly I became a non-fiction writer. I was trying to understand what does that mean and I thought it meant to do historical writing to actually go into archives and look at original documents and not just lean on other books, which is what many historians actually do, which I found out later. They just read books from colleagues and then make up their own shit. To actually go into the archive is very time consuming, but I thought everyone does that. Actually, no one does

that. So I was looking at all the archives and at one point I was in the archive of the memorial of the concentration camp of Dachau. So a very serious archive because they host like all the documents what the SS did in Dachau. So a very serious archive because they host all the documents what the SS did in Dachau. So it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at, because they wrote down everything, like every experiment the Nazis did in concentration camps was written down because it was like pseudo-science. So I found documents while I was researching Blitz relating to tests with psychoactive

substances and that was like that was not what I expected because the Nazis have been you know enthusiastic about methamphetamine but I'd never that was the first time I saw like something that related Nazis and psychedelics and I thought that that's quite strange that's quite interesting obviously I need to get to the bottom of this. So I asked the archivist, can I see like all the documents, what did the SS actually do with psychedelics, which ones did they use, why did they test them, what were they looking for?

And he said, well, I'm very sorry, but all documents are in America because when American military liberated Dachau, one of the things they do is they take a lot of documents and they took all the psychedelic research done by the Nazis with them. So I knew I had to go to America, probably to the National Archives in College Park close to Washington, biggest archive in the world, find it there. But I didn't have time while I was doing Blitz. And Blitz was also already a complete story. So I thought I save that, that psychedelic theme for another book and this other book is now being published as tripped. Wow so before this you'd had no

understanding that the Nazis had used psychedelics you know you only knew that they we all know that the meth thing and we've seen Hitler at the 36 Olympics where he's rocking back and forth or he's looking jacked out of his mind. I mean the joke about Blitz is that I was actually the first one to write about this. I mean now we all know about it but before that no one knew about it. Before 2015 when this book was published in Germany, the Nazis were still seen globally and also in Germany as this like pure movement that was like I spoke to my grandfather when I was a teenager and I was you know obviously criticizing him for his involvement. I wanted to know what did he do and he did some shit and then he always said

under Hitler everything was in order like he praised that law and order aspect and that law and order aspect of the Nazis obviously doesn't correspond to like a drug-using society. So no one knew that the Nazis were taking drugs until I found out, until I found documents for Blitz. So I was not surprised to find more and more stuff what they were doing with drugs. But then I was surprised that they actually also used psychedelics because psychedelics were totally new, you know. 43 LSD was invented.

So it was kind of, I really was wondering whether Nazis are already getting their hands on LSD, which was just so new that probably anyone in the world knew about this. So this is the story of Tripp. So Hoffman, he synthesized LSD in 1943. Correct. Right. So was there any evidence of anyone using something similar to LSD before that? I know they've studied some of ancient pottery from Greece and they found ergot in it. And ergot which contains a very similar compound to LSD.

Well, ergot is the alkaloid of the fungus which grows on rye. So LSD, from ergot LSD is made basically. So actually LSD is not a synthetic drug, as many people believe, but it actually is based on a fungus extract, which grows on rye. And the Swiss company, Sandos, they produced only ergot-based medicines.

Like they started after the first World War. It was like a startup. Sandos was a color manufacturing company and they made a lot of money after the war because everything had to be rebuilt in Europe, stuff had to be repainted, so companies that made paint made a lot of money, so they invested in a pharmaceutical branch. And they hired one guy to kind of come up with an idea how to make money in the pharmaceutical world. This guy was Arthur Stoll. He later became the CEO of Sandus. And Arthur Stoll was the first one to crack ergot because this fungus is quite poisonous actually. In the Middle Ages this created mass hallucinations in

Europe. Unwittingly people were eating like contaminated bread, were having horrific visions, actually limbs fell off because this ergot is a very very poisonous alkaloid but as we know from Paracelsus the dosage makes the poison so if you that was Stoll's idea you take a very poisonous thing the ergot and you extract like you you're still able to use the force that's within it as a medicine. This is how biochemistry that's basically the foundation of biochemistry, that's basically the foundation of biochemistry. So Stoll was able to crack the ergod and the first medicine he made was a migraine medicine, which came out I think in 1923 by Sandor, very successful,

so he immediately hit the jackpot. He became like the ergod god of the pharmaceutical world. So he developed more and more medicines with ergod. One of them for example is still used today when in childbirth it contracts the blood vessels after the birth so you can stop a bleeding. Otherwise I guess bleeding would go on much longer in childbirth. So Sandos made the first effective medicine because ergot kind of makes the blood vessels vessels contract. Yeah. Weren't they trying to develop a drug to induce labor when they initially created LSD?

Yeah, this is all the ergot kind of research. I mean the whole company was just doing ergot. So they were looking at all kinds of things that ergot could be good for just to, you know, have new products on the market. So an er ergot before I mean this is a company based in Switzerland which is now Novartis something like the fourth biggest pharmaceutical company in the world or something I mean a very successful company still they bought Sandoz and now it's Novartis but it's it's kind of the same thing so Sandoz at one point needed so much ergot that they started manufacturing

it in Switzerland. Like they went into a specific region called the Emmental which was famous for its cheese and it's also famous for its bad weather. So mold grows on rye anyhow so they thought this is the right area to industrialize the ergot manufacturing, like the growth of ergot, and the farmers were like, we're always trying to get away from the ergot, the ergot is poisonous, and suddenly they had to make it, and the Swiss company paid 20 francs, I think a kilo, 20 francs a kilo,

and rye was only like seven francs a kilo, so the farmers switched to basically producing poison, and then I mean not poison but a very poisonous mushroom you could say like a fungus like you don't want to eat this thing you know you don't want to that was the problem you harvest rye you make bread out of it and then there's like a little bit of ergot because on some of the of the of the rye ergot grows and then the bread is poisonous that was a problem in the Middle Ages. So farmers don't like it. Now they had to produce it and suddenly

Sandus in Basel, Switzerland had huge amounts of Urgot in their storage and they needed to make more and more products to use the raw materials that they had so expensively produced in the Emmental. So Stoll hired further chemists. One of them was Albert Hoffman, the famous discoverer of LSD. So he was not looking for a mind-blowing drug or anything. He was looking for actually a stimulant because this was late 30s in Germany, Nazi Germany, a stimulant that was made from the nicotine acid, nicotine acid diethylamide. No, it was actually a Swiss product, but from another company. Nicotine acid diethylamide was, I don't know the brand name, it had a brand name, it was quite successful medicine and

he thought if I take lysergic acid diethylamide, lysergic acid being the acid within the ergot, maybe we'll also have a potent stimulant. But they didn't, they weren't looking for a stimulant actually for the mind, they were looking for a physical stimulant, like something like Pervitin, like meth, like something that keeps you going. I mean this was, this was at a time when stimulants were, you know, sought after. They didn't have coffee like we have today, we just go, we drink a coffee in the morning. They didn't really have that. That's why methamphetamine was so successful in Germany because you could just, you know, buy it anywhere and you take a tablet in the morning and it's

like drinking, like being on coffee the whole time, you know. So the stimulant was what he was looking for. And then like something came into his bloodstream. It's a it's a it's a bit You know he tries later He tried to make it a bit mythical sounding like somehow the substance got into his bloodstream And he felt like weird sensations and different he saw different color So he thought this is actually a very different type of Thing like what is this lysergic the acid diatomide LSD, what is it? So he did then a first self-experiment, which was kind of normal at the time. He took a

very, very low dose, what he thought, 250 micrograms. But as we know today, that's actually quite a high dose of LSD. So he had an extremely strong experience and he told us to stall the CEO. He said, I just took this like 250 micrograms. I mean, this is a Swiss chemist in a Swiss lab and suddenly he's like full on tripping. He tried to get home somehow. His assistant like brought him home on a bicycle. He was at his house and the wall started, you know, collapsing onto him and the doctor came and he said to his doctor, I think I'm going mad, I poisoned myself, I don't know what's going on. The doctor was like feeling his pulse normal, like eyes normal.

Like on LSD you don't have a strong physical reaction but you have a very strong mental reaction and the doctor just couldn't see it. And before actually Hofmann had tested LSD on mice at Sandors and the mice also didn't show anything because you can't, they didn't like run around excitedly like if you give mice cocaine they're like, you can see the difference but if you give them LSD you can't see it because you can't get into their mind. Maybe they don't even have a trip because they don't have a conscious like us but certainly on humans it works very potently and so he communicated this with his CEO and then CEO was like I don't believe you I think you made a

mistake with a dosage then they repeated it and then they actually created at Sunrose and I think this is kind of funny if you picture like a conservative pharmaceutical Swiss company in the late 40s in Basel. They created an intoxication room, like they made a nice room within the company. They called it Rauschraum, Rausch meaning intoxication in German. And Hoffmann said, I had a very strong Rausch with this stuff. I don't know what this is. So they invited like secretaries and bookkeepers and chemists and people working in the cafeteria.

They all could come into this room and take LSD. Like the secretary is actually sitting there typing what they would relate and they all had a great experience. That's the funny thing because they had never had any bad... Today when we take LSD, we have so much discourse about LSD in our mind automatically. They didn't have that. They just took a strangely named substance like LSD-25. They took like 50 micrograms and they wrote down, I write about this in trip, like for

the first time I feel connected to my human, to my fellow human being. Some looked out and saw the clouds and had ideas about connectivity and how we are part of the universe. These kind of hippie, LSD thoughts that we classically associate with, they had them very purely, they just had them, so this was all noted down. And then they were thinking, and this was in 1943, imagine the situation in Europe in 1943 it's at the height of the of World War two people are dead injured traumatized so they they thought at Sandus maybe this is gonna be like a blockbuster you know we give this then they tested it also on sick people in a in a hospital in Zurich.

They gave it to a depressed patient. I also studied these reports, like a depressed Swiss farmer was chronically depressed. He takes LSD and he took it like three times and they released him out of the psychiatric ward because he was cured. He was good. He said, I'm fine. I'm not depressed anymore. So, Sandus really thought they had a blockbuster, they thought this is LSD is going to be the big thing. And the big question of obviously is what went wrong, you know, that is what interested me in Tripp, what happened, because also why I researched LSD and I had been interested in LSD for a long time, but then I decided to write a book and I researched itSD and I had been interested in LSD for a long time but then I decided to write a book and I researched it and I found a study by a company called Yellousis,

which is an American company, their name referring obviously to the Greek ritual, and they had done low dosage tests with LSD on Alzheimer patients and they found that the very same receptors that Alzheimer degenerates and kills, these receptors are being stimulated by LSD. So their study, which are then discussed with a leading Alzheimer researcher in Germany, and he also is looking at this white paper and he said this is actually quite good. And I said, so when is it going to happen? He said, well, this is a bit more complicated than you think, you know, because LSD is illegal. It's not even this in America, I guess you have like, universities can do research. But this is also a new thing, you know, when Nixon illegalized LSD in 1966, all the research was illegalized. So couldn't even research whether it's as dangerous as, you know, the government said it would be. So let me just finish this thought.

I bring this white paper to my father because my mother suffers from Alzheimer's. And I'm saying to him, I'm writing this book, as you know, and I found this and shouldn't we have a look at this? Because he takes care of my mother and he's quite frustrated that there's no potent medicine available to him that his doctor basically says, sorry. And he's a former judge. He was quite a high judge in Germany. He sent people to prison for drugs. So for him to even consider giving an illegal drug to his wife

is a big leap for him, but you know he's a rational thinking man so I looked at this white paper, he studied it and he said you know what, in court when I was in court as a judge I always, you don't know what is the truth, but you know what is a good story, like a credible story. That's how I determined as a judge what I believe. If someone tells something that rings true to me, and right now I'm having a study that LSD is helpful, but also I'm having the law that it's illegal, can you please find out the true story now? What is LSD? Why is it illegal? So from that point onward, I did the law that it's illegal. Can you please find out the true story now? What is LSD? Why is it illegal? So from that point onward I did the research that is in tripped which was supposed to be called LSD for mom actually

That was my working title for the book and I think it's a better title. That's a good title Yeah, it's a great title. So LSD for mom. That was mine I was who picked tripped to the editors picked tripped my German editor Didn't want LSD for mama, which is the German translation, which I think is the perfect title. It's even better in German, LSD für Mama. He somehow convinced me to use a different title in Germany and all the, you know, this is translated into many different countries and they always go to the German.

If the Germans would have called it LSD für Mama, it would be called LSD for Mom in America, LSD pour Maman in France. But because in Germany a different title was chosen, the Strongest Stuff, which is a little bit different in German, der Stärkste Stoff, then every country was like thinking how should we call it. And I guess they called it Tripp because of the success of Blitz they wanted to have. But I think LSD for Mom is a better title. I like it.

Yeah, it's great. Because it's true, you know, I was then really researching for my father and my mother and I came back after all this research with the Swiss company and the Nazi connection which we'll come to I guess in a second. I came back to my father and I presented him this story and then he decided to actually try it because he said, I understand now that LSD is not illegal because it's dangerous that there are different reasons why it's illegal and these different reasons are explained in Tripp. So we gave, we spoke obviously to my mother also because you have to get consent.

So she gave her consent and she started using LSD once in a while, you know, not chronically obviously, but like twice a week or maybe the next week only once, only low dosages and my father also took them. He never felt anything because of microdose you're not supposed to feel a trip or intoxication. It just works in your brain. But my mother actually did feel it because her brain is attacked by Alzheimer's. So for her, that was like her cheeks became redder. She would look at us. One time we also then did mushrooms, which is a very similar

molecule, actually psilocybin is very similar to the LSD molecule. On Mother's Day we gave her a little piece of mushroom chocolate and she took it and there was a newspaper on the table and she hadn't even looked at newspaper as an object of desire for her for about a year, my father then later told me. And she picked up the newspaper when the chocolate was working and started reading the headlines and my father was like, this is a medicinal miracle. My father's really like a rational skeptical guy, you know, but it was amazing. So that is also what I write about in Tripped AK LSD for Mom.

It's so fascinating there's so many people suffering from Alzheimer's in the world and it's illegal basically everywhere except for countries like Portugal that decriminalize everything. But yeah. I mean dementia is like the pandemic of the future if I want to use that ugly word pandemic. But to not allow our scientists to examine this properly. For example, in the pandemic, a lot of, during the pandemic, like regulations in regards to developing medicines, a vaccine especially, were lowered because we wanted, the government, the society wanted a vaccine quick.

But so this is what has to happen with psychedelics now because we are moving. Like in 2050, I read the numbers, they're also in the book, like a lot of people will have dementia. Like we will all know someone or we'll have it ourselves or it's going to grow exponentially or at least a lot. So I think our society should actually shift its focus towards preventing that because when I spoke to the Alzheimer expert he said, yeah, of course you could prevent Alzheimer if you would know how to stimulate the brain. And so far by 2050 153 million people are expected to be living with dementia worldwide up from 57 million in

2013 2019 rather largely due to population growth and population aging Don't they believe that Alzheimer's has something to do with diet as well. Isn't that what they're calling type 3 diabetes? Yeah, and I think it could be true. I mean, the reason for Alzheimer's, you know, you have to see it separately from the cure, you know. The reason, I think, I've come actually to the conclusion that sugar is quite bad for you. And I was quite a sugar addict. I really was. Like, I could not put down a bar of chocolate. I could not eat one piece.

I just couldn't because I love it so much. But then I just realized it's not good and I stopped it and it's actually possible to stop. I eat now like a little bit and it's actually no problem. So I think, well, there's a few reasons for dementia. One is also the so-called neuroinflammation of the brain. And that could be caused obviously by sugar, by imbalances in the sugar diet, I think. And the inflammation of the brain, and that is scientifically proven, is being decreased if you take psychedelics.

So if you take psychedelics, every time you take psychedelics, your neuroinflammation goes down. So that is something that needs to be examined. Maybe we should all take maybe once a week a low dosage of let's say LSD or psilocybin. Maybe we could prevent like 50% of dementia. I think it's quite plausible and I think not to look into it is not very smart by society because the costs of dementia, I mean the human costs, my father suffers quite a bit. My mother, obviously she has the disease, she suffers, the family suffers. If someone in the family has Alzheimer, the whole family suffers. And of course our medical

system is very expensive to treat dementia, like put them in homes, whatever. So I think we're making a big mistake by not examining this. Absolutely. Well, it's just a stunning amount of ignorance on our part. All the at least anecdotal evidence of the positive benefits of some of these things, particularly in microdose usage. Well, it's just not a focus of politicians. Like, to legalize drugs has not become a very popular meme among politicians in the 20th century. This is also what I examined in Tripp. I kind of looked at where did it actually start? Where does this prohibitionist approach come from?

Because it's kind of weird. As a child, I watched Star Trek. It was an American TV show even on German television. It was called Raumschiff Enterprise in German, like Spaceship Enterprise. And I was always very touched by the beginning when they say boldly go where no man has gone before. Like that was for me the American, like the Western philosophy to always transcend where you are. And that totally contradicts our prohibitionist policies. It's like a chemical wall that the government is setting up in our brain saying like, you

can go this much with stimulating your brain, but you're not allowed to go further. Like you're not allowed to use LSD, which does stimulate the H2TA receptors. I think it contradicts the Western philosophy and actually also I think it contradicts the idea of democracy, which I always was hot for. I grew up in a small town in West Germany which was actually occupied by American forces so I was very much connecting with American culture early on and I always associated Western culture with freedom and transcendence and boldly going where no man has gone before. That is for me the strength of the West. This is for example not what Islam offers. Islam says you're not allowed to intoxicate.

You can only believe in this. You cannot go further. This is actually the problem of all monotheistic religions. But for me the West was always going beyond that. So I was curious how did this happen, this prohibition? Like who, was there one person that, no, people cannot use this anymore? And there actually is one person and his name is Harry J. Ansling.

I'm sure you're familiar with the guy. So for this trip, I also went to the Harry J. Ansling archives at Penn State University, which was quite interesting because you can see in the archive and in the way like it smells and what he collected and the letters he wrote and the language he used. It's a very closed mindset and he was actually able to convince Democratic and Republican presidents. He was like serving under, he was bipartisan basically. So his anti-drug regime that he was able to create, and he created it because the alcohol

prohibition failed and his federal bureau of narcotics was about to be extinct because he had completely failed with the alcohol prohibition. And then he thought, I have to find a new enemy and the new enemy for him was actually cannabis and he coined the word marijuana, because marijuana sounds foreign, it sounds Mexican, it sounds something that we don't want in our clean, white American society. Well, it was a Mexican wild tobacco.

It was a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco. It wasn't cannabis. Yeah, right. So basically what we could say is that, and unfortunately, Ansinger was quite a racist. He was like, he openly used words to describe Afro-American colleagues that shouldn't be used by white men, I guess, in like memos. This went all the way up to the president so but they always kept him because he was the man

that defends America from the scourge of foreign influences which is drugs in this case from China the opium from Mexico the marijuana so he was he was very good politician basically got like an anti-drug lobbyist that everyone in Washington loved. And so the reasons for the prohibition in America is not that this Anslinger was actually studying LSD and finding out that this is actually dangerous and marijuana is dangerous. Even though we're free in our society, we have to curb this. This is not how it went. He wanted to attack the jazz scene,

and he knew that the jazz musicians were smoking a lot of weed. So it's very hard to make it illegal to play jazz, but you can make marijuana illegal, and then you can target jazz musicians. So it's got racial profiling. Why were they going after jazz musicians? He hated jazz. He thought that...

This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. The world is a big place and it's filled with all different kinds of people. So you're bound to find exactly who you need for your business. But where do you start looking? ZipRecruiter. Whether you need to hire a civil engineer in New York, a pediatric nurse in Nebraska, an attorney in Colorado, or even a mascot in Michigan, ZipRecruiter

can help you find candidates with the right skills. And you can try it for free right now at ziprecruiter.com slash rogan. ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to find top talent. As soon as you post your job, it uses powerful matching technology to scan through resumes and identify qualified people

for your role, whatever it is. From accountant to zoologist, ZipRecruiter makes hiring faster and easier. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash rogan. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash rogan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Need more hot takes? Head to the FanDuel Sportsbook app. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. fan duel and get more from North America's number one sportsbook. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. I think he had a, I think it's a sexual thing actually. Because he actually said once when

black men smoke reefer they think they're as good as white men and they're going to sleep with a women or something like that. That was kind of the world that he was living in. So was it because the jazz musicians were on stage and people loved them? They were cool. They were only cool because they smoked the weed. That gave them that diabolical power over the audience and the groove. If you take the weed away from them, they're just going to be like boring people, you know.

So that guy really did a lot of damage in my mind to the American society. It's just stunning that 90 years later we're still dealing with the aftermath of that, you know, and also in conjunction with his union with William Randolph Hearst. William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, had a vested financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal or making marijuana illegal because of hemp. You know the whole story about the decorticator? Yeah, are you talking about the wood now? No, the decorticator was a device that was manufactured, it was created in the early 1930s, and it was on the cover of Popular Science magazine when they called it, they said hemp, the new

billion dollar crop of the future. So because hemp was a very difficult plant to take the fiber and convert it into paper and convert it into textiles, things like that. They used slave labor for the most part until the cotton gin came along. When the cotton gin came along, that became more effective to use cotton than to use hemp. It was easier. Then in the early 1930s, they came out with the de-cordicator. The de-cordicator was this machine. See if you could get a version of that, Jamie. So the decorticator allowed them to effectively, that's the decorticator.

So this machine, they would run the hemp stalks through it, and it would break them down far more economically, much, much easier, more effectively than the way they would do it by hand previously. So hemp, the new billion dollar crop. So hemp, you know, find the cover of that magazine. So hemp was a far more effective paper. It's much more durable. I'll give you take hemp, very difficult to tear. In fact, the earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence were on hemp. So this billion dollar crop. So this was Popular Science Magazine. And William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst publications,

he also owned paper mills. So he had thousands and thousands of acres of trees and forests that they were converting into paper. And now all of a sudden sudden there was this new product that was going to destabilize his industry. I mean, yeah, hemp is a disruptor, you know. Exactly. So when they made marijuana illegal, a lot of the people that were voting on this didn't even understand they were making cannabis illegal. They didn't understand that it was the same thing. Yeah, they didn't understand that it was the same

Literal textile that created canvas all the great works like if you look at you know Leonardo da Vinci's paintings is on him. It's on hemp. It's on hemp. It's on canvas. It's on cannabis paper It's on a very durable form of paper. Have you ever touched cannabis paper like hemp paper? It's crazy It's really hard to tear my friend Todd McCormick. He was a early Grower in Los Angeles when marijuana was medically legal and he wound up going to jail because in federal court You couldn't say that it was for medical purposes They just they just prosecuted him based on the say that it was for medical purposes. They just prosecuted him based on the fact that he was a drug dealer instead of someone who was legally

in the state of California growing medical marijuana. He had a stalk on his table of hemp. I don't know if you've ever felt a hemp stalk. Have you ever picked one up? No. It is crazy. It's like styrofoam. You pick it up. It feels like nothing, but it's hard like oak, but it's not heavy. It's very strange. It's like an alien plant. Very, very weird. So that stuff converts incredibly to clothing. You can make building materials out of it. There's a thing called hemp Crete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of, out of hemp. There's a thing called hempcrete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of out of hemp and it's incredibly sustainable because if you have an acre of trees, if you chop down that acre of trees and make paper out of it,

it takes forever to grow enough trees in that acre to grow them to the point where you could harvest them and make paper out of them. them to the point where you could harvest them and make paper out of them. Cannabis, if you're growing hemp rather, if you grow hemp stalks in the same field, you got new hemp in a few months and now you have paper again. So you think so William Randolph Hearst demonized cannabis for the particular interest that he had with paper, with his paper mills, and to stop the hemp industry. I mean they were quite close allies in a way. Yeah. Anslinger and Hearst. And in his publications the word marijuana was for the first time publicized. So they kind of... And with a racial element to it. They said that

blacks and Mexicans were smoking this new drug and raping white women, right? Right, and then the reefer madness movies which are fantastic Pieces of propaganda. They're absolutely hilarious If you watch them today, especially knowing what we know about marijuana like these people were just crazed It was more meth like than it was, you know what they were depicting, right? Absolutely, so It was more meth-like than it was, you know, what they were depicting, right? Absolutely. So, Anslinger, 90 years ago, the propaganda that he pushed out into society, the way that infected people like a mind virus, the effects of that still today.

When people find out that you have taken marijuana or that you regularly enjoy marijuana, people freak out. They're like, oh, what are you doing? What are you regularly enjoy marijuana, people freak out. They're like, what are you doing? What are you doing to yourself? Oh my God, you're out there taking drugs. Meanwhile, this person's on antidepressants and they drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and take Xanax.

There's sanctioned drugs that are far worse for you. It's not a drug-free society. Yeah, I mean, I talked about this sugar thing that I start. It's a crazy drug. And that actually made me realize that we, as humans, take drugs every day. Like, every human takes drugs every day. I'm drinking coffee, I got these little nicotine pouches, yeah. Which is interesting, you know, that we don't acknowledge that really.

We think, like, people who are against drugs, they kind of vote, they kind of say we stand for a sober society, but it never is a sober society. No. We just have some legalized drugs and some drugs that are illegalized. My friends that are in Alcoholics Anonymous, they all drink cigarettes or drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. They're all doing a drug. They're just doing a drug that doesn't completely destroy their life. I mean, I thought about this, you know, writing, having written Blitz and Trip both on drugs

and history, I was, I'm now trying to come up with a more, with a larger narrative. And I mean, at your, in your podcast, a lot has been talked about the stoned ape theory, right? Yes. I think it's very interesting and I think it's time for kind of a new world history, as you may. I think because we actually are stoned sapiens. I think that this cognitive revolution that happened in Africa, it's, as Stamets said, it's not a theory, it's a, what is it, a, a theory is when there's already proof, it's a hypothesis.

It's a hypothesis, but I think that a lot speaks for this hypothesis. I think it makes sense if you see that early humans were, for example, depicting mushrooms in drawings, that these mushrooms have some kind of relevance to them. And our edge, which is something that Harari writes about over other homos, like the Neanderthals, or also just monkeys, large monkeys. Our edge was that we had this cognitive revolution, that we had a neocortex forming and that we suddenly had an understanding about time, so we're not just living in the moment. We know there's a past and there's a future. So that creates a different language. And the different language, a more abstract, more complex language than, for example, the

apes. Apes can organize up to like a hundred. Then that language kind of fails them. But humans suddenly, not suddenly, I mean, this is over long periods of time, could develop a language that enabled them to form larger groups. That's how they became dominant, also dominant over other homo species like the Neanderthals. And we know today that they had these plants at their availability, so it makes sense to imagine that actually we found, maybe it was

a mushroom, maybe it was iboga, which is something still used in African societies and which now is again being examined as the new psychoactive hot drug. It could be a mixture or some groups could have had this, others could have had that. But it seems to be pretty clear that like the founding moment of our race is actually this transcendence. Like suddenly you realize this moment where I'm in is not all, there's more. Like there's a future, there's a past, that is what transcendence is. So we are basically, that's why I call our species, we're stone sapiens. We were stone from the start. So drugs, which transferred into language, into also music, into rituals, because we wanted to keep the drug also secret from others who are not from apes or Neanderthals. So rituals start existing like a person who kind of has the drugs and hands them out.

So this is at the beginning of our race. I think, and we were so powerful because we could develop that larger language than the apes would only organize up until 100. And now we have the problem, we poor stone sapiens, that we have created global problems but we don't have a global narrative. Like we're falling into the Western camp, we have China, we have... We don't have a global narrative. Like our narrative usually stops within the national context, like there's the American

narrative, there's the Western narrative which also includes Europe, there's the German narrative, but there's no human global narrative. There's the Western narrative which also includes Europe, there's the German narrative, but there's no human global narrative. And that's what I intend to change with my book, Stone Sapiens, which will be the next book and kind of conclude the trilogy of these, like how are drugs and humans kind of symbiotic in a way. Pete Slauson Well, there's a, for lack of a better term, there's a consciousness that exists in mushrooms. There's something that you interact with, and we don't necessarily understand what's going on.

But if you could imagine a lower primate interacting with a higher consciousness on a regular basis and then adapting. I mean, this is the theory of why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years. And if you ever listen to Dennis McKenna describe this, Dennis McKenna describes it brilliantly because he's an actual scientist and the way he explains the effects of psilocybin, how it had, you know, what the effects it would have on the mind in terms of developing language and just expanding our creativity, expanding our ability to see things, makes better edge detection, you have better visual acuity, makes them more horny, they're gonna more likely to breed,

more community. There's also this potential for a type of, you know, for lack of a better term, a type of mind melding, you know, there's a type of consciousness expanding energy that happens that it seems to be connected in a way that we can't measure, where human beings interact with each other without words, you know Telepathy was exactly what they would they when they first found harming When they found some certain trees that were part of the components of ayahuasca They they try to call it telepathy But due to the rules of scientific nomenclature that that substance had already been identified as harming

But the researchers that were taking this are saying we are experiencing these telepathic melds there's something that's going on with these things and we want to get to the bottom of that was let's call it telepathy because it imparts a type of telepathy well for tripped up became very interested in that question that you just articulated, what actually happens in the brain, because that is quite hard to figure out actually how do they work and what actually changes in the brain. And there's one researcher in Zurich again in Switzerland, they're really experts on

psychedelics, actually, because they didn't sign all the UN treaties because they're like a neutral, more neutral country than others. So they actually have a little bit more freedom for research. And there is a professor called Franz Vollenweider at University in Zurich. And he was able to start in the early 90s giving his patients psilocybin and LSD and DMT. And then he put them in, like he examined their brains in brain scanners, like imaging, like high-tech imaging technology, and he found that actually, that you can actually measure it.

Or you can see the changes that happen in psychedelics, and what happens is that the so-called default mode network, that is a term that brain scientists used to describe what Freud would just call the ego, like the center in our brain, like the boss in our brain, like the guy I guess it would be, or the woman in our brain that like says now I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast and everything's cool and you know I'm a writer or whatever and you like this is, we have always this controlling force within us. Otherwise we would go basically insane, like what's going on here?

Where is this, this is cool? Am I in danger? Basically, am I in danger? Like there's this thing, the ghost with the rifle, is he gonna shoot? So the default mode network makes sure that this doesn't happen, that we function, and it makes a lot of sense.

And actually under psychedelics, he could measure that this part of the brain gets a little less energy. So it's a little, it's not switched off completely. I mean, if you take a lot of psychedelics, it might be switched off completely, then you have what's called like a full immersion experience. But if you take a little, it's also switched off, like gets a little less energy. And that other parts of the brain, peripheral parts that are usually like following the main guy, they can communicate more on psychedelics.

So what happens in your brain is actually, it is actually a change in the brain chemistry and what also happens is what is called the neuroplasticity is enhanced. Neuroplasticity is the term for basically the brain is not obviously like a fixed like non-moving object like my fist or something. It's constantly kind of moving the brain, you know, and neuroplasticity describes that Neuroplasticity describes that ability to constantly adapt to the situation and be flexible, make new connections. That's neuroplasticity. He could also measure that neuroplasticity is enhanced when you take psychedelics. That's why also it could become dangerous if it's enhanced too quickly and you're not

experienced. I mean, we're on the Joe Rogan experience. We're not experienced, I mean we're on the Joe Rogan experience, we're all experienced, I hope we'll have an experienced audience, but if you're unexperienced that could be too much, you know, then the stimulation of your brain or the change or the disruption of your day-to-day way of thinking could be overwhelming. But if you handle it properly, it's actually, that is I guess what is the beneficial aspect of the psychedelic experience. You enhance neuroplasticity in a way, I don't know if becoming smarter is the right term because what is smart, what is intelligence,

but it's a fact that neuroplasticity is enhanced and because of this kind of orthodox thought forms, like depressed people always think the same thing, like I'm not worthy or I can't, you know, depression is a loop or loops in your brain of always this. And LSD, especially psilocybin, they disrupt that because, you know, other parts of the brain suddenly come into play and the default mode network which has, you know, this disease of depression suddenly is not, you know, this disease of depression suddenly is not, you know, calling the shots anymore. That's why psychedelics have proven effective against depression.

The first study that showed this clinical study was done in 2015 actually in America at Johns Hopkins University that psilocybin helps against, you know, very severe depression when nothing else helps. So we know a little bit about what happens in the brain, but obviously the brain is still a black box. That's why so many scientists, when LSD came out in the late 40s and early 50s, especially in America, were enthusiastic. They thought, finally we have a tool with which we can, you know, shine like a torch shining into the black box of the brain because it works in such small quantities.

There was actually a lot of hope in the beginning that original enthusiasm by Sanders that I talked about when they thought we have a game changer, we have a blockbuster, that everyone will become, you know, will heal from LSD. That many scientists actually believe that. And the interesting question is, and we're like making a long circle, now what went wrong? Like why wasn't it developed into a medicine that you can get at your dispensary? Like you can get cannabis products now, for example, in the state of California. Why? Well you can get them here too which is weird. Okay. You get them here like I said there's like different deltas so we can get legal cannabis. Society sell it. Society is still very insecure when it comes to drugs because we have been bombarded with the propaganda are horrifically

dangerous proper you know this propaganda when I was in high school was this is your brain on drugs you know it was just say no Nancy Reagan yeah everyone was just say no yeah I was I was also in America actually in high school I graduated from Flint Powers Catholic High School in Michigan class of 88 and I had been taught because I was sent from Germany as like a German exchange student. I was taught before, don't mix with the drug people. There will be drug people at the high school and they will approach you and they will try to draw you in and then you won't get out again. And I really believed that. I mean, I was like...

Well, there are people like that. That is true people like that if you fall into the opiate crowd yeah if you fall into a crowd I'm talking about we know right well weed is they're very different but the problem is the blanket term right the blanket term of drugs yeah it's a big problem yeah but also if you fall into a weed crowd in high school it's very possible that you'll fall into a crowd of ne'er-do-wells who will ruin their lives and they just get high all day and they wake and bake and they abuse it. Just like you can abuse sugar, right?

Just like you can abuse alcohol. I actually think that cannabis is a dangerous drug because it is quite addictive. Yeah, it can be. Unlike LSD, LSD is not addictive. LSD is actually when the guy who invented AA, he himself had made an LSD therapy and got away from alcohol using LSD and he wanted to incorporate LSD therapy into the AA program and then didn't do it because I guess it was pressure or whatever. We'll come to the pressure in a second. So

LSD is actually a non-addictive drug. For example, in Germany now we legalize cannabis. It's legal everywhere in the country. I think they should have legalized LSD and not cannabis because cannabis is actually harder to use. I think it should be legal. I think it's good that it's legal, but I think it's a little bit of a more problematic drug actually to legalize because it's also so easy to use. But to legalize LSD, which is like, I think it should be legalized all over the globe because I think it's a brain food. That's what I think after studying it. But saying this sounds like completely outrageous.

LSD, like so many people are afraid of it. So I hope with Tripp to take a little bit of the edge off, you know, to actually show where it comes from. And I would like to tell that story where that comes from. Yeah, please. If I may. Because that's the core story because when I had found these SS records that they had used because you asked before, was there another

psychedelic substance? Yes, there was mescaline. Mescaline was already kind of investigated by scientists since the 20s. It was also a German, there was a German scientist called Beringer. He was really, he was at the University of Heidelberg and he was really into mescaline and he was like doing it with his students and making tests and how does it change consciousness and what happens. So he was basically one of the pioneers of psychedelic research you could say. So the Nazis knew about mescaline and the Nazis wanted to find a truth drug. Hitler was a paranoid person. He always thought, and it's actually true, that people are conspiring against him.

There were quite a lot of assassination attempts on his life. He survived them all. But there were a lot of people who didn't like him. I mean, Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship, and most people supported Hitler, but there were also people who did not. You know, there were people in the resistance, even within, you even within the army, who thought he was an idiot, high-ranking officers who were a bit more brilliant than him and who knew that he was running things to the ground. So he gave the order to find a truth drug. It's the wet dream of intelligence. You give someone a substance and then you can control that person. You can extract secrets from that person. You can kind of, you can control a person. And the Nazis, the SS, even with their torture methods had been unable to extract all the

secrets they wanted to extract from prisoners, especially Polish resistance fighters had been very resistant even against SS torture. Like they wouldn't say, I got the job from the British intelligence or what. You know, they just wouldn't talk even when you tortured them. So Hitler wanted the drug that would solve this problem. And one man that was put in charge with this is a chemist called Richard Kuhn, who actually received the Nobel Prize for chemistry. He was a brilliant mind, but he was a Nazi. So he didn't, like many scientists left Germany or writers left, Thomas Mann left Germany

when the Nazis took power. But some people stayed, some writers stayed, some scientists stayed. And this Kuhn actually became, you know, he's really working for Hitler. He was developing a nerve poison, sarin, which was deadly for Hitler. And if you worked for Hitler as a scientist, obviously you got all the grants, you need the money you needed. You had a great time, basically, if you sold your soul to the devil. So Richard Kuhn was in charge with finding the truth drug and then the interesting thing is because I was in the Novartis archive of Sandos because I wanted to find the link between a Swiss pharmaceutical company who develops LSD and then the SS who tests it in Dachau.

Like how did the SS know like and did they really test LSD also in Dachau or was it just mescaline? Because they write in the reports that are then found in the US, mescaline and another odorless colorless substance was being used. And LSD is that famousless, colorless substance was being used. And LSD is that famous odorless, colorless substance. Like I could put a drop of LSD in your coffee, you wouldn't even notice it. Which is good for intelligence service. You want to dose someone without that person knowing it. So LSD was kind of perfect. But how did the Nazis, did they actually know about LSD? Was it LSD? That was kind of what I wanted to find out.

And when I was in the archive of Sandoz, I wanted to find like papers, like did they sell LSD to the SS? I was curious to find something. And the archivist, he was very skeptical of me because he sensed that I was onto something. Like was protecting basically the archive because the archive at Sunderland is not a public archive. If you go to the National Archives of the United States or the Federal Archive of Germany, it's a public archive. The archivists want you to find the information. They will reveal the find book, which has a database that shows you everything that's in the archive. So you have a, it takes sometimes days or weeks to actually figure out what's all there. But you have theoretically an overview of everything that's

in the archive, but a company archive like Novartis archive, there was no find book. The archive is set to me, just tell me what you're looking for. And then I will find it for you, which is basically shit, you know? Because in a way you have to – it's basically under his control, the documents that he gives to you. You know, you have no – you don't even know what's in the archive behind that guy sitting in front of you. And I wanted to see like – I knew that Albert Hoffman wasn't a Nazi.

Like I had learned – I had known a lot about Albert Hoffman and I never heard anything about him having Nazi connections like giving LSD to Richard Kuhn or something. But I wanted to see what his boss, Stoll, the one we talked about before, had the whole like the Urgot God, like who was this guy because he is the CEO called the shots for Sanders the pharmaceutical company. And then the archivist didn't want me really to see these papers. I could sense that and I wanted to come again to the archive. How did you sense that?

Well the first time I was there, he said, why is everyone always so interested in LSD? We have so many beautiful products here. And there was like a showcase with all the products that Sandos has made. And LSD wasn't one of them. I said LSD is actually missing from that showcase here and he said well it was never a product. I said it was a product it actually had a name it was called Delusit that was the brand name of LSD. It existed you know and he's like yeah you know but we are not so you know it's illegal so they don't they have a difficult relationship with LSD. And the only thing he gave me were the original lab books of Albert Hoffman.

And it's very easy to flatter, like it stuns you. Like if you're interested in LSD, you see like the original lab book, you see like his handwriting when he for the first time takes LSD and then his handwriting, like he can't hold the pen anymore and you see like this line on the paper. That's exciting, you know? But it's not new, you know? People have seen that before. But so he kind of tricks you into like, you see that you're saying, oh, great, thank you. Bye bye. Like after you go home. But then I was on the Swiss mountain, I was actually visiting a scientist that had researched this ergot producing and in the Emmental.

I visited this guy on the mountain. He showed me the former fields of Sandos. And then I had the idea, I must go back to the archive and look at the papers of the CEO because the CEO calls the shots. Why wasn't the CEO able to turn this potential game changer into a lucrative medicine? What went wrong was probably on the CEO level of the company, not on like the chemist level of the company. So I wrote an email to the archivist, he said, I'm going to come back tomorrow and I want to look at the papers of the CEO. And then he wrote back

to me, well, sorry, tomorrow I have too much work. You cannot come anymore, kind of like that. But I just showed up. I just showed up at the archive and he opened and he said, well, you're here. I don't have any time. And I said, well, I'm here. You know, it's an archive. I can use it. And then I was sitting there and I was thinking, what can I do? And I actually, at the time, I had some LSD with me because I was already getting it for my mother. So I had it with me and I said to him, I suddenly had an idea and I said to him, have you ever actually seen LSD? And he's like, in a Swiss accent, like, no, it's illegal, I have not seen it.

And then I asked him, do you want to see it? He said, sure, I would like to see it. But where could I see it? No one has it anymore. And I said, well, here you go, this is LSD and he's like studying it. He was quite interested. He suddenly became interested, like, oh, this is actually LSD. That's how it looks. And the LSD I had received had printed on it, like these papers, the old logo of Sandoz. So like the chemist who had made this, actually in Basel it was made in a black lab obviously, kind of made a joke and put like the logo of Sandoz on it and

he said, this is the logo of our old company, how is this possible? And I said, well maybe it's like an homage by the chemist who made these. I said, do you want one? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, I'll give you one as a gift. You know, you've been so helpful to me. And he's like, oh, this, but this, yes, okay, I'll take one. And I gave him a trip. And what is the dose? That was like a hundred micrograms, which is quite strong. You know, I said to him, take it.

It's legit. I said to him, take it like when you legit. I said to him, take it like when you're in the beautiful Swiss mountains, like you want to walk, you know, then maybe it's a good time. And he's like, interested. Yeah. And then he gave it back to me. He said, I can't, I can't for legal reasons. I don't think I can accept this. I said, okay, fine. Took it back. And then he said, but is there something you want to see maybe today in the archive? Because he was, you know, we had formed a connection suddenly. Right, right, right.

And I said, yeah, actually, I would be interested in seeing the paper of the CEO of Arthur Stoll. He said, that's not a problem at all. And he just went and he brought me the folder. And as I'm looking through the folder, I can see that there's one man that Stoll was communicating with all through his career. And that one man, he Stoll himself had learned under Wilstetter. Wilstetter was the Jewish German master of biochemistry who was later by the, he had to leave Germany, you know, the Nazis were prosecuting him also because he was Jewish.

And Wilstetter was this genius who also received the Nobel Prize and who had found out that, you know, Stoll's idea from potent plants you extract and then you make medicines from plants basically, because plants are very powerful obviously. So Wilstetter was like the scientific father of Stoll, and Stoll had one other prodigy child, and that was Richard Kuhn, who by then had been the leading Nazi biochemist. So Kuhn and Stoll, which I saw then in the letters in front of me, had been best friends because they had had the same teacher. They had exchanged already in the 20s all their research, in the 30s, especially the

ergod research. Kuhn was very interested in it. So now he has the job by Hitler to find the truth drug and then Stoll says, we found this almost magical substance that even in microgram dosages has this strong effect on the mind and Kuhn obviously became very interested in it. And I found a letter, maybe we can pull that one up, I don't know if you can find it, from 1943, October, where Kuhn, and I found this in the archive, this was the smoking gun basically,

where Kuhn thanks Stoll for sending ergotamine, which is the precursor to LSD. It's like from Ergotamine you do one step and then you have LSD. And we received Ergotamine in October 1943 from the Swiss company and then, you know, the Nazis had their hand on LSD. And then it becomes very interesting what happens when the Americans find out about that. Because when the Americans liberated Germany from National Socialism, when they won the war basically, certain units had attached to them the so-called Alsos unit, A-L-S-O-S. And the Alsos unit was responsible

for finding German nuclear scientists and interviewing them about their research for the nuclear bomb in Nazi Germany. Because Nazi Germany was also trying to develop a nuclear weapon. And the Americans thought they're probably quite far ahead because they're good in science, like everything they do, they fucking rock. Which in this case actually probably wasn't true. I don't think the Nazis were so advanced. It's still a bit obscure like how far the Nazis really were with nuclear technology. But this Alsos was in place. And the second job of Alsos was to find out about biochemical weapons because they also thought, rightly so, that Hitler had biochemical weapons. So one of the first scientists they interviewed was Richard Kuhn because Richard Kuhn was the leading Nazi biochemist.

So in the spring of 1945 and liberated Heidelberg after World War II, Kuhn is being interviewed. And for Kuhn, it's a question of will I cooperate with Americans or will I go to the Nuremberg trial as like a war criminal because he could have ended up on the bench for developing sarin, a nerve poison. So he decided to rather extend his career. He later came to America, was teaching in America. So he told them about LSD. He said, we were very interested in LSD. And those experiments in Dachau could not be finished

because there was not enough time. Dachau was already liberated. They were in the middle of finding out if I give a psychedelic to a prisoner, can I extract his secrets, can I fully control him. These tests take a bit of time, you know, you have to do it with several, you know, you don't do it in a day. So these tests were not finished yet, but these findings then were very interesting to the American military because after the war, what started immediately the next war, the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which was what then CIA was founded, which CIA called the CIA Director Dallas. He called it, this is brain warfare. It's a totally new type of war and we have to get ahead of them and they probably are

working on brainwashing techniques. So we have to be ready to defend ourselves against the Soviet onslaught with their brainwashing techniques. So, the Americans learned actually a lot from the Nazis. I once met in Florida on the beach together with my father, an SS Marine that was in the 80s when I was an exchange student in Flint, Michigan. We took a vacation, met my German parents in Florida and we spoke with this Marine and he said, yeah, we learned so much from the SS. And it's true, you know,

the SS, the German system was a very evil system, obviously, but it was a very functional system. There was a lot to be learned from them in terms of warfare. So the Americans, because the Nazis were so interested in this truth drug, thought this must be interesting, we have to look at this. So they started now, first the American military, then the CIA started now to investigate, can LSD actually be the truth drug, can it be like a pharmaceutical weapon? So this is actually what went wrong. So what went wrong was the Swiss CEO sending samples to the German Nazi biochemist.

From him the knowledge goes to the American military and then intelligence apparatus that LSD could be abused as a weapon. This is what really put LSD on the wrong foot in a way. Because there was also at the same time in the early 50s a lot of hopeful research at universities in America. Like brain scientists, they were looking at LSD. It wasn't illegal yet. It was an interesting thing. But then the CIA took over the military research. First it was the US military. They had a professor at Harvard University called Beecher. Beecher was like the drug expert of the American army. He had also been in the war and then he looked at the SS reports from Dachau

and he made a report called Report on Ego-depressant Drugs which he sent to Washington. So he was kind of the knowledgeable guy that would interpret how could psychedelic molecules be used as drugs. And then in 1947 the CIA was founded, basically the CIA took over this truth-joke research from the military. And then Biccia was sending his reports to the CIA. This was done by a guy called Sidney Gottlieb. I don't know if you've heard that name. He was the head of MKUltra.

MKUltra is basically a program first to see whether LSD could be used as a weapon. And Gottlieb traveled to Basel, Switzerland, because he had heard that Sanders was also selling LSD to the other side of the Iron Curtain. There was rumor that the Soviet Union had purchased like 20 million dosages of LSD. So he flew to Basel with a suitcase full of cash and put it on the table of Stoll, the CEO, and said, I want the whole, the world supply of LSD. I'm here by buying the world supply of LSD Which was he said Your supply like his intelligence like told him that the Sandos had produced something like I don't know

It's in the book I forgot the number like four kilograms of LSD and he said I want to buy the whole you know Four kilograms quite a lot, you know, because it's already potent in microagent. Those are just the whole, you know, four kilograms is quite a lot, you know, because it's already potent in micro-acidosages. Stoll said, well, we only made 400 grams so far. They hadn't even made that much. But so he bought the 400 grams and he set a mechanism in place that Stoll would always inform – Stoll would not sell to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

That's what the Sandos had to, you know, basically assure him. Of course, the payback is Sandos can still sell all the other medicines in America, doesn't have problems with the FDA and the American, you know, that's the pressure. And then Godley takes, you know, the 400 gram back to the states and is now from now on always informed when like a scientist in an American University acquires LSD from Zandos because they would not sell it openly in the beginning they would only give it away basically to scientists they were still in the product development phase because they still weren't sure what can LSD like what do we write on the package basically? What is, what's the indication? So Gottlieb was basically in the driving chair of LSD at that time. He got all the information from Basel, Switzerland who had LSD in the country.

He had the most LSD and then he had the idea to really look at how LSD can be used to manipulate people, basically. That was like the big goal. And that's not an easy thing to achieve. The way he did it was he let all the universities in the country, I think over like over 60 institutions, like, you know know the big universities of this big country, he let them all you know in their special you know departments investigate LSD but these tests are expensive and what Gottlieb, the idea Gottlieb had was university tests are often funded by foundations, let's say the Rockefeller

Foundation. Like a university wants to make like some pharmaceutical, you know, test series that goes over two years and involves all these people that, you know, have to be paid and it's expensive. Like it costs, let's say, $200,000 to make like one serious clinical test. So that money comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, and the money first goes from the CIA to the Rockefeller Foundation. So he used not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Foundation, but other foundations as like go between. So he gave them money and they would finance research done in universities which are supposed to be, I guess, neutral, like just trying to figure out like what is, you know, science is, you know, you don't want a CIA guy to finance your science and then kind of manipulate through that money how your research is being done and especially all the results going back to the people who bring the money. So he was very efficient in setting up this

program which then I guess was called MKUltra and that's also that's that's that's how LSD really that's what really went wrong with LSD. MKLTRA. Yeah, because it dominated a controlling force over the research and a lot of research then was tailored to, like there was crazy stuff happening, like there was even in Canada at a university, I write about this in Tripped, this guy, and it sounds a bit like a Stanley Kubrick movie. He put people on constant LSD and then had speakers under their pillows which would tell them single sentences. He was trying to see, can you really drive someone mad with LSD, for example?

Can you deprogram a brain with LSD? So these are very creepy experiments. These are actually human experiments. In a way, they were a continuation of what the SS started in Dachau, but much more sophisticated. And they were done on American citizens. Like part of MKUltra were so-called safe houses.

The safe houses, there was one in the West Village in Manhattan, one on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, and in these safe houses people would be, you know, would be approached on the street or in bars in in lower Manhattan and, you know, invited to like a party come we want to come to my pad you know I have booze and and and it was like a cool apartment and but there was one large mirror and behind the mirrors set up an operative who was filming and listening in and recording and then they checked like what happens to a person if they receive unwittingly a dosage of LSD. You know, so this is quite unethical work that was done. They also did Operation Midnight Climax.

Yeah, that's in Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Yeah, so that was a brothel. Yeah, it was an apartment. They called it the pad, but they hired sex workers, which then got an additional fee from the CIA for giving their clients from them. Also they received their fee, obviously, and then giving them LSD. I think it was a stupid, actually, experiment. It's kind of spectacular, Operation Midnight Climax. It looks great in a film, I guess.

Sounds good. Yeah. I mean, it's just show, but it wasn't very effective. What do you gain? What do you see? Someone, of course, has a little bit different sex on LSD, but it's kind of stupid. It never led anywhere. Basically, Sidney Godley wasted a lot of tax money, and he brought a lot of suffering to people who were subjected to these unethical tests and he had no result. It's definitely not a good thing that they did.

But if you put your mind into their perspective back then trying to understand the effects of these drugs, they probably had limited resources. And without making these things legal and without like opening up the research to everybody to this potentially powerful life-changing drug I mean this drug could be something that could be used by foreign governments it could be used against us so they're probably very secretive in their approach we kind of had the benefit of, you know, 2020 hindsight, because we're looking back. I mean, yes, it was the Cold War. And I think that they really believe

that there are these threats from the Soviet Union, and there were threats from the Soviet Union, obviously. And brainwashing is a specialty of communism, you know. So it's clear that they wanted to be... From his perspective, it makes sense, you know. Right. So... But it didn't help LSD to become a medicine, because that was a time when there were no antidepressants yet developed and no antipsychotics. So I think LSD would have had a chance to actually become a very

helpful medicine instead of being kind of an unhelpful weapon because it never worked as a weapon. So right. No it's definitely unhelpful what they did. Yeah. And it might be understandable but it's it went the wrong way. It went the wrong way but it was also indicative of the kind of control that those people wanted over society and population especially coming after World War II. There's a whole new order in the world. The United States emerges victorious, and then there's this clamoring for trying to figure out, okay, what is the enemy up to?

What are these powerful tools that could be used against us? And some of them could be mind control. I mean this is obviously at a time where you know the Red Scare right there the McCarthy era they were worried about communism and communism infiltrating our society and they're probably very terrified of things that disrupted which is what was going on in the 1960s. You know I, Jamie I'm gonna send you this, this is a video of hipp on in the 1960s. You know, I, Jamie, I'm going to send you this. This is a video of hippies in the 1960s. And what it kind of shows you that a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now with the disruption of society, this is, it's very similar to what was going on in

1968 with the anti-war movement. You know, the free Palestine movement has a lot in common with an anti-war movement. The free Palestine movement has a lot in common with a lot of other anti-war movements of the past where these people want peace and love and and back then in the 1960s in particular they were dropping acid this is the Timothy Leary days and you know tune out and drop out and so play this 1968 You have all these young kids coming from a very rich affluent middle-class society where they've been taken care of since they've been babies and never really had to do anything for themselves In a serious way and now they come here and they want to be taken care of.

One of the first questions they'll ask is, what do you do? And so I say, I live. And they say, no, I mean, do you work or what? And I say, no, I just live. A lot of people say to me, what are you doing? You're not doing any work. You're not working at a job. You tell them that you don't do anything and that you come to the park.

It's like they can't believe you. We're doing the hardest work in the world because we're growing, we're trying to change. We have a group of young people from upper middle class families who have moved into a physical environment that is in effect a reversion. They're living in gross and sanitary conditions with a great deal of overcrowding. There is a very high incidence of infectious hepatitis. About one fourth or one fifth of our total caseload in the venereal disease clinics appear to be hippies. Now I'm going on the appearance solely.

And we have one case history in which the young chap has been into the clinic 12 times in three months with 12 different cases of gonorrhea. Okay, so that guy, that last guy with the salt and pepper hair and the tie and the nice suit, those are the people that were from another generation and were seeing this younger generation that was completely dropping out of society. And what was causing that, there was a lot causing that, the anti-war movement, but a lot of it was fueled by psychedelics. And they wanted to stop that. They wanted to stop this radical shift in society that they were seeing from the 1950s to the 1960s. Yeah, there's an interview with one main aid of Nixon

afterwards when he was already retired and he said that they couldn't make it illegal to be black and they couldn't make it illegal to go on rallies and be against the war, like it's an American principle that you can go to a demonstration, but they could make it illegal to take LSD and then criminalize people. So it's kind of the same thing that Anslinger started much earlier. Yeah, I mean, it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over again. Whenever there's a powerful disruptor that might be ultimately great for the human race,

but bad for the power structures that are in place currently, they step in and they do their best to throw water on it. And what they did from the late 1960s into the 1980s, they radically shifted culture. Everything changed. Music sucked, cars sucked, everything sucked. There's direct evidence that it had a huge impact on our creativity. If you look at the music from the 1960s, it was so radically different from the music from the 1950s. Something had happened.

I mean, that's why John Lennon guy called Ken Kesey was working at a psychiatric ward in Menlo Park, California and he was part of MKUltra basically. I mean he was a guinea pig. He received 75 US dollars for taking LSD and then he took LSD and his default mode network was, default mode, default mode network was, you know, had less energy and he had, like he said, suddenly understood the crazies, you know, he was walking through the psychiatric ward and understanding a lot better, like what's actually going on in the brain. And that's when he had the idea for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which made him so much money that he then decided to stop writing and buy a bus

and drive around the country with his friends and dish out LSD. So it's kind of a, he made like a career change. Yeah, I could see how the powers it be. I could see how the CIA and the government are like, we have to stop this. We have to put stop this is gonna be the downfall of society certainly downfall of the people that are in control of the government Currently and these people are necessary to be in control of the country because we are in a cold war with Russia We just got out of world war two war with Vietnam I mean that war was taking a big toll on the American society and suddenly there's like young people shitting on it, you know, saying what the fuck, I'm not going there. So that creates, that created a strong counter reaction by the regime, which is to legalize

LSD, but poor LSD. Poor LSD and what's really unfortunate is that if that had not happened, who knows how transformative those substances would have been to society globally. If there was a great reckoning in the United States, if we understood things, if we got our act together, if we really cleaned up all the problems in society and did so on an egalitarian plane, We like recognize that there's work that can be done here or we can make life better for everybody, have everybody recognize that we are literally all in this together and we

are all connected. We need each other, we are a part of each other, and we should treat each other, all of us, like we are a community. I think that's the globalized narrative that we need. Yes. It's the only way we survive. Yeah. I mean this is the perspective that astronauts have when they go to the space station. They look down at this ball and they go, this is so crazy. Like that we are fighting over imaginary boundaries that we've created. Lines in the dirt. I think it really is a problem of our language and of our communication skills because we can only create a discourse within the United States possibly.

You have the media, you have the Joe Rogan experience, you have a discourse and you have a discourse in other nation states but there is no global discourse. I mean maybe when there's like Olympic games, that's a type of global discourse that's happening. Maybe right now, that's why people kind of like to watch it right now because they feel we're connecting from all over the world without being like total assholes. We're doing sports together. Isn't that nice? And we like when the opposing teams hug each other and make friends.

We need positive global communication because we have a lot of negative global communication. We have two, I mean two very prominent wars right now and a lot of other conflicts and we have global problems like the heating up of the planet which leads to refugee floods and crisis and migration. I mean we have we have a global theme but how do we talk about it? There's no global government. Not that we need one or we should have one but there's no global. Basically there's no global end. There's nothing you know. Right. I don't necessarily think a global government's the rule because the problem is whenever people have control over people they just want more. It's just it's like everything else. It's like

if you have money you want more money. If you have power, you want more power, you want control, you want more control. And it makes it easier for them to stay in control. And if you had a global world government that could tell people, no, you can't move to Switzerland where the laws are different. You can't move to Costa Rica. You have to, the laws apply everywhere. It's a global world order. we decide what you can and can't do, and we're not deciding it based on empirical evidence, fact, objective analysis of reality, we're doing on the basis of what's the most effective way that we can control and govern. I think it's like a horror scenario that we might be moving into. Well we're in it right now, we're battling it, you know, there's

rational, logical people that understand the consequences of these things that are fighting against it and talking against it. And then there's people that are saying, we need centralized digital currency to compete with China. Like, Jesus Christ. And we're leading ourselves into a position that's very similar to many other positions that societies have faced in the past, including ancient Greece, where ancient Greece, where they developed democracy, the Illicinian mysteries, and then all that stuff got made illegal.

And then society crumbles, things fall apart, it's no longer the center of intellectual discourse in the world, everything goes away. They threw water on it in the 1960s with the psychedelics acts where they made everything schedule one. They locked people up that were anti-war protesters. They figured out a way to squash this sort of new movement of thought. I think, yeah, I think it would be a step into the future if psychedelics were made legal and if we kind of move more towards, you know, because the psychedelics, as we said before, and humans are about transcendence,

you know. It's about basically including the other and not being afraid of the other and that fear of the other leads to violence against the others. The psychedelic is moving in the opposite way. So it is obviously not a surprise that Nixon would legalize the psychedelics. They're dangerous. They're dangerous to power. They disrupt. But it's great for everyone. That's the crazy thing. The people that are making it illegal are the people that haven't experienced it. That's correct. That's where it's crazy because it would be beneficial to them. They are human beings

with a finite lifespan. Their experience on earth would be greatly enhanced if they had the perspective of a psychedelic encounter. Well if I was Chancellor of Germany, which I will never be, but if I was, I would make a psychedelic year. Like after high school, you have the opportunity to actually experience these substances. I think it would be very good for societies to think about rituals or mechanisms or discourse. Like what you said about the mysteries of Eleusis. That was the defining ritual of ancient Greece. The Athens

Society would move there in September, like they would go there, they would have this experience, they would talk about this experience. Because of that experience they could relate to each other, they could relate to the planet that they live on. So that was a very healthy thing and we today, because it's illegal, we don't have this. I mean, some things like burning man obviously are like attempts to create like ritualistic spaces and I've never been there and I heard it's kind of stupid because it's so expensive and kind of elitist. I don't know if that's true, but basically we need...

We need something. We need something, yeah. We need a legitimate structure because there's also a thing that is described called spiritual narcissism, where you start doing these things and you think that you have all the answers and then you have people that are the ones who speak to these groups of people and they have all the knowledge and we're all in this together and it's essentially a cult.

And it's really easy to run a cult if everyone in the cult is naive and they're looking for a leader, they're looking for an answer, maybe they've had a listless life that lacks in direction and all of a sudden someone comes along and through this ritual we can all transcend and you know becomes a lot of bullshit. So what are we going to do you know? Well we need real shamans, we need actual legit shamans and the problem is that term is in our society is much maligned right that term is Silly people that are in the jungle that are doing you know voodoo But but we need someone who is a legitimate psychedelic

experiencer who is who has a genuine a Genuine goal of advancing consciousness and Advance advancing conscious goal and doing it in a very responsible way One of the things that we would have to be careful of if you have something like a year of psychedelics is schizophrenia We don't understand. I didn't I didn't say we should the young people should take psychedelics for a straight year, but maybe a year where they could take it.

Well, they have a possibility. They have a possibility, some kind of structure, maybe a place you can go and... Well, I think we need a structure for everybody. I think that's really the goal of this thing, is to develop a sensible objective structure based on actual research, based on a real knowledge of real clinical data on dosages, a real knowledge on which compounds are more effective for which particular ailments. Ibogaine, which you talked about, iboga, very effective for addiction. My friend Ed went over to Mexico and he got into an Ibogaine clinic when he got hooked on pills and it cured him of it.

Well, just one experience. One experience, yeah. That's what I heard also. I've known many people that have had real problems on pills and it cured him of it. Well, just one experience. One experience, yeah. That's what I heard also. I've known many people that have had real problems with pills and have knocked it with one Ibogaine experience. So there's a lot of different things that can be done that can benefit society tremendously, but it has to be done responsibly and it has to be done with real knowledge and that real knowledge is only going to be available if they open everything up to real

research. And instead of being biased about this and say, like, let it be open to everyone to have an objective analysis of what is actually going on, have the naysayers and the people that are converted. Everyone debate this and try to have some sort of an understanding of what is good, what is bad, what's the right dose, what can be done, and what is the most effective setting. Because set and setting, the part of the ritual aspect of it is important too, because you're

setting an intention before you do these things. Which is why a lot of these people that are serious users of psychedelics, they don't like the concept of microdics, they don't like the concept of microdosing and they don't like the concept of recreational use. They think these things are sacred and they should be used only in this one particular way. And I think this conversation would benefit everyone in society, including the people that want it illegal. That's what's ironic about it. The people that want it illegal, they are just human beings. They're just human beings that are trapped in this paradigm. They're trapped in the world that they live in. They're

trapped in the momentum of their actions and all the life that they've lived up until this moment and they would benefit from it. I mean, it would also give the Western societies a tremendous push, you know, if psychedelics were allowed and there could be research and there could be, you know, it would probably encourage like a cultural flowering and right now we have kind of a decay of Western culture, like Western society is in crisis and we don't really know how to get out of it. And the current recipes given to us by the camps that are now also competing for the US presidency, they don't really solve the problem. I mean, we all feel like in the last couple of years, more and more people feel that something is wrong, and that something should

change. I think somehow people are ready for a revolution, but no one knows exactly what kind of revolution it should be. So people who tap into that are quite successful even though they might not even provide what is actually needed to have that change. But we do need a change on a national level in Germany, in America, in other countries, as well as on a global level. And I think opening up our societies to psychedelic research and psychedelics, I would be curious to see a society which treats itself with that liberty and relaxation and curiosity. Right now we're all tense and we're saying, no, this is the chemical wall in our brain. I just don't think it works for a democratic,

Western free society to have a chemical wall in the brain. It's a contradiction. It keeps us back from really developing a society that is much better than the current society, because the current society is pretty shitty actually. And we really moved into it and we're trapped. We're trapped but there is of course ways out.

There can always be a so-called revolution. We're talking about one right now. This is what's crazy. This isn't theoretical, right? These are actual substances. We're talking about it now and Kanye West on this show said he's the leader of the free world. Maybe we're maybe today we're now the leaders of the free world and we're gonna start a psychedelic, you know,

revolution from this podcast. Well, I think it has to be done everywhere with everyone. They have to demand freedom and if you have freedom, freedom over your own consciousness is what Mekhenna talked about often, that it means nothing if you don't have freedom over your own consciousness. Especially freedom over your own consciousness with substances that have been shown to have dramatic positive effects on people. So there's a lot of drugs that are very good positive drugs that people use on a regular basis that if you take too much of them you will die. So we know what the substances are, we understand what the correct dosage is, we understand what the LD50 is,

and we know how to prescribe them correctly. We should apply that same logic to psychedelics. I mean Albert Hoffman was thinking about this in the 50s. This was another document I found in the archives. He set up a memo to Stoll, the CEO, writing that Sanders should now focus on these psychedelic substances. We should examine all the possibilities. We should create new compounds.

We should become the psychedelic pharmaceutical powerhouse in the world. That idea is really a great idea. It is a great idea. And Stoll just said no, because he had been visited by Sidney Gottlieb who basically said don't do it. Well it's guys like that guy in the suit and tie with the salt and pepper hair. There's no nonsense Republican right wing controlling.

But I think it's also these guys are a little bit of the past. I mean, I'm quite surprised, for example, in America, I get approached by different camps about Tripp in a very positive way. Because I think somehow that anti-drug rhetoric is losing ground. That's the feeling I have. Well, it's losing ground.

That makes me a little bit optimistic. It's losing ground because of the internet. So the narrative up until the internet came around was that these things destroy lives and then all sudden people are saying You know actually not really and then you have the positive effect that it has on people that are suffering From post-traumatic stress disorder coming back from the war which is really maps is concentrating on right? The mainstream media really is a problem in this regard. They're a problem with everything. Well, they're essentially a propaganda network that is passing itself off as the news. It kind of comes from Randolph Hearst in a way. I mean, certainly does. I mean, he kind of set the tone. Absolutely. But I mean, I'm sure there were people doing

that before. If you have control of the newspaper, and especially back then with hers publications, there's very few newspapers in the country, and especially ones that were respected. If you have control over that narrative, you put something in the newspaper and people read it, they read that as that, oh my God, that is a fact. This is what's happening. People today are far more skeptical, particularly after the pandemic. I think the pandemic kind of shook things up to a point where it's much more difficult to pass off propaganda today than it was even just four years ago. I mean, that's why I was quite excited to come on this podcast, on this experience, because I think you have actually created a space where free thought is possible and free communication.

It's like a stage that you've created. I think it's actually quite an important artwork that you have established here. I mean, it's not so easy to create like your own media that has a global reach. So thank you. Thanks for having me. It just happened. I think it made itself. Maybe.

Yeah, I think so. Because the concept was right. Well, I think, look, I'm the one who's the host of it, so I would be the best judge. I do not think I'm really responsible for this thing. I think this thing wanted to be made and it made itself and it did in a very sneaky way. It did in a very sneaky way where originally it was just me having fun with my friends. Just with a webcam, me and Brian and then Eddie Bravo and Tom Segura and all my friends. We'd just come over and just talk, just have a good time. And then it started to be where it got enough downloads where I could contact someone like

Graham Hancock and say, hey, tell me about ancient civilizations. Come on my podcast. Anthony Bourdain, Tell me about your travels." And then it became much, much bigger and it sort of, I genuinely believe it tricked me into making it. When was the breaking point when it got big? It was very gradual. It was very gradual. I'll tell you when I realized it.

I think it was like 2011 or 2012. I was on stage in the Chicago theater. And I was doing comedy and I asked the audience, I was gonna tell a story from the podcast and I said, how many of you guys listen to the podcast? And it was just, yeah, 3,700 people cheering. And I was like, whoa, I'll never forget that moment. Cause I was like, oh, one of the things that I used to do

and I still do is I don't look at the numbers. I don like, oh. One of the things that I used to do and I still do is I don't look at the numbers. I don't pay attention. I don't pay attention to how many downloads. I'm not like feverishly checking the, what's good and what's bad. I don't look at like what the retention is when people drop out.

I don't, that's up to them. My job is to just have an interesting conversation with people that I'm actually Excited about talking to that's my only job. So the way I book it I completely book it based on my interests I don't I don't have a Publicist that's like examining trends and this person's pop. I don't do any of that. Yeah, I think it made itself I think it made itself. I think it made itself. I think it's a trick I think it's like the muse like the muse sort of like Brings these ideas into your head. I think the universe gave birth this thing

I know it's a stupid hippie thing to say it sounds ridiculous But if anybody should know it's me and if anybody should want to take responsibility be proud of something it would be me, right? But I'm not I feel like it's not really me. I feel like this thing wanted to be made and I think this is one of many of these things that want to be made all around the world and that's why podcasts are developing. I think there's a hunger for honest discourse and real conversations with people that exists everywhere and I think that's why podcasts are exploding. That's where you don't have a gatekeeper anymore to your ability to discuss things. Yeah, because people are so frustrated with mainstream media.

Well, you shouldn't have gatekeepers. You shouldn't have someone who your, the narrative that you're pushing out to the world is heavily influenced by the people that are advertising on your channel. Yeah. Heavily influenced. So there's certain things you cannot criticize, there's certain things you will gaslight the media or the public into believing is a good thing when it's probably not really a good thing. You will say things in a very biased perspective. You will attack particular individuals. You not just attack political individuals,

you'll attack them with a very specific narrative that gets repeated over and over and over again to the point where they make these compilations of these media pundits saying the exact same thing over and over and over again. This is not news. This is not real discourse. This is not real human beings discussing things and trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong. This is propaganda, and this is most of what people get. And inside that propaganda are some real news. There's actual specific information about the weather. There's actual real reports about conflicts breaking out overseas and all sorts of different things. But at the end of the day, it's not real conversation. So real conversation was able to flourish because people had this hunger for it. And

they didn't even know they wanted it until they got it. I mean, it's thought when we first started making podcasts that everyone was moving to a much shorter attention span and that most of the things that were going to be popular in the future were like 10 minute things, like very quick things, you know, which is like a lot of the truth today with TikTok and Instagram reels and you know, all these things that we, that people like short attention span just, it just captures you it gives you nothing and you just keep scrolling and looking and we thought that's what people are moving to. But then podcasts came along. And podcasts came along with three hour conversations

with scientists that get 50 million views. And then people are like, whoa, okay. So it's not that people aren't intellectually curious. It's not people aren't, they don't have this want to be engaged. They do. Everybody does. It's just they're not being fed correctly. I mean, that's also one of the beauties. I mean, I'm here as a writer of literature, actually. I mean, if I decide to work on a book, I don't get influenced by anybody. And I have a very large space in which I can develop my thoughts and my narrative.

That's why I'm actually active in this field. I think there might be similarity between a podcast and literature because they both go into the long form and into immersion into something. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, literature is the ultimate form of that, right? Because the amount of time that it takes for you to ponder the sentences and the paragraphs and putting them all together and the order in which you say things and the way you captivate and compel the reader, it's very similar. And it's all coming from your mind too, which is also very similar. When I hear you talk on a podcast, if I'm a listener and I'm listening, I hear one human being who's talking about your analysis of all the data and all the research that you've done to create

this book. That's not really available in most places anymore. But people want that because they want to know what did this guy find out? What does he know? And how does he know it? Let me listen to him. And along the way, especially we're having a three-hour conversation along the way, let me hear if he says some crackpot things. Let me listen to him and along the way especially we're having a three-hour conversation along the way Let me hear says some crackpot things. Let me hear if he says some things like oh that guy is a kind of a kook Oh, that guy's not really thinking clearly. Oh, that guy's kind of full of shit Oh, he's saying that but there's no way he really believes that okay now I know now I'm suspicious now. I know I can kind of like look at this through a filter of reality So I think maybe we should talk a little bit about blitz and Nazis and drugs.

I thought that's why you had me here. I thought that would be like your subject of fascination. Oh, it's part of it for sure. I want to talk to you about everything. I just was interested in talking to you. I mean immediately when I saw what you were talking about when I saw you in the Jesse Walter show. Oh, okay. I saw what you were talking about when I saw you in the Jesse Walter show. Okay.

That was kind of funny to me because that was really speaking to an audience I usually don't speak to, but it was great, you know? Yeah, well, they're willing to take much more chances on Fox News than they are on other networks in a strange way. Well, I think they started with Tucker Carlson in a lot of ways, but the Jesse Waters thing was interesting because you got to scratch the surface a little bit. Yeah, it was just seven minutes, not three hours. Yeah, so tell me about Blitz.

What do you wanna know? Well, first of all, what was, when was the first, when was the creation of amphetamines? And when did it start getting utilized by military and by people like Hitler? Well, there's like a rumor going on that it started at the Olympic Games in Berlin 1936 because an African-American athlete named Jesse Owens was running faster than the white Aryan German superheroes jumping further and

winning I think five gold medals. The rumor was he must be on something similar kind of to Anslinger like the jazz people are only so good because they're on something you know. So there was like was he on benzadrine because benzadrine was an American product that was already available and it's basically speed and there were no doping checks at these Olympics. I think they were the last Olympic Games without doping checks. Really? Yeah. So you could basically take everything. But it's never, no one knows if Jesse, oh, he was just good, you know? But there was a guy called Theodor Temmler who was the head of the Temmler factory. And he said to his chemist, Fritz Hauschild, after the Olympic Games, we have to create

a better amphetamine, like a better than the American amphetamine. This can never happen again. Like an Afro-American is faster than the white guys, you know. And then Hauschild was the chemist's name. He did research about amphetamines and he found that in Japan a chemist called Nagai in 1917, quite a while ago actually. This was in 1936, so already 19 years earlier a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine, and methamphetamine is stronger than amphetamine.

So Houshiel thought, I'm going to make a new methamphetamine. So he found a new way of synthesizing meth. There's different ways you can make meth, I guess, and he found a specific way that this Temmler company then patented. The patent was issued in Berlin in October 1937 and then they put it on the market in 1938. Methamphetamine became available. No one said it was like a drug or anything. It was just a new medicine. You didn't even need a prescription. You could just, like a child could go into a pharmacy and say, I want 10 packages

of methamphetamine. And it was cheap also and you got it. It was branded as Pervitin. Pervitin, we say in German. There it is. Wow. There's Pervitin. And Pervitin then became very fashionable. Look how innocuous that little container looks. Who would imagine that's how they sell meth? Nuts. I think this could already be, and I'm

going to get to this in a second, for the military. But first, it was a drug that was just on the market in the civil society. There was no war yet in 1938. 1938 was actually kind of the height of the Hitler regime. People loved him. There was full employment. I mean, there was oppression against the Jews.

But if you were a national socialist, you thought that was good, basically. So the problem was, or I mean, there were many problems, but the reality was that it was like a steam engine. It was the society was really working. Everyone had a job, everyone was taking part. It was basically a modern capitalist society that also created a lot of stress. You always have to compete, like you have to go from meeting to meeting, like the German economy was booming.

So people loved meth. There was no coffee available because Germany didn't have colonies like France where they couldn't bring in coffee. I don't even know if there was coffee. Probably you could get it maybe somewhere, but it was not a normal thing to go into a cafe in the morning and have a coffee. So this methamphetamine became very popular. Like workers used it in the factories. They could increase their output. And party people used it because it was also, it boosted your ego. So it was, you know, you go into a meeting, an important meeting, you take a bit of meth before. So it wasn't stigmatized, you know, it was just,

it was, they called it performance enhancing, performance enhancing substance. So that's a neutral term, you know. They made studies at universities showing that there's actually good against anything, also against depression, and it would increase your sexual drive. And people thought this is the greatest thing, basically. There was no studies being done yet on addiction, which obviously is a problem of meth. But also we have to understand that this meth that Temmler produced is not the crystal meth that's being produced in a trailer somewhere in a southern state. I don't know, it's a different, you know, it was made by a pharmaceutical company. The way I found out about Pervitin was actually, it's actually a funny story because I didn't know anything about, no one knew anything about Nazis and drugs as I said before.

Like in 2010 I'm asking a friend of mine who's a DJ in Berlin, Alex is his name, I said to him, what should I write about next? What should my next book be? Because I'd written three novels and I was about to write the fourth novel and he said, you should write about Nazis and drugs. I said, well, but they didn't take any drugs, you know, because I, and he said, they did. And I said, how do you know? No one's ever talked about this before. He said, well, yesterday I received Pervitin, which I said, what is Pervitin? He said, well, it's methamphetamine from the so-called, from the Third Reich.

The Reich being a propaganda term by the Nazis. That's why I like to say the so-called Third Reich. How did this happen? He had a friend who was an antique dealer and in 2010, this antique dealer in East Berlin had purchased like in an apartment where people died, like, you know, then the antique dealers come in and they take furniture, like they pay maybe a little. He bought a medicine chest and he opened the medicine chest and there was pavitin inside from the 1940s.

And that antique dealer was a friend of Alex the DJ. He looked at it and said on the package, contains methamphetamine. He's like, what? So he took it with his partner. They were curious, you know, and I later met this guy and he said for one month we took this pevitin and it was like so great. He said it was not too strong, it made us happy, we were very active, we worked a lot, we had great sex. It was like great. And then Alex, the DJ, being very interested in all kinds

of drugs, he also took it. And he told me this in my writing tower in Berlin. He said, after the first Pervitin, I could feel that something's coming on, that there was like increased energy level. Then I took another one. And these are pills which were like 70 years old, and they were still working. And then I took a third one and my writing tower was right at the river in Berlin and there was like a big ship passing by and I felt like this ship when the big engines turned on and the push of the engine like moving the whole big ship forward. That's how I felt after three tablets.

I said this is insane, you know. And I Googled it and there was like just a little on the internet, there was one medicine historian who had like totally unknown guy, but I mean a researcher who had written like a two-page thing that the German Blitzkrieg, which is the German word for speed war, like the Nazis's strategy how to lead a war, was only possible because of methamphetamine, because of this pavitin. And I read this and I said, this is crazy, maybe I should write about this. And I contacted, so it's a very odd story how this came about, you know.

And I contacted this academic, he was at the University of Ulm, I traveled down there, I met him and he said, yeah, there's actually a lot more to find, but I just didn't have the time because he's investigating all kinds of things, you know, this was just a side project of his. And he gave me the signatures in archives, you get a signature, every document has a signature and he gave me like the signatures where I can find like all the documents on the meth during Nazi times. This was in the military archive of Germany which is housed in Freiburg in southern Germany. Germany is a decentralized country so not

all archives are in Berlin. For example the military archive is in this small town called Freiburg. The military archive is almost bigger than the town, you know, because the German military has done so much shit, you know, in the first, we lost two world wars. I mean, that's quite, that's world record for sure. So, and everything that the German armies did is, you know, documented because the Germans loved to document, like everything is written down. So the military archive is huge. And because I had the signatures from this guy, he basically did the legwork for me. I could look at all the files and then I realized that the German army was using methamphetamine. And it's another interesting story how that came about because a professor called Ranke, he was the head of the Institute for Defense Physiology of the German Army.

And basically his job was to enhance the fighting capability of the soldier. So he was researching in 1938 how can we combat fatigue because he said not the Russians are our biggest enemy, not the British, not even the French, you know. Our biggest enemy is fatigue because you get tired in the evening. You fight the whole day and then you need to sleep. What a waste, you know. That's not good. He was looking for a way to beat this enemy, sleep. And then when Pavitin came onto the market, he started reading studies done by universities and they very clearly show that on math, and I think this is an experience that people who have used math probably would sign,

you know, you don't sleep as much, you know, it keeps you awake because all your dopamine is released. So your brain is basically in a fight or flight mode, like your methamphetamine makes you extremely alert over a very long period of time. And then at one point, obviously, you drop down and you get the urge to take it again. This is how the addiction works. But he was not looking at addiction problems. He was just looking at, does it really work to keep a soldier awake maybe for two hours longer on the battlefield.

Because there's this saying from Napoleonic times, the last 15 minutes in a battle, that's the decisive 15 minutes. Like who wins in the end wins, you know? So if you have something that keeps your men awake for longer than the enemy has, then you have a decisive advantage. So he made tests. I don't know, I have, like there's photos of it in my book Blitzed where you see like the young medical officers, like he was working in an institution that was breeding medical

officers for the German army. So he gave these young guys placebo, methamphetamine, coffee, just to check, and like, can they sustain longer on meth? And they could. They could actually, they were more active. Like these tests started at 8 p.m. and went until 10 a.m. And the meth people, like, they were awake the whole night, you know, they were filling out, you know, they had tests, like you had to draw things or repeat orders or like solve mathematical questions and the math people were like going at it until 10 a.m. and then some said, and now we want to go out, like now then they wanted to party while the caffeine people, I don't know if we can see that image,

it's kind of funny, can you pull that up? Yeah, I'm not sure which image it is though. Your mic's not on, Jamie. I'm just not sure which one it was though. Like the... Your mic's not on, Jamie. I'm just not sure which one it is. I'm looking at... It's just... It's a lot of images and they're all in... Go...

Yeah, this one. So these guys are all messed up. Well, you see like going up, maybe? You see like the S, you know, sleeping there. S means Shine Tablete, which is placebo. To the left of him is a pervitin guy. He's quite placebo. To the left of him is a pervitin guy. He's quite happy. To the right of him is a benzadrine guy. That's the B. And that's another stimulant?

That's the American stimulant, which is not as potent as methamphetamine. I mean, methamphetamine is more potent than amphetamine. It's like a difference between like a Mercedes and a bicycle or something. What is a C? C is coffee. Coffee. Yeah. There's a few more images where you like,

this is like a taken at 4.15 in the morning, this is taken at 5.50 in the morning. Yeah, go back maybe to the 4.15. Hmm. That guy's head's moved. Well, I mean, Here we see photos. Then he obviously looked at the results of the people filling out. There's more pictures later in the day when the S person is yawning.

Well, you see in front of him the pervitin person. He's not yawning. He's ready. He's ready for the next questionnaire. You know, he can't sleep for like another day. The guy in the back though, that's a P, his head is down. I think he's, I think he's solving a... Yeah, he might be studying things.

Well, in any case, maybe go one picture down. Yeah, that one. I like, that's how, that's how the, the test like he did. So he's, he saw that, uh, with that if you take two times six milligrams of pevitin on the right there, that black bar, they don't show any fatigue at all. He basically came to the conclusion, it does work, it does keep you awake. And he also found out something which I think is kind of funny. He found out that on math you are less capable of solving higher complex questions. So math keeps you up

but it makes you a little bit dumber. Like things that are really that demand like abstract, very abstract thinking or you know more complex things, you're not better on math. Is it because math sort of rushes you to come to a conclusion? Yeah. And also you feel too good about yourself, that self-criticism is lowered. And he concluded that this is perfect for the German soldier. It makes you awake longer and makes you a little bit more stupid because

a soldier just needs to follow orders. He just needs to shoot for a long time, you know. And so he got all excited about it. This was in 38. His last test he did was in 39. Then Germany was about to invade Poland September 1st, 1939, beginning of World War II. And he said to his, you know, his superior was in America, it's called the Surgeon General, in German that's a different name, but the highest medical guy in the army who, you know, determines basically at the end of the day what is given to the soldiers. So he wrote to his boss, and this was kind of an old school guy, the boss, like he was still from the First World War and he read the reports and he's like, why do we need to use a chemical drug to enhance the...

He didn't get it basically, so he said we're not using this in the attack on Poland. And then Ranka, the professor really believed in math and I read his war diary, like every officer was required to write like a diary during the war. And in his war diary you can clearly see that he himself became addicted to math. Like he writes about it, it's so great, I don't even understand how I could even do a day at the office without math. Why is not everyone taking it? But then like a few months later it's like I feel very depressed this morning. Even the Pervitin I'm using does not help me anymore against my depression. He didn't understand that this was actually the problem, that he was becoming addicted

himself. And he ate higher and higher dosages. He did, yeah. And he became quite unhinged, but he was like the meth guy of the German army. But he was still doing his job. And he asked the medical officers in the field in Poland, Poland was beaten by Germany within a few days, actually, I think 17 days or something. It was a quick victory, actually quite surprising that it was so quick, but it happened so quick. And a lot of medical officers wrote back to him that Pervitin was actually quite helpful.

They said things like, and I studied all these reports for Blitzt and I'm quoting some of them in Blitzt, like, it really helped all soldiers achieve their work load, like do their work load, which was basically killing or invading a foreign country. So Rangel Genenn was very excited and he said to the surgeon general, because then after the successful campaign against Poland, it was now going against the West, France, the old enemy of Germany. Like we had had a war 1865, Germany won, and then in World War I, Germany lost, and now Hitler wanted like the revenge, you know, now we have the third one, we're going to win the third one.

But his high command was saying, let's please not do it, because the French army, la Grande Armée, was supposed to be the best army in the world at the time, in the late 30s, early 40s. They were really proud of their army, the French, and it wasn't good, but everyone thought it's good. And they also had an ally, which was very powerful, Great Britain, the world's empire. So these two powers to attack from Germany, these two powers was considered insane by the high command. They thought Hitler is just a lunatic. And Hitler wanted to attack the West already in November 1939, like Poland was beaten. The German military actually needed

a lot of repairs because even in a successful campaign you lose a lot of machinery, you lose a lot of people. So everyone said, let's not do it, let's just get back on track and develop a strategy with which we can win against the West because they knew there is no strategy. Because that was exactly what happened in World War I. Germany attacked from the north of Belgium and there was a stalemate and then in the end Germany lost because Germany is one country and it cannot win against so many countries. So they said it's not going to work, you know, but Hitler was very stubborn and he said it will work, but they blocked him. There was even

a coup attempt in November 39 against him which failed. And then he had a breakfast meeting February 17, 1940, three kind of revolutionary tank generals, von Manstein, Guderian and Rommel, Rommel later becoming very famous tank general, came to Hitler in Berlin in the Rice Chancellery and said, we have a plan. We know it's going to work. We can beat them because we will not use the tanks as everyone expects us to use the tanks, which is kind of more in the back, kind of backing up the infantry and, you know, being like the backup guys, like the heavy guys in the back. Like we will use the tanks in the front and make the tanks kind of overrun the enemy. And Hitler's like, well, this is a crazy thought. He loved crazy thoughts. So he's like, this is a

good thought, but where are we going to do it? And they said, we're going to do it in an area. like this is a good thought, but where are we going to do it? And they said, we're going to do it in an area. And I also sent an image. I don't know if we need it, but it's interesting. They decided on an area, which is the Ardennes Mountains. And the Ardennes Mountains is a mountain range in Belgium, which is exactly between the north of Belgium, where the Western Allies were massing their defense forces,

and France, where the French Allies were massing their defense forces, and France where the French also had heavy defense. But in this mountainous terrain, it wasn't heavily fortified. So they said, we're going to go through the Aden Mountains within three days and three nights, but we can't stop at night. Because if we stop and kind of sleep at night, they will know that we're there and then they will come from the north and the south and the pincer movement destroy our advance. So we have to not stop and within three days and three nights we have to reach through

Belgium, the mountains, the French border town of Sedon. We have to get there because then we will be faster because they will still be stuck in the north of Belgium. We will be faster than them and we will race through all the way to the channel and then we will be in the back of them and destroy them. So we will have kind of surrounded them. This is what Churchill later called the sickle cut. And this was a, this is the sickle cut, you know, you see where they're going through and then kind of branch off to the north and to the south and encircle the allied forces there in the north and the French forces there in the south, like being further within enemy territory

than the defenders. It's a crazy plan and the only problem is that thing of not sleeping for three days and three nights. So they were not sure how to solve that problem actually. And Hitler said, this is not a problem. The German soldier is so convinced of the ideology of national socialism, of fighting for me, the Führer. They will not sleep. I didn't sleep in the First World War. Hitler was a soldier in the First World War and he claimed that he was awake and didn't need sleep and stuff like that. So he kind of said that the ideology will make the normal German soldier into the superhuman soldier doesn't need to sleep, which is bullshit obviously. Everyone needs to sleep, you know,

not because you are convinced of an idea you don't need to sleep. And another fact is that actually soldiers were not convinced at all, you know, the German army was the German army. Of course, there were many Nazis in the German army. But at the beginning of the war, there were also just, you know, young guys, and they were not like burning for Hitler. They were actually quite pissed there to go to war against the West. Like they were scared. Like I read reports on like mass depression before the attack started

of people who just said, we're going to lose, you know. This is not possible because to launch a successful invasion into enemy territory, you needed three to one superiority in manpower and in weaponry. And the Germans were actually, they had less people, less soldiers than the West and their weapons were not as good. For example, their tanks were not as good as the British tanks. So it was basically, there was a lot of doubt that this madman plan by these three young revolutionary generals and Hitler supporting this madman plan would actually work. But

then Ranke thought, this is my calling now, this is my hour. And he presented his findings that actually you don't need to sleep for three days and three nights. On meth it's possible. If you give enough meth to a person, you can stay awake for five days. So suddenly his findings became very interesting. He was invited to the high command, he was giving lectures, he wrote a so-called stimulant decree. I don't know if you want to see that. I found that also in the archive in Freiburg. It was the first official paper by an army where the soldiers were basically invited

or ordered or it was suggested to them to take a powerful synthetic stimulant, which is this is the stimulant decree. It says, for example, this was distributed to all the medical officers so they knew, you know, how to use the meth. So for example, it says what to what you could give if someone took too much, like then you give like a sleeping sleeping pill. It also says it's quite interesting what are the side effects and the side effects are aggression. So that was like a desired side effect, you know. So, Ranko was suddenly very popular. He was on top of the world.

There's another paper I found which shows how many dosages then the German army ordered from the Temmler Company just before they attacked France and this is 35 million dosages. So finding that document was also kind of fun. Wow! 35 million! And so were they on a large dose of this when the soldiers? Well it's interesting then to see how those 35 million dosages were being used because they were used asymmetrical. They were handed out especially to the tank troops because the tanks were at the forefront and these tanks could not stop.

So everyone in these tanks was basically high on crystal meth, like all the way through the advance. And there's reports by the French army that they simply could not understand their opponent anymore. Like they didn't sleep. They just chased through. They behaved like madmen basically. Rommel was seen at one point, totally high on meth, like standing in the tank, like the lid was open, he was standing there, and they were racing at night through a French village where the French army had camped because they needed to sleep because it's kind of, I guess, funny. I don't know if funny is the right word, but France also

had sort of, not a stimulant decree, but they had the rule that in a war situation, and this had been beneficial in World War I, each French soldier has the right to drink three quarters of a liter of red wine per day. So when France was attacked by Germany, I think it was 17,000 trucks with red wine drove from the French wine regions to the front lines and distributed the red wine. So the French guys were like drinking red wine, which is a mood enhancer, but it does make you tired, you know, especially three quarters of a liter. So the Germans were messed up and the French were like kind of drowsy. So that scene with Rommel I described, he's standing in the open lid of the tank going through this village at

night and left and right are kind of the French soldiers kind of sleeping basically and he just fires with the tank left and right and he runs over people and he's like a complete madman. And then the French got scared. They got very scared and their defenses collapsed. Germany beat France in a few days, you know. The big neighbor that in First World War Germany had been fighting Like they had been fighting four years like moving like a meter a day and the next day back and this time because of the methamphetamine Charging through and you know Hitler was in Paris in June already, you know That's the story of blitzed in nutshell or of a part of Blitz.

Wow. Isn't it incredible that that's not taught in school? Actually, I do give talks now in school. Now. Yeah, now. But no historians touched the subject. Right. I spoke to, for this book, I collaborated, not collaborated, but I had advice from a leading German historian, an elderly gentleman who passed away, Mommsen, like the leading German historian of National Socialism, really cool guy.

I met him, I showed him my findings from the archives and he's like, we overlooked this the whole time because we historians have no clue about drugs. It has to enter your mind in a way that this might have a relevance. Historians are very square people, at least used to be very square people. National socialism is such a serious topic that out of the-the-box thinking is not really encouraged within the academia at least, but me being a non-historian, I could think out of the box. So he said this is the missing puzzle piece that we need to know to understand what actually went down in World War II.

So he was very much behind it and wrote a preface to the German edition also. So it was interesting to communicate with him obviously about it because he helped me also put things into perspective. Because also one thing he said was don't argument in a mono causal way. Like it's kind of flippant to say the blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine. It's, it's, it's, it's, methamphetamine played a huge role and I examined that huge role. I think it was probably one of the decisive factors, but you know, many facts in a war, many factors come together. So if you can't stay awake for three days, none of it works. Yeah.

World War II would have been very, very different. If you want to make cement, you have to add water. And I mean, it's not a... if you look at it from a military standpoint, it actually makes a lot of sense. The problem in Germany, Nazi Germany, they then had was that the army was so crazy about meth and also the Air Force. They were giving it to pilots in the, we say Luft, in the air battle against Great Britain. That was like a decisive air battle in the late 1940s after France had been beaten by Germany, conquered, then it was Germany against

Great Britain. There was a lot of fighting in the air between Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe. The German Luftwaffe was messed up because they had less pilots. Comikaze pilots, right. That's a big one for suicide flights. We've talked about that before. Japanese factory workers also use methamphetamine I mean Japan was an ally of Germany

They were part of the evil axis. So Japan had knowledge that methamphetamine was successfully used In the European theater of this war so they used it also in their kamikaze pilots against American, you know ships and stuff So kamikaze pilots against American ships and stuff. So where were we? We were the effect of meth on the soldiers and also the effectiveness of it during the Blitzkrieg, but then also the Japanese pilots. The Japanese were using it, the kamikazes were using it. I mean the problem, oh yeah, no, I wanted to talk about something that became a problem then in the German military because then suddenly there were guys in the... For example, the so-called health-führer, which is like the minister for health in German... Nazi Germany

was called a health-führer. He was like an enemy of Pavitin because he said... He like used the old argument, we are superheroes anyhow from our genes because we are a superior race. We don't need a stimulant to perform these miraculous acts on the battlefield. So he wanted the army to stop the methamphetamine and I studied all the letters going back and forth between like high command and the Ministry of Health and the army basically said, we're not stopping this. We're a modern army. We're using modern means to achieve our goals. So this actually shows that Hitler is full of shit when he says you just need to install the right ideology in people and then they are motivated. It's actually Germany was,

Nazi Germany was a very, you know, modern system that was using this to their advantage and the army was a modern, you know, war machine and they used it very effectively and that's why also other than armies who learned about this, it took them a while, like the British needed quite a while to understand what was going on, but there was one point, a headline in a British newspaper, when does Churchill also use victory in form of a pill? Because in an Italian newspaper in the fall of 1940, there was an article on the German Luftwaffe using a pillola di chiraggio, like a courage pill, which was this methamphetamine. So then the British became like, we have to examine this.

And they actually made tests in England comparing methamphetamine with amphetamine and decided that for the British guys, for the English guys, amphetamine is better because it's not so strong. Like the Nazis always take the strongest and the British were like a little bit more hesitant. And it is actually a smart choice because methamphetamine does burn you out, obviously. It's an addictive drug that's not healthy. And amphetamine is also not healthy, you know, but it's not as... it doesn't make you as edgy. So you can take it over a longer period of time, I guess. While methamphetamine really burns you out. I spoke in my research for Blitz with one medical officer that was still alive that had served in World War II

for the German army in Stalingrad, actually. He was in Stalingrad and he said he still had Pervitin and he gave it to like these guys that are like freezing to death being you know killed by the Red Army. And he said it's not said it didn't work anymore, but it just gave us another day of artificial energy. So methamphetamine is a very – in a long war, it's very problematic. In a short war, it actually works. That's why after the October 7th attack of Hamas on Israel, I was interviewed by Haaretz, which is the leading Israeli newspaper, because there was rumor that also these combatants or these terrorists or whatever you want to call them had used Cap-ta-gon, which is another

form of meth that's a brand name that's very popular actually in the Middle East. And I had found a paper from April last year, April 23, was a report, you can find it online by some newspaper, that a large shipment of Cap d'Agone was seized at the Gaza border, actually by Hamas border forces, who claimed that actually Israel was smuggling this into Gaza to kind of corrupt the Gaza youth. I don't know if that's true, you know, it was just what Hamas said. But for sure, there was Cap d'Argonne in the Gaza Strip and I'm totally convinced that people used it when they attacked Israel. And that is not the only case.

When the terrorist attacks in Paris happened, they found amphetamines. They seized one billion dollars worth of Cap-to-gon amphetamines. It is rumored that the Assad regime in Syria is actually behind large-scale manufacturing of Cap-to-gon at the moment. That's how they get their money because CaptaGone is like the cocaine of the poor man, you know. 13 tons. Whoa. Dubai police uncovered 13 tons of the drug known as CaptaGone hidden in doors and wooden panels. Wow. So CaptaGone is a...

Whoa. And CaptaGone has a similar effect to methamphetamine? Yeah, it's very similar. It's a very similar molecule. I guess it's very strong. Well, it makes sense that that would be very effective in times of war, especially for short campaigns. I had a reading in LA from Blitz and afterwards a special Navy SEAL approached me who had been in the audience, and he was not on the team that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was on a parallel team. He knew a lot about it. He did stuff like that. And he said before they go into an operation like that, an operation that requires them

to stay awake for, let's say, 50 hours, and not only stay awake to stay awake for let's say 50 hours, and not only stay awake but to stay very alert for 50 hours, it's obvious that you use an amphetamine. It doesn't matter if you burn out later, you just take a week off, you know. So the Nazis invented methamphetamine for war, the idea, you know, by Ranke to use it for war purposes. And it has been copied already in the Korean War, American pilots were on amphetamines. Like amphetamines are like a staple now of armies and of, you know, terrorist groups, freedom fighters or whatever, you know. Because it also lowers, this was what Ranke also found out, it lowers your fear level.

So when you're on meth, you're less afraid. It lowers your level of inhib- like you're not as inhibited. Like you would rather kill someone in a brutal way than you would sober because it's very hard actually to kill another human being. It's very stressful and we don't really want to do it. But studies found that on meth, you're more likely, it's easier for you to do it. So it's really, the Nazis set a horror, they pioneered in it. How similar is that to the effects of Adderall?

Adderall is obviously amphetamine and there was I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 39 million prescriptions in a recent year. It's another one of these contradictions like we make like drugs are illegal but Adderall is legal which is basically it is amphetamine so it's just like a certain type of amphetamine and I know quite a few people who are addicted to these types of pills and it's not a nice addiction I think and because it's also you know it's legal like your psychiatrist says take this so you function well. You have ADHD Norman, you need to take it.

What did you just say? You need to take it, you should take the medication. I'm very sorry I came on the show sober. I would have been so amazing otherwise. No, I mean... I know many, many people, especially journalists. I know a lot of journalists and a lot of writers who use Adderall to be productive. Yeah, and I would say why not if you want to pay the price of using something that's maybe bad for your brain and maybe makes you addicted, but maybe you think you write better on it. So that's like a chance that some writers take like who wrote, do Android's dream of electric sheep. Is that Philip K. Dick?

Yeah, right. He was using a lot of amphetamines. I heard that Jack Kerouac wrote on the road like in two weeks on amphetamines. So, I mean, drugs are basically neutral, you know, you don't become a Nazi soldier when you take amphetamine, you know. It just, it creates a certain state in your brain. You release all your dopamine, you're highly alert. You might be very creative, but you also might write a lot of shit, you know, because your self-criticism is lowered. So Kiroak, being a very good writer, he like wrote the wave, you know, he was just writing this on the road thing. I have friends that have tried amphetamines, particularly Adderall, and then done standup

comedy and they say it's absolutely terrible. It's terrible for standup comedy. You lose that subtlety, right? You lose the subtlety, you lose a connection with the audience, and you're not having fun anymore. It's like you're not being silly, and your self-criticism is out the window, so you think everything you say is brilliant. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.

Maybe. No. I mean, but some people find it very beneficial for productivity, which is interesting, because like, they are- It probably depends what you need to do. You know, it also depends on your self control, right? Can do you have the amount of self control and amount of objective analysis about what you're doing with your life to recognize that what you're doing is detrimental?

Can you manage that? Can you figure out how to back off? Can you figure out how to take time off? Can you figure out when to use it and just use it effectively and say to yourself in a very disciplined way? I'm gonna take X amount of this adderall stuff because I have a deadline. I'm gonna get this done I'm gonna do my best and then afterwards. I'm not gonna fuck with it anymore a lot of people can't do that, but a lot of people can I guess and It's sort of like all other drugs we should sort of figure out

what's the dose what's effective what's not effective and also strategies for helping people get off of it like Ibogaine you know I think having any kind of legalization strategy so if they legalize drugs in this country I think it has to be done in conjunction with a treatment strategy. And I think that treatment strategy is Ibogaine. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the psychedelics do get you off other drugs. That's a fact. Also DMT gets you off other drugs. So they work against addiction. So that old scare of some drugs are like you take one drug and then you take the next

drug, you know, until in the end you land with heroin. That's kind of stupid, you know, because if you take LSD, you're not going to land with heroin. No, no. If you take Ibogaine, for sure also not. Well, marijuana is the great one, right? The gateway drug, people. I think alcohol is a great gateway drug.

That's the real one because alcohol lowers your inhibitions. It lowers your judgment and then all of a sudden you're like I'll try that. Yeah, right. Yeah, and then there's also people take cocaine when they drink too much alcohol to wake up. Yeah, I spoke with actually with an Ibogaine researcher Deborah Mash from University of Miami and she found that alcohol and cocaine together create a new metabolite in the body and that is the one that many people go for.

It's like one plus one equals three basically. So you won't get that high from alcohol alone and you won't get it from cocaine alone. Most people don't take cocaine alone. They always drink when they take cocaine because they want that particular form of metabolite of intoxication going. Interesting. It's obviously very unhealthy.

So here it is. How do you say that word? Coquethylene. Coquethylene is a byproduct of concurrent consumption of alcohol and cocaine as metabolized by the liver. Normally the metabolism of cocaine produces two primary biologically inactive metabolites, benzolec, how do you say that? Benzolecone, benzoleconine, and econeine,

econeine, methyl ester. Yeah, it's this coca. Well, that's a big factor too, right? Like how it's metabolized by the liver. There's a difference between eating cannabis and smoking it, right? So 11-hydroxy metabolite which is created by the liver which is five times more psychoactive than THC. So there's a lot of factors and the thing is like we don't know if it's kind of crazy that your book and your work was really illuminating

the effect that this had on one of the most historically significant events in human history, which is World War II. Yeah, I thought that was quite strange. I went onward with my research. I wanted to expand and I wanted to look at Hitler also I was gonna ask you this before you get to that if methamphetamine was created after the 1936 games What was Hitler on during the 1936 games when you see him rocking back and forth and he's tripping was he doing cocaine? Was he what was he on? I mean I I

Studied the notes of his doctor his doctor's personal physician Theodore Morrell, who was kind of a celebrity doctor in Berlin before he met Hitler. Like he was famous for treating diseases that don't exist, so he gave mood enhancing shots, injections, and he was also a vitamin pioneer. He believed in vitamins, and at the time vitamins were kind of unknown. So he thought if you inject someone with like such and such, inject someone with like vitamin C, that would be like a mood enhancing effect, and actually that's true. So he cured Hitler's photographer, Hubertus Hoffmann, of a sexual transmitted disease in 36 and then Hoffmann said, I have to bring you to my, to a special

patient and then there was a spaghetti dinner with Morel and Hitler and Hitler was complaining of bloating problems. He always was like he had digestion problems and Morel, who was like an alternative doctor, gave him like vitamins in the probiotic, which was also new at the time, and Hitler was cured and he appointed Morel as his personal physician. They became kind of best friends. They were like Hitler spent more time with Morel than with anyone else, all the way up to the end. So Morel's notes are very interesting to study because he was like one of these German nerds that wrote everything down. And I went to another federal archive in Germany and I checked out all the papers of Morel and I could see

that basically no one had looked at these papers. Like Hitler is the most examined person in the world. The most literature about one person is actually about Hitler, but no one... I mean the last time someone checked out these notes, I could see it in the record of the archive, it was like in 1986 and then someone in 1961. So I was like the fourth person to look at this. So it's kind of crazy because Morel describes like in detail like what he gives to Hitler. That's why I'm a little bit surprised by this famous video of him. I think maybe it's a fake, I don't know.

Because from 36 when they met, and Morel was with him at the Olympic Games until 41 basically Hitler only received vitamins vitamin C vitamin B1 and sometimes glucose like sugar was injected into maybe he was on a sugar rush you know because sugar is a strong drug because sugar immediately kicks you know in the brain so but there was no like heavy substances in 36 not that you know I I morel wrote everything down so I don't think he would, you know. And Morel's introduction to Hitler was what year? 36. So it was at the same time.

Yep, a little bit before. So the introduction was before the Olympics? Yeah. Is it possible that Hitler is taking something without the knowledge of Morel? No. No? Because Morel was very protective of his patient. He called him patient A. And before that, Hitler had like an array of like specialists.

Hitler didn't like specialists in general. Like he didn't like, like there was Karl Brandt. He was like the highest SS doctor and he wanted to be like the personal physician of Hitler. But Hitler didn't want like an SS guy to have so much knowledge about his body, so he always kept Brandt at bay. And then Morel was like perfect for Hitler because Morel was like this kind of chubby, good-humored kind of house doctor with the crazy recipes and the crazy injections. So Hitler thought this is my guy basically. And Morel became like, Morel's wife was very much against that,

that his her husband became the personal physician of Hitler. She said to him like, we'll never, we won't spend that much time together from now on. Morel like, no, I have to take this chance. You know, I can be the person. He was like a celebrity doctor before. Now he's the personal physician of the Fuhrer, the most powerful man of Europe. So Morel very much controlled what Hitler took. Hitler didn't take anything that Morel didn't, you know, talk about or authorize and write down. He was his doctor, like he was always there, you know. So I see basically three phases in Hitler's drug taking from and from 36 to 41 it was mostly these vitamins. And Hitler was never ill during

this time. Like he had a pretty good health in general, except from the bloating because he ate wrong. He was a vegetarian that basically ate like bread, bread and sugar. So that's very unhealthy for your gut, we know these days. They didn't know that. So he was always farting basically. That was a problem for him. And Morel kind of cured him with the probiotics and then the vitamins and you know Hitler kind of grooved along to this kind of treatment and he was you know very successful also in the beginning. He was very healthy. He won all the wars like he was on top of the world. And then in 1941 Germany decided, he decided to attack the Soviet Union. And also the Soviet Union, the campaign against Russia was very successful in the first three

months. A lot of methamphetamine was given to the soldiers, just like in the attack on France. They overran the Red Army like crazy. Like within three months, they made huge territorial gains. In October of 1940, they were already standing in front of Moscow. They could see one officer could look with his binoculars and he could see the tram, like the last tram station of Moscow. He could see that.

So they were right in front of Moscow. And the thing was, what happened was in August 1941, like in the middle of the campaign, the campaign started June 21st, 1941. So August 41, they were already that huge, you know, made, gained a lot of territory. But Hitler for the first time became sick. He had what they call the Russian flu. Like he was, you know, camping, you know, the headquarters was moving with the troops.

So he was, you know, maybe drank bad water or something. And he had the Russian flu, which made him stay in bed. He had very high fever. He was like, diarrhea and vomiting. So he was really not in a good shape. So he said to Morel, and Morel wrote all of this down. Like I was sitting in the National Archives in Germany and reading all this stuff. And I really felt like the fly on the wall that could look at things that no one had seen before. He describes that Hitler coming in, sitting down, the decisions that had to be made that day, Hitler saying, I need something stronger than vitamins.

I mean, Hitler was lying in bed and the generals were deciding on that important military briefing how to further advance. The generals wanted to move towards Moscow and Hitler wanted to split the troops and go to Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg, and to the south. He had a different strategy. He wanted to be at that briefing and he said to Morel, I need something stronger than vitamins. Morel gave him for the first time a very strong opioid, which was called Dolantin, which was a German product.

And that opioid, you know, is a different ball game than vitamins. He got an injection of a very potent opioid and he gets up from the bed, he goes to the military briefing, he can call the shots, you know, troops will be separated. High command was like, what the fuck, you know, but they, you know, he can call the shots, troops will be separated, high command was like what the fuck, but he's the leader so he decides. And from that moment on we can see in the notes of Morel that Hitler's drug consumption actually changes, like he becomes more and more interested in potent substances. And from 41 to 43 Morel experiences a lot with also animal hormones. Like when Germany invades the Ukraine and has the whole territory of the Ukraine, Morel

gets the monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals in all of the slaughterhouses of Ukraine. It's like an order that I found, like an order that I found like an official paper, all the organs of all the slaughtered animals of all slaughterhouses of occupied Ukraine will go to Hitler's personal, the Führer's personal physician. Was that for Taurin? Huh? Was that for Taurin?

Yeah, I mean, he experimented, he had like his own pharmaceutical company by the time, Morel, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where like his chemist was like getting awful and organs and thyroid glands and all kinds of very potent things and then making like concoctions with it. Like there was a famous liver concoction like from pig's liver and Morel's problem was that at the time in 1943 it was a war economy in Germany, so it was very difficult to bring new medicines onto the market. Basically it was not possible, like all the tests that usually are done in peace times on a new medicine.

So he said this to Hitler, like, I'm developing all these new medicines from all these organs and I cannot bring them on the market, they cannot help the German people sustain in this war. And then Hitler said, this is bullshit. I the Führer will be your guinea pig and I will test all these dubious concoctions that you make. And then because when I take it, every German can take it and we kind of bypass all the regulations.

This is exactly what happened. So Hitler actually became the guinea pig for like hormonal concoctions for Morel. So it's really an insane story that is beautifully documented. So you can like read like train wagons going from the Ukraine, from the German army. Very scarce it was to have a whole train wagon because they needed to ship wounded soldiers back or ammunition. And he just required whole train wagons filled with this offal from the slaughterhouses and all the livers of all the slaughtered pigs in the Ukraine. And then the army was like, we can't do this.

We need these wagons for like war sensitive stuff, you know. And then Morel would run to Hitler and say, the army is blocking me, transporting these precious materials that I can turn into drugs for the common good of the German people. And Hitler wrote an order. And then the wagon was going through and then Morel was creating these concoctions. And Hitler actually, he took too many of these weird things, you know. His health started deteriorating in 1943. Like, he was quite healthy until 41, 41 to 43, when he took all these organ things and

all these hormones and, you know, crazy stuff. You know, today you would send the doctor that prescribes you that stuff to prison. But there was no checks and balances. Hitler just took because he liked morale and he liked to experiment and they were always talking about new enhancement of the body. That was a whole Nazi idea to become more powerful, more strong, you know. So he was interested in these things and he actually, his health started to deteriorate. And then by 43 he had already become quite a different man. He aged quite a lot. I mean, you can see it if you compare the young Hitler with like just five years later, he looks like 20 years older, you know.

And then in 43, because he's doing so poorly, like his chi, you would say today, your physical energy was like really down. If you get like one pig liver extract injection a day, you can imagine how you're going to feel after like a year or so. It's not very healthy. So it diminished... What was the goal of the pig liver extract? Enhance energy. Like they then gave it to the German soldiers. Like they drank this stuff because it's like liver is always like filled with like nutrients I guess. So that's why you know some people think and I would probably agree that it's healthy to eat like liver. I think

like an ounce of liver a day is probably the right amount but injecting pig liver. So Hitler technically speaking wasn't a vegetarian at all because he was using all these animal you know supplements and just wasn't consuming them with his mouth. Right. So do you know the famous story about Hitler meeting Mussolini, or Mussolini wanted to get out of the war? Yeah. I write about that in Blitz because that is the first time, like Hitler was quite depressed

before the meeting and felt betrayed because Mussolini wanted to leave the war effort. This was in July 1943. Like Mussolini said, leave the war effort. This was in July 1943. Like Mussolini said, this is not working. We'd rather get out. Okay? Is that fine with you if we just leave the Axis now? And Hitler's like, no, it's not fine, you know? So he was very nervous before that meeting and was in a villa in northern Italy.

And he asked Morel again for something stronger and then Morel for the first time presented what then would become Hitler's favorite drug and this is a it was a German drug called Eukodal and it's quite interesting. Eukodal was made by the Merck company which is still a pharmaceutical giant today and it's an opioid. It's an opioid that makes you, if you inject it intravenously, quite euphoric but also quite calm, you know. You're not crazy. If you're on Oikodal intravenously, you're like, you think you're like on top of the world. It's like you feel so great. And Hitler loved this drug. Like he

got it injected before the meeting with Mussolini on the way to the plane. He asked for another injection. He loved it so much. And then like people who were at the meeting in this villa said that Hitler was just, you know, talking nonstop like I'm doing right now. Like talking. No, we're actually having a conversation. We're having a conversation. Hitler and Mussolini did not have a conversation. Hitler was talking for three, four hours without stopping. And Mussolini became very sweaty. And like, aides came in and handed him papers that Rome was being bombed the very minute.

But he couldn't get out. Hitler was very dominant in the room. Very, very dominant in the room. And from that moment on, Oikodal became kind of his favorite drug and now comes the pun. When Germany lost, a lot of patents were also lost from Germany and became possession of America. And the patent of Oikodal also traveled to America and Oikodal is oxycodone. So what has created the American opioid crisis is the very same opioid that was Hitler's favorite opioid

sold in America as pills, crushed and sniffed whatever, you know, I don't know, you know. Hitler was injecting it from the start, you know. He didn't fuck around with pills, you know, because pills, because he still had these stomach problems. He didn't like a medicine to go orally, like into the, he didn't like, they took too long, you know, you don't know, you take something now and it's acting like in 45 minutes, and not good, you know. The injection is the immediate effect.

So that's what he wanted. He would go to a military briefing when the war was in 44 1944, the generals were just, they knew it was lost. They came from the Eastern Front. People were dying every day. It was over. But they came to the meeting to tell Hitler basically, you want to save your men. But Hitler on Oxycodone, on Oikodale, as it was called then, had so much power in the room, like so much charisma. He was very charismatic early on, but he had lost his

charisma in the meantime, but through Oikodale he could reinstall his charisma being good in the room, and he would like, and I read like a lot of witnesses' reports from generals, a lot of them wrote books afterwards or made notes what happened. They said when they were with Hitler in this room, they were convinced that Hitler knew something that they didn't know. Like he had a wonder weapon up his sleeve. Like he knew that the war would turn around and we would win, the Germans would win in the end because he was so convincing on this Eukodal. So Hitler was very clever actually in using that drug to, you know,

for his like horrific vision, you know. Wow. Yeah. And you can look at, you can like examine this like day by day, you know, by studying the papers of Morel and then also studying like other, you know, accounts, you know, because it's always good to look at more, not only have one source, but there's quite a lot on it. So it is quite surprising no one ever wrote about that before. Well, it's fascinating because if you think about how much is written about Hitler and how much Hitler has been studied, that they didn't study that. It's totally crazy actually. Because it has such a profound effect on the way you think and behave.

It does. Yeah. It's totally crazy actually. Because it has such a profound effect on the way you think and behave. It does. I mean there was one, we all know that on July 20th, 1944, there was the most successful, I mean it wasn't successful but almost successful assassination attempt when the bomb by Stauffenberg blew up in the headquarters in the East, Operation Valkyrie, it was called, it was a code name. And afterwards, like Morel rushes in, the doctor rushes in, Hitler's quite injured actually which Nazi propaganda later said like the Führer was not injured. He was quite injured by that detonation.

I mean he was sitting there and the bomb was like on the other side of the table leg and the table leg was quite thick and the table was thick so he was very lucky that he didn't die. He had like hundreds of splinters in his body and his ear drums were blown and he was bleeding from his ears and he was like totally, you know, he was, I mean he was injured, you know. And then Morelle immediately comes in and gives him eukodal because in the evening Mussolini came for a meeting. He was already in the train. So you can see like an hour later like Hitler like you know on top of his game again you know joking with Mussolini and like the other like officers lose have lost a leg that died like so and then actually from that moment on Hitler Hitler, that's like July 20th, 1944 until the very

end, May 8th, 1945 when the war ends, that is his heaviest drug consumption because then he's really like, this is the most intense time. One of the things, for example, that happens is that to treat his blown ear drums, which were connected with heavy pain that he experienced, the new doctor came in, Giesing was his name, and he had cocaine. He brought cocaine, which was a legal product at the time, also by Merck. Germany was importing the coca leaves from Peru mostly. and then Merck cocaine was supposed to be the best in the world. Like there were even like product foragers in China who like replicate the Merck label with the Merck cocaine. Merck cocaine was, you know, was the best cocaine

and this doctor came in and he wanted to give the cocaine because it was something to numb the pain basically. It was an anesthetic. And Hitler was like, I want more of this stuff. And Giesing writes this down. I found these documents actually in Washington in the National Archive. Hitler demands to use cocaine, like he wants the doctor to brush it into his nostrils, which is the most effective way to take cocaine, I guess. And then he's like, finally I can think clear again. And the doctor realized this is a drugged guy. Once he gets onto a potent drug, he completely embraces it and wants it more. So Giesing tried to get the coke away from Hitler. Hitler demanded more and more of these cocaine treatments because I can feel, finally I can breathe again and I don't feel like injured anymore.

And actually on cocaine he developed the strategy of a second Ardennes Offensive. We talked about the mountainous terrain of the Ardennes in Belgium in 1940, and Hitler wanted to do it again in late 1944, like a surprise attack. And like his generals, they couldn't believe it because it was a ridiculous idea because the Americans were already on the continent. Like it was no chance it could have worked out. It would just mean that a lot of people, a lot of young German soldiers are going to die. You know, that's what it meant, his second Adenofense. But he had it on cocaine. You can see it very clearly, like Morel, and Morel didn't like this. He didn't like this other doctor coming in with the cocaine.

Like the doctor started competing. It's called the doctor's war because the one guy gives him cocaine and Morel gives him oxycodone, which is an opioid. So Hitler was kind of speed balling in August and September 1944 and made very crazy then decisions, very bad, very for the German, for the Nazi war effort, very bad decisions for the world. You know, it was good that he was so fucked up. I actually spoke to a British historian who told me that he had investigated, Anthony Beaver is his name, a great colleague of mine, he had investigated the British intelligence's plan to assassinate

Hitler because obviously there were these plans, you know. And they had realized in 1944 that it's actually not good to assassinate Hitler because he was already so off the rails that he weakened the German war effort. Let's say Hitler was assassinated, then let's say Himmler becomes the Führer or something. He was also a total freak. He did two hours of yoga each morning because he thought the Aryan race is connected with ancient Vedic, you know, so he was into yoga, but he was not into drugs.

So let's just say they would have had an efficient leader, would have been more dangerous basically to the allies than keeping totally drugged out Hitler. Wow. So they wanted him to stay fucked up because it was better. They actually did not bomb pharmaceutical companies until like in December 1944, British bombers bombed the Merck company and then Eukodal could not be made anymore. And actually Hitler then moves to the bunker and he doesn't have eukodal anymore, which was his drug of choice.

He received it every other day in a very high dosage, 20 milligrams intravenously of the most potent opioid. So he became a junkie, he became addicted to this. So then when he moves to the bunker in the end phase of the war, just before that the Merck production site had been bombed, we were supplying it, Morel doesn't have it anymore. And that creates quite a friction between patient A, as Morel called Hitler, and the doctor because the doctor basically made him hooked on a substance and suddenly it's like the

one mistake the dealer should make, make the client hooked and then you can't supply anymore. And also no one else could supply, you know, Hitler couldn't go somewhere else. There's a report by Morel driving on a motorcycle through bombed out Berlin like February, March 45, like going from pharmacy to pharmacy, asking do you still have like a supply of Oikodal, you know. So the situation became, you know, Hitler lost World War II, which was not good for him, but he also was on withdrawal, heavy withdrawal from opioids, which made him feel like shit. So that leads to the complete degeneration of the character. So that third

Reich kind of crumbled in on itself. Fascinating. Probably would have lost anyway, but still. Of course. Fascinating that it all happened and it's kind of ironic that it happens while he's in full withdrawal. Yeah. I mean, the only drug really that he had left in the end was harmin, which we spoke about

harmin. I studied what Morel still had in his bag basically. Looked at the bottom of his bag and he still had Harmin, so he gave Harmin to Hitler. I don't know what Harmin does to you if you just take it singularly, but it doesn't, you know. And sugar. Hitler more and more demanded cake, because sugar does actually give you a little high. Yeah. I mean, it does.

A little high. It does. Even if you're in the bunker losing World War II, you still kind of crave that sugar high. But at the time they had to really crumble the cake for him because he couldn't, like he was shaking so much from the withdrawal. Like he took it in a spoon and kind of put it in his mouth. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Wow. It's in Blitz we find like a new biography in a way of Hitler, a more accurate one actually. That is so fascinating. Wasn't there recorded instances

of JFK? Didn't he have a doctor that were prescribed some sort of amphetamines to him as well? JFK is a very interesting case. He had chronic pain and there is reports that he used also methamphetamine. Also he had depression. So he had a kind of a doctor feel-good. And one time I found a connection, but I couldn't research more about it, that this doctor feel-good of JFK actually had studied what Morel had given to Hitler. But you probably don't even need to study Morel, that's what's out there. So JFK, I think, received quite a lot of medications. That's why it's interesting. What I wrote about in Tripp is his possible LSD experience. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Yeah, you talked about that with Jesse Waters. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, there's's only one source for it and we always have to be skeptical if there's only one source. If there's two sources, it's always much better. But one source and it's actually Timothy Leary's autobiography. He describes, and I don't think he made this up. I have no reason to believe that he made this up. He describes how a woman called Mary Pinchot visits him at Harvard telling him, because

he was known as the, you know, he was still employed by Harvard. He was, you know, the LSD guy, basically. If you wanted to know about LSD, you would ask Leary. He had done the most research. And also some of the research is very good, very, you know, it's very interesting. So she went to him. She was like a socialite in Washington, Mary Pinchot. She had been married to a CIA guy, but they had been divorced.

She was probably too, quote unquote, left for him. She was more like a peace person, I guess. And she was also a very good friend of JFK. They were rumored to be lovers. She was in the White House a lot. He took her to functions. Like she was a part of his life and she visited Leary saying to Leary, I have a very powerful friend. This was in April 63. And I want to, you know, do the experience with him. And Lyri was all, you know, he kind of was probably thinking, he's this JFK. But she didn't disclose it.

She didn't disclose who this powerful friend was. And Lyri said, yeah, I'm going to come with you, we're going to do it together. And she said, no, no, no, just give it to me. I want the stuff, the LSD, and I want to kind of get some guidelines from you. How do you do like a LSD session? So they had this, you know, Lyri told her a bit about what he thinks, how it should be done, set and setting. You know, JFK shouldn't do it while he's like doing a press conference.

He should do it when there's maybe he doesn't have to go on camera anymore that day, you know, maybe it's in the evening, you know, in the White House. So she takes the LSD and then there's no record that they actually took it together because there's just no record. There's one, there's her diary, but we'll come to her diary in a second. What happened was a little bit later, and you can pull that up on YouTube, you can see that it's quite interesting. Kennedy gave his so-called peace speech at the American University, which is, I think, in Washington, or maybe not, but is it Washington? And in this peace speech, it's kind of funny actually to see him because we have to understand

that JFK was quite a hawk. He was really a Cold War guy. Like he was a Democrat. Like the Democrats, they're all for war. It's confrontation. We have to be safe. We have to protect the country. We're serious arms race. That was his thing. He was not different than other presidents. But in this peace speech that he gave a few weeks after Mary Pinchot received the LSD from Leary, he has a completely different agenda. He sounds like basically like a hippie. He says like, you're very presidential, giving a speech for all these students and nice day

in America and he gives a presence coming and gives a speech. And he talks about, you know, we all live on this planet together, even the Russians, you know, we all care for our children, and we're all in this together. And he basically shifts course. Like he says that this arms race is kind of ridiculous, it just burns resources and we must come to a different understanding. And then he gets killed like a few months later. So that is just, those are the facts, you know, and I think I'll leave it at the facts. So, fact also is that Mary Pinchot was shot in the head a few weeks or months after the assassination of JFK.

And that day of her death, she was jogging in Washington close to her apartment. There was a breaking into her apartment and her diary was taken. So maybe that's the source actually that links JFK to LSD. And maybe JFK was eventually killed because he took LSD and changed his mind, but maybe. There's a lot of factors why he was killed, right? It's yeah, obviously. I mean, it's kind of a mystery why he was killed, you know, why does he need to be killed, but maybe that change of mind becoming like saying like arms race must stop which you know pisses off a lot of people in the

military industrial complex who are like based their whole thing on the arms race you know maybe that becomes a very big threat and he must be eliminated who knows you know but maybe he had a change of mind for sure maybe because of LSD maybe because of the love making with Mary Pinchot, or maybe they were just smoking joints. They were seen, there are sources for that they had smoked joints in the White House before, but I don't know if cannabis would kind of bring about this change of mind. But LSD certainly could because the default mode network, which is Cold War arms race,

suddenly gets a little less energy. Other parts of the brain is like, maybe we should do it differently. And also the realization that if anybody can change things, he literally has a responsibility to express himself in that way. Absolutely. If he really is a leader. Norman, thank you very much. This is a fascinating conversation. That was just three hours. Isn't that crazy? It just flew by. Thank you very much for all your work. I mean, what you've done by just the Hitler stuff, just explaining all that is so illuminating. It's so interesting.

And I really hope everybody goes out and buys your books. So Tripped and Blitzed is the other one? Yeah. And are they available? There's actually a present for you. Oh, thank you very much. And you can have the Tripped also. Thank you. Are these available in audiobook as well? They are, but I do encourage everyone to read, but they are available in audiobooks.

It is great to read, but sometimes people are stuck in traffic. Yeah, right. And it's a great way to consume information. Of course they're out there in audiobooks. Thank you very much. Really appreciate you. I hope we will see each other again. Yeah, let's do it again.

Well, when is this next book that you're working on going to be out? Stone Sapiens will be out, I think, in the fall of 2025. Okay, in the fall of 2025. Come on back. Let's do it. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you. All right.

Bye, everybody.