The Joe Rogan Experience - #2419 - John Lisle

Starting point is 00:00:00 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. John, what's happening, man? Not much. It's good to be here. You too. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:00:17 I know you're in the middle of a project. You're doing a project with David Chase, right? It's about MK. Ultra and... Yes, he has gotten the rights to this book. You know, this book, Project Mind Control. And he's, yeah, interested in adapting it into a series. Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject. So as soon as I heard about it, and they said the series is coming, but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book now.

Starting point is 00:00:39 I'm like, let's go. So here we go. Project Mind Control, Sydney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy of MK Ultra, which really is a tragedy. You know, I really got, and I knew about it, but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until chaos. Tom O'Neill's book, have you read that? Oh, yeah. And when you realize what the MK Ultra program involved and how long it ran and how insane it is

Starting point is 00:01:07 and it essentially had no oversight and these people were just running these wild mine experiments on American citizens and nobody went to jail for it. Yeah, that's part of the crazy thing. One of the things I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second half of the book or the consequences of MK Ultra in society

Starting point is 00:01:26 but also just what happened to these people afterwards. The victims of M.K. Ultra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically really nothing much came out of it. They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated M.K. Ultra, they didn't really face any consequences. And so I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I really try to talk about in the latter part of the book are, what are the failures of oversight that allowed this to happen? How is that possible?

Starting point is 00:01:50 How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on people unwittingly and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions. So I delve into that pretty deeply. How did you get interested in the subject? Like, what was your introduction to it? I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people because I didn't know that much about MK Ultra. And I was doing my Ph.D. at UT.

Starting point is 00:02:16 And I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of scientists within the intelligence. They had connections to the intelligence community. They were called the science attaches out of the State Department. The State Department would send these science attachets to different embassies, American embassies around the world. And the CIA was very interested in these people because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad. Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing. So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community.

Starting point is 00:02:45 And from that, I learned about, you know, Sidney Gottlie, but also mostly my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovell, who was a scientist. essentially the Sydney Gottlieb of the OSS. So prior to the CIA, the U.S. had the OSS., the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. And that was the U.S. kind of intelligence agency. And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development Branch. And that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job was to basically invent the deadly weapons, create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent abroad. So my first... fun stuff. Oh, yeah. My first book, The Jergy Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovell in that group. And one of the things they do are drug experiments and truth drug experiments, trying to find out whether it's possible to give someone, you know, a captured enemy agent, some kind of drug to make them tell the truth during an interrogation. And it turns out, when I was researching that book, I came across a series of depositions of which Sidney Gottlieb is one of the departments who would later lead M.K. Ultra. And in these depositions, he was talking about how when he was assigned to be in charge. of MK Ultra, he didn't really know where to begin. He didn't know anything about mind control. So one of the things that he did, he went into the old OSS files and was starting to look at the drug experiments that Stanley Lovell was doing. And so I thought, that's the connection between Stanley Lovell, my first book, and now this one. So that naturally led me into becoming interested in MK Ultra. So a lot of the things that Sidney Gottlieb was up to with MK Ultra, his blueprint

Starting point is 00:04:16 was basically Stanley Lovell. Just imagine being a government agency, the CIA, the OSS, whatever it is. and then someone says, hey, figure out if we can control people's minds. And that's where you start from, right? It's not like Sidney Gottlieb was some expert hypnotist or really, it was a psychologist or really understood human minds. No, they started a program going, what can we do? How can we fuck with people's minds? How can we figure out how to control people's minds? And they did it for decades.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Yeah, yeah. And they're probably still doing it now. Well, even before MK Ultra, so there are a couple programs that preceded it. I mean, you know, so during World War II, the OSS was already doing truth drug, drug experiments, not with LSD, because that wasn't really around then, but with THC acetate, they would inject it into cigarettes and have people smoke it. So they just get high? They would get high. And tell the truth? Well, supposedly.

Starting point is 00:05:09 Supposedly. The idea was that it lowers their inhibitions, and so maybe they'll be more amenable to talking. Oh, that's hilarious. They just gave them splits. Yeah, exactly. They basically gave them split. That's a European smoke. Yeah. And so one of the guys who was actually on the truth drug committee that was kind of overseeing these drug experiments during World War II was Harry Anslinger, who of course is launching this crusade against marijuana. And at the same time, he's overseeing these experiments about dozing people with the THC. So it's very ironic. That was the case.

Starting point is 00:05:35 It's really stunning the kind of damage those people did to just our trust in government, what we know what we know about these psychedelic compounds. and drugs and, like, what they did with them that completely changed our idea of what the future of legalization and all these... There's so much negative impact to what they did. On top of what they did, they essentially created Ted Kaczynski. Well, I'm a little... Are you on the fence on that? I'm a little skeptical of whether M.K. Ultra is connected to that. Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments that did at Harvard.

Starting point is 00:06:14 And I don't imagine they would do that without the involvement of the government. without them wanting to have access to research. If you have people at Harvard they're doing like really critical LSD studies on people, humiliation studies. Yeah, well, with him in particular, the study that he was involved in was Henry Murray was the guy who was running that.

Starting point is 00:06:33 It's like a psychological experiment about, I think it was interpersonal relationships where he would basically interrogate them and berate them and see how they reacted to it. Now, Henry Murray, who ran that experiment with Ted Kaczynski, he did have connections to the intelligence community. I just am not convinced that he was funded by M.K. Ultra or something. His connection, he has a couple of connections.

Starting point is 00:06:53 One connection that I mentioned in my first book, the Dirty Tricks Department, he was tasked with creating psychological profiles of German leaders like Hitler. And so the idea was that he would kind of figure out what their psychology was and maybe we could find ways to exploit that psychology. So Stanley Lovell, who is the head of this R&D branch of the OSS, he read Henry Murray's psychological profile of Hitler, and he decided maybe I can figure out a way to kind of drive Hitler crazy by using this. So Henry Murray said that Hitler had a very feminine kind of personality.

Starting point is 00:07:24 He was on the border between masculine and feminine. And, you know, at least that's what Henry Murray is saying in this psychological profile. Stanley Lovell reads that and he thinks, maybe I can exploit this by getting one of the gardeners near the eagleness where Hitler often had some meetings. There were some gardeners down there. We can get an agent to slip a gardener of some female sex hormone. And that gardener can inject it into the beats that are destined for Hitler's plate. Hitler's going to eat it and it's going to like exacerbate this feminine tendency and it's going to make him go crazy or something like that.

Starting point is 00:07:55 That was the plan. That never actually happened. So Henry Murray is kind of connected to the OSS in that sense. And then later he developed some personality tests for the OSS and CIA. I believe it was for recruits to give these to recruits to determine whether they kind of have the psychological profile that would be amenable to being in an intelligence organization. Did you see that they recently did a scan of some blood that was found in Hitler's bunker and they determined that he has a very unusual gene expression? Can you find out what that is?

Starting point is 00:08:28 It's something that would lead to him potentially having a micropenus? Yeah, which is, you know, like the most obvious psychological profile ever. A guy wants to destroy everything in the world. He's got a tiny dick. Maybe Henry Murray was on to someone. Something. Yeah, I'm sure he was. Hitler's DNA.

Starting point is 00:08:47 I'm sure there was something, some research behind it. Like somebody must have said something about him. Yeah. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that. I didn't know that. Hitler's DNA reveals Nazi leader likely had syndrome that can affect genitals. Researchers say, according to the Cleveland Clinic, the syndrome can disrupt the process that drives puberty and manifest in symptoms that include undesended testicles and a micropenus.

Starting point is 00:09:08 Isn't that wild? Yeah. Which totally makes sense. Like, we should kill everyone with a micropinus. They're too dangerous. So it is, you know, maybe useful to be careful about correlation and causation. A lot of people probably have this and that doesn't cause them to become a hitler. I'm just kidding.

Starting point is 00:09:24 Obviously, there's like the nicest people out there that just happen to have a micropenist. It actually makes me really sensitive. Maybe his temperament, I don't know. This episode is brought to you by Visible. When your phone plans as good as visible, you've got to tell your people. It's the ultimate wireless hack to save money and still get great coverage and a reliable connection. Get one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot for $25 a month. Taxes and fees included all on Verizon's 5G network.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Plus, now for a limited time, new members can get the visible plan for just $19 a month for the first 26 months. Use promo code Switch 26 and save beyond the season. It's a deal so good you're going to want to tell your people. Switch now at visible.com slash rogan. Terms apply, limited time offers subject to change. See visible.com for planned features and network management details. Well, he was also on a bunch of drugs. You know, he had like a special doctor that just worked for him.

Starting point is 00:10:29 Yeah, those videos of him at sporting events or whatever, he's like rocking back and forth. It's incredible. It's crazy. He's just completely out of his mind on something. Have you read Norman Oler's book, Blitzed? Yes. Yes. I don't know if I've read the whole thing. I know I dipped into it. I can't remember if I... It's insane. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. Yeah, it is. The entire Nazi army was methed out of their minds. Yeah. And you know what these... There are a lot of LSD experiments after World War II within the CIA and MK Ultra, of course, but also army LSD experiments that aren't really connected to MK Ultra. So I don't go into them that much in this book. But there are, you know, the British are doing LSD experiments on their personnel. The U.S. military does too.

Starting point is 00:11:10 You know, it's just some of the stories that come out of it are very silly and really just insane. But there is one document I found that talks about how they were giving these two army personnel, these two soldiers, LSD, to see how they reacted to it. And so each of them took the LSD. They were in like a padded room isolated with each other, so nobody else was there. And they started hallucinating. And one of them pretended to like start smoking a cigarette. And he didn't actually have a cigarette.

Starting point is 00:11:36 He had nothing, you know, but he just pretended to smoke a cigarette. and the other guy was off in his own world. And then the first guy, he reached into his pocket and took out an imaginary pack of cigarettes. He didn't actually have one. It was just an empty hand, but he was just hallucinating that there was one. And he reached it out to the other guy, basically to offer, hey, do you want a cigarette? And the other guy looked at it and he said, no, I couldn't take your last one. It was just an empty hand.

Starting point is 00:11:59 There was nothing there. No, I couldn't take your last one. They were having this shared hallucination or something. Wow. Wow. I mean, also back then, we didn't really know too much about that stuff. So they were kind of gathering information about what would happen if you gave someone LSD. Yep, that's kind of the motivation for M.K. Ultra in the first place.

Starting point is 00:12:20 There are several motivating factors. One of them is how do we get prisoners to speak during an interrogation? Maybe there's some, maybe there is some kind of truth drug that can get them to tell us the secrets that we want to know. another is maybe we can use this to discredit individuals like fidel castro let's say we dose him with lSD before a big speech he appears to be crazy and his people are going to lose trust in him because he's making nonsense you know he's just talking gibberish was that proposed oh yeah yeah they were proposed a plan to put lSD into cigars that would sneak into Castro's kind of place that he would smoke before he gave a speech what i don't understand about that is they were trying to kill him so

Starting point is 00:12:57 yeah if they couldn't get poisoned into his cigars why they think they'd get acid in there The original plan was to discredit him, and then the later plan was to kill him. Oh. So there were a couple original plans to discredit him. One is to sneak him LSD to make him appear insane so that his people will lose faith in him. Another one was to slip what's called thallium salts into his shoes, and these are depilatories. They make your hair fall out. And so the idea is that, you know, he's got this masculine allure with his big beard.

Starting point is 00:13:24 But if we can slip these depilatories into his shoes and he puts them on, his beard's going to fall out. And like Samson, he's going to lose his power or something like that. That was the idea. So Sidney Gottlie was kind of involved in some of these that I talk about in the book. Another one, so you have the LSD, you have the depilatory. Another one was to Photoshop images, basically, of Castro with a bunch of beautiful women around him and like a buffet of food in front of him. And to have a captain underneath it that said, my ration is different to indicate, like,

Starting point is 00:13:52 I'm getting all the benefits of, you know, this spoils of society while my people are going hungry. And so, you know, the idea was to spread this around. Cuba and have people resent Castro for indulging in all these. Well, that one's actually reasonable. Right? A little bit more than the other two. That one's probably the closest to accurate. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:09 So those were attempts to discredit Castro. And then there were several attempts to assassinate him that Sidney Gottlieb and others involved kind of in this story do. So some of the main assassination attempts on Castro involved his hobby of ocean diving. So he liked to dive in the ocean. And one idea was that what if we get this really beautiful shell? that he would just be unable to pass up. It would be so beautiful that if anyone swam by it, they would obviously want to pick it up.

Starting point is 00:14:36 We packed the shell full of explosives and put it on, have some kind of trigger mechanism for when you pick it up that detonates the explosives. So when he's underwater, he's going to swim by this. He's going to see this beautiful shell. He's going to pick it up and it's going to explode. But it turns out they couldn't really figure out a shell big enough that would catch his interest,

Starting point is 00:14:52 you know, so that never happened. Another concept with his scuba diving hobby is that what if we gift him a scuba diving suit? There are people kind of negotiating for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. So what if we get one of those lawyers to gift Castro a suit? And in that suit, we would lace it

Starting point is 00:15:09 with some kind of poison or some kind of fungus that would cause him to break out and develop some kind of disease. But it turns out the guy that they wanted to give him the suit had already given him a diving suit. And so it was like, oh, we can't use him anymore.

Starting point is 00:15:24 Wow. And they were the people running. Yeah. That was the best they could do. Yeah. But it's just the concept of not having any experience whatsoever in any studies about mind control and just given this assignment, what do you know about mind control? What can we do? How much does it work? What did the Nazis learn during World War II? Because they did a lot of experiments, right? They're doing a lot of experiments. And it is, you know, I mentioned the OSS is doing truth drug experiments. The Nazis are doing truth drug experiments in their concentration camps as well. and the British are doing some truth-stroke experiments during World War II as well.

Starting point is 00:16:00 You can get the British ones online, at least the post-World War II ones? Was it 1950s? Have you seen the British LSD studies? Oh, you haven't seen it? No, I don't think so. Oh, it's wonderful. You should watch it. We'll watch it real quick because it's kind of hilarious.

Starting point is 00:16:13 They start breaking out. They can't. Oh, yeah. You have seen it? I think so. They can concentrate. Some of them start laughing. They're in the middle of doing their task.

Starting point is 00:16:21 They just start laughing on control when they sit down. Yeah. Well, you know, during, I mentioned those, like, THC acetate experiments during World War II, these guys are. These giant smiles on their face. Yeah. This guy's having a guard go of it. Yeah, he might have been having an encounter or something.

Starting point is 00:16:38 He had to be removed from the experiment after 35 minutes. Look at the radio operator trying to figure out how to work it. They're just so confused. And eventually, they just start laying down. and just laugh like these guys, these guys just can't. Yeah, and these THC experiments during World War that guys. For some of the people, they would give them this THC,

Starting point is 00:17:07 they would smoke it through a cigarette, and some of the reactions it talked about was it made them just uncontrollably start laughing and it put them in a good mood. Some of the reactions were, oh, yeah, I mean, they were just getting these people high and they were reacting to them. It didn't make them tell the truth.

Starting point is 00:17:22 No, no. Of course not. It did actually make them talk more, though, because they actually recorded these interviews, and they would count the number of words per minute that these people spoke. And it turns out after they smoked this, they would talk about, like, 40% more words per minute. But it's not that this guaranteed the truth. They were just talking. They're talking about cartoons. Yeah, it's, it's just, what other drugs did they experiment with?

Starting point is 00:17:45 Did they experiment with amphetamines? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, well, I should mention that M.K. Ultra was broken into 149. sub-projects. So MK Ultra was the umbrella term, and within MK.K. Ultra, there were 149 sub-projects that were kind of farmed out to, in many cases, independent researchers who might be working at a hospital or a prison or a university or something like that.

Starting point is 00:18:07 One of the main people who is running these studies is a guy named Harris Isbell at the Lexington Narcotic Farm. This is where drug addicts could go to get treatment for their addiction. Prisoners could go there as well. And whenever Sidney Gottlieb found a drug that he was interested in, he would basically just give it to Harris Isbel, who could try it out on these prisoners to see how they reacted, and then Isbel would write reports back to Gottlieb. So he tried psilocybin when that came out, LSD, but also stuff like, I mean, heroin. The CIA was particularly interested in heroin because if you can induce an addiction in a captured agent, let's say, then you can use that as leverage and interrogation, the withdrawal symptoms. So you get them addicted to heroin and then use the withdrawal.

Starting point is 00:18:51 symptoms saying, well, if you tell us about this, maybe I'll, you know, give you a little. So that was at least the concept. But there were, I mean, dozens and dozens of different kinds of drugs. They were testing just to see how people reacted to them and if any of them could be used as a potential truth drug. The heroin one actually makes sense. I never thought of that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:08 Well, one of the ironies as well about this experiment that I mentioned, you know, Harris's Bell and giving these prisoners all these drugs, the prisoners are in this place. It's called the narcotic form because they're supposed to be getting off drugs. You know, they're supposed to be, you know, curing them of their addiction. At the same time, they're giving them all these drugs to test them out. And then as a reward for participating in these trials, they had two options. Either they could get like a positive letter in the parole board in like a hundred bucks or something. Or they could go to the drug bank window, stick out their arm, and they would get a needle full of heroin as a reward.

Starting point is 00:19:40 Oh, my God. They were supposed to be getting off drugs, and yet you're incentivizing them to participate in these drug trials by giving them drugs. Wow. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So that's one of 149 sub-projects. Are you aware that heroin was created as a substitute for people that were addicted to morphine?

Starting point is 00:20:03 No. No. Yeah. That's correct, right? Search that. I'm pretty sure it's correct. Yeah, they came up with heroin to treat people that were addicted to morphine. Hmm.

Starting point is 00:20:18 What? what? Well, that's like oxycontin, giving them oxycontin if they're addicted to heroin. It's like the same thing. Yeah. But getting someone addicted to that and then pulling it away from them seems like it would be very effective in terms of like getting them to give up information. Yeah, that was the idea. And so here it is.

Starting point is 00:20:40 We put it into our sponsor perplexity. Heroin created as a morphine treatment originally developed in late 19th century as a medical drug that was indeed marketed as an improved non-addictive. alternative to morphine and as a cough suppressant. Hey, what do you know? Yeah, how nuts. Who, uh, what company came up with it? Germ, bear. There you go.

Starting point is 00:21:00 Fucking bear. I think at the same time they were doing this, they just, um, find out if it's true that acidometapine is what's toxic in Tylenol, correct? I find out of it's true that at the same time they decide that acetaminephine was, too dangerous. I think that is Tylenol. What do you mean? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:23 I mean the substance. You know, that's, Tylenol's the name brand. What's the question then? Did they, poor Jamie, if you hear his voice, ladies and gentlemen, informed the people at home, poor Jamie got a tooth pulled last night. It was, it's rough. And he, not even, yeah, excuse me, last night you were in pain. Today you got a tooth pulled.

Starting point is 00:21:43 And he's got what looks like a softball stuffed in his cheek. Oh, man. Um, did the, did bear decide not to release acetaminephine during the same time period? I, during, um, the pandemic, I got fascinated with acetamine because I read this horrible story about this poor lady who got COVID and she was in real pain. So she took a bunch of aced of metafin, she took a bunch of Tylenol and kept taking it. And apparently didn't realize how dangerous it is to overdose on Tylenol. And she died of liver poisoning. Oh, that's true.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Yeah. And I was like, oh my God, how many people died? liver portion. It's like 500 a year in this country. It's like acidaminophen. It's scary stuff. Was not being actively held back by bear at the same period that it promoted heroin and aspirin. It was simply not yet recognized or marketed the way those drugs were. And its development adoption followed a different path. Existing historical accounts focused more on scientific uncertainty and competing drugs than on deliberate suppression campaign by bear. I don't think I was, I don't think they were saying in this article that I read that it was a, that they were suppressing it, that they decided not to focus on it because it was dangerous.

Starting point is 00:22:55 Why acetamine less? Early clinicians favored phenocetine and acetatein and acetyne. How does that work? Acetanililid? Ascetanilid. Despite their later recognized toxicity and acetamine's advantages, better safety profile at therapeutic doses, was not clearly distinguished at first. Okay. Anyway, we're getting off track.

Starting point is 00:23:19 I was just going to say one of the ironic things, too, is some of these MK Ultra Subprojects. They're interested in finding these supposed truth drugs that could get someone to tell the truth during an interrogation. But it turns out even just the threat of giving someone a truth drug turned out to be a lot more effective than any drug that they actually tried out. So, for instance, in an interrogation,

Starting point is 00:23:39 if you tell someone that this is a truth drug and I'm going to give it to you and it's going to make you tell the truth, that can lower their defenses and a bit. in the sense that the person who takes this, that might give them kind of the permission to be able to talk because it makes them think, well, I couldn't have stopped myself. Well, you know, I mean, they gave me this truth drug. Of course I'm going to have to say this.

Starting point is 00:23:58 So I can't be blamed. No one's going to blame me. So it takes kind of the burden off their shoulders if they think they've been given a truth drug, even if they haven't, just give them a sugar pill. So that actually turned out to be a lot more effective than any of the drugs that they actually tried. That totally makes sense.

Starting point is 00:24:11 They did the same thing with hypnotism, too. The hypnotism turned out to be not that effective in, at least in an interrogation, but if you could convince someone that they had been hypnotized even if they hadn't, then that could be effective. So for instance, this is what a guy called Martin Orrin. He was one of the psychologists. He was in charge of one of these sub-projects. But he put forward what's called the hypnotic situation, not hypnotism, but the hypnotic situation. So for instance, you pretend to hypnotize someone, the person you're interrogating, and they know they're not hypnotized. They obviously can tell that, you know, you're not,

Starting point is 00:24:45 controlling me, nothing's happening. However, you start saying things like, you know, I'm hypnotizing you and your hands are getting warmer and they're going to think to themselves, no, they're not. But under the table, you secretly implanted a heater and their hands actually are getting warmer because where they're sitting, there's this heater under that they don't know exists, and it's making their hands warmer. So after a certain period of time, they start thinking to themselves, maybe I am being hypnotized. Like the things that he's saying are actually happening. And so if you can make them think that they've been hypnotized, again, that lowers their resistance because, I mean, who could blame me for talking to you know, I've been hypnotized. I couldn't help myself but talk. At least that's the idea. It's just so fascinating to me how much time and effort was spent just studying how to control people's minds and trying to come up with ways to do it. It must have been really exciting to be them. I think what they did is horrible. I don't, you know, I'm not in any way for giving MK Ultra for what they did. However, boy, it must have been fun. Just to have no oversight, No one even knows you exist. You kind of get this impression by looking at some of these M.K. Ultra documents,

Starting point is 00:25:49 especially at the beginning before the Frank Olson incident. Frank Olson eventually dies after one of these experiments. And so that kind of, that definitely puts a damper on a lot of things that are going on. Before that, though, I do get the sense that it's almost like they're a bunch of guys just trying to, you know, play around with each other in a way, even though what they're doing is completely unethical. But they would just be dosing like the CIA coffee pot and see what happens to people who are taking drinks of it just to. I mean, the rationale is that, well, if the Soviets possess some kind of hallucinogenic drug and they were going to release it into the water supply of a city, we need to know how people would react to that, because we need to know how to defend against that. Therefore, we should be doing that to people just to see how they react to it so that we know what kind of signs to look for in case the Soviets do that. Didn't they dose up a town in France?

Starting point is 00:26:37 I don't think the CIA was connected to that. I mean, I think it actually was like an ergot poisoning that came from the bread. I think so. But there was some speculation that it was purpose. Yeah. The town's called Pointe St. Espri, I believe. But yeah, there were multiple dozens of people who came down with hallucinogenic symptoms. They were one guy stripped naked and started running around the street.

Starting point is 00:26:59 Multiple people died after this. But that was one of the things that led the CIA to become really interested in hallucinogens. Because if a poisoning from a bakery could cause that much havoc within this one French town, how much more damaging would it be if the Soviets did that? to a city's water supply. And so that kind of leads the CIA. That's the justification. So they start dosing the coffee pots and they're running brothels.

Starting point is 00:27:22 Oh, yeah, yeah. That's the crazy one. Operation Midnight Climax. Look it up, folks, because it's really crazy. They had their own brothels, and they would use two-way mirrors with cameras behind them, and they would dose the Johns up, they'd give him a, would you like a drink? Have a seat. And they go, sure, I'll have a drink, and there's poor guy.

Starting point is 00:27:40 Get off work, has a drink, thinks he's going to be with a prostitute, and have some nice sex. Next, you know, he's just tripping out of his mind while he's being recorded by Jolly West. Yeah, you know, the guy who actually ran that is a guy named George White, and he was involved in the OSS. So he was, you know, I mentioned Stanley Lovell and the THC acetate. George White was the guy who was hired to do that in the OSS. Then Sidney God leave, when he's thinking, I need to do these drug experiments for myself, who am I going to get it to do it for me? I need someone who has connections to the underworld, who has criminal connections.

Starting point is 00:28:11 George White was a Bureau of Narcotics Officer, and so Gottlie was going through the OSS files, and it turns out, oh, this guy's already done these experiments. I'm going to hire him. So that's how George White eventually gets involved in the CIA stuff. Wow. I can't wait for this show. Because David Chase gets a hold of a subject like this is good. There's so much room. Like, it's so endlessly fascinating. Yeah, I'm really excited. Obviously, for me, I mean, it's just so lucky that he happened to be interested in this kind of topic. I mean, there are. a lot of books out there on any number of topics that anyone could be interested in, but the fact that, you know, I mean, I do consider myself extremely lucky. I happen to write this book at the right time and someone happened to be interested at the right time. So, yeah, I can't wait for that to come out. Yeah, I'm very happy that you did write this book and I'm very happy that this happening. Because I talk to people about the subject, you know, like Normies per se, and they

Starting point is 00:29:05 look at you sideways. Like, what do they do? They do what? They're responsible for Manson. What? What? Huh? And it's like, oh my God, the rabbit hole is so deep. I don't have enough battery in my flashlight to take you down this rabbit hole. That's one of the things with MK. Ultra just in general. I mean, initially reading about this, my first impression is that, obviously, that's like a conspiracy theory or it can't be right. But some conspiracies are true. And the MK. Ultra stuff, they actually did this. They were dosing people using prostitutes behind a one-way mirror. George White sitting on a toilet watching this happen. They're, you know, I mean, even besides drugs, MK Ultra is involved in a lot of psychological experiments. So not just LSD. Most people associate MK.K. Ultra with LSD.

Starting point is 00:29:47 But one of the, one of the most expansive of the subprojects is subproject 68. It was by this guy named Ewan Cameron. Have you heard that name before? No. Okay, Ewan Cameron. He is a psychiatrist up in Montreal in Canada, working at what's called the Allen Memorial Institute. And Gottlieb wanted to expand MK. Ultra. drugs, because he already had a lot of people doing drug experiments.

Starting point is 00:30:10 So he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques that could be used to manipulate a person. So not just in an interrogation, but can we actually, like, control a person's personality? Can we make them behave in certain ways, make them do something? So the idea that you and Cameron had come up with before the CIA is involved, I should mention you and Cameron is a behaviorist. So he thinks that all behavior is a result of nurture, not nature. So it's the environmental input that causes a person to behave a certain. certain way. And he thought that if you could bring a person back down to a blank slate, remove all

Starting point is 00:30:42 the environmental inputs that have been put into them, and then you can build them back up in your image into whatever you want them to be. So his idea to bring someone down to the blank slate was to induce enough stress that they forgot who they formerly were. And so you reduce them to the blank slate, and then the CIA is really interested in if you could do that, then you could form them into whatever. So you and Cameron, his main goal is to try to figure out what can induce enough stress in a person to bring them down to that blank slate? And so he performs a lot of experiments. His most famous one is called psychic driving, where he was doing a therapy session, quote-unquote therapy,

Starting point is 00:31:19 with one of his patients. And he was recording the session, and she said something about how, you know, my mother when I was young used to tell me, blah, blah, blah, you know, she said something negative to her. And so you and Cameron rewinded that on the tape that he was recording and made her listen back to it and said, hey, I want you to listen back to what you said. your mother used to say to you. When he rewinded the tape and played it forward, as soon as the woman was kind of quoting her mother

Starting point is 00:31:41 and she listened to that herself on the tape, she recoiled. And Cameron thought, oh, you have a negative reaction to that. So he rewinded again and again and again. And he kept rewinding it and she just got more and more emotional, had this more and more kind of visceral reaction to what she was saying her mother used to tell her. So this led Cameron to develop the concept of psychic driving,

Starting point is 00:31:59 which is you record some kind of negative message and then you make someone listen to it, for thousands and thousands and thousands of times for weeks on end, for hours every day. All their waking day, they basically are strapped into a headphone that is playing this negative message and it will break them down over time. That's how you induce enough stress to break them down to the blank slate. And then you can record a positive psychic driving message to build them up into whatever image you want them to be. So that was his initial idea.

Starting point is 00:32:27 Was it based on anything? Not really. It was just based on he had this one encounter with this woman and she had a negative reaction. And he's just trying to induce stress. This obviously seemed to induce stress in her. Therefore, we're going to start playing these negative tapes to them. So it was just his idea. It's just his idea.

Starting point is 00:32:42 He was known for doing this kind of thing, like kind of spur the moment. In fact, there was one kid, basically, who had been at this Allen Memorial Institute, where you and Cameron was. He eventually had gotten out, but he had tried to commit suicide. And so he was sent back to the Allen Memorial Institute. But the way that he had tried to commit suicide was to close the garage and have the CO2 build. up with a running car, and then he would, you know, breathe it in and pass out and die. That ended up not working. However, when he went back to the Allen Memorial Institute, U.N. Cameron thought, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:12 his personality seems like a little bit better than it was that when he was here before. Maybe CO2 can, like, influence someone. So he sent out some of his assistance to go buy, like, CO2 canisters, and we're going to start, like, giving this to be. But it turns out the assistants knew that this was, like, completely unethical. There's no medical basis for anything. And so they lied to him and said, oh, the canisters were way more expensive than. and we could actually afford so we can't do that.

Starting point is 00:33:35 But so he was, he was just, he was trying to find any way that he could have a breakthrough to cure mental illness. And he was using his patients as guinea pigs, basically. Complete guinea pigs. What was the result with the woman? The woman where they played the negative recordings? I don't, well, there are, there are dozens and dozens of people who that happened to. I don't know about her in particular, because I don't know if she's actually named in the documents. So I don't, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:33:58 Did any of these experiments have a positive effect? Oh, hardly. Hardly. Hardly. So that was only... I shouldn't even say positive. I should say we're the effective. No. No. For the most part, the people who he did his practice on came out way worse than when they went in. So psychic driving, that's initially what got the CIA interested in Cameron. So it's important to keep in mind. It's not that the CIA told Cameron to do this. He's doing this on his own because he thinks he's going to cure mental illness by having this radical breakthrough where we break them down and build them back up and we can build them back up and make them forget their schizophrenia or depression or whatever they have. The CIA reads his article about psychic driving, and they think this is the kind of thing we're interested in. So from that point on, they start funding him not only to do psychic driving experiments, but also he does, like, puts people in chemical comas for months on end. And while they're in these chemical comas, he would put an audio device next to their pillow playing these psychic driving messages. And he would put them in sensory deprivation chambers for weeks.

Starting point is 00:34:58 You know, they would have goggles over their eyes, earmuffs on their ears. they would have cardboard tubes over their arms so that they couldn't feel anything and they would just be in a room for weeks on end. The idea, again, being to induce enough stress so that it breaks them down so that you can eventually build them up. But one of the saddest stories in the book, really,

Starting point is 00:35:17 is of this woman named Mary Morrow, who is one of the patients of Ewan Cameron in Montreal. The sad thing about her especially is she had been a resident in training at the Allen Memorial Institute under Ewan Cameron. So she had been training to be a doctor under him, and she had administered some of these techniques, including electric shock. So that's one of the things, too.

Starting point is 00:35:37 We would put these electrodes on the heads of people, and just he would continually shock them until, again, the idea was to reduce them to, like, in one case, he says, an infantile-like state where they lose control of their bladder, they can't eat, they can't talk, they can't go to the bathroom on their own, they can't put on their own clothes or anything like that. So she was in charge of administering some of these, I mean, you know, therapy sessions or whatever they would call it, but just basically torture to these people. she ended up having almost kind of a psychotic break herself she became anorexic and she failed her neurology exams and so she went into a really deep depression she attempted to commit suicide that didn't work she was admitted to the hospital to another hospital you and cameron came to visit her and he said i think you should come back to the allen memorial not as a doctor but as a patient and let me treat you so she ends up going back to the allen memorial as a patient and she thought to herself that it's going to to be okay, they're not going to do the electric shock to me because you had to sign a consent form for that to happen to you. The people who are signing the consent forms, they don't know how bad it's actually going to be. They're just signing their name. But she knows, I haven't signed a consent form, so they can't do that to me. But it turns out in the time since she went to the hospital and came back, they had stopped doing the consent forms and he would just do this on whoever.

Starting point is 00:36:50 And so they ended up doing this electric shock treatment on her. And, you know, afterwards, she would be babbling incontinent, couldn't put on her makeup or clothes or anything. eventually she would call her mother after some of these treatments and her mother knew something was going on because she just became more and more incoherent as time went on. So the mother sent Mary's sister Margaret in order to go to the Allen Memorial to basically bust her out of there. So the sister walked in the front door and said, I'm not leaving until I see Mary. You know, I'm going to call the police if you don't let me through.

Starting point is 00:37:20 So eventually she goes to her sister's room, opens the door and Mary is sitting there just with wide bug eyes, you know, doesn't even recognize her sister. It takes several days for her to figure out where she actually is, and then she gets busted out of there. So it's a very— Was it reversible in any way? Was it— In her case, I'm not exactly sure. She went on to have a little bit of a career, but she eventually attempted to commit suicide later again.

Starting point is 00:37:44 That was unsuccessful. Then her and several of the victims of U.N. Cameron's experiments, in the 1980s, they ended up suing the CIA for supporting U.N. Cameron. And during those lawsuits, the attorneys who are representing them, They took the depositions of several of the people who were involved in M.K. Ultra to try to use this during their trial. So they took the depositions of Sidney Gottlie, Robert Lashbrook, Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, and many of the victims who were victims of all this. And that's basically the basis for my book. I found thousands of pages of these depositions. That's just verbatim transcript of these people talking about either what they did or what was done to them. And so I'm using that throughout the book to explain, here's what they're doing in their own words or here's what was done to them in their own words.

Starting point is 00:38:26 Wow. So what was the result of the trial? trial. Oh, well, so it was actually settled out of court before it went to trial. So the plaintiffs, the CIA gave the plaintiffs $750,000 to be split among them. But, you know, after attorney's fees and everything, it doesn't really amount to much anyway. And so, you know, they settled out of court. They got a little bit of money, but it never went to trial. And so these depositions, though, you know, since it never went to trial, these were just in the papers of Joseph Rao, who's the main lawyer who was involved in this case. And when he passed away, his papers were donated to

Starting point is 00:38:58 the Library of Congress that had all these thousands of pages of depositions in there, 823 pages of which are Sidney Gottlie testifying about what he did in MK Ultra. And so I was rooting around the Library of Congress and happened to find them. So that's how I found basically the basis for what this book is. Wow. Wow. I wonder how much of that woman's psychological breakdown had to do with the guilt of performing those experiments on people and realizing that it wasn't doing anything. Yeah. He thought that you and Cameron thought it was going to do.

Starting point is 00:39:28 In fact, it was destroying people's minds. Yeah, maybe some. I mean, it's just speculation because I'm not sure. Yeah, of course. That had to have weighed on the consciences. You know, there's in what was called the sleep room, you and Cameron's sleep room, this is where they would do the chemical comas. One of the nurses, I have kind of her diary entries basically describing what she was seeing.

Starting point is 00:39:48 And she does seem to be pretty reluctant to have done what she was actually doing. And you and Cameron, she said, would often come over to her and pat her on the bian. and say, you know, you're helping these people, you're helping these people, just trying to coax her along to go along with what he was telling her to do. You and Cameron seems like a complete madman. Like he was almost like too good to be true. Not too good, but too like mad scientist to be true. Was he on any sort of drugs?

Starting point is 00:40:16 I mean, I've never seen anything to indicate that he was on drugs, but he definitely had a almost like a Messiah complex. He thought I'm going to be the one to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine because I'm going to cure all mental illness through this psychic driving or whatever it was. He was going to be the next Sigmund Freud. He really had delusions of grandeur, just like I think Jolly West did as well. And so I think that drove a lot of what he was doing. His patients were just a means to his own end. They're the guinea pigs that I can use to prove that these medical techniques actually work, and therefore everyone's going to praise me because I've cured, you know, schizophrenia or whatever it is.

Starting point is 00:40:49 I'm just always suspicious of something that has that, someone has that kind of access to all sorts of compounds, like, and then you're experimenting on people, and, you know, especially with things like amphetamines, which do tend to make people a little less empathetic, a little more driven. You know, I would be very curious to see if he was interested in anything like that. Yeah, I don't remember specifically for him in that case. I mean, many of the people who are either running the subprojects or approving them, like Sidney Gottlieb, Gottlieb took a lot of LSD. You know, he was, when the CIA got LSD, before it gave it to other people,

Starting point is 00:41:25 The first thing they did was try it for themselves to see what actually happened. So Sidney Gottlie took it multiple times before he ever even gave it to people to understand what it was like. Wow. And, you know, one of the physician who was the attending physician the first time he took LSD, because they did it in kind of a controlled setting with several other people there, a guy named Harold Abramson. And for anyone listening who knows much about the Frank Olson incident, Frank Olson is a guy that would later be dosed with LSD.

Starting point is 00:41:53 He would go out the hotel window in New York. and Harold Abramson is the guy who, Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook, they took to New York to get treatment from Harold Abramson afterwards. So he had this CIA connection. Wow. The reason why I brought up amphetamines is because I feel like it might be one of the unheralded or undiscussed drivers in a lot of like psychopathic behavior that we see in our culture today. I think there's a lot of people on prescribed. amphetamines that operate in a way that is very very much like a functional meth head you know what I mean and I would wonder like if you were in charge of doing something this evil just running experiments where

Starting point is 00:42:42 you're destroying people's minds and you're getting no positive results none of its work and yet you continue to do it and you even do it to people that used to be involved in the program with that poor woman like what what's the psychological profile of that guy because he's obviously meant to ill, which is fascinating, right? It's fascinating that a mentally ill person is working on a mind experiment program, because there's no ways not mentally ill. Like, to have no empathy to these people that you've tried all this stuff on, and not only has it not been effective and not rid them of mental illness, it's made them far worse. Yeah. For you and Cameron, I feel like he definitely lacked empathy, whether that's some kind of medically medical thing or whatever. There are a couple

Starting point is 00:43:20 people in the book, I think, who are like that. One of them is you and Cameron. Another is George White, who was in charge of Operation Midnight Climax, he was in it just for the fun of it. He would dose his own friends with LSD just to see what would happen. You know, there's one story in the book. There was a woman who had gone over to a dinner party, basically. She had actually gone over with her husband a few weeks before, but George White didn't dose them because the husband was there.

Starting point is 00:43:43 The husband went away on a business trip, so the woman and her friend, they ended up going to see George White to hang out, and White dosed them with LSD. The woman had her one-year-old son, they're with her, but he still dose them with LSD. She ends up basically going crazy. I mean, she, you know, she goes home. She ends up calling, you know, George White asking, what's happened to me?

Starting point is 00:44:05 What's going on? One of these women, she ended up being committed to a mental institution for basically the rest of her life after this happened to her. So she had some kind of like psychotic break after this unwitting, surreptitious dose of LSD. Of course, she didn't know what was going on, so she thought her whole world was collapsing. Yeah, she lost her husband. it was said that she would cower in the corner of her parents' house before she went to this mental institution,

Starting point is 00:44:29 convinced that an unidentified they was like looking after her or trying to get her, you know, calling on the phone. None of this was happening, but she was just having these delusions that someone was out to get her. That's kind of a recurring theme that you see in these people who are unwittingly dosed. One of them, one of the saddest stories in the book is a guy named Wayne Ritchie, and George White did the same thing to him.

Starting point is 00:44:51 But Wayne Ritchie was this, he was a garlander. at Alcatraz for a while. This is in San Francisco. And he had gone to a Christmas party at the post office there in San Francisco, just for, you know, he was a U.S. Marshal, too, so just the U.S. Marshals, whatever. And that night, he was drinking, you know, some of the punch at this party. And he started feeling very strange. He started seeing colors. The room started spinning around him. He ended up going upstairs to where his locker was and, you know, getting his things. And he wound up going home because he didn't, you know, know, know what was going on. When he got home, His girlfriend was upset at him.

Starting point is 00:45:25 She said that, you know, I'm not happy here. I want to move to New York. And so when he's in this fog, he decides, I know how to set my life on track. I'm going to grab a couple of my service revolvers. I'm going to go to a bar downtown. I'm going to rob it. And I'm going to give the money to my girlfriend so she can go to New York and she'll be happy. And so she won't break up with me.

Starting point is 00:45:45 So when he's in this fog, he ends up doing all this. He gets his revolvers. He goes to a bar downtown. He basically has a stick up, give me all the money in the till. A quick-thinking patron who's sitting next to him basically gets the mug of beer and smashes it over his head so he falls down. The cops come later. They arrest him. He's in jail.

Starting point is 00:46:02 After a day or two, he kind of soberes up and kind of awakens from this fog. And he doesn't know what happened to him. At that point, he ends up losing his job, losing his friends for the next 30, 40 years he doesn't know what happened until in 1999 he was reading the Washington Post and he saw an article describing M.K. Ultra. and two things in particular stuck out to him. One was George White, whom he knew back in the days when he was a U.S. Marshal, and the other one was a description of LSD. And so Wayne Ritchie starts putting all this together and thinking, I think George White gave me LSD that night at the holiday party and spiked the punch bowl,

Starting point is 00:46:40 and that's what happened. And it turns out, you can see in this book, in the photo section, the last photo in the photo section of my book, it's an image of George White's diary from the day that Wayne Ritchie, went insane, and it says federal building Christmas party. So he was there at the Christmas party. Wow. Imagine being that guy reading that article 30 years later, realizing this guy ruined my life for fun.

Starting point is 00:47:06 Yeah. So he ended up suing the CIA, but the judge said that he couldn't prove that he had been dosed with drugs so they couldn't rule in his favor. And so that was it. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, but there are, I mean, there are dozens of stories like that. Fucking psycho. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:22 What a fucking psycho. Just dosing up the punch bowl, ruining lives. And he knows how messed up it is. Because by that point, he had done this to multiple people and caused them to lose a lot, you know. So he knew what he was doing at that point. God. This is just what happens with people when they have that kind of unchecked power and no oversight. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:47 And they're the kind of psychopaths that would be involved in this sort of experiment. in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. No, so I think he's probably the most heinous of the individuals in this book. All of them are to a degree. Sidney Gottlieb, I think he, I don't think he's as heinous in the sense that he's like intentionally trying to harm people.

Starting point is 00:48:08 He thinks he's doing this for a patriotic reason. He thinks M.K. Ultra is actually going to help us defend ourselves against the Soviet Union. There is some like moral justification, at least he has for himself. So it's not all just, you know, whatever George White does. doing. But at the same time, Sidney Gottlieb doesn't really take any responsibility for what happens to these people. Basically, the way that M.K. Ultra was structured with these subprojects. Sidney Gottlieb wasn't running these experiments himself. What he would do is he would fund other people to do experiments. And most of the time, these people were experts in their own

Starting point is 00:48:41 field. So they were like reputable people. You and Cameron was the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. He was like the most famous psychiatrist in the world, and he was being funded by this. So Sidney Gottlieb thought, well, if I can fund reputable psychiatrists or drug researchers to do these experiments, then it's up to them to provide the safety and the procedures to keep these patients safe. It's not my job. They're the ones who are conducting the experiments. That's how he justified it to himself. But that's how the structure of MK Ultra typically worked.

Starting point is 00:49:15 Such a diffusion of responsibility. Exactly. Gottlieb is funding people, and he's not even funding them directly. In most cases, what's happening is he's. He's using cut-out organizations. So he's giving the money to the... Of course. One of them's called the Getchicker Fund.

Starting point is 00:49:27 One of them is called the National Institutes of Mental Health. And then the CIA sets up its own cut-out organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Which is just a made-up organization. But so the CIA would transfer the funds to the society who would then transfer it to the researcher. In many cases, the researchers didn't even know they were being funded by the CIA. They just thought, oh, I got it. grant from this organization. That's great. So they don't even know that their true patron is Sidney Gottlieb and M.K. Ultra. They just know, oh, they want me to do these experiments.

Starting point is 00:49:58 And in many cases, they're allowed to still publish their work. So, you know, they're publishing this. Nothing's changed that much from what they were doing before. But it turns out their patron is actually the CIA who wants to make sure they continue doing these experiments just in case they find something that could be of use. Oh, my God. What was your journey personally like, both researching these subjects and then writing books about it because what what how what was your opinion on all these things before this and how much of it's how much of it has shaped your worldview um so with the probably the first book is more formative to the shaping of my worldview just because you know i that was the first one i did so what did what was your

Starting point is 00:50:43 perspective before getting involved in any of this material well i i'm not I'm pretty much, I would consider myself a skeptic, generally, you know, so when stuff gets a little too outlandish, I am pretty skeptical. But, of course, that the existence of M.K. Ultra, and even in my first book, the Jardy Tricks Department, there are some, there are some projects that are even more outlandish than some of the stuff I've been talking about with MK Ultra. And so that kind of lowered my barriers to thinking that, oh, people are crazy. Like, oh, the government does actually perform these crazy, you know, projects. One of the ones that really lowered my barriers to that for the first book was called Operation Fantasia. And again, it's just a testament to the absurdity of some of the ideas that were happening in World War II and just within the intelligence community. Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of this guy named Ed Salinger. And he had been a businessman who had done imports and exports in Tokyo.

Starting point is 00:51:38 So he knew Japanese culture. He knew the language. He knew the religious beliefs. the OSS wanted to exploit that by trying to find a way we can demoralize the Japanese. You know a lot about the Japanese psyche. The idea was, Ed Salinger, so figure out a way we can demoralize the Japanese and make them basically give up this war because, you know, they're dug in, they're not giving up. We need to find a way that we can basically use psychological warfare on them. So his idea is that in the Shinto religion, there are these kind of mystical figures called Kitsuni.

Starting point is 00:52:11 And in many cases, they tape the form of like a fox, a glowing fox. And oftentimes they represent portents of doom. So, you know, if you see one of these Kitsuni, it's an indication that something bad is about to happen. And so Salinger knew, what if we can artificially create Kitsuni, spread them around Japan, then all these Japanese soldiers are going to see them and think, oh, that's a portent of doom. Surely it means we're going to lose the war. Therefore, we might as well lay down our arms right now. And so Salinger initially his idea is we're going to create whistles that can make foxes,

Starting point is 00:52:41 sounds, and we're going to distribute them across Japan to our agents there, and they can blow these whistles like anyone would recognize a fox sound. He had the idea that we're going to create artificial fox odors and spread it around places, and people are going to think that it's the Kitsuni foxes that are walking around. None of those ever materialized, but then he thought, what if we actually do it? What if we capture foxes from China and Australia? We paint them with glowing radioactive paint, and then we drop them in Japan. Surely that's going to scare the Japanese. So there are actually several experiments that they did this. So they captured foxes.

Starting point is 00:53:17 The United States Radium Corporation produced a paint with radium, radioactive. So loom from like dials of watches. Exactly. It's the same kind of thing. So they decided we're going to paint foxes with this. But they first needed to test whether it's possible to paint fur with this and it stay on. So they went to the Central Park Zoo and they got a raccoon and they painted it and kept it under lock and key. And it turns out after a few days of ordinary raccoon shenanigans, the paint stayed on.

Starting point is 00:53:41 So they thought, okay, this might have something going for it. So then Salinger decided we're going to paint these foxes, row them out into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, and throw them overboard to see if they can actually swim to shore? Because if we're going to get these foxes to Japan, we're going to have to throw them off the coast and they're going to have to swim and then scare people. But can foxes even swim? He didn't know. So he gets these foxes. He paints them with this paint. He throws them in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.

Starting point is 00:54:05 And it turns out they actually swam to shore. that worked. However, by the time they had gotten to shore, the paint had all washed off. And so they poisoned the water. Well, yeah. And so it's like, well, if we were to do this in Japan, the paints, it's just, you see a fox. It's not a Katsuni. It has to be a glowing fox. And so he decided, well, that's not going to work. So his next plan, this is one of the craziest things I found from my first book. The next plan was we're going to stuff a fox, a dead fox, just taxidermy it, have this fox body. We're going to paint it with his glowing paint. We can drape a cloth over it and paint glowing bones on it to make it look like a

Starting point is 00:54:38 skeleton. And we're going to put a human skull over this foxhead to make it look as if it's a human skull. Because apparently this was like an even more potent version of the Kitsuni myth that was going around in Japan. So we're going to put this human skull on this taxonomy glowing fox. We're going to have the jaw open and close as if it's talking and we're going to blast propaganda out of this skull. And we're going to attach balloons to it so that it can fly over Japan. The Japanese are going to look up and see this flying, glowing, radioactive fox spreading this propaganda, and they're apparently going to lay down their arms. I guess that was the plan. And so that was his ultimate idea of what we can do to the feet of the Jeff.

Starting point is 00:55:15 Did they launch that? Did they attempt it? That never actually made it. About the time that he was riding all this up and doing these experiments, the Manhattan Project had performed the Trinity test. And so it was like, well, we already have the weapon that's going to win the war. So we don't mean the glowing foxes. Thank you very much. Wow. Wow. Do you know about the three teas of Thanksgiving, turkey for eating, table for gathering, and touchdowns for winning with Draft King Sportsbook, an official sports betting partner of the NFL. Every touchdown could bring you closer to cashing in before dessert.

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Starting point is 00:57:01 anything is kind of possible the problem is most people haven't researched it so when you're having conversations with people like I've always been conspiratorially minded but more in the fun side like bigfoot UFOs dumb stuff as a distraction like I know what it is I'm interested because it's silly you know and I just find it fun like the big foot thing is my I watched a big football documentary the other night against my own better judgment. And now my YouTube algorithm is filled with Bigfoot stories. It's just the dumbest thing ever. But when I started doing the podcast, it slowly shifted my perspective of not only are there real conspiracies, but they're way more prevalent than you would ever think. And you almost have to get lucky to find out about them.

Starting point is 00:57:50 You know, like one of the things from the book, Chaos, was Tom O'Neill describing some of the documents that were discovered in, God, I believe it was a storage unit that were, they had some. Oh, like the M.K. Ultra document? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do you remember that story? Yeah, that's a big part of my book. So in 1975 or so, really in 1974, there's something called the Rockefeller Commission. and that was an executive commission set up to investigate past abuses of the intelligence community. And that kind of led to the Church Committee in 1975 and also the Pike Committee in the House. But after they published their final reports, those reports included things about MK Ultra that the U.S. government had performed these secret drug experiments in the past. And that led a former State Department employee named John Marks to file a Freedom of Information Act request

Starting point is 00:58:42 basically for any and all documents related to these former drug experiments. And so, you know, not too long afterwards, this CIA, this guy named Frank Laubinger, he was working in like the CIA archives, but he discovered these six or seven boxes of material that Sidney Gottlieb hadn't destroyed when he retired from the CIA because Gottlie incinerated most of his files. And so did Richard Helms. They were in on this together. But it turns out those boxes escaped the destruction because they had been sent to the CIA Record Center several years before. Gottlieb and Helms retired, therefore they weren't incinerated in this purge, and so they survived. So Marx filed that information request. These boxes were found, and then they were released, and this was right around the time that

Starting point is 00:59:28 there were a couple of subcommittee hearings on MK Ultra, and that's right when all these documents came out too, so it became kind of a big deal. So that's how thousands and thousands of documents related to MK Ultra survived, even though Gottlieb and Helms incinerated most of the files that they actually had. Which leads you to consider what would we know if those documents hadn't been discovered? We would be decades behind on this. Yeah, they do reveal a lot of information. That said, we can actually kind of run this scenario because we do know what we kind of knew before those documents were released.

Starting point is 01:00:04 So before those documents were released, you still had the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee and a few other things. So we would have known still because it came out before those documents about. the Frank Olson incident. This guy was dosed with LSD at this place called Deep Creek and he ended up going out the window of the Statler Hotel in New York. He died. We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, even though I don't know if that name was specifically used within these committee publications. So we would have known. Such a great name. Well, that's George White's doing. Is it? Sidney Gottlieb said he had a flare with a pen. He was a journalist before he fucking psycho. Yeah, yeah, he was. In fact, while we're on that topic, at the end of Operation

Starting point is 01:00:41 midnight climax, he wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlie basically thanking him for supporting me for all these years. Out of all the MK Ultra sub-projects, you know, a lot of them started in 1953. Many of them were done by 1963, but several continued into the late 60s. But he, after this was done, he wrote a letter to Sydney Gottlieb. And in the depositions that I found, the attorneys confront Gottlieb about this. And they ask him, what was in that letter? And Gottlieb says, oh, you know, he had a flare for writing. You can't trust anything he said. But they, no, what was in it? Turns out what was in it, George White wrote, I toiled in the vineyards wholeheartedly because it was fun, fun, fun.

Starting point is 01:01:16 Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with a sanction and blessing of the all-highest. He wrote that down. Yeah. God. Yeah. So we would have known about the Frank Olsen incident. We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, though maybe not that name. We would have known the broad outlines of M.K. Ultra because that was already least,

Starting point is 01:01:39 released before those files, but the files give us a really detailed view of what happened. But we don't know what was in the files that were incinerated. That's correct. And imagine that. Yeah. We kind of do know a little bit about what was in them because there was an investigation that was done afterwards because it was illegal for them to destroy these files, not that anything ever happened to them.

Starting point is 01:02:01 They didn't face any consequences for it. However, Gottlieb's secretary, this woman who had only been working for him for a few weeks before he retired, he told her to basically incinerate these files, you know, to help him do this. So she didn't know it was against protocol or whatever. She was new to the job, but she was interviewed later as part of a CIA investigation into the destruction of the files, and she does say a little bit about what she thinks were in the files. She says it was some of his personal papers, and there was secret and secret sensitive files in

Starting point is 01:02:30 there. We don't really have a great idea about what it could be, although I do think a lot of the files were, in the depositions that I found, George White, or Sidney Gottlieb says that George White would write to him personal updates about the experiments that he was doing in these brothels, basically. And so I'm assuming that a lot of those files consisted of George White's personal reports on what was going on. Now, when you get deeper and deeper into this stuff, how much has it shaped your worldview? A decent amount in the sense that, just as it did for kind of the American public in general in the 1970s when this was coming out, it really led people to cast a skeptical eye toward the government in thinking it's just assumed that the government is supposed to be the protector of civil liberties.

Starting point is 01:03:24 But after Watergate, after M.K. Ultra, after the Vietnam War, it starts to seem as if the government is infringing on those civil liberties, you know, instead of being the protector of it, in many cases, it's infringing on them. Not that it doesn't protect civil liberties, but one of the main things that I came away after writing this book is the problem of oversight. You know, I think the constitutional system of government that we have is ingenious, the fact that we have checks and balances and the separation of powers. However, you have to enable the separate branches of government to be able to check the other branches. For most of the Cold War, that external check on the executive branch, the like Congress, checking the executive, the president, or the CIA didn't really exist. So any time that the CIA was doing an operation, I have a chapter about this. But, you know, sometimes CIA personnel would try to inform members of Congress of what they were doing. I have one specific quote where a CIA guy

Starting point is 01:04:23 walks up to a sitting senator and says, hey, let me tell you about what we're doing in Chile or whatever it is. And then he says, no, I don't want to hear it. Don't tell me. Just do what you're going to do. He doesn't even want to know. So it's like, how can you expect Congress to give oversight of the executive if they are completely unwilling to even know what the executive is doing. So fortunately, in the aftermath of these revelations, there have been some programs or committees that are set up within Congress to provide that external check. However, it's, you know, it's not even clear how effective those are. One check on the executive after this is that the president now has to sign off basically on.

Starting point is 01:05:04 covert operations so that eliminates the president's plausible deniability. One of the main themes throughout this book is what I call this the vicious cycle of secrecy. So an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that kind of leads to what I see is this vicious cycle. Secrecy leads to plausible deniability, because if it's secret, nobody can know that I'm doing this, therefore I'm not going to be blamed for it. So secrecy leads to plausible deniability. Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior, like MK Ultra. If nobody's going to find out what I'm doing. Therefore, I'm incentivized to do some crazy stuff because I'm not going to be held accountable for it. So secrecy to plausible deniability, plausible deniability to reckless behavior.

Starting point is 01:05:43 Reckless behavior in many instances leads to embarrassment. It's almost inevitable for many of these projects that they get found out. Someone leaks something to the press. This is how the family jewels that the CIA had that was like a compilation of all the illegal stuff that it had done over the past couple of decades. It eventually got leaked to Seymour Hers. She published it on the front page of the New York Times. So reckless behavior leads to embarrassment, but embarrassment leads to secrecy because now that we've been found out, we've got to make sure that never happens again. We need more secrecy, and the vicious cycle continues. So if you can break that vicious cycle by having some kind of external check, that's what you actually need, like an empowered Congress that is willing to check the executive.

Starting point is 01:06:22 And then you realize, well, who's running against them? Who wants that job? Not a lot of impressive people. A lot of really driven, successful, intelligent people are involved in other activities that consume their time. They have families, they have careers, they have a lot. They don't have the desire to be a congressperson. So you're not getting the cream of the crop. You're not even getting anything remotely similar to the cream of the crop.

Starting point is 01:06:52 You're occasionally getting great people that really want to serve the country. But that is rare. That is like, I wouldn't say rare, but if 20% of the food you ate at a place was poison, would you go eat at that place? No. You would not, right? You would say, I'm assuming there's fucking poison in that place. That's Congress. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:09 That's elected officials. Yeah. And Andrew Yang has made this point before. I know I've heard him say it that the re-election rate of Congress is super high. It's like 80, 90% whatever it is. The approval rating for Congress is like in the teens. So how is that we have such a divergence between the reelection rate and the approval? rating. It has to do with the kind of electoral system, you know, the people who are

Starting point is 01:07:32 incentivized to actually run for Congress. In many cases, they're the most ideological on either side because the only race that matters is actually the primary, because if you're in a, you know, a district that is 90 percent Trump voters, the Republican is going to win the general election. It doesn't matter who it is. So, you know, the primary is the main election that happens in those districts. And if that's the case, well, the person who can win the primary, is going to win the general. And who's going to win the primary? Well, it's going to win, it's going to be the person who can get 90% of Trump voters to be more interested in them than whoever the other Republican, you know, is. In many cases, that drives ideological extremism

Starting point is 01:08:10 because, you know, you're already selecting a sample size of voters within the primary who are the most ideological extreme. And so they're going to elect basically whoever it is. Yeah. Because the general election is a foregone conclusion. So if you can realign the electoral system in a way to where, I mean, I don't know the answer to this, but it would be some kind of open primaries or ranked voting or proportional representation, ending gerrymandering, something like that, then you better incentivize Congresspeople to actually want the job or incentivize people who would be good at the job to engage in the job or to become Congress people because they actually have a clear path to doing it because they're not going to be blocked in the primary. So some kind of

Starting point is 01:08:53 reform like that, I think, is how you better facilitate this check between the different branches. But even then, I don't know if it motivates the cream of the crop because I just, I think most people would rather be on the outside, like most wealthy people that are successful, they'd rather fund a candidate that, you know, suits their needs. Yeah. Well, getting maybe big money out of politics. That would be wonderful. That would be one. I mean, that would be the single, probably biggest help. and then also getting out insider trading out of Congress and make it less like when you're finding out that people are getting a hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year and they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars and there's no investigation whatsoever like what did you do what did you do and why are you still working if you're so good at trading why are you working for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars year which is a great salary don't get me wrong i'd take it nothing wrong with a hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year but when you have 400 million yeah like you're Like, you couldn't get me to do a job for $170,000 a year.

Starting point is 01:09:55 Like, I don't have the time. You could get me to do it. Right, but you know what I'm saying? Like, you can get Congresspeople to still show up and do that job. Is it because they care that much about the American people? Well, that doesn't really jive. It doesn't make sense because they seem completely full of shit when they give their speeches. And it's all canned and fake and insincere.

Starting point is 01:10:12 And there's no, you don't have any real connection with their words. So what are they? They're these weird people that have accepted this job that no one wants. It's critically important. to the function of our government. And you're getting really dull people that are taking this job. It's fascinating. One of the things that also was like so disheartening.

Starting point is 01:10:32 I had rep Luna on the podcast, who was great. And she's very interesting. And we mostly were talking about UFOs because that's the thing that she's involved in. But one of the things she said about certain issues is they don't want to solve these issues. Oh, yeah. Because this is how they run. They can fundraise off of it. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:10:52 And I was like, oh, no. Like, just that trap, I was like, oh, no. I didn't want to think that that is the case. And she's like, oh, that's it. That's 100% of it. Yeah. They don't want to fix it. That, I mean, that makes me even more convinced, though, that a restructuring of the electoral

Starting point is 01:11:08 system in a way that eliminates, I don't know, that incentivizes basically better behavior, whether that's through open primaries, rank choice voting, whatever. Yeah. That has to help in some way, I would think. So this should also be some sort of a competency test if someone wants to take that position. Like if you want to be a lawyer, you have to look at poor Kim Kardashian. She can't pass the bar. She's trying so hard.

Starting point is 01:11:32 She keeps, oh, I can't pass the bar. It's hard to be a lawyer. I'm kind of skeptical of a competency test in a sense, though, because someone has to write the test. Well, not only that, but are you watching them? Do they use chat GPT? And we're living in a weird world right now, you know. It's a very weird world of technology. and, you know, but it would be nice if you knew that this person was capable of doing the job.

Starting point is 01:11:56 Yeah. I mean, I bring it back to the passing the bar thing because, you know, law is very complicated. One of the things that I found out really recently that is super disturbing was that you don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge. To be a judge. Interesting. Oh, if you... You don't have to know anything. You could just become a judge. You could be a regular person and just now you're a judge.

Starting point is 01:12:18 Yeah. I wonder what kind of judge that is. Because I know some judge positions... Yeah, man, I don't give a fuck if it's a judge at Dairy Queen. Like, you should... What are you talking about? You don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge? That's insane.

Starting point is 01:12:35 That's so insane. That's like you don't know how to count to be a mathematician. Like, what are you talking about? You're a judge. You don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge to me. It was like, oh, my God. State and federal courts, most state and federal court and all federal judges

Starting point is 01:12:51 must have a law degree. Wonderful. Some state practice requirements. Many states require judges to have a certain number of years of experience as a practicing lawyer before they're eligible for a judgeship. Makes sense. When a law degree may not be required. Limited court jurisdiction.

Starting point is 01:13:05 Some states allow non-lawyers to become judges in specific lower-level courts such as those that handle small claims, traffic violations or minor criminal manners, state and local variations. The specific requirements may vary wildly by state, even by the type of court within a state and training, judges appointed

Starting point is 01:13:24 from the non-lawyer pool typically must compete complete specific training programs. Right. But what is the program? I wonder if that's a relic of rural communities where maybe there isn't a lawyer, but you need someone to act in that position, you know? Right. Like you've got to be the sheriff in this town. Instead of being like an MD doctor, some people can practice medicine, you know, in rural

Starting point is 01:13:47 communities they do without being a MD doctor. I forget the term of it, but whatever that term is. So maybe that's- Because they don't have a doctor? Well, yeah, they don't have a doctor, but you can, you still have a degree, not an MD, but some kind of metal tool degree that maybe doesn't require as much time. Or you didn't complete your residency or something. So maybe it's a relic of that.

Starting point is 01:14:07 Right, that makes sense. But point being that, you know, if Congress has oversight over these things, well, who are we talking about? This is the thing. Like if you are the CIA and you are running some program that you think is crucial in national security and you have some fucking dingling from pick a state, Virginia, North Dakota, whatever, some ding-dong that just happened to be able to get the right amount of votes because they have the right color on their flag, you know, and then all of a sudden they're in. And you have to talk to this fucking moron. Like, get out of here. Like, I'm not telling you shit.

Starting point is 01:14:46 you're going to hold back information, you're going to come up with reasons why you have to redact files and fuck off, you'll be gone in two years. Yeah, yeah. This is the inherent tension within any intelligence community, whether it's the CIA or the FBI. Yeah. There are legitimate reasons to keep things secret. You have to keep secrets. 100%.

Starting point is 01:15:04 But at the same time, the fact that you're afforded that secrecy allows you to avoid accountability. 100%. So it's a catch-22. You have to keep secrets. There's just no way around it. But at the same time, how can I know that the. secrets they're keeping is because it's in my interest or it's because it's in their interest. Oh, 100%. And then you find out the really crazy stuff that's happened in the past.

Starting point is 01:15:24 Like the Demena Arkansas cocaine situation. I haven't heard of that. You don't know about the Barry Seals story? No. They made a movie about it with Tom Cruise. In fact, in the movie, Tom Cruise actually gets arrested for smuggling cocaine and Bill Clinton gets him off. They call Bill Clinton. He gets arrested in Arkansas. They call Bill Clinton and they have him dead to rights and, you know, he's joking around with the cops saying, I'd like to buy you guys all Cadillacs and stuff like that.

Starting point is 01:15:53 And they're like, you're going to jail for the rest of your life. He goes, no, she's going to get a phone call and I'm going to walk right out of here. And it turned out to be exactly how it happened. Barry Seal was flying drugs from South America and dropping them off in Mina, Arkansas, and then they would go and pick them up in the woods. They had a drop point. Two kids were hanging out in the woods. and they witnessed it accidentally. They were murdered.

Starting point is 01:16:19 And then the official story was they had done drugs and they laid down, fell asleep on train tracks. The parents funded an autopsy. And the autopsy show that they've been stabbed multiple times. So then there's an investigation comes through. And then it turns out that there's a long history of this guy, Barry Seals, who's a CIA operative, who is flying in cocaine, dropping an off in meat,

Starting point is 01:16:44 Arkansas, all known about by the Clintons. Everybody was aware of it. And he had been funneling this money and they were using it, probably for black ops, similar to what they did with the Contras in Sandinista, you know, the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He winds up going to testify, gets murdered on his way to the trial with George Bush's phone number in his pocket. The whole story is like completely. crazy. Wow, yeah. When did that happen? I hadn't heard of it. So it was when Bill Clinton was a governor. So I believe it was the 80s. Okay. He died in 86. 86. Yeah. Fuck it. You weren't alive then. That's hilarious. Fucking crazy story. But this is the CIA, right? This is the same thing that

Starting point is 01:17:32 they did. I'm friends with Freeway Ricky Ross. Do you know who he is? Okay. Great story. So Rick Ross, the rapper. Okay. You know who that is? He got his name. He got his name. from a very famous street hustler named Freeway Ricky. Rick Ross. His real name is Rick Ross. He's the real Rick Ross. Rick Ross was a guy who is a tennis player. A young tennis player who started selling cocaine. It was like super disciplined because he was a tennis player. So it was funneling millions of dollars of cocaine had no idea he was getting his cocaine from the CIA. So he was getting cocaine selling it in the hood. they were getting the money and they were using it this Oliver North thing, the Contras versus the Sandinistas. All of this comes out in court and he wants up going to jail. He winds up going to jail for selling the cocaine.

Starting point is 01:18:27 He doesn't know how to read. He's illiterate. Learns how to read in jail. Becomes a lawyer in jail. Goes over his trial and realizes that they had tried him on the three strikes law, which is supposed to be three different felonies at three different. times, but they jammed them all together. And so he gets off.

Starting point is 01:18:47 So he's free now, and he sells legal marijuana in California. He's been on the podcast multiple times. But this was the CIA that was involved in all of this. This is how, like, they were making money. They were selling cocaine. And one thing crazy, just about not only that, but M.K. Ultra in general, it's against the CIA's charter to operate within the United States. You know, that should be a deal ender right there for whatever they're doing within the

Starting point is 01:19:14 United States. It's just, it's within, it's against the charter. Yep. I mean, there's no more discussion. That's illegal. Well, I just think without oversight, there's cowboys. And there's also, when you realize how much money is there to be made and that you could funnel this money into oversee accounts that are anonymous, and then you could eventually retire someday and get out of the game and be worth millions of dollars and live in Monaco or whatever the fuck you want to do. Like, and I think that's the dream for a lot of these guys. I think they get involved. They realize it's a completely corrupt system and it's corrupt from the top down and there's ways to make money and there's a bunch of stuff going on where money's

Starting point is 01:19:53 being funneled into these NGOs and there's just so much opportunity for corruption and so little oversight and so much power and so much secrecy. And as you were talking about, the importance and the necessity of secrecy for national security, which is a real thing, but also leads to corruption and it leads to people just doing wild things because there's no one watching. And they're in control. They're in, look, it's so, it must be so fun. Like, what's his name was talking about? The evil guy.

Starting point is 01:20:21 George White. Like, he was talking about, like, how much fun he had, which is so sick. Yeah. But that's the kind of people that want that kind of a job. And if you make that kind of a job available with no oversight, we need, like, a council of elders, like a wise council, you know, like, of like completely objective, brilliant people that oversee all these things that aren't ideologically captured, you know, they're financially independent. They don't need anything from you. I've mentioned external oversight, like Congress

Starting point is 01:20:50 checking the executive, but at the same time, one of the big problems with MK Ultra, or one of the problems that led to MK Ultra without people, even within the CIA questioning it, there are people in the CIA who know about it, actually not that many because it's very heavily compartmentalized, but some people still do know about it. So one of the questions I was asking myself throughout this book, why aren't the people who are in the CIA and know about M.K. Ultra. Why aren't they speaking up? Why don't they say, pull Sidney Gottlieb aside and just have a conversation with them? Do you think what you're doing here is all right? I think they're terrified about their career. That's exactly the thing. There's a specific person within the CIA during this time. That's his job, the inspector general. So the inspector general within the CIA, his job is to make sure there's nothing that goes against the CIA's charter or internal regulations or the U.S. law. But I found an interview that he did later. There's this guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick. He was the Inspector General during the 1950s when this was going on.

Starting point is 01:21:48 And he did an investigation into M.K. Ultra in 1957 as it was going on, and it continued on after that. And so one of the things he talks about is, why isn't the case that you tried, why didn't you try to shut this down? Like, you obviously knew this was illegal. In fact, in 1963, a different CIA Inspector General named John Earman, he did a separate investigation into mk ultra and his report that i quote in this book specifically says what i think they're doing is quote illegal and unethical those are his terms and he's the inspector general yet in this later interview lyman kirkpatrick talks about why why didn't you tell them to stop why didn't you put an end to this why didn't you do something and he said i was worried about bringing up

Starting point is 01:22:29 anything that could cause me to lose my job he knew that if he brought this up he'd basically be retaliated against, and so that was it. So, you know, there's problems with external oversight, but also internal oversight. The internal oversight has to be able to bring that kind of stuff up. And another lack of internal oversight is the fact

Starting point is 01:22:48 that Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Helms, they could destroy all these files with no repercussions. It's just completely illegal. It's against the CIA's own internal regulations. In fact, in these depositions that I found, some of the most colorful parts of the depositions happen with the lawyers. The

Starting point is 01:23:04 lawyers just get into heated arguments back and forth. That makes the book really colorful. At certain times, you know, Joseph Rao is this old civil rights, you know, he used to be this civil rights lawyer. He took on this case basically to fight against the CIA. At certain points, he basically says to the other lawyers representing the CIA, I'm going to punch you in the nose. And he says, I'm never giving this up. I'm going to mortgage my house if it means I have to keep on fighting you. But there's a certain point where he basically lays in the Gottlieb asking him, why did you destroy the files? Why did you destroy the files? Sidney Gottlieb comes up with several

Starting point is 01:23:37 excuses. One of those excuses at first is he says the CIA was drowning in paper. We had so much paper. We couldn't move. So there was just an internal kind of drive to get rid of this paper so that we could walk around and figure out where stuff was. He's just completely making this up. Rao presses him

Starting point is 01:23:53 again. Why did you destroy this stuff? Sydney Gottlieb, you know, and he does this to Richard Helms too. They both eventually say again, well, we wanted, you know, it's part of our job to protect sources and methods. And so we wanted to make sure that nobody would be able to know what our sources and methods were as part of this project. So we had to destroy the files. And Rao was like, these files are secret. It's not like they're going to be released to the public. They're the CIA's

Starting point is 01:24:14 files. How could destroying them protect sources and methods any more than just not releasing them to the public? That's just a non-excus. So eventually, Rao presses Gottlieb more. And he kind of breaks down during this interrogation. And he says, I was embarrassed by it. I was embarrassed by what I had done basically, you know, ruined the lives of all these people, spent $10 million at all these different institutions, for what? To ruin these lives, and we didn't even learn that much out of it. And so he destroyed the files. Wow. And didn't face any repercussions. So in addition to external oversight, there's got to be some internal oversight that can provide a check and prevent that from happening, or if it does happen, at least deter others from doing the

Starting point is 01:24:56 same thing by holding them accountable. It's really fascinating that what we're experiencing is essentially 250 years after the founding fathers had already recognized these patterns of human behavior that required oversight. They required checks and balances in order to have a government that doesn't sink into tyranny. You have to have all these things in place

Starting point is 01:25:17 to make sure that no one person has the power to do anything that really fucks up the apple cart. And they knew that this was a, and they really painstakingly structured this system of government that they thought would protect, against it. They didn't factor into account special interest groups and the stock market and money and they just didn't factor into, it expanded exponentially into so many different factions and so many different influencing bodies that it's almost completely out of control. But essentially they knew what could happen that has proven to be accurate, which is really kind of fascinating. It is. It is. You know, it's a it's a brilliant system. And I quote James,

Starting point is 01:26:01 Madison, actually, when I talk about oversight, because his specific verbiage is, you know, auxiliary cautions are necessary, auxiliary precautions, you know, humans, he says, man, men aren't angels, therefore auxiliary precautions are necessary to keep their ambitions in check, which means external oversight, which is like, he's exactly right. That's exactly what you need. He's exactly right. You know, I wonder, like, where this goes, because it's going in the wrong direction. From the founding fathers to today, it's going in the wrong direction. It's like I think most people agree that the lack of oversight and secrecy is a gigantic problem with not just the stuff that we've already discussed with MK Ultra and the CIA and the cocaine and all

Starting point is 01:26:44 these different things, but with virtually everything that gets decided upon in our government that affects daily lives of people. There's so many different influences that aren't based on the greater good of the American people, it's based on financial interests. And that's sort of overwhelmed all of our policies, overwhelmed all of our systems of government. And then you have all of these social issues that they never really want to fix because they campaign fund against them, which is what we're talking about before. So this is this constant psychological game. There's a game of us versus them. There's a game of certain key points, whether it is abortion or gun rights or immigration or whatever it is.

Starting point is 01:27:26 Like nothing ever gets solved. These are the beach balls that they throw up in the air at the concert and they keep getting bounced around. And we're just little dumb monkeys that are giving up our tax dollars so they can keep running this giant Ponzi scheme. Yeah. I will say a counterintuitive point that I think is important to also make, though, is Daniel Shore was a CBS News correspondent.

Starting point is 01:27:49 And he's the guy who initially broke the story on CIA assassinations. nation tips on foreign leaders. And he has this quote about how the U.S. has a, you know, there's a pendulum that swings between security and liberty. You know, the more security you have, the more liberty, basically, you have to take away. You can be infinitely secure, but that means that the government would be inside your house and know everything about you and prevent you from doing anything, but nothing bad would happen. At least you wouldn't be able to do anything bad because there would be a policeman in every bedroom, basically. On the opposite side, you know, the pendulum swings too far the opposite way, complete liberty, well, you have no security

Starting point is 01:28:26 because anyone could do anything. So there's this constant tension between security and liberty that swings throughout American history. And an important thing to keep in mind is that I don't think you want that pendulum to stop. You actually want a little bit of tension between that. You want, in other words, you want the press and Congress to be exposing abuses, you know, because human nature is not going to change. People are going to try to abuse. the system in whatever it is. That's not going to stop. However, if the press and Congress aren't exposing these abuses, you might think that there are no abuses happening, but they're going to be happening. So I think it's actually good the fact that this pendulum is swinging a

Starting point is 01:29:09 little bit, the fact that there is a little bit of tension and the fact that there are abuses being exposed. I wish the abuses didn't happen, but at the same time, the abuses are going to happen no matter what. Therefore, the exposure of the abuses is a good sign. It's a sign that the system is actually working as intended because the abuses are being exposed. You know, one of the points I'm making this book is dread the day when the press sings nothing but the praises of those in power and Congress says that there are no abuses to investigate. It might seem like that's utopia, but that's the day that you have lost all of your liberties. That's a very good point. That's a very good point. And well said. I think this is what we're

Starting point is 01:29:45 seeing now with independent journalism. And that that, that, these, a lot of these issues that get raised are coming from independent journalists first, and then they ultimately have to be recognized when they reach the zeitgeist. They ultimately have to be recognized by the New York Times or by mainstream media publications, but they're not the ones who break a lot of these stories. A lot of these stories are broken by the Glenn Greenwalds and the Matt Taibis and the genuine independent journalists who initially worked for an organization and then found there's some sort of an ideological blockade or some certain subjects that they couldn't breach or certain

Starting point is 01:30:23 things that they were told that they couldn't publish and they were like, I'm out. And then they started doing it on their own. And then also social media. This is the new function that social media has where you have these accounts that break news stories all the time. And interestingly enough, some of them are very reliable and those ones wind up becoming the ones that people share and they get a tremendous amount of followers. and then they are more trustworthy, oftentimes, than corporate media, which is really kind of scary, but also fascinating.

Starting point is 01:30:57 Like, there's a need for it, there's a recognition, there's a distribution of information that lets you to see all of this corruption and all this chaos and like, what's at the root of it and why isn't this being discussed in the New York Times? And then all of a sudden someone puts up this 10 Twitter post of all these different links and shows you, This is the history of it and the story of it. And then a month later, it's in the Washington Post. And it's interesting. It's interesting. It's because it's like, it's almost like these, this need exists. It's not being fulfilled by mainstream media because mainstream media is captured by corporate interests.

Starting point is 01:31:33 So in order to have this information comes out, the world gives us this new platform and that social media. And social media distributes all this stuff. And then you have to sort through what's real, what's foreign governments, making. Making up fake stories. That's the other side of it. Because the algorithm can push something, but it doesn't necessarily push truth. Right. It might just push engagement.

Starting point is 01:31:54 Exactly. And if that's the case, then how do you know? Community notes. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Well, that's the beautiful thing about Twitter. And when Elon solved that issue with community. I don't necessarily say solved.

Starting point is 01:32:05 It's not solved. But it certainly made it a lot easier to understand what's going on. Because there's oftentimes there's some outrageous video clip, like, oh my God, can you believe the Democrats are doing this? and then it turns out, no, that's actually from a movie, you know, or that's actually AI, or that's actually from 2016, and it's in Poland. You know, I mean, there's a lot of that stuff happens where people get outraged and someone post something, and then I always go to the original account that posts it, and how many times I've gone there, I'm going, oh, you're not a real person.

Starting point is 01:32:36 Like, most of the time, I go and look at all the posts that they have. I'm like, well, this is either a bot or this is a foreign government running one of these like puppet accounts. Yeah. You might like being a historian because it sounds like that's very similar to what I do in the historical record, not on social media, but, you know, most, a lot of what I'm doing is following this source, that cites this source, that cites that source, that this source. It's like, where's the origin of this thing? And you can see the, it's a game of telephone. You can see the transformation along the way. One of my favorite examples comes from my first book. I was writing about William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS. And he was this really, you know, large and than life individual, a World War I war hero, he had a Medal of Honor and all kinds of stuff. And there was this really great quote in a book. And it was describing Donovan basically as that. He was the kind of guy that would dance on the roof of the hotel and he would, you know, he would destroy these planes and whatever. And I thought, man, that's such an exciting quote to encapsulate

Starting point is 01:33:34 who he is. So I was reading this book and I kind of, okay, I'm going to mark that quote. I'm going to come back and see, where does he, what source is this from? So I can use that in my book. So I go to the source, it turns out it cites another book. And it's like, okay, I've got to get that book. So I go to the library. I was teaching at Louisiana Tech at the time. Go to the Louisiana Tech Library, get that book, open it to the page that it says, find the quote. Okay, here's where it is.

Starting point is 01:33:57 Now go to the back of the book, see the note. The note cites another book. It turns out I had that book. I owned that book. So I went back home, go to that book, do the same thing, look for the source of this quote. It turns out it was a book I didn't have, and the library didn't have. so I had to put an inner library loan, you know, in use. So I had to basically request that my library get the book from a different library.

Starting point is 01:34:16 That was going to take several weeks. So, okay, now I've got to wait. In the meantime, I go into Google Books. I start searching this quote for other books. It turns out they basically cite the books that I had already consulted, so it's a dead in there. I have to wait for this other book to come in. And in the meantime, I'm thinking to myself, that quote sounds awfully familiar.

Starting point is 01:34:33 What do I know that from? It turns out I had already used that quote in my book, but it was from a different it was in a different context. It wasn't talking about William Donovan. It was talking about just people in the OSS in general, and the quote was different. It wasn't like the same quote, but it had many of the key words,

Starting point is 01:34:48 and you could tell that it was the same thing, but somebody had changed it. So now I'm thinking, did I use like a fake quote, you know, in this book? So I've got to figure out in my manuscript where I got this. It turns out I got it from this book called Wander by this guy named Sterling Hayden,

Starting point is 01:35:02 the actor, later an actor. He was in the OSS. And he had used the quote because he was quoting he was talking about when he was in Europe at the end of the war, he told someone he was in the OSS and they said, oh, the OSS guys are the kind of guys who, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 01:35:17 And I thought, okay, well, he's recalling this from memory, so this must be the origin of the quote, then what are all these other books quoting? So finally, that inner library loan comes in and I get it and it basically says the quote, but it's, you know, it's a little bit different and it's referring

Starting point is 01:35:32 to Donovan, again, and not just OSS guys in general, and it doesn't cite a source. So I thought, okay, what happened is the guy who wrote that book, he had read Sterling Hayden's book, he had taken the quote and he liked it, but he wanted to apply it to Donovan, so we switched the subject and he changed the quote a little bit, and everyone after that

Starting point is 01:35:48 dozens of different books have cited that as their original source, and it was about the wrong person and not even the right quote. Wow! And that's for one quote in my book, that's the amount of work you have to do. Well, kudos to you for doing that work, right? That's why people like you are so important that you chased that

Starting point is 01:36:04 whole story down to the end. If anyone is interested in that, though, in My book, I cite the original book, obviously, because that's what, but next to what I said, also see Joseph Persico, blah, blah, blah, the original book. So that's the book that I originally found the quote in. So if they want to go down the rabbit, oh, they can follow his book to that book, to that book, to that book. Wow. Well.

Starting point is 01:36:23 It's a lot of rabbit holes going down, even just to find the origins of things. Well, and then apply that to religion. You know, like stories. Oh, oh, yeah. You know, like game of telephone. Oh, my God. You know, what was the original story? Yeah, it's a lot of this stuff, the secrecy, MK Ultra, all the stuff we're talking about oversight, it all relays to the way the human mind works, like that the human mind, in this instance, would take a quote and for its own convenience, apply it to a different person and change it a little bit.

Starting point is 01:37:00 But it's like we're constantly dealing with all of these factors that are in motion with human intelligence, with ego, with reputation, embarrassment, the ambition, power, control. And one thing I especially noticed in doing this, too, is the ability for humans to rationalize anything to agree with what they already think is true is almost limitless. I give an example in this book of a psychologist named Leon Festinger. He wrote this book called When Prophecy Fails. And it's a really fascinating story where he was looking in a newspaper and he saw an announcement for the end of the world. There was this cult called the Seekers Colt. And they had said basically on December 21st, 1953, I think it was, it's going to be the end of the world. There's going to be a massive flood.

Starting point is 01:37:53 Join us. And so we can get whisked away on the spaceship before the end of the world happens. Festinger sees this and he thinks, this is. This is a great psychological experiment because they are making a specific prediction. On this day, this is going to happen. What happens when it doesn't happen? So he decides to embed himself in this cult. Basically, they knew he was a psychologist, but they said, yeah, sure, come on by.

Starting point is 01:38:13 So him and some of his researchers, they just sit with a cult on the day that the world is supposed to end because they want to know, how are they going to deal with the fact that the world doesn't actually end? So obviously, there wasn't even a light rain, there was like no flood. And so the world doesn't end. Some people actually do end up leaving the cult afterwards, but many people stay, especially the people who had sunk many costs into the cult. They had abandoned their families to join this.

Starting point is 01:38:38 They had donated lots of money. They had quit their jobs basically to be in this cult because they thought the world was going to end. What do we need money for? And so those people stayed, and now, Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance. So the idea that you're holding two irreconcilable views in your mind at the same time. So one of their views is we predicted because we had received, we have received, we have received revelations from God basically that the world was going to end on this day. That's one

Starting point is 01:39:03 position they're holding. The other position is the world didn't end on that day. So this is cognitive dissonance. How do we reconcile the fact that these two things contradict each other, but we have to believe both of them? So Fessinger was interested in how they would do this. There were a couple rationalizations originally. One was, well, maybe God minute in a figurative sense, not a literal sense. Maybe it was a figurative flood that was going to cleanse our minds of, you know, something. Instead, not like a literal flood that was going to kill everyone. But then they said, no, we actually thought it was going to be a literal flood. So he's in the middle of their discussions when they're rationalizing this. And they eventually

Starting point is 01:39:36 come upon the conclusion, God was going to destroy the world. We were right to believe that he was going to do that. But because he saw how fervently we believed in him and how fervently we believed that the world was going to be destroyed, he decided to have mercy on us and didn't destroy the world. So the fact that we believed that the world was going to be destroyed is the reason why the world wasn't destroyed. So the evidence against them, comes evidence for them. We know we are right because the world wasn't destroyed because that proves that God was taking mercy on us. So this is how they rationalize it. So this is non-falsifiable, something that there's no way you could prove it wrong. This is an indication

Starting point is 01:40:13 of a bad theory of it's non-falsifiable. It's like not tethered to reality. It's gold medal mental gymnastics. Exactly. If something's non-falsifiable, the classic example for me of non-falsifiability is the concept of last Thursdayism. So it's the idea that God created the universe last Thursday. Now, how could I prove that wrong? You know, I asked my students this, and many of them say, well, I remember last Wednesday. I remember time before last Thursday. But of course you remember that, but God created you and your memories last Thursday.

Starting point is 01:40:43 So, of course, you would think that there was time before last Thursday because God implanted those memories in you last Thursday. In other words, this is just a non-falsifiable belief. You can't prove it wrong, but that doesn't mean it's right. So the capacity for humans to rationalize things, if you start, from a false premise, we can rationalize a world to make sure that we believe in that false premise. Yes, yes. We do that with everything. We do that with religion.

Starting point is 01:41:06 We do that with ideologies. We do that with everything. And it's not, it's, you know, people typically associate rationalization with religion or this kind of cult behavior like this group I explained. But actually, I'm a historian of science and actually plays an important role in science itself, like

Starting point is 01:41:22 the method of science, how science works. If you don't mind, if I can briefly describe the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn. He's this famous philosopher of science. He wrote this, the most influential book in the philosophy of science called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, basically explaining, how does science change or progress over time? His concept was that scientists operate within a paradigm, a worldview. So we believe in Newtonian gravity, or we have the worldview of the germ theory of disease or whatever it is. So this is our paradigm, whatever group of scientists we are. Within that paradigm, we do normal science.

Starting point is 01:41:58 He says puzzle solving. We do experiments to try to prove our paradigm right. So if my paradigm is, you know, if I'm a follower of Ptolemy and I believe in the geocentric universe, I'm going to be observing the way that the planets and the stars are moving across the sky to try to prove Ptolemy right. I'm going to try to prove that his predictions actually come true. So this is just called puzzle solving. What scientists actually do, Thomas Kuhn says, many of them, they just puzzle solve.

Starting point is 01:42:22 They just try to prove the paradigm right. In the process of doing that, they uncover occasionally an anomaly. An anomaly is something that seems to contradict the paradigm. Like, okay, Ptolemy makes this prediction about where the planet should be, but it turns out the planet's actually not there. It's a little bit off. That's an anomaly. And Kuhn says, what do scientists do with anomalies?

Starting point is 01:42:42 Do they throw out their theory? No. He says they either ignore it or they find a way to rationalize it. Well, Ptolemy made that prediction, but it's close enough to where his theory still works for most of the observations we're making. So scientists usually ignore or rationalize the anomaly. But over time, as they do more and more puzzle-solving, normal science, more and more anomalies crop up. To the point where we just can't ignore them anymore. There's just too many anomalies.

Starting point is 01:43:09 At a certain point, we realize that our worldview, our paradigm, must be wrong. And Kuhn says this allows for a crisis within the scientific community. The group of scientists within this paradigm, they enter a crisis period. And it's during that crisis period when someone can put forward an alternative paradigm that accounts for all those anomalies, and then we accept that as our new paradigm. So it accounts for all the things that the previous paradigm could do, in addition to all the anomalies that the previous paradigm couldn't account for. Now we're in a new paradigm, and what do we do? We do puzzle solving. We try to prove our paradigm right, and in the process, we uncover anomalies. Oh, and we

Starting point is 01:43:45 rationalize them away. But the reason I raise this point is because one of the integral parts to the progression of science, says Thomas Kuhn, is the fact that scientists are stubborn. The fact that contrary to popular belief. We typically think of scientists as people who are really open to changing their minds. They're confronted by evidence. And so, okay, they're willing to accept this evidence. Thomas Coon says, if you actually look at the history of science closely, that does happen. But what also happens in a lot of instances is scientists are stubborn and they don't want to change their minds. They're stuck on their paradigm. And so they rationalize away the anomalies. So the same kind of rationalizing that you have within the seekers cult about their belief system

Starting point is 01:44:22 is very similar to the kind of rationalizing that scientists are doing when they refuse to throw out their paradigm because they've uncovered these anomalies, but surely there's a way we can make those anomalies fit with our paradigm instead, and they don't. So this isn't to say that scientists are members of a cult or anything like that. In fact, there's, you know, there are good reasons to maybe elevate the predictions of scientists over those of these cult members because there are structures in place within the scientific community to prevent some of the more egregious biases that they have. However, really what I consider Kuhnaz, it's a commentary on human psychology. Kuhn basically figured out cognitive dissonance before Leon Fessinger,

Starting point is 01:45:02 you know, but Kuhn didn't have that terminology. Festinger is describing cognitive dissonance in these cult members. Kuhn is describing it in scientists. He just doesn't have that terminology, but that's just what it is. And Kuhn says that's why science progresses. It's necessary for those people to ignore that evidence because it enables them to keep uncovering more anomalies that eventually leads to the revolution. So it's like, it's an ironic thing that our ability to rationalize is what allows us to progress in the future. Wow. This is the perfect point to take a break because I have to take a leak.

Starting point is 01:45:31 So this is awesome. We'll be right back. Okay. Sorry about that. But I'm glad we took a break right after that epic rant. That was so good. I mean, you just nailed it. It's so perfect that there's just this bizarre psychological dance when it comes to human beings, even scientists.

Starting point is 01:45:48 Yeah. And it's, you know, the main point to make is that it's not, the main point is just that human psychology is human psychology. Just because you're a scientist or a cult member or whatever, it's not as if you're immune to any of these tendencies. Anyone is subject to them. It's just human psychology. So I tend to think of Thomas Kuhn in terms of psychology instead of philosophy. Yeah. Well, it's brilliant.

Starting point is 01:46:10 And it's just, it also, all of that, all that understanding of human psychology is really what leads us to even begin to wonder what is going on with the human mind. How do you exploit it? what can you do? And then you get people like Sidney Gottlieb who make a fucking career out of it. They're realizing like we're like these very bizarre, complicated thinking apes. And we have tendencies and we have these things that we do that protect ourselves and we have these desires and we have these motivations and how do we exploit that? How do we do that for, air quotes, national security interests?

Starting point is 01:46:49 Yeah. And one of the ironic things is I don't think Sidney Gottlieb is particularly successful in creating like a Manchurian candidate and controlling someone like a Marionette and getting them to commit an assassination or something like that. However, there are ways to manipulate people and to influence them to behave in certain ways. And the typical ways that we associate with like cult behavior, there's a guy named Stephen Hassan. And he he's... Yeah, I've had him on. Oh, have you? Okay. Yeah. His bite model, behavior, information, thought, emotion. I think that's a very good model for understanding how actual mind control.

Starting point is 01:47:24 actually takes place. You know, behavior being like controlling where someone can go, what they can do, what they can eat, when they can sleep, information being restricting someone from accessing outside sources of information, but if they do, teaching them to distrust that information, even if they do access it. Well, he was actually in a cult. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was in the Moonies.

Starting point is 01:47:43 Yeah, yeah. Thought control is like reinforcing previous patterns of thought, so saying mantras, reciting prayers, creating an us versus them mentality, and then emotion and control is like instilling in someone certain emotions to make them beholden to the cult or to whatever it is. Guilt, fear, shame, anger, loyalty, dependence, that kind of thing. And so a combination of these four factors is, I think, the real mind control, how people actually manipulate people, how especially cults are able to manipulate their members to do all kinds of really insane things like cut off their genitals or commit murders or anything like that.

Starting point is 01:48:22 I think it's much more influenced by those four factors than it is some kind of LSD, you know, mind control, Sidney Gottlie, MK Ultra type thing. Are you aware of the cult that existed in Austin that there's a documentary called Holy Hell? I don't think so, no. When was that? Very interesting. I believe it took place here in the 90s. cult, it's called the Bodie Tree, I believe.

Starting point is 01:48:49 Okay, now I haven't heard it. Originally, they started in West Hollywood, and this is a great story. It was a guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist. It was also a yoga instructor. So he starts this cult. He would have liked this book, I bet. Yeah. I believe his name was Jaime Gomez, and he changed his name a couple of times. One of them was Michelle, and I think the other one was Andreas. And so when the cult awareness network started looking at the cults right after Waco. And Jolly West started that, right? The Cult Awareness.

Starting point is 01:49:21 Yes. So this guy leaves West Hollywood and moves to Austin and has his followers build him a theater that he can dance for them in front of them. That was the point so that he can like show off to? Yes. It's a beautiful theater. I almost bought it. Oh, really? Yeah, the original comedy mothership was going to be at this cult.

Starting point is 01:49:40 Is it downtown or? No, no, it's West Austin. It's on Bee Cave's Road. Okay, yeah. And it's still there. It's a beautiful theater. And the reason why I was going to buy, it was for sale, first of all. It was a beautiful theater.

Starting point is 01:49:52 And we wanted a place to put a comedy club. And Ron White, my dear friend, had performed there. And he told me how great it was. It's like, some cult owned it or something. So I was like, all right, cool. When I went to check it, I'm like, this is great. And then I get a phone call from my friend Adam. He goes, hey, man, have you seen the documentary on this cult?

Starting point is 01:50:09 And I'm like, oh, fuck. There's a documentary. And the documentary is terrible. It's horrible. However, there's one fascinating aspect of it. Okay, so this guy, he had sex with all these people. He made them pay money so that he can have sex with them. Like, they would do therapy, and he was having sex with all these guys, and they were straight, and it was like they felt terrible about it.

Starting point is 01:50:32 And after it was over, like, one guy had sent a mass email. Like, hey, this guy's been hypnotized me and fucking me for the past 10 years. And everybody's like, I thought it was just me. And the entire call falls apart. But here's the point. this guy had this thing that he would do to them called the knowing and they would have to qualify for the knowing they'd have to be ready for it and only he could decide if they were ready when they were ready they would have this ceremony this huge thing and then he would put his hands on them they would like they would kneel there in acceptance of the knowing and he would put his hands on them and they would have this profound psychedelic experience so through the power of suggestion through the placebo effect whatever it is they they they They genuinely have this profound psychedelic experience, this connection to God, this feeling of all oneness to a person, everyone who left the cult, who talked about what a terrible

Starting point is 01:51:29 guy he was, talked about how he sexually exploited them and abused them and took their money and they wasted 20 years of their life with this guy. But that day when they got the knowing was the most profound day of their lives. Really? Even after they're out of the cultics? Yes. even after they were out of the cults, people weeping about what he did to them still talked about that experience as being the most profound moment of their life, which is like, this guy,

Starting point is 01:51:56 because he was a hypnotist and because he was also a megalomaniacal, narcissistic, yeah, oh, beautiful, man, like gorgeous man, like six-pack, ripped body. And it got weird at the end because later in his life he started getting plastic surgery because he was getting older and so his looks were going so his fucking face kept and everybody was like what are you doing

Starting point is 01:52:18 like what are you doing and he would deny doing anything but it was like so obvious and he had facelifts and he just went crazy but the point is it's like he figured out how to not just

Starting point is 01:52:30 manipulate these people like all cult leaders do but have this one experience that apparently was a real experience for these people in some way able to intercept like some kind of idea into them or, yeah.

Starting point is 01:52:45 If they could just get out then. Like, I got it. Thank you. I'm going to go get a regular job now. But in order to have that, I'm sure you have to go through the whole experience because it builds up some tension or resentment or something. Of course. Human psychology has to have gone through that in order to maybe reach that.

Starting point is 01:53:01 Well, it's just spectacular that he was able to understand that you had to hold it back from them for so long. And like some of them in the film would be they were complaining that I'm ready for it. He won't give it to me. I wanted it. I wanted so badly. Michelle got it. Now she's enlightened.

Starting point is 01:53:18 I'm just sitting here on earth eating carrots. This is bullshit. And, you know, it's really weird. Because one of the things about these cult documentaries is every time you watch one, like, for me at least, in the beginning, I'm like, that looks like fun. Yeah. In the beginning, it looks great. They're all having dinners together. It's a community.

Starting point is 01:53:37 It's a community. Everyone loves community. Everyone needs to feel accepted. They're all like working in the garden. together. Like, this looks great. It looks great. And then it always descends into one guy fucks everybody. One guy takes all the money. One guy wants to be known as the living God. Uh-huh. Yep. It's just these patterns are so weird. They're so weird because they're so similar. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same basic human psychology operating under different circumstances

Starting point is 01:54:10 that leads to, you know, I mean, there's a classic phrase, you know, history repeats itself or history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, but it's because human share of psychology. So, of course, there are going to be similar actions. That reminds me kind of this concept of like incepting something into someone or making him feel this. Were you, you know, this is a little bit before my time, but did you experience the satanic panic in the sense that were you keeping up with it when that was happening in the 1980s? I wasn't.

Starting point is 01:54:36 You know, I was very busy during that time, but I peripherally remember. remember it. And then later on, we examined it and looked into it. And, you know, we've done a few episodes where we went over it. But it was, you know, legitimately kind of crazy. Yeah. You know, because there's a connection between that and some of the, what I would say, are MK Ultra kind of conspiracies. There are a lot of true things about MK Ultra that are just crazy. But there are also some things that people propose that I don't think actually happened. You know, there are some people who say, for instance, that M.K. Ultra was, it was like getting young women to run around these military compounds where they would be hunted for sport. And it was saying, like, you know,

Starting point is 01:55:21 there was a vice president who activated a hologram around his body to make this woman think that she had turned into a lizard, to make her think that lizard people actually exist. Like, you know, she was saying that the CIA personnel would impregnate her and abort the fetuses and eat the fetus and sell some of the body parts in their interstate occult body part business and all this stuff, which I don't think any of that happened. However, there's a connection between, you know, the people who are making these assertions and the satanic panic. A lot of the people who make these assertions say that they recovered their memories through hypnotism. And that is a lot of what was going on during the satanic panic.

Starting point is 01:55:57 You had people recovering memories through hypnotism about being involved in this ritualistic satanic abuse. And in fact, there was a, there's a. group called the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. And a lot of the members were kind of responsible for propagating many of these satanic panic conspiracy theories. The president of that organization, a guy named Bennett Braun, he was sued by a former patient for falsely convincing her that she had engaged in cannibalism and infanticide and all this stuff that she didn't do. And he lost his medical license and she was awarded $10 million in this lawsuit. But it turns out that many of the people, one in particular, of the kind of prominent M.K. Ultra

Starting point is 01:56:39 conspiracy theorists, her husband who did this hypnotism on her to recover her memories, he said he learned how to recover memories from Bennett Braun himself. And he was a part of this international society for the study of dissociation. So it's like the same techniques that were being used during the satanic panic to so-called recover these memories. It's the same thing in many of these MK. Ultra, what I would say are conspiracy theorists, who are propagating these, you know, misinformation about MK Ultra because they've supposedly recovered these memories about how these jelly beans were used to control their behavior or something. But it's the same kind of techniques that are being used in both instances.

Starting point is 01:57:14 Hypnotic regression in particular is very odd because a lot of is dependent upon the questions that are asked while the person's under, like that you can lead someone to believe something happened that didn't happen. This is what Jolly West was some of the stuff that he was doing. This is what's really, do you know what John Mack is? John Mack. John Mack was, I believe, he was a psychiatrist at Harvard. He got really obsessed with alien abduction stories.

Starting point is 01:57:42 And he wrote a book called abduction. And it was all hypnotic regressions of people that had been abducted by aliens, allegedly. And they all had very similar stories. But the real controversy from skeptics has always been, like, what were these sessions like? Like leading questions? Yes. Yes. And also, there was a precedent.

Starting point is 01:58:04 So do you know the Betty and Barney Hill story? Okay. Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple in New Hampshire, I believe, in the 1950s, with a very first UFO abduction story. And they had an experience on a highway. They saw a thing. They lost time. And then they couldn't sleep dead.

Starting point is 01:58:23 All these real problems. And they both wound up going to a hypnotist and separately had the same story. Separately have the same story about being taking aboard a craft and being manipulated. The problem is then that story gets out into the zeitgeist. Yeah. Right? And then you have hypnotic regression where people tell very similar versions of that story. And it becomes a thing where like even if the original Betty and Barney Hill story was real, now that becomes a possibility in your mind that could have happened to you. And then you get hypnotized and someone says, do you see any beings in this? room with you. Yes, I do. Do they, are they short with large heads and large black eyes?

Starting point is 01:59:06 They are. Like, what are the questions? Like, how did you lead them into this hypnotic regression of alien abduction? And I think a very similar thing took place during the European kind of witch craze in the 17th century. These preachers would go around to different communities talking about witches and demons. And so as soon as they left, in the weeks following, there is a huge uptick and witch accusations in supposed demonic possessions. Is it a coincidence that right after they're, as soon as it's brought to your consciousness, oh, I think you might be a witch or all these accusations starts farting around. Obviously, it's like a suggested thing that they picked up from attending these religious rallies. Of course. Did you know that when the printing

Starting point is 01:59:44 press was first created, some of the first and most popular books were all about how to spot witches? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like Heinrich Kramer and the hammer of witches. You would think. No, no, no. But now we have a printing press. It's just all about philosophy. And, you know, it's going to get me able to print the Bible and mathematics. No, no, no, no, no, no. If it bleeds, it leads. It's like people are attracted to sensational stories.

Starting point is 02:00:09 Yes. It's the same thing about human psychology. They're just the same psychology as us today. And if we're interested in learning these sensational stories, of course they want to, too. It was their version of what I'm obsessed with Bigfoot. The same thing, just nonsense. Yeah, a funny anecdote, kind of related to that. I teach a course on Isaac Newton, and he writes this big book, the Principia.

Starting point is 02:00:28 It's like the most famous book in the history of science, and it goes off to the publisher. And the publisher, you know, he's publishing this book. And right after the Principia is published, the publisher gets arrested for publishing pornography. So it's like there's this image of this publishing house where the Principia, the most important book in the history of science, is there. And right next to it is all this smut that he's secretly doing. Wow. God, human psychology is such a trip.

Starting point is 02:00:53 We're so weird. We're such weird animals, and it makes it so hard because we're so weird to find the truth. Yeah, especially when you're talking about, like, suggested memories or something like that. There are a few studies. I don't remember them, you know, like perfectly, but there's one study that I talk about in this book where this is right after the Challenger explosion. So the space shuttle has exploded, and there were two psychologists. I think they're at Emory University, and they decide we are going to have all of our students, like 200 students, right down exactly where they were when they were. heard about this because obviously they're all going to remember, this is like the next day,

Starting point is 02:01:27 where were you, what were you doing, who told you about the explosion? And so they got copies, you know, of these questionnaires basically from a hundred, how and for many students. Four years later, I think it was, they tracked down, I don't know what, 40 or 80 of these students and had them do the same questionnaire. When the Challenger exploded, where were you? Who were you with? What did, you know, what did you learn? Blah, blah, blah, blah. They took the exact same questionnaire and the majority of the students got a majority of the questions wrong in the sense that they put down something completely different than they did the first time. So it's like nobody was even manipulating them. That was just their own memory that, you know, the majority got the majority of these important details wrong.

Starting point is 02:02:06 There's another intriguing kind of humorous psychological study. I don't know how big the sample size was on this, but it was to determine how powerful our memory is in the sense that if you just suggest to, that someone did something, is it possible that they actually think they actually did? So the suggestion was they took a bunch of students to some vending machines, and they either had them proposed to the vending machine, something that surely you would remember, or they would suggest to them that they had proposed to the vending machine. So some students would actually propose, and other students, they would just tell them, oh, you know, imagine yourself proposing to this vending machine.

Starting point is 02:02:42 And afterwards, I don't remember what the percentage was, but a decent amount of percentage of the students who were only told to envision proposing actually thought they had proposed. And so the power of suggestion is very strong. So strong. And the memory is so fallible. Like I have a pretty good memory for like hard facts, like the information that I know is true. But my memory of my own life is basically like weird, blurry snapshots that I can recall. And oftentimes what I'm recalling is the memory of my recounting

Starting point is 02:03:21 of my memory. It's not really my memory. Yeah. This is the story that you've told yourself. I watched an episode of news radio the other day. There was a sitcom that I was on in the 1990s. I didn't remember it at all. I didn't remember the plot. I didn't remember the lines that I had.

Starting point is 02:03:37 I didn't remember. Like, if it was fake, if someone created it during AI, I would have no idea whether it was an AI version of news radio, Unless it was an episode that I really remember, like, oh, that was a really funny one. I didn't remember this at all. Yeah. And it was me.

Starting point is 02:03:53 I lived it. I was on TV, right? So it was, like, probably a big moment for me at the time. Gone. It doesn't exist. I feel like I, it's ironic. I'm a historian, but I feel like my memory is not that good either. I don't think anybody's is.

Starting point is 02:04:05 No, it can't be. Well, there's certain people, like, you know, that woman that was on taxi, really pretty redhead lady, that sitcom taxi from the 1970s. God, I forget her name is. Famous actress, Mary Lou Tenor, Mary Lou Tenor. Photographic memory. Henner. Henry Lou, Henner.

Starting point is 02:04:24 Mary Lou. Sorry, Mary Lou. I used to be in love with her when I was a kid. She has a photographic memory. Like, she can remember that it was a Tuesday in 1983, like this lady. It's an incredible memory. Highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition in which people can remember nearly every day of their lives with precise detail.

Starting point is 02:04:48 I wonder if that would be good to have or bad to have. She seems very happy. Okay. Show a picture of her when she was young. I can imagine having a negative experience or a bad memory and then dwelling on that and knowing every single detail of that and having to relive that like in photographic detail every time you think of it. I'm sure that couldn't be a pleasant experience. That one right above.

Starting point is 02:05:09 Go to the one right above there. Right there. No, right there. Bam. That was her. who smoke show that was your younger oh my goodness yeah she was so pretty

Starting point is 02:05:18 and also photographic memory so you can't lie to her what an amazing person but that's got to be I would imagine it's not a burden I would take that over not taking that

Starting point is 02:05:31 like if someone gave me the option would you rather have an absolute photographic memory or be like not really sure I don't know what happened I would take the photographic memory I think the burden I think would be worth it I think I'd handle it.

Starting point is 02:05:44 Even me for questions, like, you know, if you ask me, how did you come to write this book? Like, you asked me, how did you become interested in this topic? When I was thinking about the answer to that question, I mean, what I said is factual in the sense that I was doing a dissertation on scientists in the intelligence community and this. But is that really like how I came to this topic? I might have read some other book that I read the name Sidney Gottlieb and that got me interested. And, you know, even when I'm talking to you about my own autobiographical experience, to me, it's like, I mean, what I'm I'm saying is true, but is it like literally true in the sense that I know with precision that how I came to this topic because I was doing my dissertation on this.

Starting point is 02:06:20 It might have been, you know, I kind of remember reading Tim Wiener's book, Legacy of Ashes, and it briefly mentions Sidney Gottlieb in there. Maybe I read that, and it's like, oh, who's this guy, you know? Right. So there's a classic joke about how there's a guy looking for his keys on the parking lot, and there's a, it's night, and there's a lamp post right above him, and a police officer walks by, and a police officer walks by, and the police officer. officer says, sir, what are you doing? And he says, oh, I'm looking for my keys on the

Starting point is 02:06:45 ground. They must be somewhere around here. And the officer says, oh, well, did you drop him right here? And the guy says, no, I dropped him in the bush over there, but this is where the light is. So this is where I'm looking. So to me, it's like, well, when I remember my own autobiographical experience, am I remembering it how it's convenient to memor it? Yeah. Remember it or, you know, or what? Oftentimes. Oftentimes. I mean, that's the human tendency, right? I know for a fact, when I really got into conspiracies, because I have a moment connected to it that was a bad experience. So when I was in my early 20s, this guy that was a friend of mine that was in a band, had read this book called Best Evidence by David Lifton. David Lifton was an accountant

Starting point is 02:07:27 and I forget what his assignment was, but it had something to do with the Warren Commission. So he goes over the Warren Commission report, and he actually read the whole thing. So it's a huge volume. And he reads all this and he finds so many contradictions and so many things that are wrong with it that he starts investigating the Kennedy assassination. And he writes this book called Best Evidence. And the book is basically saying there's no way the official story is true. And I read this while I was a comedian on the road. So I was in Philadelphia and I was doing stand-up and I had

Starting point is 02:07:59 a show on Friday night and I spent the whole day in my hotel room reading this book freaking out going, oh my God, they killed it. So then I go on on stage, first show, and fucking bomb. And I had done really good the night before. Did you talk about the JFK, or did you already have the set routine? No, I had my set, but I was like completely freaked out by the fact they killed the president. And then I apologize to the manager. I said, I'm so sorry.

Starting point is 02:08:24 I read this book on JFK and I'm super bummed out. I'll be over it by the second show, I promise you. And then they were like, you better me. And I was like, I promise I'm good at this. I know what I'm doing. And the second show was great. And they're like, don't do that again. I'm like I won't I won't do it again but I genuinely freaked out so I remember

Starting point is 02:08:40 very specifically because it was a you know it was a big moment for me I was on the road and I ate shit at the comedy club so like that thing is in my head forever but that book was that was my first step because I was like oh my gosh if this is a true story I mean if this is this book is accurate like someone killed the president and they got away with it and it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald even if he was involved it was and it was there was a conspiracy to to distort the evidence of the assassination in terms of like the difference in the discrepancies between the report at Dallas when they first received his body to Bethesda Maryland. There's a bullet hole

Starting point is 02:09:17 wound that they describe in the Dallas where they call it a tracheotomy hole in Bethesda Maryland. They're manipulating the narrative to incorporate the single gunman theory. Yeah. Have you ever had Gerald Posner on? I have not. Okay. I haven't gone really down the JFK rabbit hole, so I don't know that much about it, but I know he wrote the book Case Closed. book sucks. You need to get him together with Oliver Stone and he'll take that book apart. I bring him up just because I follow him on Twitter

Starting point is 02:09:44 X and he was posting recently about the, I think he posted about the tracheotomy thing. And so, but I don't really just the magic bullet theory alone is complete utter nonsense to anybody's ever shot anything with a bullet. When bullets hit bone

Starting point is 02:10:00 and shatter bone, first of all, there's the fact that there was more bullet fragments in Connolly's wrist than were missing from this magic bullet. This magic bullet was only used as a tool because they had to account for a bullet that hit the underpass. So there was a guy standing under the underpass. He got hit with a ricochet. So they're like, well, definitely that bullet hit here. So we have to attribute all these wounds to one bullet. So it had to go through Kennedy, bounce around, come out of him, hit Connolly, go through him, go through his wrist. And then they magically find this bullet in

Starting point is 02:10:36 the gurney when they're bringing in the body, like, or when they're bringing in Connolly to get medical assistance, they supposedly magically find this bullet. This bullet has clearly been shot into water. This bullet is either water or pillows. This bullet has no deformations. It's pristine. It's not missing any fragments. So it doesn't account for the fragments in the wrist. It's a total horseshit idea. And then there's the back to the left when you see there's a pruder film where his head explodes. It's all the people that were talking about the shots coming from the grassy knoll, it's the fact that so many of the witnesses died in mysterious circumstances. They died from car accidents. They died from suicide. They died

Starting point is 02:11:18 from crime. They died from random acts of violence. Like, they did a calculation of what are the odds that all these witnesses would wind up dying the way they did? And it's like some spectacular number. They fucking killed a bunch of people that were there. I'm sure you know this, but Vincent Buliosi wrote, like, I think what might be the longest nonfiction single volume book ever written on the Kennedy assassination, remembering history or something like that. It's like 1,500 pages. This is Boliosi that was involved in the Manson. Yeah, he wrote like a book about the JFK assassination.

Starting point is 02:11:49 And if you read Tom O'Neill's book, it calls him a complete Charlotte to him. Like, he was a crazy person. But, yeah, I mean, if anyone has seen that book in person, it really is like 1,500 pages of, like, the densest, tiniest little print. And it was so long that it came with a CD of the notes that were like a thousand additional pages they couldn't fit in the volume and like a physical CD you had to put in your computer to see the notes that you had. Oh my God. That's so crazy. I think that could be like the longest single volume nonfiction book that I've ever seen. I would love to get Gerald Posner in a room with Oliver Stone because Oliver Stone, even at his advanced age, he's so smart and his recall is

Starting point is 02:12:27 incredible for dates and times and people that were involved. I don't think Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was definitely an intelligence agent. I think Lee Harvey Oswald, the fact that he lived in Russia, the fact that he came back to America, married a Russian woman. He seems to have like just very bizarre access to, I think he was an intelligence agent. I think he probably was involved in the whole thing. But the calmness in which he describes the fact that he's a patsy after he's been arrested for killing the president. Like to me, just that, that guy's involved in some shit. That's not how a normal person reacts when you get accused of killing the president.

Starting point is 02:13:04 If you're innocent, you go, I'm innocent. I don't have anything to do with this. I don't know why they have me. You'd be freaking the fuck out. And he's like, I'm just a patsy. Oh, are you really? Like, I think you're probably an intelligence agent. There's probably something creepy about you.

Starting point is 02:13:19 Well, if anyone could get them to talk, I'm sure it's you. I think there was a lot of people involved in the Kennedy assassination. I think there was multiple shooters and I think it was very coordinated. And it was probably, it probably involved our government. It might have involved the mafia, might have involved other governments. Some people think it had something to do with Israel because Israel, Kennedy did not want to give Israel nuclear weapons. There's a ton of stuff that's attached to that assassination. But this idea of case closed, fuck you.

Starting point is 02:13:50 There's no case closed in this. This is one of the craziest conspiracies of all time because it seems to be that they killed the president and got a with it. That's what it seems to be. And then the Jolly West connection to Jack Ruby. So Jack Ruby goes in and kills Lee Harvey Oswald. Then in jail, Jolly West visits him and he goes completely fucking insane. Losing his mind, thinks he's in hell, this fire, the Jews are all burning. Like he's like going nuts right after the guy was in charge of all these LSD studies visits him. How convenient. One thing, do you, it's been, I don't know, five years or whenever I read Tom Munoz book when it came out the first time. So I don't remember

Starting point is 02:14:30 that well. But one thing, because I have a chapter on Jolly West, and one thing that stuck out to me especially is one of the main crusades he had in his life was against the death penalty. You know, he writes a lot about how it's completely immoral, this thing he doesn't like. So to me, especially there's an earlier case called this Jimmy Shaver case about this guy who abused and killed this little girl that Jolly West was involved into. it seems to me the possibility is also open that Jolly West might also have had an incentive to dose these people with LSD if he did to prevent them from getting the death sentence because if they could, you know, appear insane, maybe they would not get the death penalty instead.

Starting point is 02:15:12 Why was he so obsessed about the death sentence? I don't know. I think he just considered it immoral. And what a fascinating thing that a guy would ruin people's lives would consider just ending them to be immoral. where a lot of those people wind up killing themselves because of his actions. Yeah, and he ended up killing himself too. Well, I mean, it was an assisted suicide with his son. His son later wrote a book about this, but his son basically Jolly West had gotten cancer that had metastasized throughout his entire body, and he was about to die,

Starting point is 02:15:43 and he didn't really want to go through the remaining months or whatever he had left in agony. And so he got his son to stockpile a bunch of pills and feed him to him when he basically became unable to move for himself. And so that happened to Jolly West. Then the son did that to Jolly West's wife, his own mother, later when, I don't know exactly if she had a medical issue or something, but he helped her commit assisted suicide. The son wrote a book about it, and then he later committed suicide as well. Oh, boy. Oh, man. It's just so strange how so much, so many bad things can have come from just a few people.

Starting point is 02:16:21 just a few people and these terrible ideas and this complete lack of oversight that's so much evil including the Manson family because we've talked about it the Tom O'Neill book please folks if you're listening to this read that book

Starting point is 02:16:36 at Desjardin we speak business we speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans we've mastered made to measure growth and expansion advice and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes

Starting point is 02:16:50 Because at Desjardin Business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. It's one of the craziest books of all time by a man completely obsessed with the story that literally chased down nothing but that story for 20 years. And one of the parts of the book that I really enjoyed is the writing style is kind of like a Gonzo, Like, he's part of the story. You know, you're following him on the journey to discover this stuff. For me, that was the exciting part of the ride.

Starting point is 02:17:27 It's like, oh, it's not just telling you the story. It's like, we're figuring out how a historian or a journalist actually works. He's telling you, now I've got this interview, and I'm going to go do this, and I'm going to go find these documents. I didn't write this book in that style because I just wanted to stick to a description of MK Ultra. But there is something tempting about. One of the exciting things about history is doing the history, and no one really sees that process. You know, how I was describing going down the rap. rabbit hole to find the origin of that quote. There are a million stories like that about how it's so

Starting point is 02:17:54 crazy. For example, there was, there was this guy named Venever Bush. He was President Roosevelt's unofficial, official, really, science advisor during World War II. And some people say Vannevar Bush, but it's he connected to the Bushes? No, no, no, no. Different Bushes. But it's Venever Bush. Bush himself says that it rhymes with Beaver, his name, so it's Venever. But he was writing his autobiography. He was in charge of coordinating scientific research during World War II. And when he was writing his autobiography, he did this series of interviews that were like a thousand pages long so that he could kind of talk about his life and he would use chunks of that as part of his autobiography. Well, I wanted to get that because for my first book,

Starting point is 02:18:38 Vaniever Bush plays an important role because he's the guy who gets Stanley level a job in the OSS, and Stanley Levels my main character. So it's like, oh, Vaniever Bush is like one of the main guys who is, you know, playing a role in this story. So I go, there are a couple of different archives that have this 1,000-page interview that Veneverbush did. And every single page is there in one of the versions except two pages that talk about Stanley Lovell and the OSS. And I thought, that's the exact thing I need. Like, how is it out of a thousand pages, the one thing that's missing is the two pages? And so I finally eventually find out that there's another copy of this interview at a different repository, like at Georgetown University or MIT, I forget which one it was.

Starting point is 02:19:21 So I get them to send me a photocopy of every single page, and it turns out that had the two missing pages. So it's like, oh my gosh, now I can actually use that information because, but they didn't have the two pages out of a thousand that I actually needed. They were missing. There were like a thousand stories about these crazy coincidences that happened. One of them, again, from my first book, was about Stanley Lovell. He's this chemist in the OSS, creating all these ingenious like gadgets and whatever. He talks in his memoir about his wartime experience about being on this biological warfare committee where they were discussing the possibility of using anthrax and tularemia and tuberculosis and distributing this across towns and

Starting point is 02:20:02 just discussing what would happen, what would we need to be able to do this, what would have to happen for us to engage in biological warfare. But he talks about this in his memoir. But I had never seen, you know, a copy of that meeting, minutes of that meeting or anything, he said that this group, this biological warfare committee, it was part of the National Academy of Sciences. And I thought, okay, well, that's interesting, but, you know, I can't hardly put it in the book if I don't actually have the minutes in the meeting where they're talking about this, because Stanley Lovell was known to exaggerate, to say the least, some of the stuff that he was up to during the war.

Starting point is 02:20:34 But then I thought to myself, I kind of remember several years earlier when I was writing my dissertation before this book, I had gone to the National Academy of Sciences. because I was working on, you know, some scientists in government, and I ended up taking just a bunch of pictures of a lot of the materials they had in their archives, and I went back through the material that I already had, and it turns out I had taken pictures of the minutes of the very meeting Stanley Lovell was talking about in his memoir. It was already in my possession. I didn't have to go there.

Starting point is 02:21:00 I already had it. It's just a crazy coincidence that I already had the exact thing I needed. Wow. So the process of making history is sometimes even more exciting than the story itself. Well, the process, it seems like it takes a very dedicated person to chase down that process. Like all the things, all the things you're saying about finding those two pages, the quote, like there's so many versions of you wanting to absolutely be sure, which is so critical. And I'm so glad that you did that. I can chase down those things because a lot of lazy people wouldn't have gone that far, right?

Starting point is 02:21:33 Yeah. Especially as no one's watching. Yeah. You know, you have books you could cite. Like, oh, it says, here's the quote. Yeah. But for me, that's the enjoyment of it. You know, I enjoy doing it.

Starting point is 02:21:43 I like going to the archives. I like finding things. I feel like a detective, you know. I'm in the archive and I'm looking at these documents and, oh, I find this guy's name is mentioned here. I know. Okay. So to me, it's exciting.

Starting point is 02:21:52 It's like a treasure hunt. So that's the fun part of it, you know. Do you have a hard time communicating with people that aren't familiar with all this stuff in terms of like this subject gets discussed and someone brings it up and they start asking questions? Do you have a hard time of not looking crazy? Do you know what I mean? Because there's a lot of people that are like very intelligent, very educated people that have not just no information about this or no knowledge of this, but an aversion. Yeah, yeah. Because it's a naturally a thing that you would assume could not have taken place.

Starting point is 02:22:27 But it's not just that. It's like there's an aversion to even rationally discussing it. Like I am not the type of person that's going to sit here and do conspiracies with you. I've had a few conversations like. that with people that do not believe in conspiracies. And they always fall apart under scrutiny. That narrative falls apart. Well, you don't think they exist. Which ones don't you think exists? Well, a conspiracy, I mean, to me, a conspiracy is just a secret plot to do something. There are a lot of secret plots, of course. Yeah. All throughout history. Now, I mean, there are conspiracy theories in the sense that there are stuff that people make up and isn't actually true. But to say conspiracies themselves are necessarily false, well, any secret plot is a conspiracy. Not just that. I think we live in a day and age where there's a lot of fake

Starting point is 02:23:13 conspiracies that are thrown in to muddy the water. Oh yeah. Yeah. In fact, that actually ties in at the end of this book. I talk about a little bit about kind of the what's kind of called censorship through noise, the idea that we can put so much noise out there that no one's really going to know what to trust. And so I give an example of the idea that AIDS was created in a government laboratory like Fort Diedrich. And then in the really 1980s, there was a Soviet kind of propaganda mouthpiece newspaper in India called the Patriot. And this would just publish like KGB propaganda.

Starting point is 02:23:48 Wow. In India. In India, yeah. And one of the stories in that newspaper was basically saying AIDS was created in the government laboratory. But it doesn't just say that. In order to get there, it first said, did you know that the CIA was involved in dosing people with drugs?

Starting point is 02:24:03 Which is completely true. Did you know that the military was involved in spraying certain germs over cities to, you know, determine the distribution of the air currents to see if we were attacked by in biological warfare situation how the air currents would spread these germs? They were just spraying like yeast and stuff over, but, you know, it's bacteria. So did you know that this, did you know that they've performed experiments on these drug addicts and this and that and this? And also, did you know that in Fort Diedrich, they created a biological weapon called AIDS? So it's, you know, it's the lie is made more potent because it's sandwiched in between all these truths. And so this newspaper, the Patriot, published this article basically saying all these true things, and then one thing at the end that they were actually pushing. But if you knew that all these other things were true, you might assume that that final thing is true as well.

Starting point is 02:24:49 And other countries around the world where they had these front newspapers, they would also publish the same kind of story. Did you know? And then AIDS was created in this government laboratory. And then those newspapers would cite the Indian newspaper, the Patriot, as evidence that other independent newspapers had also come to this conclusion. And if many independent sources are coming to this, surely it means that it's got some credibility to it, not knowing that the actual connection, the KGB is just sponsoring all this. Wow. So it's censorship through noise, the idea that there are certain things we don't want people to know or maybe we do not want people to know but not understand or something. And so we're going to flood the zone with all this, you know, crap, basically.

Starting point is 02:25:25 to maybe nobody's going to know what to believe. Maybe it is the case that the CIA created AIDS in Fort Diedrich or whatever it is. So that's one tactic that I talk about at the very end. It's also a great way to minimize the impact of all the things that actually are true on that list because you attach to something that's completely kooky. And if you do that enough times, you can muddy the waters on basically every subject that there is. Yeah, so it can go both ways in the sense that fake stories can de-legitimize true stories, but true stories legitimize fake stories.

Starting point is 02:25:55 Both ways. And then you have the social media impact of bots, which is just really unstudied. We don't really know the numbers. We've talked about this before, but there was a former FBI analyst before the purchase of Twitter he was looking at and he thinks it's 80% bots. He's 80% of the discourse, 80% of the traffic is not human or people that are being paid to do it. It's like some government entity wanting to do this to so confusion? There's a lot of different factors. There's us, there's them, there's. There's everybody. There's NGOs. There's different packs. And they all have, like, you can go online. There's companies that will fund a social campaign for you. So imagine if you wanted to go online and attack people over a certain issue, like, say

Starting point is 02:26:45 if you're trying to get a bill passed and you want to attack people over a certain issue, you can fund a campaign using bots to promote your position. it could give the illusion of some sort of, some agreement online or disagreement online. Or maybe you could take a thing that's a very reasonable position and make it seem completely ridiculous. And it also seem like there's a bunch of support that it's completely ridiculous. Like a lot of people believe. And they start citing things that aren't true and quotes that aren't true.

Starting point is 02:27:15 And you could just completely screw up the idea of what the truth is. Yeah, I know the Russian government had, I think it was called like the Internet Research Agency, Yeah, that's it. Yeah. And there's a book called Active Measures by Thomas Ridd. And he kind of chronicles what they were doing. Basically, young people would be hired to pose as whoever anyone wanted to be posed as. I guess the Russian government to spread certain amounts of disinformation to certain communities. So they would just create fake profiles. And your whole job at work would be to cycle through these different profiles and comment on people's posts and post your own. And then boost the post of your fellow disinformation actors in this IRA. so that their posts would be seen by more people. There's a whole, there's a whole organization or a whole, you know, whatever it is. What was the woman's name that came on to talk about that? René Deresta. That's right.

Starting point is 02:28:10 Yeah, she was saying how, like, she had to study all these memes, and so many of them were really funny. And, like, these people that were in charge of, what they wanted to do was make sure the people online in America were arguing about, everything and the more you could get people at each other's throats the more you could destroy their democracy this is part of the idea of it just this just

Starting point is 02:28:33 to have another element that people have to deal with and that they were organizing Texas separatist meetings directly across the street from these Muslim meetings they were doing it on purpose they were trying to get people to argue with each other trying to get people to be in conflict with each other yeah and I mean one of the things now with social media but just in a globalized world, any amount of conflict is kind of available for anyone to see. So, you know, the worst thing in the world that happens today, you're probably going to learn about it, you're going to know about it, which that can't be good for your mental health to constantly be

Starting point is 02:29:08 bombarded by this negative stuff. It's not that in the past all this negative stuff didn't happen. It's just that in the past, you were probably more focused on your community because it's not like you've got constant access to what's going on in Myanmar at the second or whatever it is. So the fact that you're constantly able to see the worst. thing happening in the world, that cannot be good just for your mentality. It's definitely not good, but it's also a social experiment because we didn't know what would happen when you get all this bad news from all over the world. It's never happened before.

Starting point is 02:29:37 So there's never been a device that you carry in your pocket that gives you the worst news of the day all day long. It's totally new. So anybody growing up today is bombarded, which is why it has to account for some of the anxiety that kids face today because you see heightened levels of anxiety. heightened levels of fear about climate or anything that they tell you that's the thing that you really need to freak out about. It's like you're being inundated and you don't have a chance to just enjoy the moment that you're in because everything is like this total existential crisis that's going to destroy humanity.

Starting point is 02:30:11 If you don't act now, oh God, there's a genocide going on it. It's like no matter what it is. It's like you're being bombarded by everything. The economy is a crash. No kings. Ah, ice is coming. Jesus. Gun control. Do you have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-internet days? Because I don't remember it that well. No. No, fuck those times. That was stupid. I think with the internet with all this flaws is way better. It's way better. It's way better than the government being in control of the narrative. And now we know intelligence agencies absolutely in control what's distributed in mainstream news. The idea that the mainstream news back then was independent and free and they were.

Starting point is 02:30:53 the press like no no the government agencies and intelligence agencies have been involved in propaganda from the jump and it's way better now you have more access to information it's way more complicated it's way more complicated to live your life it's way more psychologically complicated to be in the moment and to be present and to just enjoy your life it's harder it's much harder because you are constantly being informed and there's the addiction aspect of it you know the addiction to being informed, the addiction to seeing what people are saying and seeing the, oh, what did this guy do? He stole all this money. Like, we were in the green room last night. We were reading the story about this congressperson who stole money and how they did it. And then they bought a giant giant diamond ring. So they wear this giant three-carat diamond ring on a hundred thousand dollar a year salary. Like, what are you doing? You fucking crazy person. But it's like that, that's what you're, you that's where you're taking in all day, instead of your friends, instead of your life and just having an experience in your neighborhood. No, you're just, you're constantly looking at all the

Starting point is 02:32:05 problems that are happening all over the world all the time. Yeah. And you don't get a break. But it's better than being ignorant. It's just like you have to, you have to find a way to weather whatever that psychological storm is and seek shelter. And don't always just stay out there in it. and just get bombarded by psychological hail, because that's kind of what it is. You've got to have a strong roof and stay inside sometimes. Yeah. This is a weird transition, but you said psychological hail. It made me think of this project during World War II, the OSS did call the bat bomb.

Starting point is 02:32:43 Are you familiar with that? It just made me think of these things kind of raining down. But I write about this in the Dirty Tricks Department, but during World War II, there was this concept of how can we better target cities or buildings with our incendiary explosives? We can drop bombs, but, I mean, those aren't targeted. They're just going to fall where they fall. And if the wind's going the wrong way, they're not even going to hit the target that we want them to. So this guy named Little Adams, he was working with the OSS, he had the idea. He had just gone to Carlsbad Caverns. What if we get bats and we attach napalm to them?

Starting point is 02:33:17 And then we release these over Japanese cities, the bats are going to roost into the buildings. in these cities, and then we can have the napalm time delayed so that it'll explode after a certain amount of time that we release them, and it'll set fires to all these buildings. So we have like targeted incendiaries instead of just random bombs falling. So it sounds like kind of a crazy idea, but he happened to be friends with Eleanor Roosevelt because he had flown planes before and he had given her a ride in his plane, and they kind of knew each other. So he sent this kind of report on the bat bomb to Eleanor Roosevelt. She gave it to her husband, President Roosevelt, who gave it to William Donovan, the head of the OSS,

Starting point is 02:33:53 and with a note attached to the thing that he gave to Donovan, it said, this man is not a nut, you know, take this seriously. So Donovan, of course, he gives this to the research and development branch, Stanley Lovell that I write about in my first book, and it becomes this bat bomb project that now his level feels obligated to do because the president's saying we need to research this. So they end up going to Carlsbad Caverns and to some caverns here in Texas. And they scoop up a bunch of bats, and they do a few tests with them.

Starting point is 02:34:20 them. They actually get a guy named Lewis Fisor who invented Napalm to create tiny little incendiaries that you could strap to bats. This is a little bit of a digression, but Pfizer had been at Harvard. He was a chemist there. And when he was inventing Napalm, it was like a jellied gasoline, he would do the tests on the soccer field at Harvard, just like in the middle of the campus. That's where Napalm was invented, just like in the middle of Harvard's campus, these bombs would be exploding. And people would get mad at him. People would get been mad, not because he was detonating these bombs, but because he was hogging the soccer fields and the drill sergeant needed it for practice. And so there's like these disputes back

Starting point is 02:34:56 and forth. Oh my God. But so he was hired by the OSS to create these tiny little incendiaries to strap to these bats. So the OS did, S did a few experiments with this. Before the incendiaries were strapped, they put like fake incendiaries on them. The idea was to cool down these bats. We're going to fly them in a plane over the desert, like out in Utah or somewhere. And we're going to drop these bats and see if they actually kind of disperse. It turns out that they were using Mexican freetailed bats, which I don't think actually hibernate, but they travel south for the winter. And so they cooled down these bats in this like artificial refrigerator, but apparently

Starting point is 02:35:33 they had cooled them down too much. So when they dropped them from the plane, they just like fell straight down to the ground and never woke up. And so they just flattered across the desert. So that was one of the tests. Another of the tests, they wanted to do a live experiment where they had to have a an actual bat and with an actual napalm bomb attached to it to see if it could, like, fly off or to see if it would actually like carry this weight, but they had it in like somewhat

Starting point is 02:35:55 of a controlled environment. They cooled this bat down, put it in artificial hibernation, and then they were taking pictures of it, you know, to see how everything operated. But then the bat started kind of waking up and it flew off before they could grab it, and it actually flew into a control tower, and it burst into flame, and the whole thing caught on fire and burned down. So it turned out this thing actually worked. But again, it was never deployed against Japan.

Starting point is 02:36:18 This is right at the end of World War II. And, you know, they're already, the Manhattan Project was kind of successful at that point. So there was no need for the bat bomb. But if people are interested in that kind of story and how crazy that can get, that's in these books, too. Do you know about the proposal for the gay bomb? That sounds familiar about, like, releasing some kind of chemical that distracts people. They'll be so infatuated with each other, these soldiers that we can go. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:36:43 Not just that, but then somehow or another, it would demoralize them. and make them easy to conquer. Huh. Interesting. Which didn't make any sense, especially historically when you consider the Spartans. You know, they were all gay.

Starting point is 02:36:53 They were the craziest force ever. Like, that's not going to stop people. Well, you know, that's actually one of the big inspirations for M.K. Ultra, not the gay bomb, but the idea that we could use chemicals to defeat an enemy army.

Starting point is 02:37:04 So Sidney Gottlie, before he was really running MK Ultra experiments, he had attended a few conferences where some people would talk, this guy named Luther Green, who was part of the army. and Luther Green was in charge of developing

Starting point is 02:37:18 and experimenting with nerve agents that could incapacitate these are like some of the most potent agents that have ever been created a fraction of an ounce applied to your skin can be lethal so he wanted to find a substance Green did that could mimic the effects

Starting point is 02:37:31 of a nerve agent like incapacitate someone without actually killing them his idea was that if we could get this substance and we can drop it over enemy territory it could incapacitate these soldiers just through chemical warfare but we wouldn't actually have to kill them They'll be incapacitated for a certain amount of time.

Starting point is 02:37:48 And then we could send the Marines in and they could gather up all these people. And we can conquer this territory. We can defeat this enemy army without actually having to kill anyone or for any of our people to be killed. So Stanley Lovell was really interested in this concept. War without death was what they were talking about. War without death, we should use chemical weapons that just incapacitate people. So one of the things that got, I should say, Sidney Gottlieb, interested in investigating LSD was the fact that maybe this could be an incapacitant that we could use to basically eliminate an enemy army for

Starting point is 02:38:20 the time being, and then we could go and conquer them without actually having to kill them ourselves. So it was trying to use it almost as a more ethical form of warfare where, you know, instead of killing someone, you just incapacitate them. Wow. I think we covered it all. Listen, your book's amazing. I'm really excited that you put in the time to write it, and I can't wait to see it.

Starting point is 02:38:45 what David Chase does with it and when it happens let's do this again I'd love to I feel like we could talk about this stuff for hours and hours and hours there's a lot of stuff to go into too is there an audio book of this

Starting point is 02:38:57 there is an audio book yeah so did you read it I didn't read it they got a professional for that oh man you would kill it you have a great voice thank you thank you yeah but the nice thing is it's the same narrator who did both my first and second book so there's some kind of continuity

Starting point is 02:39:11 between that so that's nice so you're happy with it yeah yeah it turned out really he did a really good job And the other book is The Dirty Tricks Department, Stanley Lovel, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Ward Fair. I appreciate it. Thank you. It was awesome. I really appreciate it.

Starting point is 02:39:29 It was really fun. Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - #2419 - John Lisle

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