Timesuck with Dan Cummins - BONUS 8 - Project MK Ultra: The CIA experiments with LSD

Episode Date: August 25, 2017

In the 1950s, while many Americans were busy watching I Love Lucy or waiting for the new Elvis Presley album, the members of the CIA's Project MK Ultra were busy dropping acid, taking shrooms, and con...ducting some of our nation's most outlandish experiments in their quest to beat Russia in a race to see who could develop a truth serum, induce selective amnesia, and master mind control (spoiler alert - neither nation figured it out - thank God). Hear the true, declassified tales of CIA Cold War mayhem in the most hallucinogenic suck yet. Timesuck is brought to you today by the Small Town Murder podcast. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and anywhere podcasts are found! The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No shame in calling them. Ever.  Click HERE to watch me tell my LSD experience on Comedy Central's This Is Not Happening Please rate and subscribe and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG, @timesuckpodcast on Twitter, and www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Project MK Ultra, the CIA's 1950s and 1960s mine control program. Did the CIA really give college volunteers prisoners psychiatric patients random people on the street and each other high doses of LSD? Yeah. Did they introduce LSD in magic mushrooms? Into American culture? Yeah, they did. Did they research hypnosis in an attempt to create an assassin who would kill when given a subliminal command?
Starting point is 00:00:25 Mm-hmm. Do they fund research and remote viewing, try to train people into spying on their enemies with their minds? Yeah, yeah, they really did. I know it sounds crazy. It really does. So why did they do it? Find out.
Starting point is 00:00:37 In this conspiracy theorist episode of TimeSuck, based on a conspiracy that actually is true, with the declassified government documents to prove it. It's time for a special bonus Friday edition, Mind Control edition of Time Suck. Hey, Time Suckers, welcome to a special 800 iTunes review bonus edition of the Suck. Today's bonus edition is brought to us, brought to you by the fantastically dark and entertaining podcast, Small Town Murder. Yes, the same duo that brings you crime in sports also produces Small Town Murder every Thursday. True crime enthusiasts, comedians, James Petigallo, Jimmy Wiseman, cover small
Starting point is 00:01:26 towns with very creepy and disturbing paths. They preface the story with the brief history of a small town somewhere in the world. How was established local economy, breakdown of citizen makeup, income, and strange local fun facts. My favorite is when they do Southern small towns. They're especially weird to me. And there seems to be a lot of crime in those towns. They then introduce a story about a murder that shattered the lives and changed the town
Starting point is 00:01:47 forever. Summer dark, uncomfortable. And that's why James and Jimmy approached with some humor to make it not just, you know, dark and horrifying, but also fun and a little more digestible. James traps on a cave, speed-lunking helmet as he mines for gold, common police reports, news files, public records, to get the full story, but the goal is not to denigrate victims of their families, jokes come from terrible small town traditions, quotes, bumbling police forces are just brazen police interrogation tactics.
Starting point is 00:02:13 The stories are riveting. The facts are all true, but they won't bogg it down with too much. It doesn't pertain to the story. They will shut up and give you murder, small town murder. That's that's it. I love these guys. Subscribe to small town murder on iTunes, a stitcher Spotify, everywhere podcasts are available. And again, this is a great podcast. And if you like the crime and sports you'll love this. And if you don't listen to crime and sports,
Starting point is 00:02:32 like if you're really, really not in your sports, you just don't want to hear anything about it. Then this is the one to start with. It's just a great, I like these guys because they approach it the same way I do. They just, you know, heavy on the research and, you know, add humor to make the story move. And so you learn a lot in a very entertaining way. And I've noticed it's hard to find podcasts to do that, in my opinion. There's a lot of info heavy podcasts out there, very light on humor, they bore this shit out of me.
Starting point is 00:02:56 And then there's a lot of, you know, one that are very funny, I think, but they don't give me the facts that I want. And I feel like these guys just, you know, walked the line very well. So check it out, small time order. And yeah, 800 reviews, man. 800 reviews and counting.
Starting point is 00:03:08 Thank you guys so much. I know some of you guys wonder, like why do the reviews need to be on iTunes? Well, it's just because over 80% of podcasts listeners according to studies use iTunes, so listen to their podcasts. So it's just the best way to spread the sucked new listeners. Helping get some new sponsors,
Starting point is 00:03:21 so I can keep this podcast going, and have the podcast, you you know just stand out on iTunes Still can't believe we ended up the number 10 a while back. That was fantastic Because I really I think it's kind of like Yelp, you know like when I'm in a new town look over a place to eat And I don't have a local I trust to tell me where to go or you know Especially something like walking distance the hotel I have to be at I just you know I go to Yelp and generally when a restaurant Has a lot of positive Yelp reviews it ends up providing a pretty solid meal. No different with podcasts. When someone's looking for a new podcast, they tend to look at the reviews,
Starting point is 00:03:48 and when there's a lot of good reviews, they give it a shot. And so, when you spread this up to friends and coworkers or post about it on social media and you're rated on iTunes, it also moves the podcast up the charts where it's easier to be noticed. And the higher, it doesn't have a chart,
Starting point is 00:04:00 the more likely it is for just a new listener to find it. And with more listeners, the show has a chance to make, you know, a little more money. I can more realistically entertain the possibility of having time-saving my main job right along there with stand-up instead of a side project. So it's moving that direction. God, I'm really hopeful. I love doing this.
Starting point is 00:04:16 I really, really love doing this. So thank you, thank you, thank you. If you've shared Time-Zuck or if you've reviewed it, it helps so much. And if you haven't, please, please, please, take a few seconds to do so. It really helps more than I think most people understand. My favorite recent review, by the way, just came from an iTunes user. It wasn't me with the subject line of,
Starting point is 00:04:33 cannot recommend this podcast enough, saying, what's up, mother suckers? This podcast is amazing, forgetting through the daily cubicle grind, the suck Lord Master comments twist, and weaves of fantastic presentation topics that are often overlooked while showing the Northern Idaho handle of the English language. This podcast is not disappointing. comments, twists and weaves of fantastic presentation topics that are often overlooked while showing the northern
Starting point is 00:04:45 Idaho handle of the English language. This podcast is not disappointing. I love northern Idaho handle of the English language. Thank God you guys care more about content than about my hillbilly backwards pronunciation abilities because I'm not going to be winning any excellence in broadcast presentation awards anytime ever. I'll never escape my North Idaho upbringing. I swear, I swear, I swear, I say, you know, it's like an accent. A source, and when you get like a hardwired in your brain,
Starting point is 00:05:14 yeah, you can like look at a word and you know that you're not seeing it right, but it's like your mouth doesn't wanna say it the way that you know somebody on NBC Nightly News would say it. So, I appreciate you guys putting up with that and enjoying it. Also, thanks for getting those new little time sucks tickers, continuing to purchase the Don't Wake the Bear album,
Starting point is 00:05:30 Daddy Bear and the Three Rabbits meet the real world very adult kids book at the time sucks store and all those unicorn scrotum, chinchilla labia, koala aina's first, second, third generation T's at the time suckpodcast.com store. And you know, a lot of you guys have been using that Amazon button
Starting point is 00:05:44 to do your shopping, helping out the suck and directly helping the suck with somepodcast.com store. And you know, and a lot of you guys have been using that Amazon button to do your shopping, helping out the suck, and directly helping the suck with some PayPal donations out here and there. I really appreciate it so much, you guys, for real. And now, as of today, fourth generation T is in the store. It's a charcoal, bell of tri blend with the word time suck, and the new logos, new font written across the chest, from Royal Blue, tight little white line underneath,
Starting point is 00:06:04 all classy looking, leading to a sneaky little website reference, and then a little monochromatic white face from the logo on the left sleeve. Way more subdued than the previous designs, because I recognize that while I may love a giant robotic dog with buck and Michael motherfucking McDonald riding him, or some crazy, you know, space lizard shit, portrayed across my chest,
Starting point is 00:06:22 some smooth time suckers want something a little more subtle, a little more classy, you know? And this is it, this is a slick looking shirt, and it's just as soft as previous generations. For this design, I decided to go with 311% pure, domestic bald eagle feathers. Specifically, I only used the little tiny white feathers around the bald eagle's head,
Starting point is 00:06:42 because those are the softest feathers, and the most premium. So good news, so soft and patriotic, it's gonna bring a tear to your eye every time you wear it. And it's gonna make you salute a flag that you don't even see. Bad news, it takes about 25 bald eagles to make a single shirt, you know, 25 to 30.
Starting point is 00:06:59 But so, you know, whatever, no increase in costs, you know, to you though, because I do illegally poach every single bald eagle used for the shirts. That's to keep me, keep me up late at nights. I've been shooting so many fucking eagles, and I have to really be careful not to shoot them in the head, cause then, you know, total loss. And just like with the other shirts,
Starting point is 00:07:15 freesticker pack with each purchase. So fuck yeah, hail minimum rot. Check them out at timesackpodcast.com at the shop. And come see me live this weekend at the Irvine Improv, use the code DINS, D-A-N, D-N's Dan. I don't know where they come up with that, but that's what it is to get five to get five dollar tickets. It's night 730 show. That's Friday and then tomorrow's Saturday shows.
Starting point is 00:07:36 Also be the Hollywood improv in the lab Thursday, October 5th, the first ever live recording of the time stock podcasts, part of the LA podcast festival. Show starts at 730, tickets 15 bucks, support that if you can, take a link in the episode description. Also, we do in stand up that weekend at the improv Saturday night, October 7th in the main room, 8 p.m. make a weekend out of it,
Starting point is 00:07:54 more dates, no maha, Portland, Columbus, coming up. And you can link to those at timesuckpodcast.com and while you're doing so, follow the suck on social media. And please, as Nimrod at time suck podcast on all those fucking things. And finally, thanks to Chad, Jake at J. Astronaut on Twitter, Cree Lucas, Jeff Patik, Ben Sastak, and Austin Jones for requesting this episode. And to everyone who voted for MK Ultra, to be the next bonus suck on Instagram. Now, let's suck the shit out of CIA and stay tuned after we're done for those
Starting point is 00:08:23 time sucker updates that are now at the end of the episode. Alright, the main guide I used to research this episode, because I wanted to be extra selective with this one, because there's a lot of weird shit. If you googled MK Ultra, I'd say about 90% of it is just fucking complete bananas. The best book I found, and I decided to go, going with a book as the primary source more and more lately. I really like it. I found the search for the Manchurian candidate published by former State Department officer John Marx in 1979 using the Freedom of Information Act. John was able to access 16,000 pages of CIA documents that avoided the paper shredder for reasons lost to history. Two Senate committees looked into Project Ultra and its CIA project predecessors and March's track done. Everyone basically related to the
Starting point is 00:09:08 documents he could find. You know, some people is impossible because the names are all scratched out, but a lot of interviews. And did all that in the late 1970s when it was a little fresher in people's minds. The book has over 15 pages of footnotes, one the best book of the year award for investigative journalism. The New York magazine called it the CIA Expose to end all CIA exposés. And I only add all this to point out that, you know, I just want to make sure I, you know, that with this kind of delicate topic, I'm not basing my research on, you know,
Starting point is 00:09:35 some articles in the weekly world news. I'm not reading about MK Ultra next to an article on fucking Batboy was just found again, or about how an alien Bible has been found and it turns out that UFOs worship Oprah Winfrey. Those are real headlines, by the way. Every time I look up, info from the book, it was corroborated by actual unsealed government files or other academic sources, so I feel real good about it.
Starting point is 00:09:55 There was nothing that just didn't line up with other stuff I found on the web. So project MK Ultra and its precursors, project Arda Choke and Project Bluebird are very real. I know this is kind of a conspiracy theory type episode, but there's no doubt about this. There are the documents. These are real things. The CIA truly did spend a large amount of tax dollars on trying to figure out how to control people's minds, how to wipe people's memories, you know, and similarly other insane sounding quests, and they crossed a lot of ethical and legal boundaries
Starting point is 00:10:26 while doing so. And whenever I look into a conspiracy theory, I also look into the, I look into the why now. I try and look into that first. You know, it's gotta pass that test before I look any further. Like if there's no motive, it's like the flatter thing. It's like the flatter thing I've jumped about so many times
Starting point is 00:10:39 with the NASA guards guarding the ice wall to keep the fucking NASA shenanigans alive, right? It's all a big conspiracy and it's all money funneled to the Illuminati even though it would cost way more to guard the wall. It would be much cheaper for them just to let the ruse die and stop guarding the wall. Like that, there's no mode of there. It doesn't make any sense because there's not enough money in it. Like NASA doesn't receive enough money
Starting point is 00:11:07 to compensate for having to guard the perimeter of the earth to keep people finding out that NASA is a lie. Like it's such nonsense. Or like the lizard illuminates. Like get the fuck out of here. It's just like there's what? The lizard's doing this why? And we just never see what?
Starting point is 00:11:23 It's just nonsense. This one makes sense. There was a good motive. And here's the very strong motive to fund and carry out MK Ultra. It's the Cold War. The CIA itself was founded, as you learned in the JFK episode,
Starting point is 00:11:35 September 18th, 1947. The United States had just finished up with World War II, two years earlier. And President Truman, who'd authorized the use of atomic bombs and here is Shima Nagasaki, he'd still be in office for many years. Cold War was just getting, you know, starting to ramp up. Everything I read about, you know, that happened during this era, paints a picture of US obsession with communism.
Starting point is 00:11:56 And that's where, you know, ultra, MK-Ultra came out of this, you know, period in history. The Russians and Americans had worked together to defeat Hitler, but they had very different ideas of how things should look in the post-World War II world. You know, Russia and the US were not good buds before World War II because of their ideologies being so opposed with communism and democracy. But then they had to join forces to get Hitler, fucking out of power. And while doing so Stalin and his army had pushed West into Germany from the east and when the war was over, he was kind of already in most of Eastern Europe. He's already occupying it.
Starting point is 00:12:32 And the Soviets had lost roughly 20 million people in the war, military and civilian losses combined. And they wanted to secure their borders. And doing that meant occupying, continuing to occupy most of Eastern Europe. Just like America has bases around the world to kind of guard our interests, they wanna do the same goddamn thing.
Starting point is 00:12:49 But that also, when you do that, it also means spreading your ideology. And so it's one of the communist world that they were the biggest piece of because that would mean a safer world for them, one where they would have more power and control. They were just as ambitious as we were and are. However, a communist world
Starting point is 00:13:05 that, you know, led by Russia poses a huge threat, obviously, to the US and their allies, such as Britain. And it was the best interest of the US to have a democratic world where they were essentially, you know, they were the biggest bosses in. And so the two countries, you know, at odds, ideologically, with each other, the two biggest powers in the world, head to head, that's how the Cold War, Cold War gets going. And then when China, the world's most populated nation, also falls under communist control in 1949, the US gets real fucking antsy. It's starting to really, really worry
Starting point is 00:13:33 that communism could spread to the rest of Asia. We know that it also made it to Vietnam and Korea and other places. And then if it's gonna spread into more of Europe, and then it's there's making little inroads in South America, and Cuba and those kind of places, they're just worried that eventually, Communists are gonna be knocking in our door
Starting point is 00:13:54 and are gonna be pushing their way into the United States. Now, which foreign government is better for the common person, capitalism, the capitalism of the US, or the communism of China and Soviet Russia? There is no objective answer to that. It's subjective, but in general, most people, including myself, Michael Motherfuck, MacDonald, you know, Bojangles Nimrod, I think that, you know, democratic capitalism is much better
Starting point is 00:14:15 than autocratic communism. And for the purpose of today's episode, just know that the overwhelming majority of American people in the 50s were terrified about communism. They're terrified of Russia. They're worried about the spread of what is viewed as a tyrannical and oppressive system government, full of citizen starving, being tortured, killed by government officials. No hope of ever being able to rise above their lowly economic station, you know, that they may have been born into. There's no, you know, in that system, no hope of having that American dream of a houseboat, vacations, college for the kids, comfy retirement. You know, and
Starting point is 00:14:44 included in these people, afraid of communism, are government officials themselves. And most of their fear was very real. We'll look at communist Russia and communist China down the road and some other time sucks for sure. And if you listen to the North Korea Times at a capacity, you're already familiar with how insanely oppressive and terrifying
Starting point is 00:14:58 these regimes can be. So this fear is also exaggerated during the World War II by the United States government's first major well-coordinated and funded venture into the intelligence game. You know, the espionage and propaganda game, the Office of Strategic Services to OSS, which was founded in 1942. And for the duration of World War II, the OSS conducted multiple activities and missions collected intelligence by spine, performed acts of sabotage, espionage, wage propaganda
Starting point is 00:15:25 war, domestically and abroad organized and coordinated anti-nazi resistance groups in Europe, provided military training for anti-Japanese guerrilla groups in Asia, created various spy gadgets and espionage weapons, and during World War II, the OSS is pumping out a lot of state-funded propaganda about the communists as well. In the late 40s and 50s, government loyalty boards actually investigated millions of federal employees asking what books and magazines they read. Not a million, what I say, thousands, what's a million, well, you know, the investigation gave thousands and thousands of people, I took a little farther for a second.
Starting point is 00:15:58 You know, but they were looking to like what unions and civic organizations they belong to, whether they went to a church or not, you know, hundreds of screenwriters, actors, this is like the whole rampant out to McCarthyism, you know, directors are blacklisted because of their alleged political beliefs, teachers, steelworkers, sailors, lawyer, social workers, lost their jobs for similar reasons. More than 39 states required teachers and other public employees
Starting point is 00:16:17 to take loyalty oaths. Meanwhile, some library books were being pulled. They were considered too leftist for the shelves. You know, banned volumes, included stuff like Robin Hood, Henry David Throes, Civil Disobedience, John Steinbeck's The Crapes of Wrath. President Truman in March 1947 issued an executive order creating a federal loyalty security program, a greatly enlarged version of a program originally instituted in 1939. The program gave loyalty review boards the power to fire federal employees when reasonable
Starting point is 00:16:43 grounds existed for belief that they were disloyal. Evidence of disloyalty included not only treasonous activities but sympathetic association, with a long list of organizations deemed by the Attorney General to be communist, fascist, or totalitarian. These organizations ranged from Abraham Lincoln Brigade to the National Negro Congress, and practiced people could lose their jobs for being on the wrong mailing list, owning the wrong book, owning the wrong record,
Starting point is 00:17:08 listening to the wrong music, associating with relatives or friends who are politically suspect, the accused almost never learned the source, the allegations against them, and the criteria for dismissal were expanded in 1951 and again in 1953. Tens of thousands of federal employees,
Starting point is 00:17:19 including disproportionate numbers of civil rights activists and homosexuals, were fully investigated under the loyalty security program and some 2700 lost their jobs between 1947 and 1956. And people fired for maybe having socialist leaning views. This sounds a lot like the North Korean shit we just learned about a while back, you know? Being fucking monitored by the government, you know,
Starting point is 00:17:40 for what your loyalty lies. And then obviously, you know, these people weren't sent to a labor camp like they were in North Korea, but they were fucking fired. And this is the atmosphere that CIA is born into. This is how worked up the country is about the Cold War and about communism. It's fucking bananas, right? So it's so scary to me always, when under the notion of fighting for freedom, freedom ends
Starting point is 00:18:00 up getting taken away. You know, like if America truly is a free country, you know, what's it is, you know, you should be allowed to openly be communist in America. You know, this kind of attitude in the early Cold War years reminds me of a few years after those, first few years after 9-11. When if you weren't in favor of just carpet bombing the fuck out of the Middle East,
Starting point is 00:18:18 in some misguided notion of fighting terrorism, you were viewed by many Americans as being un-American. Like every motherfucker in the most totalitarian of regimes many Americans as being un-American. Every motherfucker in the most totalitarian of regimes is allowed to agree with the government. That's not being free. A green with the government, not an indication of freedom, going along with the majority, not an indication of freedom. Freedom is exercised through dissent.
Starting point is 00:18:39 The question is to be patriotic. That's to be a fighter for freedom. To blindly, fiercely, unquestioningly follow your government wherever they lead you is not patriotic. That's to be, you know, a fighter for freedom. To blindly, fiercely, unquestioningly, follow your government wherever they lead you is not patriotic, actually. It's nationalistic. And while nationalism can be great during the time of war, it's also a good way to become less free overall.
Starting point is 00:18:54 Just the fucking irony of it all, you know? Just that we can't let the commies win. We won't be free anymore, okay? Don't you get it? God damn leftist sympathizer. Hey, what is that? What is that? What is that over there by the record player? Is that belly holidays, love for sale?
Starting point is 00:19:08 What the fuck do you think you're doing listening to that trash? This is America. You can't listen to that liberal smut in the land of the free. I heard you watch the streetcar name desire. Did you watch it? Hold on a hand with fucking Joseph Stalin?
Starting point is 00:19:21 You pinko fuck? What do you think? What do you think you can just have whatever ideas you want in your head? You think you're in Russia? We get out of here, this is America. You're fired, good luck finding another job. Carthias, man, that's another thing that needs to get sucked someday.
Starting point is 00:19:36 Okay, so then after the war ends, thanks to Truman's National Security Act of 1947, the United States now has a national peace time federally funded full time intelligence agency, the CIA, now has a national peace time, federally funded full time intelligence agency, the CIA, for the first time in our history. We had intelligence, you know, kind of things going on during times of war, but never during times of peace. And many of the OSSS's leaders and employees now have a new agency to work for and new work
Starting point is 00:20:01 to do. And most of that work centers on stopping the spread of communism. You know, and the CIA shortly after World War II, there is this idea that existed during the OSS, during the war. This kind of notion that no idea is a bad idea. This is this really experimental. We're going to try everything to get ahead of the Soviets' kind of philosophy. For example, the OSS had looked into hypnosis as a way to get a hypnotized German target close to Hitler and then turn him into a killing machine with some kind of code word, you know, have him assassinate the furor. They did all kinds of OSS scientists had also developed a synthetic compound that looked and smelled like diarrhea and snuck it into Japanese occupied Chinese cities and distributed to Chinese children and little tubes during the war. Yeah, this is what they're working on. This is the kind of experimental atmosphere
Starting point is 00:20:45 they're existing in. Yeah, cause you know, shitty ones pants, I guess was apparently especially shameful for Japanese soldiers. And Chinese kids were encouraged to sneak up on Japanese soldiers on patrol and shoot a tube of this poop juice onto the back of their uniform. The product was called, who, me?
Starting point is 00:21:00 I'm not making this up. This was designed by the OSS. It was designed to psychologically torment the Japanese and bearish them and lower their soldiers morale. I'm totally serious. It's gonna seem like I'm fucking with you constantly in this episode and most of the time I'm not. I love it, man.
Starting point is 00:21:15 I love that this was an idea that had to be pitched and approved by the government some kind of meeting. Like at one point, some high ranking officer was listening to an OSS official explain the who, me, project to him. Some journalists like, so just to make sure I understand what you're saying, you've developed fake shit. Well, yes, that's a crude simplistic way of describing it, but yes, we developed a fake synthetic fecal matter, diarrhea
Starting point is 00:21:46 to be precise. Fake diarrhea shit. And we're supposed to dispense this to the Chinese, some kind of poop tube. And then the kids are going to shoot this fake poop and some Japanese butts. And what exactly director is this supposed to accomplish? Well, they will look like they've truly defecated sir. They'll look like they shit their pants. Yeah. And then what? And then what they just give up because they
Starting point is 00:22:16 put themselves wars over? No, no, no general, but we think if they get laughed at and pointed at enough for people thinking that they have defecated themselves, they will not continue to fight as hard. Uh huh. All right, director, part of me wants to grab you, drag you out of my office and throw you off the goddamn roof with my bare hands for wasting my time with this cockamani bullshit.
Starting point is 00:22:42 But the other part of me thinks this is fucking hilarious. Oh man, worst case scenario is gonna give our boys something in the field that's fun to talk about. And that, my friend, is good for morale. Okay, go ahead, go ahead. Green light on who, me? Unbelievable. OSS also made some pretty cool secret weapons.
Starting point is 00:23:01 One was an explosive powder called anjamima because it looked like anjamima pancake batter. And it was batter you could actually cook with. Dr. George Kisztek-Hioski, a Harvard chemist with an extremely difficult, long, last name to pronounce. He invented it. And when he presented it to military officers during the war,
Starting point is 00:23:17 he actually made cookies out of it, ate them in front of the officers to show how secretive this powder was. How insane is that, man? Attach a powerful detonator to anjamima and it had the power of dynamite. It was used at least once during the war, or World War II to successfully blow up a bridge in China. That is badass and terrifying, right? An edible, explosive compound. And like I said after the war, the OSS gives birth to the CIA and the experiments continue. So I'm just trying
Starting point is 00:23:42 to give some context for where the weird shit coming up came from. And in 1949, mind control becomes a prime concern for the Cold War of Cessed CIA researchers. Thanks to something that happened in Hungary. In 1949, the CIA becomes convinced that the Soviets are making great leaps in their experiments to master mind control. During the, they could become convinced
Starting point is 00:24:03 when they witnessed the Hungarian trial of Cardinal Joseph, my nizenti in 1949 during World War II, Joseph was in prison by the pronazi arrow cross party. After the war, he opposed communism and communist persecution in this country. As a result, he was tortured and given a life sentence in 1949, kind of a show trial, shortly after the Soviets made hungry a satellite nation. During the trial, he just had a glazed look in his eye and he confessed to numerous crimes of treason, investigations would soon reveal he didn't commit the crimes he was accused of, couldn't have committed a lot of them. The CIA became convinced that the Russians had used some sort of hypnosis on him. Remember, there are already experiment with that with OSS, they're already thinking that you can hypnotize somebody to do something like this.
Starting point is 00:24:46 Because yeah, and so the big kind of convinced that he was not acting of his own free will and that he was being basically mind-controlled. And this fast nation with mind-controlled possibility that it actually was possible starts to grow within the CIA and a type of secret arms race begins. Just like the V of the Manhattan Project, the US was in a race to develop bigger and better nuclear weapons at a faster rate than the Soviets. And just like how the space race would soon take off later in the 1950s with a race to see who could be first to land on the moon, there was also a secret race to see who could control
Starting point is 00:25:14 the subject's mind the fastest, who could create the ultimate spy the quickest. Who could have their mind controlled to a degree to make it impossible for them to give up classified information while being interrogated. A spy who couldn't be flipped by the enemy, turned into a double agent, controlled an entire army's minds, and you could create a troop of super soldiers whose morale would never falter,
Starting point is 00:25:34 whose loyalty would never be tested. The practical applications were almost limitless, and if you think about it in a dark way, fucking terrifying. Master, mind control, and you could control the president to do your bidding, completely take over a nation. You know, when you really, really think about it, I mean, it could lead to a lot of scary places, you know. And even if the CIA never had the intention, you know, to do that, to actually just, you know, rule the world with it,
Starting point is 00:25:56 we'll never know because they destroyed most of those ultra-document. But it's easy to understand their motivation to accomplish it before the Russians did, you know. It's, again, it's very comfortable to the nuclear arms race. You know, the best thing for the planet is not to have nukes, but if some huge enemy of yours, your convinced that they definitely are developing nukes, you are kind of foolish not to develop it yourselves, because if they get, you know, crazy sophisticated nuclear weapons and you don't have any, well, your fucking ass is gone, right? They are definitely going to take you over. So in a weird way, you know, the most dangerous weapons that humanity has ever created is also what keeps us at peace most of
Starting point is 00:26:34 the time. You know, because there's this constant kind of checkmate or stalemate, excuse me, not to not checkmate, but that stalemate situation. And so again, similar thing is going on with the mind control. Workinvents that We're convinced that they're making strides, which a history would show turned out not to be true, but it was real in the minds of the CIA agents who are working to figure out how to do it on our end. So Project Bluebird, yeah, on April 20th, 19th, sorry, I'm a little mush mouse,
Starting point is 00:26:59 more than normal today. Sometimes a mouse, it doesn't want to cooperate. April 20th, 1950, project Bluebird is launched. It's the early precursor to MK Ultra. And initially, it's main focus is hypnosis. And interrogation teams are formed of three people, each a psychiatrist, a lie detector test administrator,
Starting point is 00:27:15 trained in hypnosis, and a lie detector machine to technician. And the goal is somehow to hypnotize subjects and then use the lie detector to make sure that the info that they are getting from these people while these people are hypnotized is accurate and honest. You know, because CIA can never be sure that the info they're getting is reliable from captured Soviet spies, for example, massed for this project and they know for sure that
Starting point is 00:27:37 their information was reliable and that you know getting all the information they needed. Hypnosis, if it were to work like they hoped it was going to, would be way more effective than say like physical torture, which wasn't always reliable because sometimes people will just tell you anything just to make the torture stop. One former CIA official interviewed in the book said, if you have a blowtorch, help someone's ass, he'll give you tactical information, but you won't be able to keep getting continuous reliable information from this subject, you know, because as soon as you let him go, he's he's going to be looking for revenge or at least just to never see you again, you know, because people don't like
Starting point is 00:28:06 having their, having their buttholes, blow torched. My God. May I bet you really would give up? You really would give us a info if you thought you had a blow torch, you know, about to light up your ass. That is such a specific form of torture. Like when I read that, it really disturbed me because that's not like a random example. Like you know that the guy who Mark's talked to that said that either did blowtorch somebody's ass himself or new of people who did. My God. You know, like I'd like to think I wouldn't
Starting point is 00:28:33 rat out info and endanger lives by giving up sensitive information, but if you actually started blowtorching my butthole, I'm gonna talk. Yeah, I am gonna talk. There's no way I'm not. I think I might just tell you, you know, whatever you want to hear. Can you imagine having that done to you?
Starting point is 00:28:50 Can you imagine being released after having that done to you? God, you'd walk a little funny for a long time after that. Maybe for the rest of your life. And would anyone actually believe you, if you told them why you were walking funny, it's so ridiculous. Yeah, just look a little dinner there, Ravi. You hold something evil in there, buddy.
Starting point is 00:29:06 Trying to make it to the toilet before you let that demon loose. Uh, no, I don't, I don't have to go to the bathroom, Ryan. Nah, rough night, huh? Things get a little weird, get a little intense and bad. No, no, Brian, things did not get a little, things did not get a little intense and bad. Well, why are you walking like you have a cactus in your ass,
Starting point is 00:29:27 Robbie? Okay. Because some dude from the CIA took a blowtorch to my bottle, Brian. All right. They had me confused with some other Robbie who may or may not be a Russian spy. And when I didn't tell them what they wanted to know, they blistered up my bottle with a goddamn blowtorch Get the fuck out of here, Robbie. What do you do? Seriously, what's it going on with you? What the hell happened to you? What happened is I told him everything Ryan. I told him I jerked off the janitors closet in junior high I told him I beat a neighbor's cat to death and buried it in the backyard on the 15
Starting point is 00:29:59 I told him sometimes I get boned and when I ride the road coaster and I don't know why I told him everything and Those blowtorch wielding bastards burped my fucking butt all the way. Jesus, Ravi, I was just asking a question to me. I know, I don't need to go crazy with all the burn butt all the time. That was weird. Okay, man, take care. Oh, my God. Anyway, Project Bluebird also ran tests with chemicals on subjects, such as North Korean POWs,
Starting point is 00:30:26 to try and develop some kind of true serum, to get people to give them the info that they wanted. They'd shoot up subjects with various chemicals, various chemical compounds, make them drink potions, chemists were coming up with, and basically just kind of see what would happen. They'd also run chemical tests on subjects to try and induce amnesia. They wanted to wipe away memories of interrogation so that subjects wouldn't even realize they've been interrogated in the first place because for S.P. knowledge, how amazing would that be? If you could just fucking kidnap somebody,
Starting point is 00:30:52 basically towards the shit out of them, get a bunch of information out of them, then wipe their memory clean, drop them off at a fucking corner and they have no idea what happened. And so they would do stuff like inject subjects with the depressant sodium amatol, the stimulant benzadrine, the stimulant pecortoxin. Project Bluebird also began experimenting with shock therapy in 1951.
Starting point is 00:31:10 Remember, this is all government sanctioned stuff. This is all taxpayer dollars. They talked with some psychiatrists who assured the researchers that electroshock therapy could be used to induce amnesia. And that while recovering from shocks, patients would also sometimes give up information that would be otherwise withheld from the doctors. Shock machine also could be used for straight up interrogation torture, because it could cause
Starting point is 00:31:34 excruciating pain to recipients, which they could be helpful in interrogations that way. Here's something interesting. I learned a second little further by electric shock therapy. Not only is it still legal in the US, it's still considered a useful therapeutic tool by many psychiatrists. Yeah, electric shock therapy pushes electric currents through patients' brain, intentionally giving them seizures for brief period.
Starting point is 00:31:54 Now, doctors don't know exactly how it works, but they believe it kind of resets the wonky parts of the brain. And again, it is legal in the US, though according to businessinsider.com and article I read there, it's illegal to give it, though according to businessinsider.com, an article I read there, it's illegal to give it to patients younger than 16 in Texas and Colorado,
Starting point is 00:32:08 which implies that it totally legal to shock the brains of kids younger than 16 in the rest of the gutting country. In some cases, with the permission of courts, doctors can force very sick patients to get electro shock therapy. One of the more serious side effects of it is memory loss, and it was discovered by accident,
Starting point is 00:32:23 like many types of psychotherapy. Physicians began using the treatment in the 1930s after they noticed patients with severe mental illness suddenly get better after they had seizures. In the next couple of decades, Lutrius shock therapy got a hideous reputation. The bad rap wasn't completely unwarranted since doctors used to use such high doses of electricity. They would actually break people's bones because they weren't using muscle relaxers and anesthesia with it. Well, with Project Bluebird, researchers weren't interested in treating depression or any other
Starting point is 00:32:50 form of mental illness with a shock. They were just interested in inducing amnesia. And yeah, and it does work. It turns out if you shock someone to an inhumane amount of times, they forget basically fucking everything. Lobotomies were looked into, a 1952 Project Blueoper began to dig around with neurosurgical techniques, according to classified documents, most likely meaning lobotomies. Remember Dr. Ice Pick, McBrain Stabber,
Starting point is 00:33:14 from the Insane Insane Asylum's episode? Well, him and old Dr. Shaki Shokerton were probably on the payroll of Project Blooper. And while no one is legally slamming an ice pick into someone's frontal lobe via the orbital socket and mangling their noodle that way today, even though the bottomies were outlawed in Russia in 1953, based on the grounds of, as one Soviet doctor put it, turning an insane person into an idiot, they are still legal in the US. I didn't know that either. They're now referred to as psychosurgery or singulotomy. The procedure
Starting point is 00:33:43 is performed as a last resort when treating mental illness in the US. The part of the brain called the singulot cortex is where illness is like obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, attention deficit disorder, and chronic pain can originate. A stereotactic singulotomy is a procedure like the lobotomy, targets a very small portion of brain matter. In the case of a singulotomy, the targeted matter is the singulate cortex. Like a lobotomy, the procedure involves cutting the patient's head open. But instead of scooping out brain matter doctors,
Starting point is 00:34:11 you know, use more advanced technologies to sever connections in the brain that cause illnesses. Now, while this new technique sounds less barbaric, than a nice pick in the eye socket, I do wonder how we're gonna look back at it 50 years from now. Still just fucking snip and shit in the brain. And again, bluebird researchers don't care about treating mental illness with neurosurgical
Starting point is 00:34:29 techniques. They just wanted to fucking wipe people's memories and the bottomies could do that. Unfortunately, they also tended to wipe out people's entire personalities. And the researchers back on the, we're willing, excuse me, to shock or operate on the brains of subjects far more than was normal to time. And what was normal to time is looked at as barbaric now. And here's how the researchers rationalized it. CIA officials working here in this era felt that, again, they were among the first line of defense for America in this cold war with communism. You know, as I stated earlier, the most populated nation in the world China had recently
Starting point is 00:34:58 been taken over by communist regime, 1949. So it's taken over most of Eastern Europe thousands of troops in weaponry and East Berlin alone that can be inside of the UK And under 48 hours of mobilized there was a feeling of constant great peril And you had to do what you had to do to save America in the world It's also heavily suspected that Soviets were not you know adhering to any kind of ethical standards in their research And I could give them a huge military advantage And so in the US that became this strong ethos and you know in these projects of the end justifies the means
Starting point is 00:35:25 You know with these type of experiments, you know, and you know, whenever that kind of philosophy is used, that means someone's getting super fucked over. Project Bluebird morphs into Project Artichoke in August of 1951, continuing experimentation regarding mind control and interrogation. Code names, by the way, apparently, just totally random. Don't hold on any meeting,
Starting point is 00:35:43 cause I was always like, what is fucking ultra-stand-forward? No one knows. What does, you know, Bluebird's Stanford? Maybe the guy who came up with it just thought Bluebirds were cool. Or maybe he had some weird algorithm where he just fucking picked words out of a book. Maybe he's through darts on the wall, you know? Maybe Project Artichoke.
Starting point is 00:35:59 Maybe I got, yeah, I hated Artichokes. Maybe eight and one for lunch that day. Who knows? They have nothing to do with mind control. The CIA wanted to intensify their research in this new project. They struggled to find doctors with moral codes flexible enough to do the research, expect to them. And for subjects, they began to use individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plans,
Starting point is 00:36:17 subjects having known reasons for deception, etc. That's off of the CIA document. Bluebird researchers weren't interested in just volunteer subjects anymore who knew they wouldn't be harmed because they felt that compromised their findings. In order to get real results, they felt that they needed to start testing these mind control, you know, this mind control research on subjects who weren't aware that their minds are trying to be controlled. Sadly, I do see the logic there, you know, just like you can't truly care about the health and welfare of a lab rat when you're doing experiments that may harm or kill it, you also
Starting point is 00:36:44 can't care about a human to get the best cold blooded results there either. Obviously, this means this type of research when done on humans ends up crossing serious ethical boundaries. The first known group of people to be experimented on without their consent or knowledge was a group of five men in Germany in 1982. And I know those North Korean POWs were mentioned earlier,
Starting point is 00:37:03 but at least I guess apparently they knew, they knew some shit was happening them on some level. You know, they could see the needle going their arm. But now they start getting sneaky in 1952. They got three defectors, a known double agent and a suspected double agent. And then Artichoke researchers, you know, in their documents showed that they were prepared to dispose of these people's bodies. If this truth serum, they were working on this point to control their minds, ended up killing them. And members of Project Artichoke took these subjects
Starting point is 00:37:28 out of confinement, took them out to secret locations in the German countryside. Where they acted like they just wanted to talk to them about some stuff, checking with them. You know, just checking in guys to see what's what. You know, they're having their their eating, they're hanging out, they're laughing around, and then all of a sudden they gave one of the subjects,
Starting point is 00:37:42 beer, that the person didn't know was spiked with second-all, Dexadrine, and the active ingredient in marijuana, which is tetrohydro-ketnavinal. My god, these words. When they didn't work, they injected sodium penthanol into his veins and knock him out, and then brought him back to a semi-conscious state
Starting point is 00:38:01 with benzadrine, and then they tried to hypnotize him. So there's this fucking with this guy. There's spiking his drink, and they're like, ah, shit, that's not working. So then they just, you know, I guess he's kind of messed up, and he's high, and then they inject himself into his veins, it's just noxiously down,
Starting point is 00:38:14 and then he's too unconscious, so then they bring him back, and then they try to hypnotize him. None of this shit works. But apparently, you know, they don't kill anybody this weekend. But then, a little bit later, to see how you catch the wind of a new drug,
Starting point is 00:38:24 they have some really high hopes for LSD, You know, they don't kill anybody this weekend. But then a little bit later, the CIA catches a wind of a new drug, they have some really high hopes for LSD, the Sergic Acid diethylamide, and soon MK Ultra develops out of Artichoke. LSD, let's talk about that for a second. I didn't truly realize how recently this thing, this drug had been developed. It was discovered by Acid, this is a really cool story.
Starting point is 00:38:41 By a scientist named Albert Hoffman in Switzerland in 1943. In 1938, 32-year-old Albert Hoffman wanted to synthesize a chemical compound that would stimulate the respiratory and circulatory systems. He had gone to work for Sandos, a Swiss chemical company in 1929 after graduation from the University of Zurich. Sandos, founded in 1886, has started out manufacturing dyes and then later saccharine, and then they had a pharmaceutical department that was established in 1917. When professor Arthur Stoll isolated an active substance called Ergotamine from Ergot, which is a fungus found in tainted rye that have been used as kind of a folk medicine for generations. In its natural form and in certain quantities, Ergotant was a deadly poison. And it was a scourge responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over many
Starting point is 00:39:29 centuries, like an 857-18, what is now Germany, contemporary accounting of events of that year, recorded that a great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death. Well, the story ends now. It should is now attributed in similar events throughout history to long-term exposure to infected grains, a condition known as St. Anthony's Fire. After the French monastic order, they devoted itself to caring for this plague's victims. St. Anthony's Fire can cause physical convulsions, psychosis, gangrene, nausea, mania, other horrible shit.
Starting point is 00:40:03 In medieval Europe, there were cases where entire villages would basically just go fucking insane and also become horribly gangrenous from an outbreak of Urgot poisoning. Urgotism's toxic effects were eventually classified into two categories. There was gangrenous, Urgotism, and convulsive, Urgotism.
Starting point is 00:40:22 Convulsive, Urgotism is characterized by nervous dysfunction, where the victim is twisting and contorting their body and pain, trembling and shaking, more or less, you know, twisting of their next, right next call, seem to simulate convulsions or fits. In some cases, it's accompanied by muscle spasms, confusion, delusions, hallucinations. Some people now believe that the advent of these gruesome symptoms without a known cause, especially the convulsive symptoms, which along with the hallucinations, sometimes included mania and psychosis, or mania, historically led to accusations of witchcraft and mass hysteria, such as the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692 and 1693. They might have actually been victims of
Starting point is 00:41:00 ergoppoisoning. Studies have even correlated events like the Salem witch trials with years of rye scarcity, which kind of suggests an increased willingness to consume tainted rye. There's nothing else to eat. In small doses, the muscle and blood vessel constricting properties of ergop could actually be useful to hasten childbirth, staunch bleeding after delivery,
Starting point is 00:41:21 capabilities that had somehow been divine by alchemists and midwives and made use of generations and that kind of folk medicine. So Arthur Stolls' accomplishment was to isolate the compounds and ergot the cause, the constrictions. Ergotamine, ergotamine, excuse me, and ergo basing. And it's refined form the compound can be precisely dosed to avoid a host of side effects
Starting point is 00:41:42 from the other unhelpful compounds and ergot properties that made sand dosed a lot of, and launched the pharmaceutical research and development department that hired Hoffman 12 years later. Well within a few years, researchers had determined the chemical structure of the various biologically active compounds in Ergot, all of which shared a common nucleus. This chemical starting point was called LeSurgic Acid, right? That's the L, that's the L, LSD. Hoffman developed a synthetic process
Starting point is 00:42:06 to build the Urgot compounds from their component chemicals. Using this method, he recreated Urgot's active ingredients. And he starts combining Leusurgic acid with various other organic molecules. Just to kind of see what would happen. You know, he created 24 of these Leusurgic acid combinations. And then he created the 25th reacting Leus the surgical acid with diethylamide, a derivative of ammonia.
Starting point is 00:42:28 And this compound was abbreviated as LSD25 for the purposes of lab testing. All right, so I guess, you know, when I said, like, surgical earlier was the L, it's actually the L and the S. I guess they threw in the S, they threw in the S for the surgical. Albert had hoped for something to stimulate circulation
Starting point is 00:42:43 and respiration, but instead he reported that experimental animals given LSD became highly excited during testing and LSD testing was discontinued. Yeah, I bet they were excited. They were probably seeing some insane shit. Hoffman went on with his, ergot research, but for some reason, as the years passed, he just couldn't stop thinking about the apparently useless
Starting point is 00:43:00 at first LSD 25. Maybe it was just the memory of those, oddly excited animals and their pens. Hoffman never said, he just had a quote, feeling that the substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations. He would write that in his memoir later. So five years after initially experimenting
Starting point is 00:43:14 with the surgical acid, diethlamide, it was tossed on the ash heap, a pharmaceutical history based on a hunch. Hoffman decided to synthesize it again. He would later tell his friends, I did not choose LSD, LSD found and called me, which is the exactly the kind of thing acid makes you say. Then on April 16th, 1943, in the middle of World War II, Hoffman was in the final stages of synthesis of just a few centigrams of the material, the part where the LSD crystallized into a salt when he suddenly felt very strange,
Starting point is 00:43:41 to the point he had to leave work and go home. When he returned to the lab, the following Monday, he wrote a memo to his boss, Stole, the guy we were talking earlier, explaining what had happened, and what had happened was he had the world's first LSD trip. Check this shit out. This is from his memoir. He says, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed
Starting point is 00:44:00 home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dissonance. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant and toxicated light condition characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state with eyes closed, I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring, I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors. Well, when you recovered Hoffman, said about trying to figure out what it's so strongly affected. In a 2006 New York Times interview, Hoffman would say,
Starting point is 00:44:31 that he first suspected the fumes of the chloroform, like Solvon, he'd been using for giving him these kind of symptoms. So now, so first off, he intentionally breathed those fumes, but nothing happened. So then he finally realized he must have somehow gotten like a trace amount of LSD in a system. And because of his lab protocol, the only point of access that this would have been able to happen with was like, you know, some kind of contact with the skin, possibly his fingertips. And the amount involved would have to be so, so tiny that he had a hard time believing it could produce a significant reaction. Now that is intuition about LSD was showing some kind of strange results, he decided he should take this experiment further and intentionally dose himself
Starting point is 00:45:08 with LSD. So at 420 in the afternoon on April 19th without informing anyone at Sandos except his lab assist and Hoffman dissolved 250 millions of a gram of a surject acid diethlamide tartrate, the crystallized salt form of the compound and drink it. He expected to do absolutely nothing. Hoffman dealt with LSD as it might be like a deadly poison, you know, so he began his death with like the tiniest of doses. A thousand times less than the active dose of any other physically active compound that he knew of at the time.
Starting point is 00:45:39 He planned to increase the dosage by teeny tiny increments until he first got a little inkling of a reaction, expected to take you, many, many doses before that happened, which is 40 minutes after that small initial dose, he wrote the one and only entry in his lab journal that day. 17 o'clock, beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh, and then I'm sure he's too fucked up to write anymore. Years later, he would write his memoir, LSD, my problem child. That's a great title, by the way. I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. I bet he struggled. I've only taken LSD one time and you can hear about it actually too. I told my story for the Comedy Central Show a couple
Starting point is 00:46:19 years ago. This is not happening. And you can actually watch the video on YouTube. And as crazy as my story was, I was not exaggerating. A buddy of mine and I, we took nine tabs of Acid to Vegas. I had never done it before. We split it right down to tearing one tab in half. So we each took four and a half hits, and it fucking ripped a hole in my consciousness. I experienced powerful visual hallucinations. The pattern on the hotel, carpet seemed to unrelate, you know, warp and move.
Starting point is 00:46:43 People's faces would not still, you know, be still. Even when I'm sure they were still, they just kind of just kept distorting and shifting. They didn't seem to have the right proportions. Lites were extremely powerful and distorted. They would follow me as I looked away in these visual trails, you know, but far worse than the visual hallucinations was a sense of distorted reality, extreme paranoia. I was convinced for a while that I'd been in a coma for many years. And that no one I knew, and what I thought had been my real life, were actually real. Everything was fake. My entire reality had been created by some kind of nefarious scientists trying to trick me
Starting point is 00:47:17 into revealing secret, so secret, even I didn't know what they were. How fucked up is that? That sounds insane, it's because I wasn't sane. But it felt so real to me that night and elastered for hours. I started feeling like horrible things were right behind me, like blood was coming out of the walls, nightmare-ish things were all around. This time went on the visual hallucinations, intensified, I wanted to call somebody, but I couldn't even use a phone because it would seem to melt when I picked it up, I couldn't
Starting point is 00:47:38 make out any of the buttons. I became convinced that the way I felt was the way I was always going to feel, it was horrible. For good chunks of night, I just laid down the bed and just waited for it to be over. Well, after Hoffman's second trip and the first intentional one, he asked his lab assistant to escort him home, which wasn't as easy as it probably should have been, because a wartime restriction and automobile use, both men were on bikes. And I must have been one hell of a bike ride.
Starting point is 00:47:59 Hoffman felt his condition take a threatening turn. He says, everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted, as if seen in a curved mirror. Oh, I totally get that. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, I understand that too, actually,
Starting point is 00:48:14 because I kept thinking like my buddy would start to drift away from me, and then sometimes it felt like I was moving, but not moving. Oh, so weird. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had traveled very rapidly. Finally, we arrived at home safe and sound,
Starting point is 00:48:26 and I was just barely capable of asking my companion to summon our family doctor and request milk from the neighbors. I did that, I'd take it a poison, and maybe the milk would help calm it down or something. The effects were powerful, frightening, and unexpected. Hoffman had no idea how the experiments might play out in the next few hours and beyond, because, you know, at least like when I went on my trip,
Starting point is 00:48:44 there was at least part of my brain that knew what I had done to myself. He fucking had no idea. For all he knew, this might be the way he was forever. Like, you know, he didn't know anybody else had done it. The only thing, this might be just how things were now. Oh, I can't imagine how terrifying that would be. And he thought he was gonna kill him.
Starting point is 00:49:01 He talked about how he felt. Again, in his book, he said, the dizziness and sensation of fainting became so strong at times that I could no longer hold myself erect and had to lie down on the sofa. Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assume grotesque, threatening forms.
Starting point is 00:49:16 They were in continuous motion, animated, as if driven by an inner-retth relentlessness. The lady next door whom I scarcely recognize brought me milk. Well, they'll focus on milk is. In the course of the evening. I drank more than two liters. He must look like an idiot. This is dude just pounding milk. I just, I feel better if I just pound milk. She was no longer Mrs. R but rather a malevolent and city-us-witch with a colored mask. Every exertion of my will, every attempt to put out an end to the disintegration of the outer world
Starting point is 00:49:46 and the disillusion of my ego seemed to be a wasted effort. A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, soul. I was seized by the dreadful fear of going and saying, I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation. Lifeless, strange. Was I dying?
Starting point is 00:50:02 Oh my God, do I understand all this? And by the way, if this like is sounds enticing, do you, man, just be careful. I can't talk anybody out of doing hallucinogens, but holy shit. If no one's going to talk you out of doing as at least do it with somebody who's done it from the batch, you're going to be doing it from before. I mean, totally serious. Trying to just be practical about this and make sure that they stay with you. Don't be by yourself and don't be by anything sharp. No knives, no weapons can be around you. You cannot have access to any of that seriously.
Starting point is 00:50:30 And do not be any place that you could jump off of and kill yourself accidentally, because you will think the craziest shit. I remember looking out the window at one point, if the window would have been able to open, there is a chance I'd be like, you know what? I think I can pull it off. I think I can glide down to the bottom. Oh, powerful. Well, a doctor showed up for Hoffman detecting nothing more alarming than dilated pupils, blood pressure, respiration, pulse, we're all actually completely normal, even though inside he was going bananas. And the doctor didn't give him any medicine and he just puts Hoffman to bed and he leaps. And then Hoffman would write about how he came back
Starting point is 00:51:04 down later saying, the whore is softened and gave way to a feeling of good fortune and gratitude, the more normal perceptions and thoughts returned, and I became more confident that the danger of insanity was conclusively passed. Now, little by little, I began to enjoy the unprecedented colors in plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Collider's Scopic Fantastic Images surged in on me. Again, totally relate. Out of the worst of my trip, my buddy and I were looking out over the Vegas skyline, we were way up on our hotel room
Starting point is 00:51:31 with this big window looking out of the strip, and it was one of those beautiful things I'd ever seen, because the lights were just pulsing and trailing and it was, yeah, it was amazing. And I was just overleaved, I made it back to sanity. The next morning, Hoffman wrote, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created.
Starting point is 00:51:48 All my senses vibrated in a condition of high sensitivity which persisted for the entire day. I'm so, how amazing is that he documented the first LSD trip? That's amazing to me. So it's clear the remarkable discovery had been made. First, the drug had to be tested extensively in animals
Starting point is 00:52:03 to determine any acutely toxic effects that Hoffman had been merely lucky to survive. Animal tests would eventually provide some curious results. I love all this. Myce, given LSD, moved erratically and showed alterations in licking behavior. Started licking weird. Cats, hairs stood on to end and they salivated indications they were having hallucinations that were either threatening or enticing. So you understand that? Like they're like they're by themselves on acid and a little cat cage and either like kind of like getting their back all hunched up and their hair is on end because they're seeing some crazy shit coming towards them this threatening.
Starting point is 00:52:34 Or they're licking like, I want to eat that. I want to eat that big ol' how do that big ol' fish just swim through the air? You know, just by seeing the weirdest stuff. When researchers introduce mice into the cat's cages instead of attacking them, sometimes the feelings would ignore the rodents intrusion or sometimes appear frightened by them, like they'd grown huge. Dose chimpanzees did not show any obvious signs of being affected, but the normal chimps around them tend to become extremely upset. So Hoffman attributed that to the test animals failure to maintain social norms perceptible only to the chimps so you know the other chimps knew that the the LSD
Starting point is 00:53:06 Chimp was fucked up man animals tripped on acid It is messed up because they didn't know what's happening but also the hilarious to me I just wish we could know for sure what they saw Hop hop hop and knew what he what he had seen saying I was taking to another world another place another time my body seemed to be without sensation lifeless strange Oh man, he tests on all kinds of stuff, he aquarium fish on acid. They would swim oddly, they give it to spiders, and the spiders would alter their web-building patterns. Spiders, how do we,
Starting point is 00:53:34 spiders give an acid at low doses? The webs would sometimes become better proportioned and more exactly built than normal. But at higher doses, like extremely high doses, the webs were just completely erratic and poorly made. After a lot of testing, Hoffman determined that none of the animals in the test seemed to suffer acute harm at the active dose, and that the lethal dose was like 100 times higher
Starting point is 00:53:55 than what was necessary for maximum kind of psychic effect. So there was a wide safety margin with this new drug. So now, reassured that LSD wouldn't kill him or destroys brain, Hoffman's curiosity about his own experience only intensified and he decided to continue his LSD research informally saying that in the friendly and private company of two good friends of mine, you know, he just kept tripping. He did this. He later wrote an order to investigate the influence of the surroundings of the outer and inner conditions of the LSD experience. These experiments showed me the enormous impact of to to use modern terms, set and setting on
Starting point is 00:54:25 the content and character of the experience. Some of my psychedelic experiences, I had a feeling of ecstatic love and unity with all creatures in the universe. You would later tell high times in an interview to have had such an experience of absolute beautitude. It's a word. Means an enrichment of our life. But he also learned something else.
Starting point is 00:54:43 He said controlling for set and setting had its limits. He says, in spite of a good mood at the beginning of a session, positive expectations, beautiful surroundings and sympathetic company, I once fell into a terrible depression. And he said, the unpredictability of the effects is a major danger of LSD. Okay, so half an NSK workers within publish a paper
Starting point is 00:55:02 on LSD in 1947 and then 1949 Otto Koders, Viennese, doctor who had read Hoffman's report and then studied it himself, gave a speech on LSD as leading to potential treatment for schizophrenia in Boston in 1949. And soon thereafter, the members of Project Artichoke hear about LSD and think this incredibly powerful mind-altering substance, you know,
Starting point is 00:55:24 something that previously unknown, this has been the this incredibly powerful mind-altering substance, you know, something that previously unknown, this has been the most powerfully mind-altering substance anyone had ever seen to this point, mind-unlocked secrets to mind control. So 1953, future CIA director Richard Helmins proposes to then-director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, that the CIA set up a program under Dr. Sid Gottlieb, a man with a PhD from Caltech who headed the CIA's chemical division within his technical services staff, TSS. He wanted Gottlieb to head a program based on, quote, the covert use of biological and chemical materials for use in future clandestine operations.
Starting point is 00:55:58 On April 13, 1953, director Doles approves the project, names it MK Ultra, and gives it an initial budget of $300,000. So in the early days of MK Ultra, the six TSS members assigned to it spent a good deal of time considering the possibilities of LSD. Mind altering drugs already around, but again, nothing is powerful. It was several thousand times more potent than a comparable amount of mescaline, and a million times stronger, at least by weight than hashish. They also did some math and figured out fun stuff,
Starting point is 00:56:27 like one suitcase full of pure LSD could send every citizen of the United States on a trip. And they considered it's used as a military weapon, like what if they put it in city's water supply and sent an entire city off to another planet mentally? How fucking amazing would that be? And effective. I mean, seriously, that is a one hell of a weapon.
Starting point is 00:56:49 I mean, can you imagine like the entire city of Chicago started going at one massive LSD trip and none of them knew they had taken LSD? Like if the entire water supply was dosed. You know, only people who hadn't washed their hands or showered or drank any water other than bottle water or hadn't used water to cook with were unaffected. ambulance drivers, firemen, surgeons, teachers, police officers, gang members, freight truck
Starting point is 00:57:10 drivers, everyone, just tripping balls. No one, no one why. Think of the YouTube videos that would create the chaos. Oh, that actually would work extremely effectively as a biological weapon, right? Sneak into an enemy's military or behind enemy lines and spike the military's water supply with LSD. See how well the army can fight back if they're completely out of their minds,
Starting point is 00:57:31 if they don't know where the targets are. They're seeing extra targets, they aren't there. How are they supposed to shoot the rifles? How are they supposed to fly their planes? What if they can convince that their targets are unkillable monsters, demons, other nonsensical stuff? Well rather than focus mainly on the unlike wide-scale attack potentials, potential of LSD, ultra primarily focused on the research on the drug's effect on individuals.
Starting point is 00:57:54 For example, could they turn the allegiance of a Russian spy to their side by manipulating his mind while he was under the influence of LSD? And while LSD was the primary mind altering drug that you're focused on, they also did look into like cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, heroin, basically every other drug for similar purposes. And they began to secretly funnel money through various legitimate grants and endowments
Starting point is 00:58:17 to start to have psychiatrists. And other academic researchers started administering drugs to volunteers in order to clinically study its effects. And at first, the volunteers knew what they were taking and what the potential side effects would be. Researchers also routinely started to take the drugs themselves, just to know what it would feel like. They convinced psychiatrists to work with this new drug, psychiatrists who were interested in LSD for other reasons. The drugs, you know, high mimicked the effects of schizophrenia. Remember that first presentation in the States in 1949.
Starting point is 00:58:47 It's like Hyattristath that they could find out how to sober somebody up basically in the middle of a trip, how to get their mind to snap back, discover a type of antidote for LSD, that same antidote might also cure schizophrenia. And I, you know, I see the logic there, you know. Ultra researchers also began to work with prison populations in the early 1950s, given the inmates their drug a choice, cocaine, heroin, whatever, to study the effects on them. Inmates would be rewarded with shorter senses or given more drugs. As reward, LSD was also offered. Dr. Harris Isbell, during some of these early experiments, once gave seven inmates in Lexington, Kentucky,
Starting point is 00:59:25 LSD doses for 77 days in a row. That is absurd. 43 days into the experiment, he was amazed at the tolerance some of the subjects were beginning to develop and he quadrupled their dosages. Clearly that crossed a symmetrical boundaries. No one, no one should trip for two and a half months straight. I can't imagine what that did to those seven people long term. One early prison volunteer was actually the infamous gangster Whitey Bulger. You may know that name Whitey Bulger is the Boston gangster who was arrested in
Starting point is 00:59:53 Santa Monica in 2011. The guy played by Johnny Depp in 2015's Black Mass will Burge Bulger was given LSD while in federal prison in Atlanta in exchange for a lighter sentence. And for 18 months, Bulger and other inmates were tested, you know, with tons of drug use. Bulger described his experience in his notebook as horrible LSD experiences followed by thoughts of suicide and deep depression. He was so deeply and negatively affected by the project that Bulger compared the program's doctor to Joseph Mangle, the Nazi doctor responsible for a horrific human experimentation conducted at concentration camps during World War II. Bulger's anxiety was compounded by his inability
Starting point is 01:00:30 to ask for help or disclose what he was experiencing. He was afraid that telling anyone about his visual and auditory hallucinations would lead to lifelong commitment in an insane asylum. How horrible is that, man? You know, so obviously they didn't tell him everything that was gonna happen to them. And so, you know, they make these people feel like they're going insane, man? You know, so obviously they didn't tell him everything that was going to happen to them.
Starting point is 01:00:45 And so, you know, they make these people feel like they're going insane, they're hearing things, they're seeing things, and then they're afraid to talk about it. That's going to do some psychological damage. The effects of the LST on Bulger were such that the mobster reflected on the irony of a situation as notebook writing, I was in prison for committing a crime and feel they've committed a worse crime on me. He was also so enraged after learning the program's intent and its effects. It had another inmates that he strongly considered tracking down Dr. Carl Fyfer,
Starting point is 01:01:10 the pharmacologist who oversaw the program and killing him later in life. Dr. Isbel and that Alexan prison also experimented with other hallucinogenic drugs and inmates that I never even heard of before. Stuff like scopolamine, rivia seeds from the morning glory plant, which apparently can produce a mild trip. They have a similar chemical composition to LSD, scopolamine. Also known as highocene is used to treat nausea and motion sickness.
Starting point is 01:01:35 In some cases, though, this derivative of a type of night-shade flour can also produce hallucinations. These details are just looking at everything. Ultra researchers also worked with American pharmaceutical companies, you know, having them try to develop some new, you know, Hulu's sanitary drugs. And then also they started manufacturing acid domestically, rather than relying on foreign distributor for it,
Starting point is 01:01:52 rather than relying on that Swiss lab that created it. The CIA founded a synthetic development of SLSD domestically, creating a state-side infrastructure for the drug. And ironically, the drug of choice for the counter-culture revolution in the 1960s ended up being made by the drug. And ironically, the drug of choice for the counterculture revolution in the 1960s ended up being made by the man. The man they despised in the 1950s. Right?
Starting point is 01:02:10 And how weird is that? All those hippies, you know, doing LSD in the 60s, you know, questioning the government, all that questioning, and all that LSD, well, not the questioning, but all the LSD drug use came out of a lot of CIA stuff in the 50s. LSD, man, brought to you by the CIA. So funny to me. In addition to giving people, like prisoners, the drug early ultra members also did it themselves.
Starting point is 01:02:31 They were taking acid apparently pretty often in the early 1950s, taking it at work at home while traveling. One researcher recall suddenly seeing rainbows shooting out from cracks in the sidewalks, he became obsessed with people's facial blemishes, finding them suddenly beautiful, said that the trip changed him,
Starting point is 01:02:45 and he suddenly found the world a more beautiful place than it was before. I love how this happened in the America of the 1950s. These CIA agents, dudes who are probably wearing slacks, button up shirts, ties, listening to Perry Como and Eddie Fisher on the radio, watching I Love Lucy, the Ed Sullivan show, the Jackie Gleason show at home.
Starting point is 01:03:02 Shows where the worst thing a character ever does is have one drink too many, you know. This is the buttoned up baby boomer life of the early 1950s and these guys are tripping balls on acid at work. By late 1953, ultra researchers decided they needed to start testing on people who didn't know they've been given it because that's how they'd use it in the military. On unsuspecting targets, how fucking terrible is that again? What a terrible thing to do to somebody.
Starting point is 01:03:26 On November 18, 1953, during a three day work retreat with members of the Army Chemical Corps Special Operations Division, sawed ultra researchers gave acid to people for the first time who truly had no idea what was going on. The SOD researchers were familiar with drugs, they'd specialized in stuff like developing new lethal toxins used to assassinate enemies
Starting point is 01:03:46 in seconds, suicide pills, stuff that wouldn't show up in autopsies, stuff like that. They came up with poisons that mimic the effects of natural diseases to make deaths look accidental or natural, kind of like how anthrax poising can look like pneumonia. They also worked on creating new strains of diseases used to kill enemy populations in attacks with biological warfare, but that wouldn't prepare them for a drink spiked with LSD. During this retreat, Sid Gottleb from Ultra, right, the head of this new project spiked their alcohol with LSD, and one of the men who's drinks with spiked
Starting point is 01:04:15 was a guy named Dr. Frank Olson. And apparently, and you probably recognize that name if you're a big ultra fan. And apparently Dr. Olson went fucking bananas. He ran out of the retreat, took them, took these guys, the rest of the guys hours to find him. When they finally found him, he was way, he had made it miles away. He was hiding by the side of the road, cowering and fear, took a long time for them to convince him to come back to the tree. He was super
Starting point is 01:04:36 paranoid, thought everyone was out to get him. And of course he was, you know, out of his mind, and he didn't know why. You know, when he left the retreat the next day, his wife noticed he was seriously depressed and paranoid. He had delusions of being persecuted, they just kept intensifying, intensified over the next few days to the point that co-workers had him flown to New York City to see a CIA psychiatrist
Starting point is 01:04:54 and be given a mental health evaluation. He had suffered a complete nervous breakdown and agreed to have them take him to a sanitarium for some evaluations. Well, the night before he was to be taken for these evaluations on November 28th, 1953, just 10 days after being given that LSD, you know, and not knowing he'd been given it, he threw himself through the 10th floor window of his Manhattan hotel, apparently just ran and just jumped into the window and then he died on impact, you know, 10 stories below.
Starting point is 01:05:22 And the CIA rationalized his death as basically coincidence. Well, acknowledging that, you know, there may be LSD, one had a little something to do with it. Well, Frank's widow would later sue the CIA in a 1976 president Gerald Ford would personally apologize to this guy's family and award them $750,000 to Congress. So they definitely were responsible. The death of Frank Olsen did not threaten to end MK Ultra, but it did change their choice and subjects. No more spiking people's drinks at work. They're not gonna be given at the other
Starting point is 01:05:50 unwitting government officials now. Instead, they get a little bit more evil. They just start to turn to an element of society where people can't fight back, junkies, prostitutes, small-time career criminals, chronically disenfranchised, homeless people. The disenfranchised, people powerless to seek, the disenfranchised people powerless to seek revenge. Ah man, exploitation of the powerless man, the kind of shit that inspired Zach Deloroka into writing a ton
Starting point is 01:06:11 a really good rage against the machine songs years later. Well, ultra began setting up safe houses in New York City and later a San Francisco on Telegraph Hill and in Marin County to experiment on random US citizens. They recruited federal Bureau of Narcotics agent for George White to gain access to the criminal underworld. Older agents would use these safe houses to talk to criminal informants. And it was at this, you know, these safe houses where they began to slip and acid into informants drinks and food, you know, and then see how much the information they'd give them after being out of the influence of LSD.
Starting point is 01:06:43 And I guess they had like, you know, two-way mirrors, or I'm sorry, see through mirrors setup, so that, you know, while one person's interrogating some guy who's out of his mind on LSD and doesn't know why, there's conscientists behind a fucking see through mirror, taking some notes. It's also weird. San Francisco's safe house was set up as a brothel. Agent White would recruit prostitutes
Starting point is 01:07:01 to use this new safe brothel. And again, see through mirrors are established here. They're just watching people have sex with the prostitutes to use this new safe brothel and and again they were see through mirrors are established here they're just watching people have sex with the prostitutes watching johns getting their drinks spiked with acid and seeing what happened to them in these situations you know they also they also kind of studied the prostitutes with an eye towards using them as CIA operatives like if a woman was willing to sell her body for sex what else would she be willing to do on behalf of the CIA to get information out of a target? So it wasn't just you know the ultra stuff It was just they were doing a lot of weird shit in the fifties a lot of very sketchy stuff
Starting point is 01:07:31 Also by studying what guys were truly into the bedroom when they didn't think anyone was watching and they're with the prostitute Who didn't know who they were or you know wouldn't tell their co-workers or family? They gained a lot of insight I guess into human behavior in general. Yeah, I guess you would. The CIA would later use Berlin prostitutes as operatives to try and get info out of East Berlin communists. And then again, there was the LSD stuff. And there was, you know, given the LSD to the Johns. And then after a while, they got a little bit bolder, and they decided to just kind of go to other, you know, hangouts, like in San Francisco, for example, around Telegraph Hill, and
Starting point is 01:08:04 just spike random people's drinks. People who weren't even criminals. Just some dude, buy himself, drink it late at night. Couple other dudes start talking to him. I think he's just cool guys, but they're not cool guys. They're ultra agents. Older agents who are slipping, you know, a Mickey in the form of acid into his drink and then just letting him wander off home, thinking he'd lost his mind for the rest of his life. I'll mess that up. How messed up is that? Now you know, you head out for a night in the town with some friends.
Starting point is 01:08:29 Suddenly you're, you know, had too much of a drink. You'd wander off by yourself. And now you're tripping on a drug. Makes you feel insane. A drug you don't even know exists yet. None of your friends or family have ever heard about it. You question your mental health or rest your life.
Starting point is 01:08:39 You know, how would that feel if you, you know, you feel like you have a totally sound mind for 30 years. And then one night after two whiskey showers and maybe the Castro district or somewhere, you start seeing demons on the streets of San Francisco. You see blood pouring out of people's eyes. And you know, you know it's because the devil needs your soul and you're so loaned to win the battle of the apocalypse. Or you know, or some other nonsensical nightmare shit that can appear all too real
Starting point is 01:09:01 when you've taken too much LSD. Well, not only did MK Ultra agents give random people LSD, they also gave other hallucinogens to unsuspecting people, including one especially terrifying and powerful one, developed by the military called Buzz, or three-quinu-clindinol-benzolyt. It was a powerful deliriant. Acting as a competitive non-selective blocker at post-synaptic and post-junctional muscarinic receptor sites in smooth muscle, exocrine glands, and the brain.
Starting point is 01:09:31 BZ decreases the effective concentration of acetyl-acetyl-coline seen by receptors of these sites. Thus, BZ causes PNS effects that are in general are opposite those seen in nerve agent poisoning. Central nervous system effects include stupor, confusion, confabulation, with concrete and panoramic illusions and hallucinations, and with regressing deprimative and voluntary behaviors
Starting point is 01:09:58 such as floxylation. It was invented by another one of those Swiss pharmaceutical companies in 1951, man, for a neutral country, for putting out a lot of, you know, horrible, non-neutral shit. And anyway, this nasty, as hell-sounding buzz allegedly caused a trip lasting a week or more and regularly induces violent behavior. So it's like, you know, far more evil than acid. John Marks, author of this book, I've been referring to, this book, the Search for the Manchurian Canada, talks about interviewing a Latin American professor who was outspokenly against the CIA around this time
Starting point is 01:10:27 and against their involvement in Latin America in the 50s. And this guy said that one day when he was working alone in his office, some strange woman runs in and sticks him with a needle that he thinks contained buzz or something similar. He says he almost immediately became irrational. He started breaking shit around the office, sort of throwing stuff at colleagues and ambulance,
Starting point is 01:10:46 you know, comes, they have to restrain him, take him to a hospital where it takes more than a week for him to stop hallucinating and become rational again. Instead of taking years to get his career back on track after that. Ah man, that is, again, what a weapon man. You have some spy, not necessarily kill some foreign person, but he imagined just giving that to some foreign leader
Starting point is 01:11:04 and just making him completely batshit insane for a week or two. There's no way you can run a country in that mindset. Mind sets, excuse me. The CIA was exploring all kinds of mind-altering drugs. Anything they could get their hands on, including magic mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms. The first encounter of these mushrooms
Starting point is 01:11:22 investigated them in Mexico in 1953 is Project Artichoke. It's part of Project Artichoke, excuse me. The mushrooms had been known in parts of Mexico as far back as the Aztecs used them in religious ceremonies. Aztec priests called these mushrooms Godflesh. What an awesome name for a drug. Hey man, you want to take a hit of this Godflesh? You want chew on some of this God God flesh? Do you want to see God's mind? Do you want to be thrust into his mind's eye? Oh man, agents brought the mushrooms back to the states. He began working on analyzing them so they could chemically replicate the hallucinogenic properties
Starting point is 01:11:55 and not have to rely on growing them, which you know could be slow and tricky. Albert Hoffman, same Swiss scientist who had discovered LSD was the one who also identified the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, cellosybing. There, this guy is just the fucking godfather of hallucinogens. She has statues him and San Francisco places. She has some statues. They should have a statue of a burning man, right? Soon after discovering the exact compound, Dr. Isbel was shooting up inmates with psilocybin, back in that Lexington prison and getting paid CIA money to do it. Again, fascinating that MK Ultra researchers helped launch a counterculture revolution.
Starting point is 01:12:29 I didn't know that they brought mushrooms over before doing this research either. That we have CIA to thank for both mushroom and acid. Yeah, and how they got from the CIA experiments to the counterculture revolution is a lot of this early work was done at colleges, colleges like Harvard, and then eventually, the LSD recipe begins to get replicated by some rogue chemists, some smarty pantses hanging out these smarty pants schools, and they start doing recreationally.
Starting point is 01:12:56 Starts getting in the hands of some professors looking to expand their minds, and it just goes from there. Timothy Liri, the LSD guru himself, he was around MK Ultra experiments when he was at Harvard, Harold Abrinson, an early researcher recruited by MK Ultra who worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, made him the first man to disperse LSD recreationally, given it to friends. He had in the academic world, little parties, beat Nick Poet, Alan Ginsberg. He was part of an early wave of volunteers to try LSD Ken Kese author of one flew over the kukus nest. Maybe mispronounced his last name. It's KES. EY Was an early government user of LSD
Starting point is 01:13:31 Ultra agents were looking into anything that might lead to a breakthrough mind control interrogation techniques or memory Erasing One doctor whose research M. K. Ultra was very interested in was Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron a Canadian psychiatrist working in Montreal in the 50s At a hospital called Alan Memorial who believed he could create what was called differential amnesia. Basically, he could make people like, you know, forget their mental illness but not forget their rest of their life through essentially a shitload of shocking. So we're going to go back into the shocking for a second project ultra agents love this, you know, if it worked, they can interrogate someone, you know, like we talked about earlier,
Starting point is 01:14:06 and then they can forget their interrogated. You know, this is one of the things that, you know, again, they're trying LSD to try and see if they can do this. You know, they just want to be able to control someone's mind or if they can't control someone's mind completely, have some kind of like truth serum to at least get them to give honest info or if they can't do that, maybe also, you know,
Starting point is 01:14:21 be able to wipe their memories. Ideally, they want to accomplish all three. And they're trying all of these things, hoping that one of them leads to summer all of that. Well, this Dr. Cameron was not some quack. He was, but he was a quack in the sense that all, almost all, not all, but almost all psychiatrists in 1950s were quacks.
Starting point is 01:14:38 They didn't know they were doing. They were fucking messing around with people's noodles in horrific ways. But this guy was very esteemed. He was the president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1952 and 1953, president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association in 1589. So, you know, he kind of took a dive there. That's okay. That's just, why did I do that? Why did I take a random shot at Canada? I don't even, that was like a joke done out of habit. Like in my brain, it's like I've heard so many jokes
Starting point is 01:15:02 disparaging Canada. I don't even feel that way. So I'm gonna retract, I'm not gonna edit that out, but I'm gonna retract that joke. He was president of the World Psychiatric Association from 1961 to 1966. He's the best of the best. He's the best around, no one's ever gonna tell. But the, and he thought that, I don't know what's on that.
Starting point is 01:15:20 And he thought that, you know, maybe forcing patients into a routine of drug-induced sleep and then multiple daily powerful electroshocks that by doing that, they could reprogram their brains. Kind of like doing a hard reset on your phone, like reformatting a memory card, except you get the key files that you want intact. Now check out how horrific this method was. Patients would be started with 15 to 30 days of sleep therapy. Where they'd be given a daily sleep cocktail of 100 milligrams of thorazine, 100 milligrams
Starting point is 01:15:51 of nemutol, 100 milligrams of secondol, 150 milligrams of verinol, and 10 milligrams of pheneregin. Then, then gets even better. Then they would be woken by the staff two or three times a day for powerful electro shock treatments. Around this time, psychiatric patients receiving electro shock therapy would generally be given a dose of about 110 volts, one dose that would last
Starting point is 01:16:14 a fraction of a second. And that would happen to once a day, or like once every other day. Well, Dr. Cameron cranked it up to 150 volts. So almost a, you know, like a 30-some percent increase, 30 percent, you know, increased it by over 30 percent and gave patients an initial one second shock. So instead of a fraction of a second,
Starting point is 01:16:33 it kicked up to one second, and that would induce convulsions and then he would follow by five to nine additional one second shocks in the middle of convulsions. So they're being shocked like, you know, a thousand times more, or the nor, I'm not a thousand times, ten times more. This is a bad math, but way more, way, way, way more than between shocked other places.
Starting point is 01:16:52 Former staff members and patients we call here and a lot of frequent screams in the hospital during this type of treatment. Oh yeah, I bet they did. Some subjects ended up undergoing this daily treatment for 60 straight days, two months of forced sleep only to be woken up to eat, go to the bathroom, or be fucking shocked to shit. And these aren't captured enemy spies
Starting point is 01:17:15 being tortured to reveal secrets, they could save hundreds of lives. These are patients, these are mentally ill patients, they came there to feel better. Well, subject to the treatment would end up days losing control of bodily functions. They would be just seeing kind of aimlessly wandering the halls of the facility. Initially, the subjects would lose much of their memory, but they still kind of knew who they were and why they were there.
Starting point is 01:17:34 Eventually, for many more days, they have horrible torture. They would forget who they were. They would forget why they were there, but they would be anxious when asked those questions. And then eventually, they wouldn't know anything and wouldn't care why they didn't know anything. So their minds were just completely gone by the end. And Dr. Cameron considered this a success because he also did an exhibit symptoms at schizophrenia. See, you're cured. No more schizophrenia.
Starting point is 01:17:57 You also have no more personality or memories, but you know, kind of a win. Nope. Dr. Cameron was also a big proponent of sensory deprivation. He was basically just like a medieval torture or disguised as a psychiatrist. He thought minds could be erased and rebuilt with enough of a sensory deprivation,
Starting point is 01:18:16 which again, ultra agents were like, okay, we're listening. We like the possibility of rebuilding a mind the way we'd like it rebuilt, because they wanted to strip away somebody to nothing and then use the resulting blank'd like it to be built. You know, because they wanted to strip away somebody to nothing and then use the resulting blank slate to build a super agent. Someone who would be intensely loyal to the CIA, someone, you know, cognitively incapable
Starting point is 01:18:32 of betraying them. Someone who had no family allegiances to be used against them, have captured someone truly, you know, psychologically, unafraid of torture or death, kind of like a carbon-based robot really working for them. Well, Dr. Cameron would place patients in a small box that let in no lighter sound. They would only be removed briefly to use the bathroom and eat. Now, they wouldn't have room to move at all. They'd be like in one position.
Starting point is 01:18:54 They wouldn't be spoken to at any time. Other doctors interested in sensory deprivation felt that no patient should ever be left alone in the box for more than six days. But as we learned about Dr. Cameron before he doesn't give a fuck about protocol It's like what no more than six days ever or it'll completely break somebody. Okay. Well, how about we just how about we kick it up for over a month How about we just go more than five times that he left one woman who symptoms analyzed by doctors years later He'll just go into menopause. Let's turn that box for over a month to cure her of wildly swinging moats And it didn't cure her.
Starting point is 01:19:25 I'm sure I'm guessing it made her much more insane. And now permanently instead of just hormonally. In addition to the box, Dr. Cameron also injected some patients with a non-leasal dose of a career, a South American poison used by remote tribes to poison arrows with. In non-lethal amounts, it would just paralyze you, you know, but you could still kind of be aware it was happening around you. So there you are, now physically unable to move in a dark place where you can't hear anything and left there for weeks at a time.
Starting point is 01:19:49 Jesus Christ. And CIA, the project, Ulters paying for this. Because, hey, yeah, it's a lot of torture, but again, and justifies the means, maybe we'll figure out how to wipe somebody's brain, clean, and make a super agent. 1953, the CIA also works for a man named Dr. Lily. At the National Institute of Institutes of Health outside of Washington, DC, Lily had come up with a method of pounding,
Starting point is 01:20:11 man, sorry, animal lovers, this is gonna be rough. Pounding up to 600 tiny sections of hypodermic tubing into the skulls of monkeys, through which he could insert electrodes into different parts of the monkey's brain and electrically stimulate each part of the brain specifically to determine which part of the brain specifically to determine which part of the brain is responsible for like pleasure, anger, anxiety, pain, fear,
Starting point is 01:20:29 you know, etc. You know, and again, I know if you're an animal lover, this is especially painful to hear about, but he did do something nice for at least one of his subjects. He did do something nice for a monkey with all those tubes sticking out of this monkey's head. He figured out exactly what part of the monkey's brain was responsible for orgasm and then he, I'm not making this up. This is one of my weird flights. He then gave the monkey access to the switch that controlled stimulating that particular electrode. You know, so you see what I'm saying? This monkey's like the monkey figured out that if he pulls this little
Starting point is 01:20:59 lever, he has an orgasm. And when the monkey put that together, I guess this monkey would give itself at least one orgasm, at least every three minutes, for up to 16 hours a day. So on the conservative end, this monkey was given itself 320 orgasms a day. So on the one hand, 600 tubes pounded into your head by a mass scientist. Not good. But on the other hand, give yourself at least 320 orgasms a day and because you're a monkey,
Starting point is 01:21:30 not even feel guilty that you're, you know, just come in your life away, that's good. Well, Dr. Lily to his credit, he stopped working with the CIA shortly after he started. Just if he was afraid that this research could lead to CIA agents sent on deadly missions with electrodes strategically planted in the brains, they could be remote controlled to ensure they completed their missions. So, you know, so good for him on that end. Okay, finally, the end of ultra habits 1963 project ultra is ended. For all the research you've already heard about and God knows what else. Most of the classified documents for project ultra made it to the paper shredder, so we'll
Starting point is 01:22:00 never know for sure what they did. We do know they also looked into like remote viewing, you know, ESP. So they were trying to do things like control things across the world with their brains, you know, people in rooms, fucking concentrate in real hard, trying to like look into the Kremlin and stuff. They did stuff like they would meet with tribal witch doctors and try and get their seat like again, remember just nothing was too strange. One ultra agent described their approach as way. He said, there were some unbelievable schemes, but you also knew Einstein was considered crazy. One ultra agent described their approach as well. He said there were some unbelievable schemes, but you also knew Einstein was considered crazy.
Starting point is 01:22:29 You know, you couldn't be so biased that you couldn't leave open the possibility that one crazy idea might work. So one of my favorite things they researched was it was investing 9,000 into figuring out how to instantly hypnotize someone. Kind of like it sounds like some shit out of Star Trek, like some kind of Vulcan nerve pinch,
Starting point is 01:22:46 where what you would do is you would surprise somebody, sit in the chair, and I'll suddenly put your hands on their forehead and tell them to go sleep. That's how I was described in the book. And they claim it worked on some people. God, that had been super awkward when it didn't work. Just do what the fuck are you doing? Get your hand on my head.
Starting point is 01:23:03 Why are you telling me to go to sleep? What the hell's wrong with you? Can you give me a heart attack sneaking me up on like that, Earl? We'll read about their older experiments, makes me understand the allegations of mafia ties more clearly, right? Like they couldn't create some type of manchurian candidate to do their bidding, keep all their secrets. I mean, the next best thing is to work with criminals used to doing others bidding and used to keeping secrets mafia hitmen. Speaking of which, I know we and used to keeping secrets. Mafia Hitman, speaking of which, I know we will get to the Iceman eventually.
Starting point is 01:23:28 I promise, not too much longer. And just because Ultra ended in 1963, that doesn't mean I went away. It just became Project MK Search, one project would morph into another. And before we delve into a little bit more of what Search looked like, let's look into the idiots of the internet
Starting point is 01:23:42 and see what they think of Ultra. It is the internet. It is the internet. All right, I thought this episode would provide some fantastic idiot commentary and holy shit was I right. The first video I looked at when I just went on YouTube and I titled, you just searched for MK Ultra, it's titled,
Starting point is 01:24:02 Katie Perry, the MK Ultra Illuminati Puppet of the Elite, posted by Vigilant Citizen last month. It already has hundreds of thousands of views. It's a video trying to show that Katy Perry has been brainwashed by the MK Ultra project that is apparently still going on. They took footage from a recent therapy session of sorts that she did for Iceland. User Tina R. Posts after watching the video, that helped me part of the end was creep.
Starting point is 01:24:27 She wasn't joking, looked like she was in a deep MK state to which KC MX replies, Tina R, it was definitely a humiliation ritual. If you know about MK, you will know about why they do them. Same thing when Kanye humiliated Taylor Swift and then done a song saying, I made the bitch famous. He done exactly that because by taking part
Starting point is 01:24:49 in that humiliation ritual, she became initiated as an illuminati puppet like the rest of them. Majority of the celebs have taken part in that at some point or another in their careers to which Tina R. Reaffirms, K M. XX, yep, you're right. Definitely a humiliation-richal, some kind. SMH, shake him ahead. No, Tina R and Casey M. XX, I'm shaking my head.
Starting point is 01:25:14 So let me get this straight. You clearly believe that Project Ultra is still around that they've mastered mind control and that they're using it to turn celebrities into mind control puppets. No, they haven't. Now I'll tell you why. If they have mastered mind control, truly accomplished that, then to turn celebrities into mind control puppets. No, they haven't. I'll tell you why. If they have mastered mind control, truly accomplished that, then they would just be mind
Starting point is 01:25:28 control. And you know, everyone in the media, you know, high ranking government officials, big corporations, and to pushing some narrative that, you know, worked much better for them than dick around with Katy Perry. There be no need to distract the public with celebrities because the poor would be mind control and to be happy about being poor. Foreign leaders would be mind controlled and to never bother us. There would be no national debt.
Starting point is 01:25:48 You could mind-control the IMF, World Banks, Foreign Banks, foreign leaders into absolving our debt. There would be no need for the world to be as turbulent as it is right now if a small group of people had the power just to totally control how the rest of us think. But no, but no, you think they're going to use that unbelievable godlike power to fuck with Katy Perry. Okay. Here's another video called Undeniable Proof and Footage Illuminati, MK Ultra, Mind Control,
Starting point is 01:26:13 and Cloning Malfunctions Exposed. All right. First off, I want you to feel for this. I want you to listen to a little bit of this video. Listen to this horse shit. True, Ben Valf here. And today we're going to be going over cloning MK Ultra and the mind control and the illuminati
Starting point is 01:26:29 that's behind it indeed. Now I've covered cloning before it in the past. And I've talked about cloning centers and the MK Ultra program, but this time I'm actually going to show you footages of clone malfunctions and even the MK Ultra program so you can see it right in front of you and See what really goes on and helly would indeed Now just just this guy's voice not to be a dick
Starting point is 01:26:56 But if you had to bet your life on like is this guy recording this audio from his his parents house or from like a weird like like a weird, like a, you know, you know, like a picture like a room with a lot of age inappropriate kind of posters on the walls. Like he's, you know, he's 35, but his room is decorated mostly in Pokemon posters, kind of vibe,
Starting point is 01:27:20 or is it more that way? Or is it more like he's got a couple kids, he's got a house, he's recording this from his office at work where he has a solid job. You know, just basically like, did this sound like somebody who may have their shit together or somebody on the absolute fringes of the society? So let's just, I just want to point that out.
Starting point is 01:27:43 Okay. Okay. So now this is footage of a Katy Perry concert where she's acting like she's feeling off. And then he has the word on the screen, clone malfunction as she seems to act, act apparently a little bit off. She She's saying I'm not feeling so well. He is that captioned, and he says, wait for it. It gets quiet. Now, he writes spiraling out of control as she continues with her obviously stage choreography. And she does a prat ball on the stage. She gets carried off by security.
Starting point is 01:28:32 The sad music, he says he says cue in the sad music. But dancers clearly on cue come out. So that's all he sees. It's obviously to me when you watch the video, it's obviously just part of the show. No one seems alarmed in the crowd. No one seems alarmed in the crowd. No one seems alarmed in the band right next to her. They just keep playing no weird looks towards her. This is obviously part of the show. Okay. And then somehow though, truth unveiled 777, this person that posted this video, he uses this pop star performing on stage in a very
Starting point is 01:29:05 normal pop star way as proof of cloning and proof of mk ultra mind control typing. Even if the Katy Perry performance was staged and part of the show, this is once again one of the many all caps. Covert and subtle ways that the elite are literally putting the cloning MK Ultra mind control agenda right in front of our faces, exclamation points, several of them. Plus the all caps whole world is a stage indeed. This is no different. Do you hear what this ass clown is saying? Even if the show is a normal show, still proof of cloning and mind control. Come on, you guys wake up having normal looking people act normally.
Starting point is 01:29:45 That's how they get you. That's exactly how they get you. Making everything seem totally normal, having things work like they're supposed to. That's when the CIA is controlling our minds the most. That's brilliantly idiotic. You can't argue with someone who uses things not seeming normal and things seeming normal,
Starting point is 01:30:02 both as undeniable proof of something nonsensical. You can never out debate just utter insanity. Under the same video, user daily content chimes in with, I believe in MK Ultra, but not in cloning to which user Mike Johnson comes back with, cloning is not a big deal. They admitted cloning in the 70s. This is 2017. They've been cloning for centuries. I love cloning is no big deal. What are you talking about? Just clones man, shit. Clones have been around for hundreds of years bro.
Starting point is 01:30:34 They make them, you know, they just fucking, they make them in clone factories, wake up dude. You gotta stay woke bro. No big deal man. I would love to see this guy. Like, I love to see this guy questioned by Anderson Cooper or somebody. So you know, just, so how do you think people
Starting point is 01:30:48 were being cloned hundreds of years ago when modern medicine hadn't been invented yet in world leaders and the wealthy were still dying of basic infections? Well, you know, you know, Luminati, M.K. Ultraman, Demonstrires motherfuckers, you know, well, that's how they do this shit, you know what I'm saying? Uh huh, that actually didn't answer any part of my question
Starting point is 01:31:08 in even the most miniscule of ways. So I will ask it again, how were human beings being cloned hundreds of years ago when no single doctor had ever claimed to have successfully cloned a human in the history of ever? And the medical community has only recently begun to acknowledge it could actually happen in the near future. It's clones, bro.
Starting point is 01:31:28 It's no big deal. Do you even know what a question is? Do you understand how a question works? Clones, bro. Well, user Crimson Land 1 seems even dumber than Mike Johnson, typing the following idiot gold types. How could you not believe in cloning? He actually types that many haus.
Starting point is 01:31:51 I might have missed if you guys started to kind of choke out. They cloned his sheep like what? 20 years ago and you honestly can't believe they're not cloning humans. Get real fool. Look at the TV 20 years ago, bro. And look at the end of the day. This is just one example that he ends with. Don't be a dumb-o.
Starting point is 01:32:07 And don't be a dumb-o, you guys. Dollar the sheep was cloned back in 1996, you know? 21 years ago, he was right about that. But, uh, shit face, uh, Katy Perry is 32 years old. She's born in 1984, which would mean Crimson Land One that this upgrade in cloning technology would have had to take in place 12 years before The sheep was cloned. Why? Because cloning doesn't mean replicating a fully grown person That's something you probably saw on some shitty science fiction movie. You must look for a documentary. You fucking idiot
Starting point is 01:32:38 My god, I'm sorry I've this segment seems cruel sometimes, but I think it is important to have a weekly reminder of just you know Just how how necessary basic education is. Education is so important. Teach children, proper deductive reasoning skills, teach them critical thinking, encourage them to read, academic literature, study science, mathematics, in addition to history, and the arts and I promise, they will not grow up to be Crimson Land One, and the world's going to be a better place for all of us. You know, everyone who has even a little education knows that other than Dolly the sheep, the only mammal that has ever been cloned is Bojangles. Bojangles was cloned by Project
Starting point is 01:33:09 Ultra Agents 1959 to create a race of super dogs, 50, three-legged, one-eyed pit bulls were given LSD and dropped into Cuba to stabilize the existing government and turn back the castroled communist. Why were they given Elsi? I don't know. I don't know why. That part doesn't make sense, but it happened in a backfire. And the scientists were unable to clone Bojangles, his patriotism. That's where they messed up.
Starting point is 01:33:35 They weren't able to clone patriotism, and the clone Bojangles is ended up being communist. And that made it possible for the CIA to never assassinate Castro. That's what got Castro in power, was the Bojangles' clones. And they still live in the jungles of Cuba to this day. Look it up on a website in my head. That's some history for you right there. Seriously though, enough of my idiotic thoughts
Starting point is 01:34:00 have back to these idiots. Finally, just another day, at the end of this very long thread of comments, some mind numbingly idiotic, so uncreatively idiotic, they're not even worth digging into in this segment. User, the mighty red panda eloquently takes a hard truth shit in the middle of their simpleton shindig, typing, you're all insane. You know that right?
Starting point is 01:34:20 You claim to be the ones with open minds and us the sheep. But all I've seen in the comments of these videos and the videos themselves are people following blind faiths, fights breaking out over both theorists and nonbelievers not being tolerant for others' opinions, and a whole lot of claims with a minuscule amount of evidence. Seriously, I consider myself to be a pretty progressive and open-minded guy, but I never believe anything without seeing proof, and I rarely do I ever, and rarely do I ever see accurate proof to support these crackpot claims you all keep spewing.
Starting point is 01:34:50 You're the true sheep here. Following blindly a resistance led by an uneducated cynical and downright intolerant mechaliniac who asked to deceive others to feel better about the fact that they never understood the way the world actually works. Well, zapAP! Take that
Starting point is 01:35:06 truth and bailed 777. If only you were intellectually capable of understanding how he just destroyed your entire life's focus, you realize that you're not uncovering any hidden truths, but are instead but one of the many idiots of the internet. It is an internet. It's an internet. M.K. Ultra, do I think it happened? Yeah, yeah I do. I know it did. I read some of the source documents, documents, the CIA themselves declassified.
Starting point is 01:35:35 At first the idea of the CIA slipping LSD and Miranda people's drinks or injecting it into prisoners sounded like true conspiracy nut gibberish to me. Sounded like something that truth unveiled 777 will be blabbing about, or some dude on the street wearing the aluminum foil hat will be screaming at the sky about. But now, I'm a believer, 100%. And who knows how far they really took experiments? Well, never know, basic logic tells me
Starting point is 01:35:54 that the most damning documents always get destroyed. I mean, come on. You know, this is an agency that is given unsuspecting people, large doses of LSD. This is an agency created to covertly overthrow governments. They're trained across ethical lines. So do you think that people trained across ethical lines on a regular basis are also gonna be the kind of people
Starting point is 01:36:15 who just keep every document that could possibly incriminate them? There's no way. They've burned in that shit. That stuff's going through the shredder. Not only do I believe all this happened, I understand why, man, it was a different cultural going through the shredder. Not only do I believe all this happened, I understand why. Man, it was a different cultural climate during the Cold War.
Starting point is 01:36:27 If you truly believe that Soviets are one step away from mastering mind control and taking down America with it, of course you're going to do anything you can to try and stop that. Of course you're going to try and discover things like mind control first. And as I said before, the experiments didn't stop when Altru did. In June of 1964, MK Search was launched. MK Search shifted the focus from mind control to products that address stresses, society wide, could topple nations through a different sort of espionage.
Starting point is 01:36:51 Kind of more practical stuff. And frankly, a little bit more genius-like stuff like developing a bacteria that corrupts oil so that the contaminated oil fows any engine in encounters. They tried to actually use that in Cuba in the late 1960s and 1970s. I mean, that's genius, man. Tainter oil, foul every automobile, boat, plane, in addition to destroying oil-based production and industrial facilities. Man, you do that.
Starting point is 01:37:13 You collapse the entire economy of a nation, making their government a lot easier to overthrow. 1966, the CIA funded a former agent, JC King's new company, the Amazon Drug Company, and King Scour, the Amazon Jungle for years, looking for some previously unknown plant with properties that maybe could finally make mind-control or selective amnesia possible, maybe finally be synthesized in some magical truth serum. And I'm sure there's still research and stuff today
Starting point is 01:37:35 on some level, you know, I'm sure they're doing stuff we don't know about, that's literally their job. To do shit, we don't know about. That's why some projects are classified. We don't get to know about them, you know? And I'm sure a lot of them are necessary on some level, or at least worth looking into. Who knows? And they may have some, you know, truly mind blowing technology or new drug that would just scare the shit out of us if we truly realize it exists. They may have aliens at Area 51 for all I know. Who knows? I don't think they have Roswell
Starting point is 01:37:58 aliens after sucking that topic some time ago. And I don't think that, you know, Katy Perry is a clone, but I do think there's probably some shit out there that's pretty crazy. And one last thought before we hit the wrap up on this, I really, really, really hope that no one ever accomplishes their goals. I hope that no one ever discovers some magical mind controlling elixir, you know, or technique to control minds, because if they do, God help us all. What kind of world is that going to look like if someone gets ahold of that godlike power? Alright, time for some talk 5 takeaways. Time shut, tough 5 takeaways. Number 1, CIA agents working on Project MK Ultra in the early 50s with spike each other's drinks with LSD at work. And you thought things got weird at your job.
Starting point is 01:38:42 Number 2, the CIA is responsible for introducing magic mushrooms to America in the 1950s. I've had them a few times, and honestly, they're a lot of fun. Thanks, CIA. Number three, the only thing better than anjima pancake batter, which is delicious, by the way, is exploding anjima pancake batter. Holy shit, can I please have some of that?
Starting point is 01:39:01 Maybe I'll have pancakes tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll blow up my neighbor's shed. I got both possibilities sitting right there in a nice little box. Number four, project MK Ultra was about a lot of things, but mostly it was about LSD, so much LSD, like dosing prisoners with LSD daily for over two months, kind of LSD,
Starting point is 01:39:19 which even after having taken LSD only once in my life, I can confidently say is way too much. Number five, new info. Ted Gazzinski, aka the Unibomber, aka Future Time Sucks subject, aka the man who would mail or deliver 16 package bombs to scientists, academics, and others over 17 years, killing three people and injuring 23 attended Harvard as a 16 yearyear-old student in 1958 and was an early participant in an MK-Ultra experiment. He was involved in an interrogation study designed to weed out potential agents for being
Starting point is 01:39:51 too psychologically weak to a standing interrogation from the enemy. The study was ran by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects, write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken into a room where electrodes were tasked with them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful and brutal critiques about the essays they had just written. Basically, their dreams were then just shit on horrifically. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch videos of themselves
Starting point is 01:40:18 being psychologically attacked multiple, multiple times. Kaczynski claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to any of those being interrogated. Again, he was only 16. These experiments, pair of his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, may have caused Kuzinski to suffer horrible nightmares that eventually drove him into seclusion
Starting point is 01:40:36 and outside of Lincoln, Montana. MK Ultra, may not, you know, they didn't clone, Katy Perry, but they might have created the Unibomber. Time suck, tough five takeaway. All right, little preview, a next week's show now. That was this week's suck, time suck, or no, the bonus episode in the bank. I'll figure out what the next three options are gonna be
Starting point is 01:41:00 for the 900 suck episode and let y'all vote on Instagram to pick your favorites. This Monday on time suck the KKK. I really don't know much about the Clue Clux clan, but after the recent events in Charlottesville, I just feel like it's time to suck on these shitheads. I suspect the entire episode is going to feel like one big ol' idiot to the internet segment and I like it. How many people in the U.S. are still racist enough in 2017 to put on white hoods and march
Starting point is 01:41:22 and protest against race relations, you know. What are these people actually believe in? What are they actually trying to accomplish? Have any of them ever graduate in high school? Their hate-filled history thoroughly explained, examined, and probably, you know, seriously mocked, let's be honest, on Monday. So that's what's ahead, and now let's take a second to see what's been covered. Let's look back with some time of sucker updates. Okay, so if you're new to the suck, this is where listeners update the time of the community with changes to previous stories, corrections to mistakes
Starting point is 01:41:57 I've made, or just write in and share how much the suck may mean to them. Quick pronunciation update from a few suckers Britain's reading festival, as I said, where Nirvana had lined, is pronounced a writing festival, reading, not reading, like it spelled. Local names, they don't sound like the the fucking words they're clearly spelled like, they have defeated me yet again. Well, thanks to a British
Starting point is 01:42:18 listener, Graham at G H A M O X 14 on Twitter, forgive me, local scoop, let me know, it's the Redding Festival. Also a Slenderman trial update from a couple episodes back, Cole Warren, White Mullins, a few other time suckers wrote in to let me know that Anissa Weir, 15, you know, one of the two girls who stabbed their friend in Wisconsin to appease the online monster known as Slenderman. When all three girls were 12, it just played guilty to attempted second degree homicide as a party to a crime with use of a deadly weapon to avoid a charge of attempted
Starting point is 01:42:46 First degree intentional homicide an instant can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison for this charge or be out by 2020 if a jury determines that she's incapable of being guilty this charge by a reason of mental disease or defect Not really curious as to what the jury decides in this case because you know if she did in fact truly truly believe that she had to kill someone to a Peace slender man and to keep slender man from killing her family, she claimed that she probably would be much better served in a mental health facility for a couple years than a prison for 10 or more than 10. But what I brought up still isn't being discussed
Starting point is 01:43:16 by the mainstream media when I brought up an initial episode, and that's that she didn't just wanna stab some girl to a peace slender man to save her family. She wanted to stab a girl so she could join slender man and be an active part of his murderous crew. So even if there's like some mental illness there, there's also this weird evil intent along with it. So, you know, if that part's true,
Starting point is 01:43:34 shouldn't she receive maybe some additional years of treatment for that? You know, I guess what I'm saying is basically like, should there be different mental health senses depending on what type, like how your mental illness kind of manifests. And you know, like, for example, if you kill somebody because you truly believe they're trying to kill you and your family Shouldn't maybe you receive a lighter type of you know mental health confinement sense
Starting point is 01:43:52 Then if you kill someone because you know the devil told you to and also told you that once you killed them You got to join his team start raping killing everybody else and you thought this sounded fucking great Because you've been waiting for that for years and you just couldn't believe you're good fortune on being offered a wonderful opportunity to join your favorite team. One example is just sad mental illness. The other example seems to be mental illness combined was some evil horrificness. I don't know, I guess mental illness is mental illness,
Starting point is 01:44:16 but in both cases, but maybe you can't chop it up that way. But something still really bothers me about Anissa and Morgan wanting to stab their friend, Peyton, so they can become slender man's proxies. You know, and when you watch their prison confessions, anis and particular seem very excited about the chance to be proxy, which is, you know, basically to be this monster's assistant who gets to also kill kids. So I just creeped me out.
Starting point is 01:44:37 And then another update, depression admission updates. This is a came in from Ryan Johnson, time sucker, wrote in with an update about Monday's Kurt Cobain episode. It just says, Hello, sucklord. I'd like to make a comment regarding the option you shared, or the opinions you shared on the Kurt Cobain podcast about riddling. You mentioned in the podcast that you didn't believe riddling could lead to future drug abuse,
Starting point is 01:44:57 but I would like to kindly disagree. I feel that my experience taking Adderall was very similar to Kurtz and that when you were taking a drug as strong as Adderall Riddle and daily for a long period of time, your body as well as your mind starts to crave the euphoria that it gives you. It may help many people, but for me, I feel that it really changed my brain chemistry
Starting point is 01:45:14 to the point where three years off of it, I'm still struggling with alcohol dependence. Say what you want about clinical trials proving this wrong, but you can't deny the drug spikes dopamine levels in your brain, and to do that daily, you become dependent on some type of high I hope this made a little bit of sense it did and I really wanted to share my point of view with you So you can better understand where a curt and many people may be going through what they may be going through
Starting point is 01:45:35 Also, the podcast keep on sucking. Yes. Yes. You keep on sucking. Hail Nimrod Brian Thanks for sharing that story and sorry to hear about your struggles man personal first-hand experience is hard to ignore and you know And unlike you I don't have any with Riddle and Arrall. Never took it. And just like you, though, Kurt did feel that having that feeling of euphoria as a kid be dissociated with a pill made him more likely to take drugs later on.
Starting point is 01:45:56 And you know what? That might be totally true. It does make it sense to me on a gut level that that could be very real. No matter what the cause, drug addiction and depression are real and prevalent things. And if one or both ever lead anyone listening to this to some horrible thoughts, call that number I mentioned last week, 1-800-273-8255. That's the suicide prevention hotline, 1-800-273-8255.
Starting point is 01:46:19 And your message is a good one, Ryan, to remember that certain child experiences do predispose some people to have a harder time with addiction later in life. And because of that, it's good to approach addiction with more empathy, excuse me, and less judgment. You know, I wonder how Kurt could have taken his own life with a little baby at home, with so many people who loved his art so much, but I also, you know, have never been addicted to heroin. I don't know how that feels.
Starting point is 01:46:39 I didn't have his childhood. I didn't have his genetic makeup, which included numerous suicides in his family. So maybe instead of feeling anger towards him for doing that, you know, I should feel sorry for him that he wasn't able to get the help that he clearly needed. That being said, if anyone listening commits suicide for any reason, you are eternally banished from Nimrod's Alpha and Omega Ball sack. And as I said last week, you know, you're Monday, you're doomed to be stuck in Nimrod's tight, hairy stinky bottle forever, you know, rules, rules.
Starting point is 01:47:03 Speaking of rules, this might be the fourth update today. When I said, I know I only stick to three, but fuck it. A lot of people wrote in after hearing the Kurt Cobain episode, sharing their own battles with depression and suicidal thoughts. A time-soaker named Nick was one of those fine folks and he wrote in saying, I want to let you know that I really appreciate you talking about your past depression problems and suicidal thoughts.
Starting point is 01:47:21 I know it's never easy to talk about and be that personal stranger's. That's why I love your comedy, that's why I love your comedy, or sorry, that's why I love your comedy for years and love your podcasts. I contemplated suicide 10 years ago and had the memory of having the rope around my neck
Starting point is 01:47:36 around two o'clock in the morning and by the grace of Nimrod, my mother knocked on the door because she woke up with a bad feeling. I unlocked the door and said everything was okay. And to this day she has no idea what she stopped me because I freaked out. It seems like a haze because I honestly don't believe
Starting point is 01:47:51 how I could think that way now. I look at my daughter and I don't have those hopeless feelings, but I keep that feeling to help people as a firefighter slash EMT and appreciate that you use your gift of comedy to also help people. I proudly wear my time stock t-shirt everywhere. Honestly, for my heart, thank you for doing what you do. Keep on sucking.
Starting point is 01:48:06 Well, damn it. It got me. You can't be right in the heart box there, they're Nick. Wow, man. This and other emails, you know, I like that email. Really, really touch me, man.
Starting point is 01:48:16 I really touch me this past week. It's nice to know that we can all help each other. Feel a little better by sharing how, you know, sometimes we feel like shit. Once again, you time suckers prove that you're the cream of the fucking crop. I love you people. I love you.
Starting point is 01:48:28 I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Starting point is 01:48:35 I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Starting point is 01:48:43 I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you by someone who you even think may look like someone who could even play a CIA agent on TV. Don't go get in the bottomy, just because it's still technically legal. Think twice. Before shocking the shit out of your brain, trust no one, except me. Hail, name Rod, praise both jangles, peace be with Michael Motherfucka McDonald and keep on... Suck it.
Starting point is 01:49:04 Thank you.

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