The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2183 - Norman Ohler

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:13.000 Pleasure to meet you.

00:00:14.000 I'm very happy to be here.

00:00:16.000 I'm actually quite thrilled.

00:00:17.000 I'm quite thrilled to have you here.

00:00:19.000 This is your book.

00:00:20.000 It's called Tripped!

00:00:21.000 Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age.

00:00:26.000 First of all, how did you get involved in studying this?

00:00:30.000 Well, this had a lot to do with my previous book, which is called Blitz, Drugs in the Third Reich.

00:00:36.000 And I mean, the Nazis were really into meth, basically. 0.58

00:00:40.000 They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can change the war effort.

00:00:47.000 They basically doped their soldiers. 0.92

00:00:49.000 So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitz.

00:00:53.000 And also, I spoke about Hitler's consumption, which is quite outrageous, actually.

00:00:58.000 And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives because I'm not a historian.

00:01:03.000 I usually write novels.

00:01:05.000 I started out writing three novels and then suddenly I became a nonfiction writer.

00:01:09.000 I was trying to understand what does that mean.

00:01:12.000 And I thought it meant to do historical writing to actually go into archives and look at original documents and not just lean on other books, which is what many historians actually do, which I found out later.

00:01:23.000 They just read books.

00:01:24.000 I think we're good to go.

00:01:32.000 I think we're good to go.

00:01:47.000 So it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at, because they wrote down everything, like every experiment the Nazis did in concentration camps was like written down because it was like pseudoscience.

00:01:59.000 So I found documents while I was researching Blitz relating to tests with psychoactive substances.

00:02:06.000 And that was like That was not what I expected because the Nazis had been enthusiastic about methamphetamine, but that was the first time I saw something that related Nazis and psychedelics.

00:02:20.000 And I thought that's quite strange.

00:02:21.000 That's quite interesting, obviously.

00:02:24.000 I need to get to the bottom of this.

00:02:26.000 So I asked the archivist, can I see all the documents?

00:02:30.000 What did the SS actually do with psychedelics?

00:02:33.000 Which ones did they use?

00:02:34.000 Why did they test them?

00:02:36.000 What were they looking for?

00:02:36.000 And he said, well, I'm very sorry, but all documents are in America because when American military liberated Dachau, one of the things they do is they take a lot of documents and they took all the psychedelic research done by the Nazis with them.

00:02:50.000 So I knew I had to go to America, probably to the National Archives in College Park, close to Washington, biggest archive in the world, find it there.

00:02:59.000 But I didn't have time while I was doing Blitzed.

00:03:01.000 And Blitzed was also already a complete story.

00:03:03.000 So I thought I saved that, that psychedelic theme for another book.

00:03:08.000 And this other book is now being published as Tripped.

00:03:12.000 Wow.

00:03:13.000 So...

00:03:15.000 Before this, you'd had no understanding that the Nazis had used psychedelics.

00:03:20.000 You only knew that they – we all know the meth thing and we've seen Hitler at the 36 Olympics where he's rocking back and forth because he's jacked out of his mind. 0.87

00:03:29.000 I mean, the joke about Blitz is that I was actually the first one to write about this.

00:03:33.000 I mean, now we all know about it.

00:03:35.000 But before that, no one knew about it.

00:03:37.000 Before 2015, when this book was published in Germany, the Nazis were still seen globally and also in Germany as this, like, pure movement that was... 0.61

00:03:48.000 I spoke to my grandfather when I was a teenager, and I was obviously criticizing him for his involvement. 0.99

00:03:54.000 I wanted to know what did he do, and he did some shit. 0.98

00:03:57.000 And then he always said, under Hitler, everything was in order. 0.99

00:04:00.000 He praised that law and order aspect.

00:04:03.000 And that law and order aspect of the Nazis obviously doesn't correspond to like a drug using society.

00:04:09.000 So no one knew that the Nazis were taking drugs until I found out, until I found documents for Blitz. 0.82

00:04:16.000 So, but this, so I was not surprised to see.

00:04:21.000 To find more and more stuff, what they were doing with drugs.

00:04:25.000 But then I was surprised that they actually also used psychedelics because psychedelics were totally new, you know.

00:04:30.000 43 LSD was invented.

00:04:32.000 So it was kind of, I really was wondering whether Nazis already getting their hands on LSD, which was just so new that hardly anyone in the world knew about this.

00:04:41.000 So this is the story of Tripped.

00:04:43.000 So, Hoffman, he synthesized LSD in 1943. Correct.

00:04:49.000 Right?

00:04:49.000 So, was there any evidence of anyone using something similar to LSD before that?

00:04:55.000 I know they've studied some of ancient pottery from Greece and they found ergot in it.

00:05:01.000 And ergot which contains a very similar compound to LSD. Well, ergot is the alkaloid of the fungus, which grows on rye.

00:05:16.000 So from ergot, LSD is made, basically.

00:05:23.000 So actually, LSD is not a synthetic drug, as many people believe, but it actually is based on a fungus extract, which grows on rye.

00:05:31.000 And the Swiss company Sandoz, they produced only ergot-based medicines.

00:05:37.000 They started after the First World War.

00:05:41.000 It was like a start-up.

00:05:43.000 Sandoz was a color manufacturing company.

00:05:46.000 And they made a lot of money after the war because everything had to be rebuilt in Europe.

00:05:50.000 Stuff had to be repainted.

00:05:51.000 So companies that made paint made a lot of money.

00:05:54.000 So they invested in a pharmaceutical branch.

00:05:57.000 And they hired one guy to kind of come up with an idea how to make money in the pharmaceutical world.

00:06:03.000 This guy was Arthur Stoll.

00:06:04.000 He later became the CEO of Sandos.

00:06:06.000 And Arthur Stoll was the first one to crack ergot because this fungus is quite poisonous, actually.

00:06:13.000 In the Middle Ages, this created mass hallucinations in Europe.

00:06:17.000 You know, unwittingly, people were eating, like, contaminated bread.

00:06:21.000 We're having horrific visions.

00:06:23.000 Actually, limbs fell off because this ergot is a very, very poisonous alkaloid.

00:06:29.000 But as we know from Paracelsus, the dosage makes the poison.

00:06:33.000 So that was Stoll's idea.

00:06:35.000 You take a very poisonous thing, the ergot, and you extract, like you're still able to use the force that's within it as a medicine.

00:06:43.000 This is how biochemistry, that's basically the foundation of biochemistry.

00:06:47.000 So, Stoll was able to crack the ergot, and the first medicine he made was a migraine medicine, which came out, I think, in 1923 by Sanders, very successful, so he immediately hit the jackpot.

00:06:58.000 He became like the ergot god of the pharmaceutical world.

00:07:02.000 So he developed more and more medicines with ergot.

00:07:06.000 One of them, for example, is still used today in childbirth.

00:07:09.000 It contracts the blood vessels after the birth so you can stop a bleeding.

00:07:15.000 Otherwise, I guess bleeding would go on much longer in childbirth.

00:07:19.000 So Sanders made the first effective medicine because ergot kind of makes the blood vessels contract naturally.

00:07:25.000 Weren't they trying to develop a drug to induce labor when they initially created LSD? Yeah, this is all the ergot kind of research.

00:07:35.000 I mean, the whole company was just doing ergot.

00:07:38.000 So they were looking at all kinds of things that ergot could be good for, just to have new products on the market.

00:07:45.000 Wow.

00:07:46.000 And Ergot before, I mean, this is a company based in Switzerland, which is now Novartis, something like the fourth biggest pharmaceutical company in the world or something.

00:07:55.000 I mean, a very successful company still.

00:07:57.000 They bought Sandoz and now it's Novartis, but it's kind of the same thing.

00:08:01.000 So Sandoz at one point needed so much ergot that they started manufacturing it in Switzerland.

00:08:08.000 Like they went into a specific region called the Emmental, which was famous for its cheese.

00:08:13.000 And it's also famous for its bad weather.

00:08:16.000 So mold grows on rye anyhow.

00:08:18.000 So they thought this is the right area to industrialize the ergot manufacturing, like the growth of ergot.

00:08:27.000 And the farmers were like, we're always trying to get away from the ergot. 1.00

00:08:31.000 The ergot is poisonous.

00:08:32.000 And suddenly they had to make it.

00:08:34.000 And the Swiss company paid 20 francs I think a kilo, 20 francs a kilo, and rye was only like 7 francs a kilo, so the farmers switched to basically producing poison.

00:08:45.000 I mean, not poison, but a very poisonous mushroom, you could say, like a fungus.

00:08:50.000 You don't want to eat this thing.

00:08:52.000 That was the problem.

00:08:53.000 You harvest rye, you make bread out of it, and then there's a little bit of ergot, because on some of the rye, ergot grows, and then the bread is poisonous.

00:09:03.000 That was the problem in the Middle Ages.

00:09:05.000 Farmers don't like it.

00:09:07.000 Now they had to produce it.

00:09:08.000 And suddenly Sandoz in Basel, Switzerland, had huge amounts of ergot in their storage.

00:09:16.000 And they needed to make more and more products to use the raw materials that they had so expensively produced in the Edmonton.

00:09:23.000 So Stoll hired further chemists.

00:09:26.000 One of them was Albert Hoffman, the famous discoverer of LSD. So he was not looking for a mind-blowing drug or anything.

00:09:33.000 He was looking for actually a stimulant because this was late 30s in Germany, Nazi Germany.

00:09:40.000 A stimulant that was made from the nicotine acid, nicotine acid diathlamide.

00:09:48.000 No, it was actually a Swiss product, but from another company.

00:09:51.000 Nicotine acid diathlamide was, I don't know the brand name.

00:09:55.000 It had a brand name.

00:09:56.000 It was quite successful medicine.

00:09:57.000 And he thought, if I take...

00:10:00.000 Lysergic acid, diathlamide, lysergic acid being the acid within the ergot, maybe we'll also have a potent stimulant.

00:10:06.000 But they weren't looking for a stimulant actually for the mind, they were looking for a physical stimulant, something like Pervitin, like meth, like something that keeps you going.

00:10:15.000 I mean, this was at a time when stimulants were, you know, sought after.

00:10:21.000 They didn't have coffee like we have today.

00:10:23.000 We just go, we drink a coffee in the morning.

00:10:25.000 They didn't really have that.

00:10:26.000 That's why methamphetamine was so successful in Germany. 0.91

00:10:29.000 Because you could just, you know, buy it anywhere and you take a tablet in the morning and it's like drinking, like being on coffee the whole time, you know?

00:10:36.000 So the stimulant was what he was looking for.

00:10:41.000 And then, like, something came into his bloodstream.

00:10:45.000 It's a bit, you know, he tries later, he tried to make it a bit mythical sounding, like somehow the substance got into his bloodstream and And he felt like weird sensations and he saw different colors.

00:10:57.000 So he thought, this is actually a very different type of thing.

00:11:02.000 Like, what is this lysergic acid, diathlamide LSD? What is it?

00:11:07.000 So he did then a first self-experiment, which was kind of normal at the time.

00:11:11.000 He took a very, very low dose, what he thought, 250 micrograms.

00:11:16.000 But as we know today, that's actually quite a high dose of LSD. So he had an extremely strong experience and he told this to Stoll, the CEO. He said, I just took this like 250 micrograms.

00:11:29.000 I mean, this is a Swiss chemist in a Swiss lab and suddenly he's like full on tripping.

00:11:33.000 He tried to get home somehow.

00:11:35.000 His assistant brought him home on a bicycle.

00:11:37.000 He was at his house and the walls started collapsing onto him.

00:11:42.000 And the doctor came and he said to his doctor, I think I'm going mad.

00:11:46.000 I poisoned myself.

00:11:48.000 I don't know what's going on.

00:11:49.000 The doctor was feeling his pulse, pulse normal, like...

00:11:53.000 Eyes normal.

00:11:54.000 Like on LSD, you don't have a strong physical reaction, but you have a very strong mental reaction.

00:11:59.000 And the doctors just couldn't see it.

00:12:01.000 And before, actually, Hoffman had tested LSD on mice at Sanders, and the mice also didn't show anything because you can't...

00:12:10.000 They didn't run around excitedly.

00:12:12.000 If you give mice cocaine, you can see the difference.

00:12:17.000 But if you give them LSD, you can't see it because you can't get into their mind.

00:12:19.000 Maybe they don't even have a trip because they don't have a conscious like us.

00:12:23.000 But certainly on humans, it works very potently.

00:12:26.000 And so he communicated this with the CEO. And the CEO was like, I don't believe you.

00:12:31.000 I think you made a mistake with the dosage.

00:12:33.000 Then they repeated it.

00:12:35.000 And then they actually created at Sanders, and I think this is kind of funny, if you picture like a conservative pharmaceutical Swiss company in the late 40s in Basel, they created an intoxication room, like they made a nice room within the company.

00:12:51.000 They called it Rauschraum.

00:12:53.000 Rausch meaning intoxication in German.

00:12:55.000 And Hoffman said, I had a very strong Rausch with this stuff.

00:12:58.000 I don't know what this is.

00:13:00.000 So they invited secretaries and bookkeepers and chemists and people working in the cafeteria.

00:13:07.000 They all could come into this room and take LSD. The secretary is actually sitting there typing what they would relate, and they all had a great experience.

00:13:17.000 That's the funny thing, because they had never had any bad...

00:13:20.000 Today when we take LSD, we have so much discourse about LSD in our mind automatically.

00:13:25.000 They didn't have that.

00:13:26.000 They just took...

00:13:27.000 A strangely named substance like LSD-25.

00:13:30.000 They took like 50 micrograms.

00:13:33.000 And they wrote down, I write about this in Tripp, like, for the first time I feel connected to my fellow human being.

00:13:42.000 Some looked out and saw the clouds and had ideas about connectivity and how we are part of the...

00:13:50.000 Of the universe.

00:13:51.000 These kind of hippie, LSD thoughts that we classically associate with, they had them very purely.

00:13:57.000 They just had them, so this was all noted down.

00:14:00.000 And then they were thinking...

00:14:02.000 And this was in 1943. Imagine the situation in Europe in 1943. It's at the height of World War II. People are dead, injured, traumatized.

00:14:14.000 So they thought at Sanders...

00:14:18.000 Maybe this is gonna be like a blockbuster, you know?

00:14:21.000 Then they tested it also on sick people in a hospital in Zurich.

00:14:25.000 They gave it to like a depressed patient.

00:14:27.000 I also studied these reports like a depressed Swiss farmer was like chronically depressed.

00:14:34.000 He takes LSD and he took it like three times and they released him out of the psychiatric ward because he was cured.

00:14:41.000 He was good.

00:14:42.000 He said, I'm fine.

00:14:43.000 I'm not depressed anymore.

00:14:46.000 So, Sandos really thought they had a blockbuster.

00:14:48.000 They thought LSD is going to be the big thing.

00:14:51.000 And the big question, obviously, is what went wrong?

00:14:56.000 That is what interested me in Tripped.

00:14:58.000 What happened?

00:14:59.000 Because also why I researched LSD, and I... I had been interested in LSD for a long time, but then I decided to write a book, and I researched it, and I found a study by a company called Yelousis, which is an American company, their name referring, obviously, to the Greek ritual.

00:15:16.000 And they had done low-dosage tests with LSD on Alzheimer patients, and they found...

00:15:24.000 That the very same receptors that Alzheimer degenerates and kills, these receptors are being stimulated by LSD. So their study, which I then discussed with a leading Alzheimer researcher in Germany,

00:15:40.000 and he also is looking at this white paper and said, this is actually quite good.

00:15:45.000 I said, so when is it going to happen?

00:15:47.000 He said, well, this is a bit more complicated than you think, you know, because LSD is illegal.

00:15:51.000 It's not even...

00:15:52.000 In America, I guess you have, like, universities can do research.

00:15:57.000 But this is also a new thing, you know.

00:15:59.000 When Nixon illegalized LSD in 1966, all the research was illegalized.

00:16:03.000 So...

00:16:03.000 Couldn't even research whether it's as dangerous as the government said it would be.

00:16:08.000 So let me just finish this thought.

00:16:11.000 I bring this white paper to my father because my mother suffers from Alzheimer.

00:16:17.000 And I'm saying to him, I'm writing this book, as you know, and I found this.

00:16:22.000 And shouldn't we have a look at this?

00:16:25.000 Because he takes care of my mother and he's quite frustrated that there's no...

00:16:31.000 Potent medicine available to him that his doctor basically says, sorry.

00:16:37.000 And he's a former judge.

00:16:38.000 He was quite a high judge in Germany.

00:16:40.000 He sent people to prison for drugs.

00:16:44.000 So for him to even consider giving an illegal drug to his wife is a big leap for him, but, you know, he's a rational-thinking man, so he looked at this white paper, he studied it, and he said, you know what?

00:16:58.000 In court, when I was in court as a judge, I always...

00:17:01.000 You don't know what is the truth, but you know what is a good story, like a credible story.

00:17:07.000 That's how I determined as a judge...

00:17:11.000 What I believe.

00:17:12.000 If someone tells something that rings true to me, and right now I'm having a study that LSD is helpful, but also I'm having the law that it's illegal.

00:17:21.000 Can you please find out the true story now?

00:17:24.000 What is LSD? Why is it illegal?

00:17:26.000 So from that point onward, I did the research that is in Tripped, which was supposed to be called LSD for Mom, actually.

00:17:32.000 That was my working title for the book, and I think it's a better title.

00:17:35.000 That's a good title.

00:17:36.000 Yeah, it's a great title.

00:17:37.000 So LSD for Mom, that was my...

00:17:39.000 Who picked Tripped?

00:17:40.000 Did the editors pick Tripped?

00:17:42.000 My German editor didn't want LSD für Mama, which is the German translation, which I think is the perfect title. 1.00

00:17:48.000 It's even better in German, LSD für Mama. 0.68

00:17:51.000 He somehow convinced me to use a different title in Germany.

00:17:55.000 This is translated into many different countries, and they always go to the German translation.

00:18:00.000 If the Germans would have called it LSD for Mama, it would be called LSD for Mom in America, LSD for Mom in France.

00:18:06.000 But because in Germany a different title was chosen, the strongest stuff, which is a little bit different in German, then every country was like thinking, how should we call it?

00:18:16.000 And I guess they call it Trip because of the success of Blitz they wanted to have.

00:18:19.000 But I think LSD for Mom is a better title.

00:18:23.000 I like it.

00:18:23.000 Yeah, it's great.

00:18:25.000 Because it's true, you know, I was then really researching for my father and my mother and I came back after all this research with the Swiss company and the Nazi connection which we'll come to I guess in a second.

00:18:38.000 I came back to my father and I presented him this story and then he decided to actually try it because he said, I understand now that LSD is not illegal because it's dangerous that there are different reasons why it's illegal and these different reasons are explained in Tripped.

00:18:54.000 We spoke, obviously, to my mother also, because you have to get consent.

00:18:59.000 So she gave her consent, and she started using LSD once in a while.

00:19:06.000 Not chronically, obviously, but like twice a week, or maybe the next week only once.

00:19:14.000 Only low dosages, and my father also took them.

00:19:16.000 He never felt anything, because a microdose, you're not supposed to feel a trip or intoxication.

00:19:21.000 It just works in your brain.

00:19:24.000 But my mother actually did feel it because her brain is attacked by Alzheimer's.

00:19:28.000 So for her, that was like, her cheeks became redder.

00:19:32.000 She would look at us.

00:19:33.000 One time, we also then did mushrooms, which is a very similar molecule.

00:19:40.000 Actually, psilocybin is very similar to the LSD molecule.

00:19:43.000 On Mother's Day, we gave her a little piece of mushroom chocolate and she took it and there was a newspaper on the table and she hadn't even looked at newspaper as an object of desire for her for about a year, my father then later told me.

00:19:59.000 And she picked up the newspaper when the chocolate was working and started reading the headlines and my father was like, this is a medicinal miracle.

00:20:08.000 And my father's really like a...

00:20:10.000 Irrational, skeptical guy, you know, but it was amazing.

00:20:14.000 So that is also what I write about in Tripped AK LSD for Mom. 0.91

00:20:18.000 But it's so fascinating.

00:20:20.000 There are so many people suffering from Alzheimer's in the world.

00:20:24.000 And it's illegal basically everywhere except for countries like Portugal that have decriminalized everything.

00:20:31.000 But yet...

00:20:31.000 I mean, dementia is like the pandemic of the future, if I want to use that ugly word pandemic.

00:20:37.000 But...

00:20:39.000 To not allow our scientists to examine this properly.

00:20:47.000 For example, in the pandemic, during the pandemic, Like regulations in regards to developing medicines, a vaccine especially, were lowered because we wanted, the government,

00:21:02.000 the society wanted a vaccine quick.

00:21:06.000 So this is what has to happen with psychedelics now because we are moving.

00:21:12.000 Like in 2050, I read the numbers, they're also in the book, like a lot of people will have dementia.

00:21:18.000 Yeah.

00:21:18.000 Like we will all know someone or we'll have it ourselves or it's going to grow exponentially or at least a lot.

00:21:27.000 So I think our society should actually shift its focus towards preventing that because when I spoke to the Alzheimer expert he said yeah of course this could be you could prevent Alzheimer if you would know like how to stimulate the brain and so far By 2050,

00:21:46.000 153 million people are expected to be living with dementia worldwide, up from 57 million in 2019, largely due to population growth and population aging.

00:21:57.000 Don't they believe that Alzheimer's has something to do with diet as well?

00:22:01.000 Isn't that what they're calling type 3 diabetes?

00:22:03.000 Yeah, and I think it could be true.

00:22:06.000 I mean, the reason for Alzheimer is, you know, you have to see it separately from the cure, you know.

00:22:12.000 The reason, I think, I've come actually to the conclusion that sugar is quite bad for you.

00:22:18.000 Yeah.

00:22:19.000 I was quite a sugar addict.

00:22:22.000 I really was.

00:22:23.000 I could not put down a bar of chocolate.

00:22:26.000 I could not eat one piece.

00:22:28.000 I just couldn't.

00:22:29.000 Because I love it so much.

00:22:30.000 But then I just realized it's not good and I stopped it and it's actually possible to stop.

00:22:34.000 I eat now like a little bit and it's actually no problem.

00:22:38.000 So I think, well, there's a few reasons for dementia.

00:22:43.000 One is also the so-called neuroinflammation of the brain.

00:22:51.000 And that could be caused, obviously, by sugar, by blood.

00:22:58.000 By imbalances in the sugar diet, I think.

00:23:05.000 And the inflammation of the brain, and that is scientifically proven, is being decreased if you take psychedelics.

00:23:12.000 So if you take psychedelics, every time you take psychedelics, your neuroinflammation goes down.

00:23:19.000 So that is something that needs to be examined.

00:23:22.000 Like, maybe we should all take, maybe once a week, a low dosage of, let's say, LSD or psilocybin.

00:23:30.000 Maybe we could prevent, like, 50% of dementia.

00:23:33.000 I mean, I think it's quite plausible, and I think not to look into it...

00:23:39.000 It's not very smart by society because the costs of dementia, I mean, the human costs, my father suffers quite a bit.

00:23:47.000 My mother, obviously, she has the disease she suffers. 1.00

00:23:51.000 The family suffers.

00:23:53.000 If someone in the family has Alzheimer's, the whole family suffers.

00:23:58.000 And of course, our medical system is very expensive to treat dementia, like put them in homes, whatever.

00:24:05.000 So I think we're making a big mistake by not examining this.

00:24:11.000 Absolutely.

00:24:12.000 Well, it's just a stunning amount of ignorance on our part.

00:24:16.000 All the, at least anecdotal evidence of the positive benefits of some of these things, particularly in microdose usage.

00:24:25.000 Well, it's just not a focus of politicians.

00:24:30.000 To legalize drugs has not become a very popular meme among politicians in the 20th century.

00:24:39.000 This is also what I examined in Tripped.

00:24:41.000 I kind of looked at where did it actually start?

00:24:44.000 Where does this prohibitionist approach come from?

00:24:47.000 Because it's kind of weird.

00:24:49.000 As a child...

00:24:52.000 I watched Star Trek.

00:24:54.000 It was an American TV show, even on German television.

00:24:58.000 It was called Raumschiff Enterprise in German, like Spaceship Enterprise.

00:25:03.000 And I was always very touched by the beginning when they say, boldly go where no man has gone before.

00:25:10.000 That was for me the American, like the Western philosophy, to always transcend where you are and that totally contradicts our prohibitionist policies.

00:25:27.000 It's like a chemical wall that the government is setting up in our brain, saying, like, you can go this much with stimulating your brain, but you're not allowed to go further.

00:25:36.000 Like, you're not allowed to use LSD, which does stimulate the H2TA receptors.

00:25:44.000 I think it contradicts the Western philosophy, and actually also I think it contradicts the idea of democracy.

00:25:53.000 Which I always was hot for.

00:26:00.000 I grew up in a small town in West Germany, which was actually occupied by American forces, so I was very much connecting with American culture early on, and I always liked...

00:26:19.000 This is, for me, the strength of the West.

00:26:23.000 This is, for example, not what Islam offers. 0.96

00:26:26.000 Islam says you're not allowed to intoxicate.

00:26:28.000 You can only believe in this.

00:26:30.000 You cannot go further.

00:26:31.000 This is actually the problem of all monotheistic religions.

00:26:34.000 But for me, the West was always going beyond that.

00:26:38.000 So I was curious, how did this happen, this prohibition?

00:26:43.000 Was there one person that decided, no, people cannot use this anymore?

00:26:46.000 And there actually is one person, and his name is Harry J. Ansling.

00:26:50.000 I'm sure you're familiar with the guy.

00:26:52.000 Sure.

00:26:52.000 So for a trip, I also went to the Harry J. Anslinger Archives at Penn State University, which was quite interesting because you can see in the archive and in the way it smells and what he collected and the letters he wrote and the language he used.

00:27:09.000 It's a very closed mindset.

00:27:11.000 And he was actually able to convince Democratic and Republican presidents.

00:27:16.000 He was like serving under...

00:27:17.000 He was bipartisan, basically.

00:27:20.000 So his anti-drug...

00:27:23.000 Regime that he was able to create and he created it because the alcohol prohibition failed and his federal bureau of narcotics was about to be extinct because he had completely failed with the alcohol prohibition and then he thought I have to find a new enemy and the new enemy for him was actually cannabis and he coined the word marijuana because marijuana sounds foreign,

00:27:46.000 it sounds Mexican, it sounds something that we don't want in our clean white American society. 1.00

00:27:52.000 Well, it was a Mexican wild tobacco.

00:27:54.000 It was slang for a Mexican wild tobacco.

00:27:56.000 It wasn't cannabis.

00:27:58.000 Yeah, right.

00:27:59.000 Yeah.

00:28:04.000 That is...

00:28:05.000 So basically what we could say is that...

00:28:09.000 Unfortunately, Ansinger was quite a racist.

00:28:13.000 He openly used words to describe Afro-American colleagues that shouldn't be used by white men, I guess, in memos.

00:28:24.000 This went all the way up to the president.

00:28:27.000 But they always kept him because he was the man that defends America from the scourge of...

00:28:46.000 I think?

00:28:50.000 And so the reasons for the prohibition in America is not that this Anslinger was actually studying LSD and finding out that this is actually dangerous or marijuana is dangerous.

00:29:01.000 We really, even though we're free in our society, we have to curb this.

00:29:08.000 This is not how it went.

00:29:10.000 He wanted to attack the jazz scene and he knew that the jazz musicians were smoking a lot of weed.

00:29:15.000 So he's...

00:29:17.000 It's very hard to make it illegal to play jazz, but you can make marijuana illegal, and then you can target jazz musicians.

00:29:24.000 So it's got racial profiling.

00:29:26.000 Why were they going after jazz musicians?

00:29:28.000 He hated jazz.

00:29:29.000 He thought that...

00:29:34.000 I think it's a sexual thing, actually. 0.98

00:29:37.000 Because he actually said once, when black men smoke reefer, they think they're as good as white men and they're going to sleep without women or something like that. 0.96

00:29:46.000 That was kind of the world that he was...

00:29:50.000 So was it because the jazz musicians were on stage and people loved them?

00:29:55.000 They were cool.

00:29:56.000 They were only cool because they smoked the weed.

00:29:59.000 That gave them that diabolical power over the audience and the groove.

00:30:04.000 If you take the weed away from them, they're going to be boring people.

00:30:10.000 So that guy really did a lot of damage in my mind to the American society.

00:30:15.000 It's just stunning that 90 years later we're still dealing with the aftermath of that, you know, and also in conjunction with his union with William Randolph Hearst.

00:30:25.000 William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, had a vested financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal or making marijuana illegal because of hemp, right?

00:30:36.000 You know the whole story about the decorticator?

00:30:38.000 Yeah, are you talking about the wood now?

00:30:41.000 No, decorticator was a device that was manufactured.

00:30:46.000 It was created in the early 1930s and it was on the cover of Popular Science magazine.

00:30:52.000 When they called it, they said, hemp, the new billion-dollar crop of the future.

00:30:56.000 So because hemp was a very difficult plant to take the fiber and convert it into paper and convert it into textiles and things like that, they used slave labor for the most part until the cotton gin came along.

00:31:11.000 When the cotton gin came along, that became more effective to use cotton than to use hemp.

00:31:16.000 It was easier.

00:31:17.000 Then in the early 1930s, they came out with the decorticator.

00:31:21.000 The decorticator was this machine.

00:31:23.000 See if you could get a version of that, Jamie.

00:31:26.000 So the decorticator allowed them to effectively...

00:31:29.000 That's the decorticator.

00:31:30.000 So this machine, they would run the hemp stalks through it, and it would break them down far more economically, much, much easier, more effectively than the way they would do it by hand previously.

00:31:44.000 Oh, right.

00:31:44.000 So hemp, the new billion-dollar crop...

00:31:47.000 So hemp, you know, find the cover of that magazine.

00:31:50.000 So hemp was a far more effective paper.

00:31:54.000 It's much more durable.

00:31:55.000 I'll give you take hemp, very difficult to tear.

00:31:57.000 In fact, the earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence were on hemp.

00:32:03.000 So there's a billion dollar crop.

00:32:05.000 So this was Popular Science magazine.

00:32:09.000 And William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst Publications, he also owned Paper Mills.

00:32:15.000 So he had thousands and thousands of acres of trees and forests that they were converting into paper, and now all of a sudden there was this new product that was going to destabilize his Yeah,

00:32:32.000 hemp is a disruptor.

00:32:33.000 Exactly.

00:32:34.000 So when they made marijuana illegal, a lot of the people that were voting on this didn't even understand they were making cannabis illegal.

00:32:41.000 They didn't understand that it was the same thing.

00:32:44.000 They didn't understand that it was the same literal textile that created cannabis.

00:32:50.000 All the great works, like if you look at, you know, Leonardo da Vinci's paintings.

00:32:56.000 It's on hemp.

00:32:57.000 It's on canvas.

00:32:59.000 It's on cannabis paper.

00:33:00.000 It's on a very durable form of paper.

00:33:04.000 Have you ever touched cannabis paper, like hemp paper?

00:33:07.000 It's crazy.

00:33:08.000 It's really hard to tear.

00:33:09.000 My friend Todd McCormick, he was an early grower in Los Angeles when marijuana was medically legal, and he wound up going to jail because in federal court you couldn't say that it was for medical purposes.

00:33:25.000 They just prosecuted him based on the fact that he was a drug dealer instead of someone who was...

00:33:32.000 Legally in the state of California growing medical marijuana.

00:33:36.000 He had a stalk on his table of hemp.

00:33:39.000 I don't know if you've ever felt a hemp stalk.

00:33:40.000 Have you ever picked one up?

00:33:41.000 No.

00:33:42.000 It is crazy.

00:33:43.000 It's like styrofoam.

00:33:44.000 You pick it up, it feels like nothing.

00:33:46.000 But it's hard, like oak.

00:33:49.000 But it's not heavy.

00:33:50.000 It's very strange.

00:33:52.000 It's like an alien plant.

00:33:53.000 Very, very weird.

00:33:54.000 So that stuff converts incredibly to clothing, You can make building materials out of it.

00:34:01.000 There's a thing called hempcrete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of out of hemp.

00:34:08.000 And it's incredibly sustainable because if you have an acre of trees, if you chop down that acre of trees and make paper out of it, it takes forever to grow enough trees in that acre to grow them to the point where you could harvest them and make paper out of them.

00:34:25.000 Cannabis, if you're growing hemp rather, if you grow hemp stalks in the same field, you got new hemp in a few months.

00:34:33.000 And now you have paper again.

00:34:35.000 So, William Randolph Hearst demonized cannabis for the particular interest that he had with paper, with his paper mills, and to stop the hemp industry.

00:34:47.000 I mean, they were quite close allies in a way, Enslinger and Hearst.

00:34:52.000 And in his publications, the word marijuana was for the first time publicized, so they kind of And with a racial element to it.

00:35:01.000 They worked hand in hand. 1.00

00:35:01.000 They said that blacks and Mexicans were smoking this new drug and raping white women. 1.00

00:35:08.000 Right. 1.00

00:35:08.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:35:09.000 And then the reefer madness movies, which are fantastic pieces of propaganda.

00:35:14.000 They're absolutely hilarious.

00:35:16.000 If you watch them today, especially knowing what we know about marijuana, like these people were just crazed.

00:35:21.000 It was more meth-like than it was, you know, what they were depicting, right?

00:35:26.000 Absolutely.

00:35:27.000 So Anslinger, 90 years ago, the propaganda that he pushed out into society, the way that infected people like a mind virus, the effects of that still today, when people find out that you have taken marijuana or that you regularly enjoy marijuana,

00:35:45.000 people freak out.

00:35:46.000 They're like, what are you doing?

00:35:48.000 What are you doing to yourself?

00:35:49.000 Oh my god, you're out there taking drugs?

00:35:51.000 Meanwhile, this person's on antidepressants, and they drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and take Xanax.

00:35:57.000 Like, there's sanctioned drugs that are far worse for you.

00:36:01.000 It's not a drug-free society.

00:36:03.000 Yeah, I mean, I talked about the sugar thing that I started.

00:36:08.000 Oh, it's a crazy drug.

00:36:09.000 And that actually made me realize that we, as humans, take drugs every day.

00:36:15.000 Like, every human takes drugs every day.

00:36:18.000 I'm drinking coffee.

00:36:19.000 I got these little nicotine pouches.

00:36:21.000 Yeah.

00:36:22.000 Which is interesting, you know, that we don't acknowledge that, really.

00:36:27.000 We think, like, people who are against drugs, they kind of vote.

00:36:30.000 They kind of say we stand for a sober society, but it never is a sober society.

00:36:35.000 No.

00:36:35.000 We just have some legalized drugs and some drugs that are illegalized.

00:36:39.000 My friends that are in Alcoholics Anonymous, they all drink coffee and smoke cigarettes.

00:36:44.000 They're all doing a drug.

00:36:46.000 They're just doing a drug that doesn't completely destroy their life.

00:36:49.000 I mean, I thought about this, you know...

00:36:53.000 Having written Blitz and Tripp, both on drugs and history, I'm now trying to come up with a larger narrative.

00:37:04.000 In your podcast, a lot has been talked about the stoned ape theory, right?

00:37:09.000 I think it's very interesting, and I think it's time for kind of a new world history, as you may.

00:37:16.000 I think we actually are stoned sapiens.

00:37:20.000 I think...

00:37:21.000 That this cognitive revolution that happened in Africa, it's, as Stamets said, it's not a theory.

00:37:30.000 It's a, what is it?

00:37:32.000 A theory is when there's already proof.

00:37:35.000 It's a hypothesis.

00:37:36.000 It's a hypothesis.

00:37:37.000 But I think that a lot speaks for this hypothesis.

00:37:40.000 I think it makes sense if you see that early humans were, for example, depicting mushrooms in drawings, that these mushrooms have some kind of relevance to them.

00:37:53.000 And our edge, which is something that Harari writes about over other...

00:38:01.000 Homos, like the Neanderthals, or also just monkeys, large monkeys. 0.99

00:38:06.000 Our edge was that we had this cognitive revolution, that we had a neocortex forming and that we suddenly had an understanding about time, so we're not just living in the moment,

00:38:22.000 we know there's a past and there's a future.

00:38:25.000 So that creates a different language.

00:38:27.000 And the different language, a more abstract, more complex language than, for example, the apes.

00:38:33.000 Apes can organize up to like a hundred.

00:38:36.000 Then that language kind of fails them.

00:38:39.000 But humans suddenly, not suddenly, I mean, this is over long periods of time, could develop a language that enabled them to form larger groups.

00:38:47.000 That's how they became dominant, also dominant over other homo species like the Neanderthals. 1.00

00:38:54.000 And we know today that they had these plants at their availability, so it makes sense to imagine that actually we found, maybe it was a mushroom, maybe it was iboga,

00:39:10.000 which is something still used in African societies and which now is again being examined as the new psychoactive hot drug.

00:39:18.000 It could be a mixture or some groups could have had this, others could have had that, but it seems to be pretty clear that the founding moment of our race is actually this transcendence.

00:39:30.000 Suddenly you realize this moment where I'm in is not all, there's more.

00:39:36.000 There's a future, there's a past, that is what transcendence is.

00:39:39.000 So we are basically, that's why I call our species, we're stoned sapiens.

00:39:44.000 Like we were stoned from the start.

00:39:46.000 So drugs, which transferred into language, into also music, into rituals, because we wanted to keep the drug also secret from others who are not, you know, from apes or Neanderthals.

00:40:00.000 So rituals start existing like a person who kind of has the drugs and hands them out.

00:40:05.000 So this is at the beginning of our race, I think.

00:40:11.000 And we were so powerful because we could develop that larger language than the apes. 0.83

00:40:18.000 We could only organize up until 100. And now we have the problem, we poor stone sapiens, that we have created global problems, but we don't have a global narrative.

00:40:29.000 Like, we're falling into the Western camp.

00:40:32.000 We have China.

00:40:33.000 We don't have a global narrative.

00:40:37.000 Like, our narrative usually stops within the national context.

00:40:40.000 Like, there's the American narrative.

00:40:41.000 There's the Western narrative, which also includes Europe.

00:40:44.000 There's the German narrative.

00:40:45.000 But there's no human global narrative.

00:40:48.000 And that's what I intend to change with my book, Stone Sapiens, which will be the next book and kind of conclude the trilogy of these, like, how are drugs and humans kind of symbiotic in a way?

00:41:00.000 Well, there's a, for lack of a better term, there's a consciousness that exists in mushrooms.

00:41:07.000 There's something that you interact with and we don't necessarily understand what's going on.

00:41:12.000 But if you could imagine a lower primate interacting with a higher consciousness on a regular basis and then adapting.

00:41:20.000 This is the theory of why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years.

00:41:25.000 And have you ever listened to Dennis McKenna describe this?

00:41:28.000 Dennis McKenna describes it brilliantly because he's an actual scientist in the way he explains the effects of psilocybin, the effects it would have on the mind in terms of developing language and Just expanding our creativity,

00:41:44.000 expanding our ability to see things, it makes better edge detection, you have better visual acuity, makes them more horny, they're more likely to breed, more community.

00:41:58.000 There's also this potential for a type of You know, for lack of a better term, a type of mind-melding.

00:42:08.000 You know, there's a type of consciousness-expanding energy that happens that it seems to be connected in a way that we can't measure, where human beings interact with each other without words.

00:42:25.000 You know, telepathine was exactly what they, when they first found harmine, when they found some certain trees that were part of the components of ayahuasca, they tried to call it telepathine.

00:42:38.000 But due to the rules of scientific nomenclature, that substance had already been identified as harmine.

00:42:45.000 But the researchers that were taking this were saying, we are experiencing these telepathic melds.

00:42:50.000 There's something that's going on with these things.

00:42:53.000 And we want to get to the bottom of it.

00:42:55.000 Let's call it telepathy because it imparts a type of telepathy.

00:43:00.000 Well, for Tripp, I became very interested in that question that you just articulated.

00:43:06.000 What actually happens in the brain?

00:43:09.000 Because that is quite hard to figure out, actually.

00:43:12.000 How do they work and what actually changes in the brain?

00:43:15.000 And there's one researcher in Zurich, again, in Switzerland.

00:43:18.000 They're really experts on psychedelics, actually.

00:43:21.000 Because they didn't sign all the UN treaties because they're like a neutral, more neutral country than others.

00:43:26.000 So they actually have a little bit more freedom for research.

00:43:29.000 And there is a professor called Franz Vollenweider at the university in Zurich.

00:43:34.000 And he was able to start in the early 90s.

00:43:37.000 Giving his patients psilocybin and LSD and DMT. And then he put them in, like he examined their brains in brain scanners, like imaging, like high tech, you know, imaging technology.

00:43:49.000 And he found that actually, that you can actually measure it.

00:43:54.000 Or you can see the changes that happen in psychedelics.

00:43:57.000 And what happens is that the so-called default mode network, that is a term that brain scientists use to describe what Freud would call the ego, like the center in our brain, like the boss in our brain, like the guy,

00:44:13.000 I guess it would be, or the woman in our brain that says, now I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast, and Everything's cool.

00:44:21.000 I'm a writer, whatever.

00:44:23.000 We have always this controlling force within us.

00:44:28.000 Otherwise, we would go basically insane.

00:44:30.000 What's going on here?

00:44:31.000 Am I in danger?

00:44:33.000 Basically, am I in danger?

00:44:34.000 There's this thing that goes with the rifles you're going to shoot.

00:44:38.000 So the default mode network makes sure that this doesn't happen, that we function, and it makes a lot of sense.

00:44:44.000 And actually, under psychedelics, he could measure that this part of the brain gets a little less energy.

00:44:50.000 So it's not switched off completely.

00:44:52.000 I mean, if you take a lot of psychedelics, it might be switched off completely.

00:44:55.000 Then you have what's called like a full immersion experience.

00:44:57.000 Yeah.

00:44:58.000 If you take a little, it's also switched off.

00:45:00.000 It gets a little less energy.

00:45:02.000 And that other parts of the brain, peripheral parts that are usually following the main guy, they can communicate more on psychedelics.

00:45:13.000 So what happens in your brain is actually a change in the brain chemistry.

00:45:19.000 And what also happens is what is called...

00:45:24.000 The neuroplasticity is enhanced.

00:45:26.000 Neuroplasticity is the term for basically the brain is not obviously like a fixed, like non-moving object like my fist or something.

00:45:36.000 It's constantly kind of moving the brain, you know?

00:45:39.000 And neuroplasticity describes that ability to constantly adapt to, like, the situation and be flexible, make new connections.

00:45:52.000 That's neuroplasticity.

00:45:53.000 And he could also measure that neuroplasticity is enhanced when you take psychedelics.

00:45:59.000 That's why also it could become dangerous if it's enhanced too quickly and you're not experienced.

00:46:04.000 I mean, we're on the Joe Rogan experience.

00:46:05.000 We're all experienced.

00:46:07.000 I hope we have an experienced audience.

00:46:10.000 But if you're unexperienced, that could be too much.

00:46:12.000 Then the stimulation of your brain or the change or the disruption of your day-to-day way of thinking...

00:46:20.000 Could be overwhelming.

00:46:21.000 But if you handle it properly, it's actually...

00:46:25.000 That is, I guess, what is the beneficial aspect of the psychedelic experience.

00:46:30.000 You enhance neuroplasticity in a way...

00:46:32.000 I don't know if becoming smarter is the right term, because what is smart, what is intelligence, but it's a fact that neuroplasticity is enhanced, and because of this...

00:46:43.000 Kind of orthodox thought forms, like depressed people always think the same thing, like I'm not worthy or I can't, you know.

00:46:51.000 Depression is a loop or loops in your brain of always this.

00:46:55.000 And LSD, especially psilocybin, they disrupt that.

00:46:59.000 Because, you know, other parts of the brain suddenly come into play, and the default mode network, which has, you know, this disease of depression, suddenly is not, you know, calling the shots anymore.

00:47:09.000 That's why psychedelics have proven effective against depression.

00:47:12.000 The first study that showed this clinical study was done in 2015, actually in America, at Johns Hopkins University, that psilocybin.

00:47:20.000 It helps against very severe depression when nothing else helps.

00:47:26.000 So we know a little bit about what happens in the brain, but obviously the brain is still a black box.

00:47:32.000 That's why so many scientists, when LSD came out in the late 40s and early 50s, Especially in America were enthusiastic.

00:47:42.000 They thought finally we have a tool with which we can, you know, shine like a torch shining into the black box of the brain because it works in such small quantities.

00:47:51.000 There was actually a lot of hope in the beginning that original enthusiasm by Sanders that I talked about when they thought we have a game changer, we have a blockbuster that everyone will...

00:48:05.000 We'll heal from LSD. Many scientists actually believe that.

00:48:11.000 And the interesting question is, and we're making a long circle, what went wrong?

00:48:16.000 Why wasn't it developed into a medicine that you can get at your dispensary, like you can get cannabis products now, for example, in the state of California?

00:48:26.000 Well, you can get them here too, which is weird.

00:48:29.000 You get them here, like I said, there's like different deltas.

00:48:32.000 So we can get legal cannabis here.

00:48:35.000 They sell it.

00:48:36.000 Society is still very insecure when it comes to drugs.

00:48:41.000 Because we have been bombarded with the...

00:48:44.000 Propaganda.

00:48:45.000 ...drugs are horrifically dangerous, you know, this propaganda.

00:48:49.000 Well, when I was in high school, it was this is your brain on drugs, you know?

00:48:52.000 It was just say no, Nancy Reagan.

00:48:55.000 Everyone was just say no.

00:48:56.000 I was also in America, actually, in high school.

00:48:59.000 I graduated from Flint Powers Catholic High School in Michigan, class of 88. And I had been taught because I was sent from Germany as like a German exchange student.

00:49:11.000 I was taught before, don't mix with the drug people.

00:49:14.000 There will be drug people at the high school and they will approach you and they will try to draw you in and then you won't get out again.

00:49:22.000 And I really believed that.

00:49:23.000 I mean, I was like 17. Well, there are people like that.

00:49:27.000 That is true.

00:49:28.000 Look, if you fall into the opiate crowd, if you fall into a crowd of people that are taking… I'm talking about weed now.

00:49:33.000 Right.

00:49:33.000 Well, weed is very different, but the problem is the blanket term, right?

00:49:37.000 The blanket term of drugs.

00:49:39.000 Yeah, it's a big problem.

00:49:41.000 Yeah, but also if you fall into the weed crowd in high school, it's very possible that you'll fall into a crowd of ne'er-do-wells who will ruin their lives and they just get high all day and they wake and bake and they abuse it.

00:49:55.000 Just like you can abuse sugar, right?

00:49:57.000 Just like you can abuse alcohol.

00:49:59.000 I actually think that cannabis is a dangerous drug because it is quite addictive.

00:50:03.000 Yeah, it can be.

00:50:04.000 Unlike LSD, LSD is not addictive.

00:50:07.000 LSD is actually when the guy who invented AA, he himself had made an LSD therapy and got away from alcohol using LSD and he wanted to incorporate LSD therapy into the AA program and then didn't do it because I guess it was pressure or whatever.

00:50:23.000 We'll come to the pressure in a second.

00:50:26.000 So LSD is actually a non-addictive drug.

00:50:29.000 For example, in Germany now we legalized cannabis.

00:50:31.000 It's legal everywhere in the country.

00:50:33.000 I think they should have legalized LSD and not cannabis because cannabis is actually harder to use.

00:50:37.000 I think it should be legal.

00:50:39.000 I think it's good that it's legal, but I think it's a little bit of a more problematic drug actually to legalize because it's also so easy to use.

00:50:48.000 But to legalize LSD, which is like, I think it should be legalized, you know, all over the globe because I think it's a brain food.

00:50:58.000 That's what I think after studying it, you know.

00:51:00.000 But saying this sounds like completely outrageous, you know.

00:51:04.000 LSD, like so many people are afraid of it.

00:51:06.000 So I hope with Tripp to take a little bit of the edge off, you know, to actually show where it comes from.

00:51:12.000 And I would like to tell that story where that comes from.

00:51:15.000 Yeah, please.

00:51:17.000 Because that's the core story, because when I had found these SS records that they had used, because you asked before, was there another psychedelic substance?

00:51:27.000 Yes, there was mescaline.

00:51:29.000 Mescaline was already kind of investigated by scientists since the 20s.

00:51:34.000 It was also a German...

00:51:35.000 There was a German scientist called Behringer.

00:51:39.000 He was at the University of Heidelberg and he was really into mescaline and he was doing it with his students and making tests and how does it change consciousness and what happens.

00:51:48.000 So he was basically one of the pioneers of psychedelic research, you could say.

00:51:53.000 So the Nazis knew about mescaline and the Nazis wanted to find a truth drug.

00:52:01.000 Hitler was a paranoid person. 0.75

00:52:03.000 He always thought It's actually true, that people are conspiring against him.

00:52:08.000 There were quite a lot of assassination attempts on his life.

00:52:11.000 He survived them all.

00:52:13.000 But there were a lot of people who didn't like him.

00:52:15.000 I mean, Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship, and most people supported Hitler, but there were also people who did not. 1.00

00:52:21.000 You know, there were people in the resistance, even within, you know, the army, who thought he was an idiot. 0.94

00:52:26.000 High-ranking officers who, like, were, like, a bit more brilliant than him, and who knew that he was running things to the ground. 0.99

00:52:34.000 He wanted...

00:52:35.000 He gave the order to find a truth drug.

00:52:39.000 Like, it's the wet dream of intelligence.

00:52:41.000 You give someone a substance and then you can control that person.

00:52:46.000 You can extract secrets from that person.

00:52:48.000 You can kind of...

00:52:52.000 You can control a person.

00:52:53.000 And the Nazis, the SS, even with their torture methods, had been unable to extract all the secrets they wanted to extract from prisoners.

00:53:03.000 Especially Polish resistance fighters had been very resistant even against SS torture.

00:53:09.000 Like they wouldn't say, I got the job from the British intelligence or what.

00:53:14.000 You know, they just wouldn't talk even when you tortured them.

00:53:16.000 So Hitler wanted the drug that would solve this problem. 0.88

00:53:20.000 And one man that was put in charge with this is a chemist called Richard Kuhn, who actually received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

00:53:30.000 He was a brilliant mind, but he was a Nazi, so he didn't, like many scientists left Germany or writers left, Thomas Mann left Germany when the Nazis took power. 0.77

00:53:39.000 But some people stayed.

00:53:41.000 Some writers stayed.

00:53:42.000 Some scientists stayed.

00:53:43.000 And this Kuhn actually became, you know, he's really working for Hitler.

00:53:47.000 He was developing a nerve poison, Sarin, which was deadly for Hitler.

00:53:53.000 And if you worked for Hitler as a scientist, obviously, you got all the grants you needed, the money you needed. 0.78

00:54:00.000 You had a great time, basically, if you sold your soul to the devil.

00:54:04.000 Richard Kuhn was in charge with finding the truth drug and then the interesting thing is because I was in the Novartis archive of Sandoz because I wanted to find The link between a Swiss pharmaceutical company who develops LSD and then the SS who tests it in Dachau.

00:54:29.000 How did the SS know?

00:54:32.000 And did they really test LSD also in Dachau or was it just mescaline?

00:54:37.000 Because they write in the reports that are then found in the U.S., Right.

00:55:07.000 And when I was in the archive of Sandoz, I wanted to find papers, like did they sell LSD to the SS? I was curious to find something.

00:55:16.000 And the archivist, he was very skeptical of me because he sensed that I was onto something.

00:55:22.000 He was protecting basically the archive.

00:55:25.000 Because the archive at Sandoz is not a public archive.

00:55:28.000 If you go to the National Archives of the United States or the Federal Archive of Germany, it's a public archive.

00:55:35.000 The archivists want you to find the information.

00:55:38.000 They will reveal the find book, which is a database.

00:55:43.000 It shows you everything that's in the archive.

00:55:46.000 It takes sometimes days or weeks to actually figure out what's all there.

00:55:50.000 You have, theoretically, an overview of everything that's in the archive.

00:55:54.000 But a company archive like Novartis archive, there was no find book. 0.98

00:55:59.000 The archivist said to me, just tell me what you're looking for and then I will find it for you, which is basically shit, you know?

00:56:06.000 Because in a way, it's basically under his control, the documents that he gives to you. 0.95

00:56:11.000 You don't even know what's in the archive behind that guy sitting in front of you.

00:56:17.000 And I wanted to see, like, I knew that Albert Hoffman wasn't a Nazi.

00:56:22.000 Like, I had known a lot about Albert Hoffman, and I never heard anything about him having Nazi connections, like giving LSD to Richard Kuhn or something.

00:56:31.000 But I wanted to see what his boss, Stoll, the one we talked about before, had the whole, like, the ergot god.

00:56:37.000 Like, who is this guy?

00:56:39.000 Because he, as the CEO, called the shots for Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company.

00:56:43.000 And then...

00:56:46.000 The archivist didn't want me really to see these papers.

00:56:49.000 I could sense that.

00:56:50.000 And I wanted to come again to the archive.

00:56:52.000 How did you sense that?

00:56:54.000 Well, the first time I was there, he said, why is everyone always so interested in LSD? You know, we have so many beautiful products here.

00:57:01.000 And there was like a...

00:57:03.000 A showcase with all the products that Sandoz has made.

00:57:06.000 And LSD wasn't one of them.

00:57:07.000 I said, LSD is actually missing from that showcase here.

00:57:09.000 And he said, well, it was never a product.

00:57:11.000 I said, it was a product.

00:57:12.000 It actually had a name.

00:57:13.000 It was called Delusite.

00:57:14.000 That was the brand name of LSD. It existed, you know.

00:57:17.000 And he's like, yeah, you know, but we are not so, you know, it's illegal.

00:57:20.000 So they don't...

00:57:21.000 They have a difficult relationship with LSD. And the only thing he gave me were the original lab books of Albert Hoffman.

00:57:32.000 And it's very easy to flatter.

00:57:34.000 It stuns you.

00:57:35.000 If you're interested in LSD, you see the original lab book.

00:57:38.000 You see his handwriting when he for the first time takes LSD. And then his handwriting.

00:57:43.000 He can't hold the pen anymore.

00:57:45.000 And you see this line on the paper.

00:57:46.000 That's exciting, you know?

00:57:48.000 Yeah.

00:57:49.000 But it's not new.

00:57:50.000 People have seen that before.

00:57:52.000 So he kind of tricks you into, like, you see that, you say, oh, great, thank you, bye-bye, like after you go home.

00:57:59.000 But then I was on the Swiss mountain.

00:58:00.000 I was actually visiting a scientist that had researched this ergot producing in the Emmental.

00:58:06.000 I visited this guy on the mountain.

00:58:07.000 He showed me the former fields of Sandoz.

00:58:10.000 And then I had the idea I must go back to the archive and look at the papers of the CEO because the CEO calls the shots.

00:58:16.000 Why wasn't the CEO able to turn this potential game changer into a lucrative medicine?

00:58:21.000 What went wrong was probably on the CEO level of the company, not on the chemist level of the company.

00:58:28.000 So I wrote an email to the archive.

00:58:31.000 He said, I'm going to come back tomorrow and I want to look at the papers of the CEO. And then he wrote back to me, well, sorry, tomorrow I have too much work.

00:58:38.000 You cannot come anymore.

00:58:40.000 Kind of like that.

00:58:42.000 But I just showed up.

00:58:43.000 I just showed up at the archive and he opened and he said, well, you're here.

00:58:47.000 I don't have any time.

00:58:48.000 And I said, well, I'm here.

00:58:50.000 You know, it's an archive.

00:58:51.000 I can use it.

00:58:52.000 And Then I was sitting there and I was thinking, what can I do?

00:58:56.000 And I actually, at the time, I had some LSD with me because I was already getting it for my mother.

00:59:03.000 So I had it with me and I said to him, I suddenly had an idea and I said to him, have you ever actually seen LSD? And he's like, in a Swiss accent, like, no, it's illegal, I have not seen it.

00:59:17.000 And then I asked him, do you want to see it?

00:59:19.000 He said, sure, I would like to see it.

00:59:21.000 But where could I see it?

00:59:23.000 No one has it anymore.

00:59:25.000 And I said, well, here you go.

00:59:27.000 This is LSD. And he's like studying it.

00:59:29.000 He was quite interested.

00:59:31.000 Suddenly he became interested like, oh, this is actually LSD. That's how it looks.

00:59:35.000 And the LSD I had received had printed on it, like these papers, the old logo of Sandos.

00:59:42.000 So like the chemist who had made this, actually in Basel, it was made in a black lab, obviously, kind of made a joke and put like the logo of Sandos on it. 0.52

00:59:51.000 And he said, this is the logo of our old company?

00:59:53.000 How is this possible?

00:59:54.000 And I said, well, maybe it's like an homage by the chemist who made these.

00:59:58.000 I said, do you want one?

00:59:59.000 And he said, what do you mean?

01:00:01.000 I said, well, I'll give you one as a gift.

01:00:03.000 You know, you've been so helpful to me.

01:00:06.000 And he's like, oh, this...

01:00:08.000 Yes, okay, I'll take one.

01:00:12.000 And I gave him a trip.

01:00:15.000 And...

01:00:16.000 What is the dose?

01:00:17.000 That was like 100 micrograms, which is quite...

01:00:23.000 It's legit.

01:00:24.000 I said to him, take it like when you're in the beautiful Swiss mountains, like you want to walk, you know, then maybe it's a good time.

01:00:31.000 And he's like, interested, yeah.

01:00:32.000 And then he gave it back to me.

01:00:34.000 He said, I can't, I can't, for legal reasons, I don't think I can accept this.

01:00:38.000 I said, okay, fine.

01:00:39.000 Took it back.

01:00:40.000 And then he said, but is there something you want to see maybe today in the archive?

01:00:44.000 Because we had formed a connection suddenly.

01:00:48.000 And I said, yeah, actually I would be interested in seeing the paper of the CEO of Arthur Stoll.

01:00:53.000 He said, that's not a problem at all.

01:00:55.000 And he just went and he brought me the folder.

01:00:58.000 And as I'm looking through the folder, I can see that there's one man that Stoll was communicating with all through his career.

01:01:08.000 And that one man, Stoll himself had learned under Willstetter.

01:01:14.000 Willstetter was the Jewish-German master of biochemistry, who was later, he had to leave Germany.

01:01:22.000 You know, the Nazis were prosecuting him also because he was Jewish.

01:01:26.000 And Willstädter was this genius who also received the Nobel Prize and who had found out that, you know, Stoll's idea from potent plants you extract and then you make medicines from plants, basically.

01:01:37.000 Because plants are very powerful, obviously.

01:01:40.000 So Willstädter was like the scientific father of Stoll.

01:01:45.000 And Stoll had one other prodigy child, and that was Richard Kuhn.

01:01:50.000 Who by then had been the leading Nazi biochemist.

01:01:53.000 So Kuhn and Stoll, which I saw then in the letters in front of me, had been best friends because they had the same teacher.

01:02:02.000 They had exchanged already in the 20s all their research, in the 30s, especially the ergot research.

01:02:08.000 Kuhn was very interested in it.

01:02:09.000 So now he has the job by Hitler to find the truth drug. 0.89

01:02:14.000 And then Stoll says, we found this truth.

01:02:18.000 Almost magical substance that even in microgram dosages has this strong effect on the mind and Kuhn obviously became very interested in it and I found a letter maybe we can pull that one up I don't know if you can find it from 1943 October where Kuhn and I found this in the archive this was the smoking gun basically where Kuhn thanks Stoll for sending ergotamine which is the precursor to LSD it's like From ergotamine,

01:02:48.000 you do one step and then you have LSD. And we received ergotamine in October 1943 from the Swiss company.

01:02:56.000 And then, you know, the Nazis had their hand on LSD. And then it becomes very interesting what happens when the Americans find out about that.

01:03:09.000 Because when the Americans liberated Germany from National Socialism, when they won the war basically, And certain units had attached to them the so-called ALSOS unit,

01:03:26.000 A-L-S-O-S. And the ALSOS unit was responsible for finding German nuclear scientists and interviewing them about their research for the nuclear bomb in Nazi Germany, because Nazi Germany was also trying to develop a nuclear weapon. 0.97

01:03:41.000 And the Americans thought they're probably quite far ahead because they're good in science, like everything they do, they fucking rock. 0.95

01:03:49.000 Which in this case actually probably wasn't true. 0.95

01:03:53.000 I don't think the Nazis were so advanced.

01:03:55.000 It's still a bit obscure like how far the Nazis really were with nuclear technology.

01:04:00.000 But this ALSOS was in place and the second job of ALSOS was to find out about biochemical weapons because they also thought rightly so that Hitler had biochemical weapons. 0.90

01:04:09.000 So one of their first scientists they interviewed was Richard Kuhn, because Richard Kuhn was a leading Nazi biochemist.

01:04:15.000 So in the spring of 1945 and liberated Heidelberg after World War II, Kuhn is being interviewed.

01:04:24.000 And for Kuhn, it's a question of, will I cooperate with Americans or will I go to the Nuremberg trial as like a war criminal?

01:04:31.000 Because he could have ended up on the bench for developing...

01:04:36.000 So he decided to rather extend his career.

01:04:41.000 He later came to America, was teaching in America.

01:04:44.000 So he told them about LSD. He said, we were very interested in LSD. And those experiments in Dachau could not be finished because there was not enough time.

01:04:52.000 Dachau was already liberated.

01:04:53.000 They were in the middle of finding out if I give a psychedelic to a prisoner, can I extract his secrets?

01:04:59.000 Can I fully control him?

01:05:02.000 These tests take a bit of time, you know, you have to do it with several.

01:05:06.000 You don't do it in a day.

01:05:08.000 So these tests were not finished yet.

01:05:10.000 But these findings then were very interesting to the American military.

01:05:16.000 Because after the war, what started immediately the next war, the Cold War against the Soviet Union, Which was what then CIA was founded, which CIA called, the CIA director, Dallas, he called it, this is brain warfare.

01:05:29.000 It's a totally new type of war and we have to get ahead of them and they probably are working on brainwashing techniques.

01:05:41.000 So we have to be ready to defend ourselves against the Soviet onslaught with their brainwashing techniques. 0.94

01:05:49.000 So the Americans learned actually a lot from the Nazis. 0.60

01:05:53.000 I once met in Florida on the beach together with my father, an SS Marine that was in the 80s when I was an exchange student in Flint, Michigan.

01:06:01.000 We took a vacation, met my German parents in Florida and we spoke with this Marine and he said, yeah, we learned so much from the SS. And it's true, you know, the SS, the German system, was an evil system, obviously, but it was a very functional system,

01:06:17.000 you know?

01:06:18.000 There was a lot to be learned from them in terms of warfare, you know?

01:06:22.000 So the Americans, because the Nazis were so interested in this truth drug, thought, this must be interesting. 0.54

01:06:30.000 We have to look at this.

01:06:31.000 So they started now, first the American military, then the CIA started now to investigate, can LSD actually be The truth drug, can it be like a pharmaceutical weapon?

01:06:45.000 So this is actually what went wrong.

01:06:49.000 So what went wrong was the Swiss CEO sending samples to the German Nazi biochemist. 0.81

01:06:55.000 From him, the knowledge goes to the American military and then intelligence apparatus that LSD could be abused as a weapon.

01:07:04.000 This is what really put LSD on the wrong foot in a way.

01:07:10.000 Because there was also at the same time in the early 50s a lot of hopeful research at universities in America.

01:07:17.000 Like brain scientists, they were looking at LSD. It wasn't illegal yet.

01:07:20.000 It was an interesting thing.

01:07:22.000 But then the CIA took over the military research.

01:07:28.000 First it was the U.S. military.

01:07:30.000 They had a professor at Harvard University called Beecher.

01:07:33.000 Beecher was like the drug expert of the American army.

01:07:37.000 He had also been in the war.

01:07:39.000 And then he looked at the SS reports from Dachau and he made a report called Report on Egodepressant Drugs, which he sent to Washington.

01:07:48.000 So he was kind of the knowledgeable guy that would interpret, you know, how could psychedelic molecules be used as drugs.

01:07:57.000 And then in 1947, the CIA was founded.

01:08:00.000 Basically, the CIA took over this truth drug research from the military.

01:08:06.000 And then Biccia was sending his reports to the CIA. This was done by a guy called Sidney Gottlieb.

01:08:11.000 I don't know if you've heard that name.

01:08:13.000 He was the head of MKUltra.

01:08:15.000 MKUltra is basically a program first to see whether LSD could be used as a weapon.

01:08:22.000 Gottlieb traveled to Basel, Switzerland, because he had heard that Sanders was also selling LSD to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

01:08:30.000 There was rumor that the Soviet Union had purchased like 20 million dosages of LSD. So he flew to Basel with a suitcase full of cash and put it on the table of Stoll, the CEO, and said, I want the whole, the world supply of LSD. I'm hereby buying the world supply of LSD. Sure.

01:08:48.000 Which was, he said, your supply, like, his intelligence, like, told him that Sandos had produced something, like, I don't know, it's in the book, I forgot the number, like, four kilograms of LSD, and he said, I want to buy the whole, you know, four kilograms is quite a lot, you know, because it's already potent in microagrant dosages.

01:09:06.000 Stoll said, well, we only made 400 grams so far.

01:09:09.000 They hadn't even made that much.

01:09:11.000 So he bought the 400 grams and he set a mechanism in place that Stoll would always inform.

01:09:18.000 Stoll would not sell to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

01:09:21.000 That's what Sanders had to, you know, basically assure him.

01:09:25.000 Of course, the payback is Sanders can still sell all the other medicines in America.

01:09:30.000 It doesn't have problems with the FDA and the American, you know, that's the pressure.

01:09:35.000 Yeah.

01:09:36.000 And then Gottlieb takes the 400 gram back to the States and is now from now on always informed when like a scientist in an American university acquires LSD from Sanders because they would not sell it openly in the beginning.

01:09:54.000 They would only give it away basically to scientists.

01:09:57.000 They were still in the product development phase.

01:09:59.000 Because they still weren't sure what can LSD, like, what do we write on the package, basically?

01:10:04.000 What's the indication?

01:10:06.000 So Gottlieb was basically in the driving chair of LSD at that time.

01:10:13.000 He got all the information from Basel, Switzerland, who had LSD in the country.

01:10:17.000 He had the most LSD. And then he had the idea to really...

01:10:23.000 Look at how LSD can be used to manipulate people, basically.

01:10:29.000 That was like the big goal.

01:10:31.000 And that's not an easy thing to achieve.

01:10:34.000 And the way he did it was he let all the universities in the country, I think over like 60 institutions, like, you know, the big universities of this big country...

01:10:49.000 He let them all, you know, in their special, you know, departments investigate LSD. But these tests are expensive.

01:10:59.000 And what Gottlieb, the idea Gottlieb had was university tests are often funded by foundations, let's say the Rockefeller Foundation.

01:11:09.000 Like a university wants to make like some pharmaceutical, you know, test series that goes over two years and...

01:11:15.000 It involves all these people that have to be paid, and it's expensive.

01:11:20.000 It costs, let's say, $200,000 to make one serious clinical test.

01:11:24.000 So that money comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, and the money first goes from the CIA to the Rockefeller Foundation.

01:11:33.000 So he used not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Foundation, but other foundations as like go-between.

01:11:40.000 So he gave them money and they would finance research done in universities, which are supposed to be, I guess, neutral, like just trying to figure out like what is, you know, science is...

01:11:55.000 You know, you don't want a CIA guy to finance your science and then kind of manipulate through that money how your research is being done, and especially all the results going back to the people who, you know, bring the money.

01:12:06.000 So he was very efficient in setting up this program, which then I guess was called MKUltra.

01:12:16.000 But that's also, that's how LSD really, that's what really went wrong with LSD. MKUltra.

01:12:24.000 Yeah, because it dominated a controlling force over the research, and a lot of research then was tailored to, like, there was crazy stuff happening, like, there was, even in Canada at a university, I write about this in Tript,

01:12:43.000 this guy, and it sounds a bit like a Stanley Kubrick movie.

01:12:47.000 He put people on constant LSD and then had speakers under their pillows which would tell them single sentences.

01:12:57.000 He was trying to see, can you really drive someone mad with LSD, for example?

01:13:03.000 Can you deprogram a brain with LSD? So these are very creepy experiments.

01:13:08.000 These are actually human experiments in a way.

01:13:11.000 We're good to go.

01:13:29.000 One on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.

01:13:32.000 And in these safe houses, people would be approached on the street or in bars in lower Manhattan and, you know, invited to, like, a party.

01:13:44.000 We want to come to my pad.

01:13:45.000 You know, I have booze.

01:13:47.000 And it was like a cool apartment, but there was one large mirror, and behind the mirror sat an operative who was filming and listening in and recording, and then they checked what happens to a person if they receive unwittingly a dosage of LSD. So,

01:14:04.000 this is quite unethical work that was done.

01:14:12.000 They also did Operation Midnight Climax.

01:14:14.000 Yeah, that's in Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.

01:14:15.000 Yeah, so that was a brothel. 1.00

01:14:18.000 Yeah, it was an apartment.

01:14:20.000 They called it the PAD. But they hired sex workers, which then got an additional fee from the CIA for giving their clients from them. 0.71

01:14:31.000 Also, they received their fee, obviously, and then giving them LSD. I think it was a stupid, actually, experiment. 1.00

01:14:39.000 I mean, it's kind of spectacular. 1.00

01:14:41.000 Operation Midnight Climax looks great in a film, I guess.

01:14:44.000 Sounds good.

01:14:45.000 Yeah, I mean, it just shows, but it wasn't very effective.

01:14:49.000 What do you gain?

01:14:50.000 What do you see? 1.00

01:14:51.000 Someone, of course, has a little bit different sex on LSD, but it's kind of stupid. 0.91

01:14:59.000 Nevertheless, It's definitely not a good thing that they did but if you put your mind into their perspective back then trying to understand the effects of these drugs They probably had limited resources and without making these things legal and without like opening up the research to everybody to this potentially 0.97

01:15:29.000 Powerful life-changing drug.

01:15:32.000 I mean this drug could be something that It could be used by foreign governments.

01:15:38.000 It could be used against us.

01:15:40.000 So they're probably very secretive in their approach.

01:15:42.000 I mean, we kind of had the benefit of, you know, 2020 hindsight because we're looking back.

01:15:49.000 Yes, it was the Cold War.

01:15:50.000 And I think that they really believe that there are these threats from the Soviet Union and they were threats from the Soviet Union, obviously. 0.54

01:15:57.000 Sure.

01:15:57.000 Brainwashing is a specialty of communism, you know?

01:16:01.000 So it's clear that they wanted to be...

01:16:05.000 From his perspective, it makes sense, you know?

01:16:10.000 But it didn't help LSD to become...

01:16:16.000 A medicine because that was a time when there were no antidepressants yet developed and no antipsychotics.

01:16:22.000 So I think LSD would have had a chance to actually become a very helpful medicine instead of being kind of an unhelpful weapon because it never worked as a weapon.

01:16:34.000 Right.

01:16:35.000 No, it's definitely unhelpful what they did.

01:16:38.000 It might be understandable, but it went the wrong way.

01:16:41.000 It went the wrong way, but it was also indicative of the kind of control that those people wanted over society and population, especially coming after World War II. There's a whole new order in the world.

01:16:54.000 The United States emerges victorious, and then there's this clamoring for trying to figure out, okay, what is the enemy up to?

01:17:01.000 What are these powerful tools that could be used against us?

01:17:05.000 And some of them could be mind control.

01:17:07.000 I mean, this is obviously at a time where the Red Scare, the McCarthy era, they were worried about communism and communism infiltrating our society.

01:17:17.000 And they're probably very terrified of things that disrupted, which is what was going on in the 1960s.

01:17:23.000 You know, Jamie, I'm going to send you this.

01:17:26.000 This is a video of hippies in the 1960s.

01:17:31.000 And it kind of shows you that a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now with the disruption of society, it's very similar to what was going on in 1968 with an anti-war movement.

01:17:43.000 The Free Palestine movement has a lot in common with a lot of other anti-war movements of the past where these people want peace and love.

01:17:53.000 And back then, in the 1960s in particular, they were dropping acid.

01:17:58.000 This is the Timothy Leary days and, you know, tune out and drop out.

01:18:03.000 So play this.

01:18:08.000 1968. You have all these young kids coming from a very rich affluent middle-class society where they've been taken care of since they've been babies and never really had to do anything for themselves in a serious way and now they come here and they want to be taken care of.

01:18:27.000 One of the first questions they'll ask is, what do you do?

01:18:31.000 And so I say, I live.

01:18:32.000 And they say, no, I mean, do you work or what?

01:18:35.000 And I say, no, I just live.

01:18:37.000 A lot of people say to me, what are you doing?

01:18:39.000 You're not doing any work.

01:18:40.000 You're not working at a job.

01:18:42.000 You tell them that you don't do anything and that you come to the park.

01:18:45.000 It's like they can't believe you.

01:18:46.000 We're doing the hardest work in the world because we're growing.

01:18:50.000 We're trying to change.

01:18:51.000 We have a group of young people from upper-middle-class families who have moved into a physical environment that is, in effect, a reversion.

01:19:00.000 They're living in gross, insanitary conditions with a great deal of overcrowding.

01:19:06.000 There is a very high incidence of infectious hepatitis.

01:19:10.000 About one-fourth or one-fifth of our total caseload in the venereal disease clinics appear to be hippies. 0.99

01:19:17.000 Now, I'm going on the appearance solely.

01:19:20.000 And we have one case history in which a young chap has been into the clinic 12 times in three months with 12 different cases of gonorrhea.

01:19:32.000 Okay, so that guy, that last guy with the salt and pepper hair and the tie and the nice suit...

01:19:39.000 Those are the people that were from another generation and were seeing this younger generation that was completely dropping out of society.

01:19:47.000 And what was causing that, there was a lot causing that, the anti-war movement, but a lot of it was fueled by psychedelics.

01:19:55.000 And they wanted to stop that.

01:19:57.000 They wanted to stop this radical shift in society that they were seeing from the 1950s to the 1960s.

01:20:05.000 Yeah, there's an interview with one main aide of Nixon afterwards when he was already retired, and he said that they couldn't make it illegal to be black, and they couldn't make it illegal to go on rallies and be against the war.

01:20:23.000 Like, it's an American principle that you can go to a demonstration, but they could make it illegal to take LSD and then criminalize.

01:20:32.000 Yeah.

01:20:32.000 It's kind of the same thing that Anslinger started much earlier.

01:20:37.000 Yeah, I mean, it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over again, whenever there's a powerful disruptor that might be ultimately great for the human race.

01:20:45.000 I think we're good to go.

01:21:03.000 There's direct evidence that it had a huge impact on our creativity.

01:21:08.000 If you look at the music from the 1960s, it was so radically different from the music from the 1950s.

01:21:16.000 Something had happened.

01:21:17.000 I mean, that's why John Lennon said we have to thank the CIA because they gave us LSD. I mean, it is kind of interesting also, a young guy called Ken Kesey was working at a psychiatric ward in Menlo Park.

01:21:33.000 California, and he was part of MKUltra, basically.

01:21:37.000 I mean, he was a guinea pig.

01:21:38.000 He received 75 US dollars for taking LSD, and then he took LSD, and his default mode network had less energy, and he suddenly understood the crazies.

01:21:55.000 He was walking through the psychiatric ward, and Understanding a lot better what's actually going on in the brain.

01:22:02.000 And that's when he had the idea for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

01:22:08.000 Which made him so much money that he then decided to stop riding and buy a bus and drive around the country with his friends and dish out LSD. He made a career change.

01:22:19.000 I could see how the powers would be.

01:22:21.000 I could see how the CIA and the government were like, we have to stop this.

01:22:24.000 We have to put a stop.

01:22:25.000 This is going to be the downfall of society, certainly downfall of the people that are in control of the government currently.

01:22:31.000 And these people are necessary to be in control of the country because we are in a Cold War with Russia. 0.83

01:22:37.000 We just got out of World War II. We're also in a hot war with Vietnam.

01:22:40.000 I mean, that war was taking a big toll on the American society and suddenly there's like young people sitting on it, you know, saying, what the fuck? 0.99

01:22:48.000 I'm not going there. 0.99

01:22:49.000 Right.

01:22:49.000 So, that created a strong counter-reaction by the regime, which is to legalize LSD, but poor LSD. And what's really unfortunate is that if that had not happened,

01:23:06.000 who knows how transformative those substances would have been to society globally.

01:23:12.000 If there was a great reckoning in the United States, if we understood things, if we got our act together, if we really cleaned up all the problems in society and did so on an egalitarian plane, we, like, recognize that there's work that can be done here,

01:23:28.000 or we can make life better for everybody, have everybody recognize that we are literally all in this together, and we are all connected.

01:23:35.000 We need each other, we are a part of each other, and we should treat each other, all of us, like we are a community.

01:23:42.000 I think that's the globalized narrative that we need.

01:23:46.000 It's the only way we survive.

01:23:48.000 I mean, this is the perspective that astronauts have when they go to the space station.

01:23:51.000 They look down at this ball and they go, this is so crazy.

01:23:55.000 We're fighting over imaginary boundaries that we've created.

01:23:59.000 Lines in the dirt.

01:24:01.000 I think it really is a problem of our language and of our communication skills because we can only create a discourse within the United States, possibly.

01:24:10.000 You have the media, you have the Joe Rogan experience, you have, you know, you have a discourse and you have a discourse in other nation states, but there is no global discourse.

01:24:18.000 I mean, maybe when there's like Olympic Games, that's a type of global discourse that's happening. 0.97

01:24:23.000 Maybe right now, that's why people kind of like to watch it right now because they feel we're connecting like from all over the world without being like total assholes. 0.91

01:24:32.000 We're doing sports together. 0.93

01:24:33.000 Isn't that nice?

01:24:34.000 And we like when the opposing teams hug each other and make friends.

01:24:39.000 We need positive global communication because we have a lot of negative global communication.

01:24:45.000 We have two very prominent wars right now.

01:24:49.000 And a lot of other conflicts.

01:24:51.000 And we have global problems like the heating up of the planet, which leads to refugee floods and crises and migration. 1.00

01:25:02.000 I mean, we have a global theme, but how do we talk about it?

01:25:07.000 There's no global government.

01:25:09.000 Not that we need one or we should have one, but there's no global end.

01:25:14.000 There's nothing, you know.

01:25:15.000 Right.

01:25:16.000 I don't necessarily think a global government's the rule because the problem is whenever people have control over people, they just want more.

01:25:23.000 It's like everything else.

01:25:25.000 It's like if you have money, you want more money.

01:25:26.000 If you have power, you want more power.

01:25:27.000 You want control, you want more control.

01:25:29.000 And it makes it easier for them To stay in control.

01:25:32.000 And if you had a global world government that could tell people, no, you can't move to Switzerland where the laws are different.

01:25:37.000 You can't move to Costa Rica.

01:25:39.000 The laws apply everywhere.

01:25:41.000 It's a global world order.

01:25:43.000 We decide what you can and can't do.

01:25:46.000 And we're not deciding it based on empirical evidence, fact, objective analysis of reality.

01:25:52.000 We're doing it on the basis of what's the most effective way that we can control and govern.

01:25:57.000 I think that's like a horror scenario that we might be moving into.

01:26:02.000 Well, we're in it right now.

01:26:02.000 We're battling it.

01:26:04.000 You know, there's rational, logical people that understand the consequences of these things that are fighting against it and talking against it.

01:26:11.000 And then there's people that are saying, we need centralized digital currency to compete with China.

01:26:15.000 Like, Jesus Christ.

01:26:16.000 And we're leading ourselves into a position that's very similar to many other positions that societies have faced in the past, including ancient Greece.

01:26:25.000 Where ancient Greece, where they developed democracy, the Illusinian mysteries, and then all that stuff got made illegal.

01:26:32.000 And then society crumbles, things fall apart.

01:26:34.000 It's no longer the center of intellectual discourse in the world.

01:26:38.000 Everything goes away.

01:26:39.000 They threw water on it in the 1960s with the psychedelics acts where they made everything schedule one.

01:26:46.000 They locked people up that were anti-war protesters.

01:26:49.000 They figured out a way to squash this sort of new movement of thought.

01:26:55.000 I think, yeah, I think it would be a step into the future if psychedelics were made legal and if we kind of move more towards, you know, because the psychedelics, as we said before, and humans are about transcendence,

01:27:11.000 you know.

01:27:12.000 It's about basically including the other and not being afraid of the other and that fear of the other leads to violence against the other.

01:27:21.000 The psychedelic is moving in the opposite way.

01:27:25.000 Right.

01:27:25.000 So it is, you know, obviously not a surprise that Nixon would illegalize the psychedelics.

01:27:32.000 They're dangerous.

01:27:33.000 They're dangerous to power.

01:27:34.000 They disrupt.

01:27:36.000 But it's great for everyone.

01:27:38.000 That's the crazy thing.

01:27:39.000 The people that are making it illegal are the people that haven't experienced it.

01:27:44.000 That's correct.

01:27:45.000 That's where it's crazy, because it would be beneficial to them.

01:27:49.000 They are human beings with a finite lifespan.

01:27:52.000 Their experience on Earth would be greatly enhanced if they had the perspective of a psychedelic encounter.

01:28:01.000 Well, if I was Chancellor of Germany, which I will never be, but if I was, I would make a psychedelic year.

01:28:09.000 Like, after high school, you have the opportunity to actually experience these substances.

01:28:14.000 I think it would be very good for societies to think about rituals or mechanisms or discourse, like what you said about the mysteries of Eleusis.

01:28:28.000 That was the defining ritual of ancient Greece.

01:28:31.000 The Athens Society would move there in September.

01:28:35.000 They would go there.

01:28:36.000 They would have this experience.

01:28:37.000 They would talk about this experience.

01:28:40.000 Because of that experience, they could relate to each other.

01:28:44.000 They could relate to the planet that they live on.

01:28:48.000 So that was a very healthy thing.

01:28:50.000 And we today, because it's illegal, we don't have this.

01:28:55.000 And I don't know what...

01:28:57.000 I mean, some things like Burning Man obviously are like attempts to create like ritualistic spaces. 0.96

01:29:04.000 And I've never been there and I heard it's kind of stupid because it's so expensive and kind of elitist. 0.61

01:29:11.000 I don't know if that's true, but basically we need... 0.99

01:29:14.000 We need something.

01:29:15.000 We need something.

01:29:16.000 We need a legitimate structure because there's also a thing that is described called spiritual narcissism.

01:29:23.000 Where you start doing these things and you think that you have all the answers and then you have people that are the ones who speak to these groups of people and they have all the knowledge and we're all in this together and it's essentially a cult.

01:29:38.000 And it's really easy to run a cult if everyone in the cult is naive and they're looking for a leader, they're looking for an answer, maybe they've had a listless life that lacks in direction and all of a sudden someone comes along and Through this ritual, we can all transcend and, 0.98

01:29:55.000 you know, it becomes a lot of bullshit. 0.98

01:29:55.000 So what are we going to do, you know? 0.98

01:29:57.000 Well, we need real shamans.

01:29:59.000 We need actual, legit shamans.

01:30:01.000 And the problem is that term in our society is much maligned, right?

01:30:07.000 That term is... 0.98

01:30:08.000 There's silly people that are in the jungle that are doing, you know, voodoo. 0.99

01:30:13.000 But we need someone who is a legitimate psychedelic experiencer, who has a genuine... 0.77

01:30:24.000 A genuine goal of advancing consciousness and advancing conscious growth and doing it in a very responsible way.

01:30:34.000 One of the things that we would have to be careful of if you have something like a year of psychedelics is schizophrenia.

01:30:41.000 We don't understand...

01:30:43.000 I didn't say young people should take psychedelics for a straight year, but maybe a year where they could take it, where they have a possibility, and some kind of structure, maybe a place you can go and do it.

01:30:54.000 I think we need a structure for everybody.

01:30:55.000 I think that's really the goal of this thing, is to develop a sensible, objective structure based on actual research, based on a real knowledge Of real clinical data on dosages, a real knowledge on which compounds are more effective for which particular ailments.

01:31:13.000 Ibogaine, which you talked about, Iboga, very effective for addiction.

01:31:16.000 My friend Ed went over to Mexico and got into an Ibogaine clinic when he got hooked on pills and it cured him of it.

01:31:22.000 Well, just one experience.

01:31:24.000 One experience, yeah.

01:31:25.000 That's what I heard also.

01:31:26.000 I've known many people that have had real problems with pills and have knocked it with one Ibogaine experience.

01:31:31.000 So there's a lot of different things that can be done that can benefit society tremendously, but it has to be done responsibly and it has to be done With real knowledge.

01:31:44.000 And that real knowledge is only going to be available if they open everything up to real research.

01:31:49.000 And instead of being biased about this, let it be open to everyone to have an objective analysis of what is actually going on, have the naysayers and the people that are converted, everyone debate this and try to have some sort of an understanding of What is good?

01:32:08.000 What is bad?

01:32:09.000 What's the right dose?

01:32:10.000 What can be done?

01:32:11.000 And what is the most effective setting?

01:32:14.000 Because set and setting, the part of the ritual aspect of it is important too because you're setting an intention before you do these things.

01:32:20.000 Which is why a lot of these people that are serious users of psychedelics We're good to go.

01:32:40.000 Everyone in society, including the people that want it illegal.

01:32:43.000 That's what's ironic about it.

01:32:45.000 The people that want it illegal, they are just human beings.

01:32:48.000 They're just human beings that are trapped in this paradigm.

01:32:50.000 They're trapped in the world that they live in.

01:32:52.000 They're trapped on the momentum of their actions and all the life that they've lived up until this moment.

01:32:57.000 And they would benefit from it.

01:32:59.000 I mean, it would also give the Western societies a tremendous push, you know?

01:33:03.000 If psychedelics were allowed, and there could be research, and there could be...

01:33:08.000 You know, it would probably encourage, like, a cultural flowering.

01:33:13.000 And right now we have kind of a decay of Western culture.

01:33:16.000 Like, Western society is in crisis, and we don't really know how to get out of it.

01:33:22.000 And the current...

01:33:26.000 The recipes given to us by the camps that are now also competing for the US presidency, they don't really solve the problem.

01:33:35.000 I mean, we all feel like in the last couple of years, more and more people feel that something is wrong and that something should change.

01:33:43.000 I think somehow people are ready for a revolution.

01:33:46.000 But no one knows exactly what kind of revolution it should be.

01:33:49.000 So people who tap into that are quite successful, even though they might not even provide what is actually needed to have that change.

01:33:58.000 But we do need a change on a national level in Germany, in America, in other countries, as well as on a global level.

01:34:06.000 And I think opening up our societies to psychedelic research and psychedelics, I would be curious to see a society which treats itself with that liberty and relaxation and curiosity.

01:34:25.000 Right now we're all tense and we're saying, no, this is the chemical wall in our brain.

01:34:30.000 I just don't think it works for a democratic Western free society to have a chemical wall in the brain.

01:34:37.000 It's a contradiction. 0.89

01:34:38.000 It keeps us back from really developing a society that is much better than the current society because the current society is pretty shitty, actually. 0.68

01:34:47.000 Yeah.

01:34:47.000 And we really moved into it.

01:34:49.000 And we're trapped.

01:34:51.000 We're trapped, but there is, of course, ways out.

01:34:54.000 There can always be a so-called revolution.

01:34:56.000 We're talking about one right now.

01:34:57.000 This is what's crazy.

01:34:58.000 This isn't theoretical, right?

01:35:00.000 And these are actual substances.

01:35:02.000 Yeah, we're talking about it now.

01:35:03.000 And Kanye West on the show said he's the leader of the free world.

01:35:08.000 Yeah.

01:35:09.000 Maybe today we're now the leaders of the free world, and we're going to start a psychedelic revolution from this podcast onward.

01:35:17.000 Well, I think it has to be done everywhere, with everyone.

01:35:20.000 They have to demand freedom.

01:35:23.000 And if you have freedom, freedom over your own consciousness is what McKenna talked about often, that it means nothing if you don't have freedom over your own consciousness.

01:35:34.000 Especially freedom of your own consciousness with substances that have been shown to have dramatic positive effects on people.

01:35:41.000 So there's a lot of drugs that are very good positive drugs that people use on a regular basis that if you take too much of them you will die.

01:35:50.000 So we know what the substances are, we understand what the correct dosage is, we understand what the LD50 is, and we know how to prescribe them correctly.

01:35:59.000 We should apply that same logic to psychedelics.

01:36:03.000 I mean, Albert Hoffman was thinking about this in the 50s.

01:36:06.000 This was another document I found in the archives.

01:36:09.000 He set up a memo to Stoll, the CEO, writing that Sanders should now focus on these psychedelic substances.

01:36:16.000 We should examine all the possibilities.

01:36:19.000 We should create new compounds.

01:36:21.000 We should become the psychedelic pharmaceutical powerhouse in the world.

01:36:26.000 And that idea is really, it's a great idea.

01:36:29.000 It is a great idea.

01:36:30.000 And Stoltz just said, no.

01:36:32.000 Because he had been visited by Sidney Gottlieb, who basically said, no, don't do it.

01:36:37.000 Well, it's guys like that guy in the suit and tie with the salt and pepper hair.

01:36:40.000 There's no nonsense, Republican, right-wing, controlling.

01:36:44.000 But I think it's also, these guys are a little bit of the past.

01:36:48.000 I mean, I'm quite surprised, for example, in America, I get approached by, you know, different camps about Tripp in a very positive way.

01:36:56.000 Because I think somehow that anti-drug rhetoric is losing ground.

01:37:00.000 That's the feeling I have.

01:37:01.000 That makes me a little bit optimistic.

01:37:04.000 It's losing ground because of the internet.

01:37:06.000 So the narrative up until the internet came around was that these things destroy lives.

01:37:10.000 And then all of a sudden people are saying, you know, actually not really.

01:37:13.000 And then you have the positive effect that it has on people that are suffering.

01:37:17.000 From post-traumatic stress disorder coming back from the war, which is what MAPS is concentrating on.

01:37:23.000 The mainstream media really is a problem in this regard.

01:37:26.000 They're a problem with everything.

01:37:27.000 Well, they're essentially a propaganda network that is passing itself off as the news.

01:37:33.000 It kind of comes from Randolph Hearst, in a way.

01:37:38.000 It certainly does.

01:37:39.000 He kind of set the tone.

01:37:41.000 Absolutely.

01:37:42.000 But I mean, I'm sure there were people doing that before.

01:37:44.000 If you have control of the newspaper, and especially back then with Hearst publications, there's very few newspapers...

01:37:50.000 In the country, and especially ones that were respected.

01:37:53.000 If you have control over that narrative, if you put something in the newspaper and people read it, they read that as that, oh my god, that is a fact.

01:37:59.000 This is what's happening.

01:38:00.000 People today are far more skeptical, particularly after the pandemic.

01:38:05.000 I think the pandemic kind of shook things up to a point where it's much more difficult to pass off propaganda today than it was even just four years ago.

01:38:14.000 I mean, that's why I was quite excited to come on this podcast, on this experience, because I think you have actually created a space where free thought is possible and free communication.

01:38:27.000 It's like a stage that you've created.

01:38:29.000 I think it's actually quite an important artwork that you have established here.

01:38:34.000 I mean, it's not so easy to create like your own media that has a global reach.

01:38:40.000 Thank you.

01:38:41.000 I don't know how it happened.

01:38:42.000 It just happened.

01:38:42.000 I think it made itself.

01:38:44.000 Maybe, yeah.

01:38:45.000 I think so.

01:38:46.000 Because the concept was right.

01:38:47.000 Well, I think, look, I'm the one who's the host of it, so I'd be the best to judge.

01:38:52.000 I do not think I'm really responsible for this thing.

01:38:55.000 I think this thing wanted to be made, and it made itself, and it did in a very sneaky way.

01:38:59.000 It did in a very sneaky way where originally it was just me having fun with my friends.

01:39:03.000 Just with a webcam, me and Brian, and then Eddie Bravo, and Tom Segura, and all my friends.

01:39:08.000 We'd just come over and just talk.

01:39:10.000 Just have a good time.

01:39:11.000 And then it started to be where it got enough downloads where I could contact someone like Graham Hancock.

01:39:17.000 And say, hey, tell me about ancient civilizations.

01:39:21.000 Come on my podcast.

01:39:22.000 Anthony Bourdain, tell me about your travels.

01:39:25.000 And then it became much, much bigger.

01:39:27.000 And it sort of, I genuinely believe it tricked me into making it.

01:39:31.000 When was the breaking point when it got big?

01:39:34.000 It was very gradual.

01:39:36.000 It was very gradual.

01:39:38.000 I'll tell you when I realized it.

01:39:39.000 I think it was in 2011 or 2012. I was on stage in the Chicago Theater.

01:39:46.000 And I was doing comedy and I asked the audience, I was gonna tell a story from the podcast and I said, how many of you guys listen to the podcast?

01:39:53.000 And it was just...

01:39:56.000 3,700 people cheering.

01:39:58.000 And I was like, whoa.

01:39:59.000 I'll never forget that moment.

01:40:01.000 Because I was like, oh.

01:40:03.000 One of the things that I used to do and I still do is I don't look at the numbers.

01:40:07.000 I don't pay attention.

01:40:09.000 I don't pay attention to how many downloads.

01:40:11.000 I'm not feverishly checking what's good and what's bad.

01:40:15.000 I don't look at what the retention is when people drop out.

01:40:18.000 I don't That's up to them.

01:40:21.000 My job is to just have an interesting conversation with people that I'm actually excited about talking to.

01:40:28.000 That's my only job.

01:40:29.000 So the way I book it, I completely book it based on my interests.

01:40:34.000 I don't have a publicist that's like examining trends and this person's popular.

01:40:40.000 I don't do any of that.

01:40:42.000 I think it made itself.

01:40:44.000 I think it made itself.

01:40:45.000 I think it's a trick.

01:40:46.000 I think it's like the muse.

01:40:48.000 Like the muse sort of like brings these ideas into your head.

01:40:53.000 I think the universe gave birth to this thing. 1.00

01:40:55.000 I know it's a stupid hippie thing to say. 1.00

01:40:57.000 It sounds ridiculous. 1.00

01:40:58.000 But if anybody should know, it's me. 0.69

01:41:00.000 And if anybody should want to take responsibility and be proud of something, it would be me, right?

01:41:04.000 But I'm not.

01:41:05.000 I feel like it's not really me.

01:41:07.000 I feel like this thing wanted to be made.

01:41:08.000 And I think this is one of many of these things that want to be made all around the world.

01:41:12.000 And that's why podcasts are developing.

01:41:15.000 I think there's a hunger for honest discourse and real conversations with people that exists everywhere.

01:41:21.000 And I think that's why podcasts are exploding.

01:41:24.000 That's where you don't have a gatekeeper anymore to your ability to discuss things.

01:41:28.000 Yeah, because people are so frustrated with mainstream media.

01:41:30.000 Well, you shouldn't have gatekeepers.

01:41:32.000 You shouldn't have someone who...

01:41:34.000 The narrative that you're pushing out to the world is heavily influenced by the people that are advertising on your channel.

01:41:43.000 Heavily influenced.

01:41:44.000 So there's certain things you cannot criticize.

01:41:46.000 There's certain things you will gaslight the media or the public into believing is a good thing when it's probably not really a good thing.

01:41:53.000 You will say things in a very biased perspective.

01:41:55.000 You will attack particular individuals.

01:41:57.000 You not just attack political individuals.

01:41:59.000 You'll attack them with a very specific narrative that gets repeated over and over and over again to the point where they make these compilations of these media pundits saying the exact same thing over and over and over again.

01:42:10.000 This is not news.

01:42:12.000 This is not real discourse.

01:42:13.000 This is not real human beings discussing things and trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong.

01:42:18.000 This is propaganda.

01:42:19.000 And this is most of what people get.

01:42:21.000 And inside that propaganda are some real news.

01:42:24.000 There's actual specific information about the weather.

01:42:28.000 There's actual, you know, real reports about conflicts breaking out overseas and all sorts of different things.

01:42:35.000 But at the end of the day, it's not real conversation.

01:42:38.000 So real conversation was able to flourish because people had this hunger for it.

01:42:43.000 And they didn't even know they wanted it until they got it.

01:42:46.000 I mean, it was thought when we first started making podcasts that everyone was moving to a much shorter attention span.

01:42:51.000 And that most of the things that were going to be popular in the future were like 10-minute things, like very quick things.

01:42:57.000 You know, which is like a lot of the truth today with TikTok and Instagram reels and, you know, all these things that people like, short attention span, it just captures you, it gives you nothing, and you just keep scrolling and looking.

01:43:08.000 And we thought that's what people are moving to.

01:43:11.000 But then podcasts came along.

01:43:12.000 And podcasts came along with three-hour conversations with scientists that get 50 million views.

01:43:17.000 And then people are like, whoa, okay.

01:43:20.000 So it's not that people aren't intellectually curious.

01:43:22.000 It's not people aren't – they don't have this want to be engaged.

01:43:27.000 They do.

01:43:28.000 Everybody does.

01:43:29.000 It's just they're not being fed correctly.

01:43:32.000 I mean, that's also one of the beauties.

01:43:34.000 I mean, I'm here as a writer of literature, actually.

01:43:37.000 I mean, if I decide to work on a book, I don't get influenced by anybody.

01:43:42.000 And I have a very large space in which I can develop my thoughts and my narrative.

01:43:49.000 That's why I'm actually active in this field.

01:43:51.000 I think there might be a similarity between a podcast and literature because they both go into the long form and into immersion into something.

01:44:01.000 Absolutely.

01:44:01.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:44:02.000 I mean, literature is the ultimate form of that, right?

01:44:04.000 Because the amount of time that it takes for you to ponder the sentences and the paragraphs and putting them all together and the order in which you say things and the way you captivate and compel the reader, it's very similar.

01:44:17.000 And it's all coming from your mind, too, which is also very similar.

01:44:20.000 When I hear you talk on a podcast, if I'm a listener and I'm listening, I hear one human being who's talking about your analysis of all the data and all the research that you've done to create this book.

01:44:30.000 That's not really available in most places anymore, right?

01:44:35.000 But people want that because they want to know what what did this guy find out?

01:44:39.000 What does he know and how does he know it?

01:44:41.000 Let me listen to him and along the way Especially we're having a three-hour conversation along the way. 0.81

01:44:46.000 Let me hear says some crackpot things Let me hear if he says some things like oh that guy is a kind of a kook. 1.00

01:44:51.000 Oh that guy's not really thinking clearly Oh that guy's kind of full of shit. 1.00

01:44:54.000 Oh, he's saying that but there's no way he really believes that okay now I know and Now I'm suspicious. 1.00

01:44:59.000 Now I can kind of like look at this through a filter of reality.

01:45:03.000 So I think maybe we should talk a little bit about blitzed and Nazis and drugs.

01:45:07.000 Sure.

01:45:07.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:08.000 I thought that's why you had me here.

01:45:10.000 I thought that would be like your subject of fascination.

01:45:14.000 Oh, it's part of it, for sure.

01:45:15.000 I want to talk to you about everything.

01:45:17.000 You know?

01:45:18.000 I just was interested in talking to you.

01:45:19.000 I mean, immediately when I saw what you were talking about, when I saw you on the Jesse Walters show, I was like, oh, okay.

01:45:26.000 That was kind of funny to me because that was really speaking to an audience I usually don't speak to, but it was great, you know?

01:45:33.000 He loved the book.

01:45:34.000 They're willing to take much more chances on Fox News than they are on other networks in a strange way.

01:45:39.000 Well, I think that started with Tucker Carlson in a lot of ways.

01:45:42.000 But the Jesse Walters thing was interesting because You got to scratch the surface a little bit.

01:45:47.000 Yeah, it was just seven minutes, not three hours.

01:45:50.000 Yeah, so tell me about Blitzed.

01:45:52.000 What do you want to know?

01:45:54.000 Well, first of all, when was the creation of amphetamines?

01:46:03.000 And when did it start getting utilized by military and by people like Hitler?

01:46:09.000 Well, there's like a rumor going on that it started at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 because an Afro-American athlete named Jesse Owens was running faster than the white, Aryan,

01:46:25.000 German superheroes jumping further and winning, I think, five gold medals.

01:46:32.000 The rumor was he must be on something.

01:46:34.000 Similar kind of to Anslinger, like the jazz people, they're only so good because they're on something, you know?

01:46:39.000 So there was like, was he on Benzedrine?

01:46:42.000 Because Benzedrine was an American product that was already available.

01:46:45.000 And it's basically speed.

01:46:46.000 And there were no doping checks at these Olympics.

01:46:50.000 I think they were the last Olympic Games without doping checks.

01:46:53.000 Really?

01:46:53.000 Yeah.

01:46:54.000 So you could basically take everything.

01:46:56.000 But it's never...

01:46:56.000 No one knows if Jesse...

01:46:58.000 Oh, he was just good, you know?

01:47:00.000 But there was a guy called Theodor Temmler, who was the head of the Temmler factory.

01:47:06.000 And he said to his chemist, Fritz Hauschild, after the Olympic Games, we have to create a better amphetamine, like a Better than the American amphetamine.

01:47:17.000 This can never happen again.

01:47:18.000 Like an Afro-American is faster than the white guys. 1.00

01:47:23.000 And then Hauschild was the chemist's name.

01:47:26.000 He did research about amphetamines and he found that in Japan, a chemist called Nagai in 1917, quite a while ago actually, This was in 1936. So already 19 years earlier,

01:47:42.000 a Japanese chemist had made meth amphetamine.

01:47:46.000 And meth amphetamine is stronger than amphetamine.

01:47:50.000 So Haushu thought, I'm going to make a new meth amphetamine.

01:47:53.000 So he found a new way of synthesizing meth.

01:47:57.000 There's different ways you can make meth, I guess.

01:48:00.000 And he found a specific way.

01:48:01.000 That this Temla company then patented.

01:48:05.000 The patent was issued in Berlin in October 1937. And then they put it on the market in 1938. Methamphetamine became available.

01:48:15.000 No one said it was like a drug or anything.

01:48:18.000 It was just a new medicine.

01:48:20.000 You didn't even need a prescription.

01:48:22.000 You could just...

01:48:22.000 Like a child could go into a pharmacy and say, I want...

01:48:26.000 Ten packages of methamphetamine and, you know, it was cheap also and you got it.

01:48:30.000 It was branded as Pervitin.

01:48:33.000 Pervitin, we say in German.

01:48:35.000 There it is?

01:48:36.000 Wow.

01:48:37.000 There's Pervitin.

01:48:38.000 And Pervitin then became very, you know, fashionable.

01:48:45.000 Look how innocuous that little container looks.

01:48:47.000 Who would imagine that's how they sell meth?

01:48:52.000 I think this could already be, and I'm going to get to this in a second, for the military.

01:48:57.000 But first, it was a drug that was just on the market in the civil society.

01:49:00.000 There was no war yet in 1938. 1938 was actually kind of the height of the Hitler regime.

01:49:06.000 Like, people loved him.

01:49:07.000 There was full employment.

01:49:09.000 I mean, there was oppression against the Jews.

01:49:12.000 But if you were like a national socialist, you thought that was good, basically.

01:49:16.000 So...

01:49:18.000 I mean, there were many problems, but the reality was that it was like a steam engine.

01:49:24.000 The society was really working.

01:49:27.000 Everyone had a job.

01:49:28.000 Everyone was taking part.

01:49:31.000 It was basically a modern capitalist society that also created a lot of stress.

01:49:35.000 You always have to compete.

01:49:37.000 I think?

01:49:58.000 So, this methamphetamine became very popular.

01:50:00.000 Like, workers used it in the factories.

01:50:02.000 They could, you know, increase their output.

01:50:04.000 And party people used it because it boosted your ego.

01:50:11.000 So, it was, you know, you go into a meeting, an important meeting, you take a bit of meth before.

01:50:15.000 So, it wasn't stigmatized, you know.

01:50:17.000 It was just, it was, they called it performance enhancing substance.

01:50:25.000 So, it was, that's a neutral term, you know.

01:50:27.000 They made studies at universities showing that it's actually good against anything, also against depression, and it would increase your sexual drive.

01:50:38.000 People thought this is the greatest thing, basically.

01:50:42.000 There was no studies being done yet on addiction, which obviously is a problem of meth.

01:50:47.000 But also we have to understand that this meth that Temla produced is not the crystal meth that's being produced in a trailer somewhere in a southern state.

01:51:01.000 I don't know.

01:51:01.000 It's different.

01:51:02.000 It was made by a pharmaceutical company.

01:51:04.000 The way I found out about Pavitin is actually a funny story because I didn't know anything about...

01:51:11.000 No one knew anything about Nazis and drugs, as I said before.

01:51:14.000 And in 2010, I'm asking a friend of mine who's a DJ in Berlin, Alex is his name, I said to him, what should I write about next?

01:51:21.000 What should my next book be?

01:51:23.000 Because I'd written three novels, and then I was about to write the fourth novel, and he said, you should write about Nazis and drugs.

01:51:30.000 I said, well, but they didn't take any drugs, you know, because – and he said, they did.

01:51:35.000 And I said, how do you know?

01:51:36.000 No one's ever talked about this before.

01:51:38.000 He said, well, yesterday I received Pavitin.

01:51:43.000 I said, what is Pavitin?

01:51:44.000 He said, well, it's methamphetamine from the so-called – from the Third Reich.

01:51:48.000 Third Reich being a propaganda term by the Nazis.

01:51:50.000 That's why I like to say the so-called Third Reich. 0.98

01:51:53.000 How did this happen?

01:51:54.000 He had a friend who was an antique dealer and in 2010 this antique dealer in East Berlin had purchased like in an apartment that where people died like you know then the antique dealers come in and they take furniture like to pay maybe a little like he bought a medicine chest And he opened the medicine chest and there was Pavitin inside from the 1940s.

01:52:15.000 And that antique dealer who was a friend of Alex the DJ, he looked at it and it said on the package, contains methamphetamine.

01:52:21.000 He's like, what?

01:52:23.000 So he took it with his partner.

01:52:26.000 They were curious, you know.

01:52:28.000 And I later met this guy and he said, for one month we took this Pavitin and it was like so great.

01:52:33.000 Yeah.

01:52:34.000 He said it was not too strong.

01:52:37.000 It made us happy.

01:52:38.000 We were very active.

01:52:39.000 We worked a lot.

01:52:40.000 We had great sex. 0.95

01:52:41.000 It was great.

01:52:43.000 And then Alex, the DJ, being very interested in all kinds of drugs, he also took it.

01:52:47.000 And he told me this in my writing tower in Berlin.

01:52:50.000 He said, after the first Pavitin, I could feel that something's coming on.

01:52:55.000 There was like...

01:53:09.000 I think?

01:53:24.000 And I googled it and there was like just a little on the internet, there was one medicine historian who had totally unknown guy, but I mean a researcher, who had written like a two-page thing that the German Blitzkrieg,

01:53:42.000 which is the German word for speed war, like the Nazis' strategy how to lead a war, was only possible because of methamphetamine, because of this Pavitine.

01:53:51.000 And I read this and I said, this is crazy, maybe I should write about this.

01:53:55.000 And I contacted...

01:53:56.000 So it's a very odd story how this came about, you know.

01:53:59.000 And I contacted this academic.

01:54:01.000 He was at the University of Ulm.

01:54:03.000 I traveled down there.

01:54:04.000 I met him.

01:54:04.000 And he said, yeah, there's actually a lot more to find.

01:54:08.000 But I just didn't have the time because he's investigating all kinds of things, you know.

01:54:12.000 This was just a side project of his.

01:54:14.000 And he gave me the signatures.

01:54:18.000 In archives, you get a signature.

01:54:20.000 Every document has a signature.

01:54:22.000 And he gave me like...

01:54:23.000 The signatures where I can find like all the documents on meth during Nazi times, this was in the military archive of Germany, which is housed in Freiburg in southern Germany.

01:54:37.000 Germany is a decentralized country, so not all archives are in Berlin.

01:54:41.000 For example, the military archive is in this small town called Freiburg. 0.66

01:54:44.000 The military archive is almost bigger than the town, you know, because the German military has done so much shit, you know, in the first, really, we lost two world wars. 0.86

01:54:52.000 I mean, that's quite, that's world record for sure. 0.57

01:54:54.000 So, and everything that the German armies did is, you know, documented because the Germans love to document, like everything is written down.

01:55:01.000 So the military archive is huge.

01:55:04.000 And because I had the signatures from this guy, he basically did the legwork for me.

01:55:08.000 I could look at all the files and then I realized that the German army was using methamphetamine.

01:55:14.000 And it's another interesting story how that came about because a professor called Ranke, he was the head of the Institute for Defense Physiology of the German army.

01:55:28.000 And basically his job was to enhance the fighting capability of the soldier.

01:55:33.000 So he was researching in 1938, how can we combat fatigue?

01:55:38.000 Because he said, not the Russians are our biggest enemy, not the British, not even the French, you know.

01:55:44.000 Our biggest enemy is fatigue because you get tired in the evening.

01:55:47.000 You fight the whole day and then you need to sleep.

01:55:49.000 What a waste, you know.

01:55:51.000 That's not good.

01:55:52.000 He was looking for a way to beat this enemy, sleep.

01:55:59.000 And then when Pavitin came onto the market, he started reading studies done by universities and they very clearly show that on math...

01:56:08.000 And I think this is an experience that people who have used meth probably would sign, you know, you don't sleep as much, you know, it keeps you awake because all your dopamine is released.

01:56:18.000 So your brain is basically in a fight or flight mode, like your methamphetamine makes you extremely alert over a very long period of time.

01:56:29.000 And then at one point, obviously, you drop down and you get the urge to take it again.

01:56:34.000 This is how the addiction works.

01:56:36.000 But he was not looking at addiction problems.

01:56:39.000 He was just looking at, does it really work to keep a soldier awake maybe for two hours longer on the battlefield?

01:56:46.000 Because there's this saying from Napoleonic times, the last 15 minutes in a battle, that's the decisive 15 minutes.

01:56:55.000 Like, who's...

01:56:55.000 Who wins in the end wins, you know?

01:56:57.000 So if you have something that keeps your men awake for longer than the enemy has, then you have a decisive advantage.

01:57:07.000 So he made tests.

01:57:08.000 I don't know.

01:57:10.000 There's photos of it in my book Blitzed where you see the young medical officers.

01:57:17.000 He was working in an institution that was breeding medical officers for the German army.

01:57:22.000 So he gave these young guys Placebo, methamphetamine, coffee, just to check and, like, can they sustain longer on meth?

01:57:31.000 And they could.

01:57:31.000 They could actually...

01:57:33.000 They were more active.

01:57:34.000 Like, these tests started at 8 p.m.

01:57:36.000 and went until 10 a.m.

01:57:38.000 And the meth people, like, they were awake the whole night, you know?

01:57:42.000 They were filling out...

01:57:44.000 You know, they had tests, like you had to draw things or repeat orders or like solve mathematical questions.

01:57:49.000 And the math people were like going at it until 10am.

01:57:52.000 And then some said, and now we want to go out like now, then they wanted to party.

01:57:56.000 While the caffeine people, I don't know if we can see that image.

01:58:00.000 It's kind of funny.

01:58:01.000 Can you pull that up?

01:58:04.000 Your mic's on, Jamie.

01:58:06.000 I'm not sure which one it is.

01:58:08.000 It's a lot of images in there.

01:58:10.000 Yeah, this one.

01:58:13.000 So these guys are all messed up.

01:58:15.000 Well, you see, like, going up, maybe?

01:58:19.000 You see like the S, you know, sleeping there. 0.98

01:58:22.000 S means shine tablette, which is placebo.

01:58:24.000 To the left of him is a Pervitin guy.

01:58:26.000 He's quite happy.

01:58:27.000 To the right of him is a Benzedrine guy.

01:58:30.000 That's the B. And that's another stimulant?

01:58:32.000 That's the American stimulant, which is not as potent as methamphetamine.

01:58:36.000 I mean, methamphetamine is more potent than amphetamine.

01:58:39.000 It's like a difference between like a Mercedes and a bicycle or something.

01:58:45.000 Okay.

01:58:45.000 What is a C? C is coffee.

01:58:48.000 Coffee.

01:58:49.000 There's a few more images.

01:58:50.000 This is taken at 4.15 in the morning.

01:58:55.000 This is taken at 5.50 in the morning.

01:58:57.000 Go back maybe to the 4.15.

01:59:02.000 That guy's head's moved.

01:59:05.000 Well, I mean, here we see photos.

01:59:08.000 I mean, then he obviously, like, he obviously looked at the results of, you know, people filling out.

01:59:14.000 And there's more pictures later in the day when the S person is, like, yawning.

01:59:19.000 Well, you see in front of him the Perviton person.

01:59:22.000 He's not yawning.

01:59:23.000 He's, like, ready.

01:59:25.000 He's ready for the next questionnaire, you know.

01:59:27.000 He can't sleep for, like, another day.

01:59:28.000 But the guy in the back, though, that's a P, his head is down. 1.00

01:59:31.000 See him in the far right?

01:59:32.000 I think he's solving a...

01:59:33.000 Yeah, he might be studying things.

01:59:35.000 When in any case, maybe go one picture down.

01:59:39.000 Yeah, that one.

01:59:41.000 That's how the test, like he did.

01:59:43.000 So he saw that if you take two times six milligrams of Pavitine on the right there, that black bar, they don't show any fatigue at all.

01:59:57.000 He basically came to the conclusion it does work, it does keep you awake.

02:00:01.000 And he also found out something which I think is kind of funny.

02:00:05.000 He found out that on meth you...

02:00:09.000 Are less capable of solving higher complex questions. 1.00

02:00:15.000 So math keeps you up, but it makes you a little bit dumber. 0.61

02:00:19.000 Like things that are really, that demand like abstract, very abstract thinking or, you know, more complex things. 0.98

02:00:28.000 You're not better on math.

02:00:30.000 Is it because math sort of rushes you to come to a conclusion?

02:00:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:00:33.000 And also you feel too good about yourself, that self-criticism is lowered.

02:00:37.000 Right, right.

02:00:39.000 And he concluded that this is perfect for the German soldier. 1.00

02:00:42.000 It makes you awake longer and makes you a little bit more stupid. 1.00

02:00:45.000 Because a soldier just needs to follow orders. 1.00

02:00:48.000 He just needs to shoot for a long time, you know? 0.93

02:00:50.000 Right, right.

02:00:51.000 And so he got all excited about it.

02:00:54.000 This was in 1938. His last test he did was in 1939. Then Germany was about to invade Poland, September 1st, 1939, beginning of World War II. And he said to his, you know, his superior was, in America, it's called the Surgeon General.

02:01:08.000 In German, that's a different name, but the highest medical guy in the army who, you know, determines basically at the end of the day what is given to the soldiers.

02:01:17.000 So he wrote to his boss, and this was kind of an old school guy, the boss, like he was still from the First World War, and he read the reports, and he's like...

02:01:25.000 We need to use a chemical drug to enhance the...

02:01:29.000 He didn't get it, basically.

02:01:31.000 So he said, we're not using this in the attack on Poland.

02:01:36.000 And then Ranke, the professor, really believed in meth.

02:01:39.000 And I read his war diary.

02:01:42.000 Every officer was required to write a diary during the war.

02:01:47.000 And in his war diary, you can clearly see that he himself became addicted to meth.

02:01:51.000 He writes about it so great.

02:01:53.000 I don't even understand how I could even do a day at the office without meth.

02:01:58.000 Why is not everyone taking it?

02:02:00.000 But then a few months later, it's like...

02:02:02.000 I feel very depressed this morning.

02:02:05.000 Even the Pavitin I'm using does not help me anymore against my depression.

02:02:10.000 He didn't understand that this was actually the problem.

02:02:12.000 That he was becoming addicted himself.

02:02:15.000 He needed higher and higher dosages.

02:02:17.000 He did.

02:02:17.000 And he became quite unhinged.

02:02:19.000 But he was like the meth guy of the German army. 0.85

02:02:21.000 But he was still doing his job.

02:02:23.000 And he asked the medical officers in the field in Poland.

02:02:31.000 Poland was beaten by Germany within a few days, actually 17 days or something.

02:02:36.000 It was a quick victory.

02:02:39.000 Actually quite surprising that it was so quick, but it happened so quick.

02:02:44.000 And a lot of medical officers wrote back to him that Pavitin was actually quite helpful.

02:02:49.000 They said things like, and I studied all these reports for Blitz, and I'm quoting some of them in Blitz, like, it really helped all soldiers achieve their workload, like, do their workload, which was basically killing or, you know, invading a foreign country.

02:03:04.000 So Rang again was very excited.

02:03:06.000 And he said to the Surgeon General, because then after the successful campaign against Poland, it was now going against the West, France, the old enemy of Germany.

02:03:17.000 Like we had had a war in 1865, Germany won. 0.95

02:03:21.000 And then in World War I, Germany lost.

02:03:24.000 And now Hitler wanted like the revenge. 0.93

02:03:26.000 You know, now we have the third one.

02:03:28.000 We're going to win the third one.

02:03:30.000 But his high command was saying, let's please not do it because the French army, La Grande Armée, was supposed to be the best army in the world at the time in the late 30s, early 40s.

02:03:42.000 They were really proud of their army, the French, and it I mean, it wasn't good, but everyone thought it's good. 0.99

02:03:48.000 And they also had an ally, which was very powerful, Great Britain, you know, the world's empire, you know.

02:03:53.000 So these two powers, to attack from Germany, these two powers, was considered insane by the high command. 0.92

02:04:01.000 Like, they thought Hitler was just a lunatic.

02:04:04.000 And Hitler wanted to attack the West already in November 1939. Like, Poland was beaten. 0.91

02:04:10.000 The German military actually needed a lot of repairs because even in a successful campaign, you lose a lot of machinery, you lose a lot of people.

02:04:18.000 So everyone said, let's not do it.

02:04:21.000 Let's just get back on track and develop a strategy with which we can win against the West.

02:04:28.000 Because they knew there is no strategy.

02:04:30.000 Because that was exactly what happened in World War I. Germany attacked from the north of Belgium and there was a stalemate and then in the end Germany lost because Germany is one country and it cannot win against, you know, so many countries. 0.67

02:04:43.000 So they said it's not going to work, you know, but Hitler was very stubborn and he said it will work but they blocked him.

02:04:49.000 There was even a coup attempt in November 1939 against him which failed.

02:04:55.000 And then he had a breakfast meeting, February 17th, 1940, three kind of revolutionary tank generals, von Mahnstein, Guderian and Rommel, Rommel later becoming very famous tank general,

02:05:11.000 came to Hitler in Berlin in the Reich Chancellery and said, we have a plan.

02:05:17.000 We know it's going to work.

02:05:18.000 We can beat them.

02:05:19.000 Because we will not use the tanks as everyone expects us to use the tanks, which is kind of more in the back, kind of backing up the infantry and being like the backup guys, like the heavy guys in the back.

02:05:32.000 We will use the tanks in the front and make the tanks kind of overrun the enemy.

02:05:37.000 And Hitler's like, whoa, this is a crazy thought.

02:05:39.000 He loved crazy thoughts.

02:05:40.000 So he's like, this is a good thought, but where are we going to do it?

02:05:43.000 And they said, we're going to do it in an area...

02:05:48.000 I also sent an image.

02:05:49.000 I don't know if we need it, but it's interesting.

02:05:52.000 They decided on an area which is the Aden Mountains.

02:05:55.000 And the Aden Mountains is a mountain range in Belgium, which is exactly between the north of Belgium, where the Western Allies were massing their defense forces.

02:06:05.000 I think?

02:06:27.000 You know, not stop.

02:06:28.000 And within three days and three nights, we have to reach through Belgium, the mountains, the Swiss, sorry, the French border town of Sedon.

02:06:36.000 We have to get there because then we will be faster because they will still be stuck in the north of Belgium.

02:06:41.000 Like, we will be faster than them and we'll race through all the way to the channel. 0.88

02:06:46.000 And then we will be in the back of them and destroy them.

02:06:49.000 So we will have kind of surrounded them. 0.84

02:06:50.000 This is what Churchill later called the sickle cut.

02:06:54.000 And this was a This is the sickle cut.

02:06:58.000 You see where they're going through and then kind of branch off to the north and to the south and encircle the allied forces there in the north and the French forces there in the south, like being further within enemy territory than the defenders.

02:07:14.000 It's a crazy plan, and the only problem is that thing of not sleeping for three days and three nights.

02:07:23.000 So they were not sure how to solve that problem, actually.

02:07:26.000 And Hitler said, this is not a problem. 0.88

02:07:29.000 The German soldier is so convinced of the ideology of national socialism, of fighting for me, the Führer, They will not sleep.

02:07:38.000 I didn't sleep in the First World War.

02:07:40.000 Hitler was a soldier in the First World War and he claimed that he was awake and didn't need sleep and stuff like that. 0.96

02:07:45.000 So he kind of said that the ideology will make the normal German soldier into the superhuman soldier who doesn't need to sleep, which is bullshit, obviously. 0.74

02:07:56.000 Everyone needs to sleep, you know, not because you are convinced of an idea you don't need to sleep. 0.96

02:08:01.000 I think?

02:08:22.000 Of people who just said, we're going to lose, you know, this is not possible because to launch a successful invasion into enemy territory, you needed three to one superiority in manpower and in weaponry.

02:08:35.000 And the Germans were actually, they had less people, less soldiers than the West, and their weapons were not as good.

02:08:44.000 For example, their tanks were not as good as the British tanks.

02:08:47.000 So it was basically...

02:08:48.000 There was a lot of doubt that this madman plan by these three young revolutionary generals and Hitler supporting this madman plan would actually work.

02:08:58.000 But then Ranke thought, this is my calling now.

02:09:02.000 This is my hour.

02:09:03.000 And he presented...

02:09:04.000 His findings that actually you don't need to sleep for three days and three nights.

02:09:09.000 On meth, it's possible.

02:09:10.000 If you give enough meth to a person, you can stay awake for five days.

02:09:15.000 So suddenly his findings became very interesting.

02:09:18.000 He was invited to the high command.

02:09:21.000 He was giving lectures.

02:09:22.000 He wrote a so-called stimulant decree.

02:09:25.000 I don't know if you want to see that.

02:09:27.000 I found that also in the archive in Freiburg.

02:09:30.000 It was the first official paper published I think?

02:09:52.000 So, for example, it says what you could give if someone took too much, like then you give like a sleeping pill.

02:09:59.000 It also says, it's quite interesting, what are the side effects?

02:10:02.000 And the side effects are aggression.

02:10:04.000 So, that was like a desired side effect, you know?

02:10:07.000 So, Ranke was suddenly very popular.

02:10:11.000 He was on top of the world.

02:10:14.000 There's another paper I found which shows how many dosages then the German army ordered from the Temmler company just before they attacked France.

02:10:25.000 And this is 35 million dosages.

02:10:30.000 So finding that document was also kind of fun.

02:10:33.000 Wow!

02:10:34.000 35 million.

02:10:35.000 Yeah.

02:10:36.000 And so were they on a large dose of this when the soldiers?

02:10:41.000 Well, it's interesting then to see how those 35 million dosages were being used because they were used asymmetrical.

02:10:48.000 They were handed out especially to the tank troops because the tanks were at the forefront and these tanks could not stop.

02:10:54.000 So everyone in these tanks was basically high on crystal meth.

02:10:58.000 Like, all the way through the advance.

02:11:02.000 And there's reports by the French army that they simply could not understand their opponent anymore.

02:11:10.000 Like, they didn't sleep.

02:11:12.000 They just chased through.

02:11:14.000 They behaved like madmen, basically.

02:11:16.000 Rommel was seen at one point, totally high on meth, like, standing in the tank. 0.84

02:11:21.000 Like, the lid was open.

02:11:23.000 He was standing there.

02:11:24.000 They were racing at night through a French village where the French army had camped because they needed to sleep because it's kind of, I guess, funny.

02:11:34.000 I don't know if funny is the right word, but France also had sort of, not a stimulant decree, but they had the rule that in a war situation, and this had been beneficial in World War I, each French soldier has the right to drink three quarters of a liter of red wine per day.

02:11:50.000 So when France was attacked by Germany, I think it was 17,000 trucks with red wine drove from the French wine regions to the front lines and distributed the red wine.

02:12:02.000 So the French guys were like drinking red wine, which is a mood enhancer, but it does make you tired, you know, especially three quarters of a liter. 0.99

02:12:09.000 So the Germans were messed up and the French were like kind of drowsy. 1.00

02:12:13.000 So that scene with Rommel I described, he's standing in the open lid of the tank going through this village at night and left and right are kind of the French soldiers kind of...

02:12:35.000 Wow.

02:12:41.000 In a few days, you know, the big neighbor that in First World War, Germany had been fighting, like they had been fighting four years, like moving like a meter a day and the next day back and this time because of the methamphetamine charging through and,

02:12:57.000 you know, Hitler was in Paris in June already, you know. 0.50

02:13:02.000 That's the story of Blitzed in a nutshell.

02:13:04.000 Or of a part of Blitzed.

02:13:07.000 Wow.

02:13:08.000 Isn't it incredible that that's not taught in school?

02:13:11.000 Actually, I do give talks now in school.

02:13:16.000 Now?

02:13:16.000 Yeah, now.

02:13:17.000 But no historians touch the subject.

02:13:19.000 Right.

02:13:20.000 I spoke to, for this book, I collab, not collaborated, but I had advice from a leading German historian, an elderly gentleman who passed away, Momsen, like the leading German historian,

02:13:35.000 national socialist, a really cool guy.

02:13:37.000 I met him, I showed him my findings from the archives, and he's like, We overlook this the whole time because we historians have no clue about drugs.

02:13:50.000 It has to enter your mind in a way that this might have a relevance.

02:13:55.000 Historians are very square people, or at least used to be very square people.

02:14:00.000 National socialism is such a serious topic that out-of-the-box thinking is not really encouraged within the academia, at least.

02:14:09.000 But me, being a non-historian, I could think out-of-the-box.

02:14:14.000 He said this is the missing puzzle piece that we need to know to understand what actually went down in World War II. So he was very much behind it and wrote a preface to the German edition also.

02:14:25.000 So it was interesting to communicate with him.

02:14:31.000 Obviously about it because he helped me also put things into perspective.

02:14:36.000 Because also one thing he said was don't argument in a monocausal way.

02:14:45.000 It's kind of flippant to say The Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine.

02:14:55.000 Methamphetamine played a huge role, and I examined that huge role.

02:14:58.000 I think it was probably one of the decisive factors, but in a war, many factors come together.

02:15:03.000 But if you can't stay awake for three days, none of it works.

02:15:06.000 Yeah.

02:15:08.000 World War II would have been very, very different.

02:15:10.000 If you want to make cement, you have to add water.

02:15:13.000 And, I mean, if you look at it from a military standpoint, it actually makes a lot of sense.

02:15:22.000 The problem in Germany, Nazi Germany, they then had was that the army was so crazy about meth and also the Air Force. 0.67

02:15:29.000 They were using – giving it to pilots in the – we say Luft, in the air battle against Great Britain.

02:15:36.000 That was like a decisive – There was an air battle in the late 1940s after France had been beaten by Germany, conquered. 0.85

02:15:45.000 Then it was Germany against Great Britain.

02:15:47.000 There was a lot of fighting in the air between Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe.

02:15:51.000 And the German Luftwaffe was, you know, messed up because they had less pilots.

02:15:58.000 Kamikaze pilots, right. 0.81

02:15:59.000 That's a big one.

02:16:00.000 For suicide flights.

02:16:03.000 We've talked about that before.

02:16:04.000 Japanese factory workers also use methamphetamine to work longer.

02:16:07.000 Japan was an ally of Germany.

02:16:09.000 They were part of the evil axis.

02:16:12.000 So Japan had knowledge that methamphetamine was successfully used in the European theater of this war.

02:16:19.000 So they used it also in their kamikaze pilots against American ships and stuff.

02:16:25.000 So...

02:16:29.000 Where were we?

02:16:30.000 The effect of meth on the soldiers and also the effectiveness of it during the blitzkrieg, but then also the Japanese pilots.

02:16:42.000 The Japanese were using it, the kamikazes were using it. 1.00

02:16:45.000 I mean, I wanted to talk about something that became a problem in the German military because then suddenly there were guys, for example, the so-called Healthführer, which is like the minister for health in Nazi Germany, it was called the Healthführer.

02:17:00.000 He was like an enemy of Pavitin because he said, he used the old argument, we are superheroes anyhow from our genes because we are a superior race.

02:17:09.000 We don't need a stimulant to perform these miraculous acts on the battlefield.

02:17:15.000 So he wanted the army to stop the methamphetamine.

02:17:18.000 And I studied all the letters going back and forth between, like, high command and the Ministry of Health.

02:17:24.000 And the army basically said, we're not stopping this.

02:17:27.000 We're a modern army.

02:17:28.000 We're using modern means to...

02:17:30.000 You know, achieve our goals. 0.99

02:17:33.000 So this actually shows that Hitler is full of shit when he says you just need to install the right ideology in people and then they are motivated. 0.99

02:17:43.000 It's actually Nazi Germany was a very modern system that was using this to their advantage and the army was a modern war machine and they used it Very effectively. 0.99

02:17:54.000 And that's why also other than armies who learned about this, it took them a while, like the British needed quite a while to understand what was going on.

02:18:02.000 But there was one point, a headline in the British newspaper, when does Churchill also use victory in form of a pill?

02:18:12.000 Because in an Italian newspaper in the fall of 1940, there was an article on the German Luftwaffe using a pillolaticioraggio, like a courage pill, which was this methamphetamine.

02:18:24.000 So then the British became like, we have to examine this.

02:18:27.000 And they actually made tests in England comparing methamphetamine with amphetamine and decided that for the British guys, for the English guys, amphetamine is better because it's not so strong.

02:18:38.000 Right.

02:18:39.000 The Nazis always take the strongest and the British were like a little bit more hesitant.

02:18:42.000 And it is actually a smart choice because methamphetamine does burn you out, obviously.

02:18:48.000 It's an addictive drug that's not healthy.

02:18:52.000 And amphetamine is also not healthy, you know, but it's not as – it doesn't make you as edgy.

02:18:58.000 So you can – You can take it over a longer period of time, I guess.

02:19:02.000 Well, methamphetamine really burns you out.

02:19:04.000 I spoke in my research for Blitz with one medical officer that was still alive that had served in World War II for the German army in Stalingrad, actually.

02:19:15.000 He was in Stalingrad, and he said he still had Pervitin, and he gave it to these guys that were freezing to death, being killed by the Red Army and He said it didn't work anymore, but it just gave us another day of artificial energy.

02:19:32.000 So, methamphetamine is a very...

02:19:35.000 In a long war, it's very problematic.

02:19:38.000 In a short war, it actually works. 0.86

02:19:41.000 That's why after the October 7th attack of Hamas on Israel, I was interviewed by Haaretz, which is the leading Israeli newspaper, Because there was rumor that also these combatants or these terrorists or whatever you want to call them had used captagon which is another form of meth that's a brand name that's very popular actually in the Middle East.

02:20:05.000 And I had found a paper from...

02:20:11.000 So, April last year, so April 23, was a report, you can find it online by some newspaper, that a large shipment of Kaptagon was seized at the Gaza border, actually by Hamas border forces.

02:20:26.000 Who claimed that actually Israel was smuggling this into Gaza to kind of corrupt the Gaza youth.

02:20:32.000 I don't know if that's true.

02:20:33.000 You know, it was just what Hamas said.

02:20:35.000 But for sure, there was Kaptagon in the Gaza Strip.

02:20:40.000 And I'm totally convinced that people used it when they attacked Israel.

02:20:46.000 And that is not the only case.

02:20:47.000 When the terrorist attacks in Paris happened, they found amphetamines.

02:20:54.000 They seized $1 billion worth of Captagon amphetamines.

02:20:58.000 It is rumored that the Assad regime in Syria is actually behind large-scale manufacturing of Captagon at the moment.

02:21:05.000 That's how they get their money because Captagon is like the cocaine of the poor man, you know?

02:21:09.000 30%.

02:21:10.000 13 tons!

02:21:12.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:21:12.000 Dubai police uncovered 13 tons of the drug known as Captagon hidden in doors and wooden panels. 0.71

02:21:18.000 Wow!

02:21:19.000 So Captagon is a...

02:21:21.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:21:23.000 And Captagon has a similar effect to methamphetamine?

02:21:26.000 Yeah, it's very similar.

02:21:28.000 It's a very similar molecule.

02:21:30.000 Wow.

02:21:31.000 So I guess it's very strong.

02:21:32.000 Well, it makes sense that that would be very effective in times of war, especially for short campaigns.

02:21:37.000 I had a reading in LA from Blitz, and afterwards a Navy SEAL approached me who had been in the audience.

02:21:47.000 And he was not on the team that killed Osama Bin Laden, but he was on a parallel team.

02:21:53.000 He knew a lot about it.

02:21:56.000 He did stuff like that.

02:21:58.000 And he said before they go into an operation like that, an operation that requires them to stay awake for, let's say, 50 hours.

02:22:06.000 And not only stay awake, but to stay very alert for 50 hours.

02:22:10.000 It's obvious that you use an amphetamine.

02:22:12.000 It doesn't matter if you burn out later.

02:22:14.000 You just take a week off, you know.

02:22:17.000 So the Nazis invented methamphetamine for war. 0.65

02:22:21.000 The idea, you know, by Ranke to use it for war purposes.

02:22:25.000 And it has been copied.

02:22:26.000 Already in the Korean War, American pilots were on amphetamines.

02:22:30.000 Like amphetamines are like a staple now of armies and of, you know, terrorist groups, freedom fighters or whatever, you know.

02:22:38.000 Because it also lowers, this was what Ranke also found out, it lowers your fear level.

02:22:45.000 So when you're on meth, you're less afraid.

02:22:49.000 It lowers your level of, like you're not as inhibited.

02:22:53.000 Like you would rather kill someone in a brutal way than you would sober, because it's very hard actually to kill another human being.

02:23:00.000 It's very stressful and we don't really want to do it.

02:23:04.000 But studies found that on meth, you're more likely, it's easier for you to do it.

02:23:09.000 So it's really the Nazis that are, you know, they pioneered in it. 0.93

02:23:17.000 How similar is that to the effects of Adderall?

02:23:22.000 Adderall is obviously amphetamine, and there was, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 39 million prescriptions in a recent year.

02:23:30.000 It's another one of these contradictions, like drugs are illegal, but Adderall is legal, which is basically, it is amphetamine, so it's just like a certain type of amphetamine, and I know quite a few people who are addicted to these types of pills,

02:23:47.000 and it's not a nice addiction, I think, and Because it's also, you know, it's legal.

02:23:51.000 Like, your psychiatrist says, take this, so you function well.

02:23:55.000 Yeah, you have ADHD, Norman.

02:23:56.000 You need to take it.

02:23:58.000 What did you just say?

02:23:59.000 You need to take it.

02:24:00.000 You should take the medication.

02:24:02.000 I'm very sorry I came on the show sober.

02:24:03.000 I would have been so amazing otherwise.

02:24:07.000 I know many, many people, especially journalists.

02:24:11.000 I know a lot of journalists and a lot of writers who use Adderall to be productive.

02:24:17.000 Yeah, and I would say why not?

02:24:20.000 If you want to pay the price of using something that's maybe bad for your brain and maybe makes you addicted, but maybe you think you write better on it.

02:24:27.000 So that's like a chance that some writers take, like...

02:24:32.000 Who wrote, do electric sheep...

02:24:35.000 No, do androids dream of electric sheep? 1.00

02:24:39.000 Is that Philip K. Dick?

02:24:41.000 Yeah, right.

02:24:41.000 He was using a lot of amphetamines.

02:24:43.000 I heard that Jack Kerouac wrote on the road, like in two weeks, on amphetamines.

02:24:50.000 Drugs are basically neutral.

02:24:52.000 You don't become a Nazi soldier when you take amphetamine.

02:24:55.000 It creates a certain state in your brain.

02:24:58.000 You release all your dopamine.

02:24:59.000 You're highly alert. 0.99

02:25:00.000 You might be very creative, but you also might write a lot of shit, because your self-criticism is lowered. 0.99

02:25:07.000 So Kiroek, being a very good writer, he rode the wave. 0.99

02:25:11.000 He was just riding this on-the-road thing.

02:25:14.000 I have friends that have tried amphetamines, particularly Adderall, and then done stand-up comedy, and they say it's absolutely terrible.

02:25:21.000 It's terrible for stand-up comedy.

02:25:22.000 Because you lose that subtlety, right?

02:25:24.000 You lose the subtlety, you lose a connection with the audience, and you're not having fun anymore.

02:25:29.000 It's like you're not being silly, and your self-criticism is out the window, so you think everything you say is brilliant.

02:25:36.000 Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.

02:25:38.000 I mean, but some people find it very beneficial for productivity, which is interesting.

02:25:44.000 It probably depends what you need to do.

02:25:47.000 It also depends on your self-control, right?

02:25:49.000 Do you have the amount of self-control and the amount of objective analysis about what you're doing with your life to recognize that what you're doing is detrimental?

02:25:58.000 Can you manage that?

02:25:59.000 Can you figure out how to back off?

02:26:01.000 Can you figure out how to take time off?

02:26:03.000 Can you figure out when to use it and just use it effectively and say to yourself in a very disciplined way?

02:26:09.000 I'm gonna take X amount of this Adderall stuff because I have a deadline.

02:26:13.000 I'm gonna get this done. 0.97

02:26:14.000 I'm gonna do my best and then afterwards I'm not gonna fuck with it anymore. 0.97

02:26:19.000 A lot of people can't do that but a lot of people can I guess. 0.98

02:26:22.000 And it's sort of like all other drugs.

02:26:25.000 We should sort of figure out what's the dose, what's effective, what's not effective, and also strategies for helping people get off of it, like Ibogaine.

02:26:35.000 I think having any kind of legalization strategy.

02:26:40.000 So if they legalize drugs in this country, I think it has to be done in conjunction with a treatment strategy.

02:26:46.000 And I think that treatment strategy is Ibogaine.

02:26:50.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:26:52.000 I mean, the psychedelics do get you off other drugs.

02:26:55.000 That's a fact.

02:26:56.000 Also DMT gets you off other drugs.

02:26:58.000 So they work against addiction.

02:27:00.000 So that old scare of, you know, some drugs are like, you take one drug and then you take the next drug, you know, until in the end you land with heroin. 0.96

02:27:09.000 That's kind of stupid, you know, because if you take LSD, you're not going to land with heroin, you know. 0.93

02:27:14.000 And if you take Ibogaine, for sure also not. 1.00

02:27:16.000 Well, marijuana is the great one, right?

02:27:17.000 The gateway drug.

02:27:18.000 I think alcohol is a great gateway drug.

02:27:20.000 That's the real one.

02:27:21.000 Because alcohol lowers your inhibitions.

02:27:24.000 It lowers your judgment.

02:27:26.000 And then all of a sudden you're like, I'll try that.

02:27:29.000 Yeah, right.

02:27:30.000 Yeah, and then there's also people take cocaine when they drink too much alcohol to wake up.

02:27:36.000 Yeah, I spoke with, actually with an Ibogaine researcher, Deborah Mash from University of Miami, and she found that alcohol and cocaine together create a new metabolite in the body, and that is the one that many people go for.

02:27:53.000 It's like...

02:27:54.000 One plus one equals three, basically.

02:27:57.000 So you won't get that high from alcohol alone and you also won't get it from cocaine alone.

02:28:02.000 Most people don't take cocaine alone.

02:28:04.000 They always drink when they take cocaine because they want that particular form of metabolite of intoxication going.

02:28:12.000 Interesting.

02:28:12.000 It's obviously very unhealthy.

02:28:14.000 So here it is.

02:28:16.000 How do you say that word?

02:28:17.000 Yeah, right.

02:28:17.000 Cocethylene?

02:28:18.000 Cocethylene is a byproduct of concurrent consumption of alcohol and cocaine as metabolized by the liver.

02:28:24.000 Normally, the metabolism of cocaine produces two primary biologically inactive metabolites.

02:28:30.000 Benzo, how do you say that?

02:28:32.000 Benzo-lec-lec-go-neen, benzo-lec-o-neen and echinine, echinine, methyl ester.

02:28:43.000 Well that's a big factor too, right?

02:28:45.000 Like how it's metabolized by the liver.

02:28:47.000 There's a difference between eating cannabis and smoking it, right?

02:28:51.000 So 11 hydroxy metabolite, which is created by the liver, which is five times more psychoactive than THC. So there's a lot of factors.

02:29:00.000 And the thing is, it's kind of crazy that your book and your work was really illuminating the effect that this had on one of the most historically significant events in human history,

02:29:16.000 which is World War II. Yeah, I thought that was quite strange.

02:29:19.000 I mean, I went onward with my research from, I wanted to expand and I wanted to look at Hitler also.

02:29:28.000 I was going to ask you this before you get to that.

02:29:30.000 If methamphetamine was created after the 1936 Games, what was Hitler on during the 1936 Games?

02:29:36.000 When you see him rocking back and forth and he's tripping, was he doing cocaine?

02:29:39.000 What was he on?

02:29:41.000 I mean, I studied the notes of his doctor, his doctor's personal physician, Theodor Morel, who was kind of a celebrity doctor in Berlin before he met Hitler.

02:29:56.000 Like, he was famous for treating diseases that don't exist, so he gave mood-enhancing drugs.

02:30:02.000 Shots, injections.

02:30:03.000 And he was also a vitamin pioneer.

02:30:07.000 He believed in vitamins.

02:30:08.000 And at the time, vitamins were kind of unknown.

02:30:11.000 So he thought if you inject someone with such and such, inject someone with vitamin C, that would be a mood-enhancing effect.

02:30:20.000 And actually, that's true.

02:30:23.000 So, he cured Hitler's photographer Hubertus Hoffmann of a sexual transmitted disease in 1936 and then Hoffmann said, I have to bring you to a special patient and then there was a spaghetti dinner with Morell and Hitler. 0.75

02:30:40.000 And Hitler was complaining of bloating problems. 0.73

02:30:43.000 He always was like he had digestion problems.

02:30:46.000 And Morel, who was like an alternative doctor, gave him like vitamins and a probiotic, which was also new at the time.

02:30:52.000 And Hitler was cured and he appointed Morel as his personal physician. 0.90

02:30:57.000 They became kind of best friends.

02:30:58.000 They were like Hitler spent more time with Morel than with anyone else all the way up to the end. 0.65

02:31:04.000 So Morell's notes are very interesting to study because he was like one of these German nerds that wrote everything down.

02:31:10.000 And I went to another federal archive in Germany and I checked out all the papers of Morell.

02:31:15.000 And I could see that basically no one had looked at these papers.

02:31:19.000 Like Hitler's the most examined person in the world. 0.90

02:31:24.000 The most literature about one person is actually about Hitler, but no one...

02:31:29.000 I mean, the last time someone checked out these notes, I could see it in the record of the archive, it was like in 1986 and then someone in 1961. So I was like the fourth person to look at this.

02:31:40.000 So it's kind of crazy because Morel describes in detail what he gives to Hitler.

02:31:47.000 And what, that's why I'm a little bit surprised by this famous video of him, like, I think maybe it's a fake, I don't know, because in 36, up until, from 36 when they met, and Morel was with him at the Olympic Games, until 41,

02:32:03.000 basically Hitler only received vitamins.

02:32:06.000 Vitamin C, vitamin B1, and sometimes glucose, like sugar, was injected into...

02:32:12.000 Maybe it was on a sugar rush, you know, because sugar is a strong drug, because sugar immediately kicks in the brain.

02:32:18.000 But there was no heavy substances in 36. Morel wrote everything down, so I don't think he would...

02:32:28.000 And Morell's introduction to Hitler was what year? 0.69

02:32:31.000 36. So it was at the same time?

02:32:33.000 Yep, a little bit before.

02:32:34.000 So the introduction was before the Olympics?

02:32:37.000 Yeah.

02:32:38.000 Is it possible that Hitler is taking something without the knowledge of Morell?

02:32:41.000 No.

02:32:41.000 No?

02:32:42.000 Because Morell was very protective of his patient.

02:32:46.000 He called him patient A. And before that, Hitler had like an array of like specialists. 0.91

02:32:52.000 Hitler didn't like specialists in general.

02:32:54.000 Like he didn't like...

02:32:55.000 There was Karl Brandt, he was like the highest SS doctor and he wanted to be like the personal physician of Hitler but Hitler didn't want like an SS guy to have so much knowledge about his body so he always kept Brandt at bay and then Morell was like perfect for Hitler because Morell was like this kind of chubby good-humoured kind of house doctor with the crazy recipes and the crazy injections so Hitler thought this is my guy basically.

02:33:23.000 And Morel's wife was very much against that, that her husband became the personal physician of Hitler.

02:33:29.000 She said to him, like, we won't spend that much time together from now on.

02:33:33.000 Morel was like, no, I have to take this chance, you know, I can be the person.

02:33:36.000 He was like a celebrity doctor before us.

02:33:38.000 Now he's the personal physician of the Führer, the most powerful man of Europe.

02:33:42.000 So Morell very much controlled what Hitler took. 0.62

02:33:46.000 Hitler didn't take anything that Morell didn't talk about or authorize and write down.

02:33:52.000 He was his doctor.

02:33:54.000 He was always there.

02:33:56.000 So I see basically three phases in Hitler's drug taking, and from 36 to 41, it was mostly these vitamins. 0.77

02:34:05.000 And Hitler was never ill during this time.

02:34:08.000 Like, he had a pretty good health in general, except from the bloating, because he ate wrong.

02:34:12.000 He was a vegetarian that basically ate, like, bread, bread and sugar.

02:34:16.000 So that's very unhealthy for your gut, we know these days.

02:34:20.000 You know, they didn't know that.

02:34:21.000 So he was always farting, basically.

02:34:23.000 That was a problem for him.

02:34:25.000 And Morell kind of cured him with the probiotics and then the vitamins.

02:34:29.000 And, you know, Hitler kind of grooved along to this kind of treatment. 0.76

02:34:33.000 And he was, you know, very successful also in the beginning.

02:34:35.000 He was very healthy.

02:34:36.000 He won all the wars.

02:34:38.000 Like, he was on top of the world.

02:34:39.000 And then in 1941, Germany decided, he decided, to attack the Soviet Union.

02:34:46.000 And also the Soviet Union, the campaign against Russia was very successful in the first three months.

02:34:53.000 A lot of methamphetamine was given to the soldiers, just like any attack on France.

02:34:57.000 They overran the Red Army like crazy.

02:35:00.000 Like within three months, they made huge territorial gains.

02:35:03.000 They were in October 1940. They were already standing in front of Moscow.

02:35:07.000 Like, they could see, like, one officer could, like, look with his binoculars and he could see the tram, like, the last tram station of Moscow.

02:35:15.000 He could, like, see that.

02:35:16.000 So they were right in front of Moscow.

02:35:18.000 And the thing was, what happened was, in August 1941, like, in the middle of the campaign, the campaign started June 21st, 1941. So August 1941, they were already, they had huge, you know, gained a lot of territory.

02:35:33.000 But Hitler for the first time became sick. 0.79

02:35:35.000 He had what they call the Russian flu.

02:35:37.000 Like he was, you know, camping, you know, the headquarters was moving with the troops.

02:35:41.000 So he was, you know, maybe drank bad water or something.

02:35:45.000 And he had the Russian flu, which made him stay in bed.

02:35:50.000 He had very high fever.

02:35:51.000 He was like...

02:36:02.000 I think?

02:36:14.000 I think?

02:36:38.000 And so he wanted to be at that briefing, and he said to Morell, I need something stronger than vitamins.

02:36:43.000 And Morell gave him for the first time a very strong opioid, which was called Dolantin, which was a German product.

02:36:51.000 And that opioid, you know, is a different ballgame than vitamins.

02:36:56.000 He got an injection of a very potent opioid, and he gets up from the bed, he goes to the military briefing office, He can call the shots, you know, troops will be separated. 0.99

02:37:06.000 High command was like, what the fuck, you know, but, you know, he's the leader, so he decides. 0.88

02:37:11.000 And from that moment on, we can see in the notes of Morrell that Hitler's drug consumption actually changes, like he becomes more and more interested in In potent substances. 0.99

02:37:23.000 And from 1941 to 1943, Morel experiences a lot with also animal hormones.

02:37:30.000 Like when Germany invades the Ukraine and has the whole territory of the Ukraine, Morel gets the monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals in all of the slaughterhouses of Ukraine. 0.70

02:37:43.000 It's like a Was that for Taurine?

02:37:57.000 Huh?

02:37:57.000 Was that for Taurine?

02:37:59.000 Yeah, I mean, he experimented.

02:38:00.000 He had like his own pharmaceutical company by the time, Morel, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where like his chemist was like getting awful and organs and thyroid glands and, you know, all kinds of very potent things and then making like concoctions with it.

02:38:18.000 Like there was a famous liver concoction, like from pig's liver.

02:38:24.000 And Morell's problem was that at the time in 1943 it was a war economy in Germany so it was very difficult to bring new medicines onto the market.

02:38:32.000 Basically it was not possible like all the tests that usually are done in peace times on a new medicine.

02:38:37.000 So he said this to Hitler like I'm developing all these new medicines from all these organs and I cannot bring them on the market.

02:38:46.000 They cannot help the German people sustain in this war. 0.99

02:38:48.000 And then Hitler said this is bullshit. 0.99

02:38:51.000 I, the Führer, will be your guinea pig and I will test all these dubious concoctions that you make. 0.99

02:38:59.000 And then, because when I take it, every German, you know, can take it and we kind of bypass all the regulations.

02:39:06.000 And this is exactly what happened.

02:39:07.000 So Hitler actually became the guinea pig for like hormonal concoctions for Morell. 0.92

02:39:14.000 So this is, it really, it's really an insane thing.

02:39:17.000 A story that is beautifully documented.

02:39:20.000 So you can read train wagons going from the Ukraine, from the German army.

02:39:26.000 Very scarce it was to have a whole train wagon because they needed to ship wounded soldiers back or ammunition.

02:39:34.000 And he just required whole train wagons filled with his offal from the slaughterhouses and all the... 0.69

02:39:53.000 We're good to go.

02:40:02.000 And then the wagon was going through and then Morell was creating these concoctions.

02:40:07.000 And Hitler actually, he took too many of these weird things. 0.85

02:40:12.000 His health started deteriorating in 1943. He was quite healthy until 1941 to 1943 when he took all these organ things and all these hormones and crazy stuff.

02:40:25.000 Today you would send the doctor that prescribes you that stuff to prison, you know.

02:40:29.000 But, you know, there was no checks and balances like Hitler just took because he liked Morell and he liked to experiment and they were always talking about new enhancement of the body. 0.77

02:40:40.000 That was a whole Nazi idea, you know, to become more powerful, more strong, you know. 0.92

02:40:45.000 So he was interested in these things and actually his health started to deteriorate.

02:40:51.000 And then by 43 he had already become quite a different man.

02:40:56.000 He aged quite a lot.

02:40:58.000 I mean you can see it if you compare the young Hitler with like just five years later. 0.80

02:41:01.000 He looks like 20 years older, you know.

02:41:04.000 And then in 43, because he's doing so poorly, like his chi, you would say today, your physical energy was like really down.

02:41:12.000 If you take like, if you get like one pig liver extract injection a day, you know, you can imagine how you're going to feel like after like a year or so.

02:41:20.000 It's not very healthy.

02:41:21.000 So it...

02:41:23.000 What was the goal of the pig liver extract?

02:41:27.000 Enhance energy.

02:41:28.000 They then gave it to the German soldiers.

02:41:31.000 They drank this stuff because liver is always filled with nutrients, I guess.

02:41:39.000 That's why some people think, and I would probably agree, that it's healthy to eat liver.

02:41:45.000 They think an ounce of liver a day is probably the right amount.

02:41:50.000 But injecting pig liver.

02:41:52.000 So Hitler, technically speaking, wasn't a vegetarian at all because he was using all these animal supplements. 0.79

02:42:02.000 He just wasn't consuming them with his mouth.

02:42:04.000 Right.

02:42:05.000 Right.

02:42:05.000 So, do you know the famous story about Hitler meeting Mussolini, where Mussolini wanted to get out of the war?

02:42:12.000 Yeah.

02:42:13.000 I write about that in Blitz because that is the first time.

02:42:19.000 Hitler was quite depressed before the meeting and felt betrayed because Mussolini wanted to leave the war effort.

02:42:25.000 This was in July 1943. Mussolini said, this is not working.

02:42:29.000 We'd rather get out, okay?

02:42:30.000 Is that fine with you if we just leave the Axis now? 0.97

02:42:34.000 And Hitler's like, no, it's not fine, you know? 0.87

02:42:36.000 So he was very nervous before that meeting and was in a villa in northern Italy.

02:42:41.000 And he asked Morell again for something stronger.

02:42:44.000 And then Morell for the first time presented what then would become Hitler's favorite drug. 0.88

02:42:51.000 And this was a German drug called Oikodal.

02:42:55.000 And it's quite interesting.

02:42:57.000 Oikodal was made by the Merck company, which is still a pharmaceutical giant today.

02:43:02.000 And it's an opioid.

02:43:03.000 It's an opioid that makes you, if you inject it intravenously, quite euphoric, but also quite calm.

02:43:10.000 You know, you're not crazy if you're...

02:43:12.000 If you're on Oikodal intravenously, you think you're on top of the world. 1.00

02:43:18.000 You feel so great.

02:43:19.000 And Hitler loved this drug. 0.87

02:43:21.000 He got it injected before the meeting with Mussolini.

02:43:25.000 On the way to the plane, he asked for another injection.

02:43:28.000 He loved it so much.

02:43:30.000 And then like people who were at the meeting in this villa said that Hitler was just, you know, talking nonstop like I'm doing right now.

02:43:38.000 Like talking?

02:43:39.000 No, we're actually having a conversation.

02:43:41.000 We're having a conversation.

02:43:42.000 Hitler and Mussolini did not have a conversation.

02:43:45.000 Hitler was talking like for three, four hours without stopping. 0.81

02:43:49.000 I think?

02:44:12.000 When Germany lost, a lot of patents were also lost from Germany and became possession of America.

02:44:19.000 And the patent of oikodal also traveled to America.

02:44:22.000 And oikodal is oxycodone.

02:44:25.000 So what has created the American opioid crisis is the very same opioid that was Hitler's favorite opioid. 0.85

02:44:32.000 Sold in America as pills.

02:44:34.000 They, you know, crushed and sniffed whatever, you know, inject.

02:44:37.000 I don't know, you know.

02:44:38.000 Hitler was injecting it from the start, you know? 0.99

02:44:41.000 He didn't fuck around with pills, you know? 0.99

02:44:44.000 Because pills... 0.99

02:44:45.000 Because he still had these stomach problems.

02:44:48.000 He didn't like a medicine to go orally, like, into the...

02:44:51.000 He didn't like...

02:44:52.000 It took too long, you know?

02:44:53.000 You don't know.

02:44:54.000 You take something now and it's acting like in 45 minutes.

02:44:57.000 They're not good, you know?

02:44:58.000 The injection is the immediate effect.

02:45:00.000 So that's what he wanted.

02:45:01.000 He would go to a military briefing...

02:45:03.000 When the war was in 1944, the generals knew it was lost.

02:45:09.000 They came from the Eastern Front.

02:45:11.000 People were dying every day.

02:45:13.000 It was over.

02:45:15.000 But they came to the meeting to tell Hitler, basically, you want to save your men. 0.59

02:45:21.000 But Hitler on Oxycodone, on Oikodar, as it was called then, had so much power in the room, so much charisma. 0.62

02:45:31.000 He was very charismatic early on, but he had lost his charisma in the meantime.

02:45:36.000 But through Eukodal, he could reinstall his charisma, being good in the room.

02:45:41.000 And I read a lot of witnesses' reports from generals.

02:45:45.000 A lot of them wrote books afterwards or made notes what happened.

02:45:48.000 They said...

02:45:50.000 When they were with Hitler in this room, they were convinced that Hitler knew something that they didn't know.

02:45:55.000 Like he had a wonder weapon up his sleeve.

02:45:57.000 Like he knew that the war would turn around and we would win, the Germans would win in the end. 0.97

02:46:02.000 Because he was so convincing on this Eukodal.

02:46:05.000 So Hitler was very clever actually in using that drug for his horrific vision. 0.96

02:46:13.000 Wow!

02:46:15.000 And you can examine this day by day by studying the papers of Morell and then also studying other accounts.

02:46:25.000 Because it's always good to look at more, not only have one source, but there's quite a lot on it.

02:46:31.000 So it is quite surprising no one ever wrote about that before.

02:46:33.000 Well, it's fascinating because if you think about how much is written about Hitler and how much Hitler has been studied, that they didn't study that.

02:46:41.000 It's totally crazy, actually.

02:46:42.000 Because it has such a profound effect on the way you think and behave.

02:46:45.000 It does.

02:46:47.000 I mean, there was one...

02:46:48.000 We all know that on July 20th, 1944, there was the most successful...

02:46:54.000 I mean, it wasn't successful, but almost successful assassination attempt when the bomb by Stauffenberg blew up in the headquarters in the East.

02:47:03.000 Operation Valkyrie, it was called.

02:47:05.000 It was a codename.

02:47:09.000 I think?

02:47:39.000 I think?

02:47:47.000 So you can see, like, an hour later, Hitler, like, you know, on top of his game again, you know, joking with Mussolini and, like, the other, like, officers have lost a leg, died. 0.70

02:47:59.000 And then, actually, from that moment on, Hitler, that's, like, July 20, 1944, until the very end, May 8, 1945, when the war ends. 0.79

02:48:12.000 That is his heaviest drug consumption because then he's really like, this is the most intense time.

02:48:19.000 One of the things, for example, that happens is that to treat his blown eardrums, which were connected with heavy pain that he experienced, A new doctor came in, Giesing was his name,

02:48:34.000 and he had cocaine.

02:48:36.000 He brought cocaine, which was a legal product at the time, also by Merck.

02:48:40.000 Germany was importing the coca leaves from Peru mostly.

02:48:45.000 And then Merck cocaine was supposed to be the best in the world.

02:48:48.000 There were even product foragers in China who replicate the Merck.

02:48:54.000 We're good to go.

02:49:17.000 Hitler demands to use cocaine. 0.89

02:49:21.000 He wants the doctor to brush it into his nose, nostrils, which is the most effective way to take cocaine, I guess.

02:49:30.000 And then he's like, finally I can think clear again.

02:49:33.000 And the doctor realized this is a drugged guy.

02:49:37.000 Once he gets onto a potent drug, he completely embraces it and wants it more.

02:49:43.000 So Gizing...

02:49:44.000 I tried to get the coke away from Hitler. 0.89

02:49:47.000 Hitler demanded more and more of these cocaine treatments because I can feel, finally I can breathe again and I don't feel like injured anymore. 0.85

02:49:56.000 And actually on cocaine he developed the strategy of a second Ardennes offensive.

02:50:01.000 We talked about the mountainous terrain of the Ardennes in Belgium in 1940. And Hitler wanted to do it again in late 1944, like a surprise attack. 0.86

02:50:11.000 And like his generals, they couldn't believe it because it was a ridiculous idea because the Americans were already on the continent.

02:50:18.000 Like it was no chance it could have worked out.

02:50:21.000 It would just mean that a lot of people, a lot of young German soldiers are going to die.

02:50:25.000 That's what it meant, his second adenophan.

02:50:27.000 But he had it on cocaine.

02:50:29.000 You can see it very clearly like Morell.

02:50:31.000 And Morell didn't like this.

02:50:32.000 He didn't like this other doctor coming in with the cocaine.

02:50:35.000 The doctor started competing.

02:50:37.000 It's called the doctor's war because the one guy gives him cocaine and Morell gives him oxycodone, which is an opioid.

02:50:44.000 So Hitler was kind of speedballing. 0.88

02:50:46.000 Oh, God.

02:50:47.000 In August and September 1944, and made very crazy, then, decisions.

02:50:52.000 Very bad, for the Nazi war effort, very bad decisions for the world. 1.00

02:50:57.000 You know, it was good that he was so fucked up. 0.99

02:50:59.000 I actually spoke to a British historian who told me that he had investigated... 0.99

02:51:06.000 Anthony Beaver is his name, a great colleague of mine.

02:51:09.000 He had investigated...

02:51:11.000 The British intelligence's plan to assassinate Hitler, because obviously there were these plans, you know.

02:51:18.000 And they had realized in 1944 that it's actually not good to assassinate Hitler, because he was already so off the rails that he weakened, you know, the German war effort.

02:51:30.000 Let's say Hitler was assassinated, then let's say Himmler becomes the Führer or something. 0.66

02:51:39.000 Himmler, he was also a total freak.

02:51:41.000 He did two hours of yoga each morning because he thought the Aryan race is connected with ancient Wiedig.

02:51:47.000 So he was into yoga, but he was not into drugs.

02:51:51.000 Let's just say they would have had an efficient leader, would have been more dangerous basically to the Allies than keeping totally drugged out Hitler. 0.87

02:52:00.000 Wow. 0.99

02:52:00.000 So they wanted him to stay fucked up because it was better. 0.99

02:52:06.000 They actually did not bomb pharmaceutical companies until like in December 1944 British bombers bombed the Merck company and then Eucodal could not be made anymore. 0.95

02:52:21.000 And actually Hitler then moves to the bunker and he doesn't have oikodal anymore, which was, you know, his drug of choice. 0.95

02:52:28.000 He received it every other day in a very high dosage, 20 milligrams intravenously of the most potent opioid.

02:52:35.000 So he became a junkie.

02:52:37.000 He became addicted to this.

02:52:38.000 So then when he moves to the bunker in the end phase of the war, Just before that, the Merck production site had been bombed, who were supplying it.

02:52:46.000 Morell doesn't have it anymore.

02:52:48.000 And that creates quite a friction between patient A, as Morell called Hitler, and the doctor, because the doctor basically made him hooked on a substance.

02:52:57.000 And suddenly, it's like the one mistake that the dealer shouldn't make, make the client hooked, and then you can't supply anymore.

02:53:04.000 And also, no one else could supply.

02:53:06.000 Hitler couldn't go somewhere else. 0.94

02:53:08.000 There's a report by Morell driving on a motorcycle through bombed-out Berlin, like, February-March 1945, like, going from pharmacy to pharmacy, trying, asking, do you still have, like, a supply of oikodal, you know?

02:53:22.000 Wow. 0.98

02:53:22.000 So, the situation became, you know, Hitler lost World War II, which was not good for him, but he also was on withdrawal, heavy withdrawal from opioids, which made him feel like shit, so... 0.98

02:53:35.000 That leads to the complete degeneration of the character. 0.98

02:53:40.000 Wow.

02:53:41.000 So that Third Reich kind of crumbled in on itself. 0.91

02:53:46.000 Fascinating.

02:53:47.000 Probably would have lost anyway, but still.

02:53:48.000 Of course.

02:53:49.000 Fascinating that it all happened, and it's kind of ironic that it happens while he's in full withdrawal.

02:53:55.000 Yeah.

02:53:56.000 I mean, the only drug really that he had left in the end was Harmin, which we spoke about Harmin.

02:54:01.000 Like, I studied, like, what Morel still had, like, in his bag, basically.

02:54:05.000 Like, looked at the bottom of his bag and he still had Harmin, so he gave Harmin to Hitler. 0.82

02:54:09.000 So Hitler was a... 0.85

02:54:10.000 I don't know what Harmin does to you if you just take it singularly, but it doesn't, you know...

02:54:16.000 And sugar.

02:54:18.000 Like, Hitler more and more demanded cake. 0.53

02:54:29.000 Wow.

02:54:31.000 Wow.

02:54:43.000 Wow.

02:54:45.000 In Blitz we find like a new biography in a way of Hitler. 0.50

02:54:50.000 A more accurate one actually.

02:54:53.000 That is so fascinating.

02:54:56.000 Wasn't there recorded instances of JFK? Didn't he have a doctor that would prescribe some sort of amphetamines to him as well?

02:55:04.000 JFK is a very interesting case.

02:55:08.000 He had chronic pain and there is reports that he used also methamphetamine.

02:55:18.000 Also he had depression.

02:55:20.000 So he had a kind of a doctor feel good.

02:55:23.000 And one time I found a connection, but I don't really...

02:55:29.000 I couldn't research more about it that this Dr. Feelgood of JFK actually had studied what morale had given to Hitler.

02:55:38.000 But you probably don't even need to study morale.

02:55:42.000 That's what's out there.

02:55:44.000 So JFK, I think, received quite a lot of medications.

02:55:51.000 That's why it's interesting what I wrote about in Tripped is his possible LSD experience.

02:56:00.000 I don't know if you're familiar with that.

02:56:01.000 Yeah, you talked about that with Jesse Waters.

02:56:05.000 Unfortunately, there's only one source for it, and we always have to be skeptical if there's only one source.

02:56:11.000 If there's two sources, it's always much better.

02:56:13.000 But one source, and it's actually Timothy Leary's autobiography.

02:56:17.000 He describes, and I don't think he made this up.

02:56:21.000 I have no reason to believe that he made this up.

02:56:23.000 He describes how a woman called Mary Pinchot visits him at Harvard, telling him, because he was known as the, you know, he was still employed by Harvard.

02:56:33.000 He was, you know, the LSD guy, basically.

02:56:35.000 If you wanted to know about LSD, you would ask Leary.

02:56:38.000 He had done the most research.

02:56:40.000 And also some of the research is very good.

02:56:42.000 Very, you know, it's very interesting.

02:56:44.000 So she went to him.

02:56:45.000 She was like a socialite in Washington, Mary Pinchot.

02:56:48.000 She had been married to a CIA guy, but they had been divorced.

02:56:52.000 She was probably too, quote-unquote, left for him.

02:56:55.000 She was more like a peace person, I guess.

02:57:00.000 And she was also a very good friend of JFK. They were rumored to be lovers.

02:57:06.000 She was in the White House a lot.

02:57:08.000 He took her to functions.

02:57:09.000 She was a part of his life.

02:57:12.000 And she visited Leary Saying to Leary, I have a very powerful friend.

02:57:18.000 This was in April, 63. And I want to do the experience with him.

02:57:26.000 And Leary was all, you know, he kind of was probably thinking, is this JFK? But she didn't disclose it.

02:57:32.000 She didn't disclose who this powerful friend was.

02:57:35.000 And Leary said, yeah, I'm going to come with you.

02:57:37.000 We're going to do it together.

02:57:38.000 And she said, no, no, no, just give it to me.

02:57:41.000 I want the staff, the LSD, and I want to kind of get some guidelines from you.

02:57:45.000 How do you do like a LSD session?

02:57:48.000 So they had this, you know, Leary told her a bit about what he thinks, how it should be done.

02:57:52.000 It's set and setting.

02:57:54.000 JFK shouldn't do it while he's doing a press conference.

02:57:57.000 He should do it when there's maybe...

02:57:59.000 He doesn't have to go on camera anymore that day.

02:58:02.000 Maybe it's in the evening in the White House.

02:58:05.000 So she takes the LSD and then there's no record that they actually took it together because there's just no record.

02:58:14.000 There's her diary, but we'll come to her diary in a second.

02:58:17.000 What happened was...

02:58:20.000 A little bit later, and you can pull that up on YouTube, you can see that it's quite interesting.

02:58:26.000 Kennedy gave his so-called peace speech at the American University, which is, I think, in Washington, or maybe not, but is it Washington?

02:58:36.000 Yeah.

02:58:37.000 And in this peace speech, it's kind of funny actually to see him because we have to understand that JFK was quite a hawk.

02:58:44.000 Like he was really a Cold War guy.

02:58:46.000 Like he was a Democrat.

02:58:48.000 Like the Democrats, they're all for war.

02:58:50.000 You know, they like, you know, it's confrontation.

02:58:52.000 We have to be safe.

02:58:53.000 You know, we have to protect the country.

02:58:55.000 You know, we're serious, you know, arms race.

02:58:57.000 You know, that was his thing.

02:58:58.000 He was not different than other presidents.

02:59:01.000 But in this peace speech that he gave a few weeks after Mary Pinchot received the LSD from Leary, he has a completely different agenda.

02:59:14.000 And he sounds basically like a hippie.

02:59:17.000 He says, like, you're very presidential, you know, giving a speech for all these students and a nice day in America.

02:59:25.000 And the president's coming to give a speech.

02:59:28.000 And he talks about, you know, we all live on this planet together.

02:59:31.000 Even the Russians, you know, we all care for our children and we're all in this together.

02:59:37.000 And he basically shifts course. 0.85

02:59:40.000 He says that this arms race is kind of ridiculous.

02:59:44.000 It just burns resources and we must come to a different understanding. 0.97

02:59:48.000 And then he gets killed like a few months later.

02:59:51.000 So that is just, those are the facts, you know, and I think I'll leave it at the fact.

02:59:56.000 So, fact also is that Mary Pinchot was shot in the head a few weeks or months after the assassination of JFK. And that day of her death, she was jogging in Washington close to her apartment.

03:00:12.000 There was a breaking into her apartment and her diary was taken.

03:00:16.000 Maybe that's the source, actually, that links JFK to LSD. And maybe JFK was eventually killed because he took LSD and changed his mind.

03:00:29.000 I think there's a lot of factors why he was killed, right?

03:00:34.000 Yeah, obviously.

03:00:36.000 I mean, it's kind of a mystery why he was killed.

03:00:40.000 Why does he need to be killed?

03:00:42.000 But maybe that change of mind, saying the arms race must stop, which pisses off a lot of people in the military-industrial complex who base their whole thing on the arms race.

03:00:55.000 Maybe that becomes a very big threat and it must be eliminated.

03:00:59.000 Who knows?

03:00:59.000 You know, but maybe it was, you know, he had a change of mind for sure.

03:01:04.000 Maybe because of LSD, maybe because of the lovemaking with Mary Pinchot, or maybe they were just smoking joints.

03:01:10.000 They were seen, there are sources for that they had smoked joints in the White House before.

03:01:15.000 But I don't know if cannabis would kind of bring about this change of mind.

03:01:18.000 But LSD certainly could, because the default mode network, which is Cold War, arms race, suddenly gets a little less energy.

03:01:27.000 Other parts of the brain is like, Maybe we should do it differently.

03:01:31.000 And also the realization that if anybody can change things, he literally has a responsibility to express himself in that way.

03:01:38.000 Absolutely.

03:01:39.000 If he really is a leader.

03:01:40.000 Yeah.

03:01:42.000 Norman, thank you very much.

03:01:43.000 This was a fascinating conversation.

03:01:45.000 That was just three hours.

03:01:46.000 Isn't that crazy?

03:01:47.000 Just flew by.

03:01:48.000 Thank you very much for all your work.

03:01:51.000 I mean, what you've done by just the Hitler stuff, just explaining all that is...

03:01:56.000 It's so illuminating.

03:01:58.000 It's so interesting.

03:01:59.000 And I really hope everybody goes out and buys your books.

03:02:02.000 So Tripped and Blitzed is the other one?

03:02:05.000 Yeah.

03:02:06.000 And are they available?

03:02:08.000 That's actually a present for you.

03:02:09.000 Oh, thank you very much.

03:02:10.000 And you can have the Tripped also.

03:02:11.000 Thank you.

03:02:12.000 Are these available in audiobook as well?

03:02:15.000 They are, but I do encourage everyone to read.

03:02:19.000 But they are available in audiobooks.

03:02:21.000 It is great to read, but sometimes people are stuck in traffic.

03:02:23.000 Yeah, right.

03:02:23.000 It's a great way to consume information.

03:02:25.000 Of course, they're out there in audiobooks.

03:02:27.000 Thank you very much.

03:02:27.000 Really appreciate you.

03:02:29.000 I hope we will see each other again.

03:02:30.000 Yeah, let's do it again.

03:02:31.000 Well, when is this next book that you're working on going to be out?

03:02:33.000 Stone Sapiens will be out, I think, in the fall of 25. Okay, in the fall of 25. Come on back.

03:02:40.000 Let's do it.

03:02:41.000 Thank you, sir.

03:02:42.000 I appreciate you.

03:02:42.000 All right.

03:02:43.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 01, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2183 - Norman Ohler

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