In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I'm joined by the author of the new book, "Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age: How the Nazis Used Psychedelics in the Third Reich" to talk about her new book and her research into the Nazi's use of psychedelics. She talks about how she found out that the Nazis were using psychedelics in their everyday life, and why it was so surprising to her that no one had ever suspected that they were doing so before her book was published in 2015. It's a great episode for anyone who's ever wanted to know what the Nazis did with psychedelics, or if they were even interested in them at all, and for those who want to know how they got their hands on some of the most potent psychedelics the Nazis had ever known. This episode is sponsored by The Joe Rogans Experience, a company that makes high-performance headphones and headphones for the podcasting experience. Check it out! The J.R.Rogan Experience is a podcast by day, all day. All day, by night, all night. I'm very happy to be here. I'm thrilled to be thrilled to have you here! This is my first guest, and I'm so excited to have him on the show! I hope you enjoy this episode. - it's going to be a great one! - I'm looking forward to seeing you soon! Cheers, Cheers - Cheers Cheers! Cheers. Cheerio - Joseph Rogan - The JOKER Podcast by Day by Night - by Night by Night, All Day, by Day, By Night, By Day, Cheerios by Cheers - Cheer! by Night Cheer by Night by Day - By Night Cheers: Cheer (Joe Rogan Podcast by Night All Day Cheer? -- Cheers!! and Cheers by Night's Day by Day Cheers and Night, by Night and Night by Day by Chelle by Night & Night by Cheer's Day, by Chatter by Night? - By Day , Cheers? by Norma Day - All Day All Day by Chanting by Night ( ) By Night by Chantal McElroy ( ) by Chee Day ( ) Chee Chee
00:01:05.000I started out writing three novels and then suddenly I became a nonfiction writer.
00:01:09.000I was trying to understand what does that mean.
00:01:12.000And 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.
00:01:47.000So 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.
00:01:59.000So I found documents while I was researching Blitz relating to tests with psychoactive substances.
00:02:06.000And 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.
00:02:36.000And 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.
00:02:50.000So 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.
00:02:59.000But I didn't have time while I was doing Blitzed.
00:03:01.000And Blitzed was also already a complete story.
00:03:03.000So I thought I saved that, that psychedelic theme for another book.
00:03:08.000And this other book is now being published as Tripped.
00:03:15.000Before this, you'd had no understanding that the Nazis had used psychedelics.
00:03:20.000You 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.
00:03:29.000I mean, the joke about Blitz is that I was actually the first one to write about this.
00:03:35.000But before that, no one knew about it.
00:03:37.000Before 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...
00:03:48.000I spoke to my grandfather when I was a teenager, and I was obviously criticizing him for his involvement.
00:03:54.000I wanted to know what did he do, and he did some shit.
00:03:57.000And then he always said, under Hitler, everything was in order.
00:04:32.000So 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.
00:06:35.000You 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.
00:06:43.000This is how biochemistry, that's basically the foundation of biochemistry.
00:06:47.000So, 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.
00:06:58.000He became like the ergot god of the pharmaceutical world.
00:07:02.000So he developed more and more medicines with ergot.
00:07:06.000One of them, for example, is still used today in childbirth.
00:07:09.000It contracts the blood vessels after the birth so you can stop a bleeding.
00:07:15.000Otherwise, I guess bleeding would go on much longer in childbirth.
00:07:19.000So Sanders made the first effective medicine because ergot kind of makes the blood vessels contract naturally.
00:07:25.000Weren't they trying to develop a drug to induce labor when they initially created LSD? Yeah, this is all the ergot kind of research.
00:07:35.000I mean, the whole company was just doing ergot.
00:07:38.000So they were looking at all kinds of things that ergot could be good for, just to have new products on the market.
00:07:46.000And 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.
00:07:55.000I mean, a very successful company still.
00:07:57.000They bought Sandoz and now it's Novartis, but it's kind of the same thing.
00:08:01.000So Sandoz at one point needed so much ergot that they started manufacturing it in Switzerland.
00:08:08.000Like they went into a specific region called the Emmental, which was famous for its cheese.
00:08:13.000And it's also famous for its bad weather.
00:08:34.000And 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.
00:08:45.000I mean, not poison, but a very poisonous mushroom, you could say, like a fungus.
00:08:53.000You 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.
00:09:03.000That was the problem in the Middle Ages.
00:10:00.000Lysergic acid, diathlamide, lysergic acid being the acid within the ergot, maybe we'll also have a potent stimulant.
00:10:06.000But 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.
00:10:15.000I mean, this was at a time when stimulants were, you know, sought after.
00:10:21.000They didn't have coffee like we have today.
00:10:23.000We just go, we drink a coffee in the morning.
00:10:26.000That's why methamphetamine was so successful in Germany.
00:10:29.000Because 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?
00:10:36.000So the stimulant was what he was looking for.
00:10:41.000And then, like, something came into his bloodstream.
00:10:45.000It'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.
00:10:57.000So he thought, this is actually a very different type of thing.
00:11:02.000Like, what is this lysergic acid, diathlamide LSD? What is it?
00:11:07.000So he did then a first self-experiment, which was kind of normal at the time.
00:11:11.000He took a very, very low dose, what he thought, 250 micrograms.
00:11:16.000But 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.
00:11:29.000I mean, this is a Swiss chemist in a Swiss lab and suddenly he's like full on tripping.
00:12:35.000And 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.
00:13:00.000So they invited secretaries and bookkeepers and chemists and people working in the cafeteria.
00:13:07.000They 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.
00:13:17.000That's the funny thing, because they had never had any bad...
00:13:20.000Today when we take LSD, we have so much discourse about LSD in our mind automatically.
00:14:59.000Because 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.
00:15:16.000And they had done low-dosage tests with LSD on Alzheimer patients, and they found...
00:15:24.000That 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,
00:15:40.000and he also is looking at this white paper and said, this is actually quite good.
00:15:45.000I said, so when is it going to happen?
00:15:47.000He said, well, this is a bit more complicated than you think, you know, because LSD is illegal.
00:16:44.000So 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?
00:16:58.000In court, when I was in court as a judge, I always...
00:17:01.000You don't know what is the truth, but you know what is a good story, like a credible story.
00:17:12.000If 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.
00:17:21.000Can you please find out the true story now?
00:17:42.000My German editor didn't want LSD für Mama, which is the German translation, which I think is the perfect title.
00:17:48.000It's even better in German, LSD für Mama.
00:17:51.000He somehow convinced me to use a different title in Germany.
00:17:55.000This is translated into many different countries, and they always go to the German translation.
00:18:00.000If the Germans would have called it LSD for Mama, it would be called LSD for Mom in America, LSD for Mom in France.
00:18:06.000But 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?
00:18:16.000And I guess they call it Trip because of the success of Blitz they wanted to have.
00:18:19.000But I think LSD for Mom is a better title.
00:18:25.000Because 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.
00:18:38.000I 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.
00:18:54.000We spoke, obviously, to my mother also, because you have to get consent.
00:18:59.000So she gave her consent, and she started using LSD once in a while.
00:19:06.000Not chronically, obviously, but like twice a week, or maybe the next week only once.
00:19:14.000Only low dosages, and my father also took them.
00:19:16.000He never felt anything, because a microdose, you're not supposed to feel a trip or intoxication.
00:19:33.000One time, we also then did mushrooms, which is a very similar molecule.
00:19:40.000Actually, psilocybin is very similar to the LSD molecule.
00:19:43.000On 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.
00:19:59.000And 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.
00:20:39.000To not allow our scientists to examine this properly.
00:20:47.000For example, in the pandemic, during the pandemic, Like regulations in regards to developing medicines, a vaccine especially, were lowered because we wanted, the government,
00:21:18.000Like we will all know someone or we'll have it ourselves or it's going to grow exponentially or at least a lot.
00:21:27.000So 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,
00:21:46.000153 million people are expected to be living with dementia worldwide, up from 57 million in 2019, largely due to population growth and population aging.
00:21:57.000Don't they believe that Alzheimer's has something to do with diet as well?
00:22:01.000Isn't that what they're calling type 3 diabetes?
00:24:54.000It was an American TV show, even on German television.
00:24:58.000It was called Raumschiff Enterprise in German, like Spaceship Enterprise.
00:25:03.000And I was always very touched by the beginning when they say, boldly go where no man has gone before.
00:25:10.000That was for me the American, like the Western philosophy, to always transcend where you are and that totally contradicts our prohibitionist policies.
00:25:27.000It'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.
00:25:36.000Like, you're not allowed to use LSD, which does stimulate the H2TA receptors.
00:25:44.000I think it contradicts the Western philosophy, and actually also I think it contradicts the idea of democracy.
00:26:00.000I 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...
00:26:19.000This is, for me, the strength of the West.
00:26:23.000This is, for example, not what Islam offers.
00:26:26.000Islam says you're not allowed to intoxicate.
00:26:52.000So 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.
00:27:23.000Regime 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,
00:27:46.000it sounds Mexican, it sounds something that we don't want in our clean white American society.
00:28:50.000And 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.
00:29:01.000We really, even though we're free in our society, we have to curb this.
00:29:34.000I think it's a sexual thing, actually.
00:29:37.000Because 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.
00:29:46.000That was kind of the world that he was...
00:29:50.000So was it because the jazz musicians were on stage and people loved them?
00:29:56.000They were only cool because they smoked the weed.
00:29:59.000That gave them that diabolical power over the audience and the groove.
00:30:04.000If you take the weed away from them, they're going to be boring people.
00:30:10.000So that guy really did a lot of damage in my mind to the American society.
00:30:15.000It'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.
00:30:25.000William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, had a vested financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal or making marijuana illegal because of hemp, right?
00:30:36.000You know the whole story about the decorticator?
00:30:38.000Yeah, are you talking about the wood now?
00:30:41.000No, decorticator was a device that was manufactured.
00:30:46.000It was created in the early 1930s and it was on the cover of Popular Science magazine.
00:30:52.000When they called it, they said, hemp, the new billion-dollar crop of the future.
00:30:56.000So 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.
00:31:11.000When the cotton gin came along, that became more effective to use cotton than to use hemp.
00:31:30.000So 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.
00:32:09.000And William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst Publications, he also owned Paper Mills.
00:32:15.000So 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,
00:32:34.000So when they made marijuana illegal, a lot of the people that were voting on this didn't even understand they were making cannabis illegal.
00:32:41.000They didn't understand that it was the same thing.
00:32:44.000They didn't understand that it was the same literal textile that created cannabis.
00:32:50.000All the great works, like if you look at, you know, Leonardo da Vinci's paintings.
00:33:09.000My 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.
00:33:25.000They just prosecuted him based on the fact that he was a drug dealer instead of someone who was...
00:33:32.000Legally in the state of California growing medical marijuana.
00:33:54.000So that stuff converts incredibly to clothing, You can make building materials out of it.
00:34:01.000There's a thing called hempcrete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of out of hemp.
00:34:08.000And 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.
00:34:25.000Cannabis, if you're growing hemp rather, if you grow hemp stalks in the same field, you got new hemp in a few months.
00:34:35.000So, William Randolph Hearst demonized cannabis for the particular interest that he had with paper, with his paper mills, and to stop the hemp industry.
00:34:47.000I mean, they were quite close allies in a way, Enslinger and Hearst.
00:34:52.000And in his publications, the word marijuana was for the first time publicized, so they kind of And with a racial element to it.
00:35:27.000So 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,
00:37:37.000But I think that a lot speaks for this hypothesis.
00:37:40.000I 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.
00:37:53.000And our edge, which is something that Harari writes about over other...
00:38:01.000Homos, like the Neanderthals, or also just monkeys, large monkeys.
00:38:06.000Our 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,
00:38:22.000we know there's a past and there's a future.
00:38:27.000And the different language, a more abstract, more complex language than, for example, the apes.
00:38:33.000Apes can organize up to like a hundred.
00:38:36.000Then that language kind of fails them.
00:38:39.000But humans suddenly, not suddenly, I mean, this is over long periods of time, could develop a language that enabled them to form larger groups.
00:38:47.000That's how they became dominant, also dominant over other homo species like the Neanderthals.
00:38:54.000And 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,
00:39:10.000which is something still used in African societies and which now is again being examined as the new psychoactive hot drug.
00:39:18.000It 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.
00:39:30.000Suddenly you realize this moment where I'm in is not all, there's more.
00:39:36.000There's a future, there's a past, that is what transcendence is.
00:39:39.000So we are basically, that's why I call our species, we're stoned sapiens.
00:39:46.000So 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.
00:40:00.000So rituals start existing like a person who kind of has the drugs and hands them out.
00:40:05.000So this is at the beginning of our race, I think.
00:40:11.000And we were so powerful because we could develop that larger language than the apes.
00:40:18.000We 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.
00:40:29.000Like, we're falling into the Western camp.
00:40:45.000But there's no human global narrative.
00:40:48.000And 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?
00:41:00.000Well, there's a, for lack of a better term, there's a consciousness that exists in mushrooms.
00:41:07.000There's something that you interact with and we don't necessarily understand what's going on.
00:41:12.000But if you could imagine a lower primate interacting with a higher consciousness on a regular basis and then adapting.
00:41:20.000This is the theory of why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years.
00:41:25.000And have you ever listened to Dennis McKenna describe this?
00:41:28.000Dennis 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,
00:41:44.000expanding 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.
00:41:58.000There's also this potential for a type of You know, for lack of a better term, a type of mind-melding.
00:42:08.000You 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.
00:42:25.000You 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.
00:42:38.000But due to the rules of scientific nomenclature, that substance had already been identified as harmine.
00:42:45.000But the researchers that were taking this were saying, we are experiencing these telepathic melds.
00:42:50.000There's something that's going on with these things.
00:42:53.000And we want to get to the bottom of it.
00:42:55.000Let's call it telepathy because it imparts a type of telepathy.
00:43:00.000Well, for Tripp, I became very interested in that question that you just articulated.
00:43:09.000Because that is quite hard to figure out, actually.
00:43:12.000How do they work and what actually changes in the brain?
00:43:15.000And there's one researcher in Zurich, again, in Switzerland.
00:43:18.000They're really experts on psychedelics, actually.
00:43:21.000Because they didn't sign all the UN treaties because they're like a neutral, more neutral country than others.
00:43:26.000So they actually have a little bit more freedom for research.
00:43:29.000And there is a professor called Franz Vollenweider at the university in Zurich.
00:43:34.000And he was able to start in the early 90s.
00:43:37.000Giving 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.
00:43:49.000And he found that actually, that you can actually measure it.
00:43:54.000Or you can see the changes that happen in psychedelics.
00:43:57.000And 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,
00:44:13.000I guess it would be, or the woman in our brain that says, now I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast, and Everything's cool.
00:46:21.000But if you handle it properly, it's actually...
00:46:25.000That is, I guess, what is the beneficial aspect of the psychedelic experience.
00:46:30.000You enhance neuroplasticity in a way...
00:46:32.000I 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...
00:46:43.000Kind of orthodox thought forms, like depressed people always think the same thing, like I'm not worthy or I can't, you know.
00:46:51.000Depression is a loop or loops in your brain of always this.
00:46:55.000And LSD, especially psilocybin, they disrupt that.
00:46:59.000Because, 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.
00:47:09.000That's why psychedelics have proven effective against depression.
00:47:12.000The first study that showed this clinical study was done in 2015, actually in America, at Johns Hopkins University, that psilocybin.
00:47:20.000It helps against very severe depression when nothing else helps.
00:47:26.000So we know a little bit about what happens in the brain, but obviously the brain is still a black box.
00:47:32.000That's why so many scientists, when LSD came out in the late 40s and early 50s, Especially in America were enthusiastic.
00:47:42.000They 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.
00:47:51.000There 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...
00:48:05.000We'll heal from LSD. Many scientists actually believe that.
00:48:11.000And the interesting question is, and we're making a long circle, what went wrong?
00:48:16.000Why 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?
00:48:26.000Well, you can get them here too, which is weird.
00:48:29.000You get them here, like I said, there's like different deltas.
00:48:56.000I was also in America, actually, in high school.
00:48:59.000I 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.
00:49:11.000I was taught before, don't mix with the drug people.
00:49:14.000There 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.
00:49:41.000Yeah, 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.
00:50:07.000LSD 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.
00:50:23.000We'll come to the pressure in a second.
00:50:26.000So LSD is actually a non-addictive drug.
00:50:29.000For example, in Germany now we legalized cannabis.
00:50:39.000I 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.
00:50:48.000But 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.
00:50:58.000That's what I think after studying it, you know.
00:51:00.000But saying this sounds like completely outrageous, you know.
00:51:04.000LSD, like so many people are afraid of it.
00:51:06.000So I hope with Tripp to take a little bit of the edge off, you know, to actually show where it comes from.
00:51:12.000And I would like to tell that story where that comes from.
00:51:17.000Because 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?
00:51:35.000There was a German scientist called Behringer.
00:51:39.000He 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.
00:51:48.000So he was basically one of the pioneers of psychedelic research, you could say.
00:51:53.000So the Nazis knew about mescaline and the Nazis wanted to find a truth drug.
00:52:53.000And the Nazis, the SS, even with their torture methods, had been unable to extract all the secrets they wanted to extract from prisoners.
00:53:03.000Especially Polish resistance fighters had been very resistant even against SS torture.
00:53:09.000Like they wouldn't say, I got the job from the British intelligence or what.
00:53:14.000You know, they just wouldn't talk even when you tortured them.
00:53:16.000So Hitler wanted the drug that would solve this problem.
00:53:20.000And one man that was put in charge with this is a chemist called Richard Kuhn, who actually received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
00:53:30.000He 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.
00:53:43.000And this Kuhn actually became, you know, he's really working for Hitler.
00:53:47.000He was developing a nerve poison, Sarin, which was deadly for Hitler.
00:53:53.000And if you worked for Hitler as a scientist, obviously, you got all the grants you needed, the money you needed.
00:54:00.000You had a great time, basically, if you sold your soul to the devil.
00:54:04.000Richard 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.
00:54:32.000And did they really test LSD also in Dachau or was it just mescaline?
00:54:37.000Because they write in the reports that are then found in the U.S., Right.
00:55:07.000And 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.
00:55:16.000And the archivist, he was very skeptical of me because he sensed that I was onto something.
00:55:22.000He was protecting basically the archive.
00:55:25.000Because the archive at Sandoz is not a public archive.
00:55:28.000If you go to the National Archives of the United States or the Federal Archive of Germany, it's a public archive.
00:55:35.000The archivists want you to find the information.
00:55:38.000They will reveal the find book, which is a database.
00:55:43.000It shows you everything that's in the archive.
00:55:46.000It takes sometimes days or weeks to actually figure out what's all there.
00:55:50.000You have, theoretically, an overview of everything that's in the archive.
00:55:54.000But a company archive like Novartis archive, there was no find book.
00:55:59.000The 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?
00:56:06.000Because in a way, it's basically under his control, the documents that he gives to you.
00:56:11.000You don't even know what's in the archive behind that guy sitting in front of you.
00:56:17.000And I wanted to see, like, I knew that Albert Hoffman wasn't a Nazi.
00:56:22.000Like, 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.
00:56:31.000But I wanted to see what his boss, Stoll, the one we talked about before, had the whole, like, the ergot god.
00:58:31.000He 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.
00:58:52.000And Then I was sitting there and I was thinking, what can I do?
00:58:56.000And I actually, at the time, I had some LSD with me because I was already getting it for my mother.
00:59:03.000So 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.
00:59:17.000And then I asked him, do you want to see it?
00:59:19.000He said, sure, I would like to see it.
00:59:31.000Suddenly he became interested like, oh, this is actually LSD. That's how it looks.
00:59:35.000And the LSD I had received had printed on it, like these papers, the old logo of Sandos.
00:59:42.000So 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.
00:59:51.000And he said, this is the logo of our old company?
01:00:55.000And he just went and he brought me the folder.
01:00:58.000And as I'm looking through the folder, I can see that there's one man that Stoll was communicating with all through his career.
01:01:08.000And that one man, Stoll himself had learned under Willstetter.
01:01:14.000Willstetter was the Jewish-German master of biochemistry, who was later, he had to leave Germany.
01:01:22.000You know, the Nazis were prosecuting him also because he was Jewish.
01:01:26.000And 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.
01:01:37.000Because plants are very powerful, obviously.
01:01:40.000So Willstädter was like the scientific father of Stoll.
01:01:45.000And Stoll had one other prodigy child, and that was Richard Kuhn.
01:01:50.000Who by then had been the leading Nazi biochemist.
01:01:53.000So Kuhn and Stoll, which I saw then in the letters in front of me, had been best friends because they had the same teacher.
01:02:02.000They had exchanged already in the 20s all their research, in the 30s, especially the ergot research.
01:02:09.000So now he has the job by Hitler to find the truth drug.
01:02:14.000And then Stoll says, we found this truth.
01:02:18.000Almost 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,
01:02:48.000you do one step and then you have LSD. And we received ergotamine in October 1943 from the Swiss company.
01:02:56.000And 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.
01:03:09.000Because 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,
01:03:26.000A-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.
01:03:41.000And the Americans thought they're probably quite far ahead because they're good in science, like everything they do, they fucking rock.
01:03:49.000Which in this case actually probably wasn't true.
01:03:53.000I don't think the Nazis were so advanced.
01:03:55.000It's still a bit obscure like how far the Nazis really were with nuclear technology.
01:04:00.000But 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.
01:04:09.000So one of their first scientists they interviewed was Richard Kuhn, because Richard Kuhn was a leading Nazi biochemist.
01:04:15.000So in the spring of 1945 and liberated Heidelberg after World War II, Kuhn is being interviewed.
01:04:24.000And 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?
01:04:31.000Because he could have ended up on the bench for developing...
01:04:36.000So he decided to rather extend his career.
01:04:41.000He later came to America, was teaching in America.
01:04:44.000So 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.
01:05:10.000But these findings then were very interesting to the American military.
01:05:16.000Because 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.
01:05:29.000It's a totally new type of war and we have to get ahead of them and they probably are working on brainwashing techniques.
01:05:41.000So we have to be ready to defend ourselves against the Soviet onslaught with their brainwashing techniques.
01:05:49.000So the Americans learned actually a lot from the Nazis.
01:05:53.000I 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.
01:06:01.000We 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,
01:06:31.000So 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?
01:08:15.000MKUltra is basically a program first to see whether LSD could be used as a weapon.
01:08:22.000Gottlieb traveled to Basel, Switzerland, because he had heard that Sanders was also selling LSD to the other side of the Iron Curtain.
01:08:30.000There 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.
01:08:48.000Which 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.
01:09:06.000Stoll said, well, we only made 400 grams so far.
01:09:36.000And 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.
01:09:54.000They would only give it away basically to scientists.
01:09:57.000They were still in the product development phase.
01:09:59.000Because they still weren't sure what can LSD, like, what do we write on the package, basically?
01:10:31.000And that's not an easy thing to achieve.
01:10:34.000And 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...
01:10:49.000He let them all, you know, in their special, you know, departments investigate LSD. But these tests are expensive.
01:10:59.000And what Gottlieb, the idea Gottlieb had was university tests are often funded by foundations, let's say the Rockefeller Foundation.
01:11:09.000Like a university wants to make like some pharmaceutical, you know, test series that goes over two years and...
01:11:15.000It involves all these people that have to be paid, and it's expensive.
01:11:20.000It costs, let's say, $200,000 to make one serious clinical test.
01:11:24.000So that money comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, and the money first goes from the CIA to the Rockefeller Foundation.
01:11:33.000So he used not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Foundation, but other foundations as like go-between.
01:11:40.000So 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...
01:11:55.000You 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.
01:12:06.000So he was very efficient in setting up this program, which then I guess was called MKUltra.
01:12:16.000But that's also, that's how LSD really, that's what really went wrong with LSD. MKUltra.
01:12:24.000Yeah, 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,
01:12:43.000this guy, and it sounds a bit like a Stanley Kubrick movie.
01:12:47.000He put people on constant LSD and then had speakers under their pillows which would tell them single sentences.
01:12:57.000He was trying to see, can you really drive someone mad with LSD, for example?
01:13:03.000Can you deprogram a brain with LSD? So these are very creepy experiments.
01:13:08.000These are actually human experiments in a way.
01:13:47.000And 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,
01:14:04.000this is quite unethical work that was done.
01:14:12.000They also did Operation Midnight Climax.
01:14:14.000Yeah, that's in Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
01:14:51.000Someone, of course, has a little bit different sex on LSD, but it's kind of stupid.
01:14:59.000Nevertheless, 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
01:15:50.000And I think that they really believe that there are these threats from the Soviet Union and they were threats from the Soviet Union, obviously.
01:16:16.000A medicine because that was a time when there were no antidepressants yet developed and no antipsychotics.
01:16:22.000So 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.
01:16:35.000No, it's definitely unhelpful what they did.
01:16:38.000It might be understandable, but it went the wrong way.
01:16:41.000It 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.
01:16:54.000The United States emerges victorious, and then there's this clamoring for trying to figure out, okay, what is the enemy up to?
01:17:01.000What are these powerful tools that could be used against us?
01:17:05.000And some of them could be mind control.
01:17:07.000I mean, this is obviously at a time where the Red Scare, the McCarthy era, they were worried about communism and communism infiltrating our society.
01:17:17.000And they're probably very terrified of things that disrupted, which is what was going on in the 1960s.
01:17:23.000You know, Jamie, I'm going to send you this.
01:17:26.000This is a video of hippies in the 1960s.
01:17:31.000And 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.
01:17:43.000The 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.
01:17:53.000And back then, in the 1960s in particular, they were dropping acid.
01:17:58.000This is the Timothy Leary days and, you know, tune out and drop out.
01:18:08.0001968. 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.
01:18:27.000One of the first questions they'll ask is, what do you do?
01:18:51.000We have a group of young people from upper-middle-class families who have moved into a physical environment that is, in effect, a reversion.
01:19:00.000They're living in gross, insanitary conditions with a great deal of overcrowding.
01:19:06.000There is a very high incidence of infectious hepatitis.
01:19:10.000About one-fourth or one-fifth of our total caseload in the venereal disease clinics appear to be hippies.
01:19:17.000Now, I'm going on the appearance solely.
01:19:20.000And 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.
01:19:32.000Okay, so that guy, that last guy with the salt and pepper hair and the tie and the nice suit...
01:19:39.000Those are the people that were from another generation and were seeing this younger generation that was completely dropping out of society.
01:19:47.000And what was causing that, there was a lot causing that, the anti-war movement, but a lot of it was fueled by psychedelics.
01:19:57.000They wanted to stop this radical shift in society that they were seeing from the 1950s to the 1960s.
01:20:05.000Yeah, 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.
01:20:23.000Like, it's an American principle that you can go to a demonstration, but they could make it illegal to take LSD and then criminalize.
01:20:32.000It's kind of the same thing that Anslinger started much earlier.
01:20:37.000Yeah, 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.
01:21:17.000I 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.
01:21:33.000California, and he was part of MKUltra, basically.
01:21:38.000He 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.
01:21:55.000He was walking through the psychiatric ward, and Understanding a lot better what's actually going on in the brain.
01:22:02.000And that's when he had the idea for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
01:22:08.000Which 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.
01:22:25.000This is going to be the downfall of society, certainly downfall of the people that are in control of the government currently.
01:22:31.000And these people are necessary to be in control of the country because we are in a Cold War with Russia.
01:22:37.000We just got out of World War II. We're also in a hot war with Vietnam.
01:22:40.000I 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?
01:22:49.000So, 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,
01:23:06.000who knows how transformative those substances would have been to society globally.
01:23:12.000If 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,
01:23:28.000or we can make life better for everybody, have everybody recognize that we are literally all in this together, and we are all connected.
01:23:35.000We need each other, we are a part of each other, and we should treat each other, all of us, like we are a community.
01:23:42.000I think that's the globalized narrative that we need.
01:24:01.000I 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.
01:24:10.000You 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.
01:24:18.000I mean, maybe when there's like Olympic Games, that's a type of global discourse that's happening.
01:24:23.000Maybe 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.
01:25:16.000I don't necessarily think a global government's the rule because the problem is whenever people have control over people, they just want more.
01:26:04.000You know, there's rational, logical people that understand the consequences of these things that are fighting against it and talking against it.
01:26:11.000And then there's people that are saying, we need centralized digital currency to compete with China.
01:26:16.000And 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.
01:26:25.000Where ancient Greece, where they developed democracy, the Illusinian mysteries, and then all that stuff got made illegal.
01:26:32.000And then society crumbles, things fall apart.
01:26:34.000It's no longer the center of intellectual discourse in the world.
01:26:39.000They threw water on it in the 1960s with the psychedelics acts where they made everything schedule one.
01:26:46.000They locked people up that were anti-war protesters.
01:26:49.000They figured out a way to squash this sort of new movement of thought.
01:26:55.000I 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,
01:27:45.000That's where it's crazy, because it would be beneficial to them.
01:27:49.000They are human beings with a finite lifespan.
01:27:52.000Their experience on Earth would be greatly enhanced if they had the perspective of a psychedelic encounter.
01:28:01.000Well, if I was Chancellor of Germany, which I will never be, but if I was, I would make a psychedelic year.
01:28:09.000Like, after high school, you have the opportunity to actually experience these substances.
01:28:14.000I 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.
01:28:28.000That was the defining ritual of ancient Greece.
01:28:31.000The Athens Society would move there in September.
01:29:16.000We need a legitimate structure because there's also a thing that is described called spiritual narcissism.
01:29:23.000Where 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.
01:29:38.000And 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,
01:29:55.000you know, it becomes a lot of bullshit.
01:30:43.000I 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.
01:30:54.000I think we need a structure for everybody.
01:30:55.000I 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.
01:31:13.000Ibogaine, which you talked about, Iboga, very effective for addiction.
01:31:16.000My friend Ed went over to Mexico and got into an Ibogaine clinic when he got hooked on pills and it cured him of it.
01:31:26.000I've known many people that have had real problems with pills and have knocked it with one Ibogaine experience.
01:31:31.000So 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.
01:31:44.000And that real knowledge is only going to be available if they open everything up to real research.
01:31:49.000And 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?
01:32:11.000And what is the most effective setting?
01:32:14.000Because 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.
01:32:20.000Which is why a lot of these people that are serious users of psychedelics We're good to go.
01:32:40.000Everyone in society, including the people that want it illegal.
01:33:26.000The recipes given to us by the camps that are now also competing for the US presidency, they don't really solve the problem.
01:33:35.000I 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.
01:33:43.000I think somehow people are ready for a revolution.
01:33:46.000But no one knows exactly what kind of revolution it should be.
01:33:49.000So people who tap into that are quite successful, even though they might not even provide what is actually needed to have that change.
01:33:58.000But we do need a change on a national level in Germany, in America, in other countries, as well as on a global level.
01:34:06.000And 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.
01:34:25.000Right now we're all tense and we're saying, no, this is the chemical wall in our brain.
01:34:30.000I just don't think it works for a democratic Western free society to have a chemical wall in the brain.
01:34:38.000It keeps us back from really developing a society that is much better than the current society because the current society is pretty shitty, actually.
01:35:23.000And 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.
01:35:34.000Especially freedom of your own consciousness with substances that have been shown to have dramatic positive effects on people.
01:35:41.000So 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.
01:35:50.000So 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.
01:35:59.000We should apply that same logic to psychedelics.
01:36:03.000I mean, Albert Hoffman was thinking about this in the 50s.
01:36:06.000This was another document I found in the archives.
01:36:09.000He set up a memo to Stoll, the CEO, writing that Sanders should now focus on these psychedelic substances.
01:36:16.000We should examine all the possibilities.
01:37:42.000But I mean, I'm sure there were people doing that before.
01:37:44.000If you have control of the newspaper, and especially back then with Hearst publications, there's very few newspapers...
01:37:50.000In the country, and especially ones that were respected.
01:37:53.000If 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.
01:38:00.000People today are far more skeptical, particularly after the pandemic.
01:38:05.000I 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.
01:38:14.000I 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.
01:38:27.000It's like a stage that you've created.
01:38:29.000I think it's actually quite an important artwork that you have established here.
01:38:34.000I mean, it's not so easy to create like your own media that has a global reach.
01:39:39.000I think it was in 2011 or 2012. I was on stage in the Chicago Theater.
01:39:46.000And 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?
01:41:44.000So there's certain things you cannot criticize.
01:41:46.000There'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.
01:41:53.000You will say things in a very biased perspective.
01:41:55.000You will attack particular individuals.
01:41:57.000You not just attack political individuals.
01:41:59.000You'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.
01:42:21.000And inside that propaganda are some real news.
01:42:24.000There's actual specific information about the weather.
01:42:28.000There's actual, you know, real reports about conflicts breaking out overseas and all sorts of different things.
01:42:35.000But at the end of the day, it's not real conversation.
01:42:38.000So real conversation was able to flourish because people had this hunger for it.
01:42:43.000And they didn't even know they wanted it until they got it.
01:42:46.000I mean, it was thought when we first started making podcasts that everyone was moving to a much shorter attention span.
01:42:51.000And that most of the things that were going to be popular in the future were like 10-minute things, like very quick things.
01:42:57.000You 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.
01:43:08.000And we thought that's what people are moving to.
01:43:29.000It's just they're not being fed correctly.
01:43:32.000I mean, that's also one of the beauties.
01:43:34.000I mean, I'm here as a writer of literature, actually.
01:43:37.000I mean, if I decide to work on a book, I don't get influenced by anybody.
01:43:42.000And I have a very large space in which I can develop my thoughts and my narrative.
01:43:49.000That's why I'm actually active in this field.
01:43:51.000I think there might be a similarity between a podcast and literature because they both go into the long form and into immersion into something.
01:44:02.000I mean, literature is the ultimate form of that, right?
01:44:04.000Because 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.
01:44:17.000And it's all coming from your mind, too, which is also very similar.
01:44:20.000When 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.
01:44:30.000That's not really available in most places anymore, right?
01:44:35.000But people want that because they want to know what what did this guy find out?
01:44:39.000What does he know and how does he know it?
01:44:41.000Let me listen to him and along the way Especially we're having a three-hour conversation along the way.
01:44:46.000Let me hear says some crackpot things Let me hear if he says some things like oh that guy is a kind of a kook.
01:44:51.000Oh that guy's not really thinking clearly Oh that guy's kind of full of shit.
01:44:54.000Oh, he's saying that but there's no way he really believes that okay now I know and Now I'm suspicious.
01:44:59.000Now I can kind of like look at this through a filter of reality.
01:45:03.000So I think maybe we should talk a little bit about blitzed and Nazis and drugs.
01:45:54.000Well, first of all, when was the creation of amphetamines?
01:46:03.000And when did it start getting utilized by military and by people like Hitler?
01:46:09.000Well, 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,
01:46:25.000German superheroes jumping further and winning, I think, five gold medals.
01:46:32.000The rumor was he must be on something.
01:46:34.000Similar kind of to Anslinger, like the jazz people, they're only so good because they're on something, you know?
01:46:39.000So there was like, was he on Benzedrine?
01:46:42.000Because Benzedrine was an American product that was already available.
01:47:00.000But there was a guy called Theodor Temmler, who was the head of the Temmler factory.
01:47:06.000And 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.
01:47:18.000Like an Afro-American is faster than the white guys.
01:47:23.000And then Hauschild was the chemist's name.
01:47:26.000He 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,
01:47:42.000a Japanese chemist had made meth amphetamine.
01:47:46.000And meth amphetamine is stronger than amphetamine.
01:47:50.000So Haushu thought, I'm going to make a new meth amphetamine.
01:47:53.000So he found a new way of synthesizing meth.
01:47:57.000There's different ways you can make meth, I guess.
01:50:17.000It was just, it was, they called it performance enhancing substance.
01:50:25.000So, it was, that's a neutral term, you know.
01:50:27.000They made studies at universities showing that it's actually good against anything, also against depression, and it would increase your sexual drive.
01:50:38.000People thought this is the greatest thing, basically.
01:50:42.000There was no studies being done yet on addiction, which obviously is a problem of meth.
01:50:47.000But 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.
01:51:54.000He 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.
01:52:15.000And that antique dealer who was a friend of Alex the DJ, he looked at it and it said on the package, contains methamphetamine.
01:53:24.000And 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,
01:53:42.000which 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.
01:53:51.000And I read this and I said, this is crazy, maybe I should write about this.
01:54:23.000The 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.
01:54:37.000Germany is a decentralized country, so not all archives are in Berlin.
01:54:41.000For example, the military archive is in this small town called Freiburg.
01:54:44.000The 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.
01:54:52.000I mean, that's quite, that's world record for sure.
01:54:54.000So, and everything that the German armies did is, you know, documented because the Germans love to document, like everything is written down.
01:55:04.000And because I had the signatures from this guy, he basically did the legwork for me.
01:55:08.000I could look at all the files and then I realized that the German army was using methamphetamine.
01:55:14.000And 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.
01:55:28.000And basically his job was to enhance the fighting capability of the soldier.
01:55:33.000So he was researching in 1938, how can we combat fatigue?
01:55:38.000Because he said, not the Russians are our biggest enemy, not the British, not even the French, you know.
01:55:44.000Our biggest enemy is fatigue because you get tired in the evening.
01:55:47.000You fight the whole day and then you need to sleep.
01:55:52.000He was looking for a way to beat this enemy, sleep.
01:55:59.000And then when Pavitin came onto the market, he started reading studies done by universities and they very clearly show that on math...
01:56:08.000And 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.
01:56:18.000So your brain is basically in a fight or flight mode, like your methamphetamine makes you extremely alert over a very long period of time.
01:56:29.000And then at one point, obviously, you drop down and you get the urge to take it again.
02:00:54.000This 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.
02:01:08.000In 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.
02:01:17.000So 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...
02:01:25.000We need to use a chemical drug to enhance the...
02:02:39.000Actually quite surprising that it was so quick, but it happened so quick.
02:02:44.000And a lot of medical officers wrote back to him that Pavitin was actually quite helpful.
02:02:49.000They 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.
02:03:06.000And 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.
02:03:17.000Like we had had a war in 1865, Germany won.
02:03:21.000And then in World War I, Germany lost.
02:03:24.000And now Hitler wanted like the revenge.
02:03:42.000They were really proud of their army, the French, and it I mean, it wasn't good, but everyone thought it's good.
02:03:48.000And they also had an ally, which was very powerful, Great Britain, you know, the world's empire, you know.
02:03:53.000So these two powers, to attack from Germany, these two powers, was considered insane by the high command.
02:04:01.000Like, they thought Hitler was just a lunatic.
02:04:04.000And Hitler wanted to attack the West already in November 1939. Like, Poland was beaten.
02:04:10.000The 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.
02:04:21.000Let's just get back on track and develop a strategy with which we can win against the West.
02:04:28.000Because they knew there is no strategy.
02:04:30.000Because 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.
02:04:43.000So 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.
02:04:49.000There was even a coup attempt in November 1939 against him which failed.
02:04:55.000And 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,
02:05:11.000came to Hitler in Berlin in the Reich Chancellery and said, we have a plan.
02:05:19.000Because 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.
02:05:32.000We will use the tanks in the front and make the tanks kind of overrun the enemy.
02:05:37.000And Hitler's like, whoa, this is a crazy thought.
02:05:49.000I don't know if we need it, but it's interesting.
02:05:52.000They decided on an area which is the Aden Mountains.
02:05:55.000And 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.
02:06:28.000And within three days and three nights, we have to reach through Belgium, the mountains, the Swiss, sorry, the French border town of Sedon.
02:06:36.000We have to get there because then we will be faster because they will still be stuck in the north of Belgium.
02:06:41.000Like, we will be faster than them and we'll race through all the way to the channel.
02:06:46.000And then we will be in the back of them and destroy them.
02:06:49.000So we will have kind of surrounded them.
02:06:50.000This is what Churchill later called the sickle cut.
02:06:54.000And this was a This is the sickle cut.
02:06:58.000You 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.
02:07:14.000It's a crazy plan, and the only problem is that thing of not sleeping for three days and three nights.
02:07:23.000So they were not sure how to solve that problem, actually.
02:07:26.000And Hitler said, this is not a problem.
02:07:29.000The German soldier is so convinced of the ideology of national socialism, of fighting for me, the Führer, They will not sleep.
02:07:38.000I didn't sleep in the First World War.
02:07:40.000Hitler was a soldier in the First World War and he claimed that he was awake and didn't need sleep and stuff like that.
02:07:45.000So 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.
02:07:56.000Everyone needs to sleep, you know, not because you are convinced of an idea you don't need to sleep.
02:08:22.000Of 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.
02:08:35.000And the Germans were actually, they had less people, less soldiers than the West, and their weapons were not as good.
02:08:44.000For example, their tanks were not as good as the British tanks.
02:08:48.000There was a lot of doubt that this madman plan by these three young revolutionary generals and Hitler supporting this madman plan would actually work.
02:08:58.000But then Ranke thought, this is my calling now.
02:10:14.000There's another paper I found which shows how many dosages then the German army ordered from the Temmler company just before they attacked France.
02:11:24.000They 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.
02:11:34.000I 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.
02:11:50.000So 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.
02:12:02.000So 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.
02:12:09.000So the Germans were messed up and the French were like kind of drowsy.
02:12:13.000So 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...
02:12:41.000In 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,
02:12:57.000you know, Hitler was in Paris in June already, you know.
02:13:02.000That's the story of Blitzed in a nutshell.
02:13:20.000I 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,
02:13:35.000national socialist, a really cool guy.
02:13:37.000I 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.
02:13:50.000It has to enter your mind in a way that this might have a relevance.
02:13:55.000Historians are very square people, or at least used to be very square people.
02:14:00.000National socialism is such a serious topic that out-of-the-box thinking is not really encouraged within the academia, at least.
02:14:09.000But me, being a non-historian, I could think out-of-the-box.
02:14:14.000He 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.
02:14:25.000So it was interesting to communicate with him.
02:14:31.000Obviously about it because he helped me also put things into perspective.
02:14:36.000Because also one thing he said was don't argument in a monocausal way.
02:14:45.000It's kind of flippant to say The Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine.
02:14:55.000Methamphetamine played a huge role, and I examined that huge role.
02:14:58.000I think it was probably one of the decisive factors, but in a war, many factors come together.
02:15:03.000But if you can't stay awake for three days, none of it works.
02:16:30.000The effect of meth on the soldiers and also the effectiveness of it during the blitzkrieg, but then also the Japanese pilots.
02:16:42.000The Japanese were using it, the kamikazes were using it.
02:16:45.000I 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.
02:17:00.000He 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.
02:17:09.000We don't need a stimulant to perform these miraculous acts on the battlefield.
02:17:15.000So he wanted the army to stop the methamphetamine.
02:17:18.000And I studied all the letters going back and forth between, like, high command and the Ministry of Health.
02:17:24.000And the army basically said, we're not stopping this.
02:17:33.000So 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.
02:17:43.000It'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.
02:17:54.000And 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.
02:18:02.000But there was one point, a headline in the British newspaper, when does Churchill also use victory in form of a pill?
02:18:12.000Because 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.
02:18:24.000So then the British became like, we have to examine this.
02:18:27.000And 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.
02:18:39.000The Nazis always take the strongest and the British were like a little bit more hesitant.
02:18:42.000And it is actually a smart choice because methamphetamine does burn you out, obviously.
02:18:48.000It's an addictive drug that's not healthy.
02:18:52.000And amphetamine is also not healthy, you know, but it's not as – it doesn't make you as edgy.
02:18:58.000So you can – You can take it over a longer period of time, I guess.
02:19:02.000Well, methamphetamine really burns you out.
02:19:04.000I 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.
02:19:15.000He 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.
02:19:41.000That'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.
02:20:11.000So, 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.
02:20:26.000Who claimed that actually Israel was smuggling this into Gaza to kind of corrupt the Gaza youth.
02:22:26.000Already in the Korean War, American pilots were on amphetamines.
02:22:30.000Like amphetamines are like a staple now of armies and of, you know, terrorist groups, freedom fighters or whatever, you know.
02:22:38.000Because it also lowers, this was what Ranke also found out, it lowers your fear level.
02:22:45.000So when you're on meth, you're less afraid.
02:22:49.000It lowers your level of, like you're not as inhibited.
02:22:53.000Like you would rather kill someone in a brutal way than you would sober, because it's very hard actually to kill another human being.
02:23:00.000It's very stressful and we don't really want to do it.
02:23:04.000But studies found that on meth, you're more likely, it's easier for you to do it.
02:23:09.000So it's really the Nazis that are, you know, they pioneered in it.
02:23:17.000How similar is that to the effects of Adderall?
02:23:22.000Adderall is obviously amphetamine, and there was, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 39 million prescriptions in a recent year.
02:23:30.000It'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,
02:23:47.000and it's not a nice addiction, I think, and Because it's also, you know, it's legal.
02:23:51.000Like, your psychiatrist says, take this, so you function well.
02:24:20.000If 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.
02:24:27.000So that's like a chance that some writers take, like...
02:25:38.000I mean, but some people find it very beneficial for productivity, which is interesting.
02:25:44.000It probably depends what you need to do.
02:25:47.000It also depends on your self-control, right?
02:25:49.000Do 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?
02:26:14.000I'm gonna do my best and then afterwards I'm not gonna fuck with it anymore.
02:26:19.000A lot of people can't do that but a lot of people can I guess.
02:26:22.000And it's sort of like all other drugs.
02:26:25.000We 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.
02:26:35.000I think having any kind of legalization strategy.
02:26:40.000So if they legalize drugs in this country, I think it has to be done in conjunction with a treatment strategy.
02:26:46.000And I think that treatment strategy is Ibogaine.
02:27:00.000So 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.
02:27:09.000That's kind of stupid, you know, because if you take LSD, you're not going to land with heroin, you know.
02:27:14.000And if you take Ibogaine, for sure also not.
02:27:16.000Well, marijuana is the great one, right?
02:27:30.000Yeah, and then there's also people take cocaine when they drink too much alcohol to wake up.
02:27:36.000Yeah, 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.
02:28:45.000Like how it's metabolized by the liver.
02:28:47.000There's a difference between eating cannabis and smoking it, right?
02:28:51.000So 11 hydroxy metabolite, which is created by the liver, which is five times more psychoactive than THC. So there's a lot of factors.
02:29:00.000And 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,
02:29:16.000which is World War II. Yeah, I thought that was quite strange.
02:29:19.000I mean, I went onward with my research from, I wanted to expand and I wanted to look at Hitler also.
02:29:28.000I was going to ask you this before you get to that.
02:29:30.000If methamphetamine was created after the 1936 Games, what was Hitler on during the 1936 Games?
02:29:36.000When you see him rocking back and forth and he's tripping, was he doing cocaine?
02:29:41.000I 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.
02:29:56.000Like, he was famous for treating diseases that don't exist, so he gave mood-enhancing drugs.
02:30:23.000So, 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.
02:30:40.000And Hitler was complaining of bloating problems.
02:30:43.000He always was like he had digestion problems.
02:30:46.000And Morel, who was like an alternative doctor, gave him like vitamins and a probiotic, which was also new at the time.
02:30:52.000And Hitler was cured and he appointed Morel as his personal physician.
02:30:58.000They were like Hitler spent more time with Morel than with anyone else all the way up to the end.
02:31:04.000So Morell's notes are very interesting to study because he was like one of these German nerds that wrote everything down.
02:31:10.000And I went to another federal archive in Germany and I checked out all the papers of Morell.
02:31:15.000And I could see that basically no one had looked at these papers.
02:31:19.000Like Hitler's the most examined person in the world.
02:31:24.000The most literature about one person is actually about Hitler, but no one...
02:31:29.000I 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.
02:31:40.000So it's kind of crazy because Morel describes in detail what he gives to Hitler.
02:31:47.000And 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,
02:32:03.000basically Hitler only received vitamins.
02:32:06.000Vitamin C, vitamin B1, and sometimes glucose, like sugar, was injected into...
02:32:12.000Maybe it was on a sugar rush, you know, because sugar is a strong drug, because sugar immediately kicks in the brain.
02:32:18.000But there was no heavy substances in 36. Morel wrote everything down, so I don't think he would...
02:32:28.000And Morell's introduction to Hitler was what year?
02:32:55.000There 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.
02:33:23.000And Morel's wife was very much against that, that her husband became the personal physician of Hitler.
02:33:29.000She said to him, like, we won't spend that much time together from now on.
02:33:33.000Morel was like, no, I have to take this chance, you know, I can be the person.
02:33:36.000He was like a celebrity doctor before us.
02:33:38.000Now he's the personal physician of the Führer, the most powerful man of Europe.
02:33:42.000So Morell very much controlled what Hitler took.
02:33:46.000Hitler didn't take anything that Morell didn't talk about or authorize and write down.
02:35:00.000Like within three months, they made huge territorial gains.
02:35:03.000They were in October 1940. They were already standing in front of Moscow.
02:35:07.000Like, 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.
02:35:16.000So they were right in front of Moscow.
02:35:18.000And 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.
02:35:33.000But Hitler for the first time became sick.
02:35:35.000He had what they call the Russian flu.
02:35:37.000Like he was, you know, camping, you know, the headquarters was moving with the troops.
02:35:41.000So he was, you know, maybe drank bad water or something.
02:35:45.000And he had the Russian flu, which made him stay in bed.
02:36:38.000And so he wanted to be at that briefing, and he said to Morell, I need something stronger than vitamins.
02:36:43.000And Morell gave him for the first time a very strong opioid, which was called Dolantin, which was a German product.
02:36:51.000And that opioid, you know, is a different ballgame than vitamins.
02:36:56.000He 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.
02:37:06.000High command was like, what the fuck, you know, but, you know, he's the leader, so he decides.
02:37:11.000And 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.
02:37:23.000And from 1941 to 1943, Morel experiences a lot with also animal hormones.
02:37:30.000Like 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.
02:38:00.000He 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.
02:38:18.000Like there was a famous liver concoction, like from pig's liver.
02:38:24.000And 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.
02:38:32.000Basically it was not possible like all the tests that usually are done in peace times on a new medicine.
02:38:37.000So 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.
02:38:46.000They cannot help the German people sustain in this war.
02:38:48.000And then Hitler said this is bullshit.
02:38:51.000I, the Führer, will be your guinea pig and I will test all these dubious concoctions that you make.
02:38:59.000And then, because when I take it, every German, you know, can take it and we kind of bypass all the regulations.
02:40:02.000And then the wagon was going through and then Morell was creating these concoctions.
02:40:07.000And Hitler actually, he took too many of these weird things.
02:40:12.000His 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.
02:40:25.000Today you would send the doctor that prescribes you that stuff to prison, you know.
02:40:29.000But, 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.
02:40:40.000That was a whole Nazi idea, you know, to become more powerful, more strong, you know.
02:40:45.000So he was interested in these things and actually his health started to deteriorate.
02:40:51.000And then by 43 he had already become quite a different man.
02:40:58.000I mean you can see it if you compare the young Hitler with like just five years later.
02:41:01.000He looks like 20 years older, you know.
02:41:04.000And then in 43, because he's doing so poorly, like his chi, you would say today, your physical energy was like really down.
02:41:12.000If 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.
02:46:15.000And you can examine this day by day by studying the papers of Morell and then also studying other accounts.
02:46:25.000Because it's always good to look at more, not only have one source, but there's quite a lot on it.
02:46:31.000So it is quite surprising no one ever wrote about that before.
02:46:33.000Well, 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.
02:46:48.000We all know that on July 20th, 1944, there was the most successful...
02:46:54.000I mean, it wasn't successful, but almost successful assassination attempt when the bomb by Stauffenberg blew up in the headquarters in the East.
02:47:47.000So 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.
02:47:59.000And then, actually, from that moment on, Hitler, that's, like, July 20, 1944, until the very end, May 8, 1945, when the war ends.
02:48:12.000That is his heaviest drug consumption because then he's really like, this is the most intense time.
02:48:19.000One 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,
02:49:44.000I tried to get the coke away from Hitler.
02:49:47.000Hitler 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.
02:49:56.000And actually on cocaine he developed the strategy of a second Ardennes offensive.
02:50:01.000We 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.
02:50:11.000And like his generals, they couldn't believe it because it was a ridiculous idea because the Americans were already on the continent.
02:50:18.000Like it was no chance it could have worked out.
02:50:21.000It would just mean that a lot of people, a lot of young German soldiers are going to die.
02:50:25.000That's what it meant, his second adenophan.
02:51:11.000The British intelligence's plan to assassinate Hitler, because obviously there were these plans, you know.
02:51:18.000And 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.
02:51:30.000Let's say Hitler was assassinated, then let's say Himmler becomes the Führer or something.
02:51:41.000He did two hours of yoga each morning because he thought the Aryan race is connected with ancient Wiedig.
02:51:47.000So he was into yoga, but he was not into drugs.
02:51:51.000Let'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.
02:52:00.000So they wanted him to stay fucked up because it was better.
02:52:06.000They 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.
02:52:21.000And actually Hitler then moves to the bunker and he doesn't have oikodal anymore, which was, you know, his drug of choice.
02:52:28.000He received it every other day in a very high dosage, 20 milligrams intravenously of the most potent opioid.
02:52:38.000So 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.
02:52:48.000And 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.
02:52:57.000And suddenly, it's like the one mistake that the dealer shouldn't make, make the client hooked, and then you can't supply anymore.
02:53:08.000There'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?
02:53:22.000So, 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...
02:53:35.000That leads to the complete degeneration of the character.
02:55:44.000So JFK, I think, received quite a lot of medications.
02:55:51.000That's why it's interesting what I wrote about in Tripped is his possible LSD experience.
02:56:00.000I don't know if you're familiar with that.
02:56:01.000Yeah, you talked about that with Jesse Waters.
02:56:05.000Unfortunately, there's only one source for it, and we always have to be skeptical if there's only one source.
02:56:11.000If there's two sources, it's always much better.
02:56:13.000But one source, and it's actually Timothy Leary's autobiography.
02:56:17.000He describes, and I don't think he made this up.
02:56:21.000I have no reason to believe that he made this up.
02:56:23.000He 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.
02:56:33.000He was, you know, the LSD guy, basically.
02:56:35.000If you wanted to know about LSD, you would ask Leary.
02:59:40.000He says that this arms race is kind of ridiculous.
02:59:44.000It just burns resources and we must come to a different understanding.
02:59:48.000And then he gets killed like a few months later.
02:59:51.000So that is just, those are the facts, you know, and I think I'll leave it at the fact.
02:59:56.000So, 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.
03:00:12.000There was a breaking into her apartment and her diary was taken.
03:00:16.000Maybe that's the source, actually, that links JFK to LSD. And maybe JFK was eventually killed because he took LSD and changed his mind.
03:00:29.000I think there's a lot of factors why he was killed, right?
03:00:42.000But 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.
03:00:55.000Maybe that becomes a very big threat and it must be eliminated.