The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle

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

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

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00:00:12.000 John, what's happening, man?

00:00:14.000 Not much.

00:00:14.000 It's very nice to meet you.

00:00:15.000 You too.

00:00:15.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:17.000 I know you're in the middle of a project.

00:00:19.000 You're doing a project with David Chase, right?

00:00:21.000 It's about MKUltra and...

00:00:24.000 Yes, he has gotten the rights to this book, you know, this book, Project Mind Control, and he's, yeah, interested in adapting it into a series.

00:00:32.000 Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject.

00:00:34.000 So as soon as I heard about it, and they said the series is coming, but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book now.

00:00:39.000 I'm like, let's go.

00:00:40.000 So here we go.

00:00:41.000 Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy of MKUltra, which really is a tragedy.

00:00:49.000 You know, I really got, I mean, I knew about it, but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until Chaos, Tom O'Neill's book.

00:00:58.000 Have you read that?

00:00:59.000 Oh, yeah.

00:01:00.000 And when you realize what the MKUltra program involved and how long it ran and how insane it is, and it essentially had no oversight.

00:01:09.000 And these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American citizens.

00:01:13.000 And nobody went to jail for it.

00:01:16.000 Yeah, that's part of the crazy thing.

00:01:18.000 One of the things I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second half of the book, are the consequences of MKUltra in society, but also just what happened to these people afterwards.

00:01:30.000 The victims of MKUltra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically really nothing much came out of it.

00:01:36.000 They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra, they didn't really face any consequences. 0.60

00:01:41.000 And so I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I really try to talk about in the latter part of the book are what are the failures of oversight that allowed this to happen?

00:01:49.000 How is that possible?

00:01:50.000 How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on people unwittingly and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions?

00:01:59.000 So I delve into that pretty deeply.

00:02:01.000 How did you get interested in the subject?

00:02:03.000 Like, what was your introduction to it?

00:02:07.000 I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people because I didn't know that much about MKUltra.

00:02:14.000 And I was doing my PhD at UT.

00:02:16.000 And I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of scientists within the intelligence.

00:02:23.000 They had connections to the intelligence community.

00:02:25.000 They were called the science attachés out of the State Department.

00:02:27.000 The State Department would send these science attachés to different embassies, American embassies around the world.

00:02:33.000 And the CIA was very interested in these people because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad.

00:02:37.000 Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing.

00:02:41.000 So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community.

00:02:45.000 And from that, I learned about, you know, Sidney Gottlieb, but also mostly my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovell, who was essentially the Sidney Gottlieb of the OSS.

00:02:57.000 So prior to the CIA, the U.S. had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II.

00:03:03.000 And that was the U.S. kind of intelligence agency.

00:03:06.000 And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development Branch.

00:03:12.000 And that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job was to basically invent the deadly weapons, create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent abroad.

00:03:23.000 Fun stuff.

00:03:24.000 Oh, yeah.

00:03:25.000 My first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovell and that group.

00:03:29.000 And one of the things they do are drug experiments and truth-drug experiments, trying to find out whether it's possible to give someone, you know, a captured enemy agent some kind of drug to make them tell the truth during an interrogation.

00:03:39.000 And it turns out, when I was researching that book, I came across a series of depositions of which Sidney Gottlieb is one of the deponents who would later lead MKUltra.

00:03:48.000 And in these depositions, he was talking about how when he was assigned to be in charge of MKUltra, he didn't really know where to begin.

00:03:56.000 He didn't know anything about mind control.

00:03:58.000 So one of the things that he did, he went into the old OSS files and was starting to look at the drug experiments that Stanley Lovell was doing.

00:04:04.000 And so I thought, that's the connection between Stanley Lovell, my first book, and now this one.

00:04:08.000 So that naturally led me into becoming interested in MKUltra.

00:04:11.000 So a lot of the things that Sidney Gottlieb was up to with MKUltra, his blueprint was basically Stanley Lovell.

00:04:17.000 Just imagine being a government agency, the CIA, the AOSS, whatever it is.

00:04:22.000 And then someone says, hey, figure out if we can control people's minds.

00:04:26.000 And that's where you start from, right?

00:04:28.000 It's not like Sidney Gottlieb was some expert hypnotist or really was a psychologist or really understood human minds.

00:04:36.000 No, they started a program going, what can we do? 0.99

00:04:39.000 How can we fuck with people's minds? 0.99

00:04:41.000 How can we figure out how to control people's minds? 1.00

00:04:44.000 And they did it for decades.

00:04:47.000 So in it now.

00:04:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:50.000 Well, even before MKUltra.

00:04:51.000 So there are a couple programs that precede it.

00:04:53.000 I mean, you know, so during World War II, the OSS was already doing truth drug experiments, not with LSD, because that wasn't really around then, but with THC acetate.

00:05:03.000 They would inject it into cigarettes and have people smoke it.

00:05:05.000 So they just get high?

00:05:06.000 They would get high.

00:05:07.000 Did you tell the truth?

00:05:08.000 Supposedly?

00:05:09.000 Supposedly.

00:05:10.000 The idea was that it lowers their inhibitions, and so maybe they'll be more amenable to talking.

00:05:14.000 They just gave them splits.

00:05:14.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

00:05:16.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:05:16.000 They basically gave them splits.

00:05:18.000 That's what Europeans smoke. 1.00

00:05:19.000 And so one of the guys who was actually on the truth drug committee that was kind of overseeing these drug experiments during World War II was Harry Anslinger, who, of course, is launching this crusade against marijuana.

00:05:29.000 And at the same time, he's overseeing these experiments about dosing people with the THC.

00:05:33.000 So it's very ironic that that was the case.

00:05:36.000 It's really stunning the kind of damage those people did to just our trust in government, what we know about these psychedelic compounds and drugs and what they did with them that completely changed our idea of what the future of legalization and of all these.

00:05:57.000 There's so much negative impact to what they did.

00:06:01.000 On top of what they did, they essentially created Ted Kaczynski.

00:06:04.000 Well, I'm a little skeptical.

00:06:06.000 Are you on the fence on that?

00:06:07.000 I'm a little skeptical of whether MKUltra is connected to that.

00:06:10.000 Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments that did at Harvard.

00:06:14.000 And I don't imagine they would do that without the involvement of the government.

00:06:18.000 Without them wanting to have access to research.

00:06:20.000 If you have people at Harvard that are doing like really critical LSD studies on people, humiliation studies.

00:06:26.000 Yeah, well, with him in particular, the study that he was involved in was Henry Murray, was the guy who was running that.

00:06:33.000 It's like a psychological experiment about, I think it was interpersonal relationships, where he would basically interrogate them and berate them and see how they reacted to it.

00:06:41.000 Now, Henry Murray, who ran that experiment with Ted Kaczynski, he did have connections to the intelligence community.

00:06:46.000 I just am not convinced that he was funded by MKUltra or something.

00:06:50.000 His connection, he has a couple of connections.

00:06:53.000 One connection that I mentioned in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, he was tasked with creating psychological profiles of German leaders like Hitler.

00:07:02.000 And so the idea was that he would kind of figure out what their psychology was and maybe we could find ways to exploit that psychology.

00:07:08.000 So Stanley Lovell, who is the head of this R D branch of the OSS, he read Henry Murray's psychological profile of Hitler and he decided maybe I can figure out a way to kind of drive Hitler crazy by using this.

00:07:19.000 So Henry Murray, Henry Murray said that Hitler had a very feminine kind of personality. 0.99

00:07:24.000 He was on the border between masculine and feminine.

00:07:27.000 And, you know, at least that's what Henry Murray is saying in this psychological profile.

00:07:30.000 Stanley Lovell reads that and he thinks, maybe I can exploit this by getting one of the gardeners near the eagle nest where Hitler often had some meetings.

00:07:40.000 There were some gardeners down there.

00:07:41.000 We can get an agent to slip a gardener some female sex hormone and that gardener, that gardener can inject it into the beats that are destined for Hitler's plate. 0.99

00:07:49.000 Hitler's going to eat it and it's going to like exacerbate this feminine tendency and it's going to make him go crazy or something like that. 0.98

00:07:55.000 That was the plan.

00:07:56.000 That never actually happened, but so Henry Murray is kind of connected to the OSS in that sense.

00:08:00.000 And then later he developed some personality tests for the OSS and CIA.

00:08:06.000 I believe it was for recruits to give these to recruits to determine whether they kind of have the psychological profile that would be amenable to being in an intelligence organization.

00:08:15.000 Did you see that they recently did a scan of some blood that was found in Hitler's bunker and they determined that he has a very unusual gene expression?

00:08:27.000 Can you find out what that is?

00:08:28.000 It's something that would lead to him potentially having a micropenis.

00:08:33.000 Yeah, which is you know, like the most obvious psychological profile ever.

00:08:40.000 A guy wants to destroy everything in the world. 1.00

00:08:42.000 He's got a tiny dick. 1.00

00:08:43.000 Maybe Henry Murray was onto something. 1.00

00:08:45.000 Look at, yeah, I'm sure he was.

00:08:46.000 Hitler's DNA. 0.88

00:08:47.000 I'm sure there's something, some research behind it.

00:08:50.000 Like somebody must have said something about him.

00:08:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:52.000 I didn't know that.

00:08:52.000 I hadn't heard of that.

00:08:53.000 Hitler's DNA reveals Nazi leader likely had syndrome that can affect genitals.

00:08:57.000 Researchers say.

00:08:59.000 According to the Cleveland Clinic, the syndrome can disrupt the process that drives puberty and manifest in symptoms that include undescended testicles and a micropenis.

00:09:08.000 Isn't that wild?

00:09:09.000 Yeah.

00:09:09.000 It is.

00:09:10.000 Which totally makes sense. 1.00

00:09:11.000 Like, we should kill everyone with a micropenis. 1.00

00:09:12.000 They're too dangerous. 0.99

00:09:14.000 It is, you know, maybe useful to be careful about correlation and causation.

00:09:20.000 A lot of people probably have this, and that doesn't cause people out there.

00:09:23.000 I'm just kidding.

00:09:24.000 Obviously, there's like the nicest people out there that just happen to have a micropenis.

00:09:27.000 Yeah.

00:09:28.000 And it actually said, you know, maybe his temperament.

00:09:30.000 I don't know.

00:09:31.000 Well, he was also on a bunch of drugs.

00:09:33.000 You know, he had a special doctor that just worked for him.

00:09:37.000 Yeah, those videos of him at sporting events or whatever.

00:09:39.000 He's like rocking back and forth.

00:09:41.000 It's incredible.

00:09:42.000 He's living just completely out of his mind on something.

00:09:45.000 Have you read Norman Ohler's book, Blitz?

00:09:48.000 Blitz.

00:09:49.000 Yes.

00:09:50.000 I don't know if I've read the whole thing.

00:09:51.000 I know I dipped into it.

00:09:52.000 I can't remember.

00:09:53.000 It's insane.

00:09:54.000 Yeah.

00:09:54.000 It's insane.

00:09:55.000 Yeah, it is.

00:09:56.000 The entire Nazi army was mepped out of their minds.

00:09:59.000 And you know what?

00:09:59.000 Yeah.

00:10:00.000 There are a lot of LSD experiments after World War II within the CIA and MKUltra, of course, but also Army LSD experiments that aren't really connected to MKUltra, so I don't go into them that much in this book.

00:10:12.000 But there are, you know, the British are doing LSD experiments on their personnel.

00:10:15.000 The U.S. military does too. 0.94

00:10:17.000 And, you know, it's just some of the stories that come out of it are very silly and really just insane.

00:10:24.000 But there is one document I found that talks about how they were giving these two Army personnel, these two soldiers, LSD to see how they reacted to it.

00:10:32.000 And so each of them took the LSD.

00:10:34.000 They were in like a padded room isolated with each other, so nobody else was there.

00:10:37.000 And they started hallucinating.

00:10:39.000 And one of them pretended to start smoking a cigarette.

00:10:43.000 And he didn't actually have a cigarette.

00:10:44.000 He had nothing, you know, but he just pretended to smoke a cigarette.

00:10:47.000 And the other guy was off in his own world.

00:10:49.000 And then the first guy, he reached into his pocket and took out an imaginary pack of cigarettes.

00:10:54.000 He didn't actually have one.

00:10:55.000 It was just an empty hand, but he was just hallucinating that there was one.

00:10:58.000 And he reached it out to the other guy basically to offer, hey, do you want a cigarette?

00:11:02.000 And the other guy looked at it and he said, no, I couldn't take your last one.

00:11:06.000 It was just an empty hand.

00:11:07.000 There was nothing.

00:11:09.000 No, I couldn't.

00:11:10.000 They were having like this shared hallucination or something.

00:11:13.000 Wow.

00:11:14.000 Wow.

00:11:16.000 I mean, also back then, we didn't really know too much about that stuff.

00:11:20.000 So they were kind of gathering information about what would happen if you gave someone LSD.

00:11:24.000 Yep, that's kind of the motivation for MKUltra in the first place.

00:11:28.000 There were several motivating factors.

00:11:31.000 One of them is, how do we get prisoners to speak during an interrogation?

00:11:36.000 Maybe there is some kind of truth drug that can get them to tell us the secrets that we want to know.

00:11:40.000 Another is maybe we can use this to discredit individuals like Fidel Castro.

00:11:45.000 Let's say we dose him with LSD before a big speech. 0.99

00:11:48.000 He appears to be crazy and his people are going to lose trust in him because he's making nonsense. 0.99

00:11:52.000 You know, he's just talking gibberish. 1.00

00:11:54.000 Was that proposed?

00:11:54.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:55.000 Yeah, there was proposed a plan to put LSD into cigars that would sneak into Castro's kind of place that he would smoke before he gave a speech.

00:12:02.000 What I don't understand about that is they were trying to kill him.

00:12:05.000 So if they couldn't get poison into his cigars, why'd they think they could get acid?

00:12:08.000 Well, the original plan was to discredit him, and then the later plan was to kill him.

00:12:14.000 So there were a couple original plans to discredit him.

00:12:16.000 One is to sneak him LSD to make him appear insane so that his people will lose faith in him.

00:12:21.000 Another one was to slip what's called thallium salts into his shoes.

00:12:25.000 And these are depilatories.

00:12:27.000 They make your hair fall out.

00:12:28.000 And so the idea was that, you know, he's got this masculine allure with his big beard.

00:12:33.000 But if we can slip these depilatories into his shoes and he puts them on, his beard's going to fall out.

00:12:38.000 And like Samson, he's going to lose his power or something like that.

00:12:40.000 That was the idea.

00:12:42.000 So Sidney Gottlieb was kind of involved in some of these that I talk about in the book.

00:12:45.000 Another one, so you have the LSD, you have the depilatory.

00:12:48.000 Another one was to photoshop images basically of Castro with a bunch of beautiful women around him and like a buffet of food in front of him and to have a caption underneath it that said, my ration is different to indicate like I'm getting all the benefits of this spoils of society while my people are going hungry.

00:13:05.000 And so, you know, the idea was to spread this around Cuba and have people resent Castro for indulging in all these things.

00:13:11.000 Well, that one's actually reasonable.

00:13:13.000 Right?

00:13:13.000 A little bit more than the others.

00:13:15.000 That one's probably the closest to accurate.

00:13:17.000 Yeah.

00:13:17.000 So those were attempts to discredit Castro, and then there were several attempts to assassinate him that Sidney Gottlieb and others involved kind of in this story do.

00:13:26.000 So some of the main assassination attempts on Castro involved his hobby of ocean diving.

00:13:31.000 So he liked to dive in the ocean.

00:13:34.000 And one idea was that, what if we get this really beautiful shell that he would just be unable to pass up?

00:13:41.000 It would be so beautiful that if anyone swam by it, they would obviously want to pick it up.

00:13:44.000 We packed a shell full of explosives and put it on, have some kind of trigger mechanism for when you pick it up that detonates the explosives.

00:13:51.000 So when he's underwater, he's going to swim by this.

00:13:53.000 He's going to see this beautiful shell.

00:13:54.000 He's going to pick it up and it's going to explode.

00:13:56.000 But it turns out they couldn't really figure out a shell big enough that would catch his interest, you know, so that never happened.

00:14:03.000 Another concept with his scuba diving hobby is that what if we gift him a scuba diving suit?

00:14:08.000 There are people kind of negotiating for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners.

00:14:12.000 So what if we get one of those lawyers to gift Castro a suit and in that suit we would lace it with some kind of poison or some kind of fungus that would cause him to break out and develop some kind of disease?

00:14:24.000 But it turns out the guy that they wanted to give him the suit had already given him a diving suit.

00:14:28.000 And so it was like, oh, we can't use him anymore.

00:14:32.000 Wow.

00:14:34.000 And they were the people running it.

00:14:36.000 That was the best they could do.

00:14:36.000 Yeah.

00:14:38.000 Yeah.

00:14:38.000 But it's just the concept of not having any experience whatsoever in any studies about mind control and just given this assignment.

00:14:48.000 What do you know about mind control?

00:14:50.000 What can we do?

00:14:50.000 How much does it work?

00:14:51.000 What did the Nazis learn during World War II?

00:14:54.000 Because they did a lot of experiments, right?

00:14:56.000 They're doing a lot of experiments.

00:14:57.000 And it is, you know, I mentioned the OSS is doing truth drug experiments.

00:15:01.000 The Nazis are doing truth drug experiments in their concentration camps as well.

00:15:05.000 And the British are doing some truth drug experiments during World War II as well.

00:15:08.000 You can get the British ones online.

00:15:11.000 Well, at least the post-World War II ones, was it 1950s?

00:15:14.000 Have you seen the British LSD studies?

00:15:16.000 Oh, you haven't seen it?

00:15:17.000 No, I don't see it.

00:15:18.000 Oh, it's wonderful.

00:15:19.000 You should watch it.

00:15:19.000 We'll watch it real quick because it's kind of hilarious.

00:15:21.000 They start breaking out.

00:15:22.000 They can't.

00:15:23.000 You have seen it?

00:15:23.000 Oh, they can't.

00:15:24.000 They can't.

00:15:24.000 I think so.

00:15:25.000 The soldiers all in a row and they can't.

00:15:26.000 Some of them start laughing when they're in the middle of doing their task and they just start laughing uncontrollable and they sit down.

00:15:31.000 Yeah.

00:15:32.000 Well, you know, during, I mentioned those like THC acetate experiments during World War II.

00:15:38.000 These guys are giant smiles on their face.

00:15:41.000 Yeah.

00:15:42.000 This guy's having a guard go of it.

00:15:44.000 Yeah, he might have been having an encounter or something.

00:15:46.000 He had to be removed from the experiment after 35 minutes.

00:15:49.000 Look at the radio operator trying to figure out how to burke it.

00:15:53.000 They're just so confused.

00:15:59.000 And eventually they just start laying down and just laugh like these guys.

00:16:03.000 These guys just can't.

00:16:08.000 Yeah, and these THC experiments during World War II, guys.

00:16:14.000 For some of the people, they would give them this THC.

00:16:16.000 They would smoke it through a cigarette.

00:16:18.000 And some of the reactions it talked about was it made them just uncontrollably start laughing and it put them in a good mood.

00:16:24.000 And like some of the reactions were, oh, yeah, I mean, they were just getting these people high and they were reacting to this.

00:16:29.000 It didn't make them tell the truth.

00:16:30.000 No, no.

00:16:31.000 Of course not.

00:16:32.000 It did actually make them talk more, though, because they actually recorded these interviews and they would count the number of words per minute that these people spoke.

00:16:38.000 And it turns out after they smoked this, they would talk about like 40% more words per minute.

00:16:43.000 But it's not that this guaranteed the truth.

00:16:45.000 They were just talking.

00:16:46.000 They're just rambling.

00:16:47.000 They're talking about cartoons.

00:16:50.000 Yeah.

00:16:52.000 What other drugs did they experiment with?

00:16:53.000 Did they experiment with amphetamines?

00:16:55.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:56.000 Yeah.

00:16:56.000 So one, well, I should mention that MKUltra was broken into 149 sub-projects.

00:17:02.000 So MKUltra was the umbrella term.

00:17:05.000 And within MKUltra, there were 149 sub-projects that were kind of farmed out to, in many cases, independent researchers who might be working at a hospital or a prison or a university or something like that.

00:17:16.000 One of the main people who is running these studies is a guy named Harris Isbel at the Lexington Narcotic Farm.

00:17:23.000 This is where drug addicts could go to get treatment for their addiction.

00:17:28.000 Prisoners could go there as well.

00:17:30.000 And whenever Sidney Gottlieb found a drug that he was interested in, he would basically just give it to Harris Isbel, who could try it out on these prisoners to see how they reacted.

00:17:38.000 And then Isbel would write reports back to Gottlieb.

00:17:40.000 So he tried psilocybin when that came out, LSD, but also stuff like, I mean, heroin.

00:17:46.000 The CIA was particularly interested in heroin because if you can induce an addiction in a captured agent, let's say, then you can use that as leverage and interrogation, the withdrawal symptoms.

00:17:57.000 So you get them addicted to heroin and then use the withdrawal symptoms saying, well, if you tell us about this, maybe I'll, you know, give you a little.

00:18:03.000 So that was at least the concept.

00:18:05.000 But there were, I mean, dozens and dozens of different kinds of drugs they were testing just to see how people reacted to them, if any of them could be used as a potential truth drug.

00:18:14.000 The heroin one actually makes sense.

00:18:15.000 I never thought of that.

00:18:16.000 Yeah.

00:18:16.000 Well, one of the ironies as well about this experiment that I mentioned, you know, Harris Isbell and giving these prisoners all these drugs, the prisoners are in this place.

00:18:25.000 It's called the narcotic farm because they're supposed to be getting off drugs.

00:18:28.000 You know, they're supposed to be curing them of their addiction.

00:18:31.000 At the same time, they're giving them all these drugs to test them out.

00:18:35.000 And then as a reward for participating in these trials, they had two options.

00:18:39.000 Either they could get like a positive letter in the parole board and like $100 or something, or they could go to the drug bank window, stick out their arm, and they would get a needle full of heroin as a reward.

00:18:49.000 They were supposed to be getting off drugs, and yet you're incentivizing them to participate in these drug trials by giving them drugs.

00:18:58.000 Wow.

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00:19:52.000 So that's one of 149 subprojects.

00:19:52.000 Wow.

00:19:52.000 Yeah.

00:19:56.000 Are you aware that heroin was created as it was a substitute for people that were addicted to morphine?

00:20:04.000 No, no.

00:20:05.000 Yeah.

00:20:08.000 That's correct, right?

00:20:09.000 Search that.

00:20:10.000 I'm pretty sure that's correct.

00:20:12.000 Yeah, they came up with heroin to treat people that were addicted to morphine.

00:20:18.000 Which, what?

00:20:21.000 Well, that's like giving them oxycontin if they're addicted to heroin.

00:20:25.000 It's the same thing.

00:20:26.000 Yeah.

00:20:27.000 But getting someone addicted to that and then pulling it away from them seems like it would be very effective in terms of getting them to give up information.

00:20:37.000 Yeah, that was the idea.

00:20:39.000 So here it is.

00:20:40.000 We put it into our sponsor perplexity.

00:20:42.000 Heroin created as a morphine treatment.

00:20:44.000 Originally developed in late 19th century as a medical drug that was indeed marketed as an improved non-addictive alternative to morphine and as a cough suppressant.

00:20:52.000 Hey, what do you know?

00:20:54.000 How nuts. 0.91

00:20:54.000 Yeah. 0.91

00:20:56.000 What company came up with it?

00:20:59.000 There you go.

00:20:59.000 Bear.

00:21:00.000 Fucking Bear. 0.99

00:21:04.000 I think at the same time they were doing this, they just find out if it's true that acetametophene is what's toxic in Tylenol, correct? 0.99

00:21:15.000 Find out if it's true that at the same time they decided that acetaminophen was too dangerous.

00:21:20.000 I think that is Tylenol.

00:21:21.000 What do you mean?

00:21:22.000 I mean, the substance.

00:21:22.000 Yeah.

00:21:24.000 You know, that's Tylenol is the name brand.

00:21:27.000 What's the question then?

00:21:29.000 Did they, poor Jamie, if you hear his voice, ladies and gentlemen, inform the people at home.

00:21:34.000 Poor Jamie got a tooth pulled last night.

00:21:36.000 It was rough.

00:21:39.000 Not even, yeah, excuse me.

00:21:40.000 Last night you were in pain.

00:21:42.000 Today he got a tooth pulled.

00:21:43.000 And he's got what looks like a softball stuffed in his cheek.

00:21:47.000 Oh, man.

00:21:49.000 Did Bayer decide not to release acetaminophen during the same time period?

00:21:58.000 During the pandemic, I got fascinated with acetaminophen because I read this horrible story about this poor lady who got COVID and she was in real pain.

00:22:06.000 So she took a bunch of acetaminophen, she took a bunch of Tylenol and kept taking it.

00:22:10.000 And apparently didn't realize how dangerous it is to overdose on Tylenol, and she died of liver poison.

00:22:16.000 Yeah, and I was like, oh my God, how many people die of liver poisoning?

00:22:19.000 What's like 500 a year in this country?

00:22:21.000 It's like acetaminophen, it's scary stuff.

00:22:24.000 It was not being actively held back by Bayer at the same period that it promoted heroin and aspen.

00:22:29.000 It was simply not yet recognized or marketed the way those drugs were.

00:22:32.000 And its development adoption followed a different path.

00:22:35.000 Existing historical accounts focus more on scientific uncertainty and competing drugs than on deliberate suppression campaign by Bayer.

00:22:44.000 I don't think they were saying in this article that I read that it was a that they were suppressing it, that they decided not to focus on it because it was dangerous.

00:22:55.000 Why acetaminophen last?

00:22:57.000 Early clinicians favored fenacetatine and aceta.

00:23:03.000 How does that work?

00:23:04.000 Is that Acetonylide.

00:23:06.000 Despite their later recognized toxicity and acetaminophen's advantages, better safety profile at therapeutic doses was not clearly distinguished at first.

00:23:16.000 Okay.

00:23:17.000 Anyway.

00:23:18.000 We're getting off track.

00:23:20.000 I was just going to say, one of the ironic things, too, with some of these MKUltra sub-projects, they're interested in finding these supposed truth drugs that could get someone to tell the truth during an interrogation.

00:23:29.000 But it turns out even just the threat of giving someone a truth drug turned out to be a lot more effective than any drug that they actually tried out.

00:23:37.000 So for instance, in an interrogation, if you tell someone that this is a truth drug and I'm going to give it to you and it's going to make you tell the truth, that can lower their defenses a bit in the sense that the person who takes this, that might give them kind of the permission to be able to talk because it makes them think, well, I couldn't have stopped myself.

00:23:55.000 Well, I mean, they gave me this truth drug.

00:23:57.000 Of course, I'm going to have to say this, so I can't be blamed.

00:24:00.000 No one's going to blame me.

00:24:01.000 So it takes kind of the burden off their shoulders if they think they've been given a truth drug, even if they haven't.

00:24:05.000 Just give them a sugar pill. 1.00

00:24:06.000 So that actually turned out to be a lot more effective than any of the drugs that they actually tried.

00:24:09.000 That totally makes sense.

00:24:11.000 They did the same thing with hypnotism, too.

00:24:13.000 The hypnotism turned out to be not that effective in, at least in an interrogation.

00:24:17.000 But if you could convince someone that they had been hypnotized, even if they hadn't, then that could be effective.

00:24:23.000 So for instance, this is what a guy called Martin Orne, he was one of the psychologists who was in charge of one of these sub-projects.

00:24:31.000 But he put forward what's called the hypnotic situation.

00:24:34.000 Not hypnotism, but the hypnotic situation.

00:24:37.000 So for instance, you pretend to hypnotize someone, the person you're interrogating, and they know they're not hypnotized.

00:24:44.000 They obviously can tell that you're not controlling me, nothing's happening.

00:24:47.000 However, you start saying things like, you know, I'm hypnotizing you and your hands are getting warmer.

00:24:52.000 And they're going to think to themselves, no, they're not.

00:24:54.000 But under the table, you secretly implanted a heater and their hands actually are getting warmer because where they're sitting, there's this heater under that that they don't know exists and it's making their hands warmer.

00:25:02.000 So after a certain period of time, they start thinking to themselves, maybe I am being hypnotized.

00:25:07.000 Like the things that he's saying are actually happening.

00:25:09.000 And so if you can make them think that they've been hypnotized, again, that lowers their resistance because, I mean, who could blame me for talking now?

00:25:16.000 I've been hypnotized.

00:25:17.000 I couldn't help myself but talk.

00:25:18.000 At least that's the idea.

00:25:20.000 It's just so fascinating to me how much time and effort was spent just studying how to control people's minds and trying to come up with ways to do it.

00:25:29.000 Yeah.

00:25:30.000 It must have been really exciting to be them.

00:25:32.000 I mean, I think what they did is horrible.

00:25:35.000 I don't, you know, I'm not in any way forgiving MKUltra for what they did. 0.59

00:25:40.000 However, boy, it must have been fun.

00:25:42.000 Just to have no oversight.

00:25:44.000 No one even knows you exist.

00:25:46.000 You kind of get this impression by looking at some of these MKUltra documents, especially at the beginning before the Franklson incident when Frank Olsen eventually dies after one of these experiments.

00:25:55.000 And so that kind of definitely puts a damper on a lot of things that are going on.

00:25:58.000 Before that, though, I do get the sense that it's almost like they're a bunch of guys just trying to, you know, play around with each other in a way, even though what they're doing is completely unethical.

00:26:09.000 But they would just be dosing like the CIA coffee pot and see what happens to people who are taking drinks of it.

00:26:13.000 Just to, I mean, the rationale is that, well, if the Soviets possess some kind of hallucinogenic drug and they were going to release it into the water supply of a city, we need to know how people would react to that because we need to know how to defend against that.

00:26:27.000 Therefore, we should be doing that to people just to see how they react to it so that we know what kind of signs to look for in case the Soviets do that. 0.87

00:26:34.000 Didn't they dose up a town in France? 0.94

00:26:37.000 I don't think the CIA was connected to that.

00:26:39.000 I mean, I think it actually was like an ergot poisoning that came from the bread.

00:26:44.000 I think so.

00:26:44.000 But yeah, but there was some speculation that it was purpose.

00:26:48.000 The town's called Pont Saint-Esprit, I believe.

00:26:48.000 Yeah.

00:26:51.000 But yeah, there were multiple dozens of people who came down with hallucinogenic symptoms.

00:26:56.000 One guy stripped naked and started running around the street.

00:26:59.000 Multiple people died after this.

00:27:02.000 But that was one of the things that led the CIA to become really interested in hallucinogens because if a poisoning from a bakery could cause that much havoc within this one French town, how much more damaging would it be if the Soviets did that to a city's water supply?

00:27:14.000 And so that kind of leads to the CIA.

00:27:17.000 That's the justification.

00:27:18.000 And so they started dosing the coffee pots and they're running brothels. 1.00

00:27:22.000 Oh, yeah.

00:27:22.000 Yeah.

00:27:23.000 That's the crazy one.

00:27:24.000 Operation Midnight Climax.

00:27:26.000 Look it up, folks, because it's really crazy.

00:27:28.000 They had their own brothels and they would use two-way mirrors with cameras behind them and they would dose the Johns up. 1.00

00:27:35.000 They'd give him a drink.

00:27:36.000 Would you like a drink?

00:27:36.000 Have a seat.

00:27:37.000 And he goes, sure, I'll have a drink. 1.00

00:27:38.000 And this poor guy get off work, has a drink, thinks he's going to be with a prostitute and have some nice sex. 1.00

00:27:44.000 Next thing you know, he's just tripping out of his mind while he's being recorded by Jolly West. 0.98

00:27:49.000 You know, the guy who actually ran that is a guy named George White, and he was involved in the OSS.

00:27:49.000 Yeah.

00:27:56.000 So he was, you know, I mentioned Stanley Lovell and the THC Acetate.

00:27:59.000 George White was the guy who was hired to do that in the OSS.

00:28:02.000 Then Sidney Gottlieb, when he's thinking, I need to do these drug experiments for myself, who am I going to get it to do it for me?

00:28:08.000 I need someone who has connections to the underworld, who has criminal connections.

00:28:11.000 George White was a Bureau of Narcotics officer.

00:28:14.000 And so Gottlieb was going through the OSS files and it turns out, oh, this guy's already done these experiments.

00:28:18.000 I'm going to hire him.

00:28:19.000 So that's how George White eventually gets involved in the CIA stuff.

00:28:22.000 Wow.

00:28:23.000 I can't wait for this show.

00:28:26.000 Because David Chase gets a hold of a subject like this.

00:28:29.000 There's so much room.

00:28:31.000 Like, it's so endlessly fascinating.

00:28:34.000 Yeah, I'm really excited.

00:28:35.000 Obviously, for me, I mean, it's just so lucky that he happened to be interested in this kind of topic.

00:28:41.000 I mean, there are a lot of books out there on any number of topics that anyone could be interested in.

00:28:45.000 But the fact that, you know, I mean, I do consider myself extremely lucky.

00:28:48.000 I happened to write this book at the right time, and someone happened to be interested at the right time.

00:28:53.000 So, yeah, I can't wait for that to come out.

00:28:55.000 Yeah, I'm very happy that you did write this book, and I'm very happy that this is happening.

00:29:00.000 Because I talk to people about this subject, you know, like normies per se, and they look at you sideways, like, what did they do?

00:29:08.000 They do, what?

00:29:09.000 They're responsible for Manson.

00:29:11.000 What?

00:29:11.000 Huh?

00:29:12.000 And it's like, oh, my God, the rabbit hole is so deep.

00:29:15.000 I don't have enough battery in my flashlight to take you down this rabbit hole.

00:29:18.000 That's one of the things with MKUltra just in general.

00:29:20.000 I mean, initially reading about this, my first impression is that, obviously, that's like a conspiracy theory or it can't be right, but some conspiracies are true.

00:29:30.000 And the MKUltra stuff, they actually did this.

00:29:31.000 They were dosing people using prostitutes behind a one-way mirror.

00:29:35.000 George White sitting on a toilet watching this happen.

00:29:38.000 I mean, even besides drugs, MKUltra is involved in a lot of psychological experiments.

00:29:43.000 So not just LSD.

00:29:44.000 Most people associate MKUltra with LSD, but one of the most expansive of the sub-projects is Sub-Project 68.

00:29:53.000 It was by this guy named Ewan Cameron.

00:29:55.000 Have you heard that name before?

00:29:57.000 Okay, Ewan Cameron.

00:29:58.000 He is a psychiatrist up in Montreal in Canada, working at what's called the Allen Memorial Institute.

00:30:04.000 And Gottlieb wanted to expand MKUltra besides drugs because he already had a lot of people doing drug experiments.

00:30:10.000 So he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques that could be used to manipulate a person.

00:30:14.000 So not just in an interrogation, but can we actually like control a person's personality?

00:30:18.000 Can we make them behave in certain ways, make them do something?

00:30:21.000 So the idea that Ewan Cameron had come up with before the CIA is involved, I should mention, Ewan Cameron is a behaviorist.

00:30:28.000 So he thinks that all behavior is a result of nurture, not nature.

00:30:34.000 So it's the environmental input that causes a person to behave a certain way.

00:30:38.000 And he thought that if you could bring a person back down to a blank slate, remove all the environmental inputs that have been put into them, and then you can build them back up in your image into whatever you want them to be.

00:30:48.000 So his idea to bring someone down to the blank slate was to induce enough stress that they forgot who they formerly were.

00:30:54.000 And so you reduce them to the blank slate.

00:30:57.000 And then the CIA is really interested in if you could do that, then you could form them into whatever.

00:31:01.000 So Ewan Cameron, his main goal is to try to figure out what can induce enough stress in a person to bring them down to that blank slate.

00:31:08.000 And so he performs a lot of experiments.

00:31:11.000 His most famous one is called Psychic Driving, where he was doing a therapy session, quote unquote therapy, with one of his patients.

00:31:20.000 And he was recording the session and she said something about how, you know, my mother, when I was young, used to tell me, blah, blah, blah, you know, she said something negative to her.

00:31:28.000 And so Ewan Cameron rewinded that on the tape that he was recording and made her listen back to it and said, hey, I want you to listen back to what you say your mother used to say to you.

00:31:36.000 When he rewinded the tape and played it forward, as soon as the woman was kind of quoting her mother and she listened to that herself on the tape, she recoiled.

00:31:44.000 And Cameron thought, oh, you have a negative reaction to that.

00:31:47.000 So he'd rewind it again and again and again.

00:31:49.000 And he kept rewinding it.

00:31:50.000 And she just got more and more emotional, had this more and more kind of visceral reaction to what she was saying her mother used to tell her.

00:31:57.000 So this led Cameron to develop the concept of psychic driving, which is you record some kind of negative message and then you make someone listen to it for thousands and thousands and thousands of times for weeks on end, for hours every day.

00:32:09.000 All their waking day, they basically are strapped into a headphone that is playing this negative message and it will break them down over time.

00:32:15.000 That's how you induce enough stress to break them down to the blank slate.

00:32:19.000 And then you can record a positive psychic driving message to build them up into whatever image you want them to be.

00:32:25.000 So that was his initial idea.

00:32:27.000 Was it based on anything?

00:32:29.000 Not really.

00:32:29.000 It was just based on he had this one encounter with this woman and she had a negative reaction.

00:32:33.000 And he's just trying to induce stress.

00:32:35.000 This obviously seemed to induce stress in her.

00:32:37.000 Therefore, we're going to start playing these negative tapes to them.

00:32:40.000 So it was just his idea.

00:32:41.000 It's just his idea.

00:32:42.000 He was known for doing this kind of thing, like kind of spur of the moment.

00:32:45.000 In fact, there was one kid, basically, who had been at this Allen Memorial Institute where Ewan Cameron was.

00:32:53.000 He eventually had gotten out, but he had tried to commit suicide.

00:32:56.000 And so he was sent back to the Allen Memorial Institute.

00:32:59.000 But the way that he had tried to commit suicide was to close the garage and have the CO2 build up with a running car.

00:33:04.000 And then he would, you know, breathe it in and pass out and die.

00:33:07.000 That ended up not working.

00:33:08.000 However, when he went back to the Allen Memorial Institute, Ewan Cameron thought, you know, his personality seems like a little bit better than it was when he was here before.

00:33:16.000 Maybe CO2 can like influence someone.

00:33:19.000 So he sent out some of his assistants to go buy like CO2 canisters and we're going to start like giving this to people.

00:33:25.000 But it turns out the assistants knew that this was like completely unethical.

00:33:28.000 There's no medical basis for anything.

00:33:30.000 And so they lied to him and said, oh, the canisters were way more expensive than we could actually afford.

00:33:34.000 So we can't do that.

00:33:35.000 So he was just, he was trying to find any way that he could have a breakthrough to cure mental illness.

00:33:40.000 And he was using his patients as guinea pigs.

00:33:43.000 Complete guinea pigs. 0.67

00:33:44.000 Complete guinea pigs.

00:33:45.000 What was the result with the woman?

00:33:47.000 The woman where they played the negative recordings?

00:33:50.000 I don't, well, there are dozens and dozens of people who that happened to.

00:33:53.000 I don't know about her in particular because I don't know if she's actually named in the documents.

00:33:57.000 So I don't know.

00:33:58.000 Did any of these experiments have a positive effect?

00:34:02.000 Oh, it worked?

00:34:02.000 Hardly, hardly, hardly.

00:34:04.000 So that was only- I shouldn't even say positive.

00:34:06.000 I should say were the effective.

00:34:08.000 No, no.

00:34:08.000 For the most part, the people who he did his practice on came out way worse than when they went in.

00:34:14.000 So psychic driving, that's initially what got the CIA interested in Cameron.

00:34:18.000 So it's important to keep in mind.

00:34:19.000 It's not that the CIA told Cameron to do this.

00:34:22.000 He's doing this on his own because he thinks he's going to cure mental illness by having this radical breakthrough where we break them down and build them back up and we can build them back up and make them forget their schizophrenia or depression or whatever they have.

00:34:32.000 The CIA reads his article about psychic driving and they think this is the kind of thing we're interested in.

00:34:38.000 So from that point on, they start funding him not only to do psychic driving experiments, but also he does like puts people in chemical comas for months on end.

00:34:49.000 And while they're in these chemical comas, he would put an audio device next to their pillow playing these psychic driving messages.

00:34:55.000 And he would put them in sensory deprivation chambers for weeks.

00:34:58.000 You know, they would have goggles over their eyes, earmuffs on their ears.

00:35:01.000 They would have cardboard tubes over their arms so that they couldn't feel anything.

00:35:04.000 And they would just be in a room for weeks on end.

00:35:07.000 The idea, again, being to induce enough stress so that it breaks them down so that you can eventually build them up.

00:35:12.000 But one of the saddest stories in the book, really, is of this woman named Mary Morrow, who is one of the patients of Ewan Cameron in Montreal.

00:35:23.000 The sad thing about her especially is she had been a resident in training at the Allen Memorial Institute under Ewan Cameron.

00:35:30.000 So she had been training to be a doctor under him, and she had administered some of these techniques, including electric shock.

00:35:36.000 So that's one of the things too.

00:35:37.000 We would put these electrodes on the heads of people and just he would continually shock them until, again, the idea was to reduce them to like, in one case, he says, an infantile-like state where they lose control of their bladder.

00:35:47.000 They can't talk.

00:35:47.000 They can't eat.

00:35:48.000 They can't go to the bathroom on their own.

00:35:49.000 They can't put on their own clothes or anything like that.

00:35:52.000 So she was in charge of administering some of these, I mean, you know, therapy sessions or whatever they would call it, but just basically torture to these people.

00:36:01.000 She ended up having almost kind of a psychotic break herself.

00:36:06.000 She became anorexic and she failed her neurology exams.

00:36:09.000 And so she went into a really deep depression.

00:36:11.000 She attempted to commit suicide.

00:36:12.000 That didn't work.

00:36:13.000 She was admitted to the hospital, to another hospital.

00:36:16.000 Ewan Cameron came to visit her and he said, I think you should come back to the Allen Memorial, not as a doctor, but as a patient and let me treat you.

00:36:23.000 So she ends up going back to the Allen Memorial as a patient.

00:36:27.000 And she thought to herself that it's going to be okay.

00:36:31.000 They're not going to do the electric shock to me because you had to sign a consent form for that to happen to you.

00:36:36.000 The people who are signing the consent forms, they don't know how bad it's actually going to be.

00:36:39.000 They're just signing their name.

00:36:41.000 But she knows, I haven't signed a consent form, so they can't do that to me.

00:36:44.000 But it turns out in the time since she went to the hospital and came back, they had stopped doing the consent forms and he would just do this on whoever.

00:36:50.000 And so they ended up doing this electric shock treatment on her. 0.99

00:36:55.000 And afterwards, she would be babbling, incontinent, couldn't put on her makeup or clothes or anything.

00:37:01.000 Eventually, she would call her mother after some of these treatments.

00:37:04.000 And her mother knew something was going on because she just became more and more incoherent as time went on.

00:37:09.000 So the mother sent Mary's sister, Margaret, in order to go to the Allen Memorial to basically bust her out of there. 1.00

00:37:14.000 So the sister walked in the front door and said, I'm not leaving until I see Mary. 0.82

00:37:18.000 You know, I'm going to call the police if you don't let me through. 1.00

00:37:20.000 So eventually she goes to her sister's room, opens the door, and Mary is sitting there just with wide bug eyes, doesn't even recognize her sister. 0.53

00:37:28.000 It takes several days for her to figure out where she actually is, and then she gets busted out of there.

00:37:33.000 So it's a very— Is it reversible in any way?

00:37:36.000 Was it— It's— In her case, I'm not exactly sure.

00:37:40.000 She went on to have a little bit of a career, but she eventually attempted to commit suicide later again.

00:37:44.000 That was unsuccessful.

00:37:45.000 Then her and several of the victims of Ewan Cameron's experiments in the 1980s, they ended up suing the CIA for supporting Ewan Cameron.

00:37:54.000 And during those lawsuits, the attorneys who are representing them, they took the depositions of several of the people who were involved in MKUltra to try to use this during their trial.

00:38:04.000 So they took the depositions of Sidney Gottley, Robert Lashbrook, Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, and many of the victims who were victims of all this.

00:38:11.000 And that's basically the basis for my book.

00:38:12.000 I found thousands of pages of these depositions.

00:38:15.000 That's just verbatim transcript of these people talking about either what they did or what was done to them.

00:38:19.000 And so I'm using that throughout the book to explain, here's what they're doing in their own words, or here's what was done to them in their own words.

00:38:26.000 Wow.

00:38:27.000 So what was the result of the trial?

00:38:29.000 Oh, well, so it was actually settled out of court before it went to trial.

00:38:33.000 So the plaintiffs, the CIA gave the plaintiffs $750,000 to be split among them.

00:38:39.000 But after attorney's fees and everything, it doesn't really amount to much anyway.

00:38:43.000 And so, you know, they settled out of court.

00:38:45.000 They got a little bit of money, but it never went to trial.

00:38:47.000 And so these depositions, though, you know, since it never went to trial, these were just in the papers of Joseph Rao, who's the main lawyer who was involved in this case.

00:38:55.000 And when he passed away, his papers were donated to the Library of Congress that had all these thousands of pages of depositions in there, 823 pages of which are Sidney Gottlieb testifying about what he did in MKUltra.

00:39:07.000 And so I was rooting around the Library of Congress and happened to find them.

00:39:10.000 So that's how I found basically the basis for what this book is.

00:39:13.000 Wow.

00:39:15.000 Wow.

00:39:15.000 I wonder how much of that woman's psychological breakdown had to do with the guilt of performing those experiments on people and realizing that it wasn't doing anything that Ewan Cameron thought it was going to do.

00:39:28.000 In fact, it was destroying people's minds.

00:39:30.000 Yeah, maybe some.

00:39:30.000 I mean, it's just speculation because I'm not sure about that.

00:39:33.000 That had to have weighed on the consciences.

00:39:35.000 You know, there's in what was called the sleep room, Ewan Cameron's sleep room, this is where they would do the chemical comas.

00:39:41.000 One of the nurses, I have kind of her diary entries basically describing what she was seeing.

00:39:48.000 And she does seem to be pretty reluctant to have done what she was actually doing.

00:39:52.000 And Ewan Cameron, she said, would often come over to her and pat her on the back and say, you know, you're helping these people.

00:39:58.000 You're helping these people.

00:39:59.000 Just trying to coax her along to go along with what he was telling her to do. 0.98

00:40:01.000 Ewan Cameron seems like a complete madman.

00:40:04.000 Like he was almost like too good to be true. 0.98

00:40:09.000 Not too good, but too like mad scientists to be true.

00:40:13.000 Was he on any sort of drugs?

00:40:16.000 I mean, I've never seen anything to indicate that he was on drugs, but he definitely had a, almost like a messiah complex.

00:40:22.000 He thought, I'm going to be the one to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine because I'm going to cure all mental illness through this psychic driving or whatever it was.

00:40:29.000 He was going to be the next Sigmund Freud.

00:40:30.000 He really had delusions of grandeur, just like I think Jolly West did as well.

00:40:34.000 And so I think that drove a lot of what he was doing.

00:40:37.000 His patients were just a means to his own end.

00:40:39.000 They're the guinea pigs that I can use to prove that these medical techniques actually work, and therefore everyone's going to praise me because I've cured schizophrenia or whatever it is.

00:40:49.000 I'm just always suspicious of something that has that, someone has that kind of access to all sorts of compounds.

00:40:57.000 And then you're experimenting on people, especially with things like amphetamines, which do tend to make people a little less empathetic, a little more driven.

00:41:06.000 I would be very curious to see if he was interested in anything like that.

00:41:10.000 Yeah, I don't remember specifically for him in that case.

00:41:13.000 I mean, many of the people who are either running the sub-projects or approving them, like Sidney Gottlieb, Gottlieb took a lot of LSD.

00:41:22.000 When the CIA got LSD, before it gave it to other people, the first thing they did was try it for themselves to see what actually happened.

00:41:28.000 So Sidney Gottlieb took it multiple times before he ever even gave it to people to understand what it was like.

00:41:34.000 Wow.

00:41:35.000 And one of the physician who was the attending physician the first time he took LSD, because they did it in kind of a controlled setting with several other people there, a guy named Harold Abramson.

00:41:47.000 And for anyone listening who knows much about the Frank Olson incident, Frank Olson is a guy that would later be dosed with LSD.

00:41:53.000 He would go out the hotel window in New York.

00:41:56.000 And Harold Abramson is the guy who Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook, they took to New York to get treatment from Harold Abramson afterwards.

00:42:04.000 So he had this CIA connection.

00:42:06.000 Wow.

00:42:07.000 The reason why I brought up amphetamines is because I feel like it might be one of the unheralded or undiscussed drivers in a lot of psychopathic behavior that we see in our culture today.

00:42:22.000 I think there's a lot of people on prescribed amphetamines that operate in a way that is very, very much like a functional meth head.

00:42:33.000 You know what I mean?

00:42:34.000 And I would wonder, like if you were in charge of doing something this evil, just running experiments where you're destroying people's minds and you're getting no positive results.

00:42:44.000 None of it's working.

00:42:45.000 Yet you continue to do it.

00:42:47.000 And you even do it to people that used to be involved in the program with them.

00:42:49.000 Poor woman. 1.00

00:42:51.000 Like, what's the psychological profile of that guy? 0.94

00:42:54.000 Because he's obviously mentally ill, which is fascinating, right? 1.00

00:42:57.000 It's fascinating that a mentally ill person is working on a mind experiment program. 0.98

00:43:01.000 Because there's no way he's not mentally ill.

00:43:03.000 Like, to have no empathy to these people that you've tried all this stuff on, and not only has it not been effective and not rid them of mental illness, it's made them far worse.

00:43:12.000 Yeah.

00:43:12.000 For Ewan Cameron, I feel like he definitely lacked empathy, whether that's some kind of medical thing or whatever.

00:43:20.000 There are a couple of people in the book, I think, who are like that.

00:43:22.000 One of them is Ewan Cameron.

00:43:24.000 Another is George White, who is in charge of Operation Midnight Climax.

00:43:28.000 He was in it just for the fun of it.

00:43:29.000 He would dose his own friends with LSD just to see what would happen.

00:43:33.000 There's one story in the book.

00:43:34.000 There was a woman who had gone over to a dinner party, basically. 1.00

00:43:37.000 She had actually gone over with her husband a few weeks before, but George White didn't dose them because the husband was there.

00:43:44.000 The husband went away on a business trip.

00:43:45.000 So the woman and her friend, they ended up going to see George White to hang out.

00:43:50.000 And White dosed them with LSD.

00:43:53.000 The woman had her one-year-old son there with her, but he still dosed them with LSD.

00:43:57.000 She ends up basically going crazy.

00:44:00.000 I mean, she, you know, she goes home.

00:44:02.000 She ends up calling, you know, George White, asking, what's happened to me?

00:44:06.000 What's going on?

00:44:07.000 One of these women, she ended up being committed to a mental institution for basically the rest of her life after this happened to her.

00:44:13.000 So she had some kind of like psychotic break after this unwitting, surreptitious dose of LSD.

00:44:18.000 Of course, she didn't know what was going on, so she thought her whole world was collapsing.

00:44:22.000 Yeah, she lost her husband.

00:44:23.000 It was said that she would cower in the corner of her parents' house before she went to this mental institution, convinced that an unidentified they was like looking after her, trying to get her, calling on the phone.

00:44:36.000 None of this was happening, but she was just having these delusions that someone was out to get her.

00:44:40.000 That's kind of a recurring theme that you see in these people who are unwittingly dosed.

00:44:44.000 One of them, one of the saddest stories in the book, is a guy named Wayne Ritchie, and George White did the same thing to him.

00:44:51.000 But Wayne Ritchie was this, he was a guard at Alcatraz for a while.

00:44:54.000 This is in San Francisco.

00:44:56.000 And he had gone to a Christmas party at the post office there in San Francisco just for, you know, he was a U.S. Marshal too, so just the U.S. Marshals, whatever.

00:45:05.000 And that night, he was drinking, you know, some of the punch at this party.

00:45:10.000 And he started feeling very strange.

00:45:11.000 He started seeing colors.

00:45:12.000 The room started spinning around him.

00:45:14.000 He ended up going upstairs to where his locker was and, you know, getting his things.

00:45:19.000 And he wound up going home because he didn't, you know, know what was going on.

00:45:22.000 When he got home, his girlfriend was upset at him.

00:45:25.000 She said that, you know, I'm not happy here.

00:45:27.000 I want to move to New York.

00:45:28.000 And so when he's in this fog, he decides, I know how to set my life on track.

00:45:33.000 I'm going to grab a couple of my service revolvers.

00:45:37.000 I'm going to go to a bar downtown.

00:45:38.000 I'm going to rob it.

00:45:39.000 And I'm going to give the money to my girlfriend so she can go to New York and she'll be happy. 0.58

00:45:43.000 And so she won't break up with me.

00:45:45.000 So when he's in this fog, he ends up doing all this.

00:45:47.000 He gets his revolvers.

00:45:48.000 He goes to a bar downtown.

00:45:50.000 He basically has a stick up, give me all the money in the till.

00:45:53.000 A quick thinking patron who's sitting next to him basically gets the mug of beer and smashes it over his head so he falls down.

00:45:59.000 The cops come later.

00:46:00.000 They arrest him.

00:46:01.000 He's in jail.

00:46:02.000 After a day or two, he kind of sobers up and kind of awakens from this fog.

00:46:08.000 And he doesn't know what happened to him at that point.

00:46:11.000 He ends up losing his job, losing his friends.

00:46:14.000 For the next 30, 40 years, he doesn't know what happened until in 1999, he was reading the Washington Post and he saw an article describing MKUltra.

00:46:22.000 And two things in particular stuck out to him.

00:46:24.000 One was George White, whom he knew back in the days when he was a U.S. Marshal.

00:46:29.000 And the other one was a description of LSD.

00:46:31.000 And so Wayne Ritchie starts putting all this together and thinking, I think George White gave me LSD that night at the holiday party and spiked the punch bowl.

00:46:40.000 And that's what happened.

00:46:41.000 And it turns out, you can see in this book, in the photo section, the last photo in the photo section of my book, it's an image of George White's diary from the day that Wayne Ritchie went insane, and it says, Federal Building Christmas Party.

00:46:55.000 So he was there at the Christmas party.

00:46:58.000 Wow.

00:46:59.000 Imagine being that guy reading that article 30 years later and realizing this guy ruined my life for fun.

00:47:06.000 So he ended up suing the CIA, but the judge said that he couldn't prove that he had been dosed with drugs, so they couldn't rule in his favor.

00:47:06.000 Yeah.

00:47:14.000 And so that was it.

00:47:15.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:47:18.000 Yeah, but there are, I mean, there are dozens of stories like that. 1.00

00:47:21.000 What a fucking psycho. 1.00

00:47:22.000 What a fucking psycho. 1.00

00:47:22.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:47:24.000 He's dosing up the punch bowl, ruining lives.

00:47:27.000 And he knows how messed up it is.

00:47:31.000 Because by that point, he had done this to multiple people and called them and caused them to lose a lot, you know?

00:47:38.000 So he knew what he was doing at that point.

00:47:41.000 God, this is just what happens with people when they have that kind of unchecked power and no oversight.

00:47:47.000 And they're the kind of psychopaths that would be involved in this sort of experimentation in the first place.

00:47:47.000 Yeah.

00:47:52.000 Yeah.

00:47:53.000 No, so I think he's probably the most heinous of the individuals in this book.

00:47:58.000 All of them are to a degree.

00:48:00.000 Sidney Gottlieb, I think he, I don't think he's as heinous in the sense that he's like intentionally trying to harm people.

00:48:08.000 He thinks he's doing this for a patriotic reason.

00:48:10.000 He thinks MKUltra is actually going to help us defend ourselves against the Soviet Union.

00:48:14.000 There is some like moral justification, at least he has for himself.

00:48:18.000 So it's not all just, you know, whatever George White is doing.

00:48:22.000 But at the same time, Sidney Gottlieb doesn't really take any responsibility for what happens to these people.

00:48:28.000 Basically, the way that MKUltra was structured with these sub-projects, Sidney Gottlieb wasn't running these experiments himself.

00:48:35.000 What he would do is he would fund other people to do experiments.

00:48:38.000 And most of the time, these people were experts in their own field.

00:48:41.000 So they were like reputable people.

00:48:43.000 Ewan Cameron was the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association.

00:48:51.000 He was like the most famous psychiatrist in the world, and he was being funded by this.

00:48:55.000 So Sidney Gottlieb thought, well, if I can fund reputable psychiatrists or drug researchers to do these experiments, then it's up to them to provide the safety and the procedures, you know, to keep these patients safe.

00:49:07.000 It's not my job.

00:49:08.000 They're the ones who are conducting the experiments.

00:49:10.000 That's how he justified it to himself.

00:49:11.000 But that's how the structure of MKUltra typically worked.

00:49:15.000 Such a diffusion of responsibility.

00:49:16.000 Exactly.

00:49:17.000 Gottlieb is funding people, and he's not even funding them directly.

00:49:19.000 In most cases, what's happening is he's using cut-out organizations.

00:49:23.000 So he's giving the money to one of them is called the Gettschaker Fund.

00:49:27.000 One of them is called the National Institutes of Mental Health.

00:49:30.000 And then the CIA sets up its own cut-out organization called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which is just a made-up organization.

00:49:41.000 So the CIA would transfer the funds to the society, who would then transfer it to the researcher.

00:49:46.000 In many cases, the researchers didn't even know they were being funded by the CIA.

00:49:50.000 They just thought, oh, I got a grant from this organization.

00:49:52.000 That's great.

00:49:53.000 So they don't even know that their true patron is Sidney Gottlieb and MKUltra.

00:49:56.000 They just know, oh, they want me to do these experiments.

00:49:58.000 And in many cases, they're allowed to still publish their work.

00:50:02.000 So, you know, they're publishing this.

00:50:03.000 Nothing's changed that much from what they were doing before.

00:50:06.000 But it turns out their patron is actually the CIA who wants to make sure they continue doing these experiments just in case they find something that could be of use.

00:50:13.000 Oh, my God.

00:50:15.000 What was your journey personally like, both researching these subjects and then writing books about it?

00:50:22.000 Because what was your opinion on all these things before this?

00:50:29.000 And how much of it has shaped your worldview?

00:50:34.000 So with the Probably the first book is more formative to the shaping of my worldview just because, you know, that was the first one I did.

00:50:43.000 What was your perspective before getting involved in any of this material?

00:50:47.000 Well, I'm pretty much, I would consider myself a skeptic generally, you know, so when stuff gets a little too outlandish, I am pretty skeptical.

00:50:56.000 But of course, that the existence of MKUltra, and even in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, there are some projects that are even more outlandish than some of the stuff I've been talking about with MKUltra.

00:51:08.000 And so that kind of lowered my barriers to thinking that, oh, people are crazy here.

00:51:12.000 Like, oh, the government does actually perform these crazy, you know, projects.

00:51:17.000 One of the ones that really lowered my barriers to that for the first book was called Operation Fantasia.

00:51:22.000 And again, it's just a testament to the absurdity of some of the ideas that were happening in World War II and just within the intelligence community.

00:51:30.000 Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of this guy named Ed Salinger.

00:51:34.000 And he had been a businessman who had done imports and exports with Tokyo in Tokyo.

00:51:39.000 So he knew Japanese culture.

00:51:41.000 He knew the language.

00:51:42.000 He knew the religious beliefs.

00:51:43.000 The OSS wanted to exploit that by trying to find a way we can demoralize the Japanese.

00:51:50.000 You know a lot about the Japanese psyche, the idea was, Ed Salinger.

00:51:53.000 So figure out a way we can demoralize the Japanese and make them basically give up this war because, you know, they're dug in, they're not giving up. 0.58

00:52:00.000 We need to find a way that we can basically use psychological warfare on them.

00:52:03.000 So his idea is that in the Shinto religion, there are these kind of mystical figures called kitsuni.

00:52:11.000 And in many cases, they take the form of like a fox, a glowing fox.

00:52:16.000 And oftentimes they represent portents of doom.

00:52:18.000 So, you know, if you see one of these kitsuni, it's an indication that something bad is about to happen. 1.00

00:52:23.000 And so Salinger knew, what if we can artificially create kitsuni, spread them around Japan, then all these Japanese soldiers are going to see them and think, oh, that's a portent of doom. 0.92

00:52:31.000 Surely it means we're going to lose the war.

00:52:33.000 Therefore, we might as well lay down our arms right now.

00:52:36.000 And so Salinger, initially, his idea is we're going to create whistles that can make fox sounds, and we're going to distribute them across Japan to our agents there, and they can blow these whistles like anyone would recognize a fox sound.

00:52:47.000 He had the idea that we're going to create artificial fox odors and spread it around places and people are going to think that it's the kitsuni foxes that are walking around.

00:52:56.000 None of those ever materialized.

00:52:57.000 But then he thought, what if we actually do it?

00:53:00.000 What if we capture foxes from China and Australia?

00:53:03.000 We paint them with glowing radioactive paint and then we and then we drop them in Japan. 0.92

00:53:09.000 Surely that's going to scare the Japanese. 1.00

00:53:12.000 So there are actually several experiments that they did this.

00:53:15.000 So they captured foxes.

00:53:17.000 The United States Radium Corporation produced a paint with radium, radioactive.

00:53:21.000 So loom from like dials of watching.

00:53:24.000 Exactly.

00:53:25.000 It's the same kind of thing.

00:53:26.000 So they decided we're going to paint foxes with this, but they first needed to test whether it's possible to paint fur with this and it stay on.

00:53:33.000 So they went to the Central Park Zoo and they got a raccoon and they painted it and kept it under lock and key.

00:53:37.000 And it turns out after a few days of ordinary raccoon shenanigans, the paint stayed on.

00:53:41.000 So they thought, okay, this might have something going for it.

00:53:44.000 So then Salinger decided we're going to paint these foxes, row them out into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and throw them overboard to see if they can actually swim to shore.

00:53:53.000 Because if we're going to get these foxes to Japan, we're going to have to throw them off the coast and they're going to have to swim and then scare people.

00:53:58.000 But can foxes even swim?

00:53:59.000 He didn't know.

00:54:00.000 So he gets these foxes.

00:54:02.000 He paints them with this paint.

00:54:03.000 He throws them in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.

00:54:05.000 And it turns out they actually swam to shore.

00:54:05.000 Oh, okay.

00:54:07.000 So that worked.

00:54:08.000 However, by the time they had gotten to shore, the paint had all washed off.

00:54:12.000 So poison the water. 0.98

00:54:13.000 Well, yeah.

00:54:14.000 And so it's like, if we were to do this in Japan, the paint's, you see a fox.

00:54:17.000 It's not a kitsuni.

00:54:18.000 It has to be a glowing fox.

00:54:20.000 And so he decided, well, that's not going to work.

00:54:21.000 So his next plan, this is one of the craziest things I found from my first book.

00:54:26.000 The next plan was, we are going to stuff a fox, a dead fox, just taxidermy it, have this fox body.

00:54:33.000 We're going to paint it with this glowing paint.

00:54:34.000 We can drape a cloth over it and paint glowing bones on it to make it look like a skeleton.

00:54:39.000 And we're going to put a human skull over this fox head to make it look as if it's a human skull.

00:54:43.000 Because apparently this was like an even more potent version of the kitsuni myth that was going around in Japan.

00:54:49.000 So we're going to put this human skull on this taxonomy glowing fox.

00:54:53.000 We're going to have the jaw open and close as if it's talking.

00:54:56.000 And we're going to blast propaganda out of this skull and we're going to attach balloons to it so that it can fly over Japan.

00:55:02.000 The Japanese are going to look up and see this flying, glowing, radioactive fox spreading this propaganda and they're apparently going to lay down their arms. 0.60

00:55:09.000 I guess that was the plan.

00:55:11.000 And so that was his ultimate idea of what we can do to do that.

00:55:14.000 Did they launch that?

00:55:15.000 Did they attempt it?

00:55:17.000 That never actually made it.

00:55:18.000 About the time that he was writing all this up and doing these experiments, the Manhattan Project had performed the Trinity test.

00:55:24.000 And so it's like, well, we already have the weapon that's going to win the war.

00:55:26.000 So we don't need the glowing foxes.

00:55:27.000 Thank you very much.

00:55:28.000 Wow.

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00:56:57.000 Wow.

00:56:57.000 Yeah.

00:56:58.000 So when you research stuff like that, all of a sudden it's like, well, anything is kind of possible.

00:57:03.000 The problem is most people haven't researched it.

00:57:05.000 So when you're having conversations with people, like I've always been conspiratorially minded, but more in the fun side, like Bigfoot, UFOs, dumb stuff as a distraction.

00:57:17.000 Like, I know what it is.

00:57:18.000 I'm interested because it's silly, you know, and I just find it fun.

00:57:21.000 Like, the Bigfoot thing is my, I watched a Bigfoot documentary the other night against my own better judgment.

00:57:28.000 And now my YouTube algorithm is filled with Bigfoot stories. 0.99

00:57:31.000 It's just the dumbest thing ever.

00:57:32.000 But when I started doing the podcast, it slowly shifted my perspective of not only are there real conspiracies, but they're way more prevalent than you would ever think. 0.98

00:57:46.000 And you almost have to get lucky to find out about them.

00:57:50.000 You know, like one of the things from the book Chaos was Tom O'Neill describing some of the documents that were discovered in, I believe it was a storage unit that where they had some like the MKUltra documents?

00:58:07.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:58:08.000 Yeah.

00:58:08.000 Do you remember that story?

00:58:09.000 Yeah, that's a big part of my book.

00:58:10.000 So in 1975 or so, really in 1974, there's something called the Rockefeller Commission, and that was an executive commission set up to investigate past abuses of the intelligence community.

00:58:22.000 And that kind of led to the church committee in 1975 and also the Pike Committee in the House.

00:58:28.000 But after they published their final reports, those reports included things about MKUltra, that the U.S. government had performed these secret drug experiments in the past.

00:58:36.000 And that led a former State Department employee named John Marks to file a Freedom of Information Act request, basically for any and all documents related to these former drug experiments.

00:58:46.000 And so, you know, not too long afterwards, a CIA This guy named Frank Laubinger, he was working in like the CIA archives, but he discovered these six or seven boxes of material that Sidney Gottlieb hadn't destroyed when he retired from the CIA because Gottlieb incinerated most of his files, and so did Richard Helms.

00:59:08.000 They were in on this together.

00:59:09.000 But it turns out those boxes escaped the destruction because they had been sent to the CIA records center several years before Gottlieb and Helms retired.

00:59:17.000 Therefore, they weren't incinerated in this purge, and so they survived.

00:59:21.000 So Marks filed that information request.

00:59:23.000 These boxes were found, and then they were released.

00:59:26.000 And this was right around the time that there were a couple of subcommittee hearings on MKUltra, and that's right when all these documents came out, too.

00:59:34.000 So it became kind of a big deal.

00:59:35.000 But so that's how thousands and thousands of documents related to MKUltra survived, even though Gottlieb and Helms incinerated most of the files that they actually had.

00:59:45.000 Which leads you to consider what would we know if those documents hadn't been discovered.

00:59:52.000 We would be decades behind on this.

00:59:55.000 Yeah, they do reveal a lot of information.

00:59:57.000 That said, we can actually kind of run this scenario because we do know what we kind of knew before those documents were released.

01:00:04.000 So before those documents were released, you still had the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee and a few other things.

01:00:10.000 But so we would have known still because it came out before those documents about the Frank Olson incident.

01:00:15.000 This guy was dosed with LSD at this place called Deep Creek and he ended up going out the window of the Stateler Hotel in New York.

01:00:21.000 He died.

01:00:21.000 We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, even though I don't know if that name was specifically used within these committee publications.

01:00:29.000 So we would have known.

01:00:30.000 That's a great name.

01:00:31.000 Well, that's George White's doing.

01:00:33.000 Sidney Gottlieb said he had a flair with a pin.

01:00:35.000 Like he was a journalist before he.

01:00:37.000 Yeah.

01:00:37.000 Yeah, yeah, he was.

01:00:37.000 Fucking psycho.

01:00:38.000 In fact, while we're on that topic, at the end of Operation Midnight Climax, he wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlieb, basically thanking him for supporting me for all these years. 0.99

01:00:46.000 Out of all the MKUltra sub-projects, you know, a lot of them started in 1953.

01:00:51.000 Many of them were done by 1963, but several continued into the late 60s.

01:00:56.000 But he, after this was done, he wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlieb.

01:00:59.000 And in the depositions that I found, the attorneys confront Gottlieb about this, and they ask him, what was in that letter?

01:01:04.000 And Gottlieb says, oh, you know, he had a flair for writing.

01:01:07.000 You can't trust anything he said.

01:01:08.000 But they, no, what was in it?

01:01:10.000 Turns out what was in it, George White wrote, I toiled in the vineyards wholeheartedly because it was fun, fun, fun.

01:01:15.000 Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with a sanction and blessing of the all-highest? 0.61

01:01:25.000 And he wrote that down.

01:01:27.000 Yeah.

01:01:28.000 God.

01:01:29.000 Yeah.

01:01:29.000 So we would have known about the Frank Olenson incident.

01:01:32.000 We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, though maybe not that name.

01:01:36.000 We would have known the broad outlines of MKUltra because that was already released before those files.

01:01:41.000 But the files give us a really detailed view of what happened.

01:01:45.000 But we don't know what was in the files that were incinerated.

01:01:49.000 That's correct.

01:01:50.000 Can you imagine that?

01:01:51.000 Yeah, we kind of do know a little bit about what was in them because there was an investigation that was done afterwards because it was illegal for them to destroy these files.

01:02:00.000 Not that anything ever happened to them.

01:02:01.000 They didn't face any consequences for it.

01:02:03.000 However, Gottlieb's secretary, this woman who had only been working for him for a few weeks before he retired, he told her to basically incinerate these files, you know, to help him do this.

01:02:13.000 So she didn't know it was against protocol or whatever.

01:02:15.000 She was new to the job.

01:02:17.000 But she was interviewed later as part of a CIA investigation into the destruction of the files.

01:02:21.000 And she does say a little bit about what she thinks were in the files.

01:02:25.000 She says it was some of his personal papers, and there was secret and secret-sensitive files in there.

01:02:30.000 We don't really have a great idea about what it could be.

01:02:33.000 Although I do think a lot of the files were in the depositions that I found, George White, or Sidney Gottlieb says that George White would write to him personal updates about the experiments that he was doing in these brothels, basically.

01:02:48.000 And so I'm assuming that a lot of those files consisted of George White's personal reports on what was going on.

01:02:57.000 Now, when you get deeper and deeper into this stuff, how much has it shaped your worldview?

01:03:06.000 A decent amount in the sense that, just as it did for kind of the American public in general in the 1970s when this was coming out, it really led people to cast a skeptical eye toward the government in thinking it's just assumed that the government is supposed to be the protector of civil liberties.

01:03:24.000 But after Watergate, after MKUltra, after the Vietnam War, it starts to seem as if the government is infringing on those civil liberties.

01:03:33.000 Instead of being the protector of it, in many cases, it's infringing on them.

01:03:37.000 Not that it doesn't protect civil liberties, but one of the main things that I came away after writing this book is the problem of oversight.

01:03:45.000 I think the constitutional system of government that we have is ingenious, the fact that we have checks and balances and the separation of powers.

01:03:52.000 However, you have to enable the separate branches of government to be able to check the other branches.

01:04:00.000 For most of the Cold War, that external check on the executive branch, like Congress checking the executive, the president, or the CIA, didn't really exist.

01:04:10.000 So anytime that the CIA was doing an operation, I have a chapter about this, but sometimes CIA personnel would try to inform members of Congress of what they were doing.

01:04:20.000 I have one specific quote where a CIA guy walks up to a sitting senator and says, Hey, let me tell you about what we're doing in Chile or whatever it is.

01:04:28.000 And he says, No, I don't want to hear it.

01:04:29.000 Don't tell me.

01:04:30.000 Just do what you're going to do.

01:04:31.000 He doesn't even want to know.

01:04:32.000 So it's like, how can you expect Congress to give oversight of the executive if they are completely unwilling to even know what the executive is doing?

01:04:39.000 So fortunately, in the aftermath of these revelations, there have been some programs or committees that are set up within Congress to provide that external check.

01:04:51.000 However, it's not even clear how effective those are.

01:04:57.000 One check on the executive after this is that the president now has to sign off basically on covert operations so that that eliminates the president's plausible deniability.

01:05:08.000 One of the main themes throughout this book is what I call the vicious cycle of secrecy.

01:05:14.000 So an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that kind of leads to what I see as this vicious cycle.

01:05:19.000 Secrecy leads to plausible deniability, because if it's secret, nobody can know that I'm doing this, therefore I'm not going to be blamed for it.

01:05:26.000 So secrecy leads to plausible deniability.

01:05:28.000 Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior, like MKUltra.

01:05:32.000 If nobody's going to find out what I'm doing, therefore I'm incentivized to do some crazy stuff because I'm not going to be held accountable for it.

01:05:38.000 So secrecy to plausible deniability, plausible deniability to reckless behavior.

01:05:43.000 Reckless behavior in many instances leads to embarrassment.

01:05:47.000 It's almost inevitable for many of these projects that they get found out.

01:05:50.000 Someone leaks something to the press.

01:05:52.000 This is how the family jewels that the CIA had that was like a compilation of all the illegal stuff that it had done over the past couple of decades.

01:06:00.000 It eventually got leaked to Seymour Hirsch, who published it on the front page of the New York Times.

01:06:04.000 So reckless behavior leads to embarrassment, but embarrassment leads to secrecy.

01:06:08.000 Because now that we've been found out, we got to make sure that never happens again.

01:06:11.000 We need more secrecy.

01:06:12.000 And the vicious cycle continues.

01:06:14.000 So if you can break that vicious cycle by having some kind of external check, that's what you actually need, like an empowered Congress that is willing to check the executive.

01:06:23.000 Then you realize, well, who's running against them?

01:06:27.000 Who wants that job? 1.00

01:06:29.000 Not a lot of impressive people.

01:06:31.000 A lot of really driven, successful, intelligent people are involved in other activities that consume their time.

01:06:40.000 They have families, they have careers, they have a lot.

01:06:43.000 They don't have the desire to be a congressperson.

01:06:46.000 So you're not getting the cream of the crop.

01:06:48.000 You're not even getting anything remotely similar to the cream of the crop.

01:06:52.000 You're occasionally getting great people that really want to serve the country.

01:06:55.000 But that is rare.

01:06:57.000 That is like, I wouldn't say rare, but if 20% of the food you ate at a place was poison, would you go eat at that place?

01:07:04.000 You would not, right?

01:07:04.000 No.

01:07:05.000 You would say, I'm assuming there's fucking poison in that place. 1.00

01:07:08.000 That's Congress. 1.00

01:07:09.000 Yeah.

01:07:09.000 And, you know, that's elected officials.

01:07:11.000 And Andrew Yang has made this point before.

01:07:11.000 Yeah.

01:07:13.000 I know I've heard him say it, that the reelection rate of Congress is super high.

01:07:18.000 It's like 80, 90%, whatever it is.

01:07:20.000 The approval rating for Congress is like in the teens.

01:07:23.000 So how is it we have such a divergence between the re-election rate and the approval rating?

01:07:27.000 It has to do with the kind of electoral system.

01:07:31.000 You know, the people who are incentivized to actually run for Congress, in many cases, they're the most ideological on either side because the only race that matters is actually the primary.

01:07:40.000 Because if you're in a, you know, a district that is 90% Trump voters, the Republican is going to win the general election.

01:07:47.000 It doesn't matter who it is.

01:07:48.000 So, you know, the primary is the main election that happens in those districts.

01:07:53.000 And if that's the case, well, the person who can win the primary is going to win the general.

01:07:57.000 And who's going to win the primary?

01:07:59.000 Well, it's going to win, it's going to be the person who can get 90% of Trump voters to be more interested in them than whoever the other Republican is.

01:08:08.000 In many cases, that drives ideological extremism because you're already selecting a sample size of voters within the primary who are the most ideological extreme.

01:08:18.000 And so they're going to elect basically whoever it is because the general election is a foregone conclusion.

01:08:24.000 So if you can realign the electoral system in a way to where, I mean, I don't know the answer to this, but it would be some kind of open primaries or ranked voting or proportional representation, ending gerrymandering, something like that.

01:08:38.000 Then you better incentivize Congresspeople to actually want the job or incentivize people who would be good at the job to engage in the job or become Congress people because they actually have a clear path to doing it because they're not going to be blocked in the primary.

01:08:52.000 So some kind of reform like that, I think, is how you better facilitate this check between the different branches.

01:09:01.000 But even then, I don't know if it motivates the cream of the crop.

01:09:05.000 Because I just, I think most people would rather be on the outside, like most wealthy people that are successful.

01:09:11.000 They'd rather fund a candidate that suits their needs.

01:09:15.000 Yeah.

01:09:15.000 Well, getting maybe big money out of politics.

01:09:17.000 That would be wonderful.

01:09:19.000 That would be one.

01:09:20.000 I mean, that would be the single, probably biggest help.

01:09:22.000 And then also getting out insider trading out of Congress to make it less like when you're finding out that people are getting $170,000 a year and they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars and there's no investigation whatsoever.

01:09:35.000 Like, what did you do?

01:09:38.000 What did you do?

01:09:38.000 And why are you still working?

01:09:40.000 If you're so good at trading, why are you working for $170,000 a year, which is a great salary?

01:09:45.000 Don't get me wrong.

01:09:46.000 I'd take it.

01:09:47.000 Nothing wrong with $170,000 a year.

01:09:49.000 But when you have $400 million, you couldn't get me to do a job for $170,000 a year.

01:09:55.000 Like, I don't have the time.

01:09:57.000 You could get me to do it.

01:09:58.000 But you know what I'm saying?

01:09:58.000 Right.

01:09:59.000 Like, you can get Congress people to still show up and do that job.

01:10:02.000 Is it because they care that much about the American people?

01:10:04.000 Well, that doesn't really jive. 0.99

01:10:06.000 It doesn't make sense because they seem completely full of shit when they give their speeches and it's all canned and fake and insincere. 0.98

01:10:12.000 And there's no, you don't have any real connection with their words. 0.99

01:10:16.000 So what are they?

01:10:17.000 They're these weird people that have accepted this job that no one wants.

01:10:21.000 It's critically important to the function of our government.

01:10:23.000 And you're getting really dull people that are taking this job.

01:10:28.000 It's fascinating.

01:10:29.000 One of the things that also was so disheartening, I had Rep Luna on the podcast, who is great, and she's very interesting.

01:10:38.000 And mostly we're talking about UFOs because that's the thing that she's involved in.

01:10:43.000 But one of the things she said about certain issues is they don't want to solve these issues because this is how they run.

01:10:50.000 They can fundraise off of it.

01:10:51.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:10:52.000 And I was like, oh, no.

01:10:54.000 Like, just that trap.

01:10:55.000 I was like, oh, no.

01:10:57.000 I didn't want to think that that is the case.

01:11:00.000 And she's like, oh, that's it.

01:11:01.000 That's 100% it.

01:11:02.000 They don't want to fix it.

01:11:02.000 Yeah.

01:11:04.000 I mean, that makes me even more convinced, though, that a restructuring of the electoral system in a way that eliminates, I don't know, that incentivizes basically better behavior, whether that's through open primaries, ranked choice voting, whatever.

01:11:17.000 Yeah.

01:11:18.000 That has to help in some way, I would think.

01:11:20.000 So this should also be some sort of a competency test if someone wants to take that position.

01:11:25.000 Like if you want to be a lawyer, you have to look at poor Kim Kardashian.

01:11:29.000 She can't pass the bar. 1.00

01:11:30.000 She's trying so hard.

01:11:31.000 She keeps, oh, I can't pass the bar.

01:11:33.000 It's hard.

01:11:34.000 Hard to be a lawyer.

01:11:35.000 I'm kind of skeptical of a competency test in a sense, though, because someone has to write the test.

01:11:41.000 Well, not only that, but are you watching them?

01:11:44.000 Do they use ChatGPT?

01:11:45.000 And we're living in a weird world right now.

01:11:48.000 It's a very weird world of technology.

01:11:52.000 But it would be nice if you knew that this person was capable of doing the job.

01:11:57.000 I mean, I bring it back to the passing the bar thing because law is very complicated.

01:12:01.000 One of the things that I found out really recently that is super disturbing was that you don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge.

01:12:08.000 To be a judge.

01:12:09.000 Interesting.

01:12:10.000 Oh, if you don't have to know anything.

01:12:12.000 You just get elected if it doesn't.

01:12:13.000 You could just become a judge.

01:12:15.000 You could be a regular person and just now you're a judge.

01:12:18.000 I wonder what kind of judge that is.

01:12:18.000 Yeah.

01:12:20.000 Because I know some judge positions.

01:12:22.000 Yeah, man. 0.99

01:12:22.000 I don't give a fuck if it's a judge at Dairy Queen. 0.99

01:12:25.000 Like, you should. 0.99

01:12:28.000 What are you talking about?

01:12:30.000 You don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge.

01:12:33.000 That's insane. 0.89

01:12:35.000 That's so insane.

01:12:36.000 That's like you don't know how to count to be a mathematician.

01:12:38.000 Like, what are you talking about?

01:12:40.000 You're a judge.

01:12:41.000 You don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge to me.

01:12:43.000 It was like, oh, my God.

01:12:46.000 State and federal courts, most state and federal court and all federal judges must have a law degree.

01:12:53.000 Some state.

01:12:54.000 Practice requirements.

01:12:55.000 Many states require judges to have a certain number of years of experience as a practicing lawyer before they're eligible for a judgeship.

01:13:02.000 When a law degree may not be required.

01:13:02.000 Makes sense.

01:13:04.000 Limited court jurisdiction.

01:13:05.000 Some states allow non-lawyers to become judges in specific lower-level courts, such as those that handle small claims, traffic violations, or minor criminal matters.

01:13:15.000 State and local variations.

01:13:17.000 The specific requirements may vary wildly by state, even by the type of court within a state and training.

01:13:23.000 Judges appointed from the non-lawyer pool typically must complete specific training programs, right?

01:13:29.000 But what is the program?

01:13:30.000 I wonder if that's a relic of like rural communities where maybe there isn't a lawyer, but you need someone to act in that position.

01:13:38.000 Right.

01:13:39.000 Like a sheriff in this town.

01:13:41.000 Yeah, instead of being like an MD doctor, some people can practice medicine in rural communities they do without being a MD doctor.

01:13:49.000 I forget the term of it, but whatever that term is.

01:13:54.000 Because they don't have a doctor.

01:13:56.000 Well, yeah, they don't have a doctor, but you still have a degree, not an MD, but some kind of medical degree that maybe doesn't require as much time.

01:14:04.000 Or you didn't complete your residency.

01:14:05.000 So maybe it's a relic of that.

01:14:07.000 I don't know.

01:14:08.000 That makes sense.

01:14:08.000 Right.

01:14:10.000 But point being that, you know, if Congress has oversight over these things, well, who are we talking about?

01:14:18.000 This is the thing. 1.00

01:14:18.000 Like, if you are the CIA and you are running some program that you think is crucial to national security and you have some fucking ding-a-ling from Picka State, Virginia, North Dakota, whatever, some ding-dong that just happened to be able to get the right amount of votes because they have the right color on their flag, you know, and then all of a sudden they're in and you have to talk to this fucking moron. 1.00

01:14:43.000 Like, get out of here. 1.00

01:14:44.000 Like, I'm not telling you shit. 0.99

01:14:46.000 You're going to hold back information. 0.95

01:14:49.000 You're going to come up with reasons why you have to redact files. 1.00

01:14:52.000 Fuck off. 1.00

01:14:52.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:14:53.000 You'll be gone in two years.

01:14:54.000 Yeah.

01:14:55.000 Yeah.

01:14:55.000 This is the inherent tension within any intelligence community, whether it's the CIA or the FBI.

01:15:00.000 Yeah.

01:15:00.000 There are legitimate reasons to keep things secret.

01:15:03.000 You have to keep secrets.

01:15:04.000 100%.

01:15:04.000 But at the same time, the fact that you're afforded that secrecy allows you to avoid accountability.

01:15:09.000 So it's a catch-22.

01:15:09.000 100%.

01:15:11.000 You have to keep secrets.

01:15:12.000 There's just no way around it.

01:15:13.000 But at the same time, how can I know that the secrets they're keeping is because it's in my interest or it's because it's in their interest?

01:15:20.000 Oh, 100%.

01:15:21.000 And then you find out the really crazy stuff that's happened in the past.

01:15:24.000 Like the Demina Arkansas cocaine situation.

01:15:29.000 I haven't heard of that.

01:15:30.000 You don't know about the Barry Seals story?

01:15:32.000 No.

01:15:33.000 They made a movie about it with Tom Cruise, in fact.

01:15:36.000 In the movie, Tom Cruise actually gets arrested for smuggling cocaine, and Bill Clinton gets him off.

01:15:43.000 They call Bill Clinton.

01:15:44.000 He gets arrested in Arkansas.

01:15:45.000 They call Bill Clinton and they have him dead to rights.

01:15:48.000 And he's joking around with the cops saying, I'd like to buy you guys all Cadillacs and stuff like that.

01:15:53.000 And they're like, you're going to jail for the rest of your life.

01:15:55.000 He goes, no, she's going to get a phone call and I'm going to walk right out of here.

01:15:58.000 And it turned out to be exactly how it happened.

01:16:01.000 Barry Seale was flying drugs from South America and dropping them off in Mina, Arkansas.

01:16:08.000 And then they would go and pick them up in the woods.

01:16:10.000 They had a drop point.

01:16:11.000 Two kids were hanging out in the woods and they witnessed it accidentally.

01:16:18.000 They were murdered.

01:16:19.000 And then the official story was they had done drugs and they laid down, fell asleep on train tracks.

01:16:27.000 The parents funded an autopsy and the autopsy showed that they'd been stabbed multiple times.

01:16:34.000 So then there's an investigation comes through.

01:16:36.000 And then it turns out that there's a long history of this guy, Barry Seals, who's a CIA operative, who is flying in cocaine, dropping it off in MENA, Arkansas, all known about by the Clintons.

01:16:49.000 Everybody was aware of it.

01:16:50.000 And he had been funneling this money and they were using it probably for black ops, similar to what they did with the Contras in Sandinista, you know, the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

01:17:03.000 He winds up going to testify, gets murdered on his way to the trial with George Bush's phone number in his pocket.

01:17:13.000 The whole story is like completely crazy.

01:17:15.000 Wow, yeah.

01:17:15.000 When did that happen?

01:17:16.000 I hadn't heard of that.

01:17:17.000 So it was when Bill Clinton was a governor.

01:17:20.000 So I believe it was the 80s.

01:17:21.000 Okay.

01:17:22.000 86.

01:17:23.000 More than 11.

01:17:23.000 Yeah.

01:17:24.000 Fuck, you weren't alive then. 1.00

01:17:25.000 That's hilarious. 1.00

01:17:27.000 Fucking crazy story. 0.99

01:17:29.000 But this is the CIA, right? 1.00

01:17:31.000 This is the same thing that they did.

01:17:33.000 I'm friends with Freeway Ricky Ross.

01:17:35.000 Do you know who he is?

01:17:36.000 Okay.

01:17:37.000 Great story.

01:17:38.000 So Rick Ross, the rapper, okay, you know who that is?

01:17:43.000 He got his name from a very famous street hustler named Freeway Ricky.

01:17:49.000 Okay.

01:17:49.000 Rick Ross.

01:17:50.000 His real name is Rick Ross.

01:17:52.000 He's the real Rick Ross.

01:17:53.000 Rick Ross was a guy who is a tennis player, a young tennis player, who started selling cocaine.

01:18:00.000 It was like super disciplined because he was a tennis player.

01:18:03.000 So was funneling millions of dollars of cocaine.

01:18:08.000 Had no idea he was getting his cocaine from the CIA.

01:18:11.000 So he was getting cocaine, selling it in the hood.

01:18:15.000 They were getting the money and they were using it this Oliver North thing with the Contras versus the Sandinistas.

01:18:21.000 All of this comes out in court and he winds up going to jail.

01:18:25.000 He winds up going to jail for selling the cocaine, doesn't know how to read.

01:18:29.000 He's illiterate.

01:18:30.000 Learns how to read in jail, becomes a lawyer in jail, goes over his trial and realizes that they had tried him on the three strikes law, which is supposed to be three different felonies at three different times, but they jammed them all together.

01:18:46.000 And so he gets off.

01:18:47.000 So he's free now and he sells legal marijuana in California.

01:18:52.000 And he's been on the podcast multiple times.

01:18:54.000 But this was the CIA that was involved in all of this.

01:18:59.000 This is how they were making money.

01:19:01.000 They were selling cocaine.

01:19:03.000 And one thing crazy just about not only that, but MKUltra in general, it's against the CIA's charter to operate within the United States.

01:19:10.000 That should just be a deal ender right there for whatever they're doing within the United States.

01:19:14.000 It's just, it's within, it's against the charter.

01:19:16.000 Yep.

01:19:17.000 I mean, there's no more discussion.

01:19:19.000 That's illegal.

01:19:20.000 Well, I just think without oversight, there's cowboys. 0.94

01:19:23.000 And there's also when you realize how much money is there to be made and that you could funnel this money into oversea accounts that are anonymous, and then you could eventually retire someday and get out of the game and be worth millions of dollars and live in Monaco or whatever the fuck you want to do. 0.85

01:19:41.000 And I think that's the dream for a lot of these guys.

01:19:42.000 I think they get involved.

01:19:43.000 They realize it's a completely corrupt system and it's corrupt from the top down and there's ways to make money.

01:19:50.000 And there's a bunch of stuff going on where money's being funneled into these NGOs and there's just so much opportunity for corruption and so little oversight and so much power and so much secrecy.

01:20:03.000 And as you were talking about the importance and the necessity of secrecy for national security, which is a real thing, but also leads to corruption and it leads to people just doing wild things because there's no one watching.

01:20:14.000 And they're in control.

01:20:17.000 Look, it must be so fun.

01:20:19.000 Like, what's his name was talking about?

01:20:20.000 The evil guy.

01:20:21.000 George White? 0.70

01:20:22.000 Like he was talking about, like, how much fun he had, which is so sick.

01:20:22.000 George White.

01:20:27.000 But that's the kind of people that want that kind of a job.

01:20:29.000 And if you make that kind of a job available with no oversight, we need like a council of elders, like a wise council, you know, like of like completely objective, brilliant people that oversee all these things that aren't ideologically captured.

01:20:44.000 You know, they're financially independent.

01:20:46.000 They don't need anything from you.

01:20:48.000 I've mentioned external oversight, like Congress checking the executive.

01:20:51.000 But at the same time, one of the big problems with MKUltra, or one of the problems that led to MKUltra, without people, even within the CIA, questioning it, there are people in the CIA who know about it.

01:21:01.000 Actually, not that many because it's very heavily compartmentalized, but some people still do know about it.

01:21:06.000 So one of the questions I was asking myself throughout this book, why aren't the people who were in the CIA and know about MKUltra, why aren't they speaking up?

01:21:15.000 Why don't they say, pull Sidney Gottlieb aside and just have a conversation with him?

01:21:19.000 Do you think what you're doing here is all right?

01:21:21.000 I think they're terrified about their career.

01:21:23.000 That's exactly the thing.

01:21:24.000 There's a specific person within the CIA during this time.

01:21:28.000 That's his job, the Inspector General.

01:21:30.000 So the Inspector General within the CIA, his job is to make sure there's nothing that goes against the CIA's charter or internal regulations or the U.S. law.

01:21:39.000 But I found an interview that he did later.

01:21:43.000 There's this guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick.

01:21:45.000 He was the inspector general during the 1950s when this was going on.

01:21:48.000 And he did an investigation into MKUltra in 1957 as it was going on.

01:21:53.000 And it continued on after that.

01:21:55.000 And so one of the things he talks about is, why isn't the case that you tried, why didn't you try to shut this down?

01:22:00.000 Like, you obviously knew this was illegal.

01:22:02.000 In fact, in 1963, a different CIA inspector general named John Ehrman, he did a separate investigation into MKUltra.

01:22:10.000 In his report, his report that I quote in this book specifically says, what I think they're doing is, quote, illegal and unethical.

01:22:17.000 Those are his terms, and he's the inspector general.

01:22:19.000 Yet in this later interview, Lyman Kirkpatrick talks about why didn't you tell them to stop?

01:22:24.000 Why didn't you put an end to this?

01:22:25.000 Why didn't you raise this to higher ups?

01:22:26.000 Why didn't you do something?

01:22:27.000 And he said, I was worried about bringing up anything that could cause me to lose my job.

01:22:31.000 He knew that if he brought this up, he'd basically be retaliated against.

01:22:36.000 And so that was it.

01:22:37.000 So even, you know, there's problems with external oversight, but also internal oversight.

01:22:43.000 The internal oversight has to be able to bring that kind of stuff up.

01:22:46.000 And another lack of internal oversight is the fact that Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Helms, they could destroy all these files with no repercussions.

01:22:53.000 It's just completely illegal.

01:22:55.000 It's against the CIA's own internal regulations.

01:22:58.000 In fact, in these depositions that I found, some of the most colorful parts of the depositions happen with the lawyers.

01:23:04.000 The lawyers just get into heated arguments back and forth.

01:23:07.000 That makes the book really colorful.

01:23:09.000 At certain times, Joseph Rao is this old civil rights lawyer, he used to be the civil rights lawyer.

01:23:15.000 He took on this case basically to fight against the CIA. 0.87

01:23:19.000 At certain points, he basically says to the other lawyers representing the CIA, I'm going to punch you in the nose.

01:23:24.000 And he says, I'm never giving this up. 0.79

01:23:25.000 I'm going to mortgage my house if it means I have to keep on fighting you.

01:23:28.000 But there's a certain point where he basically lays into Gottlieb asking him, why did you destroy the files?

01:23:34.000 Why did you destroy the files?

01:23:35.000 Sidney Gottlieb comes up with several excuses.

01:23:37.000 One of those excuses at first is he says the CIA was drowning in paper.

01:23:41.000 We had so much paper we couldn't move.

01:23:43.000 So there was just an internal kind of drive to get rid of this paper so that we could walk around and figure out where stuff was.

01:23:50.000 He's just completely making this up.

01:23:52.000 Rao presses him again, why did you destroy this stuff?

01:23:54.000 Sidney Gottlieb, you know, and he does this to Richard Helms too.

01:23:57.000 They both eventually say again, well, we wanted, you know, it's part of our job to protect sources and methods.

01:24:04.000 And so we wanted to make sure that nobody would be able to know what our sources and methods were as part of this project.

01:24:08.000 So we had to destroy the files.

01:24:10.000 And Rao was like, these files are secret.

01:24:12.000 It's not like they're going to be released to the public.

01:24:13.000 They're the CIA's files.

01:24:16.000 How could destroying them protect sources and methods any more than just not releasing them to the public?

01:24:20.000 That's just a non-excuse.

01:24:22.000 So eventually, Rao presses Gottlieb more, and he kind of breaks down during this interrogation.

01:24:28.000 And he says, I was embarrassed by it.

01:24:31.000 I was embarrassed by what I had done.

01:24:33.000 Basically, you know, ruined the lives of all these people, spent $10 million at all these different institutions for what?

01:24:40.000 To ruin these lives, and we didn't even learn that much out of it.

01:24:43.000 And so he destroyed the files.

01:24:44.000 Wow.

01:24:45.000 And didn't face any repercussions.

01:24:47.000 So in addition to external oversight, there's got to be some internal oversight that can provide a check and prevent that from happening.

01:24:52.000 Or if it does happen, at least deter others from doing the same thing by holding them accountable.

01:24:58.000 It's really fascinating that what we're experiencing is essentially 250 years after the founding fathers had already recognized these patterns of human behavior that required oversight.

01:25:10.000 They required checks and balances in order to have a government that doesn't sink into tyranny.

01:25:15.000 You have to have all these things in place to make sure that no one person has the power to do anything that really fucks up the apple cart.

01:25:23.000 And they knew that this was a, and they really painstakingly structured this system of government that they thought would protect against it.

01:25:32.000 Just they didn't factor into account special interest groups and the stock market and money.

01:25:38.000 And they just didn't factor into it.

01:25:40.000 It expanded exponentially into so many different factions and so many different influencing bodies that it's almost completely out of control.

01:25:48.000 But essentially, they knew what could happen that has proven to be accurate, which is really kind of fascinating.

01:25:57.000 It is.

01:25:57.000 You know, it's a brilliant system.

01:26:00.000 And I quote James Madison, actually, when I talk about oversight, because his specific verbiage is, you know, auxiliary cautions are necessary, auxiliary precautions.

01:26:09.000 You know, humans, he says, men aren't angels, therefore auxiliary precautions are necessary to keep their ambitions in check, which means external oversight.

01:26:18.000 That's exactly what you need.

01:26:18.000 He's exactly right.

01:26:20.000 He's exactly right.

01:26:21.000 You know, I wonder where this goes, because it's going in the wrong direction.

01:26:28.000 From the founding fathers to today, it's going in the wrong direction.

01:26:31.000 It's like I think most people agree that a lack of oversight and secrecy is a gigantic problem with not just the stuff that we've already discussed with MKUltra and the CIA and the cocaine and all these different things, but with virtually everything that gets decided upon in our government that affects daily lives of people.

01:26:52.000 There's so many different influences that aren't based on the greater good of the American people.

01:26:59.000 It's based on financial interests.

01:27:01.000 And that's sort of overwhelmed all of our policies, overwhelmed all of our systems of government.

01:27:07.000 And then you have all of these social issues that they never really want to fix because they campaign fund against them, which is what we were talking about before.

01:27:14.000 So this is this constant psychological game.

01:27:17.000 There's a game of us versus them.

01:27:19.000 There's a game of certain key points, whether it is abortion or gun rights or immigration or whatever it is.

01:27:27.000 Nothing ever gets solved.

01:27:29.000 These are the beach balls that they throw up in the air at the concert and they keep getting bounced around. 0.98

01:27:34.000 And we're just little dumb monkeys that are giving up our tax dollars so they can keep running this giant Ponzi scheme. 0.99

01:27:40.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:27:41.000 I will say a counterintuitive point that I think is important to also make, though, is Daniel Shore was a CBS news correspondent.

01:27:50.000 And he's the guy who initially broke the story on CIA assassination attempts on foreign leaders.

01:27:55.000 And he has this quote about how the U.S. has a, you know, there's a pendulum that swings between security and liberty.

01:28:03.000 You know, the more security you have, the more liberty basically you have to take away.

01:28:08.000 If you can be infinitely secure, but that means that the government would be inside your house and know everything about you and prevent you from doing anything, but nothing bad would happen.

01:28:15.000 At least you wouldn't be able to do anything bad because there would be a policeman in every bedroom, basically.

01:28:21.000 On the opposite side, if the pendulum swings too far the opposite way, complete liberty, well, you have no security because anyone could do anything.

01:28:27.000 So there's this constant tension between security and liberty that swings throughout American history.

01:28:32.000 And an important thing to keep in mind is that I don't think you want that pendulum to stop.

01:28:37.000 You actually want a little bit of tension between that.

01:28:40.000 You want, in other words, you want the press and Congress to be exposing abuses, you know, because human nature is not going to change.

01:28:51.000 People are going to try to abuse the system in whatever it is.

01:28:54.000 That's not going to stop.

01:28:55.000 However, if the press and Congress aren't exposing these abuses, you might think that there are no abuses happening, but they're going to be happening.

01:29:04.000 So I think it's actually good the fact that this pendulum is swinging a little bit, the fact that there is a little bit of tension and the fact that there are abuses being exposed.

01:29:13.000 I wish the abuses didn't happen, but at the same time, the abuses are going to happen no matter what.

01:29:18.000 Therefore, the exposure of the abuses is a good sign.

01:29:21.000 It's a sign that the system is actually working as intended because the abuses are being exposed.

01:29:26.000 One of the points I make in this book is dread the day when the press sings nothing but the praises of those in power and Congress says that there are no abuses to investigate.

01:29:35.000 It might seem like that's utopia, but that's the day that you have lost all of your liberties.

01:29:39.000 That's a very good point.

01:29:40.000 That's a very good point.

01:29:41.000 And well said.

01:29:43.000 I think this is what we're seeing now with independent journalism and that a lot of these issues that get raised are coming from independent journalists first and then they ultimately have to be recognized when they reach the zeitgeist.

01:30:02.000 They ultimately have to be recognized by the New York Times or by mainstream media publications.

01:30:06.000 But they're not the ones who break a lot of these stories.

01:30:08.000 A lot of these stories are broken by the Glenn Greenwalds and the Matt Taibbes and the genuine independent journalists who initially worked for an organization and then found there's some sort of an ideological blockade or some certain subjects they couldn't breach or certain things that they were told that they couldn't publish and they were like, I'm out.

01:30:27.000 And then they started doing it on their own.

01:30:28.000 And then also social media.

01:30:30.000 This is the new function that social media has where you have these accounts that break news stories all the time.

01:30:37.000 And interestingly enough, some of them are very reliable and those ones wind up becoming the ones that people share and they get a tremendous amount of followers.

01:30:47.000 And then they are more trustworthy oftentimes than corporate media, which is really kind of scary, but also fascinating.

01:30:57.000 Like there's a need for it.

01:30:59.000 There's a recognition.

01:31:01.000 There's a distribution of information that lets you to see all of this corruption and all this chaos and like what's at the root of it and why isn't this being discussed in the New York Times?

01:31:10.000 And then all of a sudden someone puts up this 10 Twitter post of all these different links and shows you this is the history of it and the story of it.

01:31:18.000 And then a month later it's in the Washington Post.

01:31:21.000 And it's interesting.

01:31:22.000 It's interesting because it's almost like this need exists.

01:31:27.000 It's not being fulfilled by mainstream media because mainstream media is captured by corporate interests.

01:31:33.000 So in order to have this information come out, the world gives us this new platform and that's social media.

01:31:40.000 And social media distributes all this stuff and then you have to sort through what's real, what's foreign governments making up fake stories.

01:31:48.000 And that's the other side of it because the algorithm can push something, but it doesn't necessarily push truth.

01:31:53.000 It might just push engagement.

01:31:54.000 And if that's the case, then how do you know community notes?

01:31:57.000 Yeah, yeah, something like that.

01:31:58.000 Well, that's the beautiful thing about Twitter.

01:32:00.000 And when Elon solved that issue with community, I don't necessarily say solved.

01:32:05.000 It's not solved, but it certainly made it a lot easier to understand what's going on.

01:32:10.000 Because there's oftentimes there's some outrageous video clip, like, oh my God, can you believe the Democrats are doing this?

01:32:16.000 And then it turns out, no, that's actually from a movie, you know, or that's actually AI, or that's actually from 2016, and it's in Poland.

01:32:24.000 You know, I mean, there's a lot of that stuff happens where people get outraged and someone posts something.

01:32:29.000 And then I always go to the original account that posts it.

01:32:32.000 And how many times I've gone there?

01:32:35.000 I'm going, oh, you're not a real person.

01:32:37.000 Like, most of the time, I go and look at all the posts that they have.

01:32:39.000 I'm like, well, this is either a bot or this is a foreign government running one of these puppet accounts.

01:32:45.000 Yeah.

01:32:45.000 You might like being a historian because it sounds like that's very similar to what I do in the historical record, not on social media, but a lot of what I'm doing is following this source that cites this source, that cites that source.

01:33:00.000 It's like, where's the origin of this thing?

01:33:02.000 And you can see the trend.

01:33:03.000 It's a game of telephone.

01:33:03.000 You can see the transformation along the way.

01:33:05.000 One of my favorite examples comes from my first book.

01:33:08.000 I was writing about William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS.

01:33:11.000 And he was this really, you know, larger than life individual, a World War I war hero.

01:33:17.000 He had a Medal of Honor and all kinds of stuff.

01:33:20.000 And there was this really great quote in a book.

01:33:22.000 And it was describing Donovan basically as that.

01:33:25.000 He was the kind of guy that would dance on the roof of the hotel and he would, you know, he would destroy these planes and whatever.

01:33:32.000 And I thought, man, that's such a like exciting quote to encapsulate who he is.

01:33:35.000 So I was reading this book and I kind of, okay, I'm going to mark that quote.

01:33:38.000 I'm going to come back and see where does he, what source is this from so I can use that in my book.

01:33:42.000 So I go to the source.

01:33:44.000 It turns out it cites another book.

01:33:45.000 And it's like, okay, I've got to get that book.

01:33:47.000 So I go to the library.

01:33:48.000 I was teaching at Louisiana Tech at the time.

01:33:50.000 Go to the Louisiana Tech Library.

01:33:52.000 Get that book.

01:33:53.000 Open it to the page that it says.

01:33:55.000 Find the quote.

01:33:56.000 Okay, here's where it is.

01:33:57.000 Now go to the back of the book, see the note.

01:33:59.000 The note cites another book.

01:34:00.000 It turns out I had that book.

01:34:01.000 I own that book.

01:34:02.000 So I went back home, go to that book, do the same thing, look for the source of this quote.

01:34:06.000 It turns out it was a book I didn't have and the library didn't have.

01:34:09.000 So I had to put an interlibrary loan, you know, in use.

01:34:13.000 So I had to basically request that my library get the book from a different library.

01:34:17.000 That was going to take several weeks.

01:34:18.000 So, okay, now I got to wait.

01:34:19.000 In the meantime, I go onto Google Books.

01:34:21.000 I start searching this quote for other books.

01:34:23.000 It turns out they basically cite the books that I had already consulted.

01:34:26.000 So it's a dead end there.

01:34:27.000 I have to wait for this other book to come in.

01:34:29.000 And in the meantime, I'm thinking to myself, That quote sounds awfully familiar.

01:34:33.000 What do I know that from?

01:34:34.000 It turns out I had already used that quote in my book, but it was from a different, it was in a different context.

01:34:41.000 It wasn't talking about William Donovan.

01:34:42.000 It was talking about just people in the OSS in general.

01:34:45.000 And the quote was different.

01:34:46.000 It wasn't like the same quote, but it had many of the key words.

01:34:49.000 And you could tell that it was the same thing, but somebody had changed it.

01:34:52.000 So now I'm thinking, did I use like a fake quote, you know, in this book?

01:34:55.000 So I got to figure out in my manuscript where I got this.

01:34:58.000 It turns out I got it from this book called Wanderer by this guy named Sterling Hayden, the actor, later an actor.

01:35:03.000 He was in the OSS.

01:35:05.000 And he had used the quote because he was quoting, he was talking about when he was in Europe at the end of the war.

01:35:11.000 He told someone he was in the OSS and they said, oh, the OSS guys are the kind of guys who blah, And I thought, okay, well, he's recalling this from memory.

01:35:19.000 So this must be the origin of the quote.

01:35:21.000 Then what are all these other books quoting?

01:35:23.000 So finally, that interlibrary loan comes in and I get it.

01:35:27.000 And it basically says the quote, but it's, you know, it's a little bit different.

01:35:31.000 And it's referring to Donovan again and not just OSS guys in general.

01:35:35.000 And it doesn't cite a source.

01:35:36.000 So I thought, okay, what happened is the guy who wrote that book, he had read Sterling Hayden's book.

01:35:41.000 He had taken the quote and he liked it, but he wanted to apply it to Donovan.

01:35:45.000 So he switched the subject and he changed the quote a little bit.

01:35:47.000 And everyone after that, dozens of different books have cited that as their original source.

01:35:51.000 And it was about the wrong person and not even the right quote.

01:35:54.000 Wow.

01:35:55.000 So that's for one quote in my book.

01:35:57.000 That's the amount of work you have to do.

01:35:58.000 Well, kudos to you for doing that work, right?

01:36:01.000 That's why people like you are so important, that you chased that whole story down to the end.

01:36:07.000 If anyone is interested in that, though, in my book, I cite the original book, obviously, because that's what, but next to it, I said, also see Joseph Persico, blah, blah, blah, the original book.

01:36:15.000 So that's the book that I originally found the quote in.

01:36:17.000 So if they want to go down the rabbit hole, they can follow his book to that book, to that book, to that book.

01:36:21.000 Wow.

01:36:22.000 Well, it's a lot of rabbit holes going down, even just to find the origins of things.

01:36:27.000 Well, and then apply that to religion.

01:36:30.000 You know, like stories.

01:36:31.000 Oh, oh, yeah.

01:36:32.000 You know, like Game of Telephone.

01:36:34.000 Oh, my God.

01:36:35.000 You know, what was the original story?

01:36:38.000 Yeah, it's, it's a lot of this stuff, the secrecy, MKUltra, all the stuff we're talking about about oversight, it all relays to the way the human mind works.

01:36:52.000 Like that the human mind, in this instance, would take a quote and for its own convenience, apply it to a different person and change it a little bit.

01:37:01.000 It's like we're constantly dealing with all of these factors that are in motion with human intelligence, with ego, with reputation, embarrassment, ambition, power, control.

01:37:20.000 And one thing I especially noticed in doing this, too, is the ability for humans to rationalize anything to agree with what they already think is true is almost limitless.

01:37:30.000 I'll give an example in this book of a psychologist named Leon Festinger.

01:37:34.000 He wrote this book called When Prophecy Fails.

01:37:37.000 And it's a really fascinating story where he was looking in a newspaper and he saw an announcement for the end of the world.

01:37:43.000 There was this cult called the Seekers Cult, and they had said basically on December 21st, 1953, I think it was, it's going to be the end of the world.

01:37:52.000 There's going to be a massive flood.

01:37:53.000 Join us.

01:37:54.000 And so we can get whisked away on this spaceship before the end of the world happens.

01:37:58.000 Festinger sees this and he thinks this is a great psychological experiment because they are making a specific prediction on this day.

01:38:04.000 This is going to happen.

01:38:05.000 What happens when it doesn't happen?

01:38:07.000 So he decides to embed himself in this cult.

01:38:09.000 Basically, they knew he was a psychologist, but they said, yeah, sure, come on by.

01:38:13.000 So him and some of his researchers, they just sit with the cult on the day that the world is supposed to end because they want to know how are they going to deal with the fact that the world doesn't actually end.

01:38:23.000 So obviously, there wasn't even a light rain.

01:38:26.000 There was like no flood.

01:38:27.000 And so the world doesn't end.

01:38:29.000 Some people actually do end up leaving the cult afterwards, but many people stay, especially the people who had sunk many costs into the cult.

01:38:37.000 They had abandoned their families to join this.

01:38:38.000 They had donated lots of money.

01:38:40.000 They had quit their jobs basically to be in this cult because they thought the world was going to end.

01:38:44.000 What do we need money for?

01:38:46.000 And so those people stayed.

01:38:47.000 And now, Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance.

01:38:50.000 So the idea that you're holding two irreconcilable views in your mind at the same time.

01:38:55.000 So one of their views is we predicted because we had received, we have received revelations from God, basically, that the world was going to end on this day.

01:39:02.000 That's one position they're holding.

01:39:04.000 The other position is the world didn't end on that day.

01:39:07.000 So this is cognitive dissonance.

01:39:09.000 How do we reconcile the fact that these two things contradict each other, but we have to believe both of them?

01:39:13.000 So Festinger was interested in how they would do this.

01:39:16.000 There were a couple rationalizations originally.

01:39:18.000 One was, well, maybe God meant it in a figurative sense, not a literal sense.

01:39:23.000 Maybe it was a figurative flood that was going to cleanse our minds of, you know, something instead, not like a literal flood that was going to kill everyone.

01:39:29.000 But then they said, no, no, we actually thought it was going to be a literal flood.

01:39:32.000 So he's in the middle of their discussions when they're rationalizing this.

01:39:35.000 And they eventually come upon the conclusion God was going to destroy the world.

01:39:39.000 We were right to believe that he was going to do that.

01:39:42.000 But because he saw how fervently we believed in him and how fervently we believed that the world was going to be destroyed, he decided to have mercy on us and didn't destroy the world.

01:39:51.000 So the fact that we believed that the world was going to be destroyed is the reason why the world wasn't destroyed.

01:39:57.000 So the evidence against them becomes evidence for them.

01:39:59.000 We know we are right because the world wasn't destroyed because, you know, that proves that God was taking mercy on us.

01:40:06.000 So this is how they rationalize it.

01:40:07.000 So this is, you know, non-falsifiable, something that there's no way you could prove it wrong.

01:40:12.000 This is an indication of a bad theory of it's non-falsifiable.

01:40:15.000 It's like not tethered to reality.

01:40:17.000 It's gold medal mentality.

01:40:19.000 Exactly.

01:40:19.000 If something's non-falsifiable, the classic example for me of non-falsifiability is the concept of last Thursdayism.

01:40:27.000 So it's the idea that God created the universe last Thursday.

01:40:31.000 Now, how could I prove that wrong?

01:40:33.000 You know, I ask my students this and many of them say, well, I remember last Wednesday.

01:40:38.000 I remember time before last Thursday.

01:40:40.000 But of course you remember that, but God created you and your memories last Thursday.

01:40:43.000 So of course you would think that there was time before last Thursday because God implanted those memories in you last Thursday.

01:40:49.000 In other words, this is just a non-falsifiable belief.

01:40:51.000 You can't prove it wrong, but that doesn't mean it's right.

01:40:54.000 So the capacity for humans to rationalize things, if you start from a false premise, we can rationalize a world to make sure that we believe in that false premise.

01:41:03.000 Yes, yes.

01:41:04.000 We do that with everything.

01:41:05.000 We do that with religion.

01:41:06.000 We do that with ideologies.

01:41:08.000 We do that with everything.

01:41:09.000 And it's not, it's, you know, people typically associate rationalization with religion or this kind of cult behavior like this group I explained.

01:41:17.000 But actually, I'm a historian of science and actually plays an important role in science itself, like the method of science, how science works.

01:41:26.000 If you don't mind, if I can briefly describe the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, he's this famous philosopher of science.

01:41:31.000 He wrote this, the most influential book in the philosophy of science called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, basically explaining how does science change or progress over time.

01:41:39.000 His concept was that scientists operate within a paradigm, a worldview.

01:41:44.000 So we believe in Newtonian gravity, or we have the worldview of the germ theory of disease or whatever it is.

01:41:52.000 So this is our paradigm, whatever group of scientists we are.

01:41:56.000 Within that paradigm, we do normal science.

01:41:58.000 He says, puzzle solving.

01:42:00.000 We do experiments to try to prove our paradigm right.

01:42:03.000 So, if my paradigm is, you know, if I'm a follower of Ptolemy and I believe in the geocentric universe, I'm going to be observing the way that the, you know, the planets and the stars are moving across the sky to try to prove Ptolemy right.

01:42:15.000 I'm going to try to prove that his predictions actually come true.

01:42:17.000 So, this is just called puzzle solving.

01:42:19.000 What scientists actually do, Thomas Kuhn says, many of them, they just puzzle solve.

01:42:22.000 They just try to prove the paradigm right.

01:42:24.000 In the process of doing that, they uncover occasionally an anomaly.

01:42:28.000 An anomaly is something that seems to contradict the paradigm.

01:42:31.000 Like, okay, Ptolemy makes this prediction about where the planet should be, but it turns out the planet's actually not there.

01:42:37.000 It's a little bit off.

01:42:39.000 That's an anomaly.

01:42:40.000 And Kuhn says, What do scientists do with anomalies?

01:42:42.000 Do they throw out their theory?

01:42:44.000 No.

01:42:44.000 He says they either ignore it or they find a way to rationalize it.

01:42:48.000 Well, Ptolemy made that prediction, but it's close enough to where it's, you know, his theory still works for most of the observations we're making.

01:42:55.000 So scientists usually ignore or rationalize the anomaly.

01:42:59.000 But over time, as they do more and more puzzle solving, normal science, more and more anomalies crop up to the point where we just can't ignore them anymore.

01:43:08.000 There are just too many anomalies.

01:43:09.000 At a certain point, we realize that our worldview, our paradigm, must be wrong.

01:43:14.000 And Kuhn says this allows for a crisis within the scientific community.

01:43:19.000 The group of scientists within this paradigm enter a crisis period, and it's during that crisis period when someone can put forward an alternative paradigm that accounts for all those anomalies, and then we accept that as our new paradigm.

01:43:31.000 So it accounts for all the things that the previous paradigm could do in addition to all the anomalies that the previous paradigm couldn't account for.

01:43:37.000 Now we're in a new paradigm, and what do we do?

01:43:39.000 We do puzzle solving.

01:43:41.000 We try to prove our paradigm right.

01:43:42.000 And in the process, we uncover anomalies.

01:43:45.000 Oh, and we rationalize them away.

01:43:47.000 But the reason I raise this point is because one of the integral parts to the progression of science, says Thomas Kuhn, is the fact that scientists are stubborn.

01:43:56.000 The fact that, contrary to popular belief, we typically think of scientists as people who are really open to changing their minds.

01:44:02.000 They're confronted by evidence.

01:44:03.000 And so, okay, they're willing to accept this evidence.

01:44:05.000 Thomas Kuhn says, if you actually look at the history of science closely, that does happen.

01:44:09.000 But what also happens in a lot of instances is scientists are stubborn and they don't want to change their minds.

01:44:14.000 They're stuck on their paradigm.

01:44:15.000 And so they rationalize away the anomalies.

01:44:17.000 So the same kind of rationalizing that you have within the seeker's cult about their belief system is very similar to the kind of rationalizing that scientists are doing when they refuse to throw out their paradigm because they've uncovered these anomalies. 0.56

01:44:30.000 But surely there's a way we can make those anomalies fit with our paradigm instead and they don't.

01:44:34.000 So this isn't to say that scientists are members of a cult or anything like that.

01:44:38.000 In fact, there's, you know, there are good reasons to maybe elevate the predictions of scientists over those of these cult members because there are structures in place within the scientific community to prevent some of the more egregious biases that they have.

01:44:53.000 However, really what I consider Kuhn as, it's a commentary on human psychology.

01:44:58.000 Kuhn basically figured out cognitive dissonance before Leon Festinger, you know, but Kuhn didn't have that terminology.

01:45:04.000 Festinger is describing cognitive dissonance in these cult members.

01:45:07.000 Kuhn is describing it in scientists.

01:45:09.000 He just doesn't have that terminology, but that's just what it is.

01:45:11.000 And Kuhn says that's why science progresses.

01:45:13.000 It's necessary for those people to ignore that evidence because it enables them to keep uncovering more anomalies that eventually leads to the revolution.

01:45:21.000 So it's like it's an ironic thing that our ability to rationalize is what allows us to progress in the future.

01:45:27.000 Wow.

01:45:28.000 This is the perfect point to take a break because I have to take a leak.

01:45:31.000 We'll be right back.

01:45:31.000 So this is awesome.

01:45:33.000 Sorry about that.

01:45:34.000 But I'm glad we took a break right after that epic rant.

01:45:38.000 That was so good.

01:45:39.000 I mean, you just nailed it.

01:45:42.000 It's so perfect that there's this bizarre psychological dance when it comes to human beings, even scientists.

01:45:48.000 Yeah, and it's, you know, the main point to make is that it's not.

01:45:53.000 The main point is just that human psychology is human psychology.

01:45:56.000 Just because you're a scientist or a cult member or whatever, it's not as if you're immune to any of these tendencies.

01:46:02.000 Anyone is subject to them.

01:46:03.000 It's just human psychology.

01:46:05.000 So I tend to think of Thomas Kuhn in terms of psychology instead of philosophy.

01:46:09.000 Yeah, well, it's brilliant.

01:46:10.000 And it's just, it also, all of that, all that understanding of human psychology is really what leads us to even begin to wonder what is going on with the human mind.

01:46:23.000 How do you exploit it?

01:46:25.000 What can you do? 0.98

01:46:26.000 And then you get people like Sidney Gottlieb who make a fucking career out of it. 0.98

01:46:31.000 They're realizing we're these very bizarre, complicated thinking apes. 0.95

01:46:36.000 And we have tendencies and we have these things that we do that protect ourselves and we have these desires and we have these motivations and how do we exploit that?

01:46:45.000 How do we do that for air quotes national security interests?

01:46:49.000 And one of the ironic things is I don't think Sidney Gottlieb is particularly successful in creating like a Manchurian candidate and controlling someone like a marionette and getting them to commit an assassination or something like that.

01:46:49.000 Yeah.

01:47:01.000 However, there are ways to manipulate people and to influence them to behave in certain ways.

01:47:07.000 And the typical ways that we associate with like cult behavior, there's a guy named Steven Hassan, and he's.

01:47:15.000 Yeah, I've had him on.

01:47:16.000 Oh, have you?

01:47:16.000 Okay, yeah.

01:47:17.000 Yeah, his bite model, behavior, information, thought, emotion.

01:47:20.000 I think that's a very good model for understanding how actual mind control actually takes place.

01:47:26.000 You know, behavior being like controlling where someone can go, what they can do, what they can eat, when they can sleep, information being restricting someone from accessing outside sources of information.

01:47:36.000 But if they do, teaching them to distrust that information, even if they do access it.

01:47:40.000 Well, he was actually in a cult.

01:47:41.000 Oh, yeah.

01:47:42.000 Yeah.

01:47:42.000 He was in the moonies.

01:47:43.000 Yeah.

01:47:44.000 Thought control is like reinforcing previous patterns of thought.

01:47:44.000 Yeah.

01:47:48.000 So saying mantras, reciting prayers, creating an us versus them mentality. 0.70

01:47:54.000 And then emotion control is like instilling in someone certain emotions to make them beholden to the cult or to whatever it is.

01:48:01.000 Guilt, fear, shame, anger, loyalty, dependence, that kind of thing.

01:48:06.000 And so a combination of these four factors is, I think, the real mind control, how people actually manipulate people, how especially cults are able to manipulate their members to do all kinds of really insane things, like cut off their genitals or commit murders or anything like that.

01:48:22.000 I think it's much more influenced by those four factors than it is some kind of LSD, you know, mind control, Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra type thing.

01:48:30.000 Are you aware of the cult that existed in Austin?

01:48:35.000 There's a documentary called Holy Hell.

01:48:37.000 I don't think so.

01:48:38.000 No.

01:48:39.000 When was that?

01:48:40.000 Very, really interesting.

01:48:42.000 I believe it took place here in the 90s.

01:48:46.000 The cult, it's called the Bodhi Tree, I believe. 0.97

01:48:49.000 Okay, now I haven't seen it.

01:48:50.000 And originally they started in West Hollywood.

01:48:53.000 And this is a great story. 0.99

01:48:55.000 It was a guy who is a gay porn star and a hypnotist. 0.99

01:48:58.000 He was also a yoga instructor. 0.99

01:49:00.000 So he starts this cult.

01:49:02.000 He would have liked this book, I bet.

01:49:03.000 Yeah.

01:49:04.000 I believe his name was Jaime Gomez, and he changed his name a couple of times.

01:49:09.000 One of them was Michelle, and I think the other one was Andreas.

01:49:13.000 And so when the Cult Awareness Network started looking in the cults right after Waco.

01:49:19.000 And Jolly West started that, right?

01:49:20.000 The cult awareness.

01:49:21.000 Yes.

01:49:23.000 So this guy leaves West Hollywood and moves to Austin and has his followers build him a theater that he can dance for them in front of them.

01:49:33.000 That was the point so that he can show off.

01:49:35.000 Yes.

01:49:35.000 It's a beautiful theater.

01:49:36.000 I almost bought it.

01:49:37.000 Oh, really?

01:49:37.000 Yeah, the original comedy Mothership was going to be at this cult.

01:49:40.000 Is it downtown or no?

01:49:42.000 No, it's West Austin.

01:49:43.000 It's on Bee Caves Road.

01:49:45.000 Okay, yeah.

01:49:46.000 And it's still there.

01:49:47.000 It's a beautiful theater.

01:49:48.000 And the reason why I was going to buy, it was for sale, first of all, it was a beautiful theater, and we wanted a place to put a comedy club.

01:49:54.000 And Ron White, my dear friend, had performed there, and he told me how great it was.

01:49:59.000 It's like some cult owned it or something.

01:50:01.000 So I was like, all right, cool.

01:50:02.000 When I went to check it out, I'm like, this is great.

01:50:04.000 And then I get a phone call from my friend Adam.

01:50:06.000 He goes, hey, man, have you seen the documentary on this cult? 1.00

01:50:09.000 And I'm like, oh, fuck. 1.00

01:50:11.000 There's a documentary. 1.00

01:50:13.000 And the documentary is terrible.

01:50:15.000 It's horrible.

01:50:16.000 However, there's one fascinating aspect of it. 0.99

01:50:19.000 Okay, so this guy, he had sex with all these people. 0.99

01:50:24.000 He made them pay money so that he could have sex with them. 1.00

01:50:27.000 Like they would do therapy and he was having sex with all these guys and they were straight and it was like they felt terrible about it. 0.99

01:50:32.000 And after it was over, like one guy had sent a mass email like, hey, this guy's been hypnotizing me and fucking me for the past 10 years. 0.97

01:50:39.000 And everybody's like, I thought it was just me. 0.91

01:50:41.000 And then the entire cult falls apart.

01:50:43.000 But here's the point.

01:50:45.000 This guy had this thing that he would do to them called the knowing.

01:50:50.000 And they would have to qualify for the knowing.

01:50:53.000 They'd have to be ready for it.

01:50:54.000 And only he could decide if they were ready.

01:50:57.000 When they were ready, they would have this ceremony, this huge thing.

01:51:00.000 And then he would put his hands on them.

01:51:02.000 They would like, they would kneel there in acceptance of the knowing.

01:51:05.000 And he would put his hands on them.

01:51:07.000 And they would have this profound psychedelic experience.

01:51:10.000 So through the power of suggestion, through the placebo effect, whatever it is, they genuinely have this profound psychedelic experience, this connection to God, this feeling of all oneness to a person.

01:51:26.000 Everyone who left the cult, who talked about what a terrible guy he was, talked about how he sexually exploited them and abused them and took their money.

01:51:34.000 And they wasted 20 years of their life with this guy.

01:51:36.000 But that day when they got the knowing was the most profound day of their lives.

01:51:41.000 Really?

01:51:41.000 Even after they're out of the cults.

01:51:43.000 Even after they were out of the cult, people weeping about what he did to them still talked about that experience as being the most profound moment of their life.

01:51:54.000 Which is like this guy, because he was a hypnotist and because he was also a megalomaniacal charismatic.

01:52:03.000 Oh, beautiful man.

01:52:04.000 Like gorgeous man.

01:52:05.000 Like six pack, ripped body.

01:52:08.000 And it got weird at the end because later in his life, he started getting plastic surgery because he was getting older.

01:52:13.000 And so his looks were going. 0.99

01:52:15.000 So he was fucking face cut. 0.98

01:52:16.000 And everybody was like, what are you doing? 0.99

01:52:18.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:52:19.000 And he would deny doing anything, but it was like so obvious that he had face lifts.

01:52:23.000 And he just went crazy.

01:52:25.000 But the point is, it's like he figured out how to not just manipulate these people like all cult leaders do, but have this one experience that apparently was a real experience for these people in some way.

01:52:41.000 Able to incept like some idea into them.

01:52:45.000 If they could just get out then, like, I got it.

01:52:47.000 Thank you.

01:52:48.000 I'm going to go get a regular job now.

01:52:51.000 But in order to have that, I'm sure you have to go through the whole experience because it builds up some tension or resentment or something.

01:52:57.000 Of course.

01:52:57.000 Human psychology has to have gone through that in order to maybe reach that.

01:53:01.000 Well, it's just spectacular that he was able to understand that you had to hold it back from them for so long.

01:53:07.000 And like some of them in the film would be, they were complaining that I'm ready for it.

01:53:12.000 He won't give it to me.

01:53:13.000 I want it so badly.

01:53:13.000 I want it.

01:53:15.000 Michelle got it.

01:53:16.000 Now she's enlightened.

01:53:18.000 And I'm just sitting here on earth eating carrots. 1.00

01:53:20.000 This is bullshit. 0.98

01:53:21.000 And, you know, it's really weird because one of the things about these cult documentaries is every time you watch one, like for me at least, in the beginning, I'm like, that looks like fun. 0.99

01:53:33.000 In the beginning, it was great.

01:53:34.000 They're all having dinners together.

01:53:36.000 It's a community.

01:53:37.000 It's a community.

01:53:38.000 Everyone loves community.

01:53:39.000 Everyone needs to feel accepted.

01:53:40.000 They're all like working in the garden together.

01:53:42.000 Like, this looks great.

01:53:44.000 It looks great.

01:53:44.000 And then it always descends into one guy fucks everybody, one guy takes all the money, one guy wants to be known as the living God.

01:53:58.000 Uh-huh. 0.95

01:53:58.000 Yep. 0.95

01:53:59.000 It's just these patterns are so weird.

01:54:03.000 They're so weird because they're so similar.

01:54:05.000 Yeah.

01:54:06.000 Yeah.

01:54:06.000 It's the same basic human psychology operating under different circumstances that leads to, you know, I mean, there's a classic phrase, you know, history repeats itself or history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

01:54:18.000 But it's because humans share a psychology.

01:54:19.000 So of course there are going to be similar actions.

01:54:22.000 That reminds me kind of this concept of like incepting something into someone or making them feel this.

01:54:27.000 Were you, you know, this is a little bit before my time, but did you experience the satanic panic in the sense that were you keeping up with it when that was happening in the 1980s?

01:54:35.000 I wasn't.

01:54:36.000 You know, I was very busy during that time, but I peripherally remember it.

01:54:41.000 And then later on, we examined it and looked into it.

01:54:45.000 And, you know, we've done a few episodes where we went over it.

01:54:47.000 But it was, you know, legitimately kind of crazy.

01:54:50.000 Yeah, you know, because there's a connection between that and some of the, what I would say are MKUltra kind of conspiracies.

01:54:59.000 There are a lot of true things about MKUltra that are just crazy, but there are also some things that people propose that I don't think actually happened.

01:55:06.000 You know, there are some people who say, for instance, that MKUltra was like getting young women to run around these military compounds where they would be hunted for sport.

01:55:19.000 And it was saying like, you know, there was a vice president who activated a hologram around his body to make this woman think that she had turned into a lizard, to make her think that lizard people actually exist.

01:55:29.000 Like, you know, she was saying that the CIA personnel would impregnate her and abort the fetuses and eat the fetuses and sell some of the body parts in their interstate occult body part business and all this stuff, which I don't think any of that happened.

01:55:43.000 However, there's a connection between, you know, the people who are making these assertions and the satanic panic.

01:55:49.000 A lot of the people who make these assertions say that they recovered their memories through hypnotism.

01:55:54.000 And that is a lot of what was going on during the satanic panic.

01:55:57.000 You had people recovering memories through hypnotism about being involved in this ritualistic satanic abuse.

01:56:04.000 And in fact, there's a group called the International Society for the Study of Dissociation.

01:56:10.000 And a lot of the members were kind of responsible for propagating many of these satanic panic conspiracy theories.

01:56:15.000 The president of that organization, a guy named Bennett Braun, he was sued by a former patient for falsely convincing her that she had engaged in cannibalism and infanticide and all this stuff that she didn't do.

01:56:30.000 And he lost his medical license and she was awarded $10 million in this lawsuit.

01:56:34.000 But it turns out that many of the people, one in particular, of the kind of prominent MKUltra conspiracy theorists, her husband, who did this hypnotism on her to recover her memories, he said he learned how to recover memories from Bennett Braun himself.

01:56:48.000 And he was a part of this International Society for the Study of Dissociation.

01:56:52.000 So it's like the same techniques that were being used during the satanic panic to so-called recover these memories.

01:56:57.000 It's the same thing in many of these MKUltra, what I would say are conspiracy theorists, who are propagating these misinformation about MKUltra because they supposedly recovered these memories about how these jelly beans were used to control their behavior or something.

01:57:11.000 But it's the same kind of techniques that are being used in both instances.

01:57:14.000 Hypnotic regression in particular is very odd because a lot of it is dependent upon the questions that are asked while the person's under.

01:57:21.000 Like that you can lead someone to believe something happened that didn't happen.

01:57:26.000 This is what Jolly West was, some of the stuff that he was doing.

01:57:28.000 This is what's really, do you know who John Mack is?

01:57:32.000 John Mack.

01:57:33.000 John Mack was, I believe he was a psychiatrist at Harvard.

01:57:38.000 He got really obsessed with alien abduction stories.

01:57:42.000 And he wrote a book called Abduction, and it was all hypnotic regressions of people that have been abducted by aliens, allegedly.

01:57:49.000 And they all had very similar stories.

01:57:51.000 But the real controversy from skeptics has always been, like, what were these sessions like?

01:57:57.000 Did you?

01:57:58.000 Leading questions?

01:57:59.000 Did you lead them to believe?

01:57:59.000 Yes.

01:58:01.000 And also, there was a precedent.

01:58:04.000 So do you know the Betty and Barney Hill story?

01:58:07.000 Okay, Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple in New Hampshire, I believe, in the 1950s, with the very first UFO abduction story.

01:58:17.000 And they had an experience on a highway, they saw a thing, they lost time, and then they couldn't sleep.

01:58:23.000 They had all these real problems, and they both wound up going to a hypnotist and separately had the same story.

01:58:31.000 Separately had the same story about being taken aboard a craft and being manipulated.

01:58:35.000 The problem is then that story gets out into the zeitgeist.

01:58:38.000 Right.

01:58:39.000 And then you have hypnotic regression where people tell very similar versions of that story.

01:58:45.000 And it becomes a thing where, like, even if the original Betty and Barney Hill story was real, now that becomes a possibility in your mind that could have happened to you.

01:58:56.000 And then you get hypnotized and someone says, Do you see any beings in the room with you?

01:59:01.000 Yes, I do.

01:59:03.000 Are they short with large heads and large black eyes?

01:59:07.000 They are.

01:59:07.000 Like, what are the questions?

01:59:09.000 Like, how did you lead them into this hypnotic regression of alien abduction?

01:59:14.000 And I think a very similar thing took place during the European kind of witch craze in the 17th century.

01:59:19.000 These preachers would go around to different communities talking about witches and demons.

01:59:23.000 And so as soon as they left, in the weeks following, there is a huge uptick in witch accusations and supposed demonic possessions.

01:59:30.000 Is it a coincidence that right after they're as soon as it's brought to your consciousness, oh, I think you might be a witch or all these accusations start sparting around?

01:59:38.000 Obviously, it's like a suggested thing that they picked up from attending these religious rallies.

01:59:42.000 Of course.

01:59:43.000 Did you know that when the printing press was first created, some of the first and most popular books were all about how to spot witches?

01:59:49.000 Oh, yeah.

01:59:50.000 Yeah, like Heinrich Kramer and The Hammer of Witches.

01:59:53.000 You would think, no, no, no.

01:59:55.000 But now we have a printing press.

01:59:56.000 It's just all about philosophy.

01:59:58.000 And, you know, it's going to give people to print the Bible and mathematics.

02:00:03.000 Oh, no, If it bleeds, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.

02:00:06.000 It's like people are attracted to sensational stories.

02:00:09.000 It's the same thing about human psychology.

02:00:11.000 They're just the same psychology as us today.

02:00:13.000 And if we're interested in learning these sensational stories, of course they want to too.

02:00:17.000 It was their version of what I'm obsessed with, Bigfoot.

02:00:20.000 The same thing, just nonsense.

02:00:22.000 A funny anecdote, kind of related to that.

02:00:22.000 Yeah.

02:00:24.000 I teach a course on Isaac Newton, and he writes this big book, The Principia.

02:00:28.000 It's like the most famous book in the history of science.

02:00:30.000 And it goes off to the publisher.

02:00:32.000 And the publisher, you know, he's publishing this book.

02:00:34.000 And right after the Principia is published, the publisher gets arrested for publishing pornography.

02:00:39.000 So it's like, there's this image of this publishing house where the Principia, the most important book in the history of science, is there.

02:00:44.000 And right next to it is all this smut that he's secretly doing.

02:00:50.000 Wow. 0.52

02:00:51.000 God, human psychology is such a trip.

02:00:53.000 We're so weird.

02:00:54.000 We're such weird animals.

02:00:55.000 And it makes it so hard because we're so weird to find the truth.

02:00:58.000 Yeah, especially when you're talking about like suggested memories or something like that.

02:01:04.000 There are a few studies.

02:01:06.000 I don't remember them, you know, like perfectly, but there's one study that I talk about in this book where this is right after the Challenger explosion.

02:01:14.000 So the space shuttle has exploded, and there were two psychologists, I think they're at Emory University, and they decide we are going to have all of our students, like 200 students, write down exactly where they were when they heard about this because obviously they're all going to remember this is like the next day.

02:01:27.000 Where were you?

02:01:28.000 What were you doing?

02:01:29.000 Who told you about the explosion?

02:01:31.000 And so they got copies of these questionnaires basically from 100, however many students.

02:01:37.000 Four years later, I think it was, they tracked down, I don't know, what 40 or 80 of these students and had them do the same questionnaire.

02:01:43.000 When the challenger exploded, where were you?

02:01:45.000 Who were you with?

02:01:46.000 What did you know?

02:01:47.000 What did you learn?

02:01:48.000 Blah, They took the exact same questionnaire, and the majority of the students got a majority of the questions wrong. 0.89

02:01:56.000 In the sense that they put down something completely different than they did the first time.

02:01:59.000 So it's like nobody was even manipulating them.

02:02:01.000 That was just their own memory.

02:02:02.000 That, you know, the majority got the majority of these important details wrong.

02:02:07.000 There's another intriguing, kind of humorous psychological study.

02:02:11.000 I don't know how big the sample size was on this, but it was to determine how powerful our memory is in the sense that if you just suggest that someone did something, is it possible that they actually think they actually did?

02:02:24.000 So the suggestion was they took a bunch of students to some vending machines and they either had them propose to the vending machine, something that surely you would remember, or they would suggest to them that they had proposed to the vending machine.

02:02:35.000 So, you know, some students would actually propose and other students, they would just tell them, oh, you know, imagine yourself proposing to this vending machine.

02:02:42.000 And afterwards, I don't remember what the percentage was, but it's a decent amount of percentage of the students who were only told to envision proposing actually thought they had proposed.

02:02:51.000 And so the power of suggestion is very strong.

02:02:54.000 So strong.

02:02:55.000 And the memory is so fallible.

02:02:57.000 Like, I have a pretty good memory for like hard facts, like information that I know is true.

02:03:07.000 But my memory of my own life is basically like weird, blurry snapshots that I can recall.

02:03:16.000 And oftentimes, what I'm recalling is the memory of my recounting of my memory.

02:03:22.000 It's not really my memory.

02:03:23.000 Yeah.

02:03:24.000 This is the story that you've told yourself.

02:03:26.000 I watched an episode of News Radio the other day.

02:03:29.000 It was a sitcom that I was on in the 1990s.

02:03:31.000 I didn't remember it at all.

02:03:33.000 I didn't remember the plot.

02:03:35.000 I didn't remember the lines that I had.

02:03:37.000 I didn't remember.

02:03:37.000 Like, if it was fake, if someone created it during AI, I would have no idea whether it was an AI version of news radio or whether, unless it was an episode that I really remember, like, oh, that was a really funny one.

02:03:50.000 I didn't remember this at all.

02:03:51.000 And it was me.

02:03:51.000 Yeah.

02:03:53.000 I lived it.

02:03:54.000 I was on TV, right?

02:03:55.000 So it was like probably a big moment for me at the time.

02:03:58.000 Gone.

02:03:59.000 It doesn't exist.

02:04:00.000 I feel like I, it's ironic.

02:04:01.000 I'm a historian, but I feel like my memory is not that good either.

02:04:04.000 I don't think anybody's.

02:04:05.000 No, it can't be.

02:04:06.000 Well, there's certain people, like, you know, that woman that was on taxi, really pretty redhead lady, that sitcom taxi from the 1970s.

02:04:15.000 God, I forget her name is.

02:04:17.000 Famous actress, Mary Lou Tenner.

02:04:21.000 Mary Lou Tenner.

02:04:22.000 Photographic memory.

02:04:23.000 Henner.

02:04:24.000 Henner.

02:04:24.000 Mary Lou Henner.

02:04:25.000 Yeah.

02:04:26.000 Sorry, Mary Lou.

02:04:26.000 Sorry.

02:04:28.000 I used to be in love with her when I was a kid.

02:04:30.000 She has a photographic memory.

02:04:33.000 Like, she can remember that it was a Tuesday in 1983.

02:04:38.000 Like this lady, it's an incredible memory.

02:04:41.000 Highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition which people can remember nearly every day of their lives with precise detail.

02:04:48.000 I wonder if that would be good to have or bad to have.

02:04:51.000 She seems very happy.

02:04:52.000 Okay, because I show a picture of her when she was young.

02:04:55.000 She was awful.

02:04:55.000 I can imagine having a negative experience or a bad memory and then dwelling on that and knowing every single detail of that and having to relive that like in photographic detail every time you think of it.

02:05:05.000 I'm sure that couldn't be a pleasant experience.

02:05:08.000 That one right above, go to the one right above there, right there.

02:05:11.000 No, right there.

02:05:11.000 Bam.

02:05:12.000 That was her.

02:05:13.000 Woo! 0.99

02:05:14.000 Smoke show.

02:05:15.000 That was your younger.

02:05:16.000 Oh my goodness.

02:05:17.000 Yeah, she was so pretty.

02:05:18.000 And also photographic memory, so you can't lie to her.

02:05:24.000 What an amazing person.

02:05:25.000 But that's got to be, I would imagine it's not a bur.

02:05:29.000 I would, I would take that over not taking that.

02:05:31.000 Like if someone gave me the option, would you rather have an absolute photographic memory or be like not really sure? 0.56

02:05:36.000 Like, I don't fucking know what happened, you know? 0.84

02:05:38.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:05:39.000 I would take the photographic memory, I think.

02:05:41.000 The burden, I think, would be worth it.

02:05:43.000 I think I'd handle it.

02:05:44.000 Even me for questions, like, you know, if you ask me, how did you come to write this book?

02:05:48.000 Like, you asked me, how did you become interested in this topic?

02:05:51.000 When I was thinking about the answer to that question, I mean, what I said is factual in the sense that I was doing a dissertation on scientists in the intelligence community and this, but is that really like how I came to this topic?

02:06:00.000 I might have read some other book that I read the name Sidney Gottlieb, and that got me interested.

02:06:04.000 And, you know, even when I'm talking to you about my own autobiographical experience, to me, it's like, I mean, what I'm saying is true, but is it like literally true in the sense that I know with precision that how I came to this topic because I was doing my dissertation on this?

02:06:20.000 It might have been, you know, I kind of remember reading Tim Weiner's book, Legacy of Ashes, and it briefly mentioned Sidney Gottlieb in there.

02:06:27.000 Maybe I read that and it's like, oh, who's this guy?

02:06:29.000 You know, right.

02:06:30.000 So there's a classic joke about how there's a guy looking for his keys on the parking lot.

02:06:36.000 And it's night and there's a lamp post right above him.

02:06:40.000 And a police officer walks by and a police officer says, sir, what are you doing?

02:06:44.000 And he says, oh, I'm looking for my keys on the ground.

02:06:46.000 They must be somewhere around here.

02:06:47.000 And the officer says, oh, well, did you drop him right here?

02:06:50.000 And the guy says, no, I dropped him in the bush over there, but this is where the light is.

02:06:52.000 So this is where I'm looking.

02:06:53.000 So to me, it's like, well, when I remember my own autobiographic experience, am I remembering it how it's convenient to memorate?

02:07:01.000 Yeah.

02:07:03.000 Remember it?

02:07:03.000 Or, you know, or oftentimes.

02:07:06.000 Oftentimes.

02:07:07.000 I mean, that's the human tendency, right?

02:07:09.000 I know for a fact when I really got into conspiracies because I have a moment connected to it that was a bad experience.

02:07:18.000 So when I was in my early 20s, this guy that was a friend of mine that was in a band had read this book called Best Evidence by David Lifton.

02:07:26.000 David Lifton was an accountant, and I forget what his assignment was, but it had something to do with the Warren Commission.

02:07:32.000 So he goes over the Warren Commission report, and he actually read the whole thing.

02:07:36.000 So it's a huge volume.

02:07:38.000 And he reads all this and he finds so many contradictions and so many things that are wrong with it that he starts investigating the Kennedy assassination.

02:07:46.000 And he writes this book called Best Evidence.

02:07:48.000 And the book is basically saying there's no way the official story is true.

02:07:52.000 And I read this while I was a comedian on the road.

02:07:56.000 So I was in Philadelphia and I was doing stand-up and I had a show on Friday night and I spent the whole day in my hotel room reading this book, freaking out, going, oh my God, they killed him. 0.99

02:08:06.000 So then I go on stage, first show, and fucking bomb. 0.98

02:08:11.000 And I had done really good the night before. 0.99

02:08:13.000 Did you really have the JFK or did you already have the set routine?

02:08:17.000 No, I had my set, but I was like completely freaked out by the fact they killed the president.

02:08:21.000 And then I apologize to the manager.

02:08:23.000 I said, I'm so sorry.

02:08:24.000 I read this book on JFK and I'm super bumped out.

02:08:27.000 I'll be over it by the second show, I promise you.

02:08:29.000 And then they were like, you better be.

02:08:30.000 And I was like, I promise I'm good at this.

02:08:32.000 I know what I'm doing.

02:08:33.000 And the second show was great.

02:08:34.000 And they're like, don't do that again.

02:08:36.000 I'm like, I won't.

02:08:37.000 I won't do it again.

02:08:38.000 But I genuinely freaked out.

02:08:39.000 So I remember very specifically, because it was a, you know, it was a big moment for me. 0.97

02:08:43.000 I was on the road and I ate shit at a comedy club. 0.95

02:08:46.000 So like that thing is in my head forever. 0.98

02:08:48.000 But that book was, that was my first step because I was like, oh my god, if this is a true story, I mean, if this book is accurate, like someone killed the president and they got away with it.

02:08:59.000 And it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald.

02:09:01.000 Even if he was involved, it was, and there was a conspiracy to distort the evidence of the assassination in terms of like the difference in the discrepancies between the report at Dallas when they first received his body to Bethesda, Maryland.

02:09:16.000 There's a bullet hole wound that they describe in the Dallas where they call it a tracheotomy hole in Bethesda, Maryland.

02:09:22.000 They're manipulating the narrative to incorporate the single gunman theory.

02:09:27.000 Have you ever had Gerald Posner on?

02:09:27.000 Yeah.

02:09:29.000 I have not.

02:09:30.000 Okay, because I know he, I haven't gone really down the JFK rabbit hole, so I don't know that much about it, but I know he wrote the book Case Closed. 0.98

02:09:36.000 Yeah, that book sucks.

02:09:37.000 You need to get him together with Oliver Stone, and he'll take that book apart. 0.97

02:09:41.000 I bring him up just because I follow him on Twitter.

02:09:45.000 And he was posting recently about the, I think he posted about the tracheotomy thing.

02:09:45.000 Yeah.

02:09:50.000 And so, but I don't really have anything.

02:09:53.000 Just the magic bullet theory alone is complete, utter nonsense to anybody who's ever shot anything with a bullet.

02:09:59.000 When bullets hit bone and shatter bone, first of all, there's the fact that there were more bullet fragments in Connolly's wrist than were missing from this magic bullet.

02:10:08.000 This magic bullet was only used as a tool because they had to account for a bullet that hit the underpass.

02:10:15.000 So there was a guy standing under the underpass.

02:10:17.000 He got hit with a ricochet.

02:10:18.000 So they're like, well, definitely that bullet hit here.

02:10:21.000 So we have to attribute all these wounds to one bullet.

02:10:24.000 So it had to go through Kennedy, bounce around, come out of him, hit Connolly, go through him, go through his wrist, and then they magically find this bullet in the gurney when they're bringing in the body, like or when they're bringing in Connolly to get medical assistance.

02:10:44.000 They supposedly magically find this bullet.

02:10:46.000 This bullet has clearly been shot into water.

02:10:48.000 This bullet is either water or pillows.

02:10:50.000 This bullet has no deformations.

02:10:52.000 It's pristine.

02:10:53.000 It's not missing any fragments.

02:10:55.000 So it doesn't account for the fragments in the wrist. 0.89

02:10:57.000 It's a total horseshit idea.

02:10:59.000 And then there's the back to the left when you see this apruder film where his head explodes. 0.82

02:11:04.000 It's all the people that were talking about the shots coming from the grassy knoll.

02:11:08.000 It's the fact that so many of the witnesses died in mysterious circumstances.

02:11:13.000 They died from car accidents.

02:11:16.000 They died from suicide.

02:11:17.000 They died from crime.

02:11:19.000 They died from random acts of violence.

02:11:21.000 Like, they did a calculation of what are the odds that all these witnesses would wind up dying the way they did.

02:11:26.000 And it's like some spectacular number. 0.99

02:11:28.000 They fucking killed a bunch of people that were there. 0.99

02:11:30.000 I'm sure you know this, but Vincent Bugliosi wrote like, I think what might be the longest nonfiction single-volume book ever written on the Kennedy assassination, remembering history or something like that. 1.00

02:11:42.000 It's like 1,500 pages.

02:11:43.000 This is Bugliosi that was involved in the Manson assassination.

02:11:45.000 Yeah, he wrote like a book about the JFK assassination.

02:11:49.000 And if you read Tom O'Neill's book, it calls him a complete charlatan. 0.98

02:11:52.000 Like he's a crazy person.

02:11:53.000 But yeah, I mean, if anyone has seen that book in person, it really is like 1,500 pages of the densest, tiniest little print.

02:12:01.000 And it was so long that it came with a CD of the notes that were like a thousand additional pages that couldn't fit in the volume.

02:12:07.000 And it got like a physical CD you had to put in your computer to see the notes that you had.

02:12:11.000 Oh my God.

02:12:12.000 That's so crazy.

02:12:13.000 But I think that could be like the longest single volume nonfiction book that I've ever seen.

02:12:18.000 I would love to get Gerald Posner in a room with Oliver Stone because Oliver Stone, even at his advanced age, he's so smart.

02:12:26.000 And his recall is incredible for dates and times and people that were involved.

02:12:31.000 I don't think Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent.

02:12:33.000 I think Lee Harvey Oswald was definitely an intelligence agent.

02:12:36.000 I think Lee Harvey Oswald, the fact that he lived in Russia, the fact that he came back to America, married a Russian woman, he seems to have like just very bizarre access to, I think he was an intelligence agent.

02:12:47.000 I think he probably was involved in the whole thing. 0.99

02:12:50.000 But the calmness in which he describes the fact that he's a patsy after he's been arrested for killing the president, like to me, just that, that guy's involved in some shit. 0.99

02:13:00.000 That's not how a normal person reacts when you get accused of killing the president. 0.98

02:13:04.000 If you're innocent, you go, I'm innocent.

02:13:06.000 I didn't have anything to do with this.

02:13:07.000 I don't know why they have me. 0.87

02:13:09.000 You'd be freaking the fuck out. 0.54

02:13:10.000 And he's like, I'm just a patsy. 0.97

02:13:12.000 Oh, are you really?

02:13:15.000 Like, I think you're probably an intelligence agent.

02:13:18.000 There's probably something creepy about you.

02:13:20.000 Well, if anyone could get them to talk, I'm sure it's you.

02:13:23.000 I think there was a lot of people involved in the Kennedy assassination.

02:13:26.000 I think there were multiple shooters, and I think it was very coordinated.

02:13:31.000 And it was probably, it probably involved our government.

02:13:34.000 It might have involved the mafia, might have involved other governments.

02:13:38.000 Some people think it had something to do with Israel because Israel, Kennedy did not want to give Israel nuclear weapons. 1.00

02:13:45.000 There's a ton of stuff that's attached to that assassination, but this idea of case closed, fuck you. 1.00

02:13:51.000 There's no case closed in this. 1.00

02:13:52.000 This is one of the craziest conspiracies of all time because it seems to be that they killed the president and got away with it.

02:14:01.000 That's what it seems to be.

02:14:02.000 And then the Jolly West connection to Jack Ruby.

02:14:05.000 So Jack Ruby goes in and kills Lee Harvey Oswald. 0.99

02:14:08.000 Then in jail, Jolly West visits him and he goes completely fucking insane. 0.99

02:14:12.000 Completely insane. 1.00

02:14:13.000 Loses his mind. 1.00

02:14:14.000 Thinks he's in hell.

02:14:15.000 There's fire. 1.00

02:14:16.000 The Jews are all burning. 1.00

02:14:17.000 Like he's like going nuts right after the guy who's in charge of all these LSD studies visits him. 0.98

02:14:23.000 How convenient.

02:14:25.000 One thing, it's been, I don't know, five years or whenever I read Tomonu's book when it came out the first time, so I don't remember that well.

02:14:31.000 But one thing, because I have a chapter on Jolly West, and one thing that stuck out to me especially is one of the main crusades he had in his life was against the death penalty.

02:14:41.000 You know, he writes a lot about how it's completely immoral, this thing he doesn't like.

02:14:46.000 So to me, especially there's an earlier case called this Jimmy Shaver case about this guy who abused and killed this little girl that Jolly West was involved into.

02:14:57.000 It seems to me the possibility is also open that Jolly West might also have had an incentive to dose these people with LSD if he did to prevent them from getting the death sentence because if they could appear insane, maybe they would not get the death penalty instead.

02:15:12.000 Why was he so obsessed about the death sentence?

02:15:15.000 I don't know.

02:15:16.000 I think he just considered it immoral.

02:15:18.000 And what a fascinating thing that a guy who would ruin people's lives would consider just ending them to be immoral.

02:15:24.000 Where a lot of those people wind up killing themselves because of his actions.

02:15:24.000 Yeah.

02:15:28.000 Yeah, and he ended up killing himself too.

02:15:31.000 Well, I mean, it was an assisted suicide with his son.

02:15:33.000 His son, his son later wrote a book about this, but his son basically, Jolly West had gotten cancer that had metastasized throughout his entire body, and he was about to die, and he didn't really want to go through the remaining months or whatever he had left in agony.

02:15:47.000 And so he got his son to stockpile a bunch of pills and feed them to him when he basically became unable to move for himself.

02:15:54.000 And so that happened to Jolly West.

02:15:56.000 Then the son did that to Jolly West's wife, his own mother, later when, I don't know exactly if she had a medical issue or something, but he helped her commit assisted suicide.

02:16:05.000 The son wrote a book about it, and then he later committed suicide as well.

02:16:08.000 Boy.

02:16:09.000 Oh, man.

02:16:12.000 It's just so strange how so much, so many bad things can have come from just a few people.

02:16:22.000 Just a few people and these terrible ideas and this complete lack of oversight.

02:16:27.000 It's so much evil, including the Manson family.

02:16:32.000 We've talked about it, the Tom O'Neill book.

02:16:34.000 Please, folks, if you're listening to this, read that book.

02:16:36.000 It's one of the craziest books of all time by a man completely obsessed with a story that literally chased down nothing but that story for 20 years.

02:16:43.000 And one of the parts of the book that I really enjoyed is the writing style is kind of like a gonzo journal.

02:16:50.000 Like, he's part of the story.

02:16:52.000 You know, you're following him on the journey to discover this stuff.

02:16:55.000 For me, that was the exciting part of the ride.

02:16:57.000 It's like, oh, it's not just telling you the story.

02:16:59.000 It's like, we're figuring out how a historian or a journalist actually works.

02:17:02.000 He's telling you, now I've got this interview and I'm going to go do this and I'm going to go find these documents.

02:17:06.000 I didn't write this book in that style because I just wanted to stick to a description of MKUltra.

02:17:11.000 But there is something tempting about one of the exciting things about history is doing the history and no one really sees that process.

02:17:19.000 You know how I was describing going down the rabbit hole to find the origin of that quote?

02:17:22.000 There are a million stories like that about how it's so crazy.

02:17:25.000 For example, there was this guy named Venever Bush.

02:17:31.000 He was President Roosevelt's unofficial official, really science advisor during World War II.

02:17:36.000 And some people say Vannevar Bush, but it's actually.

02:17:39.000 Is he connected to the Bushes?

02:17:41.000 No, Different Bushes.

02:17:42.000 But it's Veneva Bush.

02:17:43.000 Bush himself says that it rhymes with Beaver, his name.

02:17:45.000 So it's Veneva.

02:17:47.000 But he was writing his autobiography.

02:17:50.000 He was in charge of coordinating scientific research during World War II.

02:17:54.000 And when he was writing his autobiography, he did this series of interviews that were like a thousand pages long so that he could kind of talk about his life and he would use chunks of that as part of his autobiography.

02:18:05.000 Well, I wanted to get that because for my first book, Veneva Bush plays an important role because he's the guy who gets Stanley Lovell a job in the OSS and Stanley Lovell is my main character.

02:18:15.000 So it's like, oh, Veneva Bush is like one of the main guys who is playing a role in this story.

02:18:20.000 So I go, there are a couple of different archives that have this thousand-page interview that Veneva Bush did.

02:18:28.000 And every single page is there in one of the versions except two pages that talk about Stanley Lovell in the OSS.

02:18:34.000 And I thought, that's the exact thing I need.

02:18:36.000 Like, how is it out of a thousand pages, the one thing that's missing is the two pages?

02:18:42.000 And so I finally eventually find out that there's another copy of this interview at a different repository, like at Georgetown University or MIT, I forget which one it was.

02:18:51.000 So I get them to send me a photocopy of every single page, and it turns out that had the two missing pages.

02:18:56.000 So it's like, oh my gosh, now I can actually use that information because, but they didn't have the two pages out of a thousand that I actually needed.

02:19:02.000 They were missing.

02:19:04.000 So there are like a thousand stories about these crazy coincidences that happen.

02:19:07.000 One of them, again, from my first book, was about Stanley Lovell.

02:19:13.000 He's this chemist in the OSS creating all these ingenious gadgets and whatever.

02:19:17.000 He talks in his memoir about his wartime experience about being on this biological warfare committee where they were discussing the possibility of using anthrax and tularemia and tuberculosis and distributing this to across towns and just discussing what would happen, what would we need to be able to do this, what would have to happen for us to engage in biological warfare.

02:19:39.000 But he talks about this in his memoir.

02:19:41.000 But I had never seen a copy of that meeting, minutes of that meeting or anything.

02:19:47.000 He said that this group, this biological warfare committee, it was part of the National Academy of Sciences.

02:19:52.000 And I thought, okay, well, that's interesting.

02:19:54.000 But I can't hardly put it in the book if I don't actually have the minutes of the meeting where they're talking about this because Stanley Lovell was known to exaggerate, to say the least, some of the stuff that he was up to during the war.

02:20:04.000 But then I thought to myself, I kind of remember several years earlier when I was writing my dissertation before this book, I had gone to the National Academy of Sciences because I was working on some scientists in government.

02:20:15.000 And I ended up taking just a bunch of pictures of a lot of the materials they had in their archives.

02:20:19.000 And I went back through the material that I already had.

02:20:22.000 And it turns out I had taken pictures of the minutes of the very meeting Stanley Lovell was talking about in his memoir.

02:20:28.000 It was already in my possession.

02:20:29.000 I didn't have to go there.

02:20:30.000 I already had it.

02:20:31.000 It's just a crazy coincidence that I already had the thing exact thing I needed.

02:20:35.000 Wow.

02:20:35.000 So the process of making history is sometimes even more exciting than the story itself.

02:20:41.000 Well, the process, it seems like it takes a very dedicated person to chase down that process.

02:20:46.000 Like all those things, all the things you're saying about finding those two pages, the quote, like there's so many versions of you wanting to absolutely be sure, which is so critical.

02:20:57.000 And I'm so glad that you did that.

02:20:58.000 If you chase down those things, because a lot of lazy people wouldn't have gone that far, right?

02:21:03.000 Yeah.

02:21:04.000 Especially if no one's watching.

02:21:05.000 Yeah.

02:21:05.000 But you have books you could cite.

02:21:07.000 Like, oh, it says, here's the quote.

02:21:09.000 Yeah.

02:21:09.000 But for me, that's the enjoyment of it.

02:21:11.000 You know, I enjoy doing it.

02:21:13.000 I like going to the archives.

02:21:14.000 I like finding things.

02:21:15.000 I feel like a detective.

02:21:16.000 You know, I'm in the archive and I'm looking at these documents and, oh, I find this guy's name is mentioned here.

02:21:20.000 I know, okay.

02:21:21.000 So to me, it's exciting.

02:21:22.000 It's like a treasure hunt.

02:21:23.000 So that's the fun part of it.

02:21:26.000 Do you have a hard time communicating with people that aren't familiar with all this stuff in terms of like this subject gets discussed and someone brings it up and they start asking questions?

02:21:36.000 Do you have a hard time of not looking crazy?

02:21:40.000 Do you know what I mean?

02:21:41.000 Because there's a lot of people that are very intelligent, very educated people that have not just no information about this or no knowledge of this, but an aversion.

02:21:53.000 Yeah.

02:21:54.000 Because it's naturally a thing that you would assume could not have taken place.

02:21:57.000 But it's not just that.

02:21:58.000 It's like there's an aversion to even rationally discussing it.

02:22:03.000 Like, I am not the type of person that's going to sit here and do conspiracies with you.

02:22:07.000 I've had a few conversations like that with people that do not believe in conspiracies.

02:22:12.000 And they always fall apart under scrutiny.

02:22:16.000 That narrative falls apart.

02:22:18.000 Well, you don't think they exist?

02:22:19.000 Which ones don't you think exist?

02:22:21.000 Well, a conspiracy, I mean, to me, a conspiracy is just a secret plot to do something.

02:22:25.000 There are a lot of secret plots, of course.

02:22:27.000 Yeah.

02:22:28.000 All throughout history.

02:22:29.000 Now, I mean, there are conspiracy theories in the sense that there are stuff that people make up and isn't actually true, but to say conspiracies themselves are necessarily false, well, any secret plot is a conspiracy.

02:22:40.000 Not just that.

02:22:41.000 I think we live in a day and age where there's a lot of fake conspiracies that are thrown in to muddy the water.

02:22:46.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:22:47.000 You know, in fact, that actually ties in at the end of this book.

02:22:50.000 I talk about a little bit about kind of the what's kind of called censorship through noise, the idea that we can put so much noise out there that no one's really going to know what to trust.

02:23:00.000 And so I give an example of the idea that AIDS was created in a government laboratory like Fort Diedrick. 0.68

02:23:09.000 In the really 1980s, there was a Soviet kind of propaganda mouthpiece newspaper in India called The Patriot.

02:23:16.000 And this would just publish like KGB propaganda.

02:23:18.000 Wow.

02:23:19.000 In India. 0.51

02:23:20.000 In India, yeah.

02:23:21.000 And one of the stories in that newspaper was basically saying AIDS was created in a government laboratory.

02:23:27.000 But it doesn't just say that.

02:23:28.000 In order to get there, it first said, did you know that the CIA was involved in dosing people with drugs, which is completely true.

02:23:34.000 Did you know that the military was involved in spraying certain germs over cities to determine the distribution of the air currents to see if we were attacked by in biological warfare situation, how the air currents would spread these germs?

02:23:47.000 They were just spraying yeast and stuff over, but it's bacteria.

02:23:50.000 So did you know that this, did you know that they've performed experiments on these drug addicts and this and that and this?

02:23:56.000 And also, did you know that in Fort Diedrich, they created a biological weapon called AIDS? 0.75

02:24:01.000 So it's, you know, it's the lie is made more potent because it's sandwiched in between all these truths.

02:24:07.000 And so this newspaper, The Patriot, published this article basically saying all these true things and then one thing at the end that they were actually pushing.

02:24:15.000 But if you knew that all these other things were true, you might assume that that final thing is true as well.

02:24:19.000 In other countries around the world where they had these front newspapers, they would also publish the same kind of story.

02:24:24.000 Did you know that?

02:24:25.000 And then AIDS was created in this government laboratory.

02:24:28.000 And then those newspapers would cite the Indian newspaper, The Patriot, as evidence that other independent newspapers had also come to this conclusion.

02:24:34.000 And if many independent sources are coming to this, surely it means that it's got some credibility to it, not knowing that the actual connection, the KGB is just sponsoring all this.

02:24:42.000 So it's a, yeah, censorship through noise, the idea that there are certain things we don't want people to know, or maybe we do not want people to know, but not understand or something. 0.89

02:24:51.000 And so we're going to flood the zone with all this crap, basically.

02:24:55.000 So maybe nobody's going to know what to believe. 0.99

02:24:58.000 Maybe it is the case that the CIA created AIDS in Fort Diedrick or whatever it is.

02:25:02.000 So that's one tactic that I talk about at the very end.

02:25:04.000 It's also a great way to minimize the impact of all the things that actually are true on that list because it attaches something that's completely kooky.

02:25:12.000 And if you do that enough times, you can muddy the waters on basically every subject that there is.

02:25:17.000 Yeah, so it can go both ways in the sense that fake stories can delegitimize true stories, but true stories legitimize fake stories.

02:25:25.000 Right, both ways.

02:25:25.000 And then you have the social media impact of bots, which is just really unstudied.

02:25:31.000 We don't really know the numbers.

02:25:33.000 We've talked about this before, but there was a former FBI analyst before the purchase of Twitter that he was looking at and he thinks it's 80% bots.

02:25:41.000 80% of the discourse, 80% of the traffic is not human or people that are being paid to do it.

02:25:48.000 It's like some government entity wanted to do this to sow confusion?

02:25:51.000 There's a lot of different factors.

02:25:53.000 There's us, there's them, there's everybody.

02:25:55.000 There's NGOs, there's different PACs, and they all have, like, you can go online.

02:26:03.000 There's companies that will fund a social campaign for you.

02:26:06.000 Like, so imagine if you wanted to go online and attack people over a certain issue.

02:26:15.000 Like, say, if you're trying to get a bill passed and you want to attack people over a very certain issue, you can fund a campaign using bots to promote your position.

02:26:24.000 And it could give the illusion of some sort of some agreement online or disagreement online.

02:26:32.000 Or maybe you could take a thing that's a very reasonable position and make it seem completely ridiculous and then also seem like there's a bunch of support that it's completely ridiculous. 0.63

02:26:40.000 Like a lot of people believe.

02:26:41.000 And they start citing things that aren't true and quotes that aren't true.

02:26:45.000 And you could just completely screw up the idea of what the truth is.

02:26:49.000 Yeah, I know the Russian government had, I think it was called like the Internet Research Agency, something like that.

02:26:55.000 And there's a book called Active Measures by Thomas Ridd.

02:26:55.000 Yeah.

02:26:59.000 And he kind of chronicles what they were doing.

02:27:02.000 Basically, young people would be hired to pose as whoever anyone wanted to be posed as.

02:27:08.000 I guess the Russian government to spread certain amounts of disinformation to certain communities.

02:27:12.000 Say they would just create fake profiles, and your whole job at work would be to cycle through these different profiles and comment on people's posts and post your own and then boost the post of your fellow disinformation actors in this IRA so that their posts would be seen by more people.

02:27:26.000 There's a whole organization or a whole, you know, whatever it is.

02:27:34.000 What was the woman's name that came on to talk about that?

02:27:37.000 Renee DeResta.

02:27:38.000 Renee DeResta.

02:27:39.000 Yeah.

02:27:39.000 That's right.

02:27:40.000 She was saying how she had to study all these memes and so many of them were really funny.

02:27:45.000 And like these people that were in charge of what they wanted to do was make sure the people online in America were arguing about everything.

02:27:55.000 And the more you could get people at each other's throats, the more you could destroy their democracy.

02:28:01.000 This is part of the idea of it.

02:28:03.000 Just to have another element that people have to deal with.

02:28:07.000 And that they were organizing Texas separatist meetings directly across the street from these Muslim meetings.

02:28:15.000 They were doing it on purpose.

02:28:16.000 They were trying to get people to argue with each other, trying to get people to be in conflict with each other.

02:28:20.000 Yeah.

02:28:21.000 And I mean, one of the things now with social media, but just in a globalized world, any amount of conflict is kind of available for anyone to see.

02:28:30.000 So, you know, the worst thing in the world that happens today, you're probably going to learn about it.

02:28:34.000 You're going to know about it.

02:28:35.000 Which that can't be good for your mental health to constantly be bombarded by this negative stuff.

02:28:40.000 It's not that in the past all this negative stuff didn't happen.

02:28:43.000 It's just that in the past, you were probably more focused on your community because it's not like you've got constant access to what's going on in Myanmar at the second or whatever it is.

02:28:51.000 So the fact that you're constantly able to see the worst thing happening in the world, that cannot be good just for your mentality.

02:28:58.000 It's definitely not good, but it's also a social experiment because we didn't know what would happen when you get all this bad news from all over the world.

02:29:06.000 It's never happened before.

02:29:07.000 So there's never been a device that you carry in your pocket that gives you the worst news of the day all day long.

02:29:13.000 It's totally new.

02:29:14.000 So, anybody growing up today is bombarded, which is why it has to account for some of the anxiety that kids face today because you see heightened levels of anxiety, heightened levels of fear about climate, or anything that they tell you that's a thing that you really need to freak out about.

02:29:30.000 It's like you're being inundated, and you don't have a chance to just enjoy the moment that you're in because everything is like this total existential crisis that's going to destroy humanity.

02:29:41.000 If you don't act now, oh, God, there's a genocide going on.

02:29:45.000 It's like no matter what it is, it's like you're being bombarded by everything.

02:29:49.000 The economy is a crash, no kings, ah, ice is coming, Jesus, gun control.

02:29:55.000 Ah, do you have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-internet days?

02:29:58.000 Because I don't remember it that well, but no. 0.99

02:30:00.000 Nah, fuck those times. 1.00

02:30:03.000 That was stupid. 1.00

02:30:05.000 I think the internet with all its flaws is way better. 1.00

02:30:08.000 It's way better.

02:30:09.000 It's way better than the government being in control of the narrative.

02:30:13.000 And, you know, now we know intelligence agencies absolutely in control of what's distributed in mainstream news.

02:30:19.000 Like the idea that the mainstream news back then was independent and free and they were the press.

02:30:23.000 Like, no.

02:30:24.000 No, the government agencies and intelligence agencies have been involved in propaganda from the jump.

02:30:31.000 And it's way better now.

02:30:33.000 You have more access to information.

02:30:34.000 It's way more complicated.

02:30:35.000 It's way more complicated to live your life.

02:30:38.000 It's way more psychologically complicated to be in the moment and to be present and to just enjoy your life.

02:30:45.000 It's harder.

02:30:46.000 It's much harder because you are constantly being informed.

02:30:50.000 And there's the addiction aspect of it.

02:30:52.000 You know, the addiction to being informed, the addiction to seeing what people are saying and seeing the, oh, what did this guy do?

02:31:00.000 He stole all this money.

02:31:01.000 Like we were in the green room last night.

02:31:03.000 We're reading the story about this congressperson who stole money and how they did it.

02:31:08.000 And then they bought a giant diamond ring.

02:31:12.000 So they're wearing this giant three-carat diamond ring on a $100,000 a year salary. 1.00

02:31:16.000 Like, what are you doing, you fucking crazy person? 0.98

02:31:20.000 But it's like that, that's what you're, that's what you're taking in all day instead of your friends, instead of your life, and just having an experience in your neighborhood. 1.00

02:31:31.000 No, you're just, you're constantly looking at all the problems that are happening all over the world all the time.

02:31:39.000 And you don't get a break.

02:31:39.000 Yeah.

02:31:42.000 But it's better than being ignorant.

02:31:43.000 It's just like you have to find a way to weather whatever that psychological storm is and seek shelter and don't always just stay out there in it and just get bombarded by psychological hail.

02:31:57.000 That's kind of what it is.

02:31:58.000 You got to have a strong roof and stay inside sometimes.

02:32:01.000 Yeah.

02:32:03.000 This is a weird transition, but you said psychological hail.

02:32:07.000 It made me think of this project during World War II, the OSS did called a bat bomb.

02:32:13.000 Are you familiar with it?

02:32:14.000 No.

02:32:16.000 It just made me think of these things kind of raining down.

02:32:18.000 But I read about this in the Dirty Tricks Department.

02:32:20.000 But during World War II, there was this concept of how can we better target cities or buildings with our incendiary explosives?

02:32:30.000 We can drop bombs, but I mean, those aren't targeted.

02:32:32.000 They're just going to fall where they fall.

02:32:33.000 And if the wind's going the wrong way, they're not even going to hit the target that we want them to.

02:32:37.000 So this guy named Little Adams, he was working with the OSS.

02:32:41.000 He had the idea.

02:32:42.000 He had just gone to Carlsbad Caverns.

02:32:44.000 What if we get bats and we attach napalm to them?

02:32:47.000 And then we release these over Japanese cities.

02:32:50.000 The bats are going to roost into the buildings in these cities.

02:32:54.000 And then we can have the napalm time delayed so that it'll explode after a certain amount of time that we release them and it'll set fires to all these buildings.

02:33:01.000 So we have like targeted incendiaries instead of just random bombs falling.

02:33:05.000 So it sounds like kind of a crazy idea, but he happened to be friends with Eleanor Roosevelt because he had flown planes before and he had given her a ride in his plane and they kind of knew each other.

02:33:14.000 So he sent this kind of report on the bat bomb to Eleanor Roosevelt.

02:33:19.000 She gave it to her husband, President Roosevelt, who gave it to William Donovan, the head of the OSS, and with a note attached to the thing that he gave to Donovan, it said, this man is not a nut.

02:33:28.000 You know, take this seriously.

02:33:30.000 So Donovan, of course, he gives this to the research and development branch, Stanley Lovell, that I write about in my first book.

02:33:37.000 And it becomes this bat bomb project that now Lovell feels obligated to do because the president's saying we need to research this.

02:33:43.000 So they end up going to Carlsbad Caverns and to some caverns here in Texas.

02:33:47.000 And they scoop up a bunch of bats and they do a few tests with them.

02:33:51.000 They actually get a guy named Louis Pfizer who invented napalm to create tiny little incendiaries that you could strap to bats.

02:33:59.000 This is a little bit of a digression, but Pfizer had been at Harvard.

02:34:02.000 He was a chemist there.

02:34:03.000 And when he was inventing napalm, it was like a jellied gasoline.

02:34:08.000 He would do the tests on the soccer field at Harvard, just like in the middle of the campus.

02:34:12.000 That's where napalm was invented, just like in the middle of Harvard's campus.

02:34:15.000 These bombs would be exploding.

02:34:16.000 And people would get mad at him.

02:34:18.000 People would get mad, not because he was detonating these bombs, but because he was hogging the soccer fields and the drill sergeant needed it for practice.

02:34:25.000 And so there was like these disputes back and forth.

02:34:27.000 So he was hired by the OSS to create these tiny little incendiaries to strap to these bats.

02:34:33.000 So the OSS did a few experiments with this.

02:34:37.000 Before the incendiaries were strapped, they put like fake incendiaries on them.

02:34:41.000 The idea was to cool down these bats.

02:34:43.000 We're going to fly them in a plane over the desert, like out in Utah or somewhere.

02:34:47.000 And we're going to drop these bats and see if they actually kind of disperse.

02:34:51.000 It turns out that they were using Mexican free-tailed bats, which I don't think actually hibernate, but they travel south for the winter.

02:34:59.000 And so they cooled down these bats in this like artificial refrigerator, but apparently they had cooled them down too much.

02:35:05.000 So when they dropped them from the plane, they just like fell straight down to the ground and never woke up.

02:35:09.000 And so they just flattered across the desert.

02:35:11.000 So that was one of the tests.

02:35:14.000 Another of the tests, they wanted to do a live experiment where they had an actual bat and with an actual napalm bomb attached to it to see if it could like fly off or to see if it would actually like carry this weight.

02:35:24.000 But they had it in like somewhat of a controlled environment.

02:35:27.000 They cooled this bat down, put it in artificial hibernation.

02:35:31.000 And then they were taking pictures of it, you know, to see how everything operated.

02:35:35.000 But then the bat started kind of waking up and it flew off before they could grab it.

02:35:39.000 And it actually flew into a control tower and it burst into flame and the whole thing caught on fire and burned down.

02:35:44.000 So it turned out this thing actually worked.

02:35:46.000 But again, it was never deployed against Japan.

02:35:48.000 This is right at the end of World War II.

02:35:50.000 And, you know, they're already, the Manhattan Project was kind of successful at that point.

02:35:54.000 So there was no need for the bat bomb. 0.97

02:35:56.000 But if people are interested in that kind of story and how crazy that can get, that's in these books too.

02:36:01.000 Do you know about the proposal for the gay bomb? 1.00

02:36:04.000 That sounds familiar. 0.95

02:36:06.000 About releasing some kind of chemical that distracts people.

02:36:09.000 They'll be so infatuated with each other, these soldiers, that they can go.

02:36:13.000 Not just that, but then somehow or another, it would demoralize them and make them easy to conquer.

02:36:18.000 Huh.

02:36:18.000 Interesting.

02:36:19.000 Which didn't make any sense, especially historically when you consider the Spartans. 0.99

02:36:23.000 They were all gay and they were the craziest force ever. 1.00

02:36:25.000 That's not going to stop people. 0.99

02:36:27.000 Well, you know, that's actually one of the big inspirations for MKUltra, not the gay bomb, but the idea that we could use chemicals to defeat an enemy army. 0.93

02:36:35.000 So Sidney Gottley, before he was really running MKUltra experiments, he had attended a few conferences where some people would talk, this guy named Luther Green, who was part of the army.

02:36:46.000 And Luther Green was in charge of developing and experimenting with nerve agents, you know, that could incapacitate.

02:36:51.000 These are like some of the most potent agents that have ever been created.

02:36:54.000 A fraction of an ounce applied to your skin can be lethal.

02:36:57.000 So, he wanted to find a substance, Green did, that could mimic the effects of a nerve agent, like incapacitate someone without actually killing them.

02:37:06.000 His idea was that if we could get this substance and we can drop it over enemy territory, it could incapacitate these soldiers just through chemical warfare, but we wouldn't actually have to kill them.

02:37:15.000 They would be incapacitated for a certain amount of time, and then we could send the Marines in and they could gather up all these people and we can conquer this territory.

02:37:23.000 We can defeat this enemy army without actually having to kill anyone or for any of our people to be killed.

02:37:28.000 So, Stanley Lovell was really interested in this concept.

02:37:32.000 War without death was what they were talking about.

02:37:34.000 War without death.

02:37:35.000 We should use chemical weapons that just incapacitate people.

02:37:38.000 So, one of the things that got, I should say, Sidney Gottlieb, interested in investigating LSD was the fact that maybe this could be an incapacitant that we could use to basically eliminate an enemy army for the time being, and then we could go and conquer them without actually having to kill them ourselves.

02:37:54.000 So, he was trying to use it almost as a more ethical form of warfare where instead of killing someone, you just incapacitate them.

02:38:02.000 Wow.

02:38:07.000 I think we covered it all.

02:38:10.000 Your book's amazing.

02:38:11.000 I'm really excited that you put in the time to write it, and I can't wait to see what David Chase does with it and when it happens.

02:38:19.000 Let's do this again.

02:38:20.000 I'd love to.

02:38:21.000 I feel like we could talk about this stuff for hours and hours and hours.

02:38:23.000 There's a lot of stuff to go into, too.

02:38:25.000 Yeah, is there an audiobook of this?

02:38:27.000 There is an audio book.

02:38:27.000 Yeah, so did you read it?

02:38:29.000 I didn't read it.

02:38:30.000 They got a professional for that. 1.00

02:38:32.000 Oh, man, you would kill it.

02:38:33.000 You have a great voice.

02:38:34.000 Thank you.

02:38:36.000 But the nice thing is, it's the same narrator who did both my first and second book.

02:38:40.000 So there's some kind of continuity between that.

02:38:42.000 Oh, okay.

02:38:42.000 So you're happy with it.

02:38:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:38:43.000 It turned out really, he did a really great job.

02:38:45.000 So, and the other book is The Dirty Tricks Department, Stanley Lowell, The OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II: Secret Warfare.

02:38:56.000 I appreciate it.

02:38:57.000 Thank you.

02:38:58.000 It was awesome.

02:38:58.000 I really appreciate it.

02:38:59.000 It was really fun.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 27, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle

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