In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, host John Rocha sits down with the author of Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, to discuss MK-Ultra, the CIA's secret mind control program, and the tragic consequences of it.
00:00:24.000Yes, 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.
00:00:32.000Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject.
00:00:34.000So 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.
00:01:18.000One 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.
00:01:30.000The victims of MKUltra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically really nothing much came out of it.
00:01:36.000They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra, they didn't really face any consequences.
00:01:41.000And 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?
00:01:50.000How 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?
00:02:33.000And the CIA was very interested in these people because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad.
00:02:37.000Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing.
00:02:41.000So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community.
00:02:45.000And 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.
00:02:57.000So prior to the CIA, the U.S. had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II.
00:03:03.000And that was the U.S. kind of intelligence agency.
00:03:06.000And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development Branch.
00:03:12.000And 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.
00:03:25.000My first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovell and that group.
00:03:29.000And 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.
00:03:39.000And 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.
00:03:48.000And 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.
00:03:56.000He didn't know anything about mind control.
00:03:58.000So 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.
00:04:04.000And so I thought, that's the connection between Stanley Lovell, my first book, and now this one.
00:04:08.000So that naturally led me into becoming interested in MKUltra.
00:04:11.000So a lot of the things that Sidney Gottlieb was up to with MKUltra, his blueprint was basically Stanley Lovell.
00:04:17.000Just imagine being a government agency, the CIA, the AOSS, whatever it is.
00:04:22.000And then someone says, hey, figure out if we can control people's minds.
00:04:26.000And that's where you start from, right?
00:04:28.000It's not like Sidney Gottlieb was some expert hypnotist or really was a psychologist or really understood human minds.
00:04:36.000No, they started a program going, what can we do?
00:04:51.000So there are a couple programs that precede it.
00:04:53.000I 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.
00:05:03.000They would inject it into cigarettes and have people smoke it.
00:05:19.000And 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.
00:05:29.000And at the same time, he's overseeing these experiments about dosing people with the THC.
00:05:33.000So it's very ironic that that was the case.
00:05:36.000It'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.
00:05:57.000There's so much negative impact to what they did.
00:06:01.000On top of what they did, they essentially created Ted Kaczynski.
00:06:07.000I'm a little skeptical of whether MKUltra is connected to that.
00:06:10.000Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments that did at Harvard.
00:06:14.000And I don't imagine they would do that without the involvement of the government.
00:06:18.000Without them wanting to have access to research.
00:06:20.000If you have people at Harvard that are doing like really critical LSD studies on people, humiliation studies.
00:06:26.000Yeah, well, with him in particular, the study that he was involved in was Henry Murray, was the guy who was running that.
00:06:33.000It'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.
00:06:41.000Now, Henry Murray, who ran that experiment with Ted Kaczynski, he did have connections to the intelligence community.
00:06:46.000I just am not convinced that he was funded by MKUltra or something.
00:06:50.000His connection, he has a couple of connections.
00:06:53.000One connection that I mentioned in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, he was tasked with creating psychological profiles of German leaders like Hitler.
00:07:02.000And 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.
00:07:08.000So 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.
00:07:19.000So Henry Murray, Henry Murray said that Hitler had a very feminine kind of personality.
00:07:24.000He was on the border between masculine and feminine.
00:07:27.000And, you know, at least that's what Henry Murray is saying in this psychological profile.
00:07:30.000Stanley 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.
00:07:41.000We 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.
00:07:49.000Hitler'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.
00:07:56.000That never actually happened, but so Henry Murray is kind of connected to the OSS in that sense.
00:08:00.000And then later he developed some personality tests for the OSS and CIA.
00:08:06.000I 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.
00:08:15.000Did 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?
00:08:59.000According to the Cleveland Clinic, the syndrome can disrupt the process that drives puberty and manifest in symptoms that include undescended testicles and a micropenis.
00:10:00.000There 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.
00:10:12.000But there are, you know, the British are doing LSD experiments on their personnel.
00:10:17.000And, you know, it's just some of the stories that come out of it are very silly and really just insane.
00:10:24.000But 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.
00:11:55.000Yeah, 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.
00:12:02.000What I don't understand about that is they were trying to kill him.
00:12:05.000So if they couldn't get poison into his cigars, why'd they think they could get acid?
00:12:08.000Well, the original plan was to discredit him, and then the later plan was to kill him.
00:12:14.000So there were a couple original plans to discredit him.
00:12:16.000One is to sneak him LSD to make him appear insane so that his people will lose faith in him.
00:12:21.000Another one was to slip what's called thallium salts into his shoes.
00:12:42.000So Sidney Gottlieb was kind of involved in some of these that I talk about in the book.
00:12:45.000Another one, so you have the LSD, you have the depilatory.
00:12:48.000Another 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.
00:13:05.000And so, you know, the idea was to spread this around Cuba and have people resent Castro for indulging in all these things.
00:13:17.000So 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.
00:13:26.000So some of the main assassination attempts on Castro involved his hobby of ocean diving.
00:13:34.000And one idea was that, what if we get this really beautiful shell that he would just be unable to pass up?
00:13:41.000It would be so beautiful that if anyone swam by it, they would obviously want to pick it up.
00:13:44.000We 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.
00:13:51.000So when he's underwater, he's going to swim by this.
00:13:53.000He's going to see this beautiful shell.
00:13:54.000He's going to pick it up and it's going to explode.
00:13:56.000But it turns out they couldn't really figure out a shell big enough that would catch his interest, you know, so that never happened.
00:14:03.000Another concept with his scuba diving hobby is that what if we gift him a scuba diving suit?
00:14:08.000There are people kind of negotiating for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners.
00:14:12.000So 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?
00:14:24.000But it turns out the guy that they wanted to give him the suit had already given him a diving suit.
00:14:28.000And so it was like, oh, we can't use him anymore.
00:16:32.000It 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.
00:16:38.000And it turns out after they smoked this, they would talk about like 40% more words per minute.
00:16:43.000But it's not that this guaranteed the truth.
00:17:05.000And 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.
00:17:16.000One of the main people who is running these studies is a guy named Harris Isbel at the Lexington Narcotic Farm.
00:17:23.000This is where drug addicts could go to get treatment for their addiction.
00:17:30.000And 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.
00:17:38.000And then Isbel would write reports back to Gottlieb.
00:17:40.000So he tried psilocybin when that came out, LSD, but also stuff like, I mean, heroin.
00:17:46.000The 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.
00:17:57.000So 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.
00:18:05.000But 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.
00:18:16.000Well, 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.
00:18:25.000It's called the narcotic farm because they're supposed to be getting off drugs.
00:18:28.000You know, they're supposed to be curing them of their addiction.
00:18:31.000At the same time, they're giving them all these drugs to test them out.
00:18:35.000And then as a reward for participating in these trials, they had two options.
00:18:39.000Either 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.
00:18:49.000They were supposed to be getting off drugs, and yet you're incentivizing them to participate in these drug trials by giving them drugs.
00:20:27.000But 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.
00:20:40.000We put it into our sponsor perplexity.
00:20:42.000Heroin created as a morphine treatment.
00:20:44.000Originally 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.
00:21:49.000Did Bayer decide not to release acetaminophen during the same time period?
00:21:58.000During 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.
00:22:06.000So she took a bunch of acetaminophen, she took a bunch of Tylenol and kept taking it.
00:22:10.000And apparently didn't realize how dangerous it is to overdose on Tylenol, and she died of liver poison.
00:22:16.000Yeah, and I was like, oh my God, how many people die of liver poisoning?
00:22:19.000What's like 500 a year in this country?
00:22:21.000It's like acetaminophen, it's scary stuff.
00:22:24.000It was not being actively held back by Bayer at the same period that it promoted heroin and aspen.
00:22:29.000It was simply not yet recognized or marketed the way those drugs were.
00:22:32.000And its development adoption followed a different path.
00:22:35.000Existing historical accounts focus more on scientific uncertainty and competing drugs than on deliberate suppression campaign by Bayer.
00:22:44.000I 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.
00:23:06.000Despite their later recognized toxicity and acetaminophen's advantages, better safety profile at therapeutic doses was not clearly distinguished at first.
00:23:20.000I 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.
00:23:29.000But 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.
00:23:37.000So 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.
00:23:55.000Well, I mean, they gave me this truth drug.
00:23:57.000Of course, I'm going to have to say this, so I can't be blamed.
00:24:11.000They did the same thing with hypnotism, too.
00:24:13.000The hypnotism turned out to be not that effective in, at least in an interrogation.
00:24:17.000But if you could convince someone that they had been hypnotized, even if they hadn't, then that could be effective.
00:24:23.000So 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.
00:24:31.000But he put forward what's called the hypnotic situation.
00:24:34.000Not hypnotism, but the hypnotic situation.
00:24:37.000So for instance, you pretend to hypnotize someone, the person you're interrogating, and they know they're not hypnotized.
00:24:44.000They obviously can tell that you're not controlling me, nothing's happening.
00:24:47.000However, you start saying things like, you know, I'm hypnotizing you and your hands are getting warmer.
00:24:52.000And they're going to think to themselves, no, they're not.
00:24:54.000But 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.
00:25:02.000So after a certain period of time, they start thinking to themselves, maybe I am being hypnotized.
00:25:07.000Like the things that he's saying are actually happening.
00:25:09.000And 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?
00:25:20.000It'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.
00:25:46.000You 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.
00:25:55.000And so that kind of definitely puts a damper on a lot of things that are going on.
00:25:58.000Before 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.
00:26:09.000But they would just be dosing like the CIA coffee pot and see what happens to people who are taking drinks of it.
00:26:13.000Just 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.
00:26:27.000Therefore, 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.
00:27:02.000But 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?
00:29:12.000And it's like, oh, my God, the rabbit hole is so deep.
00:29:15.000I don't have enough battery in my flashlight to take you down this rabbit hole.
00:29:18.000That's one of the things with MKUltra just in general.
00:29:20.000I 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.
00:29:30.000And the MKUltra stuff, they actually did this.
00:29:31.000They were dosing people using prostitutes behind a one-way mirror.
00:29:35.000George White sitting on a toilet watching this happen.
00:29:38.000I mean, even besides drugs, MKUltra is involved in a lot of psychological experiments.
00:29:58.000He is a psychiatrist up in Montreal in Canada, working at what's called the Allen Memorial Institute.
00:30:04.000And Gottlieb wanted to expand MKUltra besides drugs because he already had a lot of people doing drug experiments.
00:30:10.000So he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques that could be used to manipulate a person.
00:30:14.000So not just in an interrogation, but can we actually like control a person's personality?
00:30:18.000Can we make them behave in certain ways, make them do something?
00:30:21.000So the idea that Ewan Cameron had come up with before the CIA is involved, I should mention, Ewan Cameron is a behaviorist.
00:30:28.000So he thinks that all behavior is a result of nurture, not nature.
00:30:34.000So it's the environmental input that causes a person to behave a certain way.
00:30:38.000And 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.
00:30:48.000So his idea to bring someone down to the blank slate was to induce enough stress that they forgot who they formerly were.
00:30:54.000And so you reduce them to the blank slate.
00:30:57.000And then the CIA is really interested in if you could do that, then you could form them into whatever.
00:31:01.000So 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.
00:31:08.000And so he performs a lot of experiments.
00:31:11.000His most famous one is called Psychic Driving, where he was doing a therapy session, quote unquote therapy, with one of his patients.
00:31:20.000And 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.
00:31:28.000And 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.
00:31:36.000When 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.
00:31:44.000And Cameron thought, oh, you have a negative reaction to that.
00:31:47.000So he'd rewind it again and again and again.
00:31:50.000And 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.
00:31:57.000So 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.
00:32:09.000All their waking day, they basically are strapped into a headphone that is playing this negative message and it will break them down over time.
00:32:15.000That's how you induce enough stress to break them down to the blank slate.
00:32:19.000And then you can record a positive psychic driving message to build them up into whatever image you want them to be.
00:33:08.000However, 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.
00:34:19.000It's not that the CIA told Cameron to do this.
00:34:22.000He'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.
00:34:32.000The CIA reads his article about psychic driving and they think this is the kind of thing we're interested in.
00:34:38.000So 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.
00:34:49.000And while they're in these chemical comas, he would put an audio device next to their pillow playing these psychic driving messages.
00:34:55.000And he would put them in sensory deprivation chambers for weeks.
00:34:58.000You know, they would have goggles over their eyes, earmuffs on their ears.
00:35:01.000They would have cardboard tubes over their arms so that they couldn't feel anything.
00:35:04.000And they would just be in a room for weeks on end.
00:35:07.000The idea, again, being to induce enough stress so that it breaks them down so that you can eventually build them up.
00:35:12.000But 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.
00:35:23.000The sad thing about her especially is she had been a resident in training at the Allen Memorial Institute under Ewan Cameron.
00:35:30.000So she had been training to be a doctor under him, and she had administered some of these techniques, including electric shock.
00:35:37.000We 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.
00:35:48.000They can't go to the bathroom on their own.
00:35:49.000They can't put on their own clothes or anything like that.
00:35:52.000So 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.
00:36:01.000She ended up having almost kind of a psychotic break herself.
00:36:06.000She became anorexic and she failed her neurology exams.
00:36:09.000And so she went into a really deep depression.
00:36:13.000She was admitted to the hospital, to another hospital.
00:36:16.000Ewan 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.
00:36:23.000So she ends up going back to the Allen Memorial as a patient.
00:36:27.000And she thought to herself that it's going to be okay.
00:36:31.000They're not going to do the electric shock to me because you had to sign a consent form for that to happen to you.
00:36:36.000The people who are signing the consent forms, they don't know how bad it's actually going to be.
00:36:41.000But she knows, I haven't signed a consent form, so they can't do that to me.
00:36:44.000But 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.
00:36:50.000And so they ended up doing this electric shock treatment on her.
00:36:55.000And afterwards, she would be babbling, incontinent, couldn't put on her makeup or clothes or anything.
00:37:01.000Eventually, she would call her mother after some of these treatments.
00:37:04.000And her mother knew something was going on because she just became more and more incoherent as time went on.
00:37:09.000So the mother sent Mary's sister, Margaret, in order to go to the Allen Memorial to basically bust her out of there.
00:37:14.000So the sister walked in the front door and said, I'm not leaving until I see Mary.
00:37:18.000You know, I'm going to call the police if you don't let me through.
00:37:20.000So 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.
00:37:28.000It takes several days for her to figure out where she actually is, and then she gets busted out of there.
00:37:33.000So it's a very— Is it reversible in any way?
00:37:36.000Was it— It's— In her case, I'm not exactly sure.
00:37:40.000She went on to have a little bit of a career, but she eventually attempted to commit suicide later again.
00:37:45.000Then her and several of the victims of Ewan Cameron's experiments in the 1980s, they ended up suing the CIA for supporting Ewan Cameron.
00:37:54.000And 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.
00:38:04.000So 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.
00:38:11.000And that's basically the basis for my book.
00:38:12.000I found thousands of pages of these depositions.
00:38:15.000That's just verbatim transcript of these people talking about either what they did or what was done to them.
00:38:19.000And 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.
00:38:29.000Oh, well, so it was actually settled out of court before it went to trial.
00:38:33.000So the plaintiffs, the CIA gave the plaintiffs $750,000 to be split among them.
00:38:39.000But after attorney's fees and everything, it doesn't really amount to much anyway.
00:38:43.000And so, you know, they settled out of court.
00:38:45.000They got a little bit of money, but it never went to trial.
00:38:47.000And 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.
00:38:55.000And 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.
00:39:07.000And so I was rooting around the Library of Congress and happened to find them.
00:39:10.000So that's how I found basically the basis for what this book is.
00:39:15.000I 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.
00:39:28.000In fact, it was destroying people's minds.
00:40:16.000I mean, I've never seen anything to indicate that he was on drugs, but he definitely had a, almost like a messiah complex.
00:40:22.000He 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.
00:40:29.000He was going to be the next Sigmund Freud.
00:40:30.000He really had delusions of grandeur, just like I think Jolly West did as well.
00:40:34.000And so I think that drove a lot of what he was doing.
00:40:37.000His patients were just a means to his own end.
00:40:39.000They'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.
00:40:49.000I'm just always suspicious of something that has that, someone has that kind of access to all sorts of compounds.
00:40:57.000And 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.
00:41:06.000I would be very curious to see if he was interested in anything like that.
00:41:10.000Yeah, I don't remember specifically for him in that case.
00:41:13.000I mean, many of the people who are either running the sub-projects or approving them, like Sidney Gottlieb, Gottlieb took a lot of LSD.
00:41:22.000When 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.
00:41:28.000So Sidney Gottlieb took it multiple times before he ever even gave it to people to understand what it was like.
00:41:35.000And 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.
00:41:47.000And for anyone listening who knows much about the Frank Olson incident, Frank Olson is a guy that would later be dosed with LSD.
00:41:53.000He would go out the hotel window in New York.
00:41:56.000And Harold Abramson is the guy who Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook, they took to New York to get treatment from Harold Abramson afterwards.
00:42:07.000The 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.
00:42:22.000I 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.
00:42:34.000And 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.
00:42:51.000Like, what's the psychological profile of that guy?
00:42:54.000Because he's obviously mentally ill, which is fascinating, right?
00:42:57.000It's fascinating that a mentally ill person is working on a mind experiment program.
00:43:01.000Because there's no way he's not mentally ill.
00:43:03.000Like, 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.
00:44:23.000It 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.
00:44:36.000None of this was happening, but she was just having these delusions that someone was out to get her.
00:44:40.000That's kind of a recurring theme that you see in these people who are unwittingly dosed.
00:44:44.000One 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.
00:44:51.000But Wayne Ritchie was this, he was a guard at Alcatraz for a while.
00:44:56.000And 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.
00:45:05.000And that night, he was drinking, you know, some of the punch at this party.
00:46:02.000After a day or two, he kind of sobers up and kind of awakens from this fog.
00:46:08.000And he doesn't know what happened to him at that point.
00:46:11.000He ends up losing his job, losing his friends.
00:46:14.000For 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.
00:46:22.000And two things in particular stuck out to him.
00:46:24.000One was George White, whom he knew back in the days when he was a U.S. Marshal.
00:46:29.000And the other one was a description of LSD.
00:46:31.000And 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.
00:46:41.000And 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.
00:46:55.000So he was there at the Christmas party.
00:46:59.000Imagine being that guy reading that article 30 years later and realizing this guy ruined my life for fun.
00:47:06.000So 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.
00:48:43.000Ewan Cameron was the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association.
00:48:51.000He was like the most famous psychiatrist in the world, and he was being funded by this.
00:48:55.000So 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.
00:49:17.000Gottlieb is funding people, and he's not even funding them directly.
00:49:19.000In most cases, what's happening is he's using cut-out organizations.
00:49:23.000So he's giving the money to one of them is called the Gettschaker Fund.
00:49:27.000One of them is called the National Institutes of Mental Health.
00:49:30.000And 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.
00:49:41.000So the CIA would transfer the funds to the society, who would then transfer it to the researcher.
00:49:46.000In many cases, the researchers didn't even know they were being funded by the CIA.
00:49:50.000They just thought, oh, I got a grant from this organization.
00:49:53.000So they don't even know that their true patron is Sidney Gottlieb and MKUltra.
00:49:56.000They just know, oh, they want me to do these experiments.
00:49:58.000And in many cases, they're allowed to still publish their work.
00:50:02.000So, you know, they're publishing this.
00:50:03.000Nothing's changed that much from what they were doing before.
00:50:06.000But 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.
00:50:15.000What was your journey personally like, both researching these subjects and then writing books about it?
00:50:22.000Because what was your opinion on all these things before this?
00:50:29.000And how much of it has shaped your worldview?
00:50:34.000So 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.
00:50:43.000What was your perspective before getting involved in any of this material?
00:50:47.000Well, 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.
00:50:56.000But 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.
00:51:08.000And so that kind of lowered my barriers to thinking that, oh, people are crazy here.
00:51:12.000Like, oh, the government does actually perform these crazy, you know, projects.
00:51:17.000One of the ones that really lowered my barriers to that for the first book was called Operation Fantasia.
00:51:22.000And 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.
00:51:30.000Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of this guy named Ed Salinger.
00:51:34.000And he had been a businessman who had done imports and exports with Tokyo in Tokyo.
00:51:43.000The OSS wanted to exploit that by trying to find a way we can demoralize the Japanese.
00:51:50.000You know a lot about the Japanese psyche, the idea was, Ed Salinger.
00:51:53.000So 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.
00:52:00.000We need to find a way that we can basically use psychological warfare on them.
00:52:03.000So his idea is that in the Shinto religion, there are these kind of mystical figures called kitsuni.
00:52:11.000And in many cases, they take the form of like a fox, a glowing fox.
00:52:16.000And oftentimes they represent portents of doom.
00:52:18.000So, you know, if you see one of these kitsuni, it's an indication that something bad is about to happen.
00:52:23.000And 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.
00:52:31.000Surely it means we're going to lose the war.
00:52:33.000Therefore, we might as well lay down our arms right now.
00:52:36.000And 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.
00:52:47.000He 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.
00:53:26.000So 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.
00:53:33.000So they went to the Central Park Zoo and they got a raccoon and they painted it and kept it under lock and key.
00:53:37.000And it turns out after a few days of ordinary raccoon shenanigans, the paint stayed on.
00:53:41.000So they thought, okay, this might have something going for it.
00:53:44.000So 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.
00:53:53.000Because 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.
00:54:20.000And so he decided, well, that's not going to work.
00:54:21.000So his next plan, this is one of the craziest things I found from my first book.
00:54:26.000The next plan was, we are going to stuff a fox, a dead fox, just taxidermy it, have this fox body.
00:54:33.000We're going to paint it with this glowing paint.
00:54:34.000We can drape a cloth over it and paint glowing bones on it to make it look like a skeleton.
00:54:39.000And we're going to put a human skull over this fox head to make it look as if it's a human skull.
00:54:43.000Because apparently this was like an even more potent version of the kitsuni myth that was going around in Japan.
00:54:49.000So we're going to put this human skull on this taxonomy glowing fox.
00:54:53.000We're going to have the jaw open and close as if it's talking.
00:54:56.000And 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.
00:55:02.000The 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.
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00:56:58.000So when you research stuff like that, all of a sudden it's like, well, anything is kind of possible.
00:57:03.000The problem is most people haven't researched it.
00:57:05.000So 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.
00:57:32.000But 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.
00:57:46.000And you almost have to get lucky to find out about them.
00:57:50.000You 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?
00:58:10.000So 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.
00:58:22.000And that kind of led to the church committee in 1975 and also the Pike Committee in the House.
00:58:28.000But 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.
00:58:36.000And 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.
00:58:46.000And 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.
00:59:09.000But 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.
00:59:17.000Therefore, they weren't incinerated in this purge, and so they survived.
00:59:21.000So Marks filed that information request.
00:59:23.000These boxes were found, and then they were released.
00:59:26.000And 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.
00:59:35.000But 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.
00:59:45.000Which leads you to consider what would we know if those documents hadn't been discovered.
01:00:21.000We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, even though I don't know if that name was specifically used within these committee publications.
01:00:38.000In 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.
01:00:46.000Out of all the MKUltra sub-projects, you know, a lot of them started in 1953.
01:00:51.000Many of them were done by 1963, but several continued into the late 60s.
01:00:56.000But he, after this was done, he wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlieb.
01:00:59.000And in the depositions that I found, the attorneys confront Gottlieb about this, and they ask him, what was in that letter?
01:01:04.000And Gottlieb says, oh, you know, he had a flair for writing.
01:01:51.000Yeah, 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.
01:02:00.000Not that anything ever happened to them.
01:02:01.000They didn't face any consequences for it.
01:02:03.000However, 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.
01:02:13.000So she didn't know it was against protocol or whatever.
01:02:17.000But she was interviewed later as part of a CIA investigation into the destruction of the files.
01:02:21.000And she does say a little bit about what she thinks were in the files.
01:02:25.000She says it was some of his personal papers, and there was secret and secret-sensitive files in there.
01:02:30.000We don't really have a great idea about what it could be.
01:02:33.000Although 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.
01:02:48.000And so I'm assuming that a lot of those files consisted of George White's personal reports on what was going on.
01:02:57.000Now, when you get deeper and deeper into this stuff, how much has it shaped your worldview?
01:03:06.000A 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.
01:03:24.000But after Watergate, after MKUltra, after the Vietnam War, it starts to seem as if the government is infringing on those civil liberties.
01:03:33.000Instead of being the protector of it, in many cases, it's infringing on them.
01:03:37.000Not 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.
01:03:45.000I think the constitutional system of government that we have is ingenious, the fact that we have checks and balances and the separation of powers.
01:03:52.000However, you have to enable the separate branches of government to be able to check the other branches.
01:04:00.000For 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.
01:04:10.000So 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.
01:04:20.000I 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.
01:04:28.000And he says, No, I don't want to hear it.
01:04:32.000So 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?
01:04:39.000So 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.
01:04:51.000However, it's not even clear how effective those are.
01:04:57.000One 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.
01:05:08.000One of the main themes throughout this book is what I call the vicious cycle of secrecy.
01:05:14.000So an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that kind of leads to what I see as this vicious cycle.
01:05:19.000Secrecy 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.
01:05:26.000So secrecy leads to plausible deniability.
01:05:28.000Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior, like MKUltra.
01:05:32.000If 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.
01:05:38.000So secrecy to plausible deniability, plausible deniability to reckless behavior.
01:05:43.000Reckless behavior in many instances leads to embarrassment.
01:05:47.000It's almost inevitable for many of these projects that they get found out.
01:05:52.000This 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.
01:06:00.000It eventually got leaked to Seymour Hirsch, who published it on the front page of the New York Times.
01:06:04.000So reckless behavior leads to embarrassment, but embarrassment leads to secrecy.
01:06:08.000Because now that we've been found out, we got to make sure that never happens again.
01:06:14.000So 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.
01:06:23.000Then you realize, well, who's running against them?
01:07:20.000The approval rating for Congress is like in the teens.
01:07:23.000So how is it we have such a divergence between the re-election rate and the approval rating?
01:07:27.000It has to do with the kind of electoral system.
01:07:31.000You 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.
01:07:40.000Because if you're in a, you know, a district that is 90% Trump voters, the Republican is going to win the general election.
01:07:59.000Well, 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.
01:08:08.000In 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.
01:08:18.000And so they're going to elect basically whoever it is because the general election is a foregone conclusion.
01:08:24.000So 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.
01:08:38.000Then 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.
01:08:52.000So some kind of reform like that, I think, is how you better facilitate this check between the different branches.
01:09:01.000But even then, I don't know if it motivates the cream of the crop.
01:09:05.000Because I just, I think most people would rather be on the outside, like most wealthy people that are successful.
01:09:11.000They'd rather fund a candidate that suits their needs.
01:09:20.000I mean, that would be the single, probably biggest help.
01:09:22.000And 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.
01:11:04.000I 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.
01:13:05.000Some 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.
01:13:56.000Well, 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.
01:14:04.000Or you didn't complete your residency.
01:14:18.000Like, 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.
01:15:13.000But 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?
01:16:19.000And then the official story was they had done drugs and they laid down, fell asleep on train tracks.
01:16:27.000The parents funded an autopsy and the autopsy showed that they'd been stabbed multiple times.
01:16:34.000So then there's an investigation comes through.
01:16:36.000And 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.
01:16:50.000And 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.
01:17:03.000He winds up going to testify, gets murdered on his way to the trial with George Bush's phone number in his pocket.
01:17:13.000The whole story is like completely crazy.
01:18:30.000Learns 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.
01:19:20.000Well, I just think without oversight, there's cowboys.
01:19:23.000And 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.
01:19:41.000And I think that's the dream for a lot of these guys.
01:19:43.000They realize it's a completely corrupt system and it's corrupt from the top down and there's ways to make money.
01:19:50.000And 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.
01:20:03.000And 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.
01:20:27.000But that's the kind of people that want that kind of a job.
01:20:29.000And 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.
01:20:48.000I've mentioned external oversight, like Congress checking the executive.
01:20:51.000But 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.
01:21:01.000Actually, not that many because it's very heavily compartmentalized, but some people still do know about it.
01:21:06.000So 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?
01:21:15.000Why don't they say, pull Sidney Gottlieb aside and just have a conversation with him?
01:21:19.000Do you think what you're doing here is all right?
01:21:21.000I think they're terrified about their career.
01:21:24.000There's a specific person within the CIA during this time.
01:21:28.000That's his job, the Inspector General.
01:21:30.000So 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.
01:21:39.000But I found an interview that he did later.
01:21:43.000There's this guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick.
01:21:45.000He was the inspector general during the 1950s when this was going on.
01:21:48.000And he did an investigation into MKUltra in 1957 as it was going on.
01:22:37.000So even, you know, there's problems with external oversight, but also internal oversight.
01:22:43.000The internal oversight has to be able to bring that kind of stuff up.
01:22:46.000And another lack of internal oversight is the fact that Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Helms, they could destroy all these files with no repercussions.
01:24:47.000So in addition to external oversight, there's got to be some internal oversight that can provide a check and prevent that from happening.
01:24:52.000Or if it does happen, at least deter others from doing the same thing by holding them accountable.
01:24:58.000It'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.
01:25:10.000They required checks and balances in order to have a government that doesn't sink into tyranny.
01:25:15.000You 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.
01:25:23.000And they knew that this was a, and they really painstakingly structured this system of government that they thought would protect against it.
01:25:32.000Just they didn't factor into account special interest groups and the stock market and money.
01:25:40.000It expanded exponentially into so many different factions and so many different influencing bodies that it's almost completely out of control.
01:25:48.000But essentially, they knew what could happen that has proven to be accurate, which is really kind of fascinating.
01:26:00.000And I quote James Madison, actually, when I talk about oversight, because his specific verbiage is, you know, auxiliary cautions are necessary, auxiliary precautions.
01:26:09.000You know, humans, he says, men aren't angels, therefore auxiliary precautions are necessary to keep their ambitions in check, which means external oversight.
01:26:21.000You know, I wonder where this goes, because it's going in the wrong direction.
01:26:28.000From the founding fathers to today, it's going in the wrong direction.
01:26:31.000It'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.
01:26:52.000There's so many different influences that aren't based on the greater good of the American people.
01:27:01.000And that's sort of overwhelmed all of our policies, overwhelmed all of our systems of government.
01:27:07.000And 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.
01:27:14.000So this is this constant psychological game.
01:27:41.000I will say a counterintuitive point that I think is important to also make, though, is Daniel Shore was a CBS news correspondent.
01:27:50.000And he's the guy who initially broke the story on CIA assassination attempts on foreign leaders.
01:27:55.000And he has this quote about how the U.S. has a, you know, there's a pendulum that swings between security and liberty.
01:28:03.000You know, the more security you have, the more liberty basically you have to take away.
01:28:08.000If 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.
01:28:15.000At least you wouldn't be able to do anything bad because there would be a policeman in every bedroom, basically.
01:28:21.000On the opposite side, if the pendulum swings too far the opposite way, complete liberty, well, you have no security because anyone could do anything.
01:28:27.000So there's this constant tension between security and liberty that swings throughout American history.
01:28:32.000And an important thing to keep in mind is that I don't think you want that pendulum to stop.
01:28:37.000You actually want a little bit of tension between that.
01:28:40.000You want, in other words, you want the press and Congress to be exposing abuses, you know, because human nature is not going to change.
01:28:51.000People are going to try to abuse the system in whatever it is.
01:28:55.000However, 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.
01:29:04.000So 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.
01:29:13.000I wish the abuses didn't happen, but at the same time, the abuses are going to happen no matter what.
01:29:18.000Therefore, the exposure of the abuses is a good sign.
01:29:21.000It's a sign that the system is actually working as intended because the abuses are being exposed.
01:29:26.000One 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.
01:29:35.000It might seem like that's utopia, but that's the day that you have lost all of your liberties.
01:29:43.000I 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.
01:30:02.000They ultimately have to be recognized by the New York Times or by mainstream media publications.
01:30:06.000But they're not the ones who break a lot of these stories.
01:30:08.000A 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.
01:30:27.000And then they started doing it on their own.
01:30:30.000This is the new function that social media has where you have these accounts that break news stories all the time.
01:30:37.000And 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.
01:30:47.000And then they are more trustworthy oftentimes than corporate media, which is really kind of scary, but also fascinating.
01:31:01.000There'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?
01:31:10.000And 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.
01:31:18.000And then a month later it's in the Washington Post.
01:31:22.000It's interesting because it's almost like this need exists.
01:31:27.000It's not being fulfilled by mainstream media because mainstream media is captured by corporate interests.
01:31:33.000So in order to have this information come out, the world gives us this new platform and that's social media.
01:31:40.000And social media distributes all this stuff and then you have to sort through what's real, what's foreign governments making up fake stories.
01:31:48.000And that's the other side of it because the algorithm can push something, but it doesn't necessarily push truth.
01:31:58.000Well, that's the beautiful thing about Twitter.
01:32:00.000And when Elon solved that issue with community, I don't necessarily say solved.
01:32:05.000It's not solved, but it certainly made it a lot easier to understand what's going on.
01:32:10.000Because there's oftentimes there's some outrageous video clip, like, oh my God, can you believe the Democrats are doing this?
01:32:16.000And 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.
01:32:24.000You know, I mean, there's a lot of that stuff happens where people get outraged and someone posts something.
01:32:29.000And then I always go to the original account that posts it.
01:32:45.000You 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.
01:33:00.000It's like, where's the origin of this thing?
01:35:05.000And he had used the quote because he was quoting, he was talking about when he was in Europe at the end of the war.
01:35:11.000He 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.
01:35:19.000So this must be the origin of the quote.
01:35:21.000Then what are all these other books quoting?
01:35:23.000So finally, that interlibrary loan comes in and I get it.
01:35:27.000And it basically says the quote, but it's, you know, it's a little bit different.
01:35:31.000And it's referring to Donovan again and not just OSS guys in general.
01:35:57.000That's the amount of work you have to do.
01:35:58.000Well, kudos to you for doing that work, right?
01:36:01.000That's why people like you are so important, that you chased that whole story down to the end.
01:36:07.000If 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.
01:36:15.000So that's the book that I originally found the quote in.
01:36:17.000So if they want to go down the rabbit hole, they can follow his book to that book, to that book, to that book.
01:36:35.000You know, what was the original story?
01:36:38.000Yeah, 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.
01:36:52.000Like 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.
01:37:01.000It'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.
01:37:20.000And 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.
01:37:30.000I'll give an example in this book of a psychologist named Leon Festinger.
01:37:34.000He wrote this book called When Prophecy Fails.
01:37:37.000And it's a really fascinating story where he was looking in a newspaper and he saw an announcement for the end of the world.
01:37:43.000There 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.
01:38:07.000So he decides to embed himself in this cult.
01:38:09.000Basically, they knew he was a psychologist, but they said, yeah, sure, come on by.
01:38:13.000So 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.
01:38:23.000So obviously, there wasn't even a light rain.
01:38:29.000Some people actually do end up leaving the cult afterwards, but many people stay, especially the people who had sunk many costs into the cult.
01:38:37.000They had abandoned their families to join this.
01:38:47.000And now, Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance.
01:38:50.000So the idea that you're holding two irreconcilable views in your mind at the same time.
01:38:55.000So 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.
01:39:09.000How do we reconcile the fact that these two things contradict each other, but we have to believe both of them?
01:39:13.000So Festinger was interested in how they would do this.
01:39:16.000There were a couple rationalizations originally.
01:39:18.000One was, well, maybe God meant it in a figurative sense, not a literal sense.
01:39:23.000Maybe 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.
01:39:29.000But then they said, no, no, we actually thought it was going to be a literal flood.
01:39:32.000So he's in the middle of their discussions when they're rationalizing this.
01:39:35.000And they eventually come upon the conclusion God was going to destroy the world.
01:39:39.000We were right to believe that he was going to do that.
01:39:42.000But 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.
01:39:51.000So the fact that we believed that the world was going to be destroyed is the reason why the world wasn't destroyed.
01:39:57.000So the evidence against them becomes evidence for them.
01:39:59.000We know we are right because the world wasn't destroyed because, you know, that proves that God was taking mercy on us.
01:40:40.000But of course you remember that, but God created you and your memories last Thursday.
01:40:43.000So of course you would think that there was time before last Thursday because God implanted those memories in you last Thursday.
01:40:49.000In other words, this is just a non-falsifiable belief.
01:40:51.000You can't prove it wrong, but that doesn't mean it's right.
01:40:54.000So 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.
01:41:09.000And it's not, it's, you know, people typically associate rationalization with religion or this kind of cult behavior like this group I explained.
01:41:17.000But actually, I'm a historian of science and actually plays an important role in science itself, like the method of science, how science works.
01:41:26.000If you don't mind, if I can briefly describe the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, he's this famous philosopher of science.
01:41:31.000He 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.
01:41:39.000His concept was that scientists operate within a paradigm, a worldview.
01:41:44.000So we believe in Newtonian gravity, or we have the worldview of the germ theory of disease or whatever it is.
01:41:52.000So this is our paradigm, whatever group of scientists we are.
01:41:56.000Within that paradigm, we do normal science.
01:42:00.000We do experiments to try to prove our paradigm right.
01:42:03.000So, 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.
01:42:15.000I'm going to try to prove that his predictions actually come true.
01:42:17.000So, this is just called puzzle solving.
01:42:19.000What scientists actually do, Thomas Kuhn says, many of them, they just puzzle solve.
01:42:22.000They just try to prove the paradigm right.
01:42:24.000In the process of doing that, they uncover occasionally an anomaly.
01:42:28.000An anomaly is something that seems to contradict the paradigm.
01:42:31.000Like, okay, Ptolemy makes this prediction about where the planet should be, but it turns out the planet's actually not there.
01:42:44.000He says they either ignore it or they find a way to rationalize it.
01:42:48.000Well, 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.
01:42:55.000So scientists usually ignore or rationalize the anomaly.
01:42:59.000But 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.
01:43:09.000At a certain point, we realize that our worldview, our paradigm, must be wrong.
01:43:14.000And Kuhn says this allows for a crisis within the scientific community.
01:43:19.000The 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.
01:43:31.000So 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.
01:43:37.000Now we're in a new paradigm, and what do we do?
01:43:47.000But 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.
01:43:56.000The fact that, contrary to popular belief, we typically think of scientists as people who are really open to changing their minds.
01:44:15.000And so they rationalize away the anomalies.
01:44:17.000So 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.
01:44:30.000But surely there's a way we can make those anomalies fit with our paradigm instead and they don't.
01:44:34.000So this isn't to say that scientists are members of a cult or anything like that.
01:44:38.000In 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.
01:44:53.000However, really what I consider Kuhn as, it's a commentary on human psychology.
01:44:58.000Kuhn basically figured out cognitive dissonance before Leon Festinger, you know, but Kuhn didn't have that terminology.
01:45:04.000Festinger is describing cognitive dissonance in these cult members.
01:45:13.000It's necessary for those people to ignore that evidence because it enables them to keep uncovering more anomalies that eventually leads to the revolution.
01:45:21.000So it's like it's an ironic thing that our ability to rationalize is what allows us to progress in the future.
01:46:10.000And 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.
01:46:26.000And then you get people like Sidney Gottlieb who make a fucking career out of it.
01:46:31.000They're realizing we're these very bizarre, complicated thinking apes.
01:46:36.000And 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?
01:46:45.000How do we do that for air quotes national security interests?
01:46:49.000And 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.
01:47:17.000Yeah, his bite model, behavior, information, thought, emotion.
01:47:20.000I think that's a very good model for understanding how actual mind control actually takes place.
01:47:26.000You 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.
01:47:36.000But if they do, teaching them to distrust that information, even if they do access it.
01:47:48.000So saying mantras, reciting prayers, creating an us versus them mentality.
01:47:54.000And then emotion control is like instilling in someone certain emotions to make them beholden to the cult or to whatever it is.
01:48:01.000Guilt, fear, shame, anger, loyalty, dependence, that kind of thing.
01:48:06.000And 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.
01:48:22.000I 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.
01:48:30.000Are you aware of the cult that existed in Austin?
01:48:35.000There's a documentary called Holy Hell.
01:49:23.000So 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.
01:49:33.000That was the point so that he can show off.
01:49:48.000And 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.
01:49:54.000And Ron White, my dear friend, had performed there, and he told me how great it was.
01:49:59.000It's like some cult owned it or something.
01:51:07.000And they would have this profound psychedelic experience.
01:51:10.000So 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.
01:51:26.000Everyone 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.
01:51:34.000And they wasted 20 years of their life with this guy.
01:51:36.000But that day when they got the knowing was the most profound day of their lives.
01:51:43.000Even 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.
01:51:54.000Which is like this guy, because he was a hypnotist and because he was also a megalomaniacal charismatic.
01:52:25.000But 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.
01:52:41.000Able to incept like some idea into them.
01:52:45.000If they could just get out then, like, I got it.
01:52:48.000I'm going to go get a regular job now.
01:52:51.000But 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.
01:53:21.000And, 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.
01:54:06.000It'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.
01:54:18.000But it's because humans share a psychology.
01:54:19.000So of course there are going to be similar actions.
01:54:22.000That reminds me kind of this concept of like incepting something into someone or making them feel this.
01:54:27.000Were 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?
01:54:36.000You know, I was very busy during that time, but I peripherally remember it.
01:54:41.000And then later on, we examined it and looked into it.
01:54:45.000And, you know, we've done a few episodes where we went over it.
01:54:47.000But it was, you know, legitimately kind of crazy.
01:54:50.000Yeah, you know, because there's a connection between that and some of the, what I would say are MKUltra kind of conspiracies.
01:54:59.000There 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.
01:55:06.000You 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.
01:55:19.000And 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.
01:55:29.000Like, 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.
01:55:43.000However, there's a connection between, you know, the people who are making these assertions and the satanic panic.
01:55:49.000A lot of the people who make these assertions say that they recovered their memories through hypnotism.
01:55:54.000And that is a lot of what was going on during the satanic panic.
01:55:57.000You had people recovering memories through hypnotism about being involved in this ritualistic satanic abuse.
01:56:04.000And in fact, there's a group called the International Society for the Study of Dissociation.
01:56:10.000And a lot of the members were kind of responsible for propagating many of these satanic panic conspiracy theories.
01:56:15.000The 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.
01:56:30.000And he lost his medical license and she was awarded $10 million in this lawsuit.
01:56:34.000But 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.
01:56:48.000And he was a part of this International Society for the Study of Dissociation.
01:56:52.000So it's like the same techniques that were being used during the satanic panic to so-called recover these memories.
01:56:57.000It'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.
01:57:11.000But it's the same kind of techniques that are being used in both instances.
01:57:14.000Hypnotic regression in particular is very odd because a lot of it is dependent upon the questions that are asked while the person's under.
01:57:21.000Like that you can lead someone to believe something happened that didn't happen.
01:57:26.000This is what Jolly West was, some of the stuff that he was doing.
01:57:28.000This is what's really, do you know who John Mack is?
01:58:39.000And then you have hypnotic regression where people tell very similar versions of that story.
01:58:45.000And 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.
01:58:56.000And then you get hypnotized and someone says, Do you see any beings in the room with you?
01:59:09.000Like, how did you lead them into this hypnotic regression of alien abduction?
01:59:14.000And I think a very similar thing took place during the European kind of witch craze in the 17th century.
01:59:19.000These preachers would go around to different communities talking about witches and demons.
01:59:23.000And so as soon as they left, in the weeks following, there is a huge uptick in witch accusations and supposed demonic possessions.
01:59:30.000Is 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?
01:59:38.000Obviously, it's like a suggested thing that they picked up from attending these religious rallies.
02:00:32.000And the publisher, you know, he's publishing this book.
02:00:34.000And right after the Principia is published, the publisher gets arrested for publishing pornography.
02:00:39.000So 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.
02:00:44.000And right next to it is all this smut that he's secretly doing.
02:01:06.000I 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.
02:01:14.000So 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.
02:02:02.000That, you know, the majority got the majority of these important details wrong.
02:02:07.000There's another intriguing, kind of humorous psychological study.
02:02:11.000I 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?
02:02:24.000So 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.
02:02:35.000So, 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.
02:02:42.000And 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.
02:02:51.000And so the power of suggestion is very strong.
02:03:37.000Like, 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.
02:04:55.000I 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.
02:05:05.000I'm sure that couldn't be a pleasant experience.
02:05:08.000That one right above, go to the one right above there, right there.
02:05:44.000Even me for questions, like, you know, if you ask me, how did you come to write this book?
02:05:48.000Like, you asked me, how did you become interested in this topic?
02:05:51.000When 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?
02:06:00.000I might have read some other book that I read the name Sidney Gottlieb, and that got me interested.
02:06:04.000And, 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?
02:06:20.000It 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.
02:06:27.000Maybe I read that and it's like, oh, who's this guy?
02:07:07.000I mean, that's the human tendency, right?
02:07:09.000I know for a fact when I really got into conspiracies because I have a moment connected to it that was a bad experience.
02:07:18.000So 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.
02:07:26.000David Lifton was an accountant, and I forget what his assignment was, but it had something to do with the Warren Commission.
02:07:32.000So he goes over the Warren Commission report, and he actually read the whole thing.
02:07:38.000And 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.
02:07:46.000And he writes this book called Best Evidence.
02:07:48.000And the book is basically saying there's no way the official story is true.
02:07:52.000And I read this while I was a comedian on the road.
02:07:56.000So 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.
02:08:06.000So then I go on stage, first show, and fucking bomb.
02:08:11.000And I had done really good the night before.
02:08:13.000Did you really have the JFK or did you already have the set routine?
02:08:17.000No, I had my set, but I was like completely freaked out by the fact they killed the president.
02:08:39.000So I remember very specifically, because it was a, you know, it was a big moment for me.
02:08:43.000I was on the road and I ate shit at a comedy club.
02:08:46.000So like that thing is in my head forever.
02:08:48.000But 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.
02:09:01.000Even 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.
02:09:16.000There's a bullet hole wound that they describe in the Dallas where they call it a tracheotomy hole in Bethesda, Maryland.
02:09:22.000They're manipulating the narrative to incorporate the single gunman theory.
02:09:30.000Okay, 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.
02:09:50.000And so, but I don't really have anything.
02:09:53.000Just the magic bullet theory alone is complete, utter nonsense to anybody who's ever shot anything with a bullet.
02:09:59.000When 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.
02:10:08.000This magic bullet was only used as a tool because they had to account for a bullet that hit the underpass.
02:10:15.000So there was a guy standing under the underpass.
02:10:18.000So they're like, well, definitely that bullet hit here.
02:10:21.000So we have to attribute all these wounds to one bullet.
02:10:24.000So 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.
02:10:44.000They supposedly magically find this bullet.
02:10:46.000This bullet has clearly been shot into water.
02:10:48.000This bullet is either water or pillows.
02:11:19.000They died from random acts of violence.
02:11:21.000Like, they did a calculation of what are the odds that all these witnesses would wind up dying the way they did.
02:11:26.000And it's like some spectacular number.
02:11:28.000They fucking killed a bunch of people that were there.
02:11:30.000I'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.
02:12:13.000But I think that could be like the longest single volume nonfiction book that I've ever seen.
02:12:18.000I would love to get Gerald Posner in a room with Oliver Stone because Oliver Stone, even at his advanced age, he's so smart.
02:12:26.000And his recall is incredible for dates and times and people that were involved.
02:12:31.000I don't think Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent.
02:12:33.000I think Lee Harvey Oswald was definitely an intelligence agent.
02:12:36.000I 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.
02:12:47.000I think he probably was involved in the whole thing.
02:12:50.000But 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.
02:13:00.000That's not how a normal person reacts when you get accused of killing the president.
02:13:04.000If you're innocent, you go, I'm innocent.
02:13:06.000I didn't have anything to do with this.
02:14:25.000One 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.
02:14:31.000But 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.
02:14:41.000You know, he writes a lot about how it's completely immoral, this thing he doesn't like.
02:14:46.000So 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.
02:14:57.000It 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.
02:15:12.000Why was he so obsessed about the death sentence?
02:15:28.000Yeah, and he ended up killing himself too.
02:15:31.000Well, I mean, it was an assisted suicide with his son.
02:15:33.000His 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.
02:15:47.000And 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.
02:15:56.000Then 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.
02:16:05.000The son wrote a book about it, and then he later committed suicide as well.
02:16:12.000It's just so strange how so much, so many bad things can have come from just a few people.
02:16:22.000Just a few people and these terrible ideas and this complete lack of oversight.
02:16:27.000It's so much evil, including the Manson family.
02:16:32.000We've talked about it, the Tom O'Neill book.
02:16:34.000Please, folks, if you're listening to this, read that book.
02:16:36.000It'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.
02:16:43.000And one of the parts of the book that I really enjoyed is the writing style is kind of like a gonzo journal.
02:17:50.000He was in charge of coordinating scientific research during World War II.
02:17:54.000And 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.
02:18:05.000Well, 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.
02:18:15.000So it's like, oh, Veneva Bush is like one of the main guys who is playing a role in this story.
02:18:20.000So I go, there are a couple of different archives that have this thousand-page interview that Veneva Bush did.
02:18:28.000And every single page is there in one of the versions except two pages that talk about Stanley Lovell in the OSS.
02:18:34.000And I thought, that's the exact thing I need.
02:18:36.000Like, how is it out of a thousand pages, the one thing that's missing is the two pages?
02:18:42.000And 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.
02:18:51.000So I get them to send me a photocopy of every single page, and it turns out that had the two missing pages.
02:18:56.000So 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.
02:19:04.000So there are like a thousand stories about these crazy coincidences that happen.
02:19:07.000One of them, again, from my first book, was about Stanley Lovell.
02:19:13.000He's this chemist in the OSS creating all these ingenious gadgets and whatever.
02:19:17.000He 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.
02:19:39.000But he talks about this in his memoir.
02:19:41.000But I had never seen a copy of that meeting, minutes of that meeting or anything.
02:19:47.000He said that this group, this biological warfare committee, it was part of the National Academy of Sciences.
02:19:52.000And I thought, okay, well, that's interesting.
02:19:54.000But 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.
02:20:04.000But 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.
02:20:15.000And I ended up taking just a bunch of pictures of a lot of the materials they had in their archives.
02:20:19.000And I went back through the material that I already had.
02:20:22.000And it turns out I had taken pictures of the minutes of the very meeting Stanley Lovell was talking about in his memoir.
02:20:35.000So the process of making history is sometimes even more exciting than the story itself.
02:20:41.000Well, the process, it seems like it takes a very dedicated person to chase down that process.
02:20:46.000Like 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.
02:21:26.000Do 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?
02:21:36.000Do you have a hard time of not looking crazy?
02:21:41.000Because 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.
02:22:29.000Now, 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.
02:22:47.000You know, in fact, that actually ties in at the end of this book.
02:22:50.000I 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.
02:23:00.000And so I give an example of the idea that AIDS was created in a government laboratory like Fort Diedrick.
02:23:09.000In the really 1980s, there was a Soviet kind of propaganda mouthpiece newspaper in India called The Patriot.
02:23:16.000And this would just publish like KGB propaganda.
02:23:28.000In order to get there, it first said, did you know that the CIA was involved in dosing people with drugs, which is completely true.
02:23:34.000Did 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?
02:23:47.000They were just spraying yeast and stuff over, but it's bacteria.
02:23:50.000So did you know that this, did you know that they've performed experiments on these drug addicts and this and that and this?
02:23:56.000And also, did you know that in Fort Diedrich, they created a biological weapon called AIDS?
02:24:01.000So it's, you know, it's the lie is made more potent because it's sandwiched in between all these truths.
02:24:07.000And 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.
02:24:15.000But if you knew that all these other things were true, you might assume that that final thing is true as well.
02:24:19.000In other countries around the world where they had these front newspapers, they would also publish the same kind of story.
02:24:25.000And then AIDS was created in this government laboratory.
02:24:28.000And then those newspapers would cite the Indian newspaper, The Patriot, as evidence that other independent newspapers had also come to this conclusion.
02:24:34.000And 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.
02:24:42.000So 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.
02:24:51.000And so we're going to flood the zone with all this crap, basically.
02:24:55.000So maybe nobody's going to know what to believe.
02:24:58.000Maybe it is the case that the CIA created AIDS in Fort Diedrick or whatever it is.
02:25:02.000So that's one tactic that I talk about at the very end.
02:25:04.000It'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.
02:25:12.000And if you do that enough times, you can muddy the waters on basically every subject that there is.
02:25:17.000Yeah, so it can go both ways in the sense that fake stories can delegitimize true stories, but true stories legitimize fake stories.
02:25:33.000We'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.
02:25:41.00080% of the discourse, 80% of the traffic is not human or people that are being paid to do it.
02:25:48.000It's like some government entity wanted to do this to sow confusion?
02:25:55.000There's NGOs, there's different PACs, and they all have, like, you can go online.
02:26:03.000There's companies that will fund a social campaign for you.
02:26:06.000Like, so imagine if you wanted to go online and attack people over a certain issue.
02:26:15.000Like, 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.
02:26:24.000And it could give the illusion of some sort of some agreement online or disagreement online.
02:26:32.000Or 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.
02:26:59.000And he kind of chronicles what they were doing.
02:27:02.000Basically, young people would be hired to pose as whoever anyone wanted to be posed as.
02:27:08.000I guess the Russian government to spread certain amounts of disinformation to certain communities.
02:27:12.000Say 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.
02:27:26.000There's a whole organization or a whole, you know, whatever it is.
02:27:34.000What was the woman's name that came on to talk about that?
02:27:40.000She was saying how she had to study all these memes and so many of them were really funny.
02:27:45.000And 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.
02:27:55.000And the more you could get people at each other's throats, the more you could destroy their democracy.
02:28:21.000And 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.
02:28:30.000So, you know, the worst thing in the world that happens today, you're probably going to learn about it.
02:28:35.000Which that can't be good for your mental health to constantly be bombarded by this negative stuff.
02:28:40.000It's not that in the past all this negative stuff didn't happen.
02:28:43.000It'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.
02:28:51.000So the fact that you're constantly able to see the worst thing happening in the world, that cannot be good just for your mentality.
02:28:58.000It'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.
02:29:14.000So, 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.
02:29:30.000It'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.
02:29:41.000If you don't act now, oh, God, there's a genocide going on.
02:29:45.000It's like no matter what it is, it's like you're being bombarded by everything.
02:29:49.000The economy is a crash, no kings, ah, ice is coming, Jesus, gun control.
02:29:55.000Ah, do you have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-internet days?
02:29:58.000Because I don't remember it that well, but no.
02:31:01.000Like we were in the green room last night.
02:31:03.000We're reading the story about this congressperson who stole money and how they did it.
02:31:08.000And then they bought a giant diamond ring.
02:31:12.000So they're wearing this giant three-carat diamond ring on a $100,000 a year salary.
02:31:16.000Like, what are you doing, you fucking crazy person?
02:31:20.000But 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.
02:31:31.000No, you're just, you're constantly looking at all the problems that are happening all over the world all the time.
02:31:43.000It'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.
02:32:44.000What if we get bats and we attach napalm to them?
02:32:47.000And then we release these over Japanese cities.
02:32:50.000The bats are going to roost into the buildings in these cities.
02:32:54.000And 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.
02:33:01.000So we have like targeted incendiaries instead of just random bombs falling.
02:33:05.000So 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.
02:33:14.000So he sent this kind of report on the bat bomb to Eleanor Roosevelt.
02:33:19.000She 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.
02:34:18.000People 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.
02:34:25.000And so there was like these disputes back and forth.
02:34:27.000So he was hired by the OSS to create these tiny little incendiaries to strap to these bats.
02:34:33.000So the OSS did a few experiments with this.
02:34:37.000Before the incendiaries were strapped, they put like fake incendiaries on them.
02:35:14.000Another 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.
02:35:24.000But they had it in like somewhat of a controlled environment.
02:35:27.000They cooled this bat down, put it in artificial hibernation.
02:35:31.000And then they were taking pictures of it, you know, to see how everything operated.
02:35:35.000But then the bat started kind of waking up and it flew off before they could grab it.
02:35:39.000And it actually flew into a control tower and it burst into flame and the whole thing caught on fire and burned down.
02:35:44.000So it turned out this thing actually worked.
02:35:46.000But again, it was never deployed against Japan.
02:35:48.000This is right at the end of World War II.
02:35:50.000And, you know, they're already, the Manhattan Project was kind of successful at that point.
02:35:54.000So there was no need for the bat bomb.
02:35:56.000But if people are interested in that kind of story and how crazy that can get, that's in these books too.
02:36:01.000Do you know about the proposal for the gay bomb?
02:36:27.000Well, 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.
02:36:35.000So 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.
02:36:46.000And Luther Green was in charge of developing and experimenting with nerve agents, you know, that could incapacitate.
02:36:51.000These are like some of the most potent agents that have ever been created.
02:36:54.000A fraction of an ounce applied to your skin can be lethal.
02:36:57.000So, he wanted to find a substance, Green did, that could mimic the effects of a nerve agent, like incapacitate someone without actually killing them.
02:37:06.000His 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.
02:37:15.000They 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.
02:37:23.000We can defeat this enemy army without actually having to kill anyone or for any of our people to be killed.
02:37:28.000So, Stanley Lovell was really interested in this concept.
02:37:32.000War without death was what they were talking about.
02:37:35.000We should use chemical weapons that just incapacitate people.
02:37:38.000So, 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.
02:37:54.000So, he was trying to use it almost as a more ethical form of warfare where instead of killing someone, you just incapacitate them.