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John Lisle has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas, where he is now a professor of the history of science. His two books on the intelligence community are "The Dirty Tricks Department" and "Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA." www.johnlislehistorian.com https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250338747/projectmindcontrol/
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John, what's happening, man?
Not much, it's good to be here.
Very nice to meet you.
You too, thanks for having me.
I know you're in the middle of a project, you're doing a project with David
Chase, right?
It's about MKUltra and...
Yes, he has gotten the rights to this book, you know, this book Project Mind
Control,
and he's, yeah, interested in adapting it into a series.
Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject.
So as soon as I heard about it, and they said the series is coming,
but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book now, I'm like, let's go.
So here we go, Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy
of MKUltra,
which really is a tragedy.
You know, I really got, and I knew about it,
but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until Chaos, Tom O'Neill's
book.
Have you read that?
Oh, yeah.
And when you realize what the MKUltra program involved and how long it ran and
how insane it is,
and it essentially had no oversight,
and these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American
citizens,
and nobody went to jail for it.
Yeah, that's part of the crazy thing.
One of the things I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second
half of the book,
are the consequences of MKUltra in society, but also just what happened to
these people afterwards.
The victims of MKUltra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA,
and basically really nothing much came out of it.
They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra,
they didn't really face any consequences.
And so I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I really try to
talk about in the latter part of the book
are what are the failures of oversight that allowed this to happen?
How is that possible?
How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on
people unwittingly
and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions?
So I delve into that pretty deeply.
How did you get interested in the subject?
What was your introduction to it?
I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people
because I didn't know that much about MKUltra, and I was doing my Ph.D. at UT.
And I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of
scientists within the intelligence.
They had connections to the intelligence community.
They were called the science attaches out of the State Department.
The State Department would send these science attaches to different embassies,
American embassies around the world, and the CIA was very interested in these
people
because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad.
Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of
research they're doing.
So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the
intelligence community.
And from that, I learned about, you know, Sidney Gottlieb,
but also mostly my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovell,
who was essentially the Sidney Gottlieb of the OSS.
So prior to the CIA, the U.S. had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services,
during World War II,
and that was the U.S. kind of intelligence agency.
And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research
and Development Branch,
and that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job
was to basically invent the deadly weapons,
create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent
abroad.
Fun stuff.
Oh, yeah.
My first book, The Drudgy Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovell and that
group.
And one of the things they do are drug experiments and truth drug experiments,
trying to find out whether it's possible to give someone, you know, a captured
enemy agent,
some kind of drug to make them tell the truth during an interrogation.
And it turns out when I was researching that book, I came across a series of
depositions of which Sidney Gottlieb is one of the deponents who would later
lead MKUltra.
And in these depositions, he was talking about how when he was assigned to be
in charge of MKUltra, he didn't really know where to begin.
He didn't know anything about mind control.
So one of the things that he did, he went into the old OSS files and was
starting to look at the drug experiments that Stanley Lovell was doing.
And so I thought, that's the connection between Stanley Lovell, my first book,
and now this one.
So that naturally led me into becoming interested in MKUltra.
So a lot of the things that Sidney Gottlieb was up to with MKUltra, his
blueprint was basically Stanley Lovell.
Just imagine being a government agency, the CIA, the OSS, whatever it is.
And then someone says, hey, figure out if we can control people's minds.
And that's where you start from, right?
It's not like Sidney Gottlieb was some expert hypnotist or really was a
psychologist or really understood human minds.
No, they started a program going, what can we do?
How can we fuck with people's minds?
How can we figure out how to control people's minds?
And they did it for decades.
And they're probably still doing it now.
Well, even before MKUltra.
So there are a couple programs that precede it.
I mean, you know, so during World War II, the OSS was already doing truth drug
experiments, not with LSD because that wasn't really around then.
But with THC acetate, they would inject it into cigarettes and have people
smoke it.
So they just get high?
They would get high.
Until the truth?
Supposedly?
Supposedly.
The idea was that it lowers their inhibitions.
And so maybe they'll be more amenable to talking.
Oh, that's hilarious.
They just gave them spliffs.
Yeah, exactly.
They basically gave them spliffs.
That's a European smoke.
No.
And so one of the guys who was actually on the truth drug committee that was
kind of overseeing these drug experiments during World War II was Harry Anslinger,
who, of course, is launching this crusade against marijuana.
And at the same time, he's overseeing these experiments about dosing people
with THC.
So it's very ironic that that was the case.
It's really stunning the kind of damage those people did to just our trust in
government, what we know about these psychedelic compounds and drugs and, like,
what they did with them that completely changed our idea of what the future of
legalization and all these.
There's so much negative impact to what they did.
On top of what they did, they essentially created Ted Kaczynski.
Well, I'm a little –
Are you on the fence on that?
I'm a little skeptical of whether MKUltra is connected to that.
Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments they did at Harvard.
And I don't imagine they would do that without the involvement of the
government, without them wanting to have access to research.
If you have people at Harvard that are doing, like, really critical LSD studies
on people, humiliation studies.
Yeah.
Well, with him in particular, he – the study that he was involved in was –
Henry Murray was the guy who was running that.
It's like a psychological experiment about – I think it was interpersonal
relationships where he would basically interrogate them and berate them and see
how they reacted to it.
Now, Henry Murray, who ran that experiment with Ted Kaczynski, he did have
connections to the intelligence community.
I just am not convinced that he was funded by MKUltra or something.
His connection – he has a couple of connections.
One connection that I mentioned in my first book, the Dirty Tricks Department,
he was tasked with creating psychological profiles of German leaders like
Hitler.
And so the idea was that he would kind of figure out what their psychology was
and maybe we could find ways to exploit that psychology.
So Stanley Lovell, who is the head of this R&D branch of the OSS, he read Henry
Murray's psychological profile of Hitler and he decided, maybe I can figure out
a way to kind of drive Hitler crazy by using this.
So Henry Murray said that Hitler had a very feminine kind of personality.
He was on the border between masculine and feminine and, you know, at least
that's what Henry Murray is saying in this psychological profile.
Stanley Lovell reads that and he thinks, maybe I can exploit this by getting
one of the gardeners near the eagleness where Hitler often had some meetings.
There were some gardeners down there.
We can get an agent to slip a gardener some female sex hormone and that gardener
can inject it into the beets that are destined for Hitler's plate.
Hitler's going to eat it and it's going to, like, exacerbate this feminine
tendency and it's going to make him go crazy or something like that.
That was the plan.
That never actually happened.
But so Henry Murray is kind of connected to the OSS in that sense.
And then later he developed some personality tests for the OSS and CIA.
I believe it was for recruits to give these to recruits to determine whether
they kind of have the psychological profile file that would be amenable to
being in an intelligence organization.
Did you see that they recently did a scan of some blood that was found in
Hitler's bunker and they determined that he has a very unusual gene expression?
Can you find out what that is?
It's something that would lead to him potentially having a micropenis.
Yeah.
Which is, you know, like the most obvious psychological profile ever.
A guy wants to destroy everything in the world.
He's got a tiny dick.
Well, maybe Henry Murray was onto something.
Yeah, I'm sure he was.
I'm sure there was something, some research behind it.
Like, somebody must have said something about him.
Yeah, yeah.
I hadn't heard of that.
I didn't know that.
Hitler's DNA reveals Nazi leader likely had syndrome that can affect genitals,
researchers say.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, the syndrome can disrupt the process that
drives puberty and manifest in symptoms that include undescended testicles and
a micropenis.
Isn't that wild?
Yeah.
It is.
Which totally makes sense.
Like, we should kill everyone with a micropenis.
They're too dangerous.
It is, you know, maybe useful to be careful about correlation and causation.
A lot of people probably have this and that doesn't cause them to become a
Hitler.
Oh, it's probably the sweetest people out there.
I'm just kidding.
Obviously, there's like the nicest people out there that just happen to have a
micropenis.
Yeah.
And it actually makes them really sensitive.
But that couldn't have helped, you know, maybe his temperament.
I don't know.
Well, he was also on a bunch of drugs, you know.
He had like a special doctor that just worked for him.
Yeah.
Those videos of him at sporting events or whatever.
He's like rocking back and forth.
It's incredible.
It's crazy.
He's just completely out of his mind on something.
Have you read Norman Oler's book, Blitz?
Blitz?
Yes.
Yes.
I don't know if I've read the whole thing.
I know I dipped into it.
I can't remember if I...
It's insane.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's insane.
Yeah, it is.
The entire Nazi army was methed out of their minds.
Yeah.
And you know what these...
There are a lot of LSD experiments after World War II within the CIA and MKUltra,
of course,
but also Army LSD experiments that aren't really connected to MKUltra.
So I don't go into them that much in this book.
But there are, you know, the British are doing LSD experiments on their
personnel.
The U.S. military does too.
And, you know, it's just some of the stories that come out of it are very silly
and really
and just insane.
But there is one document I found that talks about how they were giving these
two Army personnel,
these two soldiers, LSD, to see how they reacted to it.
And so each of them took the LSD.
They were in like a padded room, isolated with each other, so nobody else was
there.
And they started hallucinating.
And one of them pretended to like start smoking a cigarette.
And he didn't actually have a cigarette.
He had nothing, you know, but he just pretended to smoke a cigarette.
And the other guy was off in his own world.
And then the first guy, he reached into his pocket and took out an imaginary
pack of cigarettes.
He didn't actually have one.
It was just an empty hand.
But he was just hallucinating that there was one.
And he reached it out to the other guy, basically to offer, hey, do you want a
cigarette?
And the other guy looked at it and he said, no, I couldn't take your last one.
It was just an empty hand.
There was nothing.
No, I couldn't take your last one.
They were having like this shared hallucination or something.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, also back then, we didn't really know too much about that stuff.
So they were kind of gathering information about what would happen if you gave
someone LSD.
Yep.
That's kind of the motivation for MKUltra in the first place.
There are several motivating factors.
One of them is how do we get prisoners to speak during an interrogation?
Maybe there is some kind of truth drug that can get them to tell us the secrets
that we want to know.
Another is maybe we can use this to discredit individuals like Fidel Castro.
Let's say we dose him with LSD before a big speech.
He appears to be crazy and his people are going to lose trust in him because he's
making nonsense.
You know, he's just talking gibberish.
Was that proposed?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
They were 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.
What I don't understand about that is they were trying to kill him.
So, if they couldn't get poison into his cigars, why do they think they could
get acid in there?
Well, the original plan was to discredit him and then the later plan was to
kill him.
Oh.
Yeah.
So, there were a couple original plans to discredit him.
One is to sneak him LSD to make him appear insane so that his people will lose
faith in him.
Another one was to slip what's called thallium salts into his shoes and these
are depilatories.
They make your hair fall out.
And so, the idea was that, you know, he's got this masculine allure with his
big beard.
But if we can slip these depilatories into his shoes and he puts them on, his
beard's going to fall out.
And like Samson, he's going to lose his power or something like that.
That was the idea.
So, Sidney Gottlieb was kind of involved in some of these that I talk about in
the book.
Another one.
So, you have the LSD.
You have the depilatory.
Another one was to Photoshop images, basically, of Castro with a bunch of
beautiful women around him and like a buffet of food in front of him.
And to have a caption underneath it that said, my ration is different.
To indicate, like, I'm getting all the benefits of, you know, this, you know,
the spoils of society while my people are going hungry.
And so, you know, the idea was to spread this around Cuba and have people
resent Castro for indulging in all these places.
Well, that one's actually reasonable.
Right?
A little bit more than the other two.
That one's probably the closest to accurate.
So, those were attempts to discredit Castro.
And then there were several attempts to assassinate him that Sidney Gottlieb
and others involved kind of in this story do.
So, some of the main assassination attempts on Castro involved his hobby of
ocean diving.
So, he liked to dive in the ocean.
And one idea was that what if we get this really beautiful shell that he would
just be unable to pass up?
It would be so beautiful that if anyone swam by it, they would obviously want
to pick it up.
We pack the shell full of explosives and put it on, have some kind of trigger
mechanism for when you pick it up that detonates the explosives.
So, when he's underwater, he's going to swim by this.
He's going to see this beautiful shell.
He's going to pick it up and it's going to explode.
But it turns out they couldn't really figure out a shell big enough that would
catch his interest, you know.
So, that never happened.
Another concept with his scuba diving hobby is that what if we gift him a scuba
diving suit?
There are people kind of negotiating for the return of the Bay of Pigs
prisoners.
So, what if we get one of those lawyers to gift Castro a suit and in that suit,
we would lace it with some kind of poison or some kind of fungus that would
cause him to break out and develop some kind of disease.
But it turns out the guy that they wanted to give him the suit had already
given him a diving suit.
And so, it was like, oh, we can't use him anymore.
Wow.
And they were the people running it.
Yeah.
That was the best they could do?
Yeah.
But it's just the concept of not having any experience whatsoever in any
studies about mind control and just given this assignment.
What do you know about mind control?
What can we do?
How much does it work?
What did the Nazis learn during World War II?
Because they did a lot of experiments, right?
They're doing a lot of experiments.
And it is, you know, I mentioned the OSS is doing truth drug experiments.
The Nazis are doing truth drug experiments in their concentration camps as well.
And the British are doing some truth drug experiments during World War II as
well.
You can get the British ones online.
Well, at least the post-World War II ones.
Was it 1950s?
Have you seen the British LSD studies?
No.
Oh, you haven't seen it?
No, I don't think so.
Oh, it's wonderful.
You should watch it.
We'll watch it real quick because it's kind of hilarious.
They start breaking out.
They can't.
Oh, yeah.
You have seen it?
I think so.
The soldiers all in a row.
Some of them, they start laughing.
They're in the middle of doing their task.
They just start laughing uncontrollable.
And they sit down.
Yeah.
Well, you know, during, I mentioned those like THC acetate experiments during
World War II.
These guys are.
These giant smiles on their face.
Yeah.
This guy's having a hard go of it.
Yeah.
He might have been having a downer or something.
He had to be removed from the experiment after 35 minutes.
Look at the radio operator trying to figure out how to work it.
It's just, they're just so confused.
And eventually they just start laying down and just laugh like these guys.
These guys just can't.
Yeah.
And these THC experiments during World War II.
Oh, thank you, guys.
For some of the people, they would give them this THC.
They would smoke it through a cigarette.
And, you know, some of the reactions it talked about was it made them just
uncontrollably start laughing.
And it put them in a good mood.
And like some of the reactions were, oh, yeah.
I mean, they were just getting these people high.
And they were reacting to that.
It didn't make them tell the truth.
No, no.
Of course not.
It did actually make them talk more, though.
Because they actually recorded these interviews and they would count the number
of words per minute that these people spoke.
And it turns out after they smoked this, they would talk about like 40% more
words per minute.
But it's not that this guaranteed the truth.
They were just talking.
They just rambling.
They're talking about cartoons.
Yeah, it's just what other drugs did they experiment with?
Did they experiment with amphetamines?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So one.
Well, I should mention that MKUltra was broken into 149 subprojects.
So MKUltra was the umbrella term.
And within MKUltra, there are 149 subprojects 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.
One of the main people who is running these studies is a guy named Harris Isbell
at the Lexington Narcotic Farm.
This is where drug addicts could go to get treatment for their addiction.
Prisoners could go there as well.
And whenever Sidney Gottlieb found a drug that he was interested in, he would
basically just give it to Harris Isbell, who could try it out on these
prisoners to see how they reacted.
And then Isbell would write reports back to Gottlieb.
So he tried psilocybin when that came out, LSD, but also stuff like, I mean,
heroin.
The CIA was particularly interested in heroin because if you can induce an
addiction in a captured agent, let's say, then you can use that as leverage and
interrogation, the withdrawal symptoms.
So you get them addicted to heroin and then use the withdrawal symptoms saying,
well, if you tell us about this, maybe I'll give you a little.
So that was at least the concept.
But there were, I mean, dozens and dozens of different kinds of drugs they were
testing just to see how people reacted to them and if any of them could be used
as a potential truth drug.
The heroin one actually makes sense.
I never thought of that.
Yeah.
Well, one of the ironies as well about this experiment that I mentioned, you
know, Harris Isbell and giving these prisoners all these drugs, the prisoners
are in this place.
It's called the narcotic farm because they're supposed to be getting off drugs.
You know, they're supposed to be, you know, curing them of their addiction.
At the same time, they're giving them all these drugs to test them out.
And then as a reward for participating in these trials, they had two options.
Either they could get like a positive letter in the parole board and like a
hundred bucks 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.
Oh, my God.
So they were supposed to be getting off drugs, and yet you're incentivizing
them to participate in these drug trials by giving them drugs.
Wow.
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Wow.
Yeah.
So that's one of 149 sub-projects.
Are you aware that heroin was created as a substitute for people that were
addicted to morphine?
No.
No.
Yeah.
That's correct, right?
Search that.
I'm pretty sure it's correct.
Yeah.
They came up with heroin to treat people that were addicted to morphine.
Hmm.
It's – what?
Well, that's like giving them Oxycontin if they're addicted to heroin.
It's like the same thing.
Yeah.
But getting someone addicted to that and then pulling it away from them seems
like it would be very effective in terms of, like, getting them to give up
information.
Yeah.
That was the idea.
So here it is.
We put it into our sponsor, Perplexity.
Heroin created as a morphine treatment.
Originally developed in the late 19th century as a medical drug that was indeed
marketed as an improved, non-addictive alternative to morphine and as a cough
suppressant.
Hey, what do you know?
Yeah.
How nuts.
Who – what company came up with it?
German – Bayer.
There you go.
Fucking Bayer.
I think at the same time they were doing this, they just – find out if it's
true that – acetaminophen is what's toxic in Tylenol, correct?
Find out if it's true that at the same time they decided that acetaminophen was
too dangerous.
I think that is Tylenol.
What do you mean Tylenol?
Yeah.
I mean the substance.
You know, that's – Tylenol is the name brand.
What's the question then?
Did they – poor Jamie, if you hear his voice, ladies and gentlemen, inform
the people at home.
Poor Jamie got a tooth pulled last night.
It was – it's rough.
And he – not even – yeah, excuse me.
Last night you were in pain.
Today he got a tooth pulled and he's got what looks like a softball stuffed in
his cheek.
Oh, man.
Did Bayer decide not to release acetaminophen during the same time period?
I – during the pandemic I got fascinated with acetaminophen because I read
this horrible story about this poor lady who got COVID and she was in real pain.
So she took a bunch of acetaminophen – she took a bunch of Tylenol and kept
taking it and apparently didn't realize how dangerous it is to overdose on Tylenol.
And she died of liver poisoning.
Oh, that's true.
Yeah.
And I was like, oh, my God.
How many people die of liver poisoning?
Well, it's like 500 a year in this country.
It's like acetaminophen.
It's scary stuff.
It was not being actively held back by Bayer at the same period that it
promoted heroin and aspen.
It was simply not yet recognized or marketed the way those drugs were.
And its development and adoption followed a different path.
Existing historical accounts focused more on scientific uncertainty and
competing drugs than on deliberate suppression campaign by Bayer.
I don't think they were saying in this article that I read that it was a –
that they were suppressing it, that they decided not to focus on it because it
was dangerous.
Why acetaminophen less?
Early clinicians favored phenacetatine and acetanilide – how does that work?
Acetanilide?
Acetanilide.
Despite their later recognized toxicity and acetaminophen's advantages, better
safety profile at therapeutic doses was not clearly distinguished at first.
Okay.
Anyway.
We're getting off track.
I was just going to say one of the ironic things too was some of these MKUltra
subprojects.
They're interested in finding these supposed truth drugs that could get someone
to tell the truth during an interrogation.
But it turns out the – 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.
So, for instance, in an interrogation, if you tell someone that this is a truth
drug and I'm going to give it to you and, you know, 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.
Right.
Because it makes them think, well, I couldn't have stopped myself.
Well, you know, I mean, they gave me this truth drug.
Of course I'm going to have to say this.
So I can't be blamed.
No one's going to blame me.
So it takes kind of the burden off their shoulders if they think they've been
given a truth drug, even if they haven't, just give them a sugar pill.
So that actually turned out to be a lot more effective than any of the drugs
that they actually tried.
That totally makes sense.
They did the same thing with hypnotism too.
The hypnotism turned out to be not that effective in – at least in an
interrogation.
But if you could convince someone that they had been hypnotized, even if they
hadn't, then that could be effective.
So, for instance, this is what a guy called Martin Orrin.
He was one of the psychologists who was in charge of one of these subprojects.
But he put forward what's called the hypnotic situation.
Not hypnotism, but the hypnotic situation.
So, for instance, you pretend to hypnotize someone, the person you're interrogating,
and they know they're not hypnotized.
They obviously can tell that, you know, you're not controlling me.
Nothing's happening.
However, you start saying things like, you know, I'm hypnotizing you, and your
hands are getting warmer.
And they're going to think to themselves, no, they're not.
But under the table, you secretly implanted a heater, and their hands actually
are getting warmer.
Because where they're sitting, there's this heater under that they don't know
exists, and it's making their hands warmer.
So after a certain period of time, they start thinking to themselves, maybe I
am being hypnotized.
Like, the things that he's saying are actually happening.
And so if you can make them think that they've been hypnotized, again, that
lowers their resistance.
Because, I mean, who could blame me for talking now?
I've been hypnotized.
I couldn't help myself but talk.
At least that's the idea.
It's just so fascinating to me how much time and effort was spent just studying
how to control people's minds and trying to come up with ways to do it.
Yeah.
It must have been really exciting to be them.
I mean, I think what they did is horrible.
I don't, you know, I'm not in any way forgiving MKUltra for what they did.
However, boy, it must have been fun.
Boy, it must have been fun.
Just to have no oversight.
No one even knows you exist.
You kind of get this impression by looking at some of these MKUltra documents,
especially at the beginning before the Frank Olsen incident.
Frank Olsen eventually dies after one of these experiments.
And so that kind of, that definitely puts a damper on a lot of things that are
going on.
Before that, though, I do get the sense that it's almost like they're a bunch
of guys just trying to, you know, play around with each other in a way, even
though what they're doing is completely unethical.
But they would just be dosing like the CIA coffee pot and see what happens to
people who are taking drinks of it just to, I mean, the rationale is that, well,
if the Soviets possess some kind of hallucinogenic drug and they were going to
release it into the water supply of a city, we need to know how people would
react to that because we need to know how to defend against that.
Therefore, we should be doing that to people just to see how they react to it
so that we know what kind of signs to look for in case the Soviets do that.
Didn't they dose up a town in France?
I don't think the CIA was connected to that.
I mean, I think it actually was like an ergot poisoning that came from the
bread.
I think so.
But yeah.
But there was some speculation that it was purposeful.
Yeah.
The town's called Point Saint-Esprit, I believe.
But yeah, there were multiple dozens of people who came down with hallucinogenic
symptoms.
They were one guy stripped naked and started running around the street.
Multiple people died after this.
But that was one of the things that led the CIA to become really interested in
hallucinogens.
Because if a poisoning from a bakery could cause that much havoc within this
one French town, how much more damaging would it be if the Soviets did that to
a city's water supply?
Right.
And so that kind of leads to CIA.
That's the justification.
So they start dosing the coffee pots.
And they're running brothels.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That's the crazy one.
Operation Midnight Climax.
Look it up, folks, because it's really crazy.
They had their own brothels.
And they would use two-way mirrors with cameras behind them.
And they would dose the Johns up.
They'd give them a drink.
Would you like a drink?
Have a seat.
And they go, sure, I'll have a drink.
And this poor guy, getting off work, has a drink, thinks he's going to be with
a prostitute and have some nice sex.
Next thing you know, he's just tripping out of his mind while he's being
recorded by Jolly West.
Yeah, you know, the guy who actually ran that is a guy named George White.
And he was involved in the OSS.
So he was, you know, I mentioned Stanley Lovell and the THC acetate.
George White was the guy who was hired to do that in the OSS.
Then Sidney Gottlieb, when he's thinking, I need to do these drug experiments
for myself, who am I going to get to do it for me?
I need someone who has connections to the underworld, who has criminal
connections.
George White was a Bureau of Narcotics officer.
And so Gottlieb was going through the OSS files and it turns out, oh, this guy's
already done these experiments.
I'm going to hire him.
So that's how George White eventually gets involved in the CIA stuff.
Wow.
I can't wait for this show.
Because David Chase gets a hold of a subject like this.
There's so much room.
Like, it's so endlessly fascinating.
Yeah, I'm really excited.
Obviously, for me, I mean, it's just so lucky that he happened to be interested
in this kind of topic.
I mean, there are a lot of books out there on any number of topics that anyone
could be interested in.
But the fact that, you know, I mean, I do consider myself extremely lucky.
I happened to write this book at the right time and someone happened to be
interested in it at the right time.
So, yeah, I can't wait for that to come out.
Yeah, I'm very happy that you did write this book and I'm very happy that this
is happening.
Because I talk to people about this subject, you know, like normies per se.
And they look at you sideways like, what did they do?
They do what?
They're responsible for Manson.
What?
Huh?
And it's like, oh, my God, the rabbit hole is so deep.
I don't have enough battery in my flashlight to take you down this rabbit hole.
That's one of the things with MKUltra just in general.
I mean, initially reading about this, my first impression is that obviously
that's like a conspiracy theory or it can't be right.
But some conspiracies are true.
And the MKUltra stuff, they actually did this.
They were dosing people, using prostitutes behind a one-way mirror, George
White sitting on a toilet watching this happen.
You know, I mean, even besides drugs, MKUltra is involved in a lot of
psychological experiments.
So not just LSD.
Most people associate MKUltra with LSD.
But one of the most expansive of the subprojects is subproject 68.
It was by this guy named Ewan Cameron.
Have you heard that name before?
Okay, Ewan Cameron.
He is a psychiatrist up in Montreal in Canada, working at what's called the
Allen Memorial Institute.
And Gottlieb wanted to expand MKUltra besides drugs because he already had a
lot of people doing drug experiments.
So he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques that could be used
to manipulate a person.
So not just in an interrogation, but can we actually, like, control a person's
personality?
Can we make them behave in certain ways, make them do something?
So the idea that Ewan Cameron had come up with before the CIA is involved, I
should mention Ewan Cameron is a behaviorist.
So he thinks that all behavior is a result of nurture, not nature.
So it's the environmental input that causes a person to behave a certain way.
And he thought that if you could bring a person back down to a blank slate,
remove all the environmental inputs that have been put into them,
and then you can build them back up in your image into whatever you want them
to be.
So his idea to bring someone down to the blank slate was to induce enough
stress that they forgot who they formerly were.
And so you reduce them to the blank slate, and then the CIA is really
interested in if you could do that, then you could form them into whatever.
So Ewan Cameron, his main goal is to try to figure out what can induce enough
stress in a person to bring them down to that blank slate.
And so he performs a lot of experiments.
His most famous one is called psychic driving, where he was doing a therapy
session, quote-unquote therapy, with one of his patients.
And he was recording the session, and she said something about how, you know,
my mother, when I was young, used to tell me blah, blah, blah.
You know, she said something negative to her.
And so Ewan Cameron rewinded that on the tape that he was recording and made
her listen back to it and said,
Hey, I want you to listen back to what you say your mother used to say to you.
When he rewinded the tape and played it forward, as soon as the woman was kind
of quoting her mother and she listened to that herself on the tape, she recoiled.
And Cameron thought, oh, you have a negative reaction to that.
So he rewinded again and again and again.
And he kept rewinding it.
And she just got more and more emotional, had this more and more kind of visceral
reaction to what she was saying her mother used to tell her.
So this led Cameron to develop the concept of psychic driving, which is you
record some kind of negative message,
and then you make someone listen to it for thousands and thousands and
thousands of times, for weeks on end, for hours every day, all their waking day.
They basically are strapped into a headphone that is playing this negative
message, and it will break them down over time.
That's how you induce enough stress to break them down to the blank slate.
And then you can record a positive psychic driving message to build them up
into whatever image you want them to be.
So that was his initial idea.
Was it based on anything?
Not really.
It was just based on he had this one encounter with this woman and she had a
negative reaction.
And he's just trying to induce stress.
This obviously seemed to induce stress in her.
Therefore, we're going to start playing these negative tapes to them.
So it was just his idea?
It's just his idea.
He was known for doing this kind of thing, like kind of spur of the moment.
In fact, there was one kid, basically, who had been at this Allen Memorial
Institute where Ewan Cameron was.
He eventually had gotten out, but he had tried to commit suicide, and so he was
sent back to the Allen Memorial Institute.
But the way that he had tried to commit suicide was to close the garage and
have the CO2 build up with a running car,
and then he would breathe it in and pass out and die.
That ended up not working.
However, when he went back to the Allen Memorial Institute, Ewan Cameron
thought, you know,
his personality seems like a little bit better than it was when he was here
before.
Maybe CO2 can, like, influence someone.
So he sent out some of his assistants to go buy, like, CO2 canisters, and we're
going to start, like, giving this to people.
But it turns out the assistants knew that this was, like, completely unethical.
There's no medical basis for anything.
And so they lied to him and said, oh, the canisters were way more expensive
than we could actually afford, so we can't do that.
So he was just trying to find any way that he could have a breakthrough to cure
mental illness, and he was using his patients as guinea pigs, basically.
Complete guinea pigs.
Complete guinea pigs.
What was the result with the woman?
The woman where they played the negative recordings?
I don't – well, there are dozens and dozens of people who that happened to.
I don't know about her in particular because I don't know if she's actually
named in the documents.
So I don't know –
Did any of these experiments have a positive effect?
Did it work?
Oh, hardly, hardly, hardly.
So that was only –
I shouldn't even say positive.
I should say were they effective.
No, no.
For the most part, the people who he did his practice on came out way worse
than when they went in.
So psychic driving, that's initially what got the CIA interested in Cameron.
So it's important to keep in mind, it's not that the CIA told Cameron to do
this.
He's doing this on his own because he thinks he's going to cure mental illness
by having this radical breakthrough where we break them down and build them
back up, and we can build them back up and make them forget their schizophrenia
or depression or whatever they have.
The CIA reads his article about psychic driving, and they think this is the
kind of thing we're interested in.
So from that point on, they start funding him not only to do psychic driving
experiments, but also he does – like puts people in chemical comas for months
on end.
And while they're in these chemical comas, he would put an audio device next to
their pillow playing these psychic driving messages.
And he would put them in sensory deprivation chambers for weeks.
You know, they would have goggles over their eyes, earmuffs on their ears.
They would have cardboard tubes over their arms so that they couldn't feel
anything.
And they would just be in a room for weeks on end.
The idea, again, being to induce enough stress so that it breaks them down so
that you can eventually build them up.
And 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.
The sad thing about her especially is she had been a resident in training at
the Allen Memorial Institute under Ewan Cameron.
So she had been training to be a doctor under him, and she had administered
some of these techniques, including electric shock.
So that's one of the things, too.
We would put these electrodes on the heads of people, and just he would
continually shock them until, again, the idea was to reduce them to, like, in
one case, he says, an infantile-like state where they lose control of their
bladder.
They can't eat.
They can't talk.
They can't go to the bathroom on their own.
They can't put on their own clothes or anything like that.
So she was in charge of administering some of these, I mean, you know, therapy
sessions or whatever they would call it, but just basically torture to these
people.
She ended up having almost kind of a psychotic break herself.
She became anorexic, and she failed her neurology exams, and so she went into a
really deep depression.
She attempted to commit suicide.
That didn't work.
She was admitted to another hospital.
Ewan Cameron came to visit her, and he said, I think you should come back to
the Allen Memorial, not as a doctor, but as a patient, and let me treat you.
So she ends up going back to the Allen Memorial as a patient, and she thought
to herself that it's going to be okay.
They're not going to do the electric shock to me because you had to sign a
consent form for that to happen to you.
You know, the people who are signing the consent forms, they don't know how bad
it's actually going to be.
They're just signing their name.
But she knows.
I haven't signed a consent form, so they can't do that to me.
But it turns out in the time since she went to the hospital and came back, they
had stopped doing the consent forms, and he would just do this on whoever.
And so they ended up doing this electric shock treatment on her, and, you know,
afterwards, she would be babbling, incontinent, couldn't put on her makeup or
clothes or anything.
Eventually, she would call her mother after some of these treatments, and her
mother knew something was going on because she just became more and more incoherent
as time went on.
So the mother sent Mary's sister, Margaret, in order to go to the Allen
Memorial to basically bust her out of there.
So the sister walked in the front door and said, I'm not leaving until I see
Mary.
You know, I'm going to call the police if you don't let me through.
So eventually, she goes to her sister's room, opens the door, and Mary is
sitting there just with wide bug eyes, you know, doesn't even recognize her
sister.
It takes several days for her to figure out where she actually is, and then she
gets busted out of there.
Was it reversible in any way?
In her case, I'm not exactly sure.
She went on to have a little bit of a career, but she eventually attempted to
commit suicide later again.
That was unsuccessful.
Then her and several of the victims of Ewan Cameron's experiments in the 1980s,
they ended up suing the CIA for supporting Ewan Cameron.
And during those lawsuits, the attorneys who are representing them, they took
the depositions of several of the people who were involved in MKUltra to try to
use this during their trial.
So they took the depositions of Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, Richard Helms,
the head of the CIA, and many of the victims who were victims of all this.
And that's basically the basis for my book.
I found thousands of pages of these depositions.
That's just verbatim transcript of these people talking about either what they
did or what was done to them.
And so I'm using that throughout the book to explain here's what they're doing
in their own words or here's what was done to them in their own words.
Wow.
So what was the result of the trial?
Oh, well, so it was actually settled out of court before it went to trial.
So the plaintiffs, the CIA gave the plaintiffs $750,000 to be split among them.
But, you know, after attorney's fees and everything, it doesn't really amount
to much anyway.
And so, you know, they settled out of court.
They got a little bit of money, but it never went to trial.
And so these depositions, though, you know, since it never went to trial, these
were just in the papers of Joseph Rau, who's the main lawyer who was involved
in this case.
And when he passed away, his papers were donated to the Library of Congress
that had all these thousands of pages of depositions in there, 823 pages of
which are Sidney Gottlieb testifying about what he did in MKUltra.
And so I was rooting around the Library of Congress and happened to find them.
So that's how I found basically the basis for what this book is.
Wow. Wow.
I wonder how much of that woman's psychological breakdown had to do with the
guilt of performing those experiments on people and realizing that it wasn't
doing anything that you and Cameron thought it was going to do.
In fact, it was destroying people's minds.
Yeah, maybe some.
I mean, it's just speculation because I'm not sure.
Yeah, of course.
But that had to have weighed on the consciences.
You know, there's – in what was called the sleep room, you and Cameron's
sleep room, this is where they would do the chemical comas.
One of the nurses, I have kind of her diary entries basically describing what
she was seeing.
And she does seem to be pretty reluctant to have done what she was actually
doing.
And you and Cameron, she said, would often come over to her and pat her on the
back and say, you know, you're helping these people.
You're helping these people, just trying to coax her along to go along with
what he was telling her to do.
You and Cameron seem like a complete madman.
Like he was almost like too good to be true.
Not too good, but too like mad scientist to be true.
Was he on any sort of drugs?
I mean, I've never seen anything to indicate that he was on drugs, but he
definitely had a – almost like a messiah complex.
He thought, I'm going to be the one to win the Nobel Prize in medicine because
I'm going to cure all mental illness through this psychic driving or whatever
it was.
He was going to be the next Sigmund Freud.
He really had delusions of grandeur, just like I think Jolly West did as well.
And so I think that drove a lot of what he was doing.
His patients were just a means to his own end.
They're the guinea pigs that I can use to prove that these medical techniques
actually work and therefore everyone's going to praise me because I've cured
schizophrenia or whatever it is.
I'm just always suspicious of something that has that – someone has that kind
of access to all sorts of compounds.
And then you're experimenting on people and especially with things like amphetamines,
which do tend to make people a little less empathetic, a little more driven.
I would be very curious to see if he was interested in anything like that.
Yeah.
I don't remember specifically for him in that case.
I mean many of the people who are either running the subprojects or approving
them, like Sidney Gottlieb, Gottlieb took a lot of LSD.
He was – when the CIA got LSD, before it gave it to other people, the first
thing they did was try it for themselves to see what actually happened.
So Sidney Gottlieb took it multiple times before he ever even gave it to people
to understand what it was like.
And one of the physicians 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.
And for anyone listening who knows much about the Frank Olson incident, Frank
Olson is a guy that would later be dosed with LSD.
He would go out the hotel window in New York.
And Harold Abramson is the guy who – Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook,
they took to New York to get treatment from Harold Abramson afterwards.
So he had this CIA connection.
The reason why I brought up amphetamines is because I feel like it might be the
– one of the unheralded or undiscussed drivers in a lot of like psychopathic
behavior that we see in our culture today.
I think there's a lot of people on prescribed amphetamines that operate in a
way that is very much like a functional meth head.
You know what I mean?
And I would wonder like if you were in charge of doing something this evil,
just running experiments where you're destroying people's minds and you're
getting no positive results, none of it's working, yet you continue to do it.
And you even do it to people that used to be involved in the program with that
poor woman.
Like what's the psychological profile of that guy?
Because he's obviously mentally ill, which is fascinating, right?
It's fascinating that a mentally ill person is working on a mind experiment
program because there's no way he's not mentally ill.
Like to have no empathy to these people that you've tried all this stuff on and
not only has it not been effective and not rid them of mental illness, it's
made them far worse.
Yeah.
For you and Cameron, I feel like he definitely lacked empathy whether that's
some kind of medical thing or whatever.
There are a couple of people in the book I think who are like that.
One of them is you and Cameron.
Another is George White who is in charge of Operation Midnight Climax.
He was in it just for the fun of it.
He would dose his own friends with LSD just to see what would happen.
You know, there's one story in the book.
There was a woman who had gone over to a dinner party basically.
She had actually gone over with her husband a few weeks before, but George
White didn't dose them because the husband was there.
The husband went away on a business trip.
So the woman and her friend, they ended up going to see George White to hang
out.
And White dosed them with LSD.
The woman had her one-year-old son there with her, but he still dosed them with
LSD.
She ends up basically going crazy.
I mean, she, you know, she goes home.
She ends up calling, you know, George White asking, what's happened to me?
What's going on?
One of these women, she ended up being committed to a mental institution for
basically the rest of her life after this happened to her.
So she had some kind of like psychotic break after this unwitting, surreptitious
dose of LSD.
Of course, she didn't know what was going on, so she thought her whole world
was collapsing.
Yeah, she lost her husband.
It was said that she would cower in the corner of her parents, you know, house
before she went to this mental institution,
convinced that an unidentified they was like looking after her or trying to get
her, you know, calling on the phone.
None of this was happening, but she was just having these delusions that
someone was out to get her.
That's kind of a recurring theme that you see in these people who are unwittingly
dosed.
One of them, one of the saddest stories in the book is a guy named Wayne Ritchie,
and George White did the same thing to him.
Wayne Ritchie was this, he was a guard at Alcatraz for a while.
This is in San Francisco.
And he had gone to a Christmas party at the post office there in San Francisco
just for, you know, he was a U.S. marshal too, so just the U.S. marshals,
whatever.
And that night, he was drinking, you know, some of the punch at this party, and
he started feeling very strange.
He started seeing colors.
The room started spinning around him.
He ended up going upstairs to where his locker was and, you know, getting his
things.
And he wound up going home because he didn't, you know, know what was going on.
When he got home, his girlfriend was upset at him.
She said that, you know, I'm not happy here.
I want to move to New York.
And so when he's in this fog, he decides, I know how to set my life on track.
I'm going to grab a couple of my service revolver, revolvers.
I'm going to go to a bar downtown.
I'm going to rob it, and I'm going to give the money to my girlfriend so she
can go to New York, and she'll be happy, and so she won't break up with me.
So when he's in this fog, he ends up doing all this.
He gets his revolvers.
He goes to a bar downtown.
He, you know, basically has a stick up, give me all the money in the till.
A quick-thinking patron who's sitting next to him basically gets the mug of
beer and smashes it over his head so he falls down.
The cops come later.
They arrest him.
He's in jail.
After a day or two, he kind of sobers up and kind of awakens from this fog, and
he doesn't know what happened to him.
At that point, he ends up losing his job, losing his friends.
For the next 30, 40 years, he doesn't know what happened until in 1999, he was
reading the Washington Post, and he saw an article describing MKUltra, and two
things in particular stuck out to him.
One was George White, whom he knew back in the days when he was a U.S. marshal,
and the other one was a description of LSD.
And so Wayne Ritchie starts putting all this together and thinking, I think
George White gave me LSD that night at the holiday party and spiked the punch
bowl, and that's what happened.
And it turns out, you can see in this book, in the photo section, the last
photo in the photo section of my book, it's an image of George White's diary
from the day that Wayne Ritchie went insane, and it says,
Federal Building Christmas Party.
So he was there at the Christmas party.
Wow.
Imagine being that guy, reading that article 30 years later, realizing, this
guy ruined my life for fun.
Yeah.
So he ended up suing the CIA, but the judge said that he couldn't prove that he
had been dosed with drugs, so they couldn't rule in his favor, and so that was
it.
Oh, Jesus.
Yeah, but there are, I mean, there are dozens of stories like that.
What a fucking psycho.
Yeah.
What a fucking psycho.
Just dosing up the punch bowl, ruining lives.
And he knows how messed up it is, because by that point, he had done this to
multiple people and called them, and caused them to lose a lot, you know.
So he knew what he was doing at that point.
God.
Yeah.
This is just what happens with people when they have that kind of unchecked
power and no oversight.
Yeah.
And they're the kind of psychopaths that would be involved in this sort of
experimentation in the first place.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, so I think he's probably the most heinous of the individuals in this book.
All of them are to a degree.
Sidney Gottlieb, I think he, I don't think he's as heinous in the sense that he's
like intentionally trying to harm people.
He thinks he's doing this for a patriotic reason.
He thinks MKUltra is actually going to help us defend ourselves against the
Soviet Union.
There is some, like, moral justification, at least he has for himself, so it's
not all just, you know, whatever George White is doing.
But at the same time, Sidney Gottlieb doesn't really take any responsibility
for what happens to these people.
Basically, the way that MKUltra was structured with these subprojects, Sidney
Gottlieb wasn't running these experiments himself.
What he would do is he would fund other people to do experiments.
And most of the time, these people were experts in their own field, so they
were, like, reputable people.
Ewan Cameron was the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian
Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association.
He was, like, the most famous psychiatrist in the world, and he was being
funded by this.
So Sidney Gottlieb thought, well, if I can fund reputable psychiatrists or drug
researchers to do these experiments, then it's up to them to provide the safety
and the procedures, you know, to keep these patients safe.
It's not my job.
They're the ones who are conducting the experiments.
That's how he justified it to himself.
But that's how the structure of MKUltra typically worked.
Such a diffusion of responsibility.
Exactly.
Gottlieb is funding people, and he's not even funding them directly.
In most cases, what's happening is he's using cutout organizations.
So he's giving the money to—
Of course, of course.
One of them is called the Getchiker Fund.
One of them is called the National Institutes of Mental Health.
And then the CIA sets up its own cutout organization called the Society for the
Investigation of Human Ecology, which is just a made-up organization.
And so the CIA would transfer the funds to the Society, who would then transfer
it to the researcher.
In many cases, the researchers didn't even know they were being funded by the
CIA.
They just thought, oh, I got a grant from this organization.
That's great.
So they don't even know that their true patron is Sidney Gottlieb and MKUltra.
They just know, oh, they want me to do these experiments.
And in many cases, they're allowed to still publish their work, you know.
So, you know, they're publishing this.
Nothing's changed that much from what they were doing before.
But it turns out their patron is actually the CIA, who wants to make sure they
continue doing these experiments just in case they find something that could be
of use.
Oh, my God.
What was your journey personally like, both researching these subjects and then
writing books about it?
Because what was your opinion on all these things before this?
And how much of it has shaped your worldview?
So with the – probably the first book is more formative to the shaping of my
worldview just because, you know, that was the first one I did.
And what was your perspective before getting involved in any of this material?
Well, I'm pretty much – I would consider myself a skeptic generally, you know.
So when stuff gets a little too outlandish, I am pretty skeptical.
But, of course, that – the existence of MKUltra and even in my first book,
The Dirty Tricks Department, there are some projects that are even more outlandish
than some of the stuff I've been talking about with MKUltra.
And so that kind of lowered my barriers to thinking that, oh, people are crazier.
Like, oh, the government does actually perform these crazy, you know, projects.
One of the ones that really lowered my barriers to that for the first book was
called Operation Fantasia.
And, again, it's just a testament to the absurdity of some of the ideas that
were happening in World War II and just within the intelligence community.
Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of this guy named Ed Salinger.
And he had been a businessman who had done imports and exports with Tokyo in
Tokyo.
So he knew Japanese culture.
He knew the language.
He knew the religious beliefs.
The OSS wanted to exploit that by trying to find a way we can demoralize the
Japanese.
You know a lot about the Japanese psyche, the idea was, Ed Salinger.
So figure out a way we can demoralize the Japanese and make them basically give
up this war because, you know, they're dug in.
They're not giving up.
We need to find a way that we can basically use psychological warfare on them.
So his idea is that in the Shinto religion, there are these kind of mystical
figures called Kitsuni.
And in many cases, they take the form of like a fox, a glowing fox.
And oftentimes they represent portents of doom.
So, you know, if you see one of these Kitsuni, it's an indication that
something bad is about to happen.
And so Salinger knew, what if we can artificially create Kitsuni, spread them
around Japan, then all these Japanese soldiers are going to see them and think,
oh, that's a portent of doom.
Surely it means we're going to lose the war.
Therefore, we might as well lay down our arms right now.
And so Salinger, initially his idea is we're going to create whistles that can
make fox sounds and we're going to distribute them across Japan to our agents
there.
And they can blow these whistles like anyone would recognize a fox sound.
He had the idea that we're going to create artificial fox odors and spread it
around places.
And people are going to think that it's the Kitsuni foxes that are walking
around.
None of those ever materialized.
But then he thought, what if we actually do it?
What if we capture foxes from China and Australia?
We paint them with glowing radioactive paint.
And then we drop them in Japan.
Surely that's going to scare the Japanese.
So there are actually several experiments.
Oh, my God.
That they did this.
So they captured foxes.
The United States Radium Corporation produced a paint with radium, radioactive.
So loom from like dials of watches.
Exactly.
It's the same kind of thing.
Yeah.
So they decided we're going to paint foxes with this.
But they first needed to test whether it's possible to paint fur with this and
it stay on.
So they went to the Central Park Zoo and they got a raccoon and they painted it
and kept it under lock and key.
And it turns out after a few days of ordinary raccoon shenanigans, the paint
stayed on.
So they thought, okay, this might have something going for it.
So then Salinger decided we're going to paint these foxes, row them out into
the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and throw them overboard to see if they can
actually swim to shore.
Because if we're going to get these foxes to Japan, we're going to have to
throw them off the coast and they're going to have to swim and then scare
people.
But can foxes even swim?
He didn't know.
So he gets these foxes.
He paints them with this paint.
He throws them in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.
Oh, my God.
And it turns out they actually swam to shore.
So that worked.
However, by the time they had gotten to shore, the paint had all washed off.
So they poisoned the water.
Well, yeah.
And so it's like, well, if we were to do this in Japan, the paint's just, you
see a fox.
It's not a kitsune.
It has to be a glowing fox.
And so he decided, well, that's not going to work.
So his next plan, this is one of the craziest things I found from my first book.
The next plan was we're going to stuff a fox, a dead fox, just taxidermy it,
have this fox body.
We're going to paint it with this glowing paint.
We can drape a cloth over it and paint glowing bones on it to make it look like
a skeleton.
And we're going to put a human skull over this fox head to make it look as if
it's a human skull.
Because apparently this was like an even more potent version of the kitsune
myth that was going around in Japan.
So we're going to put this human skull on this taxidermy glowing fox.
We're going to have the jaw open and close as if it's talking.
And we're going to blast propaganda out of this skull.
And we're going to attach balloons to it so that it can fly over Japan.
The Japanese are going to look up and see this flying, glowing, radioactive fox
spreading this propaganda.
And they're apparently going to lay down their arms.
I guess that was the plan.
And so that was his ultimate idea of what we can do.
Did they launch that?
Did they attempt it?
That never actually made it.
About the time that he was writing all this up and doing these experiments, the
Manhattan Project had performed the Trinity test.
And so I was like, well, we already have the weapon that's going to win the war.
So we don't need the glowing foxes.
Thank you very much.
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Wow.
Yeah.
So when you research stuff like that, all of a sudden it's like, well, anything
is kind
of possible.
The problem is most people haven't researched it.
So when you're having conversations with people, like I've always been conspiratorially
minded,
but more in the fun side, like Bigfoot, UFOs, dumb stuff as a distraction.
Like I know what it is.
I'm interested because it's silly, you know, and I just find it fun.
Like the Bigfoot thing is my, I watched a Bigfoot documentary the other night
against
my own better judgment.
And now my YouTube algorithm is filled with Bigfoot stories.
It's just the dumbest thing ever.
But when I started doing the podcast, it slowly shifted my perspective of not
only are there
real conspiracies, but they're way more prevalent than you would ever think.
And you almost have to get lucky to find out about them.
You know, like one of the things from the book Chaos was Tom O'Neill describing
some of
the documents that were discovered in, I believe it was a storage unit that
where they had some-
Oh, like the MKUltra document?
Yes.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Do you remember that story?
Yeah, that's a big part of my book.
So in 1975 or so, really in 1974, there's something called the Rockefeller
Commission.
And that was an executive commission set up to investigate past abuses of the
intelligence
community.
And that kind of led to the Church Committee in 1975 and also the Pike
Committee in the
House.
But after they published their final reports, those reports included things
about MKUltra,
that the U.S.
government had performed these secret drug experiments in the past.
And that led a former State Department employee named John Marks to file a
Freedom of Information
Act request, basically for any and all documents related to these former drug
experiments.
And so, you know, not too long afterwards, this 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.
They were in on this together.
But it turns out those boxes escaped the destruction because they had been sent
to the CIA
records center several years before Gottlieb and Helms retired.
Therefore, they weren't incinerated in this purge.
And so they survived.
So Marks filed that information request.
These boxes were found and then they were released.
And this was right around the time that there were a couple of subcommittee
hearings on MKUltra.
And that's right when all these documents came out, too.
So it became kind of a big deal.
But so that's how thousands and thousands of documents related to MKUltra
survived, even
though Gottlieb and Helms incinerated most of the files that they actually had.
Which leads you to consider what would we know if those documents hadn't been
discovered?
We would be decades behind on this.
Yeah, they do reveal a lot of information.
That said, we can actually kind of run this scenario because we do know what we
kind of
knew before those documents were released.
So before those documents were released, you still had the Rockefeller
Commission and the
Church Committee and a few other things.
So we would have known still because it came out before those documents about
the Frank Olsen
incident.
This guy was dosed with LSD at this place called Deep Creek and he ended up
going out the window
of the Statler Hotel in New York.
He died.
We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, even though I don't know
if that name
was specifically used within these committee publications.
So we would have known.
Such a great name.
Well, that's George White's doing.
Is it?
Sidney Gottlieb said he had a flare with a pen.
Like he was a journalist before he-
Fucking psycho.
Yeah, yeah, he was.
In fact, while we're on that topic, at the end of Operation Midnight Climax, he
wrote a
letter to Sidney Gottlieb basically thanking him for supporting me for all
these years.
Out of all the MKUltra subprojects, you know, a lot of them started in 1953.
Many of them were done by 1963, but several continued into the late 60s.
But he, after this was done, he wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlieb, and in the
depositions
that I found, the attorneys confront Gottlieb about this, and they ask him,
what was in
that letter?
And Gottlieb says, oh, you know, he had a flare for writing.
You can't trust anything he said.
But no, what was in it?
Turns out what was in it, George White wrote, I toiled in the vineyards wholeheartedly
because
it was fun, fun, fun.
Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage
with a sanction
and blessing of the all-highest?
And he wrote that down.
Yeah.
God.
Yeah.
So we would have known about the Frank Olsen incident.
We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, though maybe not that name.
We would have known the broad outlines of MKUltra because that was already
released before those
files.
But the files give us a really detailed view of what happened.
But we don't know what was in the files that were incinerated.
That's correct.
And imagine that.
Yeah, we kind of do know a little bit about what was in them because there was
an investigation
that was done afterwards because it was illegal for them to destroy these files.
Not that anything ever happened to them.
They didn't face any consequences for it.
However, Gottlieb's secretary, this woman who had only been working for him for
a few
weeks before he retired, he told her to basically incinerate these files, you
know, to help
him do this.
So she didn't know it was against protocol or whatever.
She was new to the job.
But she was interviewed later as part of a CIA investigation into the
destruction of the
files.
And she does say a little bit about what she thinks were in the files.
She says it was some of his personal papers and there was secret and secret
sensitive files
in there.
We don't have really have a great idea about what it could be.
Although I do think a lot of the files were in the depositions that I found,
George White
or Sidney Gottlieb says that George White would write to him personal updates
about the experiments
that he was doing in these, you know, brothels basically.
And so I'm assuming that a lot of those files consisted of George White's
personal reports
on what was going on.
Now, when you get deeper and deeper into this stuff, how much has it shaped
your worldview?
A decent amount in the sense that just as it did for kind of the American
public in general
in the 1970s when this was coming out, it really led people to cast a skeptical
eye toward
the government in thinking it's just assumed that the government is supposed to
be the
protector of civil liberties.
But after Watergate, after MKUltra, after the Vietnam War, it starts to seem as
if the
government is infringing on those civil liberties, you know, instead of being
the protector of
it.
In many cases, it's infringing on them.
Not that it doesn't protect civil liberties, but one of the main things that I
came away after
writing this book is the problem of oversight.
You know, I think the constitutional system of government that we have is ingenious.
The fact that we have checks and balances and the separation of powers.
However, you have to enable the separate branches of government to be able to
check the other
branches.
For most of the Cold War, that external check on the executive branch, the
Congress checking
the executive, the president or the CIA didn't really exist.
So any time that the CIA was doing an operation, I have a chapter about this,
but, you know,
sometimes the CIA personnel would try to inform members of Congress of what
they were doing.
I have one specific quote where a CIA guy walks up to a sitting senator and
says, hey, let
me tell you about what we're doing in Chile or whatever it is.
And then he says, no, I don't want to hear it.
Don't tell me.
Just do what you're going to do.
He doesn't even want to know.
So it's like, how can you expect Congress to give oversight of the executive if
they are
completely unwilling to even know what the executive is doing?
So fortunately, in the aftermath of these revelations, there have been some
programs or committees
that are set up within Congress to provide that external check.
However, it's, you know, it's not even clear how effective those are.
One check on the executive after this is that the president now has to sign off
basically
on covert operations so that that eliminates the president's plausible deniability.
One of the main themes throughout this book is what I call this the vicious
cycle of secrecy.
So an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that kind of leads to what I
see as this vicious
cycle.
Secrecy leads to plausible deniability because if it's secret, nobody can know
that I'm doing
this.
Therefore, I'm not going to be blamed for it.
So secrecy leads to plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior like MKUltra.
If nobody's going to find out what I'm doing, therefore, I'm incentivized to do
some crazy
stuff because I'm not going to be held accountable for it.
So secrecy to plausible deniability, plausible deniability to reckless behavior.
Reckless behavior in many instances leads to embarrassment.
It's almost inevitable for many of these projects that they get found out.
Someone leaks something to the press.
This is how the family jewels that the CIA had that was like a compilation of
all the illegal
stuff that it had done over the past couple of decades.
It eventually got leaked to Seymour Hersh, who published it on the front page
of The New
York Times.
So reckless behavior leads to embarrassment.
But embarrassment leads to secrecy because now that we've been found out, we've
got to make
sure that never happens again.
We need more secrecy.
And the vicious cycle continues.
So if you can break that vicious cycle by having some kind of external check,
that's what you
actually need.
Like an empowered Congress that is willing to check the executive.
And then you realize, well, who's running against them?
Who wants that job?
Not a lot of impressive people.
A lot of really driven, successful, intelligent people are involved in other
activities that
consume their time.
They have families.
They have careers.
They have a lot.
They don't have the desire to be a congressperson.
So you're not getting the cream of the crop.
You're not even getting anything remotely similar to the cream of the crop.
You're occasionally getting great people that really want to serve the country.
But that is rare.
That is like, I wouldn't say rare, but if 20% of the food you ate at a place
was poison,
would you go eat at that place?
No.
You would not, right?
You would say, I'm assuming there's fucking poison in that place.
That's Congress.
Yeah.
That's elected officials.
Yeah.
And Andrew Yang has made this point before.
I know I've heard him say it, that the re-election rate of Congress is super
high.
It's like 80, 90%, whatever it is.
The approval rating for Congress is like in the teens.
So how is it we have such a divergence between the re-election rate and the
approval rating?
It has to do with the kind of electoral system.
You know, the people who are incentivized to actually run for Congress, in many
cases,
they're the most ideological on either side because the only race that matters
is actually
the primary.
Because if you're in a, you know, a district that is 90% Trump voters, the
Republican is
going to win the general election.
It doesn't matter who it is.
So, you know, the primary is the main election that happens in those districts.
And if that's the case, well, the person who can win the primary is going to
win the general.
And who's going to win the primary?
Well, it's going to win.
It's going to be the person who can get 90% of Trump voters to be more
interested in
them than whoever the other Republican, you know, is.
Right.
In many cases, that drives ideological extremism because, you know, you're
already selecting
a sample size of voters within the primary who are the most ideological extreme.
And so they're going to elect basically whoever it is because the general
election is a foregone
conclusion.
So if you can realign the electoral system in a way to where, you know, 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, then
you better incentivize
Congress people to actually want the job or incentivize people who would be
good at the job to engage
in the job or to become Congress people because they actually have a clear path
to doing it
because they're not going to be blocked in the primary.
So some kind of reform like that, I think, is how you better facilitate this
check between
the different branches.
But even then, I don't know if it motivates the cream of the crop because I
just I think
most people would rather be on the outside, like most wealthy people that are
successful,
they'd rather fund a candidate that, you know, suits their needs.
Yeah, well, getting maybe big money out of politics.
That would be wonderful.
That would be one.
I mean, that would be the single probably biggest help.
And then also getting out insider trading out of Congress and 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.
Like, what did you do?
What did you do?
And why are you still working?
If you're so good at trading, why are you working for $170,000 a year, which is
a great
salary?
Don't get me wrong.
I'd take it.
Nothing wrong with $170,000 a year.
But when you have $400 million, like you couldn't get me to do a job for $170,000
a year.
Like I don't have the time.
You could get me to do it.
Right.
But you know what I'm saying?
Like you can get Congress people to still show up and do that job.
Is it because they care that much about the American people?
Well, that doesn't really jive.
It doesn't make sense because they seem completely full of shit when they give
their speeches
and it's all canned and fake and insincere and there's no, you don't have any
real connection
with their words.
So what are they?
They're these weird people that have accepted this job that no one wants.
It's critically important to the function of our government.
And you're getting really dull people that are taking this job.
It's fascinating.
One of the things that also was like so disheartening, I had Rep Luna on the
podcast who was great.
And she's very interesting.
And we mostly were talking about UFOs because that's the thing that she's
involved in.
But one of the things she said about certain issues is they don't want to solve
these issues.
Oh, yeah.
Because this is how they run.
They can fundraise off of it.
Yeah, exactly.
And I was like, oh, no.
Like just that trap.
I was like, oh, no.
I didn't want to think that that is the case.
And she's like, oh, that's it.
That's 100 percent it.
Yeah.
They don't want to fix it.
I mean, that makes me even more convinced, though, that a restructuring of the
electoral
system in a way that, you know, eliminates, I don't know, that incentivizes
basically better
behavior, whether that's through open primaries, rank choice voting, whatever.
Yeah.
That has to help in some way, I would think.
Well, this should also be some sort of a competency test if someone wants to
take that position.
Like if you want to be a lawyer, you have to look at poor Kim Kardashian.
She can't pass the bar.
She's trying so hard.
She keeps, oh, I can't pass the bar.
It's hard.
It's hard to be a lawyer.
I am kind of skeptical of a competency test in a sense, though, because someone
has to
write the test.
Well, not only that, but are you watching them?
Do they use Chad GPT?
And we're living in a weird world right now, you know?
It's a very weird world of technology and, you know, but it would be nice if
you knew
that this person was capable of doing the job.
Yeah.
I mean, I bring it back to the passing the bar thing because, you know, law is
very complicated.
One of the things that I found out really recently that is super disturbing was
that
you don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge.
To be a judge.
Interesting.
Oh, if you...
You don't have to know anything.
I guess you can just get elected if...
You could just become a judge.
You could be a regular person and just now you're a judge.
Yeah.
I wonder what kind of judge that is.
Because I know some judge positions...
Yeah, man.
I don't give a fuck if it's a judge at Dairy Queen.
Like, you should...
What are you talking about?
You don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge?
That's insane.
That's so insane.
That's like you don't know how to count to be a mathematician.
Like, what are you talking about?
You're a judge.
You don't have to be a lawyer to be a judge.
To me, it was like, oh my God.
State and federal courts, most state and federal court and all federal judges
must have a law
degree.
Wonderful.
Some state doesn't...
Practice requirements.
Many states require judges to have a certain number of years of experience as a
practicing
lawyer before they're eligible for a judgeship.
Makes sense.
When a law degree may not be required.
Limited court jurisdiction.
Some states allow non-lawyers to become judges in specific lower-level courts,
such as those
that handle small claims, traffic violations, or minor criminal matters.
State and local variations.
The specific requirements may vary wildly by state, even by the type of court
within a
state.
And training judges appointed from the non-lawyer pool typically must complete
specific training
programs.
That's right.
But what is the program?
I wonder if that's a relic of rural communities where maybe there isn't a
lawyer, but you
need someone to act in that position.
Right.
Like you got to be the sheriff in this town.
Instead of being like an MD doctor, some people can practice medicine, you know,
in rural
communities they do without being an MD doctor.
I forget the term of it, but whatever that term is.
So maybe that's...
Because they don't have a doctor?
Well, yeah.
They don't have a doctor, but you can...
You still have a degree, not an MD, but some kind of medical degree that maybe
doesn't
require as much time.
Or you didn't complete your residency or something.
So maybe it's a relic of that.
I don't know.
Right.
That makes sense.
But point being that, you know, if Congress has oversight over these things,
well, who
are we talking about?
This is the thing.
Like if you are the CIA and you are running some program that you think is
crucial to national
security and you have some fucking ding-a-ling from pick a 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?
Like, get out of here.
Like, I'm not telling you shit.
You're going to hold back information.
You're going to come up with reasons why you have to redact files.
Fuck off.
You'll be gone in two years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is the inherent tension within any intelligence community, whether it's
the CIA or the FBI.
Yeah.
There are legitimate reasons to keep things secret.
You have to keep secrets.
A hundred percent.
But at the same time, the fact that you're afforded that secrecy allows you to
avoid accountability.
A hundred percent.
So it's a catch-22.
You have to keep secrets.
There's just no way around it.
Yes.
But at the same time, how can I know that the secrets they're keeping is
because it's in my
interest or it's because it's in their interest?
Oh, one hundred percent.
And then you find out the really crazy stuff that's happened in the past, like
the demean
Arkansas cocaine situation.
I haven't heard of that.
You know about the Barry Seals story?
No.
They made a movie about it with Tom Cruise.
In fact, in the movie, Tom Cruise actually gets arrested for smuggling cocaine
and Bill
Clinton gets him off.
They call Bill Clinton.
He gets arrested in Arkansas.
They call Bill Clinton and they have him dead to rights.
And, you know, he's joking around with the cops saying, I'd like to buy you
guys all Cadillacs
and stuff like that.
And they're like, you're going to jail for the rest of your life.
He goes, no, she's going to get a phone call and I'm going to walk right out of
here.
And it turned out to be exactly how it happened.
Barry Seals was flying drugs from South America and dropping them off in Mena,
Arkansas.
And then they would go and pick them up in the woods.
They had a drop point.
Two kids were hanging out in the woods and they witnessed it accidentally.
They were murdered.
And then the official story was they had done drugs and they laid down, fell
asleep on train
tracks.
The parents funded an autopsy and the autopsy showed that they've been stabbed
multiple
times.
So then there's an investigation comes through.
And then it turns out that there is a long history of this guy, Barry Seals,
who is CIA
operative, who is flying in cocaine, dropping it off in Mena, Arkansas, all
known about by
the Clintons.
Everybody was aware of it.
And he had been funneling this money and they were using it probably for black
ops, similar
to what they did with the Contras in Sandinista, you know, the Contras versus
the Sandinistas
in Nicaragua.
He winds up going to testify, gets murdered on his way to the trial with George
Bush's phone
number in his pocket.
The whole story is like completely crazy.
Wow.
Yeah.
When did that happen?
I hadn't heard of that.
So it was when Bill Clinton was the governor.
So I believe it was the 80s.
Okay.
He died in 86.
86.
I wasn't alive then.
You weren't alive then.
That's hilarious.
Fucking crazy story.
But this is the CIA, right?
This is the same thing that they did.
I'm friends with Freeway Ricky Ross.
Do you know who he is?
Okay.
Great story.
So Rick Ross, the rapper, okay, you know who that is?
He got his name from a very famous street hustler named Freeway Ricky.
Rick Ross.
His real name is Rick Ross.
He's the real Rick Ross.
Rick Ross was a guy who is a tennis player, a young tennis player who started
selling cocaine.
It was like super disciplined because he was a tennis player.
So it was funneling millions of dollars of cocaine.
Had no idea he was getting his cocaine from the CIA.
So he was getting cocaine, selling it in the hood.
They were getting the money and they were using it, this Oliver North thing,
the Contras versus the Sandinistas.
All of this comes out in court and he winds up going to jail.
He winds up going to jail for selling the cocaine, doesn't know how to read.
He's illiterate.
Learns how to read in jail.
Becomes a lawyer in jail.
Goes over his trial and realizes that they had tried him on the three strikes
law, which is supposed to be three different felonies at three different times.
But they jammed him all together.
And so he gets off.
So he's free now and he sells legal marijuana in California.
He's been on the podcast multiple times.
But this was the CIA that was involved in all of this.
This is how they were making money.
They were selling cocaine.
And one thing crazy just about not only that but MKUltra in general, it's
against the CIA's charter to operate within the United States.
That should just be a deal ender right there for whatever they're doing within
the United States.
It's against the charter.
Yep.
I mean, there's no more discussion.
That's illegal.
Well, I just think without oversight, there's cowboys.
And there's also when you realize how much money is there to be made and that
you could funnel this money into oversee 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.
And I think that's the dream for a lot of these guys.
I think they get involved, they realize it's a completely corrupt system and it's
corrupt from the top down and there's ways to make money.
And there's a bunch of stuff going on where money is 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.
And as you were talking about, the importance and the necessity of secrecy for
national security, which is a real thing, but also leads to corruption and it
leads to people just doing wild things because there's no one watching.
And they're in control.
They're in control.
Look, it must be so fun.
Like, what's his name was talking about?
The evil guy.
George White.
George White.
Like he was talking about, like how much fun he had, which is so sick.
Yeah.
But that's the kind of people that want that kind of a job.
And if you make that kind of a job available with no oversight, we need like a
council of elders, like a wise council, you know, like of like completely
objective, brilliant people that oversee all these things that aren't ideologically
captured.
You know, they're financially independent.
They don't need anything from you.
I've mentioned external oversight, like Congress checking the executive, but at
the same time, one of the big problems with MKUltra or one of the problems that
led to MKUltra without people even within the CIA questioning it.
There are people in the CIA who know about it.
Actually, not that many because it's very heavily compartmentalized, but some
people still do know about it.
So one of the questions I was asking myself throughout this book, why aren't
the people who are in the CIA and know about MKUltra, why aren't they speaking
up?
Why don't they say, pull Sidney Gottlieb aside and just have a conversation
with them?
Do you think what you're doing here is all right?
I think they're terrified about their career.
That's exactly the thing.
There's a specific person within the CIA during this time.
That's his job, the inspector general.
So the inspector general within the CIA, his job is to make sure there's
nothing that goes against the CIA's charter or internal regulations or the U.S.
law.
But I found an interview that he did later.
There's this guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick.
He was the inspector general during the 1950s when this was going on.
And he did an investigation into MKUltra in 1957 as it was going on.
And it continued on after that.
And so one of the things he talks about is, why isn't the case that you tried?
Why didn't you try to shut this down?
Like, you obviously knew this was illegal.
In fact, in 1963, a different CIA inspector general named John Ehrman, he did a
separate investigation into MKUltra.
And his report that I quote in this book specifically says, what I think they're
doing is, quote, illegal and unethical.
Those are his terms.
And he's the inspector general.
Yet in this later interview, Lyman Kirkpatrick talks about, why didn't you tell
them to stop?
Why didn't you put an end to this?
Why didn't you raise this to higher ups?
Why didn't you do something?
And he said, I was worried about bringing up anything that could cause me to
lose my job.
He knew that if he brought this up, he'd basically be retaliated against.
And so that was it.
So, you know, there's problems with external oversight, but also internal
oversight.
The internal oversight has to be able to bring that kind of stuff up.
And another lack of internal oversight is the fact that Sidney Gottlieb and
Richard Helms, they could destroy all these files with no repercussions.
It's just completely illegal.
It's against the CIA's own internal regulations.
In fact, in these depositions that I found, some of the most colorful parts of
the depositions happen with the lawyers.
The lawyers just get into heated arguments back and forth.
That makes the book really colorful.
At certain times, there, you know, Joseph Rao is this old civil rights, you
know, he used to be the civil rights lawyer.
He took on this case basically to fight against the CIA.
At certain points, he basically says to the other lawyers representing the CIA,
I'm going to punch you in the nose.
And he says, I'm never giving this up.
I'm going to mortgage my house if it means I have to keep on fighting you.
But there's a certain point where he basically lays into Gottlieb asking him,
why did you destroy the files?
Why did you destroy the files?
Sidney Gottlieb comes up with several excuses.
One of those excuses at first is he says the CIA was drowning in paper.
We had so much paper we couldn't move.
So there was just an internal kind of drive to get rid of this paper so that we
could walk around and figure out where stuff was.
He's just completely making this up.
Rao presses him again.
Why did you destroy this stuff?
Sidney Gottlieb, you know, and he does this to Richard Helms too.
They both eventually say again, well, we wanted, you know, it's part of our job
to protect sources and methods.
And so we wanted to make sure that nobody would be able to know what our
sources and methods were as part of this project.
So we had to destroy the files.
And Rao was like, these files are secret.
It's not like they're going to be released to the public.
They're the CIA's files.
How could destroying them protect sources and methods any more than just not
releasing them to the public?
It's just a non-excuse.
So eventually Rao presses Gottlieb more and he kind of breaks down during this
interrogation.
And he says, I was embarrassed by it.
I was embarrassed by what I had done.
Basically, you know, ruined the lives of all these people, spent $10 million at
all these different institutions.
For what?
To ruin these lives and we didn't even learn that much out of it.
And so he destroyed the files.
Wow.
And didn't face any repercussions.
So in addition to external oversight, there's got to be some internal oversight
that can provide a check and prevent that from happening.
Or if it does happen, at least deter others from doing the same thing by
holding them accountable.
It's really fascinating that what we're experiencing is essentially 250 years
after the founding fathers had already recognized these patterns of human
behavior that required oversight.
They required checks and balances in order to have a government that doesn't
sink into tyranny.
You have to have all these things in place to make sure that no one person has
the power to do anything that really fucks up the apple cart.
Yeah.
And they knew that this was a – and they really painstakingly structured this
system of government that they thought would protect against it.
They didn't factor into account special interest groups and they just expanded
exponentially into so many different factions and so many different influencing
bodies that it's almost completely out of control.
But essentially they knew what could happen that has proven to be accurate,
which is really kind of fascinating.
It is.
It is.
It is.
You know, it's a brilliant system.
And I quote James Madison, actually, when I talk about oversight because his
specific verbiage is, you know, auxiliary precautions.
You know, humans, he says, men aren't angels.
Therefore, auxiliary precautions are necessary to keep their ambitions in check,
which means external oversight, which is like, he's exactly right.
That's exactly what you need.
He's exactly right.
You know, I wonder, like, where this goes because it's going in the wrong
direction from the founding fathers to today.
It's going in the wrong direction.
It's like I think most people agree that the 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, there's so many different influences that aren't
based on the greater good of the American people.
It's based on financial interests.
And that's sort of overwhelmed all of our policies, overwhelmed all of our
systems of government.
And then you have all of these social issues that they never really want to fix
because they can't pay fun against them, which is what we were talking about
before.
So this is this constant psychological game.
There's a game of us versus them.
There's a game of certain key points, whether it is abortion or gun rights or
immigration or whatever it is.
Like nothing ever gets solved.
These are the beach balls that they throw up in the air at the concert and they
keep getting bounced around.
And we're just little dumb monkeys that are giving up our tax dollars so they
can keep running this giant Ponzi scheme.
I will say a counterintuitive point that I think is important to also make,
though, is Daniel Shore was a CBS News correspondent.
And he's the guy who initially broke the story on CIA assassination attempts on
foreign leaders.
And he has this quote about how the U.S. has a, you know, there's a pendulum
that swings between security and liberty.
You know, the more security you have, the less the more liberty, basically, you
have to take away.
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.
At least you wouldn't be able to do anything bad because there would be a
policeman in every bedroom, basically.
On the opposite side, you know, if the pendulum swings too far the opposite way,
complete liberty, well, you have no security because anyone could do anything.
So there's this constant tension between security and liberty that swings
throughout American history.
And an important thing to keep in mind is that I don't think you want that
pendulum to stop.
You actually want a little bit of tension between that.
You want, in other words, you want the press and Congress to be exposing abuses,
you know, because human nature is not going to change.
People are going to try to abuse the system in whatever it is.
That's not going to stop.
However, if the press and Congress aren't exposing these abuses, you might
think that there are no abuses happening, but they're going to be happening.
So I think it's actually good, the fact that this pendulum is swinging a little
bit, the fact that there is a little bit of tension, and the fact that there
are abuses being exposed.
I wish the abuses didn't happen, but at the same time, the abuses are going to
happen no matter what.
Therefore, the exposure of the abuses is a good sign.
It's a sign that the system is actually working as intended because the abuses
are being exposed.
One of the points I make in this book is dread the day when the press sings
nothing but the praises of those in power, and Congress says that there are no
abuses to investigate.
It might seem like that's utopia, but that's the day that you have lost all of
your liberties.
That's a very good point.
That's a very good point, and well said.
I think this is what we're seeing now with independent journalism and that a
lot of these issues that get raised are coming from independent journalists
first,
and then they ultimately have to be recognized when they reach the zeitgeist.
They ultimately have to be recognized by the New York Times or by mainstream
media publications, but they're not the ones who break a lot of these stories.
A lot of these stories are broken by the Glenn Greenwalds and the Matt Taibis
and the genuine independent journalists who initially worked for an
organization
and then found there was 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, and then they started doing it on their own.
And then also social media.
This is the new function that social media has where you have these accounts
that break news stories all the time.
And interestingly enough, some of them are very reliable, and those ones wind
up becoming the ones that people share, and they get a tremendous amount of
followers.
And then they are more trustworthy oftentimes than corporate media, which is
really kind of scary but also fascinating.
Like there's a need for it.
There's a recognition.
There's a distribution of information that lets you to see all of this
corruption and all of this chaos and, like, what's at the root of it,
and why isn't this being discussed in the New York Times?
And then all of a sudden someone puts up this 10 Twitter post of all these
different links and shows you this is the history of it and the story of it.
And then a month later it's in the Washington Post.
And it's interesting.
It's interesting because it's almost like this need exists.
It's not being fulfilled by mainstream media because mainstream media is
captured by corporate interests.
So in order to have this information comes out, the world gives us this new
platform, and that's social media.
And social media distributes all this stuff, and then you have to sort through
what's real, what's foreign governments making up fake stories.
I think that's the other side of it because the algorithm can push something,
but it doesn't necessarily push truth.
It might just push engagement.
And if that's the case, then how do you know?
Community notes.
Yeah, yeah, something like that.
Well, that's the beautiful thing about Twitter.
And when Elon solved that issue with community, I don't necessarily say solved.
It's not solved.
But it certainly made it a lot easier to understand what's going on because
oftentimes there's some outrageous video clip like, oh, my God, can you believe
the Democrats are doing this?
And then it turns out, no, that's actually from a movie, or that's actually AI,
or that's actually from 2016, and it's in Poland.
There's a lot of that stuff happens where people get outraged, and someone
posts something, and then I always go to the original account that posts it.
And how many times I've gone there, I'm going, oh, you're not a real person.
Most of the time, I go and look at all the posts that they have.
I'm like, well, this is either a bot or this is a foreign government running
one of these puppet accounts.
Yeah, you might like being a historian because it sounds like that's very
similar to what I do in the historical record, not on social media.
But, you know, a lot of what I'm doing is following this source that cites this
source that cites that source.
It's like, where's the origin of this thing?
And you can see the – it's a game of telephone.
You can see the transformation along the way.
One of my favorite examples comes from my first book.
I was writing about William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS, and he was
this really, you know, larger-than-life individual, a World War I war hero.
He had a Medal of Honor and all kinds of stuff.
And there was this really great quote in a book, and it was describing Donovan
basically as that.
He was the kind of guy that would dance on the roof of the hotel, and he would,
you know, he would destroy these planes and whatever.
And I thought, man, that's such an, like, exciting quote to encapsulate who he
is.
So I was reading this book, and I kind of – okay, I'm going to mark that
quote.
I'm going to come back and see where does he – what source is this from so I
can use that in my book.
So I go to the source.
It turns out it cites another book.
And it's like, okay, I've got to get that book.
So I go to the library.
I was teaching at Louisiana Tech at the time.
Go to the Louisiana Tech Library.
Get that book.
Open it to the page that it says.
Find the quote.
Go – okay, here's where it is.
Now go to the back of the book.
See the note.
The note cites another book.
It turns out I had that book.
I own that book.
So I went back home.
Go to that book.
Do the same thing.
Look for the source of this quote.
It turns out it was a book I didn't have and the library didn't have, so I had
to put an interlibrary loan, you know, in use.
So I had to basically request that my library get the book from a different
library.
That was going to take several weeks.
So, okay, now I've got to wait.
In the meantime, I go on to Google Books.
I start searching this quote for other books.
It turns out they basically cite the books that I had already consulted, so it's
a dead end there.
I have to wait for this other book to come in.
And in the meantime, I'm thinking to myself, that quote sounds awfully familiar.
What do I know that from?
It turns out I had already used that quote in my book, but it was from a
different – it was in a different context.
It wasn't talking about William Donovan.
It was talking about just people in the OSS in general, and the quote was
different.
It wasn't like the same quote, but it had many of the key words, and you could
tell that it was the same thing, but somebody had changed it.
So now I'm thinking, did I use like a fake quote, you know, in this book?
So I've got to figure out in my manuscript where I got this.
It turns out I got it from this book called Wanderer by this guy named Sterling
Hayden, the actor, later an actor.
He was in the OSS.
And he had used the quote because he was quoting – he was talking about when
he was in Europe at the end of the war.
He told someone he was in the OSS, and they said, oh, the OSS guys are the kind
of guys who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I thought, okay, well, he's recalling this from memory, so this must be the
origin of the quote.
Then what are all these other books quoting?
So finally that interlibrary loan comes in, and I get it, and it basically says
the quote, but it's, you know, it's a little bit different, and it's referring
to Donovan, again, and not just OSS guys in general, and it doesn't cite a
source.
So I thought, okay, what happened is the guy who wrote that book, he had read
Sterling Hayden's book, he had taken the quote, and he liked it, but he wanted
to apply it to Donovan, so he switched the subject, and he changed the quote a
little bit.
And everyone after that, dozens of different books, have cited that as their
original source, and it was about the wrong person and not even the right quote.
Wow!
So, and that's for one quote in my book, that's the amount of work you have to
do.
Well, kudos to you for doing that work, right?
That's why people like you are so important, that you chased that whole story
down to the end.
If anyone is interested in that, though, in my book, I cite the original book,
obviously, because that's what, but next to what I said, also see Joseph Persico,
blah, blah, blah, the original book.
So, that's the book that I originally found the quote in, so if they want to go
down the rabbit hole, they can follow his book to that book to that book to
that book.
Wow.
Well.
It's a lot of rabbit holes going down, even just to find the origins of things.
Well, and then apply that to religion.
You know, like stories?
Oh, oh, yeah.
You know, like.
Game of telephone.
Oh, my God.
You know, what was the original story?
Yeah, it's, it's, a lot of this stuff, the secrecy, MKUltra, the, all the stuff
we're talking about, about oversight, it, it all relays to the way the human
mind works.
Like, that the human mind, in this instance, would take a quote, and for its
own convenience, apply it to a different person and change it a little bit.
It's like, we're, we're constantly dealing with all of these factors that are
in motion with human intelligence.
With ego, with reputation, embarrassment, the ambition, power, control.
And one thing I especially noticed in doing this, too, is the, the ability for
humans to rationalize anything, to agree with what they already think is true,
is almost limitless.
I give an example in this book of a psychologist named Leon Festinger.
He wrote this book called When Prophecy Fails.
And it's a really fascinating story where he was looking in a newspaper and he
saw an announcement for the end of the world.
There was this cult called the Seeker's Cult, and they had said, basically, on
December 21st, 1953, I think it was, it's going to be the end of the world.
There's going to be a massive flood.
Join us, and so we can get whisked away on the spaceship before the end of the
world happens.
Festinger sees this, and he thinks, this is a great psychological experiment,
because they are making a specific prediction.
On this day, this is going to happen.
What happens when it doesn't happen?
So he decides to embed himself in this cult.
Basically, they knew he was a psychologist, but they said, yeah, sure, come on
by.
So him and some of his researchers, they just sit with the cult on the day that
the world is supposed to end, because they want to know, how are they going to
deal with the fact that the world doesn't actually end?
So, obviously, there wasn't even a light rain.
There was, like, no flood.
And so the world doesn't end.
Some people actually do end up leaving the cult afterwards, but many people
stay, especially the people who had sunk many costs into the cult.
They had abandoned their families to join this.
They had donated lots of money.
They had quit their jobs, basically, to be in this cult, because they thought
the world was going to end.
What do we need money for?
And so those people stayed.
And now, Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance.
So the idea that you're holding two irreconcilable views in your mind at the
same time.
So one of their views is, we predicted, because we have received revelations
from God, basically, that the world was going to end on this day.
That's one position they're holding.
The other position is, the world didn't end on that day.
So this is cognitive dissonance.
How do we reconcile the fact that these two things contradict each other, but
we have to believe both of them?
So Festinger was interested in how they would do this.
There were a couple rationalizations originally.
One was, well, maybe God meant it in a figurative sense, not a literal sense.
Maybe it was a figurative flood that was going to cleanse our minds of, you
know, something.
Not like a literal flood that was going to kill everyone.
But then they said, no, no, we actually thought it was going to be a literal
flood.
So he's in the middle of their discussions when they're rationalizing this.
And they eventually come upon the conclusion, God was going to destroy the
world.
We were right to believe that he was going to do that.
But because he saw how fervently we believed in him and how fervently we
believed that the world was going to be destroyed,
he decided to have mercy on us and didn't destroy the world.
So the fact that we believed that the world was going to be destroyed is the
reason why the world wasn't destroyed.
So the evidence against them becomes evidence for them.
We know we are right because the world wasn't destroyed because, you know, that
proves that God was taking mercy on us.
So this is how they rationalize it.
So this is, you know, non-falsifiable, something that there's no way you could
prove it wrong.
This is an indication of a bad theory of it's non-falsifiable.
It's like not tethered to reality.
It's gold medal mental gymnastics.
Exactly.
If something's non-falsifiable, you know, for the classic example for me of non-falsifiability
is the concept of last Thursday-ism.
So it's the idea that God created the universe last Thursday.
Now, how could I prove that wrong?
You know, I ask my students this and many of them say, well, I remember last
Wednesday.
I remember time before last Thursday.
But of course you remember that, but God created you and your memories last
Thursday.
So of course you would think that there was time before last Thursday because
God implanted those memories in you last Thursday.
In other words, this is just a non-falsifiable belief.
You can't prove it wrong, but that doesn't mean it's right.
So the capacity for humans to rationalize things, if you start from a false
premise, we can rationalize a world to make sure that we believe in that false
premise.
Yes, yes.
We do that with everything.
We do that with religion.
We do that with ideologies.
We do that with everything.
And it's not – it's – you know, people typically associate rationalization
with religion or this kind of cult behavior like this group I explained.
But actually I'm a historian of science and it actually plays an important role
in science itself, like the method of science, how science works.
If you don't mind, if I can briefly describe the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn.
He's this famous philosopher of science.
He wrote this – the most influential book in the philosophy of science called
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, basically explaining how does science
change or progress over time.
His concept was that scientists operate within a paradigm, a worldview.
So we believe in Newtonian, you know, gravity or we have the worldview of, you
know, the germ theory of disease or, you know, whatever it is.
So this is our paradigm, whatever group of scientists we are.
Within that paradigm, we do normal science.
He says puzzle solving.
We do experiments to try to prove our paradigm right.
So if my paradigm is, you know, if I'm a follower of Ptolemy and I believe in
the geocentric universe, I'm going to be observing the way that the, you know,
the planets and the stars are moving across the sky to try to prove Ptolemy
right.
I'm going to try to prove that his predictions actually come true.
So this is just called puzzle solving.
What scientists actually do, Thomas Kuhn says, many of them, they just puzzle
solve.
They just try to prove the paradigm right.
In the process of doing that, they uncover occasionally an anomaly.
An anomaly is something that seems to contradict the paradigm.
Like, okay, Ptolemy makes this prediction about where the planet should be, but
it turns out the planet's actually not there.
It's a little bit off.
That's an anomaly.
And Kuhn says, what do scientists do with anomalies?
Do they throw out their theory?
No.
He says they either ignore it or they find a way to rationalize it.
Well, Ptolemy made that prediction, but it's close enough to where it's, you
know, his theory still works for most of the observations we're making.
So scientists usually ignore or rationalize the anomaly.
But over time, as they do more and more puzzle solving, normal science, more
and more anomalies crop up to the point where we just can't ignore them anymore.
There are just too many anomalies.
At a certain point, we realize that our worldview, our paradigm, must be wrong.
And Kuhn says this allows for a crisis within the scientific community.
The group of scientists within this paradigm, they 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.
So it accounts for all the things that the previous paradigm could do, in
addition to all the anomalies that the previous paradigm couldn't account for.
Now we're in a new paradigm.
And what do we do?
We do puzzle solving.
We try to prove our paradigm right.
And in the process, we uncover anomalies.
Oh, and we rationalize them away.
But the reason I raise this point is because one of the integral parts to the
progression of science, says Thomas Kuhn, is the fact that scientists are
stubborn.
The fact that, contrary to popular belief, we typically think of scientists as
people who are really open to changing their minds.
They're confronted by evidence.
And so, OK, they're willing to accept this evidence.
Thomas Kuhn says if you actually look at the history of science closely, that
does happen.
But what also happens in a lot of instances is scientists are stubborn and they
don't want to change their minds.
They're stuck on their paradigm and so they rationalize away the anomalies.
So the same kind of rationalizing that you have within the seeker's cult about
their belief system is very similar to the kind of rationalizing that
scientists are doing when they refuse to throw out their paradigm because they've
uncovered these anomalies.
But surely there's a way we can make those anomalies fit with our paradigm
instead and they don't.
So this isn't to say that scientists are members of a cult or anything like
that.
In fact, 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.
However, really what I consider Kuhn as, it's a commentary on human psychology.
Kuhn basically figured out cognitive dissonance before Leon Festinger, you know,
but Kuhn didn't have that terminology.
Festinger is describing cognitive dissonance to these cult members.
Kuhn is describing it in scientists.
He just doesn't have that terminology, but that's just what it is.
And Kuhn says that's why science progresses.
It's necessary for those people to ignore that evidence because it enables them
to keep uncovering more anomalies that eventually leads to the revolution.
So it's like it's an ironic thing that our ability to rationalize is what
allows us to progress in the future.
Wow.
Wow.
This is the perfect point to take a break because I have to take a leak.
So this is awesome.
We'll be right back.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
But I'm glad we took a break right after that epic rant.
That was so good.
I mean, you just nailed it.
It's so perfect that there's this bizarre psychological dance when it comes to
human beings, even scientists.
Yeah, and it's – you know, the main point to make is that it's not – the
main point is just that human psychology is human psychology.
Just because you're a scientist or a cult member or whatever, it's not as if
you're immune to any of these tendencies.
Anyone is subject to them.
It's just human psychology.
So I tend to think of Thomas Kuhn in terms of psychology instead of philosophy.
Yeah.
Well, it's brilliant.
And it's just – it also – all of that – all that understanding of human
psychology is really what leads us to even begin to wonder what is going on
with the human mind.
How do you exploit it?
What can you do?
And then you're going to get people like Sidney Gottlieb who make a fucking
career out of it.
They're realizing like we're like these very bizarre, complicated thinking apes.
And we have tendencies and we have these things that we do that protect
ourselves and we have these desires and we have these motivations.
And how do we exploit that?
How do we do that for air quotes national security interests?
Yeah, and one of the ironic things is I don't think Sidney Gottlieb is
particularly successful in creating like a Manchurian candidate and controlling
someone like a marionette and getting them to commit an assassination or
something like that.
However, there are ways to manipulate people and to influence them to behave in
certain ways.
And the typical ways that we associate with like cult behavior – there's a
guy named Stephen Hassan and he –
Yeah, I've had him on.
Oh, have you?
Okay, yeah.
His bite model, behavior, information, thought, emotion, I think that's a very
good model for understanding how actual mind control actually takes place.
You know, behavior being like controlling where someone can go, what they can
do, what they can eat, when they can sleep, information being restricting
someone from accessing outside sources of information.
But if they do, teaching them to distrust that information even if they do
access it.
Well, he was actually in a cult.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he was in the Moonies.
Yeah, yeah.
Thought control is like reinforcing previous patterns of thought.
So saying mantras, reciting prayers, creating an us versus them mentality.
Yeah.
And then emotion control is like instilling in someone certain emotions to make
them beholden to the cult or to whatever it is.
Guilt, fear, shame, anger, loyalty, dependence, that kind of thing.
And so a combination of these four factors is I think the real mind control,
how people actually manipulate people, how especially cults are able to
manipulate their members to do all kinds of really insane things like cut off
their genitals or commit murders or anything like that.
I think it's much more influenced by those four factors than it is some kind of
LSD, mind control, Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra type thing.
Are you aware of the cult that existed in Austin that there's a documentary
called Holy Hell?
I don't think so, no.
When was that?
Really interesting.
I believe it took place here in the 90s.
The cult, it's called the Bodhi Tree, I believe.
Okay, no, I haven't heard of it.
Originally they started in West Hollywood, and this is a great story.
It was a guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist who was also a yoga
instructor.
So he starts this cult.
He would have liked this book, I bet.
Yeah.
I believe his name was Jaime Gomez, and he changed his name a couple of times.
One of them was Michelle, and I think the other one was Andreas.
And so when the Cult Awareness Network started looking in the cults right after
Waco.
And Jolly West started that, right?
The Cult Awareness Network.
Yes.
So this guy leaves West Hollywood and moves to Austin and has his followers
build him a theater
that he can dance for them in front of them.
That was the point?
So that he can show off to it?
Yes.
It's a beautiful theater.
I almost bought it.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
The original Comedy Mothership was going to be at this cult.
Is it downtown?
No.
No.
It's West Austin.
It's on Bee Caves Road.
Okay.
Yeah.
And it's still there.
It's a beautiful theater.
And the reason why I was going to buy it was for sale, first of all.
It was a beautiful theater, and we wanted a place to put a comedy club.
And Ron White, my dear friend, had performed there, and he told me how great it
was.
He's like, some cult owned it or something.
So I was like, all right, cool.
And I went to check it out.
I'm like, this is great.
And then I get a phone call from my friend Adam.
He goes, hey, man, have you seen the documentary on this cult?
And I'm like, oh, fuck.
There's a documentary?
And the documentary is terrible.
It's horrible.
However, there's one fascinating aspect of it.
Okay.
So this guy, he had sex with all these people.
He made them pay money so that he could have sex with them.
Like, they would do therapy, and he was having sex with all these guys, and
they were straight.
And it was like they felt terrible about it.
And after it was over, like, one guy had sent a mass email like, hey, this guy's
been hypnotizing me and fucking me for the past 10 years.
And everybody's like, I thought it was just me.
And then the entire cult falls apart.
Oh, man.
But here's the point.
This guy had this thing that he would do to them called the knowing, and they
would have to qualify for the knowing.
They'd have to be ready for it, and only he could decide if they were ready.
When they were ready, they would have this ceremony, this huge thing.
And then he would put his hands on them.
They would, like, they would kneel there in acceptance of the knowing, and he
would put his hands on them, and they would have this profound psychedelic
experience.
So through the power of suggestion, through the placebo effect, whatever it is,
they genuinely have this profound psychedelic experience, this connection to
God, this feeling of all oneness.
To a person, everyone who left the cult, who talked about what a terrible guy
he was, talked about how he sexually exploited them and abused them and took
their money, and they wasted 20 years of their life with this guy.
But that day, when they got the knowing, was the most profound day of their
lives.
Really?
Even after they were out of the cult?
Yes.
Even after they were out of the cult?
People weeping about what he did to them still talked about that experience as
being the most profound moment of their life.
Which is, like, this guy, because he was a hypnotist, and because he was also a
megalomaniacal, narcissistic, yeah, oh, beautiful man.
Like, gorgeous man.
Like, six-pack, ripped body.
And it got weird at the end, because later in his life, he started getting
plastic surgery, because he was getting older, and so his looks were going.
So his fucking face got pulled back, and everybody was like, what are you doing?
Like, what are you doing?
And he would deny doing anything, but it was, like, so obvious, and he had facelifts,
and he just went crazy.
But the point is, it's like, he figured out how to not just manipulate these
people, like all cult leaders do, but have this one experience that apparently
was a real experience for these people, in some way.
Able to incept, like, some kind of idea into them, or, yeah.
If they could just get out then.
Like, I got it, thank you, I'm going to go get a regular job now.
But in order to have that, I'm sure you have to go through the whole experience,
because it builds up some tension or resentment or something.
Of course.
Human psychology has to have gone through that in order to maybe reach that.
Well, it's just spectacular that he was able to understand that you had to hold
it back from them for so long.
And, like, some of them in the film would be, they were complaining that, I'm
ready for it, he won't give it to me, I want it, I want it so badly, Michelle
got it, now she's enlightened, and I'm just sitting here on Earth eating
carrots.
This is bullshit.
And, you know, it's really weird, because one of the things about these cult
documentaries is every time you watch one, like, for me at least, in the
beginning, I'm like, that looks like fun.
Yeah.
In the beginning, it looks great.
They're all having dinners together, they're all laughing.
It's a community.
It's a community.
Everyone loves community.
Everyone needs to feel accepted.
They're all helping out.
They're all, like, working in the garden together, like, this looks great.
It looks great.
And then it always descends into one guy fucks everybody, one guy takes all the
money, one guy wants to be known as the living God.
It's just, these patterns are so weird.
They're so weird because they're so similar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the same basic human psychology operating under different circumstances
that leads to, you know, I mean, there's a classic phrase, you know, history
repeats itself, or history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
But it's because humans share a psychology, so of course there are going to be
similar actions.
That reminds me kind of this concept of, like, incepting something into someone
or making them feel this.
Were you, you know, this is a little bit before my time, but did you experience
the satanic panic in the sense that were you keeping up with it when that was
happening in the 1980s?
I wasn't.
You know, I was very busy during that time, but I peripherally remember it.
And then later on, we examined it and looked into it.
And, you know, we've done a few episodes where we went over it, but it was, you
know, legitimately kind of crazy.
Yeah.
You know, because there's a connection between that and some of the, what I
would say are MKUltra kind of conspiracies.
There are a lot of true things about MKUltra that are just crazy, but there are
also some things that people propose that I don't think actually happened.
You know, there are some people who say, for instance, that MKUltra was, it was,
like, getting young women to run around these military compounds where they
would be hunted for sport.
And it was saying, like, you know, there was a vice president who activated a
hologram around his body to make this woman think that she had turned into a
lizard, to make her think that lizard people actually exist.
Like, you know, she was saying that the CIA personnel would impregnate her and
abort the fetuses and eat the fetuses and sell some of the body parts in their
interstate occult body part business and all this stuff, which I don't think
any of that happened.
However, there's a connection between, you know, the people who are making
these assertions and the satanic panic.
A lot of the people who make these assertions say that they recovered their
memories through hypnotism.
And that is a lot of what was going on during the satanic panic.
You had people recovering memories through hypnotism about being involved in
this ritualistic satanic abuse.
And, in fact, there was a group called the International Society for the Study
of Dissociation.
And a lot of the members were kind of responsible for propagating many of these
satanic panic conspiracy theories.
The president of that organization, a guy named Bennett Braun, he was sued by a
former patient for falsely convincing her that she had engaged in cannibalism
and infanticide and all this stuff that she didn't do.
And he lost his medical license and she was awarded $10 million in this lawsuit.
But it turns out that many of the people, one in particular, of the kind of
prominent MKUltra conspiracy theorists, her husband, who did this hypnotism on
her to recover her memories, he said he learned how to recover memories from
Bennett Braun himself.
And he was a part of this International Society for the Study of Dissociation.
So it's like the same techniques that were being used during the satanic panic
to so-called recover these memories.
It's the same thing in many of these MKUltra, what I would say are conspiracy
theorists, who are propagating this misinformation about MKUltra because they
supposedly recovered these memories about how these jelly beans were used to
control their behavior or something.
But it's the same kind of techniques that are being used in both instances.
Hypnotic regression in particular is very odd because a lot of it is dependent
upon the questions that are asked while the person's under.
Like that you can lead someone to believe something happened that didn't happen.
This is what Jolly West was some of the stuff that he was doing too.
This is what's really – do you know who John Mack is?
John Mack.
John Mack was – I believe he was a psychiatrist at Harvard.
He got really obsessed with alien abduction stories and he wrote a book called
Abduction and it was all hypnotic regressions of people that had been abducted
by aliens allegedly.
And they all had very similar stories.
But the real controversy from skeptics has always been like what were these
sessions like?
Like leading questions?
Yes, yes.
Did you lead them to believe – and also there was a precedent.
So do you know the Betty and Barney Hill story?
Okay.
Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple in New Hampshire I believe in
the 1950s with the very first UFO abduction story.
And they had an experience on a highway.
They saw a thing.
They lost time and then they couldn't sleep.
They had all these real problems and they both wound up going to a hypnotist.
And separately had the same story.
Separately had the same story about being taking aboard a craft and being
manipulated.
The problem is then that story gets out into the zeitgeist.
Yeah.
Right?
And then you have hypnotic regression where people tell very similar versions
of that story.
And it becomes a thing where like even if the original Betty and Barney Hill
story was real, now that becomes a possibility in your mind that could have
happened to you.
And then you get hypnotized and someone says, do you see any beings in the room
with you?
Yes, I do.
Do they – are they short with large heads and large black eyes?
They are.
Like what are the questions?
Like how did you lead them into this hypnotic regression of alien abduction?
And I think a very similar thing took place during the European kind of witch
craze in the 17th century.
Yes.
These preachers would go around to different communities talking about witches
and demons.
And so as soon as they left, in the weeks following, there is a huge uptick in
witch accusations and supposed demonic possessions.
Is it a coincidence that right after they're – as soon as it's brought to
your consciousness, oh, I think you might be a witch or all these accusations
start farting around.
Obviously, it's like a suggested thing that they picked up from attending these
religious rallies.
Of course.
Did you know that when the printing press was first created, some of the first
and most popular books were all about how to spot witches?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Like Heinrich Kramer and the Hammer of Witches.
You would think, no, no, no.
But now we have a printing press.
It's just all about philosophy and, you know, it's going to be able to print
the Bible and mathematics.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
If it bleeds, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.
It's like people are attracted to sensational stories.
Yes.
It's the same thing about human psychology.
They're just the same psychology as us today.
And if we're interested in learning these sensational stories, of course they
want to, too.
It was their version of what I'm obsessed with Bigfoot.
The same thing.
It's just nonsense.
Yeah.
A funny anecdote kind of related to that.
I teach a course on Isaac Newton, and he writes this big book, The Principia.
It's like the most famous book in the history of science.
And it goes off to the publisher.
And the publisher, you know, he's publishing this book.
And right after The Principia is published, the publisher gets arrested for
publishing pornography.
So it's like there's this image of this publishing house where The Principia,
the most important book in the history of science, is there.
And right next to it is all this smut that he's secretly doing.
Wow.
God, human psychology is such a trip.
We're so weird.
We're such weird animals.
And it makes it so hard because we're so weird to find the truth.
Yeah.
Especially when you're talking about, like, suggested memories or something
like that.
There are a few studies.
I don't remember them, you know, like, perfectly.
But there's one study that I talk about in this book where this is right after
the Challenger explosion.
So the space shuttle has exploded and there were two psychologists, I think
they're at Emory University, and they decide we are going to have all of our
students, like 200 students, write down exactly where they were when they heard
about this.
Because obviously they're all going to remember this is like the next day.
Where were you?
What were you doing?
Who told you about the explosion?
And so they got copies, you know, of these questionnaires basically from 100
and how many students.
Four years later, I think it was, they tracked down, I don't know what, 40 or
80 of these students and had them do the same questionnaire.
When the Challenger exploded, where were you?
Who were you with?
What did, you know, what did you learn?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They took the exact same questionnaire and the majority of the students got a
majority of the questions wrong.
In the sense that they put down something completely different than they did
the first time.
So it's like nobody was even manipulating them.
That was just their own memory that, you know, the majority got the majority of
these important details wrong.
There's another intriguing kind of humorous psychological study.
I don't know how big the sample size was on this, but it was to determine how
powerful our memory is in the sense that if you just suggest that someone did
something, is it possible that they actually think they actually did?
So the suggestion was they took a bunch of students to some vending machines
and they either had them propose to the vending machine, something that surely
you would remember, or they would suggest to them that they had proposed to the
vending machine.
So, you know, some students would actually propose and other students, they
would just tell them, oh, you know, imagine yourself proposing to this vending
machine.
And afterwards, I don't remember what the percentage was, but it was a decent
amount of percentage of the students who were only told to envision proposing
actually thought they had proposed.
And so the power of suggestion is very strong.
So strong.
And the memory is so fallible.
Like, I have a pretty good memory for, like, hard facts, like, information that
I know is true.
But my memory of my own life is basically like weird, blurry snapshots that I
can recall.
And oftentimes what I'm recalling is the memory of my recounting of my memory.
It's not really my memory.
Yeah.
This is the story that you've told yourself.
I watched an episode of news radio the other day.
It was a sitcom that I was on in the 1990s.
I didn't remember it at all.
I didn't remember the plot.
I didn't remember the lines that I had.
I didn't remember, like, if it was fake, if someone created it during AI, I
would have no idea whether it was an AI version of news radio or whether,
unless it was an episode that I really remember, like, oh, that was a really
funny one.
I didn't remember this at all.
Yeah.
And it was me.
I lived it.
I was on TV, right?
So it was, like, probably a big moment for me at the time.
Gone.
It doesn't exist.
I feel like I, it's ironic.
I'm a historian, but I feel like my memory is not that good either.
I don't think anybody's is.
No, it can't be.
Well, there's certain people, like, you know, that woman that was on Taxi, um,
really pretty redhead lady, that sitcom Taxi from the 1970s.
God, I forget her name is, uh, famous actress, Mary Lou Tenner, Mary Lou Tenner.
Photographic memory.
Henner.
Henner.
Mary Lou Henner.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry, Mary Lou.
Um, I used to be in love with her when I was a kid.
Uh, she has a photographic memory.
Like, she can remember, uh, that it was a Tuesday in 1983, like this lady.
It's an incredible memory.
Highly superior autobiographical memory.
A rare condition in which people can remember nearly every day of their lives
with precise detail.
I wonder if that would be good to have or bad to have.
She seems very happy.
Okay.
Show a picture of her when she was young.
Oh, she was so old.
I can imagine having a negative experience or a bad memory and then dwelling on
that and knowing every single detail of that and having to relive that, like,
in photographic detail every time you think of it.
I'm sure that couldn't be a pleasant experience, but.
That one right above.
Go to the one right above there.
Right there.
No, right there.
Bam.
That was her.
Woo!
Smoke show.
That was your younger crush.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, she was so pretty.
And also, uh, photographic memory, so you can't lie to her.
Like, what an amazing person.
But that's gotta be, I would imagine it's not, I would, I would take that over
not taking that.
Like, if someone gave me the option, would you rather have an absolute
photographic memory or be, like, not really sure, or, like, I don't fucking
know what happened, you know?
Yeah.
I would take, I would take the photographic memory, I think.
The burden, I think, would be worth it.
I think I'd handle it.
Even me for questions, like, you know, if you ask me, how did you come to write
this book?
Like, you asked me, how did you become interested in this topic?
When I was thinking about the answer to that question, I mean, what I said is
factual in the sense that I was doing a dissertation on scientists in the
intelligence community and this, but is that really, like, how I came to this
topic?
I might have read some other book that I read the name Sidney Gottlieb and that
got me interested.
And, you know, even, 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?
It might have been, you know, I kind of remember reading Tim Weiner's book,
Legacy of Ashes, and it briefly mentioned Sidney Gottlieb in there.
Maybe I read that and it, like, oh, who's this guy, you know?
Right.
So there's a classic joke about how there's a guy looking for his keys on the
parking lot, and it's night, and there's a lamppost right above him, and a
police officer walks by, and the police officer says, sir, what are you doing?
And he says, oh, I'm looking for my keys on the ground.
They must be somewhere around here.
And the officer says, oh, well, did you drop him right here?
And the guy says, no, I dropped him in the bush over there, but this is where
the light is, so this is where I'm looking.
So to me, it's like, well, when I remember my own autobiographical experience,
am I remembering it, how it's convenient to remember it?
Yeah.
Remember it, or, you know, or what?
Oftentimes.
Oftentimes.
I mean, that's the human tendency, right?
I know for a fact when I really got into conspiracies because I have a moment
connected to it that was a bad experience.
So when I was in my early 20s, this guy that was a friend of mine that was in a
band had read this book called Best Evidence by David Lifton.
David Lifton was an accountant, and I forget what his assignment was, but it
had something to do with the Warren Commission.
So he goes over the Warren Commission report, and he actually read the whole
thing.
So it's a huge volume.
And he reads all this, and he finds so many contradictions and so many things
that are wrong with it that he starts investigating the Kennedy assassination.
And he writes this book called Best Evidence.
And the book is basically saying there's no way the official story is true.
And I read this while I was a comedian on the road.
So I was in Philadelphia, and I was doing stand-up.
And I had a show on Friday night, and I spent the whole day in my hotel room
reading this book, freaking out, going, oh, my God, they killed him.
So then I go on stage, first show, and fucking bomb.
And I had done really good the night before.
And they were like, what happened?
Did you talk about JFK, or did you already have your set routine?
No, I had my set, but I was completely freaked out by the fact they killed the
president.
And then I apologized to the manager.
I said, I'm so sorry.
I read this book on JFK, and I'm super bummed out.
I'll be over it by the second show.
I promise you.
And then they were like, you better be.
And I was like, I promise I'm good at this.
I know what I'm doing.
And the second show was great.
And they're like, don't do that again.
I'm like, I won't.
I won't do it again.
But I genuinely freaked out.
So I remember very specifically, because it was a big moment for me.
I was on the road, and I ate shit at a comedy club.
So that thing is in my head forever.
But that book was my first step, because I was like, if this is a true story, I
mean, if this book is accurate, someone killed the president, and they got away
with it.
And it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald, even if he was involved, it was – and
there was a conspiracy to distort the evidence of the assassination in terms of
like the difference in the discrepancies between the report at Dallas when they
first received his body to Bethesda, Maryland.
There's a bullet hole wound that they describe in the Dallas where they call it
a tracheotomy hole in Bethesda, Maryland.
They're manipulating the narrative to incorporate the single gunman theory.
Yeah.
Have you ever had Gerald Posner on?
I have not.
OK.
Because I know – 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.
Yeah, that book sucks.
You need to get him together with Oliver Stone, and he'll take that book apart.
I bring him up just because I follow him on Twitter, X.
And he was posting recently about the – I think he posted about the tracheotomy
thing.
And so – but I don't really –
Just the magic bullet theory alone is complete, utter nonsense to anybody who's
ever shot anything with a bullet.
When bullets hit bone and shatter bone, first of all, there's the fact that
there was more bullet fragments in Connelly's wrist than were missing from this
magic bullet.
This magic bullet was only used as a tool because they had to account for a
bullet that hit the underpass.
So there was a guy standing under the underpass.
He got hit with a ricochet.
So they're like, well, definitely that bullet hit here.
So we have to attribute all these wounds to one bullet.
So they had to go through Kennedy, bounce around, come out of him, hit Connelly,
go through him, go through his wrist.
And then they magically find this bullet in the gurney when they're bringing in
the body or when they're bringing in Connelly to get medical assistance.
They supposedly magically find this bullet.
This bullet has clearly been shot into water.
This bullet is either water or pillows.
This bullet has no deformations.
It's pristine.
It's not missing any fragments.
So it doesn't account for the fragments in the wrist.
It's a total horseshit idea.
And then there's the back to the left when you see this Pruder film where his
head explodes.
It's all the people that were talking about the shots coming from the grassy knoll.
It's the fact that so many of the witnesses died in mysterious circumstances.
They died from car accidents.
They died from suicide.
They died from crime.
They died from random acts of violence.
Like they did a calculation of what are the odds that all these witnesses would
wind up dying the way they did.
And it's like some spectacular number.
They fucking killed a bunch of people that were there.
I'm sure you know this, but Vincent Bugliosi wrote like I think what might be
the longest nonfiction single volume book ever written on the Kennedy
assassination.
Remembering history or something like that.
It's like 1,500 pages.
This is Bugliosi that was involved in the Manson.
Yeah, he wrote like a book about the JFK assassination.
And if you read Tom O'Neill's book, it calls him a complete charlatan.
Like he's a crazy person.
But yeah, I mean, if anyone has seen that book in person, it really is like 1,500
pages of like the densest, tiniest little print.
And it was so long that it came with a CD of the notes that were like 1,000
additional pages that couldn't fit in the volume.
And it came like a physical CD you had to put in your computer to see the notes.
Oh, my God.
That's so crazy.
But I think that could be like the longest single volume nonfiction book that I've
ever seen.
I would love to get Gerald Posner in a room with Oliver Stone because Oliver
Stone, even at his advanced age, he's so smart.
And his recall is incredible for dates and times and people that were involved.
I don't think Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent.
I think Lee Harvey Oswald was definitely an intelligence agent.
I think Lee Harvey Oswald, the fact that he lived in Russia, the fact that he
came back to America, married a Russian woman.
He seems to have like just very bizarre access to – I think he was an
intelligence agent.
I think he probably was involved in the whole thing.
But the calmness in which he describes the fact that he's a patsy after he's
been arrested for killing the president.
Like to me, just that, that guy's involved in some shit.
That's not how a normal person reacts when you get accused of killing the
president.
If you're innocent, you go, I'm innocent and I don't have anything to do with
this.
I don't know why they have me.
You'd be freaking the fuck out.
And he's like, I'm just a patsy.
Oh, are you really?
Like I think you're probably an intelligence agent.
There's probably something creepy about you.
Well, if anyone could get them to talk, I'm sure it's you.
I think there was a lot of people involved in the Kennedy assassination.
I think there was multiple shooters and I think it was very coordinated.
And it was probably – it probably involved our government.
It might have involved the mafia.
It might have involved other governments.
Some people think it had something to do with Israel because Israel – Kennedy
did not want to give Israel nuclear weapons.
There's a ton of stuff that's attached to that assassination.
But this idea of case closed, fuck you.
There's no case closed in this.
This is one of the craziest conspiracies of all time because it seems to be
that they killed the president and got away with it.
That's what it seems to be.
And then the Jolly West connection to Jack Ruby.
So Jack Ruby goes in and kills Lee Harvey Oswald.
Then in jail, Jolly West visits him and he goes completely fucking insane.
Completely insane.
Loses his mind.
Thinks he's in hell.
There's fire.
The Jews are all burning.
Like he's like going nuts.
Right after the guy was in charge of all these LSD studies visits him.
How convenient.
One thing – it's been, I don't know, five years or whenever I read Tom O'Neill's
book when it came out the first time.
So I don't remember that well.
But one thing – because I have a chapter on Jolly West.
And one thing that stuck out to me especially is one of the main crusades he
had in his life was against the death penalty.
You know, he writes a lot about how it's completely immoral, this thing he
doesn't like.
So to me, especially – there's an earlier case called this Jimmy Shaver case
about this guy who abused and killed this little girl that Jolly West was
involved into.
It seems to me the possibility is also open that Jolly West might also have had
an incentive to dose these people with LSD if he did to prevent them from
getting the death sentence.
Because if they could, you know, appear insane, maybe they would not get the
death penalty instead.
Why was he so obsessed about the death sentence?
I don't know.
I think he just considered it immoral.
And what a fascinating thing that a guy who would ruin people's lives would
consider just ending them to be immoral.
Yeah.
Where a lot of those people wind up killing themselves because of his actions.
Yeah.
And he ended up killing himself too.
Well, I mean it was an assisted suicide with his son.
His son – his son later wrote a book about this.
But his son basically – Jolly West had gotten cancer that had metastasized
throughout his entire body.
And he was about to die.
And he didn't really want to go through the remaining months or whatever he had
left in agony.
And so he got his son to stockpile a bunch of pills and feed them to him when
he basically became unable to move for himself.
And so that happened to Jolly West.
Then the son did that to Jolly West's wife, his own mother, later when – I
don't know exactly if she had a medical issue or something.
But he helped her commit assisted suicide.
The son wrote a book about it.
And then he later committed suicide as well.
Oh, boy.
Oh, man.
It's just so strange how so much – so many bad things can have come from just
a few people.
Just a few people and these terrible ideas and this complete lack of oversight.
It's so much evil, including the Manson family.
Because we've talked about it, the Tom O'Neill book.
Please, folks, if you're listening to this, read that book.
It's one of the craziest books of all time.
Yeah.
By a man completely obsessed with the story that literally chased down nothing
but that story for 20 years.
And one of the parts of the book that I really enjoyed is the writing style is
kind of like a gonzo – like he's part of the story.
You're following him on the journey to discover this stuff.
For me, that was the exciting part of the ride.
It's like, oh, it's not just telling you the story.
It's like we're figuring out how a historian or a journalist actually works.
He's telling you, now I've got this interview and I'm going to go do this and I'm
going to go find these documents.
I didn't write this book in that style because I just wanted to stick to a
description of MKUltra.
But there is something tempting about – one of the exciting things about
history is doing the history and no one really sees that process.
You know how I was describing going down the rabbit hole to find the origin of
that quote?
There are a million stories like that about how it's so crazy.
For example, there was this guy named Vannevar Bush.
He was President Roosevelt's unofficial – official, really, science advisor
during World War II.
And some people say Vannevar Bush, but it's actually –
Is he connected to the Bushes?
No, no, no, no.
No, different Bushes.
But it's Vannevar Bush.
Bush himself says that it rhymes with beaver, his name.
So it's Vannevar.
But he was writing his autobiography.
He was in charge of coordinating scientific research during World War II.
And when he was writing his autobiography, he did this series of interviews
that were like 1,000 pages long so that he could kind of talk about his life.
And he would use chunks of that as part of his autobiography.
Well, I wanted to get that because for my first book, Vannevar 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.
So it's like, oh, Vannevar Bush is like one of the main guys who is, you know,
playing a role in this story.
So I go – there are a couple of different archives that have this 1,000-page
interview that Vannevar Bush did.
And every single page is there in one of the versions except two pages that
talk about Stanley Lovell and the OSS.
And I thought, that's the exact thing I need.
Like, how is it out of 1,000 pages, the one thing that's missing is the two
pages?
And so I finally eventually find out that there's another copy of this
interview at a different repository, like at Georgetown University or MIT.
I forget which one it was.
So I get them to send me a photocopy of every single page.
And it turns out that had the two missing pages.
So it's like, oh, my gosh, now I can actually use that information because –
but they didn't have the two pages out of 1,000 that I actually needed.
They were missing.
So there are like 1,000 stories about these crazy coincidences that happened.
One of them, again, from my first book, was about Stanley Lovell.
You know, he's this chemist in the OSS creating all these ingenious, like,
gadgets and whatever.
He talks in his memoir about his wartime experience about being on this
biological warfare committee where they were discussing the possibility
of using anthrax and tularemia and tuberculosis and, you know, distributing
this 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.
But he talks about this in his memoir.
But I had never seen, you know, a copy of that meeting – minutes of that
meeting or anything.
He said that this group, this biological warfare committee, it was part of the
National Academy of Sciences.
And I thought, okay, well, that's interesting.
But, you know, I can't hardly put it in the book if I don't actually have the
minutes in 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.
But then I thought to myself, I kind of remember several years earlier when I
was writing my dissertation before this book,
I had gone to the National Academy of Sciences because I was working on, you
know, some scientists in government.
And I ended up taking just a bunch of pictures of a lot of the materials they
had in their archives.
And I went back through the material that I already had.
And it turns out I had taken pictures of the minutes of the very meeting
Stanley Lovell was talking about in his memoir.
It was already in my possession.
I didn't have to go there.
I already had it.
It's just a crazy coincidence that I already had the exact thing I needed.
Wow.
So the process of making history is sometimes even more exciting than the story
itself.
Well, the process, it seems like it takes a very dedicated person to chase down
that process.
Like 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.
And I'm so glad that you did that and chased down those things because a lot of
lazy people wouldn't have gone that far, right?
Yeah.
Especially if no one's watching.
Yeah.
You know, you have books you could cite like, oh, it says, here's the quote.
Yeah.
But for me, that's the enjoyment of it.
You know, I enjoy doing it.
I like going to the archives.
I like finding things.
I feel like a detective, you know, I'm in the archive and I'm looking at these
documents and, oh, I find this guy's name is mentioned here.
I know.
Okay.
So to me, it's exciting.
It's like a treasure hunt.
So that's the fun part of it.
Do you have a hard time communicating with people that aren't familiar with all
this stuff in terms of like this subject gets discussed and someone brings it
up and they start asking questions?
Do you have a hard time of not looking crazy?
Do you know what I mean?
Because like there's a lot of people that are like very intelligent, very
educated people that have not just no information about this or no knowledge of
this, but an aversion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because it's naturally a thing that you would assume could not have taken place.
But it's not just that.
It's like there's an aversion to even rationally discussing it.
Like I don't I am not the type of person that's going to sit here and do
conspiracies with you.
I've had a few conversations like that with people that do not believe in
conspiracies and they always fall apart under scrutiny.
They know that that narrative falls apart.
Well, you don't think they exist.
Which ones don't you think exist?
Well, a conspiracy.
I mean, to me, a conspiracy is just a secret plot to do something.
There are a lot of secret plots.
Of course.
Yeah.
All throughout history.
Now, I mean, there are conspiracy theories in the sense that there are stuff
that people make up and isn't actually true.
But to say conspiracies themselves are necessarily false.
Well, any secret plot is a conspiracy.
Not just that.
I think we live in a day and age where there is a lot of fake conspiracies that
are thrown in to muddy the water.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, in fact, that actually ties in at the end of this book.
I talk about a little bit about kind of the what's kind of called censorship
through noise, the idea that we can put so much noise out there that no one's
really going to know what to trust.
And so I give an example of the idea that AIDS was created in a government
laboratory like Fort Diedrich.
And then in the really 1980s, there was a Soviet kind of propaganda mouthpiece
newspaper in India called The Patriot.
And this would just publish like KGB propaganda.
Wow.
And in India.
In India.
Yeah.
And one of the stories in that newspaper was basically saying AIDS was created
in the government laboratory.
But it doesn't just say that in order to get there.
It first said, did you know that the CIA was involved in dosing people with
drugs, which is completely true.
Did you know that the military was involved in in spraying certain germs over
cities to, you know, 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.
They were just spraying like yeast and stuff over.
But, you know, it's bacteria.
So did you know that this did you know that they've performed experiments on
these drug addicts and this and that and this?
And also, did you know that in Fort Diedrich, they created a biological weapon
called AIDS?
So it's, you know, it's the the lie is made more potent because it's sandwiched
in between all these truths.
And so this newspaper, The Patriot, published this article basically saying all
these true things.
And then one thing at the end that they were actually pushing.
But if you knew that all these other things were true, you might assume that
that final thing is true as well.
And other countries around the world where they had these front newspapers,
they would also publish the same kind of story.
Did you know that and then AIDS was created in this government laboratory.
And then those newspapers would cite the Indian newspaper, The Patriot, as
evidence that other independent newspapers had also come to this conclusion.
And if many independent sources are coming to this, surely it means that it's
got some credibility to it.
Not knowing that the actual connection, the KGB is just sponsoring all this.
You know, so it's a 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.
And so we're going to flood the zone with all this, you know, crap basically to
maybe nobody's going to know what to believe.
Maybe it is the case that the CIA created AIDS in Fort Diedrich or whatever it
is.
So that's one tactic that I talk about at the very end.
It's also a great way to minimize the impact of all the things that actually
are true on that list because you attach something that's completely kooky.
And if you do that enough times, you can muddy the waters on basically every
subject that there is.
Yeah.
So it can go both ways in the sense that fake stories can delegitimize true
stories, but true stories legitimize fake stories.
Right.
Both ways.
And then you have the social media impact of bots, which is just really unstudied.
We don't really know the numbers.
We've talked about this before, but there was a former FBI analyst before the
purchase of Twitter that he was looking at and he thinks it's 80 percent bots.
It's 80 percent of the discourse.
80 percent of the traffic is not human or people that are being paid to do it.
Is it like some government entity wanting to do this to sow confusion or?
There's a lot of different factors.
There's us.
There's them.
There's everybody.
There's NGOs.
There's different PACs.
And they all have – like you can go online.
There's companies that will fund a social campaign for you.
Like so imagine if you wanted to go online and attack people over a certain
issue.
Like say if you're trying to get a bill passed and you want to attack people
over a certain issue.
You can fund a campaign using bots to promote your position.
And it could give the illusion of some sort of – some agreement online or
disagreement online.
Or maybe you could take a thing that's a very reasonable position and make it
seem completely ridiculous and then also seem like there's a bunch of support
that it's completely ridiculous.
Like a lot of people believe and they start citing things that aren't true and
quotes that aren't true.
And you could just completely screw up the idea of what the truth is.
Yeah.
I know the Russian government had – I think it was called like the Internet
Research Agency or something like that.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's a book called Active Measures by Thomas Ridd.
And he kind of chronicles what they were doing.
Basically, young people would be hired to pose as whoever anyone wanted to be
posed as.
I guess the Russian government to spread certain amounts of disinformation to
certain communities.
So 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.
There's a whole – there's a whole organization or a whole, you know, whatever
it is.
What was the woman's name that came on to talk about that?
Renee DiResta.
Renee DiResta.
That's right.
Yeah.
She was saying how like she had to study all these memes and so many of them
were really funny.
And like these people that were in charge of – what they wanted to do was
make sure the people online in America were arguing about everything.
And the more you could get people at each other's throats, the more you could
destroy their democracy.
This was part of the idea of it.
Just to have another element that people have to deal with and that they were
organizing Texas separatist meetings directly across the street from these
Muslim meetings.
Like they were doing it on purpose.
They were trying to get people to argue with each other, trying to get people
to be in conflict with each other.
Yeah.
And I mean one of the things now with social media but just in a globalized
world, any amount of conflict is kind of available for anyone to see.
So, you know, the worst thing in the world that happens today, you're probably
going to learn about it.
You're going to know about it.
Which that can't be good for your mental health to constantly be bombarded by
this negative stuff.
It's not that in the past all this negative stuff didn't happen.
It's just that in the past you were probably more focused on your community
because it's not like you've got constant access to what's going on in Myanmar
at this second or whatever it is.
Right, right, right.
So the fact that you're constantly able to see the worst thing happening in the
world, that cannot be good just for your mentality.
It's definitely not good but it's also a social experiment because we didn't
know what would happen when you get all this bad news from all over the world.
It's never happened before.
So there's never been a device that you carry in your pocket that gives you the
worst news of the day all day long.
It's totally new.
So anybody growing up today is bombarded, which is why it has to account for
some of the anxiety that kids face today.
Because you see heightened levels of anxiety, heightened levels of fear about
climate or anything that they tell you that's the thing that you really need to
freak out about.
It's like you're being inundated and you don't have a chance to just enjoy the
moment that you're in because everything is like this total existential crisis
that's going to destroy humanity.
If you don't act now, oh, God, there's a genocide going on.
It's like no matter what it is, it's like you're being bombarded by everything.
The economy is a crash.
No kings.
Oh, ice is coming.
Jesus.
Gun control.
Ah.
Do you have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-internet days?
Because I don't remember it that well.
No.
Nah, fuck those times.
That was stupid.
I think the internet with all its flaws is way better.
It's way better.
It's way better than the government being in control of the narrative.
And now we know intelligence agencies absolutely in control of what's
distributed in mainstream news.
Like the idea that the mainstream news back then was independent and free and
they were the press.
Like, no.
No.
The government agencies and intelligence agencies have been involved in
propaganda from the jump.
And it's way better now.
You have more access to information.
It's way more complicated.
It's way more complicated to live your life.
It's way more psychologically complicated to be in the moment and to be present
and to just enjoy your life.
It's harder.
It's much harder because you are constantly being informed.
And there's the addiction aspect of it, you know, the addiction to being
informed, the addiction to seeing what people are saying and seeing the, oh,
what did this guy do?
He stole all this money.
Like, we were in the green room last night.
We were reading a story about this congressperson who stole money and how they
did it.
And then they bought a giant diamond ring.
So they were wearing this giant three-carat diamond ring on a $100,000-a-year
salary.
Like, what are you doing?
You fucking crazy person.
But it's like 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.
No, you're just – you're constantly looking at all the problems that are
happening all over the world all the time.
Yeah.
And you don't get a break.
But it's better than being ignorant.
It's just like you have to find a way to weather whatever that psychological
storm is and seek shelter and don't always just stay out there in it and just
get bombarded by psychological hail.
That's kind of what it is.
You've got to have a strong roof and stay inside sometimes.
Yeah.
This is a weird transition, but you said psychological hail.
It made me think of this project during World War II the OSS did called the Bat
Bomb.
Are you familiar with that?
It just made me think of these things kind of raining down.
But I write about this in the Dirty Tricks Department.
But during World War II, there was this concept of how can we better target
cities or buildings with our incendiary explosives?
We can drop bombs, but, I mean, those aren't targeted.
They're just going to fall where they fall.
And if the wind's going the wrong way, they're not even going to hit the target
that we want them to.
So this guy named Little Adams, he was working with the OSS, he had the idea.
He had just gone to Carlsbad Caverns.
What if we get bats and we attach napalm to them and then we release these over
Japanese cities?
The bats are going to roost into the buildings in these cities.
And then we can have the napalm time delayed so that it'll explode after a
certain amount of time that we release them.
And it'll set fires to all these buildings.
So we have, like, targeted incendiaries instead of just random bombs falling.
So it sounds like kind of a crazy idea.
But he happened to be friends with Eleanor Roosevelt because he had flown
planes before and he had given her a ride in his plane.
And they kind of knew each other.
So he sent this kind of report on the bat bomb to Eleanor Roosevelt.
She gave it to her husband, President Roosevelt, who gave it to William Donovan,
the head of the OSS.
And with a note attached to the thing that he gave to Donovan, it said, this
man is not a nut.
You know, take this seriously.
So Donovan, of course, he gives this to the research and development branch,
Stanley Lovell, that I write about in my first book.
And it becomes this bat bomb project that now Lovell feels obligated to do
because the president is saying we need to research this.
So they end up going to Carlsbad Caverns and to some caverns here in Texas.
And they scoop up a bunch of bats and they do a few tests with them.
They actually get a guy named Louis Fizer who invented napalm to create tiny
little incendiaries that you could strap to bats.
And this is a little bit of a digression, but Fizer had been at Harvard.
He was a chemist there.
And when he was inventing napalm, it was like a jellied gasoline.
He would do the tests on the soccer field at Harvard, just like in the middle
of the campus.
That's where napalm was invented, just like in the middle of Harvard's campus.
These bombs would be exploding and people would get mad at him.
People would get mad, not because he was detonating these bombs, but because he
was hogging the soccer fields and the drill sergeant needed it for practice.
And so there was like these disputes back and forth.
Oh, my God.
But so he was hired by the OSS to create these tiny little incendiaries to
strap to these bats.
So the OSS did a few experiments with this.
Before the incendiaries were strapped, they put like fake incendiaries on them.
The idea was to cool down these bats.
We're going to fly them in a plane over the desert, like out in Utah or
somewhere.
And we're going to drop these bats and see if they actually kind of disperse.
It turns out that they were using Mexican free-tailed bats, which I don't think
actually hibernate, but they travel south for the winter.
And so they cooled down these bats in this like artificial refrigerator, but
apparently they had cooled them down too much.
So when they dropped them from the plane, they just like fell straight down to
the ground and never woke up.
And so they just splattered across the desert.
So that was one of the tests.
Another of the tests, they wanted to do a live experiment where they had an
actual bat and with an actual napalm bomb attached to it to see if it could
like fly off or to see if it would actually like carry this weight.
But they had it in like somewhat of a controlled environment.
They cooled this bat down, put it in artificial hibernation, and then they were
taking pictures of it, you know, to see how everything operated.
But then the bat started kind of waking up, and it flew off before they could
grab it, and it actually flew into a control tower, and it burst into flame,
and the whole thing caught on fire and burned down.
So it turned out this thing actually worked, but again, it was never deployed
against Japan.
This is right at the end of World War II, and, you know, they're already—the
Manhattan Project was kind of successful at that point, so there was no need
for the bat bomb.
But if people are interested in that kind of story and how crazy that can get,
that's in these books too.
Do you know about the proposal for the gay bomb?
That sounds familiar, about like releasing some kind of chemical that makes—that
distracts people.
They'll be so infatuated with each other, these soldiers that we can go—yeah.
Not just that, but then somehow or another it would demoralize them and make
them easy to conquer.
Huh. Interesting.
Which didn't make any sense, especially historically when you consider the
Spartans.
You know, they were all gay.
They were the craziest force ever.
Like, that's not going to stop people.
Well, you know, that's actually one of the big inspirations for MKUltra, not
the gay bomb, but the idea that we could use chemicals to defeat an enemy army.
So, Sidney Gottlieb, 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.
And Luther Green was in charge of, like, developing and experimenting with
nerve agents, you know, that could incapacitate—these are like some of the
most potent agents that have ever been created.
A fraction of an ounce applied to your skin can be lethal.
So, he wanted to find a substance, Green did, that could mimic the effects of a
nerve agent, like incapacitate someone without actually killing them.
His idea was that if we could get this substance and we can drop it over enemy
territory, it could incapacitate these soldiers just through chemical warfare,
but we wouldn't actually have to kill them.
They would be incapacitated for a certain amount of time.
And then we could send the Marines in and they could gather up all these people
and we can conquer this territory, we can defeat this enemy army without
actually having to kill anyone or for any of our people to be killed.
So, Stanley Lovell was really interested in this concept.
You know, war without death was what they were talking about.
War without death.
We should use chemical weapons that just incapacitate people.
So, one of the things that got, I should say, Sidney Gottlieb interested in
investigating LSD was the fact that maybe this could be an incapacitant that we
could use to basically eliminate an enemy army for the time being and then we
could go and conquer them without actually having to kill them ourselves.
So, he was trying to use it almost as a more ethical form of warfare where, you
know, instead of killing someone, you just incapacitate them.
Wow.
Um, I think we covered it all.
Listen, your book's amazing.
I'm really excited that you put in the time to write it and I can't wait to see
what David Chase does with it.
Um, and, uh, when it, when it happens, let's do this again.
I'd love to.
I feel like we could talk about this stuff for hours and hours and hours.
There's a lot of stuff to go into, too.
Um, is there an audio book of this?
There is an audio book, yes.
Did you read it?
I didn't read it.
Damn it.
They got a, they got a professional for that.
Oh, man, you would kill it.
You have a great voice.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, but the nice thing is it's the same narrator who did both my first and
second book.
So there's some kind of continuity between that.
Oh, okay.
So you're happy with it.
Yeah, yeah.
It turned out really, he did a really good job.
So, and the other book is, uh, the Dirty Tricks Department.
Um, uh, Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
It was awesome.
I really appreciate it.
It was really fun.
Bye, everybody.