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- John, what's happened, Matthew?

- How much? It's 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?

That's about MK Ultra 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 down,

like, let's go. (laughs)

Here we go, project, mind control, Sydney Gottlieb,

the CIA, and the tragedy of MK Ultra.

Which really is a tragedy, you know?

I really got, you know, I knew about it,

but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it

until chaos, Tom O'Neil's book, if you read that.

- Oh, yeah.

- And when you realize what the MK Ultra 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,

or the consequences of MK Ultra in society,

but also just what happened to these people afterwards,

the victims of MK Ultra, 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 MK Ultra,

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'd delve into that pretty deeply.

- How did you get interested in the subject,

like what was your introduction to it?

- I feel like my introduction is a little bit different

probably for most people, because I didn't know that much

about MK Ultra, and I was doing my PhD 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 Sydney Gottlieb,

but also mostly my initial interest was this man

named Stanley Lovell, who was essentially

the Sydney Gottlieb of the OSS.

So prior to the CIA, the US had the OSS,

the Office of Strategic Services during World War II,

and that was the US 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 centred abroad.

So my first book, the Jersey Tricks Department,

it's about Stanley Lovell in 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 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 Sydney Gottlieb is one of the depoments

who would later lead MK Ultra,

and in these depositions he was talking about how,

when he was assigned to be in charge of MK Ultra,

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 MK Ultra.

So a lot of the things that Sydney Gottlieb was up to

with MK Ultra, his blueprint was basically Stanley Lovell.

Just imagine being a government agent

to 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 Sydney Gottlieb was some expert hypnotist,

or really, it was a psychologist

who 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.

Yeah, yeah.

And they're probably still doing it now.

Well, even before MK Ultra,

so there are a couple of programs that precede it.

I mean, 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 would get high?

They would get high.

And they had--

Will the truth supposedly?

Supposedly.

The idea was that it lowers their inhibitions,

and so maybe they'll be more meaningful to talking.

Oh, that's hilarious.

They would just give them splits.

Yeah, exactly.

They basically gave them splits.

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 Anselinger, 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.

Which is what we know about these psychedelic compounds

and drugs and what they did with them

that completely changed our idea of what

the future of legalization and 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 what their MK Ultra is connected to that.

Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments.

Yes, they did at Harvard.

And I don't imagine they would do that

without the involvement of the government.

Yeah, well, without the wanting to have access to research.

If you have people at Harvard that doing 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 MK Ultra

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 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 USS, 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

or some female sex hormone in that gardener.

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 a plan.

That never actually happened, but that--

So Henry Murray is kind of connected to the USS

in that sense.

And then later, he developed some personality tests

for the USS and CIA.

I believe it was for recruits to give these to recruits

to determine whether they kind of have

the psychological profile.

That would be amenable to being in an intelligence organization.

Did you see that they recently did a scan of some blood

that was found in Hitler's bunker and the determine

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 micro penis.

Yeah, which is--

Henry.

You know, like the most obvious psychological profile ever.

A guy wants to destroy everything of the world.

He's got a tiny dick.

Maybe Henry Murray was onto something.

Yeah, I'm sure he was.

Hitler's-- I'm sure there was something--

some research behind it.

Like somebody must have said something about him.

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, researcher's 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 micro penis.

In that wild, it is totally makes sense.

Like, we should kill everyone with a micro penis.

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 people out there.

I'm just kidding.

Obviously, there's like the nicest people out there

that just have to have a micro penis.

Yeah.

But that couldn't have helped.

Yeah, maybe his--

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- Remember that I don't know.

- Well, he was also on a bunch of drugs.

He had a special doctor that just worked for him.

- Yeah, those videos of him at sporting events

and whatever, he's like rocking back and forth.

It's incredible, it's great to live.

- Completely out of his mind on something.

- Have you read Norman Older's book Blitz?

- 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 the same.

- Yeah, it's the same.

- Yeah, it is.

- That's the entire Nazi army was met 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 MK Ultra, of course,

but also Army LSD experiments

that aren't really connected to MK Ultra,

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 US 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's just an empty hand, there was nothing.

- What?

(laughing)

- No, I couldn't take your last one.

- No, I couldn't take your last one.

- It was 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 Incailta in the first place.

There were 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 give 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 gonna lose trust

in him 'cause he's making nonsense.

He's just talking gibberish.

- Was that proposed?

- Oh yeah, yeah, there were proposed a plan to put LSD

into cigars that would sneak into Castro's kind of place

that he would smoke before he'd give a speech.

- What I don't understand about that is they were trying

to kill him.

- Yeah, if they couldn't get poisoned into his cigars,

why do they think they could ask that?

- Well, the original plan was to discredit him

and then the later plan was to kill him.

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 thalium salts

into his shoes and these are de-pilatories.

They make your hair fall out.

And so the idea was that he's got this masculine allure

with his big beard, but if we can slip these de-pilatories

into his shoes and he puts them on,

his beard's gonna fall out and like Samsung,

he's gonna 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 de-pilatory.

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 captain underneath it that said,

my ration is different to indicate like,

I'm getting all the benefits of, you know, this,

you know, this spoils a 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

and all these things.

- Well, that one's actually reasonable.

(laughing)

- Right.

- A little bit more than the other teams.

- That one's probably the closest to accurate.

- Yeah, 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 packed 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.

(laughing)

Wow, and they were the people running it.

- Yeah.

- That was the best they could do.

But it's just the concept of not having any experience

whatsoever in any studies about mind control

and just giving 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?

'Cause 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-rug experiments.

The Nazis are doing truth-rug experiments

in their concentration camps as well.

And the British are doing some truth-rug experiments

during World War II as well.

- You can get the British ones online.

The, at least the post-World War II ones, was it 1950s?

You can, if you're seeing the British LSD studies.

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, 'cause it's kind of hilarious.

They start breaking out.

They can't, they can't, they can't, you have seen it.

- I think so.

- The soldiers don't want to row.

- Some of them start laughing in the middle of the day.

- They're doing their task, 'cause they just start laughing

on control when they sit down.

- Yeah, well, I mentioned those, like THC acetate experiments

during World War II, I don't know any of these guys.

- These giant smiles on their face.

- Yeah.

- Those guys have the guard go of it.

- Yeah, he might have been having a gun or something.

- He had to be removed from the experiment after 35 minutes.

Look at the radio operator, try to figure out how to work it.

- They're just, they're just so confused.

(laughing)

- And eventually they just start laying down

and just laugh like these guys, these guys just can't.

(laughing)

- Yeah, in these THC experiments during World War II guys.

For some of the people, they would give them this THC,

they would smoke it through a cigarette.

And some of the reactions that 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.

- They didn't make them tell the truth.

- No, no, of course not.

- They 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 would just, they would just talk it just randomly.

- They're talking about cartoons.

(laughing)

- Yeah, it's, it's just, what other drugs did they experiment?

What did they experiment with inphetamines as well?

- Oh yeah, yeah.

- So, well, I should mention that MK Ultra

was broken into 149 subprojects.

So MK Ultra was the umbrella term.

And within MK Ultra, 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 Isbel 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 Sydney Gottlieb found a drug

that he was interested in, he would basically just give it

to Harris Isbel who could try it out on these prisoners

to see how they reacted.

And then Isbel 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.

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.

Well, one of the ironies as well about this experiment

that I mentioned, you know, Harris Isbel,

and giving these prisoners all these drugs,

the prisoners are in this place.

It's called the narcotic form

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.

They were supposed to be getting off drugs

for the first 26 months.

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- Wow. - Yeah.

So that's one of 149 sub-ratchets.

(laughing)

- Are you aware that heroin was created

as it was a substitute for people

that were addicted to morphine?

- I know, 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.

What?

(laughing)

Well, that's like oxycaut,

given the oxycautin if they're addicted to heroin.

It's 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 getting them to give up information.

- Yeah, that was the idea.

- So here it is.

We put it into our sponsor perplexity.

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- Yeah, how nuts.

Who, what company came up with it?

Jerm, bear.

There you go, fucking bear.

(laughing)

- I think at the same time they were doing this,

they just find out if it's true

that acidimetaphine is what's toxic

in Tylenol, correct?

Find out if it's true that at the same time

they decide that acidimetaphine was too dangerous.

- I think that is Tylenol, what do you mean?

- Yeah.

I mean, the substance, you know,

that's Tylenol's 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 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, did, bear decide not to release acidimetaphine

during the same time period?

During the pandemic, I got fascinated with acidimetaphine

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 acidimetaphine,

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.

Yeah, and I was like, oh my God,

how many people died of liver poisoning?

It was like 500 a year in this country.

It's like acidimetaphine, it's scary stuff.

It was not being actively held back by bear

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 adoption followed a different path,

existing historical accounts, focus more

on scientific uncertainty and competing drugs

than on deliberate suppression campaign by bear.

I don't think I was, 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 acidimetaphine last?

Early clinicians favoured phenocetatine

and aceta, how does that work?

Was that a nylon?

I said a nylon.

Despite their later recognized toxicity

and aceta, acetimetaphine's advantages,

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was not clearly distinguished at first.

Okay, anyway, we're getting off track.

I was just gonna say one of the ironic things too

with some of these MK-ultra sub-projects.

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 gonna give it to you

and it's gonna make you tell the truth,

that can lower their defenses in a bit

in the sense that the person who takes this,

that might give them kind of the permission

to be able to talk because it makes them think,

"Well, I couldn't have stopped myself."

Well, I mean, they gave me this truth drug.

Of course, I'm gonna have to say this,

so I can't be blamed, no one's gonna blame me,

so it takes kind of the burden off their shoulders

if they think they've been giving a truth drug,

even if they haven't, just giving 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 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,

he was in charge of one of these sub-projects,

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, this, nothing's happening.

However, you start saying things like, you know,

I'm hypnotizing you, and your hands are getting warmer,

and they're gonna think to themselves, another 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, 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 MK Ultra

for what they did.

However, 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 MK Ultra documents,

especially at the beginning,

before the Frank Olsen incident,

Frank Olsen eventually dies after one of these experiments.

And so 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 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,

'cause 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 Urgot poisoning

that came from the Reds, I think so.

But yeah, there was some speculation and then it was purpose.

- Yeah, the town's called Point Santa Spree, 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?

And so that kind of leads to the CIA.

- That's the justification.

- And then they start ghosting the coffee pots

and they're running brothels.

- Oh yeah, yeah, that's the crazy one.

Operation Midnight Climax.

Look it up folks, 'cause 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

that would give them, would you like a drink?

- Have a seat.

- And they go, "Sure, I'll have a drink."

And there's poor guy, get out of work,

has a drink, he thinks he's gonna be with a prostitute

and have some nice sex.

Next, 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 gonna get it 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 this guy's already done these experiments.

I'm gonna hire him.

So that's how George White eventually gets involved

in the CIA stuff.

- Wow, I can't wait for this show.

(laughing)

'Cause David Chase gets ahold 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 happen to write this book at the right time

and someone happen to be interested 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.

'Cause I talk to people about this subject,

you know, like Normie's per se.

And they look at you sideways.

Like what did they do?

They do, but 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 MK Ultra just in general.

I mean, initially reading about this,

my first impression is that, obviously that,

that's like a conspiracy theory or it can't be right,

but some conspiracies are true.

And the MK Ultra 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.

They're, you know, I mean, even besides drugs,

MK Ultra is involved in a lot of psychological experiments.

So not just LSD, most people associate MK Ultra with LSD,

but one of the most expansive of the subprojects

is subproject 68.

It was by this guy named you and Cameron.

Have you heard that name before?

No.

Okay, you and Cameron.

He is a psychiatrist up in Montreal and Canada,

working at what's called the Allen Memorial Institute.

And Gottlieb wanted to expand MK Ultra 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 you and Cameron had come up with

before the CIA is involved, I should mention,

you and 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 you and 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 my mother,

when I was young, used to tell me blah, blah, blah,

you know, she said something negative to her.

And so you and 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 in, 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.

- But was it based on anything?

- Not really.

It was just based on he had this one encounter

with his 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 gonna start playing these negative tapes to them.

- So it was just his idea.

- That's just his idea.

He was known for doing this kind of thing,

like kind of spur the moment.

In fact, there was one kid basically

who had been at this Alan Memorial Institute

where you and Cameron was.

He eventually had gotten out,

but he had tried to commit suicide,

and so he was sent back to the Alan 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, you know,

breathe in and pass out and die.

That ended up not working.

However, when he went back to the Alan Memorial Institute,

you and 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 by like CO2 canisters,

and we're gonna 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.

But so he was just, he was trying to find any way

that he could have a breakthrough

to cure mental illness, and he was using his patients

as 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,

'cause I don't know if she's actually named in the documents.

So I don't know.

- Do any of these experiments have a positive effect?

- Oh, hardly, hardly, hardly.

So that was only,

should he say positive, I should say we're the 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,

'cause he thinks he's gonna 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, they would have goggles over their eyes,

ear muffs 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.

But one of the saddest stories in the book, really,

is of this woman named Mary Moro,

who was one of the patients of UN Cameron in Montreal.

The sad thing about her, especially,

is she had been a resident in training

at the Ellen Memorial Institute under UN 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 infant tie a 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, therapy sessions or whatever they would call it,

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.

UN Cameron came to visit her, and he said,

"I think you should come back to the Ellen Memorial,

"not as a doctor, but as a patient, and let me treat you."

So she ends up going back to the Ellen Memorial as a patient,

and she thought to herself that it's gonna be okay,

they're not gonna do the electric shock to me,

because you had to sign a consent form

and for that to happen to you.

The people who were signing the consent forms,

they don't know how bad it's actually gonna 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 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 sister Margaret

in order to go to the Ellen 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 gonna 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.

So it's a very reversible in any way.

- Was it, 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 UN Cameron's experiments in the 1980s,

they ended up suing the CIA for supporting UN Cameron.

And during those lawsuits, the attorneys

who are representing them, they took the depositions

of several of the people who were involved in MK Ultra

to try to use this during their trial.

So they took the depositions of Sydney Gottlie,

Robert Lashbrook, Richard Helms, ahead 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 after attorney's fees and everything,

it doesn't really amount to much anyway.

And so they settled out of court.

They got a little bit of money, but it never went to trial.

And so these depositions though, since it never went to trial,

these were just in the papers of Joseph Rao,

who's the main lawyer who's 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 Sydney Gottlieb

testifying about what he did in MK Ultra.

And so I was rooting around the Library of Congress

and having 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,

'cause I'm not sure about that.

- Yeah, of course.

- 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.

The 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,

what 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, it 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 gonna be the one

to win the Nobel Prize in medicine

because I'm gonna cure all mental illness

through this psychic driving or whatever it was.

He was gonna 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 gonna praise me

because I've cured schizophrenia or whatever it is.

- I'm just always suspicious of something

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 less empathetic,

a little more driven.

- You know, 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 sub-projects 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.

- Wow.

- And one of the physician who was the attending physician,

the first time he took LSD,

because they did it in kind of a controlled setting

with several other people there.

A guy named Harold Abramsen.

And for anyone listening who knows much

about the Frank Olsen incident,

Frank Olsen is a guy that would later be dose with LSD.

He would go out the hotel window in New York.

And Harold Abramsen is the guy who,

Sidney Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook,

they took to New York to get treatment

from Harold Abramsen afterwards.

So he had the CIA connection.

- Wow.

The reason why I brought up inphetamines

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 its work and yet you continue to do it.

And you even do it to people that used to be involved

in the program without poor woman.

Like what's the psychological profile of that guy?

'Cause he's obviously mentally ill,

which is fascinating, right?

It's fascinating that a mentally ill person

is working on a mind experiment program.

'Cause 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 is 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's definitely lacked empathy,

whether that's some kind of medically medical thing

or whatever.

There are a couple of people in the book,

I think, who were like that.

One of them is you and Cameron.

Another is George White, who is in charge of operation,

in that 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.

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 dose them with LSD.

The woman had her one-year-old son there with her,

but he still dose them with LSD.

She ends up basically going crazy.

I mean, she goes home, she ends up calling 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 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' house before she went

to this mental institution, convinced that an unidentified

they was looking after her, trying to get her,

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 Richie, and George White

did the same thing to him.

But Wayne Richie 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 US Marshal too,

so just the US Marshal's 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 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 MK Ultra,

and two things in particular stuck out to him.

One was George White, whom he knew back in the days

when he was a US Marshal, and the other one was a description

of LSD, and so Wayne Richie starts putting all this together

and thinking, I think George White gave me LSD that night

at the holiday party and spiked the punchball,

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 Richie 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.

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.

- What a fucking psycho.

- So he's dosing up the punchball, ruining lives.

- And he knows how messed up it is,

'cause 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 psychopath

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.

Sydney Gottlieb, 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 MK Ultra 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,

Sydney Gottlieb doesn't really take any responsibility

for what happens to these people.

Basically, the way that MK Ultra was structured

with these subprojects, Sydney 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.

And we were like reputable people.

You and 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 Sydney 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 MK Ultra typically worked.

- So it's 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 cut-out

organizations.

So he's giving them money to...

- Of course.

- One of them's called the Getchicker Fund.

One of them's called the National Institutes

of Mental Health.

And then the CIA sets up its own cut-out organization

called The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.

It's just a made-up organization.

But 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 MK Ultra.

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 probably the first book

is more formative to the shaping of my worldview,

just because, you know, that was the first one I did.

- 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 MK Ultra

and even in my first book,

the Jardy Tricks Department,

there are some projects that are even more outlandish

than some of the stuff I've been talking about with MK Ultra.

And so that kind of lowered my barriers

to thinking that, oh, people are crazy here.

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 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. - They did this.

So, they captured foxes.

The United States radium corporation

produced a paint with radium, the radioactive, but--

- So loom. - Like, the dials of watch.

- Exactly. It's the same kind of thing.

It glowed in them, 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,

roll 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

and it turns out they actually swim to shore.

So that worked, however, but the time they had gone to shore,

the paint had all washed off.

- So the poison the water?

- Yeah, so it's like, well, if we were to do this in Japan,

the paint's, you see a fox, it's not a kitsuni,

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 are going to stuff a fox,

a dead fox, just taxidermy it, have this fox body.

We're going to paint it with his 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 kitsuni 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 opening 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 to that.

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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 'cause 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, God, I believe it was a storage unit

that where they had some...

- Like the MK-Ultra? - 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 MK-Ultra

that the US 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 like the CIA archives,

but he discovered these six or seven boxes of material

that Sydney Gottlieb hadn't destroyed

when he retired from the CIA,

'cause 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 record 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 MK-Ultra, 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

are related to MK-Ultra 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?

- Yeah, 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.

But so we would have known still,

because it came out before those documents

about the Frank Olson incident.

This guy was dose with LSD at this place called Deep Creek,

and he ended up going out the window

of the state-lar-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.

Sidney Gottlieb said he had a flare with a pin.

He was a journalist before he-- - Like a psycho.

- 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 MK Ultra sub-projects,

a lot of them started in 1953.

Many of them were done by 1963,

but several continued into the late '60s.

But 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?"

(whooshing)

- 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 MK Ultra

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, yeah. - Imagine that.

- Yeah, we'd 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 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 Sydney Gottlieb says,

that George White would write to him personal updates

about the experiments that he was doing

in these 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 MK Ultra,

after the Vietnam War,

it starts to seem as if the government

is infringing on the civil liberties.

Instead of being the protector of it,

in many cases, it's infringing on them.

Now 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.

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 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 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 eliminates

the president's plausible deniability.

One of the main themes throughout this book

is what I call the vicious cycle of secrecy.

So an organization like the CIA that has secrecy,

that kind of leads to what I see is 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.

Plosible deniability leads to reckless behavior

like MK Ultra.

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.

Plosible 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 see more her.

She 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 got to make sure that never happens again.

We need more secrecy in 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, who will,

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 don't have the desire to be a Congress person.

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 in 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 reelection 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 reelection rate and the approval rating?

It has to do with the kind of electoral system.

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 district that is 90% Trump voters,

the Republican is going to win the general election.

It doesn't matter who it is.

So 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 gonna win the general.

And who's gonna win the primary?

Well, it's gonna win, it's gonna be the person

who can get 90% of Trump voters to be more interested in them

than whoever the other Republican is.

In many cases, that drives ideological extremism

because you're already selecting a sample size

of voters within the primary

who are the most ideological extreme.

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, 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 gonna be blocked in the primary.

So some kind of reform like that, I think is how you...

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So we have live experts on hand

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Questions like, can I claim my SUV is my home office

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Tax act, let's get them over with.

- Better facilitate this check

between the different branches.

And but even then, I don't know if it motivates

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

'cause they seem completely full of shit

when they give their speeches.

And they, 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

'cause 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.

Because this is how they run.

They can fundraise off of this.

- 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% it.

They don't want to fix it.

- That makes me even more convinced, though,

that a restructuring of the electoral system

in a way that eliminates, I don't know,

that incentivizes basically better behavior,

whether that's through open primaries,

rank choice voting, whatever.

- Yeah.

- That has to help in some way, I would think.

So.

- 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.

And she's trying so hard, she can't pass the bar.

It's hard to be a lawyer, right?

- Yeah, I'm kind of skeptical of a competency test

in a sense, though, because someone has to write the test, you know?

- Well, not only that,

but are you watching them to the use chat GPT

and we're living in a weird world right now, you know?

It's a very weird world of technology, you know?

But it would be nice if you knew that this person

was capable of doing the job.

I mean, I bring it back to the passing the bar thing,

'cause, 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 just gotta like--

- 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,

'cause I know some judge positions.

- Yeah, man, I don't give a fuck

if it's a judge at Dairy Queen.

Like you--

(laughing)

- What are you talking about?

- Yeah.

- 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

in all federal judges must have a law degree.

- Some states--

- Plac practice requirements.

Many states require judges to have a certain number

of years of experience as a practicing lawyer

for they're eligible for a judgeship, make sense.

What 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 for the non-lawyer pool

typically must compete complete, specific training programs,

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, you know?

- Right.

- Like, you got to be the sheriff in this town.

- Yeah, 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 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 meddled whole degree

that maybe doesn't require as much time.

- Or you didn't complete your residency.

- So maybe it's a relic of that.

- 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 in national security

and you have some fucking dangling

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 gonna hold back information.

You're gonna come up with reasons

why you have to redact files and 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.

There are legitimate reasons to keep things secret.

You have to keep secrets.

- 100%.

- But at the same time, the fact that you're afforded

that secrecy allows you to avoid accountability.

- 100%.

- So it's a catch-22, you have to keep secrets.

There's just no way around it.

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, 100%.

And then you find out the really crazy stuff

that's happened in the past.

Like, like the demean Arkansas cocaine situation.

- Oh, I haven't heard of that one.

- You didn't 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 Seale was flying drugs from South America

and dropping them off in Mina, 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 lay down fell asleep on train tracks.

The parents funded an autopsy.

And the autopsy show 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 Seale, who is CIA operative,

who is flying in cocaine, dropping it off in Mina, 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 Sandinista 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 a governor.

So I believe it was the '80s.

- '86.

- '86.

- '86.

- Yeah.

- Fuck, 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 tennis player.

So it was funneling millions of dollars of cocaine.

He 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

with this Oliver North thing,

with the Contras versus the Sandinistas.

All this comes out in court and he wants up going to jail.

He wants 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 them all together.

And so he gets off.

So he's free now and he sells legal marijuana in California.

(laughing)

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 MK Ultra in general,

it's against the CIA's charter

to operate within the United States.

That should be a deal into 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.

Like, 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's being funneled into these NGOs.

And there's just so much opportunity for corruption

and so little oversight and so much power

and so much secrecy.

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

'cause there's no one watching.

And they're in control.

They're like, it's so, it must be so fun.

Like, what's his name was talking about?

The evil guy.

George White.

Like he was talking about, like how much fun he had

which is so sick, 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 a 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 MK-Ultra are one of the problems that led to MK-Ultra

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 MK-Ultra?

Why aren't they speaking up?

Why aren't, why don't they say,

Paul Sidney got leave 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 MK-Ultra

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 he tried,

why didn't you try to shut this down?

You obviously knew this was illegal.

In fact, in 1963, a different CIA Inspector General

named John Earman, he did a separate investigation into MK-Ultra

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 hire it up?

So 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 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, Joseph Rouse, this old civil rights,

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 gonna punch you in the nose

and he says, I'm never giving this up.

I'm gonna 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.

But he's just completely making this up.

Rouse presses him again, why did you destroy this stuff?

Sidney Gottlieb, and he does this to Richard Helms too.

They both eventually say again, well, we wanted,

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 Rouse 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?

That's just a non-excuse.

So eventually, Rouse 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, ruin 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 were acquired 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.

And they knew that this was a,

and they really painstakingly structured

this system of government that they thought

would protect against it.

Just they didn't factor into account special interest groups

and the stock market and money, and they just didn't factor

into 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, you know, it's a brilliant system.

And I quote James Madison actually

when I talk about oversight

because his specific verbiages, auxiliary cautions

are auxiliary precautions.

Humans, he says, man, men aren't angels

therefore auxiliary precautions are necessary

to keep their ambitions in check,

which means external oversight,

which is 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.

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 MK Ultra and the CIA and the cocaine

and all these different things,

but 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

'cause they can't paint fun against them,

which is what we're talking about before.

So this is a 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 a little dumb monk.

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- These that are giving up our tax dollars

so they can keep running this giant Ponzi scheme.

because there would be a policeman

in every bedroom basically.

On the opposite side, you know,

at 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

and 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.

You know, 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's some sort of an ideological blockade

or some certain subjects they couldn't breach

or certain things that they were told that they couldn't publish

and they were like, "I'm out."

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 is it this being discussed in the New York Times

and then also someone puts up this 10 Twitter post

of all these different links and shows you,

this is the history of it and then a month later,

it's in the Washington Post and it's interesting.

It's interesting because it's like,

it's almost like this need exists.

It's not being fulfilled by mainstream media

as 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 go have to sort through

what's real, what's foreign governments

making up fake stories.

- Yeah, well 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 it,

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 there's often times

there's some outrageous video clip like,

"Oh my God, can you believe the Democrats are doing this?"

And then it turns out that's actually from a movie

or that's actually AI or that's actually from 2016

and it's in Poland or you know I mean,

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 have gone there

I'm like, "Oh, you're not a real person."

Like most of the time I go and look at all the posts

that they have and like, well this is either a bot

or this is a foreign government running

one of these like 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, most, a lot of what I'm doing is

following this source, that sites this source,

that sites that source, this is 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,

a 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 a like exciting quote

to encapsulate who he is.

So I was reading this book and I kind of,

okay, I'm gonna mark that quote,

I'm gonna 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 sites 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 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 sites 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 inner library loan, you know, in you.

So I had to basically request that my library

get the book from a different library.

That was gonna take several weeks.

So, okay, now I gotta 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 in 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.