Rebecca Lemov traces MKUltra's origins from POW interrogations to 149 subprojects involving LSD, remote-controlled animals, and human experimentation under Sidney Gottlieb. The discussion details Patty Hearst's brainwashing by the SLA, Lewis Jollyon West's controversial ties to the Manson Family, and DARPA's modern neural implant research aimed at creating pain-resistant "super soldiers." While debating whether these efforts reflect a grand conspiracy or mere incompetence, the episode concludes that current media monopolies and corporate greed prioritize profit over societal health, leaving humanity vulnerable to emotional contagion and behavioral nudging. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The Laboratory Imagination00:06:47
Thanks for coming, Rebecca.
I'm excited to talk to you.
Thanks for having me, Dan.
You were just telling me you would show your class the beginning of Clockwork Orange?
Yeah, I would show them a special, like a specially selected clip of it for maybe half an hour, though.
Just where he's getting conditioned.
Oh, interesting.
To where Alex is behaviorally.
Let me see.
I'm trying to remember.
Well, it's, yeah, it's about how he's cured from his.
Violence by the Ludovico technique.
It's all coming back to me now.
I think it must have been for my brainwashing class, which I started to teach a couple decades ago.
But then after a while, I felt like I couldn't really show it in class or maybe when I changed universities or something.
So, how did you end up teaching a brainwashing class?
Ah, that is a good question.
So, I was at the University of Washington and I guess I just thought it would be interesting.
To teach a class because at the time brainwashing seemed like such an unusual topic that nobody would.
It seemed like a way to just ask, you know, these kind of almost philosophical questions about how much people can be controlled or how much, you know, how social systems work, how much our cultural and political systems affect us.
But at the time brainwashing was so out of fashion and it seemed like a really, like a relic of another, an earlier era.
So this would have been like after, in the early 2000s.
And I just thought it was, I love ideas that have really fallen out of favor.
So brainwashing just seemed like a joke, basically, in a very niche topic when I started it.
And students were drawn to it.
You know, students who like things like Clockwork Orange or who like to think about the difference between 1984 and Brave New World or, you know, questions like that were drawn to it.
And it was, people were always kind of intrigued by it, but it wasn't an obvious class.
So I think it just came out of my dissertation research.
What was your dissertation?
It was about, it was called the laboratory imagination.
It was basically about how much first laboratory animals can be controlled in certain environments.
So, in these kind of behaviorist experiments from the 20th century, and then how that was applied to human society.
Is this like something similar to John Calhoun's mice universe?
What is it called?
The mice utopia experiment.
Exactly.
Calhoun's a perfect example.
I mean, I didn't happen to write about him, I wrote about people who came before him, but he's a perfect example.
Like the embodiment of that kind of dream.
So, the idea of his mice utopia, if I recall correctly, was he put a ton of mice in like this little city that he created, this little miniature city.
And then he kept like increasing the population and giving them like unlimited resources, abundance of food and resources.
And he found out that the more mice were in there, the more their behavior started to degrade.
And eventually they started dying off and they like went extinct.
They also, I think they, if my memory is correct, They started attacking each other and having.
Oh, yeah, cannibalism.
Cannibalism.
Yeah, urban.
So it was equivalent almost of urban violence.
And he was a big, he was very popular in the 60s and 70s.
Yeah, they were being like hyper aggressive.
There was like sexual deviancy, cannibalism.
They started to go nuts.
Yeah, and so he, in a way, he's a culmination of this longer, decades long attempt to model a human society or understand questions about human behavior control based on animals and.
How they are conditioned, how they respond to micro environments.
And this stuff was funded by the CIA, I believe, right?
I think Calhoun was.
In fact, yeah, he actually, I think he was, but I haven't, he wasn't one of my subjects, but he would be a perfect person to look into.
So, who else did you study that was doing similar stuff like Calhoun for your dissertation?
For my dissertation, I wrote about these now totally forgotten behaviorists at Yale, the Institute for Human Relations.
And they were, you know, they just got the largest grant that has ever been given in the social sciences.
Even to this day, I think if you adjust for inflation, it was $2 million in 1929.
So they were really before World War II, but they kind of were, I guess, ahead of their time.
They were really around the time Huxley was writing Brave New World and behaviorism was being invented.
So they're really the first wave.
And they spent a lot of resources.
They were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and many other sources eventually.
And they just in the 20s.
Yeah, they built well, so then the stock market crashed.
And in the 30s they just turned.
Originally, they said, We're going to solve the greatest problems of the human mind and philosophy.
And they were on the front page of the New York Times, things like that.
But then, after the stock market crashed, and other things, they sort of turned just to mouse experiments, rat experiments, animal experiments, just building these infinite series of mazes and seeing how conditioning worked and putting a lot of money into that.
So, at times, the Rockefeller Foundation was threatening to ask for its money back because they didn't see a real payoff.
So, anyway, I went deep into the archives of that project just because it was so ambitious and then it was so forgotten.
But it was the basis of people like B.F. Skinner.
What kind of payoff were they looking for?
Do you know?
And what kind of things were they doing to these rats and these experiments?
Were they giving them any drugs or anything?
They did give them, yeah, they did give them sometimes cocaine or caffeine, sometimes stimulants.
They wanted to see, basically, they talked about the maze the human must run.
It was the idea that human society, you know, people may be square pegs equivalent to that, but they need to fit into their holes.
They need to fit into a certain social role.
And so, if you could properly condition the environment, you wouldn't have to force them.
They would make these changes to themselves.
They would do it to themselves, essentially.
So, it was this idea of social engineering, not in the sense of social disruption, but really could you engineer humans to fit the society so that they wouldn't need to be controlled?
By force, so it was kind of like internalizing control was the dream, and they joined with anthropologists and sociologists and psychologists to make this unified science.
Freud's Psychological Advertising00:02:46
Oh, wow!
Yeah, so I got very interested in that.
I can see why.
Have you ever seen any of Adam Curtis's documentaries?
Yeah, yes, yeah, they're like right along the lines of this.
Exactly, what was the one that there was one called?
I think it was maybe Hyper Normalization, or no, there was one about.
I think it's the century.
Freud?
Yeah, century of the self.
Freud and his cousin or something.
Yeah.
Bernays, Edward Bernays.
He was one of the big advertising executives.
He created advertising in the West.
And from what I understand, he was doing things like working with brand names to try to get people to consume more.
He was basically on the ground floor of consumerism in the US.
Exactly.
And there was this crazy story in that documentary how he was working with this company that was making.
Like cakes, or like little, like at home, make your own cakes, like cake mix and stuff like this.
And they weren't selling.
So, he was trying to market them to housewives.
So, he said, Okay, we're just going to put in the instructions to add an egg to it because it makes these people feel like they're actually doing something and they're contributing and they're not just taking these shortcuts.
They feel useless.
So, if you make them crack an egg into it, they feel like they're actually making something from scratch.
So then they started flying off the shelves.
Weird, like little psychological tricks like that are super interesting.
Yeah.
Bernays was really a pioneer of that, of you could say adding a psychological dimension to.
To sales, which was pretty new at the time.
And that's why he's the father of PR and advertising, aspects of advertising.
And that's true about the Betty Crocker, the egg.
Because women didn't want, they wanted to feel that they were contributing.
It sounds super Freudian, contributing an egg to your cake, but it made them feel like they were involved in the process.
But he was really good.
He also led these famous campaigns to sell ivory soap and associate it with purity.
But also, he was.
He was pioneering the connection of PR to political advertising.
And he said you could pretty much sell anything.
And so it's interesting that he was Freud's nephew.
So that was the beginning of political advertising, too?
I mean, he did take part in some campaigns, I think, and he saw the potential, which then was later taken up by others.
So, and then at what point did you start learning about and digging into all the MKUltra stuff?
So that happened, let's see.
How did MKUltra come into my life?
Breaking Down the Mind00:09:11
Right.
Because again, that was not something that certainly no.
Well, that started 20 years after those guys were doing those behavioral experiments.
If they were doing it in 29, MKUltra started in like the 50s, right?
Yeah, I think.
Oh, it's because when I finished my dissertation, I wrote a last chapter about Aldous Huxley, and I said he talked about how in this great book, The Devils of Ludon, which is not, people don't read very much, but.
It's really about this question he asks about how can people be broken?
And he says, it used to be in, you know, if you go back to the 17th century, you could take a case like this priest called Urbain Grandier.
And he was a questionable priest in a small town in France.
But he basically was seducing the daughters of the town and he was not well liked.
So eventually they accused him of taking the form of the devil at night and possessing the nuns and raping them.
Oh my God.
You know, he denied this, of course.
He was mostly just interested in like drinking a lot of wine and seducing the young women of the town.
So he wasn't a great clergyman, but he, you know, he denied these charges.
He was found guilty.
And because he had political enemies, he was burned at the stake.
And before he was burned, he was like pulled apart, you know, in the way they used to do that.
Very brutal.
And as he was dying, they asked him to confess.
And he didn't.
He refused to confess.
And Huxley said, you know, in.
In that day, even a middling man could somehow find in himself the strength to resist.
But today.
What were they trying to give him to confess?
That he was Satan?
Yeah, that he had done this, that he had violated the nuns in particular.
And Huxley goes into the whole question of hysteria and things like that.
But Huxley then says, this thing really struck me.
Said today, nobody could resist the way this priest, you know, the way Urban Grandier did because we're all subject to this new form of intense conditioning.
Which, and he was talking about even after Brave New World, a kind of scaling up of intense micromanagement of the inner life and like powerful, powerful techniques.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I wanted to know what he meant by that.
And I think that's how I got into, you know, post war.
What happened after World War II?
How did this?
Kind of dream of social management and behavioral technology.
How did that develop?
And then I so, when I finished my, just when in the last chapter of my dissertation I wrote a little bit about it and in my first book also I started talking about MK Ultra, just because there were the uh three, three central figures in the kind of life of behavioral, what you know, extreme behaviorism, were working for MK Ultra.
So that's kind of how I got into it.
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And what do you think the end, like, why was that?
You think what they were saying about the guy who got pulled apart and burned at the stake, the reason that he was able to not confess, they were interested in how he was able to do that and how they could basically break that?
Is that what you're saying?
I think Huxley was saying, he said in his basic point, which I don't know if I quite expressed this as well.
I definitely didn't say it as well as he did.
He said, basically, in the old days, they could pull someone apart in their body, but the mind was.
Oh, the mind was solid.
The mind was solid if you wanted it.
You know, you could protect your own mind.
But he felt that in the 1950s, which is when he published this book, that it wasn't the case anymore.
It was not the case because it was targeted.
Okay.
Oh, is this a painting of the guy?
The Urban Grandier.
Oh, wow.
Look, he's got all of his limbs.
He's happily refusing to confess.
Wow.
And yeah, Huxley was really, he did all this historical research on him.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, that makes sense.
They would want to, if your goal is to teach people to resist torture and not confess stuff, a way to reverse engineer that would be something like MKUltra, you know, to break down the mind and like figure out how to, how to break down the mind and to figure out how to reprogram the mind after that.
Whether the question is, are you doing it from an offensive perspective or a defensive perspective?
Or where is the line between them?
Yeah, it's quite confusing with MKUltra because it began as a defensive maneuver.
Like, our enemy is doing this, so we have to figure out how to protect against it, but also how to.
It quickly turned into, and maybe even from the very start, it was also an offensive weapon, the capabilities of which people could imagine.
You know, if you could use LSD as a way to.
It was also seen as more humane because it was a non lethal weapon.
Incapacitating agent.
So there was an interest in weapons that were non lethal.
So you wouldn't have to, you know, bomb a whole city.
You could just, what if you could just get them high?
You could get LSD and they'd be very confused.
It might disrupt, you know, their everything about daily life and that could be a possible weapon.
So the whole thing was both combined.
I think it was always combining the defensive and the operational.
Right.
And so the story is we first learned about this.
Well, what got.
the United States interested in this stuff was the POWs, right?
The Chinese POWs.
Yeah, exactly.
They came back and they basically, some of them stayed.
They just decided to stay.
And then some of them came.
Back with like communist ideologies, is that right?
Exactly.
Well, they came back seeming to have been infected by communist systems, vocabulary, but also they had written letters home where they were praising the great, you know, this great system and condemning capitalism, but also they were, they seemed to be different, or that was the idea that they were, that they had, something had happened to them.
A lot of the men who came back who'd been POWs, but then also 21 didn't come back at all.
They just decided to stay in China, so that was very.
that really got people's attention.
So they were doing it way before we were, which is interesting.
I wonder where they got the idea to do that and what I would be fascinated to hear if there was ever any sort of documented history of when they started it and what specifically they were doing.
Yeah.
I mean, so they call it thought reform or re-education, and the Chinese were doing that on a large scale with their own population.
So there's interesting research on how we've underestimated how The Chinese ness of brainwashing.
But on the other hand, the Soviets had their own version of it.
It did come with communism.
It seems to come with like a true believer.
Yeah, there's a great historian of China named Aminda Smith who gave a paper about that that I thought was really interesting that people sort of extracted brainwashing away from this, you know, the way it was inflected through the Chinese system.
And what I found with the POWs over the, as I was studying more and more what had happened to them, that they actually did go through a pretty formal System of thought reform, much like the ones that Chinese peasants, Chinese prostitutes, petty criminals, others in Chinese society were being put through.
Do we know what type of techniques they were using?
We do, yeah.
There were many studies of what had happened.
Basically, so there were three steps.
One is to sort of disorient the person, chain them, physically restrain them.
Second, there's a kind of, and there's a beginning of interrogation, so asking and trying to extract a confession.
And then once a confession is in the second stage, a confession is kind of solidified because nobody, if really subjected to the full thought reform, very few people can resist or they'll essentially die.
And then they're reintegrated at the end.
So it's almost like unfreezing and then refreezing in a new system.
And Mao himself said, you know, 7% of humanity he felt would not, were resistant to this, just would never.
7%.
He thought 7%, and they should just be killed.
But everybody else, he said, you have to continually renew this.
Even myself, I have to continually re educate myself.
So it was a constant process.
And the POWs who did go to China, the Americans, they were sometimes judged, oh, it's slipping.
Searching for Patterns in Data00:04:35
So they would send them back out to the countryside to be re educated sometimes.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's craziness.
It's amazing.
It kind of is an interesting idea when you think about all the stuff that we're talking about right now, especially with the mice stuff and the mice utopia.
That's kind of how our society is right now.
And the internet's connecting everyone together.
And we're all able to communicate instantaneously.
And Google and YouTube are the two biggest websites on the face of the earth where people consume most of their content.
So if you were the government and you controlled YouTube and Google, Wouldn't you want to re educate the people that are putting all the content on there?
I mean, even if you weren't the government, I guess they have – there are ways that they would – let's see.
I mean, I guess you would, perhaps.
If you were the government, right?
If you were the government.
But if you were just a platform like a big tech company.
Well, are you familiar with the formation of Google?
A bit, yeah.
Remind me.
With Sergey Brin.
And so Sergey Brin was – when he was first creating Google at Stanford, The whole process was incubated and curated by the NSA and the CIA and DARPA.
They got the search engine, the ranking system came from DARPA, and a lot of the funding and a lot of the initial ramp up was pushed by the CIA and the NSA.
He was being visited by a bunch of CIA, NSA, and DARPA people in the very beginning.
And I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that these are two pieces of the same pie.
You know what I mean?
If they were responsible for incubating and creating this whole thing, like, aren't they involved in it now?
I would imagine they would be.
Yeah.
I mean, it's hard to know how much and in what ways, but I would say so.
It's the perfect way to surveil a society.
Yeah.
In fact, the CIA involvement in computer, the development of pattern recognition systems goes back to the 60s and Oliver Selfridge.
I actually have a graduate student who just finished his, well, he's no longer a graduate student, but he just finished a dissertation about this.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And the CIA was involved.
In funding this early, very speculative research about how to optically recognize patterns and do that through a tremendous amount of data because it was, and that became the basis of our current technology.
Yeah.
How do you do that with billions of people doing stuff online, right?
Like, how do you detect patterns and drill down to specifics within those vast swaths of users on the internet?
Yeah, I think we take it for granted, but.
It was highly.
It's a lot of work.
It used to just be done by humans through just.
What happened was in the 60s, they were just overwhelmed with so much surveillance data from different areas of interest.
So the CIA had to figure out a way or was interested in a way that they could go and search for patterns among the data instead of having human eyes.
So basically mechanizing that.
In what year?
This was in like 60s.
Two or three, oh wow, and they weren't sure that it would yield anything.
But so it's.
I mean that so that there's a longer history too.
So in the late 50s, early 60s is when they first got the money to start experimenting with this stuff.
After the Pows came back, they realized okay, we got to figure out what they're doing, how they're doing this, and um, that's when it didn't start out as MK Ultra.
I think it started out as something else, right?
Well, before MKUltra, there are a couple different ones.
Right.
Like Operation, I mean, I think Bluebird.
I think there's a couple of them where they were testing drugs.
Right.
And this is with Sidney Gottlieb and Frank Olson and all this stuff.
But that's all MKUltra.
So that starts in 53.
Okay.
Yeah.
So Gottlieb is taken up to run MKUltra and he's a chemist.
And then he brings on board John Ginninger and many psychiatrists, psychologists, and many social scientists.
So if you look at the, so it ended up, I think 149 sub projects, at least the ones that were found in the records when it was officially discontinued in 63.
Wow.
Or 64.
The MKUltra Experiment Begins00:03:47
Yeah.
So of those 149 subprojects, some are not known in the records.
But if you look at them, some of them are very mundane.
They're like, you know, make sure our billing, you know, they're just really bureaucratic things.
But a lot of them also are very extravagant, you know, wanting to, for example, program remote control animals.
This is a connection to back to my earlier research, but to basically condition, behaviorally condition a cat.
And then implant a microphone within the cat.
So you could remote control this animal.
This is so terrible, but remote control a cat and it would sidle up to people that you wanted to spy on and it would just pretend to just be a cat or it would be a cat, but it would have an internalized microphone, could be controlled by its literal controllers.
But this cat just died.
They tried to do this with birds too, I think.
And they also tried to behave.
So the building blocks of behaviorism were also used with.
Dolphins to try to train them to be assassins or to take them.
So, this sounds outlandish, but it's in John Mark's book.
They were trained to carry a needle, and on the needle was LSD, which I guess is, you know, somehow they would be trained to like poke people, or at least they wanted this to happen, and the person would either trip or perhaps could be assassinated.
There was a whole bunch of dolphin training.
And John Lilly was connected.
Yeah, John Lilly, he got funded by NASA to try to figure out how to communicate with dolphins.
Yeah, that was after his change.
Well, he sort of transformed in the 70s.
Yeah.
He got much more into communication and this idea of some kind of psychic bond between dolphins and humans.
Before then, during the 50s and 60s, he was much more in the sort of tradition of torturing them.
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Remote Controlling Animals00:07:54
Yeah, I had a gentleman on the show a while back, Richard O'Berry, who made this documentary called The Dolphin Project, but he made this documentary called The Cove about the killing cove in Japan, where they round up all the dolphins and basically slaughter them while they're alive.
Yeah.
And he was a part of the filming of the TV show Flipper.
And he was living in Miami at the Miami Sea Aquarium.
And he was the guy who was basically like handling Flipper every day.
He was the trainer for Flipper.
Wow.
And that's how he met John Lilly.
And they befriended John Lilly.
And that was right when he got that funding from NASA.
And, you know, they were like opening up the skull of the dolphin and like putting probes in there, all kinds of like sick, inhumane things they were doing to try to figure out communication.
Yeah, Lilly is kind of a key figure.
And I think maybe people forget, or I don't know what his reputation necessarily is, but how invasive his research was and how many dolphins died because of it.
But he, yeah, then later he kind of became.
He's actually one thing I learned was that dolphins were not seen as specially, you know, peaceful or, you know, interesting animals before Lily.
So he did kind of put them on the map.
Interesting.
Yeah, they weren't seen as majestic or inspiring.
Flipper probably did that.
I guess he did.
Yeah.
Because I don't think many people know about John Lily, do they?
Well, I guess it's sometimes hard for me to tell because in some of the circles I traveled, not in your circles.
Of course, John Lily.
And of course, he became a.
He also, you know, his experiences with LSD and with ketamine, I found in his papers, because I did visit his papers at Stanford.
He was experimenting with ketamine.
Yeah, he was bombed on ketamine.
I think that's what kind of drove him crazy at the end of the day.
Yeah, that's what happened.
Yeah, he thought that he was talking to aliens or something like that.
He was communicating with an alien race, is that right?
Well, he and Louis Jollyon West actually wrote a paper together, which they tried to publish.
And I think it was Science they sent in the manuscript.
I found this in his papers.
But it was never published.
But they're really.
And you read them?
You read them?
I have it.
No way.
I have it on me at this very moment.
But I would summarize it as saying they start off very sober and they're saying, we've discovered these properties of ketamine.
It's going to change the world.
And only very, very qualified, very mature, evolved human beings such as ourselves should be allowed to have access to it.
And they say, but there's really no limit to what it can do.
It can put us.
And then they start to get very carried away with the possibilities of it.
Including contact with aliens.
So they were doing ketamine together?
Yes.
Was Johnny West using a lot of psychedelic drugs?
I don't actually know how much, but certainly he was.
And so he wasn't early.
So he started off at the very start of MKUltra.
He was working with LSD, sleep deprivation, other psychoactive drugs, and hypnosis.
Did you see the photo that I showed Joe?
Of uh, Jolly West in the set of 2001 Space Odyssey.
No, oh, Steve, pull it up.
Have you seen 2001 Space Odyssey?
I have.
There's a photo of Jolly West uh, walking in between sound stages with Stanley Kubrick.
Where did he see it?
On the set of that movie.
Amazing.
I mean, maybe you can confirm.
I, um, Jamie couldn't believe that this was Jolly West, but maybe you can confirm.
Actually, the guy right behind, right?
Can you punch in, Steve?
It does look like him, but I can't.
So what would he have been doing there and what year would that be?
What year did they, that's a good question.
Steve, find out what year they were filming 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Rebecca would probably be the best person to confirm or deny that this could be accurate.
Well, I'm intrigued because I thought I've tried to figure out everything I could about him, and he does like to talk about himself.
So he never mentioned that.
Right.
But then in the.
Well, there's a lot of conspiracy theories that say that they got Stanley Kubrick to film the moon landing footage.
So it was released in 68, so it must have been filmed in 67.
Okay.
So 60, yeah, 66 or 67 came out to, usually movies come out a year or two later after they're filmed.
Well, interestingly, so this may or may not be West, but he in 67 and 68, who was in Haight Ashbury in his hippie, doing his research at the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic and his other research in the, what he called the Psyche Pad, which was.
Can you find a photo of him from 68?
So I think by 68, he might have looked a little.
Yeah, okay.
This is good.
But I know he grew out his hair, which is one pertinent thing.
He said he tried to fit in, and his graduate students who were working on the project described how he was wearing these hippie clothes and he was maybe growing a beard.
Right, yeah.
This is Tom O'Neill did a very good job of explaining all this in his book, Chaos.
How even the students thought he was kind of a wacko because he'd be hanging out with them and getting high all day.
Yeah, sitting on the couch with his friends.
Yeah.
What is this project?
Any luck, Steve?
I think I found it's not dated.
No, there's nothing that's can't find anything, huh?
This is one.
Oh, shit.
We're just there.
We go.
This is one that I found, but it's not dated.
Yeah, it looks very much like him.
I mean, the hairline is identical.
That's the Oklahoma period of West before he went to California.
So, 67 when this, if that is him, he was in the middle of transitioning from Oklahoma to California.
He was spending his sabbatical year.
Okay.
And hate Ashbury and Palo Alto.
Interesting.
So I don't know where that was filmed either, but of course he could have gotten around.
Yeah.
Find out where 2001 Space Odyssey was filmed.
You can find all the set locations of it, all the filming locations.
Because, you know, just him even being around Stanley Kubrick is suspicious.
Whether it was on the set of 2001 or not, you know, maybe this was on the set of Clockwork Orange.
I mean, you can see how he would be a key contributor to a show like that, right?
Well, this brings us back to what we were talking about.
I mean, he'd be a perfect.
Uh, consultant for Clockwork Orange, and it looks more like a set of Clockwork Orange, doesn't it?
Then, like, that looks almost like London or something.
But anyway, I'm just massively speculating.
I think they actually said that this was London or this was somewhere in Europe, right, Steve?
Oh, I don't remember.
Yeah, I think this was supposed to be shot in Europe.
So maybe, maybe in MGM British Studios in England, Hertfordshire.
So it's hard to tell.
I mean, that would make it more like, well, I don't know.
So, you're saying 2001 was shot there?
I don't know.
I thought it was.
It's most likely Clockwork Orange was shot there.
Clockwork Orange is, we just talked about how it's from the 80s, it's done in the 80s.
So, this is definitely more of this earlier era.
So, filming locations for 2001 was Nambia, Arizona, Scotland, and Hertfordshire.
Okay.
So, okay.
I don't know.
We need to figure out where that photo was taken and what year because that would give you, it seems way more reasonable that he would be on the.
Working with him on Clockwork Orange because that's right up Jolly West's alley and he would be the perfect consultant or something like that.
But that's too late.
Hypnosis and Truth Serums00:04:01
And by the 80s, he was denying any connection to the CIA.
Oh, really?
Even though it was in the record and it was in all the papers.
But he said he had only ever experimented on animals, never on a human being.
For years and decades, there are still people who think that, who were his friends who believed that.
That maintained that.
He was so fervent that he hadn't.
You know he hadn't done any human experimentation.
Were there any close confidants of his that ever spoke out about him or any said anything about him other than like his?
I think his son uh, wrote a book.
Right, his son wrote a book, but it was more about, well, there you can read the book and discern that he was a difficult father and yeah, extremely uh given to serial affairs and he had like, different families in different places.
Maybe, oh god and uh, it caused his wife a lot of suffering in his family.
But, and you so you get some of the dynamics, but he doesn't talk about that.
But they're actually.
And he was very good friends with Charlton Heston, which is interesting they were.
They went back to the they had been in the army together and then even they were in Oklahoma City at the same time for reasons I'm not oh, I guess maybe Heston was a struggling actor and and West was, that was in his CIA years and working for the University OF Oklahoma.
But they remained friends and lived in houses next to each other, basically in when in LA at the At the top of the mountains.
How did Jolly West first get into doing stuff like this?
Well, that's a really good question.
I think it was through his mentor during his medical training.
So he says he became a patriotic, red blooded American physician and scientist because the government paid for his education.
This is what he says in one of his statements, and they sent him to medical school.
I think it was the University of Minnesota, but he did his residency in New York.
And at the time he did his residency, Harold Wolf was there.
And Wolf was an expert in basically migraine pain, but also in stress and sort of the human body at the limits of stress.
He even had this scary licking machine where he would invert people and see if it induced headaches and then he would try to cure them.
He was very renowned, but Wes went to work for him and Wolf had.
He was Alan Dulles's, he was the doctor to Alan Dulles's son who had been injured in the Korean War.
And so through Wolf, early MKUltra funding came through New York, I think it was Columbia.
And then West was, he got trained there to work on subjects like hypnosis and other things.
And then he became, then he relocated to Lackland Air Force Base as a major.
And he, Started up his own MKUltra program or sub project because he basically had this conversation with Sid Gottlieb about all the things he wanted to do.
And he was so ambitious that Gottlieb said, You're just the sort of man I think we've been dreaming of.
Because he really wanted this kind of zone of free experiment.
He wanted to build a space where he could change the conditions.
It's really, again, harks back to those behaviorist ideas.
Like if you could deprive someone of sleep, But also use hypnotic techniques, but also use drug alter, the alteration of consciousness through drugs.
Like, could you actually totally transform or break a person?
I heard, I don't remember where I read this, but I read that they were building black sites around the world outside of America where they could do these experiments on people and avoid the American law.
Depriving Sleep and Using Drugs00:10:19
Yeah, I believe that's true.
This was before NKUltra, but part of the CIA.
There were various sites.
There was a great interest in interrogation and truth serums.
So could you, you know, what could you make somebody confess to or, you know, reveal?
Really not false confessions, but could you break someone sufficiently that they'd reveal the information they had?
So they had prisoners at various sites who could be the subject of terminal experiments.
At least this is covered in John Mark's book, which is pretty authoritative.
And I think also John Lyle talks about it in his new book.
Before MKUltra, there were these experiments where people would basically be killed after being.
Essentially tortured through interrogation.
And where were they finding these people?
So they were, you know, from, I think some were from North Korea, maybe, and some were.
Good Lord.
There's, yeah, I'm forgetting exactly, but they were basically prisoners or spies who nobody was going to be checking up on, or they felt that.
Yeah.
That's so fucked up.
And then, what's this, Steve?
I found a date.
Oh, wow.
Stanley Kubrick himself.
Oh, no.
This is if he came back.
Somebody has a Stanley Kubrick handle on Twitter.
Wow.
September 1965.
NASA's George Mueller, a senior manager on the Apollo moon landing program, visits Stanley and Arthur C. Clarke as they prepared to shoot 2001 A Space Odyssey.
After seeing the film, Blueprints, Models, and Sets, Mueller reported, dubbed the studio NASA East.
Interesting.
What's even more interesting is other people are.
They have the same question.
Like, who's the guy in the back?
Hang on, scroll up.
Scroll up.
Let me read the top again.
So, why is he?
So, he's visiting Arthur C. Clarke to prepare to shoot 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Wow.
65?
Does this reconcile with what you know about where he was?
So, it interests me only because I don't know what he was doing in 65.
There's kind of a gap after MKUltra.
His funding does seem to dry up a bit.
He's at the University of Oklahoma.
He still does, I mean, he does dress in suits at that point.
Like later, he kind of adopts in the 70s.
You see him more in like lumberjack garb and he's more casual at UCLA.
But this would be his look at that period.
But I don't know all the things he did in that period.
So it would be interesting to know.
And it will say physically, it sort of resembles him.
I mean, NASA had a lot of research on, you know, humans in extreme micro environments because they had to know about that.
Yeah.
So.
You know, he may have had contact with this.
I don't know.
This is such a curious thing.
This is what another thing that, uh, that I was talking about with Joe the other day.
The MKUltra stuff, everything that was happening during the Cold War, there was more lying and more like sinister black project experiments that were happening in the U.S. than any other time in history.
Like JFK, right?
His assassination, MKUltra, um, Watergate.
There was just so much crazy, um, The Iran Contra scandal.
There was so much stuff going on during the Cold War, like spying.
It was like the pinnacle of spy agency stuff that was happening, and defectors and moles, and so many different countries from Cuba to the Soviet Union, all being involved in this just cauldron of deception.
And that's right when the moon landing was supposed to happen.
There was the space race.
But there's this weird cognitive dissonance thing that happens when people question the moon landing.
It's like you're a fool for even questioning that.
But if you really just back up from this cultural programming that we're in, And like look at it just on paper, just look at it like purely from a statistical point of view.
Like it's not that unreasonable to say they faked it.
It looks fake and it was in the middle of all this other fake stuff, right?
I mean, maybe.
It does seem that it does seem that people didn't have, they didn't have necessary, they didn't have the information to be able to question these programs and also they were clandestine.
So that's what's interesting about MKUltra is completely clandestine, even from the CIA itself, even from most of the.
The US government.
So, like, for example, one of the cutouts, the Geschichter Foundation, they received CAA funding to kind of create a conduit by which money could be given scientists a cutout.
But then Georgetown Medical Center also received additional funds because they thought it was just funded by Charles Geschichter.
So, they also contributed.
So, they were sort of doubling up the federal funding just because not all the arms were speaking to each other.
I mean, maybe the reason the moon landing looks kind of clumsily.
Photographed is just the technology we see that technology as looking easily falsifiable, and also we do have many cases that just seem outlandish and surreal.
That's one reason I've always been kind of drawn to them, just because you can't quite, you know, they don't seem like proper, sober, scholarly topics.
But if you can actually find the records, and it seems important to do that, you know, yeah.
When it comes to the moon landing, though, it's like you know.
One of the things about it is it's just, it's so, it's one of those conspiracies that, like, if the cat ever got let out of the bag, it would utterly destroy the reputation of the United States, right?
We would be like, the country would be so embarrassed, I would imagine, on the world stage, right?
Even more so than, like, I don't know.
I mean, the Kennedy assassin.
Like, and then the Kennedy thing, it's like everybody knows the truth.
Like, everybody knows.
In general, what happened there?
We know it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.
Like, if you took a consensus on every American, it would be a vast majority of the American population that believes it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, right?
Whether you want to say it was true or not, I would say the vast majority believe that there's some sort of conspiracy there.
Yeah.
Right.
So, like, even though the leaders, like the people who are behind these things, are never going to let the cat out of the bag, there's already this distrust that's been built.
Right.
Yeah.
I agree with your point.
But I also, have you been to the Air and Space Museum in DC, in Washington?
In Washington.
So I think they have, at least I remember seeing it there in DC.
And I think they still have it like one of the capsules that went to the moon.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And you can't believe it because it looks like they, it looks literally like a tin can.
It looks so unimpressive.
And you're like, human beings actually put themselves in this and shot into space and.
Right.
So either this could support, I mean, to me, it just supports the point that we don't, yeah.
And then you see, they had, they actually invented the checklist for the Apollo, one of the missions.
So, before that, there wasn't even a concept that you should have a checklist because they wanted, you know, because several of them went, there were mistakes and things went wrong and people failed to check, like certain, you know, make sure this works.
So, they invented just this idea of the checklist.
So, you see these printed out, you know, typed.
It just doesn't look like our idea of advanced technology.
So, I think that's one thing that undermines this, you know, people's belief in it or perhaps generates these theories.
I don't.
Well, it's also the fact that we haven't been back since 72, 73.
What was it?
Yeah.
We went on the first try.
We went all the way to the moon.
No one's been there since.
We went there with less than one millionth of the technology that's in an iPhone today.
And then conveniently, if all of the NASA files and all of the technology was accidentally, you can chat GPT this and chat GPT will pull up like NASA's actual official response to it was that they accidentally did an overwrite on their hard drives and erased all the technology.
Now they have no evidence of any of the technology.
So, what other technology do we have that's ever existed that humans have created that has not increased?
And gotten better over time or like at least stayed the same, right?
Right.
Not just vanished.
Yeah.
I mean, well, one thing though, you do, I mean, I'm old enough to not exactly remember this, but I remember hearing about, you know, just the priorities change so radically.
And I do remember in my, in like the 80s and 90s, people just couldn't believe we, the country had ever prioritized going to the moon just because it seems so, in a way, it became silly, I think, because we're like, we have lots of problems at home.
We've got, Attics in the streets, we've got people shooting up in the parks, we've got problems in our schools.
Why did we spend all this money?
It seemed so absurd.
And so maybe for a time it just became one of, I mean, there are other cycles of history that made it seem outlandish and strange that it ever happened.
So, I mean, I don't know.
I wouldn't imagine it didn't happen, but then again, I'm a product of that.
I mean, I remember as a child seeing it on TV.
Right.
Yeah.
And then another weird thing about it was when they broadcast the way the television companies broadcasted it, they had to go to the location in Houston and NASA put up the feed on a big projection screen.
So instead of giving all the news stations, letting them give them direct access to the feed individually, they all had to go there and set up their cameras and point it at this projection screen.
The Liberation Army Escape00:10:21
Well, that's just, I mean, I think one thing is.
So it's like third generation to start with the footages.
Yeah.
That's just.
I mean, so interesting.
One of the interesting things about writing my book is about, you know, looking at, for example, the Patty Hearst trial in the mid 70s and the case of Patty Hearst.
I mean, when there was a firefight to capture her and the group who held up, who had kidnapped her.
For people who don't know who she is, can you give a brief?
Yeah, so the short story is she was the daughter of, she was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst.
Oh, okay, yes.
Immortalized in the Citizen Kane.
In the fictional.
So he was a publishing magnate, basically a huge, a billionaire equivalent in his day.
And his granddaughter was one of, I think, four or five girls who were brought up in this family.
And she went to college at UC Berkeley at the age of 19.
She was living in the town of Berkeley.
She was studying art history.
She was a sophomore.
And this group called the Symbionese Liberation Army discovered that she was, you know, this daughter of a wealthy capitalist family, as they saw it.
Was studying and they wanted to make what they called a righteous arrest of her.
So, they went by her apartment where she was living with her fiancee, who had been her math teacher, actually, in this private school she'd gone to.
So, she's 19.
She's taken out of her apartment.
They bludgeon her boyfriend, leave him on the floor.
She was watching TV with him, so she's wearing a bathrobe.
They shove her in the trunk of their car.
They drive off, shooting up the street, and they keep her in a closet for 59 days, reading Maoist propaganda to her.
Forcing her to listen to broadcasts and covering her eyes so she can't see for that whole time.
She's never alone.
She has to submit to rape.
Basically, they say, if you're a person of good faith and you're starting to believe in us, which she had to kind of pretend that she was, she had to sleep with various members of this group.
So she submitted to rape.
She was moved to a different closet.
And over the course of these 59 days, she had to release cassette tapes of her reading messages to her parents.
And at first, she sounds really shaky.
And these are broadcast on all the local and national radio stations.
And she's saying things like, Mom, Dad, I'm okay, but they seem like a decent group.
She's saying, You should listen to what they say.
Do what they want.
And then her messages start to transform over the next month or two.
And she's saying, They're actually pretty cool.
She says, She said, No, I mean, she just was, she had to convince them that she was starting to believe in them or that she had been converted because she said, I decided I wanted to live because they had just massacred the local superintendent of Oakland schools.
So they were definitely, and they were highly armed.
They were constantly doing these military exercises.
They wanted to, they told her they were just one branch of this paramilitary organization that was.
You know, revolutionizing the United States and was going to bring about a new system of government.
And so she was so disoriented.
What was the name of the military group?
They call themselves the Symbianese Liberation Army.
Symbianese Liberation Army?
Yeah.
Okay.
And there's a whole story there.
Their leader was a former convict named Donald DeFries who renamed himself Sinkyu.
And he said that he had been, he was almost like a guru and he had recruited all these.
Middle class students.
He was black and most of the members were white.
And he said this was going to create a new system in the United States.
And basically, if they could get Patty Hearst to join them, it would look really good for their cause.
And so, after about a month and a half, they sat her down, they took off her blindfold finally, and they let her see them.
And they said, Do you want to join us?
And she said, She basically had to.
This is why it's known as a brainwashing case, or they tried to make this argument that she had to make herself into a soldier in their army if she wanted to live, which she could have easily not because she knew they would never return her to her parents.
And so, in a week or two, there's a famous picture of her holding an automatic weapon, and she ended up robbing a bank with the other members of the group.
And she said.
75?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
And she declared that she had a new name.
She was no longer Patricia Hurst.
She was going to be called Tanya.
And when they, so eventually she went on the run with this group, and a whole bunch of things happened.
Oh my God.
And people in the country didn't believe that she, you know, they seemed like they kind of forgot that she'd been kidnapped.
And they started to assume that she was a willing participant in this gang, and they were associating her with the hippies and with the people, the radicals of that time.
And so she was tried in 1976, and Louis Jollyon West was the lead expert who, in her defense.
Wow.
Because he was.
What?
How did that happen?
Yeah.
That's bananas.
So he was defending her.
He was, yeah.
Actually, all of the main brainwashing experts from the 50s, from the earlier POW incidents, were then recalled to this trial.
They were brought forward again.
So Robert J. Lifton, Robert.
Martin Orne and Lewis Jolly on West, but West was really the lead expert witness, and he was called to describe what had happened to her and hopefully exonerate her.
But he failed massively on the stand because he perjured himself very quickly and also because he didn't do a very good job.
Well, he basically disqualified brainwashing as a legal defense, even while he was claiming that she was.
Oh, no.
But I mean, one of the things is that the entire, most of the group was killed in a firefight, which is even to this day.
Probably the largest firefight that was in the city limits of LA.
And it was the first deployment of a SWAT team at a large scale.
And I guess originally why I was thinking about this is so many things were new about technology.
Like they never had synced sound to image.
So this firefight happened live on television, and people all over the nation saw the Symbian needs.
Liberation Army members, six of them burned.
They didn't see their bodies burn, but they saw their safe house burn on live television with sound synced to the image and with portable minicam.
So, all these things that, you know, they were totally new in 1975 when that happened.
And I think we just assume sometimes that these things have always existed, but actually, it was kind of things were changing so quickly even then.
But anyway, they assumed that Hearst had also died.
In the firefight.
But she happened to be out doing errands.
And that's a whole other story, which is very amazing.
What ended up happening to her after all of this?
So she was left with two other members of the SLA, the Harris's, who were a married couple.
And Bill Harris was, you know, he had beaten up Patty Hurst when she was first.
He was always beating her up, but they were also working with her.
So they went on, they said, we're going to go in the lamb with you because.
Basically, the rest of the group died.
So they had to go underground and people started ferrying them across the U.S.
They ended up spending a whole summer, I think it was in Pennsylvania maybe, and they were helping Hearst.
They wanted her to write her autobiography and they wanted it to be a bestseller talking about her transformation and her belief in this new revolutionary army.
And it was kind of like the POWs in the sense that she was constantly working on her confession, you know, her repudiation of her family, how she had seen the light, how she had changed.
And ultimately, though, she was discovered and arrested, and people couldn't understand why she hadn't just run away during that.
There was about a year when she was on the lam when the security wasn't that tight, and she arguably could have just walked away.
But she said that she was so.
I mean, this happens often with people who have been abducted.
They're so entrained and so fearful.
Like it's a kind of.
They start to feel protected by the abuser.
Yeah, they cling to the situation because they're.
And she also.
You know, when she saw the way the SWAT teams in the LAPD came after her group and slaughtered them on live TV, she thought like, and they thought she was in the building.
She knew that they, you know, she didn't feel protected by her own government.
Yeah, that seems like a common thing, even in like relationships with like husbands and wives where the husband can be abusive to the wife and they've been together for 10 years and he's been abusing her for 10 years.
It's like she can't.
Some women have like are unable to leave the relationship.
You know, where it's just like, I'm so used to this, I can't do change.
Like, this sucks, but I'm going to stick to it.
And it's better, it's easier for me to stay here and be abused than to get out of it.
Amphetamines and Triggered Violence00:14:46
Yeah.
I think coercively controlling relationships also have financial elements of control.
Like, it's very difficult, especially if you have children.
Yeah.
Like, the dynamics of domestic violence are similar.
Also, the dynamics of people, young women, often who are abducted by, you know, when they're really young and held.
Right.
Yeah.
Like the famous case of Elizabeth Smart.
You know, at a certain point, years in, there are moments they, and they eventually do break away.
But it's hard to know what that moment is.
And of course, you're risking your life if you try to reveal who you are.
Right.
Or like, like Jolly West's situation, you said that he had like affairs and families all over the world, and his wife somehow knew about it.
I don't know how many families he had.
He had at least one.
Oh, he's right.
And he had many, many affairs, so much so that his wife talked about, I think it's in his son's book.
How she was so humiliated because they would sometimes show up.
Um, and oh no, he was just he was he was kind of a larger than life figure to say the least.
And she, but she did get used to it and she stayed with him to the very end.
That always blows my mind, too.
Yeah, how how people will stay with their spouse after like aggressive, long history of cheating.
It's like that's got to be some form of you know weird mind control, something like like self.
Induced mind control.
Yeah.
And how did Jolly West die?
He died by his son basically killing him.
He asked his son to kill him.
Because he had cancer?
He had very advanced, I forget what kind of cancer.
He was going to die probably within another couple of months.
In the 90s, right?
In the late 90s.
But he.
But it's really interesting in Mark West's book because he.
He went on a press tour afterwards and he gave all these interviews and he wrote the book as a kind of tribute.
He talked about how he had to be very secretive.
I mean, in a sense, he consulted with these societies, the Hemlock Society and others, about it.
It was basically seen as a mercy killing.
He saw it as a mercy killing, but he didn't really want to do it.
And his father sort of made him.
And then about half a year later, his mother also got him to.
Help her kill herself, or basically, he killed her by administering drugs.
And she wasn't, she just had, you know, kind of medium stage dementia.
So I think the toll was very heavy on him.
So even though he wrote quite an amazing book about it, and he, it's, it's, I think it's a bit, it's a tortured book because he wants to say that he did this merciful thing and he was helping his parents, but you can't help.
But see this tortured family dynamic.
And then he killed himself.
How did he kill himself?
Same way?
I'm not sure how.
And also, why wouldn't you just like, if you were going to overdose yourself, why couldn't you do that yourself?
Why would you make your child do that to you?
It seems like an easy thing to do yourself.
It did seem that my impression from the book, because it's quite well written.
Oh, do you know the name of it?
I forget the name Mark West.
And he, I'm just forgetting the title, but he, it's, Very conspiratorial.
It's like his father wanted to have a conspiracy with him.
We're doing this together.
He had to hide it from his sisters.
That was the main thing.
And the same thing with the mother.
It was almost like they were bonding over this task, this joint project, and that the project would ultimately be both of their deaths.
So, and you can see that that was not to, you know, ultimately something he could, he was able to reckon with.
That's sick.
That's so sickening.
I found the book.
The Last Good Nights Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides.
Jesus.
The comments, at least last I looked, were very interesting because some friends of the family wrote in on the Amazon.
No way.
Comments?
Yeah.
I love it.
Go down.
Let's read them.
Good book, but it shouldn't have said, it shouldn't have had to be this way.
Interesting.
Okay.
John Stuart West, after killing his parents over a decade ago, took his own life on October 4th, 2014.
I have to wonder if suicide became so normalized for him that this was his answer to his own psychological pain for which he would not get meaningful help.
His suicide note, quote, note via email to his friends was glib and completely cavalier, obviously written by a deeper, depressed, psychologically defended man.
Has he not been recruited by his parents to assist them in their deaths?
Perhaps he would be alive today.
Suicide is not the answer.
Nope.
It's definitely not the answer, folks.
Wow.
Yeah, it's very sad because he's an interesting man.
And I thought.
It would have been interesting to be able to talk to him.
He had a tough family dynamic.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
To say the least.
Because, I mean, West, interesting.
He just.
He's hard to figure out.
I was just talking to someone who knew him in the 70s.
He said he was, he spoke really slowly.
This is what some people say.
I mean, even though people were talking about how ebullient he was called Jolly because that did match his demeanor, but others describe him as speaking very slowly and hypnotically.
And, but he, yeah, he would kind of use the killing, you know, he famously, or maybe not famously, but he administered LSD to an elephant.
Oh, yeah.
Tusco, right?
Tusco, the elephant.
And it's, This is also heartbreaking if you actually read the article because the female elephant who was Tesco's mate tried to hold him up while he was dying.
Oh no.
And I'm like, ah.
But West, you know, wrote this paper.
I think he wanted to find, so this is an interesting connection.
He was interested in the trigger to irrational violence.
And male elephants are known to go into periods of irrational violence, like during their must periods.
So it seems that he wanted to see if the LSD would trigger that, which is very related to his, you know, this kind of questions at the time about LSD and speed.
Also, whether amphetamines might trigger.
And LSD, you know, in combination might trigger violence.
They were sometimes wondering or seeing that, I think, in some studies with also with mice.
So that may have been part of why he did this, but he didn't hesitate for the rest of his career to use the elephant, the Tusco's death as kind of his calling card in a very flippant way.
He was very proud of it.
Yeah, I'm the guy who killed the elephant.
He kind of would swagger into a room, and he was known for that.
And didn't he have like a violence center that he wanted to create?
Like a center for violence?
He wrote, he, it was, That's a short word for it, or the short phrase was the Violent Center.
And he considered it his greatest defeat, but in some ways it was right after the Hate Ashbury period when he first got to UCLA and it was, he got millions, $2 million of funding.
It was all set to go and it was going to be a center for the study and reduction of violence.
There were like 29 affiliated projects within it.
It was almost like an above board MKUltra in the sense that it was public.
And one of the reasons it Was that he made it public, but he was really interested in that, in violence, but it kind of fell apart.
He felt he was just attacked by people who didn't understand and who were his political enemies.
And how did that stuff tie into what was going on with the Haight Ashbury Clinic and Charles Manson?
Because you can see, like, you know, one of the things that Tom described, which you just described, is that they were not only messing with LSD, but they were also testing amphetamines with this place that was funded by that cutout that was CIA money.
And the Manson murders are one of the most violent.
That's ever happened in this country, in the history of this country on American soil.
So, like, the fact that there's a clear tie that I think Tom O'Neill points out in his book with all the people that Manson was connected with, bringing the girls there all the time, you know, all the other shady things.
So, like, what is your understanding or what is your opinion on what was happening with Charles Manson?
Yeah.
Well, there are demonstrable studies that were being done involving Manson.
So this is true.
I mean, he was at the very least in observational studies, his family.
These are so, I was actually just talking with Tom O'Neill last week about this because we're both interested in, I mean, I don't think it's determined yet that West, you can't yet put, you can't put Jolly West in a room with Charles Manson, at least not in a documented way.
But it is true that West had a, he had an office at the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic from the very beginning.
And he was part of the crowd of people who were running the, Both the Haight Ashbery Research Project, which was, and his own observational study, which was really like a naturalistic study of these communes, of the different families, of how their psychodynamics and social dynamics worked.
And so West and some of his colleagues were actually going into the field with the Manson family and others.
Really?
In Mendocino, yeah.
And one of them was Alan Rose.
And I mean, so there are people such as a graduate student and assistant at the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic named Gary Landis who will, so they are personally links between West and people like Alan Rose.
And they were definitely treating the Manson and his family at the clinic.
So you can bring them so close, but you don't really know.
It's hard to tell exactly, you know, if you want to trace West's role.
What I do see is that People for many years were saying that the hippies turned from LSD to speed later, and that this caused the hate to become a violent and unpleasant place after the flower child period.
And so the Amphetamine Research Project was tracking and interviewing these young runaways and stuff starting in 68, I think it was.
Yeah, 68.
So one of the people working for West, Gary Landis, talks about how he went into the medical clinic.
And he saw, he observed them interviewing kids who were amphetamine addicts, like they were tracking them over time.
So West used to say something like, or people used to say, Manson was unusual in that he was a speed addict first and then he got into LSD and then he stopped because he didn't really like needles.
But his family definitely, this was the lore, you know, why he maybe.
Amphetamines didn't have anything to do with the murders or whatever.
This is what people used to say.
But actually, it does seem that he and his family were increasingly turning to speed at the same time, or amphetamines and speed.
Injecting it?
Well, maybe not injecting it because he didn't like needles.
Gotcha.
But, you know, they could be orally taking it, or it's not, this is just something that has come up in various interviews.
But there was a curiosity about triggering violence and the Potential connection between LSD and violence.
And certainly, Manson, you know, obviously used LSD in his relationships.
I mean, this is, you know, his people like Susan Atkins and others talked about how they would try never to come down, like they were vying to see who could never come down from one day to another.
So they were very addled.
And then, if you add other substances, so it's interesting.
I mean, there are parallels in the NIMH funded research.
So you don't see the name CIA.
You don't see any of these earlier cutouts.
What is NIMA?
The National Institute of Mental Health.
Okay.
They were funding a couple of these projects.
Right.
Because they were just interested.
They were interested and they wanted, you know, on one level, they had an interest in curing addiction.
There seemed to be a mass epidemic of amphetamine addiction.
Yeah.
It's, you know, I always wonder whether or not with the stuff that they were testing on Charles Manson and the family, like, did they were they trying to aim for a specific result or were they just throwing shit at the wall to basically see what would happen?
Or were they trying to guide them in any specific way?
I'm not sure they were even testing on them.
I mean, I don't think that's been proven.
I think they were naturalistically observing them.
Oh, they were just observing them as wild animals.
And also, well, the problem with naturalistic observation is people, you know, throughout time, they get involved with their subjects.
And West himself in his own diary wrote, I'm getting too close to my subjects.
These were many different things, he was involved in many different things.
Right.
And his other team also became involved.
Like they not only went to sort of anthropologically observe the family, but they were sleeping with them sometimes, the women, or they sort of get involved.
But I'm not sure there were, I don't believe that there were formal, at least nothing in the record, nothing that they would have published or nothing that NIMH would have sponsored, which would have allowed the actually giving or testing or experimenting with Manson or anything like that.
Well, I mean, one of the biggest questions about that, though, is like, why was he, why did he kept getting let out of prison by Roger Smith, you know?
Covering Up Manson Connections00:03:46
Well, this is such a good, I mean, it's true.
It's remarkable.
So I, you can say, it is possible.
So there could be clandestine papers, studies, who knows.
But Roger Smith is, it's really odd that he was both, you know, a prominent researcher in amphetamine addiction.
He was, he was doing these experiments with mice and with.
Complicated protocols.
He was also friends with David A. Smith, who ran the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic, and he was Manson's parole officer.
Like, that's very hard to understand, and he kept releasing him.
But he says that, I think he said at one point there was a program to try releasing parolees to see if they would do better.
I mean, it doesn't really, like a criminological experiment of some kind.
It's not easily explained, and I think that's why Tom O'Neill's. Book is very striking.
I mean, did he and he didn't, um, he didn't commit any like real violent crimes though, did he?
Before that, were they just like petty theft and like stealing a car and some other things that wouldn't lock him up forever, or did he actually like well, he and his family did kill a Buddhist practitioner in a drug deal, uh, some sort of uh, right before the murders?
Oh, yes, you know, so but before that, Manson actually, his family was known, some people say, at least Alan Rose at one point said, actually, they're kind of like model.
Model hippies, at least he takes care of them.
He brings them to the doctor.
They're not just, you know, in squalor.
But he, because he was pimping out his, the women in the family too.
But so, and he had this, he had career ambitions, Manson.
So, right.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I don't think he had, he didn't, he didn't have a, he didn't have, he didn't have, actually much history of violence that I know of.
Like he, and he, of course, he didn't commit these murders himself.
He, His family did.
Right.
But he was there.
He went there right afterwards, right?
Yeah.
And then there was the one after the Tate murders, the LaBianca murders.
I think that was the next night, right?
Right.
He was there, I believe, right?
I think he was out front.
Maybe he didn't go inside.
It was very nearby.
Yeah, very close by.
And then another weird thing about the Tate LaBianca murders is that there was a CIA agent who made a phone call.
I don't remember if you remember that from the.
It's one of the really curious things about that book was this guy who called somebody, I can't remember who, and told them at like eight o'clock in the morning or like first thing in the morning before the first phone call to the police ever even happened.
And this guy was like a legitimate CIA.
I don't know if he was an agent or an actual officer.
I think he was probably just an agent working for the CIA, giving them information.
This guy ended up being a ghost and they never found who he was.
But.
I think Tom included photos of this guy in the book.
So that's really curious.
Were they just following him?
Were they just observing him?
Like, did they know?
Did they like see, like, oh my God, this guy's going to, what are they doing?
They found out, like, fuck, this is getting out of control.
I don't know.
But the fact, you know, also the other thing about how the prosecutor covered, like, the story of the prosecutor and him writing that book and, like, covering up all those really blatant facts and really crazy connections to Manson.
Vince Bugliosi.
Vince Bugliosi, yeah.
I mean, that's why Tom's book is very compelling.
Evaluating Historical Verification00:06:16
Right.
He finds all these.
And how he started meeting with Vince, and Vince was like, oh, yeah, come on, let's talk about it.
And as soon as Tom started digging in too deep, Vince completely shut him down and cut him out.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
He, he, yeah.
People, I mean, he's reputationally damaging, like to, I gather.
Totally.
And I think, you know, in the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic did do a lot of amazing things.
So it would be frustrating.
I mean, they, you know, it's not just one, it's not like it just simply was a front for the CIA or anything.
But it shut down two weeks after he released the book.
Yeah, because his reputation was so damaged by it.
So he's.
Quite upset.
I mean, I can understand that you spend your whole life doing that.
Yeah.
It just makes me wonder like all the money and resources and projects that they had devoted to this stuff in the 60s.
Like, imagine what they could possibly do now with the internet and social media, you know, to sort of because the, you know, the population is obviously growing and more and more people are connected.
And you got to find a way to sort of control the population, especially in this age of just.
Over information, there's an abundance of information everywhere, and like stuff, there's so much truth.
Like the government can't hide stuff as well as they used to, right?
Yeah.
So, so you have one problem is stuff can get secrets can get out easier.
And one of the ways I think they combat it is by letting out a bunch of fake stuff, too, so that you know you have the real stuff and the fake stuff all mixed together in this cauldron, and it's impossible to pick out what's real.
Yeah, that's why I came up with the phrase the instability of truth.
Or you could also say the instability of the real.
Or that you have, I mean, even going back to the 60s and the idea of Robert Anton Wilson of the reality tunnel, that we, you know, a lot of our, as you know about his concept, that everyone kind of inhabits a reality tunnel.
And that the main, he says something I think amazing like, we, a lot of the world's greatest ills come because we don't understand that a lot.
So much of our perception is just grasping, in other words, to make sense of reality.
So he was an early, I think, someone who understood that we do construct a kind of sense of what's real and it can be highly siloed.
But I think one difference between that era, I mean, there are so many resonances and there's a reason we want, I'm, you know, lots of people want to go back to the early Cold War and it looks so intriguing.
Because these things were happening, but also because they kept really good records.
I mean, they destroyed a lot of MKUltra, but the parts they didn't destroy the financial records.
I mean, they're keeping records down to the cent.
They're sometimes so boring like, did you make the transfer?
I paid this much for stamps.
It's very mundane.
And it seems like things could be so there could be a kind of controlled experiment that was done clandestinely and maybe we're a little nostalgic.
Because we live in a moment, I think, of uncontrolled experiments.
I mean, that's what I tend to think, which are just emerging and not necessarily directed on so many levels.
Like, we don't know what the results will be.
And a lot of them are just maybe platforms maximizing for profit and engagement.
And then the side effects are certainly psychological, social, and like mind melding and also warping of our ability, even our ability to really deal with this.
Yeah.
And it's the more you pay attention, the problem is most people don't have the luxury.
Of paying attention to this stuff because people are burdened by, you know, their jobs, their lives, and people like me, who my job is to pay attention to this stuff, get to see it.
And I get to see how, like, my mom and my dad live in two separate parallel realities because my mom gets all of her information from CNN.
She's very left wing, and my dad gets all this information from Fox News.
You know, he's right wing.
So they both have, like, completely separate facts on every situation that exists.
And it's like, It's amazing to me that they can't see it, but most people are still married.
No, they got divorced when I was five.
Okay.
Because I was going to say, that would be impressive.
Yeah, no, no, no, no.
It would be a miracle if they stayed married.
My mom was a fine arts major, and my dad was a mailman.
It couldn't be more opposite.
Yeah.
But yeah, I don't know.
I forgot where I was going with that.
Sorry to interrupt you.
No, it was very interesting.
We were saying separate.
You can actually find, I mean, I think it is more unique because you were talking about, I mean, there is just such an overabundance of evidence that it's hard to evaluate.
It's hard for anyone to evaluate, even if you have a lot of credentials in historical verification or, you know, the vetting of sources, just because, I mean, I just was hearing about how AI is capable of, so if it generates a hallucinatory story, it can actually then also generate supporting documents.
And websites that seem to support that story from a web vault or something.
So once that starts to happen, it really upends the historical process and it makes you even more, maybe reliant on or interested in paper records that are less subjective.
Physical records.
Physical records, which seemed malleable and subject to suppression and all these things, but at least are much more.
They offer you something to some sort of verification process.
Disrupted Circadian Rhythms00:13:29
Have you ever heard of the book called The Electric Body?
No.
Steve, find out who the author of that is.
This is somebody Jack Cruise was talking to us about.
So there's, I guess, like in all of the devices that we have, like all the phones and the iPads and even in televisions and stuff like this, there's this, it's all this one spectrum of light, which is on the blue end of the spectrum.
And there's something about that specific spectrum of light that like messes with the chemicals in your brains, in your brain, which it turns it into stimulating, right?
So it's not only is it stimulating, but it's feeding you content from social media that you're getting just like tiny little hits of dopamine every time you scroll through this thing.
And it's designed to keep you on the thing, right?
Yeah.
And apparently, like this started like early on when like.
Vegas was first developing with the casinos, and they decided to take out all the windows and take out all the clocks to keep people in there to gamble all the time.
And then eventually, we started getting televisions, and then the iPhone came about.
And then these social media companies figured out we can make way more money if we keep people on the phones.
And what's happened is it's exponentially gotten worse because not only are people just constantly being inundated with this blue light that's messing with their circadian rhythm, they're staying up too late.
But They are like, it's like their brain is hijacked by these devices combined with social media because they're optimizing only for money and retention, right?
They want to keep you on their platforms longer.
They don't get you.
Becker, was it Becker?
So this is Robert Becker.
That's Robert Becker.
Yeah.
Robert Becker did this.
The Body Electric.
The Body Electric, right.
Which talks about, you know, it's a fascinating, I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it's a fascinating deep dive.
It's from 98.
Oh, wow.
It is kind of recent, huh?
So, yeah, it explores the pathways, you know, in the understanding of evolution and psychic phenomena and healing and stuff like this.
But before blue light.
But like light, right.
But the guy who was explaining this to me was explaining how light is like fundamental to human health and biology, our evolution.
You know, even like he was explaining how we overlook the circadian rhythm.
And how this technology has taken us so far off the path of that, of like where human beings are supposed to be, like in nature when it comes to the sun and light and all this stuff.
And we're like constantly.
And then Obama did this thing when he was president where he mandated that everyone had to have incandescent light bulbs or no LED lights.
He banned incandescent lights, right?
Because they weren't energy efficient enough.
And those lights are full spectrum.
Right, they have the full spectrum of light, like sunlight has.
They don't have UV, but incandescent or the LED lights are all specifically blue light.
And when people are spending all their time inside underneath these lights and then having this blue light on your eyes all the time, um, the argument that he was making is that this is a form of mind control, you're keeping people locked into this stuff.
And if you can get a population of people addicted to An electronic device in which you're feeding all the information into that could be very dangerous for sure, especially on a large scale.
I agree that.
Well, first of all, the larger point that our circadian rhythms are massively disrupted, and that that has psychological effects that we don't even we haven't even begun to reckon with.
I think because not only our devices, but long before that with fluorescent lighting, and then later, as you're saying, with the I mean, LED lights, I think that was a An unintended consequence was of making incandescent lighting illegal, essentially.
You can't even buy those.
And you know how depressing it is.
Even when you tune an LED light to look more warmer in different ways, it doesn't have the same effect.
But also, just the way we spend so much time indoors, people have shift work.
There are so many ways that our attunement to just the rhythms of day and night are disrupted.
Sleep is a massive problem.
This creates a kind of a background disruption.
You could even look at the potential effects of.
There's a historian of biology at UCLA who's looking at the effects on age of menstruation because for young men, you know, it's earlier than it's six to seven years earlier than it used to be.
I mean, then over historical time, you can track this kind of.
And why did they say that that was?
I mean, people, this is, as far as I know, not fully understood why, you know, girls as young as nine to 11 are now starting.
Menstruation, whereas it used to be.
I was listening to a scholar who was saying that if you look at in Shakespeare's time, people didn't really come of age until 17, like women, young women didn't.
And even in recent memory, it was much later.
So what has been happening?
I mean, you could say chemicals, you could say maybe an enriched diet.
People have talked about maybe the disruption of circadian rhythms can also affect.
Like, I'm just, this is not my area.
I'm just, I think it's, I've seen people write about this.
And I just think the various ways that our lives are disrupted by, by kind of being in artificially lighted environments and not, you know, not being outside enough, essentially.
Yeah.
Not tuning to these cues that maybe through much of human history we were cued to.
Age of, what is this?
Menarsh?
Menstruation.
Okay.
So in the 1900s, it was 14.
This is in the U.S.
Yeah.
So from 14 down to so now it's down to 12.
And if you go back a couple of centuries, apparently it was even later.
Wow.
So this is something that people don't fully, physicians don't understand.
It's just been happening.
It probably has to have something to do with just like the overabundance of chemicals in our products and our food products.
And microplastics and everything, phthalates, all these things.
You know, Dr. Shauna Swan?
She wrote this book called The Countdown, which is all about how things like glyphosate and microplastics and phthalates have been reducing.
There's a similar chart like this you can probably find, Steve, but in men, it's reduced sperm count, testosterone levels, and fertility.
And they started studying it in the 50s, and every year it drops by a percent, and now it's dropping by like 2% per year.
And it's all to do with these types of things, these pollutions.
Yeah.
I mean, our indoor, to some, sometimes it's an unintended consequence of like a well intended regulation that says our sofas need to be doused in anti inflammatory, in chemicals that will stop them from catching on fire.
Because people, you know, this was part of the consumer product safety and, you know, movement in the 70s to, because people, you know, kids' pajamas were catching on fire sometimes.
My dad was actually part of the, This movement to part of it's actually related to also auto safety and the idea that consumer products should be safe.
But one effect was that these chemicals were introduced into all sofas.
So, sofas can are often incredibly toxic just because people frequently did used to fall asleep with cigarettes and set the sofa on fire.
So now they're anti inflammatory.
But one effect is, and this is just one among many factors that creates an indoor environment that's full of just massively.
There's so much ambient chemical additions that we're constantly interacting with.
Yeah.
And not just in that kind of stuff, but in food products and stuff in the U.S.
And the US is the most guilty country of doing this stuff because, like, for example, my wife was just trying to buy baby formula and we're trying to find the baby formula that's not packed with all like the crazy coconut tree, not coconut, but palm oils and all these crazy, like, super unhealthy oils that are, and all these other like weird ingredients they pack into the baby formula.
So we literally, she literally had to go on some weird website and order it from Germany.
No, it's true.
It's the same brand, same exact brand, but the stuff they sell to Germany.
They make sure that they don't put all that crap in there.
They regulate against it in Germany.
Because I had the same thing with my daughter when she was young.
She has a sensitivity to artificial colors and flavors that are just used to make the yogurts look really pink or whatever it is.
But in Germany, they don't allow many of the chemicals that are allowed here.
So we could get really colorful things, but they were just made with creatively.
Like they sourced them out of, I don't know.
So we don't regulate them here.
Well, now, of course, it's an issue with.
And they complain that they won't make enough money.
They'll go bankrupt if they have to take all that stuff out of there because it makes a manufacturer.
Well, you sell it to them.
I think it's interesting how, and you might be having this same experience that I had when my daughter was young, which was like a decade and a half ago.
But she, it's just so many things are more concentrated for children, but children and infants are more sensitive.
So why is it when you go to a children's movie, it's so loud, you know, or their food is more colored than with a.
An adult's food, or so many things are hyper you know, they're hyper concentrated.
And it was amazing to live in Berlin for two years and just be able to find things that weren't so toxic.
Yeah, you can tell.
You can tell when you go to countries like that, there's a stark difference, especially if you spend enough time there.
Yeah.
And the way you feel with the food, you know, like even just like going to Costa Rica and eating junk food, you can eat.
I could go there, it tastes kind of good.
I go there and I.
I eat pizza, burgers, whatever, like tacos, whatever it is.
And I don't feel like I just pounded 10 pounds of cement.
You feel different.
I don't feel like I'm carrying a lead brick in my stomach afterwards.
You know, and you just, it's so much different.
And it makes sense why countries like Costa Rica are, they have the longest lifespans of any other developed countries.
I feel like the more technology and the more convenience and the more like, Convenient foods are available, the less healthy it is and the worse it is for human beings.
And I think that that directly correlates with mental health too.
I know that the new head of, well, RFK Jr. just introduced this new legislation banning certain artificial additives to food.
Yeah.
I think some of this stuff is so funny.
Like, it's hard to stay optimistic about this stuff when you see, like, you know, they're just focusing on food dyes and then Trump just says, oh, we're going to put, we're going to bring real sugar back to Coke.
Like, okay, so the people who drink Coke are going to be a little bit healthier.
Like, come on, is that the best we can do?
Yeah, I think you're, yeah, the point you're making is one that anyone who eats, if you go somewhere in a different country and you eat their food, it's usually a lot better.
And you don't feel, you don't need to eat as much because it just feels more filling.
Yeah.
Or at least that's been my experience.
And as recently in Amsterdam.
And it's, yeah, just basically the, you realize that our food supply, for whatever, and a complex number of reasons, it's not going to be solved.
By one little change.
But that we have for, and it's hard to exactly tell why and how this happened, although I think it did happen in the mid 20th century, maybe around the same period.
Not to say it's a conspiracy, but it's like different forces, different incentives.
Right.
It's not like one well oiled machine and they're all working together to make this happen.
Like the food being processed, the fluoride in the water, we're specifically trying to program you to be our little mind control experiment.
What is this, Steve?
This is, oh, two different versions of Froot Loops.
Same product.
Well, oh, wow.
Same marketing.
Yeah.
Another interesting thing is, yeah, like Costa Rica, they don't have, they don't have, no, they put zero fluoride in their water.
And that's a crazy story behind the fluoride thing in the U.S.
Yeah.
Politics, Culture, and Media Influence00:03:23
So hyper focusing perhaps on one thing is, you know, takes you off the bigger picture, but the bigger picture is compelling.
It definitely is.
It definitely is.
But I don't think, I mean, these people, they aren't as competent as we give them credit for.
These people are just trying to figure it out day by day.
And it's easier for us to paint some big, broad, connect all these dots that have no, you know, like I'm trying to do with Jolly West being on this, you know, with Stanley Kubrick to prove the moon isn't real.
It's probably, that probably has nothing to do with it, but like that's where my mind goes.
It's tempting.
It is tempting.
But I think, yeah, we should never, it's kind of like what I discovered in my research we can't underestimate, we're drawn to shiny objects and to, uh, Brilliant conspiracies into incredibly, you know, into like the man behind the curtain.
But actually, there, you know, that there's a lot of bumblingness in it.
And what is so in the case of conditioning, it's like in the case of brainwashing, so much of it is just how susceptible we are to the influence of other people, you know, whether that's orchestrated or not.
And how much we, you know, want to get along, kind of.
And, you know, and I think that's why I got so inspired by this.
Polish writer Czesław Milo, she wrote a book called The Captive Mind because he describes how in his own experience, you know, how the effects of World War II and how his own living in communist Poland as the government was being taken over, you know, how he faced this dilemma in himself.
Like, was he going to find a way to convert himself to sort of actually, he said, it's an operation you perform on yourself or a kind of inner surrender.
But could he make himself do that just to get along in his life or would he end up leaving?
But I think that one point he made is that, is just that how, he said, if people were told, if men were told or humans were told that in order to have high social status, they had to crawl around on their hands and knees with a feather sticking out of their hindquarters and, you know, act like it was just perfectly normal, they would do it just because that was the mandate of the day.
Or that's the way that you, you know, that's what people assumed.
So these things are so powerful, yet they're hard to.
Identify exactly.
So sometimes it's helpful to look at a particular concept or a phrase or a place where you can really focus.
And Lewis Jolly and West becomes one of those.
There's always a slow evolving undercurrent of ideas and ideology in the US.
And that has to do with politics, it has to do with culture.
It has to do, you know, which a lot of it comes, you know, from the media, obviously.
But I often wonder like the reason we are where we are in this sort of world that is we get where we get all of our information from like four companies, four media companies.
Emotional Contagion Online00:12:12
And you have the incentives, our incentives, which are to to make more money, to get ahead, to develop new things, to be the number one leader in GDP in the world, to be.
The military superpower in the world is like, I wonder if that's the optimal way, or are those the optimal incentives for us to evolve in a good way?
You know, like, if we keep chasing these carrots that we are chasing, I don't know, maybe it's not me or you, but the people that are like, you know, the head of the military or like top executives at Wall Street firms, like, um, financial firms.
Or whatever it is, these people are strictly on this treadmill, chasing this carrot and pushing things from a financial perspective because we have this idea of being an American as having a big house in the suburbs and driving a nice car, having a boat, and this just idealistic view of being a successful American.
And I don't think that that is conducive.
To having a healthy society, but it's not something we can turn.
It's not like you can turn that ship.
I don't think.
I think we're just on this path.
And I think a lot of people, you know, and music, I think music has a big part to do, is a huge part of it too, because, you know, also people want fame and attention, which is a weird thing.
And I don't know if that's like, if that's inherently in us as human beings or if that's.
More a part of the culture and how that's gonna evolve over time and how that's gonna get worse.
You know, and I just don't, I don't see it getting any better.
It seems like if, if we want to be the best version of ourselves, I think like we have to go back in time and start again.
Restart.
No, I hope, I hope it's not that.
But I do think we've reached a critical point of potential incoherence and.
Even collapse because, and I hope it, I don't, but I'm not a pessimist, I don't think, but I see all the things you're talking about.
I mean, the, I mean, you were talking about people's, you know, wanting to prove themselves by living a certain kind of life.
I think it's, and finding that there's countless stories of people who reach the top of some corporate ladder or music empire or kind of fame or success and then find it empty.
And so that's an old story.
I mean, that's a really old story.
It goes back to, The Buddha, or many others, or Socrates.
So it's a question of how do you know yourself?
And I think one of the mistakes we're always making is, and this is one thing that got me interested again in, I guess, in maybe the crisis over social media or whatever, and AI and things that we're experiencing now, and the split in our population, and maybe the question of ideological manipulation is that.
These things are never really about the ideas, I don't think.
They're mostly about the emotion underlying it.
And that's one of my central findings is that what spreads is really, and the way people, the way it works is through emotional contagion.
And that then the ideas get kind of positioned on top of that.
So, and to the extent that people have trauma, and I mean, this is one thing that really stands out with even to go back to the early Cold War and the POWs is that when they came back, the one thing that the experts never saw was that they were traumatized.
These men had been through.
Like unspeakable conditions, and had a lot, you know.
I call it ungrounding, but really it included conditions beyond what you could even imagine surviving, like losing half their body weight just from not being able to eat, their wounds untreated, being bombed by their own, napalm by their own military, dying under degrading circumstances.
I mean, I could go on, but it's just that one thing when they were studied later, that disappeared, you know, the idea that of what they.
The trauma they had experienced was never registered in the records.
They were just seen as these kind of freakish and weak men who had somehow capitulated to communist ideology and were now parroting it as if they were, you know, this unknown phenomenon in history.
And you see that kind of happening in other episodes.
That's why I was interested.
Could I look at these earlier episodes where it really seems mysterious to me?
Why did they not see that?
And then you look at the emergence of social media at key moments and how.
It seems to be about people adopting ideas or getting stuck on their, you know, in sort of loops, thought loops or silos and things like that.
But really, you know, research and what I've observed shows that it's feeding on your unresolved emotional states.
And that was shown, like, for example, in the Facebook experiment of 2014.
And then you could sort of see it happening also in just the way there's some really interesting research on altered states of consciousness as like, You sort of do dissociate when many people dissociate, we all do, you know, when we're absorbed in our phone or whatever platform it is.
And they each have different effects, but they're on a scale of kind of like altered states to some degree.
Can you explain what the Facebook experiment was, the emotional Facebook experiment?
Yeah.
So it was published in 2014, but the research ran in 2012.
And it was a study, so it was published in the PN, the proceedings, anyway, I can't remember the name of the publication, but it's a very prominent publication.
So in the experiment, about 700,000 users were selected without being told because the user agreement allows one to be, it was in PNAS, the user agreement allows you to be.
The Facebook, like the general user agreement.
Any general user agreement of that platform and really any platform subjects you to A B testing or experimentation.
So 689,003 users.
Massive scale.
So the title's really interesting.
And this was the last time that they published, the Facebook research team published in such a prominent journal.
And I think it was partly they wanted to announce this.
It was a little bit of like planting a flag and showing that they had done something that was historic in the field of operationalizing emotion.
So the basic experiment was somewhat simple.
They divided these users into three groups.
The first group was exposed to a more, their news feed was altered.
So instead of receiving the regular algorithmically delivered feed, you got a more negative feed.
Then that was measured by word counting software that, you know, claimed that measures the emotional state.
So it was more negative, and those people then were tracked in how they responded.
Did they post more negative things?
Did they react in a more negative way as measured by software?
So they measured their reaction by their posts.
Yeah, any kind of reaction or emoticon.
And these people had no idea they were part of this experiment.
Right.
And they discovered, and then another group, their feed was altered positively to a greater or lesser degree or intensity of positivity.
And then that group was also traced in its response.
And then a third group was a control group.
So their feed was unaltered.
And the discovery was that the negatively altered group then posted in a, Statistically significantly more negative way.
The positive group was more positive, but less striking.
And then the control group was unaltered.
And so, but what's interesting too is that the article talks about this that they say they've operationalized emotional contagion.
And emotional contagion was kind of a concept that psychologists had been talking about since the 90s, or perhaps it had been defined in the 1990s, but really it goes much longer back.
The question of how do you.
Spread emotion.
And people have always known, of course, that if you're in a room with somebody, you're having a conversation like we are, you could be spreading.
This is like the essence of a mother child bond or something like that.
But the question was could emotion be spread?
Could negative emotion be spread?
Could it be done if you're not in the physical presence of someone?
Could it be done across vast distances?
And could it be done at scale with a massive scale?
That's why they say massive scale.
So the article was really kind of triumphantly announcing that yes, we've proved that this can happen even in the absence of.
Any kind of contact.
Wow.
Because, yeah, it's not, it's completely not efficient to use actual drugs on people because you can't, you can't affect a population.
You can't go like drop, give somebody some acid.
You know, every single, however many people are on, you know, in the country, what is it like, what is it like 500 million people in the US, something like that?
But if you have, if you can find a way to manipulate what they already have in their hand 24 seven and they're staring at and use something about, about, Use the tools that are on their phones already to sort of manipulate the chemical balance in their mind.
That would be the perfect way to do this.
And what I discovered too was that, so some people wrote into Facebook when it became publicized because it got a lot of attention, this experiment in 2014.
Although, so some people wrote into Facebook saying, could I ever know if I was in this experiment?
Because I became very depressed during that period.
I was in the hospital with suicidal ideas.
Ideas and I want, you know, it's very heartbreaking.
And others were outraged.
There was an investigation of some of the researchers, but it really came to nothing, as far as I can tell.
And everyone was essentially promoted.
But what I discovered is that the, I mean, some interesting things, there's not necessarily a direct connection, but the word counting software that was used to measure negativity, to measure the emotion in the experiment, was actually trained on people's diaries because they said, we need to be able to measure.
As if we were able to enter the minds of the subject.
The software developers said, who are psychologists, they said, so we'll have people write about the worst thing that's ever happened to them in diaries, and then we'll take that and sort of make a, it's almost like a preliminary language model.
Wow.
20 years ago.
And they use that.
This is just the accounting software itself.
So it struck me it's almost more symbolic, but interesting that it was trained on the data of trauma, essentially.
And I'd also discovered that the definition of emotional contagion also goes back to this kind of classic study that was done at the University of Hawaii about trauma, essentially.
So it's not simply just trauma, but really just that you also find this in the earlier cases with cults and with POWs is that.
Emotional, the unresolved emotions, what, you know, people would say, whatever issues you have, your trauma.
And now we understand trauma to be far more pervasive than it used to be seen as.
It used to be seen as incredibly rare.
Like a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist who was trained in the 60s, he said, you would expect to run across maybe one or two cases your entire life.
Groupthink and Trauma Induction00:15:19
And it would have been someone who'd been in a fire and been burned over most of their body.
But of course, the definition and our sense of it has changed radically.
But I think it gives us some insight into how everyone has something that can be some emotional tug or trigger or whatever it is.
So I try to shift the focus a little bit away from ideological battles to the sense that these media, these platforms, and I think concerningly AI companionship, you know, these AI companions really trade on a kind of emotional conduit or contagion between.
The users, yeah, and it's funny how also how easily people can be swayed online, too.
Like, for example, there's this phenomenon on I don't know how often you read YouTube comments or read through like X or whatever, but there's this phenomenon on YouTube specifically.
If there is like a decent amount of commenters on a video, right?
Let's just say it's like a political video of something that happened in the news, uh, during.
Like today.
And there's out of a thousand comments, the top 50 comments, top 100 comments, all are sort of agreeing about one thing.
A new person who comes in and starts to read those comments without even watching the video, they are going to go along with the consensus and agree with them.
And it's not incentivized for somebody to come in and just disagree with everybody.
Yeah, they want to feel like they're a part of the group, they want to feel like they fit in.
So it's it's so there's this thing, it's called the pylon effect in you on YouTube.
So, like, if somebody comes in and says something, everyone starts piling in, and it's not necessarily like their independent thought, they're not using like their critical thinking skills at all.
They're just sort of like joining into this group discussion.
Yes, kind of that's that's a great example.
I've definitely seen that.
I'm very interested in YouTube, I don't, I'm interested in YouTube comments just because.
For years, scholars and historians have always wanted user data or what they call it, reception.
You can never really know, say, you were trying to study a literary text or a book someone published, even like Brave New World, you'd have to look at reviews.
And maybe someone wrote in their diary, like, I read this book, but you wouldn't really get it.
You wouldn't really get a lot of data.
But now we have this incredible resource.
And so I've always, I do think YouTube comments are fascinating.
And what you're describing is, I mean, I'm I imagine people have done studies, but I'm not aware of them, of how this contagion might occur.
And it's interesting, too, because a lot of the comments are fake bots.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
And people don't necessarily, well, there was that study that was then pulled, right, by the University of, it's a European university that invent, it was like studying Reddit threads and the.
I never saw this.
I think it was, sorry, it was.
A study on Reddit threads.
Yeah, they just had to recently pull it because it was unethical.
But I think they were having people misrepresent who they were.
And then they were trying to, you know, achieve a contagious effect.
And people just aren't, other users weren't good at evaluating that human or non-human status.
The botanist of who they were interacting with.
But also, you know, what struck me is if you look at some YouTube, if you look at the comments, for example, on a Joe Rogan episode, which I mean, they're interesting because you realize it is a community too.
Like people are talking to each other.
So it's not simply just a group think, but it's actually a thing in itself, which I think is interesting.
It really is.
Yeah, it really is its own little world in itself.
And there is the group think aspect, but there are also a lot of other people that stand out that be like, they'll, you know, if the consensus is going one way, somebody will leave.
There's a lot of people that will also leave comments saying, What are you guys doing?
Like, this is not at all what I was saying.
There's a contrarian.
I guess there's always, yeah, they have to be the contrarians.
Yeah.
But like, are they contrarians or are they just people that are just like objective, like in their own mind?
Or somebody who just has like an insight and then it can really move the discussion.
Pretty interesting.
Yeah.
And that's what's scary about.
Bots and uh, different groups using these things to their object, to their advantage, to to try to sway the narrative because like, even if something doesn't make doesn't make any logical sense, they can just push out a bunch of fake bots on a bunch of videos that are like giving one opinion and then it's automatically, just statistically it's going to sway a large, vast majority of normal human beings right to, to piling onto that.
So that's scary and how that's scary, you know, thinking about how that could influence society and that how could, How that could influence, like, the hive mind of people in the country.
Yeah, because not everyone is good at discerning, or people have different abilities to discern, for example, if it's a fake, if you should even take this to be a human, right?
Or much less be swayed by it.
But perhaps, I mean, perhaps it's advantageous too to be able to, you know, like they say with scams, like email scams, it's not going to, most people won't fall for it.
Most people would know not to click on whatever link.
But if you have poor eyesight and you're, Elderly and maybe lonely, or whatever circumstances, this will end up to be almost like a targeting device.
Is the incompetence of your scam or the obviousness of it, or maybe it does make you reflect on vulnerability, I guess.
Yeah, totally.
Have you ever looked into L. Ron Hubbard at all?
I mean, because he, what's interesting to me, what popped into my head when you were talking about Jolly West and the way that him and his wife asked his son to help them commit suicide.
That's the same way Elgon Hubbard killed himself.
Oh, did he?
He asked one of his members to build this super powerful e-meter, which was this electronic device that people in Scientology use and they hold it.
And it does a little shock thing and it measures something in your body.
I forget what it is.
And he told the guy to make one that would kill him.
And he did it and electrocuted himself.
And he died.
He didn't die instantly.
He did it to himself, essentially, but he had his he had a guy do it for him.
Yeah.
Assisted suicide.
Wow.
Which is interesting.
I wonder if there's a connection there with cult leaders.
Or, like, people with this certain, like, I wonder if there was any kind of like connection between his personality, like the personality types of these types of people.
I'm imagining a cult leader being so egotistical that if they can't live forever, like, I've heard stories about if they can't live forever, there can often be a mythology that they'll either switch bodies or, you know, or, you know, a lot of times it's a mythology that I can't get ill or I can't die.
So when they actually do face that, They may find ways to make either a follower responsible or how.
I don't know.
I could easily see that being more common, though.
I don't know any stories.
Yeah, that's what David Miscavige said after L. Ron Hubbard died and he came and did the big speech to all the Scientology people.
I think he said he's now left his physical form and he's entered his Satan state, where he's now like an invisible alien roaming around the earth, I guess.
So he's still marketing for Scientology even after his death?
Even after his death, yeah.
Yeah.
They're still running wild.
I think they do.
I think they do often assure the followers that they'll still be present.
Yeah.
And like Heaven's Gate, where they did the group suicide, where they thought they were going to go up to, what was it, like Halebop, the Halebop Comet or something like this?
They did that group suicide where they all thought they were going to take in different, they were going to turn into an alien life form in another dimension or something like this.
Exactly.
Crazy.
That's a perfect example, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just bizarre to me that how people are able to.
Be so manipulatable to be able to do these things.
It's because it escalates and you don't see the escalation.
You just see it at the moment of extremity.
But the Hale Bop Marshall Applethwaite, I mean, I guess he started off with his wife, kind of mild mannered.
I don't know.
And then it just, you know, you only see later the like purple Nikes and the crazy.
It just seems there's actually.
Well, it seems like the wife was like the mastermind, right?
Yeah.
And sometimes there are these complex dynamics, but there's like, Interesting phenomenon of escalation, and during that escalation period, people will fall off.
Some people will fall off.
I heard a description recently in this book on a psychoanalytical called The Sullivanians, which is very fascinating from the 70s.
That so, someone who studied them, Richard Offshoe, he said that it's like a crowded bus when some people are holding on and some people are not really, and you go around a sharp curve.
Those people who weren't holding on fall to the ground or they fall.
So, like when there's a sharp curve and some things escalate, and now everybody has to sign away their personal property or they have to sleep, you know, they have to like send their kids away to, like in this case, they had to send their kids away to boarding, these abusive boarding schools and never see them again.
Like perfectly nice people doing this.
So, as it escalates, some people will fall off because they weren't really firmly holding on, but those who were holding on are holding on even tighter.
And so, as it escalates, the true believers are kind of still on the bus.
You see what I mean?
Yes, that makes total sense.
And maybe they can be made to or asked to do these things, you know, like assisted suicide or their own death, or the leader is apocalyptically inclined and wants to take a whole bunch of people with them.
Right.
This reminds me have you ever heard of a gentleman by the name of Whitley Strieber?
I have, I have, but I don't know that much about him.
God damn it.
Communion.
Communion.
I'm sorry.
I'm brain dead today.
He wrote a book about communion that eventually got turned into a movie.
And it's basically about his series of alien abductions that he's been through, that he claims to have been through.
And a very nice guy.
And the story, I read the book, it freaked me out.
And they're like just terrifying stories of aliens coming into his room and like taking him into a spaceship and doing all these experiments on him and stuff.
And he's also a prolific writer.
He's written a ton of science fiction stuff.
Is he still alive?
He's still alive.
Yeah, he's been on this podcast before.
And speaking about trauma, one of the things that happened to him when he was young, he was living on a military base because his dad worked at like a big top secret military base in Texas.
And he was subjected to some like childhood experiments where they put him in. this weird type of box, like an isolation chamber, and they were doing strange things to him.
And Steve, maybe you can find out exactly what this is, because I'm really butchering this description right now.
And then he was sent off, and this was like right in the middle of all this MKUltra stuff.
I want to say this was in the early, mid 60s.
And apparently there's a bunch of paperclip scientists working at this area, in this part of the world, in Texas too.
And he and a bunch of other kids were sent off to Mexico to some place where they were showing these kids violent videos.
People of people being like mutilated and stuff like this or murdered.
A Skinner box.
Skinner box.
Skinner box.
Okay.
And find the name of the place that he went to school in Texas, the military school.
And they were being shown this stuff, this really traumatic stuff, and being like convinced that they were responsible for this, sort of like to induce trauma.
In children.
He has memories of this.
He has memories of this and he's talked about it.
Yeah.
And he went on to have like crazy alien abductions and he wrote the number one historical book on alien abductions, which is called Communion.
Well, this reminds me of this.
I do teach a little bit about a guy, a Harvard professor named John Mack.
Have you heard of him?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So he, but he didn't work with Stryber, but he worked with a, um, an experiencer, or you know someone who, an abductee uh, early I guess in the, he was actually already very famous.
He was running the psychiatry department at Harvard and he'd he's very he'd won the Pulitzer Prize.
He's this amazing Lee, Uh Lawrence in Arabia right yeah yeah, so you know him pretty pretty well.
So he, but he.
But to get back to the question of Trump, so he started talking to this an experiencer or someone who had been.
He claimed to have been abducted and then this guy introduced him to many such patients and he And over the years, he ended up talking to many of them, and he became convinced that they were describing something real.
He couldn't exactly locate the epistemological ground of it.
He said, Their trauma is unquestionably real, and their experiences are real.
And I think he started to think that the entire structure of materialist science had to be questioned because it wasn't allowing.
So, anyway, Harvard started an investigation of him secretly.
Whether they could remove his tenure, which is very un, it rarely happens.
Very rude of them.
Very rude.
He was, anyway, then he died.
He was like a nice guy.
He was, by all accounts, extremely nice.
He didn't end up losing his tenure, but he kind of, he experienced reputational damage.
But I don't think it necessarily upset him, but he's a really interesting figure just because he was, then he died in a car accident or being hit by a car.
But his, I think, yeah, his archives include those accounts and they're interesting just because of his being willing to entertain this, you know, this question of how to categorize their experience.
Harvard's Secret Investigation00:14:46
Like he was open to.
That or that connection at the ring.
Well, it was definitely interesting that all the experiences that these people were having under hypnosis, I believe, right?
They had very similar stories like, very, very similar stories.
John Max patients?
Yeah, John Max patients, like Betty and Barney Hill.
They explained being taken up, and then she explained them like putting a needle inside of her belly, like taking out her eggs.
And he, her husband, described them like extracting sperm from him.
And there were like hundreds and hundreds of people.
That he talked to that explained the same thing.
Now, was this just these people hearing it from other people and hearing it just through whatever, like through books or through television?
Because I think television was around back when Betty and Barney Hill explained their thing to John Mack.
Yeah, it was definitely around.
And there was radio and there were stories of this stuff.
I couldn't find the name of the school, it doesn't ever seem to name it.
He called it a secret school.
A secret school in the woods near San Antonio, Texas, in the summer of 54.
Nine years old.
He was taken by visitors.
Right.
So he was living in San Antonio, Texas, and his dad was a part of this big military thing, and he was a part of some secret school that was involved with this military stuff.
I know there were a lot of paperclip scientists there.
And what I was getting at was have you ever heard of any sort of program similar to MKUltra where they would take children and show them videos like this, like traumatic videos of violence, trying to break them down?
I haven't.
I haven't heard of that associated with MKUltra or with any other CIA programs, but I have heard of these were just published scientific studies, not done on children, but done on adults where they show them disturbing films and see how they respond in different ways.
So that was kind of a flourishing area.
Let me see.
So he would say, so his childhood, but that was going further back.
I think this, yeah, I don't know of anything like that he describes there, but it is a bit like that television show.
You know, the one that about the.
Taken?
No, the one, sorry, where the kids are, you know, there's the kids in the 80s.
Oh, Stranger Things.
Stranger Things.
It's a bit like that kind of plot.
Yes.
Yeah, it's very similar to that kind of plot, for sure.
And that's what I've realized from doing this podcast.
Most of the crazy stuff that I learn about that's happened in the past of this country is closer tied to science fiction.
Yeah.
Than any sort of like real stuff I've ever heard.
There's such an interesting intertwining, as you were saying, with, you know, scientists feeding off of science fiction projections.
Yeah.
L. Ron Hubbard, too, was a science fiction writer.
Oh, like the most prolific science fiction writer.
And then also, you know, in the case, I have a chapter where I write about this Leonard Kyle, who was a Cambridge, Massachusetts engineer who, um, Who received these experimental brain implants in the, I think it was like the late 60s, early 70s.
And he started to feel that his doctors were.
Is this the terminal man?
He was.
Well, it turns out he was the sub.
That Michael Crichton was his.
That's insane.
Was the resident.
Can you explain that whole story?
Yeah.
So the whole story is that I had.
So Leonard Kyle was this really gifted self taught engineer who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but from a working class family.
He briefly was in the military.
He had some sort of like.
He was also raised part time in an orphanage because his mother couldn't afford to keep him and his siblings at home.
So he was possibly exposed to abuse when he was a kid at this church where the orphanage was.
But at any rate, he became incredibly successful, especially for someone who didn't have a PhD.
He was one of the inventors of Polaroid patents for their optical devices that were essential for their instamatic cameras.
And he also worked for many prominent defense.
Industry companies at the time in the 60s.
So he was, his mother was really proud of him.
He got married to his childhood sweetheart and they started to have a large family.
And he was flying around the world too, sometimes overseeing, he was instrumental in inventing the triggers for nuclear bombs, test bombs.
Oh, wow.
Because he, you know, the optical aspect of them.
He, anyway, he was troubled by that and he ended up quitting the defense work, but he ended up at Polaroid.
At any rate, he was starting to have, as his family grew and as he was experiencing marriage difficulties, he was also in a car accident.
Anyway, he had like the normal run of, it seems like he had the normal run of stresses.
He also worried that his wife was having an affair with the boarder who had come to live with them to save some money.
At any rate, they went for therapy.
Um, one of his doctors was recommended that he check himself into Mass General Hospital where there was a violence unit, and this was actually ultimately possibly connected to what, at any rate, it was possibly a violence unit.
It was an experimental unit that was being set up by two doctors named Frank Irvin and Vernon Mark.
And Vernon Mark was a neurologist who was a psychosurgeon.
And Frank Irvin was a psychiatrist or psychologist too.
And they were both interested in whether violence could be controlled.
So this guy, Leonard Kyle, he had these arguments with his wife and there were allegations possibly that he was very temperamental.
So his therapist thought that maybe he'd be a candidate for brain implants that would quell his violence.
So there was later a lawsuit which alleged that these were not necessary treatments and that he was actually an experimental subject or a guinea pig.
But at any rate, he was, he was, he agreed because his wife said if, if she, if he didn't undergo this treatment, she would divorce him.
He, he accepted, you know, these temporary implants initially, and the implants were put in his amygdala.
There were many theories at the time that the amygdala is the seat of violence.
So there's an array of electrodes implanted in his amygdala, and his head was stabilized with a stereotactic device, which looks very torturous, but it was actually sort of state of the art at the time.
Steve, can you find photos?
And they would stimulate different parts of his brain of the amygdala.
And when he responded, he would say things like, I feel like I'm floating on a cloud.
I feel bliss.
Or he would seem to get really angry.
So they wanted to find those spots that triggered anger.
And ultimately, so I won't jump ahead, but basically they found those spots and they got him to agree to consent to a permanent operation that would sever or surgically cauterize those parts of his brain.
From firing, so hopefully he would become less violent.
But the thing is, they got him to sign the consent form while he was in a state of bliss, while his brain was being stimulated in the other area.
So, this was one thing his family later brought up in the lawsuit.
At any rate, these two doctors carried out the operation, and Kyle was never the same.
He was never able to work again.
And he became paranoid, he became convinced that doctors from MIT and Harvard were pursuing him.
He fled across the country to try to.
See his mother, who lived in California, and he was found wandering around in a parking lot in a dazed state.
The police rounded him up, and he said, No, I'm the inventor, I'm an important engineer.
I invented these patents, and it was actually true.
He just seemed like a madman, and he never recovered, but he just continued to have these delusions that he was in a science fiction story.
And it turns out that actually, one of his assistants to doctors Mark and Irvin was Michael Crichton, who was a Harvard medical student at the time.
And Michael Crichton ended up writing The Terminal Man about him.
And if you read The Terminal Man, you'll see that the doctor's initials are M and E for Mark and Irvin, but he just changes their name.
Oh, God.
So he wasn't delusional.
Yeah, he was paranoid.
Even, yeah, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean it's not happening.
Right.
And he was both in incredible pain.
And then his wife did end up going on and marrying the boarder in the house.
So she was having an affair.
Well, maybe not at the time, but maybe there was.
Flirtation or something.
We don't know, but I've actually been in contact with a couple of his grandchildren who, and they're very, you know, have become interested in the story because they never knew about it.
They just thought the border was their grandfather.
Oh, wow.
Oh, my God.
Is this him?
I'm unsure.
I don't think that's.
This is Neuralink.
Neuralink goes wrong.
Implant.
So, okay, so that might be Leonard Kyle, but it might not be Kyle.
I only found one actual image of him.
He's kind of hard to find.
He doesn't exist on Google.
He is.
There's an article.
Interesting.
What was that photo of, though?
That might have been someone who recently.
There it is.
Mark and Irvin.
So, Frank Irvin, ultimately, when the lawsuit happened, Irvin was summoned to court, both of them, and they were eventually exonerated.
But there was such a scandal in Massachusetts that Irvin took a job at UCLA.
And guess who his boss was?
Louis Jollyon West.
Louis Jollyon West.
Yeah, he was one of the first people who came aboard when the Violence Center was being.
Uh, planned.
Oh my god.
So, so later, you know, his mother talked about how she thought the CIA was involved, but there's no, this hasn't been proven.
Have you heard the story about the guy who's the most studied man in brain science?
He was a guy who he had an operation.
I think he he had some sort of a traumatic brain injury where something happened and he was, uh, I think he was developing epilepsy or something like this.
He was having really bad seizures and having like.
As he was getting older, his epilepsy kept getting really, really bad.
So he agreed to do some experimental brain surgery where they removed a certain part of his brain.
And when he recovered, they realized it completely wiped out his short term memory.
So every single day he would wake up and it would be the same day again.
Like he would have no memory of the day before.
But he had specific long-term memory.
And this sort of debunked the myth that they thought like memory was stored in the whole brain.
So apparently like this was what they deduced from this was that like different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain.
And then there was this other lady who took him in and like got him, did all these other studies on him throughout his life and wrote all of this stuff on him.
And it was fascinating.
It was in this book.
This book called Moonwalking with Einstein, all about memory.
Have you heard of that?
I have.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Well, one fascination with this type of psychosurgery is that not Kyle, but another patient who was called Julia in the records, she received the same implants, but it was remotely controlled.
And these were.
A special device that this scientist named Delgado had come up with.
Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with him.
Yeah, so he did the bull thing.
Yeah, he did the bull thing.
And he worked with Mark and Irvin.
They co published articles together about the Stimoceiver.
So, Julia, I mean, Leonard Kyle didn't receive the Stimoceiver.
In other words, they couldn't remotely control him, but it did seem that their interest was in violence triggers and remote control.
And that with this young woman who was 19, They did achieve that, and they wrote there was actually an article in Life magazine about it.
What did they do to her?
Well, they just um, so she had she was uh violent, like episodically, rarely but episodically, yeah.
And so, um, her family you know allowed this to be done, and she was apparently when she wasn't violent, she was a mild mannered, lovely, beautiful young woman who played the guitar, and she came from a suburb of Boston or something like that.
So they show her, there are photographs of her in the article in Life, but they showed how they could stimulate her brain and she would fly into a rage.
And there's a photograph of her throwing herself at the wall.
And it's just blurry because she's throwing herself with such force.
And then they have another photograph of, and she's wearing the stimulus lever and her head's all bandaged.
And she's playing the guitar.
It's a really horrifying article, which is hard to find online because it's not available in the.
Google archives, but at any rate, she apparently never recovered fully.
I mean, not at all.
She didn't really recover at all, but.
Have you heard of the story of when there was an experiment done, I think back around this time, when they were trying to like figure out how to communicate?
I think this was part of like the animal, human-animal communication stuff, where they were trying to get like a monkey to communicate with a girl.
And I think they put them in like a room together.
And then the monkey ended up just like tearing the girl to bits, like ripping her apart.
Oh, no.
Was this one of the terrible series of experiments that were in the 70s when people tried to raise chimps as children?
No, this wasn't a part of that.
This was something different.
Psychedelics on the Battlefield00:15:32
This is what we talked about, Stephen.
Oh, I don't know if you did that one podcast, but it was with Len Baer and Robert Duncan.
And Robert Duncan was a Harvard professor who had a background in studying this kind of stuff.
And Len Bear, he was this guy who suffered from this Havana syndrome type thing where he was getting like, he was like, apparently there was this voice of God weapon that was developed or theorized about.
And he said, he seemed to believe.
And I think this is still happening to him where he's getting like voices beamed into his mind where he's hearing things, like he's hearing his family members telling him like negative things all the time.
And he can't control it.
And it.
I don't know about that, but there is a case of this is something I wrote an article about.
But Ewan Cameron did experiment.
He was funded by MKUltra, but he would have done these anyway.
But he experimented, he was a psychiatrist who experimented with, he called it psychic driving, with implanting voices in people's heads.
Or he would do therapy with them and he would find a particular phrase or something the parent had said that was very upsetting or healing.
And then he would record it on a Tape recorded loop, and then he would implant it in people's pillows or on my headphones they couldn't take off.
Oh, wow.
And then he would force them to listen to it for weeks, sometimes dosing them with LSD, sometimes putting them in a prolonged sleep.
He called that psychic driving, but it's an extreme nightmare.
And actually, the lawsuits of some of the family members are still going on today.
Yeah, so this guy, Len Baer, he experiences these things in his brain all the time, all day.
And he took a trip to that observatory, or there's like some sort of big area in Virginia.
It's like a dead zone where there's no radio signals there.
There can't be any radio signals because it will affect their.
I always forget the name of this place in Virginia where it's like a radio wave dead zone.
He went there and then all his symptoms disappeared.
Really?
Yeah.
Super interesting.
Like maybe it has something to do.
To do with radio waves or something like this, I don't know.
Or you could say, maybe he well, who knows?
But radio quiet zone yeah, maybe he also believed it would go away there.
But yeah, hard to tell.
And then like, as far as, like the brain chips.
Um, another thing Annie Jacobson described in one of her books was that Darpa was working on uh neuralink type devices like neural, neural implants for soldiers, to where they would be able to uh override pain and hunger and fatigue, to where they could basically create super soldiers that could stay out on the battlefield longer and not be burdened by, you know, things like fatigue or not get tired.
They could go days and days without sleeping.
And this was in the 90s when they were allegedly working on this stuff.
And now today, you know, finally we have things like Nearly coming out for consumers to be able to use, which is fascinating.
You know, the stuff that they're working on seems to be 20 years ahead of what we see in the public.
Yeah, the brain computer.
Yeah.
Interface.
Yeah.
I guess.
And of course, there's a longer history too of soldiers and, you know, use of various substances to make them more, what is it, durable.
Yeah.
There was a grant that was given to the University of North Carolina by DARPA to study psychedelics for soldiers and to study like how to take, figure out how to take the psychedelic trip out of psychedelics to be able to, so soldiers could get the benefits of psychedelics for things like PTSD.
Without having to go through the hallucination or psychedelic trip of it.
Yeah, this was very recent.
I think it's still going on now.
And even in the Ukraine war, what they're doing is they're bringing them Ibogaine for the Ukrainian soldiers to help them sort of, you know, after they get off the battlefield, to give them Ibogaine, get them through the trauma, get them to like process it all and get back out on the battlefield sooner so they can, you know, rinse and repeat and get people out there and keep the fighting force strong.
Yeah.
And also I think it's being able to, it's being either, I think the reason they're trying to take, I don't know, this is like my speculation.
Conjecture is that if they are trying to figure out how to take the trip out of these psychedelics, can they give soldiers these drugs to where they're not hallucinating?
This is the study of a $27 million project to create psychedelic inspired psychiatric drugs without the trip.
Yeah, this is it.
It was interesting.
What was the guy's name again?
What's that guy's name?
The head of that department?
Brian Roth.
Brian Roth, that's who it was.
University of North Carolina.
Well, That's interesting.
So I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out how to give soldiers psychedelic drugs to make them more optimal in combat, right?
Yeah.
Because I know that stuff gives you better edge detection, better depth perception.
Who knows, you know, what kind of benefits these people can get from these drugs.
I suppose also it could be also used.
I mean, they're well known to be effective, seemingly effective in curing trauma from the battlefield.
So it's kind of a double-edged sword because even if they are effective, they could also, if employed at scale in certain ways, you could then put the soldiers back on the battlefield faster, which from the point of view of the military, that would be of value.
But also people do seem to find it effective.
So there's both healing and maybe there are, it seems like psychedelics have proven very unreliable in the sense of enhancing the ability to fight.
Because you know, there's famous films and studies of soldiers where they're like wandering.
Yeah, that's hilarious.
Americans also just, you know, you just no longer see the necessity to march in formation or not to go look at a butterfly or something.
Yeah.
But so they're quite disorganized in their effects or unpredictable.
But it is really interesting to think about just, I just took a course on the history of psychedelics at the University of Amsterdam.
It was very interesting.
Well, just a short course.
But, you know, if you go back to the introduction of psilocybin, Into the US from this Maria Sabina, who was a kind of a curandera shaman figure in Oaxaca.
She really saw them as healing children almost.
She saw them as her kin.
And she initially didn't want them moved or taken.
And it's a whole long story, her life story is really interesting because then people started to make pilgrimages in the 60s to meet her and everything changed.
But then it did leave and it's sort of taken out of context and not necessarily used for healing, but used more for spiritual insight or transformation or things like that.
She thought of it more as like specifically when you have an ailment or you're, you know, something like she was a doctor, essentially.
But she also, to some degree, was happy, I think, that they proved to continue to.
Be effective.
I mean, I think it's a tricky thing.
In other words, I'm getting back to the point of taking away the psychedelic effects to de-psychedelicize these drugs seems so, well, it's predictable maybe that people would want to, but it seems like, you know, it could be put to all sorts of uses.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seems like there's all sorts of different organizations that are trying to use psychedelics to push their whatever they're trying to do, right?
They're trying to use psychedelics to their own benefit, right?
There's obviously the military industrial complex that's using psychedelics.
There's certain aspects of medicine that are trying to push psychedelics to a degree.
I mean, obviously, you have lots of pharmaceutical companies that have historically been lobbying to keep psychedelic drugs illegal and keeping them classified as whatever schedule they are so that they can't be used recreationally or can't be prescribed these things because it, Obviously, it takes away from their bottom line unless they can take it and patent it and make money off of it.
But then there's also like this push to, there's been all kinds of studies.
There was a study that was done by John Hopkins where they took spiritual leaders from different religious groups and they gave them all psilocybin and they sort of like documented their trips and how their psychedelic trips.
mapped according to their spiritual beliefs, right?
Like if it gave them any sort of a, did it reinforce their belief of God or did it show them something else that was counterintuitive to what their beliefs were?
And I haven't read the full study, but it's recent.
It was done, I think it was done in the early 2000s, but the findings never came out.
They buried it.
And I think what it did was it just reinforced the beliefs that they already had.
You know, and that's some of the people, some of the psychedelic experts speculate that this stuff, all these psychedelics are doing is just making you more of what you already are.
They aren't necessarily changing anything.
They can be used as a tool, but the drugs themselves are neutral, right?
It's just going to reinforce whatever you already believe, whatever your values are.
I don't think it will fundamentally change you as a human being.
But I mean, obviously, it can be used as a weapon and a tool to, with things like MKUltra, to do nefarious stuff.
And there's a push to incorporate them into churches.
There's a push to.
There was this book called The Immortality Key, where he was basically doing an exploration on the Eleusinian mysteries.
And he was trying to make the case that the Eleusinian mysteries were being used.
These people were all taking ergot, which allegedly can give you a psychedelic experience.
And this was the foundation of Christianity.
And we should.
We should use.
The case that this book was making was that we should use psychedelics to bring back Religion in our country and sort of and sort of revive Christianity.
And You know, one of the dangerous things about that idea, I think, is when you give a church leader or a church father the legal access to psychedelics to be able to be the one that's administering them to people that are going to church, who are coming there for answers, right?
And the people that are leading these churches, these pastors or whatever, they believe that they have the voice of God.
They have the direct line to God.
Now you're giving these people psychedelics.
Yeah.
And you're telling them what God is telling you.
Right.
Like these people are probably already vulnerable to an extent.
Like I could imagine that could be a very slippery slope and that could slide into something bad.
That is one of the areas I'm hoping to investigate next year is this question of the finding that psychedelics can, I mean, one at least claim in a classic, in a recent paper is that suggestibility is enhanced with psychedelics.
And this can be.
I guess profound for people because they can be, they feel transformed even if it's within a certain context or maybe it's shaped by their own religious or their own, you know, their own reality tunnel.
But that perhaps suggestibility can also be abused if that's even the right word, if that's even the right way to describe it.
Have you ever heard the story of Mary Pinchot Meyer?
I have, but it's been a little while since you remind me.
So she allegedly went to Timothy Leary and she told him, Hey, I have a friend who's very, very powerful who wants to try LSD.
Can you get me some?
I can't tell you who he is, but we're going to go meet with him and you're going to walk him through the psychedelic trip with using LSD or whatever.
I can't tell you who he is.
I'm just going to take you there.
And there's a book all about this.
And she allegedly had an affair with John F. Kennedy.
So the speculation is that this was John F. Kennedy that she was trying to give LSD to because he really was interested in it.
And this was like right before he canceled the Vietnam War and wanted to pull everybody out and wanted to like disarm.
He wanted to nuclear disarm the America and the Soviet Union.
He was getting on the phone with Khrushchev trying to end this whole thing.
And literally like, I think it was a couple months after Kennedy was assassinated, she was assassinated on a run.
Like she was just like, wow.
Yeah, I think she was shot dead while she was on like doing a jog or something in the middle of the day.
I do remember hearing that.
I mean, it's interesting because people are transformed by this, by LSD in different ways, but there are certain regularities in it.
Like to go back to MK Ultranate, I endlessly talk about it, but they were all taking LSD too.
So you could observe that their work had this kind of quality of, I mean, it's pretty outrageous and outlandish.
And their thinking probably was affected.
But what they were taking also, like an example is, you know, who was it who was talking about?
Oh, David E. Smith, the founder of the Hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.
He was a pretty straight-laced drug researcher until they took LSD.
And then he had this idea, as he tells it, that he wanted to help people and bring medicine to drug addicts and things like that.
So it does change people in, you know, even in these circles, even sometimes.
The scientists, or you know, yeah, it's interesting because you know, a lot of these psychedelic studies, I think, even this John Hopkins study, which is one of the reasons that the results got buried from it, was because some of the donors were going there participating in the studies themselves because they were personally interested in it.
And the scientists that were doing the experiments were also taking it, doing the drugs and like hanging out, and like it was becoming this sort of like weird, sort of like hippie retreat for people that were wanting to take acid and they were all involved in it.
LSD Changing a Researcher00:06:11
And there's like this messianic.
That happens to these people where, like, oh, this is going to save the world.
This is going to make the world a better place.
Like, we all have to do this.
Yeah.
And you see this, right?
It gets messy.
Someone you might want to talk to is a.
We had someone visit our class in Amsterdam who is a psychedelic chaplain, and I guess it's a common, it's fairly common.
It's kind of a type of position.
It's not a therapist, he's not a therapist, but someone with some religious training, but it doesn't necessarily matter what tradition because what they're more like guides who help you process, help a person who's had psychedelic assisted therapy.
Process whatever experiences they may have had in the because often they may go in for, say, treatment resistant depression, but they end up having a profound experience maybe that relates to their faith or their lack of faith.
And a psychedelic chaplain is someone who's just good at talking them through that territory, not necessarily, and sometimes maybe it's something they didn't practice or they were but they were raised in or this experience had you know got them wondering or confused or whatever it is.
So, a chaplain, I mean, the guy who came to our class was just really.
Like a wonderful person, you could imagine he would be very good at helping people in such situations.
So, I got interest.
I mean, I think that's a good thing to talk to because they would know to what extent that seems to be happening that people's experience either conforms to their pre existing training or whether it raises other kinds of questions or whether it completely decimates your, you know, there are cases, depending also on what the person's been.
Been ingesting.
Uh, you know, they may.
They may seem to have experiences that don't relate to their religious training at all.
Oh interesting, like with Dmt and things.
Yeah, but i'm not an expert on that, but it's interesting yeah no, it is very interesting.
What I mean?
It's fun to speculate, but do you have any idea or do you have any speculation as to what could possibly, what sort of version of Nk Ultra could be going on now?
Um, I don't know.
I mean, it would be hard to.
I don't really.
Maybe my imagination is failing me here.
Yeah.
I mean, just with your historical knowledge and all of the research that you've done in this stuff, like what would the most obvious.
I mean, okay, one thing I've always been struck by is a CIA psychologist, it might have been John Ginninger, who said, we failed to do the most dramatic things that we want.
I mean, this is the kind of bottom line.
Most of our experiments were failed.
We didn't create a Manchurian candidate.
We didn't, you know, they could create what one called utter demoralization in a subject.
You could really break somebody, but you couldn't necessarily build them up in the way you wanted or transform in an exact direction or create someone who was, their will was an extension of yours.
But he said, we have been actually successful in creating tiny bits of behavior change at a large scale.
So you could get.
70% of the population do something 10% more frequently.
Yeah.
So, like that kind of idea of nudging and seemingly insignificant but tiny, you know, adjustments that you, I think, if I would imagine that would be an area and that would seem to sync up with technology and maybe people's embedding ultimately kind of welcoming these devices so intimately into our lives,
their connections to our unprocessed emotional, you know, Areas of vulnerability.
And then, you know, I don't know if people are so nefarious as to fund these.
It's also, as you said, it's a difficult environment to fund secretly.
It's much more difficult, maybe, than it used to be.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And was Ted Kaczynski's stuff, was that connected to MKUltra at all?
The Harvard experiments that he was.
Not that I don't think it's connected to MKUltra, but it is connected to Harry Murray, who was.
He did work for the OSS, but he wasn't.
I don't think he was like.
By the time he was involved with it, he was basically, I think.
He was part of the OSS during World War II, testing personality.
Like, how could you evaluate people who would become spies or subversives, basically?
So he invented the thematic apperception test and other things.
But later, after World War II, and I don't have any evidence he was connected with the CIA at all, but he was interested in, and he experimented with Ted Kaczynski.
He's interested in.
What he had developed during the war was interrogation, sort of putting people, interrogating people under stressful conditions and seeing if he could break them.
And he had a number of different psychological conditions under which he would be able to evaluate them.
And then later Kaczynski.
And I think he did do that sometimes when the person was administered LSD, whether unwittingly or wittingly.
I'm not sure.
But I think that did happen to Kaczynski and he was.
Really harmed by it, it seems.
And they were giving him LSD?
This is what I remember from.
I haven't seen the records myself from those.
And the psychological clinic, I think, that he was a part of, and later he was associated with the Department of Social Relations.
Right.
You know, it's hard to get those records now, but there is a book by.
There's a book about it.
Okay.
That's pretty good research called Harvard and the Unabomber.
Patreon Questions and Closing00:01:06
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wow.
But I have done a lot of research on Henry Murray just aside from that.
So I kind of know his interests.
Yeah.
It's fascinating stuff.
Something I always think about.
I always wonder, what could they possibly be doing now?
You know, like maybe we'll find out in 50 years, but probably not.
I mean, one thing is that people don't keep the kind of records they used to keep.
That's true.
We probably won't.
Yeah, that's true.
Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for doing this.
I really enjoyed talking to you.
What's the name of your book?
The instability of truth, brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion.
Beautiful.
Oh, look at that.
There we go.
It was great to talk to you, too.
Awesome.
Yeah, we'll link this below for everyone.
And is there anything else, like a website or anyone, anywhere people can go to to learn more or contact you or anything?
Building a website under my name.
So just RebeccaLamov.com.
Perfect.
All right.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks again.
I really appreciate it.
What do we got?
Oh, we got Patreon stuff?
We do.
Oh, we have a couple of Patreon questions for you, but this will be after.
We'll wrap up the podcast now.
And then if you don't mind, we'll answer a couple of Patreon questions.