Inside the CIA’s Mind Control Experiments

Hey everybody, it's Michael Shurmer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shurmer Show. Man, have I got a special one for you today. Spies. This is like the James Bond kind of secret uh project mind control, Sydney Gotautle, the CIA, and the tragedy of MK Ultra. Here it is.

We've been hearing all about this uh with the recent uh Trump release of the final JFK files. There was nothing in there about the CIA assassinating the president, but there was a lot of interesting stuff about what the CIA was doing in foreign countries. My guest is John Lyall. He's a historian of science and the American intelligence community. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Texas and has taught courses on US history, cyerspace, and information warfare at the University of Texas, Louisiana Tech University, and Austin Community College. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, Smithsonian magazine, Skeptic, hey that's mine, the Journal of Intelligence History, Journal of Intelligence History, and Physics in Perspective. He was on the show for his previous book, The Dirty Tricks Department, about Stanley Levelvel, the OSS precursor to the CIA and the masterminds of World War II secret warfare. In volume 25, number two of Skeptic, he wrote about MK Ultra, the CIA program in search of mind control technology. And now he has a new book out. Here it is again. Project Mind Control. And which is something of a sequel, I guess. Huh, John?

It is. It is kind of a sequel. The The first book kind of ends teasing this connection between Stanley Levelvel, the head of this R&D branch in the OSS, and Sydney Gotle, who was the head of MK Ultra. When Sydney Gotautle was put in charge of MK Ultra, he didn't really know how to proceed. This was a project that was supposed to develop methods of mind control. Can we use drugs or hypnotism or something else to get manipulate people into doing things or to revealing truths during interrogations? And so, not knowing really how to start, Stan or Sydney got went to the old OSS files and was rumaging through Stanley Levelvel's papers and kind of found some inspiration for what he was going to do. So, there is kind of a direct connection between the two books. Yeah. Interesting. And there's been a couple books out on on this subject. Um, Steven Kisner's Poisoner and Chief, which he reviewed for us in Skeptic, and John Mark's The Search for the Manurion Candidate. Oh, and another one. I haven't read this one. HP Alberly's a terrible mistake.

Anyway, so give us a little um uh what new archives you found to update these. Uh yeah, I think this is the most exciting part of my book really is that uh the the major source for this book is a series of depositions that occurred in the 1980s. Several victims of MK Ultra who had been part of some experiments by Euan Cameron who was a psychiatrist in Montreal at the Allen Memorial Institute. He was doing things like um what he called psychic driving having repeated auditory messages playing in the headphones of these people for hours and hours and days and days on end. He would put them in chemical comas and sensory deprivation uh areas. Um he would do electric shock therapy, what he called therapy. Um, but just these awful experiments on these people. And in the 1980s, after the church committee kind of revealed that MK Ultra was a thing and the public recognized that this had gone on, several victims of you and Cameron, sued the CIA, and they got this attorney, Joseph Ralph, a famous civil rights attorney, to represent them. It turns out that the lawsuit was settled out of court. The CIA paid these plaintiffs $750,000, which coincidentally is the same amount that they paid to Frank Olsen's family. and we might talk about that. But um so that was settled out of court and as part of the lawsuit before a trial was going to happen, Joseph Row and his young attorney uh young law partner James Turner, they took depositions of a lot of people involved in this. They took multiple depositions of Sydney Gotle. I mean, this is, you know, a stenographer typed out these depositions, and Sydney Gotautle's depositions run to over 800 pages. So, it's just 800 pages of his verbatim answers to the questions that these attorneys are peppering him with. Robert Lashbrook is another uh big player in the MK Ultra story. He's the guy who dosed Frank Olsson with LSD. He his deposition was taken. Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, his deposition. Many of the victims had their depositions taken for these lawsuits as well. It was ultimately settled out of court. And then these depositions were just in the files of Joseph Ralph. When he passed away, his files were donated to the Library of Congress. And I was kind of rumaging around and realized that there's thousands of pages of type typed like just depositions, these verbatim transcripts of what these people were saying about what they were doing, if they were the perpetrators or what they went to as the victims. And so it it's so exciting as a historian to find this kind of uh information, these kinds of sources because usually in history you don't have dialogue, which it dialogue really makes a story exciting. So in fiction they use a ton of dialogue. In history, you hardly ever get dialogue because nobody's there to actually write down what people are literally saying except when it's a deposition and you do have that literal transcript. So, I'm very fortunate to have found these and that really is the base of the story, these depositions, getting into the heads of these people and having them answer for themselves in many cases what they were doing and why they were doing it.

Yeah, it's an amazing story, a gripping story really. I had a insight for you here. Um, did you see the film Oppenheimer? Of course you did. I did. Yeah. So, you know, it opens with his hearing, his depositions. It wasn't really a trial, I guess, but you know, about his security clearance and all that stuff. And then, um, is it Christopher Nolan was the Yeah. Uh, you know, does a flashback, you know, so it starts in the court, you know, with the deposition, then flashes back and comes back to that as a thread. Somebody needs to take your book and make it into a drama film like that because it's a great story.

I'm hoping so. If anyone's listening, hey, the the options are open, so let me know. I would love for that to happen. You should shop it around with some screenwriters to see if they, you know, convert it because the text is right there. They just have to memorize the dialogue.

Yeah, that that's kind of what I was thinking when I was writing this, too. I thought this lends itself so well to some kind of dramatic storytelling. I mean, you have the dialogue here. I can, you know, in my head, I was imagining Joseph, this lawyer, he gets into so many fights with the opposing attorneys, and there's just so much drama going on. They bicker back and forth and all kinds of stuff in the deposition. And so I thought this would really would make for some kind of great dramatic series. Totally. Yeah.

So now as a historian um with a remembering script like that from the character you're writing about who peppers a lot of this as you put in the book. You know, I'm not quite sure. I think it was this. I don't quite remember. What do you do with the the the subject's own uncertainties?

Yeah. So it it depends on the subject cuz someone like Robert Lashbrook, again, he was involved in this effort to dose people with LSD. He was very reluctant to say anything in his depositions. In fact, he had a CIA attorney representing him and there were certain points in the depositions where the CIA attorney would tell Robert Lashbrook, "Are you sure you don't remember that?" Like, you know, cuz he was refusing to answer just so so many basic things that it was obvious that he just didn't want to say anything. Um, so it it depends on the subject. So someone like Robert Lashbrook just doesn't want to say anything. That that kind of makes for a good story for my sake because it raises some drama in these depositions. These attorneys are bickering back and forth with him. So that it's kind of interesting to read. For someone like Sydney Gotley, he actually spoke a lot more than I would have expected. In fact, I interviewed the court reporter who was there for the depositions who was transcribing this stuff and I sent the depositions over to her and said, "Could you just look over these and tell me does it spark any memories? just kind of what do you think about them? After she was done reading them, she called me and said, "I'm so surprised that he said this much." Usually in a deposition, the attorneys, the defense attorneys, they tell their clients, "Say say the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and nothing else. Like, don't don't say anything else beyond the question that's asked." And but she said, "I was really surprised. He would go on tangents about this or that." I then interviewed a defense attorney who was working with Sydney Gotle, and he said basically the same thing. He said, you know, I I introduced this in the preface to my book, but he said, um, you know, with God as a client, it really made for a lot of difficulty because, you know, you might bring something up in a question and then he would just start talking about it and go on on this tangent here. And so, it was great for the historian. I mean, hey, I I love that he would talk, but it might not have been so good for his case, right?

You know, now that you mentioned that, I remember back in 42. Oh, really? Yeah. There is some speculation that maybe you know he has a lot of remorse for what he did. Towards the end of his life a lot of people who knew him who were around him seemed to think that he was remorseful and wanted to repent in some kind of way for what he had done. He was volunteering at leper hospitals and all kinds of stuff. So, you know, maybe he wanted to get something off his chest. I don't know, but it's fortunate for me if that's the case that he did.

How old was he when he did the deposition? And uh that was in 80 83. 80 to 83 were the depositions. And let's see, I don't remember his when did he birthday exactly. I forget when he died, wasn't that early 90s? Let me look this up real quick. He he was born in 1918 and died in 99. Oh, 99. Yeah. Well, so my point is that I think, you know, perhaps he was feeling a little nostalgic, you know, uh like, you know, you sort of look back on the decades and kind of put a thread through it. What was I thinking? What did it all mean? That kind of thing. I've noticed myself doing that now that I'm 70. It's like, oh yeah, I remember when I was 50 and then 40 and 30. And then, you know, you kind of looked at for some kind of common thread, even though it's mostly just random. And this story is pretty random.

So, let's let's do a big picture here for uh the uninitiated listeners. Uh the CIA started as the OSS and the purpose of that was just information gathering for the president to make decisions about foreign affairs. Different from the FBI which is doing so just domestic affairs. The CIA was international uh information or intelligence. Right. Yes. That that was the idea in the beginning at least. On paper that's kind of the idea. We're going to collect intelligence from around the world and inform the president on what's going on so that the president can make the most informed decisions possible. That's why we have an intelligence community. they're gathering intelligence. Pretty soon within the CIA's history though, that change from gathering intelligence to actually offensively doing covert operations. Um, and so whether that's MK Ultra or something else, that was a pretty early change within the CIA. In fact, I was doing some research at the Truman Library and there are these notes from Harry Truman just written on little note cards and he's lamenting the fact that the CIA has become kind of this cloak and dagger organization. He writes, "This was only supposed to meant to inform the president like we weren't supposed to do these cloak and dagger methods. We weren't supposed to be doing all these covert operations." So, he was he was upset about the fact that that trajectory had happened, but it was pretty early within the CIA's history that it kind of moved into um clo and dagger covert operations in addition to just collecting intelligence.

Yeah. I think in your previous book you talked about the CIA as a sort of in between um negotiations by ambassadors with foreign countries and actual war. You know, yeah, we're not solving the problem by talking to them but we don't want to invade them. So, yeah, maybe by other means or something by other means right that are that are deniable like I didn't know anything about trading arms for hostages.

Yeah, plausible deniability is a big part of this book. That's one of the that's one of the factors I kind of identify as leading to some of these programs like MK Ultra with plausible deniability that kind of gives you the cover to do whatever you want because if no one can trace it back to you, well then you kind of have free reign because you're not going to be held accountable for what you do. So at the very end of the book I actually identify what I call the vicious cycle of secrecy which I think is something that happens within intelligence organizations that um enables abuses like MK Ultra. It starts with secrecy. I mean it's an intelligence organization. So by definition it it needs to keep secrets which is legitimate. It's okay for an intelligence organization to keep secrets because after all that's the whole point. You have to get secrets and inform the president. However, the secrecy that they're afforded often leads to this plausible deniability. Because we can keep secrets, that means that people can't look into everything that we're doing, which means that we kind of have this cover for what we're doing. The plausible deniability many times leads to um reckless behavior because again, you're not going to be held accountable. Reckless behavior leads to in many cases embarrassment because somebody eventually finds out. It leaks to the press. They publish it on the front page of the New York Times and you know there's this huge scandal that happened and then embarrassment leads to more secrecy because okay now we definitely have to tamp down on you know any lease getting out. We have to make sure that nobody can know what we're doing now because we don't want a repeat of that embarrassment happening and that just starts the cycle over again. Now now you have more secrecy which leads to more plausible deniability, more reckless behavior, more embarrassment, more secrecy and so on.

Yeah. So, I can imagine people in the CIA saying it's probably or even the president's own adviserss, it's probably better you don't know what we're doing.

Yes. Yes. Definitely that that's definitely the case. In fact, one of the chapters here I talk about is assassinations and the assassination of Patrice Leumba of the Congo and Sydney Gotautle is involved in that. He's he's a chemist within the CIA who heads MK Ultra and he is asked basically to develop some kind of method to kill Patrice Lumumba. He eventually comes up with anthrax. He's going to put anthrax in some toothpaste, try to sneak it into the the bathroom of Patrice Lumumba so that he'll brush his teeth. This is a little bit of of an aside, but Patrice Lamumba allegedly did not brush his teeth for this very reason. He was afraid that someone was going to kill him via his toothpaste. And so among his friends, it was said that he preferred bad breath to no breath at all. So, I guess it didn't work. But the reason I bring up Patrice Lumumba is because President Eisenhower in a meeting basically specifically orders him assassinated. And when this is being discussed among the president's adviserss and the CIA, they don't say President Eisenhower said this. They always say something like, you know, the our our sources are telling us that this needs to happen or they always use some kind of euphemism for the president to give him that plausible deniability so that on paper you can never really trace it back to the president even though it's pretty obvious that that's what's happening.

Yeah. In terms of a game theory analysis reminds me of the the little sign on the Brinks trucks that pick up the money. Driver does not know the combination to the safe, right? President does not know what his own security agency is doing. There have been some reforms to get beyond that plausible deniability. So one would be to uh make the president have to sign off on all covert operations within the CIA. You know, so if the president has to physically like sign off and approve each specific one, then that means there is no plaus more plausible deniability for the president. Okay. So that might keep him or her in check a little bit better if that's the case.

Yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. So, all right. Before we get into the details of of some of these crazy stories, uh then set the stage for us with the cold war and what the Russian KGB and their intelligence agencies were doing or the Chinese for that matter and why we felt we needed to have first the CIA in the first place and then MK Ultra and the other subprograms to you know close the there was a missile gap. So this is the mind control gap.

Exactly. Yes. The a famous phrase about MK Ultra. It's the Manhattan Project for the mind. Yes. The CIA created in 1947. MK Ultra comes 6 years later in 1953. And the main catalyst for that is the Korean War. During the Korean War, there were several American pilots who were shot down over Korea. They're captured as prisoners of war. And while they're being interrogated, they admit to certain things that didn't happen. So, for example, they admit they they say that they had dropped bio biological weapons over Korea. We dropped anthrax and typhus and chalera and bubonic plague and germs and all kinds of stuff over Korea. We're trying to infect these people. And the people in the CIA are wondering why would these American servicemen say this? It's just not true. One theory is that they must be subjected to some form of mind control. The Koreans or the Chinese or some kind of communist power must have developed methods of mind control and are using it on these people in order to convince them to say certain things that aren't true. So there are several instances like that that eventually lead the CIA to want to create its own mind control program initially just to determine whether it's possible. Is it possible that this is what they're doing? Because if it is, we need to know how to defend against that. But that quickly morphs into well if it is possible maybe we can figure out uses for it. Maybe we can use it in our own covert operations. So the Korean War prisoners of war is an especially big catalyst. Another is just the idea that um uh what's his name? the physiologist who was doing the dog ringing bell experiments. Pavlov. Yeah, Pavlov. He's a Russian. Hey, and if he's if he in the 1890s, if he was doing that in Russia back then, surely they've expanded that to human subjects now. And so if he was able to do some kind of behavioral control over these dogs, surely that they've figured out since then methods to do it to apply it to humans, too. There's a another there's a Hungarian uh cardinal Joseph Mid Menzinti and he is a vocal anti-communist around this time the late 1940s early 1950s and he's basically taken prisoner and false charges are levied against him by the communist party saying that he was you know he was doing all kinds of stuff that he wasn't doing. It was pretty obvious to anyone looking from the outside he wasn't doing any of this stuff. He was just a vocal critic of the Communist Party and they wanted him to to basically remove him from influencing people. So they put him, you know, in prison under these trumped up charges. Yet at his trial, he admits to doing them. He didn't do them. Everyone knows he didn't do them. Why is he admitting to this? Again, some people in the CIA are speculating maybe he's been a victim of mind control. Really once people look into this ironically including this guy named Jolly West who eventually becomes the head of one of the sub projects they say that what's really going on here are the traditional methods of coercion sleep deprivation in some cases torture leaving lights on at all times so you can't sleep um food deprivation in some cases so it's just the traditional methods of coercion yet by the time that that's realized the CIA had already become interested in this question of mind control is it possible and they were too far down the road to not want to investigate it at that point. And so they create this MK Ultra program in 1953. Alan Doulles actually gives a speech at an alumni conference in Princeton which is very odd to be announcing this but he says something to the effect of we know that the Soviets are up to all these mind control techniques and we need to do do something similar ourselves. I don't know why he would announce this at you know some alumni conference but that's kind of the origin of MK Ultra. And then pretty soon afterwards, Sydney God, this chemist from New York originally, he's put in charge of it.

Yeah. You know, one of Oliver Stone's things about the whole JFK assassination has always been the the Dulles brothers and how, you know, what what they all the nefarious things they were up to through the State Department and the CIA. And you know, of course, there's no ties to them at all about the assassination of Kennedy, but they did do a lot of pretty nefarious things, involved in a lot of activities. when you look at it, you go, "Huh, yeah, that's pretty wild."

Yeah. And that's one of the things I try to draw out, especially in the last chapter of this book. It's about the conspiracy theories that propagate from MK Ultra. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that, well, if someone were to do this, if if the government did something as nefarious as dose these people with LSD unwittingly and perform all these experiments on mental patients, then what must they be doing now? So, it kind of it brings people down the slippery slope. You know, I don't know how the CIA can come back from the reputational damage of something like MK Ultra, even if they don't do anything bad for the foreseeable future. It's just in the back of people's minds, the backlash is going to last so long. The fact that you once did that, now we can never trust you. And since you're a secret organization, we can't really know what's going on. Therefore, that doubt is always going to remain. I think that was not a great move for the CIA. The the reputational damage is going to last a long time.

Yeah. Well, I mean, so you have the whole idea of a false flag operation. you know, you have somebody like Alex Jones ranting about, you know, Sandy Hook or this or that. It's all false. Everything's a false flag operation. And then, you know, our response is, "Oh, come on. Our our government wouldn't do that." And then you find some examples like, "Oh, they actually did do that." Not everything, but some things. Yeah. And you know the uh one of the things I I briefly touch on in the last chapter of this book is the kind of lie that the CIA or some army personnel at Fort Dedricch, the US biological weapons installation, they created AIDS and then were spreading it to certain populations. That's kind of this conspiracy theory that goes around. The original article that is promulgating this conspiracy theory, it's in an Indian newspaper called The Patriot. And that's basically just a KGB mouthpiece, you know, that they're they're funneling kind of their propaganda through. And it the article is written by the KGB, but it claims to be written by some, you know, American businessman. He he remains anonymous obviously because it's the KGB. But he says, you know, he he he uses this kind of argument. He says, look at what the US government has done in the past. You know, it's um it's spread biological material through different cities, which it has, to test wind patterns. It spread, you know, different kinds of biological material, yeast, and all other stuff. Um, you know, and he points to stuff like MK Ultra. They've done drug experiments on people. Is it so far-fetched to think that they've also done one other thing? Create AIDS and basically spread it to other other people. So, it is the slippery slope kind of argument. Yeah. The Tuskigee experiments on African-Americans, the downwinders in Nevada from the open air nuclear tests. I mean, our government would would do things to their own citizens because they have now. Maybe hopefully the checks and balances are in place now.

All right. back to the 1950s and what happened to these soldiers that confessed to crimes they did not commit. This is a larger issue in in terms of cognitive psychology studies. Why would anybody confess to something they didn't do? I mean, it is weird. Now, some some people are just weird or or they want attention. So, you know, the police department says, "All right, we have this crime and here's a a hot tip line to call." And people call and I did it. You know, it's like, "Okay, we have to get rid of all those people, right?" But then there are people that under certain uh uh police methods of interrogation, they do end up confessing to things they didn't do. And it isn't clear why they do that. I mean be beyond mental illness just um the way they're asked. And then you can take it all the way back to the witch trials uh of which you just press them long enough. Enough sleep deprivation, enough torture, enough pain and agony, this will all go away. And they kind of let slip what it is they're looking for. Mhm. Uh, so then the accused knows, well, I think this is what I'm supposed to say to make it stop. And is that what we think happened to these American pilots and captured by North Koreans?

Uh, yeah. I I think so. I think it had to do I mean, essentially, I think they were tortured. I think, you know, the sleep deprivation and everything else. You know, the the I guess famous idea about torture is that you can make anyone say anything if you just you torture them. You can make anyone say falsehoods if you want. You know, they'll they'll pretend it's the truth because they'll do anything to make the torture stop. One, you know, quote from this book, there's an intelligence official who's talking about torture and he says, "If you have a blowtorrch up someone's butt, they'll tell you anything you want them to, you know." So, that's the nature of torture. It's It's not necessarily Where's the idea come up with of biological warfare? I mean, they must have been worried that that's what we were doing.

Uh, yeah. Yeah. the the Koreans are um concerned that this might be happening um but also are kind of looking for uh some kind of explanation in order to gain sympathy. So if we can I mean if we can actually say that this was done to us then you know it makes the Americans are the aggressors here. I mean they're using this mode of warfare that is you know banned by every international treaty and we're the victims of this.

Yeah. Exactly. Well you know again back to the kind of rationality behind some of these things. The operation paperclip uh is, you know, was that program in which if they put a paperclipip on the file of the captured Nazi, that means instead of going to Nerburgg for a trial for war crimes, they move him to Ohio and give him a house and say, "You now work for our biological weapons department." Oh, okay. Yeah. And do that. Yeah. Some people have tried to make some connections between Operation Paperclip and MK Ultra. I'm a little skeptical of the connections between them. I don't really follow, you know, it is true that the United States government recruited German scientists to do all kinds of stuff to create chemical weapons and to, you know, build basically our our whole rocket, you know, the Saturn 5 rocket that took us to the moon. Um, but I don't really see the connection between that MK Ultra that some people sometimes bring up. Um, it seems pretty clear to me that Sydney Gotautle, who's heading MK Ultra, he's tasked with basically finding out methods of mind control. And so he he starts looking in the OSS files and doing some kind of drug experiments. I think the connection that people make is it's true that the Germans were doing drug experiments true too, especially truth drug experiments. They were trying to detest different materials to see if there are certain drugs that can make someone tell the truth in an interrogation. However, basically everyone's doing that. So just because the Germans are doing that in World War II and then the CIA starts doing that after World War II doesn't mean that they're directly inspired. It just means that they both hit upon this idea. The OSS was doing it during World War II independent of the Germans. You know, the the ancient saying from plenty is in line wise the in wine lies the truth. You know, they knew that there are substances that can make you uh lose your inhibitions a little bit. So that nothing is new. So I don't really see the causal connection between them that sometimes people make.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I think you mentioned Rudolph Hess captured not captured by the British. He flew to England and crashed his plane and spent the rest of his life in prison. But they were trying to figure out why did he do this? What what's he up to? And you know what's him to talk? And the Germans were worried. Yeah. What's he going to say? Yeah. And ironically, I I kind of tease out this thread a little bit in my book as well. One of the main people who's involved in these MK Ultra sub projects. I think I mentioned him earlier is a guy named Euan Cameron, the psychiatrist in Montreal. He was at Nermberg after World War II. He was a he was a like bigname psychiatrist. He was head at one point of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. So, he went to Nuremberg to basically interview these prisoners of war to determine whether they're fit to stand trial. And he determined that they're they're they're sane. Um, and it's just ironic that, you know, the Nuremberg code comes out of this. The very first point of wish reads basically the voluntary consent of human test subjects is absolutely essential in any kind of experimentation. And yet a few years later, as part of MK Ultra, he's doing non-consensual experiments on his patients and being funded by the CIA to do it. It's just so ironic. And you know, how he can how can you be okay in one context to acknowledge that this is okay? You know, the Nermare code, and yet in another context, you just completely abandon it.

All right. Why did they uh pick Sydney Gotautle? What's his background? If you were going to set up a mind control uh program, wouldn't you want a psychologist or a psychiatrist or somebody that works with people with that studies the mind? How do they end up with this? A chemist.

Yeah. Sydney got he had been in the CIA for a few years before this, so he already had a little bit of a reputation. He had been working in the clandestine service doing working on things like secret writing, you know, how to how to conceal writing and other kinds of stuff. He's a chemist and so he naturally lends uh his work is suited for that. But the reason why he's picked is because before that he was also working for different uh universities and agencies trying to detect the amount of drugs like in in uh in a in a organism like in the human bloodstream or something and so he was very good already with um drugs and detecting drugs and that was seen as kind of the main avenue that MK Ultra would take. It's going to be include some kind of drugs to potentially manipulate human behavior. So I think that's kind of the main reason he was situated to this It's not like there were a ton of scientists within the CIA either. You know, today it's after World War II, we kind of have this impression that, you know, with the atomic bombs, of course, like science is integral to national security. How could it not be? But in World War I, you know, for my dissertation, I found this quote where it's someone talking to um oh, I forget his name. I don't know. It's someone in the military who's talking about a chemist. We have one chemist. Why would we need any more? you know, so so science isn't really seen as very integral to national security for a while. After World War II, it becomes a bigger thing and Sydney Gotautle is one of the first chemists who becomes involved in the CIA. And so, you know, he's kind of the natural pick.

Yeah. So, it kind of makes sense that uh he gets interested in LSD and other mind control drugs. So, we're going to do mind control through chemistry rather than say through skinnarian and pavlovian conditioning uh to uh shape people to do what we want them to do. The manurian candidate, can we get somebody to commit murder? Well, how do you do that?

Yeah, exact. Except you know after experimenting with LSD especially for a while Sydney Gotautle does decide that maybe there are more promising avenues in psychology or psychiatry and that's why he he uh starts funding you and Cameron's work in Montreal to do I mentioned psychic driving earlier playing repeated auditory messages you and Cameron was a behaviorist and so he believed that all you know human action is derived from the environment you know it's it's all nurture and not nature And so Cameron's idea was that if you can break someone down to their base self, if you can basically get the blank slate back to being blank, then you can build someone back up in your own image and create them how you want them to. Yeah. So Cameron's idea is how do we get someone back to the blank slate? We have to introduce enough stress so that they forget all their pre-programmed behaviors that the environment has programmed into them over time. So how do we induce enough stress? Maybe through electric shocks, maybe through sensory deprivation and all this stuff. And then once we break them down to the blank slate, we can build them back up. So he he is kind of a behaviorist and that's the origin of why he's doing what he's doing. He he thinks this is a way to cure mental illness because he thinks people with schizophrenia, well, you know, that must have been introduced to them somehow through the environment. So if we can eliminate their pre uh prescribed actions that they've learned, then we can cure their schizophrenia by building them back up in our own image.

All right. So you list here from Morris Allen, a polygraph expert in the CIA's office of scientific intelligence. Four main questions for the project to answer. Okay. The original uh project MK Ultra was project bluebird to get the person to sing like a bird, right? Was that the uh Yeah, to sing like a bird. Can accurate information be obtained from willing or unwilling individuals? Can agency personnel be conditioned to prevent any outside power from obtaining information from them by any known means? Okay, so the first one is for other people we want to get to talk and then protect our own people from talking. Yeah. Can we obtain control of the future activities physical and mental of any given individual willing or unwilling our spies or soldiers, right? And can we prevent any outside power from gaining control of future activities physical and mental of agency personnel by any known means? Yeah. Okay. So that's a start. That's a big that's a big ask. That is. Yeah, that is. So there are a lot of potential avenues to go down with that. Obviously drugs and kind of psychiatry. We talked about originally there was some discussion within the CIA. Maybe we can do it through labbotoies. Maybe we can, you know, stick an ice pick up someone's nose and move things around a certain way. And you know that'll that'll if nothing else maybe produce amnesia. So if they've been a part of something that we don't want anyone to know, we can induce amnesia in them. It was quickly discussed within the CIA. This never actually happened. You know this these lobotomy things, but it was quickly discussed that if this ever got leaked to the public then, you know, we would suffer so much damage that we would never recover from it. So we can't do labbotoies. It's ironic that they then went ahead and did everything that they did in MK Ultra if that was one of their concerns, but labbotoies never made it beyond that stage because of the fear of potential backlash that would happen in the future. And Kennedy's sister uh was labbotomized, right? Yes. Yes, she was. And um I I don't know the story too well, but apparently afterwards she was in psychiatric institutions for a lot of her life, I think. So it really affected her terribly. And then a subdivision of that, you know, can we create by post-hypnotic control an action contrary to an individual's basic moral principle? Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post- hypnotic control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? Can we force a subject, unwilling or otherwise, to travel long distances, commit specific acts, and return to us or bring documents or materials uh and so on?

Okay. So, you know what I thought of when I read that? Here's a completely crazy idea. Could we get I don't know, let's just make up a number. 19 guys to hijack four jets and train them to just learn how to fly but not land. And then they're going to do this at different airports in the United States and then crash them into the two World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon and the Capitol building. And look forward to it and be excited about it. How can we possibly What drugs could we possibly use to get anybody to do such a crazy thing?

All right. So I mean we already know how to do this, right? Religion is one way to get people to do stuff like that. Well, one of one of the reasons um I wanted to include the epilogue of the book. I I kind of um at the end of MK Ultra, I through these depositions of Sydney Godly, he admits like the attorneys are asking him, "What did you discover? What did you find of MK Ultra?" And he says, "Most of what we found was negative information, like things that you can't do. It's not really possible to do this through drugs or whatever." But at the end of the book, I say in the epilogue, "Well, mind control kind of is possible. It is possible to manipulate people into doing certain things in certain ways. It's not really through drugs. I'm sure you can make them lose them their inhibitions and make them seem crazy, and if they're tripping on LSD, they might do some crazy things, but you can't really control what they do. However, the people who are best at manipulating human behavior and beliefs are like cult leaders. And the methods that they use are I mean I like Steven Hassan's explanation of this. The bite model, behavior, information, thought, emotion. If you can control someone's behavior, whether it be what they wear, who they can talk to, where they go, that's one method of manipulation combined with information control. So the amount of information that someone receives, where they receive it from teaching them to distrust outside information, that's information control. Thought control. So making them perform rituals or repeat mantras to themselves or say prayers or sing sing hymns or that kind of thing like repeating repeatedly enforcing the beliefs in inside someone. And then emotion control, making them feel certain emotions to make them beholden to the cult. So anger, fear, guilt, something like that. Um, so those are ways that you actually can manipulate someone. So, you know, I mean, mind control is possible. It's just not necessarily through the MK Ultra methods that the CIA was trying to discover. At the same time as your subject that you're writing about, it was the madmen in in uh at Madison Avenue who were trying to manipulate people into buying cigarettes or drinking certain alcohol or whatever.

Yeah, I had Steve Hass on the podcast. I've read his book. I've known him a long time. I like his bite model. Uh the question then is how do you explain the counterfactuals? The people that have these experiences or get get influenced that way but don't join the cults. Okay, so this is an ongoing debate that I have on this show but that's in cognitive psychology. Uh Hugo Mercier for example thinks that most people are not that gullible that we're mostly rational about most things. Most people don't give all their money to Scientology, even though they've taken the personality test or did the little cans and found out that they had an issue with their mother or something, but then they don't go, "Oh, here's all my money." Um, you know, it takes a lot of steps. You know, it does, you know, most like on the Nexium cult, you know, most of the women that took these empowering uh workshops and seminars through that company, you know, they didn't get his initials branded in in their crotch, you know, I mean, they didn't give him their all their money and all that stuff. Most people don't fall for it. So, I think what what concerned me about uh Steve's last book, you know, the Trump cult, you know, are really 76 to 80 million Americans in a cult. No, come on. You know, people vote their political team and, you know, maybe there's some hardcore insiders that, you know, worship Trump or something, but you know, the average voter is not in a cult, right? So, we have to be careful about, you know, using that word as if, you know, we're all equally susceptible to mind control techniques like that. There might be a bit of surv survival bias to it too because um I can't remember where I read this but example an example of if someone were trying to convince people to invest with them like give me your money and then I'll invest it and make you a bunch of money. What you would do is get a bunch of people to sign up and then tell half of them you know to buy and half of them to sell. And whichever way it goes you know whoever's the losing half the next day you just don't talk to them and you just stick with the people who it worked for. Then you split them in two, then half buy, half sell, and keep doing that. And over a certain amount of days, the people who were left are the ones that, "Wow, he's been right 10 days in a row. Like, wow, this is great. Like, I'm going to invest a lot more money with him." And then they take it and run after that, you know? So, it's, you know, it was inevitable that there were going to be half of the people who made it to that or a certain number of people who made it to that end point. You just never know who it was originally starting from the initial population.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's such a great example. Yeah. All the people that did the cult stuff but didn't join or whatever influenced. How do you explain them? Right. The counterfactuals.

Okay. So, um, Bluebird becomes artichoke. Did you say explain where that name came from? Um, or do we know? I don't think so. I I don't remember. I don't know where it comes from. Artichoke. Yeah. I I couldn't find anything either. And then MK Ultra. What is that? Where What's the origin of that word?

Well, MK. So, anytime within the CIA you see a two-letter designator like that, there's MK, there's MH, there's some other that indicates the division within the CIA that it's under. So MK was the technical services staff, the TSS, which eventually became the TSD, which eventually became the OTS, which you know, there's like so many changes, you know, throughout this, but it's hard to keep track of sometimes. But that just is the indicator of the first two letters of the division that fell under. And then Ultra, as far as I could tell, was just an homage to like the Ultra um effort during World War II to decrypt the German Enigma machine. So I think it was it was something like that.

Yeah. I love this paragraph from your book. Uh, Bluebird, Artichoke, MK Ultra, Chemical Branch, Technical Services Staff, Office

of Security, Office of Policy Coordination, Office of Scientific Intelligence. If it all seems confusing, that's cuz it was meant to be. These things are not bureaucratically neat," Sitney got said when he asked why the CIA frequently changed the names of its projects and departments. You see, in an attempt to make it very hard for memos to be understood by people who weren't supposed to understand them, these techniques were used on purpose.

Then I love your your discussion of euphemisms, which is so good. Torture isn't torture. It's enhanced interrogation. I thought that was a was a Dick Cheney thing. I guess it goes back before that. Uh kidnapping is extraordinary rendition. Oh, assassination is elimination or executive action or in the Reagan administration. This is my favorite one, preemptive neutralization. Yeah, this is it's very, you know, I mean, George Orwell has something to say about this in his essay on politics in the English language about the euphemisms that the state uses to really paint a pretty picture about what's going on. But why can't we just talk about it in ordinary language? It's assassin. You're assassinating someone. But if you do that, that brings up legal issues, you know, and again, the plausible deniability. No, we didn't assassinate someone. We just, you know, we just preemptively neutralize them. Of course. Yeah.

All right. Uh, give us a brief history of discovery of LSD and why everybody was so obsessed with that as the miracle whatever drug that's going to do this. Mhm. 1938, Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist at Sandos Pharmaceutical, he develops this new chemical LSD. Initially, it doesn't really give him make him interested that much. He doesn't, you know, do anything with it. It sits on his shelf for about 5 years, but he has a nagging suspicion that maybe there's something actually to this thing. So, he takes some out 5 years later, 1943, and some accidentally contacts his skin. Just a minuscule amount, accidentally touches his skin. And just from that tiny amount, he starts, you know, hallucinating a little bit. He feels weird. His body seems off. He's seeing colors. And so, he knows, you know, something is up with this. He does some more test tests after that and realizes that this is an extremely powerful hallucinagen. That's one of the reasons not only it being a hallucinagen that makes it of interest to the CIA, but also it is so effective. Like such a minute dose of it can have such a powerful effect. There's hardly another drug that's as powerful that packs as much punch for the amount that you get. Um so when the CIA first started learning about this, they said this is, you know, the drug that's going to open our eyes to the world. this is going to enable us to do all kinds of stuff. It was like the miracle drug that's going to do, you know, all kinds of things for covert operations and interrogations. So that's the origin of LSD.

The CIA becomes interested in it again so that it can use it in order to try to manipulate human behavior, especially in interrogations. However, they also want to use it since it's a hallucinagen. You know, if someone takes it, they're kind of seem like they're off their rocker. What if we can use it in a covert operation to make someone seem crazy? So, let's say there's, you know, someone running for president in the Philippines and we don't like them because maybe they're communist adjacent or they have ties to the Soviet Union or something. If we want to harm their campaign, what if before a political rally we splash a little bit of LSD in their water, they drink it and then when they start giving their campaign speech, they're going to seem incoherent. No one is going to trust them for that. So, it has practical like covert operations use as well. There was some discussion among uh people within the CIA like Sydney Gotautle whether we should do this to Fidel Castro. Of course, there are a lot of assassination attempts on Castro, but there are also attempts to make him seem insane by slipping LSD into a cigar before he gives some kind of national broadcast that would make him seem insane. Sydney got actually advised against that, saying that um we don't know what he's going to say, you know, so maybe it'll make him seem insane and people won't like him, but also maybe he'll say we need to start nuking the United States or something. Should we really like let the genie out of the bottle? We We don't really want him to, you know, do anything possible. That couldn't There's potential for that to go really bad. Yeah.

That reminds me of uh Project uh uh North Operation Northwoods. Uh again, the Kennedy era suggestion that we set up false flag operations as a pretense to invading Cuba again or killing Caster or whatever. To his credit, Kennedy turned this down. you know, no, we're not going to shoot down an American airliner and call it say the Russians did it and kill Americans in that process. But that it was even tabled as an option is again one of those stories like what really it is. Yeah. You see with within these CIA documents, you do see some outlandish things like that, um as it's almost as if they're doing war games like they're they're just figuring out scenarios like what if this I I don't know if it's always that we intend to do this. I you know for for example with Operation Northwoods I don't know how far along that got or whether they were actually intending to do that in a certain circumstance. I I don't know about that one, but there is an example from uh Project Artichoke, kind of the precursor to MK Ultra, where some guys are speculating, well, what if we could drug someone with something and basically gain control of their behavior like a Manurion candidate? Then we would be able to have them assassinate this foreign leader and then what would we do with a person? Well, obviously we'd have to liquidate him and get rid of him and nobody would know and all this stuff. But they're not actually thinking they're going to do that because they don't even have the capability to do that. They're just kind of speculating like here's the potential for this. So in some circumstances some of these things seem outlandish and they are outlandish but that's kind of the point just to see how far we're pushing these scenarios.

I like your story about on August 16th 1951 dozens of residents of Espri a sleepy French town dotted with medieval buildings began experiencing vivid nightmarish hallucinations. One man jumped into a river because he thought that snakes were eating him alive. Another told the doctor that his heart had fallen out of his chest and he begged him to put it back in. Yet another ripped off his clothes and danced naked in the town square. Reporter from Paris noted, "The doctors are beside themselves with work. The rumors are wild and contradictory. Fear hangs over the town everywhere. No one knows when it will end. Five people ultimately died." And the cause of this was rye bread contaminated with erggo fungus. That's so great. Yeah. Well, this is this is an important moment for the CIA, though, because if it's the case that this hallucinogenic fungus can cause so much havoc within just this small, sleepy French town, what would happen if the Soviets decide to spike a city's water supply with LSD? Okay. Well, I mean, this small little fungus and a bunch of bread caused enormous havoc for these this French town, but this could be done on a mass scale with LSD because it's so potent. So, this was one of the main concerns of MK Ultra. What would happen to people if they unwittingly get dosed with a hallucinagen? Are they going to go out killing people or kill themselves? So that's one of the big motivations for Operation Midnight Climax, kind of the most famous subro of MK Ultra. George White, this Bureau of Narcotics agent, starts dosing people with LSD unwittingly. And then he eventually moves to San Francisco and starts hiring prostitutes to dose their clients with LSD while he watches behind a one-way mirror sitting on a toilet drinking martinis that he bought with CIA funds. It's just a crazy story. But he wants to know and he's reporting back to Sydney Godly. What do these people do unwittingly or when they're unwitting in their dose with this stuff just in case someone does this to us, we'll at least know what the symptoms are and maybe know how to control them or something. So yeah, that the pon sri you know poisoning that was a big catalyst for ideas within the CIA about this this could actually serve as like a weapon against people. Yeah.

It turns out that the CIA then hired a person to calculate if LSD was released in in a water supply, you know, like how many people would it affect? And I think he came to the conclusion that there was too much chlorine in the water and it would just like disrupt the LSD and it wouldn't do anything. Well, that would be my alternative for your film uh version of your book would be open because Sex Cells opens with a scene in one of these San Francisco hotels with the prostitute dosing the client. The clients though were people we wanted. Were they average people or or CIA cases? They were specifically Chinese people because the CIA wanted to determine like the the makeup of Chinese psychology and so if we get these people and is how are they mostly because they're worried about communist countries. So what's going to happen? Yeah, I loved your conclusion to the whole thing was that the LSD didn't do anything, but the fact that the women hung around and wanted to talk to the guys and the guy's ego was kind of stroked and they're like, "Hey, you know what I do, baby." Exactly. Yeah. You can't make people talk through drugs, but maybe through the sex because these clients afterwards, you know, one of the CIA agents is saying that it's a real boost to the guy's ego. The fact that this woman, usually a prostitute, after it's over, she just gets up and leaves. like why would she stay? But now they're kind of staying around because they're letting you know George White behind the mirror observe what's happening and these guys what are they going to talk about? Not the sex. They're not definitely not going to talk about that because you know they finished and they might be embarrassed about it. So instead they start talking about their work. Well, you know what I do? I work for this plant and blah blah blah blah blah. That's how you get information out of people. Yeah, that's too funny.

All right. Probably the most famous case of the MK Ultra is the Frank Olsen um death, shall we say? Just death, murder, jump, suicide. I don't know. Okay. So, and we know about it because of his son Eric Olsson who's had this ID fixed for decades who I don't know what exposed what really happened to his father. Uh so, give us that whole story because it's fascinating and what you think the what actually happened because we don't know for sure. Yeah. Uh so in 19 this is 1953 still I think right at the creation of MK Ultra several scientists within the CIA including Sydney God who leads in MK Ultra, Robert Lashbrook his young kind of chemist colleague and several others they occasionally meet with several scientists from Fort Dedric which is the country's biological warfare installation. They get together at a retreat called Deep Creek and they share information with each other. What are you working on? Can we use this? You know it's just a work retreat. However, at this one work retreat, Sydney Gotle and Robert Lashbrook decide that they are going to spike the liquor with LSD, pass it out to everyone there, or not quite everyone because there's one guy who's a reformed alcoholic and they're not going to give him any. There are a couple people who don't get it, but for the most part, everyone gets it except two people and they want to observe basically how it it's kind of like a prank. It doesn't sound like a fun prank. You know, today this is awful. I I think the way that Sydney God and Robert Lashbrook were thinking about it as, you know, we play pranks around the office, we're going to spike, you know, some LSD into this liquor and kind of see how people behave. So that's what happens. After about 20 minutes after the LSD is put in the liquor, people start drinking it. Sydney Gotautle announces he Sydney Gotautle announces, "We've just given you, you know, this hallucinogen. I just want to let y'all know and blah blah blah, you know. So let's see how this plays out." They start seeing colors. The room starts spinning. Most people after a few hours start they go to bed except for Frank Olsen who can't sleep that night. He is one of the scientists from Fort Dedricch who is involved in the airborne distribution of pathogens, you know, like helping to create different kinds of biological weapons. But he apparently has this terrible reaction to the LSD. It it's almost like it induces a psychosis in him. After they return home from the retreat, his wife notices that he's not behaving the same. She has a talk with him and asks him what's going on. And he basically just says, "I messed up the experiment. I messed it up. I, you know, they they don't like me." He's paranoid. He goes to his his boss's office and he says the same thing like, "I'm sorry I messed up the experiment. You know, you can you should just fire me or I should just quit." And the boss is wondering, "What are you talking about? You're a good employee. I'm not going to fire you." But something psychologically is seems to be wrong with Frank Olsen by this point. So Sydney Gotley of Robert Lashbrook and a couple other people who are associates decide that they need to send Frank Olsen to a psychiatrist. Um if he's not quite a psychiatrist, but a guy named Harold Abramson whose office is in New York. Harold Abramson has uh connections to the CIA already. He already kind of knows about these LSD experiments. So that's good for the CIA. So he's not going to leak this stuff. He's already kind of informed. So, a few people accompany Olsen to New York to see Harold Abramson, and Abramson explains that he thinks Olsen is in some kind of kind of psychotic state that was induced by this LSD experiment. It then becomes Thanksgiving and so the scientists decide to return to Washington DC because they're going to meet with their families. But as soon as they land back home, Olsen is in this like paranoid state again and he says, "No, I need to go back to New York." And so they fly him back to New York. And while they're uh well, he meets with Abramson again. And Abramson says, "How about you go to like a psychiatric hospital or something, you know, I can book you into one." And he agrees to it. So they schedule for him to go to one. However, it doesn't have any rooms available that night. So they have to wait an extra day. So they spend the next day, you know, they spend Thanksgiving basically Olsen does with one of his colleagues. And uh the next day, you know, they go to bed and at 2:30 in the morning, Olsen jumps out the window through the uh the glass and the screen on his 10th floor hotel window and falls down and dies on the pavement. So that's kind of encapsulated the Frank Olsen story precipitated by this LSD experiment at Deep Creek. There are Frank Olsson's son, Eric Olsson, he thinks that that's not quite the story. He thinks that the CIA was intentionally trying to kill his father. And in fact, there was someone else in that hotel room that pushed Franklson out that window. Franklson didn't jump out the window. He was pushed. He was intentionally murdered partially because maybe he knew something about the US using biological weapons in Korea and had moral qualms about it and somebody wanted to silence him so this didn't become a big story. Um, that's what Eric Olsson thinks. I don't think that's the case. I think I think Frank Olsson did commit suicide. I think he took this LSD. I think he did have some kind some kind of psychotic break. Um, another piece of evidence that people will point to for the Frank Olsen death potentially being a murder is that in 1953, the CIA writes this assassination primer. It's this book that explains like how to conduct the a proper assassination that won't lead to anyone discovering what happened. And one of the main suggestions it has is a fall from a tall building is especially effective, you know. So, oh, it lines up perfectly like he fell from a tall building and this primer in 1953 is saying that. Again, I think it's more a matter of correlation than, you know, something else. Um, so I I don't really buy into this story that he was intentionally killed. There are other people I've mentioned a couple in the story who take LSD unwittingly like Frank Olsen and the same kind of thing happens to them. They have kind of a psychotic break. One woman is committed to a mental institution for basically the rest of her life um after this. There there are multiple people people who this kind of thing also happens to. So, I think it's more probable that Frank Olsen was just unfortunate and had that kind of bad trip that produced that psychotic break um than it is that someone is orchestrating and masterminding this assassination against him. Yeah.

Wasn't the phrase they used drop him. Drop him by the head. Hold them. Drop him by the Yeah, I think you're probably right. I wasn't sure what to think about that. I watched the um Wormwood, six, six part series on Netflix. Earl Morris's film. He's one of my favorite filmmakers. The fog of war is just a phenomenal film um about Magnamera and that whole Cold War era. Just amazing. He ends up running two scenarios at the end just for our listeners. Um and you decide you and he kind of leaves it open I guess for the viewers. Um yeah, but the federal government did settle with the Olsen family, gave them $750,000 but did not admit any wrongdoing. Is that is that right? Something like that. Wasn't there some language? There were rumblings around that Alice Olsen once this came out in 1975 through the Church Committee, the Senate investigation into the past abuses of the intelligence community that kind of revealed that, you know, Frank Olsson had died through this experiment and not something else. The family didn't know for all those years, 20 years, they were in the dark about what actually happened. They finally realized after this investigation that their husband was a part of this experiment, somehow LSD is connected to his death. And so there are rumblings that now they're going to take out a big lawsuit against the CIA or against the government. And in order to kind of stop that, the Gerald Ford administration invites them to the White House. President Ford personally meets with them and personally apologizes and they give them $750,000 in exchange for kind of the promise that you're not going to sue the government, right? But but there was some language about we we're not we're admit not admitting any wrongdoing or something like that. They kind of left it open that way.

I guess the other famous one uh because of Tom O'Neal, the author, his book Chaos, I I was not familiar with that until I saw him on Rogan. So I listened the whole three hours like, "Oh my god, you know, but to his credit, he admits I don't have a smoking gun." He, you know, told that to Rogan and in the book at the end, you know, 500 pages. Thanks a lot. You know, it took me like 20 hours on an audio book listening to this thing. And I get to the end, he said, "But I don't." But the the the premise is interesting. tied to everything you're talking about here because the idea is more with Charlie Manson I guess and and some of the later cases after the MK Ultra had kind of uh peaked with the LSD experiments because by then LSD had trickled out into the general population and so when Manson is giving his uh family me his cult members the girls LSD and and so on uh I guess it it's not clear where he got it but probably just off the street. Uh but so there's that that's the idea. And so setting this up, uh how could he have gotten these women to commit these murders where he wasn't even there, right? I mean, Charles Manson wasn't at either of the crime scenes. Well, he was at the second one, the um the Labianca home. He went in, tied them up, and then left and said, "Do do what you got to do." And they murdered him. He wasn't at the Tate residence. Uh but and so I I love the story because Vincent Poosi had to uh somehow convict Manson of murder even though he wasn't even there. Not only did he do it, he wasn't even at the premises, right? And then but but that doesn't let the women off, right? They're still responsible. Yes, they're cult members, highly influenced by Charlie. So here's that influence question, you know, but they're still culpable. Okay, that's a tricky thing. So that's what I liked about the book, Helter Skelter. You know, O'Neal does make a good point that um Bolos's whole thesis of the helter skelter that was behind the the race war. Yeah, the race was sparking a race wars. You know, he that was all made up by uh Bull Yosi to tell a good story to convict Manson and the and the women. You know, he does have a good point there, but he never draws the connection that somehow Charlie was either an agent of or a product of the MK Ultra. And and so the the final question then is how did he get these women to do it? Well, I mean with just drugs and sex and you know just these are young women. This is what happens you know. Again I think it's yeah the classic methods of coercion that have been known for a long time and used in cults long before Manson you know. Um I'm glad you mentioned Chaos though. The book itself is is like it's a good read. I enjoyed reading that book. It's to me it was really kind of three books in one. It was about the Manson murders. So you learn about that which I didn't I didn't really know that much about before the book. So you know I was happy to read and learn about that. It's also my favorite part of the book was it's like a Gonzo journalist account of how he came to learn this stuff. You know he got assigned this article about Manson. I don't know what what it was 30 years ago and he's been on this trail ever since collecting information. So it was fun to kind of live vicariously through his detective hunt trying to search down this information. I like that part of the book. And then the third part of the book would be some kind of connection maybe between Jolly West who was head of an MK Ultra sub project doing hypnotism on people um and Manson and whether maybe there's some connection there. Jolly West was in California kind of around the same place as Charles Manson was. But again, that part was a little disappointing to me because there's no you never draw a connection like what what's the connection between the two. It's ironic to me because uh O'Neal in Chaos does a great job of kind of tearing down Buliosce's arguments in Hela Skelter about this race war that's going to happen and this was why he's doing it. He wants to pre precipitate this race war. Um and and O'Neal says that he's doing this to sell books. He he is making he's sensationalizing the story so that he can sell a lot of books. Um to me what's interesting though is O'Neal, why are you drawing this connection to MK Ultra? Admit that there's like you you can't find a smoking gun connection between, you know, West and Manson. So why include that part? You know, it seems like you're kind of sensationalizing it, too. I I don't know if that's what he was intentionally doing. I think more so it's he probably did a ton of research trying to find a connection and didn't. And you know, the fallacy of sunk cost, I don't want to have done all this research and not have something to show for it. So, I'm going to include this part in the book as well. So, yeah, but I was a little disappointed that well, where is the connection?

There are a lot of people who make these claims about any any kind of nefarious actor. Well, surely if if it happened in the 1950s or 60s or 70s even, it must have some connection to MK Ultra. The government must be influencing them. The uni bomber, Ted Kazinski, surely like he was a victim of one of these things, too. But the more I look into these individual cases, it's like I don't see the connection. Like what is the connection? That's right. Because Ted Kazinski at Harvard was part of a research project by one of those Harvard professors, Henry Murray. Yeah. Henry Murray. Right. Right. Again, you know, if you go anomaly hunting, as this is called, okay, you know, if you dig into the details of anything that's big and famous, 9/11 or the JFK assassin, you're going to find a lot of weird stuff like, yeah, what about that weird thing on like Charlie, I think O'Neal found something about Manson's parole officer had a link to the CIA or something like that. And when Manson violated his parole over and over, they just kept say, "All right, Charlie, you go back out there. It's okay. Don't worry about it." You know, something like that. It's like, "How do they not lock him back up?" You know, there was there was a lot of weird things like that. Yeah. And, you know, with the documentary that was made called Chaos on Netflix, it's kind of based on that book. It it produc it it introduces an additional kind of side to the story. So, you have the Bouios story about the Helter Skelter race war. Maybe this is the motivation. You have the O'Neal story about maybe there's this MK Ultra mind control influences that is causing people to do this. But then in the documentary, you hear from one of the Manson cult members. I'm looking up his name now, Bobby Bucle. And he he explains, you know, I I was part of it. He he committed a murder. It wasn't one of the tape murders, you know, but it was a it was like a drug deal gone wrong. He committed a murder. And he says, you know, you know why like Manson did this is because the guy he thought lived there had rejected him from some recording contract or something like that. And why did he get his acolytes to do it? These cult members because Manson wanted to have dirt on them. He wanted them to get their hands dirty so that they'd be, you know, indebted to him in some way or, you know, so that he would have control over them. Like, you know, for me it's like, oh yeah, well just says that and that that seems like the simplest explanation. So I don't know why I wouldn't go with that one. Right.

Well, then there were the weird connections to the Beach Boys. And you know they and they were living at the m at the Tate house before uh Sharon Tate was living there. I mean, it was just so many weird again anomaly hunting you can find draw the connections between the dots there. All right. Other famous people connected to this uh Patty Hurst, you know, how did she get captured by the Sibanese Liberation Army kidnapped and then converted and there she is with the machine gun in the in the on the CCT camera inside the bank. you know, is is this one of these syndrome, Stockholm syndrome, brainwashing, what you know, anyway, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. And an important thing to keep in mind, too, with MK Ultra, it's easy for people to try to make connections. Oh, this person seems mind controlled, therefore it must be MK Ultra. But it's important to keep in mind the structure of MK Ultra. Many people think that it's this CIA project where the CIA agents or scientists were going out and dosing people with drugs and doing all this stuff. A lot of the sub projects didn't have anything to do with LSD. they have to do with all kinds of other stuff. But aside, that's not the structure that was going on. In most cases, Operation Midnight Climax being the main exception. What's really happening is in most cases, there are independent researchers at prisons or hospitals or in mental institutions or universities that are already doing research. They are already doing either LSD research or some kind of other psychiatric research like you and Cameron doing sensory deprivation and all this stuff. the CIA learns about that and gets interested and then starts funding them so that they continue doing that research they're already doing. So in many cases it's not that the CIA is making these people do that. The CIA just wants to ensure that it can continue to receive information from these people. So you know even if someone was a victim of like an LSD experiment in the 1960s or something, odds are they still weren't part of an MK Ultra experiment because there were a lot of people doing that in the 1960s. A lot of psychiatrists were experimenting with this stuff. There were certain of them who were funded by MK Ultra. Most of them weren't, though. So, it's important to keep in mind. It's not that the CIA is actively making people or coercing them or funding them to do all this stuff out of nowhere. They're already doing these experiments in many cases and the CIA then gets involved because they are doing it. That's great. Yes.

So, sort of after the fact, you look back and go, "Okay, let's see if we can connect the dots here and there." You look hard enough, you can do it. Same thing was done with Oswald and Jack Ruby. Mhm. Yeah. With Jack Ruby, there is a kind of a direct connection to someone who's affiliated with MK Ultra, though, Jolly West, again, that psychiatrist who is a Yeah, I I have a chapter on Jolly West, but he has this correspondence with Sydney Gotautly, where he's telling him about these hypnotism experiments that he's doing with airmen at Lackland Air Force Base, and he gets funding from NK Ultra. Jolly West is one of the psychiatrists who evaluates Jack Ruby after he kills Lee Harvey Oswald. And this is one thing that Tom O'Neal, I think, brings out in chaos, if I'm remembering where I'm getting this from a little bit, but he kind of speculates that, you know, Jack Ruby seems to have gone insane after this shooting. You know, after he killed Lee Harvey Oswald, you know, he's he's yelling all kinds of stuff about there's a conspiracy to kill all the Jews in the United States or all kinds of things. And and Jolly West is one of the guys who tries to determine whether he's saying. And I think O'Neal, I think I'm getting that right, speculates that maybe it's the case that Jolly West might have slipped him some LSD to make him appear insane because Jolly West was really against the death penalty and maybe he could be seen as being insane and therefore escape the death penalty. You know, something like that. So, there are a few situations like that where Jolly West is involved with some people who were up for the death penalty and then they go insane. There are alternate explanations though. For instance, maybe they really were insane. You know, if you're going to kill someone, you know, there might be something wrong with you. Or maybe they're just pretending to be insane. They're probably not stupid. They probably know if they act this way, maybe that can get them off the hook. So, there are some competing interpretations that are pretty plausible as well. Besides just that, it must have been this guy dosing these people with LSD to make them insane. Yeah. Yeah.

Researching my conspiracy book, I came across that uh that Mitchell and Web bit they did on the assassination of Princess Diana. And so they're plotting her how we're going to kill her, you know, Okay, we'll get her chauffeur drunk. Well, slightly drunk. Yes, slightly drunk. And then uh we'll hire these motorcyclists to chase him around and then they'll crash because anyone you know people in car crashes, they always die. Oh yeah, for sure. Uh, you know, unless she wears her seat belt. Well, no, she won't wear a seatelt because, as we all know, women that are in love with, impregnated by the only man they ever loved are notoriously slap dash about their personal safety. And what about this and what about that? So on they got it all down and then the phone rings and they go, "Oh, well that all just happened by accident, so we'll just take credit for it." Yeah. I don't think people realize the extent to which history really is a combination of so many different causes that it's really hard to pinpoint. If someone was a mastermind and was doing something as elaborate as, I don't know, the assassination of Princess Diana or something, the amount of things that would have to go right is just so almost unfathomable. You know, the question that I ask at the end of the book that I say to always ask is what's more probable? Is it more probable that there is really someone who is able to plan all of this out down to the detail and could know everything that's going to happen and prevent all the hundreds of people working on it from leaking a single thing or there was an accident or, you know, just something bad happened. you know, there there's probably some more probable explanations. So, for any given event, there are always an infinite amount of possible interpretations. You know, if my if my keys aren't on my nightstand in the morning, it could be the case that my wife took them. It could be the case that someone broke in and stole them without me knowing. It could be the case that aliens beamed them up into their spaceship. There's an infinite amount of possible explanations. And so, we can't appeal to the evidence itself because all these explanations account for that evidence. What we have to do is ask among those possible interpretations, what's the most probable one? Is it more probable that when someone says they saw an alien spaceship above them that they actually did or that they saw something and they misinterpreted it or they're lying or someone misinformed them there? You know, so you got to go with the probability. What's more likely? That's that's always a good question.

And also the counterfactual like with the Jeffrey Epstein murder, you know, why would why would they kill him? Oh, because he has the list in his head of all the, you know, famous people that were on the island and so on. Well, um, Jane Gileain Maxwell has that same list in her head. How come they haven't killed her? Or for that matter on the other side, I have to admit, why didn't she cut a deal to get out of jail early? Like, I'll give you the names and then you let me, you know, this happens all the time. I don't know. You know, like, so why did they kill Kenny? Oh, because he was going to deescalate the war this. Okay. Or he was going to break up the CIA. remember because after the Bay of Pigs, he cursed, you know, the C because the CIA kind of lied to him and said, "Oh, we got this all covered. It's going to be great. No problem." And then, of course, it all goes to hell. And so, he's pissed and says, "I'd like to break up the CIA into a thousand pieces." So, this quote is always brought up in the JFK assassination book. I think there's a Benjamin Franklin quote that goes something like, "What a terrible thing to be a rational creature because we can always make an excuse for anything we want." You know, being rational is good, but at the same time, we can always rationalize our way into explaining anything we want. If we start from a false premise, we can figure out a way to make sure that we have evidence for that false premise. We just have to rationalize the world around us in a certain way. Yeah. Right. But but if the CIA was killed Kennedy because he was going to deescalate the war and so under pressure from the military-industrial complex and so how come they didn't kill Nixon? He's the one who ended the war for God's sakes, you know, or whatever. can always find or every president is hated by some group of people that would you know I'd like to kill Obama or whatever then you know Trump and so on it's it's happen but after the fact when they're actually killed then they go okay now we have to find who hated him the most because that's who probably did it right so yeah okay with with the assassinations as well you know Fidel Castro is a a common target of these people the reason why the CIA never killed Castro they tried to there you know Sydney got involved in multiple attempts on him. I already mentioned kind of the cigars. There were exploding cigars or, you know, all kinds of things. An exploding sea shell. You know, he likes diving. So, what if we have this sea shell that's really pretty? We put it where he dives and maybe he'll pick it up and that'll trigger the explosive to kill him underwater. So, maybe we can get someone to gift him a a diving suit that's laced with tuberculosis and then he'll put it on and contract this. But the reason why many of these never work, it's not that killing Castro would have been hard. You can just drop a bomb on them. You can kill someone. It's killing him without implicating yourself. You know, how do you get away with that's the hard thing? Doing something in a way that nobody knows that it was you that actually did it. So, assassinating someone would be relatively easy. You just, you know, drop a bomb or something. But obviously, it's going to be you who did it. So, you know, the if if they couldn't kill Castro in such a way to not implicate themselves, I'm very skeptical that you could do that to the president of the United States, too, of your own country. Yeah.

Well, Putin figured that out. He kills opponents all the time. He dropped them. Yeah. But but people know that he's the one who's behind it. Of course. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Other uh James Whitey uh uh Bulgar Bulgar. Buler. Yeah. Buler. Yeah. This Boston gangster. Yeah. He's a he's a character that you know there are several MK Ultra sub projects that happen at prisons. One is at the what's called the narcotic farm at Lexington, Kentucky, and the other is the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in in Atlanta. And that's where Widy Bulier is. This Boston gangster. He was arrested for robbing a bank and he's, you know, thrown in prison. You know, he he was in the news recently. He recently got murdered in prison, but he had, you know, committed several murders after this. But he was at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where this guy named Carl Feifer, he had an MK Ultra sub project to dose many of the prisoners with hallucinogenic substances, different kinds of drugs to see how they reacted. And Bulier was one of the people who was involved in one of these experiments. Now the thing to keep in mind with these prison sub projects is they actually did have consent forms. So there were consent forms that the prisoners signed. However, it is a question of how much of informed consent actually was there. There was one guy from the narcotic farm who I quote in this book named Eddie Flowers and he talks about how, you know, I ate this graham cracker that was laced with something and I had the it was the worst experience of my life. things were crawling out of the walls and blood dripping from the ceiling and I could see animal heads on different people. It was crazy. Um, and he says, "If I would have known that that it would have been like that, then I never would have signed up for this." So, there is a question of informed consent. The ironic thing and kind of scary thing again adding to the kind of immorality of MK Ultra is that this narcotic farm where some of these prison experiments are happening on uh many of them are drug addicts who have been committed to to this narcotic farm to rehabilitate. They're involved in these drug experiments uh by a guy named Harris Isbel. And then in exchange for participating in the experiments they have two options. They can receive like a reduced sentence or a letter, you know, a good letter for their parole board. Or they can go to the drug bank window, stick out their arm, and get a needle full of heroin pumped right into it. And it's like, these guys are drug addicts here to recover. And yet, you're incentivizing them to participate in this by giving them heroin. So, yeah, there's some kind of ethical conflict there. Yeah, no kidding. Wow. Incredible.

All right. History loves irony. I'm going to read this little portion from this is so interesting about the consequences of MK Ultra. uh went beyond just the damage that it did, especially when LSD slipped out of the CIA's hands and into the counterculture. The drug gave the beat generation of writers a new definition of what it meant to be acid tongued. Had no idea where that came from. A great such a great discovery. Ken Keezy once participated in an MK Ultra sub project and said the experience led him to pen one flew over the cuckoo's nest. Of course, now in hindsight, like ah okay, that makes sense. Robert Hunter participated in another sub project and credited LSD with inspiring him to write many of the Grateful Dead's most popular songs. Alan Ginsburg uh reflected the ironing the situation. Am I Alan Ginsburg, the product of one of the CIA's lamentable, ill-advised and triumphantly successful experiments in mind control? Had they by conscious plan or inadvertent Pandora's box let loose the whole LSD fad on the US and the world? Does kind of look like that in hindsight, right? Countercultural icon Timothy Liry thought so. I wouldn't be here now without the foresight of CIA scientist. John Lennin, the legendary singer songwriter for the Beatles. The 1980 Playboy interview, we must be always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That's what people forget. They invented LSD to control people. And what they did was give us freedom. That's just great. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

That chapter is on the consequences really of MK Ultra. You know, several several of the threads of MK Ultra are fairly wellknown. The Frank Olsson incident, Operation Midnight Climax. With these depositions, though, you know, I elaborate on a lot of different sub projects that haven't been touched on much before. However, I think a good contribution to this book, too, is at the very end there, I talk about the consequences of MK Ultra. One of the main consequences right after that paragraph is the proliferation of conspiracy theories that come out of MK Ultra. One of the main reasons why that's the case is because in 1973, Sydney Gotautle destroys the MK Ultra files, or at least the ones that he has. And this has opened a Pandora's box for people ever since. The fact that he destroyed those files to the conspiracy theorists means, well, we can't know what MK Ultra was. Therefore, it could be anything. You know, it could have been this. It could have been this. We don't have the files. Now, for me, the last chapter is called History Loves Iron because I think that's completely wrong. Ironically, I think we know more about MK Ultra than almost any other secret project. That's a big claim, but we have more documentation of MK Ultra than almost any other secret project because of how sensational it was. There were committee hearings about it within the Senate, within the House, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, and then there were specific committee hearings on Project MK Ultra. In addition to that, we have memoirs and letters and autobiographies. You know, people have written about this a lot. They've interviewed the people. These thousands of pages of deposition depositions I found We have so much documentation of MK Ultra and we have 6,000 pages of documents that were um that Sydney Godley didn't destroy. And among those documents are descriptions of basically every single sub project. So to the people who say, "Well, we can't know what MK Ultra was." I'd say, "Yes, we can." Here's an analogy I kind of like to think of with this. Um we can't know everything that MK Ultra was. That's true because, you know, we can't know everything about the past. You know, we were not there. Um we can know a lot about it. We can know enough to know what MK Ultra was and enough to know what MK Ultra wasn't. So, there are a lot of conspiracy theorists that claim that MK Ultra controls pop stars like Britney Spears today or it hosts human hunting expeditions where they tell someone to start running and

They hunt them. But we can know that MK Ultra didn't include that stuff. And here's the analogy. If I were to ask, what's the shape of the Earth? Most people would say a sphere. It's a sphere. But, you know, that's not quite right because the Earth spins. It's an oblate spheroid. You know, it bulges in its center as opposed to the poles. And so, you know, it's not quite right that it's a sphere. It's really an oblate spheroid. But even that's not quite right because it has a complicated topography. There are mountains and valleys and oceans and ice caps and sand dunes and all kinds of stuff. So, you know, we can we can't know the exact shape of the Earth in part because it's always constantly changing. However, we can know enough about the shape of the Earth to know that a sphere is a good approximation. It's not the exact shape, but it's pretty good. The same for MK Ultra. We can know enough about it to have a really good approximation of what it was, even though we can't know exactly what it was. In fact, we can know enough about MK Ultra to know what it wasn't and it wasn't, you know, all the things that conspiracy theorists are saying, just as we can know enough about the shape of the earth to know it wasn't flat. And it's the same kind of conspiracy theorists that are promaggating both views. Do you know that essay by Isaac Azimov, the relativity of wrong? No, I use this quote in in in one of my lectures. You know, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was a sphere, they were wrong. And that the whole blade sphere, right? But if you think that thinking the earth is flat is just as wrong as thinking or that the earth is a sphere is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then you're wronger than both of them put together. Right. That's a great quote. I wish I would have known that. That's so good. Yeah, it's quite good. Yeah.

Uh just make a comment about Richard Condan's 1959 novel, The Manurion Candidate, made into a film and then remade. I never saw the remake with um I didn't either. No. Okay. Yeah. So, I don't but um you know, so is that a product of or an influence on uh Yeah. Well, I I I don't think it's influenced by MK Ultra because MK Ultra wasn't really exposed to the public until the 70s. But there there are a lot of rumblings around that kind of thing largely because these Korean War soldiers, you know, their stories are well known. They're well publicized. So, you know, it's not just the CIA asking the questions of why would these Korean soldiers, you know, be, you know, admitting things that they didn't do, biological warfare or whatever. A lot of people are then, you know, piece two and two together and start thinking maybe there is kind of mind control. And so, that becomes its own kind of sub culture that the idea of mind control. The CIA is the one who actually takes that and does something with it, tries to, you know, create MK Ultra and um do projects to manipulate human behavior. But there are a lot of people who come to the same conclusion as the CIA is, you know, so they that novel wasn't inspired directly by MK Ultra because he didn't know about MK Ultra, but it wasn't too hard to piece together that well maybe something like this could be going on. Yeah.

Uh in your references, you recommend some documentaries. Codeenamed Artichoke, I watched that one. Wormwood, which I had seen before, so I watched some of that again last night. It's so well produced, so good. Yeah. Just incredible. Uh, I hadn't seen this one. Mission Mind Control. That was that 1979 ABC special. So funny. 1970s television with all the kind of psychedelic music and colors. And that one's good because funky suit and a wide tie standing out there. That that that one's particularly good for anyone who's interested in seeing some of the people who this book talks about because in that documentary they interview I think Robert Lashbrook might be on there. So if you want to actually see and hear the physical person that that has some interviews of people who were involved. Uh but this one trance the Kathy O'Brien story. I didn't know her story uh in 1995 her 1995 book transformation of America co-authored with her husband Mark Phillips. Talk about that a little bit because that does tie into the whole satanic panic and the recovered memory movement of that that is not a documentary I'd recommend. However, I do cite it in the sources because I I use something from it and so I you know I include it there. So she's a conspiracy theorist who claims that um when she was a kid, her father signed her up basically for this MK Ultra mind control programming where she became a sex slave for different people in the government, multiple presidents, vice presidents, governors, international leaders, all this stuff. She says she was a sex slave and was abused by all these people. She claims that she was impregnated and the fetuses were aborted and someone, you know, would sell them in their interstate occult body part business. She claims that um a president could control her with different colored jelly beans. She claims that one vice president produced a hologram over himself to make him look as if he was a lizard person so that she would start believing that lizard people were real. She claims that she was scheduled for ritualistic sacrifice at Bohemian Grove. And yet a heroic intelligence officer Mark Phillips, her husband, saved her at the last second before it could happen. And all her memories were wiped away with what she calls crypto amnesia scrambling. So she was induced amnesia and she couldn't remember any of this. But then he started performing hypnotism on her and helped her to recover all these memories about the terrible things that the CIA was doing to her. I don't think any of that happened. I think she's a victim of Mark Phillips. I think he was um basically inducing these memories in her or leading her to recover these memories when they didn't actually happen. And I I connect this to the satanic panic by saying that Mark Phillips actually learned this from the documentary. He was a a member of what was called the International Society for the Study of Dissociation, which is kind of a pseudoscientific um organization that promulgated a lot of satanic panic conspiracy theories. the president of the organization, this guy named Bennett Braonn, he was sued and he lost his medical license and had to pay over $10 million for convincing one of his patients that she had been um sexually abused by her father when she was a child. Another president of this organization uh convinced induced these false memories into a woman, convincing her that aliens had impregnated her and she had to abort the fetuses and eat them and all kinds of crazy stuff. Um, and Mark Phillips, Kathy O'Brien's husband, claims that he learned how to recover memories from these people, you know, and so I feel like, well, he's doing that on Kathy O'Brien. I think that she sincerely believes that these things happened to her. She has been saying this for decades, and her story has been consistent for that whole time. However, I don't think they happened to her. I think she's a victim of these recovered memories being induced in her. Um, and so in that last chapter of the book when I talk about these conspiracy theories, I talk about how a little bit about this kind of recovered memory movement and how they're not reliable. Kathy O'Brien claims that well surely her memories are reliable because they're so traumatic and so vivid to her. I mean, how could you forget when someone was sexually abusing you? The president of the United States, you're not going to forget that. But I I do give several examples of just because a memory is very vivid and traumatic doesn't mean that it can't be false. For example, there was an experiment done, I forget at which university, but it was right after the Challenger, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and these professors asked their students to write down the day after um several of the important things that was happening that day when you heard about the disaster. Who were you with? Where were you? How did you hear about it? You know, who told you? Two years later, those professors tracked down 44 of these students and had them retake that same quiz. When the Challenger exploded, who were you with? Where were you? Most of the students got most of the major details wrong. Most of them got most of the major details wrong. And when they were presented with the original quizzes that they were given and you know they could look at their original answers, many of them said that their original ones were false and it's their current memories that are actually the true ones. No, I remember it better now. So yeah, our memory is not a great thing to go on. No.

Oh, and we've learned so much uh from cognitive science since that time that memory is not like a recording device in your head and you play it back in the theater of your mind and little homunculus is sitting there watching it reporting to your cortex somewhere, you know, this is what happened. It's nothing like that. And we know like to your point uh when people get a new memory that's the that's the new memory. That's it. There is no like oh there's the old one and the new one and I'm not sure what to believe. That is what they believe. They mostly, you know, there's been a few recanters. A few people sued their therapists after the recovered memory was well, we think, you know, false memory was planted, but most of them actually just believed their father, grandfather, uncle, whatever, molested them as children. Hard to give that up. Um, you know, the um uh the the Ronald Cotton case with Jennifer, now I forget her last name. uh she was the woman who was raped uh by another guy, but in a lineup she pointed to Ronald Cotton. He spent I don't know 13 years in prison or something and then was exonerated when DNA came online in the '9s. Um and they, you know, wrote a book together, picking cotton, it was called, and did some lectures together. and they they work now on prison reform, but also accus you know police the way police present lineups or um uh you know interrogate people and Amanda Knox is also uh on this because the way that you ask the questions can construct the memory that the person is going to have you know it's like so again you know none of this this mind control stuff it isn't at all like what we think it should be I think I might have just put this in a note but there was another experiment where just to show how even the mere suggesting of someone of something could give someone the false impression of having experienced it. So one one example is like I think they told a student to propose to a vending machine and then they just told another student to imagine proposing to a vending machine. They did this to many students and then afterwards they they asked them did you propose to the vending machine and many of the students who were just supposed to imagine that they had said that no I actually proposed to it. They were insistent like I remember getting down on one knee and I proposed to this thing. So even the mere suggestion of some outlandish thing, you would think that how could you forget not doing that. You know, of course you would know whether you actually proposed to a vending machine. But in many cases, even something outlandish like that, the suggestion of it could be implanted as a memory that people think they actually remember. Elizabeth Loftess, I I think you referenced her in your book. She's the most famous example was the lost in a mall uh memory that she just asked her subjects about about multiple things about their childhood. one of which she just made up. You know, do you remember when you were lost in a mall? Oh, yeah. And they go off on all the details about the person that found them. They heard their mother's name through the loudspeaker and so on and so on and and uh you know, it's like but that never happened. And so just by asking or a simpler example was you show one group of subjects a car crash and you ask them how how uh fast would you uh project the cars were traveling when they uh collided with each other the other one when they smashed into each other. So the smashed in group gave a higher estimated speed. The lawyers I think they've known all this for a long time right and the and the scientists are just now catching up. My hunch would be I I don't remember the study in particular, Loftess, about being lost in the mall. My hunch would be when she reveals to the people that actually I made this one up that they wouldn't recant. Instead, they would double down. My hunch would be that no, no, this actually happened. Like I I remember I was there and this guy picked me up. Yeah, that would be curious. I'll have to ask her about that because she did debrief them afterwards because that's required now formed consent.

It's somewhat reminiscent of another uh example I provide in that last chapter of Leon Festinger when he kind of is embedded in this cult that predicts the end of the world. The apocalypse is coming. God is going to destroy the world in a massive flood. And they predict a specific day on which this is going to happen. So, you know, he wants to observe what are they going to do when this doesn't happen? Are they going to abandon the cult? Are they going to admit that they were wrong or something else? And it turns out after the predicted flood didn't happen. So, there's this disisconfirming evidence, some people do leave the cult. But what many of them do is double down and say, "No, we were right to believe that the world was going to end." And they find a way to rationalize why they were right. The explanation that ends up winning out is that well God was going to destroy the end of the world but because we believed in its destruction so fervently he decided to spare it. So really we spare the world. We caused it to you know so this is this is proof that we were right. So the disisconfirming evidence becomes evidence of the thing that was actually disisconfirmed. Yeah. Cognitive dissonance. Yeah. Yeah. Or we miscalculated the date. We forgot to carry the one. So it's next year. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's always ways to get around that. Well, I mean, it's just there's just so much about the human mind that we really don't still don't understand and trying to understand why people do this. I think we'll never be able to predict like who the next terrorists are going to be or the next school shooter in in a way because they themselves don't even know their own uh behavior. They can't predict you know a lot of suicides happen quite randomly. People suffering from severe depression and so on. But the day that they actually do it, you know, the people that have tried to do it and survived said, "I don't know. I just woke up that morning went you know what that's it today's the day you know you know you could have predicted it weeks ago or months ago and intervened it's hard at some point the butterfly effect seems to come into play you know so you could you can predict on average that you know when you have a large population you could predict that how many people are going to forget to put a stamp on their envelope and send it to the you know the post service. Well, think about all the chance events that happen have to happen for you to forget to put the stamp on the envelope. For any one particular person, you could never predict what day they're going to do that on. But for a group of people, you know, on average, two of them are going to do it this week, you know? So, it's the the easy thing is knowing if you have a whole population, some people are going to do it. The hard prediction is in specifically because at some point it's like the butterfly effect. You know, you you drop a glass on the floor and that causes you for to forget to pick up the stamp. But who could have predicted you were going to drop the glass that day? It's just impossible. Yeah.

Or like um you know being raised in an abusive home or impoverished home or crappy schools, bad neighborhoods and so on. On average this is not good. So we want to do something about that. But some people and the biggest most famous example is LeBron James. You know he he turned that into you know a stellar career. This is my motivation. I'm going to crawl out of the you know the gutter here and become a world champion. you know, why him and not the other guy? Of course, there's natural talents and gifts and things like that, but you know, the motivation differences, who knows? I mean, really hard to say. Yeah, it is. Oh, boy. All right, John, that's a good place to end. I got to go pick up my kid now. Project Mind Control, Sydney Gotly, the CIA, and the tragedy of MK Ultra. Love that cover, by the way. It's a very kind of 1970s60s cover. I'm I'm so glad you said that because I thought I think it really gives the vibe of the book. It's almost a little clinical but kind of playful with the colors too but you know a little maybe psycho psychotropic or something. Yeah, it's neat. Yeah, totally. Oh, what was the t not not um uh what what was the TV show that used that image? Um was it outer limits I think used it? Not the other. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, so anyway, I love that. All right. Well, uh when when it's made into a film, uh we'll have you back on to promote it. I I hope so. I hope so. We can cross our fingers and hope that happen. Thanks so much for having me on. Big fan of the podcast and your books as well. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate that.