Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
John, what's happening, man? Not much. It's good to be here. Very nice to meet you. You too. Thanks for having me. I know you're in the middle of a project. You're doing a project with David Chase, right? It's about MKUltra.
Yes, he has gotten the rights to this book, this book, Project Mind Control, and he's interested in adapting it into a series.
Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject. So as soon as I heard about it, and they said, the series is coming, but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book. Now I'm like, let's go. So here we go. Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra. which really is a tragedy.
I knew about it, but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until Chaos, Tom O'Neill's book. Have you read that? Oh, yeah. And when you realize what the MKUltra program involved and how long it ran and how insane it is, and it essentially had no oversight, and these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American citizens.
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Chapter 2: What is Project Mind Control and its significance?
And Nobody went to jail for it.
Yeah, that's part of the crazy thing. One of the things I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second half of the book, are the consequences of MKUltra in society, but also just what happened to these people afterwards. The victims of MKUltra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically really nothing much came out of it.
They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra They didn't really face any consequences. And so I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I really try to talk about in the latter part of the book are what are the failures of oversight that allowed this to happen? How is that possible?
How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on people unwittingly and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions? So I delve into that pretty deeply.
How did you get interested in the subject? Like what was your introduction to it?
I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people because I didn't know that much about MKUltra. And I was doing my PhD at UT. And I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of scientists within the intelligence. They had connections to the intelligence community. They were called the science attachés out of the State Department.
The State Department would send these science attachés to different embassies. American embassies around the world. And the CIA was very interested in these people because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad. Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing.
So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community. And from that, I learned about, you know, Sidney Gottlieb, but also mostly my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovell, who was was essentially the Sidney Gottlieb of the OSS. So prior to the CIA, the US had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
And that was the US kind of intelligence agency. And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development Branch. And that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job was to basically invent the deadly weapons, create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent abroad. So my first- Oh, yeah.
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Chapter 3: How did MKUltra's oversight failures lead to consequences?
They would get high. And tell the truth? Yeah. Supposedly? Supposedly. The idea was that it lowers their inhibitions, and so maybe they'll be more amenable to talking. Oh, that's hilarious.
They just gave them spliffs. Yeah, exactly.
They basically gave them spliffs. That's a European smoke. And so one of the guys who was actually on the Truth Drug Committee that was kind of overseeing these drug experiments during World War II- was Harry Anslinger who of course is launching this crusade against marijuana and at the same time he's overseeing these experiments about dozing people with THC.
So it's very ironic that that was the case.
It's really stunning the kind of damage those people did to just Our trust in government, what we know about these psychedelic compounds and drugs and what they did with them that completely changed our idea of what the future of legalization and all these – there's so much negative impact to what they did. On top of what they did – they essentially created Ted Kaczynski.
Well, I'm a little... Are you on the fence on that? I'm a little skeptical of whether MKUltra is connected to that. Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments they did at Harvard. And I don't imagine they would do that without the involvement of the government, without them wanting to have access to research.
If you have people at Harvard that are doing really critical LSD studies on people, humiliation studies.
With him in particular, the study that he was involved in was Henry Murray was the guy who was running that.
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Chapter 4: What are the key themes in the discussion of MKUltra's impact?
It's like a psychological experiment about – I think it was interpersonal relationships where he would basically interrogate them and berate them and see how they reacted to it. Now, Henry Murray, who ran that experiment with Ted Kaczynski – He did have connections to the intelligence community. I just am not convinced that he was funded by MKUltra or something.
His connection, he has a couple of connections. One connection that I mentioned in my first book, the Dirty Tricks Department, he was tasked with creating psychological profiles of German leaders like Hitler. And so the idea was that he would kind of figure out what their psychology was, and maybe we could find ways to exploit that psychology.
So Stanley Lovell, who is the head of this R&D branch of the OSS, he read Henry Murray's psychological profile of Hitler, and he decided, maybe I can figure out a way to kind of drive Hitler crazy by using this. So Henry Murray said that Hitler had a very feminine kind of personality. He was on the border between masculine and feminine and
You know, at least that's what Henry Murray is saying in this psychological profile. Stanley Lovell reads that and he thinks maybe I can exploit this by getting one of the gardeners near the Eagle Nest where Hitler often had some meetings. There were some gardeners down there.
We can get an agent to slip a gardener some female sex hormone and that gardener can inject it into the beets that are destined for Hitler's plate. Hitler's going to eat it and it's going to like exacerbate this feminine tendency and it's going to make him go crazy or something like that. That was the plan. That never actually happened.
So Henry Murray is kind of connected to the OSS in that sense. And then later he developed some personality tests for the OSS and CIA. I believe it was for recruits to give these to recruits to determine whether they kind of have the psychological profile that would be amenable to being in an intelligence organization.
Did you see that they recently did a scan of some blood that was found in Hitler's bunker and they determined that he has a very unusual gene expression? Can you find out what that is? It's something that would lead to him potentially having a micropenis. Yeah, which is... You know, like the most obvious psychological profile ever. A guy wants to destroy everything in the world.
He's got a tiny dick. Maybe Henry Murray was onto something. Yeah, I'm sure he was. I'm sure there was something, some research behind it. Like somebody must have said something about him. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that. I didn't know that. Hitler's DNA reveals Nazi leader likely had syndrome that can affect genitals, researchers say.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, the syndrome can disrupt the process that drives puberty and manifest in symptoms that include undescended testicles and a micropenis. Isn't that wild? Which totally makes sense. Like, we should kill everyone with a micropenis. They're too dangerous.
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Chapter 5: What illegal activities were linked to the CIA?
They were selling cocaine.
And one thing crazy just about not only that, but MKUltra in general, it's against the CIA's charter to operate within the United States. That should be a deal-ender right there for whatever they're doing within the United States. It's against the charter. Yep. I mean, there's no more discussion. That's illegal.
Well, I just think without oversight, there's cowboys. And there's also when you realize how much money is there to be made and that you could funnel this money into oversee accounts that are anonymous. And then you could eventually retire someday and get out of the game and be worth millions of dollars and live in Monaco or whatever the fuck you want to do.
And I think that's the dream for a lot of these guys.
Chapter 6: How does lack of oversight contribute to corruption?
I think they get involved. They realize it's a completely corrupt system and it's corrupt from the top down and there's ways to make money. And there's a bunch of stuff going on where money is being funneled into these NGOs and there's just – so much opportunity for corruption and so little oversight and so much power and so much secrecy.
And as you were talking about, the importance and the necessity of secrecy for national security, which is a real thing, but also leads to corruption and it leads to people just doing wild things because there's no one watching. And they're in control. Look, it must be so fun. Like, what's his name was talking about, the evil guy? George White. George White.
Like he was talking about, like how much fun he had, which is so sick. Yeah. But that's the kind of people that want that kind of a job. And if you make that kind of a job available with no oversight, we need a council of elders, a wise council of completely objective, brilliant people that oversee all these things that aren't ideologically captured.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of the MKUltra investigations?
They're financially independent. They don't need anything from you.
I've mentioned external oversight, like Congress checking the executive. But at the same time, one of the big problems with MKUltra or one of the problems that led to MKUltra without people even within the CIA questioning it, there are people in the CIA who know about it. Actually, not that many because it's very heavily compartmentalized, but some people still do know about it.
So one of the questions I was asking myself throughout this book. Why aren't the people who are in the CIA and know about MKUltra, why aren't they speaking up? Why don't they, say, pull Sidney Gottlieb aside and just have a conversation with him? Do you think what you're doing here is all right? I think they're terrified about their career. That's exactly the thing.
There's a specific person within the CIA during this time. That's his job, the inspector general. So the inspector general within the CIA, his job is to make sure there's nothing that goes against the CIA's charter or internal regulations or the U.S. law. But I found an interview that he did later. There's this guy named Lyman Kirkpatrick.
He was the inspector general during the 1950s when this was going on. And he did an investigation into MKUltra in 1957 as it was going on. And it continued on after that. And so one of the things he talks about is why isn't the case that you tried?
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Chapter 8: How does human psychology influence memory and belief?
Why didn't you try to shut this down? Like you obviously knew this was illegal. In fact. In 1963, a different CIA inspector general named John Earman, he did a separate investigation into MKUltra, and his report that I quote in this book specifically says, what I think they're doing is, quote, illegal and unethical. Those are his terms, and he's the inspector general.
Yet in this later interview, Lyman Kirkpatrick talks about, why didn't you tell them to stop? Why didn't you put an end to this? Why didn't you raise this to higher ups? Why didn't you do something? And he said, I was worried about bringing up anything that could cause me to lose my job. He knew that if he brought this up, he'd basically be retaliated against, and so that was it.
So there's problems with external oversight, but also internal oversight. The internal oversight has to be able to bring that kind of stuff up. And another lack of internal oversight is the fact that Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Helms, they could destroy all these files with no repercussions. It's just completely illegal. It's against the CIA's own internal regulations.
In fact, in these depositions that I found, some of the most colorful parts of the depositions happen with the lawyers. The lawyers just get into heated arguments back and forth. That makes the book really colorful. At certain times, Joseph Rao is this old civil rights lawyer. He took on this case basically to fight against the CIA.
At certain points, he basically says to the other lawyers representing the CIA, I'm going to punch you in the nose. And he says, I'm never giving this up. I'm going to mortgage my house if it means I have to keep on fighting you. But there's a certain point where he basically lays into Gottlieb, asking him, why did you destroy the files? Why did you destroy the files?
Sidney Gottlieb comes up with several excuses. One of those excuses at first is, he says, the CIA was drowning in paper. We had so much paper, we couldn't move. So there was just an internal... kind of drive to get rid of this paper so that we could walk around and figure out where stuff was. He's just completely making this up. Rao presses him again, why did you destroy this stuff?
Sidney Gottlieb, you know, and he does this to Richard Helms too, they both eventually say again, well, We wanted, you know, it's part of our job to protect sources and methods. And so we wanted to make sure that nobody would be able to know what our sources and methods were as part of this project. So we had to destroy the files. And Ra was like, these files are secret.
It's not like they're going to be released to the public. They're the CIA's files. How could destroying them protect sources and methods any more than just not releasing them to the public? That's just a non-excuse. So eventually, Raoul presses Gottlieb more, and he kind of breaks down during this interrogation. And he says, I was embarrassed by it. I was embarrassed by what I had done.
Basically... ruined the lives of all these people, spent $10 million at all these different institutions. For what? To ruin these lives and we didn't even learn that much out of it? And so he destroyed the files. Wow. And didn't face any repercussions. So in addition to external oversight, there's got to be some internal oversight that can provide a check and prevent that from happening.
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