#330 - Harvard's #1 Mind Control Expert Fears MK-Ultra is STILL Active | Rebecca Lemov

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Rebecca Lemov is a historian of behavioral sciences, behavioral micro-control, and brainwashing. Her new book, "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, Hyper-Persuasion" reveals how the idea of mind control has spread across the globe and penetrated courtrooms, secret labs, military schools, and today’s digital sites. SPONSORS https://irestore.com/danny - Use code DANNY to reverse hair loss & unlock HUGE savings on the iRestore Elite. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Rebecca's book: https://a.co/d/dcz03fj https://rebeccalemov.com https://x.com/rlemov FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Brainwashing research 09:26 - Origins of MKUltra 15:24 - Chinese brainwashing techniques 22:41 - MKUltra's 149 sub-projects & John Lilly's NASA dolphin experiments 30:01 - Jolly West 42:21 - The moon landing 49:41 - Patty Hearst & the Symbionese Liberation Army 01:01:20 - The weird death of Jolly West 01:08:11 - Jolly West & Charles Manson connection 01:19:06 - Instability of truth 01:28:31 - Ambient chemicals are slowly killing us 01:44:34 - The Facebook experiment 01:59:53 - Why do cult leaders end themselves? 02:04:20 - Trauma & alien abductions 02:12:10 - Leonard Kille & experimental brain implants 02:26:29 - Creating super-soldiers with psychedelics 02:41:30 - What would MKUltra be doing today? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:04Danny Jones?

  Thanks for coming, Rebecca. I'm excited to talk to you.

• 1:06Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me, Dan.

• 1:07Danny Jones?

  You were just telling me you would show your class the beginning of Clockwork Orange?

• 1:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would show them a special, like a specially selected clip of it for maybe half an hour, though. Just where he's getting conditioned.

• 1:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  To where Alex is behaviorally... Let me see, trying to remember. Well, it's... Yeah, it's about how he's cured from his violence by, you know, this... By the Ludovico technique. It's all coming back to me now. I think it was from... It must have been from my brainwashing class, which I started to teach a couple decades ago. But then after a while, I felt like I couldn't really show it in class or maybe when I changed universities or something.

• 1:52Danny Jones?

  So how did you end up teaching a brainwashing class?

• 1:57Speaker 04

  Ah, that is a good question. Um, so I was at the University of Washington and I guess I just thought it would be interesting to teach a class because at the time, brainwashing seemed like such an unusual topic that nobody would. It seemed like a way to just ask, you know, these kind of almost philosophical questions about how much people can be controlled or how much, uh, you know, how social systems work, how much our cultural and political systems affect us. But at the time, brainwashing was so out of fashion and it seemed like a really, like a relic of another, an earlier era. So this would have been like after, in the early 2000s. And I just thought it was, I love ideas that have really fallen out of favor. So, brainwashing just seemed

• 2:42Speaker 04

  like a joke, basically, and a very niche topic when I started it and students were drawn to it. You know, students who like things like Clockwork Orange or who like to think about the difference between 1984 and, uh, and Brave New World or, you know, questions like that, um, were drawn to it. And it was always, people were always kind of intrigued by it, but it wasn't an obvious class. So I think it just came out of my dissertation research.

• 3:09Danny Jones?

  What was your dissertation?

• 3:10Speaker 04

  It was about, it was called the laboratory imagination. It was basically about how much, uh, first laboratory animals can be controlled in certain environments. So, in these kind of behaviorist experiments from the 20th century, and then how that was applied to human society.

• 3:28Danny Jones?

  Is this like something similar to John Calhoun's, uh, mice, mice universe?

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 3:35Danny Jones?

  The mice, the mice utopia experiment?

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. Calhoun's a perfect example. I mean, I didn't happen to write about him. I wrote about people who came before him, but he's a perfect, like embodiment of that, that kind of dream.

• 3:46Danny Jones?

  So the idea of his mice utopia, if I recall correctly, was he put a ton of mice in like this little city that he created, this little miniature city, and then he kept like increasing the population and giving them like unlimited resources, abundance of food and, and, and resources. And he found out that the more mice were in there, the more their behavior started to degrade. And eventually they started dying off and they like went extinct.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  They also, I think they, if my memory is correct, uh, they started attacking each other and having.

• 4:16Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, cannibalism.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Cannibalism, yeah, urban. So it was equivalent almost of urban violence. And he was a big, he was very popular in the 60s and 70s.

• 4:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they were being like hyper aggressive. Uh, there was like sexual deviancy cannibalism. They started to go nuts.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so he, in a way, he's a culmination of this longer decades long, uh, attempt to model a human society or understand questions about human behavior control based on animals and how they are conditioned, how they respond to micro environments.

• 4:49Danny Jones?

  And this stuff was funded by the CIA, I believe, right?

• 4:53Speaker 04

  I think Calhoun was, in fact, yeah, he actually, I think he was, but I haven't, uh, he wasn't one of my subjects, but he would be a perfect person to look into.

• 5:06Danny Jones?

  So who else did you, did you study, uh, that was doing similar stuff like, like Calhoun in your, for your dissertation?

• 5:11Speaker 04

  For my, for my dissertation, I wrote about these now totally forgotten behaviorists at Yale, you know, at, uh, the Institute for Human Relations. And they were, you know, they just got the largest grant that has ever been given in the social sciences, even to this day, I think if you adjust for inflation, it was at $2 million in 1929. So they're really before World War II, but they, they kind of were, I guess, ahead of their time. They were really around the time Huxley was writing Brave New World and behaviorism was being invented. So they're really the first wave and they spent a lot of resources. They were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and many other sources eventually. And they just-

• 5:52Danny Jones?

  In the twenties.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, they built, well, it's, so then the crap, the stock market crashed and in the thirties, they just turned, originally they said, we're gonna solve the greatest problems of, of human, the human mind and philosophy. And they were on the front page of the New York Times, things like that. But then when, after, uh, the stock market crashed and other, they sort of turned just to mouse experiments, rat experiments, animal, just building these infinite series of mazes and seeing what, how, uh, conditioning worked and putting a lot of money into that. So at times, the Rockefeller Foundation was threatening to ask for its money back because they didn't see a real payoff. So anyway, I went deep into the archives of that project

• 6:35Speaker 04

  just because it was so ambitious and then it was so forgotten. But it was the basis of people like B.F. Skinner.

• 6:43Danny Jones?

  What kind of payoff were they looking for? Do you know? And what kind of things were they doing to these rats and these experiments? Were they giving them any drugs or anything?

• 6:50Speaker 04

  They did give them, yeah, they did give them sometimes cocaine or caffeine, sometimes stimulants. They wanted to see, basically, they talked about the maze the human must run. It was, it was the idea that human society, you know, people, people may be square pegs equivalent to that and, but they need to fit into their holes. They need to fit into a certain social role.

• 7:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  And so if you could properly condition the environment, you wouldn't have to force them, they would make these changes to themselves. They would do it to themselves, essentially. So it was this idea of social engineering, not in the sense of social disruption, but really, could you engineer humans to fit the society so that they wouldn't need to be controlled by force? So it was kind of like internalizing control was the, was the dream. And they joined with anthropologists and sociologists and psychologists to make this unified science.

• 7:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I got very interested in that.

• 7:52Danny Jones?

  I can see why. Have you ever seen any of Adam Curtis's documentaries?

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes.

• 8:00Danny Jones?

  They're like right along the lines of this.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 8:02Danny Jones?

  What was the one that, there was one called, I think it was maybe hypernormalization? Or no, there was a one, there was one about.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  I think it's the.

• 8:10Danny Jones?

  Freud?

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, Century of the Self.

• 8:12Danny Jones?

  Freud and his like, his cousin or something.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:16Danny Jones?

  Bernays, Edward Bernays, he was one of the big advertising executives. He like created advertising in the West. And from what I understand, like, he was doing things like working with brand names to try to get people to consume more. Like, he was basically like the ground, on the ground floor of consumerism in the US.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 8:36Danny Jones?

  And there was this crazy story in that documentary, how he was working with this company that was making.

• 8:44Danny Jones?

  Like cakes or like like little like at home make your own cakes like cake mix and stuff like this and they weren't they weren't selling. So he was trying to market them to housewives. So he said, okay, we're just gonna put in the instructions to add an egg to it. Because it makes these people feel like they're actually doing something and they're being they're contributing and they're not just, you know, like taking these shortcuts. They don't they feel useless. So if you make them add a crack an egg into it, they feel like they're actually making something from scratch. So then they started flying off the shelves. Weird like little psychological tricks like that.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:16Danny Jones?

  Are super interesting.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Bernays was really a pioneer of that. Of a you could say adding a psychological dimension to

• 9:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Sales, which is pretty new at the time. And that's why he's the father of PR and advertising, aspects of advertising. And that's true about the Betty Crocker, the egg.

• 9:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  Which may because women didn't want, they wanted to feel that they were contributing. It sounds, it sounds super Freudian, contributing an egg to your cake, but it but made them feel like they were involved in the process. So but he was really good. He also led these famous campaigns to sell ivory soap and associated with like purity. But also he was, he was pioneering the connection of PR to, you know, political advertising. And he said, you could pretty much sell anything. And so it's interesting that he was Freud's nephew.

• 10:09Danny Jones?

  So that was the beginning of political advertising too?

• 10:12Speaker 04

  I mean, he, he did take part in some campaigns, I think. And he saw the potential, which then was later taken up by others.

• 10:22Danny Jones?

  So, and then, at what point did you start learning about and digging into all the MKUltra stuff?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  So that happened, let's see. How did MKUltra come into my life?

• 10:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Because again, that was not something that certainly no.

• 10:39Danny Jones?

  Well, that started, that started 20 years after those guys were doing those behavioral experiments. They were doing it in 29. That was MKUltra started in like the 50s, right?

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, oh, it's because when I, when I finished my dissertation, I wrote a last chapter about Aldous Huxley. And I said, he talked about how, um,

• 10:58Speaker 04

  In this great book, The Devils of Luton, which is not, people don't read very much, but it's really about this question, he asks about how can people be broken? And he says, it used to be, and you know, if you go back to the 17th century, you could take a case like this priest called Urbain Grandier, and he was, he was a questionable priest in a French, in a small town in France, but he, he basically was seducing the daughters of the town, and he was, he was not well liked. So eventually, they accused him of taking the form of the devil at night and possessing the nuns and raping them.

• 11:36Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  You know, he, he denied this, of course, he was mostly just interested in like drinking a lot of wine and seducing the young women of the town. So he wasn't a great clergyman, but he, you know, he, he denied these charges, he was found guilty, and because he had political enemies, he was burned at the stake. And before he was burned, he was like pulled apart, you know, in the way they used to do that, very brutal. And as he was dying, they asked him to confess, and he didn't, he refused to confess. And Huxley said, you know, in, in that day, even a middling man could somehow find in himself the, the strength to resist. But today-

• 12:17Danny Jones?

  What were they trying to get him to confess? That he was Satan?

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, that he had done this, that he had violated the nun, the nuns in particular. And Huxley goes into the whole question of hysteria and things like that. But, but Huxley then says, this thing really struck me, he said, today, nobody could resist the way this priest, you know, the way Urbain Grandier did, because we're all subject to this new form of intense conditioning, which, and he was talking about even after Brave New World, a kind of scaling up of intense micromanagement of the, of the inner life and a, and like powerful, powerful techniques.

• 12:54Danny Jones?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Well, I wanted to know what he meant by that. And I think that's how I got into, you know, post-war, what happened after World War II? How did this kind of dream of social management and behavioral technology, how did that develop? And then I- So when I finished my, in the last chapter of my dissertation, I wrote a little bit about it. And in my first book also, I started talking about MKUltra, just because there were the three, three central figures in the kind of life of behavioral, what, you know, extreme behaviorism were working for MKUltra. So that's kind of how I got into it.

• 13:35Danny Jones?

  Hey, guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video. Back to the show. And what, what do you think the, like, why was that, you think what they were saying about the guy who got pulled apart and burned at the stake, the reason that he was able to not confess, they were interested in how he was able to do that and how they could basically break that? Is that what you're saying?

• 13:59Speaker 04

  I think Huxley was saying, he said, in his basic point, which I don't know if I quite expressed this as well, I definitely didn't say it as well as he did. He said, basically, in the old days, they could pull someone apart in their body, but the mind was.

• 14:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, the mind was solid.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  The mind was solid if you wanted it, you know, you could protect your own mind. But he felt that in the 1950s, which is when he published this book, that

• 14:24Danny Jones?

  Was not the case anymore.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  It was not the case because it was targeted.

• 14:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 14:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, is this a, is this a painting of the guy?

• 14:33Speaker 05

  The urban grand, grandier.

• 14:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. Look, he's got all of his limbs.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  He's happily refusing to confess.

• 14:41Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  As he, and yeah, Huxley was really, he did all this historical research on him.

• 14:46Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, well, that makes sense. They would want to, if, if your goal is to teach people to resist torture and not confess stuff, a, a way to reverse engineer that would be something like MKUltra, you know, to break down the mind and like, figure out how to, how to break down the mind and to figure out how to reprogram the mind after that.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:11Danny Jones?

  Whether the question is, are you doing it from an offensive perspective or a defensive perspective?

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:19Danny Jones?

  Or where is the line between?

• 15:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it got, it's quite confusing with MKUltra because they, they began, it began as a defensive maneuver, like, our enemy is doing this, so we have to figure out how, how to protect against it, but also how to. It quickly turned into, and maybe even from the very start, it was also an offensive weapon, the capabilities of which people could imagine, you know, if you could use LSD as a, as a way to, um, well, it was also seen as more humane because it was a non-lethal incapacitating agent.

• 15:53Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  So there was an interest in weapons that were non-lethal. So you wouldn't have to, you know, bomb the whole city. You could just, what if you could?

• 16:01Danny Jones?

  Just get them high.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  You could give LSD and they'd be very confused. It might disrupt, you know, their everything about daily life and that could be a possible weapon.

• 16:10Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  So the whole thing was both combined, and I think it was always combining the defensive and the, the operational.

• 16:19Danny Jones?

  Right. And so the story is, we first learned about this. Well, what got the United States interested in this stuff was the POWs, right? The Chinese POWs?

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:29Danny Jones?

  They came back and they basically, some of them stayed, they just decided to stay. And then some of them came back with like communist ideologies. Is that right?

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Exactly. Well, they came back seeming to have been infected by, by communist systems, vocabulary, but also they had written letters home where they were praising the great, you know, the great, this great system and condemning capitalism, but also they were, they seemed to be different, or that was the idea that they were, that they had, something had happened to them. A lot of the men who came back who'd been POWs.

• 17:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  But then also 21 didn't come back at all. They just decided to stay in China. So that was very, that really got people's attention.

• 17:09Danny Jones?

  They were doing it way before we were, which is interesting. I wonder where they got the idea to do that and what, I would be fascinated to hear if there was any, if there was ever any sort of like documented history of when they started it and what specifically they were doing, you know?

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, there, so they call it a thought reform or re-education and the Chinese were doing that at a large, on a large scale with their own population. So there is a. Yeah, there's interesting research on how we've underestimated how the Chineseness of brainwashing. But on the other hand, the Soviets had their own version of it. It did come with communism. It seems to come with like a true believer. Um, yeah, there's a great historian of China named Amanda Smith, who gave a paper about that that I thought was really interesting, that people sort of extracted brainwashing away from this, you know, the way it was inflected through Chinese, through the Chinese

• 18:08Speaker 04

  system. And what I found with the POWs over the, as I was studying more and more what had happened to them, that they actually did go through a pretty formal system of thought reform, much like the ones that Chinese peasants, Chinese prostitutes, you know, petty criminals, others in Chinese society were being put through.

• 18:26Danny Jones?

  Do we know what type of techniques they were using?

• 18:30Speaker 04

  We do, yeah. There were many studies of what had happened. Basically, they, so there were three steps. One is to, uh, one is to sort of disorient the person, um, chain them, physically restrain them. Second, there's a kind of, and, and there's a beginning of interrogation, so asking and trying to extract a confession. And then, once a confession is, in the second stage, a confession is kind of solidified because nobody, if really, if really subjected to the full thought reform, very few people can resist, or they'll essentially die. Um, and then they're reintegrated at the end.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  So it's almost like, um, unfreezing and then refreezing in a new, in a new

• 19:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  system. And Mao himself said, you know, 7% of humanity, he felt, would not, would, were resistant to this, just would never, were not.

• 19:26Danny Jones?

  7%.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  He thought 7%, and they should just be killed. But everybody else, um, he said, you have to continually renew this, even myself, I have to continually re-educate myself. So, so it was a constant process. And the POWs who did go to China, the Americans, they were sometimes judged, oh, you're, you're, it's slipping. So they would send them back out to the countryside to be reeducated sometimes.

• 19:50Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:52Danny Jones?

  That's craziness.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, it's amazing.

• 19:58Danny Jones?

  It kind of is an interesting idea when you think about all this stuff that we're talking about right now, especially with like the mice stuff and like the the mice utopia. Like, that's kind of how our society is right now. And the internet's connecting everyone together and like we're all able to communicate instantaneously. And Google and YouTube are the two biggest websites on the face of the earth.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:18Danny Jones?

  Where people consume most of their content. So like if you were the government and you controlled YouTube and Google, wouldn't you want to re-educate the people that are putting all the content on there?

• 20:29Speaker 04

  I mean, even if you weren't the government, I guess they have, there are ways that they would, let's see, would, I mean, I guess you would, perhaps.

• 20:40Danny Jones?

  If you were the government, right?

• 20:41Speaker 04

  If you were the government, but if you were just a platform like a big tech company.

• 20:46Danny Jones?

  Well, are you familiar with the the formation of Google?

• 20:49Speaker 04

  A bit, yeah, remind me.

• 20:52Danny Jones?

  With Sergey Brin? And so Sergey Brin was, when he was first creating Google at Stanford, the whole process was incubated and curated by NSA and the CIA and DARPA. They got the search engine, the the ranking system came from DARPA. And a lot of the funding and a lot of the initial ramp up was pushed by the CIA and the NSA. He was being visited by like a bunch of CIA, NSA and DARPA people in the very beginning. And, you know, it's not, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that like, these are two, two pieces of the same pie. You know what I mean? If they were responsible for incubating and creating this whole thing, like, aren't they involved in it now? I would imagine they would be.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know how much and in what ways, but I would say so.

• 21:42Danny Jones?

  It's the perfect way to surveil a society.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, in fact, the CIA involvement in computer, the development of pattern recognition systems goes back to the 60s and Oliver Selfridge. I actually have a graduate student who just finished his, well, he's no longer a graduate student, but he just finished a dissertation about this.

• 21:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 22:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the CIA was involved in funding this early, very speculative research about how to, how to optically recognize patterns and do that, you know, through a tremendous amount of data because it was, and that became the basis of. Our current technology.

• 22:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah, how do you do that with with billions of people doing stuff online, right? Like, how do you how do you detect patterns and and drill down to specifics within those, you know, vast swaths of users on the Internet?

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we take it for granted, but it was highly.

• 22:37Danny Jones?

  A lot of work.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  It was it used to just be done by, you know, humans through just the, you know, what happened was in uh in the sixties, they were just overwhelmed with so much surveillance data of different from different, you know, areas of interest. So the CIA had to figure out a way or was interested in a way that they could go and search for patterns among the data instead of having a human human eyes. So basically mechanizing that.

• 23:04Danny Jones?

  In what year?

• 23:05Speaker 04

  This was in like sixty two or three.

• 23:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  And they weren't sure that it would yield anything, but so it's, I mean, that so that there's a longer history, too.

• 23:17Danny Jones?

  Hmm. So in the late fifties, early sixties is when they first got the money to start experimenting with this stuff after the POWs came back, they realized, OK, we got to figure out what they're doing, how they're doing this. And um that's when it didn't start out as MKUltra. I think it started out as something else, right?

• 23:38Speaker 04

  Well, before MKUltra, there are a couple of different ones.

• 23:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Like Operation, I mean, I think Bluebird, I think there's a couple of them where they were testing uh drugs.

• 23:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  But.

• 23:51Danny Jones?

  And this is with Sidney Gottlieb and Frank Olson and all this stuff.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  But that's all MKUltra, so that starts in fifty three.

• 23:57Danny Jones?

  OK, I see.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Gottlieb is taken up to run MKUltra, and he's a chemist. And then he brings on board uh John Ginninger and many and many psychiatrists, psychologists, many social scientists. So if you look at the so it ended up, I think, one hundred forty nine subprojects, at least the ones that were found in the records when it was officially discontinued in sixty three.

• 24:20Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Or sixty four, yeah. So the of of those one hundred forty nine subprojects, some are not known in their records, but if you look at them, some of them are very mundane. They're like.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  You know, make sure our billing, you know, they're just really bureaucratic things, but a lot of them also are very extravagant, you know,

• 24:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  wanting to, for example, program remote control animals. This is a connection to, back to my earlier research, but to basically condition, behaviorally condition a cat and then implant a microphone within the cat. So you could remote control this animal. This is so terrible, but remote control a cat and it would sidle up to people that you wanted to spy on and it would just pretend to just be a cat or it would be a cat that would have an internalized microphone, could be controlled by its literal controllers. But this cat just died.

• 25:18Danny Jones?

  They tried to do this with birds too, I think.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Ah, and they also tried to behave, so the, this kind of, the building blocks of behaviorism were also used with dolphins to try to train them to be assassins or to,

• 25:29Danny Jones?

  What?

• 25:30Speaker 04

  like to, so this, this sounds outlandish, but it's in John Marks' book. They would, they were trained to carry a needle and on the needle was LSD, which I guess is, you know, would, somehow they would be trained to like poke people or at least they wanted this to happen and the person would either trip or perhaps could be assassinated. There were a whole bunch of dolphin training.

• 25:55Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  And John Lilly was connected.

• 25:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, John Lilly, he got funded by NASA to try to figure out how to communicate with dolphins.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was after his, his change, kind of, well, he, he sort of transformed in the seventies.

• 26:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  He got much more into communication and this idea of some kind of psychic bond between dolphins and humans. Before then, during the fifties and sixties, he was much more in the sort of tradition of torturing them.

• 26:26Danny Jones?

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• 27:53Danny Jones?

  when you use the code DANIE at irestore.com. Head on over to irestore.com and use the code DANIE for my exclusive discount on the iRestor Elite. And please support the show by telling them we sent you. Hair loss can be frustrating, but thankfully, you don't have to fight it alone, thanks to iRestor. Yeah, I had a gentleman on the show a while back, Richard O'Barry, who made this documentary called The, uh, he's part of The Dolphin Project, but he made this documentary called The Cove, about the killing cove in Japan where they round up all the dolphins and basically slaughter them while they're alive.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:25Danny Jones?

  And he was a part of, a part of the filming of the TV show Flipper. And he was living in Miami at the Miami Sea Aquarium. And he was the guy who was basically like handling Flipper every day. He was the trainer for Flipper.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:40Danny Jones?

  And he's met, that's how he met John Lilly. And he befriended John Lilly. And that was right when he got that funding from NASA. And, um, You know, they were like opening up that the the skull of the dolphin and like putting probes in there, all kinds of like sick, inhumane things they were doing to try to figure out communication.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, Lily is kind of a key figure, and I think maybe people forget, or I don't know what his reputation necessarily is, but how invasive his research was and how many dolphins died because of it. But he, yeah, then later he kind of became, he was actually, one thing I learned was that dolphins were not seen as especially, you know, peaceful or, you know, interesting animals before Lily, so he did kind of put them on the map.

• 29:26Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, they weren't seen as majestic or inspiring.

• 29:30Danny Jones?

  Flipper probably did that.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  I guess it was.

• 29:31Danny Jones?

  Part of it.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:34Danny Jones?

  Because I don't know, I don't think many people know about John Lilly, do they?

• 29:37Speaker 04

  Well, I guess it's sometimes hard for me to tell because in some of the circles I travel.

• 29:42Danny Jones?

  Right, well, not your circles.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Of course, John Lilly, and of course, he was a, he became a, he also, you know, his experiences with LSD and with ketamine, I found in his papers, because I did visit his papers at Stanford, he was experimenting with ketamine.

• 29:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he was bombed on ketamine. I think that's what kind of drove him crazy.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what I, that's what happened.

• 30:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he thought that, he thought that he was talking to aliens or something like that, he was communicating with an alien race, is that right?

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Well, he and Louis Jolly on West actually wrote a paper together, which they tried to publish, and I think it was Science, they sent in the manuscript, I found this in his papers, but it wasn't, it was never published, but they're really.

• 30:22Danny Jones?

  And you've, you read them, you read them?

• 30:24Speaker 04

  I have, I have it.

• 30:25Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  I have it on me at this very moment, but I would summarize it as saying, they start off very sober, and they're saying, we've discovered these properties of ketamine, it's, it's going to change the world, and only very, very qualified, very mature, you know, evolved human beings such as ourselves should be allowed to have access to it, and they say, but there's, there's really no limit to what it can do, it can put us, and then they start to get very carried away with the possibilities of it, including contact with aliens and.

• 30:55Danny Jones?

  So they were doing ketamine together?

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Yes, which is interesting.

• 30:58Danny Jones?

  Was Jolly West using a lot of psychedelic drugs?

• 31:01Speaker 04

  I don't actually know how much, but certainly, he was, and so he wasn't early, so he started off in the, at the very start of MKUltra, he was. Working with LSD, sleep deprivation, other psychoactive drugs and hypnosis.

• 31:19Danny Jones?

  Did you see the photo of, that I showed Joe of Jolly West on the set of 2001 Space Odyssey?

• 31:24Speaker 04

  No.

• 31:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, Steve, pull it up. Have you, have you seen 2001 Space Odyssey?

• 31:29Speaker 04

  I have.

• 31:30Danny Jones?

  There's a photo of Jolly West walking in between sound stages with Stanley Kubrick on the set of that movie.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 31:39Danny Jones?

  I mean, maybe you can confirm. I, Jamie couldn't, didn't believe that this was Jolly West, but maybe you can confirm.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  Actually, the guy right behind.

• 31:48Danny Jones?

  Can you punch in, Steve?

• 31:54Speaker 04

  It does look like him, but I can't. So what would he have been doing there? And what year would that be?

• 31:59Danny Jones?

  Uh, what year did they? That's, that's a good question. Steve, find out what year they were filming 2001 A Space Odyssey.

• 32:09Danny Jones?

  Rebecca would probably be the best person to confirm or deny that this could be accurate.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Well, I'm, I'm intrigued because I thought I've tried to figure out everything I could about him and he does like to talk about himself. So

• 32:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  He never mentioned that.

• 32:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  But then in the

• 32:24Danny Jones?

  Well, there's a lot of conspiracy theories that say that they got Stanley Kubrick to film the moon landing footage.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  So it is released in 68, so it must've been filmed in 67?

• 32:35Danny Jones?

  Okay. So 60, yeah, 66 or 67 came out. Usually movies come out a year or two later after they're filmed.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Well, interestingly, so this may, may or may not be West, but he in 67 and 68, who was in Hate Ashbury in his hippie, doing his research with, at the Hate Ashbury Medical Clinic and his other research in the, what he called the psyche pad, which was

• 32:58Danny Jones?

  Can you find a photo of him from 60, from 68?

• 33:01Speaker 04

  So I think by 68, he might've looked A little.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay.

• 33:06Danny Jones?

  This is, this is, uh, this is good.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  And I know he grew out his hair, which is one, one pertinent thing.

• 33:11Danny Jones?

  Ooh, in sixty.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  He was, he said he tried to fit in and he, and his graduate students who were working on the project described how he would, he was wearing these hippie clothes and he was maybe growing a beard.

• 33:23Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah, this is, uh, Tom O'Neill did a very good job of explaining all this in his book Chaos.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:29Danny Jones?

  How, uh, even the students thought he was like kind of a wacko because he'd be hanging out with them and like getting high all day.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Yes, and on the couch with his friends.

• 33:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  What, what is this project?

• 33:38Danny Jones?

  Any luck, Steve?

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Um.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  I think I found, it's not dated. No, there's nothing that's.

• 33:48Danny Jones?

  Can't find anything, huh?

• 33:49Speaker 05

  This is, this is one, oh shit, where's, there we go. This is one that I found, but it's not dated.

• 33:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It looks very much like him. I mean, the, the, the hairline is identical.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  That's the Oklahoma period.

• 34:02Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Of last, before he went to California, so sixty seven, when this, if that is him.

• 34:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  He was in the middle of transitioning from Oklahoma to California.

• 34:12Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  He's spending his sabbatical year.

• 34:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  In Haight Ashbury and Palo Alto, so, so I don't know where that was filmed either, but of course he could have gotten around.

• 34:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, find out where spa, uh, two thousand and one Space Odyssey was filmed. You can find all, all the set locations of it, all the filming locations. Because, you know, just him even being around Stanley Kubrick is, is suspicious. Whether it was on the set of two thousand and one or not, you know? Maybe that, maybe this was on the, uh, maybe this was on the set of, um, of Clockwork Orange. I mean, you can see how he would be a key contributor to a show like that, right?

• 34:45Speaker 04

  Well, this brings us back to what we were talking about. I mean, he'd be a perfect consultant for Clockwork Orange and it looks more like a set of Clockwork Orange, doesn't it? Then, like, that looks almost like London or something. But anyway, I'm just massively speculating.

• 34:59Danny Jones?

  I think they actually said that this was London or this was somewhere in the, in Europe, right? Steve?

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't remember.

• 35:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think I think this was supposed to be in shot in Europe. So maybe.

• 35:11Speaker 05

  Shot in MGM British Studios in England, Hertfordshire.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Hertfordshire. So it's hard to tell. I mean, that would make it more like, well, I don't know. You're saying 2001 was shot there.

• 35:26Danny Jones?

  I don't know. I thought it was. It's most likely Clockwork Orange was shot there.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Orange is, we just talked about how it's from the eight, it's done in the eighties. So this is definitely more, more of this earlier era.

• 35:39Speaker 05

  So filming locations for 2001 was Nambia, Arizona, Scotland, and Hertfordshire.

• 35:44Danny Jones?

  Okay. So, okay. I don't know. We need to figure out, we need to figure out where that, where that photo was taken and what year. Because that would give you, it, it seems way more reasonable that he would be on this, working with him on Clockwork Orange. Because that's right up Jolly West's alley and he would be the perfect consultant or something like that. But that's too late.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  And by the eighties, he was denying any connection to the CIA.

• 36:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 36:09Speaker 04

  Even though it was, it was in the record and it was, it was in all the papers.

• 36:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  But he said he had only ever experimented on animals, never on a human being. He, for years and decades, there are still people who think that that, who, who were his friends who believed that.

• 36:24Danny Jones?

  That maintained that, right?

• 36:25Speaker 04

  He was so fervent that he hadn't, you know, he hadn't done any human experimentation.

• 36:30Danny Jones?

  And were there any close confidants of his that ever spoke out about him or any said, said anything about him? Other than like his, I think my son wrote a book, right?

• 36:38Speaker 04

  His son wrote a book, but it was more about, well, there, you can read the book and discern that he was a difficult father and extremely

• 36:48Speaker 04

  given to serial affairs and he had like different families in different places, maybe. And it caused his wife a lot of suffering and his family, but, and you, so you get some of the dynamics, but he doesn't talk about that, but they're actually, and he was very good friends with Charlton Heston, which is interesting. They were, they went back to the, they had been in the army together. And then even they were in Oklahoma City at the same time for reasons I'm not, oh, I guess maybe Heston was a struggling actor and. And West was, that was in his CIA years and working for the University of Oklahoma. But they remained friends and lived in houses next to each other, basically in, when, in LA,

• 37:32Speaker 04

  at the, at the top of the mountains.

• 37:35Danny Jones?

  How did Jolly West first get into doing stuff like this?

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Well, that's a, I mean, that is a really good question. I think it was through his mentor during his medical training. So he says, he, he says, uh, he became a patriotic, red-blooded, American, you know, physician and scientist because the government paid for his education. This is what he says in one of his statements, and they sent him to medical school. I think it was University of Minnesota, but he did his residency in New York. And at the time he did his residency, Harold Wolf was there, and Wolf was an expert in, uh, basically migraine pain, but also in stress and sort of the human body at the limits of stress.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  He even had this scary-looking machine where he would invert people and see, you know, if it induced headaches, and then he would try to cure them. He was very, he was very renowned. But, uh, West went to work for him and, and Wolf had, he was Allen Dulles's, he was the doctor to Allen Dulles's son, who had been injured in the Korean War.

• 38:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  And so through Wolf, uh, early MKUltra funding came, came through, uh, through New York, I think it was, uh, Columbia. And then, um, West was, he got trained there to work on subjects like hypnosis and other things. And then he became, then he relocated to Lackland Air Force Base as a major. And he, uh, started up his own MKUltra program or sub-project because he, he basically, uh, you know, had this conversation with Sid Gottlieb about all the things he wanted to do. And he was so ambitious that Gottlieb said, "You're just the sort of man I think we've been dreaming of."

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Who, because he, he really wanted kind of a, this kind of zone of free experiment. He wanted to build a space where he could change the conditions. It's really, again, harks back to those behaviorist ideas. Like if you could deprive someone of sleep, but also use hypnotic techniques, but also use, uh, drug alter, the alteration of consciousness through drugs, like, could you actually?

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Totally transform or break a person.

• 39:52Danny Jones?

  Weren't I heard, I don't remember where I read this, but I read that they were building black sites around the world outside of America where they could do these experiments on people and avoid the American law.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I believe that's true. Um, this was before NK Ultra, but part of the CIA. There were various sites. Uh, there was a great interest in interrogation and truth serums. So could you, you know, what could you make somebody, uh, confess to or, you know, reveal and really not can not false confessions, but could you make, could you break someone sufficiently that they'd reveal the information they had? So they, they had, um, prisoners at various sites who, who could be the subject of terminal experiments. At least this is covered in John Marks book, which is pretty authoritative, um, that people,

• 40:45Speaker 04

  it's, and I think also, um, John Lyle talks about it in his new book. Um, before NK Ultra, there were these experiments where people would basically be killed after, uh, being essentially tortured through interrogation.

• 41:01Danny Jones?

  And where did they, were these like, where were they finding these people?

• 41:04Speaker 04

  So there were, uh, come, you know, from, I think some were from North Korea, maybe, and some were, uh,

• 41:13Danny Jones?

  Good Lord.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  There's, yeah, I'm forgetting exactly, but they were basically prisoners or spies. Nobody was going to be checking up on her. They felt that. Um, yeah.

• 41:28Danny Jones?

  Um, and then, uh, what's this Steve?

• 41:31Speaker 05

  I found a date from Kubrick himself.

• 41:36Danny Jones?

  This is if he came back. Somebody has a Stanley Kubrick handle on Twitter. Wow. September 1965, NASA's George Mueller, a senior manager on the Apollo moon landing program, visits Stanley and Arthur C. Clark as they prepared to shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey. After seeing the film blueprints, models and, and sets, Mueller reported dubbed the studio NASA East. Interesting.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  What's even more interesting is other people are, they have the same question. Like, who's the guy in the back?

• 42:05Danny Jones?

  Hang on, scroll up. Scroll up, uh, let me read the top again. So why is he, so he's visiting Arthur C. Clarke to prepare to shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wow. Sixty-five? Does this, does this, does this reconcile with what you know about where he was?

• 42:25Speaker 04

  So that it, it interests me only because I don't know what he was doing in sixty-five. There's kind of a gap after MKUltra. He, his funding does seem to dry up a bit. He's at University of Oklahoma. He still does, I mean, he does dress in suits at that point. Like later, he kind of adopts in the seventies, you see him more in like lumberjack garb and he's more casual at UCLA. But this is, this would be his look at that period. But I don't, I don't know all the things he did in that period. So it would be interesting to know. And it, we'll say physically, it sort of resembles him. I mean, NASA had a lot of research on, you know, humans at in extreme micro environments because they had to know

• 43:08Speaker 04

  about that. So, you know, he may have had contact with NASA. I don't know about it.

• 43:13Danny Jones?

  This is such a curious thing. This is one, another thing that, uh, that I was talking about with Joe the other day. The, the MKUltra stuff, everything that was happening during the Cold War, there was, there was more lying and more like sinister black project experiments that were happening in the US than any other time in history. Like JFK, right? His assassination, MKUltra, um, Watergate, there, there was just so much crazy, um, the Iran-Contra scandal. There was so much stuff going on during the Cold War, like spying, it was like the pinnacle of like spy agency stuff that was happening and, and defectors and moles and, and you

• 43:57Danny Jones?

  know, so many different countries from Cuba to the Soviet Union, all being involved in this just cauldron of deception. And that's right when the moon landing was supposed to happen. There was the space race. But like, there's this weird cognitive dissonance thing that happens when people question the moon landing. It's like, you're a fool for even questioning that. But like, if you really just back up from this like cultural programming that we're in. And like, look at it just on paper, just look at it like purely from a statistical point of view. Like, it's not that unreasonable to say they faked it. It looks fake, and it was in the middle of all this other fake stuff. Right?

• 44:35Speaker 04

  I mean, maybe. It does seem that, it does seem that, um, people didn't have, they didn't have necessary, they didn't have the information to be able to question these programs, and also they were clandestine. So that's what's interesting about, um, MKUltra is completely clandestine, even from the CIA itself, even from most of the US government. So, like, for example, one of the cutouts, the Gishikter Foundation, they, uh, received CIA funding to kind of create a conduit by which money, money could go to scientists, a cutout. But then Georgetown Medical Center also received additional funds because they didn't, they thought it was just funded by Charles Gishikter. So they also contributed. So the, you know, they were sort of doubling up the

• 45:19Speaker 04

  federal funding, just because not all the arms were speaking to each other. I mean, maybe the reason the moon landing looks kind of clumsily photographed is just the technology. We see that technology as looking easily falsifiable. And also, we do have many cases that just seem outlandish and surreal. That's one reason I've always been kind of drawn to them, just because you can't quite, um, you know, they don't seem like proper, sober, scholarly topics, but if you can actually find the records, and it seems important to do that, you know?

• 45:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Um, when it comes to the moon landing, though, it's like, you know, one of the things about it is it's just, it's, it's so, it's one of those conspiracies that like, if the cat ever got let out of the bag, it would utterly destroy the reputation of the United States, right? We would be like, the, the country would be so embarrassed, I would, I would imagine, on the world stage, right? Even more so than like, I don't know. I mean, the Kennedy assassination, like, and then the Kennedy thing, it's like, everybody knows the truth. Like, everybody knows in general what happened there. We know it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Like, if you took a consensus on every American,

• 46:36Danny Jones?

  it would be a vast majority of the American population that believes it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, right? Whether you want to say it was true or not, I would say the vast majority believe that there's some sort of conspiracy there.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:50Danny Jones?

  Right? So like, even though, even though, like, the leaders, like, the people who are behind these things are never gonna let the cat out of the bag, there's already this distrust that's been built, right?

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. I agree with your point, but I also, have you been to the Air and Space Museum in DC in Washington?

• 47:10Danny Jones?

  No, I haven't.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  So I think they have, at least I remember seeing it there in DC, and I think they still have it, like, one of the capsules that went to the moon.

• 47:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you can't believe it, because it looks like they, it looks literally like a tin can. It looks so unimpressive. And you're like, human beings actually put themselves in this and shot into space. And, you know, so either this could support, I mean, to me, it just supports the point that we don't, yeah, and then you see, they had, they actually invented the checklist for the Apollo, one of the missions. So before that, there wasn't even a concept that you should have a checklist, because they want, you know, because several of them went, there were mistakes and things went wrong and people failed to check, like, certain, you know, make sure this works. So they invented just this idea of the checklist. So you see these printed out, you know, typed, it just doesn't look like our idea of advanced

• 48:04Speaker 04

  technology. So I think that's one, that's one thing that undermines this, you know, people's belief in it, or perhaps generates these theories. I don't.

• 48:13Danny Jones?

  Well, it's also the fact that we haven't been back since seventy-two, seventy-three, what was it? Yeah, we went, we went. On the first try, we went all the way to the moon. No one's been there since. We went there with less than one one millionth of the technology that's in an iPhone today. All the and then conveniently if all of the NASA files and all of the technology was accidentally, you can chat GPT this and chat GPT will pull up like NASA's actual official response to it was that that they accidentally over did an overwrite on their hard drives and erased all the technology. Now they have no evidence of any of the technology. So what other technology do we have that's ever existed that that humans have created that has not increased and gotten better over time?

• 48:57Danny Jones?

  Or like at least stayed the same, right?

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:59Danny Jones?

  Not just vanished.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, well, one thing, though, you do. I mean, I'm old enough to not exactly remember this, but I remember hearing about, you know, just the priorities changed so radically. And I do remember in my in like the 80s and 90s, people just couldn't believe we the country had ever prioritized going to the moon just because it seems so, um, in a way it became silly, I think, because we're like, we have lots of problems at home. We've got addicts in the streets. We've got people shooting up in the parks. We've got problems in our schools. Why did we spend all this money? It seems so absurd. And so maybe for a time, it just became one of, I mean,

• 49:44Speaker 04

  there are other cycles of history that made it seem outlandish and strange that it ever happened. So, I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't imagine it didn't happen. But then again, I'm a product of that. I mean, I remember as a child seeing it on TV.

• 49:58Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. And then another weird thing about it was when they broadcast the way the the television companies broadcasted it, they had to go to the the location in Houston and NASA put up the feed on a big projection screen. So instead of giving all of the news stations, letting them giving them a direct access to the feed individually, they all had to go there and set up their cameras and pointed at this projection screen.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Well, that's just be, I mean, I think one thing is

• 50:27Danny Jones?

  It's like third generation to start, you know, to start with the footages.

• 50:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's just, I mean, so interesting. One of the interesting things about writing my book is about, you know, looking at, for example, the Patty Hearst trial in the mid 70s and the in the case of Patty Hearst. I mean, when there was a firefight to Capture her and the group who held up, who had kidnapped her.

• 50:50Danny Jones?

  For people who don't know who she is, can you give a brief?

• 50:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the short story is she was a, she was the daughter of, she was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst.

• 51:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay, yes.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Immortalized in the Citizen Kane, in the fictional, so he was a, he was a publishing magnate, basically a huge, a billionaire equivalent in his day. And his granddaughter was one of, I think, four or five girls who were brought up in this family and they were, and she went to college at UC Berkeley at the age of nineteen. She was living in the town of Berkeley. She was studying art history. She was a sophomore. And this group called the Symbionese Liberation Army discovered that she was, you know, this daughter of her, of her wealthy capitalist families, they thought, was studying and they wanted to make what they called a righteous arrest of her. So they went by her apartment where she was living with her fiance, who had been her

• 51:45Speaker 04

  math teacher, actually in this private school she'd gone to. So she's nineteen, she's taken out of her apartment. They bludgeon her boyfriend, leave him on the floor. She's, you know, she was watching TV with him, so she's wearing a bathrobe. They shove her in the trunk of their car. They drive off, you know, shooting, shooting up the street and they keep her in a closet for fifty-nine days, reading Maoist, reading Maoist propaganda to her, forcing her to listen to broadcasts and covering her eyes so she can't see for that whole time. She's never alone.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  She has to submit to rape or she, basically she's, they say, you know, if you're, if you, if you're a person of good faith and you're starting to believe in us, which she had to kind of pretend that, at first she had to pretend.

• 52:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  That she was, she had to sleep with various members of this group. So she submitted to rape. She was moved to a different closet and each, and over the course of these fifty-nine days, she, she had to release cassette tapes of her reading messages to her parents. And at first, she sounds really shaky. And these are, these are broadcast on all the local and national radio stations. And she's saying things like, Mom, Dad, I'm okay, but they seem like a decent group. You know, she's saying, you know, you should listen to what they say. Do what they want. And then after, then her, her messages start to transform over the next month or two. And she's saying, you know, they're actually pretty cool.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  You know, she's, she says.

• 53:27Danny Jones?

  Going off script?

• 53:28Speaker 04

  She said, no, I mean, she just was, uh, she had to convince them that she was starting to believe in them or that she had been converted. Cause she said, I decided I wanted to live. Cause they had just massacred, uh, the local superintendent of Oakland schools. So they were definitely, and they were highly armed. They were constantly doing these military exercises. They wanted to, they told her they were just one branch of this paramilitary organization that was, you know, revolutionizing the United States and was gonna bring about a new system of government. And so she was so disoriented.

• 54:03Danny Jones?

  What was the name of the, the, the military group?

• 54:05Speaker 04

  They called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.

• 54:08Danny Jones?

  Symbionese Liberation Army?

• 54:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:10Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  And this, there's a whole story there. Uh, their leader was a former convict named Donald DeFries, who renamed himself Sing Q. And he said that he had been, uh, he was, he had this, he was almost like a guru. And he had recruited all these middle-class, um, students. He was, he was black and this, most of the members were white. And he said this was gonna create, you know, a new, a new system in the United States. And basically if they could get Patty Hearst to join them, it would look really good for their cause. And so after the time, after about a month and a half, they, they sat her down. They took off her blindfold finally, and they let her see them.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  And they said, do you wanna join us? And she said, she basically had to, this is why it's known as a brainwashing case, or they tried to make this argument that she, she had to make herself, um, into a soldier in their army if she wanted to live, which she, she could have easily not. Cause she knew they would never return her to, to her parents. And so in a cup, in a week or two, she, yeah, there's a famous picture of her holding a.

• 55:24Speaker 04

  An automatic

• 55:25Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  And she ended up robbing a bank with the other members of the group. And she, um, they, she said,

• 55:34Danny Jones?

  Seventy-five?

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:36Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  And she declared that she had a new name. She was no longer Patricia Hurst. She was going to be called Tanya. And, uh, when they, so eventually she went on the run with this group. The whole bunch of things happened.

• 55:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  And, uh, people in the country didn't believe that she, you know, they first seemed like they kind of forgot that she'd been kidnapped. And they started to assume that she was a willing participant in this, in this gang. And they were associating her with the hippies and with the people, the radicals of that time. And so she, she was tried in nineteen seventy-six and Louis Jolyon West was the lead expert who, in her defense.

• 56:20Danny Jones?

  What? How did that happen?

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:24Danny Jones?

  That's bananas. So he was defending her.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  He was, yeah, actually all of the main brainwashing experts from the fifties, from the earlier POW, uh, incidents were then recalled to this trial. They were brought forward again. So Robert J. Lifton, Robert, uh, Martin Orne and, uh, Louis Jolyon West. But West was really the lead, the lead expert witness. And he was called to describe what had happened to her and, and hopefully exonerate her. But he, he failed massively on the, on the stand because he perjured himself very quickly. And also because he didn't do a very good job. Well, he basically disqualified brainwashing as a legal defense, even while he was claiming that she was.

• 57:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  But, I mean, one of the things is that the entire, most of the group was killed in a firefight, which is even to this day, um, probably the largest firefight that was in the, in the city limits of LA. And, and it was the first deployment of a SWAT team.

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• 58:25Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, at a large scale. And they, I guess my, originally why I was thinking about this is so many things were new about technology. Like, they never had synced sound to image. So this firefight happened live on television. And people all over the nation saw the Symbionese Liberation Army members, six of them, burn. They didn't see their bodies burn, but they saw their, their safe house burn on live television with sound synced to the image and with portable mini cam. So all these things that, you know, they were totally new in 1975 when that, when that happened. And I think we just assume sometimes

• 59:09Speaker 04

  that these things have always existed. But actually, it was, it was kind of, things were changing so quickly even then. But anyway, they, they assumed that Hearst had also died in the firefight. But she happened to be out doing errands. And that's a whole other story, which is very amazing.

• 59:29Danny Jones?

  What ended up, what ended up happening to, happening to her after all of this?

• 59:32Speaker 04

  So she was left with two other members of the SLA, the Harrises, who was a married, who are a married couple. And he, Bill Harris was, you know, he had beaten up Patty Hearst when she was first.

• 59:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  He was always beating her up, but they were also working with her. So they went on, they said, we're going to go on the lam with you because basically the rest of the group died. So they had to go underground and people started ferrying them across the US. They ended up spending a whole summer, I think it was in Pennsylvania, maybe. And they were helping Hearst. They wanted her to write her autobiography and they wanted it to be a bestseller, talking about her transformation and her belief in the, this new revolutionary army. And it was kind of like the POWs in the sense that she was constantly working on her confession, you know, her, her repudiation of her family, how she had seen the light, how she had changed. And ultimately though, she was discovered and arrested and people

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  couldn't understand why she hadn't just run away during that. There was about a year when she was on the lam, when the security wasn't that tight and she, you know, arguably could have just walked away.

• 1:00:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  She said that she was so, I mean, this happens often with people who have been abducted. They're so entrained and so fearful. Like it's a kind of perpetual fear.

• 1:00:56Danny Jones?

  Protected by their abuser.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. They cling to the situation because they're, and she also, you know, when she saw the way the SWAT teams in the LAPD came after her group and slaughtered them on live TV, she, she thought like, and they thought she was in the building. She knew that they, you know, she didn't feel protected by her own government. So.

• 1:01:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that seems like a, a, a common thing, even in like. Relationships with like husbands and wives where the husband can be abusive to the wife and they've been together for 10 years and he's been abusing her for 10 years. It's like she can't, some, some women have like are unable to leave the relationship. You know, where it's just like, I'm so used to this. I can't do change. Like this sucks, but I'm gonna stick to it and it's better. It's easier for me to stay here and be abused than to get out of it.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think coercively controlling relationships also have financial elements of control. Like it's very difficult, especially if you have children.

• 1:01:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Like the dynamics of domestic violence are similar. Also, the dynamics of people, uh, young women often who are, who are abducted by, you know, when they're really young and held.

• 1:02:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  Like the famous case of Elizabeth Smart. You know, at a certain point, years in, there are moments they, and they eventually do break away. But it's hard to know what that moment is. And of course you're risking your life if you try to reveal who you are.

• 1:02:23Danny Jones?

  Right. Or like, like Jolly West's situation. You said that he had like affairs and families all over the world and his wife somehow knew about it.

• 1:02:31Speaker 04

  I don't know how many families he had, at least one.

• 1:02:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, at least one.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  And he had many, many affairs, so much so that his wife talked about, I think it's in his son's book, how she was so humiliated because they would sometimes show up. And

• 1:02:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  He was just, he was, he was kind of a larger than life figure, to say the least. And she, but she, she did get used to it and she stayed with him to the, to the very end.

• 1:02:56Danny Jones?

  That always blows my mind too.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Danny Jones?

  How, how people will stay with their spouse after like aggressive, long history of cheating. It's like, that's gotta be some form of, you know, weird mind control, something like, like self-induced mind control.

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17Danny Jones?

  And how did Jolly West die?

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  He died by his son, um, basically killing him. He asked his son to kill him.

• 1:03:27Danny Jones?

  Cause he had cancer?

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  He had very advanced, I forget what kind of cancer. He was gonna die probably within another couple of months.

• 1:03:34Danny Jones?

  In the nineties, right?

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  In the late nineties, but he.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  But it's really interesting in Mark West's book because he he went on a press tour afterwards and he gave all these interviews and he wrote the book as a kind of tribute and he talked about how he had to be very secretive. I mean, in a sense, he was, he consulted with these societies, the Hemlock Society and others about it was basically Cassina's a mercy killing. He saw it as a mercy killing, but he didn't really want to do it. And his father sort of made him. And then, then about half a year later, his mother also

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  got him to help her kill herself, or basically he killed her by administering by administering drugs and she wasn't, she just had, you know, kind of medium-stage dementia. So I think the toll was very heavy on him. So even though he, he wrote quite an amazing book about it. And he, it's, it's, I think it it's a bit, it's a tortured book because he wants to say that he did this merciful thing. And he was helping his parents, but you can't help but see this tortured family dynamic. And then he, he killed himself.

• 1:04:53Danny Jones?

  How did he kill himself? Same way?

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  I'm not sure how.

• 1:04:57Danny Jones?

  And also, why, why would, wouldn't you just like, if you were gonna overdose yourself, why couldn't you do that yourself? Why would you make your child do that to you? It seems like an easy thing to do yourself.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  It did seem that my impression from the book, because it's quite well-written, it's

• 1:05:11Danny Jones?

  Do you know the name of it?

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  I forget the name. Mark West. And he I'm just forgetting the title, but he, it's very conspiratorial. It's like his father wanted to have a conspiracy with him. We're doing this together. He had to hide it from his sisters. That was the main thing. And the same thing with the mother. She, it was almost like they were bonding over this this task that they, this joint project and that the project would ultimately be both of their deaths. So, and you can see that that was not to, you know, ultimately something he could, he was able to reckon with.

• 1:05:50Danny Jones?

  That's sick.

• 1:05:53Danny Jones?

  That's so sickening. I found the book. The Last Good Nights, Assisting My Parents With Their Suicides. Jesus.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  The comments, at least last I looked, were very interesting because some friends of the family wrote in.

• 1:06:08Danny Jones?

  On, on.

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  On the, on the Amazon.

• 1:06:10Danny Jones?

  No way. Left comments?

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, I love, like.

• 1:06:14Danny Jones?

  Go down, let's read them.

• 1:06:19Danny Jones?

  Good book, but it shouldn't have said, it shouldn't, it shouldn't have had to be this way. Interesting.

• 1:06:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:06:30Danny Jones?

  It's Jon Stewart West, after killing his parents over a decade ago, took his own life on October 4, 2014. It's no, I have to wonder if suicide became so normalized for him that this was his answer to his own psychological pain for which he would not get meaningful help. His suicide note, quote note via email to his friends, was glib and completely cavalier, obviously written by a deeper, depressed, psychologically defended man. Has he not been recruited by his parents to assist them in their deaths? Perhaps he would be alive today. Suicide is not the answer. Nope, it's definitely not the answer, folks. Wow.

• 1:07:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very sad because he's, he's an interesting man and I thought.

• 1:07:17Danny Jones?

  It would have been interesting to be able to talk to him.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  He had a tough, he obviously had a tough, um, family dynamic.

• 1:07:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Danny Jones?

  To say the least.

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  Because, I mean, West, interesting, he just, um, he's hard to figure out. I was just talking to someone who knew him in the seventies. He said he was, he spoke really slowly. This is what some people say. I mean, even though people were talking about how ebullient he was called Jolly because that did match his demeanor, but he, others describe him as speaking very slowly and hypnotically. And, uh, but he, yeah, he, he would kind of use the killing, you know, he famously, or maybe not famously, but he, he administered LSD to an elephant.

• 1:08:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, Tusco, right?

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  Tusco the elephant. And it's, this is also heartbreaking if you actually read the article because.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  The female elephant who was Tusco's mate tried to hold him up while he was dying.

• 1:08:15Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  And I'm like, ah, but, uh, West, you know, wrote this paper. I think he wanted to find, so this is an interesting connection. He was interested in the trigger to irrational violence and male elephants are known to go into periods of irrational elephant, uh, of violence, like during their must period. So it seems that he wanted to see if the LSD would trigger that, which is very related to his, you know, this kind of questions at the time about LSD and

• 1:08:43Danny Jones?

  Violence, right?

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  Also whether amphetamines might trigger an LSD, you know, in combination might trigger violence. They were sometimes

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  wondering or seeing that, I think, in some studies with, also with mice. So that may have been part of why he did this, but he didn't hesitate for the rest of his career to use the elephant, the Tusco's death as kind of his calling card in a very flippant way.

• 1:09:06Danny Jones?

  He was very proud of it.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm the guy who killed the elephant. He kind of would swagger into a room and he was known for that.

• 1:09:14Danny Jones?

  And didn't he have like a violence center that he wanted to create, like a center for violence?

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  He wrote, he, it was, uh, that's a short, short word for it, or the short phrase was the violent center. And he considered it his greatest defeat, but in some ways it was one, it was right after the hate Ashbury period when he first got to UCLA and it was, he got millions, $2 million of funding. It was all set to go and it was going to be a center for the study and reduction of violence. There were like 29 affiliated projects within it. It was almost like a above board MKUltra in the sense that it was public.

• 1:09:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  And one of the reasons it collapsed was that he made it public, but he was, he was really interested in, in, uh, in that, in violence, but it kind of fell apart. He felt he was just attacked by people who didn't understand and who were his political enemies.

• 1:10:06Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And how did that stuff tie into what was going on with the hate Ashbury clinic and Charles Manson? Because you can see like, you know, one of the things that Tom described, which you just described is that they were not only messing with LSD, but they were also testing amphetamines with this place that was funded by that cut out, that was, that was CIA money. And, um, the Manson murders are one of the most violent. Murders that's ever happened in this country, in the history of this country on American soil. So like the fact that there's a clear tie that I think Tom O'Neill points out in his book with all the people that Manson was connected with, bringing the girls there all the time. You know, all the other shady things. So like, what is your, what is your

• 1:10:48Danny Jones?

  understanding or what is your opinion on what was happening with Charles Manson?

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, well, there are demonstrable studies that were being done involving Manson. So this is true. I mean, he was at the very least in observational studies, his family. These are so, I was actually just talking with Tom O'Neill last week about this because we're both interested in, I mean, I don't think it's determined yet that West, you can't yet put, you can't put Jolly West in a room with Charles Manson, at least not in a documented way. But it is true that West had, he had an office at the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic from the very beginning. And he was part of the crowd of people who were running the, both the Haight Ashbury Research Project,

• 1:11:37Speaker 04

  which was, and his own observational study, which was really like a naturalistic study of these communes, of the different families, of how they, how they, how their psychodynamics and social dynamics worked. And so West and some of his colleagues were actually going into the field with the Manson family and others.

• 1:11:56Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  In Mendocino. Yeah. And one of them was Alan Rose. And I mean, so there are people such as a graduate student and assistant at the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic named Gary Landis, who, who will, so they are personally links between West and people like Alan Rose. And and they were definitely treating the Manson Manson and his family at the clinic. So you can you can bring them so close, but you don't really know. It's hard to tell exactly, um, you know, if you want to trace West role. What I do see is that people for many years were saying that the hippies turned from LSD to speed

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  later and that this caused like the hate to become a violent and unpleasant place after the flower child period. And so the amphetamine research project was tracking and interviewing these young, you know, runaways and stuff, starting in sixty eight. I think it was, yeah, sixty eight. So one of the people working for West, Gary Landy, talks about how he went into the medical clinic and he saw and he he observed them interviewing kids who are amphetamine addicts. Like they were tracking them over time. So West used to say something like, or people used to say Manson was unusual

• 1:13:20Speaker 04

  in that he was a speed, he was a speed addict first, and then he got into LSD and then he stopped because he didn't really like needles. But um, his family definitely, this was the lore, you know, why he maybe amphetamines didn't have anything to do with the murders or whatever. This is what people used to say. But actually, it does seem that he he and his family were increasingly turning to speed at the same or amphetamines and speed.

• 1:13:47Danny Jones?

  Injecting it?

• 1:13:49Speaker 04

  Well, maybe not injecting it because he didn't like needles. But you know, they could be orally taking it or it's not, this is just something that has come up in various interviews. But um, there was a curiosity about triggering violence and the potential connection between LSD and violence and certainly Manson.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  You know, obviously used LSD in his relationships. I mean, this is, you know, his, uh, people like his Susan Atkins and others talked about how they would try never to come down, like they were vying to see who could never come down from one day to another. So they were very addled. And then if you add other substances. And so it's interesting. I mean, there are parallels in the, in the NIMH funded research. So you don't see the name CIA. You don't see any of these earlier cutouts.

• 1:14:40Danny Jones?

  What is NIMH?

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  Uh, the National Institute of Mental Health.

• 1:14:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  They were funding the, a couple of these projects.

• 1:14:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  Cause they were just interested. They were interested and they wanted, you know, on one level, they had an interest in curing addiction. There seemed to be a mass epidemic of amphetamine addiction.

• 1:14:59Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's a, you know, I always wonder whether or not with the stuff that they were testing on Charles, Charles Manson and the family, like, did they, were they trying to aim for a specific result? Or were they just throwing shit at the wall to basically see what would happen? Or were they trying to guide them in any specific way, you know?

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  I'm not sure they were even testing on them. I mean, I don't think that's been proven. Um, I think they were naturalistically observing them.

• 1:15:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, they were just, they were just observing them as like wild animals.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  And also, well, the problem is with naturalistic observation is people, you know, throughout time, they get involved with their subjects. And West himself in his own diary wrote, I'm getting too close to my subjects. You know, these were many different, he was involved in many different things.

• 1:15:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  Uh, and, and his other, uh, other of his team also became involved. Like they not only went to, you know, sort of anthropologically observe the family, but they were sleeping with them sometimes, the women, or they were, they got, they sort of get involved. But I'm not sure there were, I don't believe that there were formal, you know, at least not, nothing in the record, nothing that they would have published or nothing that NIMH would have sponsored, which would have, which would have, um, allowed the actually giving or, you know, testing or experimenting with Manson or anything like that.

• 1:16:23Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Well, I mean, one of the biggest questions about that, that was like, why was he, why did he kept getting let out of prison by Roger Smith, you know?

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  Well, this is such a good, I mean, it's true. It's, it's remarkable. So I, you can say, um, it is possible.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  So there could be clandestine papers, studies, who knows, but Roger Smith is, it's, it's really odd that he was both, you know, a prominent researcher in amphetamine addiction. He was, he was doing these experiments with mice and with complicated protocols. He was also friends with David A. Smith, the, who ran the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic, and he was Manson's parole officer. Like, that's very hard to understand. And he kept releasing him. But he says that, I think he said at one point, there was a program to try releasing parolees to see if they would do better. I mean, it doesn't really,

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  like a criminological experiment of some kind. It does, it's not, it's not easily explained. I think that's why Tom O'Neill's book is very striking.

• 1:17:32Danny Jones?

  I mean, did he, and he didn't, um, he didn't commit any, like, real violent crimes, though, did he, before that? Were there, weren't there just, like, petty theft and, like, stealing a car and some other things that wouldn't lock him up forever? Or did he actually, like?

• 1:17:46Speaker 04

  Well, he and, his family did kill a Buddhist practitioner in a drug deal, some sort of, right before the murders.

• 1:17:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  You know, so, but before that Manson, actually, the, his family was known, some people say, at least Alan Rose at one point said, actually, they're kind of like model, model hippies. At least he takes care of them, he brings them to the doctor. They're not just, you know, in squalor. But he, because he was pimping out his, the women in the family, too. But, so, and he had this, he had career ambitions, Manson. So.

• 1:18:20Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I don't think, um, he had, he didn't, he didn't have a.

• 1:18:26Danny Jones?

  Beach Boys.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  He didn't have, he didn't have, um, actually, much history of violence that I know of. Like, he, and he, of course, he didn't commit these murders himself. He.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  His family did.

• 1:18:38Danny Jones?

  Right. But he was, he was there. He would, he would, he went there right afterwards, right?

• 1:18:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:44Danny Jones?

  And then, um, there was the, the one after the Tate murders, the La Bianca murders. I think that was the next night, right?

• 1:18:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:18:56Danny Jones?

  He was there, I believe, right? I think he was out front or maybe he didn't go inside.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  He was very nearby.

• 1:19:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, very close by. And then another weird thing about the, the Tate La Bianca murders is that there was a CIA agent who made a phone call. I don't remember if you remember that from the buyer. It's one of the really curious things about that book was, um, this guy who, who called somebody, I can't remember who, and like told them at like eight o'clock in the morning, or like first thing in the morning, before the first phone call to the police ever even happened. And this guy was like a legitimate like CIA, um, an A, I don't know if he was an agent or an actual like officer. I think he was probably just an agent working for the CIA. Giving them information. Um, this guy ended up being a ghost and they, they never found who he was. But, um, but I think, um, Tom included photos of this guy in the book.

• 1:19:44Danny Jones?

  So that's really curious. Were they just following him? Were they just observing him? Like, did they know that they like see like, oh my God, this guy's gonna, what are they doing? And they, they found out like, fuck, this is getting out of control.

• 1:19:55Danny Jones?

  I don't know. But the fact, you know, the also the other thing about how the prosecutor covered, like, the story of the prosecutor and him writing that book and like covering up all those really blatant facts and, and really crazy connections to Manson.

• 1:20:11Speaker 04

  Vince Buliosi.

• 1:20:12Danny Jones?

  Vince Buliosi, yeah.

• 1:20:14Speaker 04

  And that's why Tom's book is very compelling. I mean, he finds all these.

• 1:20:19Danny Jones?

  And how he started meeting with Vince and Vince was like, oh yeah, come on, let's talk about it. And as soon as Tom started digging in too deep, Vince completely like shut him down and cut him out.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Danny Jones?

  So.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, he, he, yeah, people, I mean, he's reputationally damaging like to, I gather.

• 1:20:37Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  For, and I think, you know, In the hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic did do a lot of amazing things. So it would be frustrating. I mean, they, you know, it's not just one. It's not like it just simply was a front for the CIA or anything.

• 1:20:52Danny Jones?

  But it shut down two weeks after he released the book.

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, because his reputation was so damaged by it. So he's quite upset. I mean, I can understand that you spend your whole life doing that.

• 1:21:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It just makes me wonder, like, all the money and resources and projects that they had devoted to this stuff in the sixties. Like, imagine what they could possibly do now with the internet and social media. You know, to sort of, because the, you know, the population's obviously growing and more and more people are connected. And you got to find a way to sort of control the population, especially in this age of of just over information, an abundance of information everywhere. And like, stuff, there's so much truth, like, the government can't hide stuff as well as they used to. Right?

• 1:21:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Danny Jones?

  So, so you have one, one problem is stuff can get, secrets can get out easier. And one of the ways I think they combat it is by letting out a bunch of fake stuff, too. So that, you know, you have the real stuff and the fake stuff all mixed together in this cauldron. And it's impossible to pick out what's real.

• 1:22:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's why I came up with the phrase, the instability of truth. Or you could also say the instability of the real.

• 1:22:12Speaker 04

  Or that you have, I mean, even going back to the sixties and the idea of Robert Anton Wilson of the reality tunnel that we, you know, a lot of our, as you know about his concept, that everyone kind of inhabits a reality tunnel. And that the main, he says something, I think, amazing, like, we, a lot of the world's greatest bills come because we don't understand that so much of our perception is just grasping. In other words, to make sense of reality. So he was an early, I think, someone who understood that we, we do construct a kind of.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  We construct our sense of what of what's real.

• 1:22:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  And it can be highly siloed. But I think one difference between that era, I mean, there are so many resonances and there's a reason we want, I'm, you know, lots of people want to go back to the early Cold War and it looks so intriguing. Because these things were happening, but also because they kept really, they did keep really good records. I mean, they destroyed a lot of MKUltra, but the parts they didn't destroy, the financial records. I mean, they're keeping records down to the cent. They're so, sometimes so boring, like, did you make the transfer? And did you, you know, how, I paid this much for stamps. It's very mundane. And, uh, you know, it seems like, like, you know, things could be, so there could be a kind of controlled

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  experiment that was done clandestinely and maybe we're a little nostalgic. Because we live in a moment, I think, of uncontrolled experiments.

• 1:23:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what I tend to think, uh, which are just emerging and not necessarily directed on so many levels, like, we don't know what the results will be. And a lot of them are just maybe platforms maximizing for profit and engagement. And then the, the side effects are certainly psychological, social, and like, mind melding and also warping of our ability, even our ability to really deal with this.

• 1:24:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and it's, and it's, it's, the more you pay attention, the problem is, most people don't have the luxury of paying attention to this stuff because people are burdened by, you know, their jobs, their lives. And people like me, who, my job is to pay attention to this stuff, get to, get to see it. And I get to see how like, my mom and my dad live in two separate, parallel realities. Cause my mom gets all of her information from, from CNN, she's very left wing. And my dad gets all this information from Fox News, you know, he's right wing. So they both have like, completely separate facts on, on every situation that exists. And it's like, It's it's it's amazing to me that, you know, they can't see it, but most people.

• 1:24:56Speaker 04

  Are they still married?

• 1:24:57Danny Jones?

  No, they got divorced when I was five.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  Because I was gonna say, that would be impressive.

• 1:25:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, no, no, no. It would be, it would be a miracle if they stayed married. My mom was a fine arts major and my dad was a mailman. It couldn't be more opposite.

• 1:25:14Danny Jones?

  But, uh, but yeah, I don't know. I forgot where I was going with that, but.

• 1:25:18Speaker 04

  Sorry to interrupt you. That, no, it was very interesting. We're saying a separate reality. You can actually find, I mean, I think it is more unique because you were talking about, I mean, there is just such a overabundance of evidence that it's hard to evaluate. It's hard for any, anyone to evaluate, even if you have a lot of credentials in historical verification or, you know, the vetting of sources, just because, I mean, I just was hearing about how AI is capable of, so if it generates a hallucinatory story, it can actually then also generate supporting documents and websites that seem to support that story from the, you

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  know, from a web vault or something. So, once that starts to happen, it really upends the historical process and it makes you even more, you know, maybe reliant on or interested in, uh, paper records, you know, that are less.

• 1:26:17Danny Jones?

  Physical records.

• 1:26:18Speaker 04

  Physical records, which seemed malleable and, you know, subject to, you know, suppression and all these things, but at least are much more, they, they offer you something to, some sort of verification process.

• 1:26:34Danny Jones?

  Have you ever heard of the book called The Electric Body?

• 1:26:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:26:39Danny Jones?

  Steve, find out who the author of that is. This is somebody Jack Cruz was talking to us about, but.

• 1:26:46Danny Jones?

  So there's, I guess, like in all of the devices that we have, like all like the phones and the and the iPads and even in like televisions and stuff like this. There's this, it's all this one spectrum of light, which is on the blue end of the spectrum. And there's something about that specific spectrum of light that like messes with the chemicals in your brains, in your brain. Which it turns it into, it's stimulating, right? So it's, not only is it stimulating, but it's, it's feeding you content from social media that you're getting just like tiny little hits of dopamine every time you scroll through this thing. And it's designed to keep you on the thing, right?

• 1:27:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Danny Jones?

  And apparently like this started like early on when like Vegas was first developing with the casinos and they decided to take out all the windows and take out all the clocks to keep people in there to gamble all the time. And, um, you know, then eventually like we started getting televisions and then the iPhone came about and then the social media companies figured out we can make way more money if we keep people on the phones. And, um, keep and and what's happened is it's exponentially gotten worse because not only are people just like constantly being inundated with this blue light that's messing with like their circadian rhythm, they're staying up too late.

• 1:28:06Danny Jones?

  But they are, like, it's like their brain is hijacked by these devices combined with social media because they're optimizing only for money and retention, right? They want to keep you on their platforms longer. They don't get you. Becker, was it Becker? So. Robert Becker. Robert Becker. Yeah. Robert Becker. The Body Electric. The Body Electric, right? Which talks about, you know, it's, it's a fascinating, I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it's a, it's a fascinating deep dive.

• 1:28:34Speaker 04

  It's from ninety eight.

• 1:28:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow, it is kind of recent, huh? Um, so yeah, explores the pathways, uh, you know, and the understanding of evolution and um,

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  But it's certainly

• 1:28:46Danny Jones?

  Psychic phenomena and all and healing and stuff like this.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  But before blue light.

• 1:28:50Danny Jones?

  But like light, right, but but um, the guy who was explaining this to me was explaining how um, light is like fundamental to to human health and and biology, our evolution. You know, even like, he was explaining like how like we overlook the circadian rhythm. And how this technology has has taken us so far off the path of that. Of like our our where human beings are supposed to be like in nature when it comes to the sun and light and all this stuff, we're like constantly and then Obama did this thing when he was president where he um, he mandated that everyone had to have

• 1:29:35Danny Jones?

  incandescent light bulbs or no LED lights. He banned incandescent lights, right, because they weren't energy efficient enough.

• 1:29:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:29:41Danny Jones?

  And and those those lights are full spectrum, right, they have the full spectrum of light like like sunlight has, they don't have UV, but you incandescent or the LED lights are all specifically blue light. And when people are spending all their time inside underneath these lights and then and then having this blue light on your on your eyes all the time.

• 1:30:01Danny Jones?

  The the argument that he was making is that this is a form of mind control. You're keeping people locked into this stuff. And if you can get, if you can get a population of people addicted to an electronic device in which you're feeding all the information into, that could be very dangerous.

• 1:30:22Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 1:30:23Danny Jones?

  Especially on a large scale.

• 1:30:24Speaker 04

  I I agree that, well, first of all, the larger point that our circadian rhythms are massively disrupted in that. That has psychological, I mean, it has effects that we don't even, we haven't even begun to reckon with, I think, because not only not only our devices, but long before that with fluorescent lighting and then later, as you're saying with the, I mean, LED lights, I think that was a an unintended consequence was of a

• 1:30:55Speaker 04

  You know, making incandescent lighting illegal, essentially, like you can't, you can't even buy it by those.

• 1:31:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  And you know how depressing it, even when you tune an LED light to look more warmer in different ways, it doesn't have, it doesn't have the same effect, but also just the way our, we spend so much time indoors.

• 1:31:13Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  People have shift work. There are so many ways that um our attunement to the, just the rhythms of day and night are disrupted. Sleep is a massive problem. So this creates a kind of a background disruption. You could even look at the potential effects of, there's a historian of biology at UCLA is looking at the effects on um age of menstruation because for young women, you know.

• 1:31:39Danny Jones?

  I've heard about this.

• 1:31:39Speaker 04

  Earlier than it, it's six to seven years earlier than it used to be. I mean, then over historical time, you can track uh this kind of.

• 1:31:47Danny Jones?

  And why did they say that that was?

• 1:31:49Speaker 04

  I mean, people, uh, this is um as far as I know, not fully understood why, you know, girls as young as nine to 11 are now starting menstruation, whereas it used, if you, I was listening to a scholar who was saying that if you look at in the, in Shakespeare's time, people didn't really come of age until 17, like women.

• 1:32:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:32:10Speaker 04

  Young women didn't. So and even in, in recent memory, it was, it was much later. So why, what has been happening? I mean, you could say chemicals, you could say maybe an enriched diet. Uh, people have talked about um maybe that I think that the disruption of circadian rhythms can also affect like, I'm just, this is not my area. I'm just, I think it's, I've seen people write about this. And I just think the various ways that our lives are disrupted by um by kind of being in, in artificially lighted environments and not, you know, not being outside enough, essentially.

• 1:32:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 04

  Not tuning to these cues that maybe through much of human history, we work cued to.

• 1:32:55Danny Jones?

  Age of, what is this?

• 1:32:57Speaker 04

  Menage.

• 1:32:58Danny Jones?

  Menage?

• 1:32:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Speaker 05

  Menstruation.

• 1:33:00Danny Jones?

  Okay. So uh, in the, in the 1900s, it was 14?

• 1:33:05Speaker 05

  This is in the US.

• 1:33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Speaker 05

  So from 14 down to.

• 1:33:07Danny Jones?

  So now it's down to 12.

• 1:33:09Speaker 04

  And if you go back a couple of centuries, apparently it's even later.

• 1:33:13Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:33:14Speaker 04

  So this is something that people don't fully physicians don't understand it's just been

• 1:33:19Danny Jones?

  It probably has to has to have something to do with this just like the the overabundance of chemical product chemicals in our products and our food products and microplastics and everything phthalates all these things you know Dr. You know Dr. Shawna Swan she she um she wrote this book called um the countdown which is all about how like uh things like glyphosate and microplastics and phthalates are have been reducing there's a similar chart like this you can probably find Steve but in men it's reduced sperm count testosterone and testosterone levels and fertility and they started studying it in the 50s and like

• 1:34:00Danny Jones?

  every year it drops by a percent and now it's dropping by like 2% per year and it's all to do with these with these types of things these pollutions.

• 1:34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean our indoor in to some sometimes it's a unintended consequence of like a well intended regulation that say our sofas need to need to be doused in anti-inflammatory in uh chemicals that will stop them from catching on fire because people you know this was part of the consumer product safety and you know movement in the 70s to because people people you know kids pajamas were catching on fire sometimes my dad was actually part of the this movement to part it's actually related to also auto safety and the idea that consumer products should be safe but one one effect was that these chemicals were

• 1:34:46Speaker 04

  introduced um into all sofas so sofas can are often incredibly toxic just because people frequently did used to fall asleep with cigarettes and set the sofa on fire so now

• 1:34:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  Anti-inflammatory but um one effect is and this is just one among many factors that creates an indoor environment that's full of just massively. Um, it's, there's so much ambient chemical, uh, chemical additions that we're constantly interacting with.

• 1:35:17Danny Jones?

  And not just that, I mean, not, not just i- in that kind of stuff, but in, in like food products and stuff in the US. And the US is the, the most guilty country of doing this stuff because like, for example, my wife was just trying to buy baby formula. And we're trying to find the baby formula that's not packed with all like the crazy, uh, coconut tree, coconut, not coconut, but, uh, palm oils. And all these crazy like super unhealthy oils that are, and all these other like weird ingredients they pack into the baby formula. So we literally, she literally had to go on some weird website and, and order it from Germany.

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  No, it's true.

• 1:35:51Danny Jones?

  It's the same brand, same exact brand, but the stuff they sell to Germany, they make sure that they were, they don't put all that crap in there.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  They regulate against it in Germany. Cause I, I had the same thing with my daughter when she was young. She hasn't sensitivity to uh, artificial colors and flavors that are just used to make the yogurts look really pink or whatever it is. But in Germany, they don't allow many of the chemicals that are allowed here. So we could get, you know, really colorful things, but they were just made with creatively, like they sourced them out of, I don't know.

• 1:36:24Danny Jones?

  So we don't regulate them here.

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  We, well now of course it's an issue with, uh,

• 1:36:28Danny Jones?

  And they complain, they complain that they won't make money, they won't make enough money. They'll go bankrupt if they, if they have to take all that stuff out of there. Cause it makes them manufacture. Well, you sell it to them.

• 1:36:36Speaker 04

  I think it's interesting how, and you might be having the same experience that I had when my daughter was young, which was like a decade and a half ago, but she, it's just so many things are more concentrated for children, but children and infants are more sensitive. So why is it when you go to a children's movie, it's so loud, you know, or their food is more colored than with a, an adult's food or so many things are hyper, you know, they're, they're hyper concentrated and it was, it was amazing to live in a, we lived in Berlin for two years and just be able to find things that weren't so toxic.

• 1:37:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you can tell, you can tell when you go to countries like that, uh, there's a, there's a stark difference in the, especially if you spend enough time there.

• 1:37:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Danny Jones?

  And the way you feel with the food, you know, you like even just like going to Costa Rica and eating junk food, you can eat, I could go there.

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  It tastes kinda good.

• 1:37:31Danny Jones?

  I go there and I I eat pizza, burgers, whatever, like tacos, whatever it is. And I don't feel like I just pounded for ten pounds of cement.

• 1:37:41Speaker 04

  You feel different.

• 1:37:42Danny Jones?

  I don't feel like I'm carrying a blood brick in my in my stomach afterwards.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Danny Jones?

  And you just, it's so much different and it makes sense while why countries like Costa Rica are, they have the longest lifespans of of any other developed countries. I feel like the more technology and the more convenience and the more like convenient foods are available, the less healthy it is and the worse it is for human beings.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Danny Jones?

  And I think that that directly correlates with mental health, too.

• 1:38:15Speaker 04

  I know that the new head of, well, RFK Junior just introduced this new legislation banning certain artificial additives to food.

• 1:38:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think some of the stuff is so funny, like, God, it's hard, it's hard to stay optimistic about this stuff when you see like, you know, they're just focusing on food dyes. And then Trump just says, oh, we're gonna put, we're gonna bring real sugar back to Coke. Like, okay, so the people who drink Coke are gonna be a little bit healthier. Like, come on, is that the best we can do?

• 1:38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you're, yeah, the point you're making is one that anyone who eats, if you go somewhere in a different country and you eat their food, it's usually a lot better. And you don't feel, you you don't need to eat as much because it just feels more fulfilling.

• 1:39:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:02Speaker 04

  Or at least that's been my experience and as recently in Amsterdam. And it's, yeah, just the basically the, you realize that our food supply for whatever, and a complex number of reasons, it's not going to be solved by one little, one little change. But that we have for, and it's hard to exactly tell why and how this happened, although I think it did happen in the. Twenty mid 20th century, maybe around the same period. Not not to say it's a conspiracy, but it's like different forces, different incentives.

• 1:39:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:31Speaker 04

  Different.

• 1:39:31Danny Jones?

  It's not like one, one well oiled machine and they're all working together to make this happen. Like the, the food being processed, the fluoride in the water worked. We're specifically trying to program you to be our little mind control experiment. What is this, Steve? This is, oh, two different versions of Froot Loops.

• 1:39:49Speaker 05

  Same product. Well.

• 1:39:51Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  Same marketing.

• 1:39:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Another interesting thing is like, like, um, Costa Rica, they don't have, they don't have no, they put zero fluoride in their water. And, um, that's a crazy story behind the fluoride thing in the U.S.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. So hyper focusing perhaps on one thing is, you know, takes you off the bigger picture, but the bigger picture is compelling.

• 1:40:11Danny Jones?

  It definitely is. It definitely is, but I don't think, I mean, these people, they aren't as competent as we give them credit for. These people are just trying to figure it out day by day.

• 1:40:23Danny Jones?

  And it's easier for us to paint some big, broad, connect, connect all these dots that have no, you know, like, like I'm trying to do with Jolly West being on this, you know, with Stanley Kubrick to prove the moon isn't real. It's probably, that probably has nothing to do with it, but like, that's where my mind goes.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  It's tempting.

• 1:40:37Danny Jones?

  It is.

• 1:40:37Speaker 04

  But I think, I think, yeah, we should, we should never, it's kind of like what I discovered in my research is we can't underestimate. We're drawn to shiny objects and to brilliant conspiracies and to incredibly, you know, and to like the, the man behind the curtain. But actually there, you know, that, there's a lot of bumblingness in it. And what is, so in the case of conditioning, it's like, in the case of brainwashing, so much of it is just how susceptible we are to the influence of other people. You know, whether that's orchestrated or not, and how much we, you know, want to, uh,

• 1:41:15Speaker 04

  Want to get along, kind of, and, you know, and I think that's why I got so inspired by this Polish writer, Cheslaw Milo, she wrote a book called The Captive Mind, because he describes how, in his own experience, you know, how, how the effects of World War II and how his own, living in communist Poland as the government was being taken over, you know, how he faced, he faced this dilemma in himself, like, was he going to find a way to convert himself to sort of, actually, he said, it's an operation you could, you perform on yourself, or a kind of inner surrender, but could he make himself do that just to get along in his life, or would

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  he end up leaving? But I think that he, one thing, one point he made is that, um, is just that how, how, he said, if, if, if people were told, if men were told, or humans were told that in order to be social, have high social status, they had to crawl around on their hands and knees with a feather sticking out of their hindquarters, and, you know, act like it was just perfectly normal, they would do it, just because that was the, that was the mandate of the day, or that's the way that you, you know, that, that's what people assumed. So, these things are so powerful, yet they're hard to identify exactly, so sometimes it's helpful to, to look at a, you know, look at a particular concept, or a phrase,

• 1:42:37Speaker 04

  or a set, you know, place where you can really focus. And Lewis Dolly and West becomes one of those.

• 1:42:43Danny Jones?

  There's always a, a, a slow-evolving undercurrent of, of ideas and ideology in the US, and, you know, that has to do with politics, it has to do with culture, um, it has to do, you know, which a lot of it comes, you know, from the media, obviously, but I often wonder, like,

• 1:43:13Danny Jones?

  The reason we are where we are in this sort of world that is we get where we get all of our information from like four companies, four media companies.

• 1:43:27Danny Jones?

  And you have the incentives, our incentives, which are to to make more money, to get ahead, to develop new things, to be the the number one leader in GDP in the world, to be the the military superpower in the world.

• 1:43:45Danny Jones?

  Like, I wonder if that's the optimal way. Or are those the optimal incentives for us to evolve in a good way? You know, like, like, if we keep chasing, if we keep chasing these carrots that we are chasing, I don't, maybe it's not me or you, but the people that are like, you know, the head of the military or like, top executives at Wall Street firms, like, financial firms, or whatever it is, these people are are strictly on this, this treadmill, chasing this carrot, and, and pushing things from like a financial perspective, because we have this idea of

• 1:44:27Danny Jones?

  being an American as, you know, having a big house in the suburbs, and driving a nice car, having a boat, and, and, you know, this just idealistic view of being a successful American. And I don't think that that is conducive to having a healthy society. But it's not something we can turn, it's not, it's not like you can turn that ship, I don't think. I think we're just on this path. And I think a lot of people, you know, and music, I think music has a big part to do, is a huge part of it, too. Because, you know, also, people want fame and attention, which is a weird thing.

• 1:45:11Danny Jones?

  And I don't, I don't know if, if that's like, if that's inherently in us as human beings, or if that's more a part of the culture. And how that's gonna evolve over time and how that's gonna get worse. You know, and I just don't, I don't see it getting any better. It seems like if, if we want to be the best version of ourselves, I think like we have to go back in time and start again.

• 1:45:41Speaker 04

  Restart. No, I hope, I hope it's not that. But I do think we've reached a critical point of potential incoherence and even collapse. Because, and I hope it, I don't, but I'm not a pessimist, I don't think, but I see all the things you're talking about. I mean, the, I mean, you were talking about people's, you know, wanting to prove themselves by living a certain kind of life. I think it's, and finding that, there's countless stories of people who reached the top of some corporate ladder or music empire or kind of fame or success and then find it empty. And so that's, that's an old story.

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  I mean, that's a really old story. It goes back to the Buddha or many, many others, but, or Socrates. So it's a question of how do you know yourself? And I think one of the mistakes we're always making is, and this is one thing that got me interested again in, in, I guess, in maybe the crisis over social media or whatever, and AI and things that we're experiencing now. And the split in our population and maybe question of ideological manipulation is that

• 1:46:56Speaker 04

  these things are never really about the ideas. I don't think they're mostly about the emotion underlying it. And that's one of my central findings is that what spreads is really, and the way people,

• 1:47:09Speaker 04

  the way it works is through emotional contagion. And that then the ideas get kind of positioned on top of that. So, and to the extent that people have trauma. And I mean, this is one thing that really stands out with even to go back to the early Cold War and the POWs. Is that when they came back, the one thing that the experts never saw was that they were traumatized. These men had been through like unspeakable conditions and had lot, you know, I call it ungrounding, but really it included conditions beyond what you could even imagine surviving. Like losing half their body weight just from not being able to eat, their wounds untreated. Being bombed by their own.

• 1:47:51Speaker 04

  Napalm by their own military dying under degrading circumstances. I mean, I could go, I could go on, but it's just that one thing, when they were studied later, that disappeared, you know, the idea that of what the, the trauma they had experienced was never registered in the records. They were just seen as these kind of freakish and weak men who had somehow capitulated to communist ideology and were now parroting it as if they were, you know, these, this unknown phenomenon in history. And you see that kind of happening in other episodes. That's why I was interested. Could I look at these earlier episodes where it really seems, it seems mysterious to me. Why did they not see that?

• 1:48:33Speaker 04

  And then you look at the emergence of social media at key moments and how it seems to be about people adopting ideas or getting stuck on their, you know, in sort of loops, thought loops or silo, silos and things like that. But really, you know, research and what I've observed shows that it, it's feeding on your unresolved emotion, emotional states. And that was shown like, for example, in the Facebook experiment of 2014. And then you could sort of see it happening also in just the way, there's some really interesting research on altered states of consciousness as like you, you sort of do

• 1:49:14Speaker 04

  dissociate, what in, many people dissociate, we all do, you know, when we're absorbed in a, in our phone or whatever platform it is, and they each have different effects, but they, but they're on a scale of kind of like altered states to some degree.

• 1:49:35Danny Jones?

  Can you explain what the Facebook experiment was, the emotional Facebook experiment?

• 1:49:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it, it was published in 2014, but the research ran in 2012 and it was a study, so it was published in the PN, the Proceedings.

• 1:49:53Speaker 04

  Anyway, I can't remember the name of the publication, but a very prominent publication. So in the experiment, about 700,000 users were selected without being told because the user agreement allows one to be. It was in PNAS. The user agreement allows you to be.

• 1:50:10Danny Jones?

  The Facebook, like the general user.

• 1:50:11Speaker 04

  Any general user agreement of that platform and really any platform subjects you to A B testing or experimentation. So 689,003 users.

• 1:50:23Speaker 04

  Massive scale. So the title's really interesting. And this was the last time that such a. They published, the Facebook research team published in such a prominent journal. And I think it was. Partly they wanted to announce this. It was a little bit of like planting a flag and showing that they had done something that was historic in the field of. Operationalizing emotions. So the basic experiment was. Somewhat simple. They divided these users into three groups. The first group. Was exposed to a more, their news feed was altered. So instead of receiving the regular algorithmically delivered. Feed, you got a more negative feed than that was measured by word counting software.

• 1:51:03Speaker 04

  That, you know, claim that measures the emotional state. So it was more negative and those people then. Were tracked in how they responded. Did they post more negative things? Did they react in a more negative way as measured by software?

• 1:51:19Danny Jones?

  So they measured their reaction by their posts?

• 1:51:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, any kind of reaction or emoticon.

• 1:51:25Danny Jones?

  And these people had no idea they were part of this experiment.

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  Right. And they discovered, and then another group, their feed was altered positively and. To a greater or lesser degree or intensity of positivity. And then that group was also tracked, traced in its response. And then a third group was a control group. So their feed was unaltered. And the discovery was that the negatively altered group then posted in a statistically significantly more negative way, the positive group was more was more positive, but in less less striking. And then the control group was unaltered. And so, but what's interesting too, is that the article talks about this, that they say they've operationalized emotional contagion.

• 1:52:09Speaker 04

  And emotional contagion was kind of a concept that psychologists have been talking about since the, since the nineties, or perhaps they had, it had been defined in the 1990s. But really it goes much longer back. The question of how do you spread emotion? And people have always known, of course, that if you're in a room with somebody, you're having a conversation like we are, you could be spreading. This is like the, the essence of a mother child bond or something like that. But the question was, could emotion be spread? Could negative emotion be spread? Could it be done if you're not in the physical presence of someone? Could it be done across vast distances? And could it be done at scale with a massive, that's why they say massive scale? So the article was really kind of triumphantly announcing that yes, we've proved that this

• 1:52:52Speaker 04

  can happen even in the absence of any kind of contact.

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• 1:53:54Danny Jones?

  Wow, because yeah, it's not, it's completely not efficient to use actual drugs on, on people because you can't, you can't affect a population. You can't go like drop, give somebody some acid, you know, every single, whatever many people are on, you know, in the country, what is it like? What is it, like 500 million people in the US, something like that? But if you have, if you can find a way to manipulate what they already have in their hand 24/7, they're staring at and use something about, about, use the tools that are on their phones already to sort of manipulate the chemical balance in their mind, that would be the perfect way to do this.

• 1:54:31Speaker 04

  And what I discovered too was that, so some people wrote into, when it became publicized, because it got a lot of attention, this experiment in 2014, although, so some people wrote into Facebook saying, could I ever know if I was in this experiment because I became very depressed during that period, I was in the hospital with suicidal ideas and I want, you know, it was very heartbreaking and others were outraged, there was an investigation of some of the researchers, but it really came to nothing as far as I can tell and everyone was essentially promoted. But what I discovered is that the, I mean, some interesting things, there's not necessarily a direct connection, but the word counting software that was used to measure negativity,

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  to measure the emotion in the experiment, was actually trained on people's diaries because they said, we need to be able to measure, as if we were able to enter the minds of the subject, these, the software developers said, who are psychologists, they said, so we'll have people write about the worst thing that's ever happened to them in diaries and then we'll take that and sort of make a, it's almost like a preliminary language model.

• 1:55:41Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:55:42Speaker 04

  You know, 20 years ago, and they use that, this is just the accounting software itself, but whatever, so it struck me, it's almost more symbolic, but interesting that it was trained on the data of trauma essentially. And I'd also discovered that the definition of emotional contagion also goes back to this kind of classic study that was done at the University of Hawaii about trauma essentially. So what I, it's not simply just trauma, but really just that, you also find this in the earlier cases with cults and with POWs is that Emotional, the unresolved emotions, what, you know, people would say, whatever issues you have, your trauma. And now we understand trauma to be far more pervasive than it used

• 1:56:26Speaker 04

  to be seen as, it used to be seen as incredibly rare. Like a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist who was trained in the sixties, he said, you would expect to run across maybe one or two cases your entire life. And it would have been someone who'd been in a fire and been burned over most of their body. But of course, the definition and our sense of it has changed radically. But I think it gives us some insight into how everyone has something that can be some emotional tug or trigger or whatever it is. So I try to, try to shift the focus a little bit away from ideological battles to the sense that these media, these platforms,

• 1:57:06Speaker 04

  and I think concerningly AI companionship, you know, these AI companions really trade on a kind of emotional conduit or contagion between the users.

• 1:57:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And it's funny how also how easily people can be swayed online to like, like, for example, there's this phenomena on, I don't know how often you read YouTube comments or read through like X or whatever, but there's this phenomenon on, on YouTube specifically, if there is like, an, a decent amount of commenters on a video, right? Let's just say it's like a, a political video of something that happened in the news during like today. And there's, out of a thousand comments, the, the top 50 comments, top 100 comments, all are sort of agreeing about one thing.

• 1:58:08Danny Jones?

  A new person who comes in and starts to read those comments without even watching the video, they are gonna, they are gonna go along with the consensus and agree with them. And it's not, it's not incentivized for somebody to come in and just disagree with everybody.

• 1:58:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:25Danny Jones?

  They wanna feel like they're a part of the group. They wanna feel like they fit in. So it's, it's, so there's this thing, it's called the pylon effect in you, on YouTube. So like, if somebody comes in and says something, everyone starts piling in. It's not necessarily like their independent thought. They're not, they're not using like their critical thinking skills at all. They're just sort of like, joining into this group discussion.

• 1:58:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of, that's, that's a great, that's a great example. I've definitely seen that. I'm very interested in YouTube. I don't, I'm interested in YouTube comments just because for years scholars and historians have always wanted, you know, user data or what they call it, uh, reception. Like the, you can never really know, say you're trying to study a literary text or something, a book someone published, even like Brave New World, you'd have to look at, you'd have to look at reviews. And maybe someone wrote in their diary, like, I read this book. But you wouldn't really get it, you wouldn't really get a lot of data. But now we have this incredible resource. And so I'm always, I do think YouTube comments are fascinating. And what you're describing is, I mean, I imagine people have

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  done studies, but I'm not aware of the, of how this, how this contagion might occur. But, um,

• 1:59:38Danny Jones?

  And it's interesting, it's interesting too, because a lot of the comments are fake bots.

• 1:59:41Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's true. And people don't necessarily, well, there was that study that was then, um, pulled, right, by the University of, it's a European university that invent, it was like studying Reddit threads and the,

• 1:59:53Danny Jones?

  I never saw this.

• 1:59:54Speaker 04

  I think it was, uh, sorry, I, it was,

• 1:59:57Danny Jones?

  A study on Reddit threads?

• 1:59:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, they just had to recently pull it because it was unethical. But I think they were having people misrepresent who they were. And then they were trying to, you know, achieve a contagious effect. And people, people just aren't, other users weren't good at evaluating the human or non-human status, the botness of who they were interacting with. But also, you know, what struck me, Is um like if you look at some YouTube, if you look at the comments, for example, on a Joe Rogan episode, which I mean, they're they're interesting because you realize it is a community too. Like people are talking to each other. So it's not simply just a group think, but it's actually a thing in itself, which I think is interesting.

• 2:00:45Danny Jones?

  It really is. Yeah, it really is its own little world in itself. And there there is the group think aspect, but there also there are a lot of other people that stand out that'd be like they'll, you know, if the consensus is going one way, somebody will there's a lot of people that will also leave comments saying, what are you guys doing? Like, this is not at all what I saw.

• 2:01:03Speaker 04

  It's a contrarian.

• 2:01:04Danny Jones?

  There's always, yeah, they have to be the contrarians.

• 2:01:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Danny Jones?

  But like, are they contrarians? Or are they just people that are just like objective, like in their own mind, like?

• 2:01:11Speaker 04

  Or somebody who just has like an insight and then it can really move the it can move the discussion. Pretty interesting.

• 2:01:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And that's what's that's what's scary about bots and different groups using these things to their object to their advantage to to try to sway the narrative. Because like, even if something doesn't make doesn't make any logical sense, they can just push out a bunch of fake bots on a bunch of videos that are like giving one opinion and then it's automatically just statistically, it's going to sway a large, vast majority of normal human beings to to piling on to that. So that's scary and how that's scary, you know, thinking about how that could influence society and that how could how that could influence like the the hive mind of people in the country.

• 2:01:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, because not everyone is good at discerning or people have different abilities to discern, for example, if there if it's a fake, if you should even take this to be a human, right? Or much less be swayed by it. But perhaps, I mean,

• 2:02:14Speaker 04

  Perhaps it's advantageous to to be able to, you know, like they say with scams, like email scams, it's not gonna, most people won't fall for it. Most people would know not to click on whatever link. But if you have poor eyesight and you're elderly and maybe lonely or whatever circumstances, this will end up to be almost like a targeting device is the incompetence of your scam or the obviousness of it, or maybe it does make you reflect on vulnerability, I guess.

• 2:02:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally. Have you ever looked into L. Ron Hubbard at all?

• 2:02:50Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 2:02:52Danny Jones?

  Because he, what's interesting to me, what popped into my head when you were talking about Jolly West and the way that him and his wife asked his son to help them commit suicide? That's the same way L. Ron Hubbard killed himself.

• 2:03:01Speaker 04

  Oh, did he?

• 2:03:01Danny Jones?

  He asked one of his members to build this like super powerful E-meter, which was this electronic device that people in Scientology use and they hold it and does like a little shock thing and like measures something in your body, I forget what it is. And he told the guy to make one that would kill him and he did it and electrocuted himself and he died. Like he didn't die instantly, but.

• 2:03:21Speaker 04

  He did it to himself essentially, but he had his.

• 2:03:23Danny Jones?

  He had a guy do it for him, yeah, assisted suicide.

• 2:03:26Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:03:27Danny Jones?

  Which is interesting. I wonder if there's a connection there with like cult leaders or like people with this certain, like I wonder if there was any kind of like connection between his personality, like the personality types of these type of people.

• 2:03:40Speaker 04

  I'm imagining a cult leader being so egotistical that if they can't live forever, like I've heard stories about, if they can't live forever, there can often be a mythology that they'll either switch bodies or, you know, or, you know, a lot of times it's a mythology that I can't get ill or I can't die. So when they actually do face that, they try, they may, you know, find ways to make either a follower responsible or.

• 2:04:11Speaker 04

  Or how, I don't know, there, I could easily see that being more common, though I don't know any stories.

• 2:04:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's what David Miscavige said when, when, uh, after L. Ron Hubbard died and he came and did the big speech to all the Scientology people. He was, um, I think he said, uh, he's now left his, uh, physical form and he's entered a state in state. Where he's now the, like an invisible, an invisible alien roaming around the earth, I guess.

• 2:04:33Speaker 05

  So he's still marketing for Scientology even after his death?

• 2:04:37Danny Jones?

  Even after his death, yeah.

• 2:04:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:38Danny Jones?

  He's still running wild.

• 2:04:40Speaker 04

  I think they do, I think they do often assure the followers that they'll still be.

• 2:04:44Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, and like Heaven's Gate, where they did the group suicide, where they thought they were gonna go up to, uh, what was it, like a Hale Bop, the Hale Bop comet or something like this? They, they did that group suicide where they all thought they were gonna like, take in different, they were gonna turn into like an alien life form in another dimension or something like this.

• 2:05:03Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 2:05:03Danny Jones?

  Crazy.

• 2:05:04Speaker 04

  That's a perfect example, too.

• 2:05:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's just bizarre to me that how people are able to be so manipulate, manipulatable to be able to do these things.

• 2:05:20Speaker 04

  It's because it escalates and you don't see the escalation, you just see it at the moment of extremity. But the Hale Bop, uh, Mar- Marshall Applethwaite, I mean, I guess he started off with his wife, kind of mild mannered, I don't, and then it just, you know, you only see later the like purple Nikes and the crazy, this, it just seems, there's actually.

• 2:05:42Danny Jones?

  Well, it seems like the wife was like the mastermind, right?

• 2:05:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and sometimes there are these complex dynamics, but there's like interesting phenomenon of, of escalation and during that escalation period, people will fall off, some people will fall off. And I heard, I heard a description recently in this book on a psycho, a psychoanalytical cult called the Sullivanians, which is very fascinating from the seventies. Um, that so someone who studied them, Richard Offsh, he said that it's like a crowded bus. When some people are holding on and some people are not really, and you go around a sharp curve. And those people who weren't holding on fall to the ground or they fall. So like when there's a sharp curve and some, you know, things escalate and now everybody has to sign away their personal property or they have to sleep.

• 2:06:29Speaker 04

  You know, they have to like send their kids away to like, in this case, they had to send their kids away to boarding. These abusive boarding schools and never see them again, like perfectly nice people doing this. So as it escalates, some people will fall off because they weren't really firmly holding on. But those who were holding on are holding on even tighter. And so as it escalates, the true believers are kind of still on the bus. You see what I mean?

• 2:06:53Danny Jones?

  Yes, that makes total sense.

• 2:06:55Speaker 04

  And maybe they can be um, made to or asked to do these things, you know, like assisted suicide or their own. Their own death or the leader is apocalyptically uh, inclined and wants to take a whole bunch of people with them.

• 2:07:11Danny Jones?

  Right. This reminds me, have you ever heard of a gentleman by the name of Whitley Strieber?

• 2:07:17Speaker 04

  I have, I have, but I don't know that much about him.

• 2:07:19Danny Jones?

  So he wrote a book called um, God damn it. Communion? Communion, sorry, I'm brain dead today. He wrote a book about communion uh, that eventually got turned into a movie. And it's basically about his series of alien abductions that he's been through, that he claims to have been through. And very nice guy and uh, his, the story, I've read the book, it freaked me out. And they're like, just terrifying stories of aliens coming into his room and like taking him into a spaceship and doing all these experiments on him and stuff. And he's also a prolific writer. He's wrote a ton of science fiction stuff.

• 2:08:00Speaker 04

  Is he still alive?

• 2:08:01Danny Jones?

  He's still alive. Yeah, he's been on this podcast before. And.

• 2:08:07Danny Jones?

  Speaking about trauma, one of the things that happened to him when he was young, he was living on a military base because his dad worked at like a big top secret military base in Texas. And he was subjected to some like childhood experiments where they they put him in this weird type of box, like an isolation chamber, and they were doing strange things to him. And Steve, maybe you can find out exactly what this is because I'm really butchering this description right now. And then he was sent off, and this was like right in the middle of all this MKUltra stuff.

• 2:08:50Danny Jones?

  I want to say this was in the early, mid 60s. And apparently, there's a bunch of paperclip scientists working at this area, in this in this part of the world, in Texas, too. And he and a bunch of other kids were sent off to Mexico, to someplace where they were showing these kids violent videos, people of people being like mutilated and stuff like this or murdered. A Skinner box. Skinner box. Skinner box. Okay. And find the name, find the name of the the place that he went to school in Texas, the military school. And they were being showed this stuff, this really traumatic stuff, and being like convinced

• 2:09:32Danny Jones?

  that they were responsible for this, sort of like to induce trauma in children.

• 2:09:37Speaker 04

  He has memories of this.

• 2:09:38Danny Jones?

  He has memories of this, and he's talked about it. And he went on to have like crazy alien abductions, and he wrote the number one historical book on alien abductions, which is called Communion.

• 2:09:50Speaker 04

  Well, this reminds me of this, I do teach a little bit about a guy, a Harvard professor named John Mack. Have you heard of him?

• 2:10:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he, but he didn't work with Strieber, but he worked with a

• 2:10:06Speaker 04

  An experiencer or, you know, someone who had been abducted early, I guess in the, he was actually already very famous. He was running the psychiatry department at Harvard and he he's very, he'd won the Pulitzer Prize. He's this amazing.

• 2:10:23Danny Jones?

  Lawrence in Arabia, right?

• 2:10:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So you know him pretty, pretty well. So he, but he, but to get back to the question of Trump. So he started talking to this, an experiencer or someone who had been, he claimed to have been abducted. And then this guy introduced him to many such patients. And he, and over the years, he ended up talking to many of them and he, and he became convinced that they were describing something real. He couldn't exactly locate the epistemological ground of it. He said, their trauma is unquestionably real and their experiences are real. And I think he started to think that the entire structure of materialist science had to be

• 2:11:05Speaker 04

  questioned because it wasn't allowing. So anyway, started, Harvard started an investigation of him.

• 2:11:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:12Speaker 04

  And secretly, and whether they could remove his tenure, which is very, it rarely happens.

• 2:11:19Danny Jones?

  Very rude of them.

• 2:11:20Speaker 04

  Very rude. He was, anyway, then he died.

• 2:11:22Danny Jones?

  He's like a nice guy.

• 2:11:23Speaker 04

  He was, by all accounts, extremely nice. He didn't end up losing his tenure, but he kind of, he, he experienced reputational.

• 2:11:30Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:11:30Speaker 04

  Damage. But I don't, I don't think it necessarily upset him, but he's a really interesting figure just because he was, then he died in, in a car accident or being hit by a car. But, but his, I think, um, yeah, his archives include those accounts and they're interesting just because of his being willing to entertain this, you know, this question of how to categorize their experience. Like he was open to. That or that connection at the very

• 2:12:00Danny Jones?

  Well, it was definitely interesting that all the experiences of these people were having under hypnosis, I believe, right? They had very similar stories, like very, very similar stories.

• 2:12:10Speaker 04

  John Mack's patients?

• 2:12:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, John Mack's patients, like Betty and Barney Hill. They explained being taken up and then she explained them like putting a needle inside of her belly, like taking out her eggs. And he, her husband described them like extracting sperm from him. And there were like hundreds and hundreds of people that he talked to that explained the same thing. Now, was this just these people hearing it from other people and hearing it just, you know, through whatever, like through books or through television? Cause I think television was around back when Betty and Barney Hill explained their thing to John Mack. Yeah, it was definitely around. And there was radio and there were stories of this stuff.

• 2:12:51Speaker 05

  I couldn't find the name of the school. It doesn't ever seem to name it. He called it a secret school.

• 2:12:56Danny Jones?

  A secret school in the woods near San Antonio, Texas, in the summer of fifty-four. Nine years old, he was taken by visitors, right? So, so he was living in San Antonio, Texas, and his dad was a part of this big military thing. And he was a part of some secret school that was involved with this military stuff. I know there was a lot of paperclip scientists there. And, and what I was getting at was like, have you ever heard of any sort of like, like programs similar to MKUltra where they would take children and show them videos like this? Like, like traumatic videos of violence, trying to like break them down?

• 2:13:35Speaker 04

  I haven't, I haven't heard of that associated with MKUltra or with any other CIA programs. But I have heard of, these were just published scientific studies, not necess, not done on children, but done on adults where they show them disturbing films and see how they respond in different ways. So that was kind of a flourishing area. Let me see, so he would say, so his child would, but that was going further back. I think this, um, yeah, I don't know of anything like that he describes there, but it is a bit like that television show.

• 2:14:12Speaker 04

  You know, the one that about the

• 2:14:15Danny Jones?

  Taken?

• 2:14:16Speaker 04

  No, the the one, sorry, where they where the kids are, you know, there's the kids in the eighties.

• 2:14:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, Stranger Things.

• 2:14:24Speaker 04

  Stranger Things.

• 2:14:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:25Speaker 04

  That kind of plot, but.

• 2:14:26Danny Jones?

  Yes. Yeah, it's very similar to that kind of plot for sure. And that's what I that's what I've realized from doing this podcast. Most of the crazy stuff that I learned about that's happened in the past of of this country is closer tied to science fiction than any sort of like real stuff I've ever heard.

• 2:14:45Speaker 04

  There's such an interesting intertwining, as you were saying, with, you know, scientists feeding off of science fiction projections.

• 2:14:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:55Speaker 04

  L. Ron Hubbard, too, was a science fiction writer.

• 2:14:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, like, well, the most prolific science fiction writer.

• 2:15:00Speaker 04

  And then also, you know, in the case, I I have a chapter where I write about this Leonard Kille, who was a Cambridge, Massachusetts engineer who was who was who received these experimental brain implants in the in the, I think it was like the late sixties, early seventies. And he started to feel that his doctors were.

• 2:15:27Danny Jones?

  Is this the Terminal Man?

• 2:15:28Speaker 04

  He was. Well, it turns out he was the sub that Michael Crichton was his.

• 2:15:32Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 2:15:33Speaker 04

  Was the resident.

• 2:15:34Danny Jones?

  Can you explain that whole story?

• 2:15:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that the whole story is that I had. So Leonard Kille was this really gifted, self-taught engineer in who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but from a like a working class family, he briefly was in the military. He had some sort of like, he was also raised in a part time in an orphanage because his mother couldn't afford to keep him and his siblings at home. So he was possibly exposed to abuse when he was a kid at this. Church where the orphanage was. But at any rate, he became incredibly successful, especially for someone who didn't have a PhD. He was one of the inventors of, at Polaroid of patents for their optical,

• 2:16:20Speaker 04

  for optical devices that were essential for their Instamatic cameras.

• 2:16:23Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:24Speaker 04

  And he also worked for many defense, prominent defense industry uh, companies at the time, and so in the sixties. So he was, his fam- you know, his mother was really proud of him. He started, he got married to his childhood sweetheart and they started to have a large family. And he got, um, he was flying around the world too, sometimes overseeing, um, he was instrumental in inventing the triggers for nuclear bombs, test bombs.

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:16:54Speaker 04

  Cause he, you know, the optical aspect of them. And he, he, uh, anyway, he was troubled by that and he ended up quitting the defense work, but he wa- he ended up at Polaroid. At any rate, he was starting to have, um, as his family grew and as he was experiencing men- uh, marriage, marriage difficulties, he was also in a car accident. Anyway, he had like the normal run of, it seems like he had the normal run of stresses. He's, he also worried that his wife was having an affair with, uh, the border who had come to live with him to save some money. At any rate, they went to, they went for therapy. The, um, one of his doctors was, uh,

• 2:17:36Speaker 04

  recommended that he check himself in to, uh, to Mass General Hospital where there was a violence unit. And this was actually ultimately possibly connected. Well, at any rate, it was possibly-

• 2:17:47Danny Jones?

  Violence unit.

• 2:17:48Speaker 04

  A violence unit. It was an experimental unit that was being, uh, set up by two doctors named, uh, Frank, Frank Irvin and Vernon Mark. And Vernon Marks was a neurologist who was a psychosurgeon. And Frank Irvin was a psychiatrist or psychologist who, and they were both interested in whether violence could be controlled. Cause so this guy Leonard Kille, he was, he had these arguments with his wife and there were, there were allegations possibly that he was, he was very temperamental. So his therapist thought that, you know, maybe he'd be a candidate for- Brain implants that would quell his violence and they were very. So there's kind of like, there was later a lawsuit which alleged that he was not, these

• 2:18:32Speaker 04

  were not necessary treatments and that he was actually an experimental subject or a guinea pig. But at any rate, he was, um, he was, he agreed because his wife said if, if she, if he didn't undergo this treatment, she would divorce him. Uh, he, he accepted, you know, these, uh, temporary implants initially and the implants were put in his amygdala. There were many theories at the time that the amygdala is the seat of violence. So there's, uh, an array of, uh, electrodes implanted in his amygdala, uh, and his head was stabilized with this stereotactic device, which looks very torturous, but it is actually sort of state of the art at the time.

• 2:19:12Danny Jones?

  Steve, can you find photos?

• 2:19:13Speaker 04

  And they, um, they would stimulate different parts of his brain and when they, of the amygdala, and when he responded, he would say things like, I feel like I'm floating on a cloud. I feel bliss. And, or, you know, I feel, you know, or he would seem to get really angry. So they wanted to find those spots that triggered anger. And ultimately, so I'll, I won't jump ahead, but basically they found those spots and they, and they got him to agree to consent to a permanent operation of, you know, that would, uh, sever or, uh, surgically cauterize those parts of his brain from firing. So hopefully he would become less violent. But the thing is they got him to sign the consent form

• 2:19:57Speaker 04

  while he was in a state of bliss, while his brain was being stimulated in the other area. So this was one thing his family later brought up in the lawsuit. At any rate, these two doctors carried out the operation and Kyle was never the same. He was never able to work again and he began, he became paranoid. He became convinced that doctors from MIT and Harvard were pursuing him. He fled across the country to try to. See his mother who lived in California and he was found wandering around in a parking lot in a dazed state and the police rounded him up and he said, no, I'm the inventor. I'm an important engineer. I invented these patents and it was actually true. He just seemed like a madman and he never recovered, but he just continued to have these delusions

• 2:20:40Speaker 04

  that he was in a science fiction story. And it turns out that actually one of his, the assistant to doctors Mark and Irvin was Michael Crichton, who was a Harvard medical student at the time.

• 2:20:52Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:20:53Speaker 04

  And Michael Crichton ended up writing The Terminal Man about him. And you know, if you read The Terminal Man, you'll see that the doctor's initials are M and E for Mark and Irvin, but he just changes their name.

• 2:21:05Danny Jones?

  Oh my God. So he wasn't delusional?

• 2:21:07Speaker 04

  He was paranoid, even, yeah, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean it's not happening.

• 2:21:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:21:14Speaker 04

  He was both like in incredible pain. And then his wife did end up going on and marrying the border in the house.

• 2:21:20Danny Jones?

  So she was having an affair?

• 2:21:21Speaker 04

  Well, maybe not at the time, but maybe there was flirtation or something. We don't, we don't know. But I've actually been in contact with a couple of his grandchildren who, and they're very, you know, have become interested in the story because they never knew about it. They just thought the border was their grandfather.

• 2:21:38Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. Oh, my God.

• 2:21:41Speaker 05

  Is this him? I'm unsure.

• 2:21:42Speaker 04

  I don't think that's him.

• 2:21:43Danny Jones?

  This is Neuralink. Neuralink goes around implant.

• 2:21:46Speaker 04

  So, okay, so that might be Leonard Kille, but it might not be Kyle.

• 2:21:49Speaker 05

  I only found one actual image of him. He's kind of hard to find. He doesn't exist on Google. He is, there's an article.

• 2:21:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting. What was that photo of, though?

• 2:22:00Speaker 04

  That might have been someone who res- so.

• 2:22:02Speaker 05

  There it is.

• 2:22:03Speaker 04

  These, Mark and Irvin, so Frank Irvin, ultimately, there was, when the lawsuit happened, Irvin was summoned to court, both of them, and they were eventually exonerated, but there was such a scandal in Massachusetts that Irvin took a job at UCLA and guess who his boss was? Louis Jolyne West.

• 2:22:22Danny Jones?

  Louis Jolyne West.

• 2:22:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was one of the first people who came aboard when the violence center was being planned.

• 2:22:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:22:33Speaker 04

  So so later, you know, his mother talked about how she thought the CIA was involved, but there's no, this hasn't been proven.

• 2:22:42Danny Jones?

  Have you heard the story about the guy who's the most studied man in brain science? He was a guy who he had an operation. I think he he had some sort of a traumatic brain injury where something happened and he was, I think he was developing epilepsy or something like this. He was having really bad seizures and having like, as he was getting older, his epilepsy kept getting really, really bad. So he agreed to do some experimental brain surgery where they removed a certain part of his brain. And when he recovered, they realized it completely wiped out his short term memory. So every single day he would wake up and it would be the same day again, like he would have no memory of the

• 2:23:22Danny Jones?

  day before. But he had specific long term memory. And this sort of debunked the myth that they thought like memory was stored in the whole brain. So apparently like this was, what they deduced from this was that like, different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. And then there was this other lady who took him in and like got him, did all these other studies on him throughout his life and wrote all this stuff on him. And it was fascinating. It was in this book, this book called Moonwalking with Einstein, all about memory. Have you heard of that?

• 2:23:57Speaker 04

  I have.

• 2:23:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:24:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 2:24:01Speaker 04

  Well, one fascination with this type of psychosurgery is that not not Kyle, but another patient who was called Julia in the records, she received the same implants.

• 2:24:17Speaker 04

  But she but it was remotely controlled. And these were a special device that this scientist named Delgado had come up with.

• 2:24:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with that.

• 2:24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he he worked.

• 2:24:29Danny Jones?

  The the bull thing, right?

• 2:24:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, he did the bull thing. And he worked with Mark and Irvin. They co published articles together about the stimocere. So Julia, I mean, Leonard Kille didn't receive this demo sever. In other words, they couldn't remotely control him, but it did seem that their interest was in violence, triggers and remote control. And that with this young woman who was nineteen, they did achieve that and they wrote, there was actually an article in Life magazine about it.

• 2:24:57Danny Jones?

  What did they do to her?

• 2:24:59Speaker 04

  Well, they just, um, so she had, she was, uh, violent, like episodically, rarely, but episodically.

• 2:25:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:09Speaker 04

  And so, um, her family, you know, allowed this to be done and she was apparently, when she wasn't violent, she was a mild mannered, lovely, beautiful young woman who played the guitar.

• 2:25:22Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:25:23Speaker 04

  And she came from a suburb of Boston or something like that. And after, so they show her, there are photographs of her in the article in Life, but she, um, they showed how she would, they could stimulate her brain and she would fly into a rage and they, and there's a photograph of her throwing herself at the wall.

• 2:25:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:25:41Speaker 04

  And it's just blurry because she's throwing herself with such force. And then they have another photograph of, and she's wearing this demo sever and her head's all bandaged.

• 2:25:49Danny Jones?

  Ah.

• 2:25:50Speaker 04

  And she's playing the guitar. It's a really horrifying article, um, which is hard to find online because it's not available in the Google archives. But at any rate, she apparently never recovered fully. I mean, not at all. She didn't really recover at all, but, um.

• 2:26:07Danny Jones?

  Have you heard of the story of when there was an experiment done, I think back around this time, when they were trying to like figure out how to communicate? I think this was part of like the animal, human animal communication stuff, where they were trying to get like a monkey to communicate with a girl. And I think they put them in like a, a room together and then, and then the monkey ended just like tearing the girl to bits.

• 2:26:31Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 2:26:32Danny Jones?

  Like ripping her apart.

• 2:26:33Speaker 04

  Oh, no. Was this one of the terrible series of experiments that were in the seventies? When people tried to raise chimps as their, as children?

• 2:26:41Danny Jones?

  No, this wasn't a part of that. This was something different. This is what we talked about, Stephen. Oh, I don't know if you did that one podcast, but it was, um, with, uh, Len Bear and, uh, Robert Duncan.

• 2:26:53Danny Jones?

  And Robert Duncan was a Harvard professor who had a background in studying this kind of stuff. And Len Bear, he was this guy who suffered from this Havana syndrome type thing where he was getting like, he was like, the, apparently there was this voice of God weapon that was developed or theorized about. And he said, he seemed to believe, and I think this is still happening to him, where he's getting like, voices beamed into his mind, where he's hearing things, like he's hearing his family members telling him like, negative things all the time. And he can't control it. And

• 2:27:34Speaker 04

  That, I don't know about that. But there is a case of, this is something I wrote an article about, but Ewan Cameron did experiment. He was, he was funded by MKUltra, but he would have done these anyway. But he experiment, he was a psychiatrist who experimented with, he called it psychic driving, implanting voices in people's heads. Or he would, he would do therapy with them and he would find a particular phrase or something the parent had said that was very upsetting, or, or healing. But, and then he would record it on a tape recorded loop. And then he would implant it in people's pillows or on my, you know, headphones they couldn't take off. And then he would force them to listen to it for weeks, and sometimes

• 2:28:19Speaker 04

  dosing them with LSD, sometimes putting them in a prolonged sleep. He called that psychic driving. But it's, it's, it sounds like a, it's, it's an extreme nightmare. And actually, the lawsuits of some of the family members and are still going on today.

• 2:28:35Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, this, so this guy, Len Bear, he, he experiences these things in his, in his brain all the time, all day. And he took a trip to the, that observatory, or there's like some sort of big area in Virginia, it's like a dead zone, where there's no radio signals there, there can't be any radio signals, because it will, it will affect their, I always forget the name of this place in Virginia, where it's like a, it's like a radio, radio wave dead zone. He went there and then all his symptoms disappeared.

• 2:29:04Speaker 04

  Really?

• 2:29:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Super interesting. Like, what, like, maybe it has something to do, to do with radio waves or something like this? I don't know.

• 2:29:11Speaker 04

  Or you could say, maybe he, well, who knows?

• 2:29:14Speaker 05

  Radio quiet zone.

• 2:29:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16Speaker 04

  Maybe he also believed it would go away there.

• 2:29:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:21Speaker 04

  Hard to tell.

• 2:29:22Danny Jones?

  And then like, as far as like the brain chips, um, another thing Annie Jacobson described in one of her books was that DARPA was working on, uh, Neuralink type devices, like neural neural implants for soldiers to where they would be able to, uh, override pain and hunger and fatigue to where they could basically create super soldiers that could stay out, uh, on the battlefield longer and, uh, not be burdened by, you know, things like fatigue or not, not get tired. They could go days and days without sleeping. And this was in the nineties, uh, when they were allegedly working on this stuff. And now today, you know, is, you know, finally we have things like Neuralink coming out for consumers to be able to use.

• 2:30:05Danny Jones?

  Which is fascinating, you know, the stuff that they're working on seems to be 20 years ahead of what we see in the public.

• 2:30:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, the brain computer interface.

• 2:30:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:13Speaker 04

  I guess. And of course there's a longer history too of soldiers and, you know, use of various substances to make them

• 2:30:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:22Speaker 04

  more, what is it, durable?

• 2:30:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's a, there was a grant that was given to the University of North Carolina,

• 2:30:30Danny Jones?

  by DARPA to study psychedelics for soldiers and to study like how to take, figure out how to take the psychedelic trip out of psychedelics to be able to, so soldiers could get the benefits of psychedelics for things like PTSD. Without having to, without having to go through the hallucination or psychedelic trip of it. Yeah, this was very recent. I think it's still going on now. And, um, even in the Ukraine war, what they're doing is they're, they're bringing them ibogaine for the Ukrainian soldiers to help them sort of, you know, after they get off the battlefield, to give them ibogaine, get them through the trauma, get them to like, like process it all and get back out on the battlefield sooner. So they can, you know, rinse and repeat and get people out there and keep the fighting force strong.

• 2:31:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:31:15Danny Jones?

  And also I think it's being able, it's being either, what I think the reason they're trying to take, I don't know, this is like my speculation conjecture, is that if they are trying to figure out how to take the trip out of these psychedelics, can they give soldiers these drugs to where they're not hallucinating? This is the study of 27 million dollar, uh, project to create psychedelic inspired psychedelic, uh, psychi- psychi- psych- psychiatric drugs without the trip. Yeah, this is it. It was a-

• 2:31:43Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 2:31:44Danny Jones?

  What's the guy's name again? What's that guy's name? The, the head of that department?

• 2:31:51Speaker 04

  Brian Roth.

• 2:31:51Danny Jones?

  Brian Roth, that's who it was.

• 2:31:52Speaker 04

  University of North. Well, that's interesting.

• 2:31:56Danny Jones?

  So I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to figure out how they give soldiers psychedelic drugs to make them more optimal in combat, right?

• 2:32:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32:04Danny Jones?

  To, because I know that stuff gives you better edge detection, uh, better depth perception. Uh, who, who knows, you know, what kind of benefits these people can get from these drugs?

• 2:32:15Speaker 04

  I suppose also it could be also use, I mean, they're well known to be effective, seemingly effective in curing, uh, trauma from the battlefield. So it would, uh, it's kind of a double edged sword because even if, if they are effective, they could also, if, if employed at scale in certain ways, you could then re, put the soldiers back on the battlefield faster, which from the point of view of the military, that would be of value, but also people do seem to find it effective to, so there's both healing and maybe there are, it seems like psychedelics have proven not very unreliable in the sense of enhancing, uh, war, uh, the ability to fight because, you know, there's famous,

• 2:33:00Speaker 04

  films and studies and soldiers where they're like wandering off. Yeah, that's weird. Americans also just, you know, you just no longer see the necessity to march in formation or not to go look at a butterfly or something.

• 2:33:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:13Speaker 04

  But, um, so they're, they're quite disorganized and their effects are unpredictable, but it is really interesting to think about just, I just took a course on the history of psychedelics at the University of Amsterdam. It was very interesting. Well, just a short course, but,

• 2:33:28Speaker 04

  you know, if you, if you go back to the introduction of psilocybin into the US, um, from this Maria Sabina, uh, who was a kind of a curandera shaman, uh, figure in Oaxaca. She, she really saw them as healing, healing, uh, children almost. She saw them as her, as her kin. And she initially didn't want them moved or taken and.

• 2:33:56Speaker 04

  Um, this whole long her, her life story is really interesting. Uh, because her, then people started to make pilgrimages in the sixties to meet her and everything changed, but, but, um, but then these, these, it, it did leave and, and it's sort of, uh, taken out of context and not necessarily used for healing, but used more for spiritual insight or transformation or things like that. She, she thought of it more as like specifically when you have an ailment or you're, you know, something like she was a doctor, essentially. But she also to some degree was happy, I think, that they proved to continue to be effective. I mean, I think it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing.

• 2:34:40Speaker 04

  In other words, I'm getting back to the point of taking away the psychedelic effects to de psychedelicize these drugs seems so, um, well, it's predictable, maybe that people would want to, but it seems like, uh, you know, could be put to all sorts of uses.

• 2:34:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. It seems like, um, there's all sorts of different organizations that are trying to use psychedelics to push their, whatever they're trying to do, right? They're trying to use psychedelics to their own benefit, right? There's, uh, obviously there's the military industrial complex that's using psychedelics. There's certain aspects of medicine that are trying to push psychedelics to, to a degree. I mean, you, obviously you have, um, there, there's lots of pharmaceutical companies that have historically been lobbying to keep, uh, psychedelic drugs illegal and keeping them classified as whatever schedule they are so that they can't be used recreationally

• 2:35:41Danny Jones?

  or can't be prescribed these things because it obviously takes away from their bottom line unless they can take it and, and, and patent it and make money off of it.

• 2:35:52Danny Jones?

  But then there's also like, there's this push to, there's been all kinds of studies. There was a study that was done by John Hopkins where they took spiritual leaders from different religious groups and they gave them all psilocybin and they sort of like documented their trips and, and how their psychedelic trips mapped according to their spiritual beliefs, right? Like if it gave them any sort of a, uh, did it reinforce their belief of God or did it show them something else that was counterintuitive to what their beliefs were? And I haven't read the full study, but, um,

• 2:36:31Speaker 04

  But it's recent.

• 2:36:32Danny Jones?

  It's, it's, it was done, I think it was done in the early 2000s, but the findings never came out, they buried it.

• 2:36:40Danny Jones?

  And I, I think what it, what it did was it just reinforced the beliefs that they already had, you know, and that's some of the people, some of the psychedelic experts speculate that this stuff, all these psychedelics are doing is just making you more of what you already are, they aren't necessarily changing anything, they can be used as a tool, but the, the drugs themselves are, are neutral, right? It's just gonna, it's just gonna reinforce whatever you, whatever you already believe, whatever your values are. I don't think it like will fundamentally change you as a human being, but I mean, obviously it can be used as a weapon and a tool to, with things like MKUltra to do nefarious stuff. And there's a push to incorporate them into churches.

• 2:37:24Danny Jones?

  There, there's a, a push to, there was this book called The Immortality Key.

• 2:37:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37:31Danny Jones?

  Where they were, uh, he was basically doing an exploration on the hallucinian mysteries and he was trying to make the case that hallucinian mysteries were being used. These people were all taking ergot, which allegedly can give you a psychedelic experience. And, um, this was the foundation of Christianity and we should, we should use, the case that this book was making was that we should use psychedelics to bring back.

• 2:37:59Danny Jones?

  Religion in our country and sort of revive Christianity.

• 2:38:05Danny Jones?

  And, you know, one of the dangerous things about that idea, I think, is when you give a church leader or a church father, the legal access to psychedelics to be able to be the one that's administering them to people that are going to church, who are coming there for answers, right? And the people that are leading these churches, these pastors or whatever, they believe that they have the voice of God, they have the direct line to God. Now you're giving these people psychedelics.

• 2:38:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:38:36Danny Jones?

  And you're telling them what God is telling you.

• 2:38:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:38:43Danny Jones?

  Like, these people are probably already vulnerable to an extent. Like, I could imagine that could be a very slippery slope and that could slide into something bad.

• 2:38:50Speaker 04

  That is one of the areas I'm hoping to investigate next year is this question of the finding that psychedelics can, I mean, one at least claim in a classic, in a recent paper is that suggestibility is enhanced.

• 2:39:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:05Speaker 04

  Psychedelics, and this can be, I guess, profound for people because they can be, they feel transformed even if it's within a certain context, or maybe it's shaped by their own religious or their own, you know, their own, their own reality tunnel. But, but that perhaps suggestibility can also be abused, if that's even the right word.

• 2:39:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:27Speaker 04

  If that's even the right way to describe it, so.

• 2:39:29Danny Jones?

  Have you ever heard the story of Mary Pinchot Meyer?

• 2:39:32Speaker 04

  I have, but it's been a little while.

• 2:39:34Danny Jones?

  It's fascinating. But so she allegedly, she went to Timothy Leary and she told him, "Hey, I have a friend who's very, very powerful, who wants to try LSD. Can you get me some? I can't tell you who he is, but we're gonna go meet with him and you're gonna walk him through the psychedelic trip with using LSD or whatever. And I can't tell you who he is, I'm just gonna take you there."

• 2:39:58Danny Jones?

  And um, and she, she, there's a book all about this. And um, she allegedly had an affair with John F. Kennedy. So the speculation is that this was John F. Kennedy that she was trying to give LSD to. And because he really was interested in it.

• 2:40:14Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:40:14Danny Jones?

  And um, this was like, right before he canceled the Vietnam War and wanted to pull everybody out and wanted to like disarm, he wanted to nuclear disarm the America and the Soviet Union. He was getting on the phone with Khrushchev, trying to, trying to end this whole thing. And um, literally like, I think it was a couple of months after Kennedy was assassinated, she was assassinated on a run. Like, she was just like,

• 2:40:39Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:40:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think she was shot dead while she was on, on like, doing a jog or something in the middle of the day.

• 2:40:46Speaker 04

  I do remember hearing that.

• 2:40:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:47Speaker 04

  I mean, it's interesting because people are transformed by this, by LSD.

• 2:40:52Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:40:52Speaker 04

  Uh, in different ways, but in cer- there are certain, certain regularities in it. Like, to go back to MKUltra, not to endlessly talk about it, but they were all taking LSD too. So you could observe that their work had this kind of quality of, I mean, is pretty outrageous and outlandish. And their thinking probably was affected by their, by what they're taking. Also, like, an example is, um, what, you know, who was it? Who was talking about? Oh, David E. Smith, the founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. He was a pretty straight laced drug researcher until he took LSD. And then he had this idea, as he tells

• 2:41:34Speaker 04

  it, that he wanted to help people and bring medicine to drug addicts and things like that. So it does change people in, you know, even in these circles, even sometimes the scientists or the, you know?

• 2:41:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, a lot of these psychedelic studies, I think even this John Hopkins study, which is one of the reasons that the, the results got buried from it. Was because some of the donors were going there, participating in the studies themselves because they were personally interested in and the scientists that were doing the experiments were also taking it, doing the drugs and like hanging out and like it was becoming this sort of like weird sort of like hippie retreat for people that were wanting to take acid and they were all involved in it. And there's like this messianic complex that happens to these people where like, oh, this is going to save the world. This is going to make the world a better place. Like, we all have to do this.

• 2:42:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:27Danny Jones?

  And

• 2:42:27Speaker 04

  You see this

• 2:42:28Danny Jones?

  It gets messy.

• 2:42:30Speaker 04

  Someone you might want to talk to is a, we had someone visit our class in Amsterdam, who is a psychedelic chaplain. And I guess it's a common, it's fairly common. It's kind of a, a type of position. It's not a therapist. He's not a therapist, but someone with some religious training, but it doesn't necessarily matter what tradition, because what they, they're more like, um, guides who help you process, help a person who's had psychedelic assisted therapy, process whatever experiences they may have had in the, because often they may go in for, say, treatment resistant depression, but they end up having a profound experience, maybe that relates to their faith or their lack of faith. And a psychedelic

• 2:43:14Speaker 04

  chaplain is someone who's just good at talking them through that territory, not necessar- and sometimes maybe it's something they didn't practice, or they were, but they were raised in, or this experience had, you know, got them wondering or confused, or whatever it is. So a chaplain, I mean, the guy who came to our class was just really like a wonderful person. You could imagine he would be very good at helping people in such situations. So I got interested. I mean, I think that's a, they would be good people to talk to because they would know, uh, to what extent that seems to be happening, that people's experience either conforms to their pre-existing training, or whether it raises other kinds of questions,

• 2:43:55Speaker 04

  or it, whether it completely decimates your, you know, there are cases, depending also on the, what the person's been, been ingesting, uh, you know, they may, they may seem to have experiences that don't relate to their religious training at all.

• 2:44:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:44:13Speaker 04

  Like with DMT things.

• 2:44:15Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 2:44:16Speaker 04

  But I'm not an expert on that, but it's interesting.

• 2:44:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, it is very interesting. What, I mean,

• 2:44:23Danny Jones?

  It's fun to speculate, but do you have any idea or do you have any speculation as to what could possibly, what sort of version of NKUltra could be going on now?

• 2:44:35Speaker 04

  Hmm, um, I don't, I don't know. I mean, it would be hard to, I don't really, I just, maybe my imagination is failing me here.

• 2:44:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, just with your historical knowledge and all the, all of the research that you've done in this stuff, like, like, what would the most obvious?

• 2:44:55Speaker 04

  I mean, okay, one thing I've always been struck by is, is a CIA psychologist, it might have been John Gunninger, who said, "We failed to do the most dramatic things that we want." I mean, this is the kind of bottom line is most of our experiments were failed. We didn't create a Manchurian candidate. We didn't, you know, they could create what one called utter demoralization in a subject. You could really break somebody, but you couldn't necessarily build them up in the way you wanted or transform them in an exact direction or create someone who was, oh, their will was an extension of yours. But he said, "We have been actually successful in creating tiny bits of behavior change

• 2:45:37Speaker 04

  at a large scale." So you could get 70% of the population do something 10% more frequently. So like that kind of idea of nudging and, and seemingly insignificant, but tiny, you know, adjustments that you, I think, I would imagine that would be an area and that would seem to sync up with technology and maybe people's embedding ultimately kind of welcoming these devices so intimately into our lives, their connections to our, our unprocessed emotional.

• 2:46:14Speaker 04

  You know, areas of vulnerability and then, you know, I, I don't know if people are so nefarious as to fund these and it's also, as you said, it's a difficult environment to fund secretly. It's much more difficult maybe than it used to be, but I don't know.

• 2:46:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And was, um, was Ted Kaczynski's stuff, was that connected to MKUltra at all? The Harvard experiments that he was?

• 2:46:37Speaker 04

  Not that I, I don't think it's connected to MKUltra, but it is connected to, uh, Harry Murray, who was, uh, he did work for the OSS, but, but he wasn't, uh, I don't think he was like, by the time he was involved with, uh, he was basically, uh, I think, he was part of the OSS during World War II, testing, uh, testing personality, like how could you evaluate people who would become spies or, um, subversives, basically. So he used all, he's very, uh, he invented the thematic app perception test and other things, but he's later after World War II, and there, I don't have any evidence he was connected with the CIA at all, but he

• 2:47:20Speaker 04

  was interested in, and he experimented with Ted Kaczynski. He was interested in, um, what he had developed during the war was interrogation, uh, sort of putting people, interrogating people under stressful conditions and seeing if he could, if he could break them. And he had a number of different psychological conditions under which he would be able to evaluate them. And then later Kaczynski, and, uh, and I think he did do that sometimes when the person was administered LSD, whether unwittingly or wittingly, I'm not sure, but Kaczynski, I think that did happen to Kaczynski and he was really harmed by it, it seems.

• 2:48:01Danny Jones?

  And they were giving him LSD?

• 2:48:03Speaker 04

  Uh, this is what I remember from, I haven't seen the records myself from those, uh, and the, uh, The psychological clinic, I think, that he was a part of, and later he was associated with the Department of Social Relations.

• 2:48:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:48:19Speaker 04

  You know, it's hard to get those records now, but there is a book by, there's a book about it.

• 2:48:23Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:48:24Speaker 04

  Uh, that's pretty good research called Harvard and the Unabomber.

• 2:48:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.

• 2:48:31Speaker 04

  But I have done a lot of research on Henry Murray, just aside from that, so I kind of know his interests.

• 2:48:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's fascinating stuff, something I always think about. I always wonder what, what, what could they possibly be doing now, you know, like maybe we'll, maybe we'll find out in 50 years, but probably not.

• 2:48:48Speaker 04

  I mean, one thing is that people don't keep the kind of records they used to keep.

• 2:48:51Danny Jones?

  That's true.

• 2:48:52Speaker 04

  We probably won't.

• 2:48:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's true. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for doing this. I, I really enjoyed talking to you. What, what's, uh, what's the name of your book?

• 2:49:00Speaker 04

  It's called

• 2:49:01Danny Jones?

  Find it.

• 2:49:01Speaker 04

  The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper Persuasion.

• 2:49:05Danny Jones?

  Beautiful. Oh, look at that. There we go.

• 2:49:07Speaker 04

  It was great to talk to you, too.

• 2:49:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we'll link this below for everyone. And is there anything else, like a website anyone, anywhere people can go to, to learn more, uh, contact you or anything?

• 2:49:15Speaker 04

  Building a website under my name, so just rebeccalemov.com.

• 2:49:19Danny Jones?

  Perfect. All right.

• 2:49:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks.

• 2:49:22Danny Jones?

  Thanks again. I really appreciate it. What do we, oh, we got Patreon stuff?

• 2:49:24Speaker 05

  We do.

• 2:49:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, we have a couple Patreon questions for you, but this is, this will be after, we'll, we'll wrap up the podcast now, and then, uh, if you don't mind, we'll answer a couple Patreon questions. All right, that's all. Good night, everybody.

• 2:49:35Speaker 00

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