Oh, Sophie, come on, this is it. This is a time to celebrate. This is the longest recording session we've ever had, five hours of c I A drug nonsense. Here it behind the bastards. The people deserved to hear me sing. You know, I thought, thank you, thank you for praising me. I am lives on praise. Jason Pargeon,
how are you doing today? Well, the the vibe has become so positive here and I'm sure it is among the listeners too, because we now know that we're nearing the end of the mk ulture project when everyone was exposed and got what they deserved. Like it's been a parade of human misery up till now that all of the people who instigated this, like we all know, well yeah, but this is where they all go to jail. This is where the truth comes to light, where all the
reef forms come into play. So I know it's been a dark few episodes up to this point, but this is where it's like, Okay, this is the sunrise, this is the happy ending. That's right, And and listeners, if that doesn't wind up happening, I want to tell you it is Jason Pargeon's fault. Personally that thanks in that way. Jason. Before we move on, I want to let the listeners know you are the author of a whole bunch of books, but you have one that is just now coming out.
If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. It is the fourth novel in the John Dyes at the End series, which I started reading when I was like twelve or thirteen and has had a big impact on my sense of humor. So I cannot recommend your books enough. Um, you're ready to ready to close this out? Jason, Yes, absolutely, all right, let's do it so in between Trists and San Francisco, UM making use of all of the sex
workers that the CIA was paying for. UM. Gottlieb massively expanded the CIA a subcontractor program during the late nineteen fifties, using cutouts, these little fake corporations that he would have the agency set up create to sponsor research at a number of different institutions that you probably know today. These include Massachusetts General Hospital, Ionia State Hospital, Mount Sinai, several dozen universities including Harvard, Berkeley, m I T, Stanford, and Baylor. UM.
The CIA is carrying out l D tests. They are drugging people, torturing people, deep patterning them at many of these different universities. Also, there's sometimes doing weirder stuff, some of which is less horrible than some of the stuff we've talked about today. But like if there's a big hospital or a prominent university, the CIA was probably doing some ship there. Um, Okay, obvious questions, did these facilities know?
Do these institutions know what was going on? The the the employees of those institutions who are running the programs to right these are not The CIA isn't sending agents into Berkeley or like Baylor to to run things they are. They are finding doctors and professors who want to carry out research that is in line with what the CIA
wants to do, and they are paying those people. Now, some of those professors, those researchers don't know what's the CIA, and some of this research is stuff that isn't all that fucked up. It's like, hey, we want to know, you know how this um this particular pattern of electroshock therapy might impact people with this you know condition, and then they'll do the test and you never know. You go the rest of your life not knowing that You just conducted research for the CIA. Right, that is some
of this, but it's not most of this. A lot of these doctors are perfectly aware of what they're doing and who they're working for, as we're going to make clear in a little bit. Um. So, Gottlei's objectives at this point have spread well beyond where things were with Project Artichoke. Um. During long sessions on LSD with his friends, he gradually put together a list of the different substances he wanted to research. He publicly this is a memo
in nineteen fifty five. It included number one substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public. Number two substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception. Number three materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effective alcohol. Number four materials which will promote the intoxicating effective alcohol. Um. Yeah, let's just think of how such an invention would change
the world. You can get drunk on so much? Will it be cheaper? Like? Can you imagine if just one beer could get you as drunk as twelve beers? I can imagine Jason, like in the movie version of this, gott Lee like looking over as they're as they're taking
the program apart. They're burning all everything. He like operations stronger alcohol and like files it away along with these like last couple of cans that you see gradually like make their way through The CIA is like underground labs until they wind up on the shelves of a bodega in New York City, packaged as for Logo. Yes, operation
for Loco, the CIA is greatest success. So we have been going through San Francisco and slipping cans of four Loco too, unbeknownst to the residents there, and observing their behavior. It's almost like they've had three beers. It's incredible, Sydney,
you've done it again. So got Leave's wish list included substances that would enhance the efficacy of hypnosis, drugs that could help people avoid brainwashing, substances that could create pure euphoria with no crash, which sounds like he just wanted something to get high on. And here's where things get sketchy, Jason. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become a dependent upon
another person is enhanced. So it's a weird mix of things. Um, that one's pretty scary, but I'm not hearing in there is the classic Manchurian candidate thing. And by the way,
I don't does everybody listening still know that term? Like there this is an old movie that we're referencing that's been remade a couple of times, but it's the classic thing of it's the brainwashed assassin, the person who doesn't know they're an assassin, where you can literally program someone I guess, like Arl Schwarzenegerant told recalled, like go assassinate somebody, and then there's like a phrase it will activate them and and like a zombie like form, they will pick
up a gun and go shoot the queen or the president or whatever. And it's important to note, Jason, I kind of I probably should have made this more of
a factor in the script. The book The man charryan candidate and like the movie have a big impact on this program a lot of Like when that comes out, it gets them like another wave of interest, and like Dullis or I think I'm not sure if Dullis is around with them, but like they and this is like a regular thing for the CIA, because Leab the thing he does after him k Ultra is he's the CIA's gadget man for years, He's making anything they need, and a lot of times someone will come to him because
they've seen something in a James Bond movie and will just be like, Hey, Sydney, can we actually like make this, Like, Sydney, can you put a gun in like a Rolex watch for me? Hey, Sydney, can we like bulletproof a car like this? You know? Like that's actually how a lot of this does this? This does work, um, you know, and that actually he is much more successful at the gadgets than he is at the mind control drugs, which again,
as far as we know, he probably doesn't figure out. Um. Obviously, a lot of this is the result of Gottlieb having a limitless budget for research and kind of an unlimited purview for what he can do. His friends and he would regularly read science fiction stories and spy thrillers, and then they'd fund experiments to try and create things inspired
by the fiction they were reading. This sometimes led to tragedy, like the time the CIA funded a study at a school in Massachusetts to feed mentally handicapped children's serial relaced with your um. Um, that's pretty bad. That's a that's a pretty bad thing to do. Say that sentence again. The CIA funded a study at a school in Massachusetts to feed mentally handicapped children serial laced with uranium to
what end. Well, that's a good question, Jason. The official purpose of the study, which was also conducted at Harvard again on mentally handicapped little kids, was to study whether or not cereal interfered with iron and calcium uptake in children. Like that is the official story. We don't know why the CIA would particularly be interested in doing that. They may have had a different reason for doing it than that, and then come up with an excuse. We really don't know, um.
And the only way to find out this thing they wanted to know about cereal uranium feed them radioactive serial. Okay, Yeah, there's versions of this that are normal, where like people will be given you know, radio active in like a way that is not going to be harmful because it like allows you to tell how stuff is passing through your system. I'm not it's it's higher contrast image. It's so yeah, so that it can be okay, but this
does this was much more harmful than that. And again it's possible that, for whatever reason, Gottlieb actually did just want to know does serial hurt iron and calcium uptake? But it's one of those things. These were studies that were conducted openly by the schools. It was later that people found out the CIA was like helping to make it happen, and we don't. We simply don't know exactly why they were involved. Um So that's cool. You can come up with your own conspiracy theories about that one.
Um Alan Dules remained peripherally involved, treating MK Ultra like an occasional pet project. Sometimes he took it rather more seriously. When his son suffered a severe head injury fighting in Korea, he started talking to specialists at psychiatric clinics. This brought him to a neurologist named Harold Wolf who worked at Cornell and I'm gonna quote from Kinser's Poisoner in Chief here. Wolf shared Doulus's fascination with the idea of mind control.
He had developed a theory woven from various disciplines that a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation could wipe the mind clean and then open it to reprogramming. He called this human ecology. Delis thought that Wolf might be useful to the CIA and sent him to Gotleap. Wolf was eager for CIA sponsorship. He wrote several research proposals for Gotleap.
In one, he proposed placing people in isolation chambers until they became receptive to the suggestions of the psychotherapist, showed an increased desire to talk and to escape from the procedure, and broke down to the point where doctors could create
psychological reactions within them. In another, he offered to test special methods of interrogation, including threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, black psychiatry, hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents. Now, if you're a psychia wrist and you are offering to do something and you call it black psychiatry, maybe you're the bad guy, right that might want that
might be your hint. Um. Yeah. And the funny thing is, of all the things that scientology claims, yeah, the stuff about the dark origins of psychiatry is the one thing where they do have something that there's not nothing to it, right, Yeah, it is there. They do not it's not it is. It is not unfair to say that an awful lot of influential psychiatrists did unspeakable things as part of a government conspiracy to create mind control. That is a thing
that happened, that is documented, that is historical fact. It was was maybe a little too easy to find people who were like, yeah, of course I'll do this for the country, right, sure, of course, yeah for America. UM. So Wolfe told Gottlieb that he had a constant supply of patients who he'd be happy to experiment on secretly
for the c I a UM. Gottlieb was very happy to make this deal, and the CIA sent a hundred and forty thou dollars to Cornell University officially so wolf could study quote changes in behavior due to stress brought about by actual loss of cerebral tissues. After a year or so of drugging people without their consent, wolf made a proposition to Gottlieb. If the CIA would fund his creation of an institute that would act as a funding hub for all of their in k ultra sub projects
um or he would let it. He would use it to act as a funding hub for all their sub projects. The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology carried out hundreds of sub projects for the agency. One involved a hundred Chinese refugees who were promised fellowships to help them start life in the United States. In reality, they were drugged to see if they could be programmed to go
back to China and commit acts of terrorism. So the book The man Charian Candidate is about a bunch of like Americans who get captured by the Chinese and then sent back to the United States having been secretly programmed to do, you know, damage the United States. In reality, the CIA read that book and then we're like, what if we did that to China, wouldn't that be cool. Let's use refugees and give them acid to see if we can do this. Um, So that's neat. Jason, there
you go. I have no no, I have nothing to say to that, because again, if they had just gone to if they had just gone to this group or any group this is not specific to you know, Chinese refugees, but any group of desperate people and said hey, this is what we in America call a suitcase full of cash, which one of you in exchange for this hates your government enough that you will go blow something up and you will be You'll have this and this this, you
see this sports car park behind me, that will also be yours. Uh in all of these sex workers and we've we've hired Yeah well yeah, I mean, like again, you could appeal to like, yeah, do you want do you want to be rich and like have access to sex, or like, hey, you're probably gonna die doing this, but we'll make sure your family has taken care of forever. They'll move into a nice house tomorrow, they'll never have to work again. Just go do this terrorism for us
over in China. Yeah, you'd find people. You don't have to give them l s D. It's not going to help. Yeah, yeah, like government again, governments have done versions of this forever um without randomly dosing refugees with LSD. But that's what the CIA does so well, and that's what Cornell University does. One of the things again, one of the through lines here is that an awful lot of the most prestigious universities have highly placed faculty who are immediately like, yeah,
let's do it um now. While mk ultras different subprojects were dizzying in their variety, the primary goal was always very clear to develop a repeatable, efficient method of mind control. This was expressed in various ways, the quest for a perfect truth serum, the quest for a drug that could eliminate memories or rewrite, the methods by which people could be reprogrammed to carry out actions against their old moral
beliefs in political allegiances. Right, there's different specific projects, but the overall goal is always the same, which is too endo the concept of free will by turning people into program bable machines. That's what they're trying to do, right, Like that's a fair description, Like when you're saying, we want to be able to like rewrite someone's memories and make them carry out a terrorist attack against their old government, Like,
that's kind of what you're saying. But I think that I think the listeners have the same confusion I do, because there is nothing that they've seen in terms of results up till now that we know about that has gotten them even one percent of the way to that. Because you're literally talking about having somebody carry out a complex series of instructions, including being able to improvise on the fly things that are highly motivated, highly trained person
would do and doing it entirely against their will. When the closest they've gotten up to up to now is is what it's just people going crazy, people having seizures. People like one guy we think maybe you know, went and robbed a liquor store. That it wasn't like they implanted that idea. Like they've been successful at making people go crazy. They've been successful at making people lose their memories,
lose basic function. But in terms of saying okay, we're now at a stage where we're ready to try this, We're ready to try to turn a human into a robot. It's like you have no data and no protocols or no anything that even is like the beginnings of like can we trick this person into preferring a different color of shoe? Like like like wherever you would start if you were actually using a scientific method of like building
up to this. You see I'm saying, it feels like they're taking almost like a child's idea of how this would work. It's like, Okay, we've given a bunch of drugs to a bunch of strangers. Um, we've given some radioactive stereal to some kids. I think now we're ready to take actual human beings see if we can program them to become super assessments. You know. It's one of those were we're building to kind of the the very murky story of what might be their greatest success. We
don't know. But I think one of the things that's going on here, and one of the things that's in the background of all of this, is the Manhattan Project, right, which is a a thing that would have seemed impossible ten years earlier. Right, that you can make something like an atomic bomb, that you can split an atom, and that you can you know, create nuclear power from this as well, not just the weapon like it all is this absolute sci fi thing that barely when they started
researching it. They put a shipload of money and time into the Manhattan Project before they knew it was going to work. Right, The c i A. Sees this project the goal of perfect mind control at is a Manhattan Project. Historian Alfred McCoy refers to it as a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind. Right, that's how they're thinking about it.
So the fact that it's hard, and that they're not having early success, and that they're they're they're burning up this much money and all of these human beings to do it. To people who are thinking about this as a Manhattan Project style thing, it's not weird to them, right, um, you know that is that is how they're thinking about this. Dr Cameron's work in d patterning people over at McGill University is a really good example of like the scope
of ambition of this project. And a paper that Cameron published at the start of his work for the CIA, he said this about the goal of his research. Quote, if we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs. And that's a very prosaic way of saying we can eliminate types of human
being and types of thought from the species. Right, that's the ambition here, right. And brainwashing someone in terms of like sending them to a camp to make them, you know, like if they've expressed anti government attitudes and you've got a method. You know, they have this in North Korea, they have this all over the world where you can send them off and then it's basically you you torture them in various ways until they learn not to say
anything bad about the government. I don't think you've successfully changed anybody's attitude. You've changed their willingness to it's like, I don't want to come back here, so yes, I'll
say whatever you want me to say. It's just that I guess they would say sameything about the mainhand project, that like they screwed around with so many different things and then finally they had a bomb, and if for us it's going to be the same thing, like we're gonna keep trying stuff with throwing stuff at the wall, and then we're gonna come them across a compound or a treatment or a protocol that is going to give
us Like it's just gonna happen. It's like it's gonna be like our our test in the desert where the first time they see the bomb glop, we're going to get that perfect. It's just it feels like everything they've done after this point hasn't been building toward anything. It doesn't feel like they're any more sophisticated in their methods this many years into it than they were when they first started. I will say one thing about that they
are they do start using more outside scientists. And these scientists they're not doing what White was doing, right, They are actually conducting They're not like pooping and and and watching this stuff. They're actually conducting experiments, um not ethical experiments. But and you can see the CIA once they're perfect
mind control drug. These doctors see it as like, well, if I can create, if if I can find this drug they want, I can just tell people to stop being schizophrenic or whatever, and then I'll be the man who cured schizophrenica. You know, That's how I think they're thinking about it. I think that's how a guy like Dr Cameron is thinking about it, is I can be the man who cured obsessive compulsive disorder, right, or cured whatever.
You know. To be clear, if you're a legitimate scientist or a doctor that deals with the brain or mental illness and this is where the funding is on this research, you absolutely want in on it, like I would absolutely in their position. It's like, yes, I'm also helping them develop a weapon, but yes, I also potentially have the cure for every bad thing that happens to the human brain. Yeah, I'm gonna this is where I need to be and
this is where the funding is. I get it now, granted when they sent me down for the meeting and they say, okay, here's what we've done so far. Have you heard of George White or that his name, Like, here's here's some of his work, and here's some of his results. You see his toilet there in his in his martini bar he has next to it. Now, this did not actually yield the results we wanted, um that we just wanted to show you. We wanted to bring you up to date. Yeah, this is the research so far.
Do you have any hints? I mean, And obviously most of these guys, there's a couple who get brought into confidence that way, most of them don't know what else has been done. They don't know even there's an MK that even the ones who are doing messed up stuff, they don't know that, like my program where I'm trying to break people's minds is part of this like massive thing they're doing in you know, all of these black
sites around the world. I'm they a lot of them probably think I'm the only one doing this research, right, and the CIA is the only one who will fund it and it's so important that you know, a number of things are happening here. Um, but yeah, it's it's I mean, the thing that's scariest to me is that stuff that Cameron says about like we we can free ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs that like because a lot of these guys, a lot of this is out
of anti communism, right. It's not not a thing that like we want a drug that we can give people to make them not be communists. Um, you know, and then maybe we can make them you know, double agents and stuff. But like the idea, the idea of wanting to like rewrite people's thoughts at that level, which is their expressed goal, is the scariest thing about this. And one of the things that's like most unsettling is we don't a dent know where the research ended. And this
brings me to the most unsettling story in the series. Jesus. Um. Yeah, but before we do that, you know what isn't unsettling the products and services who support this podcast, none of whom is looking for a way to destroy the concept. We know it cannot say that though they're not I said, they're not looking for a way to do that, Sophie. You can't. They're not as far as you know. I mean, we don't pick most of our sponsors and actually has advertised on this podcast. Um, so I don't know. Uh yes,
just like the CIA. Ah, we're back talking about the agency. So Jason, I promised you I'm going to tell you the most unsettling story in this series. Now, this is going to be kind of unclear. I do not have perfect answers to you as to what is going on. I'm going to try to read you the facts of this case as they exist, and then we will talk about what might have happened here. So this is the story of Dr Lewis Jolly and West. Jolly was his nickname.
He was the head of psychiatric services at Lackland Air Force Base for much of the nineteen fifties, and as you probably guessed, he was also a c I A asset. Born in nineteen twenty four, Jolly West, as his friends knew him, had enlisted in the Air Force for World War Two and retired as a colonel. He was a big, friendly man and when he left the flag, Jolly West, Jolly West, Baby. Yeah, he's a jolly man. He goes to Cornell to follow up on his fascination with different
methods of controlling the behavior of human beings. He wound up being one of the shrinks who worked with POW's captured in Korea. Right, you know those guys we talked about earlier who claimed to have dropped biological weapons, right that the CIA thinks they've been brainwashed. Jolly West is the guy that the psychiatrists the CIA brings into debrief them, right, and he succeeds in kind of quote unquote deep programming
those men. He gets them to renounce the claims they'd made while being captured, which he gets big kudos from the CIA for this. You might not You might say, well, that's not really that impressed if they were just like beaten until they said they dropped chemical weapons, and then he was like, hey, guys, you're in America now, you should probably tell people you didn't. Is maybe not the hardest thing in the world, right, but whatever, He gets
a lot of credit for d programming these guys. So thanks to letters between West and Gottlieb, which we acquired after West's death, we know that both men started working together in nineteen fifty three and I'm gonna quote now from the intercept addressing Gottlieb as SG West outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic
drugs and hypnosis. He began with a plan to discover the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects through hallus hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs, possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation or the alteration of the subset subjects recollection of the information he formerly knew. Another item proposed honing techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects or for inducing in them
specific mental disorders. He hoped to create careers who would carry a long and complex message imbreaded secretly in their minds, and to study the induction of trans like states by drugs. So he's not just wanting to make a mind. He wants to number one, induce mental illness and people. He wants to see if he can do that. He wants to create memories and destroy them. Um. He's he's interested in experimenting with all of that, and obviously Gottlieb is
completely on board with this. Um. In nineteen fifty six, West reported to Gotlieb that his experiment had come to fruition. In a paper titled the psycho Physiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility, he claimed to have discovered a replicable method of replacing true memories with false ones in human beings
without their knowledge. Quote. It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual, and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different fictional event actually did occur. West claimed to have accomplished this by giving patients new drugs, which ones was not specified
in the papers that we have. These drugs were apparently effective in quote speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and deepening the hypnotic trance. Specific information is again impossible to find here. The version of the study found in West's papers is longer and more detailed. This was found years after his death. He was not supposed to have
kept this a c the CIA before these. This version is found since a copy of this study to a Senate committee when they start investigating M. K Ultra, and the copy the CIA has is missing a bunch of stuff that's later found in the copy that's in Jolly West's memoires, right, like that's in his collection of stuff. Um So, the CIA's version of this that they actually send to that Senate committee cuts out any mention of West's claims to have found a way to replace real
memories with fake ones. And it also adds in a passage that's not in West's draft, which reads the effects of LSD and other drugs upon the production, maintenance and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied. Now we know that this is untrue, but that begs the question, what did Dr West actually find? Now We're not going to get an answer to that today, But I do have a story that is going to make you feel bad.
On July four, ninety four, in San Antonio, a three year old girl named share Joe Horton was raped and murdered. When her parents noticed her missing, they formed a search party. They eventually found her body next to a gravel pit alongside a shirtless man covered in blood and scratches. He was described as seeming dazed and in a trance like state. The man eventually charged with and convicted of chair Joe
Horton's murder was a guy named Jimmy Shaver. He was an airman at Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record. Shaver claimed no memory of the murder, and here's the intercept again. Around four that morning, an Air Force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn't drunk. One leader testified that he probably was not normal. He was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances. He was released to the
county jail and booked for rape and murder. Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn't recognize her. He gave his first statement at ten thirty a m adamant that another man was responsible. He could summon an image of a stranger with blonde hair and tattoos. After the Air Force marshal returned to the jail house, however, Shaver signed a second statement, taking full responsibility. Though he still didn't remember any thing, he
reasoned he must have done it. Two months later, AIRMoN Shaver still reported no memories of the murder. The commander of the base hospital ordered him evaluated. Said evaluation was performed by the head of psychiatric Services for Lackland, Dr Lewis Jolly and West. Shaver and West spent two weeks together the return to the scene of the crime, and West eventually hypnotized Shaver and injected him with sodium pentathal to clear his amnesia. Event Eventually, well drugged, Shaver recalled
remembering the act of murdering Horton. He told doctor West that the little girl had brought out repressed memories of his own cousin, who he said had molested him when he was a child. Later, Shaver took back this confession. Eventually, segments of West's drugged interview with Shaver were read into the court record. The doctor had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. Tell me about
when you took your clothes off, Jimmy, He'd said. The transcript of the interview, which survived among West's papers, also showed West trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories. Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before or after you took her clothes off? What did you do? I never did take her close off. Shaver said. The interview was divided into thirds and the middle third hadn't been recorded. When the transcript picked up, it said, Shaver
is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly. West asked, now you remember it all, don't you, Jimmy, yes, Sir Shava replied. So we don't know precisely what happened here.
We know that a young girl was murdered. We know that a guy who claimed no memory of the murder um confessed and then took back his confession, and then sat down with the guy who has claimed that he can create false memories and people and remove actual memories, and then temporarily comes forward and says that he did it, but never really seems to have any memory of it,
and eventually recants that confession. Um. Now, at the time, there's nothing known publicly about the mk Ultra program, but shavers lawyers did learn that earlier before the murder, he had suffered from migraines that had debilitated him enough that the Air Force had recommended him for a two year experimental program at Lackland Air Base. This program would have been run from the same facilities where doctor West did
his research for the CIA. There is no record of what doctor had attempted to recruit Shaver, and there's no record of Shaver in the Lackland Hospital official Master Index of patients. Right, so there's no evidence that he went into Lackland Hospital and was treated prior to the murder for his headaches. However, the index that would include his
patient record is incomplete. The base archivist told the court that all records for patients in nineteen fifty four with last names beginning with s A through ST had been destroyed. There was no explanation for why this had happened. Shaver was sentenced to death and eventually executed by the state. Here's the thing. I don't think the spiracy version of this requires anything advanced or magical, or doesn't it is if they did exactly what we've already seen them do.
Where do they just break people down to where all of their normal executive functions have ceased through just sleep deprivation or traumatizing them over and over again or whatever. Again, it's not difficult to do this, um and then the guy went out and did like It doesn't require them
to program him to go out and kill. It just requires them to whatever failed treatments they gave him to have just screwed up his head to the point where he no longer was in control of his actions, similar to the guy that thought that he, you know, had spontaneously robbed a liquor store. Because once you remove the frontal lobes ability to govern your actions, you just start
doing weird stuff. And you know, whatever is in your subconscious or whatever primal urge that a person has um it just doesn't take sophisticated mind control to make that happen. It just you mess up enough people over a long enough period that somebody's going to go out and commit a murder or beat someone to death, or get into a fight at a bar. It's just this particular guy, if that's what happened, he just acted on some urge and they probably the girl was just a target of opportunity.
She was just small enough and defenseless enough that and we don't even know. I mean, it's entirely possible that she was murdered by someone else who doesn't get caught, and he's just someone that this doctor is working with who is being dosed around the time, and who they're like, I wonder if we can convince him he did it. You know, that is not beyond the pale for what it does. It also does not require them to have figured out a mind control drug. It's certainly not beyond
the pale of the stuff they've done. Yeah, by the way, getting confessions out of people is nothing like the the whole era of the and going back and checking for crimes, like we found something like in a third of the cases where they exonerated people, they had confessions. Yeah, they confess to a crime they didn't commit. That happened instantly, and again doesn't so whatever happened, And again we don't know exactly what went down here, like and we never
will for reasons I'll get to. But like something bad,
I feel confident saying that. And when we talk about there's obviously there's a more conspiratorial version, like we could we could turn this into a slightly different podcast and say, this is clear evidence that the c I developed a mind control poison, right, um, And if you want to take that, there's all these little facts that you can use to like make put together what seems like a more convincing conspiracy theory case for example, Jason in nineteen
sixty three, immediately after the Kennedy assassination, there's a psychiatrist who gets brought in to examine Jack Ruby, the guy who had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, and it's Dr Jolly and West. Now West speaks to Ruby right before he's testifies to the War in Commission, and he tells him that Ruby suffered an acute psychotic break and Ruby is never able to form to fully explain to the commission why he chose to assassinate Oswald. You can make a
bunch of conspiracies about that. There's also the thing that makes total sense, which is, well, back when those fucking pilots got brought back having been like brainwashed or whatever, Jolly's the guy they sent in to talk to him. It's not unreasonable that you would assume that maybe a foreign power was responsible for something to do with the
JFK assassination. So the CIA is going to send in the guy they normally send in to talk to people in this situation, and Jolly has a history doing that, right. It doesn't mean that Ruby was like a programmed c I,
A L. S. D assassin um. But all of this stuff is just close enough that like you get part of like why conspiracy culture becomes the thing that it is that is such a problem for all of us, is there's a lot of reasons to ben spiratorial, particularly about this period in American history, right, Like, it's not
it's not you're not like doing something unreasonable. If you're like, well, shit, maybe they did figure out something, right, Like, there's all these little pieces of fucked up stuff here, and we know what they were trying to do, and a lot of a lot of the Q and on terrible stuff that's going around today that's causing so much of a
fucking catastrophic problem for a society. Part of why that is so effective and able to spread so much is this all of this ship seeds the ground, right, it provides they've provided a fertile environment for which, well, nothing is impossible, nothing is beyond the kind of ship our
government might try to do. Right, It's not like I think that's that's one of them maybe unrecognized crimes of the n k Ultra program is they're going to provide justification for a thousand conspiracy movements because how fucked up the ship they're trying to do is even if they never accomplished any of it, right, And the issue with the usually the issue with conspiracies that they is that they assume a much higher level of competence and precision
and everything else than what you actually get. For example, if if we only had a gap where that guy's um the toilet sex dungeon was, there have been a conspiracy coming up suggesting that that had occurred. I would have no problem with that because it's like, yeah, I can see this getting out of hand. There's no one, there's no grown ups in the room, so yeah, I can believe the rumors that this guy had a toilet Martini sex dungeine going on with CIA money, because that's
the kind of thing people do. The issue is that it almost ascribes, it almost gives them too much credit to where if you see something like the JFK s astination, you say, oh, I'll bet Oswald was actually a world because the reality is that there were failures in terms of security, in terms of the protocols they're following, in terms of like everything that a man like Kennedy that the whole world can pivot on one frankly kind of a dumbass with a gun who just happens to be
a good shot. Yeah, and that like Jack Ruby, that appears was an even bigger dumbass who actually made the decision to shoot Oswald as like a spontaneous like you just ran home and got his gun and decided to do it. Like it wasn't even a planned thing as far as I could tell, it was just it was just a local dumbass who thought, hey, I'll go shoot Oswald and that was and then again he changed history because that launched a whole universe of its own conspiracy theories.
I don't know. I think that people want to believe it's weird because they want to believe the CIA is almost like godlike invisibilities, that it can work magic, that they can do things that is that are totally unknown to science. And when you find out the reality, it's almost disappointing, even though the things they are actually guilty
of horrible, Yeah, are worse because it was done. What's so, it was done so irresponsibly and with such a lack of care, where you would almost prefer a bond villain that's trying to do that's, you know, trying to pull the string. It's like, no, the actual things that that we've done in Central America elsewhere. It doesn't require a sophisticated master plan. It just requires you know, the fruit company saying, hey, the locals are trying to unionize, as
we've as we keep saying. The only thing necessary here is not deep, like incredibly complicated conspiracies including magical mind control drugs. It's money and willingness to hurt people. Yeah, it's very powerful people saying hey, this is gonna lower our stock price by several points unless unless this guy who's threatening to become president and this unless something bad happens to him, and it doesn't require you know, a mind controlled assassin. The old ways work just fine. Propaganda
still works, Bribing the right people still works. Killing the right people works really well. That's the best way to do it, which is actually Jason leads me to our sponsor for this episode, because you know, when you need the right person killed, um, you know, the president of Chile for example, no one can do it better than the sponsors for this podcast. Where is fiber is still a thing? Yeah, five, that's what's gonna be. The next government overthrown is through fucking fiber. Um it is we're
like when it comes to like incompetent cia ship. One of the reasons why I'm willing to like, yeah, I think maybe that attempt by those weird US contractor guys to overthrow the government of Venezuela might have been a cia op is that it ended with them all pissing on themselves after getting captured by fishermen, like like, they're
just not They're not. They they succeed because they have infinite resources a lot of the time, but it's not because they're the most competent people in the world anyway. By the early nineteen sixties, mk Ultra was officially seen by Sydney Gottlieb as a failure. The program was gradually wound down, and Gottlieb went out to spend the rest of his career designing James Bond style assassination devices. He
tries to kill Fidel Castro so many times. He flies to the Congo to try to poison Patrice la Mumba. It doesn't work out often for him. He's not and usually because other things happen, they just never use the poison. But he makes a lot of poisons. In nineteen sixty four, the mk ULTRA program, which by that point is known to be a failure, is renamed m K Search, which again terrible cryptonym. But as far as we know, most
of the experiments were wound down after this point. However, as this passage from Poisoner in chief makes clear, Gottlieb remained actively pursuing mind control technology even after MK Ultra proved a disappointment quote In their behavior laboratories, the psychiatrists and psychologists continued experimenting. Once more. They had turned to an earlier line of research, implanting electrodes in the brain. An agency team flew to Psygon in July nineteen eight.
Among them were a neurosurgeon and a neurologist. In a closed off compound at ben Hua Hospital, the agency team set to work. Three Vietcong prisoners had been selected by the local station. How or why they were chosen would remain uncertain. In turn, each man was anesthetized, and after he had hinged back a flap in their skulls, the neurosurgeon implanted tiny electrodes in each brain. When the prisoners
regained consciousness, the behavior is set to work. The prisoners were placed in a room and given nigh pressing the control buttons on their handsets. The behaviorists tried to arouse their subjects to violence. Nothing happened for a whole week. The doctors tried to make them in attack each other. Baffled with their lack of success, the team flew back to Washington, as previously arranged in case of failure. While the physicians were still in the air, that prisoners were
shot by Green Beret troopers and their bodies burned. And this is all stuff that happened before got we went went to prison like I'm sure the listeners are waiting from the point right right before. And don't worry is it is put on trial for all of this. It's it's coming up right now, Jason. So in nineteen seventy two, it becomes obvious that Congress was going to look into MK Ultra. CIA director Richard Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy
all records of the programs. Everything we know now came from caches of papers that were missed and odd bits of correspondence from MK Ultra partners like Dr West. No full investigation into the program will ever be possible because again all of the records are destroyed. They miss like eight thousand pages. A bunch of these doctors they used as contractors, have stuff that gets found by by journalists
and stuff later. But we do not know everything that was done under this program, and we have no accounting of how many people were hurt. Um, none of that kind of stuff. Gottlie burns it all and then a year or so later he retires from the CIA. So that's pretty cool. Um. And yeah. In nineteen sixty seven, President Lyndon Johnson looked out at the growing protest movement against the Vietnam War and the occupation of several college
campuses by anti war radicals. He ordered CIA director Richard Helms, who is the guy like right after Alan Dulas gets shit canned? Um, Helms is, by the way, the guy who later orders the MK Ultra records destroyed to launch in a legal domestic surveillance program code named Chaos. And I'm gonna quote now from Tomo. Yeah, yeah, right, like
they're they're just they keep getting worse at the kryptonyms. Um. So I'm gonna quote now from Tommonio's book Chaos, which is a history of the Charles Manson murders, as a spoiler for where we're headed here. That August, with the president's approval, CIA director Richard Helms authorized in a legal domestic surveillance program code named Chaos. Meanwhile, j Edger Hoover
revived the FBI's dormant counterinsurgency program co Intel pro. Both agencies opened the first offices of their respective operations in San Francisco, still considered ground zero for the revolution, especially since the founding of the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland the previous summer. Thanks to these two secret programs and their network of well placed informants, there was an all out war raging in California. By the summer of sixty nine. The FBI and the CIA had induced the
Left to feed on itself among competing factions. What had been sectarian strife devolved into outright violence. Now there is credible evidence to suggest that Charles Manson was for whatever reason, of interest to the CIA. UM. This is timbo O'Neill's book, Chaos, deals with this in a lot of detail. It's all very messy. There's nothing perfectly clear. There's two different guys who were close to him, who had ties to the agency.
One guy who was probably a c I a contractor, like an actual like doing ship on the ground man who was tied into Manson, who was there after the murders probably but before the murders got reported to the l A p. D Um who was very likely tied to the agency. We don't know what he was doing. He claimed that like he was because he talked a few times to people and even helped write a book with a former FBI agent and made the repeated claim that like something had this wasn't supposed to happen, and
like something had gone wrong. I'm gonna tell you right now, because all this is very messy. The most likely reason why the murders are committed is essentially a series of drug deals and relationships gone bad, and everything kind of escalates, and you have these these people who are not particularly tied in mentally, um, taking a lot of drugs and like getting scared about, like Manson at one point shoots a guy that he thinks as a black panther so
he's convinced the panthers are coming after him. This is all really fucking messy. Um. But there are one of the reasons why there's a lot of conspiracy theories that like the Cia programmed Manson is two fold. Number One, Manson is giving these these young mostly women, but there's some of them are men who he has do the actual murders. He's giving them a shipload of acid and using that to kind of reprogram them. Right. That's a thing, especially in the book Helter Skelter, that gets brought up
a bunch. There's debate as to the extent to which he was actually trying to program them and the extent to which they were all just taking acid. But they were taking a lot of acid, which probably had its because of where the acid was coming from. There's a good chance a lot of the acid they did came out of mk Ultra one way or the other. Um. That's one reason people get conspiratorial. And then there's a couple of guy is one of whom is for a while Manson's uh, what parole officer? Um? Who like he
keeps getting off for stuff he shouldn't get off for. Um, he gets like arrested while he's on patrol with guns and drugs and with stolen cars. He keeps getting At one point after the murders, when people are talking that Manson and his family may have been the people who
did it. The l a p D carries out the largest rate in their history at his compound and arrests he and his cult members for like stealing cars, and then they all get released, even though he's a paroled convict and shouldn't have been near any of this stuff. So there's all this like we don't really know what's going on, and it may not even be that it was. It's possible he was like an FBI informant, and so that's why he kept until they realized he was tied
to the murders, kept getting out. Um, it's just all like again you see why where all of these fucking conspiracy theories can come from. Right, there's all of this. There's all of this like territory in which you can kind of maneuver to set up a story about what had happened. And again, it doesn't require there actually being anything,
because Charles Manson was a messed up and abusive dude. Um, And like, it's not like cult leaders convince people to kill people all of the time without the CIA being involved. The CIA was involved to some extent. We just don't know the precise reasons why. Right. See, here's the thing. If your imagination goes off in a direction of well, maybe this was the ultimate experiment to see if they
could create a perfect assassin. That a look if somehow, through happenstance, the CIA and the people involved in in k Ultra came across Charles Manson and tried to get him to do one thing or another. If you knew the full story, every detail of if someone wrote the book of exactly what happened, I can promise you that what occurred was dumb as hell. Yep, Like the killings were an accident. He didn't do what they asked. It was a clumsy, stupid just whole just a carnival of nonsense.
I I'm saying that, based on every single other thing we know about him k Ultra, that if there was involvement, it was not successful. It was it was a very dumb person who had I mean, Charles Manson's background was horrible. He was abused as a child, He was a weirdo.
The people he surrounded himself with, like Tex Watson, were for the most part very stupid um and the whole thing with the killings may have been largely a misunderstanding or a spur of the moment thing or whatever, because I think, based on what I know of the Manson murders, his whole like what he told these people around him that they basically formed the cult, where he told them that there was a race war coming and they needed to go out into a compound and on and on.
I believe he made up all that stuff because those people, those people hung around him because he was about to be a successful musician and get a record deal and he's really tied in with the fucking the Beach Boys. Yeah, and when the record deal fell through, he just didn't want his groupies to go away, so he made up this lie so they would stick around because he didn't
want to be lonely. Like I fully believe that whole thing they began and ended with Charles Manson not wanting these hot girls who hung around him all the time to leave. So he's like the world's about to end because it's gonna be reest war. And I can sort of do a Manson voice, Not really, there's I mean, because there's also and again O'Neill's book goes into it. There's like a Hollywood kind of drug dealing thing here too.
A lot of it may have involved like money and just kind of but but that's that's outside of the scope of these episodes. Um. When it comes to the CIA's involvement, it's there's there's a lot of ugly connections, including the fact our friend Dr Jolly and West is during the period that Manson is in hate Ashbury in San Francisco, West is there too, running a free clinic with a guy named David Smith. Um and West is.
One of the things he's doing is he's operating he's renting out a house on Frederick Street which he's turned into a laboratory designed as a hippie crash pad, and he is once again using CIA resources giving a shipload of drugs to people. Um, while he has now in this case, he actually has grad students observing the hippies and like taking notes, and most of those grad students they people to talk to them. You can talk to these people, like results were published. The grad students are like,
this is a shitty study. I don't understand what he's trying to do. Like we're not really getting anything. But
Manson is kind of around at the time. Um, there's there's some connections there and kind of the thing that O'Neill brings up that I think is actually plausible in terms of there being a degree of CIA involvement here, is that we do know multiple police officers who had interactions with Manson and like arrested him, and we're looking into him at this period before and after the murders, say that it was well known in the Los Angeles Police Department that like, Charles Manson had some FEDS who
had his back and that you were not supposed to like mess with him. Um, you're not supposed to like keep him in. And so when he would get arrested, he would get let out because somebody was like and there's a number of reasons for this. It could have been he was informing for the FBI. Um, But one possibility is that either the FBI or the CIA, not that they were like trying turning Charles Manson and his followers into assassins, but that they were like, well, this
is dangerous. This guy is dangerous. What he's doing with these people are dangerous. Eventually, something terrible is going to happen, and are are The order that we have from our boss is to funk with the hippies, right, is to like do some damage to this kind of flower power movement.
So if we let this guy who was like the poster child for the worst things that can happen to like when you turn tune in, turn on and drop out, if we just let him do stuff for a while, eventually he'll do something horrible and then it'll do damage to these this movement. That's you know, we've been We've been brought in as part of Operation Chaos to hurt um. And it was kind of the end of the hippie
It absolutely was. And I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote from Tip O'Neill one more or Tom O'Neill one more time, she's tip O'Neil. It struck me that the Tate la Bianca murders had been so often invoked as the death knell of the sixties. Arguably they did more than any other event to turn the public opinion against the hippies. Recasting the peace and love flower power ethos
is a thing of latent, drug addled criminality. As the writer Tom Getland noted for the mass media, the acid head Charles Manson was ready made as the monster looking in the heart of every long hair. So yeah, um, who knows what went on there? Uh, something we just will never quite know what. In nineteen seventy four, the details of the of mk Ultra finally broke out into public knowledge after a report from Seymour Hirsch for The New York Times. This reporting helped spawn the Church Committee
and the Rockefeller Commission. The Church Committee's final report, they quoted from a nineteen fifty seven internal evaluation by the c I A precautions must be taken. The document warrant to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions. Don't let him know about this, Like one the first time someone from the agency has not got Lieber Dulls actually looks at what
they're doing. They're like, oh my god, don't let anyone know what we're doing. We have to hide this ship at all costs. Um and they do. A more haunting reveal is that in nineteen sixty three, a review by the Inspector General of the CIA included this line. A final phase of the testing of mk Ultra products places the rights and interests of US citizens in jeopardy. I don't know precisely what that means because we don't know what all of the products were, but kind of a
sketchy little line there. Um, Sydney gott Lieb burns all of his records. This comes out in the congressional investigation. He is recalled to Washington, so he when he retires, he and his wife travel to run a clinic for lepers and like India, like they're like traveling around the world,
just like trying to do good. Um. I don't know what's going on in this man's head, but yeah, he goes back to d C. He claims that he's in bad health and so he can't address the entire synate chamber, and so in a private room he's questioned and the American people can hear on a loud speaker as he tells everyone that he's destroyed the MK Ultra files. Now, he says this was not to cover up a legal activity, but quote because this material was sensitive and capable of
being misunderstood. I don't know what what's more misunderstood, Like, if you're trying to not let people conspiracy about this Sydney burning at all, probably isn't the right thing to do. It could be taken the wrong way. Wow, the fact that we were doing all this could really be taken the wrong way. I better let all this on fire so nobody thinks we're bad guys. That way, they can just fill in the void with their imaginations. Yeah, exactly
that way, and then there won't be any conspiracy theories. Um. Gottlieb says under congressional like testimony that he cannot provide specific information on any mkal trick experiments because he's never witnessed any himself. He was investigated for federal crimes due to his destruction of government files, which is absolutely illegal, but the case was quietly dropped by the Justice Department.
Gottlieb was never prosecuted, and the Senate gave him total criminal immunity in exchange for testifying against who so other people did go to prison because that's why. That's why they gave him immunity, so they can nail all those other people. Nope, we're done. All's well. Sydney Gottlieb spends the rest of his life with his wife on their eco friendly goat farm in rural Virginia, Virginia. He dies
in and for the rest of his life. Friends of the family of his children would recall a kindly, intelligent, open minded man with a strong spiritual and mystical interest. Sydney meditated regularly, he read constantly. He was, in his private life the absolute epitome of an aging hippie. The people who loved him and spent time close to him only got occasional glimpses of something darker. Stephen Kinser at one point quotes from a young woman named Elizabeth, who
wound up dating one of Sydney's sons. So she spends this summer around the family compound, and she recalled this as a generally positive experience. But there's one peculiar moment that she related later to an interviewer. One day that summer, we were out at the house swimming. The parents had gone to the store to buy food for dinner, and Peter goes, kind of conspiratorially, come here, I want to show you something. He takes me into his father's din,
his library, and says, turn around. He did something. He didn't want me to see. What he did, and the wall of books opened up behind it was all this stuff weapons. I couldn't tell which kind, but guns, there was other stuff back there. It was like a secret compartment. I asked him what is that for. He closed it back up quickly and said, you know, my father has a price on his head. I said, why is he a criminal? He said no, he works for the CIA. Then he said, you know, my dad has killed people.
He made toothpaste to kill someone. Later on he told me, don't tell anybody that you were in here, and don't ever tell anyone that you know my father kills people. And they pulled out a particular gun and he aimed it out the window and fired it at a tree. He said, you come back in two days. That tree is gonna be fucked. She's gonna she's gonna be dead. My dad's killed trees. What all such? We just a
just a I mean, that's true. That says to me that like he was kind of like he's kind of milking it, you know, like you tell like, hey, kids, you want to see like your dad's secret gun wall. I made toothpaste to kill somebody, um, which I don't believe never killed anybody. It was none of another one of the things that nothing happened with. But like I don't know, I guess that's not weird that like a guy like that would want people, would like want people who was close to to know that he was this
he has this other secret life as a badass spy. Um, he's probably not telling him about all the prostitutes, about his friend with the portable toilet or any of that would be my guess. But yeah, I mean I don't doubt that if if, if he told the story, I would love to know how he told the story, if he made it seem more dark and mysterious than it was, if you tried to cover up the fact that it was such a clumsy mess and irresponsible, Like the people
who died weren't because of his gadgets. It was through negligence. It was through killing test subjects because there was nothing else else to do with them, Like I don't know, I, I you you. And that's obviously what makes him such fascinating character, because you'll never know what he thought of himself, or what he thought of what he did, or if he spend his time abroad trying to make up for it,
trying to save his own soul. Yeah, did he feel did he realize this was all a terrible mistake and just like, yeah, dedicate the rest of his life to helping lepers or something. Um, yep, who knows. I mean I like the eco friendly goat farm part, but I wish he had just raised goats. I think they can all agree that. Yeah, Um, Jason, it's well, now, hold on, I thought that the UNI bomber was also part of Ultra? Did we leave Are we leaving that out? Or is
that not true? Is that he's he's involved in some experiments that are that are like part of this, like the whole thing, because remember it's like a pretty broad variety of things and his are like, um, it's not entirely the same. Um, It's like he's involved in a voluntary psychological study that's like pretty abusive and that probably does some damage to him. That it wasn't funded by m KAY Ultra. Well it might have been, because I remember, we don't know exactly what was an m KAY Ultra
because Sydney destroyed. But it's the kind of thing they would have done, right. It sounds a lot of what Kazinski goes through sounds like aspects of the dip patterning kind of stuff that is being researched, Like, um, that's being done up at McGill University. So I think it's pretty likely that he was in an experiment that was part of m KAY Ultra. I don't think you're gonna get exact confirmation. Kazinski was always pretty adamant that like
that had nothing to do with what he did. Um. Well, that's why I wanted to bring him up, not not to suggest that he was a product of it, but to suggest that if he if he was, it wasn't because they again, they created the perfect assassin and he carried out a series of ineffective bombings the rather than yeah, it took someone who was already disturbed and made him much much worse than they just turned him out into the world, Like like that's the thing that they were
good at, was Yeah, it was really hurting people were didn't Yeah, who were already having some problems, and like, yeah, I think that's probably the best way to look at what you've got with um. UM with Kazinski is like I don't want to we'll we'll talk about Papa Ted one of these days, but he's Whatever you want to say about the likely impact MK Ultra has on Ted Kazinski, it doesn't no way it helped right, like, there's certainly no way and made him made him a less likely
to blow things up. Right, And if his whole issue was that he did not have faith in the system and wanted to bring it down, like this probably did not yes help his faith in the system. Yeah, it does. If you really start reading a lot of mk ultra stuff, you do find yourself thinking about bringing down the system. Um, it's a natural reaction to reading a lot of stories of the CIA torturing people. Um. But that's but we've reached end of it, ultimately had a happy ending. Justice prevailed.
The guy at the top of it died in peacefully at age ninety or whatever, living living a long and peaceful retirement on his goat farm, exactly what he deserved. It is done. Yeah, I learned. It taught the lesson that actually, by destroying evidence, you can totally get off on a crime because they need evidence to convict you, Like they can charge you for destroying the evidence as a separate crime. But yeah, you'll get off from the original the original thing you did if you do successfully
destroy all of the records of you doing it. They can really they're helpless and uh yeah, that's um. Once again, their attempt to to cancel this poor man didn't work. Yeah, thank god do it? Just like uh David Chappelle uncancellable and and like Dave Chappelle regularly shows up at concerts to to sing surprise versus when I forget what band that was that had just happened with Radio ahead, Yeah,
probably Radio. We're we're on this. We're referencing things that happened on Twitter hours ago when this this episode will come out weeks later. But that's what the audience loves. Jason, Well, thank you for having me on so that I could I could go on this very dark journey with you. I I hope that it has Uh what what have we learned? What have we learned from this? I guess? Well, if if you're worried that LSD is a mind control agent,
don't worry. The CIA tested that hypothesis. Um. I guess if you've ever thought I would like to sit on a portable toilet and watch strangers have sex, Um, you might want to look for a job in the Central Intelligence Agency apparently, And if you're if you if you're worried about the techniques for affecting someone's brain. One the knowledge of how to totally destroy someone's brain. We do have that technology, but but we've actually had it since
the Stone Age. It's just called hitting someone in the head with a rock. Like it doesn't require subjecting them two months of techniques and repeating things in a in a sound helmet, and while under the influence of various drugs. You can just hit them with a rock. That in terms of you know, actually mind controlling somebody, the old methods are best. Just good old fashioned lies and bribes and threats. Uh. They all work very well. We do
not need new techniques. They work great. Advertisers have have mastered all sorts of ways to put on your insecurities and make you spend money that you don't have. Uh. They did not need some amazing new technology to do it. It's actually super easy to manipulate people into doing things. It's not not hard at all. Speaking of which, if you're looking to mind control me, Um, the thing I'm most vulnerable too is in fact suitcase is full of money. So you know, we're always the case of money. We
are available. We will betray anyone as anyone with for a big enough suitcase, not a little suitcase. You know. Anyway, my the book that I've been promoting the beginning of these each of these episodes one final time. The title is if this book exists, You're in the wrong universe has a lime green cover. If you buy books based purely on the color of the color of the cover, this one is neon lime green. You can't miss it
at your bookstore. You know. I did work at a bookstore for a while as a younger man, and people did come in occasionally asking for books by color. I don't remember the title of the author, but it was blue. Um. That is a thing I have been asked working in a bookstore. So go into your local bookstore and demand a green book. Um. And if they don't give you Jason's book, then riot um. Otherwise, you can look me
up on any of the social media platforms. My name is Jason Park and p A R G. I n um on TikTok, I'm on Twitter, I'm on all of them. Just just searched the box for my name and you'll find either my account or some bot pretending to be me that will probably both be equally as good excellent. Well, Jason, thanks for this five hour stretch of our lives that we've spent learning about the CIA. Thanks for having me, I guess. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.