#2183 - Norman Ohler
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Pleasure to meet you. I'm very happy to be here. I'm actually quite thrilled. I'm quite thrilled to have you here. This is your book. It's called Tripped, Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. First of all, how did you get involved in studying this? Well, this had a lot to do with my previous book, which is called Blitz, Drugs in the Third Reich. And...

I mean, the Nazis were really into meth, basically. They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can change the war effort. They basically doped their soldiers. So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitz. And also, I spoke about Hitler's consumption, which is quite outrageous, actually. And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives because I'm not a historian. I usually write novels. I started out writing three novels and then

Suddenly I became a non-fiction writer. I was trying to understand what does that mean, and I thought it meant to do historical writing to actually go into archives and look at original documents and not just lean on other books, which is what many historians actually do, which I found out later. They just read

books from colleagues and then make up their own shit. To actually go into the archive is very time consuming, but I thought everyone does that. Actually, no one does that. So I was looking at all the archives and at one point I was in the archive of the memorial of the concentration camp of Dachau. So very serious archive because they host like all the documents what the SS did in Dachau and

So it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at... Because they wrote down everything. Like every experiment the Nazis did in concentration camps was like written down because it was like pseudoscience. So I found documents while I was researching Blitz relating to tests with psychoactive substances. And that was like...

That was not what I expected because the Nazis had been enthusiastic about methamphetamine, but that was the first time I saw something that related Nazis and psychedelics. And I thought, that's quite strange. That's quite interesting, obviously. I need to get to the bottom of this. So I asked the archivist, can I see all the documents? What did the SS actually do with psychedelics? Which ones did they use? Why did they test them? What were they looking for? And he said, well...

I'm very sorry, but all documents are in America because when American military liberated Dachau, one of the things they do is they take a lot of documents and they took all the psychedelic research done by the Nazis with them.

So I knew I had to go to America, probably to the National Archives in College Park, close to Washington, biggest archive in the world, find it there. But I didn't have time while I was doing Blitzed. And Blitzed was also already a complete story. So I thought I save that, that psychedelic theme for another book. And this other book is now being published as Tripped. Wow. So...

Before this, you'd had no understanding that the Nazis had used psychedelics. You only knew that they – we all know the meth thing and we've seen Hitler at the 36 Olympics where he's rocking back and forth. He's jacked out of his mind. I mean the joke about Blitz is that I was actually the first one to write about this. I mean now we all know about it. But before that, no one knew about it.

Before 2015, when this book was published in Germany, the Nazis were still seen globally and also in Germany as this like pure movement that was... Like I spoke to my grandfather when I was a teenager and I was obviously criticizing him for his involvement. I wanted to know what did he do and he did some shit. And then he always said under Hitler, everything was in order. Like he praised that law and order aspect.

And that law and order aspect of the Nazis obviously doesn't correspond to like a drug using society. So no one knew that the Nazis were taking drugs until I found out, until I found documents for Blitz. So, um,

So I was not surprised to find more and more stuff what they were doing with drugs. But then I was surprised that they actually also used psychedelics because psychedelics were totally new, you know. 43 LSD was invented. So it's kind of, I really was wondering whether Nazis already getting their hands on LSD, which was just so new that probably anyone in the world knew about this. So this is the story of Tripped.

So Hoffman, he synthesized LSD in 43. Correct. Right. So was there any evidence of anyone using something similar to LSD before that? I know they've studied some of ancient pottery from Greece and they found ergot in it, an ergot which contains a very similar compound to LSD.

Well, ergot is the alkaloid of the fungus which grows on rye.

And so LSD, from ergot LSD is made basically. So actually LSD is not a synthetic drug as many people believe, but it actually is based on a fungus extract which grows on rye. And the Swiss company Sandoz, they produced only ergot-based medicines.

They started after the First World War. It was like a startup. Sandos was a color manufacturing company. And they made a lot of money after the war because everything had to be rebuilt in Europe. Stuff had to be repainted. So companies that made paint made a lot of money. So they invested in a pharmaceutical branch. And they hired one guy to kind of come up with an idea how to make money in the pharmaceutical world. This guy was Arthur Stoll. He later became the CEO of Sandos.

And Arthur Stoll was the first one to crack ergot because this fungus is quite poisonous actually. In the Middle Ages, this created mass hallucinations in Europe. Unwittingly, people were eating contaminated bread. We're having horrific visions. Actually, limbs fell off because this ergot is very, very poisonous.

But as we know from Paracelsus, the dosage makes the poison. So if you... That was Stoll's idea. You take a very poisonous thing, the ergot,

And you extract, like you're still able to use the force that's within it as a medicine. This is how biochemistry, that's basically the foundation of biochemistry. So Stoll was able to crack the ergot. And the first medicine he made was a migraine medicine, which came out, I think, in 1923 by Sondos. Very successful. So he immediately hit the jackpot. He became like the ergot god of the pharmaceutical world. So he developed more and more medicines with ergot.

One of them, for example, is still used today when in childbirth it contracts the ovaries

blood vessels after the birth so you can stop a bleeding. Otherwise, I guess bleeding would go on much longer in childbirth. So Sandoz made the first effective medicine because ergot kind of makes the blood vessels contract. Weren't they trying to develop a drug to induce labor when they initially created LSD? Yeah, this is all the ergot kind of research. I mean, the whole company was just doing ergot. So they were looking at all kinds of

things that Ergot could be good for just to, you know, have new products on the market. So, and Ergot before, I mean, this is a company based in Switzerland, which is now Novartis, something like the fourth biggest pharmaceutical company in the world or something. I mean, very successful company still. They bought Sandoz and now it's Novartis, but it's kind of the same thing.

So, Sandor's at one point needed so much ergot that they started manufacturing it in Switzerland. Like they went into a specific region called the Emmental, which was famous for its cheese. And it's also famous for its bad weather. So, mold grows on rye anyhow. So, they thought this is the right area.

to industrialize the ergot manufacturing, like the growth of ergot. And the farmers were like, we're always trying to get away from the ergot. The ergot is poisonous. And suddenly they had to make it. And the Swiss company paid 20 francs

I think a kilo, 20 francs a kilo, and rye was only like seven francs a kilo. So the farmers switched to basically producing poison. And then, I mean, not poison, but a very poisonous mushroom, you could say, like a fungus. You don't want to eat this thing. That was the problem. You harvest rye, you make bread out of it, and then there's like a little bit of ergot because on some of the rye, ergot grows, and then the bread is poisonous. That was the problem in the Middle Ages. So,

Farmers don't like it. Now they had to produce it. And suddenly, Sandoz in Basel, Switzerland, had huge amounts of ergot in their storage. And they needed to make more and more products to use the raw materials that they had so expensively produced in the Emmental. So Stoll hired further chemists. One of them was Albert Hoffmann, the famous discoverer of LSD. So he was not looking for...

a mind-blowing drug or anything. He was looking for actually a stimulant because this was late 30s in Germany, Nazi Germany, a stimulant that was made from the nicotine acid, nicotine acid diethylamide. No, it was actually a Swiss product, but from another company. Nicotine acid diethylamide was...

I don't know the brand name. It had a brand name. It was quite successful medicine. And he thought, if I take lysergic acid diethylamide, lysergic acid being the acid within the ergot, maybe we'll also have a potent stimulant. But they weren't looking for a stimulant actually for the mind. They were looking for a physical stimulant, like something like Pervitin, like meth, like something that keeps you going. I mean, this was at a time when stimulants were...

sought after. They didn't have coffee like we have today. We just go, we drink a coffee in the morning. They didn't really have that. That's why methamphetamine was so successful in Germany because you could just buy it anywhere and you take a tablet in the morning and it's like drinking, it's like being on coffee the whole time. So the stimulant was what he was looking for.

And then something came into his bloodstream. He tries later, he tried to make it a bit mythical sounding, like somehow the substance got into his bloodstream and he felt like weird sensations and he saw different colors. So he thought this is actually a very different type of

thing like what is this lysergic acid diathlomide lsd what is it so he did then a first self experiment which was kind of normal at the time he took a very very low dose what he thought 250 micrograms but as we know today that's actually quite a high dose of lsd so he had an extremely strong experience and he told this to stol the ceo he said i just took this like

250 micrograms. I mean, this is a Swiss chemist in a Swiss lab and suddenly he's like full on tripping. He tried to get home somehow. His assistant like brought him home on a bicycle. He was at his house and the wall started, you know, collapsing onto him. And the doctor came and he said to his doctor, I think I'm going mad. You know, I poisoned myself. I don't know what's going on. The doctor was like feeling his pulse, pulse normal, like

eyes normal. Like on LSD, you don't have a strong physical reaction, but you have a very strong mental reaction. And the doctors just couldn't see it. And before, actually, Hoffman had tested LSD on mice at Sundance, and the mice also didn't show anything because you can't

They didn't like run around excitedly. Like if you give mice cocaine, they're like, you can see the difference. But if you give them LSD, you can't see it because you can't get into their mind. Maybe they don't even have a trip because they don't have a conscious like us. But certainly on humans, it works very potently. And so he communicated this with the CEO and the CEO was like, I don't believe you. I think you made a mistake with the dosage. Then they repeated it.

And then they actually created at Zanders, and I think this is kind of funny, if you picture like a conservative pharmaceutical Swiss company in the late 40s in Basel, they created an intoxication room, like they made a nice room within the company. They called it Rauschraum, Rausch meaning intoxication in German. And Hoffmann said, I had a very strong Rausch with this stuff. I don't know what this is. So they invited like,

secretaries and bookkeepers and chemists and people working in the cafeteria. They all could come into this room and take LSD. The secretary is actually sitting there typing what they would relate, and they all had a great experience. That's the funny thing, because they had never had any bad... Today, when we take LSD, we have so much discourse about LSD in our mind automatically. They didn't have that. They just took...

strangely named substance like LSD-25. They took like 50 micrograms and they wrote down, I write about this in Tripped, for the first time I feel connected to my fellow human being. Some looked out and saw the clouds and had ideas about connectivity and how we are part of the

of the universe basically. Like these kind of hippie LSD thoughts that we classically associate with LSD, they had them like very purely like from... They just had them. So this was all noted down. And then they were thinking... And this was in 1943. Imagine the situation in Europe in 1943. It's at the height of World War II. People are dead, injured, traumatized. So they thought at Sandus...

Maybe this is going to be like a blockbuster, you know. Then they tested it also on sick people in a hospital in Zurich. They gave it to like a depressed patient. I also studied these reports, like a depressed Swiss farmer was like chronically depressed. He takes LSD and he took it like three times and they released him out of the psychiatric ward because he was cured. He was good. He said, I'm fine. I'm not depressed anymore.

So, Sandos really thought they had a blockbuster. They thought LSD is going to be the big thing. And the big question, obviously, is what went wrong? That is what interested me in Tripped. What happened? Because also why I researched LSD and I...

I had been interested in LSD for a long time, but then I decided to write a book and I researched it and I found a study by a company called Yellusis, which is an American company, their name referring obviously to the Greek ritual. And they had done low dosage tests with LSD on Alzheimer patients. And they found that the very same receptors that Alzheimer degenerates and kills are

These receptors are being stimulated by LSD. So their study, which I then discussed with a leading Alzheimer researcher in Germany, and he also is looking at this white paper and he said, this is actually quite good. And I said, so when is it going to happen? He said, well, this is a bit more complicated than you think, you know, because LSD is illegal. It's not even... In America, I guess you have like...

universities can do research. But this is also a new thing, you know, when Nixon illegalized LSD in 1966, all the research was illegalized. So couldn't even research whether it's as dangerous as, you know, the government said it would be. So let me just finish this thought. I bring this white paper to my father because my mother suffers from Alzheimer. And I'm saying to him, I'm writing this book, as you know, and I found this and

shouldn't we have a look at this? Because he takes care of my mother and he's quite frustrated that there's no potent medicine available to him. That his doctor basically says, sorry. And he's a former judge. He was quite a high judge in Germany. He sent people to prison for drugs. So for him to even consider giving an illegal drug to his wife is a big leap for him. But, you know, he's a rational thinking man. So he looked at this white paper, he studied it and

He said, you know what? In court, when I was in court as a judge, I always... You don't know what is the truth, but you know what is a good story, like a credible story. That's how I determined as a judge what I believe. If someone tells something that rings true to me, and right now I'm having...

a study that LSD is helpful, but also I'm having the law that it's illegal. Can you please find out the true story now? What is LSD? Why is it illegal? So from that point onward, I did the research that is in Tripped, which was supposed to be called LSD for Mom, actually. That was my working title for the book. And I think it's a better title. That's a good title. Yeah, it's a great title. So LSD for Mom, that was my... Who picked Tripped?

Did the editors pick Tripped? My German editor didn't want LSD für Mama, which is the German translation, which I think is the perfect title. It's even better in German, LSD für Mama. He somehow convinced me to use a different title in Germany. And all, you know, this is translated into many different countries and they always go to the German translation.

If the Germans would have called it LSD für Mama, it would be called LSD for Mom in America, LSD pour Maman in France. But because in Germany a different title was chosen, the strongest stuff, which is a little bit different in German, der stärkste Stoff, then every country was like thinking, how should we call it? And I guess they call it trip because of the success of Blitz. But I think LSD for Mom...

I like it.

Because it's dangerous that there are different reasons why it's illegal. And these different reasons are explained in Tripped. So we spoke, obviously, to my mother also, because you have to get consent. So she gave her consent and she started using LSD once in a while, you know, not...

Not chronically, obviously, but like twice a week or maybe the next week only once. Only low dosages. And my father also took them. He never felt anything because a microdose, you're not supposed to feel a trip or intoxication. It just works in your brain. But my mother actually did feel it because her brain is attacked by Alzheimer's. So for her, that was like...

her cheeks became redder. She would look at us. One time, we also then did mushrooms, which is a very similar molecule, actually psilocybin. It's very similar to the LSD molecule. On Mother's Day, we gave her a little piece of mushroom chocolate and she took it and there was a newspaper on the table and she hadn't even looked at newspaper as an object of desire for her for about a year, my father then later told me.

And she picked up the newspaper when the chocolate was working and started reading the headlines. And my father was like, this is a medicinal miracle. And my father's really like a rational, skeptical guy, you know, but it was amazing. So that is also what I write about in Tripped, a.k.a. LSD for Mom. It's so fascinating. There are so many people suffering from Alzheimer's in the world.

And it's illegal basically everywhere except for countries like Portugal that decriminalize everything. But yeah, I mean, dementia is like the pandemic of the future, if I want to use that ugly word pandemic. But to not allow our scientists to examine this properly, for example, in the pandemic, a lot of during the pandemic,

like regulations in regards to developing medicines, a vaccine especially, were lowered because we wanted, the government, the society wanted a vaccine quick. But so this is what has to happen with psychedelics now because we are moving. Like in 2050, I read the numbers. They're also in the book. Like a lot of people will have dementia. Like we will all know someone or we'll have it ourselves or it's going to grow rapidly.

exponentially or at least a lot. So I think our society should actually shift its focus towards preventing that because when I spoke to the Alzheimer expert, he said, yeah, of course this could be, you could prevent Alzheimer if you would know like how to stimulate the brain and so far,

By 2050, 153 million people are expected to be living with dementia worldwide, up from 57 million in 2013, 2019 rather, largely due to population growth and population aging. Don't they believe that Alzheimer's has something to do with diet as well? Isn't that what they're calling type 3 diabetes? Yeah, and I think it could be true. I mean,

The reason for Alzheimer's, you know, you have to see it separately from the cure, you know. The reason, I think, I've come actually to the conclusion that sugar is quite bad for you. And I was quite a sugar addict. I really was. Like, I could not put down a bar of chocolate. I could not eat one piece. I just couldn't.

Because I love it so much. But then I just realized it's not good and I stopped it. And it's actually possible to stop. I eat now like a little bit and it's actually no problem. So I think, well, there's a few reasons for dementia. One is also the so-called neuroinflammation of the brain. And that could be caused obviously by sugar, by, you know, by...

by imbalances in the sugar diet, I think. And the inflammation of the brain, and that is scientifically proven, is being decreased if you take psychedelics. So if you take psychedelics, every time you take psychedelics, your neuroinflammation goes down.

So that is something that needs to be examined. Like maybe we should all take maybe once a week a low dosage of let's say LSD or psilocybin. Maybe we could prevent like 50% of dementia. I mean, I think it's quite plausible and I think not to look into it is not very smart by a society because the costs of dementia, I mean the human costs, my father suffers quite a bit.

My mother, obviously, she has the disease she suffers. The family suffers. If someone in the family has Alzheimer's, the whole family suffers. And of course, our medical system is very expensive to treat dementia, like put them in homes, whatever. So I think we're making a big mistake by not examining this. Absolutely. Well, it's just a stunning amount of ignorance on our part. All the...

at least anecdotal evidence of the positive benefits of some of these things, particularly in microdose usage. Well, it's just not a focus of politicians. Like to legalize drugs has not become a very popular meme among politicians in the 20th century. This is also what I examined in Tripped.

I kind of looked at where did it actually start? Where does this prohibitionist approach come from? Because it's kind of weird. As a child, I watched Star Trek. It was an American TV show, even on German television. It was called Raumschiff Enterprise in German, like Spaceship Enterprise. And I was always very touched by the beginning when they say, boldly go where no man has gone before.

That was for me the American, like the Western philosophy to always transcend where you are. And that totally contradicts our prohibitionist policies. It's like a chemical wall that the government is setting up in our brain saying like, you can go this much with stimulating your brain, but you're not allowed to go further. Like you're not allowed...

to use LSD, which does stimulate the H2TA receptors. I think it contradicts the Western philosophy. And actually also, I think it contradicts the idea of democracy, which I always was hot for. I grew up in a small town in West Germany, which was actually occupied by American forces. So I was very much interested

connecting with American culture early on and I always like

associated Western culture with freedom and transcendence and boldly going where no man has gone before. That is, for me, the strength of the West. And that is, you know, this is, for example, not what Islam offers. Islam says you're not allowed to intoxicate. You can only believe in this. You cannot go further. This is actually the problem of all monotheistic religions. But for me, the West was always...

Like going beyond that. So I was curious, how did this happen, this prohibition? Was there one person that decided, no, people cannot use this anymore? And there actually is one person and his name is Harry J. Ansling. I'm sure you're familiar with the guy.

So for this trip, I also went to the Harry J. Anslinger Archives at Penn State University, which was quite interesting because you can see in the archive and in the way like it smells and what he collected and the letters he wrote and the language he used. It's a very closed mindset. And he was actually able to convince Democratic and Republican presidents. He was like serving under –

He was bipartisan, basically. So his anti-drug regime that he was able to create, and he created it because the alcohol prohibition failed, and his...

federal bureau of narcotics was about to be extinct because he had completely failed with the alcohol prohibition and then he thought I have to find a new enemy and the new enemy for him was actually cannabis and he coined the word marijuana because marijuana sounds foreign it sounds Mexican it sounds something that we don't want in our clean white American society well it was a Mexican wild tobacco it was slang for a Mexican wild tobacco it wasn't cannabis yeah right yeah

So basically what we could say is that, unfortunately, Anslinger was quite a racist. He openly used words to describe Afro-American colleagues that shouldn't be used by white men, I guess.

in like memos. This went all the way up to the president. But they always kept him because he was the man that defends America from the scourge of foreign influences, which is drugs in this case, from China, the opium, from Mexico, the marijuana. So he was a very good politician, basically, like an anti-drug lobbyist that everyone in Washington loved.

And so the reasons for the prohibition in America is not that this Anslinger was actually studying LSD and finding out that this is actually dangerous or marijuana is dangerous. That's, we really, even though we're free in our society, we have to, you know,

We have to curb this. This is not how it went. He wanted to attack the jazz scene, and he knew that the jazz musicians were smoking a lot of weed. So it's very hard to make it illegal to play jazz, but you can make marijuana illegal, and then you can target jazz musicians. So it's got racial profiling. Why were they going after jazz musicians? He hated jazz. He thought that...

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I think he had a... I think it's a sexual thing, actually. Because he actually said once, when black men smoke reefer, they think they're as good as white men and they're going to sleep without women or something like that. That was kind of the world that he was...

So was it because the jazz musicians were on stage and people loved them? Yeah, they were cool. They were cool. Yeah. And they were only cool because they smoked the weed, you know, that gave them that diabolical power like over the audience and the groove, you know. If you take the weed away from them, they're just going to be like boring people, you know.

So that guy really did a lot of damage in my mind to the American society. It's just stunning that 90 years later we're still dealing with the aftermath of that. And also in conjunction with his union with William Randolph Hearst. William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, had a vested financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal or making marijuana illegal because of hemp. You know the whole story about the decorticator? Yeah.

Are you talking about the wood now? No, Decorticator was a device that was manufactured. It was created in the early 1930s, and it was on the cover of Popular Science magazine when they called it, they said, Hemp, the New Billion Dollar Crop of the Future. All right. So because hemp was a very difficult plant to...

to take the fiber and convert it into paper and convert it into textiles and things like that. They used slave labor for the most part until the cotton gin came along. When the cotton gin came along, that became more effective to use cotton than to use hemp. It was easier. Then in the early 1930s, they came out with the decorticator. The decorticator was this machine. See if you can get a version of that, Jamie.

So the decorticator allowed them to effectively – that's the decorticator. So this machine, they would run the hemp stalks through it, and it would break them down far more economically, much, much easier, more effectively than the way they would do it by hand previously. Oh, right. So hemp, the new billion-dollar crop. So hemp – find the cover of that magazine. So hemp –

Was a far more effective paper. It's much more durable. I'll give you take hemp very difficult to tear in fact the earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence were on hemp so this billion dollar crop, so this was popular science magazine and

William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst Publications. He also owned paper mills. So he had thousands and thousands of acres of trees and forests that they were converting into paper. And now all of a sudden there was this new product that was going to destabilize his –

And so hemp is a disruptor. Exactly. So when they made marijuana illegal, a lot of the people that were voting on this didn't even understand they were making cannabis illegal. They didn't understand that it was the same thing. Yeah. They didn't understand that it was the same literal textile that created canvas. Yeah.

All the great works, like if you look at Leonardo da Vinci's paintings. It's on hemp. It's on hemp. It's on hemp. It's on canvas. It's on cannabis paper. It's on a very durable form of paper. Have you ever touched cannabis paper, like hemp paper? It's crazy. It's really hard to tear. My friend Todd McCormick, he was an early...

grower in Los Angeles when marijuana was medically legal and he wound up going to jail because in federal court you couldn't say that it was for medical purposes. They just prosecuted him based on the fact that he was a drug dealer instead of someone who was

Legally in the state of California growing medical marijuana. He had a stalk on his table of hemp I don't know if you've ever felt a hemp stalk. Have you ever picked one up? No, it is crazy It's like styrofoam you pick it up. It feels like nothing but it's hard like oak But it's not heavy. It's very strange. It's like an alien plant very very weird so that stuff converts incredibly to clothing

You can make building materials out of it. There's a thing called hempcrete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of, out of hemp. And it's incredibly sustainable because it's,

If you have an acre of trees, if you chop down that acre of trees and make paper out of it, it takes forever to grow enough trees in that acre to grow them to the point where you could harvest them and make paper out of them. Cannabis, if you're growing hemp, rather, if you grow hemp stalks in the same field, you got new hemp in a few months, and now you have paper again. So William Randolph Hearst demonized cannabis...

For the particular interest that he had with paper, with his paper mills, and to stop the hemp industry. I mean, they were quite close allies in a way. Yeah. Enslinger and Hearst. And in his publications, the word marijuana was for the first time publicized. So they kind of... And with a racial element to it. They worked hand in hand. Yeah, with a racial element. They said that blacks and Mexicans were smoking this new drug and raping white women. Right. Yeah.

Right. And then the reefer madness movies, which are fantastic pieces of propaganda. They're absolutely hilarious. If you watch them today, especially knowing what we know about marijuana, like these people were just crazed. It was more meth like than it was, you know what they were depicting. Right.

Absolutely. So Anslinger, 90 years ago, the propaganda that he pushed out into society, the way that infected people like a mind virus, the effects of that still today. When people find out that you have taken marijuana or that you regularly enjoy marijuana, people freak out. They're like, what are you doing? What are you doing to yourself?

Oh, my God, you're out there taking drugs. Meanwhile, this person's on antidepressants and they drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and take Xanax. Like there's sanctioned drugs that are far worse for you. It's not a drug free society. Yeah. I mean, I talked about the sugar thing that I stopped. It's a crazy drug. And that actually made me realize that we.

Us humans take drugs every day. Like, every human takes drugs every day. I'm drinking coffee. I got these little nicotine pouches. Yeah. Which is interesting, you know, that we don't...

acknowledge that really. We think like people who are against drugs, they kind of vote, they kind of say we stand for a sober society, but it never is a sober society. No. We just have some legalized drugs and some drugs that are illegalized. My friends that are in Alcoholics Anonymous, they all drink cigarettes or drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. They're all doing a drug. They're just doing a drug that doesn't completely destroy their life. I mean, I thought about this, you know,

writing, having written Blitz and Trip both on drugs and history, I was, I'm now trying to come up with a more, with a larger narrative. And I mean, in your podcast, a lot has been talked about the stoned ape theory, right? Yes. I think it's very interesting. And I think it's time for kind of a new, a new world history, as you may. I think because we, I think we actually are stoned sapiens. I think,

that this cognitive revolution that happened in Africa, it's, as Stamets said, it's not a theory. It's a, what is it? A theory is when there's already proof. It's a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis. But I think that a lot speaks for this hypothesis. I think it makes sense if you see that early humans were, for example, depicting mushrooms in drawings, that these mushrooms...

have some kind of relevance to them. And our edge, which is something that Harari writes about over other homos, like the Neanderthals, or also just monkeys, large monkeys, our edge was that we had this cognitive revolution, that we had a neocortex forming and that we suddenly had...

an understanding about time so we're not just living in the moment where we know there's a past and there's a future

So that creates a different language. And the different language, a more abstract, more complex language than, for example, the apes. Apes can organize up to like a hundred. Then their language kind of fails them. But humans suddenly, not suddenly, I mean, this is over long periods of time, could develop a language that enabled them to form larger groups. That's how they became dominant, also dominant over other homo species like the Neanderthals.

And we know today that they had these plants at their availability. So it makes sense to imagine that actually we found, maybe it was a mushroom, maybe it was iboga, which is something still used in African societies and which now is again being examined as the new psychoactive hot drug. It could be a mixture or some groups could have had this, others could have had that.

But it seems to be pretty clear that the founding moment of our race is actually this transcendence. Suddenly you realize this moment where I'm in is not all, there's more. There's a future, there's a past. That is what transcendence is. So we are basically, that's why I call our species, we're stone sapiens. We were stoned from the start. So drugs, which...

transferred into language, into also music, into rituals because we wanted to keep the drug also secret from others who are not, you know, from apes or Neanderthals. So rituals start existing like a person who kind of has the drugs and hands them out. So this is at the beginning of our race. I think

And we were so powerful because we could develop that larger language than the apes who could only organize up until 100. And now we have the problem. We poor stone sapiens.

that we have created global problems, but we don't have a global narrative. Like we're falling into the Western camp. We have China. We don't have a global narrative. Like our narrative usually stops within the national context. Like there's the American narrative. There's the Western narrative, which also includes Europe. There's the German narrative. But there's no...

global narrative and that's what I intend to change with my book Stone Sapiens which will be the next book and kind of conclude the trilogy and

these like how are drugs and humans kind of symbiotic in a way? Well, there's a, for lack of a better term, there's a consciousness that exists in mushrooms. There's something that you interact with and we don't necessarily understand what's going on. But if you could imagine a lower primate interacting with a higher consciousness on a regular basis and then adapting and

This is the theory of why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years. And if you ever listen to Dennis McKenna describe this, Dennis McKenna describes it brilliantly because he's an actual scientist in the way he explains the effects of psilocybin, what the effects it would have on the mind in terms of developing language and...

Just expanding our creativity, expanding our ability to see things. It makes better edge detection. You have better visual acuity. Makes them more horny. They're more likely to breed, more community. There's also this potential for a type of...

You know, for lack of a better term, a type of mind melding. You know, there's a type of consciousness expanding energy that happens that seems to be connected in a way that we can't measure. Where human beings interact with each other without words.

You know, telepathine was exactly what they, when they first found harming, when they found some certain trees that were part of the components of ayahuasca, they try to call it telepathine. But due to the rules of scientific nomenclature, that substance had already been identified as harming. But the researchers that were taking this are saying we are experiencing these telepathic melds. There's something that's going on with these things.

And we want to get to the bottom of that. Let's call it telepathy because it imparts a type of telepathy. Well, for Tripp, I became very interested in that question that you just articulated, what actually happens in the brain, because that is quite hard to figure out actually how do they work and what actually changes in the brain. And there's one researcher in Zurich again in Switzerland, they're really experts on psychedelics actually,

Because they didn't sign all the UN treaties because they're like a neutral, more neutral country than others. So they actually have a little bit more freedom for research. And there is a professor called Franz Vollenweider at the University in Zurich. And he was able to start in the early 90s giving his patients psilocybin and LSD and DMT. And then he put them in, like he examined their brains in brain scanners, like imaging, like high tech, you know, imaging technology. And he found that

that actually, that you can actually measure it. Or you can see the changes that happen in psychedelics. And what happens is that the so-called default mode network, that is a term that brain scientists use to describe what Freud would call the ego, like the center in our brain, like the boss in our brain, like

The guy, I guess it would be, or the woman in our brain that says, now I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast and everything's cool and I'm a writer, whatever. And you, this is like, we have always this controlling force within us. Otherwise, we would go basically insane. Like, what's going on here? Is this cool? Am I in danger? Basically, am I in danger? Like, there's this thing that the ghost with the rifle is going to shoot. Yeah.

So the default mode network makes sure that this doesn't happen, that we function and it makes a lot of sense. And actually under psychedelics, he could measure that this part of the brain gets a little less energy. So it's not switched off completely. I mean, if you take a lot of psychedelics, it might be switched off completely. Then you have what's called like a full immersion experience. But if you take a little, it's also switched off, like gets a little less energy.

And that other parts of the brain, peripheral parts that are usually like following the main guy, they can communicate more on psychedelics. So what happens in your brain is actually, it is actually a change in, you know, the brain chemistry. And what also happens is what is called the neuroplasticity is enhanced. Neuroplasticity is the term for, basically the brain is not obviously like a fixed, like

non-moving object like my fist or something it's constantly kind of moving the brain you know and neuroplasticity describes that ability to constantly adapt to like the situation and be flexible make new connections that's neuroplasticity and he could also measure that neuroplasticity is enhanced when you take psychedelics

That's why also it could become dangerous if it's enhanced too quickly and you're not experienced. I mean, we're on the Joe Rogan experience, so we're all experienced. I hope we'll have an experienced audience. But if you're unexperienced, that could be too much. Then the stimulation of your brain or the change or the disruption of your day-to-day way of thinking could be overwhelming. But if you handle it properly...

It's actually, that is, I guess, what is the beneficial aspect of the psychedelic experience. You enhance neuroplasticity in a way, I don't know if becoming smarter is the right term, because what is smart, what is intelligence, but it's the fact that neuroplasticity is enhanced, and because of this,

kind of orthodox thought forms like depressed people always think the same thing like I'm not worthy or I can't you know depression is a loop or loops in your brain of always this and LSD especially psilocybin they disrupt that

because other parts of the brain suddenly come into play and the default mode network which has this disease of depression suddenly is not calling the shots anymore. That's why psychedelics have proven effective against depression. The first study that showed this clinical study was done in 2015 actually in America at Johns Hopkins University that psilocybin helps against very severe depression when nothing else helps.

So we know a little bit about what happens in the brain, but obviously the brain is still a black box. That's why so many scientists, when LSD came out,

in the late 40s and early 50s, especially in America, were enthusiastic. They thought, finally we have a tool with which we can shine like a torch shining into the black box of the brain because it works in such small quantities. There was actually a lot of hope in the beginning that original enthusiasm by Sandus that I talked about when they thought we have a game changer, we have a blockbuster, everyone will...

become, you know, will heal from LSD. That many scientists actually believe that. And the interesting question is, and we're like making a long circle of what went wrong, like why wasn't it developed into a medicine that you can get at your dispensary, like you can get cannabis products now, for example, in the state of California.

Well, you can get them here too, which is weird. You get them here, like I said, there's like different deltas. So we can get legal cannabis here. They sell it. Society is still very insecure when it comes to drugs because we have been bombarded with the drugs are illegal.

Horrifically dangerous, you know, this propaganda. When I was in high school, this is your brain on drugs. You know, it was just say no, Nancy Reagan. Everyone was just say no. I was also in America actually in high school. I graduated from Flint Powers Catholic High School in Michigan, class of 88.

And I had been taught because I was sent from Germany as like a German exchange student. I was taught before, don't mix with the drug people. There will be drug people at the high school and they will approach you and they will try to draw you in and then you won't get out again. And I really believed that. I mean, I was like 17. Well, there are people like that.

That is true. Look, if you fall into the opiate crowd, if you fall into a crowd of people that are taking... I'm talking about weed now. Right. Well, weed is very different, but the problem is the blanket term, right? The blanket term of drugs. Yeah, it's a big problem. Yeah, but also if you fall into the weed crowd in high school, it's very possible that you'll fall into a crowd of ne'er-do-wells.

who will ruin their lives and they just get high all day and they wake and bake and they abuse it. Just like you can abuse sugar, right? Just like you can abuse alcohol. I actually think that cannabis is a dangerous drug because it is quite addictive. Yeah, it can be. Unlike LSD. LSD is not addictive. LSD is actually when the guy who invented AA, he...

He himself had made an LSD therapy and got away from alcohol using LSD. And he wanted to incorporate LSD therapy into the AA program and then didn't do it because I guess it was pressure or whatever. We'll come to the pressure in a second.

So LSD is actually a non-addictive drug. For example, in Germany now we legalize cannabis. It's legal everywhere in the country. I think they should have legalized LSD and not cannabis because cannabis is actually harder to use. I think it should be legal. I think it's good that it's legal, but I think it's a little bit of a more problematic drug actually to legalize because it's also so easy to use. But to legalize LSD, which is like, I think it should be legalized, you know,

all over the globe because I think it's a brain food. That's what I think after studying it, you know. But saying this sounds like completely outrageous, you know, LSD, like so many people are afraid of it. So I hope with Trip to take a little bit of the edge off, you know, to actually show where it comes from. And I would like to tell that story where that comes from. Yeah. If I may. Please. Please.

Because that's the core story. Because when I had found these SS records that they had used, because you asked before, was there another psychedelic substance? Yes, there was mescaline. Mescaline was already kind of investigated by scientists since the 20s. It was also a German, there was a German scientist called Behringer. He was really, he was at the University of Heidelberg and he was really into mescaline and he was like,

doing it with his students and making tests and how does it change consciousness and what happens. So he was basically one of the pioneers of psychedelic research, you could say. So the Nazis knew about mescaline and the Nazis wanted to find a truth drug. Hitler was a paranoid person. He always thought, and it's actually true, that people are conspiring against him. There were quite a lot of assassination attempts on his life. He survived them all.

But there were a lot of people who didn't like him. I mean, Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship and most people supported Hitler, but there were also people who did not. You know, there were people in the resistance, even within, you know, the army, who thought he was an idiot. High-ranking officers who were, like, were, like, a bit more brilliant than him and who knew that he was running things to the ground. So he wanted—he gave the order to find a truth drug, like—

It's the wet dream of intelligence. You give someone a substance and then you can control that person. You can extract secrets from that person. You can kind of – you can control a person. And the Nazis, the SS, even with their torture methods, had been unable to extract all the secrets they wanted to extract from prisoners, especially Polish prisoners.

resistance fighters had been very resistant even against SS torture. Like they wouldn't say, "I got the job from the British intelligence" or what, you know, they just wouldn't talk even when you tortured them. So Hitler wanted the drug that would solve this problem. And one man that was put in charge with this is a chemist called Richard Kuhn.

who actually received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He was a brilliant mind, but he was a Nazi, so he didn't... Like many scientists left Germany or writers left, Thomas Mann left Germany when the Nazis took power. But some people stayed, some writers stayed, some scientists stayed, and this Kuhn actually became...

you know, he's really working for Hitler. He was developing a nerve poison, um, Zarin, which was deadly for Hitler. He was, and if you worked for Hitler as a scientist, obviously you got all the, the grants you need, the money you needed. You were, you know, you had a great time basically if you sold your soul to the devil. So Richard Kuhn was in charge, um, with, uh, finding the truth drug. And, um, and then, and then the interesting thing is, um,

Because I was in the Novartis archive of Sandoz because I wanted to find the link between a Swiss pharmaceutical company who develops LSD and then the SS who tests it in Dachau. Like, how did the SS know? And did they really test LSD also in Dachau or was it just mescaline? Because they write in the reports that are then found in the U.S.,

and another odorless, colorless substance was being used. And LSD is that famous odorless, colorless substance. I could put a drop of LSD in your coffee, you wouldn't even notice it, which is good for intelligence service. You want to dose someone without that person knowing it. So LSD was kind of perfect. But how did the Nazis, did they actually know about LSD? Was it LSD? That was kind of what I wanted to find out.

And when I was in the archive of Sandoz, I wanted to find papers. Did they sell LSD to the SS? I was curious to find something. And the archivist, he was very skeptical of me because he sensed that I was onto something. He was protecting basically the archive because the archive at Sandoz is not a public archive. If you go to the National Archives of the United States or the Federal Archive of Germany, it's a public archive.

The archivists want you to find the information. They will reveal like the find book, which like has like it's a database. It shows you everything that's in the archive. So you have a, it takes sometimes days or weeks to actually figure out what's all there. But you have theoretically an overview of everything that's in the archive. But a company archive like Novartis archive, there was no find book. The archivist said to me, just tell me what you're looking for and then I will find it for you, which is basically shit, you know.

Because in a way you have to, it's basically under his control, the documents that he gives to you, you know, you have no, you don't even know what's in the archive behind that guy sitting in front of you. But and I wanted to see like, I knew that Albert Hoffman wasn't a Nazi, like I had learned, I had known a lot about Albert Hoffman. And he, I never heard anything about him having Nazi connections, like giving LSD to Richard Kuhn or something.

But I wanted to see what his boss, Stoll, the one we talked about before, had the whole, like the Urgot God, like, who is this guy? Because he, as the CEO, called the shots for Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company. And then the archivist didn't want me really to see these papers. I could sense that. And I wanted to come again to the archive. How did you sense that?

Well, the first time I was there, he said, why is everyone always so interested in LSD? You know, we have so many beautiful products here. And there was like a showcase with all the products that Sandoz has made. And LSD wasn't one of them. I said, LSD is actually missing from that showcase here. And he said, well, it was never a product. I said, it was a product. It actually had a name. It was called De Luzit. That was the brand name of LSD. It existed, you know. And he's like, yeah, you know, but we are not so, you know, it's illegal. So they don't.

They have a difficult relationship with LSD. And the only thing he gave me were the original lab books of Albert Hoffman. And it's very easy to flatter. Like, it stuns you. Like, if you're interested in LSD, you see, like, the original lab book. You see, like, his handwriting when he for the first time takes LSD. And then his handwriting, like, he can't hold the pen anymore. And you see, like, this line on the paper. That's exciting, you know? Yeah.

But it's not new. People have seen that before. So he kind of tricks you into like, you see that, you say, oh, great, thank you, bye-bye, like after you go home. But then I was on the Swiss mountain. I was actually visiting a scientist that had researched this ergot producing in the Emmental. I visited this guy on the mountain. He showed me the former fields of Sandoz.

And then I had the idea, I must go back to the archive and look at the papers of the CEO because the CEO calls the shots. Why wasn't the CEO able to turn this potential game changer into a lucrative medicine? What went wrong was probably on the CEO level of the company, not on like the chemist level of the company. So I wrote an email to the archive. I said, I'm going to come back tomorrow and I want to look at the papers of the CEO. And then he wrote back to me.

well, sorry, tomorrow I have too much work. You cannot come anymore. Kind of like that. But I just showed up. I just showed up at the archive and he opened and he said, well, you're here. I don't have any time. And I said, well, I'm here. You know, it's an archive. I can use it. And

Then I was sitting there and I was thinking, what can I do? And I actually, at the time, I had some LSD with me because I was already getting it for my mother. So I had it with me and I said to him, I suddenly had an idea and I said to him, have you ever actually seen LSD? And he said,

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And then I asked him, do you want to see it? And he said, sure, I would like to see it. But where could I see it? No one has it anymore. And I said, well, here you go. This is LSD. And he's like studying it. He was quite interested. Suddenly he became interested, like, oh, this is actually LSD. That's how it looks. And the LSD I had received had printed on it like these papers saying,

the old logo of Sandoz. So like the chemist who had made this, actually in Basel, it was made in a black lab, obviously, kind of made a joke and put like the logo of Sandoz on it. And he said, this is the logo of our old company. How is this possible? And I said, well, maybe it's like an homage by the chemist who made these. I said, do you want one? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, I give you one as a gift. You know, you've been so helpful to me. And he's like, oh, this is,

But this, yes, okay, I'll take one. And I gave him a trip. And what is the dose? That was like 100 micrograms, which is quite strong. You know, I said to him, it's legit. I said to him, take it like when you're in the beautiful Swiss mountains, like you want to walk, you know, then maybe it's a good time. And he's like, interested. Yeah. And then he gave it back to me. He said, I can't, I can't.

For legal reasons, I don't think I can accept this. I said, okay, fine. Took it back. And then he said, but is there something you want to see maybe today in the archive? Because he was, you know, we had formed a connection suddenly. Right, right, right. And I said, yeah, actually, I would be interested in seeing the paper of the CEO of Arthur Stoll. He said, that's not a problem at all. And he just went and he brought me the folder. And as I'm looking through the folder, I can see that there's one man that Stoll was communicating with

all through his career. And that one man, Stoll himself had learned under Willstetter. Willstetter was the Jewish-German master of biochemistry, who was later, he had to leave Germany, you know, the Nazis were prosecuting him also because he was Jewish.

And Wildstätter was this genius who also received the Nobel Prize and who had found out that, you know, Stoll's idea from potent plants you extract and then you make medicines from plants basically. Because plants are very powerful, obviously. So Wildstätter was like the scientific father of Stoll. And Stoll had one other prodigy child and that was Richard Kuhn.

who by then had been the leading Nazi biochemist. So Kuhn and Stoll, which I saw then in the letters in front of me, had been best friends because they had the same teacher. They had exchanged already in the 20s all their research. In the 30s, especially the Ergot research, Kuhn was very interested in it. So now he has the job by Hitler to find the truth drug. And then Stoll says, we found this drug.

almost magical substance that even in microgram dosages has this strong effect on the mind and Kuhn obviously became very interested in it and I found a letter maybe we can pull that one up I don't know if you can find it from 1943 October where Kuhn and I found this in the archive this was the smoking gun basically where Kuhn thanks Stoll for sending ergotamine which is the precursor to LSD it's like

From Ergotermin you do one step and then you have LSD. And we received Ergotermin in October 1943 from the Swiss company. And then, you know, the Nazis had their hand on LSD. And then it becomes very interesting what happens when the Americans find out about that. Because when the Americans liberated Germany from National Socialism, when they won the war basically,

certain units had...

attached to them the so-called Alsos unit. A-L-S-O-S. And the Alsos unit was responsible for finding German nuclear scientists and interviewing them about their research for the nuclear bomb in Nazi Germany. Because Nazi Germany was also trying to develop a nuclear weapon. And the Americans thought they're probably quite far ahead because they're good in science. Like everything they do, they fucking rock. Um...

Which in this case actually probably wasn't true. I don't think the Nazis were so advanced. It's still a bit obscure, like how far the Nazis really were with nuclear technology. But this Alsos was in place. And the second job of Alsos was to find out about biochemical weapons because they also thought, rightly so, that Hitler had biochemical weapons. So one of their first scientists they interviewed was Richard Kuhn because Richard Kuhn was a leading Nazi biochemist.

So in the spring of 1945 and liberated Heidelberg after World War II, Kuhn is being interviewed. And for Kuhn, it's a question of will I cooperate with Americans or will I go to the Nuremberg trial as like a war criminal? Because he could have ended up on the bench for developing sarine, a nerve poison. So he decided to rather extend his career. He later came to America, was teaching in America there.

So he told them about LSD. He said, "We were very interested in LSD." And those experiments in Dachau could not be finished because there was not enough time. Dachau was already liberated. They were in the middle of finding out if I give a psychedelic to a prisoner, can I extract his secrets? Can I fully control him? These tests take a bit of time. You have to do it with several... You don't do it in a day. So these tests were not finished yet.

But these findings then were very interesting to the American military because after the war, what started immediately the next war, the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which was what the then CIA was founded, which CIA called the CIA Director Dulles. He called it, this is brain warfare. It's a totally new type of war and we have to know, we have to get ahead of them and they probably are working on brainwashing techniques, um,

So we have to be, you know, ready to defend ourselves against the Soviet onslaught with their brainwashing techniques. So the Americans learned actually a lot from the Nazis. I once met in Florida on the beach together with my father, an SS Marine that was in the 80s when I was an exchange student in Flint, Michigan. We took a vacation, met my father.

my German parents in Florida and we spoke with this Marine and he said, yeah, we learned so much from the SS. And it's true, you know, the SS, the German system was a very, was an evil system, obviously, but it was a very functional system. You know, there was a lot to be learned from them in terms of warfare, you know. So the Americans, because the Nazis were so interested in this truth drug, thought this must be, you know, this must be interesting. We have to look at this. So

They started now, first the American military, then the CIA started now to investigate can LSD actually be the truth drug? Can it be like a pharmaceutical weapon? So this is actually what went wrong.

So what went wrong was the Swiss CEO sending samples to the German Nazi biochemist. From him, the knowledge goes to the American military and then intelligence apparatus that LSD could be abused as a weapon. This is what really put LSD on the wrong foot in a way. Because there was also at the same time in the early 50s,

a lot of hopeful research at universities in America, like brain scientists. They were looking at LSD. It wasn't illegal yet. It was an interesting thing. But then the CIA took over the military research. First, it was the U.S. military. They had a professor at Harvard University called Beecher. Beecher was like the drug expert of the American army. He had also been in the war,

And then he looked at the SS reports from Dachau and he made a report called Report on Ego-Depressant Drugs, which he sent to Washington. So he was kind of the knowledgeable guy that would interpret how could psychedelic molecules be used as drugs.

And then in 1947, the CIA was founded. Basically, the CIA took over this truth drug research from the military. And then Bitscher was sending his reports to the CIA. This was done by a guy called Sidney Gottlieb. I don't know if you've heard that name. He was the head of MKUltra. MKUltra is basically a program first to see whether LSD could be used as a weapon. And Gottlieb traveled to Basel, Switzerland because he had heard –

that Sanders was also selling LSD to the other side of the Iron Curtain. There was rumor that the Soviet Union had purchased like 20 million dosages of LSD. So he flew to Basel with a suitcase full of cash and put it on the table of Stoll, the CEO, and said, "I want the whole, the world supply of LSD. I'm hereby buying the world supply of LSD."

which was, he said, your supply, like his intelligence told him that the Sandoz had produced something, like, I don't know, it's in the book, I forgot the number, like four kilograms of LSD. And he said, I want to buy the whole, you know, four kilograms is quite a lot, you know, because it's already potent in micro dosages. Stoll said, well, we only made 400 grams so far. They hadn't even made that much. But so he bought the 400 grams and he set a mechanism in place

that Stoll would always inform, Stoll would not sell to the other side of the Iron Curtain. That's what the Sandoz had to, you know, basically assure him.

Of course, the payback is, Sandoz can still sell all the other medicines in America, doesn't have problems with the FDA and the American, you know, that's the pressure. And then Gottlieb takes, you know, the 400 gram back to the States and is now, from now on, always informed when like a scientist says,

in an American university acquires LSD from Zandos because they would not sell it openly in the beginning. They would only give it away basically to scientists. They were still in the product development phase because they still weren't sure what can LSD, like, what do we write on the package basically? What's the indication? So Gottlieb

was basically in the driving chair of LSD at that time. He got all the information from Basel, Switzerland, who had LSD in the country. He had the most LSD. And then he had the idea to really look at how LSD can be used to manipulate people, basically. That was like the big goal. And that's not an easy thing to achieve. And the way he did it was he let all the universities in the country know

I think over like over 60 institutions like you know the big universities of this big country he let them all you know in their in their special you know departments investigate LSD but these tests are expensive and what Gottlieb the idea Gottlieb had was

University tests are often funded by foundations. Let's say the Rockefeller Foundation. Like a university wants to make like some pharmaceutical test series that goes over two years and involves all these people that have to be paid. And it's expensive. It costs, let's say, $200,000 to make like one serious clinical test. So that money comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, for example. And the money...

first goes from the CIA to the Rockefeller Foundation. So he used not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Foundation, but other foundations as like go-between. So he gave them money and they would finance research done in universities, which are supposed to be, I guess, neutral, like just trying to figure out like what is, you know, science is...

You don't want a CIA guy to finance your science and then kind of manipulate through that money how your research is being done and especially all the results going back to the people who bring the money. So he was very efficient in setting up this program, which then I guess was called MKUltra. But that's also – that's how LSD really – that's what really went wrong with LSD. MKUltra.

Yeah, because it dominated a controlling force over the research. And a lot of research then was tailored to like, there was crazy stuff happening. Like there was even in Canada at a university. I write about this in Tripped, this guy, and it sounds a bit like a Stanley Kubrick movie.

He put people on constant LSD and then had speakers under their pillows, which would tell them single sentences. He was trying to see, can you really drive someone mad with LSD, for example? Can you deprogram a brain with LSD? So these...

These are very creepy experiments. These are actually human experiments. In a way, they were a continuation of what the SS started in Dachau, but much more sophisticated. And they were done on American citizens. Part of MKUltra were so-called safe houses. The safe houses, there was one in the West Village in Manhattan, one on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. And in these safe houses...

people would be, you know, would be approached on the street or in bars in lower Manhattan and, you know, invited to like a party, come, we want to come to my pad, you know, I have booze and, and, and it was like a cool apartment and, but there was one large mirror and behind the mirror set an operative who was filming and listening in and recording and then

They checked what happens to a person if they receive unwittingly a dosage of LSD. So this is quite unethical work that was done. They also did Operation Midnight Climax. Yeah, that's in Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Yeah, so that was a brothel. Yeah, it was an apartment. They called it The Pad, but they hired sex workers there.

which then got an additional fee from the CIA for giving their clients from them. Also, they received their fee, obviously, and then giving them LSD. But I think it was a stupid, actually, experiment. I mean, it's kind of spectacular. Operation Midnight Climax looks great in a film, I guess. Sounds good.

Yeah, I mean, it just showed... But it wasn't very effective. What do you gain? What do you see? Someone, of course, has a little bit different sex on LSD, but it's kind of stupid. It never led anywhere. Basically...

Sidney Gottlieb wasted a lot of tax money and he brought a lot of suffering to people who were subjected to these unethical tests and he had no result. It's definitely not a good thing that they did. But if you put your mind into their perspective back then trying to understand the effects of these drugs, they probably had limited resources. And without making these things legal and without like opening up the research to everybody to this potentially dangerous.

powerful, life-changing drug. I mean, this drug could be something that could be used by foreign governments. It could be used against us. So they're probably very secretive in their approach. I mean, we kind of had the benefit of

of, you know, 2020 hindsight? Because we're looking back... I mean, yes, it was the Cold War, and I think that they really believed that there are these threats from the Soviet Union, and there were threats from the Soviet Union, obviously. And brainwashing is a specialty of communism, you know? So it's clear that they wanted to be... From his perspective, it makes sense, you know? Right. So... But it didn't help LSD to become...

a medicine because that was a time when there were no antidepressants yet developed and no antipsychotics. So I think LSD would have had a chance to actually become a very helpful medicine instead of being kind of an

unhelpful Weapon because it never worked as a weapon so right? No, it's definitely unhelpful what they did Yeah, and it might be understandable, but it's it went the wrong way It went the wrong way But it was also indicative of the kind of control that those people wanted over society and population Especially coming after World War two there's there's a whole new order in the world The United States emerges victorious and you know then there's this climate

Clamoring for trying to figure out okay. What are what is the enemy up to? What are these powerful tools that could be used against us and some of them could be mind control? I mean, this is obviously at a time where you know the Red Scare right there the McCarthy era they were worried about communism and communism infiltrating our society and They're probably very terrified of things that disrupted which is what was going on in the 1960s you know I

Jamie, I'm going to send you this. This is a video of hippies in the 1960s. And it kind of shows you that a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now with the disruption of society, it's very similar to what was going on in 1968 with the anti-war movement. The Free Palestine movement happened.

has a lot in common with a lot of other anti-war movements of the past where these people want peace and love and back then in the 1960s in particular they were dropping acid this is the Timothy Leary days and you know tune out and drop out and so play this 1968

I want to climb a tree, I do that. You have all these young kids coming from a very rich, affluent, middle-class society where they've been taken care of since they've been babies and never really had to do anything for themselves in a serious way. And now they come here and they want to be taken care of. One of the first questions they'll ask is, what do you do? And so I say, I live. And they say, no, I mean...

Do you work or what? And I said, no, I just live. A lot of people say to me, what are you doing? You're not doing any work. You're not working at a job. You tell them that you don't do anything and that you come to the park. It's like they can't believe you. We're doing the hardest work in the world because we're growing. We're trying to change. We have a group of young people from upper middle class families who have moved into a physical environment that is in effect a reversion. They're living in gross, insanitary conditions.

With a great deal of overcrowding, there is a very high incidence of infectious hepatitis. About one-fourth or one-fifth of our total caseload in the venereal disease clinics appear to be hippies going on the appearance solely. And we have one case history in which a young chap has been into the clinic 12 times in three months with 12 different cases.

of gonorrhea. Okay, so that guy, that last guy with the salt and pepper hair and the tie and the nice suit, those are the people that were from another generation and were seeing this younger generation that was completely dropping out of society. And the...

What was causing that? There was a lot causing that, the anti-war movement, but a lot of it was fueled by psychedelics. And they wanted to stop that. They wanted to stop this radical shift in society that they were seeing from the 1950s to the 1960s. Yeah, there's an interview with one main aide of Nixon afterwards when he was already retired. And he said that they couldn't make it illegal to be

Black and they couldn't make it illegal to go on rallies and be against the war like it's an American Principle that you can go to a demonstration, but they could make it illegal to take LSD and then criminalize Yeah, people say it's it's kind of the same thing that Anslinger started. Mm-hmm much earlier Yeah, I mean it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over again when whenever there's a powerful disruptor that might be ultimately great for the human race and

But bad for the power structures that are in place currently they step in and they do their best to throw water on it and what they did from the 19 the late 1960s into the 1980s They radically shifted culture everything changed music sucked cars sucked everything sucked it there's there's direct evidence that it had a huge impact on our creativity and

If you look at the music from the 1960s, it was so radically different from the music from the 1950s. Something had happened. I mean, that's why John Lennon said we have to thank the CIA because they gave us LSD. I mean, it is kind of interesting. Also, a young guy called Ken Kesey was working at a psychiatric ward in Menlo Park.

California, and he was part of MKUltra basically. I mean, he was a guinea pig. He received 75 US dollars for taking LSD. And then he took LSD and his default mode network was, you know, had less energy and he had, like he said, suddenly understood the crazies. You know, he was walking through the psychiatric ward and

understanding a lot better like what's actually going on in the brain and that's when he had the idea for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which made him so much money that he then decided to stop writing and buy a bus and drive around the country with his friends and dish out LSD so it's kind of a

He made like a career change. Yeah, I could see how the powers that be. I could see how the CIA and the government were like, we have to stop this. We have to put a stop to this. This is going to be the downfall of society, certainly downfall of the people that are in control of the government currently.

And these people are necessary to be in control of the country because we are in a cold war with Russia. We just got out of World War II. Also in a hot war with Vietnam. I mean, that war was taking a big toll on the American society. And suddenly there's like young people shitting on it, you know, saying, what the fuck? I'm not going there. So that...

That created a strong counter reaction by the regime. Yes. Which is to legalize LSD, but poor LSD. Poor LSD. And what's really unfortunate is that if that had not happened, who knows how transformative those substances would have been to society globally.

If there was a great reckoning in the United States, if we understood things, if we got our act together, if we really cleaned up all the problems in society and did so on an egalitarian plane, we recognize that there's work that can be done here where we can make life better for everybody, have everybody recognize that we are literally all in this together and we are all connected. We need each other, we are a part of each other, and we should treat each other, all of us, like we are a community.

I think that's the globalized narrative that we need. It's the only way we survive. I mean, this is the perspective that astronauts have when they go to the space station. They look down at this ball and they go, this is so crazy that we're fighting over imaginary boundaries that we've created, lines in the dirt.

I think it really is a problem of our language and of our communication skills because we can only create a discourse within the United States, possibly. You have the media, you have the Joe Rogan experience, you have a discourse. And you have a discourse in other nation states, but there is no global discourse. I mean, maybe when there's like Olympic Games, that's a type of global discourse that's happening. Maybe right now, that's why people kind of like to watch it right now because they feel...

We're connecting like from all over the world without being like total assholes. We're doing sports together. Isn't that nice? And we like when the opposing teams hug each other and make friends. We need positive global communication because we have a lot of negative global communication. We have two, I mean, two very prominent wars right now.

and a lot of other conflicts, and we have global problems like the heating up of the planet, which leads to refugee floods and crises and migration. I mean, we have a global theme, but how do we talk about it? There's no

There's no global government. Not that we need one or we should have one, but there's no global. Basically, there's no global and there's nothing, you know? Right. I don't necessarily think a global government's the rule because the problem is whenever people have control over people, they just want more.

It's just it's like everything else. It's like if you have money, you want more money. If you have power, you want more power. You want control. You want more control. And it makes it easier for them to stay in control. And if you had a global world government that could tell people, no, you can't move to Switzerland where the laws are different. You can't move to Costa Rica. You have to the laws apply everywhere. It's a global world order. We decide what you can and can't do.

And we're not deciding it based on empirical evidence, fact, objective analysis of reality. We're doing it on the basis of what's the most effective way that we can control and govern. I think that's like a horror scenario that we might be moving into. Well, we're in it right now. We're battling it. There's rational, logical people that understand the consequences of these things that are fighting against it and talking against it. And then there's people that are saying, we need centralized digital currency to compete with China.

Like, Jesus Christ. And we're leading ourselves into a position that's very similar to many other positions that societies have faced in the past, including ancient Greece, where ancient Greece, where they developed democracy, the Eleusinian mysteries, and then all that stuff got made illegal. And then society crumbles, things fall apart. It's no longer the center of intellectual discourse in the world anymore.

Everything goes away. They threw water on it in the 1960s with the psychedelics acts where they made everything schedule one. They locked people up that were anti-war protesters. They figured out a way to squash this sort of new movement of thought. I think, yeah, I think it would be a step into the future if psychedelics were made legal and if we kind of move more towards, you know,

Because the psychedelics, as we said before, and humans are about transcendence. Yes. It's about basically including the other and not being afraid of the other and that fear of the other leads to violence against the other. The psychedelic is moving in the opposite way. Right. So it is obviously not a surprise that Nixon would illegalize the psychedelics. They're dangerous. Yeah. They're dangerous to power. They disrupt. Yeah.

But it's great for everyone. That's the crazy thing. The people that are making it illegal are the people that haven't experienced it. That's correct. That's where it's crazy because it would be beneficial to them. They are human beings with a finite lifespan. Their experience on Earth would be greatly enhanced if they had the perspective of...

of a psychedelic encounter? Well, if I was Chancellor of Germany, which I will never be, but if I was, I would make a psychedelic year. Like, after high school, you have the opportunity to actually experience these substances. I think it would be very good for societies to think about...

rituals or mechanisms or discourse like what you said about the mysteries of Eleusis that was the defining ritual of ancient Greece the Athens society would move there in September like they would go there they would have this experience they would talk about this experience yes

Because of that experience, they could relate to each other. They could relate to the planet that they live on. So that was a very healthy thing. And we today, because it's illegal, we don't have this. And I don't know what

I mean, some things like Burning Man obviously are like attempts to create like ritualistic spaces. And I've never been there and I heard it's kind of stupid because it's so expensive and kind of elitist. I don't know if that's true, but basically we need. We need something. We need something. We need a legitimate structure because there's also a thing that is described called spiritual narcissism.

Where you start doing these things and you think that you have all the answers and then you have people that are the ones who speak to these groups of people and they have all the knowledge and we're all in this together and it's essentially a cult.

It's really easy to run a cult if everyone in the cult is naive and they're looking for a leader They're looking for an answer. Maybe they've had a listless life That's that lacks in direction and all sudden someone comes along and through this ritual we can all Transcend and you know becomes what are we gonna do? You know what? We need real shamans we need actual legit shamans and

And the problem is that term in our society is much maligned, right? That term is silly people that are in the jungle that are doing voodoo. But we need someone who is a legitimate psychedelic experiencer who has a genuine goal of advancing life.

Consciousness and advance advancing conscious goal and doing it in a very responsible way one of things that we would have to be careful of if you have something like a year of psychedelics is schizophrenia and

We don't understand. I didn't say young people should take psychedelics for a straight year, but maybe a year where they could take it. Where they have a possibility. Where they have a possibility and some kind of structure, maybe a place you can go and do it. I think we need a structure for everybody. I think that's really the goal of this thing is to develop a sensible, objective structure based on actual research, based on a real knowledge base.

real clinical data on dosages a real knowledge on which compounds are more effective for which particular ailments ibogaine which you talked about iboga very effective for addiction my friend Ed went over to Mexico and got into an ibogaine clinic when he got hooked on pills and it cured him of it well just one one experience one experience that's what I heard also I've known many people that have had real problems with pills and have knocked it with one ibogaine experience so there's there's a

a lot of different things that can be done that can benefit society tremendously, but it has to be done responsibly and it has to be done with real knowledge. And that real knowledge is only going to be available if they open everything up to real research. And, and instead of being biased about this and say like, let, let it be open to everyone to have an objective analysis of what is actually going on, have the naysayers and the, the, the,

people that are converted, everyone debate this and try to have some sort of an understanding of what is good, what is bad, what's the right dose, what can be done, and what is the most effective setting. Because set and setting, the part of the ritual aspect of it is important too because you're setting an intention before you do these things, which is why...

A lot of these people that are serious users of psychedelics, they don't like the concept of microdosing and they don't like the concept of recreational use. They think these things are sacred and they should be used only in this one particular way.

And I think this conversation would benefit everyone in society, including the people that want it illegal. That's what's ironic about it. The people that want it illegal, they are just human beings. They're just human beings that are trapped in this paradigm. They're trapped in the world that they live in. They're trapped on the momentum of their actions and all the life that they've lived up until this moment.

And they would benefit from it. I mean, it would also give the Western societies a tremendous push, you know? If psychedelics were allowed, and there could be research, and there could be... You know, it would probably encourage, like, a cultural flowering. And right now we have kind of a decay of Western culture. Like, Western society is in crisis, and we don't really know how to get out of it. And the current...

recipes given to us by the camps that are now also competing for the US presidency, they don't really solve the problem. I mean, we all feel like in the last couple of years, more and more people feel that something is wrong and that something should change. I think somehow people are ready for a revolution. No one knows exactly what kind of revolution it should be. So

people who tap into that are quite successful, even though they might not even provide what is actually needed to have that change. But we do need a change on a national level in Germany, in America, in other countries, as well as on a global level. And I think opening up our societies to psychedelic research and psychedelics, I would be curious to see a society which treats itself with that knowledge

You know, liberty and relaxation and curiosity. Right now we're all tense and we're saying, no, this is the chemical wall in our brain. I just don't think it works for a democratic Western free society to have a chemical wall in the brain. It's a contradiction. It keeps us back from really developing a society that...

That is much better than the current society because the current society is pretty shitty actually. It is. And we really moved into it and- And we're trapped. We're trapped, but there is of course ways out. There can always be a so-called revolution. We're talking about one right now. This is what's crazy. This isn't theoretical, right? And these are actual substances. Yeah. We're talking about it now and Kanye West on this show said he's the leader of the free world. Maybe.

Maybe today we're now the leaders of the free world and we're going to start a psychedelic revolution from this podcast. Well, I think it has to be done everywhere with everyone. They have to demand freedom. And if you have freedom, freedom over your own consciousness is what McKenna talked about often. Yes. That it means nothing if you don't have freedom over your own consciousness. Yes.

Especially freedom over your own consciousness with substances that have been shown to have dramatic positive effects on people. So there's a lot of drugs that are very good positive drugs that people use on a regular basis that if you take too much of them, you will die. So we know what the substances are. We understand what the correct dosage is. We understand what the LD50 is. And we know how to prescribe them correctly.

We should apply that same logic to psychedelics. I mean, Albert Hoffman was thinking about this in the 50s. This was another document I found in the archives. He set up a memo to Stoll, the CEO, writing that Sanders should now focus on these psychedelic substances. We should examine all the possibilities. We should create new compounds. We should become the psychedelic pharmaceutical powerhouse in the world.

And that idea is really, it's a great idea. It is a great idea. And Stolz just said no. Because he had been visited by Sidney Gottlieb, who basically said, no, don't do it. Well, it's guys like that guy in the suit and tie with the salt and pepper hair. There's no nonsense, Republican, right wing, controlling. But I think it's also these guys are a little bit of the past. I mean, I'm quite surprised. For example, in America, I get approached by, you know, different camps about tripped in a very positive way.

Because I think somehow that anti-drug rhetoric is losing ground. Yes. That's the feeling I have. Well, it's losing ground. That makes me a little bit optimistic. It's losing ground because of the internet. So the narrative up until the internet came around was that these things destroy lives. And then all of a sudden people are saying, you know, actually not really. And then you have the positive effect that it has on people that are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder coming back from the war, which is what MAPS is concentrating on. Yeah, right.

The mainstream media really is a problem in this regard. They're a problem with everything. Well, they're essentially a propaganda network that is passing itself off as the news. It kind of comes from Randolph Hearst in a way. It certainly does. I mean, he kind of set the tone. Absolutely. But I mean, I'm sure there were people doing that before. If you have control of the newspaper, and especially back then with Hearst publications, there's very few newspapers today.

In the country, and especially ones that were respected. If you have control over that narrative, you put something in the newspaper and people read it. They read that as that, oh my God, that is a fact. This is what's happening. People today are far more skeptical, particularly after the pandemic. I think the pandemic kind of shook things up to a point where it's much more difficult to pass off propaganda today than it was even just four years ago.

I mean, that's why I was quite excited to come on this podcast, on this experience, because I think you have actually created a space where free thought is possible and free communication. It's like a stage that you've created. I think it's actually quite an important artwork that you have established here. I mean, it's not so easy to create like your own media that has a global reach.

So thank you. I don't know how it happened. It just happened. I think it made itself. Maybe. Yeah, I think so. Because the concept was right. Well, I think, look, I'm the one who's the host of it. So I would be the best judge. I do not think I'm really responsible for this thing. I think this thing wanted to be made and it made itself and it did it in a very sneaky way. It did in a very sneaky way where originally it was just me having fun with my friends, just with a webcam, me and Brian and then Eddie Bravo and Tom.

Tom Segura and all my friends. We'd just come over and just talk, just have a good time. And then it started to be where it got enough downloads where I could contact someone like Graham Hancock and say, hey, tell me about ancient civilizations. Come on my podcast. Anthony Bourdain, tell me about your travels. And then it became much, much bigger. And it sort of, I genuinely believe it tricked me into making it. When was the breaking point when it got...

It was very gradual. It was very gradual. I'll tell you when I realized it. I think it was like 2011 or 2012. I was on stage in the Chicago Theater. And I was doing comedy. And I asked the audience. I was going to tell a story from the podcast. And I said, how many of you guys listen to the podcast? And it was just 3,700 people cheering. And I was like, whoa. I'll never forget that moment. Because I was like, oh, wow.

One of the things that I used to do and I still do is I don't look at the numbers. I don't pay attention. I don't pay attention to how many downloads. I'm not feverishly checking what's good and what's bad. I don't look at what the retention is, when people drop out. I don't.

That's up to them. My job is to just have an interesting conversation with people that I'm actually actually Excited about talking to that's my only job. So the way I book it I completely book it based on my interests I don't I don't have a publicist that's like examining trends and this person's pop I don't do any of that. I think it made of itself. I think it made itself. I think it's a trick and

I think it's like the muse. Like the muse sort of like brings these ideas into your head. I think the universe gave birth to this thing. I know it's a stupid hippie thing to say. It sounds ridiculous. But if anybody should know, it's me. And if anybody should want to take responsibility and be proud of something, it would be me, right? But I'm not.

I feel like it's not really me. I feel like this thing wanted to be made. And I think this is one of many of these things that want to be made all around the world. And that's why podcasts are developing. I think there's a hunger for honest discourse and real conversations with people that exists everywhere. And I think that's why podcasts are exploding. That's where you don't have a gatekeeper anymore to your ability to discuss things. Yeah, because people are so frustrated with mainstream media. Well, you shouldn't have gatekeepers. You shouldn't have someone who...

The narrative that you're pushing out to the world is...

heavily influenced by the people that are advertising on your channel. Heavily influenced. So there's certain things you cannot criticize. There's certain things you will gaslight the media or the public into believing is a good thing when it's probably not really a good thing. You will say things in a very biased perspective. You will attack particular individuals. You not just attack political individuals, you'll attack them with a very specific narrative that gets repeated over and over and over again to the point where they make these compilations of

of these media pundits saying the exact same thing over and over and over again. This is not news. This is not real discourse. This is not real human beings discussing things and trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong. This is propaganda. And this is most of what people get. And inside that propaganda are some real news.

There's actual specific information about the weather. There's actual real reports about conflicts breaking out overseas and all sorts of different things. But at the end of the day, it's not real conversation. So real conversation was able to flourish because people had this hunger for it. And they didn't even know they wanted it until they got it. I mean, it's thought when we first started making podcasts that,

Everyone was moving to a much shorter attention span. Right. And that most of the things that were going to be popular in the future were like 10-minute things, like very quick things. You know, which is like a lot of the truth today with TikTok and Instagram reels and, you know, all these things that people like short attention span. It just captures you. It gives you nothing and you just keep scrolling and looking. And we thought that's what people are moving to. Right.

But then podcast came along and podcast came along with three-hour conversations with scientists that get 50 million views and then people like whoa Okay, so it's not that people aren't intellectually curious. It's not people aren't What did that they don't have this want to be engaged they do everybody does just it's just do they're not being fed correctly and

I mean, that's also one of the beauties. I mean, I'm here as a writer of literature, actually. I mean, if I decide to work on a book, I don't get influenced by anybody. And I have a very large space in which I can develop my thoughts and my narrative. That's why I'm actually active in this field. I think there might be a similarity between a podcast and

and literature because they both go into the long form and into immersion into something. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, literature is the ultimate form of that, right? Because the amount of time that it takes for you to ponder the sentences and the paragraphs and putting them all together and the order in which you say things and the way you captivate and compel the reader, right?

It's very similar and it's all coming from your mind too, which is also very similar. When I hear you talk on a podcast, if I'm a listener and I'm listening, I hear one human being who's talking about your analysis of all the data and all the research that you've done to create this book. That's not really available in most places anymore. Right.

Right. But people want that because they want to know what what did this guy find out? What does he know and how does he know it? Let me listen to him. And along the way, especially we're having a three hour conversation along the way. Let me hear says some crackpot things. Let me hear if he says some things like, oh, that guy is a kind of a kook. Oh, that guy's not really thinking clearly. Oh, that guy's kind of full of shit. Oh, he's saying that. But there's no way he really believes that. OK, now I know. Now I'm suspicious. Now I know I can kind of like look at this through a filter of reality.

So I think maybe we should talk a little bit about Blitz, the Nazis, and drugs. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought that's why you had me here. I thought that would be like your subject of fascination. Oh, it's part of it, for sure. I want to talk to you about everything.

I just was interested in talking to you. I mean, immediately when I saw what you were talking about, when I saw you on the Jesse Walter show, I was like, oh, okay. That was kind of funny to me because that was really speaking to an audience I usually don't speak to, but it was great, you know? Yeah, well... He loved the book. They're willing to take much more chances on Fox News than they are on other networks in a strange way. Well, I think that started with Tucker Carlson in a lot of ways. But the Jesse Waters thing was interesting because...

You got to scratch the surface a little bit. Yeah, it was just seven minutes, not three hours. Yeah, so tell me about Blitzed. What do you want to know? Well, first of all, when was the creation of amphetamines? And when did it start getting utilized by military and by people like Hitler? Well, there's like a rumor going on that

It started at the Olympic Games in Berlin 1936 because an African-American athlete named Jesse Owens was running faster than the white Aryan German superheroes, jumping further and winning, I think, five gold medals.

the rumor was he must be on something. Similar kind of to Anslinger, like the jazz people. They're only so good because they're on something, you know? So there was like... Was he on Benzedrine? Because Benzedrine was an American product that was already available. And it's basically speed. And there were no doping checks at these Olympics. I think there were the last Olympic Games without doping checks. Really? Yeah. So you could basically take everything. But it's never...

No one knows if Jesse, oh, he was just good, you know? But there was a guy called Theodor Temmler who was the head of the Temmler factory. And he said to his chemist, Fritz Hauschild, after the Olympic Games, we have to create a better amphetamine, like better than the American amphetamine. This can never happen again. Like an Afro-American is faster than the white guys, you know? And then Hauschild was the chemist's name.

He did research about amphetamines and he found that in Japan, a chemist called Nagai in 1917, quite a while ago actually, this was in 1936, so already 19 years earlier, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine. And methamphetamine is stronger than amphetamine. So Hauschild thought, I'm going to make a new methamphetamine. So he found a new way of

synthesizing math. There's different ways you can make math, I guess. And he found a specific way that this Temmler company then patented. The patent was issued in Berlin in October 1937.

And then they put it on the market in 1938. Methamphetamine became available. No one said it was like a drug or anything. It was just a new medicine. You didn't even need a prescription. You could just, like a child could go into a pharmacy and say, I want 10 packages of methamphetamine. And, you know, it was cheap also. And you got it. It was branded as Pervitin. Pervitin, we say in German. There it is. There's Pervitin. And Pervitin...

And Pervitin then became very fashionable. Look how innocuous that little container looks. Who would imagine that's how they sell meth? Nuts. I think this could already be, and I'm going to get to this in a second, for the military. But first it was a drug that was just on the market in the civil society. There was no war yet in 1938. 1938 was actually kind of the height of the Hitler regime. People loved him. There was full employment there.

I mean, there was oppression against the Jews, but if you were like a National Socialist, you thought that was good, basically. So the problem was, or I mean, there were many problems, but the reality was that it was like a steam engine. Like it was the society was really working. Everyone had a job. Everyone was taking part. It was basically a modern capitalist society that also created a lot of stress. You always have to compete with

Like you have to go from meeting to meeting. Like the German economy was booming. So people loved meth. There was no coffee available because Germany didn't have like colonies like France where they, you know, they couldn't bring in coffee. I don't even know if there was coffee. You know, probably you could get it maybe somewhere, but it was not a normal thing to like go into a cafe in the morning and have a coffee. So this methamphetamine became very popular. Like workers used it in the factories. They could, you know, increase their output.

And party people used it because it boosted your ego. So it was, you know, you go into a meeting, an important meeting, you take a bit of meth before. So it wasn't stigmatized, you know. It was just, they called it performance-enhancing substance. So it was, that's a neutral term, you know. They made studies at universities showing that,

that is actually good against anything, also against depression and it would increase your sexual drive and it was like people thought this is the greatest thing basically. There was no studies being done yet on addiction which obviously is a problem of meth. But also we have to understand that this meth that Temla produced

is not the crystal meth that's being produced in a trailer somewhere, you know, in a southern state. I don't know, it's a different, you know, it was made by a pharmaceutical company. The way I found out about Pervitin was actually, it's actually a funny story because I didn't know anything about, no one knew anything about Nazis and drugs, as I said before. And in 2010, I'm asking a friend of mine who's a DJ in Berlin, Alex is his name,

I said to him, what should I write about next? What should my next book be? Because I'd written three novels and I was about to write the fourth novel. And he said, you should write about Nazis and drugs. I said, well, but they didn't take any drugs, you know, because I, and he said, they did. And I said, how do you know? No one's ever talked about this before. He said, well, yesterday I received Pavitin, which I said, what is Pavitin? He said, well, it's methamphetamine from the so-called, from the Third Reich, right?

Third Reich being a propaganda term by the Nazis. That's why I like to say the so-called Third Reich. How did this happen? He had a friend who was an antique dealer. And in 2010, this antique dealer in East Berlin had purchased like in an apartment where people died. Then the antique dealers come in and they take furniture. They pay maybe a little. He bought a medicine chest. And he opened the medicine chest and there was pavitin inside from the 1940s.

And that antique dealer was a friend of Alex, the DJ. He looked at it and it said on the package contains methamphetamine. He's like, what? So he took it with his partner. They were curious, you know, and I later met this guy and he said for one month we took this Pavitin and it was like so great. Wow.

He said it was not too strong. It made us happy. We were very active. We worked a lot. We had great sex. It was like great. And then Alex, the DJ, being very interested in all kinds of drugs, he also took it. And he told me this in my writing tower in Berlin. He said after the first Pavitin...

I could feel that something's coming on, that there was increased energy level. Then I took another one. And these are pills which were like 70 years old and they were still working. And then I took a third one and my writing tower was right at the river in Berlin and there was like a big ship passing by and he said, and I felt like this ship when the big engines turned on and the shoop, like the push of the engine, like moving the whole big ship forward. That's how I felt after three tablets of

I said, this is insane, you know. And I googled it and there was like just a little on the internet. There was one medicine historian who had totally unknown guy, but I mean a researcher who had written like a two-page thing that the German Blitzkrieg, which is the German word for speed war, like the Nazis...

how to lead a war was only possible because of methamphetamine, because of this pavitin. And I read this and I said, this is crazy. Maybe I should write about this. And I contacted... So it's a very odd story how this came about, you know. And I contacted this academic. He was at the University of Ulm. I traveled down there. I met him and he said, yeah, this...

There's actually a lot more to find, but I just didn't have the time because he's investigating all kinds of things. You know, he was just, this was just a side project of his. And he gave me the signatures in archives. You get a signature. Every document has a signature. And he gave me like,

The signatures where I can find like all the documents on the meth during Nazi times, this was in the military archive of Germany, which is housed in Freiburg in southern Germany. Germany is a decentralized country, so not all archives are in Berlin. For example, the military archive is in this small town called Freiburg.

The military archive is almost bigger than the town, you know, because the German military has done so much shit, you know, in the first really, we lost two world wars. I mean, that's quite, that's world record for sure. So, and everything that the German armies did is, you know, documented because the Germans loved to document, like everything is written down. So the military archive is huge. And because I had the signatures from this guy, he basically did the legwork for me. I could look at all the files and then I realized that,

that the German army was using methamphetamine. And it's another interesting story how that came about because a professor called Ranke, he was the head of the Institute for Defense Physiology of the German army.

And basically his job was to enhance the fighting capability of the soldier. So he was researching in 1938, how can we combat fatigue? Because he said, not the Russians are our biggest enemy, not the British, not even the French, you know. Our biggest enemy is fatigue because you get tired in the evening. You fight the whole day and then you need to sleep. What a waste, you know. That's not good. He was looking for...

a way to beat this enemy, sleep. And then when Pavitin came onto the market, he started reading studies done by universities and they very clearly show that on meth, and I think this is an experience that people who have used meth probably would sign, you don't sleep as much. It keeps you awake because all your dopamine is released. So your brain...

is basically in a fight or flight mode. Like your methamphetamine makes you extremely alert over a very long period of time. And then at one point, obviously you drop down and you get the urge to take it again. This is how the addiction works.

But he was not looking at addiction problems. He was just looking at does it really work to keep a soldier awake maybe for two hours longer on the battlefield? Because there's this saying from Napoleonic times, the last 15 minutes in a battle, that's the decisive moment.

15 minutes. Like who wins in the end wins, you know? So if you have something that keeps your men awake for longer than the enemy has, then you have a decisive advantage. So he made tests. I don't know. There's photos of it in my book Blitzt where you see like the young medical officers. Like he was working in an institution that was breeding medical officers for the German army. So he gave these young guys tests.

placebo, methamphetamine, coffee, just to check and like, can they sustain longer on meth? And they could. They could actually, they were more active. Like these tests started at 8 p.m. and went until 10 a.m. And the meth people, like, they were awake the whole night, you know, they were filling out

you know they hear tests like you had to draw things or repeat orders or like solve mathematical questions and the math people were like going at it until 10 a.m and then some said and now we want to go out like now then they wanted to party while the caffeine people um i don't know if we can see that image it's kind of funny can you pull that up like the you know your mic's on on jamie just not sure which one it is i'm looking at it's just it's a lot of images in there uh go yeah yeah this one

So these guys are all methed up. Well, you see like going up, maybe. You see like the S, you know, sleeping there. That's S means shine tablet, which is placebo. To the left of him is a Pervitin guy. He's quite happy. To the right of him is a Benzedrine guy. That's the B. And that's another stimulant. That's the American stimulant, which is not as potent as methamphetamine. I mean, methamphetamine is more potent than amphetamine. It's like a difference between like a Mercedes and...

a bicycle or something. Okay. What is a C? C is coffee. Coffee. Yeah. There's a few more images where you like, this is like a taken at 4.15 in the morning. This is taken at 5.50 in the morning. Yeah. Go back maybe to the 4.15. That guy's head's moved. Well, I mean, here we see photos. I mean, then he obviously like,

He obviously looked at the results of people filling out. And there's more pictures later in the day when the S person is like yawning. Well, you see in front of him the Pervitin person. He's not yawning. He's like ready. He's ready for the next questionnaire. He can't sleep for like another day. But the guy in the back, though, that's a P, his head is down. See him in the far right? I think he's solving a… Yeah, he might be studying things. Well, in any case, maybe go one picture down.

Yeah, that one. That's how the test he did. So he saw that if you take two times six milligrams of pavitin on the right there, that black bar, they don't show any fatigue at all. He basically came to the conclusion it does work. It does keep you awake. And he also found out something which I think is kind of funny. He found out that on meth you...

are less capable of solving higher complex questions. So math keeps you up, but it makes you a little bit dumber. Like things that are really...

that demand like abstract very abstract thinking or you know more complex things you're not better on math is it because math sort of rushes you to come to a conclusion yeah and also you feel too good about yourself that self-criticism is lowered right and he concluded that this is perfect for the German soldier it makes you awake longer and makes you a little bit more stupid because

Because a soldier just needs to follow orders. He just needs to shoot for a long time, you know. And so he got all excited about it. This was in 38. His last test he did was in 39. Then Germany was about to invade Poland, September 1st, 1939, beginning of World War II. And he said to his, you know, his superior was in America, it's called the Surgeon General. In German, that's a different name, but the highest rank.

medical guy in the army who determines basically at the end of the day what is given to the soldiers. So he wrote to his boss and this was kind of an old school guy, the boss, like he was still from the First World War and he read the reports and he's like, well, we need to use a chemical drug to enhance the... Like he didn't get it basically. So he said, we're not using this in the attack on Poland.

And then Ranke, the professor, really believed in meth. And I read his war diary. Like every officer was required to write like a diary during the war. And in his war diary, you can clearly see that he himself became addicted to meth. Like he writes about it so great. I don't even understand how I could even do a day at the office without meth. Why is not everyone taking it? But then like a few months later, it's like,

I feel very depressed this morning. Even the Pervitin I'm using does not help me anymore against my depression. He didn't understand that this was actually the problem, that he was becoming addicted himself. And he needed higher and higher dosages. He did. And he became quite unhinged. But he was like the meth guy of the German army. But he was still doing his job. And he asked the medical officers...

In the field in Poland, Poland was beaten by Germany within a few days, actually, 17 days or something. It was a quick victory. Actually, quite surprising that it was so quick, but it happened so quick. And a lot of medical officers wrote back to him that Pavitin was actually quite helpful. They said things like, and I studied all these reports for Blitz, and I'm quoting some of them in Blitz, like,

it really helped all soldiers achieve their workload, like do their workload, which was basically killing or invading a foreign country. So Rangagen was very excited and he said to the Surgeon General, because then after the successful campaign against Poland, it was now going against the West, France, the old enemy of Germany. Like we had had a war, 1865, Germany won, and then in World War I, Germany lost.

And now Hitler wanted like the revenge, you know, now we have the third one, we're going to win the third one. But his high command was saying, let's please not do it because the French army, La Grande Armée, was supposed to be the best army in the world at the time in the late 30s, early 40s. They were really proud of their army, the French, and it

I mean, it wasn't good, but everyone thought it's good. And they also had an ally, which was very powerful, Great Britain, you know, the world's empire, you know. So these two powers to attack from Germany, these two powers was considered insane by the high command. Like they thought Hitler is just a lunatic. And Hitler wanted to attack the West already in November 1939, like Poland was beaten.

The German military actually needed a lot of repairs because even in a successful campaign, you lose a lot of machinery, you lose a lot of people.

So everyone said, let's not do it. Let's just get back on track and develop a strategy with which we can win against the West because they knew there is no strategy. Because that was exactly what happened in World War I. Germany attacked from the north of Belgium and there was a stalemate and then in the end Germany lost because Germany is one country and it cannot win against Europe.

so many countries. So they said it's not going to work, you know, but Hitler was very stubborn and he said it will work, but they blocked him. There was even a coup attempt in November 39 against him, which failed. And then he had a breakfast meeting, February 17th, 1940, three kind of revolutionary tank generals, von Manstein, Guderian and Rommel, Rommel later becoming very famous tank general, and

came to Hitler in Berlin in the Reich Chancellery and said, we have a plan. We know it's going to work. We can beat them because we will not use the tanks anymore.

As everyone expects us to use the tanks, which is kind of more in the back, kind of backing up the infantry and, you know, being like the backup guys, like the heavy guys in the back. Like we will use the tanks in the front and make the tanks kind of overrun the enemy. And Hitler's like, whoa, this is a crazy thought. He loved crazy thoughts. So he's like, this is a good thought, but where are we going to do it? And they said, we're going to do it in an area...

And also, I also sent an image. I don't know if we need it, but it's interesting. They decided on an area which is the Ardennes Mountains. And the Ardennes Mountains is a mountain range in Belgium, which is exactly between the north of Belgium, where the Western Allies were massing their defense forces and Belgium.

France, where the French also had heavy defense, but in this mountainous terrain, it wasn't heavily fortified. So they said, we're going to go through the Ardennes Mountains within three days and three nights, but we can't stop at night because

If we stop and kind of sleep at night, you know, they will know that we're there and then they will come from the north and the south and the pincer movement destroy our advance. So we have to, you know, not stop. And within three days and three nights, we have to reach through Belgium, the mountains, the Swiss, sorry, the French border town of Sedan. We have to get there because then we will be faster because they will still be stuck in the north of Belgium like crazy.

We will be faster than them and we'll race through all the way to the channel. And then we will be in the back of them and destroy them. So we will have kind of surrounded them. This is what Churchill later called the sickle cut. And this was a, this is the sickle cut. You know, you see, you see where they're going through and then kind of, you know, branch off to the, to the north and to the south and,

and encircle the Allied forces there in the north and the French forces there in the south, like being further within enemy territory than the defenders. It's a crazy plan, and the only problem is that

That thing of not sleeping for three days and three nights. So they were not sure how to solve that problem actually. And Hitler said, this is not a problem. The German soldier is so convinced of the ideology of national socialism, of fighting for me, the Führer. They will not sleep. I didn't sleep in the First World War. Hitler was a soldier in the First World War and he claimed that he was awake and didn't need sleep and stuff like that.

So he kind of said that the ideology will make the normal German soldier into the superhuman soldier who doesn't need to sleep, which is bullshit, obviously. Everyone needs to sleep, you know, not because you are convinced of an idea you don't need to sleep.

And another fact is that actually soldiers were not convinced at all. You know, the German army was the German army. Of course, there were many Nazis in the German army. But at the beginning of the war, they were also just, you know, young guys and they were not like burning for Hitler. They were actually quite pissed. They had to go to war against the West. Like they were they were scared. Like I read reports on like mass depression before the attack started.

of people who just said, we're going to lose, you know, this is not possible because to launch a successful invasion into enemy territory, you need a three to one superiority in manpower and in weaponry. And the Germans were actually, they had less people, less soldiers than the West and they're,

Their weapons were not as good. For example, their tanks were not as good as the British tanks. So it was basically, there was a lot of doubt that this madman plan by these three young revolutionary generals and Hitler supporting this madman plan would actually work. But then Ranke thought, this is my...

calling now this is my hour and he presented his findings that actually you don't need to sleep for three days and three nights on meth it's possible if you give enough meth to a person you can stay awake uh for five days um so suddenly his findings became very interesting he was invited to the high command he was giving lectures he wrote a so-called stimulant decree

I don't know if you want to see that. I found that also in the archive in Freiburg. It was the first official paper by an army where the soldiers were basically invited or ordered or it was suggested to them to take a powerful synthetic stimulant, which is this is the stimulant decree. It says, for example, this was distributed to all the medical officers. So they knew how to use the meth.

So for example it says what you could give if someone took too much, like then you give like a sleeping pill. It also says, it's quite interesting, what are the side effects? And the side effects are aggression. So that was like a desired side effect, you know? So Ranke was suddenly very popular. He was on top of the world.

There's another paper I found which shows how many dosages then the German army ordered from the Temmler company just before they attacked France. And this is 35 million dosages.

So finding that document was also kind of fun. Wow. 35 million. Yeah. And so were they on a large dose of this when the soldiers? Well, it's interesting then to see how those 35 million dosages were being used because they were used asymmetrical. They were handed out especially to the tank troops because the tanks were at the forefront and these tanks could not stop. So everyone in these tanks was basically high on crystal meth. Like, phew.

all the way through the advance. And there's reports by the French army that they simply could not understand their opponent anymore. They didn't sleep.

They just chased through. They behaved like madmen, basically. Rommel was seen at one point totally high on meth, like standing in the tank, like the lid was open. He was standing there and they were racing at night through a French village where the French army had camped because they needed to sleep because...

It's kind of, I guess, funny. I don't know if funny is the right word, but France also had sort of, not a stimulant decree, but they had the rule that in a war situation, and this had been beneficial in World War I, each French soldier has the right to drink three quarters of a liter of red wine per day.

So when France was attacked by Germany, I think it was 17,000 trucks with red wine drove from the French wine regions to the front lines and distributed the red wine. So the French guys were like drinking red wine, which is a mood enhancer, but it does make you tired, you know, especially three quarters of a liter. So the Germans were messed up and the French were like kind of drowsy.

So that scene with Rommel I described, he's standing in the open lid of the tank going through this village at night. And left and right are kind of the French soldiers kind of sleeping basically. And he just fires with the tank left and right. And he runs over people. And he's like a complete madman. And then the French got scared. They got very scared. And their defenses collapsed. Germany beat France.

in a few days, you know. The big neighbor that in First World War Germany had been fighting, like they had been fighting four years, like moving like a meter a day and the next day back. And this time because of the methamphetamine charging through and, you know, Hitler was in Paris in June already, you know. That's the story of Blitzed in a nutshell or of a part of Blitzed. Wow. Isn't it incredible that that's not taught in school?

Actually, I do give talks now in school. Yeah, no. But no historians touch the subject. I spoke to – for this book, I – not collaborated, but I had advice from a leading German historian, an elderly gentleman who passed away.

Mommsen, like the leading German historian on National Socialism, really cool guy. I met him, I showed him my findings from the archives and he's like, we overlooked this the whole time because we historians have no clue about drugs. Like we don't, we never, it has to enter your mind in a way that this might have a relevance. Historians are very square people, or at least used to be very square people. And National Socialism is such a

serious topic that out-of-the-box thinking is not really encouraged within the academia, at least, you know, but me being a non-historian, I could think out-of-the-box. So he said this is the missing puzzle piece that we need to know to understand what actually went down in World War II. So he was very much behind it and wrote a preface to the German edition also. So it was interesting to communicate with him about

obviously about it because he helped me also put things into perspective because also one thing he said was don't argument in a monocausal way like it's kind of flippant to say the blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine

It's, it's, it's, it's, methamphetamine played a huge role and I examined that huge role. I think it was probably one of the decisive factors, but you know, many facts in a war, many factors come together. So if you can't stay awake for three days, none of it works. Yeah. You know, World War II would have been very, very different. If you want to make cement, you have to add water. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's not a, if you look at it from a military standpoint, it actually makes, you know, a lot of sense. Yeah.

The problem in Germany, Nazi Germany, they then had was that the army was so crazy about meth and also the air force. They were using, giving it to pilots in the, we say Luft, in the air battle against Great Britain. That was like a decisive air battle in the late 1940s after France had been beaten by Germany, conquered.

Then it was Germany against Great Britain. There was a lot of fighting in the air between Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe. And the German Luftwaffe was, you know, messed up because they had less pilots.

Kamikaze pilots, right. That's a big one. Yeah, we talked about that also. For suicide flights. We've talked about that before. Japanese factory workers also use methamphetamine to work longer. I mean, Japan was an ally of Germany. Right. They were part of the evil axis. So Japan had knowledge that methamphetamine was successfully used in the European theater of this war. So they used it also in their kamikaze pilots against American ships and stuff. So...

Where were we? We were the effect of meth on the soldiers and also the effectiveness of it during the blitzkrieg. But then also the Japanese pilots, the Japanese were using it, the kamikazes were using it.

I wanted to talk about something that became a problem in the German military because then suddenly there were guys, for example, the so-called health fuhrer, which is like the minister for health in Nazi Germany. He was like an enemy of Pavitin because he said –

He used the old argument, we are superheroes anyhow from our genes because we are a superior race. We don't need a stimulant to perform these miraculous acts on the battlefield. So he wanted the army to stop the methamphetamine. And I studied all the letters going back and forth between high command and the Ministry of Health. And the army basically said, we're not stopping this. We're a modern army. We're using modern means to...

achieve our goals. So this actually shows that Hitler is full of shit when he says you just need to install the right ideology in people and then they are motivated. It's actually Germany was, Nazi Germany was a very modern system that was using this to their advantage and the army was a modern war machine and they used it

very effectively. And that's why also other than armies who learned about this, it took them a while. Like the British needed quite a while to understand what was going on. But there was one point, a headline in a British newspaper, when does Churchill also use victory in form of a pill? Because in an Italian newspaper in the fall of 1940, there was an article on the German Luftwaffe using...

pillola di curaggio, like a courage pill, which was this methamphetamine. So then the British became like, we have to examine this. And they actually made tests in England comparing methamphetamine with amphetamine and decided that for the British guys...

for the English guys, amphetamine is better because it's not so strong. The Nazis always take the strongest and the British were a little bit more hesitant. And it is actually a smart choice because methamphetamine does burn you out, obviously. It's an addictive drug that's not healthy. And amphetamine is also not healthy, but it doesn't make you as edgy. So you can

You can take it over a longer period of time, I guess. While methamphetamine really burns you out, I spoke in my research for Blitz with one medical officer that was still alive that had served in World War II for the German army in Stalingrad, actually. He was in Stalingrad and he said he still had Pervitin and he gave it to these guys that are freezing to death being killed by the Red Army and

He said it didn't work anymore, but it just gave us another day of artificial energy. So methamphetamine is a very, in a long war, it's very problematic. In a short war, it actually works. That's why after the October 7th attack of Hamas on Israel, I was interviewed by Haaretz, which is the leading Israeli newspaper,

because there was rumor that also these combatants or these terrorists, or whatever you want to call them, had used Captagon, which is another form of meth that's a brand name that's very popular actually in the Middle East. And I had found a paper from April last year, so April 23rd,

was a report, you can find it online by some newspaper, that a large shipment of Cap Dagon was seized at the Gaza border, actually by Hamas border forces, who claimed that actually Israel was smuggling this into Gaza to kind of corrupt the Gaza youth. I don't know if that's true, you know, it was just what Hamas said. But for sure, there was Cap Dagon smuggling

in the Gaza Strip and I'm totally convinced that people used it when they attacked Israel. And that is not the only case. When the terrorist attacks in Paris happened, they found amphetamines

They seized $1 billion worth of Captagon amphetamines. It is rumored that the Assad regime in Syria is actually behind large-scale manufacturing of Captagon at the moment. That's how they get their money because Captagon is like the cocaine of the poor man, you know? 13 tons. Whoa. Dubai police uncovered 13 tons of the drug known as Captagon hidden in doors and wooden panels. Wow. So Captagon is a...

Wow. And Captagon has a similar effect to methamphetamine? Yeah, it's very similar. It's a very similar molecule. Wow. So I guess it's very strong. Well, it makes sense that that would be very effective in times of war, especially for short campaigns. I had a reading in L.A. from Blitz, and afterwards a special Navy SEAL approached me who had been in the audience, and

And he was not on the team that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was like on a parallel team. Like he knew a lot about it. Like he did stuff like that. And he said before they go into an operation like that, an operation that requires them to stay awake for, let's say, 50 hours. And not only stay awake, but to stay very alert for 50 hours. It's obvious that you use an amphetamine. It doesn't matter if you burn out later. You just take a week off, you know.

So the Nazis invented methamphetamine for war, the idea by Ranke to use it for war purposes. And it has been copied already in the Korean War. American pilots were on amphetamines. Amphetamines are like a staple now of armies and of terrorist groups, freedom fighters or whatever. Because it also lowers, this was what Ranke also found out, it lowers your...

fear level. So when you're on meth, you're less afraid. It lowers your level of inhib... Like, you're not as inhibited. Like, you would rather kill someone in a brutal way than you would sober, because it's very hard actually to kill another human being. It's very stressful, and we don't really want to do it. Studies found that on meth, you're more likely... It's easier for you to do it. So it's really a

the Nazis said a horror, you know, they pioneered in it. How similar is that to the effects of Adderall? Adderall is obviously amphetamine and there was, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 39 million prescriptions in a recent year. It's another one of these contradictions. Like we make, like drugs are illegal, but Adderall is legal, which is basically, it is amphetamine. So it's just like a certain type of amphetamine and

I know quite a few people who are addicted to these types of pills, and it's not a nice addiction, I think. Because it's also, you know, it's legal. Like your psychiatrist says, take this so you function well. Yeah, you have ADHD, Norman. You need to take it. What did you just say? You need to take it. You should take the medication. I'm very sorry I came on the show sober. I would have been so amazing otherwise.

But I know many, many people, especially journalists. I know a lot of journalists and a lot of writers who use Adderall to be productive. Yeah, and I would say why not? If you want to pay the price of using something that's maybe bad for your brain and maybe makes you addicted, but maybe you think you write better on it. So that's like a chance that some writers take, like who wrote Do Electric Sheep

No, do androids dream of electric sheep? Is that Philip K. Dick? Yeah, right. He was using a lot of amphetamines. I heard that Jack Kerouac wrote on the road like in two weeks on amphetamines. So, I mean, drugs are basically neutral. You don't become a Nazi soldier when you take amphetamine. It creates a certain state in your brain. You release all your dopamine. You're highly alert. You might be very creative, but...

But you also might write a lot of shit, you know, because your self-criticism is lowered. So Kirovac, being a very good writer, he like rode the wave, you know. He was like just writing this on the road thing. I have friends that have tried amphetamines, particularly Adderall, and then done stand-up comedy. And they say it's absolutely terrible.

It's terrible for stand-up comedy. Because you lose that subtlety, right? You lose the subtlety. You lose a connection with the audience. Yeah. And you're not having fun anymore. It's like you're not being silly. And your self-criticism is out the window. So you think everything you say is brilliant. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. No. Maybe...

I mean, but some people find it very beneficial for productivity, which is interesting because like they are probably depends what you need to do. It also depends on your self-control, right? Do you have the amount of self-control and amount of objective analysis about what you're doing with your life to recognize that what you're doing is detrimental?

Are you can you manage that? Can you figure out how to back off? Can you figure out how to take time off? Can you figure out when to use it and just use it effectively and say to yourself in a very disciplined way? I'm gonna take X amount of this Adderall stuff because I have a deadline I'm gonna get this done. I'm gonna do my best and then afterwards I'm not gonna fuck with it anymore A lot of people can't do that. But a lot of people can I guess I

And it's sort of like all other drugs. We should sort of figure out what's the dose, what's effective, what's not effective, and also strategies for helping people get off of it, like Ibogaine.

I think having any kind of legalization strategy. So if they legalize drugs in this country, I think it has to be done in conjunction with a treatment strategy. And I think that treatment strategy is Ibogaine. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the psychedelics do get you off other drugs. That's a fact. Also DMT gets you off other drugs. So they work against addiction. So that old scare of...

You know, some drugs are like you take one drug and then you take the next drug, you know, until in the end you land with heroin. That's kind of stupid, you know, because if you take LSD, you're not going to land with heroin. No. And if you take Ibogaine, for sure also not. Well, marijuana is the great one, right? The gateway drug, people. I think alcohol is a great gateway drug. That's the real one because alcohol lowers your inhibitions. It lowers your judgment. And then all of a sudden you're like, I'll try that.

Yeah, right. Yeah. And then there's also people take cocaine when they drink too much alcohol to wake up. Yeah. I spoke with, actually with an ibogaine researcher, Deborah Mash from University Miami, and she found that alcohol and cocaine together create a new metabolite in the body. And that is the one that many people go for. It's like

It's like one plus one equals three, basically. So you won't get that high from alcohol alone, and you also won't get it from cocaine alone. Most people don't take cocaine alone. They always drink when they take cocaine because they want that particular form of metabolite of intoxication going. Interesting. It's obviously very unhealthy. So here it is.

How do you say that word? Yeah, right. Cocethylene. Cocethylene is a byproduct of concurrent consumption of alcohol and cocaine as metabolized by the liver. Normally, the metabolism of cocaine produces two primary biologically inactive metabolites, benzolec... How do you say that? Benzolec... No idea. Lecgonine. Benzolecgonine and...

Econine, Ech-go-neen, Methyl-eth-ster. Yeah, it's this cool color. Well, that's a big factor too, right? Like how it's metabolized by the liver. There's a difference between eating cannabis and smoking it, right? So 11-hydroxy metabolite, which is created by the liver, which is five times more psychoactive than THC. Oh, right. Yeah. So there's a lot of factors. And these, the thing is like,

It's kind of crazy that your book and your work was really illuminating the effect that this had on one of the most historically significant events in human history, which is World War II. Yeah, I thought that was quite strange. I mean, I went onward with my research from – I wanted to expand and I wanted to look at Hitler also.

I was going to ask you this before you get to that. If methamphetamine was created after the 1936 Games, what was Hitler on during the 1936 Games? When you see him rocking back and forth and he's tripping, was he doing cocaine? What was he on? I mean, I studied the notes of his doctor, his doctor's personal physician, Theodore Morel.

who was kind of a celebrity doctor in Berlin before he met Hitler. Like he was famous for treating diseases that don't exist. So he gave mood enhancing shots, injections. And he was also a vitamin pioneer. Like he believed in vitamins. And at the time, vitamins were kind of unknown. So he thought if you inject someone with like,

such and such inject someone with like vitamin C, that would be like a mood enhancing effect. And actually that's true. So he cured Hitler's photographer Hubertus Hoffmann of a sexual transmitted disease in 36. And then Hoffmann said, I have to bring you to a special patient. And then there was a spaghetti dinner with Morel and Hitler.

And Hitler was complaining of bloating problems. He always was like he had digestion problems. And Morel, who was like an alternative doctor, gave him like vitamins and a probiotic, which was also new at the time. And Hitler was cured. And he appointed Morel as his personal physician. They became kind of best friends. They were like Hitler spent more time with Morel than with anyone else all the way up to the end. So,

Morel's notes are very interesting to study because he was like one of these German nerds that wrote everything down. And I went to another federal archive in Germany and I checked out all the papers of Morel and I could see that basically no one had looked at these papers. Like Hitler's the most examined person in the world.

The most literature about one person is actually about Hitler, but no one... I mean, the last time someone checked out these notes, I could see it in the record of the archive, was like in 1986, and then someone in 1961. So I was like the fourth person to look at this. So it's kind of crazy because Morel describes in detail what he gives to Hitler. And that's why I'm a little bit surprised by this famous video of him...

I think maybe it's a fake, I don't know, because in '36, up until from '36 when they met and Morel was with him at the Olympic Games until '41, basically Hitler only received vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin B1, and sometimes glucose, like sugar was injected into, maybe he was on a sugar rush, you know, because sugar is a strong drug, because sugar immediately kicks, you know, in the brain.

But there was no heavy substances in 1936. Morel wrote everything down, so I don't think he would... Morel's introduction to Hitler was what year? 1936. So it was at the same time. A little bit before. So the introduction was before the Olympics? Yeah. Is it possible that Hitler was taking something without the knowledge of Morel? No. No? Because Morel...

was very protective of his patient. He called him patient A. And before that, Hitler had like an array of like specialists. Hitler didn't like specialists in general. Like he didn't like, like there was Karl Brandt. He was like the highest SS doctor and he wanted to be like the personal physician of Hitler. But Hitler didn't want like an SS guy to have so much knowledge about his body. So he always kept Brandt at bay. And then Morell was like perfect for Hitler because Morell was like this expert

kind of chubby, good-humored, kind of house doctor with the crazy recipes and the crazy injections. So Hitler thought, this is my guy, basically. And Morel's wife was very much against that, that her husband became the personal physician of Hitler. She said to him, like, we won't spend that much time together from now on. Morel's like, no, I have to take this chance. You know, I can be the person. He was like a celebrity doctor before. Now he's the personal physician of the Führer, the most powerful man of Europe.

So Morel very much controlled what Hitler took. Hitler didn't take anything that Morel didn't talk about or authorize and write down. He was his doctor. He was always there.

I see basically three phases in Hitler's drug taking from and from 36 to 41. It was mostly these vitamins. And Hitler was never ill during this time. Like he had a pretty good health in general, except from the bloating because he ate wrong. He was a vegetarian that basically ate like bread, bread and sugar. So that's very unhealthy for your gut. We know these days, you know, they didn't know that. So he was always farting, basically. That was a problem for him.

And Morel kind of cured him with the probiotics and then the vitamins. And, you know, Hitler kind of grooved along to this kind of treatment. And he was, you know, very successful also in the beginning. He was very healthy. He won all the wars like he was on top of the world. And then in 1941, Germany decided, he decided to attack the Soviet Union.

And also the Soviet Union campaign against Russia was very successful in the first three months. A lot of methamphetamine was given to the soldiers, just like in the attack on France. And they overran the Red Army like crazy. Like within three months, they made huge territorial gains. They were in October 1940.

They were already standing in front of Moscow. Like they could see like one officer could like look with his binoculars and he could see the tram, like the last tram station of Moscow. He could like see that. So they were right in front of Moscow. And the thing was what happened was in August 1941, like in the middle of the campaign, the campaign started June 21st, 1941.

So August 1941, they were already, they had huge, you know, gained a lot of territory. But Hitler for the first time became sick. He had what they call the Russian flu. Like he was, you know, camping, you know, the headquarters was moving with the troops. So he was, you know, maybe drank bad water or something. And he had the Russian flu, which made him stay in bed. He had very high fever. He was like...

diarrhea and vomiting. So he was really not in a good shape. So he said to Morel, and Morel wrote all of this down. Like I was sitting in the National Archives in Germany and reading all this stuff. And I really felt like the fly on the wall that could look at things that no one had seen before. Like he describes that, you know, Hitler coming in, sitting down, the decisions that had to be made that day, Hitler saying, I need something stronger than vitamins. I mean, Hitler was lying in bed, you know, and the generals were deciding that

on that important military briefing, how to further advance. And the generals wanted to move towards Moscow and Hitler wanted to split the troops and go to Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg, and to the south. Like he had a different strategy.

And so he wanted to be at that briefing and he said to Morel, I need something stronger than vitamins. And Morel gave him for the first time a very strong opioid, which was called Dolantin, which was a German product. And that opioid, you know, is a different ballgame than vitamins. He got an injection of a very potent opioid and he gets up from the bed, he goes to the military briefing. He can call the shots, you know, troops will be separated, etc.

high command was like, what the fuck, you know, but they, you know, he's the leader, so he decides. And from that moment on, we can see in the notes of Morel that Hitler's drug consumption actually changes, like he becomes more and more interested in potent substances. And from '41 to '43, Morel experiences a lot with also animal hormones, like when Germany invades the Ukraine and has the whole territory of the Ukraine,

Morel gets the monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals in all of the slaughterhouses of Ukraine. It's like an order that I found, like an official paper. All the organs of all the slaughtered animals of all slaughterhouses of occupied Ukraine will go to Hitler's personal physician. Was that for Taurine?

Was that for Taurine? Yeah, I mean, he experimented. He had like his own pharmaceutical company by the time, Morel, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where like his chemist was like getting awful and organs and thyroid glands and everything.

you know all kinds of very potent things and then making like concoctions with it like there was a famous liver concoction like from from pigs liver and morel's problem was that at the time in 43 it was a war economy in germany so it was very difficult to bring new medicines onto the market basically it was not possible like all the tests that usually are done in peace times on a new medicine so

He said this to Hitler, like, I'm developing all these new medicines from all these organs and I cannot bring them on the market. They cannot help the German people sustain in this war. And then Hitler said, this is bullshit. I, the Führer, will be your guinea pig and I will test all these dubious concoctions that you make.

And then because when I take it, every German can take it and we kind of bypass all the regulations. And this is exactly what happened. So Hitler actually became the guinea pig for like hormonal concoctions for Morel. So it's really an insane story that is beautifully documented. So you can like read it.

like train wagons going from the Ukraine, from the German army, like very scarce. It was to have a whole train wagon because they needed to ship, you know, wounded soldiers back or ammunition or, and he just, you know,

like whole train wagons filled with his offal, with this offal from the slaughterhouses and all the livers of all the slaughtered pigs in the Ukraine. And then the army was like, we can't do this. We need these wagons for like war sensitive stuff, you know. And then Morel would run to Hitler and say, the army is blocking me transporting these precious materials that I can turn into drugs for the common good of the German people. And Hitler wrote an order saying,

And then the wagon was going through and then Morel was creating these concoctions. And Hitler actually, he took too many of these weird things, you know. His health started deteriorating in 43. Like he was quite healthy until 41, 41 to 43 when he took all these organ things and all these hormones and, you know, crazy stuff, you know. Today you would send the doctor that prescribes you that stuff to prison, you know.

But, you know, there was no checks and balances like Hitler just took because he liked Morel and he liked to experiment and they were always talking about new enhancement of the body. That was a whole Nazi idea, you know, to become more powerful, more strong, you know. So he was interested in these things and he actually – his health started to deteriorate.

And then by 43, he had already become quite a different man. He aged quite a lot. I mean, you can see it if you compare the young Hitler with like just five years later, he looks like 20 years older, you know.

And then in 43, because he's doing so poorly, like his chi, you would say today, your physical energy was like really down. If you take like, if you get like one pig liver extract injection a day, you know, you can imagine how you're going to, you know, you're going to feel like after like a year or so. It's not very healthy. So it...

What was the goal of the pig liver extract? Enhance energy. They then gave it to the German soldiers. They drank this stuff because liver is always filled with nutrients, I guess. So that's why some people think, and I would probably agree that it's healthy to eat liver. They think an ounce of liver a day is probably the right amount.

But injecting pig liver. So Hitler, technically speaking, wasn't a vegetarian at all because he was using all these animal products.

supplements and shots. He just wasn't consuming them with his mouth. Right. Right. So do you know the famous story about Hitler meeting Mussolini where Mussolini wanted to get out of the war? Yeah. Yeah. I write about that in Blitz because that is the first time like Hitler was quite depressed before the meeting and felt betrayed because Mussolini wanted to leave the war effort. This was in July 1943 and

Like Mussolini said, this is not working. We'd rather get out, okay? Is that fine with you if we just leave the axis now? And Hitler's like, no, it's not fine, you know? So he was very nervous before that meeting and was in a villa in northern Italy. And he asked Morel again for something stronger. And then Morel, for the first time, presented what then would become Hitler's favorite drug. And this was a German drug called Oikodal.

And it's quite interesting. Oikodal was made by the Merck company, which is still a pharmaceutical giant today. And it's an opioid. It's an opioid that makes you, if you inject it intravenously, quite euphoric, but also quite calm. You know, you're not crazy. If you're on Oikodal intravenously, you think you're like on top of the world. It's like you feel so great. Right.

And Hitler loved this drug. Like he got it injected before the meeting with Mussolini. On the way to the plane, he asked for another injection. He loved it so much. And then like people who were at the meeting in this villa said that Hitler was just

you know, talking nonstop like I'm doing right now. Like talking, no, we're actually having a conversation. We're having a conversation. Hitler and Mussolini did not have a conversation. Hitler was talking like for three, four hours without stopping. And Mussolini became very sweaty and like aides came in and handed him papers that Rome was being bombed the very minute. But he couldn't get out. Hitler was very tired.

dominant in the room very very dominant in the room and from that moment on Oikodal became kind of his favorite drug and now comes the pun um

When Germany lost, a lot of patents were also lost from Germany and became possession of America. And the patent of Oikodal also traveled to America. And Oikodal is oxycodone. So what has created the American opioid crisis is the very same opioid that was Hitler's favorite opioid. Wow. Sold in America as pills. You know, crushed and sniffed, whatever, you know, injected. I don't know, you know.

Hitler was injecting it from the start. He didn't fuck around with pills. Because pills, because he still had these stomach problems. He didn't like a medicine to go orally into the... He didn't like it too long. You don't know. You take something now and it's acting like in 45 minutes. They're not good. The injection is the immediate effect. So that's what he wanted. He would go to a military briefing station.

When the war was in 1944, the generals were just, they knew it was lost. They came from the Eastern Front. People were dying every day. It was over. But they came to the meeting to tell Hitler, basically, you want to save your men. But Hitler on Oxycodone, on Oikoda, as it was called then, had so much power in the room, so much charisma.

He was very charismatic early on, but he had lost his charisma in the meantime. But through Eukodal, he could reinstall his charisma, being good in the room. And I read a lot of witnesses' reports from generals. A lot of them wrote books afterwards or made notes what happened. They said when they were with Hitler in this room, they were convinced that Hitler knew something that they didn't know. Like he had a wonder weapon up his sleeve. Like he knew something.

that the war would turn around and we would win, the Germans would win in the end because he was so convincing on this Oikodal. So Hitler was very clever actually in using that drug for his horrific vision. And you can examine this day by day by studying

the papers of Morel and then also studying like other accounts because it's always good to look at more, not only have one source but there's quite a lot on it so it is quite surprising no one ever wrote about that before. Well it's fascinating because if you think about how much is written about Hitler and how much Hitler has been studied that they didn't study that. It's totally crazy actually. Because it has such a profound effect on the way you think and behave.

It does. I mean, there was one, we all know that on July 20th, 1944, that was the most success. I mean, it wasn't successful, but almost successful assassination attempt when the bomb by Stauffenberg blew up in the headquarters in the East. Operation Valkyrie, it was called. It was a code name. And afterwards...

Like Morel rushes in, the doctor rushes in. Hitler's quite injured actually, which Nazi propaganda later said like the Führer was not injured. He was quite injured by that detonation. I mean, he was sitting there and the bomb was like on the other side of the table leg and the table leg was quite thick. So, and the table was thick. So he was, he was very lucky that he didn't die, but he had like hundreds of splinters in his body and he, his eardrums were blown and it was bleeding from his ears. And he was like totally, you know,

He was injured. And Morel immediately comes in and gives him Eukodal because in the evening Mussolini came for a meeting. He was already in the train. So you can see an hour later Hitler on top of his game again, joking with Mussolini and the other officers have lost a leg, died,

So, and then actually from that moment on Hitler, that's like July 20th, 1944 until the very end, May 8th, 1945 when the war ends. That is his heaviest drug consumption because then he's really like, this is the most intense time. One of the things, for example, that happens is that Hitler,

to treat his blown ear drums which you know were connected with heavy pain that he experienced the new doctor came in gizing was his name and he had cocaine he brought cocaine which was a legal product at the time also by Merck Germany was importing the coca leaves from Peru mostly and

And then Merck cocaine was supposed to be the best in the world. Like there were even like product forgers in China who like replicate the Merck label with the Merck cocaine. Merck cocaine was, you know, was the best cocaine. And this doctor came in and he wanted to give the cocaine because it was something to numb the pain basically. It was an anesthetic.

And Hitler was like, I want more of this stuff. And Giesing writes this down. I found these documents actually in Washington in the National Archive. Hitler demands to use cocaine like he wants the doctor to brush it into his nostrils, which is, you know, the most effective way to take cocaine, I guess.

And then he's like, finally, I can think clear again. And the doctor realized this is a drugged guy. Once he gets onto a potent drug, he completely embraces it and wants it more. So Giesing became very, tried to get the coke away from Hitler. Hitler demanded more and more of these cocaine treatments because I can feel...

Finally, I can breathe again and I don't feel like injured anymore. And actually on cocaine, he developed the strategy of a second Ardennes offensive. We talked about the mountainous terrain of the Ardennes in Belgium in 1940. And Hitler wanted to do it again in late 1944, like a surprise attack.

And like his generals, they couldn't believe it because it was a ridiculous idea because the Americans were already on the continent. Like it was no chance it could have worked out. It would just mean that a lot of people, a lot of young German soldiers are going to die. You know, that's what it meant, his second Ardennes offense. But he had it on cocaine. You can see it very clearly like Morel. And Morel didn't like this. You know, he didn't like this other doctor coming in with the cocaine. Like the doctor started competing. Oh, no.

It's called the doctor's war because the one guy gives him cocaine and Morel gives him oxycodone, which is an opioid. So Hitler was kind of speedballing in August and September 1944 and made very crazy then decisions, very bad for the Nazi war effort, very bad decisions for the world. You know, it was good that he was so fucked up. I actually spoke to a British historian who told me that he had investigated –

Anthony Beaver is his name, a great colleague of mine. He had investigated the British intelligence's plan to assassinate Hitler because obviously there were these plans, you know. And they had realized in 1944 that it's actually not good to assassinate Hitler because he was already so off the rails already.

that he weakened the German war effort. Let's say Hitler was assassinated, then let's say Himmler becomes the Führer or something. He was also a total freak. He did two hours of yoga each morning because he thought the Aryan race is connected with ancient Vedic. So he was into yoga, but he was not into drugs.

So let's just say they would have had an efficient leader, would have been more dangerous basically to the Allies than keeping totally drugged out Hitler. Wow. So they wanted him to stay fucked up because it was better. They actually did not bomb pharmaceutical companies until like in December 1944, British bombers bombed the Merck company and then Oikodai could not be made anymore.

And actually Hitler then moves to the bunker and he doesn't have Oikodal anymore, which was his drug of choice. He received it every other day in a very high dosage, 20 milligrams intravenously of the most potent opioid. So he became a junkie. He became addicted to this. So then when he moves to the bunker in the end phase of the war,

Just before that, the Merck production site had been bombed. We were supplying it. Morel doesn't have it anymore. And that creates quite a friction between patient A, as Morel called Hitler, and the doctor, because the doctor basically made him hooked on a substance. And suddenly, it's like the one mistake the dealer shouldn't make. Make the client hooked, and then you can't supply anymore. And also, no one else could supply. Hitler couldn't go somewhere else.

There's a report by Morel driving on a motorcycle through bombed out Berlin like February, March 45, like going from pharmacy to pharmacy, trying asking, do you still have like a supply of Oikodal, you know? Wow. So the situation became, you know, Hitler lost everything.

World War II which was not good for him but he also was on withdrawal heavy withdrawal from opioids which made him feel like shit so that leads to the complete degeneration of the character wow so that that

that third reich kind of crumbled in on itself fascinating probably would have lost anyway but still of course fascinating that it all happened and it's kind of ironic that it happens while he's in full withdrawal yeah i mean the only drug really that he had left in the end was harming which we spoke about harming like i studied like what morel still had like in his bag basically like looked at the bottom of his bag he still had harming so he gave harming to hitler

so it was a i don't know what harming does to you if you just take it singularly but it's doesn't you know and and sugar like hitler more and more demanded um cake because sugar does actually give you a little high i mean it does even if you're in the bunker losing um world war ii you still kind of crave that that sugar high but at the time they had to already crumble the cake for him because he couldn't

Like he was shaking so much from the withdrawal. Like he took it in a spoon and kind of put it in his mouth. Wow. Yeah. Wow. In Blitz, we find like a new biography in a way of Hitler, a more accurate one actually. That is so fascinating. Wasn't there recorded instances of JFK? Didn't he have a doctor that would prescribe some sort of amphetamines to him as well?

JFK is a very interesting case. He had chronic pain and there is reports that he used also methamphetamine. Also, he had depression. So he had a kind of a doctor feel good. And one time I found a connection, but I don't really...

I couldn't research more about it that this Dr. Feelgood of JFK actually had studied what morale had given to Hitler. But it's, you know, you probably don't even need to study morale. It kind of, that's what's out there. So JFK, I think, received quite a lot of medications. That's why it's interesting that,

What I wrote about in Tripped is his possible LSD experience. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Yeah, you talked about that with Jesse Waters. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, there's only one source for it. And we always have to be skeptical if there's only one source. If there's two sources, it's always much better. But one source, and it's actually Timothy Leary's autobiography. He describes, and I don't think he made this up. I have no reason to believe that he made this up.

He describes how a woman called Mary Pinchot visits him at Harvard, telling him, because he was known as the, you know, he was still employed by Harvard. He was, you know, the LSD guy, basically. If you wanted to know about LSD, you would ask Leary. He had done the most research. And also some of the research is very good. Very, you know, it's very interesting. So she went to him. She was like a socialite in Washington, Mary Pinchot. She had been married to a CIA guy, but they had been divorced. Right.

She was probably too, quote unquote, left for him. She was more like a peace person, I guess. And she was also a very good friend of JFK. They were rumored to be lovers. She was in the White House a lot. He took her to functions. She was a part of his life. And she visited Leary saying to Leary, I have a very powerful friend. This was in April 63, right?

and I want to do the experience with him. And Liri was all, you know, he kind of was probably thinking, is this JFK? But she didn't disclose it. She didn't disclose who this powerful friend was. And Liri said, yeah, I'm going to come with you. We're going to do it together. And she said, no, no, no, just...

Give it to me. I want the stuff, the LSD, and I want to kind of get some guidelines from you. How do you do like a LSD session? So they had this, you know, Larry told her a bit about what he thinks, how it should be done, set and setting. You know, JFK shouldn't do it while he's like doing a press conference. He should do it when there's maybe he doesn't have to go on camera anymore that day. You know, maybe it's in the evening, you know, in the White House. So she takes the LSD and then

There's no record that they actually took it together because there's just no record. There's one, there's her diary, but we'll come to her diary in a second. What happened was a little bit later, and you can pull that up on YouTube, you can see that it's quite interesting. Kennedy gave his so-called peace speech at the American University, which is, I think, in Washington, or maybe not, but it's in Washington. Yeah.

And in this peace speech, it's kind of funny actually to see him because we have to understand that JFK was quite a hawk. Like he was really a Cold War guy. Like he was a Democrat. Like the Democrats, they're all for war. It's confrontation. We have to be safe. We have to protect the country. We're serious arms race. That was his thing. He was not different than other presidents.

But in this peace speech that he gave a few weeks after Mary Pinchot received the LSD from Leary, he has a completely different agenda. He sounds basically like a hippie. He says, "You're very presidential, giving a speech for all these students and a nice day in America." And he gives presents, come and give a speech.

And he talks about, you know, we all live on this planet together, even the Russians, you know, we all care for our children and we're all like, you know, we're all in this together. And he basically shifts course. He says that this arms race is kind of ridiculous. It just burns resources and we must come to a different understanding.

and then he gets killed like a few months later. So that is just, those are the facts, you know, and I think I'll leave it at the fact. So fact also is that Mary Pinchot was shot in the head a few weeks or months after the assassination of JFK. And that day of her death, she was jogging in Washington close to her apartment,

There was a breaking into her apartment and her diary was taken. So maybe that's the source actually that links JFK to LSD. And maybe JFK was eventually killed because he took LSD and changed his mind. But maybe he just... There's a lot of factors why he was killed, right? It's, yeah, obviously. I mean...

It's kind of a mystery why he was killed. Why does he need to be killed? But maybe that change of mind becoming like saying like arms race must stop, which pisses off a lot of people in the military industrial complex who are like base their whole thing on the arms race. Maybe that becomes a very big threat and it must be eliminated. Who knows? But yeah.

He had a change of mind for sure. Maybe because of LSD, maybe because of the lovemaking with Mary Pinchot, or maybe they were just smoking joints. There are sources for that they had smoked joints in the White House before, but I don't know if cannabis would kind of bring about this change of mind. But LSD certainly could because the default mode network, which is Cold War, arms race, suddenly gets a little less energy. Other parts of the brain is like, maybe we should

Do it differently. And also the realization that if anybody can change things, he literally has a responsibility to express himself in that way. Absolutely. If he really is a leader. Yeah.

Norman, thank you very much. This is a fascinating conversation. That was just three hours. Isn't that crazy? Just flew by. Thank you very much for all your work. I mean, what you've done by just the Hitler stuff, just explaining all that is so illuminating. It's so interesting. And I really hope everybody goes out and buys your books. So Tripped and Blitzed is the other one. Yeah.

And are they available? It's actually a present for you. Oh, thank you very much. And you can have the tripped also. Thank you. Are these available in audiobook as well? They are, but I do encourage everyone to read. But they are available in audiobook. It is great to read, but sometimes people are stuck in traffic. Yeah, right. It's a great way to consume information. Of course, they're out there in audiobooks. Thank you very much. Really appreciate you.

I hope we will see each other again. Yeah, let's do it again. Well, when is this next book that you're working on going to be out? Stone Sapiens will be out, I think, in the fall of 25. Okay, in the fall of 25. Come on back. Let's do it. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.