Joe Rogan podcast.

Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.

Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. 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 nonfiction 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 readdez 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 a very serious archive, because they host all the documents what the SS did in Dachau. So it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at. Because they wrote down everything. 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 I'd never. That was the first time I saw, like, 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, like, 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 blitz. And Blitz was also already a complete story. So I thought I saved 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 had. We all know the meth thing, and we've seen Hitler at the 36 Olympics where he's rocking back and forth or he's looking 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, you know, 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. But this. 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. 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 hardly anyone in the world knew about this.

So this is the story of tripped.

And so Hoffman, he synthesized LSD in 43.

Correct.

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. And Ergot, which contains a very similar compound to LSD.

Well, ergot is the alkaloid of the fungus, which grows on rye. 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 ergod based medicines. Like, they started after the first world war. It was like a startup. Sandoz 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 Artur Stoll. He later became the CEO of Sandoz. And Artur Stoll was the first one to crack earth, 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 a very, very poisonous alkaloid. 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 Ergota, 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 Stohl was able to crack the ergod, and the first medicine he made was a migraine medicine, which came out, I think, in 1923 by Sandus, very successful. So he immediately hit the jackpot. Wow. He became like the ergot God of the pharmaceutical world. So he developed more and more medicines with ergodental. One of them, for example, is still used today when in childbirth, it contracts the 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, a very successful company still. They bought Sandoz, and now it's Novartis, but it's. It's kind of the same thing. So Sandoz, 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, like, you don't want to eat this thing, you know, you don't want to. 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 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 sandos 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 Edmonton stoll hired further chemists. One of them was Albert Hoffman, 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 thirties 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, Washington.

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 ergod, 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, 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. It's a bit. He tries. Later he tried to make it a bit mythical sounding. The substance got into his bloodstream and he felt like weird sensations and different. He saw different colors. So he thought, this is actually a very different type of thing.

Like, what is this? Lysergic acid, diathylamide, LSD, what is it? So he did then the 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 stoll, 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 brought him home on a bicycle. He was at his house, and the wall started collapsing onto him. The doctor came and he said to his doctor, I think I'm going mad. I poisoned myself. I don't know what's going on. The doctor was feeling his pulse. Pulse normal, eyes normal. Like, on LSD, you don't have a strong physical reaction, but you have a very strong mental reaction. And the doctor just couldn't see it. And before, actually, Hoffman had tested LSD on mice at sundress. And the mice also didn't show anything because you can't have.

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 his CEO, and 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 sandals. And I think this is kind of funny. If you picture, like, a conservative pharmaceutical swiss company in the late forties 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 Hoffman said, I had a very strong rauch with this stuff. I don't know what this is. So they invited like secretaries and bookkeepers and chemists, people working in the cafeteria. They all could come into this room and take LSD. Like 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 a strangely named substance like LSD 25. They took like 50 micrograms. And they wrote down, I write about this in Tripp. 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 universe. These hippie LSD thoughts that we classically associate with, they had them very purely. 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. Two people are dead, injured, traumatized. So they thought at Sandus, maybe this is gonna be like a blockbuster. You know, we give this. 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 Sanders really thought they had a blockbuster. They thought this is 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 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 Eleusis, 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, 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, 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 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. 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. 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 entripped, 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. Fermamma, which the german translator, which I think is the perfect title. It's not even. It's even better in German as deferma. He somehow convinced me to use a different title in Germany. And all, you know, this is translated to many different countries, and they always go to the German. If the Germans would have called it Ls de Fermammer, 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, Daxter stuff. Then every country was, like, thinking, how should we call it? And I guess they call it trip. Because of the success of Blitz, they wanted to have. But I think LsD for Mom is a better title.

I like it.

Yeah, it's great because it's true. I was then really researching for my father and my mother and I came back after all this research with the swiss company and the nazi connection, which we'll come to, I guess, in a second. I came back to my father and I presented him this story. And then he decided to actually, because he said, I understand now that LSD is not illegal because it's dangerous, that there are different reasons why it's illegal. And these different reasons I explained in Tripp. So we gave, 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. 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 in microdose, you're not supposed to feel a trip or an intoxication. It just works in your brain. But my mother actually did feel it because her brain is attacked by Alzheimer. 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 is 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. It was amazing. So that is also what I. What I write about in tripped AK LSD for mom.

Well, it's so fascinating. There's so many people suffering from Alzheimer's in the world, and it's illegal basically everywhere except for countries like Portugal that decriminalize everything.

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 will have it ourselves. Or I was like, it's going to grow 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's if you would know, like, how to stimulate the brain.

And so far, by 20, 5153 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 three diabetes?

Yeah, and I think it could be true. I mean, the reason for Alzheimer is, you know, you have to see it separately from the cure. You know, the reason. The reason. I think I've come, actually, to the conclusion that sugar is quite bad for you. And, yeah, I. 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. The so called neuroinflammation of the brain. And that could be caused, obviously, by sugar, 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, the whole family suffers. And, of course, our medical system is very expensive to treat dementia, put them in homes, whatever. 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 a tv, an american tv show, even on german television. It was called Raumschev Enterprise, in germane spaceship Enterprise. And I was always very touched by the beginning when they say, boldly go where no man has gone before. Like, that was, for me, the american, like the western philosophy, to always transcend where you are. And that is, 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 h two ta receptors. You're not. 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 connecting with american culture early on. And I always associated western culture with freedom and transcendence and boldly going where no man has gone before. That is, for me, the strength of. 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 going beyond that. So I was curious, how did this happen, this prohibition? Like, who was there one person that decided, no, people cannot use this anymore? And there actually is one person, and his name is Harry J. Anslinger. I'm sure you're familiar with the guy. So for tripped, 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 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. 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 a slang for a mexican wild tobacco. It wasn't cannabis.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

So that is. So basically what we could say is that. And unfortunately, Ansinger was quite a racist. He was like. 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 scorch of foreign influences, which is drugs, in this case, from China, the opium from Mexico, the marijuana. So he was. He was very good politician, basically, like an anti drug lobbyists 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, and 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. We have, like, this is not how it went. It's like he wanted to attack the jazz scene, and he knew that the jazz musicians were smoking a lot of weed. You know, it's very hard to make it illegal to play jazz, but you can make marijuana illegal, and then you can, you know, target jazz musicians.

So it's got racial profiling.

Why were they going after jazz musicians?

He hated jazz. He thought that. 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 gonna sleep without women or something like that. Like, that was kind of the world that he was.

So was it because the jazz musicians were on stage and people loved them.

They were cool, 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 gonna be, like, boring people, you know? So that guy. 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, you know, and also in conjunction with his union with William Randolph Hearst.

Yeah.

William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, had a vested financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal or making marijuana illegal because of hemp. Right. You know the whole story about the decorticator.

Yeah, you're 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 COVID of popular science magazine when they called it, they said, hemp, the new billion dollar crop of the future. So because hemp was a very difficult plant 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 could 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 COVID 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 hemp, $1 billion 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 a 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 industry.

Hemp is a disrupter.

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. They didn't understand that it was the same literal textile that created canvas. All the great works. Like, if you look at, you know, 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 a 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 stock on his table of hemp. I don't know if you've ever felt a hemp stock. Have you ever picked one up? 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 hemp Crete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of, out of hemp. And it's incredibly sustainable, because 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 you think.

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.

Anslinger and Hearst and in his publications, the word marijuana was, for the first time, publicized. So they kind of.

And with a racial element, blacks and Mexicans were smoking this new drug and raping white women.

Right, 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 mine 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 this sugar thing that I started.

It's a crazy drug.

And that actually made me realize that we, as 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, or 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 and 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 Tripp, both on drugs and history, I was. I'm now trying to come up 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 I think we actually are stone sapiens. I think that this cognitive revolution that happened in Africa, it's, as Demonstra said, it's not a theory. It's 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 Harare 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 neo cortex 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 that language kind of fails them.

But humans suddenly, not suddenly, I mean, this is over long periods of time, could. 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, like, the founding moment of our race is actually this transcendence. Like, suddenly you realize this moment where I'm in is not all. There's more. Like, 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. Like, 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 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. We 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 have, like, 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 human 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 of 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, this is the theory of why the human brain size doubled over a period of 2 million years. And have you ever listened 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 effects it would have on the mind in terms of developing language and just expanding our creativity, expanding our ability to see things, makes better edge detection. You have better visual acuity makes them more horny. They're going to more likely to breed more community. There's also this potential for a type of, for lack of a better term, a type of mind melding. 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 harmine.

When they found some certain trees that were part of the components of ayahuasca, they tried to call it telepathine, but due to the rules of scientific nomenclature, that substance had already been identified as harmine. 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 Follenweider at university in Zurich, and he was able to start in the early nineties, 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 actually 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 other woman in our brain that says, now I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Everything's cool, and I'm a writer, whatever. And you, like, 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 the ghost with the rifle is going to shoot. 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, 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 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 non moving object like my fist or something.

It's constantly kind of moving the brain. And neuroplasticity describes that ability to constantly adapt to 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. We all experience. I hope we have an experienced audience. But if you're unexperienced, that could be too much, you know, 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. Depression is a loop or loops in your brain of always this and lsd, especially psilocybin, they disrupted 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 forties and early fifties, 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 Sanders that I talked about when they thought, we have a game changer, we have a blockbuster that 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 now, 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. Why?

Well, you can get them here too, which is weird.

Okay.

You get them here. Like I said, there's like different deltas, so we can get legal cannabis here to sell it.

Society is still very insecure when it comes to drugs because we have been bombarded with the propaganda, are horrifically dangerous. You know, this propaganda, when I was.

In high school was, this is your brain on drugs? You know, it was just, say no, Nancy Reagan. Everyone was just saying 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, well, there.

Are 17 people like that. That is true. Look, if you fall into the opiate crowd.

Yeah.

If you fall into a crowd and talking about it. 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 in second 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 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. 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 legalized 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. But saying this sounds like completely outrageous LSD. So many people are afraid of it. So I hope with Tripp to take a little bit of the edge off to actually show where it comes from.

And I would like to tell that story where that comes from. Yeah, if I may, 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 twenties. 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 masculine, 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, 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 polished 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. 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 state, some scientists state. And this Kuhn actually became, you know, he's really working for Hitler. He was developing a nerve poison, Zarin, which was deadly for Hitler.

He was. And if you worked for Hitler as a scientist, obviously he got all the. The grants you need, the money you needed. You had a great time, basically, if you sold your soul to the devil. So Richard Kuhn was in charge with finding the truth drug. And then the interesting thing is, 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 darkness. Like, how did the SS know? Like, 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 US, mescaline. And another odorless, colorless substance was being used. And LSD is that famous odorless, colorless substance. Like, I could put a drop of LSD in your coffee, you wouldn't even notice it, which is good for Sikh, 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, like, papers. Like, 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, like 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. The find book, which has. It's a database. It shows you everything that's in the archive. It takes sometimes days or weeks to actually figure out what's all there. 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.

And I wanted to see, like, I knew that Albert Hoffman wasn't a Nazi. Like, I had known a lot about Albert Hoffman, and I never heard anything about him having nazi connections and 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 was this guy? Because he, as the CEO, called the shots for Sanders, 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 Deleuze. 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 what. 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, he can't hold the pen anymore. And you see like this line on the paper. That's exciting, you know, but it's not new. People have seen that before.

But 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 Sandos. 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 the chemist level of the company. So I wrote an email to the archive. He 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. 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's like, in the swiss accent, like, no, it's illegal. I have not seen it. And then I asked him, do you want to see it? 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. Printed on it, like these papers, 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.

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. 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, 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, 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 it was, you know, we had formed a connection suddenly.

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 stoil was communicating with all through his career, and that one man, stoil himself, had learned under Wildstetter. Wilstetter 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 Wildstetter was this genius who also received the Nobel Prize and who had found out that Stoltz idea from potent plants you extract and then you make medicines from plants, basically, because plants are very powerful, obviously. So Wildsteder was like the scientific father of Stoll. And Stoll had one other prodigy child, and that was Richard Kuhnenhezen, 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 had the same teacher they had exchanged already in the twenties, all their research in the thirties, 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 Stoel says, we found this 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 ergo Tamin, which is the precursor to LSD. It's like from Ergota mean, you do one step and then you have LSD. And we received Ergota mean in October 1943 from the swiss company. And then the Nazis had their hand on LSD. And then it becomes very interested. 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 also unit, al 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. 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 also was in place. And the second job of ulcers was to find out about biochemical weapons because they also thought, rightly, that Hitler had biochemical weapons. So one of the 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 two, 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 sarin, a nerve, poisonous. Decided to rather extend his career. He later came to America, was teaching in America. 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. A bit of time. You know, you have to do it with several. You don't do it in a day. So that these. 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 CIA was, was founded, which CIA called the CIA director Dallas, 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. 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 eighties when I was an exchange student in Flint, Michigan. We took a vacation, met my, 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, the SS, the german system was a very, was an evil system, obviously, but it was a very functional system. There was a lot to be learned from them in terms of warfare. So the Americans, because the Nazis were so interested in this truth drug, thought this must be, this must be interesting. We have to look at this. 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 fifties, a lot of hopeful research at universities in America. Like brain scientists, they were looking at LSD. It wasn't illegal yet. You know, it was an interesting thing. But then the CIA took over the military research. First it was the us 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 like, 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 when in 47, the CIA was founded, basically the CIA took over this truth drug research from the military. And then Beecher was sending his reports to the CIA. This was done by a guy called Sydney 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 here by buying the world supplier of LSD, which was, he said, your supply. Like his intelligence told him that Sandos had produced something like, I don't know, it's in the book. I forgot the number like 4 LSD. And he said, I want to buy the whole 4 kg quite a lot because it's already potent in microgram dosages. Stuy 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 Stoil would always inform. Stohl would not sell to the other side of the Iron Curtain. That's what Sandoz had to basically assure him. Of course the payback is Sandors 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 godly takes the 400 grams back to the states and is now, from now on always informed when like a scientist in an american university acquires LSD from Sandals 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, I think over like over 60 institutions like the big universities of this big country, he let them all in their special 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, you know, have to be paid. And it's, it's, it's expensive. Like it costs like 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 know, 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 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 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 Stanley Kubrick movie. He put people on constant LSD and then had speakers under their pillows which would tell them, like, single sentences, like he was. He was trying to see, can you break?

Can you really drive someone mad with LSD? For example, can you deprogram a brain with LSD? So 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. We want to come to my pad. You know, I have booze. And it was like a cool apartment, but there was one large mirror, and behind the mirror said an operative who was filming and listening in and recording. And then they checked, like, what happens to a person if they receive, unwittingly, a dosage of LSD, you know, so this is quite unethical work that was done.

They also did Operation Midnight climax.

Yeah, that's in Telegraph Hill.

That was a brothel.

Yeah, it was an apartment. They called it the padded. But they hired sex workers, which then, you know, 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 it was kind of. 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's. It's. It's. It just shows, but it wasn't very effective, you know, what do you gain. What do you see? Like, someone, of course, has a little bit different sex on LSD, I guess. 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 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, you know, 2020 hindsight, because.

We'Re looking back, yes, it was the cold war. And I think that they really believe 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. It's. It's clear that they wanted to be. From his perspective, it makes sense, you know?

Right.

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.

Right. No, it's definitely unhelpful, what they did.

And it might be understandable, but 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 a whole new order in the world. The United States emerges victorious, and then there's this clamoring for trying to figure out, okay, 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 gonna send you this. This is a video of hippies in the 1960. 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 an anti war movement. The free Palestine movement 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 tune out, drop out, and so play this. 1968.

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 our 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.

Now, I'm going on the appearance, Sullye, and we have one case history in which a young chap has been into the clinic twelve times in three months with twelve 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 we're 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 people. So it's kind of the same thing that Anslinger started much earlier.

Yeah, I mean, it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over again whenever there's a powerful disruptor that might be ultimately great for the human race 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 late 1960s into the 1980s, they radically shifted culture. Everything changed. Music sucked. Cars sucked, everything sucked. There's direct evidence that it had a huge impact on our creativity. 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 for taking LSD and then he took LSD. And his default mode network was default mode, default mode network had less energy. And he had, like he said, suddenly understood the crazies. He was walking through the psychiatric ward and understanding a lot better what's actually going on in the brain. And that's when he had the idea for one flew over the cuckoo's nesthouse, which made him so much money that he then decided to stop riding 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 would 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.

Two, 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. Right. So that creates, 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, 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. And I think that is it's the.

Only way we survive.

Yeah.

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 like, that. We're fighting over imaginary boundaries that we've created lines in the dirt of.

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. Possible. You have the media, you have the Joe Rogan experience. You have. You know, 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 doing sports together. Isn't that nice? You know?

And, like, when the opposing teams hug each other and make friends. Yeah.

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 crisis and migration. I mean, we have a global theme, but how do we talk about it? 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 end. 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 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 on the basis of what's the most effective way that we can control and govern.

I think it'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 ilysinian 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. 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. Because the psychedelics, as we said before, are, and humans are about transcendence, you know?

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, you know, obviously not a surprise that Nixon would illegalize the psychedelics.

They're dangerous.

Yeah, I really dangerous to power.

They disrupt, so. 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 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 Ulysses. 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 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. Things like burning man obviously, are attempts to create ritualistic spaces. 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 are all in this together. And it's essentially a cult. And 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. Then all of a sudden someone comes along and through this ritual we can all transcend and, you know, becomes, what.

Are we going to do? You know?

Well, we need real shamans. We need actual legit shamans. And the problem is, because that term is 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 consciousness and advancing conscious growth and doing it in a very responsible way. One of the things that we would have to be careful of if you have something like a year of psychedelics is schizophrenia. We don't understand.

I didn't say young people should take psychedelics for a straight year, but maybe they could take.

Would they have a possibility with a.

Possibility, well, some kind of structure, maybe a place you can go?

And 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 of 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.

Just 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 eyebogaine experience. So there's 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 instead of being biased about this, let it be open to everyone to have an objective analysis of what is actually going on. Have the naysayers and 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 in 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 don't like, 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, but 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, and other countries, as well as on a global level. And I think opening up our societies to psychedelic research and psychedelics. Psychedelics. I would be curious to see a society which treats itself with that 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 is much better than the current society because the current society is pretty shitty, actually. 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 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 we're. Maybe today we're now the leaders of the free world, and we're going to start a psychedelic revolution from this podcast.

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, that it means nothing if you don't have freedom over your own consciousness, 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 LD 50 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 fifties. This was another document I found in the archive. 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, you know, 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 Stoil just said no because he had been visited by Sidney Gottlieb, who basically, it 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. That's the feeling I have. Well, 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.

Right. The mainstream media really is a problem in this regard, because 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.

Mm hmm.

In a way.

I mean, 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 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. 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 Segura and all my friends, we 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 big?

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, yeah, 3700 people cheering. And I was like, whoa, I'll never forget that moment because I was like, oh. 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, like, feverishly checking the, that's good. What's good and what's bad. I don't look at, like, 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 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 have a publicist that's like, examining trends and this person's popular. I don't do any of that.

I think it made itself. I think it made itself. I think it's a trick. 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. And 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 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 these media pundits saying the exact same thing over and over and over again. This is nothing. 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 conversations.

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. And it was thought when we first started making podcasts that everyone was moving to a much shorter attention span. And that most of the things that were going to be popular in the future were, like, ten minute things, like, very quick things, which is, like, a lot of the truth today with TikTok and Instagram reels and all these things that people like, short attention span, it just captures you, gives you nothing, and you just keep scrolling and looking. And we thought that's what people are moving to. But then podcasts came along, and podcasts came along with three hour conversations with scientists that get 50 million views. And then people are like, whoa, okay, so it's not that people aren't intellectually curious. It's not. People aren't. They don't have this, want to be engaged. They do. Everybody does.

It just.

They're not being fed correctly.

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 similarity between a podcast 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, 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. 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 if he says some crackpot things. Let me hear if he says some things like, oh, that guy is 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. Okay, 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.

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. You know, I just was interested in talking to you soon. I mean, immediately when I saw the. What you were you're talking about when I saw you on the Jesse Walter.

Show, 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 they 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 3 hours.

Yeah. So tell me about blitzed.

What do you want to know?

Well, first of all, when was the first, 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 american afro american athlete named Jesse Owenshe 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 are on something. 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 they were the last Olympic games without doping checks. Yeah. So you could basically take everything, but it's never. No one knows Jesse. Oh, he was just good, you know, so. But there was a guy called Theodore Temner, who was the head of the Temner 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, white guys, you know, so. And then Hauschild was the chemist's name.

He, like, did research about amphetamines, and he found that in Japan, a chemist called Nagai in 19, 7017, 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 hoeschild thought, I'm going to make a new methamphetamine. So he found a new way of synthesizing meth. There's different ways you can make meth, I guess. And he found a specific way that this Temla 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 ten 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 is, there's pervitin and pervytine and pavitin 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 1930, 819 38 was actually kind of the height of the Hitler regime. Like, people loved him. There was full employment. 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. That also created. It was basically a modern capitalist society that also created a lot of stress. You always have to compete. 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 increase their output. And party people used it because it boosted your ego. So it was. You go into a meeting, an important meeting. You take a bit of math before. So it wasn't stigmatized. It was. They called it performance enhancing substance. So it was. That's a neutral term. 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 Temner produced is not the crystal meth that's being produced in a trailer somewhere in a. In a southern state or so. I don't know. It's a different. You know, it was made by a pharmaceutical company. The way I found out about pavitin was actually. Is actually a funny story because I didn't know anything about.

No one knew anything about Nazis and drugs. As I said before, like, 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 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 pavitine, which I said, what is pavitine? He said, well, it's methamphetamine from the so called. From the Third Reich. Third Reich being a propaganda term by the Nazis. That's why I like to say the so called Third Reich. Right. 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. Like, then the antique dealers come in and they take furniture. Like they pay maybe a little. Like, he bought a medicine chest, and he opened the medicine chest, and there was pavitin inside from the 1940s.

And that antique dealer who was a friend of Alex the DJ, he looked at it, and it said on the package contains methamphetamine. 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. 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. After the first pavitine, I could feel as something's coming on, that there was, like, increased energy level. Then I took another one, and these are pills which were, like, 70 years old, and they were still funky. They were still working. And then I took a third one, and my riding 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 engine is 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 tabs.

I said, this is insane. And I googled it, and there was 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 strategy, how to lead a war, was only possible because of methamphetamine, because of this pavitine. 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, 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, this was just a side project of him. And he gave me the signatures. In archives, you get a signature. Every document has a signature. And he gave me the signatures where I can find all the documents on 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. Work. 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 release, 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 love 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 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 38, 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 come 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 mass. 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, he was not, you know, looking at addiction problems. He was just looking at, does it really work to keep a soldier awake maybe for 2 hours longer on the battlefield? Because there's this saying from napoleonic times, the last 15 minutes in a battle, that that's the decisive 15 minutes. Like, who's. Who wins in the end wins, you know?

Right.

So if you have a. If you have something that keeps your manda awake for longer than the enemy has, then you have a decisive advantage. So he made tests. I don't know. I have like, there's photos of it in my book, blitzed, 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 placebo, methamphetamine, coffee, just to check, check. And like, can they sustain longer on meth? And they could, they could actually, they were more active. Like, these tests started at 08:00 p.m. and went until 10:00 a.m. and the math 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 10:00 a.m. and then some said, and now we want to go out, like now. Then they wanted to party while the coffin people. I don't know if we can see that image. It's kind of funny. Can you pull that up?

Your mic's on, Jamie. Just not sure which one it is I'm looking at. It's just, it's a lot of images.

In their own goat. Yeah, this one.

So these guys are all messed up.

Well, you see like going up, maybe you see like the s, you know, sleeping there. S means shine tabletta, 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 called coffee.

Coffee.

Yeah. There's a few more images where you like, this is like a taken at 415 in the morning. This is taken at 515 in the morning? Yeah. Go back maybe to the 415.

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, you know, people filling out more pictures later in the day when the. When the. And 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. You know, he can't sleep for, like, another.

But the guy in the back, though, that's a pee. His head is down. See him the far right?

I think he's solving.

Yeah, he might be studying things.

Well, in any case, maybe go one picture down. Yeah, that one. That's how the test, like, he did. So he saw that. That with, if you take two times six milligrams of pavitine 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 is, I think it's 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 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. 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 a soldier just needs to follow orders. He just needs to shoot for a long time, you know?

Right, right.

And so he got all excited about it. This was in 38. His last test he did, it was in 39. Then Germany was about to invade Poland, September 1, 1939, beginning of World War two. And he said to his superior was in America, it's called the surgeon general. German. That's a different name. But the highest 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 a diary during the war. And in his war diary, you can clearly see that he himself became addicted to meth. 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, like, I feel very depressed this morning. Even the pavitin I'm using does not help me anymore against my depression. Like, he didn't understand that this was actually the problem, that he was becoming addicted himself.

He needed higher and higher dosages.

He did, yeah. 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, I think 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 pavitine was actually quite helpful. They said things like, and I studied all these reports for blitzed, and I'm quoting some of them in blitzen. Like, it really helped all soldiers achieve their workload, like, do their workload, which was basically killing or invading a foreign country. So rank, again 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 one, 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 Armee, was supposed to be the best army in the world at the time. In the late thirties, early forties, like, they were really proud of their army, the French. And, 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, those. 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 one. 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 so many countries. So they said, it's not going to work. 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 17, 1943. Kind of revolutionary tank generals von Manstein, Guderian and Rommel. Rommel, later becoming very famous tank general, 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 as everyone expects us to use the tanks, which is kind of more in the back, kind of backing up the infantry and being like the backup guys, like the heavy guys in the back. 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 France, where the French also had a heavy defense. But in this mountainous terrain, it wasn't heavily fortified. So they said, we're going to go through the Aden. Mountainous. 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 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, we will be faster than them, and we will 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 where they're going through and then kind of, you know, branch off to the. To the north and to the south and encircle the allied forces there in the north and the french forces there in the southe being further within enemy territory than the defenders. It's a crazy plan. And the only problem is 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 Fuhrer, 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. This superhuman soldier doesn't need to sleep, which is bullshit, obviously. Everyone needs to sleep. 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 young guys, and they were not, like, burning for Hitler. They were actually quite pissed. They had to go to war against the west. They were scared. I read reports on mass depression before the attack started of people who just said, we're going to lose. 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 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. 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 for five days. 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 the stimulant decree. It says, for example, this was distributed to all the medical officers, so they knew how to use the. 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 Ranco was suddenly very popular. He was on top of the world. There's another paper I found which then, which shows how many dosages then the german army ordered from the Templar company just before they attacked France.

And this is 35 million dosages. So finding that document was also kind of fun.

35 million. 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 candid 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, all the way through the advance. And there's reports by the French, by the french army that they simply could not understand their opponent anymore. Like, 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. 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. In world War one, 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 methodical 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 they basically, their defenses collapsed. Germany beat France in a few days. Big neighbor, that in first world war, Germany had been fighting. They had been fighting four years, moving a meter a day and the next day back, and this time because of the methamphetamine charging through. And Hitler was in Paris in June already. That's the story of Blitz in a nutshell. Or a part of blitz.

Wow. Isn't it incredible that that's not taught in school?

I do give talks now in school, ya know, but no historians touched the subject, right. I spoke to for this book, I collab, not collaborated, but I had advice from a leading germane 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, yes, he said, this is the missing puzzle piece that we need to know to understand what actually went down in World War Two. So he was very much behind it. And I wrote a preface to the german edition also. So it was interesting to communicate with him, 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.

It's kind of flippant to say the blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine. Methamphetamine played a huge role, and I examined that huge role. I think it was probably one of the decisive factors. But in a war, many factors come.

Together, but if you can't stay awake for three days, none of it works.

Yeah, World War two would have been very, very different.

If you want to make cement, you have to add water.

I mean, it's not a. If you look at it from a military standpoint, it actually makes, you know, a lot of sense that 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, late 1940, after France had 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, methed up to. But because they had less pilots.

Kamikaze pilots, right? That's a big one. We're talking about suicide flights. We've talked about that before. Japanese factory workers also use methane.

I mean, Japan was an ally of Germany. 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?

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 mean, the pro. Oh, yeah, no, I wanted to talk about something that became a problem then in the german military, because then suddenly there were guys, for example, the so called health, which is like the minister for health in Nazi Germany was called the health. He was like an enemy of pavitin because he said, he, like, 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, 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, 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 army, 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 Pilola di Chioragio, 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 like the Nazis always take the strongest. And the British were, like, 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. Amphetamine is also not healthy, you know, but it's not as. It doesn't make you as edgy. So you can take it over a longer period of time, I guess. Well, 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 two for the german army in Stalingrad.

In Stalingrad, actually, he was in Stalingrad, and he said he still had purvitin. And he gave it to, like, these guys that are, like, freezing to death, being, you know, killed by the Red army. And he said it didn't work anymore, but it just gave us another day of artificial energy. 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 7 attack of Hamas on Israel, I was interviewed by Haretz, 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. April 23 was a report, you can find it online by some newspaper, that a large shipment of captagon 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. It was just what Hamas said.

But for sure, there was captagon 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. Amphetamines.

They seized $1 billion worth of Captagon amphitheaters.

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 uncover 13 tons of the drug known as captagon, hidden indoors and wooden panels. Wow.

So kaptagon is a. Wow.

And Captagon has a similar effect to methamphetamine. Is it like.

It's very similar. It's a very similar molecule.

Wow.

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 La from Blitz, and afterwards, a special, a Navy SeAL approached me who had been in the audience, 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. 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 amphetamine, and 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, you know, by ranked to use it for war purposes, and it has been copied already. In the korean war, american pilots were on amphetamines. Like, amphetamines are like a staple now of armies and of, you know, terrorist groups, freedom fighters or whatever, you know, 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 just very stressful and we don't really want to it. But studies found that on meth, you're more likely, it's easier for you to do it. So it's really the Nazis that are 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 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. It's legal. Like, your psychiatrist has take this. So you function well.

You can't see normal. 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.

No, 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 Android. Stream 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 know, 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 you also might write a lot of shit, you know, because your self criticism is lowered. Right. So Kerouac, being a very good writer, he, like, wrote the wave, you know, he was, like, just riding 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 because you don't.

You lose that subtlety. Right?

You lose the subtlety, you lose a connection with the audience, and you're not having fun anymore. It's like you're. 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.

You know, 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? 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 going to take x amount of this Adderall stuff because I have a deadline. I'm going to get this done. And I'm going to do my best, and then afterwards, I'm not going to fuck with it anymore. A lot of people can't do that, but a lot of people can, I guess. 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, you know, 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 was, is ibogaine and.

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. 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. In. In the body. And that is the one that many people go for. It's like one plus one equals three, basically. So you won't get that high from alcohol alone. And you also get. 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, that particular form of metabolite of intoxication.

Interesting.

Is obviously very unhealthy.

So here it is. How do you say that word? Is a by product of concurrent consumption of alcohol and cocaine as metabolized by the liver. Normally, the metabolism of cocaine produces two primary biologically and active metabolites. Benzolic. How do you say that? Benzoic benzolecanine and echinine. Ecylethster.

Yeah, it's just cochlear.

Well, that's a big factor, too, right? Like how it's metabolized by the liver. That's the difference between eating cannabis and smoking it. Right. So eleven hydroxy metabolite, which is created by the liver, which is five times more psychoactive than THC.

Oh, right.

So there's a lot of factors and these. The thing is, like, we don't know, it's kind of crazy that your book and your work is what's really illuminating the effect that this had on one of the most historically significant events in human history, which is world war two.

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. So 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 Morrell, who was kind of a celebrity doctor in Berlin before he met Hitler, was famous for treating diseases that don't exist. So he gave mood enhancing shots, injections, and he was also a vitamin pioneer. 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. 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 Hoffman 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, 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 pointed. 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, like, 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. What? That's why I'm a little bit surprised by this famous video of him. Like, 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 B, one, 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.

So. But there was no, like, heavy substances in 36. Not that, you know, I. Morel wrote everything down, so I don't think he.

Would, you know, Morel's introduction to Hitler was what, year?

36.

So it was at the same time.

Yep. A little bit before. So.

So the introduction was before the Olympics?

Yeah.

Is it possible that Hitler is 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. There was Karl Brand. 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 bayou. And then Morel was, like, perfect for Hitler because Morel was like this 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 became, like, Morel's wife was very much against that, that her husband became the personal physician of Hitler. She said to him, like, we'll never, we won't spend that much time together from now on. Mouret, like, no, I have to take this chance. You know, I can be the person. He was, like, a celebrity doctor before, so now he's the personal physician of the fjord, 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. So I see basically three phases in Hitler's drug taking. 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 leads. That's very unhealthy for your gut. We know these days. 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 Hitler kind of grooved along to this kind of treatment. And he was very successful also in the beginning, 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 any 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. They could see. One officer could look with his binoculars and he could see the tram, like the last tram station of Moscow. He could see that. So they were right in front of Moscow. The thing was, what happened was in August 41, in the middle of the campaign, the campaign started June 21, 1941. So August 41, they were already. They had huge. Gained a lot of territory. But Hitler for the first time became sick. He had what they call the russian flu. Like, he was camping, the headquarters was moving with the troops. So he was 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. 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 on that important military briefing, how to further advance, and that 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, 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. Troops will be separated. High command was like, what the fuck? But 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. 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 a. Like an order that I found, 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. The Fuhrer's personal physician.

Was that for Taurine?

Huh?

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 offal and organs and thyroid glands and all kinds of very potent things, and then making, like, concoctions with it. Like, there was a famous liver concoction, like, 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 says, this is. Yeah, this is bullshit. I, the Fuhrer, 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, you know, 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 this is really an insane story that is beautifully documented. So you can read train wagons going from the Ukraine, from the german army, very scarce. It was to have a whole train wagon because they needed to ship wounded soldiers back or ammunition. And he just required whole train wagons filled with this offal from the slaughterhouses, 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 war sensitive stuff. 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, 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 crazy stuff. You know, today you would send a doctor that prescribes you that stuff to prison, you know, but, you know, there was no checks, 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, to become more powerful, more strong. So he was interested in these things, and 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 just five years later, he looks like 20 years older. And then in 43, because he's doing so poorly, like, his qi, 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 gonna. How you're gonna feel. Like, after, like a year or so, it's. It's not very healthy. So it diminished.

What was the goal of the pig liver extract?

Did they just want enhance energy? Like, they then gave it to the german soldiers? Like, they. They drank this stuff because it's like, 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, like, liver.

I think, like, 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 animals supplements, just wasn't consuming them with his mouth. Right.

So do you know the famous story about Hitler meeting Mussolini, where Mussolini wanted to get out of the war?

Yeah, I write about that in blitz, because that is the first time Hitler was quite depressed before the meeting and felt betrayed because Mussolini wanted to leave the war effort. This was in July 1943. Like Mussolini said, this is not working. We rather get out. Okay, is that fine with you if we just leave the axes now? And he was 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 is a. It was a german drug called Eukodal. And it's quite interesting. Oiko Dal 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 Oikuda intravenously, you're like. You think you're, like, on top of the world. It's like you feel so great. And Hitler loved this drug. Like, he got it injected before the meeting with Mussolini.

On the way to the plate, he asked for another injection. He loved it so much. And then people who were at the meeting in this village said that Hitler was just 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, 4 hours without stopping. And Mussolini became very sweaty, and aides came in and handed him papers that Rome is being bombed the very minute, but he couldn't get up. Hitler was very dominant in the room. Very, very dominant in the room. And from that moment on, Oik Odal became kind of his favorite drug. And now comes the pun. When Germany lost, a lot of patents were also lost from Germany and became possession of America. And the patent of Oikuda also traveled to America. And euchodal is oxycodone. So what has created the american opioid crisis is the very same opioid that was Hitler's favorite opioid sold in America as pills. You know, crushed and sniffed, whatever, you know, inject. I don't know. You know, Hitler was. Was injecting it from the start, you know, he didn't fuck around with pills, you know, because pills.

Because he still had these stomach problems. He didn't like a medicine to go orally. Like, he didn't like, it took too long, you know? You don't know. He takes something now, and it's acting like in 45 minutes, they're not good. You know, the injection is the immediate effect. So that's what he wanted. He would go to a military briefing when the war was in 44, you know, the generals were just you know, they knew it was lost. You know, they came from the eastern front. You know, people were dying, like, every day, like, it was over. But they came to the meeting to tell Hitler, basically, or you want to save your men. But Hitler on oxycodone, on Oiko Dahl, as it was called then, had so much power in the room, like, so much charisma. He was very charismatic early on, but he had lost his charisma in the meantime. But through Oiko Dal, he could reinstall his charisma, being good in the room. And he would like. And I read, like, a lot of witnesses, reports from generals. A lot of them wrote books afterwards or made notes what happened? And 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 that the war would turn around and we would win, the Germans would win in the end, because he was so convincing on this eukodal. So Hitler was very clever, actually, in using that drug for his horrific vision. Wow. And you can examine this, like, day, day by day, by studying the papers of Morel and then also studying other accounts, because it's always good to look at Morse, 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, yeah. I mean, there was one. We all know that on July 20, 1944, there 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 of name. And afterwards, Morel rushes in, the doctor rushes in. Hitler's quite injured, actually, which nazi propaganda later said, like, the Fuhrer 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, and the table was thick. So he was very lucky that he didn't die, but he had, like, hundreds of splinters in his body, and his eardrums were blown and it was bleeding from his ears. And he was like, totally. You know, he was. I mean, he was. He was injured, you know, and morel immediately comes in and gives him oiko da. Because in the evening, Mussolini came for a meeting. He was already in the train. So you can see, like, an hour later, like, Hitler, like, you know, on top of his game again, you know, joking with Mussolini and, like, the other, like, officers lose, have lost a leg, die, like so.

And. And then actually, from that moment on, Hitler, that's like July 20, 1944, until the very end, May 8, 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 to treat his blown ear drums, which, you know, were connected with heavy pain that he experienced, a new doctor came in. Gieseng 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 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 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 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. That's what it meant. His second adenofensive. 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 doctors started competing. 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, very. For the german, 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, plans, and they had realized in 44 that it's actually not good to assassinate Hitler because he was already so off the rails that he weakened the german war effort. Let's say Hitler was assassinated, then let's say Himmler becomes the Fuhrer or something. He was also a total freak. He did 2 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 their 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, Britain, Britain bomber. British bombers bombed the Merck company, and then Oikudal could not be made anymore. And actually, Hitler then moves to the bunker, and he doesn't have Euchodal 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, who 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 morn mistake of the dealer shouldn't make. Make a 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 asking, do you still have, like, a supply of oiko da.

You know, wow. So the situation became, you know, Hitler lost World War two, which was not good for him, but he also was on withdrawal, heavy withdrawal from opioids, which made. Made him feel like shit. So that leads to the complete degeneration of the character.

Wow.

So that third Reich kind of crumbled in on itself.

Fascinating. Probably would have lost anyway, but still 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 harmine. We spoke about harmine. I studied what Morel still had in his bag. Basically looked at the bottom of his bag and still had harming. So he gave Harmine to Hitler. So Hitler was a. I don't know what Harmine does to you if you just take it singularly. But it doesn't, you know, and sugar, like Hitler more and more demanded cake because sugar does actually give you a little high. I mean, it does. Even if you're in the bunker losing World War two, you still kind of crave that sugar high. But at the time, they had to already crumble the cake for him because he could, he was shaking so much from the withdrawal. He took it in a spoon and kind of put it in his mouth.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

In Blitz, we find 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 know, really, I couldn't research more about it, that this doctor feelgood of JFK actually had studied what Morel had given to Hitler. But it's, you know, you probably don't even need to study morel. 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. 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, there's. 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. She was probably, too left for him. She was like a 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 like 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, and I wanted to do the experience with him. And Larry was all, he kind of probably thinking, is this JFK? But she didn't disclose it. She didn't disclose who this powerful friend was. And Larry 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 staff, the LSD, and I want to kind of get some guidelines from you. How do you do, like, a LSD session? Like, so they had this, you know, Larry told her a bit about what he thinks, how it should be done, set in 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 is it Washington? 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. You know, they like, you know, it's confrontation. You know, we have to be safe. You know, we have to protect the country. You know, we're serious, you know, arms race, you know, 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. And he sounds basically like a hippie. He says, like, you're very presidential, giving a speech from all these students, and nice day in America. And he gives presidents coming give a speech. And he talks about, we all live on this planet together, even the Russians.

We all care for our children. 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 those are the facts. I think I'll leave it at. The 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 other. 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 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. You know, why does he need to be killed? But maybe that change of mind becoming like saying, like, arms race must stop, which, you know, pisses off a lot of people in the middle military, military industrial complex who are like, base their whole thing on the arms race. You know, maybe that becomes a very big threat and he must be eliminated. Who knows? You know? But maybe it was. 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. They were seen. 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 3 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, it's 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.

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. Thanks, sir. I appreciate you.

All right.

Bye, everybody.