EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,115 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- JLJohn Lisle
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) John, what's happening, man?
- JLJohn Lisle
Not much. It's good to be here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Very nice to meet you.
- JLJohn Lisle
You too. Thanks for having me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, uh, I know you're in the middle of a project. You're doing a project with David Chase, right? That, it's about MKUltra and...
- JLJohn Lisle
Yes. He has gotten the rights to this, to this book.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
You know, this book, Project Mind Control, and he's, yeah, interested in adapting it into a series.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject, so as soon as I heard about it, and they said, "The series is coming, but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book," and I'm like, "Let's go."
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
So, here we go. Project Mind Control, Sidney, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra, which really is a tragedy.
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, you know, I, uh, really got ... I mean, I knew about it, but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until Chaos, Tom O'Neil's book.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yup. Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you read that?
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, uh, when you realize what the MKUltra program involved and how long it ran, and how insane it is, and it essentially had no oversight.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American citizens, and nobody went to jail for it.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. That, th- that's part of the crazy thing. One of the things I, I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second half in the ... of the book, are the consequences of M- MKUltra in society, but also just what happened to these people afterwards.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- JLJohn Lisle
The victims of MKUltra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically, really, nothing much came out of it. They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra, they didn't really face any consequences. And so I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things I really try to talk about in the latter part of the book are, what are the failures of oversight that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- JLJohn Lisle
... allowed this to happen? How is that possible? How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on people unwittingly, and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions? So, I, I delve into that pretty deeply.
- JRJoe Rogan
How did you get interested in the subject? Like, what was your in- introduct- introduction to it?
- JLJohn Lisle
I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people because I didn't know that much about MKUltra, um, and I was doing my PhD at UT. And I, I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of scientists within the intelligence ... They had connections to the intelligence community. They were called the science attachés out of the State Department. The State Department would send these science attachés to different embassies, American embassies around the world, and the CIA was very interested in these people because, hey, we have these scientists going abroad. Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing. So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
And from that, I learned about, you know, Sidney Gottlieb, but also, m- mostly, my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovel, who was essentially the Sidney Gottlieb of the OSS. So prior to the CIA, w- the US had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II, and that was the US kind of intelligence agency. And Stanley Lovel was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development Branch, and that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job was to basically invent the deadly weapons, create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent abroad. So my first-
- JRJoe Rogan
Fun stuff.
- 15:00 – 30:00
You can get the…
- JLJohn Lisle
is doing truth drug experiments. The Nazis are doing truth drug experiments in their concentration camps, as well. And the British are doing some truth drug experiments during World War II, as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
You can get the British ones online. The, the ... Well, at least the post- post-World War II ones. Was it 1950s? You can wa- ... Have you seen the, the British-
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm. No.
- JRJoe Rogan
... LSD studies? Oh, you haven't seen it?
- JLJohn Lisle
Uh, no, I don't think so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, it's wonderful. You should watch it.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
We'll watch it real quick, 'cause it's kind of hilarious. They start breaking out. They can't-
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh! Uh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They can't ... You have seen it?
- JLJohn Lisle
I think so, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They can't concentrate.
- JLJohn Lisle
The soldiers all in a row, and they ... Yeah. Uh-huh.
- JRJoe Rogan
And some of them just start laughing-
- JLJohn Lisle
I know what you're talking about.
- JRJoe Rogan
... they're in the middle of doing their task and they just start laughing uncontrollable and then they sit down.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
And s- some of them-
- JLJohn Lisle
You know, during ... I- I mentioned those, like, THC acetate experiments during World War II?
- JRJoe Rogan
Here they are.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs) Here these guys are.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just giant smiles on their face.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
This guy's having a guard go of it. (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, he, he might have been having a-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
... downer or something. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
He had to re- be removed from the experiment after 35 minutes. Look at the radio operator try to figure out how to work it. (laughs) Just, they're just so confused. (laughs) And eventually, they just start laying down and just laugh like these guys. These guys just can't ... (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, in these, these THC experiments during World War ... Oh, that guy's so ... (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 30:00 – 45:00
Mm-hmm. …
- JLJohn Lisle
Montreal in Canada, working at what's called the Allan Memorial Institute. And Gottlieb wanted to expand MKUltra besides drugs, because he already had a lot of people doing drug experiments, so he wanted to see if there were psychological techniques th- that, that could be used to manipulate a person. So not just in an interrogation, but can we actually, like, control a person's personality? Can we make them behave in certain ways, make them do something? So the idea that Ewen Cameron had come up with, before the CIA is involved, um, I- I should mention, Ewen Cameron is a behaviorist. So he thinks that all behavior is a result of nurture, not nature.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- JLJohn Lisle
So it's- it's the environmental input that causes a person to behave a certain way, and he thought that if you could bring a person back down to a blank slate, remove all the environmental inputs that have been put into them, and then you can build them back up in your image into whatever you want them to be. So his idea to bring someone down to the blank slate was to induce enough stress that they forgot who they formerly were. And so you reduce them to the blank str- slate, and then the CIA's really interested in if you could do that, then you could form them into whatever. So Ewen Cameron, his main goal is to try to figure out what can induce enough stress on a person to bring them down to that blank slate. And so he performs a lot of experiments. His most famous one is called psychic driving, where he was doing a, uh, a therapy session, uh, quote-unquote "therapy" with one of his patients, and she had ... He was recording the session, and she said something about how, you know, "My mother, when I was young, used to tell me blah, blah, blah." You know, she said something negative to her. And so Ewen Cameron re- rewinded that on the tape that he was recording and made her listen back to it and said, "Hey, I want you to listen back to what your- you say your mo- mother used to say to you." When he re- rewinded the tape and played it forward, as soon as the woman was kinda quoting her mother and she listened to that herself on the tape, she recoiled. And Cameron thought, "Oh, you have a negative reaction to that." So he rewinded again, and again, and again, and he kept rewinding it, and she just got more and more emotional, had this more and more kind of visceral reaction to what she was saying her mother used to tell her. So this led Cameron to develop the concept of psychic driving, which is you record some kind of negative message, and then you make someone listen to it for thousands and thousands and thousands of times for weeks on end, for hours every day. All their waking day, they basically are strapped into a headphone that is playing this negative message, and it will break them down over time. That's how you induce enough stress to b- break them down to the blank slate. And then you can record a positive psychic driving message to build them up into whatever image you want them to be. So that was his initial, um, idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
But, but was it based on anything?
- JLJohn Lisle
Not really.
- JRJoe Rogan
Or was it just-
- JLJohn Lisle
It wa- it was just based on he had this one encounter with this woman and she had a negative reaction. And he's just trying to induce stress. This obviously seemed to induce stress in her, therefore we're gonna start playing these negative in- tapes to them.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it was just his idea?
- JLJohn Lisle
It's just his idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- JLJohn Lisle
He- he was known for doing this kind of thing, like, kind of spur of the moment. In fact, there was one, there was one kid, basically, who had been at this Allan Memorial Institute where Ewen Cameron was. He eventually had gotten out, but he had tried to commit suicide, and so he was sent back to the Allan Memorial Institute. But the way that he had tried to commit suicide was to close the garage and have the CO2 build up with the running car, and then he would, you know, breathe it in and pass out and die. Um, that ended up not working. However, when he went back to the Allan Memorial Institute, Ewen Cameron thought, "You know, his personality seems like a little bit better than it was th- when he was here before. Maybe CO2 can, like-"
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) .
- JLJohn Lisle
... "influence someone." (laughs) And so, so he sent out some of his, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) .
- JLJohn Lisle
... some of his assistants to go buy, like, CO2 canisters, and, "We're gonna start, like, giving this to people."
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- JLJohn Lisle
But it turns out the assistants knew that this was, like, completely unethical. There's no medical basis for anything. And so they lied to him and said, "Oh, the canisters were way more expensive than we could actually afford, so we can't do that." But ... So he was, he was just, he was trying to find any way that he could have a breakthrough to cure mental illness, and he was using his g- patients as guinea pigs, basically.
- JRJoe Rogan
Complete guinea pigs?
- JLJohn Lisle
Complete guinea pigs.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was the result with the woman? The- the woman where they played the negative-
- JLJohn Lisle
Um ...
- JRJoe Rogan
... recordings?
- JLJohn Lisle
I don't ... Well, there are, there are dozens and dozens of people who that happened to. I don't know about her in particular, 'cause I don't know if she's actually named in the documents. So I don't, I don't know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Did any of these experiments have a positive effect?
- JLJohn Lisle
Oh.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did it work?
- JLJohn Lisle
Hardly. Hardly. Hardly. So that, that was only-
- JRJoe Rogan
I- I shouldn't even say positive. I should say were they effective?
- JLJohn Lisle
No. No. I- for the most part, the people who he did his practice on came out way worse than when they went in. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) .
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Wow. Imagine being that…
- JLJohn Lisle
office there in San Francisco just for, you know... He was a US Marshal too, so just the US Marshals, whatever. And that night, he was drinking, you know, some of the punch at this party, and he started feeling very strange. He started seeing colors. The room started spinning around him. He ended up going upstairs to where his locker was and, you know, getting his things, and he wound up going home because he didn't, you know, know what was going on. When he got home, his girlfriend was upset at him. She said that, you know, "I'm not happy here, I want to move to New York." And so when he's in this fog, he decides, "I know how to set my life on track. I'm going to grab a couple of my service revolver, revolvers. I'm gonna go to a bar downtown. I'm gonna rob it, and I'm gonna give the money to my girlfriend so she can go to New York and she'll be happy an- and so she won't break up with me." So when he's in this fog, he ends up doing all this. He gets his revolvers. He goes to a bar downtown. He, you know, basically has a stick-up, "Give me all the money in the till." A quick-thinking patron who's sitting next to him basically gets the mug of beer and smashes it over his head so he falls down. The cops come later. They arrest him. He's in jail. After a day or two, he kind of sobers up and kind of awakens from this fog, and he doesn't know what happened to him at, at that point. He ends up losing his job, losing his friends for the next 30, 40 years, he doesn't know what happened, until in 1999, he was reading The Washington Post and he saw an article describing MKUltra, and two things in particular stuck out to him. One was George White, whom he knew back in the days when he was a US Marshal, Marshal, and the other one was a description of LSD. And so Wayne Ritchie starts putting all this together and thinking, "I think George White gave me LSD that night at the holiday, you know, party, and s- spiked the punch bowl, and that's what happened." And it turns out, you can see in this book, in the, in the photo section, the last photo in the photo section of my book, it's a image of George White's diary from the day that Wayne Ritchie went insane, and it says, "Federal Building Christmas party." (laughs) So he was there at the Christmas party.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Imagine being that guy reading that article 30 years later, realizing, "This guy ruined my life."
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
"For fun."
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. So he, he ended up suing the CIA, but the judge said that he couldn't prove that he had been dosed with drugs, so they couldn't rule in his favor, and so that was it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, Jesus. (sighs)
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, but there are... I mean, there are dozens of stories like that.
- JRJoe Rogan
What a fucking psycho.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, insane.
- JRJoe Rogan
What a fucking psycho.
- JLJohn Lisle
So he's, he's pu-
- JRJoe Rogan
Just dosing up the punch bowl-
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... ruining lives.
- JLJohn Lisle
And, and he knows how messed up it is, 'cause by that point, he had done this to multiple people and called them... and caused them to, to, to lose a lot, you know? So he, he knew what he was doing at that point. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
God.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Thi- this is just what happens with people when they have that kind of unchecked power and no oversight.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they're the kind of psychopaths that would be involved in this sort of experimentation in the first place.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah, yeah. No, so, so I think he's probably the most, um, heinous of the individuals in this book. All of them are to a degree. Sidney Gottlieb, um, I think he... I, I don't think he's ha- as heinous in the sense that he's, like, intentionally trying to harm people. He thinks he's doing this for a patriotic reason. He thinks MKUltra is actually going to help us defend ourselves against the Soviet Union. There is some, like, moral justification, at least he has for himself, so it's not all just, you know, whatever George White is doing. Um, but at the same time, I...... Sidney Gottlieb doesn't really take any responsibility for what happens to these people. Basically, the way that MKUltra was structured with these sub-projects, Sidney Gottlieb wasn't running these experiments himself. What he would do is, he would fund other people to do experiments. And most of the time, these people were experts in their own field, so they were, like, reputable people. Ewen Cameron was the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. He was, like, the most famous psychic- psychiatrist in the world, and he was being funded by this. So Sidney Gottlieb thought, "Well, if I can fund reputable psychiatrists or drug researchers to do these experiments, then it's up to them to provide the safety and the procedures, you know, for, to keep these patients safe. It's not my job. They're the ones who are conducting the experiments." That's how he justified it to himself. But that's how the structure of MKUltra typically worked.
- JRJoe Rogan
Such a diffusion of responsibility.
- JLJohn Lisle
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
Gottlieb is funding people, and he's not even funding them directly. In most cases what's happening is he's using cutout organizations. So he's giving the money to-
- JRJoe Rogan
Of course, of course. (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
... the... One of them is called the Getchell Fund, one of them is called the National Institutes of Mental Health. And then the CIA sets up, sets up its own cutout organization called The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh. (laughs)
- JLJohn Lisle
... which is just a, it's just a made-up organization. But, um, so the CIA would-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- 1:00:00 – 1:09:01
Such a great name.…
- JLJohn Lisle
we do know what we kind of knew before those documents were released. So before those documents were released, you still had the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee and a few other things, but... Um, so we, we would have known still, because it came out before those documents, about the Frank Olson incident. This guy was dosed with LSD at this place called Deep Creek, and he ended up going out the window of the Stateler Hotel in New York. He died. We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, even though I don't know if that name was specifically used within these committee...... publications. So we would have known-
- JRJoe Rogan
Such a great name.
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs) Well, that's George White's doing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is it?
- JLJohn Lisle
Sidney Gottlieb said he had a flair with a pen. Like, he, he was a journalist before he-
- JRJoe Rogan
Fucking psycho.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. Yeah, he was. In fact, while we're on that topic, he, at the end of Operation Midnight Climax, he wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlieb, basically thanking him for "supporting me for all these years." Out of all the MKUltra sub-projects, uh, you know, a lot of them started in 1953. Many of them were done by 1963, but several continued into the late '60s. But he ... After this was done, he wrote a letter to Sidney Gottlieb and in the depositions that I found, the attorneys confront Gottlieb about this and they ask him, "What was in that letter?" And Gottlieb says, "Oh, you know, he, he had a flair for writing. You can't trust anything he said." But they, "No, what was in it?" Turns out what was in it, George White wrote, "I toiled in the vineyards wholeheartedly because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs) And he wrote that down?
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
God.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. So we, we, we would, we would have known about the Frank Olson incident. We would have known about Operation Midnight Climax, though maybe not that name. We would have known the broad outlines of MKUltra because that was already least- released before those files, but the files g- give us a really detailed view of what happened.
- JRJoe Rogan
But you ... We don't know what was in the files that were incinerated.
- JLJohn Lisle
That's correct. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can you imagine that?
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. We (sighs) we kind of do know a little bit about what was in them because there was an investigation that was done afterwards because it was illegal for them to destroy these files, not that anything ever happened to them. They didn't face any consequences for it. However, Gottlieb's secretary, this woman who had only been working for, for him for a few weeks before he retired, he told her to basically incinerate these files, you know, to help him do this. So she didn't know it was against protocol or whatever. She was new to the job, but she was interviewed later as part of a CIA investigation into the destruction of the files and she does say a little bit about what she thinks were in the files. She says it was some of his personal papers and there was secret and secret sensitive files in there. We don't have a, really have a great idea about what it could be, although I do think m- a lot of the files were ... In the depositions that I found, George White, or Sidney Gottlieb says that George White would write to him personal updates about the experiments that he was doing in these, you know, brothels basically. And so, I'm, I kno- I'm assuming that a lot of those files consisted of George White's personal reports on what was going on.
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs) Oof. Now, when y- you get deeper and deeper into this stuff, how much has it sh- shaped your worldview?
- JLJohn Lisle
Um, a, a decent amount in the sense that, uh, just as it did for kind of the American public in general in the 1970s when this was coming out, it really led people to cast a skeptical eye toward the government and thinking ... It's just assumed that the government is supposed to be the protector of civil li- civil liberties, but after Watergate, after MKUltra, after the Vietnam War, it starts to seem as if the government is infringing on those civil liberties, you know? Instead of being the protector of it, in many cases, it's infringing on them. Um, not that it doesn't protect civil liberties, but one of the main things that I came away after writing this book is the problem of oversight. You know, I think the, the constitutional system of government that we have is ingenious, the fact that we have checks and balances and these sep- the sep- the separation of powers. However, you have to enable the separate branches of government to be able to check the other branches. For most of the Cold War, that external check on the executive branch, the, the, like Congress checking the executive, the president or the CIA, didn't really exist. Um, so any time that the CIA was doing an operation, I have a chapter about this, but, you know, sometimes the CIA personnel would try to inform members of Congress of what they were doing. I have one specific quote where a CIA guy walks up to a sitting senator and says, "Hey, let me tell you about what we're doing in Chile or whatever it is." And then he says, "No, I don't want to hear it. Don't tell me. Just do what you're going to do." He doesn't even want to know. So it's like, how can you expect Congress to give oversight of the executive if they are completely unwilling to even know what the executive is doing? So fortunately, in the aftermath of these revelations, there have been some, um, some programs or committees that are set up within Congress to provide that external check. However, it's, you know, it's not even clear how effective those are. Um, for, one, one check on the executive after this is that the president now has to, um, sign off basically on covert operations, so that, that eliminates the president's plausible deniability. One of the main themes throughout this book is th- it is what I call this, uh, the vicious cycle of secrecy. So, an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that kind of leads to what I, I see as this vicious cycle. Secrecy leads to plausible deniability because if it's secret, nobody can know that I'm doing this, therefore I'm not going to be blamed for it. So secrecy leads to plausible deniability. Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior, like MKUltra. If nobody's gonna find out what I'm doing, therefore I'm incentivized to do some crazy stuff because I'm not going to be held accountable for it. So secrecy to plausible deniability, plausible deniability to reckless behavior. Reckless behavior, in many instances, leads to embarrassment. It's almost inevitable for many of these projects that they get found out. Someone leaks something to the press. This is how the family jewels that the CIA had that was like a compilation of all the illegal stuff that it had done over the past couple of decades, it eventually got leaked to Seymour Hersh who published it on the front page of The New York Times. So, reckless behavior leads to embarrassment, but embarrassment leads to secrecy because now that we've been found out, we got to make sure that never happens again. We need more secrecy. And the vicious cycle ten- continues. So if you can break that vicious cycle by having some kind of external check, that's what you actually need, like an empowered Congress that is willing to check the executive.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- JLJohn Lisle
So ...
- JRJoe Rogan
And then you realize, well, who's running against them? Who wants that job? Not a lot of impressive people. A lot of really driven, successful, intelligent people are involved in-... other activities that consume their time.
- JLJohn Lisle
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
They have families, they have careers, they have a lot... They don't have the desire to be a congressperson. So you're not getting the cream of the crop. You're not even getting anything-
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... remotely similar to the cream of the crop. You're occasionally getting great people that really wanna serve the country, but that is rare. That is, that is like... I wouldn't say rare, but if 20% of the food you ate at a place was poison, would you go eat at that place?
- JLJohn Lisle
(laughs) No.
- JRJoe Rogan
You would not, right? You would say, "I'm assuming there's fucking poison in that place." That's Congress.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. And, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
That, that's elected officials.
- JLJohn Lisle
Yeah. And Andrew Yang has made this point before, I know I've heard him say it, that the, the reelection rate of Congress is super high. It's like 80, 90%, whatever it is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
Episode duration: 2:39:14
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