Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle
John Lisle (guest), Joe Rogan (host), Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring John Lisle and Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle explores cIA’s MKUltra: LSD, mind control, and the psychology of power Joe Rogan interviews historian John Lisle about his book on Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra, and the CIA’s mind-control experiments. Lisle traces MKUltra’s origins in World War II OSS “dirty tricks,” truth-drug research, and postwar fears of Soviet brainwashing. They walk through infamous episodes such as Operation Midnight Climax, Canadian psychiatrist Ewen Cameron’s brutal “psychic driving,” and the legal battles that revealed MKUltra’s scope. The conversation widens into how secrecy, weak oversight, and human psychology enable abuse, and how similar manipulation dynamics appear in cults, media, and modern disinformation.
CIA’s MKUltra: LSD, mind control, and the psychology of power
Joe Rogan interviews historian John Lisle about his book on Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra, and the CIA’s mind-control experiments. Lisle traces MKUltra’s origins in World War II OSS “dirty tricks,” truth-drug research, and postwar fears of Soviet brainwashing. They walk through infamous episodes such as Operation Midnight Climax, Canadian psychiatrist Ewen Cameron’s brutal “psychic driving,” and the legal battles that revealed MKUltra’s scope. The conversation widens into how secrecy, weak oversight, and human psychology enable abuse, and how similar manipulation dynamics appear in cults, media, and modern disinformation.
Key Takeaways
MKUltra grew from earlier wartime ‘dirty tricks’ and truth-drug experiments.
World War II OSS projects testing THC-laced cigarettes, disguises, and sabotage created a blueprint that Sidney Gottlieb later mined when tasked with exploring mind control for the CIA.
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The CIA outsourced much of MKUltra to reputable institutions using cutouts.
MKUltra contained 149 subprojects, often funneled through front organizations to universities, hospitals, and prisons; many researchers never knew their real funder was the CIA, diffusing responsibility and obscuring oversight.
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Some of the most abusive work wasn’t drugs but extreme psychological ‘treatment.’
In Montreal, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron—backed by CIA money—used massive electroshock, weeks-long sensory deprivation, chemical comas, and repetitive taped messages (“psychic driving”) on patients, often leaving them far more damaged than before.
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Internal and external oversight mechanisms repeatedly failed or refused to act.
CIA Inspectors General labeled MKUltra practices “illegal and unethical” yet didn’t stop them, partly out of fear for their careers, while Congress for decades avoided real intelligence oversight, enabling a “vicious cycle” of secrecy and abuse.
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Key perpetrators largely escaped accountability while victims got minimal redress.
Victims’ lawsuits in the 1980s produced depositions that underpin Lisle’s book, but cases were settled quietly for modest sums, files were illegally destroyed, and architects like Gottlieb and Helms faced no serious punishment.
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Real mind control looks more like cult dynamics than Hollywood brainwashing.
Lisle argues that techniques seen in cults—controlling behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions (the BITE model)—are more effective at shaping people than fantasies of instant LSD-based Manchurian candidates.
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Disinformation often blends true scandals with fabricated narratives to maximize confusion.
Soviet operations, for example, promoted the false idea that the US created AIDS in a lab by embedding it among accurate claims about MKUltra and U. ...
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Notable Quotes
“Some conspiracies are true, and the MKUltra stuff, they actually did this.”
— John Lisle
“It’s just what happens with people when they have that kind of unchecked power and no oversight.”
— John Lisle
“The capacity for humans to rationalize things… is almost limitless.”
— John Lisle
“You have to keep secrets. But at the same time, how can I know that the secrets they’re keeping is because it’s in my interest or it’s because it’s in their interest?”
— John Lisle
“Dread the day when the press sings nothing but the praises of those in power and Congress says there are no abuses to investigate.”
— John Lisle
Questions Answered in This Episode
If MKUltra’s worst abuses were only uncovered because some files accidentally survived, what comparable programs today might still be completely hidden?
Joe Rogan interviews historian John Lisle about his book on Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra, and the CIA’s mind-control experiments. ...
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How should modern intelligence services balance the genuine need for secrecy with mechanisms that prevent another MKUltra-type abuse spiral?
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Are there clear ethical lines for psychological and pharmacological research that governments should never be allowed to cross, even in wartime?
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In what ways do modern social media manipulation and disinformation campaigns mirror the techniques developed in Cold War psychological operations?
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What responsibilities do universities, hospitals, and researchers have today to vet funding sources and prevent being used as fronts for covert programs?
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Transcript Preview
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) John, what's happening, man?
Not much. It's good to be here.
Very nice to meet you.
You too. Thanks for having me.
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...
Yes. He has gotten the rights to this, to this book.
Yeah.
You know, this book, Project Mind Control, and he's, yeah, interested in adapting it into a series.
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."
(laughs)
So, here we go. Project Mind Control, Sidney, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra, which really is a tragedy.
Mm-hmm.
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.
Yup. Mm-hmm.
Have you read that?
Oh, yeah.
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.
Yeah.
And these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American citizens, and nobody went to jail for it.
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.
Right.
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-
Yes.
... 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.
How did you get interested in the subject? Like, what was your in- introduct- introduction to it?
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.
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