#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA

33:27So totally understandable. Also, they have different techniques to write text like this. I used a totally different technique. And I have an apparatus. status so it really feels like it could be an academic work but still it's written in a way that uh it kind of overpowers it's it it kind of colonializes the story in a weird way i never thought about it about it like that but while i was writing it i was just trying to write it as well as i could i didn't think about these questions we're talking about now um i just i got carried away obviously but i never left the area of facts yes so we should talk about your process, that's also super fascinating.

34:15You went to the archives, you went to the sources. What's that take? What does it feel? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it entail? How much text is there? What language is it in? What's the process there? I never thought of going to the archives. And my girlfriend at the time, she said, you have to go to the archives. And she's an academic. So she, and I was like, yeah, okay, I'll go. I'm fine. I'll check it out. And then when I met a historian, he claims that without methamphetamine, there would be no Blitzkrieg victory of Germany. Like he's monocausal. But he was also extremely helpful to me.

34:57And he's an academic. He gave me the signatures, it's called in German, where you find stuff in the archives. Signature is like, then it's like H2 slash 538. something like this and these were the files of professor ranke and professor ranke was he was the head of the institute for for um army physiology his job was to improve the the performance of the soldier and all of his stuff was filed in a certain place in the military archives which in germany is in freiburg in the south in a small town not in berlin because Germany is a bit of a decentralized country. We don't want to put everything into Berlin again like the Nazis did.

35:46We try to avoid our mistakes. So the military archive is in Freiburg. And I went there. And because I had this signature, immediately I got original documents that were all relating to my research. Like I could read. I had the original. What does it look like? Is it sheets of paper? Yeah. So it's not scanned? Well, it's different things. like the guy who did the math into the, into the army, the professor Ranke, he was, uh, writing a war diary. That's what the name was war diary. So every day he would write it by hand. So this war diary was given to me. So you're reading that. So it's like dated, like you have a date, the diary.

36:29It was a bit funny with him because he took a lot of math himself because he thought it was great. He just thought it increases your performance. um by now we know a little bit more that methamphetamine is not so healthy because you get used to it and you burn out you get depressed and then you have to take more big problem and he became depressed and burned out and he didn't realize it's because of the meth that he is like describing to the whole german army like he was he made a convincing case and i can explain that in detail how that actually happened but just to have his war diary was great and then also like he would write he would type letters writing to the company of temla how fast they could produce stuff in which time so i have you have all these original documents you have like 500 documents and it goes like he writes like reports what happened in this battle on methamphetamine like there's a lot of stuff you can find in the archives if you find them but the tricky thing is that you can only look you could you kind of look at a so-called find book and the find book you cannot type in drugs it wouldn't find anything because at the time when they were taking all the notes from this doctor his water everything they didn't put the label drugs there they put the label his name his position world war ii french campaign stuff like that so because at the time they didn't know that i would at one point come and look for drugs in that you know but he was the drug guy but also they didn't realize he was the drug guy you know no one realized that he was the drug guy so it's not easy to find stuff in the archives so the archives you go it's a it's a kafka experience you go into this building and you You have to understand the rules and you will never fully understand what's going on.

38:22Also, the archivists, they don't really know what's going on because there's so many documents. No one's read them all. You know, no one knows. Like there's history kind of lying there, somehow organized, somehow stored. I mean, it does sound like a very Kafkaesque thing. But it's great if you find something. But you can also sit there for a week and not find anything. So what was the process for you? You're just reading open-minded books. trying to see, is there some truth here to be discovered? Well, I have a friend, he's a DJ, and we talked about Berlin. We'll probably talk about it more. And he takes a lot of drugs.

39:06And he knows his, let's put it that way, he knows his drugs. And one day he said to me when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next, he said the Nazis took a lot of drugs, you should write about that and i said the nazis didn't take drugs because you know when you grow up in germany you get educated about the nazis quite intensely especially in west germany like they teach you everything but they don't teach you drugs i mean now they do maybe you know but it was not known so and the nazis always had this um this aura of being law and order no drugs of course no chaos everything my grandfather he was a nazi always said well at least there was discipline in the country, there was law and order.

39:50So this doesn't match with drugs. I should also say, I think that's the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling that the Nazi ideology was all about law and order and purity, and surely they would not be doing drugs. So this really blew my mind. I think I wasn't quite ready, similar to like Richard Evans, like this is a big like, okay, a narrative transforming into a deeper, more complicated understanding what Nazi forces and the Hitler and the circle actually look like. That's why I didn't believe Alex. Always take the DJ, the drug expert with a grain of salt.

40:35I didn't believe him, but I said it's a great topic. Maybe I could invent it. He said, no, we don't invent this. This is real. I said, how do you know? And he said, I have a friend and I know this guy by now I met him he's an antique dealer in Berlin and he had bought an old medicine chest in an old Berlin apartment this was in 2010 and he found pevitin tablets inside which were the methamphetamine product that was marketed in Germany in the late 30s and this guy the antique dealer took some tablets and they were quite old you know 70 years old but they still had an effect on him and i later asked him and he's he said well we took them for about a month it was the greatest month we ever had like we had so much fun we were so productive because that methamphetamine back then was also like a quality product it was not crystal meth made in a in a trailer lab so this is many decades later they were still potent they were still potent especially alex convinced me because alex has a high tolerance and he said okay they still had some so i said to him can i have some also and i took one and he's like this was we were standing in my riding tower which is at the river in berlin and he was like i took one and i could feel something then i took another one and then it's you know i could feel more and then i took a third one typical alex he would like take three you know instead of just taking one he's take he took three methamphetamine tablets from the 40s and he said and then i felt like and he looked at the river and there was a big like big ship like a cargo ship going by and he said i felt like this ship suddenly there was a shoop he said in german like a motion that was like energy that was grabbing me and i could like i felt so powerful and he told me this and i was like wow this is like and i googled like methamphetamine nazi germany this was in 2010 and there was this one professor uh at the university in ulm who said the blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine so i called up this guy and he said sure i'll meet you and then i he gave me the signature for the archive then i went to the archive and then i really started to do my own research and then i went to different archives and i tried to find everything on nazis and drugs and that came everything is in the book so that crazy and meeting with alex in my writing tower that kind of got me on this research journey it makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives do you think there's stuff like that in there that we deeply don't understand about for example there's there's a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand maybe about the concentration camps maybe about the eastern front the interplay between stalin and Hitler, maybe a Bob Britton, that could be discovered in the letters, in the data that were completely missing?

43:35I think so. And I think that also there are archives that are not open. Let's say the Vatican archive, some secret archives that some very powerful structures have, structures that we might not even know now off the top of our head, which still have a huge influence. So I think that the human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that's just one version. I think there's several versions. And I think that it goes much deeper and is much more interesting. So I guess history is a very active thing, which I also didn't know. I was writing a historical nonfiction book, and I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool, because the history defines the future or is very connected.

44:31Our history teacher always said, if we don't know where we come from, we cannot know where we go. And that is, I think, true. That is what I now really am interested in for my next book. I'm trying to really understand human history. And obviously, I'm not the first. There's a few alternative historians that go like, because you have to go back in time quite a bit. And then it's not easy to write about it, but it's very interesting to think about. And I would love to find the truth on Atlantis, which I don't believe in, actually. And we can also talk about that. But maybe there's an archive where we can actually see that they had this king ruling.

45:09I don't think this could be found, but I think we can still also find a lot of documents. but I think especially in closed archives. So we won't find them. You said a lot of really interesting things. It's so important to have people like you that do the daring work of going to the archives of the sources, the evidence, and trying to find a thing that completely transforms history as we thought we understood it. That's revisionist history at its best. Revisionist history has a sort of negative connotation sometimes because you go to conspiratorial land without much evidence and you're just being a rebel for rebel's sake but when you ground it in data and and dare to challenge the historical narrative that's really powerful so now i should also mention that we've been just setting the laying out the context yeah we're still in the context phase context phase uh and for the next 10 hours and maybe for the rest of our lives we will be continuing just setting the context but let us dare return to the original question of um pervertin how did that come about taking the 1930s nazi germany the munich and the in the berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully uh how did pervertin come into the picture well the nazis managed to grab power on january 30th 1933, and they immediately become an anti-drug regime.

46:42That is important to them because the only intoxication they allow from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication, is the ideological intoxication. So they quickly install concentration camps, which were at the time run by the SA, not the SS, takes over later and turns the concentration camps into an industry. The first SR concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside. And some of the first people that landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users. Also, anti-Semitic policies, which were very important from day one for the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is the defining pillar of National Socialism, the core of it, really.

47:36they quickly connected anti-drug policies with anti-Semitic policies. They claimed the Jews in Germany, the German Jews, were taking more drugs than the non-Jewish Germans. And National Socialism's goal was to purify the German body. So they saw the whole Volk, the country, the people, as one body. and that has to be purified so all Jews are poison but not only Jews everyone who thinks differently communists are also poison Jews are the worst poison but you know a lot of you know then you create this clean body and obviously drugs have no position in that if you're addicted to drugs that's weak you know you're morphinist you use cocaine that's all degenerate that's Jewish that's Jewish doctors are all morphinists you know so that Nazi Germany and Hitler was the shining example of the person who doesn't take drugs.

48:41He didn't have a private life. He didn't even have a body. He just led the folks body. So Hitler was not putting any poisons into him. He stopped smoking cigarettes in the 20s already. He never touched alcohol. Vegetarian. Vegetarian. no caffeine even so he was that's what he was in the beginning story of course changes at a certain point in time but he started as this as far as you understand that's true yeah i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure that this is true also vegetarianism was a right-wing thing in germany it was an elitist thing if you were vegetarian you had a higher frequency which kind of gave you superiority over, let's say, these workers who need to eat the sausage so he can do the work.

49:39Like Wagner, the composer, he was a vegetarian. Hitler was impressed by Wagner. So vegetarianism, I think that's all true. I think Hitler was like that. And it's hard to be like that, actually. And I think that gave him an attraction inside the movement, which were all like drunk you know drunkers and goreng using morphine all the time because he of his pain he got used to morphine so they were it was not the movement wasn't like this but he was like this so he was um he symbolized but he symbolized that whole approach of clean cleanliness like purity so then how does methamphetamine come into the picture it's totally absurd that's why I thought it was fun researching this because it doesn't make sense, you know.

50:29And, you know, they used a simple trick by, you know, defining what is a drug, an illegal drug, and what is not. Because drugs don't have it written on them. This is an illegal, dangerous drug. You know, drugs are basically neutral. These are molecules, you know. So the methamphetamine molecule was found in a Berlin-based company called the Temmler Company. and the head of Temmler, he was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an Afro-American athlete, Jesse Owens, was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes, you know, how can this be? So they thought that he was on something because he won, I think, five gold medals.

51:15It was ridiculous. You know, this was supposed to be Germany's games, you know, and then the Afro-American runs better than the Aryan Übermensch. So the only explanation is he took a drug. He took probably Benzedrine, which was a legal amphetamine. And also there were no doping checks at the Olympics. And if you take an amphetamine, of course, you can run a bit faster maybe when it kicks in. this has to do with the immense release of dopamine in the brain but it was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs but the head of the Temner company he said we have to prevent this we have to invent a better amphetamine we have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine so his main chemist Fritz Hausschild he did research and he found that in 1917 in tokyo a japanese chemist had made methamphetamine and he remade that methamphetamine and they tested it among themselves the chemists in the berlin pharmaceutical lab and they loved it like they made pure methamphetamine and you know they had a really good time and they were like more active they would talkative because that's what happens on methamphetamine so the company really thought this is a great product and they turn it into a product they went to the patent bureaucracy and got the patent for methamphetamine and then it quite quickly came onto the market it was labeled as pervitine which is kind of a great name because it has like the perverse already in it and this pervitine perverdin uh was available in any pharmacy so you just you didn't need a prescription a child could go and buy 10 packs of pure methamphetamine.

53:07So methamphetamine was also very cheap. So it became quite popular because people, you know, talked about it. Did they understand the side effects and negative effects of methamphetamine? Did they care? They didn't really know what it was. I mean, I also read, I went to the archive of that company also, of course. So they were like, what is it good for? Like, I just feel great when I take it and I have more energy. and they didn't know if that could be a product. It was 1937, 38 when they were discovering it. But also, how did they think about the fact that this is a drug? Well, they called it a performance enhancer.

53:46Is drinking a coffee in the morning a drug? I mean, it is a drug, but we don't think of it as a drug. You know, it's legal. And this was kind of how meth was treated in Germany. It was normal to use it. like you had a very important business meeting of course you would take a pavitine there's a movie by billy wilder called one two three very good movie and he shows the american executive it was it the movie said right after the the end of the second world war so we see like i think it's a coca-cola executive american and he says to his secretary uh how should i have the morning coffee I think half of a Pavitin.

54:26So Pavitin was also normal. It wasn't stigmatized. It was not the American just say no propaganda where your teeth fall out. And I mean, it was a German quality product. People liked it. Of course, they did tests at universities, but most of them were quite positive. Like, yeah, it reduces your fear. Today we might look for different things, But this was also a performance-driven totalitarian society moving towards war. So if someone takes Pavitin and says in the clinical tests at the university, I'm not afraid of anything anymore. So that's positive. That's actually what got the guy who worked for the German army interested because he read university reports.

55:15I also saw all of these reports. They were also in the military archive. So he's like, okay, you're not afraid anymore if you take methamphetamine. You don't need to sleep anymore. you don't need to eat so much because your appetite is lowered this is perfect for a soldier so negative effects only became public in 1940 when the first Pavitin opponent he was actually a relative of Albert Speer Hitler's architect and later armament arms minister he was this Speer psychologist he was the first one who said wait a minute First of all, methamphetamine is against the Nazi ideology because now we're all taking a drug to be high performers.

56:00We have to be high performers without a drug. And he also said, you know, the obvious, this is going to make you addicted, etc. This will create a tolerance. So only then the first negative reports came out. Before that, what Temmler did and then what the universities did, they all thought methamphetamine is really good. So what was the process of convincing the German military, the Wormacht Army, to use it at scale? Well, Professor Ranke was employed by the army, so it was his job to find things that would improve the performance of the German soldier. I always imagined him like a James Bond character, like Q, who develops gadgets and stuff, because he also developed gadgets.

56:45so he was quite a you know he was an academic but he was also a soldier you know he was employed but he was basically running this institute examining it and he was so convinced that Pavitin is the answer to his question how to beat the main opponent of the German soldier and that was not the British soldier not the French soldier not the Russian soldier that was fatigue he had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer so when he read these reports from universities he did his own tests in the military academy with young medical officers they came together at 8 p.m in the evening and then they received either methamphetamine caffeine pill or placebo or benzidrine like he had different experiments and he always concluded at the end like at like they started 8 p.m and like at 10 a.m in the morning one time he notes the pavitin people still want to go out and party while like the the coffee guys are like sleeping on the bench and the you know it was clear that pavitin is the strongest it gives you the most energy lets you work for the longest time so he was convinced but his superior like the surgeon general of the german army he was like an old school dude and he was like he didn't even react to these like rank would write letters we have to use a synthetic drug in the next campaign which was against poland which he knew about and uh because pavitin was quite known in the civil society people were using it already so he said he even said a lot of soldiers will just take it with them and we should we should control that we should make it an official drug but the surgeon general didn't understand he he didn't reply so germany attacked poland without a clear like regulatory system on methamphetamine and indeed a lot of soldiers used it and what ranke then what did was he requested from all the medical officers in the field in poland the war was over after a few weeks so but the german army was occupying poland he said send me all back reports and tell me what did did your people take pevitin and what were the effects and he collected all these reports which are also studied in the military archive and he came to the conclusion this is a really good fighting drug and it probably is because people are still using it today methamphetamine is still being used and ranke discovered this he had he had everything in front of him and poland was beaten and then hitler wanted to attack the west and the west was a different story than poland because the west was the world empire of great britain combined with la grande armée the strongest army in the world the french army these two combined How can you win that?

59:37Poland, they could overpower. They had a better army than Poland. But is the German Wehrmacht really better than both of these armies combined? His officers didn't think so. High command said, no, we're not going to attack the West. We're going to lose. And Hitler was fanatic about it. He really wanted to attack it. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the West. because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany. Because they really cared, you know, if you're a high command, you don't want to start a war that you're going to lose. You know, very bad.

1:00:15Can you just briefly give us a sense of, do you think this is genius or insanity on Hitler's part to think that he can take on probably what's perceived as to be the most powerful military in the world, which is the French military, or at least in Europe? I think his hatred for the French was very, very deep. He really wanted to go to war with them. It was an ideological, irrational decision. That's why he didn't hate the empire. He admired it and looked down on… You mean the British Empire? Yeah. Yeah. But the French he really hated. And France had been the Erbfeind, the genetic enemy of the German people.

1:01:02At least right-wingers would say so. There had been two wars. The first one, Germany had won. Then First World War, Germany had lost. So Hitler wanted to kind of revenge and also stop the Versailles Treaty. So he really needed to attack the West, at least in his mindset. But it was an irrational decision. and that's why high command said no we're not going to do it basically and hitler's position at the time was not that he could do anything he wanted i mean high command is still a high command of the german wehrmacht that's a very old you know it's it's a it's a tradition it's they they do whatever they they want you know but also they have to obey hitler's order so it's a it's a power struggle basically um but to invade france was a totally stupid idea but it changed on the morning of February 17th, 1940.

1:01:56Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Arden Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Arden Mountain, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius and Hitler immediately understood it. because before the plan was to attack in the north of belgium which is the same as world war one it comes a stalemate and they fight for months and no one really moves and it's bloody and nothing's happening it's bad but that was the only plan that they had that's why the high command said no we're not going to do it it's stupid um but these three tank generals they had kind of like somehow they were able to snuck into hitler's office and they said look if you if we go with the whole army through the Arden Mountains.

1:02:48And like Hitler, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle basically? And they said, no, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that kind of wait for the action to happen and then, I don't know, support this somehow. we're going to use tanks in the front as race cars basically we're going to over power the enemy we're going to be in france before the french who are stationed all with the with the british in northern belgium and also on the marginal line but not really in the arden mountains that was hardly fortified because no one could imagine that germany would go through there and before they know it we are already behind them basically we are already in france and they're still hanging out in northern Belgium because it takes quite a while to travel.

1:03:44This was a different time also. So he was convinced and he then ordered the attack. The attack would happen. And that is then, but it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights. So the whole army, or at least the avant-garde of the machinery, had to be like a big part of the army had to be in sedan after three days and three nights and that was only possible if you don't stop and that was the problem the sleep was really then suddenly became a huge problem and hitler said when i was fighting in world war one of course i could stay awake for a week i'm a german you know even though he's not even german he's austrian but that was a problem but suddenly ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe how people could stay awake for three days and three nights so ranke suddenly became before that he was kind of an outsider like the freak with the drug idea suddenly he became like okay tell us how does it work and he gave like lectures in front of the officers and he wrote a stimulant decree where like Like a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case methamphetamine, how much should be taken at what intervals, what are the side effects.

1:05:08So this became a very big thing. And then Temla had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines, which were not the front yet. I mean, they were stationed in the west of Germany. And then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine and they started the surprise attack through the Aden Mountains. So the 35 million dosages for the French campaign. I mean, we could probably talk for many hours about this particular campaign because it is, I think it's fair to say, the most successful military campaign from the German side. Ended with a big mistake. Dunkirk. Dunkirk. It was brilliant up until that point.

1:05:53That is a turning point. That was the first big mistake Hitler did. And it also had to do with drugs. We'll talk about it, but that's just a link on this three days. So we should also mention that's where Blitzkrieg really shined. So it wasn't just the tanks, it was the infantry, it was the aircraft moving very fast behind the French lines. I mean, what can you speak to just the execution of that campaign and the role of drugs in it? And it is, we should say, a really bold strategic decision to use meth. I mean, it's a big risk. There's a lot of risks taken here, which could be seen as military genius or military insanity, and are a mixture of both.

1:06:36Well, they were very lucky that it all worked out. Also, the guys in the tanks could all have freaked out on the meth, because it was never tested before. Or can you actually be in a combat situation in a tank in enemy territory on meth? Can people actually cope with that and be better fighters? Going through the mountains. It's insane. Against the biggest military in Europe. Well, what meth does is, because I read reports of depressed, the depressed atmosphere right before the attack started, because they were afraid. They thought they would lose. Like they didn't want that. You know, soldiers.

1:07:16maybe some, you know, really hardcore Nazi soldiers, but most people were just normal guys, you know? They didn't want to start that. But once they had the methamphetamine, it kind of, you're like in a party mood. So also when you're in the tank, you know, and everyone likes it, you know, it's rather an uplifting thing. Like they were really getting into it and they were really, you know, they started fighting then. It's also intoxication, you know, it's a rush. Like what does meth feel like? well meth creates the so-called fight or flight motors so either you like it releases all the neurotransmitters in the brain which are released in situations of high danger for example so in a highly dangerous situation you become very alert so you can cope with the situation if you're like if you're like under life threat and you don't even react to it you're probably going to be dead you know but uh the body does that and methamphetamine does that so you take a pill of methamphetamine or you snort a line of methamphetamine and you're like you know and you're like this you're like and um then that's the fight or flight mode either you run away like it's too much you know i but on meth you usually don't run away you kind of think it's really cool what's happening you like to move you like to be with your pals you like to you know be in a tank great so there is a party aspect to it i think it was very joyful for the german soldiers because it was springtime they had immediate successes and it wasn't heavy fighting it was all it was just being in the tank i mean there was of course fighting and there were also war crimes and i read a report when rommel high on meth like at night doesn't stop of course because they're all you know they don't stop at night but every army usually stops at night so the french army were stopping they were in a village camping out and the german rommel was going with the tank through that village with his division just running over people and he was standing like in the open lid of the tank and he was like going through that thing you know and you know like a berserk uh type of you know warrior and that was when that to me is a war crime that that is when the when And the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in that push of Rommel through the French countryside.

1:09:39Because you don't do that. You know, your enemy is sleeping. Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So, of course, at night they're going to be sleepy on red wine. And the Germans were like on meth and they were just running over them. There's descriptions of the chains of the tank becoming bloody. I don't think he did it. And he was like, oh my God, what did I just do? I'm sorry. I, you know, what, what am I doing here? He was in the, in the movie, you know. This is the dark thing about human nature that in war, if you dehumanize, if you allow your brain to dehumanize the enemy, the opponent, the humans and the other side, you can actually, I think hate can take over.

1:10:27And in that hate, you can find pleasure when you murder the other. and people have written about this, have talked about this. It's probably a thing that a person like me can't possibly comprehend unless I experienced it. And you have to be in the mania, in the hysteria, in the insanity intensity of war. I mean, what Evans, for example, said is that I excuse the Germans of the war crimes because they were just in an intoxication. I understand that argument, but and if you look at individual soldiers it's quite tricky like it's a 19 year old guy he's been drafted and in nazi germany if you don't go you land in the concentration camp so you can choose you know concentration camp or you just join the ranks and then you get pavitin and then you invade france there was a trial in germany because someone said all soldiers are murderers and i I think then the German Bundeswehr sued him.

1:11:28No, soldiers are not murderers. And he actually won in court. So it's legal in Germany to call every soldier a murderer. But it's a tricky question. Yeah, I remember seeing the documentary on the ordinary people. I mean, there's also social pressure. Again, saying it is to say, I think the documentary Ordinary People was looking at the Germans that were a part of the shooting squads. and they didn't understand what they're signing up for. And they were told that they're free to leave once they understand what they're doing and many of them didn't. And they didn't have hate for Jews or for the people who they're murdering.

1:12:09You are, again, a 19, 20-year-old young kid. It's so hard to comprehend the moral insanity that's happening all around you. And you just kind of want to fit in. I mean, that's why I wrote the book The Bohemians, because there were a few people in Berlin that didn't react this way, but they reacted in a different way. They said, we cannot be part of this. But it's hard to be the person. It's very hard, yeah. And most people are part of it because it's much more safe, or at least it seems more safe. I mean, it has its own perils, you know. Because you might become a genocidal murderer, you know.

1:12:51That might happen. like and are you responsible i would say you are responsible but that's just my personal gut feeling like i always thought my grandfather was responsible for the genocide because he was working for the german railway system and he once saw a train car full of jews in a cattle wagon and he only said to me yeah this was against german railway regulations i said so what did you do and he said well there were ss at the station when i was working and i was too too scared i didn't do anything so i thought that he was him he made himself guilty i thought that's and my father for example reacted very strongly because of that he never called him by his first name the the father of his wife because he still had that you know he was a nazi because he was people actually and i certainly would not excuse high-ranking politicians that make policies because the the genocidal policies that the nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs and i never write that in any you know because there's no documents if i would find documents that say yeah when we you know but this the nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs, maybe with alcohol, you know, but it's, and I spoke with my father who had been a high judge in Germany.

1:14:21What does actually the law say? And the law says, if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility. Your responsibilities only diminish, let's say you're a totally normal person, never done any harm to anybody and suddenly you take a drug or you're totally drunk and you don't know what you're doing and you kill someone, then a judge could say maybe you have a lesser responsibility. But this is not the case with the crimes of national socialism. And I never even hinted that in my book. So I think that criticism by Evans was short-sighted.

1:15:05I think he's not right about that. Yeah, I think I agree with you totally. I didn't get that sense. He thought the book was very successful because a lot of right-wing people bought it. But that's simply not true. I think your book did a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative. To the contrary, I got an angry letter by a German army employee, quite a high officer, and a military historian. and he said that I, he also thought I overemphasized the drug use of the methamphetamine in the Western campaign because he said the German army was just so good and you kind of diminish their capability by saying they were only so good because they took methamphetamine.

1:15:57I thought that was kind of funny because the Wehrmacht doesn't exist anymore and the current German army is called the Bundeswehr and they're not historically, they're not supposed to be connected. There was a clear cut, but he still felt that I was kind of hurting the pride of the Wehrmacht. I generally sort of agree with him. In general, it seems like great historians often, I'm just a human, so I'm not a historian, but they undermine the importance of the heroes that make up an army. The Soviet army, the British army, the French army, the German army. Like, these are humans. And some of the great military campaigns involve people really stepping up.

1:16:46Now, like, the effectiveness of the military tactics with blitzkrieg, the effectiveness of meth, the strategic decisions around where to invade, the timing, the speed, all of those are important. But there's humans there. There's real heroes. and sometimes historians kind of diminish that. I don't know what to make sense of it. I might be just an idiot, but I've had a great conversation with James Holland. I've gotten to know him well. He kind of analyzed the mistakes made by Hitler and by Stalin and the Operation Barbarossa, but I just, through generations, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, you hear these stories of these heroes.

1:17:28My grandfather was a machine gunner and miraculously survived. And just knowing those stories, Stalingrad would not have happened without the heroes on the Soviet side. And it's easy to say there's a lot of blunders, a lot of bad tactics, all this kind of stuff. But to me, from the human side, I just know through my bloodline, the people that have fearlessly given their life to defend their homeland. And that sometimes could be a little bit easily dismissed. So I don't know what to make sense of it. Maybe I'm romanticizing, or maybe I'm speaking to the suffering that the people have felt, and they just propagate themselves through my life story.

1:18:12And then maybe the gratitude I have for the people who have stopped the Nazi forces. I think it's amazing what the Russian soldiers actually did because they beat the Wehrmacht. It was really the Red Army on the ground that did the job, you know. And did they love communism and their system? I don't think so. And I think they were, I mean, of course, some people, but basically they were defending their country. And I'm also very grateful to them. Yeah, they're defending their families. Quick pause, bath and break. Okay. All right, we're back. So can we say a bit more about the French campaign?

1:18:55So it was over in six weeks. It took six weeks to completely defeat and occupy most of France. And the initial operation, three days, was from a military perspective successful. What else can we say about the role of drugs, the effectiveness was learned from that experience by the Wormacht? I mean, for me to research the Western campaign was very interesting because I didn't really know anything about it except that Germany won very quickly. So to actually look at the details is very interesting. And the drugs give you kind of a way in. What are some things you found in the archives that were interesting, like maybe letters, reports, diaries?

1:19:44that gave you some insight about the human story of it all? Well, there is letters, for example, by Heinrich Böll, who won the Nobel Prize later in literature. He writes to his parents describing in detail what Pavitin did to him, how it kept his mood up, and that without Pavitin, he wouldn't have been able to do the job. But also military documents are found very interesting. For example, I could see exactly how the methamphetamine was distributed because it was not distributed equally. It was done in a way that the tank troops who were leading the advance received the most meth and they also needed it.

1:20:24I could see how many pills on which date were delivered to Rommel's troops and Rommel became, I call him the crystal fox. In my book, for obvious reasons, his division was using a lot of meth. And he was using meth as well? I just have descriptions how he like totally crazy stands in the open lid of the tank and all his people. Well, they had the meth, but there's no from that. There's no, maybe they didn't use it. Maybe he didn't use it, but it looks like he used it. Like there was also never any reports that all the meth was given back. I mean, a lot of soldiers write that they take it, but Rommel specifically.

1:21:10I wouldn't write in Blitz that Rommel would take methamphetamine on such a day or something if there was no record for it. But Rommel there is a record for it that Rommel's division used the most meth of any tank division. So I'll write about that. That already makes him the crystal fox because in his division crystal meth is rampant. You know, it's like an animal farm when the pigs discover alcohol. Animal farm by George Orwell. There's no evidence that they drank. It's just the next day that they're all hung over. I mean, Rommel is a very interesting character in general because later he turned, apparently turned against Hitler.

1:21:53He was part of the conspiracy of the Operation Valkyrie. He received, you know, the offer to shoot himself in the forest, which he did instead of being tried and executed. Is he just part of this general attention that the generals, the military had with Hitler? That'd be fair to say? I would say so, yes. I'm not an expert on the Wehrmacht. This is a very complex, large organization, but I see most of the officers of the Wehrmacht as not necessarily Nazis in the way that they would shout Heil Hitler all the time. they were highly intelligent, highly trained, super professionals that ran a very effective war machine.

1:22:42And at one point, more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler were given were not really helping, and they have their men dying because of it. So that creates a lot of tension, and that led to the mistake that Hitler did in Dunkirk, basically. what Churchill called the sickle cut, which was the idea to storm through the Ardennes mountains and kind of cut off the British and French troops who were still in the north of Belgium trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly the Germans are behind them so that they kind of cut as like a sickle into enemy territory, the sickle cut.

1:23:20That was so successful that basically the campaign was won already. So then the Germans invaded, occupied all the cities on the canal back to England to kind of cut off the British completely so they couldn't even flee. But there was just Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open. And the German army was like, they were already on the outskirts of Dunkirk. They could have just taken it and closed that hole for the British military to get out. But Hitler then did his famous, and this is all the dynamic of the Western campaign. You know, a lot of things happen every day. And then they're saying like, we're going to have Dunkirk tomorrow and then it's over.

1:24:07And then Hitler stops the tanks. It's his famous Haltebefehl, the order to stop. And, you know, they were all on meth, you know, they didn't want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. uh hitler was uh he was he basically it was a little bit similar than berlin munich uh thing hitler didn't really understand that campaign it was too fast for him he because they didn't say like oh they're all on meth they're not gonna sleep they're gonna they're gonna behave erratically they don't didn't discuss this they discussed this in the old-fashioned terms and hitler was seeing like they do not protect their flanks what if the british come from the north this is terrible like militarily it was they were already fighting world war ii while hitler was still fighting world war one and especially the allies they were still fighting world war one but the tank generals on math or the tank generals without math the tank generals per se they were fighting a new type of war and hitler then got a visit from goering the head of the air force the luftwaffe and goering was a morphinist that was that is very well documented like he was on morphine he was high as a kite most of the time and that comes with losing touch with reality i would say or at least it it changes your grip on reality you know maybe you're still a good decision maker but it could lead to you know if you're intoxicated let's say you're writing and you're intoxicated you think it's great but the next day you read it is shit you know so goering was using morphine in the morning then met met hitler at the felsen nest which was hitler's headquarters to to command the western campaign the felsen nest and goering said to him if the army generals are now going to take dunkirk then basically the army has won this campaign and that will give army high command which is already against you because they were you know for them hitler was always like the uh the kleine gefreite like the small kind of regular army guy because that's what hitler had been in in the in first world war and now suddenly he was the big decision maker so they never they thought they make much better decisions than him so goering says their power will be so overwhelming that they will from now on call the shots how this war will continue and what will be done next you should let me with the luftwaffe do the job from the air the national socialist luftwaffe is going to end the western campaign so he thought that he could destroy it doesn't make sense you know even destroy the british military from with planes maybe you can do it but certainly he couldn't do it so the the tank generals received the halts befeel the whole the stopping order they didn't believe it when they received it because the victory this would have been complete victory over great britain this would have been the end of great britain the whole british military was encircled but they did get out through dunkirk that's why the movie dunkirk by christopher nolan is not good because he doesn't describe what happened on the german side it's just this heroic british thing yeah we just got out and we reformed and then we beat you You know, this was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command and convinced by Göring's morphine high vision that he would stop it with the Air Force, which he couldn't.

1:27:43I mean, he bombed and then the British, you know, they were on ships and a few ships were sunk, but basically they got out. You need to do this on the ground. At least back then you would have needed to do it on the ground. So that was a big mistake by Hitler. That's why von Mahnstein, one of the three tank generals from February 17th was Rommel von Mahnstein and Guderian. And von Mahnstein, he later said, he spoke of a verlorener sieg, a lost victory. He said the Western campaign was a lost victory because we really could have achieved the victory. We could have dominated, you know, Britain. They could have invaded Britain.

1:28:17There was no more military. Well, okay, on land. There was still the Royal Air Force. And the Navy. And the Navy, yeah. So invading Britain, I think any invasion of actual Britain is a gigantic mistake on the Nazi part. But if Britain doesn't have a standing army anymore, it's much easier than they still have one. I think it's still extremely difficult to invade, but it's much easier to sort of neutralize, make sure that Britain is not a player in the war. For sure. Maybe Hitler wouldn't have invaded at all anyhow. Also because of his sort of, not respect, but non-hatred of the British Empire.

1:28:59Because they're also white supremacists. So why would we fight them? It doesn't make sense. While the French, they were already like half black, basically, in Hitler's eyes. If we're to talk about counterfactual history, of the possible trajectories of the war that would lead to Nazi victory, one of the big mistakes is the invasion of Britain. So you already mentioned the mistake with Dunkirk, but beyond that, if they even captured mainland Europe, they could have just neutralized the British threat and not invaded Britain, and then go after the oil, which is much needed, maybe in the Middle East.

1:29:47So focus on that campaign before invading the Soviet Union. And then maybe wait for the Soviet Union to invade them through Poland, which would be likely coming. Or wait until 1943, something like this, to invade East without the Western Front having to be, been there. And the other really big mistake is declaring war against the United States. Having complete disrespect for the United States and declare one in the United States, which didn't have to be done at all. So it's collecting enemies when those didn't have to be done. So there is, to me, actually, there's a lot of paths there, as dark as it is to imagine, for Nazi Germany to be successful in the invasion of the Soviet Union even.

1:30:41Well, I think that's why the Wehrmacht officers were pissed at Hitler because they knew that they could actually win if it was done in a certain way. But Hitler's ideology and his stupidity and later also the degeneration of his cognitive abilities did not allow the Wehrmacht to fight in the most effective way. So Hitler was a very bad leader after Dunkirk. So can you speak to the morphine? What kind of drug is morphine? Morphine was developed in the 19th century by a German, a young chemist called Saturna. And he wanted to know what is the potent alkaloid in opium. Because opium is a natural drug, but there's something in the opium that actually is decisive, and that's morphine.

1:31:35So he was able to extract that from the opium. So he basically, this young guy, he invented morphine, which then became very important in wars, especially like the American Civil War is unthinkable without morphine. Or at least it would have been very different because with morphine, you can treat people, you can amputate people, you can fix people up and send them back into battle. and that also corresponded with the development of the hypodermic needle, the injection needle that was around in the mid 19th century. So the injection needle and morphine together became a very efficient way to treat soldiers and that prolonged, for example, the civil war in America.

1:32:21So Goering was taking morphine. Yeah, morphine is like the classic. It's like you don't eat opium, you know, you take what is active in opium and you inject it and that's a very potent, you know, that numbs all your pain. Like you don't have pain anymore if you're on morphine. Also affects judgment. I've never taken morphine. So I cannot really say, like there's a few junkies that are highly creative on it. Like a lot of musicians in the 60s were using heroin, which is a more potent form or like it's a half synthetic. it's an opioid. Morphine is an opiate and heroin is an opioid. I guess you could be quite sharp on it also.

1:33:12That's why Hitler liked Oikodal, which is oxycontin, oxycodone. He injected that. Which is another opiate, heroin-like. It was a product by the Merck company from Darmstadt, Germany. They made Oikodal, which when germany lost the war the patent was basically taken by america and then ended up in oxycodone so if you inject oikodal that was a very popular drug in the 20s because apparently it gives you the most beautiful high on earth you're like super hot like you feel extremely well and you can think very clearly and you feel like this is how you this is how life should feel on high on oikodal This is like Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann.

1:33:58He used oikodal. Quite a few doctors actually used it also. And probably quite a few Jewish doctors also used it because this was like a doctor's drug. Doctors knew how to, you know, set the injection and it was, you know, a great experience. And Hitler, he really loved to be on oikodal. Like he would use oikodal every second day. In the beginning, 10 milligrams intravenously. Then he raised to 20 milligrams. And I spoke to someone who's actually done exactly that drug application because I wanted to know how Hitler felt. And I didn't feel like doing it myself for some reason. I don't like needles.

1:34:34So I didn't want to put a needle in my vein to have like the Hitler drug experience. I should have done it. Like a historian, a proper historian never does that. Okay. So I take, but I thought I should take quite a few drugs that I write about to understand it better. But this drug I didn't take. I never shot oxycodone intravenously into my veins. but I met someone who did and he said it's like the king's high. If you do that properly, obviously you get addicted to it. I'd be scared to try. Very intense experience. I think it's a very badass thing to do for a historian, by the way. But I think it's a big risk.

1:35:12I mean, there is a risk that comes along with it, right? Well, but not for Hitler because he got the oikodal from the pharmacy. He knew exactly, like his doctor knew exactly what was inside. It was made by a pharmaceutical company. No, I mean the risk of addiction. Yeah, that is a big risk. That is a big risk. But there's also the risk of getting impure stuff and heroin on the street and die from an overdose. But the addiction thing is very, I think it happens quite quickly with oikodol because it's such a great feeling. So why wouldn't you do it over and over again? And then the opioid receptors in the brain want you to take it.

1:35:49And if you don't take it, you get withdrawal symptoms and you feel like shit and you have to. So that's the problem with opioids, with morphine. That's what happens. And that's what happened to Hitler. I generally say yes to most things. But those drugs, like cocaine doesn't scare me. Heroin scares me. Like the opioids scare me. Oxycodone scares me. Because they really make you physically dependent. I don't even know if cocaine makes you physically dependent. It makes you psychologically addicted. But actually, you have to get it. Otherwise, you feel bad. That's a physical, terrible addiction.

1:36:28And also for life to feel like less when you're not on it. Right. That scares me. That's the problem also with methamphetamine. People who use a lot of methamphetamine, on days they don't use it, they don't feel great at all. Especially not compared to the methamphetamine days. So that became a problem in Germany when people were really using more and more of the Pavitine. All right, you got to take me through the full drug cocktail that Hitler was on, Patient A of Morel's. Let's start at the beginning. We're big on setting context here. So tell the story of Dr. Theodor Morel. How did he meet Hitler?

1:37:07Well, Morel was, he had his practice on Kurfürstendamm, which is like the main boulevard of Berlin in the west of Berlin kind of a fancy street and he was a celebrity doctor which was a new type of doctor in a way Dr. Feelgood he kind of was one of the first Dr. Feelgood so you didn't go to him when you had a disease you went to him when you were let's say you were like an opera star in the Berlin opera and you had a big premiere so you would go to morel in the afternoon and he would give you a nice shot and then you would you know be really good on stage um so he but he was not a quack i mean he was he just knew his drugs and he believed in you know why shouldn't you treat someone even if that person doesn't have a disease if you can make that person feel better it's good especially if that person pays like he He said, everyone who pays my, and he wasn't cheap, who comes to me and wants a testosterone hormone injection or a vitamin injection or an opioid injection, you get it from him.

1:38:16He didn't have any scruples. I mean, but we should also say he was pretty innovative and extremely knowledgeable. So you mentioned hormones, but also, you know, probiotics. Yeah, right. Just he knew his shit. He was a bit of a nerd. Yeah. Yeah, like a legit doctor just didn't have boundaries about what he used. He had a very unappealing physical appearance. And I think that was a problem for him. And he was known to have very bad eating habits, like sauce was running. And so people were easily disgusted by him. He was like an outsider. He was really like a freak. But when people looked at him after he had given them an injection and they said, thank you and i feel so great now that's what kind of made his day you know so one day a man entered his uh doctor's office on kufus named hubertus hoffman and hubertus hoffman was a photographer and he had gonorrhea and uh morel because he knew about alternative ways to treat he actually cured him and Hubertus Hoffmann said to Morel I have a good friend and I think you should meet him and I'm gonna have a dinner in Munich and I think it would be really worth your time to come and Morel came and the good friend was Hitler because Hubertus Hoffmann was the photographer of Hitler and they were in German we have a formal U which is Z if I don't know you so well I say Z and if you're my close friend, I say du, you.

1:39:54And Hitler only had like four people. He would say you, too. He would always like the C, like the distance. It was always about distance and respect and borders and boundaries. What are the two again? C and what? Du. C and du. Yeah, C is the formal one and du is the informal one. Yeah, in Russian, there's the same thing. V and T. And so there's a big, that's a big thing. Also in French, you also have that. You have that in Spanish. Only in English you don't have it. And it is part of the cultural sort of discourse of like when you upgrade from the V to the T, from the C to the do, or from the do to the C.

1:40:34From the C to the do, that would be the upgrade because you become more intimate. Yeah, like, and you ask, can I go from C to do? Yeah, like the older person must suggest it, I think. Yeah, okay. Beautiful language. So Hoffmann was a du-freund, a du-freund. we say of Hitler so he was quite close to Hitler and so that's why he could also make that close connection so he had a dinner with just him Hitler Eva Braun Hitler's girlfriend and Morel came like they sent a plane to Berlin to pick him up so it's like VIP treatment it was the whole thing and this is 36 yeah they had spaghetti with tomato sauce on the side I read in the There's like a description of this event.

1:41:18The tomato sauce was on the side and there was muscat. What is muscat? It's a spice nutmeg. Nutmeg. Yeah, it was a nutmeg, which is an unusual recipe, I guess. But that's what they had. And spaghetti wasn't a fancy thing. You know, it came from Italy, from Mussolini, who invented fascism in Italy and who was like Hitler's role model for a long time until Hitler surpassed him, obviously. so the spaghetti the spaghetti they came from italy and it was like a big thing and morel had the big problem that spaghetti is hard to eat right and he couldn't even like it was a catastrophe but he got out of it because hitler complained about stomach problems because hitler was a terrible vegetarian he was a so-called cake vegetarian he would only eat like sweets like no meat of course but like he wouldn't like eat healthy stuff you know so he was bloated the whole time because we only eat like cake and white bread and it's not good so he voiced that and there was also uh brandt was there like his an official doctor from the from the from the ss that was like his doctor and and hitler said my doctors can't cure me and morel was like this is my chance thank thank you god and he told hitler about the probiotics which hitler had never heard of and And also Brandt, the doctor, he hadn't heard of.

1:42:41Because that was a new thing that you give. And Hitler was asking, what is that? And Morel said, these are live bacteria from German soldiers from the war in the First World War that were fighting in Serbia. There was one guy who didn't get the stomach flu and all the others drank the water in Serbia and all got sick. But this one guy, so his bacteria, and this is a true story. his gut bacteria were cultivated into a medicine called mutafloa and morel told hitler about this this is amazing like i have to try this you know and it helped you know he got the mutafloa he did the mutafloa kind of therapy and it cured him he suddenly had no bloating anymore and the farting of hitler was really bad so bad that it would like he like constant like it diminished his you know ability to work you know so suddenly he could work he said he felt better he didn't have the pain he felt great so he really thought that more is a wonder doctor and he asked more pretty quickly afterwards do you want to be my personal physician and morel was like his wife was very much against it because she said if you become the personal physician of hitler you won't have any time for me anymore.

1:43:58And he said, like, come on, man, this is like the chance you only get once in your life. Yeah, I mean, at this point, Hitler's a really big deal. He's the most powerful man in Europe. And there have not been war crimes because the war hasn't started yet. Obviously, there's concentration camps and a lot of crimes have been committed. But it's also kind of hushed up. You know, it was it's not such a huge thing as now we know it became. So Morrell never really has any conscientious problems. He just thinks it's great. You know, I'm going to be the doctor. I'm going to be part of history. So he becomes a personal physician.

1:44:39And being this vitamin guy, like vitamins were really his thing. Like he believed in the power of vitamins. And today I think we know that he was right. Vitamins are good. But back then no one knew. And Hitler was like, he told Hitler. and then Hitler said, okay, I want to try this vitamins. And what they did from the beginning was injections because Hitler didn't want to take a pill because a pill takes too long and it goes through the track that he has the problems with, like the digestion. Like he didn't want to take a pill. He believed in the injection and Morel was the masterful injector.

1:45:17So Morel, because the needles were thicker than they are today, but Morel could give you an injection without you feeling any pain. So Hitler was quite impressed. So he got like a vitamin C injection, but Hitler loved the daily injection. So he got hooked on the daily injection. Once he got the injection, the day was good. And he never got sick, actually. And he could stand for a long time with the arm raised. He went to the gym, basically. I mean, he had a gym where he was doing exercise, so he could have the arm up for hours when a military parade would walk by. So he was quite fit, and he was never sick, and Morel was giving him the daily injection and they lived happily ever after, basically until the Soviet Union attacked.

1:46:03Wait, wait, he literally lifted so you can do the Heil Hitler salute? Yeah, I found a document for that. That's funny. Oh God, that's dark. He had an expander, we say. I don't know how to use that word in English, expander. Oh, like a band. Yeah, it's like this. You do like... Yeah, yeah, I have one of those. Yeah, that's what he did. in front of the window. Well, at least he's not doing it in front of a mirror. Okay, wow, that's dark. Okay, I mean, those little details, yet another reminder that he's just a human being. I mean, it's hard to keep your arm up for hours. You can't let it down. If you keep it up, that's what it's all about.

1:46:46I mean, he was very much about the facade, right? He's very important to present himself in a certain kind of way when he's giving the speeches. Yeah, everything was orchestrated. The Nazis were masters in propaganda. They really knew how to create the perfect image. Okay, so let's go into the cocktail. Started with the vitamins. This is in 36? Right. I think it was pretty harmless in the beginning. But the addiction to the injection was the main thing that I think happened. That Hitler needed his doctor. but from 36 to 41 only like vitamins are being injected and glucose so i don't think it really harms you i made my it might benefit you he never got sick he was fit i mean this is the thing that there was phase one of his drug use were the vitamins until 41 so you think the tweaking at the olympics though you've talked about before but still so you're saying this person we're watching a video of here is not on drugs I don't know I don't think so so the video could be fake it could be sped up I think it's fake because I think someone read my book that Hitler was on thought that Hitler was always on meth and created this but I might be wrong and the narrative takes hold and I think the thing you mentioned he could be on sugar so it could be a lot of elements he was also a weird guy Maybe he was really just rocking because he was so happy what he saw.

1:48:17You know, maybe he really got into it. Maybe it was a sexual thing for him what he saw. I don't know. There's no document showing that he took a drug on that day. Let's put it that way. I think I've been, especially like stay up all night. I've been fidgety. You can just be caught in a certain moment when you're being like very like fidgety. I think he probably rocked a few times and then the video was cut in a way that he rocks more or something. Also, methamphetamine wasn't yet available in 1936. That's important to say. For sure, he was not. So what is said here on Hitler tweaking on meth at the 1936 Olympics is definitely false.

1:48:56Okay, there you go. So when did it start getting more serious? The injection and the kind of drugs he was taking? This was a day in August of 1941. 1941 Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd so this is about six weeks into the campaign which was called Unternehmen Barbarossa and Germany was doing pretty well and it came to a crucial moment where high command said now we're going to take Moscow and Hitler said no we're going to split up the troops and take Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg, in the north and in the south, we're going to go for the oil fields, basically. That was his plan.

1:49:45He said, let's not do Moscow. And high command was like, this is the biggest mistake. We must take Moscow. If we take Moscow, we're going to win. And Hitler became ill for the first time on the day this decision, I mean, this is a dynamic thing that's going on you know they're moving and now they have to decide will we split up or we will continue towards moscow and he had the russian flu in german the ruhr which is a like a flu type disease with very high fever it comes like they were in the field like so they were in the east you know camping out maybe he drank water that wasn't good or he had some you know they tested everything meticulously but he got you know he got sick high fever he felt like shit and he said to morel and you know you can see that in morel's notes like morel describes this very vividly and in his notes which are at the federal archives uh which no historian ever ever looked at except me the non-historian which is kind of funny uh so he describes how hitler then asks of him basically says vitamins are not enough anymore like he's very weak he must go to the military briefing.

1:51:03But if you... The flu is quite a severe disease, I think. If you have a heavy flu, you really feel like you're going to die. You can't go to a military briefing. But Morel kind of fought with himself, and then he decided to inject an opioid into Hitler's veins intravenously, like the strongest application possible. And this was Dolantin, which is a German opioid that was legal. And I was once an exchange student in Flint, Michigan 1988 and I was number one of the tennis team because I was quite a good tennis player. We were playing our main enemy. I think I was at Flint Powers Catholic High School in Flint, Michigan and I think it was Powers Central and they had a number one, Mark Restiner.

1:51:52Still remember. He was feared. No one could beat him. Yes. And on the day of the match, I had the Russian flu, basically. I was, and I was the hope. I was the number one, the wonder kid from Germany. And they took me to a doctor and the doctor gave me an injection. And I don't know until this day because I just, I was a kid. I got the injection. I was 17 and I felt great. Like the flu was gone like this. It was probably an opioid, something, you know, something that just shuts off all the pain and gives you you know energy and i beat this guy in a way i totally i i thought of a new technique by playing like very high balls like in the in the in the direct like fearful competition i would have lost so i played something that in germany we call footen which is something you don't really do you just play high balls yeah which is not pretty to look at but it's very effective and he just lost he just lost his nerve and i beat him like six zero six zero something like that sensational so hitler receives this uh this dolentine injection and he gets up he goes into the meeting room he dominates the meeting room he feels great he decides you know in front of everybody no one is able to no one overpowers him in that meeting he was very good in the room and the troops are split up, like Leningrad is now a target, this weakens the general thrust towards Moscow.

1:53:31This is probably why they didn't take Moscow. They probably could have taken it. Or maybe not, you know, but the decision was made in August to... I think it's one of the biggest blunders of the Eastern Front. To not take Moscow. To not take Moscow. I think they had a straight shot given the disorganization. They had the one-time thing, the one-time moment where they could have done it. and the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war, only if they would do it very fast and surprise because they were always weaker, basically. They just had this moment, this dynamic moment.

1:54:04And this was fueled by the methamphetamine. Also in the Soviet Union, hundreds of millions of dosages were given. So the Germans were really going. And at one point, this ends, you know, you can't take meth for the rest of your life. You're just going to end up being a nervous wreck. But you can do it for like two months. You could do it. But then it stops. I think if you're really honest about where you have the asymmetry of power, which is in the speed of the blitzkrieg. So that's similar to Genghis Khan, who had a very small military. But their advantage was, I mean, I think at the peak, it would be probably 100 ,000.

1:54:45But every soldier of Genghis Khan's had five horses. So the whole point was they can move really fast. And not just fast, but they can move on all terrain. So they can go around. If wars were fought on normal roads, you were supposed to travel a certain kind of way. If you go fast and not on paths that are usually taking attack from all kinds of sides, that's why you can conquer as much as Genghis Khan was able to conquer. And the same thing with the Nazi forces. this is their biggest advantage and the not using that is is is essentially the end of its effectiveness i think that's also why the tank troops were such a good weapon because they can go off road while military vehicles cars cannot do it like a tank can even go through a forest and just you know kill you know small trees and just run over it so that was uh that that those are kind of the five horses that uh that was the idea that they had at this working breakfast that's what they presented to hitler we're going to use the tank force in a very different way and that's going to enable us to win the lightning war campaigns it was that one of the first times he he he tried an opiate like that an intense one that was the first time and then he that was it for him he well not immediately like you can see when you study his medications that that is a turning point in a way that now he he deviates from the vitamins like he becomes more interested in what's out there and like from 41 to 43 he tries out a lot of medications that he didn't try out before before that it was quite conventional mostly vitamins and glucose but now he becomes experimental and he discusses this with morel and morel is also very experimental like they got really they really nerded themselves into like what can we use like bulls testicle extracts so morel in order to present those things to his patient a he created a pharmaceutical company that he ran he was so he was the personal physician of Hitler and he was also the CEO of Hammer Pharmaceuticals, which had its production site in occupied Czechoslovakia.

1:57:11And for example, at one point when Germany had invaded the Ukraine, Morel asked for a monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals from all the slaughterhouses in the Ukraine. So this was a huge logistical operation. like all the slaughtered animals all the organs were removed for the personal physician of the Führer sent in military trains back to the to the factory in occupied Czechoslovakia and like the the military became really upset with that because they said we need our trains to transport back our wounded soldiers now we're like cars are full with like awful and pig's hearts and pigs and livers and it was totally bizarre and morel but morel then became like he was just like good natured dr feelgood in the beginning and then when the ukraine was occupied he became this like business freak who like made a lot of money with his dubious hormonal concoctions where like he would threaten the army if you don't let the train with my raw materials go to my factory I will tell Hitler and you will have a problem.

1:58:28He was acting like that. He became quite an asshole, actually. And a war criminal because he also, at his factory where he would make the famous pig liver extract that was then tested by Hitler. And Hitler said, that's a good medication. I have more energy. So this can also be sold to the German military. That's how it worked. because the regulations at the time were that it was very difficult to bring out a new medication onto the market because medications to bring them onto the market, you need certain test phases and all of that stuff. So that's hard to do in a war, especially in World War II.

1:59:09So Hitler said to Morel, I'm going to be your guinea pig. You just make it in your factory. I test it. And if I think it's good, then I'm just going to write a, today you would say like a decree, you know, because I'm the president, you know, I can order it, that it's going to be legal all over Germany. So Hitler was a real drug guy. He liked drugs. Well, he liked to experiment, I would say, with drugs and with Morel. He was against drugs, you know. But that's a crazy thing for a guy who didn't do anything, right? It's a big contradiction, or it's a big irony, where it's very weird. But isn't it even a bit of a mystery?

1:59:51Because at that stage, I'm sure he was paranoid about being killed and all that kind of stuff. So he must have really trusted Morel, right? Yeah, he trusted Morel because Morel was not part of any organization. He was the loner coming from the VIP doctors, his own VIP doctor's office. And now he was basically Hitler's toy. Like Hitler could get access to all kinds of medications through him and Morel would never say it to anybody. You know, he would just write it down, but this was kept quite secret. No one knew what was going on between the two men. This is so interesting because like, why, why would he, there might, there might be, can you maybe even speak to that?

2:00:30Why did Hitler trust another human being this much? Because you could probably make the case. Nobody was closer to Hitler than morale. That is, that is certainly the story I'm telling. Isn't that crazy? Like, what is it? What is it about morale? this guy who's he's i guess he's fat and weird and like uh nobody really likes him he was not a threat to hitler like hitler hated all the super smart medicine people like he didn't he never undressed before them he never let himself be seen naked because he didn't want anyone to know anything you know about him that he couldn't control so morel was harmless morel would basically did what hitler wanted they wouldn't say we're going to take today we're going to take drugs together it's going to be fun you know hitler was always about optimizing his performance because he knew only i'm doing this i have to and he always thought he's going to die young so he always like i don't have unlimited time the clock was always ticking so i have to be always the high performer.

2:01:40So Hitler, when he first experienced the beauty of the opioid high that was given to him in August 1941 intravenously when he experienced that kind of his eyes opened and he didn't think this was a drug I mean this is a medicine this is a medicine that helps me function this is a medicine that my doctor gives me in a very controlled manner and that lets me be extremely sharp for like eight hours I can convince all the generals I can do my job I'm happy because Hitler was also depressed you know I mean this is he really appreciated what the drug gave him, but he never thought, no, I'm becoming like a drug addict.

2:02:25So it begins to, oxycodone in general, begins to work within 30, 60 minutes and lasts for about 46 hours. This is a long lasting thing. Yeah, but this you swallow. If you get an intravenous injection, it works after one second. Wow. Get the injection, you're high. But it lasts for many hours. Yeah. that's why people love heroin who take it because you feel like shit you take the injection you feel great i mean it's in your system for quite a while like you can go into the meeting quite comfortably into the meeting yeah okay i mean there's the briefing it starts at one morel comes and you can see this in the notes like i have to be at the führer in his bedroom at 12 and then you know you chat a bit and then hitler rolls up his uniform sleeve and then he gets the injection maybe at maybe 12 30 then the high comes on and then it's very stable like you feel great this is a pure product from the merck company this is not some heroin from the street and morel knows exactly how what dosage you want right now so you feel at the top of your game you you don't feel you're not intoxicated i mean you are but it makes you clear you know So the mind is clear.

2:03:40The mind's totally clear. Your body feels fantastic. You know exactly your points. You know exactly how the others, because the others are just mortals, you know, because they're sober. They just sit there and they just, they haven't slept very well or they have problems with them, you know, and you're way above them. What do we know about general psychological effects of it? So does it boost your confidence? Does it boost aggressiveness? What effect did it have on his vision of the world? it makes you feel extremely confident you have a lot of energy but it's not too much like let's say you take cocaine or methamphetamine you're like that's why hitler was never a meth guy that's also why i think this video is fake he was he didn't take meth i mean i i studied morel's uh the things he gave them he gave a lot of things and only twice was meth so that was that's not a lot for Hitler like twice I read that the multivitamin had some amphetamine and maybe meth a little bit or no multi I mean I've been mutin vita mutin I mean vita mutin is interesting because it was a little bar of a sweet that was lying next to his food so he would just know eat and then at the end he would take this it was nice tasting and had some sugar in it and I read through all of the ingredients.

2:05:03There were different types and there's never methamphetamine in it. There was an SS doctor, Schenk, and he claimed that Morel made special Vita Multin in his lab with meth in it. But I think he just made that up. There was never any proof of that. That's a really important line to draw. The army, the Nazi army, at scale not everybody but some fraction especially during the french campaign used meth right and then there's hitler which used a lot of drugs but meth was not one of them really no math for him was just for the foot soldiers you know i mean he didn't even talk about meth this is not nothing that's concerned him you know this is something that makes you function maybe he signed i mean it went over his desk the stimulant decree but i don't know if you really read it or understood it i mean he probably knew pavitin because everyone knew it and maybe you know they discussed it but they would probably also not i mean there was there's a point when there's a conflict about methamphetamine in the army this is when the secretary of health of the german government the nazi government conti he starts writing to the army and he says you must stop this this is against nazi ideology but the army basically doesn't listen to him and keeps on using meth all the way to the end so maybe that guy conti maybe he discussed this with hitler but also hitler never you know if hitler would have said we stopped the methamphetamine it probably would have stopped but conti saying that wasn't wasn't enough i don't think hitler was really into meth it was not his thing he was more into the opioids into these weird hormonal things like those things were especially the opioids were interesting to him because you can function on opioids for a long time if you have a proper product and a doctor that gives you the injections i mean goering was high i was addicted to morphine from 1923 until when the americans captured him in 45 that's 22 years he was functioning on morphine and when they captured him he had i write about it in blitz like the amount of morphine capsules he had on him so what the americans did was first to take away all the morphine from him and then he went through withdrawal in american you know incarceration and he lost you know a lot of pounds and he became like a more of a haggard uh goering which was standing nuremberg you know this haggard kind of guy defending what he did.

2:07:46And so Hitler was really an opioid guy while the army was really messed up. That's how you could sum it up briefly. He did try cocaine. Why didn't he get into cocaine? He started cocaine after the bomb attack by Stauffenberg on July 20th, 1944, when this bomb went off, which actually killed a few people in the room. This was during a

2:08:15table. And the table actually saved Hitler's life because it was a good German quality oak table. So the table was so stable that the bomb explosion kind of just kind of blew up the table. But Hitler behind the table was protected by this table. Yeah, this is the closest assassination attempt. Yeah. I mean, it's very weird that it didn't succeed because he had the bomb. He put it next to Hitler. He took out some of the explosives before he went into the room. This is one of the big mysteries why did stauffenberg take out some of the explosives there's no explanation for it but hitler survived but he was quite injured which nazi propaganda always denied like they always said the hit the führer was miraculously unharmed but he was quite harmed there were like over 100 splinters from the wood everywhere his eardrums were blown which was you know it's quite an injury, I guess.

2:09:09You know, he was bleeding internally and he was shell-shocked, basically. And then a new doctor comes in. His name is Giesing. Because Morel was not a... In Germany we have... Well, I guess it's worldwide. It's the ear, nose, and throat specialist, right? So an ear, nose, and throat specialist from the German army called Dr. Giesing. He was ordered to come into headquarters after the bomb attack to treat Hitler's blown ear drums. And Giesing gave Hitler cocaine because cocaine at the time was being, it was used, it was not schedule one. It had the effect that it would numb the pain and you could like use it, you would like put it on a certain place where you had the pain and then it would numb that area.

2:10:03But Hitler was like, he'd never taken cocaine before, but he got very interested in it. And Giesing writes a meticulous report about his experiences with Hitler. Alone that report is really fun to read. It's about a 15-page report that he did for American military after the war. When he was being interrogated by American military, he described what happened with Hitler and him. And he realized that Hitler really liked the cocaine. and then he's like started saying now give it in the nose now i want and it was a liquid that he could apply like with a dab like into the nose like it was cocaine powder but he could like liquefied yeah liquefied cocaine and hitler loved it and he's just saying things like finally i can think clear again and he had this cocaine rush which is a rush of uh superiority it's a it's a dangerous drug because you think you know more than the other it's not very humble drug you know it it it just increases the ego and that actually he liked that because that was you know after the bomb attack he he thought everyone is a traitor like he didn't feel safe anymore in his own bunker you know and he was like nazis and the right wing is always paranoid like who's the enemy like they're behind us, like they're stabbing us in the back.

2:11:25So Hitler was this type of person. So the cocaine kind of stabilized him. And Giesing realized that this guy is like a drug guy. Like he didn't know. He like came in, he saw the Führer for the first time. He was like in awe and like a drug wreck was approaching him. And as soon as he had some cocaine in his system, because this was summer of 44, he already had taken a lot of opioids and a lot of drugs. So he, and a lot of these dubious hormonal concoctions, which led to autoimmune diseases in Hitler, maybe even had Parkinson's. He was, morale basically turned him into a physical wreck. Giesing also writes about this.

2:12:00He's like trembling before he goes into the room for the first time where the Führer is. And then this old guy in a blue kind of pyjama is kind of coming up to him and kind of shaking his hand. That's the Führer, you know? And Giesing is like totally shocked because he's like, you know, the destiny of the German nation, the whole Europe everything's like hangs on this guy you know and then whenever he takes cocaine he's a little bit better like but the cocaine had the problem that Giesing was more of at least later in his discussions with the US military he described himself as a conscientious guy and he's like I became like I had the kind of problems giving Hitler more cocaine and yeah and I'm sure Hitler could have sensed that And then Morel started disliking Giesing because Hitler spent more time now with Giesing than with him.

2:12:55And there was what I call the doctor's war ensued because Giesing then tried to get rid of Morel because Giesing could suddenly see that Hitler was receiving a lot of drugs. And he was taking cocaine with Giesing. Giesing left the room. Then Morel would come in and give him oikodal, the opioid intravenously. which is the speedball effect cocaine and an opioid you know at the same time that's like that creates a really crazy high but that's a high that's not stable anymore you know that's a that's a high that you that's like at the end of your drug career you take the speedball so speedball is a combination of a stimulant right and a depressant cocaine and heroin are depressants yeah so combining cocaine and heroin huh wow i've never had a speedball but i think it's like the most hardcore drug experience you can have you know and hitler had this in the summer of 1944 for quite some time and then the doctors really fought for an influence over hitler and giesing teamed up with himler head of the ss and basically said to himler this morel guy and himler was already suspicious of morel obviously because Morel spending so much time with Hitler, there's no control.

2:14:16Like Himmler was a control freak. What is he actually giving to the Führer? The Führer doesn't look good anymore. So Giesing was trying to get Morel out. Maybe because he wanted Hitler to have a better health. Maybe he wanted to have the job himself. He certainly tried to get rid of Morel and it came to like the high noon situation, like the duel between the two doctors. it's by the way why i think it's completely insane that hollywood hasn't bought the rights yet alone this darkness war you mean for the entire blitz story yeah of course yeah yeah that's really i mean some of the greatest movies i mean like uh fear alone in las vegas you can do a drug movie on the nazis uh you know one of my favorite movies probably downfall which is hitler in the bunker which does, I guess, does Downfall have a drug?

2:15:07No, they missed the drug angle because my book hadn't been out yet. They didn't know about it. That'd be a different story. They can't really explain why Hitler became a physical wreck. There's no explanation for it except the drugs, the opioid addiction. You could explain it. It is a part of it that it's an extremely stressful position he's in. Yeah, but you don't become a physical wreck. The physical wreck aspect, yeah. And there were two bedrooms in the bunker in Berlin. Two bedrooms. One, of course, for Hitler, the other one for Morel. No one else was sleeping in the bunker. I mean, you can see the importance of, especially in those last months of Morel in the bunker.

2:15:51And they didn't get that when they made the movie The Downfall. But it's still an interesting movie, but I can't take it seriously because they didn't see this. There's a drug component. Again, I don't think it has to be the main thing, but it has to be a part of it. A serious movie on Bliss would be really nice. It's not easy to do. No. There's something about drugs, if you do a movie on drugs, that involves drugs, that it makes it, you can go too far into Tarantino territory, which is also incredible and awesome, but it's a different thing. He invents history and he's like very open about it.

2:16:33Like this is not what actually happened. I think a Blitz movie would have to stick to the facts. And I've spoken with some directors, very good German directors, and it's just very hard to do. But if you do it well, that's like a legendary movie. Yeah, that would be incredible. Can you just speak high level from, what is it, you said 41 to 45. what were some behavioral changes or changes in decision-making that we can trace in Hitler that could be attributed to drugs? How did it change him? Well, an interesting event is July 1943 in a villa in northern Italy where Hitler meets Mussolini. and Mussolini is basically fed up with the war and he wants Italy to leave the axis of evil.

2:17:31And Hitler is really pissed when he hears that. He knows that's what the meeting is all about. And Mussolini, I mean, the Italians invented that modern type of fascism and Italy was the role model for Nazi Germany, but by now Nazi Germany, of course, has been much more powerful. But Italy is the most important ally and now Mussolini is quitting in the middle of the war? I mean, what is going on here? So Hitler becomes, and Morel writes about this quite a lot, he's in a terrible mood. He really doesn't want to go. He might lose his temper or whatever. He's not happy. And actually, that's the day when he receives the oikodal for the first time.

2:18:14And because he says to Morel, under such stress, I'm not going to go. he threatens like he calls off the whole thing like the plane's already waiting in in obersalzberg everything is ready and he says i'm not meeting this guy and then morel gives him oikodal and you can see you know you know the time when he gets the oikodal and that's when he has this effect for the first time he's like i can do anything this is great i'm gonna i'm gonna explain to mussolini that he's not gonna leave the war effort and on the way to the plane he says to Morel that this Oikodal is really helping him and he wants another shot and he receives another shot so he has quite a lot of Oikodal in him when he speaks to Mussolini and there's like the people who write the protocol of the meeting and also other people around it's not just two people in the room it's like I don't know 15 or 20 people in the room and a lot of people talk about that meeting in their memoirs and Mussolini is not able to say one word basically because Hitler is so high and so charged and he's like just telling him the whole time how great this is you know what they're doing right now and of course there's not even it's not possible that you're gonna leave you know we are in this together from the you know he explains everything you know the whole thing for like two hours and Mussolini is just like it's like then a messenger comes in and says Rome has just been bombed he's like Like he knows, he can't say anything and he stays.

2:19:48So that was very much influenced, that meeting by his oikodal. And that's probably because it was so successful in Hitler's eyes. What happened is why oikodal became a very attractive drug for him. And this happened, this was the first time in July 1943. So he didn't take oikodal through the whole time. It only started in July 1943. He started with a regular opioid use. You can see that he takes it more and more regular now. Not every day, but sometimes, like there's a September 1944, he takes oikoto every second day, which is like a junky rhythm. You take it, then the next day you don't take it.

2:20:25Then you take it again. Why is that junky rhythm? You don't take it all the time because you need to, I don't know, relax. You take it maybe a Saturday night, you take it, and the high lasts till Sunday morning. And then Sunday, when the high slowly wears off, you sleep and then you wake up and you're hungry. Maybe you eat. And then the next day, Monday, you're going to do it again. So that's this rhythm. And it was more potent than, what is it, dolentine? Dolentine. Oikodal is said to have the best effect, the best in the sense of, it's not about strength. You know, you just increase the dosage and you have a stronger effect, but you can't increase it too much because then you're going to die.

2:21:08You know, that's also the problem with opioids. If you take too much, you're going to die because you just have a heart attack. So, but there's nuanced differences that it's hard to convert into words, I guess. Yeah. Different molecules have different effects. So, oikodal apparently had the best effect. That's why you had the oxycodone epidemic in America, because people take this pill. I mean, thank God they're not injecting it all like Hitler did. They take a pill, so it's not so dangerous as injecting. But apparently the effect is so pleasant of this oikodal, of this particular type of opioid, that it just is more attractive maybe than Dolantin.

2:21:47Is it possible to try to reverse engineer the effect of Hitler's drug use on the outcome of World War II? So if he didn't use any drugs, would the Nazis be more successful or less successful? What do you think? I think it would be speculative to answer, but I can try. But the war is so complex. I mean, there's many different ways this war could have played out and ended, but I think it would always have ended with a German defeat. I don't think it would have ended with a German defeat. Well, if you don't attack the Soviet Union, then of course you can win. But as soon as you attack the Soviet Union, that was like...

2:22:31As we've talked about, I think the probability of success is low, but you know i would put it like i don't know 10 again extremely speculative but yeah if you do blitzkrieg type of attack very rapid don't split the forces in operation barbarossa go straight from moscow don't invade britain don't declare war on the uh united states and really focus on gaining oil from the Middle East. So maybe making the Africa campaign the central point in the very beginning so that you have the resources that are essential for the industrial capacity of Germany that's required to keep manufacturing and keep fueling the planes, the tanks, the mechanized aspect of the army.

2:23:25So there's a lot of paths to this. I mean, but I don't think, I think it's probably fair to say that reasonable, thoughtful, calculated, disciplined leader would not have done any of the things Hitler did even in the beginning. I mean, it requires insanity. It requires hatred. It requires ideological self-capture where you tell yourself narratives that rapidly deviate from ground truth, from first principles of things. And you're an insane person. You're an insane dictator that's drunk on power. And it's impossible for you to make great military decisions at that point. Yeah, you would need like an impossible Hitler that is as crazy as he was, but still wouldn't make any irrational mistakes.

2:24:14So that doesn't exist. Hitler can only be imagined or understood as this, in a way, as the drugs. Hitler without drugs is unthinkable for me. And it doesn't, it makes, he was the drug guy. You cannot separate this. so Hitler was a self-destructive personality and National Socialism is a self-destructive movement that's why I said I think the Germans would have lost in any case except if there was this this perfect Hitler which is theoretically impossible theoretically impossible in the 20th century I mean you could think of Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great type characters that would really internalize the sense of in the case of Hitler that the German people are, like without the hatred, without the ideology, but with the murderous, with the ability to dehumanize the rest of the world and see as the German people as the superior.

2:25:19And so it's fair to do the Lebensraum and all of that kind of stuff. Right. It's hard to, it's just, the reason you want to think about that kind of stuff is Hitler got, to me at least, close. to capturing a very large part of the world. And it's terrifying and sort of unbelievable that somebody could get close to that. I mean, what you described as this feeling of superiority and conquering countries, that was basically what the Wehrmacht, the High Command, that's what they were going for. Yeah. And they wanted to eliminate Hitler in the Operation Valkyrie, not because they thought he's an evil guy, is killing the jews or you know they wanted to eliminate him because he was not this effective decision maker anymore that they needed to win the war or to end it in a different way and um i spoke with anthony beaver once about um the attempt of british intelligence to assassinate hitler and he had seen some evidence that at a point in time they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler or malfunctioning Hitler, which he was after, you know, the summer of 1943, is better for Britain than, you know, killing Hitler and then having to deal with like some kind of, you know, maybe the army would have taken over the country and that would have been more uncomfortable for Great Britain than having this, having the continuation of the degenerating maniac.

2:27:00What do we know about the very end, Hitler in the bunker? The moments, the days, the weeks, the months leading up to the suicide, all those kinds of things. It's quite well documented because people at the time were keeping diaries and writing about it, writing about the experiences. Also Morel wrote quite a bit what happened in the bunker. one thing that changed was that Eukodal was not available anymore so the drug that Hitler actually had become physically addicted to was suddenly not available anymore this had to do with the bombardment of the Merck company the factory in December 1944 British bombers destroyed the production facilities and morell there's a report of morell the overweight person riding on a motorcycle through bombed out berlin from pharmacy to pharmacy basically going into the pharmacies trying to score oikodal and he couldn't find it anymore it was nowhere to be found and that's when hitler goes into withdrawal what i find surprising is that he didn't use another opioid because morphine was available all the way till the end but he never kind of made that switch then like he doesn't also he didn't realize for a long time that he becomes physically dependent on a drug that he becomes a drug addict but this realization happens in the last uh weeks in the bunker because gobbels he understood it and gobbels wanted that bedroom the second bedroom so he said to hitler uh do you understand what's going on that morel makes turns you into a drug addict and he does like and at one point he realized what gobbels is saying is true because he felt the withdrawal he was shaking he felt like shit and and more is like giving him weird stuff in the end like one time he gives him harmin which is an mao inhibitor which is part of ayahuasca actually because he still had that in his doctor's bag it hadn't been used yet so it gives him that which also creates some kind of a weird high but you know hitler at one point realizes really what's going on this is late april so very late in the game and there's a few reports of what actually happens like some say that more has to kneel in front of him and that hitler puts a gun on his head and says you've been making me addicted to opioids get the hell out of the bunker for sure he fires him that day and more is described as being in tears like leaving the bunker he gets one of the last planes out of berlin he has a research lab in the south of Bavaria, close to the Berghof.

2:29:59And he makes like the one of the last or the last plane out of Berlin. He survives. Yeah. And he goes to this research lab. And this is like May 2nd, 1945. He has like a little apartment in his research lab. His wife is still in Berlin. He's like all alone. And he starts doing his taxes. And that kind of shows you that he was probably insane at that point, you know. Just totally out of touch. Why would you do your tax? Maybe he was bored, you know. Maybe it's like he didn't do his taxes for so long because he always had to treat Hitler. And then he thinks like, no, what am I going to do? I'm just going to do my tax.

2:30:31At least I'm going to do my taxes now. Very German thing to do. He's just a strange character. I mean, you tell us. I would put that in the movie for sure, him doing his taxes. That's how the movie ends. Well, then the Americans move into Bavaria, liberate Bavaria from National Socialism, which was a great job they did there. And so I'm also thankful not only to the Red Army, but also to the American forces. Really very thankful that they, because National Socialism was hard to beat. It was a beast, you know. It was hard to beat. So they capture Morel and they interrogate him and he actually lives for another two years in American custody in Germany in a military prison.

2:31:13And after these two years, his health's really bad. He has heart problems and the Americans dump him in front of the Munich train station in a much too small kind of uniform jacket, like probably an American uniform. And he's like lying on the pavement in front of the train station. And a half-Jewish nurse walks around there, finds him and he says, I'm Theo Morel. It's really like in a movie, I'm Theo Morel. I was the personal physician of the Führer. This is 1947, Germany's in ruins. And she brings him to a hospital. His wife comes from Berlin for the last time they meet in the hospital at Tegernsee.

2:31:53beautiful lake in Bavaria, and then he dies. So that was the end of Morel. So we know pretty much what happens in the end. Did somebody try to talk to Hitler about this? Like, what about Eva Braun? Has anybody close to him tried to talk about that? Well, Goebbels did. Well, that at the very end, but you would imagine maybe the generals or friends or inner circle. I mean, the reason I mentioned Eva is because, you know, like personal and people close to him. There is a certain tension between Eva Braun and Morell. And I could very well imagine that she talked with Hitler about it, but there's no record.

2:32:29So I don't know exactly. But they had a very intimate relationship. So Eva Braun was not just the dumb blonde that plays no role. They actually spoke every day. And when Hitler was in the military headquarters, he would phone her every night at 10 p.m. They would have a long phone conversation. so they had a very deep relationship and i'm pretty sure she didn't really like morel because you know for the obvious reasons he was closer to hitler than herself and you know if you you know count one plus one it's two you know but she could have maybe not liked him because she might have cared for hitler and you can see the effects of drugs on humans that you care for she also had a good relationship with him at times because he was often at the berghof the Berkow was like the, what is it called, Mar del Lago?

2:33:20Oh, the Mar del Lago, yeah. Yeah, that was kind of what it was. And it was actually, it became an official headquarter for Hitler. So he would actually make decisions from there. It was not just a vacation place. And Morel was often there and Eva Braun was always there. That was her place. She was running that place. She was like the woman of that place. And Hitler was often, of course, in the field, in the headquarters. but he came as much as he could to the Berghof because it's quite beautiful. I went up there. It's quite interesting. And she also had a good relationship with Morel and there's like a paper that I found where like they were very intimate and very close.

2:34:01Like there's a paper of Morel where she comes to him in the morning and she has like scratch marks. So apparently they had violent sex. so morel is like also kind of witness to that that that i found in washington dc in the national where hitler and eva had violent sex what do we know about hitler's sex life it's like not known right i found it interesting that morel describes these scratch marks i mean it's it's interesting so they they had some kind of kinky sex maybe maybe they also had normal sex and sometimes it was kinky or yeah maybe hitler was aggressive in bed but it doesn't really matter it's just what happened between Eva and him.

2:34:44Yeah, I don't think that affected military operations of the drug use did his sex. If he would have had sex with a lot of people, maybe with his generals, maybe then it would be worth writing about it because maybe he dominated his generals in bed or something. But he was just having sex with Eva and I don't think that's historically relevant. It might be interesting for the movie, but I don't want to see Hitler having sex. I don't think anyone wants to see Hitler having sex. But Eva Braun is an interesting character because she had more of a say than historians for a long time attributed to her.

2:35:21Then a biography was written on her by a female German historian. And that's a very good biography. It really shows that she had quite a lot to say in this relationship. She was not the dumb blonde that just, she was quite opinionated and active. so it's it's and she was she was filming him a lot like she had she was always filming in the back off you can go online and look at the eva braun clips and you will see hitler in color at the back off how he's like meeting children petting their head and you know this is she was contributing to the myth of this private the private man the good private man so eva braun is an interesting character for sure but i found one note that she in the beginning when morel started with his drugs, said to Morel that she wants the same drugs, the same medications, not drugs, the same medications as Hitler.

2:36:15So she would be on the same wavelength with him. She wanted to be, she didn't want to lose this world. But I mean, Hitler became such a drug, polytoxicomanic user that of course Eva couldn't keep up with that. They weren't a drug couple. I don't, I didn't see any evidence for that, that they would like take all the crazy drugs together and then have crazy sex or something like that. That's not how it was. So I think she was sympathetic to Morel in the beginning and then changed her opinion. And I'm pretty sure she talked with Hitler about it, but there's no records about their private conversations.

2:36:49Let's talk about another perspective on this whole story that you document in your book, The Bohemians. The subtitle is The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis. So this is the story of the people who resisted from within Germany. Can you tell their story? And in particular, it's told to the story of the two key figures in the movement who happened to also be in love. Well, the main guy is Haro. Haro Schulze-Beusen. He caught my attention when I was doing research in an archive in Munich. researching drugs in the Luftwaffe, Göring's Luftwaffe, Göring being the Morphinist. I mean, the Luftwaffe was a drug, a very promiscuous place, like a lot of people in the Luftwaffe high.

2:37:43Oh, so more for entertainment versus the practical aspect of, so it's less about like the meth optimizing the human performance and more about just exploring. Like the number three of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet, he committed suicide in the fall of 1941 and he had had seven pervitin tablets for breakfast and okay so he was really high on meth he really enjoyed but he loved to take meth and then drink alcohol was a big thing in the luftwaffe um you can drink a lot more when you're on methamphetamine and i found this letter and it was really coincidence while i was looking through like the drug stuff i was searching for you know drugs and i found this letter by haro schultze boysen who had nothing to do with drugs but still i found this letter i don't know why i can't i can't remember how exactly it happened that i was suddenly reading this letter and it was the last letter that he wrote in his life he wrote it to his father and he said that everything i have done i'm totally fine with it and i know it's very hard for you and i really am mostly sad for you and mother and my brother that you have to go through this and i'm very sorry but i'm fine with it and i have a clean conscience i did what i could to stop this madness i'm like what who is this guy you know and i googled him and there were not so many hits on him but i read a little bit and he actually had formed together with his wife libertas which means freedom good name he had formed the largest resistance network against the nazis that ever existed over a hundred people in berlin that were all connected and they were they were like from all flights of life like there were some were artists other were workers some were leftists other were patriots uh how always believed that people could come to an agreement like it's possible to actually talk about things and he was a he was a true democrat maybe you could say or true i don't know libertarian or you know he was a he had to learn a hard lesson that with nazis you cannot argue because they they are always right they're not that they it it doesn't work at least it didn't work during the third reich like he could he had he had published a newspaper during the weimar republic called gegner which means opponent and in the gegner opponents could all write like who would be on the streets opponents they could all right in the in the opponent and so it was a you read all kinds of texts and and and opinions and he thought when hitler took over power in 33 that he could continue to publish the opponent because the opponent he's he thought even you know in a in a nazi-led germany you know this keeps the discourse you have to have a discourse you have we have to discuss we have to disagree and then in April 1933 two months after Hitler took power they had a meeting with the editorial staff and they discussed the new issue and then there was a knock on the door and it was the SS and they beat up everybody and they destroyed the typewriters and the printing press that they had in the office in Berlin and they took Haro and his best friend who was half Jewish to one of these early concentration camps and they tortured both of them and the Jew was killed.

2:41:29He didn't make it. Henry Erlanger and Haro, at that moment, he realized who he's against, you know, that he has to, he decided to become, to fight the system. And the way he fought the system was later during the 60s. We also had a 60s kind of cultural and political changes in Germany and our 60s, they called it march through the institutions. That is a way to infiltrate the system, like to become part of the system and then change the system from within. So you don't leave the country, you stay, you go into the institutions, you march through the institutions. So Haro decided to go into the Luftwaffe and he was working in the Air Force Luftwaffe Ministry, Huge building still intact today in Berlin, Wilhelmstraße.

2:42:25Quite an interesting building that was like the power center of the Luftwaffe, like one of the most important structures in the whole Nazi regime. And he was working there and he worked his way up. And he received quite a lot of information. For example, when Germany for the first time became militarily active again, Again, this was in 1936 when the Germans supported the fascists in Spain in the Spanish Civil War. This was a clandestine operation. The Luftwaffe did this. And they, like, German soldiers went to Spain, like, in plain cloth, like, posing as vacationers. But then they, you know, were actually soldiers and supporting Franco's, you know, were part of Franco's victory later on.

2:43:12And Haro had this information and he passed, he tried to pass this on to the BBC. He failed passing it on. Well, he met a BBC journalist during the Olympic Games in Berlin and told him about this. And the BBC guy was too afraid to make this public. And he kind of buried that information. So Haro, it's just a very interesting character. And he was in love with Libertas and Libertas with him. haro came from like a bourgeois family very educated his great grand uncle was frontier pits who built up the marine the navy for the kaiser so he came from this like influential german family but they were all patriots they were not nazis they were democrats patriots and militarists i guess you could say or like you know very straight laced also in a way and and libertas she came from a castle north of berlin she was this like bohemian like aristocratic bohemian type very good looking always playing music and they fell in love they met on the on boats uh they were both on a on haro was rowing and she was on a sailboat of a guy that haro also knew so he was rowing and he saw his friend on the sailboat and he looked at libertas she looked him and they were in love in 1934 and the the other guy the friend of haro he left his sailboat because he realized i'm like the the fifth wheel on the car like not really needed right like how do you say that in a sailboat terms i don't know that the third third sail is not needed you know but what happened at night haro didn't sleep with libertas for her that was very unusual because everyone wanted to sleep with her but how like he wanted to keep his clothes on it was a very warm night and i researched this quite thoroughly like i know exactly the temperature and so also the bohemians when you read the bohemians you really experience the life of these people what like what they experience but everything is nothing is invented uh which is very tricky to do uh so what happens that night like libertas wants to take off his clothes and he doesn't want to take them off because why from the torture in april 1933 he has quite a lot of scars they even burned swastikas into his thighs like not burned sorry they uh with knives the ss so he doesn't want to show that to her he just and he hadn't had a girlfriend for a while like he can't open up emotionally because he's fighting the knots it's very secret like no one knows about this that he's long-term planning his life to fight the system that he hates so much because they killed his best friend in front of his eyes but at one point libertas does you know take off his clothes and she sees this and she's like naive she's even a member of the nazi party but she's not a very active party member she's just you know she works for mgm actually in berlin maria hollywood film studio office in berlin germany was one of the biggest movie markets and she was the press girl.

2:46:21She did the campaigns for the big Hollywood movies in Germany. So just a regular German girl? Well, she wasn't regular. She was from a very high family. Actually, her grandfather had been in a relationship with the German emperor, which is a side story that I found out when I researched the Bohemians. The German emperor apparently was bisexual and was going to that castle and they had homosexual kind of meetings there with Libertas' grandfather. So she came from a very unusual family. But what I mean actually in a usual German girl, what I mean by that is it's not obvious that a person like that would hold a crucial role in the resistance against the Nazis.

2:47:10No, not at all. That was always a problem because for her, it was weird that someone was against the system. but haro told haro was totally convinced that fascism is wrong and that he has to fight it and more and more libertas was convinced and then more friends uh kind of came into the group and the way haro organized this resistance group was through parties like they were like a power couple of berlin and they had a great loft apartment they moved together to a to a loft apartment on also a side street from kudam a huge uh room and there they had parties every second thursday night and they would invite friends and then once they trusted someone personally then they would spill the beans and say this is actually not just a party but they would like test it that like at the party they would say something critical of the regime and you immediately you know either the person jumps on it, responds, or like, you know, goes somewhere else, gets a drink at the bar, you know, not into it.

2:48:17So that was the way of recruiting people. And that was such an efficient way that the Gestapo was not able to understand this group for a long time, not even recognize that there is a group because Gestapo was very good at infiltrating, for example, communist resistance groups, because you just had to go in as a Gestapo guy and be a communist. just say the right words, and they would at one point, you know, take you. But with Haro and Libertas, it wasn't so easy, you know. They would sniff you out, you know. These parties were what, like intellectuals, like artists and that kind of stuff? Yeah, yeah.

2:48:56They had music, they would dance, they would sleep with each other. Oh, sex stuff too. Well, they had, and this is again kind of a parallel to the 60s, they had the idea that if you're against fascism if you're for freedom of yeah free love the whole thing yeah they were they had free love but it wasn't a dogma like there were also there was a doctor a female doctor there she was quite square i guess you would say and she was like against this and she said this is too complicated we have we are resistance group like what if like there's jealousy and what like that this could compromise operations and it did sometimes so that's why the bohemians are a very interesting subject because sometimes it just doesn't work in a way it works that love really bonds them together but also especially libertas and how they have a terrible marriage sometimes like they really fight because libertas is not so much intellectually convinced she's she's more resistance fighter from the heart like she feels that the nazis are not good but how was more like the analytical guy so they have a lot of friction also and it's it's a it's a fascinating story and they came quite far i mean they made there was a point in time when haro had militarily relevant information through his position at the luftwaffe ministry and he passed that on to allies to western allies and to the soviet union so he went a step further than And just being like a resistance guy, he became, you could say, a traitor.

2:50:31He would give information to the Soviets. Yeah, he would. Because he said... As part of the resistance. Yeah, they can beat Germany. But that was also discussed in the group. It's very interesting to see. Some say, we can't do this because the Soviet Union is also a totalitarian regime. But then Harro says, yeah, but they are going to beat Hitler. So the Bohemians is a very interesting topic. What lessons do you learn from these folks maybe about why so few resisted Hitler in Germany? I mean, it was extremely dangerous. Is purely the danger? Is it also people believed it's hard to take yourself, like be an independent thinker and take yourself outside the propaganda?

2:51:20Because they're also swimming in propaganda. I mean, the chances of succeeding are quite small because the system was extremely strong. And if you'd made a joke about Hitler and the wrong person heard it, like in a restaurant and would rat on you, you would land in a concentration camp. So people were very, very careful. Also at parties with like Hau and Libertas and she was singing and they were drinking and dancing. And then suddenly the political discussion started. you have to have guts to then actually not leave the party but to stay because they were risking their lives basically as soon as they would be found out they would be dead and people don't want to die when they're like in their mid-20s they were pretty young and also Libertas you would often say like we can't win why are we risking our lives for like what so one time they did a

2:52:20Klebezettelaktion Klebezettel like they produced because one guy had access to a printing press and they produced leaf like small papers that had glue on one side and the paper said what the Nazis did they set up a huge exhibition hall which was called the Soviet Paradise this exhibition was in the center of Berlin I'd never heard about this before I found this when I researched the Bohemians and it was the most popular exhibition during the whole of the war like 2 million people 2 million Germans saw this they went into this exhibition and they saw how horrible the Soviet Union is how horrible communism is to people so it was a propaganda show and the group decided to make these leaflets which didn't say the soviet paradise but it said the nazi paradise torture ss torture hunger war how long will it last and they glued over a thousand of these stickers everywhere in berlin uh in in may 1942 at night and they organized it in a way that they always to a man and a woman would go out and they had like the stickers with them and then they would pretend to kiss and would like lean on a wall and then while they were kissing one would like put the put the sticker on then they would move on in the dark so in the morning of that may 1942 tens of thousands of berliners saw that the city was like saw these things so is does it make a difference it made one on that day you know it was a very dangerous thing to do and no one was No one got caught.

2:54:08And in the morning, a lot of people saw that there is actually resistance, that there are people who do something against it. So I think they did something. Yeah, I was reading about protests in recent human history, and then most of them, many of them don't have an effect until they do. It's like this threshold effect. It's very hard to know. It's very hard to know because it's a match that lights a fire. And sometimes it's a spark that takes a little bit of time to propagate through the whispers. What happens is the people whispering. It's the whisper network of people talking. And sometimes it just takes that one sticker to begin the whispers.

2:54:54And then a few months later, the regime is overthrown. It's funny. But it's hard to sort of trace back what was affecting and what was not. I mean, Haro was convinced that the system would lose. So he thought that maybe we can make a contribution that it's going faster. No, maybe we will be that spark. So unless I, when I think that there's this possibility, I must try it. You know, that's, that was his conviction. So he would put his life on the line for that possibility. How did they get caught? they were approached by the Soviet Union who wanted to recruit them as spies and they didn't want to do that.

2:55:38Howell refused the Soviet intelligence. These are documents that were found in the early 90s. One of the sons of one of the members of that group, a good friend of Haro, one of his sons, went to Moscow to look at the files And he found kind of furious Soviet KGB kind of descriptions of this weird guy, Haro, that doesn't want to be a proper Soviet spy and just says, yes, I'm going to give you information so you can hurt Hitler, but I'm not going to play your game. I'm not going to be one of you. so still they did collaborate with the soviet union they accepted a radio transmitter from the soviet union with which they were supposed to send military information via radio to moscow and they like struggle with the technology the russians give them like a an apparatus only with like a Russian instruction and it's like very difficult they make mistakes but what actually then gets them caught is the Russians at one point answer and send a message to them through the ether and in and that message is uh is coded but the Nazis intercept that message and are able to decode it and in the message it gives the clear names of Haro and his address which is a total like intelligence blunder or maybe they just wanted to give them up and had their revenge because Stalin did crazy stuff like that, you know.

2:57:20So they suddenly know, the Gestapo knows, Haro Schulze-Boysen, the high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe ministry is giving military information to the Soviet Union and apparently like he's meeting with all kinds of friends. So they started, the Gestapo started observing the group for months and the group at one point realizes that they've been basically found out and but then it's already too late then they capture quite a few of them and quite a few get a trial military trial and receive the death penalty and are also being executed and haro and libertas are among them and also that last chapter of their lives is very well documented and it actually ends with that letter you know that I found in the beginning that's the last thing that Haro does is write that letter to his father that's very interesting what happens with Libertas because she gets in custody the Gestapo asks one of their secretaries to go in and pose as a friend to Libertas and Libertas actually falls for it and starts telling that secretary who pretends to be her friend and kind of helps her with certain things, tells her secrets and that kind of breaks the neck of the group.

2:58:40It's a very tragic ending. So while my books always contain as much humor as possible, that is not a funny story, but it's a very dramatic story. Even though they had a lot of humor, obviously, I mean, they had parties to recruit people. What lessons can you learn from that about how to resist totalitarian regimes? Is there some deeper wisdom? I just think it's admirable to be brave and not do things that you cannot really justify in front of your own conscience. I don't know if I would have been so brave. I don't even know, obviously, how my conscience would have been, but I'm probably more the fleeing type.

2:59:34Like a lot of writers would just leave Germany. Like Thomas Mann just left Germany and lived in Pacific Palisades. And then maybe write, criticize, but leave first. And he criticized it from the outside and he was quite influential. Like he worked for the BBC. They did like shows against the Nazis. So maybe you can do more when you leave. It's just like today, let's say we see something, we live in a system that suddenly changes and we're not happy with it anymore. Do we just go along and continue to stare at our smartphone or do we do something against it? What do we do? I mean, every situation has very different conditions.

3:00:19you know i think it's probably even harder now to to be in the resistance uh than it was back then but i think it does at the end of the day boil down to facing yourself looking yourself in the mirror that you're facing your conscious and then doing the the courageous thing and i think that in itself that like it's the tree falling in the forest even if there's nobody there to hear it just the fact that that exists somehow through the karma channels of the world can materialize into progress into a revolution against the oppression something something about that that human spirit still shining through can start a revolution i mean it is that spirit that that actually made us human.

3:01:13It is that neuroplasticity in our brain that we... do not just repeat the conditioned

3:01:31sets that we ought to repeat, but that we actually dim down the command center in the brain and let other parts of the brain react, which is the psychedelic experience, basically. That, I think, contributes to the evolution of our species, and our species is certainly threatened by extinction. So I think if we somehow care for the human race, then resistance becomes a very immediate and important topic. Because you can resist, obviously. Your brain is yours. You can resist in many ways. Just by thinking. That's actually why I became a writer when I was a teenager. I was very political. I wanted to change the system.

3:02:26I thought this is not good what's happening. This was in the Cold War. Very conservative is even the right word, but Ronald Reagan was president. So I thought my writing could change the brainwaves of the readers basically and therefore have a neuroplastic effect on the reader. And just because that is what literature is. literature and i started off as a as a novelist so that's really literature it's about what what do you see right now how do you describe it so you do it in ways that when you read it when you read a good book you feel good because suddenly you see different things your brain changes you become more free i think if you read good literature that was always my form of of resistance communist resistance cells would probably say this is nothing you know but i think it is resistance and that's a little bit i think it resembles a little bit what this group did just living differently not living you know that's why i said in the beginning nazis are bad dancers because they like i think they were good dancers at the parties you know and And they were like, I think it's, dancing can be a form of resistance.

3:03:47Yeah, but I also like the scale. When you resist and through that resistance, you have impact at scale. And I do think writing is that. So if you can encapsulate your sort of the spirit of that resistance into writing, that's beautiful. And some of the greatest literature does exactly that. Right. That is the aim of my next book. so is this still called stone sapiens yeah it's called stone sapiens great title great title so what what is this lens that you're looking at at all of human history through i discussed this with already mentioned anthony beaver who is like the master in historical non-fiction books i said is it also possible to write a world history like about everything basically and he said yes it is possible it's not easy because you have to understand like a lot you know and obviously it will always be a selection it's clear you know that's why i also think that the historical science is basically a fictional science i mean i have a forward the blitz forward basically tells that story don't take it with a grain of salt not only blitz but every historical book because we weren't there you know that's what johnny depp said when the when the when the guy said so you had like a mega pint of red wine he just said were you there you know the guy wasn't there so um history historical sciences is a fiction yeah but you know it's a certain type of fiction and it's based on facts so i'm not inventing anything in stone sapiens and i'm highly interested in the very early human history and there are not a lot of sources so the beginning of the book is more speculative than for example the vietnam war chapter in the vietnam war chapter i'm in hanoi speaking to vietcong uh generals asking them did they supply heroin to the to the gis which would diminish which diminish their fighting capability that's you can research that and that's that's also a chapter.

3:05:59And by the way, the Vietnam War is not called the Vietnam War in Vietnam. It's called the American War. And also I was like sitting with these Viet Cong generals in Hanoi just like a few weeks ago for researching for stone sapiens. And I said, so did the Viet Cong bring heroin? Because it's, there's never been evidence that it happened this way. And they just looked at me and they said, there's no Viet Cong. Like, what are you talking about? you are the Viet Cong. He said, no, this is an American propaganda term. We were the North Vietnamese army. We never call ourselves the Viet Cong. So the book is full of surprises, obviously.

3:06:37But the very early beginning of Stone Sapiens goes back to about 1.5 million years ago when Homo erectus, who also has become kind of famous by now, Homo erectus, it's like the first human that really gets shit done. Yeah, they get moving. Yeah, they move. And why were they moving? Why were they moving? I mean, then you can examine exactly where they originated, which was, I mean, it's also disputed by now that it's the Great Rift Valley, that only the most fossils have been found there. But that doesn't mean that they originated there. Maybe they originated in the Central African rainforest where fossils disintegrate.

3:07:18And only there in the Rift Valley, we still find it. But we know for sure that in the Great Rift Valley, there was a plant called cut which is like a plant speed so they were using that it's still being used now in these countries in ethiopia yemen around the horn of africa cut is it's very normal to use you chew the leaves and it gives you like it's like an amphetamine it's a plant amphetamine basically uh so homo erectus you can there's no proof that they actually used it but they were living in that area and the plant was there so you can you can write about that So it's interesting because they were able to do certain things like they shed the fur.

3:08:01They were the first ones to suddenly be naked. And that has the effect that sweat glands are produced. Homo erectus could sweat it out basically when they were very hot. What animals couldn't do because they had the fur. So an antelope can run faster as a Homo erectus. but at like after 10 minutes the antelope has to like stop like that's what dogs do like the tongue goes out and humans didn't have to do that because they were sweating so they developed the jogging mode basically so they were jogging they were not sprinting to get the animal they were jogging it and when the animal couldn't do it had to rest then the humans would come and hunt it down so Homo erectus was evolutionary very good and then later that one of the species coming out of Homo erectus is Homo sapiens.

3:08:54And Homo sapiens, at one point, there were only like about 1 ,500 people left. There were not a lot of Homo sapiens. There was a point in time when there were quite a few of them and the problem became inbreeding and there was a real danger of extinction. They were vulnerable, you know, they were not on top of the food chain yet. So they had to develop consciousness. Consciousness is what basically saved us from extinction. Without the human consciousness, we wouldn't be here. That is what made us in the end then superior to the other animals. So how did this happen? You can kind of trace how they moved.

3:09:31You can trace that they went through the Central African rainforest. And there's one plant there which elephants like, and that's iboga. And iboga now is like the hot thing of the psychedelic renaissance. Iboga, iboga, iboga. but it's also the oldest drug in the book basically they saw that elephants were eating iboga the root and the leaves and suddenly we're like walking backwards and we're behaving in an unusual way and then people were also using this and this was going on over like a hundred thousand years in the rainforest so you can you can write a story about that you know that was it maybe iboga of course you can't prove it you know maybe the frontal cortex grew by itself you know that's a really compelling story that's one of the great mysteries of how did the light turn on right the magic of human cognition and consciousness and the the like sapiens by harari which is a great book he also misses that like at when when he comes to those moments he writes like we don't understand how the first cognitive revolution and the second cognitive revolution actually happened And so I find it interesting to kind of look, could it have been drugs?

3:10:47Like I include, like everything he leaves out, I look at thoroughly. He does a good explanation of interesting consequences. You know, our ability to imagine ideas and share them and, you know, collaborate on them and the imagination, all that kind of stuff. But the why, the transitions of why did it happen, he doesn't provide, right? I mean, there's some theories, but if Iboga is one of them, that's a compelling one. That's a really compelling one. Yeah, I mean, I'm still researching this book and writing it. I also want to go there because they still take Iboga in Gabon, for example. I also interviewed one of the leading Iboga experts at Columbia University for Stone Sapiens, and he described how iboga works in the brain because that's and he's never taken iboga himself oh interesting he just relies on the data he doesn't want to be personally influenced but he he said he will take it at a certain point in time but right now he's still just working on data just on with patients you know and what he found and also examining in the brain through brain scanners what actually happens and like classic psychedelics like lsd or psilocybin they dock at certain points they interact with certain receptors it's quite well understood how they work and he said iboga is completely different it's like and he also showed this with his hands because he's so mesmerized by his own findings like it kind of it's kind of everywhere at the same time in the brain like he says like a spa for the neurons basically like the it's it's it is his findings show and these are academic findings at colombia that it's like as if he says he said to me as if iboga would know our brain from a long time like it knows exactly like if you're addicted to something or if you're depressed a depression literally is a depression in the neuronal network a depression is a thought loop for example you know a system of thought loops that you're that i'm not worthy i'm not whatever i can't do it i you always go back like this is it really kind kind of depresses your brain in a way.

3:13:07And Iboga sees this immediately and kind of takes the depression out and makes your brain basically well again. So this is what his findings are. So he says he's totally convinced this is like, he doesn't call it a plant, he calls it like a neurotechnology of the 22nd century. So Iboga really seems to be in a different kind of category. That's why I really feel that Stone Sapiens must be written because there's so much that historians just shied away from. And it all started when I was on the island of Crete, the biggest island of Greece. Crete, that's another Harari moment. on Crete was the first what is called high culture of Europe the Minoan culture you might have heard of the Minoan culture and no one can explain so far why there on Crete suddenly in Europe they started making amazing structures and amazing art and how did it happen there that this totally backwards place Crete became i mean backwards as any other place you know why did it happen there that such intricate objects were being made and that the culture was uh was developing so intensely and i was kind of thinking about that that's how the book started i was with my kids on vacation in creed and if you go to like knossos or festos the big archaeological sites or to the museum in Heraklion you don't find an answer why did it happen there and then I found like an old book in a in an old bookshop and it described an excavation site at the sea and that it was like maybe a maritime uh place where like a harbor basically and then while I was swimming there I found on the seafloor the remnants of a wall that was a harbor wall that was out that was breaking the waves and then I climbed over the fence because the archaeological site is still fenced off like it's not explained officially what it is and the the walls in there are the biggest walls of the whole bronze era and it was actually quite a big harbor and then the next step is what did they trade?

3:15:47And they traded olive oil because Crete was the first place to produce olive oil. And then I also found, and this is historically documented, opium was made in Crete and the poppy flower was growing there. And this was the harbor. Basically, they became incredibly wealthy through olive oil and opium trade through that harbor. So you could say that the whole of the European high culture, which goes from Minoa, it goes to athens so it all started basically with with you know they were drug dealers in a way or they i mean it was the most potent medicine because it was the only medicine that numbs the pain uh for sure you know opium works and the minoans uh developed that so i mean it's kind of it's a bit similar to the blitzed experience you're the more i start i did research the more I found.

3:16:45That there's this whole component to human history that could be a really critical component. I mean, I am really interested about the origin. There are certain leaps, like the origins of human civilization and then the origins of Homo sapiens. Those are really big leaps. I mean, there's some evidence, you know, like they came through the area where Iboga was, but there's no academic proof. So I guess an academically trained historian couldn't really write about that. but I can write about it. I can write about possibilities. Yeah, I mean, that's what, the farther into history you go, the more it's about writing the possibilities.

3:17:29I mean, it's also interesting, why did the Neanderthals die out? And what we can compare is the cave art, and the cave art of the Neanderthals is much simpler than ours. Like, if you really get into the cave art, I don't know if you've done that, No, no. It's quite fascinating. Picasso looked at some of the cave paintings in southern France, and he said, we didn't learn anything new. And if you study them, they're really good. But only the humans are good. The Neanderthals, they were like worse artists than us. And you can also see there's a very famous one that comes from Algiers with like a shaman and around his body, like mushrooms grow out of his body.

3:18:14so he was like a mushroom shaman so mushrooms seem to have been like part at least in that area and i mean that's the stoned ape theory that uh that that terence mckenna uh did and i think i a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the neanderthals who did not have a drug culture they were basically too sober for the future we assimilated them they had no chance against our impetus of boldly going where no one has gone before they were much more happy with what they had they were not progressing all the time like we have the transcendental kind of moment which is the psychedelic experience I guess you could think of it without it but to imagine sapiens makes more sense to imagine sapiens as stone sapiens, as a species that was able to incorporate psychoactive components into his development.

3:19:18It makes a lot of sense. What about one of the great, if you could think of it that way, technologies that humans have developed is religion, religion of all different kinds. Do you think there's a connection between psychedelics and religion, the development of religion throughout different parts of the world? Well, I think Moses is quite interesting. Moses was a traumatized man that had fled Egypt, where he had killed a man who had been beating up a Hebrew. So Moses kind of took revenge and killed him. So he was running from the law. And he was together with, in the Bible it says, I think, 66 people.

3:20:03They were in the desert, in the Sinai. and they had been fasting for days and no alcohol. So it was kind of a psychedelic retreat, basically. I mean, this is being examined by Israeli scholars and I think it's very interesting work. They examine in detail what does the Bible say? The Bible mentions in that passage where Moses sees the burning bush and then gets the Ten Commandments. In that Bible passage, there's a lot of, several times the acacia is mentioned. And the acacia, the Egyptian acacia grows right in that Sinai area and contains DMT. So there's this Israeli research that Moses was actually having a trip, basically.

3:20:55He was seeing, he was hallucinating. The burning bush was, you know, if you take LSD and you look at a bush in the heat, you know, it will move, you know, it might resemble like a burning and, you know, experience. Then he went up the mountain, which takes three hours while the others were staying down. And with a DMT type of experience, it's not that everyone in the group has the same experience, similar to ayahuasca. sometimes like one guy has like incredible experience while another person might not feel that much at all and Moses felt a lot and you do feel a lot when you you know when you are when you have something to work through and he had certainly something to work through the trauma of killing a man so it's also no surprise that he receives one of the commandments you should not kill you know so for him it's like extremely extremely important and uh what he receives on this on the mountain like god is like there's someone speaking to me and he understands that god is not that there's not many gods just one god like he has a revelation you know and it i think when i when i read you know these examinations by these scholars i think it makes a lot of sense to imagine that the Jewish religion comes from Moses' trip.

3:22:19And also, if you look at the Jewish religion, they are quite open to drugs. I don't know if that could be an unconscious reaction to that kind of trippy beginning. Like they have Purim, where it's like you're supposed to get intoxicated to get closer to God. They're not as straight-laced as the Christians. They just allow alcohol. It's like the blood of Christ. So also Stone Sapiens is a book about religion. Also, the Islam and intoxication is also a very interesting topic because you have the Sufis who intoxicate themselves to get into ecstasy, to be closer to God. And then you have the conservative Islamist scholar Ibn Taymiyyah who defended Damascus against the Mongols by combining anti-drug rhetoric.

3:23:07They're bringing drugs to us and they are not good Muslims. So it's drugs and religion. Sometimes drugs kind of help religion to like are used in religious context. But then you can also see that religions work as prohibitionist movements against drugs like the Christian church. Also the purity law, for example. It's very famous in Germany. It's called the Reinheitsgebot. beer can only contain three things water hops and barley or something like that's that's the purity law and that was done by the church in 16th century and in germany for a long time this was seen as like this is like a quality control like beer has to be pure only has these ingredients but it's actually a move by the church to weed out all the other ingredients that had been put in beer before like nightshade plants um so beer also witches were brewing crazy beer you drink it and you have like visions and you dance around the fire it's like and the church didn't like this so the church said this is the beer now and and especially the hops was the was the new ingredient for the beer and this so the purity laws is the first prohibitionist law in in in in the middle ages in Europe.

3:24:29Another fascinating. Yeah, I think a society develops more and more. It seems to resist, certainly psychedelics, it seems to resist drugs. I don't know what that's about. One of the very fascinating turning points that I have been able to kind of pinpoint or at least I think this is what happened is when do the first kings come up they weren't kings for a very long time the first king that I can identify was in the so-called Sumerian high culture was in Uruk was Gilgamesh and they wrote the Gilgamesh epic about you know the great king but that was four or five thousand years ago something like that But what happened in the thousands of years before, there's no source that there were rulers.

3:25:28It seems like humans were quite good in organizing themselves without kings before these first kings came. And I mean, thousands of years from the end of the Ice Age until the Sumerian high culture, there were no kings. So people were quite able to organize their communities. There was, for example, Katalhöyük in eastern Turkey. That was working for like 2 ,000 years without any hierarchies. I think that is quite interesting. And then why do suddenly the hierarchies start and what makes the hierarchy stronger? And again, I'm still researching this, but in Sumeria, we can see that it's the beer that destroys the hierarchy-free society.

3:26:14because they suddenly, they are able, I mean, beer is quite old. The first beer was made in Gobekli Tepe, the famous first kind of structure of mankind. I also write about that because it's very interesting. Small detail, what is Gobekli Tepe? No one knows. How did they make it? No one knows, but they made it. But why did they make it? I think they made it because they were creating a meeting place. And why was that so important? There were not so many humans at the time. There were like one to four million. those are the estimates on the whole planet and they were usually living in small communities of like a hundred people up to 500 not more but in so the problem then is again inbreeding inbreeding means it's a degeneration so it's it's it's a problem we we are genetically not so diverse actually as humans so and but gobekli tepe people were meeting from different areas having sex with people they usually wouldn't see creating healthy children and gobekli tempe was working for 1600 years and i think it was like an evolutionary kind of machine like without without that idea we're going to create like a fucking place or a party place you know it was a party basically they were eating very well they found a lot of bones but no one lived there they just came together there for parties and then after 800 years they start making beer there and then the situation slightly changes they found these beer uh these places where they made beer you can still find the chemicals and kind of it's it's sure that they made beer there and then once they make beer they create different stone circles and then somehow it changes and uh we can see clearly how it changes in the sumerian high culture when beer beer then becomes a business beer become is being done by the by the priests by the ruling class or ruling class emerges like monasteries often brew beer and that was also the case uh in um uh in in the sumerian high culture they make beer they they they labeled the beer like the the temple that would make the beer the beer would be attributed to that temple it would be sold so that temple kind of rises in status makes money so that's how hierarchies started up so the hierarchy which is the big problem right now that we have these hierarchies that we have these kings everywhere that kind of steal our money or at least make it very difficult for us as humans to organize on an egalitarian planetary scale which is our only chance for survival if we at one point overcome the hierarchies overcome the nation states and create a planetary, probably AI-assisted, open-source AI-assisted planetary society.

3:29:07And everyone has the same political rights. There's no more borders. There's a planetary minimum income. So no one is starving. Everyone has at least what everyone needs, which is totally possible. It's just a problem of organizing and of breaking the resistance of those who don't like that. And there's a lot of resistance, obviously. I mean, I'm talking about what's happening on the planet in 50 years, not what's going to happen tomorrow. But that is where we slowly are moving towards. And you can see that this actually comes from a time when we were able to organize ourselves without kings. We don't need kings.

3:29:42Kings always say, if you don't have me, then someone else, some other guy will come. But, you know, that's why I'm not, you know, if a nation state makes war against another nation state, I'm not taking a position and saying this country is better. Basically, both nation states are doing war and who has to suffer is us, you know, is stone sapiens, is the human species. Speaking of which, I have to ask you, so I've done psilocybin a bunch, and I've done ayahuasca, but have never done LSD, acid. And you have, quite a bit. So maybe the big general question is, what's LSD like? In the space of psychedelics, which funny enough, we haven't really spoken a lot about psychedelics, except in the context of stoned sapiens.

3:30:35What's LSD like? Well, this is probably the third book that we want to talk about is Tripped because Tripped is an examination of the history of LSD. And that sounds maybe less interesting than it actually is. I mean, I find it fascinating. I had tried LSD. It was given to me by my girlfriend at the time, Anja, in Lower Manhattan on a Saturday night, 1993. So I was like 23. And she said, let's take LSD. And I'd never really taken any drug. Like I maybe smoked a bit of weed, but I didn't know what a strong drug is. and she gave me this paper and I took it and we walked around in the East Village pre-gentrified East Village it's pretty cool actually and it didn't work for like one hour I felt nothing and then I went into the toilet I had a falafel or something I went into the toilet and there was a mirror like I was peeing and then there was this mirror and but the walls had like lines like they were painted in lines suddenly these lines were started to like vibrate and that's then the trip started and it was such an powerful experience uh that i thought i would go insane like it was the worst trip i've ever had like it was because it was so strong i was totally scared i didn't know what it was i suddenly i i walked i i said i said to my girlfriend it's it's working and she said yes it's working i feel it also and i went into no tell motel which was my favorite bar just to be in a familiar environment it's not a good idea on your first very strong lsd trip to be out in lower manhattan on a saturday night but i also didn't know this you know so i was in the bar and i saw my friend dora espinoza from peru she was quite a a small woman like she was only like i don't know the american system like maybe one major 50 so So she was quite short.

3:32:50Short is the right word. But on LSD, she was like this. So I saw her down there. And I said, Dora, do I look normal? Because you look very small. And Dora's like, no, you look fine. I'm like, okay, I got to get out of here. And then we walked up to Second Avenue and we saw a bunch of Puerto Rican kids killing one of their... It was like a gang, kind of. It was more of a druggie kind of. I mean, Manhattan back then was kind of dangerous in the East Village. And they killed one of them on the hood of the car in front of our eyes. We saw it. And I said, do you see this? Like, my God. And then they resurrected him.

3:33:35Like, they gave him mouth to mouth. And the guy was fine again. And we walked past. And we were not sure anymore what we were seeing. And this was a very strong hallucination. and then we saw a full-blown racial riot on second avenue like people were smashing in uh taxi windows pulling the drivers out like getting like it was like a gta grand theft auto right it was like that and most of this is basically hallucinating i think so yeah and i have to it felt real it felt totally real and uh so i was happy when this trip was over because I thought I have gone insane basically I thought like there was a switch in my brain that had been like something chemical like I have I have now a chemical imbalance in my brain I'm gonna be crazy for the rest of my life I thought that but after like 10 hours it's suddenly got you know the effects wore off and I became normal again and I thought that was quite fascinating so in hindsight I thought it was a great experience even though it was quite scary but it also had moments of

3:34:44incredible perceptions like i could see that the atoms are not you know rigid obviously everything is moving in our universe everything there's nothing fixed you know so i could see that i could see that that everything was basically alive and that my previous perceptions how the world is It's just my conditioned perception and that the world was very different and, you know, just how you look at it, it looks different. So it's freeing in a way? Yeah, totally freeing. Also, it was much stronger than all the LSD I've taken since and I've taken high dosages. So I'm not even sure if that was LSD.

3:35:23Like there's also other compounds that are quite rare, like DOM or whatever. Maybe it was something else. but then i also spoke to lsd experts by now also for the book tripped and it can happen that your first trip is much stronger than all the other trips because your brain is kind of reacts very strongly to it because what happens in the brain is basically the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain there think more communicate better so if this happens for the first time, like your brain maybe is totally surprised by this like firework that's going on and then creates like hallucinations that somehow makes sense of it.

3:36:02Like there's a lot of things firing and then so you see things that maybe are not there, but that's not usual on an LSD trip. Like you don't have, I've never had such hallucinations afterwards again, you know. What's the usual experience on LSD? It really depends on the dosage. If you microdose, it's just like drinking an espresso So that lasts maybe for two, three hours in a very pleasant way. So you're just slightly buzzed. Is it visual artifacts? Like no color? Then you would take like more. Maybe if you take 50 micrograms, you start, the colors become more intense. But if you take a microdose of 10 micrograms, nothing happens.

3:36:42The trip starts with about 100 micrograms. And then you could see maybe it would be like I took a swimming trip in Thailand in January. and I took about 200 micrograms, which is quite a lot. I just, because it was so beautiful on this island and it was kind of, will it be more beautiful if I'm on LSD now? And of course, every LSD trip also tells you about your life, like some things you didn't understand. Suddenly you see like, oh, it's like this. It's very good for reflecting on your life, but it's also a lot of fun. So I swam for like three hours through the ocean, which is something you usually don't do.

3:37:22I like swimming, but after like 10 minutes or 20 minutes, I go out, but I was swimming and swimming. Yeah, for me on the psilocybin and ayahuasca, there's an intensification of beauty of the world around you. Whether that's nature, whether that's people, or whether that's your own memories of your past, or maybe your imagination manifesting itself in different kinds of visuals. You know, on Ayahuasca, I saw dragons of different kinds and they were just really beautiful. And maybe I've never taken a heroic dose of psilocybin, but everything was just always so beautiful and I was just grateful to be alive and grateful to be in this world and get to appreciate in this most intense way.

3:38:12there's something about like like you said you could see the individual atoms like there are certain ways to deconstruct or maybe to visualize or reinterpret re-visualize the world that makes you like appreciate holy shit this is really this is really awesome this is really special and that can only be done through the process of like showing you like a different version of it a little bit i mean when the swiss pharmaceutical company sandos developed lsd in 1943 like they were having the to solve the big question what is it good for like yeah albert hoffman a chemist he found it basically involuntarily and uh he reported to the ceo i had very strong reactions basically in the brain so they set up an intoxication room i found the documents about this intoxication room in the novartis archive when i researched tripped because novartis bought sunders in the 90s so all the lsd stuff is in the novartis archive and this intoxication room i always think it's kind of interesting to imagine this was 1943 there's a world war going on everywhere in europe except in switzerland which is a neutral country but basel where the lsd was found is like a stone throw from the german border so you actually hear the war going on and so they created a nice room within the company and then all the employees voluntarily could go and take lsd so they they were the first people to take lsd and they had no idea that there was at one point you know mk ultra and you know they they were just trying out something that one of their guys had developed and i read through all these reports they all had a great experience they was like sitting in a nice chair and they looked outside the window and they were like reporting stuff like i just had to laugh the whole time i felt so good i realized about my life and or it kind of created in them the feeling like a heightened sense of sensitivity and a feeling of that this is the light this is how life should feel kind of so the ceo arthur stoll he was really trying to figure out what he could market it for because he thought maybe this is a game changer in mental health because this was before antidepressants before antipsychotics and it was in the middle of world war ii which had created already millions of traumatized people how do you treat these people so they thought lsd could be really a big a big big big thing and uh i mean i i came up i just told you when i first took lsd and i somehow was interested in lsd but i never thought i would write a book about it i just used it once in a while when i wanted to understand something about my life i just enjoy a day in the ocean.

3:41:19But I read a study that microdoses of LSD at one point help against Alzheimer's. And my mother has Alzheimer's. So I discussed this with my father who takes care of my mother. And this was an academic study. I discussed this also with a leading Alzheimer expert that I interviewed for Tripped. And he's like, wow, this is amazing. Because LSD interacts with the very same receptors, the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain that LSD interacts with those receptors and Alzheimer destroys those receptors. So LSD basically does the opposite that Alzheimer does. And I discussed this with my father and he said, so why can't I buy LSD in the pharmacy if it's so good?

3:42:06He was a judge before. He actually put people in prison for drugs. so he said you better bring me the story so i did a kind of a research loop this is the book tripped yeah then i came back to him in the end with the true story of why lsd has been made illegal and that is quite that is quite fascinating because the swiss ceo stoll he had learned biochemistry this is very nerdy but i think it's quite interesting he had learned biochemistry from the Jewish-German god of biochemistry, Willstetter. Richard Willstetter was Nobel Prize winner for chemistry. And his work was, he would extract the potent alkaloids from so-called poisonous plants and make, you know, the poison, Paracelsus taught us, it's the dosage that makes the poison.

3:42:59You know, if you take too much of a potent alkaloid, maybe it's a poison. but if you extract a potent alcohol, maybe you can turn it into a medicine. So Stoll learned this from Wildstädter and there was another guy that was learning from Wildstädter, Richard Kuhn. So it was Kuhn and Stoll. Those were the two students of Wildstädter and Stoll left and became the CEO of Sandoz and developed the pharmaceutical branch of Sandoz and Kuhn became Hitler's leading biochemist and was responsible in finding a truth drug and also developing nerve gas. But the two guys, Kuhn and Stoll, stayed friends also when the Nazis took power.

3:43:41I researched the papers of Stoll in the archive. And in the 20s, he would communicate all the ergot research. LSD is an ergot product. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. He would communicate all this with Kuhn and Kuhn would come to the Sandoz lab and they did experiments together. And then in 43, Kuhn was a hardcore nut. Nazi scientist and especially looking for the truth drug at the time. And I was looking through the archive. I wanted to find the connection that, you know, Stoll also sent LSD to Kuhn. Because when I was researching for Blitz in Dachau, I had found that the SS had done in the concentration camp of Dachau experiments with mescaline and another hallucinogenic substance, which was not named.

3:44:32and mescaline has the problem the truth truck idea is i give you something without you noticing it like something that doesn't smell it doesn't taste like anything and then after like half an hour i know that something's working in your brain and you become insecure because suddenly something's working in your brain and i can play with that situation and therefore extract all the secrets from you because i it's a power i'm suddenly above you because i know something about you that you don't know that was the idea the problem with mescaline was it has a bitter taste and it's kind of hard to make it and lsd is very easy to make not very easy but it's quite easy and lsd is odorless and tasteless so i was trying to i somehow had the notion that lsd has a nazi past you know which is something that no one ever thinks about lsd is like the hippie drug right It's a drug of the peace people.

3:45:26But I wanted to see all the papers of the CEO of Stoll and the archivist, he already knew. He was the Swiss archivist. And this is not a public archive. In a public archive, you're basically like a national archive of the United States. You see what's there. You have the right to see it. Freedom of information. But a company archive like Novartis Archive, the archivist can just say, no, I can't find this right. you know he you basically at his mercy so i bribed him with lsd i said because he didn't want to show me he didn't want to show me the stole papers and i said to him just to distract him i said did you ever have you ever seen lsd and he's like no well how would i see it and i said well i have some here and i had some i just had gotten it from a friend what does lsd look like tabs yeah tab i had a paper and the funny thing about yeah there's a different you know different designs and you could put it on your tongue is that right yeah then you take it like that and the one i had was given to me by a swiss friend and it had like here you see certain prints on it oh yeah and he had the the print was the old logo of sandals from the 40s so the guys who make this illegal lsd in Basel in some kind of lab they know where it comes from so they made like a joke to make like the old logo of Sandus I showed this to the archivist he said this has the old logo of our company I said well it was made by your company he said I know this but it was it's not this is very interesting actually and I said you I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna gift you one of these trips now and he said wow you really you would do this and I said you can archive it he's like ha ha ha then he actually He took one.

3:47:08He was then the ice broke. That's great. And then he said, OK, I'm going to show you now the correspondence of Stoll, our CEO. It's no problem. And he just went to the next room and he looked for like 10 minutes and then he brought me these boxes. And then I saw actually the correspondence between Stoll and Kuhn, between the Swiss CEO and the German Nazi scientist, what they were talking about. And then I found a smoking gun. October 1943 Kuhn acknowledges that he receives half a gram of ergotamine which is the precursor drug to LSD and so it's highly likely that the Nazis used LSD together with mescaline in Dachau and when the Americans liberated the Dachau camp they had a special unit called Alsos with them and Alsos' job was to find German scientists and kind of interview them get their knowledge for the nuclear program mostly but also for biochemical weapons and one of the first persons they interrogated was richard kuhn and richard kuhn immediately collaborated because he didn't want to go to the nuremberg trial he wanted to continue his career actually he was an opportunist so i guess his nazi convictions were not so strong after all because he also liked the americans so he's like he told the Americans immediately about LSD and the next day a very high general flew from the states to Frankfurt went to Heidelberg spoke to Kuhn again went then took off his uniform and went in civil clothing to Basel because Switzerland is neutral and received the first LSD from Stolzsang so he the American general had LSD this was in 45 in the summer and then the American military started to examine LSD.

3:48:55Could LSD be the true drug? Because if the Nazis think so, maybe it's true, you know, because the Nazis were, you know, cutting edge scientists, as evil as they were. In Dachau, this was presumably used for the different experimentation that was done. Well, I read one report from a guy who was an inmate and he received it in coffee and he had a full-blown psychedelic trip and he had this SS guy who was like asking him questions and the guy had such a great trip. Yeah. I would always imagine you have a terrible trip in a concentration camp and he was like seeing fractals and colors and he could see that there was something bigger than these Nazis and there was something bigger than the concentration camp and he only said it was so horrible when the trip ended and he kind of became sober again and was just an inmate again in the concentration camp.

3:49:44I mean, one of the things you get from books like Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is that in the concentration camp, actually the slightest good things are so rich of feeling. You just get, so like I would actually expect to have incredible trips there because you're just grateful for anything positive. Anything positive. Yeah, I didn't think about that. It becomes intensified. But from the perspective of the Nazis, they're trying to develop the truth drug. they miserably failed because lsd is not the truth drug lsd maybe leads you closer to your own truth because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more in the brain becomes a neuroplasticity you know the neuroplasticity of the brain is is enhanced and is stimulated you might understand something about your life you might not you know i mean lsd doesn't necessarily turn you into a more knowledgeable person you could also focus that on your orthodox belief system but many people realize different things have different ideas so it doesn't work as this conditioning drug but also the the cia then kind of took over the lsd experiments that the u.s military took over from the ss so now it's now it's in cia hands in 1947 central intelligence agencies founded because america didn't have a Central Intelligence Agency before.

3:51:12They had like the military agencies like OSS. Now they have the CIA and the CIA makes it, Dallas, the first director, he says, the brain warfare is going on now between the Soviet Union and us. This is Cold War. We have to, you know, maybe they are using something against us. We have to be really on our, you know, we have to be prepared, you know, for the brain warfare because communism is a propagandistic system. So they were always like either really afraid or just pretending to be afraid the Soviet Union would, you know, develop the truth drug quicker than them. So the LSD truth drug program, which was labeled MKUltra, the infamous MKUltra is a mind control program.

3:51:58I mean, it is. And LSD played a big part in it. And it's a deeply illegal one. Certainly. I mean, it was never approved by the Congress or anything like that. It's probably deeply unethical. Maybe one of the more un-American, unethical things done in recent times. It's certainly unethical. It continues the Nazi human experiments. That's what the CIA did. It's continuing one of the worst aspects of what the Nazis were doing. Right, absolutely. Defeated the Nazis and carried the flag forward. It's just dark. And this is basically the reason why LSD at one point became illegal. because it did not get the chance.

3:52:38Stoll still wanted to put it on the market. But Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, he really didn't want LSD to be on the market. He wanted, not because he thought it's not good or dangerous for anybody. He just wanted to control LSD. He wanted LSD to be his so he could use it for MKUltra for experiments. He didn't, but he couldn't really stop. there was also legit LSD research always going on until it was prohibited in 1966. There was legit LSD research done in universities which came to all kinds of conclusions. But the decisive thing was a visit by Gottlieb in the office of Stoll in Basel where he basically says he comes with a suitcase with 240 ,000 US dollars to buy the world supply of LSD.

3:53:33because he has the information from the American ambassador. He said, I think we think by now Sandus has produced like 400 kilograms of LSD. So that was the price for these 400. And Stoll said, no, actually we have produced only 400 grams. But I'll sell everything to you, of course. I mean, because the pressure that he received from the CIA was, because the CIA and the FDA, they're like quite friendly organizations so the cia has a certain influence on the fda at least back then you know so the the pressure was if you want to put your medicines on the market which is of course the biggest market in the world and sanders you know i'm sure you want to thrive and as a pharmaceutical company then lsd is not going to be one of these products and stoll basically betrayed lsd uh so he said okay and lsd was only distributed as a research drug it was never sold by the company so researchers could actually write to sanders and say i'm doing this and this uh test and i'm new neuroscientist i need lsd and then they would receive it but mostly what happened to the lsd was it went into the cia's hands and then it was used in mk ultra but then it spilled out obviously because one of the guinea pigs was ken kesey he received 75 us dollars for taking lsd for the cia and he was working in menlo park in a psychiatric ward and on lsd he basically had the idea to write one flew over the cuckoo's nest he understood you know that these people maybe are not crazy it's just a different way of seeing that's like that's like an lsd revelation these are not bad crazy people they just see the world differently because that neuroplasticity that kind of leads you away from one way of thinking.

3:55:23You realize that there's different ways. So it does, I would say, LSD, the tendency of LSD is more to increase... Empathy, that kind of thing? Empathy, diversity, all these kind of things. Because you mentioned the effect of LSD on you as a writer, that it at least changed the way you write? Well, I mean, the book Tripped is a book where I come back with that story to my father. And then my father decides to give LSD to my mother. And we did do LSD, the three of us on Christmas. And we did mushrooms on Mother's Day. And whenever my mother takes LSD, and Alzheimer's is a horrible disease, obviously.

3:56:08For example, on Mother's Day, there was the newspaper lying on the balcony. We were like sitting in the sun. she was on mushrooms it's just microdose you know it's not that you have a trip but you have that stimulation of the of of your brain that's what you have even and her brain attacked by alzheimer reacted stronger than my father like he always says i never feel anything from a microdose and you're not supposed to feel anything but my mother suddenly picked up the newspaper which she hadn't looked at for a year so on mushroom microdoses she picks up the newspaper and starts reading the headline to us, which was about the Ukraine war.

3:56:46And she'd never heard about the Ukraine war. So when she had problems like pronouncing the word Ukraine because that was a new word for her because she hadn't been part of the news cycle in about a year. And this was because of the mushroom microdose. So this book, how did it change my writing? This, on an emotional level, writing, taking LSD and then writing about LSD changed something in my family. It improved the health of my mother. That made me very happy, of course, very satisfied. Yeah, there's a deep personal connection. But I even mean on Ken Kesey's side, like... I know what you mean.

3:57:31I mean, what does it do? Listen, writing, I don't know. So again, me as a fan of writing, it feels like writing is suffering, kind of. When I see just these great writers in history talk about writing, it seems like it's really hard. It's a kind of torture. Hemingway, you have the Kerouac stories that just kind of flows out of you. But a lot of times, it's really disciplined. Day after day, you're really digging and digging. And so it's interesting what that looks like under the different supplements, right? Like Stephen King famously, I mean, there's a lot of people, you know, they go to the drugs, to the alcohol.

3:58:13You have the Hunter S. Thompson who goes, you know, when given the option, just says yes to all of it. And the mind is a weird thing. And a lot of writers talk about like they're not really developing the ideas. they're plugging into some, they're channeling a voice from somewhere else. And with psychedelics, that's certainly, it feels like you're modifying the channel or you're expanding the channel or you're directing the channel to a different direction. That's why I ask. I think for me, writing has two important parts. and one of them is the actual writing part. And that's the painful part that you talk about.

3:59:00It's basically discipline, focus. It becomes harder and harder to focus because of the telephone. Yeah, distractions. There's a place in Switzerland, the Nietzsche house. I go there as much as I can to write. It's in Sils Maria. It's quite high up. Nietzsche went there every summer from 1882 to 1888, with the exception of 1887. Didn't go that summer. I don't know why. And he stayed there for three months and wrote most of his work in that room. And that room is still there. And his desk is still there. And you can rent rooms in that Nietzsche house. And I rent. It's great. And I do this as often as I can.

3:59:42And only there am I able to switch off the phone in the morning. I don't even switch it on. I'm like a soldier I'm in the Nietzsche house also Nietzsche house is magical so it gives you I would never take drugs in the Nietzsche house because it would disturb that clarity that is in that house when Nietzsche wrote like Zarathustra you can sense his presence a little bit yeah I speak to him quite a bit his door is always open is he an asshole or a nice guy no he's a nice guy his room cannot be rented it's always it's like a museum type room and i mean I never thought of him as an asshole I mean, he's a total weirdo, obviously.

4:00:27Had issues, like struggled getting laid. Yeah, I think he had a lot of problems. That's one of them. Yeah. But he had a lot of good qualities too. And he's also part of Stone Sapiens because he did experiment with drugs there and he writes about it. It's very hard to find. But in the Nietzsche house, I found a book on Nietzsche's medicine history. And he takes quite a bit of hashish. He smokes. is it to help with the stomach issues or whatever he's interested in what happens in the brain and this comes back to your question uh how did the drugs change my writing um well first of all it's this one it's this discipline i can do it up in the nietzsche house i can also do it sometimes in berlin it's just sitting there trying to focus and writing but what you need of course is the inspirational part and lsd helped me just the first trip to realize that it's not all black and white the world's quite colorful and uh there's like the abyss and it's there's also the horror and like i was i was a happy-go-lucky kid you know i i never thought it the world is so deep as i understand it now so the lsd makes the world deeper so i think for me to understand the world better to understand myself better it improved my writing but i would not write on lsd because on lsd you're like you want to walk in the forest or you want to go up the mountain or that's what i like i don't i would never like sit in front of the ugly computer with a stupid like screen and write you know maybe i would lie in the mountains with a notebook and kind of write like poetic lines and i that could be done on lsd because you have like when i was researching stone sapiens i did one lsd trip in from the niche house i went quite high up in the mountains on lsd and i came and it was not i just it's just i just thought about the book and kind of looked at the different chapters does it work together like kind of like macro without taking too many notes just kind of letting it, you know, play out in front of, in my mind.

4:02:35But then when I walked down, I passed the cave and I realized a lot about people's relationship to caves and the cave paintings, how, you know, actually the cave walls, you see all the arteries of the rocks. And I mean, on LSD, you see all of that and you like see how alive that is and how beautiful it actually was by humans to then use that canvas and work your cave paintings in there. I mean, I never had the appreciation of that before. Yeah, you're right. You are able to detect on psychedelics the aliveness of the details, if you can put it this way. For me, it's a very creative drug. But for other people, it might not be.

4:03:24So I cannot also advertise it because also if you have a psychological problem, Maybe it's overwhelming. Yeah, that's actually a good thing to say at this moment. From my perspective, and maybe you can comment on it, in general, when people ask me, because I've done psilocybin a few times and I did ayahuasca and I've talked about it. When people ask me if I recommend those things, as a general statement, I say no, to the general population. And then as a second step, if I'm talking to specific people on a case-by-case basis, I can just discuss my experience and let that be kind of an inspiration is I'm very hesitant to recommend a thing that could be so powerful because I don't know.

4:04:07Like I had a tremendously positive experience and I was sure I would be meeting some demons. Like I thought I would have some demons in the basement or something, but I didn't meet them, not yet. But people might have some demons that they meet and it might destroy them or it might change them in the way they don't like. and actually it's a good question for me whether it's good to do psychedelics when you're in a good place in life or in a bad place in life because I know that you know even scientifically there been studies where psilocybin helps with extreme sort of with depression and PTSD and all these kinds of things but I'd be very nervous about that too because like the mind is such a powerful thing and it's such a complicated thing that with these really powerful tools, it's unclear where it's going to take you.

4:05:01But I have heard a lot of stories of people have taken incredible journeys, sometimes difficult journeys with psychedelics and have come out much happier and much freer and have healed some of the things that we've been going through. But when people ask me to recommend or not, I'm just too afraid to say yes. I think the right thing is always as a general know. Be very careful. Yeah, I think it would be irresponsible to recommend it to people you don't see. Maybe if you know a friend and a friend asks you, maybe I would say to a friend, yeah, I think you would be fine taking it. But even that is a big responsibility.

4:05:48Because LSD, in German, the book Tripp, is called the strongest substance. and it is actually the strongest substance because it works in microgram dosages. Like even the strongest snake poison, Cobra toxin, if you use that in microgram dosages, you don't feel anything. But if you take 250 micrograms of LSD, it can totally overpower you. And if you have an unstable psyche, it could turn you mad. Do you understand how it compares to psilocybin? and ayahuasca and DMT. How does LSD compare to those? Is it similar land, territory, just more intense? LSD and psilocybin are like cousins. Distant cousins?

4:06:34No, quite close cousins. And I spoke to a neuroscientist from a university clinic in Zurich who's been researching psilocybin and LSD since the early 90s. and he puts people in brain scanners, for example. So he sees exactly what happens in the brain on LSD or on psilocybin. And he said to me, when I asked him that very same question, he said, LSD is the most sophisticated molecule. He meant by that is that LSD docks onto more receptors than psilocybin. Like psilocybin interacts with like five receptors different types of receptors in the brain and lsd like with nine so that makes lsd more complex molecule so the that's why it already works in very small quantities because it's like the key is like perfect for our brain our brain really reacts strongly to lsd for mushroom psilocybin you have to take milligrams not micrograms with milligrams so mushrooms is also described as softer psychedelic experience because it only lasts for like 5 hours while LSD lasts like 8 hours and LSD can be more LSD is also a mushroom but it's ergot which is a mushroom but it's turned into a diathlamide you extract the potent acid from ergot which is lysergic acid and you turn that into a diathlamide so it's a processed drug in a way it's a potent processed drug that works also for mass movements quite well that's why it was so popular in the 60s because people could just make it while mushrooms they kind of they have to grow like the the hippie movement they could never have you know sustained on mushrooms because so many mushrooms don't even grow but a good lsd chemist can make lsd for the whole world basically can we go back to something we talk about in the beginning about Berlin is just it'd be fascinating to learn more about this culture.

4:08:51Are you still connected? I'm sure you've been to some wild parties. I've been told that Berlin has some wild parties. Well, it had them in the 90s. I mean, it had the best clubs that I I mean, it was just a dream. You know, you go into this club, but I was also in my mid-20s so I go into this club, I take MDMA and the DJ is amazing and the sound system is crazy and there's like 500 people on mdma just dancing for like eight hours and that's when electronic music was really yeah it was really good yeah like a friend of mine he he runs no club of visionaries which is kind of a famous underground club in berlin and he asked me in the early 2000s when this club was offered to him should i do this i said i said gregor techno is over you know electronic music is dead but obviously it's not that it's still going on but in the 90s it was new so it was you really went into the club and you heard something you'd never heard before and the first time i came from new york and new york was a very old school kind of urban place i mean rock and roll or grunge music and i came to berlin it was a in a club called eimer bucket in east berlin doesn't exist anymore like in a rundown totally rundown like a squat uh and i i went to the bar and i had a beer and i looked and there was just a few people on the dance floor and just like electronic music which i'd never heard before and the guy in front of me he was like he looked like an east berlin skinhead kind of type of guy but like totally smiling i'm sure he was on ecstasy and he was disassembling like an imaginary machine and i just looked at this guy he was like for one hour he was just like doing the most yeah complicated like things and i was like this is totally a totally different way of of moving and i liked that actually i i liked to dance in clubs yeah and i did this for like two years very intensely with my girlfriend at the time we went out a lot uh like from friday to monday basically but it means, and a lot of people still do that in Berlin, but it means that you can't really work.

4:10:57I mean. Yeah, you escaped that. It's interesting that you were able to do that for a short time, just as an experience, and then go on to be extremely productive. For me, it was also kind of research, even though I didn't know this. I mean, life is research in a way, if you allow it to be. I could not have written these books on history and drugs without having had these drug experiences because that i mean also like when i wrote about methamphetamine and the nazis i asked at the time weed was illegal in germany so i asked the friend of mine she's a she's a cannabis dealer i guess you would say i said can you also get uh me crystal meth she's like shocked like no because she was a weed dealer but then she found like a polish guy who actually had crystal meth i just wanted to have it it was like the paul schrader thing when he wrote the screenplay to taxi driver he had like a gun in his drawer so he would you know get the vibe of like danger and so i wanted to have this crystal meth so this polish guy sold it to me and he gave me a zero without me saying anything and maybe my french maybe she said he's a writer or something but he gave me a xerox he gave me the methamphetamine one gram and the Xerox copy of the patent of Pavitine from 1938 so this was a crystal meth dealer that actually had a historical knowledge about it did you ever try?

4:12:23yeah well then I tried it because I really wanted I could not really write about it in the same way without having tried it I can't recommend it it feels very toxic like when you take a psychedelic I can say this with a clear conscience, it's not toxic. LSD is not toxic. It doesn't poison you. You might have reactions in your brain that are too much for you. But if you snort crystal meth, it goes on your central nervous system. Your heart starts pounding. Your blood pressure rises. So it's stressful on the organism. It's toxic, you know. But still, you know, the effect in the brain is not so interesting as with LSD.

4:13:02Like you couldn't go crazy, I would say, on crystal meth. You just have like, you're just very much awake, but you don't have like crazy thoughts that you can't, you know, evaluate anymore. So it's a very, very, very different drug. But taking that, of course, made me understand better how a soldier feels in the tank, taking it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really, really important to do. I have to ask your friend Alex, who's, it sounds like he's taken every single drug there is. Has he spoken about like, what's the most interesting drug? Like, what's his favorite drug? He seems like a connoisseur, right?

4:13:39But he's not a psychedelic guy, so... Oh, well then, okay. He's more into the addictive drugs. It's very difficult, I guess. Yeah, that would be a special person that can be a really sort of... Yeah, a full-on explorer of the drug space. Because if you get into psychedelics, then you don't really want to do the hard drugs. and even get the hard drugs you don't want to. Right. They contradict each other. They do contradict each other. Yeah. That's why we spend less and less time together.

4:14:16Since you mentioned Kerouac, listen, I love Kerouac. Do we know any sort of famous writers that have used drugs as part of the writing? So Kerouac is one. Do we know any famous writers who have not used drugs as part of their writing? Interesting. thing so wait i didn't actually know uh to be honest the story i i love that's the good thing about being a writer you can take drugs on the job and no one will cancel you for it you're like a politician you can't really do it that's right rock you can be a rock star you can be a writer you can be an artist and take drugs you mentioned that kerouac did what amphetamine and speed basically speed the legend has it that on the road was written in two weeks on speed basically without sleeping and using an endless paper roll in this typewriter so he was just writing and i can imagine that you can write a hell of a lot on amphetamines and i do it sometimes but i don't do it a lot you know so i can take amphetamines and have a really good time and write like 20 pages but then the next day i wouldn't do it any i wouldn't do it anymore but he decided okay for 14 days i'm gonna do it philip k dick was an amphetamine writer and also i think if you take a lot of amphetamines you get into kind of psychedelic spaces at a certain point in time where you start hallucinating and like if you write a you know blade runner maybe it helps you so amphetamines are also they can be creative i guess it's just not i don't it's not my type of of drug and they're certainly not as creative as but it also depends on the person like malcolm laurie uh under the volcano he was drinking a lot or hemingway was drinking a lot and they could only write when they're drunk when i'm drunk i can't write i just can't do it right drunk edit sober and that's advisable like if i would write something on amphetamines i would certainly edit it sober of course because on amphetamines your self-criticism is lowered because you feel so good like you feel so confident you just write and but writing is about nuances especially literary writing maybe a non-fiction book would be easier on amphetamines but a novel it's all about you have to be very very open amphetamines close you you become like a machine like you write but if you are on the right track like kerouac with on the road he had the right you know he was on he was going you know but you could also be on the wrong one and then write 200 pages and you just have to throw it away and probably he did a lot of that also you know yeah yeah and and also on the road is a particular kind of book it's an amphetamine book you want the spontaneity the speed of it's about speed it's about moving fast It's about not stopping.

4:17:08It is a speed book. Yeah. But it's a great book. It's such a great book. It's such a great book. But then I recently been rereading all of Dostoevsky. So, going to the notes on the ground, to the idiot, to crime, punishment, to Brothers Karamazov. And that, I don't think... Which was your favorite? Brothers Karamazov. Well, I read it in both Russian and English. And for the longest time, it was the idiot.

4:17:34Until... it's a complicated philosophical issue. When I was younger, I thought Prince Mishkin, the main character in The Idiot, was not as flawed as I believe he is now. I think Dostoevsky tried to create a Jesus-like character in Prince Mishkin, and I think kind of failed because he was too giving in a way that it was actually counterproductive and destructive to the world, which is he tried to fix in The Brothers Karamazov with Alyosha Karamazov. But anyway, I don't think that you could do that. I would be very surprised to learn that Dostoevsky did any drugs. Also, there was not so much available.

4:18:16That's true. Alcohol, of course. Nicotine, coffee. Those are really powerful drugs. And I'm also doing a podcast with Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and many other amazing books. Yeah, he's a great writer. Fight Club influenced me quite a bit. I think the novel is even better maybe than the movie. Yeah. The movie's great. I mean, in that case, as you said, like the movie is great and that it's almost like a bigger than life thing. And sometimes like the book and the movie and those things can influence culture. That certainly influenced culture. To where like, okay, this has a life of its own.

4:18:58I'd like to think some of your work might influence how we perceive history. That's really important. That's really powerful. To not just change, but sort of expand our conception of history, which is important to do. Is there particular books, fiction or nonfiction? So you were both a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer. Is there books that had an influence on you? Yeah. It's Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is good, but only when you're like in your early 20s living in New York and you're writing your first book and you just have taken LSD. Oh, nice. Then I read it and then it opened. It made sense?

4:19:39Well, it just showed, it's just a very experimental novel. So it opens up. You don't have to understand everything, but it shows you that there's many different ways of telling a tale. And that was quite interesting to me. But the most influential book maybe is The Stranger by Camus. because I like the language so much and I'm really mostly interested in language. I don't really care what it's about. I was lying on the beach in Morocco when I was 20 and reading The Stranger and then a Moroccan came and he said, why are you reading a racist book? I'm like, what are you talking about? This is world literature.

4:20:21He said, yeah, right. He's like killing an Arab without consequence. No, actually there is consequence, but no reason basically, just because he's bored. so this is racist that was like made no sense to me that argument because I was just interested in how Camus constructed it was just for me a stylistical experience to read that I always love books and Stranger's a short book I love books they're able to accomplish so much and so little and so little pages and so few pages and so few words The Stranger there's nothing unnecessary in The Stranger And I always try to write a book where every sentence is just, there's nothing unnecessary in the book.

4:21:06But it's very hard to do, actually. Nietzsche could do this. Peterson talked about this, that every sentence in Nietzsche is like chiseled and it's like perfect. And I think not every, I mean, but that's his tendency. He tries to write like this and that's very hard to achieve. That's actually where the writing becomes poetic. So for me, Nietzsche also is like a poet. The aphorisms is poetry. So Nietzsche also stylistically, since you asked, was very important to me. So Camus Nietzsche, James Joyce. And then just Kafka also. I like Kafka always. And I like Thomas Mann. I don't know how well he translates, but in German, it's interesting.

4:21:44His take on how to, it's funny. He's a very funny guy, even though he's like, he talks too much, but he's good. so I always wanted to have these guys as my colleagues basically are they there somewhere in your head as you're writing less and less but it was like an incentive to be part of that club like to be able to write a book and it's out there and it's perfect and you're on one level with Camus you know it's very hard to do let's say you become a carpenter which is also you know a very challenging job but you don't have these kind of great well you have jesus i guess as you're called potential colleague yeah sure but for the i just like these writers these two so the ones i mentioned and also then thomas thomas pinchon who wrote gravity's rainbow which i think is one of the best novels of the 20th century and i read that in berlin in the late 90s and it really blew my mind i thought but I think it's an absolute masterpiece.

4:22:48The intensity of this novel, Gravity's Rainbow, is unparalleled, and I'm still puzzled by how he did it. And it's not known how he did it, because he lives a completely obscure life. No one knows basically who he is. So he's also a very interesting colleague. It's widely regarded as one of the most challenging and significant works of postmodern literature, set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II. The novel centers on the design, production, and deployment of the German V-2 rocket. The narrative follows several characters. It lists the characters. Well, Sloth Rob is the American agent who is the main character.

4:23:30He works for Allied Intelligence and he's really a funny guy. He smokes a lot of weed and he's like in Berlin and bombed out Berlin after the war. And it's just funny to go with him through that. He's a great character. It's a great novel. It really is. So it does give a window into history also. It does, yeah. But that's not why it's interesting to me. But it makes it especially interesting. Because the way he describes these situations, it's just the way he writes is phenomenal. It's a Pulitzer Prize. Oh, but I'm sure he didn't take it. On lists. Yeah, he declined. Well, no one knows who he is.

4:24:09I know a little bit. I know who his wife is, but I'm not going to talk about it. he really wants to protect his privacy. And I think that's also amazing. I think that's a beautiful thing. But for me, from my perspective, he wouldn't appear in the podcast. He would not. It would be great if he would come to the podcast. He would not. Well, I believe it's possible, but with people like that, it has to be a long journey. And you have to, like, for me, for example, I just interviewed Terence Tao, who's one of the greatest mathematicians, one of the greatest living mathematicians, probably one of the greats in history.

4:24:40And there's another I want to speak with, which is Grisha Grigory Perlman, who's a Russian mathematician, who's more akin to Thomas Pynchon. He declined the millennial prize, the one$1 million. He declined all the prizes, the Fields Medal, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He declined everything, and he just lives with his mom now, quit mathematics. Like Kirok, he also lived with his mom. There's something really beautiful about a human being like that. Right. Right. Especially because in his case, it was done for principles. Like he has a certain set of principles and no amount of money, nothing can buy him or...

4:25:20Yeah, that's amazing actually. Yeah. I had somebody tell me this. A really interesting guy I met a few days ago said that there's nothing more exhilarating, perhaps only a rich person can say this, but there's nothing more exhilarating than saying no to a lot of money.

4:25:44But he said it was so much confidence that I somehow believed him. But the deeper truth there is living by principles and having integrity. There is something deeply fulfilling. If that means saying no to money or if that means standing up to Hitler and then risking your life. That's a deeply fulfilling thing. Big ridiculous question. I thought you were a good person to ask. What's the point of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life in our existence here on Earth? I somehow think that the universe has a big story to tell or it's telling a big story the whole time and our consciousness is part of that bigger story.

4:26:35So the consciousness of the whole of the universe, the big, the huge story is something that is probably the meaning of life and or the meaning of life of our individual life is to understand that story. and that that is something for example that i understood quite well on lsd when i walked in the mountains uh about a month ago because the mountains they actually you know they they're quite high up into the atmosphere and they are made of all kinds of minerals and so they are receiving cosmic energy that comes you know that hits our planet and uh walking up there and it doesn't i guess if you're on lsd you're more open somehow because you're not closing with your default mode network that you know this is the tree and this is the path and this is the mountain and now it's two o 'clock and i have to go back and the rain like this you're more you're more open so you're more like perceiving i i that's at least the that's the impression i had and I couldn't put it in words what exactly I was perceiving but I was perceiving more of the bigger story and I think that is inspiration and I think those moments bring you quite close to the meaning of life and I wouldn't I wouldn't put that meaning on life in words it is an experience and I think that for me as an artist it was an important experience to make to get close to that and and that is uh that is what you can achieve in each of your professions you know like a mathematician he comes to that point when he like hears more like he grasps like connections and he might not be able to put it into a formula yet but if he's a if he's an open person, he might be a better mathematician because he can understand a bit more of the meaning of everything.

4:28:43Of this bigger story that's being written. Yeah. And I mean, I mentioned to you my substack, which I think is going to be the best substack. Do you think it's possible it's the greatest substack of all time in history? That's what it's going to be. It's going to be, yeah. Stone sapient substack. But something else. I just hope you actually do it. You should become a subscriber. I will definitely subscribe. I really realized that there is a greater, a bigger story. And it's somehow interesting to try to open up. Because if we live, that's why I like to be in nature also quite a lot. You get how you have a better access.

4:29:20We live boxed in. Walter Benjamin called us like the boxed human beings. Like we're living in the cities we're doing. We're waking up. We're doing it. It's good to be. Therefore, it's good to be outside the system. And I hope that my art can contribute to, you know, freeing the brainwaves to understanding a bit more what that is. I don't know, but I think the process of understanding more and connecting in different ways, that is what I'm going for, because I think that is the meaning of life. Well, thank you for doing that with all of your work and for inspiring us all to do the same. Thank you so much for talking today.

4:29:59It was great. Thank you.

4:30:29and the world will not grind you under. It will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done, by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it is, in fact, a feather bed. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.