#2183 - Norman Ohler

30:02Well it was a Mexican wild tobacco. It was a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco. It wasn't cannabis. Yeah, right. Yeah. So that is, so basically what we could say is that, and unfortunately, and saying it was quite a racist, he was like, he openly used words to describe Afro -American colleagues that shouldn't be used by white men, I guess, in memos. This went all the way up to the president. But they always kept them because he was the man that defends America from the scourge of foreign influences, which is drugs in this case, from China, the opium, from Mexico, the marijuana. So he was very good politician, basically, like an anti -drug lobbyist that everyone in Washington loved.

31:00And so the reasons for the prohibition in America I was actually studying LSD and finding out that this is actually dangerous and Marijuana is dangerous. That's, we really, even though we're free in our society, we have to, you know, we have to curb this. We have, like, this is not how it went. It's where, like, he wanted to attack the jazz scene and he knew that the jazz musicians were smoking a lot of weed. So he's, you know, it's very hard to make it illegal to play jazz, but you can make Marijuana legal then you can you know target jazz musicians so it's got a racial profiling why would they go after jazz musician he hated jazz he thought that he thought that this episode is brought to you by Buffalo trace distillery actually have some Buffalo trace cigars here they just sent me one of the world's most award -winning distilleries that's been making whiskey the same way for more than 200 years, made as a tribute to the rugged free spirited pioneers who blaze their own trail to new frontiers, it embodies the perfectly untamed spirit of independence.

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33:09I think he was, I think it's a sexual thing actually, because he actually said once, when black men smoke reefer, they think there is good as white men and they're going to sleep with a woman or something like that. That was kind of the world that he was living because the jazz musicians were on stage and people loved them. They were cool. They were only cool because they smoked a weed. That gave them that diabolical power over the audience and that the groove. If you take the weed away from them, they're just going to be boring people. So that guy really did a lot of damage in my mind to the American society.

33:50It's just stunning that 90 years later, we're still dealing with the aftermath of that. And also in conjunction with his union with William Randolph Hearst. William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst publications, had a vested financial interest in keeping marijuana illegal or making marijuana illegal because of hemp. The whole story about the decorticator. Yeah, you talking about the wood now? No, decorticator was a device that was manufactured. It was created in the early 1930s and it was on the cover of Popular Science magazine when they called it, they said, hemp, the new billion dollar crop of the future.

34:31So because hemp was a very difficult plant to take the fiber and convert it into paper and convert it into textiles, things like that, the use slave labor for the most part. until the cotton gin came along. When the cotton gin came along, that became more effective to use cotton than to use hemp. It was easier. Then in the early 1930s, they came out with a decordicator. The decordicator was this machine, see if you could get a version of that, Jamie. So the decordicator allowed them to effectively, that's the decordicator. So this machine, they would run the hemp stalks through it, and it would break them down far more economically.

35:13much much easier, more effectively than the way they would do it by hand previously. So hemp, the new billion -dollar crop, so hemp, you know, find the cover of that magazine. So hemp was a far more effective paper. It's much more durable. I'll give you take hemp, very difficult to tear. In fact, the earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence were on hemp. So there's a billion dollar crop. So this was popular science magazine and William Brandoff Hurst didn't just own Hurst publications. He also owned paper mills So he had thousands and thousands of acres of trees and forests that they were converting into paper and now all the sudden There was this new product that was going to destabilize his industry and so So, hemp is a disruptor.

36:08Exactly. So, when they made marijuana illegal, a lot of the people that were voting on this didn't even understand they were making cannabis illegal. They didn't understand that it was the same thing. They didn't understand that it was the same literal textile that created canvass, all the great works. Like if you look at Leonardo da Vinci's paintings. It's on hemp. It's on hemp. It's on cannabis. It's on cannabis paper. It's on a very durable form of paper. Have you ever touched cannabis paper, like hemp paper? It's crazy, it's really hard to tear. My friend Todd McCormick, he was a early grower in Los Angeles when marijuana was medically legal, and he wound up going to jail because in federal court, you couldn't say that it was for medical purposes.

37:00They just prosecuted him based on the fact that he was a drug dealer. instead of someone who was legally in the state of California growing medical marijuana. He had a stalk on his table of hemp. I don't know if you've ever felt a hemp stalk? Have you ever picked one up? No. It is crazy. It's like styrofoam. You pick it up. It feels like nothing, but it's hard like oak, but it's not heavy. It's very strange. It's like an alien plant, very, very weird. So that stuff converts incredibly to clothing. You can make building materials out of it. There's a thing called hemp crete that is this incredibly effective building material that you can make houses out of out of hemp.

37:43And it's incredibly sustainable because if you have an acre of trees, if you chop down that acre of trees and make paper out of it, it takes forever to grow enough trees in that acre to grow them to the point where you could harvest them and make paper out of them. Cannabis, if you're growing hemp rather, If you grow hemp stocks in the same field, you got new hemp in a few months and now you have paper again So you think so William Randolph Hurst demonized cannabis for the particular interest that he had with paper with his paper Mills and to stop the hemp industry. I mean they were quite close allies in a way.

38:25Yeah, and slinger and first and in his publications the word marijuana was for the first time mm -hmm publicized so they kind of and with a racial element yeah with the racial element it said that blacks and Mexicans were smoking this new drug and raping white women right right right and then the Reef from Madness movies which are fantastic pieces of propaganda they're absolutely hilarious if you watch them today especially knowing what we know about marijuana like these people were just crazed. It was more meth -like than it was, you know, what they were depicting, right? Absolutely. So, ancellinger 90 years ago, the propaganda that he pushed out to society, the way that infected people like a mind virus, the effects of that still today, when people find out that you have taken marijuana or that you regularly enjoy marijuana, people freak out.

39:21They're like, oh, what are you doing? What are you doing to yourself? Oh my god, you're out there taking drugs. Meanwhile, this person's on antidepressants and they drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and take Xanax. Like there's asksian drugs that are far worse for you. It's not a drug -free society. Yeah, I mean, I talked about the sugar thing that I thought was crazy drug. And that actually made me realize that we as humans take drugs every day. Like every human takes drugs every day. I'm drinking coffee. I got these little nicotine pouches. Yeah. Which is interesting, you know, that we don't A knowledge that really we think like all people who are against drugs They they kind of vote they kind of say we stand for a sober society But it never is a sober society.

40:10No, we just have some legalized drugs and some drugs that are illegalized My friends that are in alcoholics anonymous. They all drink cigarettes drink or drink coffee and smoke cigarettes They're all doing a drug. They're just doing a drug that doesn't completely destroy their life. I mean, I thought about just writing, having written Blitz and Trip, both on drugs and history. I was now trying to come up with a larger narrative. And I mean, at your, in your podcast, a lot has been talked about the Stone Age theory, right? Yes. I think it's very interesting and I think it's time for kind of a new New world history as you may I think because we I think we actually are stone sapiens I think that this cognitive revolution that happened in Africa It's it's as dammit said.

41:03It's not a theory. It's a what is it a? Theories when there's already proof it's a hypothesis It's a hypothesis, but I think that a lot speaks for this hypothesis. I think it makes sense if you see that early humans were, for example, depicting mushrooms in drawings that these mushrooms have some kind of relevance to them. And our edge, which is something that Harari writes about over other like the Neanderthals, or also just monkeys, large monkeys. Our edge was that we had this cognitive revolution, that we had a neo -cortex forming, and that we suddenly had an understanding about time. So we're not just living in the moment, we know there's a pass, and there's a future.

41:59So that creates a different language and the different language and more abstract more complex language and for example the apes You know apes can organize up to like a hundred then that language kind of fails them But human suddenly not suddenly. I mean this is over long periods of time could could develop a language that enabled them to form larger groups That's how they became dominant also dominant over other home or species like the Neanderthals. And we know today that they had these plants at their availability. So it makes sense to imagine that actually we found, maybe it was a mushroom, maybe it was Iboga, which is something still used in African societies in which now it's again being examined as the new psychoactive hot drug.

42:53It could be a mixture or some groups could have had this, others could have had that. But it seems to be pretty clear that the founding moment of our races actually, this transcendence, like suddenly you realize this moment where I'm in is not always more. There's a future, there's a past, that is what transcendence is. So we are basically, that's why I call our species, we're stone sapiens. We were stone from the start. So drugs which transferred into language, into music, into rituals, because we wanted to keep the drug also secret from others who are not, you know, from apes or nandatiles. So, rituals start existing like a person who kind of has the drugs and hands them out.

43:40So this is at the beginning of all race. So I think, and we were so powerful because we could develop that larger language than the apes who would only organize up until 100. And now we have the problem. We poor stone sapiens that we have created global problems, but we don't have a global narrative. Like we're falling into the Western camp. We have China. and we have, like, we have, we don't have a global narrative. Like, our narrative usually stops within the national context. Like, there's the American narrative. There's the Western narrative, which also includes Europe. There's the German narrative, but there's no human global narrative.

44:23And that's what I intend to change with my book Stone Sapiens, which will be the next book and kind of conclude the trilogy of these, like, how are drugs and humans kind of symbiotic in a way? Well, there's a for lack of a better term. There's a consciousness that exists in mushrooms There's something that you interact with and we don't necessarily understand what's going on But if you could imagine a lower primate Interacting with a higher consciousness on a regular basis and then adapting I mean this is the theory of why the human brain size doubled over a period of two million years And if you ever listen to Dennis McKenna described this Dennis McKenna describes it brilliantly because he's an actual scientist in the way he explains the effects of psilocybin how it had you know what the effects it would have on the mind in terms of developing language and just expanding our creativity expanding our ability to see things it makes better edge detection makes you have better visual acuity makes them more more horny, they're going to more likely to breed, more community.

45:34There's also this potential for a type of, you know, for lack of a better term, a type of mind melding. You know, there's a type of consciousness expanding energy that happens that it seems to be connected in a way that we can't measure. or human beings interact with each other without words. Telepathyne was exactly what they, when they first found harming, when they found some certain trees that were part of the components of ayahuasca, they try to call it telepathyne, but due to the rules of scientific nomenclature, that substance had already been identified as harming. But the researchers that were taking this are saying we are experiencing these telepathic melds.

46:25There's something that's going on with these things and we want to get to the bottom of it Let's call it telepathy because it imparts a type of telepathy Well for tripped became very interested in that question that you just Atticulated what actually happens in the brain Because that is quite hard to figure out actually how do they work and what actually changes in the brain and there's one researcher in Zurich again in Switzerland, they're really experts on psychedelics actually, because they didn't sign all the UN treaties because they're like a neutral, more neutral country than others, so they actually have a little bit more freedom for research.

47:05And there is a professor called Franz Follenweider at University in Zurich and he was able to start in the early 90s, giving his patients psilocybin and LSD and DMT and then he put them in like examine their brains, in brain scanners, like imaging, like high -tech, you know, imaging technology. And he found that actually, that you can actually measure it. Or you can see the changes that happen in psychedelics. And what happens is that the so -called default mode network that is a term that brain scientists use to describe what Freud would just, just would call the ego, like the center in our brain, like the boss in our brain, like the guy I guess it would be other woman in our brain that like says, now I'm on the Joe Rogan podcast and everything's cool and you know I'm a writer whatever and you like this is like we have always this controlling force within us otherwise we would go basically insane like what's going on here was this is cool.

48:07I'm in danger you know basically in my danger like there's this thing that goes with the rifle. You're going to shoot it like that. So the default mode network makes sure that this doesn't happen that we function and it makes a lot of sense. And actually, under psychedelics, he could measure that this part of the brain gets a little less energy. So it's a little, it's not switched off completely. I mean, if you take a lot of psychedelics, it might be switched off completely. Then you have what's called like a full immersion experience. But if you take a little, it's also switched off like a little, like gets a little less energy.

48:37and that other parts of the brain peripheral parts that are usually like following the main guy, they can communicate more on psychedelics. So what happens in your brain is actually, it is actually a change in the brain chemistry and what also happens is what is called the neuroplasticity is enhanced, neuroplasticity is the term for, or basically the brain is not obviously like a fixed non -moving object like my fist or something, it's constantly kind of moving the brain. And neuroplasticity describes that ability to constantly adapt to the situation and be flexible, be, you know, make new connections, that's neuroplasticity.

49:28And he could also measure that neuroplasticity is enhanced when you take psychedelics. That's why I also could become dangerous if it's enhanced too quickly and you're not experienced. I mean, we're on the Joe Rogan experience. We're all experienced. I hope we'll have an experienced audience. But if you're inexperienced, that could be too much. Then the stimulation of your brain or the change, the disruption of your day -to -day way of thinking could be overwhelming. But if you handle it properly, it's actually that is, I guess, what is the beneficial aspect of the psychedelic experience? You enhance neuroplasticity in a way.

50:07I don't know if becoming smarter is the right term because what is smart, what is intelligence? But it's a fact that neuroplasticity is enhanced and because of this kind of orthodox thought forms like depressed people always think the same thing like I'm not worthy or I can't you know depression is a loop or loops in your brain of always this and LSD especially psilocybin they disrupt that because you know other parts of the brain suddenly and come into play and the default mode network which has you know this disease of depression suddenly is not you know the calling the shots anymore that's why psychedelics have proven effective against depression the first study that showed this clinical study was done in 2015 actually in America at Johns Hopkins University that still or Simon helps against very severe depression when nothing else helps.

51:01So we know a little bit about what happens in the brain, but obviously the brain is still a black box. That's why so many scientists, when LSD came out in the late 40s and early 50s, especially in America, were enthusiastic. They thought, finally, we have a tool with which we can, like a torch shining into the black box of the brain because it works in such small quantities. There was actually a lot of hope in the beginning that original enthusiasm by Sandos that I talked about when they thought we have a game changer, we have a blockbuster that everyone will, become, you know, will heal from LSD.

51:43That many scientists actually believed that. And the interesting question is, and we're like making a long circle on what went wrong, like why wasn't it developed into a medicine that you can get at your dispensary, like you can get cannabis products now, for example, in the state of California. Why? We can get them here too, which is weird. Okay. You get them here, like I said, there's like different deltas. So we can get legal cannabis here. Society is still very insecure when it are horrifically dangerous, you know, this propaganda. When I was in high school, this is your brain on drugs. You know, there was just say no, Nancy Reagan.

52:30Yeah. Everyone was just say no. Yeah. I was also in America actually in high school. I graduated from Flint, Powerts, Catholic, high school, in Michigan, class of 88. And I had been taught because I was sent from Germany, as like a German exchange student. I was taught before, don't mix with the drug people. They will be drug people at the high school and they will approach you and they will try to draw you in and then you won't get out again And I really believe that I mean I was like well there are people like that that is true look if you fall into the opiate crowd Yeah, if you fall into a crowd talking about a weird right well Weed is there a very different but the the problem is the blanket term right the blanket term of drugs Yeah, it's a big problem.

53:16Yeah, but also if you fall in second We can no crowd in high school. It's very possible that you'll fall into a crowd of Neradouels who will ruin their lives and they just get high all day and they wake and bake and they abuse it. Just like you can abuse sugar, right? Just like you can abuse alcohol. I actually think that cannabis is a dangerous drug because it is quite addictive. Yeah, it can be. Unlike LSD, LSD is not addictive. LSD is actually when the guy who invented AA, A, he himself had made an LSD therapy and got away from alcohol using LSD. And he wanted to incorporate LSD therapy into the AA program and then didn't do it because I guess it was pressure or whatever will come to the pressure in a second.

54:02So LSD is actually non -addictive drug. That's for example in Germany now we legalized cannabis. It's legal everywhere in the country. I think they should have legalized LSD and not cannabis because cannabis is actually harder to use. I think it should be legal. I think it's good that it's legal, but I think it's a little bit of a more problematic drug actually to legalize, because it's also so easy to use. But to legalize LSD, which is like, I think it should be legalized all over the globe, because I think it's a brain food. That's what I think after studying it, but saying this sounds like completely outrageous, LSD, like so many people are afraid of it.

54:41And so I hope with Trip to take a little bit of the edge of, you know, to actually show where it comes from. And I would like to tell that story where that comes from. Yeah. I may please. Because that's the core story because when I had found these SS records that they had used, because you asked before, was there another psychedelic substance? Yes, there was masculine. in. Mescalin was already kind of investigated by scientists since the 20s. It was also a German, there was a German scientist called Behringer. He was really, he was at the University of Heidelberg and he was really into mescalin and he was like doing it with his students and making tests and how does it change consciousness and what happens.

55:23So he was, he was basically one of the pioneers of psychedelic research, you could say. So the Nazis knew about masculine and the Nazis wanted to find a truth drug. Hitler was a paranoid person. He always thought, and it's actually true, that people are conspiring against him. There were quite a lot of assassination attempts on his life. He survived them all, but there were a lot of people who didn't like him. I mean, Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship and most people supported Hitler, but there were also people who did not. You know, there were people in the resistance, even within, you know, the army, who thought he was an idiot, high ranking officers who were like, we're like a bit more brilliant than him and who knew that he was running things to the ground.

56:08So he wanted, he gave the order to find a truth drug. Like, it's the wet dream of intelligence. You give someone a substance and then you can control that person. You can extract secrets from that person. and you can control a person. And the Nazis, even with their torture methods, had been unable to extract all the secrets they wanted to extract from prisoners, especially Polish resistance fighters had been very resistant even against SS torture. Like they wouldn't say I got the job from the British intelligence or what. You know, they just wouldn't talk even when you torture them. So Hitler wanted the drug that would solve this problem.

56:56And one man that was put in charge with this is a chemist called Richard Kuhn, Richard Kuhn, who actually received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He was a brilliant mind, but he was a Nazi. So he didn't, like many scientists left Germany or writers, left Thomas Mann, left Germany when the Nazis took power. But some people stayed, some writers stayed, some scientists stayed, and this Kuhn actually became, he's really working for Hitler. He was developing a nerve poison, Zarin, which is deadly for Hitler. And if you worked for Hitler as a scientist, obviously you got all the risk, the grants, you need the money and you were like, you had a great time basically if you sold your soul to the devil.

57:39So Richard Kuhn was in charge with finding the truth drug. and then the interesting thing is, because I was in the Novartis archive of Sandos, because I wanted to find the link between a Swiss pharmaceutical company who develops LSD and then the SS who tests it in Dachau. Like how did the SS know like, and did they really test LSD also in Dachau? I was just masculine, because they write in the reports that are then found in the US, masculine and another odorless colorless substance was being used. And LSD is that famous odorless colorless substance. Like I could put a drop of LSD in your coffee, you wouldn't even notice it.

58:27Which is good for seek for intelligent service. You want to dose someone without that person knowing it. So LSD was kind of perfect. But how did the Nazis, did they actually know about LSD? Was it LSD? That was kind of what I wanted to find out. And when I was in the archive of Sandos, I wanted to find papers like did they sell LSD to the SSO? I was curious to find something and the archiveist, he was very skeptical of me because he sensed that I was onto something like he was protecting basically the archive. Because the archive at Sandos is not a public archive. If you go to the National Archives of the United States or the Federal Archive of Germany, it's a public archive.

59:10the archive is one to define the information. They will reveal the find book, which has like it's a database, it shows you everything that's in the archive. So you have a, it takes sometimes days or weeks to actually figure out what's all there, but you have theoretically an overview of everything that's in the archive, but a company archive like Novartis archive, there was no find book. The archive is said to me, just tell me what you're looking for and then I will find it for you, which is basically shit, you know? Because in a way, you have to... It's basically under his control, the documents that he gives to you.

59:46You know, you have no... You don't even know what's in the archive behind that guy sitting in front of you. But... And I wanted to see... Like, I knew that Albert Hoffman wasn't a Nazi. Like, I had known a lot about Albert Hoffman and he... I never heard anything about him having Nazi connections like giving LSD to Richard Kuhner something. But I wanted to see what his boss stalled the one we talked about before had the whole, like the Urgod God, like who was this guy? Because he has the CEO called the shots for Sundance, the pharmaceutical company. And then the eye cover didn't want me really to see these papers.

1:00:24I could sense that. And I wanted to come again to the archive. How did you sense that? Well, the first time I was there, he said, why is everyone always so interested in LSD? We have so many beautiful products here and there was like a showcase with all the products that Sandos has made and LSD wasn't one of them. I said LSD is actually missing from that showcase here And he said well, it was never a product. I said it was a product. It actually had a name It was called De Luzit that was the brand name of LSD It existed, you know, and he's like, yeah, you know, but we are not so you know, it's illegal so they don't They have a difficult relationship with LSD and And the only thing he gave me were the original lab books of Albert Hoffmann.

1:01:07And it's very easy to flatter. It stuns you. If you're interested in LSD, you see the original lab book. You see his handwriting when he for the first time takes LSD and then his handwriting. He can't hold the pen anymore and you see this line on the paper. That's exciting. But it's not new. People have seen that before. So he kind of tricks you into. Like you see that you're saying, oh great, thank you. Bye bye, like after you go home. But then I was in the Swiss mountain. I was actually visiting a scientist that had researched this urgot producing in the Emmenthal. I visited this guy on the mountain.

1:01:42He showed me the former fields of sandals. And then I had the idea, I must go back to the archive and look at the papers of the CEO, because the CEO caused the shots. Why wasn't the CEO able to turn this potential game changer into a lucrative medicine? and what went wrong was probably on the CEO level of the company, not on the chemist level of the company. So I wrote an email to the archive and said, I'm going to come back tomorrow and I want to look at the papers of the CEO and then he wrote back to me, well sorry tomorrow I have too much work, he cannot come anymore kind of like that. But I just showed up, I just showed up at the archive and he opened and he said, well you here I don't have any time and I said well I'm here you know it's an archive I can use it and then I was sitting there and I was thinking what can I do and I actually at the time I had some LSD with me because I was already getting it for my mother like so I had it with me and I I said to him I suddenly had an idea and I said to him have you ever ever actually seen LSD and he's like in his Swiss accent like no it's illegal I have not seen it and then I asked him do you want to see it?

1:02:54He said sure I would like to see it but where could I see it? It's no one has it anymore and I said well here here here you go this is this is LSD and he's like studying it is quite interesting like suddenly became interested like oh this is actually LSD that's how it looks And the Elisdia I had received had printed on it like these papers, the old logo of sandals. So like the chemist who had made this actually in Basel, it was made in a black lab obviously, kind of made a joke and put like the logo of sandals on it and he said this is the logo of our old company. I was this possible and I said, well maybe it's like an homage by the chemist who made these.

1:03:33I said, do you want one? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, I give you one. as a gift, you know, you've been so helpful to me and he's like, oh, this, I guess, okay, I'll take one and I gave him a trip and what is the dose? That was like a hundred micrograms, which is quite strong, you know, I said to him, it's legit. It's legit, I said to him, take it, like when you're in the beautiful Swiss mountains, like you want to walk, you know, then maybe it's a good time and he's like interested, yeah. And then he gave it back to me, he said, I can't, I can't for legal reasons. I don't think I can accept this.

1:04:13I said, okay, fine, took it back. And then he said, but is there something you want to see maybe today in the archive? Because he was, you know, we had formed a connection suddenly. Right, right, right. And I said, yeah, actually I would be interested in seeing the paper of the CEO of Atoshtol. He said, that's not a problem at all. And he just went and he brought me the folder. And as I'm looking through the folder, I can see that there's one man that Stoyl was communicating with all through his career. And that one man, he stoyl himself had learned under Vilstetta. Vilstetta was the Jewish German master of biochemistry, who was later, he had to leave Germany, you know, the Nazis were prosecuting him also because he was Jewish.

1:05:01And Wiltstedt, I was this genius who also received a Nobel Prize and who had found out that, you know, Stolz idea from potent plans to extract and then you make medicines from plans, basically, because plans are very powerful, obviously. So Wiltstedt, I was like the scientific father of Stolz and Stolz had one other prodigy child and that was Richard Kuhn who by then had been the leading Nazi biochemist. So Kuhn and Stol, which I saw then in the letters in front of me, had been best friends because they had the same, had had the same like, you know, teacher, that exchange already in the 20s, all their research in the 30s, especially the Ergot Research Kuhn was very interested in it.

1:05:45So now he has the job by Hitler to find the truth drug and then Stol says, We found this almost magical substance that even in microgram dosages has this strong effect on the mind and Kuhn obviously became very interested in it. And I found a letter, maybe we can pull that one up. I don't know if you can find it from 1943, October. where Kuhn and I found this in the archive, this was the smoking gun basically, where Kuhn thanks Stol for sending Agotamin, which is the precursor to LSD. It's like from Agotamin, you do one step, and then you have LSD. And we received Agotamin in October 1943 from the Swiss company.

1:06:31And then the Nazis had their hand on LSD. And then it becomes very interesting what happens when the Americans find out about that. Because when the Americans liberated Germany from national socialism, when they won the war basically, certain units had attached to them the so -called Alsos unit, ALSOS. And the Also's unit was responsible for finding German nuclear scientists and interviewing them about their Research for the nuclear bomb in Nazi Germany because Nazi Germany was also trying to develop a nuclear weapon and the Americans thought that Probably quite far ahead because they're good in science like everything they do they fucking rock Which in this case actually probably wasn't true I don't think the Nazis were so advanced.

1:07:29It's still a bit obscure like how far the Nazis really were with nuclear technology But this also was in place and the second job of Alters was to find out about biochemical weapons because they also thought rightly so that Hitler had biochemical weapons So one of their first scientists the interview it was Richard Kuhn because Richard Kuhn was a leading Nazi biochemist So in the spring of 1945 and liberated Heidelberg after World War II Kuhn is being interviewed. And for Kuhn, it's a question of, will I cooperate with Americans? Or will I go to the Nuremberg trial as like a war criminal? Because he could have ended up on the bench for developing Sarin, a nerve poison.

1:08:12So he decided to rather extend his career. He later came to America, was teaching in America. So he told them about LSD. He said, we were very interested in LSD. And those experiments in Dachau could not be finished because there was not enough time. Dachau was already liberated. They were in the middle of finding out if I give a psychedelic to a prisoner, can I extract his secrets, can I fully control him? This test take a bit of time. You have to do it with several. You don't do it in a day. This test were not finished yet, but these findings then were very interesting to the American military.

1:08:51Because after the war, what started immediately, the next war, the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which was what the then CIA was founded, which CIA called the CIA Director Dallas. He called it, this is brain warfare. It's a totally new type of war. And we have to know, we have to get ahead of them. And they probably are working on brainwashing techniques. So we have to be ready to defend ourselves against the Soviet onslaught with their brainwashing techniques. So the Americans learn actually a lot from the Nazis. I once met in Florida on the beach together with my father and as a marine that was in the 80s when I was an exchange student in Flint, Michigan.

1:09:36We took a vacation, met my parents, my German parents in Florida, and we spoke with this marine, and he said, yeah, we learned so much from the SS. And it's true, the SS, the German system was a very, was an evil system, obviously. But it was a very functional system. There was a lot to be learned from them in terms of warfare. So the Americans, because the Nazis were so interested in this truth drug, thought, this must be, this must be interesting. We have to look at this. So they started now, first the American military, then the CIA started now to investigate can LSD actually be the truth drug, can it be like a pharmaceutical weapon.

1:10:21So this is, this is actually what went wrong. So what went wrong was the Swiss CEO sending samples to the German Nazi biochemist. From him, the knowledge goes to the American military and then intelligence apparatus that LSD could be abused as a weapon. This is what really put LSD on the wrong foot in a way. Because there was also at the same time in the early 50s, a lot of hopeful research at universities in America, like brain scientists, where they were looking at LSD, it wasn't illegal, you know, it was an interesting thing, but then the CIA took over the military research. First, was the US military, they had a professor at Harvard University called Beacher.

1:11:09Beacher was like the drug expert of the American army. He had also been in the war and then he looked at the SS report from Dachau and he made a report called report on ego -depressant drugs which he sent to Washington. So he was kind of the knowledgeable guy that would interpret how could psychedelic molecules be used as drugs. And then when in 47 the CIA was founded, basically the CIA took over this truth drug research from the military. And then Beecher was sending his reports to the CIA. This was done by a guy called Sidney Gottlieb. I don't know if you've heard that name. He was the head of MK -Altra.

1:11:50MK -Altra is basically a program first to see whether LSD could be used as a weapon. And Godly traveled to Basel, Switzerland, because he had heard that Sanders was also selling LSD to the other side of the Iron Curtain. There was rumor that the Soviet Union had purchased like 20 million docentures of LSD. So he flew to Basel with a suitcase full of cash, put it on the table of Stoll, the CEO, and said, I want the whole, the world's supply of LSD. I'm here by buying the world's supply of LSD, which which was that he said, your supply, his intelligence told him that the sandals had produced something like, I don't know, it's in the book, I forgot the number.

1:12:33Four kilograms of LSD and he said, I want to buy the whole, four kilograms, quite a lot, because it's already potent in microgram. Those are just, the store said, well, we only made 400 grams so far. They hadn't even made that much. But so he bought the 400 grams and he set a mechanism in place that Stoll would always informed, Stol would not sell to the other side of the Iron Curtain. That's what the Sanders had to, you know, basically assure him. Of course, the payback is, Sanders can still sell all the other medicines in America, doesn't have problems with the FDA and the American, you know, that's the pressure.

1:13:12And then, like, Godly takes, you know, the a gram back to the States and it's now from now on always informed when like a scientist in an American university acquires LSD from Zandas because they would not sell it openly in the beginning they would only give it away basically to scientists. They were still in the product development phase because they still weren't sure what can LSD like what do we write on the package basically what is what's the indication? So Godly was basically in the driving chair of LSD at that time. He got all the information from Basel Switzerland who had LSD in the country.

1:13:53He had the most LSD and then he had the idea to really look at how LSD can be used to manipulate people basically. That was that was like the big goal. And that's not an easy thing to achieve. And the way he did it was he let all the universities in the country, I think over like over 60 institutions, like you know, the big universities of this big country, he let them all, you know, in their, in their especially departments investigate LSD, but these tests are expensive. And what the idea Godlyb had was, university tests are often funded by foundations, let's say the Rockefeller Foundation, like a university wants to make some pharmaceutical test series that goes over two years and involves all these people that have to be paid.

1:14:54And it's expensive. So let's say $200 ,000 to make one serious clinical test. So that money comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, for example. And the money first goes from the CIA to the Rockefeller Foundation. So he used not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Foundation, but other foundations as like go between. So he gave them money and they would finance research done in universities which are supposed to be, I guess, neutral, just trying to figure out what is science is. You don't want to see a guy to finance your science and then kind of manipulate through that money, how your research is being done and especially all the results going back to the people who bring the money.

1:15:42So that he was very efficient in setting up this program which then I guess was called MK Ultra. And that's also, that's how LSD really, that's what really went wrong with LSD. MK Ultra. Yeah, because it dominated a controlling force over the research, and a lot of research then was tailored to, like there was crazy stuff happening, like there was even in Canada at University, I write about this in in Tript, this guy, and it sounds a bit like Stanley Kubrick movie. Like he put people on constant LSD and then had speakers under their pillows which would tell them like single sentences. Like he was trying to see, can you break, can you like really drive someone mad with LSD for example, can you deprogram a brain with LSD?

1:16:40So these are very creepy experiments. These are actually human experiments. In a way, they were a continuation of what they as as started in Dachau, but much more sophisticated. And they were done on American citizens. Like the part of MK Ultra were so -called safe houses. The safe houses, there was one in the West Village in Manhattan, one on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. And in the safe houses, people would be approached on the street or in bars in Lower Manhattan and invited to a party. We want to come to my pad. I have booze. It was like a cool apartment, but there was one large mirror behind the mirror, set an operative who was filming and listening in and recording.

1:17:32and then they checked like what happens to a person if they receive unwittingly a dosage of LSD. You know, so this is quite unethical work that was done. They also did operation midnight climate. Yeah, that's in telegraph hill. Yeah, so that was a brothel. Yeah, it was an apartment. They called it the pad, but they hired sex workers, which then got an additional fee from the CIA for giving their clients from them. Also, they received their fee, obviously, and then giving them LSD. But it was kind of, I think it was a stupid, actually, experiment. I mean, it's kind of spectacular operation with night climax.

1:18:17It looks great in the film. It sounds good. Yeah, I mean, it's just show, but it wasn't very effective. What do you gain? What do you see? Like, someone of course has a little bit different sex on LSD, but it's kind of stupid. It never led anywhere. Basically, Sydney got wasted a lot of tax money and he brought a lot of suffering to people who were subjected to these unethical tests and he had no result. It's definitely not a good thing that they did. But if you put your mind into their perspective back then trying to understand the effects of these drugs, they probably had limited resources and without making these things legal and without opening up the research to everybody, to this potentially powerful life -changing drug.

1:19:07I mean, this drug could be something that could be used by foreign governments, it could be used against us. So they're probably very secretive and they're approaching. We kind of had the benefit of, you know, 2020 hindsight, because we're looking back. Yes, it was the Cold War, and I think that they really believed that there are these threats from the Soviet Union, and they were threats from the Soviet Union especially. And brainwashing is a specialty of communism, you know? So it's clear that they wanted to be, from his perspective, it makes sense, you know? Right. But it didn't help LSD to become a medicine because that was a time when there were no anti -depressants yet developed and no anti -psychotics.

1:19:57So I think LSD would have had a chance to actually become a very helpful medicine instead of being kind of an unhelpful weapon because it never worked as a weapon. Right. No, it's definitely unhelpful what they did. Yeah. And it might be understandable, but it went the wrong way. It went the wrong way, but it was also indicative of the kind of control that those people wanted over society and population, especially coming after World War II. There's a whole new order in the world. The United States emerges victorious, and then there's this clamoring for trying to figure out, okay, what is the enemy up to?

1:20:37What are these powerful tools that could be used against us? And some of them could be mind control. I mean, this is obviously at a time where the red scare, right? There were the McCarthy era. They were worried about communism and communism infiltrating our society. And they're probably very terrified of things that disrupted, which is what was going on in the 1960s. You know, I, Jim, I'm going to send you this. This is a video of hippies in the 1960. And what it kind of shows you that a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now with the disruption of society, this is, it's very similar to what was going on in 1968 with the anti -war movement.

1:21:18The free Palestine movement has a lot in common with a lot of other anti -war movements of the past, where these people want peace and love and back then in the 1960s, in particular, They were dropping acid. This is the Timothy Leary days and you know tune out and drop out and so play this. I want like if I want to do that. I want to climb a tree. I do that. You have always young kids coming from a very rich affluent middle class society where they've been taken care of since they've been babies and never really had to do anything for themselves in a serious way and now they come here and they want to be taken care of.

1:22:02One of the first questions they'll ask is, what do you do? And so I say, I live and they say, no, I mean, do you work or what? And I still know I just live. A lot of people say to me, what are you doing? You're not doing any work. You're not working at a job. You tell them that you don't do anything and that you come to the park. It's like they can't believe you. We're doing the hardest work in the world because we're growing. We're trying to change. We have a group of young people from upper middle class families who have moved into a physical environment that is an effective reversion. They're living in gross and sanitary conditions.

1:22:39With a great deal of overcrowding, there is a very high incidence of infectious hepatitis. About one fourth or one fifth of our total caseload in the Renéal Disease Planets appear to be hippies. Now I'm going on the appearance solely. And we have one case history in which young chap has been into the clinic 12 times in three months with 12 different cases of gonorrhea. Okay, so that guy, that last guy with the salt and pepper hair and the tie and the nice suit, those are the people that were from another generation. and we're seeing this younger generation that was completely dropping out of society.

1:23:22And the, what was causing that, there was a lot causing that, the anti -war movement, but a lot of it was fueled by psychedelics. And they wanted to stop that. They wanted to stop this radical shift in society they were seeing from the 1950s to the 1960s. Yeah, there's an interview with one main aid of Nixon afterwords when he was already retired and he said that they could make it illegal to be black and they couldn't make it illegal to go on rallies and be against the war. Like it's an American principle that you're going to go to a demonstration but they could make it illegal to take LSD and then criminalize people.

1:24:08So it's kind of the same thing that Anselinger started much earlier. Yeah, I mean, it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over again. Whenever there's a powerful disruptor that might be ultimately great for the human race, but bad for the power structures that are in place currently, they step in and they do their best to throw water on it. And what they did from the late 1960s into the 1980s, they radically shifted culture. Everything changed. Music sucked, cars sucked, everything sucked. There's direct evidence that it had a huge impact on our creativity. If you look at the music from the 1960s, it was so radically different from the music from the 1950s.

1:24:51Something had happened. I mean, that's why John Lennon said we have to thank the CIA because they gave us LSD. I mean, it is kind of interesting also a young guy called Ken Kesey was working at a psychiatric Patrick Ward in Menlo Park, California. And he was part of MKLTRA, basically. I mean, he was a guinea pig. He received $75 for taking LSD. And then he took LSD and his default mode network was default mode, default mode network was less energy. And he said suddenly understood the crazies. He was walking through the psychiatric ward and understanding a lot better, like what's actually going on in the brain.

1:25:37And that's when he had the idea for one flu over the cook who's nest. Which made him so much money that he then decided to stop writing and buy a bus and drive around the country with his friends and dish out at LSD. So it's kind of a, he made like a career change. Yeah, I could see how the powers it be. I could see how the CIA and the government were like, we have to stop this. We have to put a stop. This is going to be the downfall of society. Certainly downfall of the people that are in control of the government currently. And these people are necessary to be in control of the country because we are in a cold war with Russia.

1:26:13We just got out of World War II. Well, also in the hot war with Vietnam. I mean, that war was taking a big toll on the American society. And suddenly it is like young people sitting on it, you know, saying, what the fuck? I'm not going there. So that creates, that created a strong counter reaction by the regime, which is to legalize LSD, but poor LSD. Poor LSD, and what's really unfortunate is that if that had not happened, who knows how transformative those substances would have been to society globally? If there was a great reckoning in the United States, if we understood things, if we got our act together, we really cleaned up all the problems in society and did so on an egalitarian plane.

1:27:00We like recognize that there's work that can be done here, where we can make life better for everybody, have everybody recognize that we are literally all in this together and we are all connected. We need each other, we are a part of each other, and we should treat each other all of us like we are a community. I think that's the globalized narrative that we need. And I think that is a thing. It's the only way we survive. I mean, this is the perspective that astronauts have when they go to the space station. They look down at this ball and they go, this is so crazy. Like that we are fighting over imaginary boundaries that we've created, lines in the dirt.

1:27:36I think it really is a problem of our language and of our communication skills because we can only create a discourse within the United States possible. You have the media, you have the Joe Rogan experience, you have, you have a discourse, and you have a discourse in other nation states, but there is no global discourse. I mean, maybe when there's like Olympic games, that's a type of global discourse that's happening, maybe right now, that's why people kind of like to watch it right now because they feel we're connecting like from all over the world without being like total assholes, we're doing sports together, isn't that nice?

1:28:09Because we like when the opposing teams hug each other and friends, yeah. We need positive global communication because we have a lot of negative global communication. We have two very prominent wars right now and a lot of other conflicts. And we have global problems like the heating up of the planet which leads to refugee floods and crises and migration. I mean, we have a global theme, but how do we talk about it? There's no global government. We need one, we should have one, but there's no global, basically there's no global end. There's nothing. Right. I don't necessarily think that global governments are the rule because the problem is whenever people have control over people, they just want more.

1:28:58It's just like everything else. It's like if you have money, you want more money, if you have power, you want more power, you want control, you want more control. And it makes it easier for them to stay in control. And if you had a global world government that could tell people, no, you can't move to Switzerland where the laws are different, you can't move to Costa Rica, you have to, the laws apply everywhere, it's a global world order, we decide what you can and can't do, and we're not deciding it based on empirical evidence, fact, objective analysis of reality, we're doing on the basis of what's the most effective way that we can control and govern.

1:29:32I think that's like a horror scenario that's a horror. It's a horror, we might be moving into it. Well, we're in it right now, we're battling it. There's rational, logical people that understand the consequences of these things that are fighting against it and talking against it. And then there's people that are saying, we need centralized digital currency to compete with China like Jesus Christ. And we're leading ourselves into a position that's very similar to many other positions that societies have faced in the past, including ancient Greece, where ancient Greece, where they developed democracy, the Illusinean mysteries, and then all that stuff got made illegal.

1:30:07And then society crumbles, things fall apart. It's no longer the center of the intellectual discourse in the world. Everything goes away. They threw water on it in the 1960s with the psychedelics acts where they made everything schedule one. They locked people up that were anti -war protesters. They figured out a way to squash this sort of new movement of thought. I think it would be a step into the future if psychedelics were made legal and if we kind of move more towards, you know, because the psychedelics, as we said before, and humans are about transcendence, you know. It's about basically including the other and not being afraid of the other and that fear of the other leads to violence against the other.

1:30:56the psychedelic is moving in the opposite way. Right. So it is obviously not a surprise that Nixon would illegalize the psychedelics. They're dangerous. Yeah, I really dangerous to power. They disrupt. So, but it's great for everyone. That's the crazy thing. The people that are making it illegal are the people that haven't experienced it. That's correct. That's where it's crazy because it would be beneficial to them. They are human beings with a finite lifespan. Their experience on earth would be greatly enhanced if they had the perspective of psychedelic encounter. Well, if I was a chance love Germany, which I will never be, but if I was, I would make a psychedelic year.

1:31:44Like after high school, you have the opportunity to actually experience these substances. I think it would be very good for societies to think about rituals or mechanisms or discourse, like what you said about the mysteries of your loses. That was the defining ritual of ancient Greece, the Athens Society would move there in September, like they would go there, they would have this experience, they would talk about this experience. Yes. Because of that experience, they could relate to each other, they could relate to their to the planet that they live on. So that was a very healthy thing. And we today, because it's illegal, we can't we don't have we don't have this.

1:32:30And I don't know what I mean some things like burning man obviously are like attempts to create like ritualistic spaces. And I've never been there and I heard it's it's it's kind of it's kind of stupid because it's so expensive and kind of elitist. I don't know if that's true, but basically we need. We need something, but we need something. We need a legitimate structure because there's also a thing that is described called spiritual narcissism where you you start doing these things and you think that you have all the answers and then you have people that are the ones who speak to these groups of people and they have all the knowledge and we're all in this together and it's essentially a cult.

1:33:13And it's really easy to run a cult if everyone in the cult is naive and they're looking for a leader, they're looking for an answer, maybe they've had a list list life that's that lacks in direction and then also someone comes along and through this ritual we can all transcend and you know becomes what do we go to do? What do we know? What we need real shamans, we need actual legit shamans and the problem is that term is in our societies is much maligned, right? That term is silly people that are in the jungle that are doing voodoo. But we need someone who is a legitimate psychedelic experiencer who has a genuine goal of advancing consciousness, and advancing conscious growth, and doing it in a very responsible way.

1:34:09One of the things that we would have to be careful of if you have something like a year of psychedelics is schizophrenia. We don't understand. I didn't say, I didn't say, the young people should take psychedelics for a straight year, but maybe a year where they could take it. Well, they have a possibility. They have a possibility. Well, some kind of structure, maybe a place you can go. Well, we need, I think we need a structure for everybody. I think that's really the goal of this thing, is to develop a sensible objective structure based on actual research, which makes on a real knowledge of real clinical data on dosages, a real knowledge on which compounds are more effective for which particular ailments I began, which you talked about Iboga, very effective for addiction.

1:34:51My friend Ed went over to Mexico and he got into an I began clinic when he got hooked on pills and he cured him of it. Well, just one experience. One experience. That's what I heard also. I've known many people that have had real problems with pills and have knocked it with one I began experience. So there's a lot of different things that can be done, that can benefit society tremendously, but it has to be done responsibly. It has to be done with real knowledge, and that real knowledge is only going to be available if they open everything up to real research. And instead of being biased about this, and let it be open to everyone to have an objective of analysis of what is actually going on, have the naysayers and the people that are converted, everyone debate this and try to have some sort of an understanding of what is good, what is bad, what's the right dose, what can be done, and what is the most effective setting?

1:35:49Because setting setting, the part of the ritual aspect of it is important too because you're setting an intention before you do these things, which is why a lot of these people that are serious users of psychedelics, they don't like the concept of microdosing and they don't like the concept of recreational use. They don't like to think these things are sacred and they should be used only in this one particular way. And I think this conversation would benefit everyone in society, including the people that wanted illegal. That's what's ironic about it. The people that want illegal, they are just human beings.

1:36:23They're just human beings that are trapped in this paradigm. They're trapped in the world that they live in. They're trapped on the momentum of their actions and all the life that they've lived up into this moment. And they would benefit from it. I mean, it would also give the Western societies a tremendous push. You know, psychedelics were allowed and that could be research and that could be, you know, it would probably encourage like a cultural flowering. And right now we have kind of a decay of Western culture, like Western Western societies in crisis and we don't really know how to get out of it.

1:36:58And the current recipes given to us by the camps that are now also competing for the US presidency, they don't really solve the problem. I mean, we all feel like in the last couple of years, more and more people feel that something is wrong and that something should change. I think somehow people are ready for a revolution, But no one knows exactly what kind of revolution it should be. So people who tap into that are quite successful, even though they might not even provide, you know, what is actually needed to have that change. But we do need a change on a national level in Germany, in America, in other countries, as well as on a global level.

1:37:41And I think opening up our societies to psychedelic research and psychedelics, I would be curious to see a society which treats itself with that liberty and relaxation and curiosity. Right now we're all tense and we're saying, no, this is the chemical wall in our brain. I just don't think it works for a democratic western free society to have a chemical wall in the brain. It's a contradiction. It keeps us back from really developing a society that is much better than the current society because the current society is pretty shitty actually. We really moved into it and we're trapped. We're trapped, but there is of course ways out.

1:38:29There can always be a so -called problem about one right now. This is what's crazy. This isn't theoretical. And these are actually substances. We're talking about it now and Kanye West on this show said he's the leader of the free world. Maybe we're maybe to they were now the leaders of the free world. And we're going to start a psychedelic, you know, revolution from this podcast. Well, I think it has to be done everywhere with every one. They have to demand freedom. And if you have freedom, freedom over your own consciousness is what McKenna talked about often. Yes. That it means nothing if you don't have freedom over your own consciousness.

1:39:08us, especially freedom over your own consciousness with substances that have been shown to have dramatic positive effects on people. So there's a lot of drugs that are very good positive drugs that people use on a regular basis that if you take too much of them, you will die. So we know what the substances are. We understand what the correct dosages, we understand what the LD50 is, and we know how to prescribe them correctly. We should apply that same logic to psychedelics. I mean, Albert Hoffman was thinking about this in the 50s. This was another document I found in the archives. He set up a memo to start the CEO writing that Sanders should now focus on these psychedelic substances.

1:39:52We should examine all the possibilities. We should create new compounds. We should become the psychedelic pharmaceutical powerhouse in the world. And that idea is really a great idea. It is a great idea. And Stolch is just said no. Because he had been visited by Sydney Gottlie, who basically said, don't do it. Well, it's guys like that guy in the suit and tie with the salt and pepper hair. There's no nonsense, republican, right wing, controlling. And I think it's also, these guys are a little bit of the past. I mean, I'm quite surprised, for example, in America, I got approached by different camps about tripped in a very positive way, because I think somehow that anti -drug red rig is losing ground.

1:40:35That's the feeling I have. Well, that makes me a little bit optimistic. It's losing ground because of the internet. So the narrative up until the internet came around was that these things just draw lives. And then all of a sudden people are saying, you know, actually not really. And then you have the positive effect that it has on people that are suffering from post -traumatic stress disorder coming back from the war, which is really maps is concentrating on. Yeah, right. The mainstream media really is a problem in this regard. They're problem with everything. Well, they're essentially a propaganda network that is passing itself off as the news.

1:41:08It kind of comes from Randolph Hearst in a way. I mean, he's the kind of set the tone. Absolutely. But I mean, I'm sure there were people doing that before. If you have control of the newspaper, and especially back then with Hearst publications, there's very few newspapers in the country. And especially the ones that were respected. If you have control over that narrative, you put something in the newspaper and people read it. They read that as that, oh my God, that is a fact. This is what's happening. People today are far more skeptical, particularly after the pandemic. I think the pandemic kind of shook things up to a point where it's much more difficult to pass off propaganda today than it was even just four years ago.

1:41:50I mean, that's why I was quite excited to come on this podcast, on this experience, because I think you have actually created a space where free thought is possible and free communication. It's like a stage that you've created. I think it's actually quite an important artwork that you have established here. I mean, it's not so easy to create like your own media that has a global reach. So... Thank you. Thanks for having me. It just happened. I think it made itself. Maybe, yeah. I think so. Because the concept was right. Well, I think, look, I'm the one who's the host of it, so I would be the best judge.

1:42:28I do not think I'm really responsible for this thing. I think this thing wanted to be made and it made itself and it did in a very sneaky way. It did in a very sneaky way where originally it was just me having fun with my friends, just with a webcam, me and Brian, and then Eddie Bravo and Tom Sager and all my friends. We just come over and just talk, just have a good time. And then it started to be where it got enough downloads where I could contact someone like Graham Hancock and say, hey, tell me about ancient civilizations. Come on my podcast, Anthony Bourdain. Tell me about your travels. And then it became much, much bigger.

1:43:03And it sort of, I genuinely believe it tricked me into making it. When was the breaking point when it got big? Like, it was very gradual. It was very gradual. I'll tell you when I realized it. I think it was in 2011 or 2012. I was on stage in the Chicago theater. And I was doing comedy and I asked the audience. I was gonna tell a story from the podcast and I said, how many of you guys listen to the podcast? And it was just, yeah, 3 ,700 people cheering. And I was like, whoa, I'll never forget that moment. Because I was like, oh, listen. One of the things that I used to do and I still do is I don't look at the numbers.

1:43:42I don't pay attention. I don't pay attention to how many downloads. I'm not like feverishly checking the, what's good and what's bad, of what I don't look at like what the retention is when people draw about. I don't, that's up to them. My job is to just have an interesting conversation with people that I'm actually excited about talking to. That's my only job. So the way I book it, I completely book it based on my interests. I don't, I don't have a publicist that's like examining trends in this person's pop. I don't do any of that. I think it made of itself. I think it made itself. I think it's a trick.

1:44:21I think it's like the muse. Like the muse sort of like brings these ideas into your head. I think the universe gave birth this thing I know it's a stupid hippie thing to say it sounds ridiculous But if anybody should know it's me and if anybody should want to take responsibility Be proud of something it would be me right, but I'm not I feel like it's not really me I feel like this thing wanted to be made and I think this is one of many of these things that want to be made all around the world and that's why podcasts are developing. I think there's a hunger for honest discourse and real conversations with people that exists everywhere.

1:44:57And I think that's why podcasts are exploding. That's where you don't have a gatekeeper anymore to your ability to self -restraint. It is frustrated with mainstream media. Well, you shouldn't have gatekeepers. You shouldn't have someone who, the narrative that you're pushing out to the world, is heavily influenced by the people that are advertising on your channel. Yeah. Heavily influence. So there's certain things you cannot criticize. There's certain things you will gaslight the median, or the public into believing is a good thing when it's probably not really a good thing. You will say things in a very biased perspective.

1:45:30You attack particular individuals. You not just attack political individuals, you'll attack them with a very specific narrative that gets repeated over and over and over again to the point where they make these compilations of these media puns that saying the exact same thing over and over and over again. And this is not news. This is not real discourse. This is not real human beings discussing things and trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong. This is propaganda. And this is most of what people get. And inside that propaganda are some real news. There's actual specific information about the weather.

1:46:04There's actual real reports about conflicts breaking out overseas and all sorts of different things. But at the end of the day, it's not real conversation. So real conversation was able to flourish because people had this hunger for it And they didn't even know they wanted it until they got it I mean it's thought when we first started making podcasts that Everyone was moving to a much shorter attention span and that most of the things that we're going to be popular in the future We're like 10 minute things like very quick things You know, which is like a lot of the truth today with TikTok and Instagram Reels and you know all these things that we the people like short attention span It just captures you, it gives you nothing, and you just keep scrolling and looking, and we thought that's what people are moving to.

1:46:46But then podcast came along, and podcast came along with three hour conversations with scientists that get 50 million views, and then people are like, whoa, okay, so it's not that people aren't intellectually curious. It's not people aren't eat what they don't have this want to be engaged. They do. Everybody does. It just do that being fed correctly. I mean, that's also one of the beauties. I mean, I'm here as a writer of literature, actually. I mean, if I decide to work on a book, I don't get influenced by anybody. And I have a very large space in which I can develop my thoughts and my narrative.

1:47:24That's why I'm actually active in this field. I think there might be similarity between a podcast and literature, because they both go into the long form and into immersion into something. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, literature is the ultimate form of that, right? Because the amount of time that it takes for you to ponder the sentences and the paragraphs and putting them all together and the order in which you say things and the way you captivate and compel the reader. It's very similar and it's all coming from your mind too, which is also very similar. When I hear you talk on a podcast, if I'm a listener and I'm listening, I hear one human being who's talking about your analysis of all the data and all the research that you've done to create this book.

1:48:06That's not really available in most places anymore. But people want that because they want to know what did this guy find out? What does he know and how does he know it? Let me listen to him and along the way, especially we're having a three hour conversation, along the way, let me hear some crackpot things. Let me hear if he says some things like, oh, that guy is kind of a cuck. Oh, that guy is not really thinking clearly. Oh, that guy is kind of full of shit. Oh, he's saying that but there's no way he really believes that. Okay, now I know. Now I'm suspicious. Now I can kind of like look at this through a filter of reality.

1:48:38So I think maybe we should talk a little bit about blitzed and notses and drugs. Sure, yeah, yeah. I thought that's why you had me here. I thought that would be like your subject of fascination. Oh, it's part of it for sure. I want to talk to you about everything. You know, I just was interested in talking to you. I mean, immediately when I saw the, But what you're talking about when I saw you in the Jesse Walter show. Oh, okay. That was kind of funny to me because that was really speaking to an audience I usually don't speak to, but it was great, you know. Yeah, well, he loved the book. They're willing to take much more chances on Fox News and they are on other, definitely in a strange way.

1:49:14Well, I think they started with Tucker Carlson in a lot of the ways. But the Jesse Waters thing was interesting because you got to scratch the surface a little bit. Yeah, it was just seven minutes, not three hours. Yeah, so tell me about Blitz. What do you want to know? Well, first of all, what was the first... What was the creation of Enfantamines? And when did it start getting utilized by military and by people of Hitler? Well, there's like a rumor going on that it started at the Olympic Games in Berlin, in 1936 because an American Afro -American athlete named Jesse Owens was running faster than the white Aryan German superheroes jumping further and winning, I think, five gold medals.

1:50:07The rumor was he must be on something similar kind of to Anselinger, like the jazz people, they're only so good because they're on something, you know. So there was like, was he on Benzadrean? Benzadrian was an American product that was already available and it's basically speed and there were no doping checks at this at these Olympics. I think there were the last Olympic Games without doping checks. So you could basically take everything. But it's never, no one knows if Jesse, oh, he was just good, you know. But there was a guy called Teo D 'Ortemla who was the head of the Temmler Factory and he He said to his chemist Fritz Hausschild after the Olympic Games, we have to create a better emphetamine, like a better than the American emphetamine.

1:50:52This can never happen again. Like an Afro -American is faster than the white guys. And then Hausschild was the chemist's name. He did research about emphetamines and he found that in Japan, a chemist called Nagai in 1917, quite a while ago actually. This was in 1936. So already 19 years earlier, a Japanese chemist had made meth amphetamine. And meth amphetamine is stronger than amphetamine. So how should thought I'm gonna make a new meth amphetamine? So he found a new way of synthesizing meth. You can, there's different ways you can make meth, I guess. And he found a specific way that this temla company then patented.

1:51:40The patent was issued in Berlin in October 1937. And then they put it on the market in 1938. Methamphetamine became available. No one said it was like a drug or anything. It was just a new medicine. You didn't even need a prescription. You could just like a child could go into a pharmacy and say I want 10 packages of methamphetamine and it was cheap also and you got it. It was branded as pervitan, parivitine, we say, in German. There it is. There is pavitine. And pavitine. And pavitine then became very fashionable. Look how innocuous that little container looks. Who would imagine that's how they sell meth?

1:52:26I think this could already be, and I'm going to get to this in a second for the military. But first it was a drug that was just on the market in the civil society. There was no war yet in 1938. 1938 was actually kind of the height of the Hitler regime. Like people loved him. There was full employment. I mean, there was oppression against the Jews. But if you were like a national socialist, you thought that was good basically. So the problem was, I mean, there were many problems, but the reality was that it was like a steam engine. Like it was the society was really working. Everyone had a job.

1:53:04Everyone was taking part. That also created, it was basically a modern capitalist society. That also created a lot of stress. You always have to compete. Like you have to go from meeting to meeting. Like the German economy was booming. So people loved math. There was no coffee available because Germany didn't have colonies like France, where they couldn't bring in coffee. I don't even know if there was coffee. Probably you could get it maybe somewhere, but it was not a normal thing to go into a cafe in the morning and have a coffee. So this methamphetamine became very popular, like workers used it in the factories.

1:53:37They could increase their output. And party people used it because it boosted your ego. So it was, you know, it go into a meeting, an important meeting. You take a bit of math before. So it wasn't stigmatized. It was just, it was, they called it performance enhancing, performance enhancing substance. So it was, that's a neutral term, you know. They made studies at universities showing that there's actually good against anything, also against depression, and it would increase your sexual drive. And it was, like, people thought this is the greatest thing, basically, There was no studies being done yet on addiction, which obviously is a problem of meth.

1:54:22But also we have to understand that this meth that Tamla produced is not the crystal meth that's being produced in a trailer somewhere in a southern state. It's a different, it was made by a pharmaceutical company. The way I found out about Pavitin was actually a funny story because I didn't know anything about no one knew anything about Nazis and drugs, as I said before. Like in 2010, I'm asking a friend of mine who's a DJ in Berlin, Alex is his name. I said to him, what should I write about next? What should my next book be? Because I'd written three novels and I was about to write the fourth novel.

1:55:02And he said, you should write about Nazis and drugs. I said, well, but they didn't take any drugs, you know, because, and he said, they did. And I said, how do you know? No one's ever talked about this before. He said, well, yesterday I received Pavitean, which I said, what is Pavitean? He said, well, it's methamphetamine from the third Reich. The Reich being a propaganda term by the Nazis. That's why I actually say the so -called third Reich. How did this happen? He had a friend who was an antique dealer, and in 2010 this antique dealer in East Berlin had purchased, like in an apartment where people died, like, you know, then the antique dealers come in and they take furniture, they pay maybe a little, they like he bought a medicine chest and he opened the medicine chest and there was pavitine inside from the 1940s and that antique dealer was a friend of Alex the DJ who looked at it and said on the package contains methamphetamine.

1:55:57He's like what? So he took it with his partner. They were curious, you know. And I made a met this guy and he said for one month we took this pavitine and it was like so great. He said it was not too strong. It made us happy. We were very active. We worked a lot. We had great sex. It was great. And then Alex, the DJ, being very interested in all kinds of drugs, he also took it. And he told me this in my writing tower in Berlin. He said, after the first pavitine, I could feel that something's coming on. That was, no, it was increased energy level. And then I took another one. And these are pills which were like 70 years old and they were still fun.

1:56:39They were still working. And then I took a third one and my writing to us right at the river in Berlin and there was like a big ship passing by and he said and I felt like this ship when the big engine is turned on and the the shoot like the push of the engine like moving the whole big ship forward. That's how I felt after three tablets. So this is insane, you know. And I googled it and there was like just a little on the internet. There was one medicine historian who had totally, totally unknown guy, but I mean a researcher who had written like a two page thing that the German Blitzkrieg, which is the German word for speed war, like the Nazis strategy, how to lead a war, was only possible because of methamphetamine, because of this pavity.

1:57:26And I read this and I said, this is crazy. Maybe I should write about this. And I contacted, so it's a very odd story how this came about, you know. And I contacted this academic, he was at the University of Ulm, I traveled down there, I met him and he said, yeah, there's actually a lot more to find, but I just didn't have the time because he's investigating all kinds of things, you know. He was just, this was just a side project of his. And he gave me the signatures in archives, he got a signature, every document has a signature. And he gave me the signatures where I can find all the documents on the math during Nazi times.

1:58:06This was in the military archive of Germany, which is housed in Freiburg in southern Germany. Germany is a decentralized country, so not all archives are in Berlin. For example, the military archive is in this small town called Freiburg. The military archive is almost bigger than the town. Because the German military has done so much shit. you know, in the first, really, we lost two world wars. I mean, that's quite, that's world record for sure. So, and everything that the German armies did is, you know, document it because the Germans loved document like everything is written down. So the military aircraft is huge.

1:58:39And because I had the signatures from this guy, he basically did the legwork for me. I could look at all the files and then I realized that the German army was using methamphetamine. And it's, it's another interesting story how that came about because a professor are called Ranker. He was the head of the Institute for Defense Physiology of the German Army. And basically his job was to enhance the fighting capability of the soldier. So he was researching in 38, how can we combat fatigue? Because he said, not the Russians are the biggest enemy, not the British, not even the French, you know, the biggest enemy is fatigue.

1:59:21Because you You get tired in the evening, you fight the whole day and then you need to sleep. What a waste, you know. That's not good. He was looking for a way to beat this enemy sleep. And then when Paviteen came onto the market, he started reading studies done by universities and they very clearly show that on math, and I think this is an experience that people who have used math probably would sign, you know, you don't sleep as much. it keeps you awake because all your dopamine is released. So your brain is basically in a fight or flight mode. Like your methamphetamine makes you extremely alert over a very long period of time.

2:00:04And then at one point, obviously, you drop down and you get the urge to take it again. This is how the addiction works. But he was not looking at addiction problems. He was just looking at does it really work to keep a soldier awake? maybe for two hours longer on the battlefield, because there's this saying from Napoleonic times, the last 15 minutes in a battle, that that's the decisive 15 minutes, like who wins in the end wins, you know? So if you have something that keeps your men awake for longer than the enemy has, then you have a decisive advantage. So he may test, I don't know, I have like, there's photos of it in my book Blitz, where you see the young medical officers, he was working in an institution that was breeding medical officers for the German Army, so he gave these young guys, placebo, methamphetamine, coffee, just to check, check, and like, can they sustain longer on math, and they could.

2:01:07They could actually, they were more active, like these tests started at 8 p .m., and went until 10 a .m. And the math people, they were awake the whole night, You know they were filling out you know they hear tests like you have to draw things or repeat orders or like solve mathematical Questions and the math people were like going at it until 10 a .m. And then some said and now we want to go out like now Then they wanted to party while the caffeine people I don't know if we can see that image is kind of funny. Can you pull that up? Like the car your mic son on Jamie It's not sure which one it is.

2:01:42I'm looking at it's just it's a lot of images in their own Yeah, this one. So these guys are all methed up. Well, you see, like, growing up, maybe. You see, like, the S, you know, sleeping there. That's, S means shine tablet, which is placebo. To the left of him is a pervatin guy. He's quite happy. To the right of him is a benzedring guy. That's the B. And that's another stimulant. That's the American stimulant, which is not as potent as methamphetamine. I mean, methamphetamine is more potent than amphetamine. It's like a difference between like a Mercedes and a bicycle or something. Okay. What is a C?

2:02:21C's coffee. Coffee. Yeah. There's a few more images where you like this is like a taken at 4 .15 in the morning. This is taken at 5 .15 in the morning. You go back maybe to the 4 .15. Hmm. That guy's head's moved. I mean, here we see photos. I mean, then he obviously looked at the results of people filling out. And there's more pictures later in the day when the S person is like yawning. Well, you see in front of him the pervatin person, he's not yawning. He's like, he's like ready. He's ready for the next questionnaire. He can't sleep for another day. But the guy in the back though that's a P, his head is down.

2:03:06I think he's solving. Yeah, you might be studying things. Well, in any case, maybe go one picture down. Yeah, that one. That's how the test like he did. So he saw that with, if you take two times, there was six milligrams of pavitine on the right there, that black bar, they don't show any fatigue at all. He basically came to the conclusion, it does work, it does keep you awake. And he also found out something which is I think is kind of funny. He found out that on math you are less capable of solving higher complex higher complex questions So math keeps you up, but it makes you a little bit dumber like things that are really That demand like abstract a very abstract thinking or you know more complex, you know things you're not better on math.

2:04:05Is it because math sort of rushes you to come to conclusion? Yeah, and also you feel too good about yourself and that self -criticism is lowered. Right, right. And he concluded that this is perfect for the German soldier. It makes you awake longer and makes you a little bit more stupid because the soldier just needs to follow orders. He just needs to shoot for a long time. Right, right. And so he got all excited about it. This was in 38, his last test he did, It wasn't 39, then Germany was about to invade Poland September 1st 1939 beginning of World War II. And he said to his, you know, his superior was in America, it's called the search in general.

2:04:43German, that's a different name, but the highest medical guy in the army who, you know, determines basically at the end of the day what is given to the soldiers. So he wrote to his boss, and this was kind of an old school guy, the boss, like he was still from the first World War He read the reports and he's like, why we need to use a chemical drug to enhance the... He didn't get it, basically. So he said we're not using this in the attack on Poland. And then Ranko, the professor really believed in meth, and I read his war diary. Like every officer was required to write a diary during the war. And in his war diary, you can clearly see that he himself became addicted to meth.

2:05:26He writes about it so great. I don't even understand how I could even do a day at the office without math Why is not everyone taking it? But then like a few months later is like I Feel very depressed this morning even the Pavitine I'm using does not help me anymore against my depression like he didn't understand that this was actually the problem So he was becoming addicted himself He hired hired dosages He did and he became quite unhinged, but he was like the meth guy of the German army, but he was still doing it, you know his job and he asked the Medical officers in the field and Poland Poland was beaten by Germany within a few days actually I think 17 days or something it was a quick a quick victory actually quite surprising that it was so quick, but it it happened so quick and And a lot of medical officers wrote back to him that Pavitin was actually quite helpful.

2:06:24They said things like, and I studied all these reports for Blitz, and I quote, I'm quoting some of them in Blitz, like, it really helped all soldiers achieve their work load, do their work load, which was basically killing or invading a foreign country. So Ranga again was very excited and he said to the search in general, because then after the successful campaign against Poland, it was now going against the West, France, the old enemy of Germany. Like we had had a war, 1865, Germany won, and then in World War I Germany lost, and now Hitler wanted like the revenge, you know, now we have the third one, we're going to win the third one.

2:07:05But his high command was saying, let's please not do it, because the French army, La Grande army was supposed to be the best army in the world at the time in the late 30s, early 40s. They were really proud of their army in the French and it wasn't good but everyone thought it's good and they also had an ally which was very powerful, great Britain, the world's empire. So these two powers to attack from Germany, these two powers was considered insane by the High command. Like they thought Hitler is just a lunatic. And Hitler wanted to attack the West already in November 1939, like Poland was beaten.

2:07:44The German military actually needed a lot of repairs, because even in a successful campaign you lose a lot of machinery, you lose a lot of people. So everyone said, let's not do it. Let's just, you know, get back on track and develop a strategy with which we can win against the West, because they knew there is no strategy, Because that was exactly what happened in World War I. Germany attacked from the north of Belgium, and there was a stalemate, and then in the end Germany lost, because Germany is one country, and it cannot win against so many countries. So they said, it's not going to work, you know, but Hitler was very stubborn, and he said it will work, but they blocked him.

2:08:24There was even a coup attempt in November 39 against him, which failed. And then he had a breakfast meeting February 17th 1940, three kind of revolutionary tank generals von Mannstein, Guderian and Rommel, Rommel later becoming very famous tank general, came to Hitler in Berlin in the rice chancelery and said, we have a plan, we know it's going to work, we can beat them because we will not use the tanks as everyone expects us to use the tanks, which is kind of more in the back, kind of backing up the infantry and you know, being like the backup guys, like the heavy guys in the back. Like we will use the tanks in the front and make the tanks kind of overrun the enemy.

2:09:12And he's like, whoa, this is a crazy thought. He loved crazy thoughts. So he's like, this is a good thought, but where are we going to do it? And they said, we're going to do it in an area. And also, I also send an image. I don't know if we need it, but it's interesting. They decided on an area which is the Arden Mountains. And the Arden Mountains is a mountain range in Belgium, which is exactly between the north of Belgium, where the western allies were massing their defense forces. And France, where the French also had a heavy defense. But in this mountainous terrain, it wasn't heavily fortified.

2:09:47So they said, we're gonna go through the Arden Mountains within three days and three nights, but we can't stop at night. Because if we stop and kind of sleep at night, you know, They will know that we're there and then they will come from the north and the south and the Pinser movement destroy our advance So we have to you know not stop and within three days and three nights We have to reach through Belgium the mountains the Swiss Sorry the French border town of Sedon we have to get there because then we will be faster because they will still be stuck in the north of Belgium like We will be faster than them and we'll race through all the way to the Channel and then we will be in the back of them and destroy them So we will have kind of surrounded them.

2:10:26This is what Churchill later called the sickle cut. And this was a, this is the sickle cut. You see where they're going through and then kind of branch off to the north and to the south. And encircle the allied forces there in the north and the French forces there in the south. Like being further within enemy territory than the defenders. It's a crazy plan. And the only problem is that that thing of not sleeping for three days and three nights. So they were not sure how to solve that problem actually. And Hitler said, this is not a problem, that German soldier is so convinced of the ideology of national socialism, of fighting for me the Führer.

2:11:12They will not sleep. I didn't sleep in the first world war. Hitler was a soldier in the first world war and he claimed that he was awake and didn't need sleep and stuff like that. So he kind of said that the ideology will make the normal German soldier into the superhuman soldier doesn't need to sleep, which is bullshit, obviously. Everyone needs to sleep, you know, not because you are convinced of an idea you don't need to sleep. And another fact is that actually soldiers were not convinced at all, you know, the German army was the German army. Of course, there were many Nazis in the German army, but at the beginning of the war, there were also just, you know, young guys and they were not like burning for Hitler.

2:11:49They were actually quite pissed they had to go to war against the West. Like they were scared. Like I read reports on like mass depression before the attack started of people who just said we're gonna lose, you know, this is not possible because to launch a successful invasion into enemy territory. You needed three to one superiority in manpower and in weaponry. And the Germans were actually, they had less people, less soldiers than the West. And their weapons were not as good. For example, their tanks were not as good as the British tanks. So it was basically, there was a lot of doubt that this madman plan by these three young revolutionary generals and Hitler supporting this madman plan would actually work.

2:12:34But then Ranke thought this is my calling now, this is my hour. And he presented his findings that actually you don't need to sleep for three days and three nights. On methods possible, if you give enough math to a person, you can stay awake for five days. So suddenly his findings became very interesting. He was invited to the high command. He was giving lectures. He wrote a so -called stimulant decree. I don't know if you want to see that. I found that also in the archive in Freiburg. It was the first official paper by an army where the soldiers were basically invited or ordered or it was suggested to them to take a powerful synthetic stimulant, which is this is the stimulant decree.

2:13:20It says for example, this was distributed to all the medical offices so they knew how to use the math. So for example it says what you could give if someone took too much, like then you give like a sleeping pill. It also says it's quite interesting what are the side effects and the side effects are aggression. So that was like a desired side effect. So Rancor was suddenly very popular. He was on top of the world. There's another paper I found which shows how many dosages then the German Army ordered from the Temla Company just before they attacked France. And this is 35 million dosages. So finding that document was also kind of fun.

2:14:08Wow. 35 million. Yeah. And so were they on a large dose of this when the soldiers? Well, it's interesting then to see how those 35 million dosages were being used because they were used asymmetrical. They were candid out, especially to the tank troops, because the tanks were at the forefront, and these tanks could not stop. So everyone in these tanks was basically high on Crystal Math, like all the way through the advance. And there's reports by the French Army that they simply could not understand and they're opponent anymore. Like they didn't sleep. They just chased through, they behaved like madmen basically.

2:14:51Romance was seen at one point, totally high on meth, like standing in the tank, like the lid was open, he was standing there, and they were racing at night through a French village where the French army had camped because they needed to sleep, because it's kind of, I guess funny, I don't know, funny is the right word, but France also had sort of not a stimulant decree, but they had the rule that in a war situation, and this had been beneficial in World War I, each French soldier has the right to drink three -quarters of a liter of red wine per day. So when France was attacked by Germany, I think it was 17 ,000 trucks with red wine drove from the French wine regions to the front lines and distributed the red wine.

2:15:37So the French guys were drinking red wine, which is a mood enhancer, but it does make you tired, especially three -quarters of a leader. So the Germans were messed up and the French were kind of drowsy. So that scene with Romila described, he's standing in the open lid of the tank going through this village at night and left and right. I kind of, the French soldier's kind of sleeping basically, and he just fires with the tank left and right and he runs over people and he's like a complete madmen and then the French got scared. They got very scared and their defenses collapsed. Germany beat France in a few days.

2:16:17You know, big neighbor that in First World War Germany had been fighting, like they had been fighting four years, like moving like a meter a day in the next day back and this time because of the methamphetamine charging through and Hitler was in Paris in June already. That's a story of Blitz in a nutshell. Oh, a part of Blitz. Wow. Isn't it incredible that that's not taught in school? I mean, I do give talks now in school. Now? Yeah, no. No, but no historians touch the subject. Right. I spoke to, for this book, I collaborated, but I had advice from a leading German historian an elderly gentleman who passed away, a mom's in the leading German historian, a national socialist, a really cool guy.

2:17:12I met him, I showed him my findings from the archives, and he's like, we overlooked this the whole time, because we historians have no clue about drugs. Like, we don't, we never, it has to enter your mind in a way that this might have a relevance. Historians are very square people, or at least used to be very square people. A national socialism is such a serious topic that out of the box thinking is not really encouraged within the academia, at least, but me being a non -astorian, I could think out of the box. So he said this is the missing puzzle piece that we need to know to understand what actually went down in World War II.

2:17:56So he was very much behind it and wrote a preface to the German edition also. So it was interesting to communicate with him obviously about it because he helped me also put things into perspective. Also, one thing he said was, don't argument in a monocausal way. It's kind of flippant to say the Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine. It's methamphetamine played a huge role and I examined that huge role. I think it was probably one of the decisive factors, but you know, many factors come together. But if you can't stay awake for three days, none of it works. Yeah. World War II would have been very, very different.

2:18:45You want to make cement, you have to add water. And I mean, it's not a… if you look at it from a military standpoint, it actually makes makes a lot of sense. The problem in Germany, Nazi Germany, they then had was that the army was so crazy about math and also the air force. They were using giving it to pilots in the air battle against Great Britain. That was like a decisive air battle in the late 1940 after France had been beaten by Germany conquered. Then it was Germany against Great Britain. And there was a lot of fighting in the air between Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe and the German Luftwaffe was, you know, messed up, because they had less pilots.

2:19:33Kamikaze pilots, right? That's a bad one. We're talking about suicide flights. We've talked about that before. Japanese factory workers also used meth and phantom oil. I mean, Japan was an ally of Germany. They were part of the evil axis. So Japan had knowledge that methamphetamine was successfully used in the European theater of this war So they used it also in the kamikaze pilots against American you know ships and stuff so Where were we? the effect of meth on the soldiers and also the effectiveness of it during the blitzkrieg, but then And also the Japanese pilots, the Japanese were using it, the kamikaze were using it.

2:20:20I mean the pro, oh yeah, no, I wanted to talk about something that became a problem than the German military because then suddenly there were guys in the, for example, the so -called health führer, which is like the minister for health in German Nazi Germany, it was called the health führer. He was like an enemy of pavittin because he said he like used the old argument, we are superhero's anyhow from our genes because we are a superior race, you know. We don't need a stimulant to perform these miraculous acts on the battlefield. So he wanted the army to stop the methamphetamine and I studied all the letters going back and forth between like high command and the Ministry of Health and that the army basically said we're not stopping this.

2:21:02We're a modern army. We're using modern means to, you know, achieve our goals. So this actually shows that Hitler is full of shit when he says you just need to install the right ideology in people and then they are motivated. It's actually Germany was Nazi Germany was a very modern system that was using this to their advantage and the army was a modern war machine and they used it very effectively and that's why also other than armies who learned about this, it took them a while like the British needed quite a while to understand what was going on but there was one point a headline in a British newspaper, when does Churchill also use victory in form of a pill?

2:21:47Because in an Italian newspaper in the fall of 1940, there was an article on the German Luftwaffe using Pillo Latte Choragio, like a courage pill, which was this methamphetamine. So then the British became like, we have to examine this. And they actually made tests in England comparing methamphetamine with themphetamine and decided for the British guys, for the English guys, I'm fed a mean is better, because it's not so strong. Like the Nazis always take the strongest, and the British were like a little bit more hesitant. And it is actually a smart choice, because methamphetamine does burn you out, obviously.

2:22:23It's an addictive drug that's not healthy. And methamphetamine is also not healthy, you know, but it's not as, it doesn't make you as edgy, so you can take it over a longer period of time, I guess. Well, methamphetamine really burns you out. I spoke in my research for Blitz with one Medical officer that was still alive that had served in World War II for the German Army Installing in Stalingrad actually he was in Stalingrad and he said he still had perveteen and he gave it to like these guys That are like freezing to death being you know killed by the red army and he said it's not it didn't work anymore But it you know it just gave us like another day of artificial energy.

2:23:08You know, so methamphetamine is a very, in a long war, it's very problematic. In a short war, it actually works. That's why after the October 7th attack of Hamas on Israel, I was interviewed by Harids, which is the leading Israeli newspaper, because there was rumor that also these combatants or these terrorists, or whatever you want to call them, had used Kapta Goan, which is another form of methods, a brand name that's very popular actually in the Middle East. And I had found a paper from April last year, April 23 was a report, you can find it online by some newspaper that a large shipment of Capdagon was seized at the Gaza border, actually by Hamas border forces, who claimed that actually Israel was smuggling this into Gaza to kind of corrupt the Gaza youth.

2:24:07I don't know if that's true, you know, it was just what Hamas said. But for sure, there was Capdagon in the Gaza strip and I'm totally convinced that people used it when they when they happened they found and fedamines they've seized one billion dollars worth it's kept a gone and it is rumored that the Assad regime in Syria is actually behind large -scale manufacturing of Capita gold at the moment that's how they get their money because Capita gold is like the cocaine of the poor man you know thirteen tons well it's been by police and cover thirteen tons of the drug knows Capita gone hidden indoors and wooden panels Wow.

2:24:54So, Cap De Gaune is a... Wow. And Cap De Gaune has a similar effect to Methamphetamine? Yeah, very similar. It's very similar molecule. Wow. I guess it's very strong. What makes sense that that would be very effective in times of war, especially for short campaigns? I had a reading in LA from Bullitz, and afterwards a special... a Navy SEAL approach me with been in the audience. and he was not on the team that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was like on a parallel team. He knew a lot about it. He didn't stuff like that. And he said before they go into an operation like that, an operation that requires them to stay awake for, let's say, 50 hours, and not only stay awake, but to stay very alert for 50 hours, it's obvious that you're using them, fed them in.

2:25:47It doesn't matter if you burn out later, you just take a week off. So the Nazis invented methamphetamine for war, the idea by Rancord to use it for war purposes. And it has been copied already in the Korean War, American pilots were in amphetamines. Like amphetamines are like a staple now of armies and of terrorist groups, freedom fighters or whatever. Because it also lowers, this was what Rancord also found out, it lowers your fear level. So when you're on meth, you're less afraid. It lowers your level of inhib, like you're not as inhibited. Like you would rather kill someone in a brutal way than you would sober because it's very hard actually to kill another human being.

2:26:35It's just, it's very stressful and we don't really want to do it. But studies found that on meth, you're more likely, it's easier for you to do it. So it's really the Nazis that are hor, you know, they pioneered in it. How similar is that to the effects of Adderall? Adderall is obviously an epidemic. And there was, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of 39 million prescriptions in a recent year. It's another one of these contradictions. Like we make drugs are illegal, but Adderall is legal, which is basically, it is an epidemic. I mean, so it's just like a certain type of, I'm fed a mean and I know quite a few people who are addicted to these types of pills and it's not a nice addiction, I think.

2:27:25Because it's also, you know, it's legal, like, you know, psychiatrist has take this or you function well. So you kind of... Yeah, you're a teen, Norman. You need to take it. What did you just say? You need to take it. You should take the medication. I'm very sorry I came on the show sober. I would have been so amazing otherwise. I know many, many people, especially journalists. I know a lot of journalists and a lot of writers who use, to be productive. Yeah, and I would say why not, if you wanna pay the price of using something that's maybe bad for your brain and maybe makes you addicted, but maybe you think you write better on it.

2:28:02So that's like a chance that some writers take, like who wrote to electric sheep? No, to Android's dream of electric sheep. Does that felt like a dick? Yeah, right. He was using a lot of emphediments. I heard that Jack Kiroak wrote on the road like in two weeks on emphediments. So I mean, drugs are basically neutral. You know, you don't become a Nazi soldier when you take emphediments. It just, it creates a certain state in your brain, you release all your dopamine, your highly alert, you might be very creative, but you also might write a lot of shit, because your self -criticism is lowered. So Kiroak being a very good writer, he wrote the wave, he was writing this on the road thing.

2:28:49I have friends that have tried and Fedamines particularly Adderall and then done stand -up comedy. And they say it's absolutely terrible. It's terrible for some of them. Because you lose that subtlety, right? You lose the subtlety, you lose a connection with the audience and you're not having fun anymore. It's like you're not being silly, and your self -criticism is not the window, so you think everything you say is brilliant? Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. No, maybe. I mean, but some people find it very beneficial for productivity, which is interesting, because they are... It probably depends what you need to do.

2:29:22It also depends on your self -control, right? Do you have the amount of self -control and the amount of objective analysis about what you're doing with your life to recognize that what you're doing is detrimental. Can you manage that? Can you figure out how to back off? Can you figure out how to take time off? Can you figure out when to use it and just use it effectively and say to yourself in a very disciplined way? I'm gonna take X amount of this Adderall stuff because I have a deadline. I'm gonna get this done and I'm gonna do my best. And then afterwards I'm not gonna fuck with it anymore.

2:29:54A lot of people can't do that, but a lot of people can, I guess. And it's sort of like all other drugs. We should sort of figure out what's the dose, what's effective, what's not effective, and then also strategies for helping people get off of it, like I began. You know, I think having any kind of legalization strategy, so if they legalize drugs in this country, I think it has to be done in conjunction with a treatment strategy. And I think that treatment strategy was, is I began. Yeah, absolutely. I mean the psychedelics do get you off other drugs. Yes. It's a fact. Also DMT gets you off other drugs so they work against addiction.

2:30:35So that old scare of you know some drugs are like you take one drug and then you take the next drug you know until and the end you land with heroin. That's kind of stupid you know because if you take LSD you're not gonna land it with heroin. No. No. If you take ibogaine for sure also not. Well marijuana is the great one right the gateway drug people I think alcohol is a great gateway drug. That's the real one because alcohol lowers your inhibitions. It lowers your judgment and then all of a sudden you're like, I'll try that. Yeah, right. Yeah, and then there's also people take cocaine when they drink too much alcohol to wake up.

2:31:11Yeah, I spoke with actually with an iBogane researcher Deborah Mash from university Miami and she found that alcohol and cocaine together create a new metabolite in in the body and that is the one that many people go for. It's like one plus one equals three basically. So you won't get that high from alcohol alone and you won't also get it from cocaine alone. Most people don't take cocaine alone. They always drink when they take cocaine because they want that particular form of metabolite of intoxication. Interesting. It's obviously very unhealthy. So here it is. How do you say that word correctly?

2:31:52Yeah, it's a bit of a product of concurrent consumption of alcohol and cocaine as metabolized by the liver. Normally the metabolism cocaine produces two primary, biological and active metabolites. Benzo lech, how do you say that? Benzo lech, lech, go, nin, benzo leclinein and echinine, ech, go, nin, methylethester. Yes, it's cool. Well, that's a big factor too, right? Like how it's metabolized by the liver. That's a difference between eating cannabis and smoking it, right? So 11 hydroxymetabolite, which is created by the liver, which is five times more psychoactive than THC. All right. So there's a lot of factors.

2:32:36And the thing is like, we don't know. If it's kind of crazy that your book and your work is what's really illuminating the effect that this had on And one of the most historically significant events in human history, which is World War 2. Yeah, I thought that was quite strange. I mean, I went onward with my research from, I wanted to expand and I wanted to look at Hitler also. I was going to ask you this before you get to that. If Methamphetamine was created after the 1936 games, what was Hitler on during the 1936 games? When you see him rocking back and forth and he's tripping, was he doing cocaine?

2:33:14What was he on? I mean, I studied the notes of his doctor, his doctor's personal physician, Theodomarell, who was kind of a celebrity doctor in Berlin before he met Hitler, like he was famous for treating diseases that don't exist. So he gave mood enhancing shots, injections, and he was also a vitamin pioneer. He believed in vitamins and at the time vitamins were kind of unknown. So he thought if you inject someone with such and such, inject someone with vitamin C, that would be a mood -enhancing effect. And actually that's true. So he cured Hitler's photographer who beat his Hoffmann of a sexual transmitted disease in 36 and then Hoffmann said, I have to bring it to my, to a special patient.

2:34:11And then there was a spaghetti dinner with Morrell and Hitler. And Hitler was complaining of bloating problems. He always, I was like, he had digestion problems. And Morrell, who was like an alternative doctor, gave him like vitamins in the probiotic, which was also new at the time. And Hitler was cured. And he appointed Morrell as his personal physician. And they became kind of best friends. They were like, Hitler spent more time with Morrell than with anyone else all the way up to the end. So Morrell's notes are very interesting to study because he was like one of these German nerds that wrote everything down and I went to another federal archive in Germany and I checked out all the papers of Morrell and I could see that basically no one had looked at these papers.

2:34:54Like Hitler's the most examined person in the world. Like the most literature about one person is actually about Hitler but no one had, I mean the last time someone checked out these notes, I could see it in the record of the arc. I was like in 1986 and then someone in 1961. So I was like the fourth person to look at this. So it's kind of crazy because Morrell describes in detail what he gives to Hitler. And that's why I'm a little bit surprised by this famous video of him. I think maybe it's a fake. I don't know because in 36, up until from 36 when they met, And Morrell was with him at the Olympic Games until 41 basically hit the only received vitamins.

2:35:41Vitamin C, vitamin B1, and sometimes glucose like sugar was injected into maybe it was on a sugar rush, you know, because sugar is a strong drug because sugar immediately kicks you know in the brain. So but there was no like heavy substances in 36. I wrote everything down, so I don't think he would... And Morales' introduction Hitler was what year? 36. So it was at the same time. A little bit before. So the introduction was before the Olympics. Is it possible that Hitler was taking something without the knowledge of Morales? No. No. Because Morales was very protective of his patient. He called him Patient A.

2:36:23And before that Hitler had like an array of like specialists, Hitler didn't like specialists in general. Like he didn't like, like there was Karl Brandt, he was like the highest SS doctor, and he wanted to be like the personal physician of Hitler. But Hitler didn't want like an SS guy to have so much knowledge about his body. So he always kept Brandt at bay. And then Morrell was like perfect for Hitler because Morrell was like this kind of chubby, good humor, kind of house doctor with the crazy recipes and the crazy injections. So Hitler thought this is this is my guy basically And Morrell became like Morrell's wife was very much against that that is her husband became the personal physician of Hitler She said to him like We'll never we won't spend that much time together from now on Morrell like no I have to take this chance You know I can be the person he was like a celebrity doctor before us No, he's the personal physician of the fear of them most powerful man of Europe So Moral read very much controlled what Hitler took.

2:37:21He didn't take anything that Moral didn't talk about or authorize and write down. He was his doctor, like he was always there, you know. So I see basically three phases in Hitler's drug taking from 36 to 41. It was mostly these vitamins. And Hitler was never ill during this time. Like he had a pretty good health in general, except from the bloating, because he ate wrong. He was a vegetarian that basically ate bread and sugar. So that leads to that's very unhealthy for your gut. We know these days. They didn't know that. So he was always farting basically. That was a problem for him. And more like to kind of cure him with the probiotics and then the vitamins and Hitler kind of grooved along to this kind of treatment.

2:38:08And he was very successful also in the beginning. He was very healthy. He won all the wars like he was on top of the world. And then in 1941 Germany decided he decided to attack the Soviet Union. And also the Soviet Union that the campaign against Russia was very successful in the first three months. A lot of methamphetamine was given to the soldiers just like any attack on France. They overran the Red Army like crazy. Like within three months they made huge territorial gains. They were in October 1940. They were already standing in front of Moscow. Like they could see like one officer could like look with his binoculars and he could see the tram Like the last tram station of Moscow he could like see that so they were right in front of Moscow and Thing was what happened was in the in August 41 like in the middle of the campaign the campaign started June 21st 1941 So August 41 they were already there at huge, you know made He gained a lot of territory, but Hitler for the first time became sick.

2:39:10He had what they call the Russian flu. Like he was camping, you know, the headquarters was moving with the troops. So he was maybe drank bad water or something, and he had the Russian flu, which made him stay in bed. He had very high fever. He was like diarrhea and vomiting. So he was really not in a good shape. So he said to Morrell and Morrell wrote all of this down. I was sitting in the National Archives in Germany and reading all this stuff and I really felt like the fly on the wall that could look at things that no one had seen before. He describes that Hitler coming in sitting down, the decisions that had to be made that day, Hitler saying, I need something stronger than vitamins.

2:39:53Hitler was lying in bed. The generals were deciding on that important military briefing, how to further advance. And that the generals wanted to move towards Moscow and Hitler wanted to split the troops and go to Leningrad, which is North St. Petersburg, and to the South. Like he had a different strategy. And so he wanted to be at that briefing. And he said to Morale, I need something stronger than vitamins. And Morale gave him for the first time a very strong opioid, which was called Dolantin, which was a German product. And that opioid, You know, there's a different, there's a different ball game than vitamins.

2:40:31He got an injection of a very potent opioid and he gets up from the bed. He goes to the military briefing. He can call the shots, you know, troops will be separated. Like, high command was like, what the fuck, you know, but they, you know, he's the leader. So he decides. And from that moment on, we can see in the notes of morale that hitless drug consumption actually changes. Like he becomes more and more interested in potent substances. And from 41 to 43, Morale experiences a lot with also animal hormones. Like when Germany invades the Ukraine and has the whole territory of the Ukraine, Morale gets the monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals in all of the slaughter houses of Ukraine.

2:41:18It's like an order that I found like an order that I found like an official paper all the organs of all the slaughtered Animals of all slaughterhouses occupied Ukraine will go to Hitler's personal the furthest personal Physician touring huh was that for touring? Yeah, I mean he experiment He had like its own pharmaceutical company by the time Morrell in occupied Czechoslovakia where like his chemist was like getting awful and organs and thyroid and all kinds of very potent things and then making like concoctions with it. Like there was a famous liver concoction like from Picks liver. And Morales problem was that at the time in 43 it was a war economy in Germany.

2:42:04So it was very difficult to bring new medicines onto the market. Basically it was not possible like all the tests that usually are done in peace times on a new medicine. And so he said, he said this to Hitler, like, I'm developing all these new medicines from all these organs and I cannot bring them on the market. They cannot help the German people sustain in this war. And then Hitler said, this is, yeah, this is bullshit. I, the Führer will be your guinea pig. And I will test all these dubious concoctions that you make. And then because when I take it, every German, you know, can take it and we kind of bypass all the regulations.

2:42:41And this is exactly what happened. So Hitler actually became the guinea pig for like homonial concoctions for more. So this is it really it's really an insane story that is beautifully documented. So you can like read like train wagons going from the Ukraine from the German army. Like very scarce. It was to have a whole train wagon because they needed to ship you know wounded soldiers back or ammunition, and he just required like whole train wagons filled with his awful, with his awful from the slaughterhouses and all the the livers of all the slaughtered pigs in the Ukraine and then the army was like we can't do this we need these wagons for like war sensitive stuff, you know, and and Morrell would run to Hitler and say the army is blocking me transporting these precious materials that I can turn into drugs for the common good of the German people and Hitler wrote an order And then the wagon was going through and then Morrell was creating these concoctions and Hitler actually He took too many of these weird things, you know He his health started deteriorating in 43 like he was quite healthy Until 41 41 to 43 when he took all these organ things and all these home hormones and you know crazy stuff You know today you would send the doctor that prescribes you that stuff to prison, you know But there was no checks and balances.

2:44:07Hitler just took, because he liked Morrell, and he liked to experiment, and they were always talking about new enhancement of the body. That was a whole Nazi idea to become more powerful, more strong. So he was interested in these things, and he actually, his health started to deteriorate. And then by 43, he had already become quite a different man. he aged quite a lot. I mean, you can see it if you compare the young Hitler with like just five years later, he looks like 20 years older, you know? And then in 43, because he's doing so poorly, like his chi, you would say today, your physical energy was like really down if you take like, if you get like one pig liver extract injection a day, you know, you can imagine how you're going to, you know, you're going to feel like after like a year or so.

2:44:55It's not very healthy. So it, What was the goal of the pig liver extract? Do they just want to enhance energy? They then gave it to the German soldiers. They drank this stuff because it's, liver is always filled with nutrients, I guess. That's why some people think, and I would probably agree that it's healthy to eat liver. I think an ounce of liver a day is probably the right amount. but injecting pig liver. So Hitler, technically speaking, wasn't a vegetarian at all because he was using all these animal supplements. And it just wasn't consumed with his mouth. Right, right. So do you know the famous story about Hitler meeting Mussolini, or Mussolini wanted to get out of the war?

2:45:47Yeah, yeah. I write about that in Blitz because that is the first time that Hitler was quite depressed before the meeting because and felt betrayed because Mussolini wanted to leave the war effort. This was in July 1943. Like Mussolini said, this is not working. We rather get out. Okay. Is that fine with you? If we just leave the act, the the acts is now and Hitler's like, no, it's not fine. You know, so he was very nervous before that meeting and was in a villa in Northern Italy. And he asked Morella again for something stronger and then Morella for the first time. presented what then would become Hitler's favorite drug and this was a German drug called Oykodal and it's quite interesting.

2:46:32Oykodal was made by the Merck Company which is still a pharmaceutical giant today and it's an opioid. It's an opioid that makes you, if you inject it intravenously, quite euphoric but also quite calm. You know, you're not crazy. If you're on On Eikodai, intravenously, you're like, you think you're like on top of the world. It's like, you feel so great. And Hitler loved this drug. Like he got it injected before the meeting with Mussolini. On the way to the plane, he asked for another injection. He loved it so much. And then like people who were at the meeting in this villa said that Hitler was just, you know, talking nonstop.

2:47:11Like I'm doing right now. Like talking, no, we're actually having a conversation. We're having a conversation. Hitler and Mussolini did not have a conversation. Hitler was talking for three, four hours without stopping. Mussolini became very sweaty and like AIDS came in and handed him papers that Rome was being bombed the very minute. But he couldn't get out. Hitler was very dominant in the room, very, very dominant in the room. And from that moment on, Okodal became kind of his favorite drug and now comes the pun. When Germany lost, a lot of patents were also lost from Germany and became possession of America.

2:47:54And the patent of Eucodal also traveled to America. And Eucodal is Oxycodone. So what has created the American opioid crisis is the very same opioid that was Hitler's favorite opioid. It sold in America as pills, you know, crushed and sniffed whatever, you know, in check. I don't know, you know, Hitler was, who was injecting it from the start, you know, he, he didn't fuck around with pills, you know, because pills, because he still had these stomach problems. He didn't like a medicine to go orally like into the, he didn't like it too long, you know, you don't know, he takes something now and it's acting like in 45 minutes, and then not good, you know.

2:48:33So the injection is the immediate effect. So that's what he wanted. He would go to a military briefing when the war was in 44, the generals, they knew it was lost. They came from the Eastern Front. People were dying like every day. It was over. But they came to the meeting to tell Hitler basically, you want to save your men. You know, but Hitler on oxycodone on Eucodal, as it was called, then had so much power in the room, like so much charisma. He was very charismatic early on, but he had lost his charisma in the meantime. But through Eucodal, he could reinstall his charisma being good in the room.

2:49:16And he would like, and I read like a lot of witnesses reports like from generals, a lot of them wrote books afterwards, or made notes, what happened. They said, when they were with Hitler in this room, they were convinced that Hitler knew something that they didn't know. Like he had a wonder weapon, obviously. Like he knew that the world would turn around and we would win, the Germans would win in the end. Because he was so convincing on this Eucodal. So Hitler was very clever actually in using that drug to, you know, for his like horrific vision, you know? Wow. Wow. And you can look at, you can like examine this like day by day, you know, by studying the papers of Morel and then also studying like other, you know, accounts.

2:50:00Because it's always good to look at more, not only have one source, but there's quite a lot on it. So it is quite surprising no one ever wrote about that before. Well, it's fascinating because if you think about how much is written about Hitler and how much Hitler has been studied, that they didn't study that. It's totally crazy actually. because it has such a profound effect on the way you think and behave. It does. I mean, we all know that on July 20th, 1944, that was the most successful. I mean, it wasn't successful, but almost successful as a nation attempt by the bomb by Staufenberg blew up in the headquarters in the East Operation Valhkary.

2:50:40It was called. It was a code name. And afterwards, like Morrell rushes in, the doctor rushes in. Hitler's quite injured actually, which Nazi propaganda later said like the Führer was not injured. He was quite injured by that detonation. I mean, he was sitting there and the bomb was like on the other side of the table leg. And the table leg was quite thick. So the table was thick. So he was very lucky that he didn't die. But he had like hundreds of splinters in his body and his ear drums were blown and it was bleeding from his ears. and he was like totally, you know, he was injured, you know. And the moral immediate comes in and gives him alcohol, because in the evening Mussolini came for a meeting, he was already in the train.

2:51:23So you can see like an hour later, like Hitler, like, you know, on top of his game again, you know, joking with Mussolini, like the other like officers lose his lifestyle, like that, die. And then actually from that moment on Hitler, that's July 20th, 1944, until the very end, May 8th, 1945, on the war ends. That is his heaviest drug consumption, because then he's really, this is the most intense time. One of the things, for example, that happens is that to treat his blown ear drums, which were connected with heavy pain that he experienced, the new doctor came in, geezing was his name, and he had cocaine.

2:52:11He brought cocaine, which was a legal product at the time, also by Merck. Germany was importing the Coca -Cola leaves from Peru mostly, and then Merck cocaine was supposed to be the best in the world. like they were even like product foragers in China who like replicate the Merck label with the Merck cocaine. Merck cocaine was you know was the best cocaine and this doctor came in and he wanted to give the cocaine because it was something to numb the pain basically. It wasn't anesthetic and Hitler was like I want more of this stuff and Geesing writes this down. I found these documents actually in Washington and the National Archive, he hit the demands to use cocaine, like he wants the doctor to brush it into his nose, nostrils, which is, you know, the most effective way to take cocaine, I guess.

2:53:06And then he's like, finally, I can think clear again. And the doctor realized, this is a drugged guy. Like he, once he gets like onto a potent drug, He completely embraces it and wants it more. So Giezing became very, like, tried to get the coke away from Hitler. Hitler demanded more and more of these cocaine treatments because I can feel, finally, I can breathe again and I don't feel like injured anymore. And actually, on cocaine, he developed the strategy of a second Ardenne offensive. We talked about the mountainous terrain of the Ardennes and Belgium in 1940. And Hitler wanted to do it again in late 1944, like a surprise attack and like his generals, they couldn't believe it because it was a ridiculous idea because the Americans were already on the continent.

2:53:53Like it was no chance it could have worked out. It would just mean that a lot of people, a lot of young German soldiers are going to die. You know, that's what it meant. His second Adenofenci, but he added on cocaine. You can see it very clearly like Morrell. And Morrell didn't like this. You know, he didn't like this other doctor coming in with the cocaine. Like the doctor started competing. It's called the Doctor's War because the one guy gives him cocaine and Morelle gives him oxycodone which is an opioid so Hitler was kind of speedballing in August and September 1944 and made very crazy then decisions very bad very for the German for the Nazi war effort very bad decisions for the world You know it was good that he was so fucked up.

2:54:34I actually spoke to a British historian who told me that he had investigated Anthony Beaver is his name, a great colleague of mine. He had investigated the British intelligence as planned to assassinate Hitler. Because obviously there were these plans. They had realized in 44 that it's actually not good to assassinate Hitler because he was already so off the rails that he weakened the German war effort. Let's say Hitler was assassinated, then let's say, you know, Himla becomes the führer or something, like this, Himla, he was also a total freak, like he did two hours of yoga each morning, because he thought the Aryan race is connected with ancient Vedic, you know, so he was into yoga, but he was not into drugs.

2:55:26So let's just say they would have had an efficient leader, it would have been more dangerous, basically, to the allies, then keeping totally drugged out Hitler. Wow, so they wanted him to stay fucked up because it was better. Yeah. They actually did not bomb pharmaceutical companies until like in December 1944, Britain, Britain bomber, British bombers bombed the Merck company and then Eucodal could not be made anymore. And actually Hitler then moves to the bunker and he doesn't have Eucodal anymore, which was his drug of choice. He received it every other day in a very high dosage, 20 milligrams intravenously of the most potent opioid.

2:56:11So he became a junkie, he became addicted to this. So then when he moves to the bunker in the end phase of the war, just before that the merc production site had been bombed, who were supplying it, Morale doesn't have it anymore. And that creates quite a friction between patient A as Morale called Hitler and the doctor, because the doctor basically made him hooked on a substance and suddenly it's like the more in mistake of the dealer shouldn't make, make your client hooked and then you can't supply anymore and also no one else could supply, you know, he couldn't go somewhere else. There's a report by Morrell driving on a motorcycle through bombed out Berlin like February March 45, like going from pharmacy to pharmacy trying, asking, do you still have like a supply of Oykoda, you know.

2:56:57So the situation became, Hitler lost World War II, which was not good for him, but he also was on withdrawal, heavy withdrawal from opioids, which made him feel like shit. So that leads to the completely generation of the character. So that third Reich kind of crumbling in on itself. Fasten it. Probably would have lost anyway, but still. Of course. Fastening that it all happened and it's kind of ironic that it happens while he's in full draw. Yeah. I mean, the only drug really that he had left in the end was harming, which we spoke about harming. Like I studied like what Morel still had like in his bag basically like looked at the bottom of his bag and he's still at harming.

2:57:43So he gave harming to Hitler. So Hitler was a, I don't know what harming does to you if you just take it single -learly, but it doesn't, you know, and sugar. Like Hitler more and more demanded cake because sugar does actually give you a little high. I mean, it does, you know? Even if you're in the bunker, losing World War II, you're still kind of craved at sugar high, but at the time they had to already crumble the cake for him because he couldn't, like he was shaking so much from the withdrawal, like he, like he, like took it in a spoon and kind of put it in his mouth. with them. Wow. Yeah. Wow.

2:58:19It's in blitzed, we find like a new biography in a way of Hitler, a more accurate one actually. Is that so fascinating? Wasn't there recorded instances of JFK? Didn't he have a doctor that were prescribed some sort of endphetamines to him as well? JFK is a very interesting case, he had chronic pain and there is reports that he used also methamphetamine. Also he had depression. So he had a kind of a doctor feel good. And one time I found a connection, but I don't really, I couldn't research more about it that this doctor feel good of JFK actually had studied what Morrell had given to Hitler. But it's, you know, you probably don't even need to study Morrell.

2:59:17It kind of, that's what's out there. So JFK, I think, received quite a lot of medications. That's why it's interesting. What I wrote about in Tripp, is his possible LSD experience. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Yeah, he talked about that with Jess Waters. Yeah, I mean there's Unfortunately, there's only one source for it and then we always have to be skeptical if there's only one source if there's two sources It's always much better But one source and it's actually Timothy Lerie's autobiography. He describes And I don't think he made this up. I have no reason to believe that he made this up He describes how a woman called Mary Pinchot visits him at Harvard telling him because he was known as the, you know, he was still employed by Harvard.

3:00:08He was, you know, the LSD guy, basically, if he wanted to know about LSD, he would ask Leary. He had done the most research. And also some of the research is very good. Very, you know, it's very interesting. So she went to him. She was like a socialite in Washington. Mary Pinchot. She had been married to a CIA guy, but they had been divorced. She was It's probably too quote unquote left for him. She was like a more like a peace person, I guess. And she was also a very good friend of JFK. They were rumored to be lovers. She was in the White House a lot. He took her to functions. She was a part of his life.

3:00:47And she visited Leary saying to Leary, I have a very powerful friend. This was in April 63. three. And I wanted to do the experience with him. And Liri was all, you know, he kind of probably thinking is this JFK. But she didn't disclose it. She didn't disclose who this powerful friend was. And Liri said, yeah, I'm going to come with you. We're going to do it together. And she said, no, no, no, just give it to me. I want the staff, the LSD. And I want to kind of get some guidelines from you. How do you do like a LSD session? And so they had this, you know, Liri told you a bit about what he thinks how it should be done, set and setting.

3:01:28You know, JFK shouldn't do it while he's doing a press conference. He should do it when there's maybe he doesn't have to go on camera anymore that day. You know, maybe it's in the evening in the White House. So she takes the LSD and then there's no record that they actually took it together because there's just no record. There's one, there's her diary, but we'll come to her diary in a second. What happened was a little bit later, and you can pull that up on YouTube. You can see that it's quite interesting. Kennedy gave his so -called peace speech at the American University, which is, I think, in Washington.

3:02:09Or maybe not, but is it in Washington? And in this peace speech, it's kind of funny actually to see him Because we have to understand that JFK was quite a hawk. Like he was really a cold -wag eye. Like he was a Democrat. Like the Democrats, they're all for war. You know, they like, you know, it's confrontation. We have to be safe. You know, we have to protect the country. You know, we're serious, you know, arms race. You know, that was his thing. It was not different than other presidents. But in this peace speech that he gave a few weeks after Mary Pinchot received the LSD from Liri, He has a completely different agenda.

3:02:49He sounds like a hippie. He says, you're a very presidential, giving a speech, one of all these students, nice day in America, and he gives presents, coming, gives a speech. And he talks about, we all live on this planet together, even the Russians. We all care for our children. And we're all in this together. and he basically shifts course. Like he says that this arms raise is kind of ridiculous. It just burns resources and we must come to a different understanding. And then he gets killed like a few months later. So that is just those are the facts, you know. And I think I'll leave it at the fact.

3:03:31So fact also is that Mary Pinchot was shot in the head a few weeks or months after the assassination of JFK. And that day of her death, she was jogging in Washington, close to her apartment. There was a breaking into her apartment and her diary was taken. So maybe that's the source actually that links JFK to LSD. And maybe JFK was eventually killed because he took LSD and changed his mind. But maybe there's a lot of factors is why he was killed, right? It's, yeah, obviously. I mean, it's kind of a mystery why he was killed, you know, why does he need to be killed? But maybe that change of mind becoming like, saying like arms race must stop, which pisses off a lot of people in the military industrial complex who are like based their whole thing on the arms race, you know, maybe that becomes a very big threat and it must be eliminated, who knows.

3:04:34You know, but maybe it was he had a change of mind for sure maybe because of LSD Maybe because of the love making with Mary Penchow or maybe they were just smoking joints They were seen and they're their sources for that they had smoked joints in the White House before but I don't know if Cannabis would kind of bring about this change of mind but LSD certainly certainly could because the default mode network Which is cold war arms race Something that gets a little less energy, other parts of the brain is like, maybe we should do it differently. And also the realization that if anybody can change things, he literally has a responsibility to express himself in that way.

3:05:13Absolutely. If he really is a leader. Norman, thank you very much. This is a fascinating conversation. That was just three hours. Isn't that crazy? It's flew by. Thank you very much for all your work. I mean, would you've done by just the Hitler stuff, I've just explaining all that. It's so illuminating. It's so interesting. And I really hope everybody goes out and buys your books. So, Tripped and Blitz, does the other one? Yeah. And are they available? It's actually a present for you. Oh, thank you very much. And they can have the Tripped also. Thank you. Are these available in audio book as well?

3:05:50They are, but I do encourage everyone to read. But they are available in all. It is great to read, but sometimes people are stuck in traffic. Yeah, right. And it's a great way to consume information on your books. Thank you very much. Really appreciate you. I hope we will see each other again. Yeah, let's do it again. Well when is this next book that you're working on going to be out? Stone Sapiens will be out I think in the fall of 25. Okay, in the fall of 25. Come on back. Let's do it. Thanks for our appreciate you. All right. Bye everybody.