Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle
Uploaded: 2025-11-27T18:00:44.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2419 - John Lisle

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
John, what's happening, man?
Not much, it's good to be here.
Very nice to meet you.
You too, thanks for having me.
I know you're in the middle of a project, you're doing a project with David
Chase, right?
It's about MKUltra and...
Yes, he has gotten the rights to this book, you know, this book, Project Mind
Control,
and he's, yeah, interested in adapting it into a series.
Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject.
So as soon as I heard about it, and they said, the series is coming,
but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book now, I'm like, let's go.
So here we go, Project Mind Control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy
of MKUltra,
which really is a tragedy.
You know, I really got, and I knew about it,
but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until Chaos, Tom O'Neill's
book.
Have you read that?
Oh, yeah.
And when you realize what the MKUltra program involved and how long it ran and
how insane
it is, and it essentially had no oversight, and these people were just running
these wild
mind experiments on American citizens, and nobody went to jail for it.
Yeah, that's part of the crazy thing.
One of the things I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second
half of the book,
are the consequences of MKUltra in society, but also just what happened to
these people afterwards.
The victims of MKUltra, they launched several lawsuits against the CIA,
and basically really nothing much came out of it.
They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra,
they didn't really face any consequences.
And so I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things I really try to
talk about
in the latter part of the book are what are the failures of oversight that
allowed this to happen?
How is that possible?
How could people within the CIA be doing these kinds of drug experiments on
people unwittingly
and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions?
So I delve into that pretty deeply.
How did you get interested in the subject?
Like, what was your introduction to it?
I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people,
because I didn't know that much about MKUltra, and I was doing my PhD at UT.
And I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of
scientists within the intelligence.
They had connections to the intelligence community.
They were called the science attaches out of the State Department.
The State Department would send these science attaches to different embassies,
American embassies around the world.
And the CIA was very interested in these people, because, hey, we have these
scientists going abroad.
Maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of
research they're doing.
So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the
intelligence community.
And from that, I learned about, you know, Sidney Gottlieb.
But also, mostly, my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovell, who
was essentially the Sidney Gottlieb of the OSS.
So prior to the CIA, the U.S. had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services,
during World War II.
And that was the U.S. kind of intelligence agency.
And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research
and Development Branch.
And that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job
was to basically invent the deadly weapons,
create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are sent
abroad.
Fun stuff.
Oh, yeah.
My first book, The Dirty Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovell and that
group.
And one of the things they do are drug experiments and truth drug experiments,
trying to find out whether it's possible to give someone, you know, a captured
enemy agent,
some kind of drug to make them tell the truth during an interrogation.
And it turns out, when I was researching that book, I came across a series of
depositions,
of which Sidney Gottlieb is one of the deponents who would later lead MKUltra.
And in these depositions, he was talking about how, when he was assigned to be
in charge of MKUltra,
he didn't really know where to begin.
He didn't know anything about mind control.
So one of the things that he did, he went into the old OSS files
and was starting to look at the drug experiments that Stanley Lovell was doing.
And so I thought, that's the connection between Stanley Lovell, my first book,
and now this one.
So that naturally led me into becoming interested in MKUltra.
So a lot of the things that Sidney Gottlieb was up to with MKUltra,
his blueprint was basically Stanley Lovell.
Just imagine being a government agency, the CIA, the OSS, whatever it is,
and then someone says, hey, figure out if we can control people's minds.
And that's where you start from, right?
It's not like Sidney Gottlieb was some expert hypnotist or really was a
psychologist
or really understood human minds.
No, they started a program going, what can we do?
How can we fuck with people's minds?
How can we figure out how to control people's minds?
And they did it for decades.
Yeah, yeah.
And they're probably still doing it now.
Well, even before MKUltra, so there are a couple programs that precede it.
I mean, you know, so during World War II, the OSS was already doing truth drug
experiments,
not with LSD because that wasn't really around then, but with THC acetate,
they would inject it into cigarettes and have people smoke it.
So they just get high?
They would get high.
And tell the truth?
Well, supposedly.
Supposedly.
The idea was that it lowers their inhibitions, and so maybe they'll be more
amenable to talking.
That's hilarious.
They just gave them spliffs.
Yeah, exactly.
They basically gave them spliffs.
That's what Europeans smoke.
No, and so one of the guys who was actually on the truth drug committee
that was kind of overseeing these drug experiments during World War II
was Harry Anslinger, who of course is launching this crusade against marijuana,
and at the same time, he's overseeing these experiments about dozing people
with THC.
So it's very ironic that that was the case.
It's really stunning the kind of damage those people did to just our trust in
government,
what we know about these psychedelic compounds and drugs and, like, what they
did with them
that completely changed our idea of what the future of legalization and all
these things.
There's so much negative impact to what they did.
On top of what they did, they essentially created Ted Kaczynski.
Well, I'm a little...
Are you on the fence on that?
I'm a little skeptical of whether MKUltra is connected to that.
Well, it's certainly Harvard and the LSD experiments.
They did at Harvard.
And I don't imagine they would do that without the involvement of the
government.
Yeah, well...
Without them wanting to have access to research.
If you have people at Harvard that are doing, like, really critical LSD studies
on people,
humiliation studies...
Yeah, well, with him in particular, the study that he was involved in was...
Henry Murray was the guy who was running that.
It's like a psychological experiment about, I think it was interpersonal
relationships,
where he would basically interrogate them and berate them and see how they
reacted to it.
Now, Henry Murray, who ran that experiment with Ted Kaczynski, he did have
connections to
the intelligence community.
I just am not convinced that he was funded by MKUltra or something.
His connection...
He has a couple of connections.
One connection that I mentioned in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department,
he was tasked
with creating psychological profiles of German leaders like Hitler.
And so the idea was that he would kind of figure out what their psychology was,
and maybe we
could find ways to exploit that psychology.
So Stanley Lovell, who is the head of this R&D branch of the OSS, he read Henry
Murray's
psychological profile of Hitler, and he decided, maybe I can figure out a way
to kind of drive
Hitler crazy by using this.
So Henry Murray said that Hitler had a very feminine kind of personality.
He was on the border between masculine and feminine.
And, you know, at least that's what Henry Murray is saying in this
psychological profile.
Stanley Lovell reads that, and he thinks, maybe I can exploit this by getting
one of the
gardeners near the eagleness, where Hitler often had some meetings.
There were some gardeners down there.
We can get an agent to slip a gardener some female sex hormone, and that gardener
can inject
it into the beets that are destined for Hitler's plate.
Hitler's going to eat it, and it's going to, like, exacerbate this feminine
tendency, and
it's going to make him go crazy or something like that.
That was the plan.
That never actually happened.
But that, so Henry Murray is kind of connected to the OSS in that sense.
And then later, he developed some personality tests for the OSS and CIA.
I believe it was for recruits, to give these to recruits to determine whether
they kind of
have the psychological profile file that would be amenable to being in an
intelligence organization.
Did you see that they recently did a scan of some blood that was found in
Hitler's bunker,
and they determined that he has a very unusual gene expression?
Can you find out what that is?
It's something that would lead to him potentially having a micropenis.
Yeah.
I hadn't heard that.
You know, like, the most obvious psychological profile ever.
A guy wants to destroy everything in the world.
He's got a tiny dick.
Maybe Henry Murray was onto something.
Yeah, I'm sure he was.
I'm sure there was something, some research behind it.
Like, somebody must have said something about him.
Yeah, yeah.
I hadn't heard of that.
I didn't know that.
Hitler's DNA reveals Nazi leader likely had syndrome that can affect genitals,
researchers
say.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, the syndrome can disrupt the process that
drives puberty
and manifest in symptoms that include undescended testicles and a micropenis.
Isn't that wild?
Yeah.
It is.
Which totally makes sense.
Like, we should kill everyone with a micropenis.
They're too dangerous.
So, it is, you know, maybe useful to be careful about correlation and causation.
A lot of people probably have this and that doesn't cause them to become a
Hitler.
Oh, it's probably the sweetest people out there.
I'm just kidding.
Obviously, there's like the nicest people out there that just happen to have a
micropenis.
Yeah.
And it actually makes them really sensitive.
But that couldn't have helped, you know, maybe his temperament.
I don't know.
Well, he was also on a bunch of drugs.
You know, he had like a special doctor that just worked for him.
Yeah, those videos of him at sporting events or whatever, he's like rocking
back and forth.
It's incredible.
It's crazy.
1936 Olympics.
Yeah.
Just completely out of his mind on something.
Have you read Norman Ohler's book, Blitz?
Blitz?
Yes.
Yes.
I don't know if I've read the whole thing.
I know I dipped into it.
I can't remember if I...
It's insane.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's insane.
Yeah, it is.
The entire Nazi army was methed out of their minds.
Yeah.
And you know what these...
There are a lot of LSD experiments after World War II within the CIA and MKUltra,
of course,
but also army LSD experiments that aren't really connected to MKUltra, so I don't
go into them
that much in this book.
But there are, you know, the British are doing LSD experiments on their
personnel.
The U.S. military does, too.
And, you know, it's just some of the stories that come out of it are very silly
and really
and just insane.
But there is one document I found that talks about how they were giving these
two army
personnel, these two soldiers, LSD to see how they reacted to it.
And so each of them took the LSD.
They were in, like, a padded room, isolated with each other, so nobody else was
there.
And they started hal