Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2183 - Norman Ohler
Uploaded: 2024-08-01T17:00:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2183 - Norman Ohler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2183 - Norman Ohler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2183 - Norman Ohler

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Pleasure to meet you.
I'm very happy to be here.
I'm actually quite thrilled.
I'm quite thrilled to have you here.
This is your book.
It's called Tripped, Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age.
First of all, how did you get involved in studying this?
Well, this had a lot to do with my previous book, which is called Blitz, Drugs
in the Third Reich.
And I mean, the Nazis were really into meth, basically.
They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can change the war
effort.
They basically doped their soldiers.
So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitz.
And also I spoke about Hitler's consumption, which is quite outrageous,
actually.
And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives because I'm not a
historian.
I usually write novels.
I started out writing three novels and then suddenly I became a nonfiction
writer.
I was trying to understand what does that mean.
And I thought it meant to do historical writing, to actually go into archives
and look at original documents and not just lean on other books, which is what
many historians actually do, which I found out later.
They just read books from colleagues and then make up their own shit.
To actually go into the archive is very time consuming.
But I thought everyone does that.
Actually, no one does that.
So I was looking at all the archives.
And at one point I was in the archive of the memorial of the concentration camp
of Dachau.
So very serious archive because they host like all the documents, what the SS
did in Dachau.
And so it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at
because they wrote down everything, like every experiment the Nazis did in
concentration camps was like written down because it was like pseudoscience.
So I found documents while I was researching Blitz relating to tests with
psychoactive substances.
And that was like, that was not what I expected because the Nazis had been, you
know, enthusiastic about methamphetamine, but I'd never, that was the first
time I saw like something that related Nazis and psychedelics.
And I thought that's quite strange.
That's quite interesting, obviously.
I need to get to the bottom of this.
So I asked the archivist, can I see like all the, all the documents?
What did the SS actually do with psychedelics?
Which ones did they use?
Why did they test them?
What were they looking for?
And he said, well, I'm very sorry, but all documents are in America because
when American military liberated Dachau, one of the things they do is they take
a lot of documents and they took all the psychedelic research done by the Nazis
with them.
So I knew I had to go to America, probably to the National Archives and in
College Park, close to Washington, biggest archive in the world, find it there.
But I didn't have time while I was doing Blitz.
And Blitz was also already a complete story.
So I thought I saved that, that psychedelic theme for another book.
And this other book is now being published as tripped.
Wow. So before this, you'd had no understanding that the Nazis had used
psychedelics.
You know, you only knew that they, we all know that the meth thing and we've
seen Hitler at the 36 Olympics where he's rocking back and forth or he's
looking, he's jacked out of his mind.
I mean, the joke about Blitz is that I was actually the first one to write
about this.
I mean, now we all know about it, but before that, no one knew about it.
Before 2015, when this book was published in Germany, the Nazis were still seen
globally and also in Germany as this like pure movement.
Like I spoke to my grandfather when I was a teenager and I was, you know,
obviously criticizing him for his involvement.
I wanted to know what did he do and he did some shit.
And then he always said under Hitler, everything was in order.
Like he praised that law and order aspect.
And that law and order aspect of the Nazis obviously doesn't correspond to like
a drug using society.
So no one knew that the Nazis were taking drugs until I found out, until I
found documents for Blitz.
So, um, but this, so I was not surprised to, to, to, to find more and more
stuff, what, what they were doing with drugs.
But then I, I, I was surprised that they actually also use psychedelics because
psychedelics were totally new, you know, 43 LSD was invented.
So it was, it's kind of, I really was wondering whether Nazis already getting
their hands on LSD, which was just so new that probably anyone in the world
knew about this.
So this is, this is the story of Tripped.
So, Hoffman, he synthesized LSD in 43.
Correct.
Right.
So was there any evidence of anyone using something similar to LSD before that?
I know they, they've studied some of, um, ancient pottery from Greece and they
found ergot in it.
And ergot, which contains a very similar compound to LSD.
Well, ergot is the alkaloid, uh, of, of, of the fungus, uh, which, which grows
on rye.
And, and, and, and so, so LSD, uh, LSD, uh, like this, er, from ergot LSD is
made basically.
So actually LSD is not a synthetic drug as many people believe, but it actually
is based on, on a fungus extract, which grows on rye.
And the Swiss, the Swiss, uh, company Sandoz, they produced only ergot-based
medicines.
Like they started, uh, after, um, the first world war.
It was like a startup.
Sandoz was a color manufacturing company.
And they made a lot of money after the war because everything had to be rebuilt
in Europe.
Stuff had to be repainted.
So companies that made paint made a lot of money.
So they invested in a pharmaceutical branch.
And they hired one guy to kind of come up with an idea how to make money in the
pharmaceutical world.
This guy was Arthur Stoll.
He later became the CEO of Sandoz.
And Arthur Stoll was the first one to crack ergot because this fungus is, is
quite poisonous actually.
In the Middle Ages, this created mass hallucinations in Europe.
And, you know, unwittingly people were eating like contaminated bread.
We're having like horrific visions, actually limbs fell off because this ergot
is a very, very poisonous alkaloid.
But as we know from Paracelsus, the dosage makes the poison.
So if you, that was Stoll's idea, you take a very poisonous thing, the ergot,
and you extract, like you, you're still able to use the force that's within it
as a medicine.
This is how biochemistry, that's basically the foundation of biochemistry.
So Stoll was able to crack the ergot.
And the first medicine he made was a, was a migraine medicine, which, which
came out, I think, in 1923 by Sandoz.
Very successful.
So he immediately hit the jackpot.
Wow.
He became like the ergot god of the pharmaceutical world.
So he developed more and more medicines with ergot.
One of them, for example, is still used today when, in childbirth, it contracts
the, the, the blood vessels after the birth so you can stop a bleeding.
Otherwise, I guess the bleeding would go on much longer in childbirth.
So Sandoz made the first effective medicine because ergot kind of makes you,
makes the blood vessels contract.
Weren't they trying to develop a drug to induce labor when they initially
created LSD?
Yeah, this, this is, this is all the ergot kind of research.
I mean, the whole company was just doing ergot.
So they were looking at all kinds of things that ergot could be good for just
to, you know, make, have new products on the market.
So, and, and ergot before, I mean, this is a company based in Switzerland,
which is now Novartis, something like the fourth biggest pharmaceutical company
in the world or something.
I mean, very successful company still.
They, they bought Sandoz and now it's Novartis, but it's, it's kind of the same
thing.
So Sandoz at one point needed so much ergot that they started manufacturing it
in Switzerland.
Like they went into a specific region called the Emmental, which was famous for
its cheese.
And it's, it's also famous for its bad weather.
So mold grows on rye anyhow.
So they thought this is the right area to industrialize the, the ergot
manufacturing, like the growth of ergot.
And the farmers were like, we're always trying to get away from the ergot.
The ergot is poisonous.
And suddenly they had to make it.
And the Swiss company paid 20 francs, I think a kilo, 20 francs a kilo.
And rye was only like seven francs a kilo.
So the, the farmers switched to basically producing poison and then, I mean,
not poison, but a very poisonous mushroom, you could say, like a fungus, like
you don't want to eat this thing.
You know, you don't want to, that was the problem.
You harvest rye, you make bread out of it.
And then there's like a little bit of ergot because on some of the, of the, of
the rye, ergot grows.
And then the bread is poisonous.
That was a problem in the Middle Ages.
So farmers don't like it.
Now they had to produce it.
And suddenly Sandoz in Basel, Switzerland had huge amounts of ergot in their
storage and they needed to make more and more products to, you know, use the
raw materials that they had so expensively produced in the Emmental.
So Stoll hired further chemists.
One of them was Albert Hoffman, the famous discoverer of LSD.
So he was not looking for like a mind-blowing drug or anything.
He was looking for actually a stimulant because this was late thirties in
Germany, Nazi Germany, a stimulant that was made from the nicotine acid, nicotine
acid diathlamide.
No, it was actually a Swiss product, but from, from another company, nicotine
acid diathlamide was, I don't know the brand name.
It had a brand name.
It was quite successful medicine.
And he thought if I take lysergic acid diathlamide, lysergic acid being the
acid within the ergot, maybe we'll also have a potent stimulant, but they didn't,
they weren't looking for a stimulant actually for the mind.
They were looking for a physical stimulant, like something like Pervitin, like
meth, like something that keeps you going.
I mean, this was, this was at a time when stimulants were, you know, sought
after.
They didn't have coffee like we have today.
We just go, we drink a coffee in the morning.
They didn't really have that.
That's why methamphetamine was so successful in Germany, because you could just,
you know, buy it anywhere and you take a tablet in the morning and it's like
drinking, like it's like being on coffee the whole time, you know, so the
stimulant was, was, was, was, was what he was looking for.
And then like he, something came into his bloodstream.
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a bit, you know, he tries later, he tried to make
it a bit mythical sounding, like somehow the substance got into his bloodstream
and he felt like weird sensations.
And different, he saw different colors and different, he saw different colors.
So he thought, this is actually a very different type of thing.
Like what is this lysergic acid, diathlamide LSD, what is it?
So he did then a first self-experiment, which was kind of normal at the time.
He took a very, very low dose, what he thought, 250 micrograms.
But as we know today, that's actually quite a high dose of LSD.
So he had an extremely strong experience and he told this to Stoll, the CEO, he
said, I just took this like 250 micrograms.
I mean, this is a Swiss chemist in a Swiss lab and suddenly he's like full on
tripping.
He tried to get home somehow.
His assistant like brought him home on a bicycle.
He was at his house and the wall started, you know, collapsing onto him and the
doctor came and he said to his doctor, I think I'm going mad.
You know, I poisoned myself.
I don't know what's going on.
The doctor was like feeling his pulse, pulse normal, like eyes normal.
Like on LSD, you don't have a strong physical reaction, but you have a very
strong mental reaction.
So he had this and the doctor just couldn't see it.
And before actually Hoffmann had tested LSD on mice at Sandoz and the mice also
didn't show anything because you ca