Name: Free Will, The Unabomber, and The Harvard LSD Studies
Uploaded: 2021-07-31T17:03:16.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Free Will, The Unabomber, and The Harvard LSD Studies' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Free Will, The Unabomber, and The Harvard LSD Studies' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-07-31. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- Oh, God.
Can you, like, minority report
of, like, legitimate serial killers?
- You know what the problem with that would be?
If you could go, like, if you were with a baby
and you said, because of this baby's life
and where he's at, this baby will one day
be a serial killer.
- I'm just trying to figure out how we got
to just being with a baby, with the scenario.
I'm just hanging, it's not even your baby, but--
- Well, you're at a hospital.
Maybe there's some future prognostication tools
where they could, like, zoom in on a baby's brain
and see exactly where it's gonna go.
- I mean, there's gotta be something
to having some sort of consistency
with the neurology of serial killers.
- I think it alters with life.
I think it's many things.
And obviously I'm a moron, so I don't really know.
- You say you're a moron as I'm sitting,
watching this beautiful sign lit up behind you
in this gorgeous building.
You are not a moron.
- I'm definitely a moron.
- You're a total moron, but you're a very smart moron.
- Compared to smart people, you need to trust me.
I'm a legit moron.
But I have a way of looking at things.
I'm a little freer in my associations
because I don't worry about being fired, right?
And so I haven't worried about being fired
for a long time.
So I have a certain freedom in the way I look at things,
but that's not intelligence.
But my point is that, I don't remember my point.
What were we talking about?
We were talking about serial killers.
- Yeah.
If you could take that child and raise it differently,
would it turn out to be an amazing person?
See, like what happens to a person?
You know the concept of determinism?
Do you know that over free will?
- Right.
- Free will meaning that you have control of your destiny.
Determinism is like, hold on a second,
it's way more complicated than that.
Who you are right now is a combination of many factors
that are outside of your control.
Particularly when you're a child.
Abuse, violence, and trauma.
Those shape a child in very horrific ways.
And neglect.
One of the things I was watching a documentary
about the Unabomber.
And the Unabomber's brother, Ted Kaczynski's brother,
was talking about how when Ted had a condition
when he was a child,
they brought him to this place to treat him.
And he was a baby and they left him alone for like months.
So during a critical period of his life,
like he had no love, no touch of his mother.
Like this is like really important stuff.
I forget how long the period was.
I want to say it was like two months,
but even if it was like two weeks,
like what does that do to a child?
- It's gotta be detrimental.
- See if you can find it, Jamie.
It was in the documentary that is recently on,
I think it was on Netflix, he talked about it.
You know, so he lived in this shack in Montana
and he would point guns at people and not kill them.
And then he starts writing this manifesto
and then he starts sending bombs to people.
But there's so many factors there.
Here's one besides the fact
that his parents left him in this place.
They definitely left him in this place
for a period of time that I think was pretty extended.
I think it was at least two weeks.
It might've been two months.
- Jesus.
- He was also a part of the Harvard LSD experiment.
- Oh shit.
- So in Harvard during the 19, I guess it was 50s, not sure.
When he was going to school at Harvard,
they were doing these LSD studies.
- Was it like MKUltra?
- You don't know, right?
I would say, yeah, no, I don't know.
- They must've had branches.
- For sure.
I think it's helping them fuel their own study.
- I don't find it time,
but this is what it says about it.
- Okay.
When Ted Kaczynski was at a tender age,
he got sick and was taken to a hospital with hives
or swollen red bumps that appeared on his skin.
His family said he was isolated from his parents.
His doctor tried to determine
what was wrong with the infant.
Mom always faulted the hospital.
They would've been there every day visiting,
but the hospital said no.
David Kaczynski said in the docu-series,
it was kind of like,
we don't want parents to be in the way.
We've got our work to do.
We have our little baby to cure.
So keep your distance.
They were only allowed to visit him
two times a week for two hours.
- Oh my God.
- It's insane.
- I mean, so then you think about us being in quarantine.
Are we going to create serial killers?
- A little bit, but look at the bottom.
He'd come out and he'd never been the same after that,
she said.
So it changed him as a toddler.
So you got that, okay?
So this horrific neglect that he experienced as a child
through no fault of his own.
So free will.
We have to look at free will like, what does that mean?
Are you saying he has free will like this guy
with a broken brain 'cause he was ignored as a child
or people that were sexually abused as children
for years and years and years by a close family relative
or a family member and no one believes them?
That's real too, right?
How much does that change you?
Then he goes on to be a part of these fucking Harvard LSD studies.
- And then you also have to factor in gender.
Google that.
You have to factor in gender.
Google that 'cause I'm pretty sure that's true, but you know, I'm wrong a lot.
Don't you think you have to factor gender in a little bit?
Him being a man?
- Yeah.
I'm sure.
Anger.
He was apparently like super...
His brother talked about how he's super angry when a girl would reject him.
He would get furious.
I'm sure with testosterone that is affected differently than somebody who's,
you know,
female with estrogen being the leading hormone.
Like there's gotta be...
That has to factor into it a little bit.
- Unabomber and the Harvard Joe experiments.
- It's a dictionary.
- I mean, you gotta admire the outfit though.
That's style.
That's me in the airport.
- Um, does it say anything in there?
- Psychology Today has it too.
- Okay.
What does it say that he was there?
Oh, was a part of the MK Ultra product.
- It was.
- Yeah.
So what does it say about Ted Kaczynski?
Does it say that in there?
- I'm 99% sure he was a part of the study.
- I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, if, if fucking Manson was, it's like they had like the NBA starting
lineup of serial killers.
- Just to Google Ted Kaczynski.
There it is.
- Analysis of the personality of Adolf Hitler.
- Wow.
- And that's the thing.
Like how, what are, when you think of the, the circles of psychology and how
many overlap,
how many are overlapping with people like Hitler and Ted Kaczynski and all of
these?
Like what are the, what are those common denominators amongst them?
Because that's what we have to figure out is people who study the brain and,
and study behavioral patterns.
That's really going to tell us a lot, but you're right.
Like will and be, what was, what are the two factors?
- Determinism or free will.
- Free will, right.
- And I used to think much more that it was free will because I'm a stubborn
person.
I used to think, fuck you, figure it out bro.
Like when I was younger in particular.
- I get that.
- But the more I talk to people that really understand the concept, the more it,
it let me relax my grip on my opinion,
which is very important, right?
When you, you have an opinion about something.
It's very important to examine how much of a grip you have on this opinion and
whether or not this opinion is connected to you judging your own intelligence.
Are you in a, like a game with people where your opinion is better than their
opinion?
Like, are you married to these ideas?
- Well, it's hard for people as well because of cognitive dissonance.
Like we have a natural reaction to learning new things.
- A hundred percent.
Well, we, we have, we, we like things to fall in line with whatever we've
already.
- Our ideas.
- Yeah.
We're very assumed as our ideas.
So this is this study and it says, uh, another ethically problematic, and this
is a fucked up story.
Ethically problematic study was conducted by, uh, Henry A. Murray.
Murray was a professor, Murray was a professor at Harvard University and had
worked with the Office of Strategic Services.
- Sounds like a bullshit office.
- The predecessor to the CIA.
Well, it was before the CIA.
They didn't just, they didn't have a good name yet.
- What are we gonna call it?
Just strategic services.
Put it on the, on the door.
- What sounds better?
Central Intelligence Agency or the Office of Strategic Services?
Strategic services is too hard to say.
- It's so hard to say.
- That's too cumbersome.
- Neither of us have said it correctly.
- Right?
We're both high though.
- That's true.
- Yeah, but strategic services, like, like if someone's got a gun in your head,
what are you doing here?
I'm from the Office of Strategic Services.
- You have two strategic servicemen in your, in your office right now.
- Yeah.
I agree with the name CIA.
It's a better name.
I'll say, okay, so during World War II, he wrote an analysis of the personality
of Adolf Hitler,
which was a psychological, psychological analysis of Hitler.
- Two stone people.
- I can't just, come up with a better word.
Why is psychological so long?
The mind of analysis of Hitler, it was used by the military.
And during this time, he also helped develop tests to screen soldiers
conducting,
conducted as tests on brainwashing and determined how well soldiers could
withstand interrogations.
So what they were trying to do is break people.
So they took, this is what's crazy about it.
They took these students and they would do things to them.
They would interrogate them and fuck with them.
And they would also dose them.
And so the interrogation studies, it says, included intense mock interrogations
on soldiers as part of assessing the limits of their psychological breaking
points.
- Okay, that's a little perverse.
- Right.
He conducted such interrogation studies on Harvard University undergraduates.
Theodore Kaczynski, who later became known as the Unabomber, was one of the 22
participants in Murray's study,
subjected to several years of interrogations designed to psychologically break
the young man.
- So why aren't the people who have run these studies under the same interrogation
that the soldiers of World War II were under,
where we went after the fucking Nazis?
We should be going after people who ran these terrible tests and basically
created some of society's most prominent and infamous serial killers.
- That's a nice, you're right, and it's a nice way of looking at it that he
deserves punishment, we deserve revenge and all that stuff.
- Not him, the people who drugged him.
- Yes, and all his victims deserve revenge.
- Yes.
- But what I'm interested in is that this man, like if karma is real, if that's
real, if like what you are today is this long chain of lies that you live that
have brought you to this,
and you're thinking of yourself in this incarnation because this is the only
one you've ever known,
but in reality you're the process of this long line of beings that has gone on
since the beginning of life itself.
- Yeah, you have all the ancestry in you.
- What did that guy do in another life?
Think about, if that's true, I'm not saying it's true, but imagine if it is,
let's just as a thought experiment,
imagine if it is that you're going to come back as a guy who is ignored in this
place because they're treating you with some rando disease,
rando disease that you got that most babies don't get.
So you have these horrible hives, they keep you in this place where they take
care of children for weeks.
They only let you visit them a couple of times a week.
- Devoid of love.
- However long they kept him there, I don't know how, I don't remember.
I want to say it was two months.
- We know your numbers are a little off.
- It could be an hour.
- He was there for 45 years.
- He was there most of his life.
- As an infant.
- They let him out in college.
- So he gets out of there and then his brother would talk about these moments
of rage that he would have that would be terrifying.
And that if a girl rejected him particularly, he would write horrific notes to
them, like really mean, mean notes.
And then this guy goes and does these Harvard studies where they fuck with him
relentlessly and they're trying to break him.
It's almost like they knew that this was a guy that was unusually broken.
- Right, and susceptible to breaking in the way that would benefit their study.
- God damn.
- And especially like when you think about the male brain and the formative
years go well into your, into your frickin' 20s.
- Yeah, like 25, the frontal cortex.
I think it's females too.
I think maybe you guys are a little quicker.
- We're a little bit quicker.
We're like 18, 19, but you know, still like he's on the heels of his brain
barely being formed.
- And they're dosing him with acid and trying to break him psychologically.
- Yeah, and doing like mocking alone as a child on the playground.
Although I do think it's a necessary passage into adulthood is to deal with
adversity.
Mocking alone is brutal.
And then you add it to this study with LSD being thrown into the mix where your
brain is not on a solid ground.
The way it's going to process everything is obviously detrimental to who you
become.
And it changes your, it changes your brain chemistry.
- You know, I think there's like a problem, a real undeniable problem with
having secrecy.
- What do you mean?
- If you're like an organization that has ultimate power, like the CIA.
- I see what you're saying.
- In the 1950s.
And you can run these studies and no one knows about them and you're giving
kids acid and you're trying to break them.
- That's why I said it's perverse.
- You're trying to do crazy shit to them.
Who knows what they did to them.
- Right, and it's like, is it really for your fucking study?
Or are you guys just bored?
- Or do you just get to do this?
- Right, is it something you get to do and you're just pushing the ticket
because you can and you're funded?
That's so demented.
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Free Will, The Unabomber, and The Harvard LSD Studies

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- Oh, God.
Can you, like, minority report
of, like, legitimate serial killers?
- You know what the problem with that would be?
If you could go, like, if you were with a baby
and you said, because of this baby's life
and where he's at, this baby will one day
be a serial killer.
- I'm just trying to figure out how we got
to just being with a baby, with the scenario.
I'm just hanging, it's not even your baby, but--
- Well, you're at a hospital.
Maybe there's some future prognostication tools
where they could, like, zoom in on a baby's brain
and see exactly where it's gonna go.
- I mean, there's gotta be something
to having some sort of consistency
with the neurology of serial killers.
- I think it alters with life.
I think it's many things.
And obviously I'm a moron, so I don't really know.
- You say you're a moron as I'm sitting,
watching this beautiful sign lit up behind you
in this gorgeous building.
You are not a moron.
- I'm definitely a moron.
- You're a total moron, but you're a very smart moron.
- Compared to smart people, you need to trust me.
I'm a legit moron.
But I have a way of looking at things.
I'm a little freer in my associations
because I don't worry about being fired, right?
And so I haven't worried about being fired
for a long time.
So I have a certain freedom in the way I look at things,
but that's not intelligence.
But my point is that, I don't remember my point.
What were we talking about?
We were talking about serial killers.
- Yeah.
If you could take that child and raise it differently,
would it turn out to be an amazing person?
See, like what happens to a person?
You know the concept of determinism?
Do you know that over free will?
- Right.
- Free will meaning that you have control of your destiny.
Determinism is like, hold on a second,
it's way more complicated than that.
Who you are right now is a combination of many factors
that are outside of your control.
Particularly when you're a child.
Abuse, violence, and trauma.
Those shape a child in very horrific ways.
And neglect.
One of the things I was watching a documentary
about the Unabomber.
And the Unabomber's brother, Ted Kaczynski's brother,
was talking about how when Ted had a condition
when he was a child,
they brought him to this place to treat him.
And he was a baby and they left him alone for like months.
So during a critical period of his life,
like he had no love, no touch of his mother.
Like this is like really important stuff.
I forget how long the period was.
I want to say it was like two months,
but even if it was like two weeks,
like what does that do to a child?
- It's gotta be detrimental.
- See if you can find it, Jamie.
It was in the documentary that is recently on,
I think it was on Netflix, he talked about it.
You know, so he lived in this shack in Montana
and he would point guns at people and not kill them.
And then he starts writing this manifesto
and then he starts sending bombs to people.
But there's so many factors there.
Here's one besides the fact
that his parents left him in this place.
They definitely left him in this place
for a period of time that I think was pretty extended.
I think it was at least two weeks.
It might've been two months.
- Jesus.
- He was also a part of the Harvard LSD experiment.
- Oh shit.
- So in Harvard during the 19, I guess it was 50s, not sure.
When he was going to school at Harvard,
they were doing these LSD studies.
- Was it like MKUltra?
- You don't know, right?
I would say, yeah, no, I don't know.
- They must've had branches.
- For sure.
I think it's helping them fuel their own study.
- I don't find it time,
but this is what it says about it.
- Okay.
When Ted Kaczynski was at a tender age,
he got sick and was taken to a hospital with hives
or swollen red bumps that appeared on his skin.
His family said he was isolated from his parents.
His doctor tried to determine
what was wrong with the infant.
Mom always faulted the hospital.
They would've been there every day visiting,
but the hospital said no.
David Kaczynski said in the docu-series,
it was kind of like,
we don't want parents to be in the way.
We've got our work to do.
We have our little baby to cure.
So keep your distance.
They were only allowed to visit him
two times a week for two hours.
- Oh my God.
- It's insane.
- I mean, so then you think about us being in quarantine.
Are we going to create serial killers?
- A little bit, but look at the bottom.
He'd come out and he'd never been the same after that,
she said.
So it changed him as a toddler.
So you got that, okay?
So this horrific neglect that he experienced as a child
through no fault of his own.
So free will.
We have to look at free will like, what does that mean?
Are you saying he has free will like this guy
with a broken brain 'cause he was ignored as a child
or people that were sexually abused as children
for years and years and years by a close family relative
or a family member and no one believes them?
That's real too, right?
How much does that change you?
Then he goes on to be a part of these fucking Harvard LSD studies.
- And then you also have to factor in gender.
Google that.
You have to factor in gender.
Google that 'cause I'm pretty sure that's true, but you know, I'm wrong a lot.
Don't you think you have to factor gender in a little bit?
Him being a man?
- Yeah.
I'm sure.
Anger.
He was apparently like super...
His brother talked about how he's super angry when a girl would reject him.
He would get furious.
I'm sure with testosterone that is affected differently than somebody who's,
you know,
female with estrogen being the leading hormone.
Like there's gotta be...
That has to factor into it a little bit.
- Unabomber and the Harvard Joe experiments.
- It's a dictionary.
- I mean, you gotta admire the outfit though.
That's style.
That's me in the airport.
- Um, does it say anything in there?
- Psychology Today has it too.
- Okay.
What does it say that he was there?
Oh, was a part of the MK Ultra product.
- It was.
- Yeah.
So what does it say about Ted Kaczynski?
Does it say that in there?
- I'm 99% sure he was a part of the study.
- I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, if, if fucking Manson was, it's like they had like the NBA starting
lineup of serial killers.
- Just to Google Ted Kaczynski.
There it is.
- Analysis of the personality of Adolf Hitler.
- Wow.
- And that's the thing.
Like how, what are, when you think of the, the circles of psychology and how
many overlap,
how many are overlapping with people like Hitler and Ted Kaczynski and all of
these?
Like what are the, what are those common denominators amongst them?
Because that's what we have to figure out is people who study the brain and,
and study behavioral patterns.
That's really going to tell us a lot, but you're right.
Like will and be, what was, what are the two factors?
- Determinism or free will.
- Free will, right.
- And I used to think much more that it was free will because I'm a stubborn
person.
I used to think, fuck you, figure it out bro.
Like when I was younger in particular.
- I get that.
- But the more I talk to people that really understand the concept, the more it,
it let me relax my grip on my opinion,
which is very important, right?
When you, you have an opinion about something.
It's very important to examine how much of a grip you have on this opinion and
whether or not this opinion is connected to you judging your own intelligence.
Are you in a, like a game with people where your opinion is better than their
opinion?
Like, are you married to these ideas?
- Well, it's hard for people as well because of cognitive dissonance.
Like we have a natural reaction to learning new things.
- A hundred percent.
Well, we, we have, we, we like things to fall in line with whatever we've
already.
- Our ideas.
- Yeah.
We're very assumed as our ideas.
So this is this study and it says, uh, another ethically problematic, and this
is a fucked up story.
Ethically problematic study was conducted by, uh, Henry A. Murray.
Murray was a professor, Murray was a professor at Harvard University and had
worked with the Office of Strategic Services.
- Sounds like a bullshit office.
- The predecessor to the CIA.
Well, it was before the CIA.
They didn't just, they didn't have a good name yet.
- What are we gonna call it?
Just strategic services.
Put it on the, on the door.
- What sounds better?
Central Intelligence Agency or the Office of Strategic Services?
Strategic services is too hard to say.
- It's so hard to say.
- That's too cumbersome.
- Neither of us have said it correctly.
- Right?
We're both high though.
- That's true.
- Yeah, but strategic services, like, like if someone's got a gun in your head,
what are you doing here?
I'm from the Office of Strategic Services.
- You have two strategic servicemen in your, in your office right now.
- Yeah.
I agree with the name CIA.
It's a better name.
I'll say, okay, so during World War II, he wrote an analysis of the personality
of Adolf Hitler,
which was a psychological, psychological analysis of Hitler.
- Two stone people.
- I can't just, come up with a better word.
Why is psychological so long?
The mind of analysis of Hitler, it was used by the military.
And during this time, he also helped develop tests to screen soldiers
conducting,
conducted as tests on brainwashing and determined how well soldiers could
withstand interrogations.
So what they were trying to do is break people.
So they took, this is what's crazy about it.
They took these students and they would do things to them.
They would interrogate them and fuck with them.
And they would also dose them.
And so the interrogation studies, it says, included intense mock interrogations
on soldiers as part of assessing the limits of their psychological breaking
points.
- Okay, that's a little perverse.
- Right.
He conducted such interrogation studies on Harvard University undergraduates.
Theodore Kaczynski, who later became known as the Unabomber, was one of the 22
participants in Murray's study,
subjected to several years of interrogations designed to psychologically break
the young man.
- So why aren't the people who have run these studies under the same interrogation
that the soldiers of World War II were under,
where we went after the fucking Nazis?
We should be going after people who ran these terrible tests and basically
created some of society's most prominent and infamous serial killers.
- That's a nice, you're right, and it's a nice way of looking at it that he
deserves punishment, we deserve revenge and all that stuff.
- Not him, the people who drugged him.
- Yes, and all his victims deserve revenge.
- Yes.
- But what I'm interested in is that this man, like if karma is real, if that's
real, if like what you are today is this long chain of lies that you live that
have brought you to this,
and you're thinking of yourself in this incarnation because this is the only
one you've ever known,
but in reality you're the process of this long line of beings that has gone on
since the beginning of life itself.
- Yeah, you have all the ancestry in you.
- What did that guy do in another life?
Think about, if that's true, I'm not saying it's true, but imagine if it is,
let's just as a thought experiment,
imagine if it is that you're going to come back as a guy who is ignored in this
place because they're treating you with some rando disease,
rando disease that you got that most babies don't get.
So you have these horrible hives, they keep you in this place where they take
care of children for weeks.
They only let you visit them a couple of times a week.
- Devoid of love.
- However long they kept him there, I don't know how, I don't remember.
I want to say it was two months.
- We know your numbers are a little off.
- It could be an hour.
- He was there for 45 years.
- He was there most of his life.
- As an infant.
- They let him out in college.
- So he gets out of there and then his brother would talk about these moments
of rage that he would ha