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

The following is a conversation with Norman Oehler, author of Blitzed, Drugs in the Third Reich. A book that investigates what role psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants, such as methamphetamine, played in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beaver give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as very well researched, serious piece of scholarship, and Anthony Beaver describes it as remarkable work of research. And it is indeed a remarkable work of research. Norman went deep into the archives using primary sources to uncover a perspective on Hitler in the Third Reich that is before this, but mostly ignored by historians. He also wrote, tripped Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the dawn of the psychedelic age, and he's now working on a new book with the possible title of Stoned Sapiens. Great title. Looking at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs. 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I think you're right to ask about the context because without the context, it's not really understandable. So what was the situation? In the 20s, the Nazi movement basically started. And it started in Bavarian beer halls. So alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy that didn't drink was Hitler. He was a T-Totla, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich. So alcohol and national socialism are very closely connected. At the same time in the 20s in Berlin, there was a completely different thing going on. People were taking all kinds of drugs. This had to do actually with the defeat of Germany in the first World War. I mean, the context is a big context. The Versailles Treaty had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty was written basically by the Western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. And I'm certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Versailles Treaty treated Germany somewhat unfair. I mean, it laid all the blame on Germany. And I mean, a war is a very complex thing. And the First World War, to examine how it actually started, is a very complex story and there's many factors to it. But the Versailles Treaty just said it was Germany's fault and then Germany had to do all these payments to the Allies. It couldn't create a new economy. It couldn't have a new army. So it was, the economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap and the people were using also substances that were very cheap in huge quantities. So while in Bavaria, they were drinking alcohol and alcohol in the brain stimulates behavior, a group behavior, us against them. You can actually examine this as a neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. While in Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphium, there was cocaine, there was mescaline, there was ether. So people were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset. It was all, you know, you didn't behave in a way that some kind of authority would like you to behave in because the authority had just lost the First World War and there was no real authority in Berlin. People were doing whatever they wanted to do and they were intoxicating themselves in the way they wanted to do it. So the population in a way, if you just look at Munich in Berlin, was growing apart. Like there were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, and then there were these weird, diverse LGBTQ, whatever seen in Berlin, like actresses sniffing ether in the morning and then making crazy moves. Could you speak to the nature, the motivation of the drug use in Berlin at the time? Was it a rebellion? Was it a way to deal with the difficult economic depression? Was it just the natural thing that young people do to explore themselves, to understand the world, to develop their culture? What do we understand about drug use there? All of these factors come together, but it was the first time in modern history in Germany at least that there was no emperor. Like before that, Kaiser Wilhelm, everything was very strict. You couldn't go crazy as a young person. You couldn't be a young person, but now in the Weimar Republic in the 20s, you could. No one stopped you. So people went crazy. That's what made Berlin into the city that it still somehow is. Maybe later we talk about contemporary Berlin. It still has that vibe. That's why people still come to Berlin, drugs are cheap. You could move however you want. There's no authority. That created a rift between the Nazis in Munich. They always hated Berlin and what was going on in Berlin. For example, Goebbels, the later propaganda minister, he called the situation in Berlin die Verhaste Asphalt Realität, the hated asphalt reality of Berlin. He hated that. And when the Nazis then were able to take power in 1933, one of the first things they did was to really prosecute people who were taking drugs because they wanted to bring everyone back into the fold. And I think that's, you asked what was the reason for people taking so many drugs? They were accessible. They were cheap. But I think the most important thing is that they let you find yourself maybe or lose yourself. Also possible. Can we also take a tangent there because you have a connection to this place, Berlin and it's part of the world. Can you just briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even deeper the personal aspect of this because you understand the music of the people, the land, its history. There's something you can only really understand if you've been there and you have taken it in. And we'll return to this topic in multiple contexts, but in this particular way as one human being who writes about this place, what's your own story? I grew up in West Germany and this was during the Cold War. And Berlin, the walled in city was always like a big fascination because there was a wall. There was actually a wall in the city preventing people to move into another part. And I was from the West fortunate enough to be from the free West. So I could travel to Berlin and I could leave. I could look at it and I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very viby place. And then when the wall came down, I was still in school, but I like immediately got into the car of my parents and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. And then Berlin really in the 90s became a place that was very attractive to me. And I moved there then in the 90s. I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York and I loved New York before Giuliani became mayor. It was he ruined the city. Before that, it was not gentrified. Let's say he introduced gentrification. Gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in the un-gentrified New York City for like 300 bucks a month rent and everyone I knew was an artist. You loved the diversity of it? Yeah, I loved it. I wrote my first novel there. I took LSD for the first time in downtown Manhattan on a Saturday night. So you're kind of like a German Kerouac type character, but moved a few decades forward. I wouldn't compare myself to another writer, but I think Kerouac is pretty cool. But he's an amphetamine writer. On the road was apparently written in two weeks on amphetamines. But it's good. Amphetamines are not bad per se. We can also talk about this so-called bad drugs, because basically they're neutral, but let's not lose the thread. Yes, yes. Even though New York was... Oh yeah. And then I was in New York. I was in a health food store, one of the first like there weren't health food stores back then a lot, but there was one on First Avenue. And suddenly there was an announcement, which was unusual in the health food store. I think it was called Prana Foods. And the announcement was that Kurt Cobain had just shot himself. It was like... And I had been actually and still am a Nirvana fan. I've seen one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York City and it was amazing. But he killed himself. And like the next day I received a music cassette from a friend of mine from Berlin with electronic music. And I realized that there had been a paradigm shift, obviously. Rock music with a hero on stage was dead. Now it was, you know, dance, electronic music, which a lot of people today think it's kind of simplistic music form, but it's actually a very highly intelligent music form. At least it was in the 90s. People were really experimenting with that music. That was the new music. That was actually the reason I moved to Berlin. I really, I decided I leave New York City. I'm going to move to Berlin. And then in Berlin, to answer your question, I fell in love with something that probably reminded me of the 20s, even though I wasn't there in the 20s. But there really, the city was very open. The wall had just was still, you know, I mean, it's a few years later, but still the wall, it felt like it just came down. That was Germany was Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany that was still in Bonn. So Berlin was a very cheap and cultural and crazy city, probably a bit like in the 20s, actually. And that's how I fell in love with it. And that's how I became interested in this electronic scene. I mean, I visited many dance venues, then called so-called clubs. That's one of the hubs in the world of electronic music. They claim that techno was kind of invented in Berlin, but it was also, it also comes from Detroit. So Detroit and Berlin are like the techno hubs, I would say. Yeah, electronic music is a soundtrack for some of the most interesting experience this earth has ever created, right? Just to get people together in some interesting ways. So it's not just the music itself, it's the experiences that the music enables. Well, in Germany, we had a situation that the wall actually kept people apart. People didn't know each other. But because the wall came down, people suddenly met in abandoned buildings in the center of Berlin, which had been owned by the socialist state of East Germany. The most famous club, Tresor, Tresor means like vault. It was the big vault with the big doors. So that's where Tresor was, the club. It's so funny that the echo 100 years later, Berlin had all these left partiers, young people, using drugs in the Munich with a beer. And then that's where Hitler came out. So is that what we're supposed to imagine in the early days of the Nazi party when Hitler's giving the speeches to just a handful of folks? They're all drunk? Well, it is a fact that the movement came out of the Bürgerbräukeller. It's a certain restaurant pub in Munich. And that was not only a beer hall, that was also a political venue. And it was a right wing venue. It was for right wing populist people like Communists wouldn't use it, even though Communists are in many ways quite similar to the right wing, especially back then. But it was used by right wingers and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right wing populism. I would claim now here. And Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk or maybe even very drunk because if you're drunk, you also get aggressive against others. He could play with that. So drunk, aggressive towards others, but drunk in a group? It constitutes the group also. If everyone is on the same alcohol level, you just go to Oktoberfest in Munich, which is not a political thing, but everyone, you know, you can kind of sense how it originated. And actually the first time the Nazis tried to grab power was the so-called beer hall put. I mean, that's an historical event. It took place in 1923. And it was after a drunk night where they suddenly decided, now we're going to do it. So they came out of the Bürgerbräukeller and they were all drunk, except of Hitler. And they just tried to overtake the Munich government and they miserably failed because it was just a stupid drunk idea. Like they were like, yeah, let's just do it. And the Bavaria police quite sober that day. They just, you know, shot him to the ground. Hitler was almost killed. Like he just jumped behind his bodyguard. Göring during the beer hall put was wounded in his stomach with a, I think, a gunshot. That's why he became a morphine addict. So this beer hall put in 23 had a severe effect. Also, they were sentenced to prison and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison. All of these little events come together. It's so interesting that for them, it was just life. But now we'll look back these critical moments in history that turn the tides of human civilization. Right? So Hitler could have died there. And these characters of Göring that became larger than life that influenced the lives and the deaths and the suffering of millions. All, first of all, could have been stopped then. And whatever that means when you look back at history. But all those are just human beings developing their ideas, growing, developing groups, developing ideologies and using drugs or drinking. I mean, that's why I thought it's interesting, for example, to examine Hitler's drug use. When I announced that to a historian while I was doing research, he helped me a lot with methamphetamine and the army, proper medicine historian from the University of Ulim. And then I said, no, I'm interested in Hitler. And he said, no, this is not interesting. This is not serious. This is not serious history, but it's, you know, even Hitler was a person, you know. And if you understand, for example, the substance abuse of a person, of course, you understand more about that person. And historians never had had that idea before. Kirchhoff, for example, who is really a great, very knowledgeable, national socialism, like many British historians, they always know more about German history than the German historians. But Kirchhoff really does. I think he's, he's really good. But in his biography of Hitler, he just writes one sentence like, and then he had a crazy doctor called Morrell who gave him dubious medications and drugs, and he stops there. And then he goes on to describe whatever. Yeah, we should say that Ian Kirchhoff is widely considered to be probably one of the greatest biographers of Hitler. I think he wrote the best biography of Hitler. Which is so important. Your work is really important because it opens a whole new perspective. On the lives of the individuals and the machinery of the Nazi military that historians haven't looked at. It's so interesting that you can unlock those perspectives. And that's, that's the underlying really the foundation of our conversation today. And if you work, is there's layers to this thing. You can look at the, the tactics of war, this strategic level of war, the operational level of war. You can look at the human suffering of war, the love stories. You can look at the hate, the psychology of propaganda, or you can look at the individual things, substances consumed by the individuals that make up the Nazi party leadership and the soldiers. And all of those are critically important to understand the war, right? And this piece of drug use and supplement use have been ignored by historians. That was very surprising to me. You know, I didn't know this myself. I never planned to write this book. It kind of happened to me. And I decided to team up with the leading German historian on national socialism, Hans Momsen, who has passed away by now. He was quite old, but quite ready to be my mentor for this book Blitzed. And he was maybe even shocked when I came back from the military archive of Germany, with like a lot of copies, all relating to the systematically drug use of the German army, including an experiment done by the navy who had always pretended to be the clean, German we say, Waffenkartung weapon. Like you have the army, you have the air force, you have the navy, you have, and in Germany they had the SS. And the navy always pretended to be like, we weren't really Nazis. We were like, you know, the German navy, we had our ethics code. But I found in the archive that the navy did human experiments in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, trying to find a new wonder drug, because they had new, what they called wonder weapons or what Hitler called wonder weapons. He always talked about these wonder weapons. Wonder weapons were basically mini submarines, one or two people going in, staying underwater for up to a week and torpedoing, you know, allied ships. So the navy was trying to do, to develop a drug that would keep you awake and combat ready for seven days and seven nights without sleep and without, you know, burning out very difficult to find. So they hired a penalty unit in the concentration camp. They hired, the SS had the so-called shoe walking unit. It was a penalty unit in the concentration camp, testing shoe soles for the German shoe industry, walking for like days, and then they would measure like how the soles, you know, kept up in the stress and they had different layers in the concentration camp, like all the surfaces that German soldiers would touch when they conquer Europe. So this is a very elaborate thing, you know, and if you go to the concentration camp, today it's a museum, you can still see that running track of the shoe runner's unit. So the navy hired the shoe runner's unit from the SS, paid them money and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and in a chewing gum and like all kinds of things. So this is a, this is a big thing, you know, and there's documents to it. And Momsen, who knew everything about national socialism, the old, you know, authority. I'm like the young, like I didn't study history. I just, you know, I just try to make sense, you know, but I present him all these documents. He's reading like from this pill patrol and he said, wow, he said, we historians, we never do drugs. We don't understand drugs. This, we missed this, you know, so he was very clear that we missed this. And he said, this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. Like he, he, he made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you, you can, you can link that to drugs. You can explain a lot of Hitler through the drugs, but you can also look at this point that historians so far had not been able to figure out basically what happened to Hitler. Why did he get crazy? And I mean, he was crazy or he was, but why did he get so bad as a leader? Because he was very effective for a long time. And then there's this moment where it turns. Yeah, the, the generation of decision making psychology behavior, all of that. You, you cannot understand that fully without understanding his drug use. And we should also say that some of the historians you mentioned Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beaver, these legends of history, they all gave you compliments. So Kershaw said that your work is very good, extremely interesting, and a serious piece of well researched history. Anthony Beaver said that's a remarkable work of research. So props to them. You have received a bunch of criticism from historians, but you've also received obviously a lot of props. I mean, Kershaw's, the legendary historian of Hitler complimenting how deep your work is. That's, that must feel good. Maybe, maybe this is a good moment to also just, since we're talking about historians to address some of the criticism. So Richard Evans was been also a great historian, has been one of the bigger critics. He said that your work is crass and dangerously inaccurate account and is morally and politically dangerous. I think that's grounded in the idea that if you say that well, all the Nazi forces and Hitler was on drugs, so therefore their evil can be, they're not really evil. It's just accountability can be removed because they were using drugs. Right. And also another criticism of his, which I also understand and probably can steal man is if you look too much through this singular lens of drugs, you can overemphasize it. You can overemphasize how important it was as an explainer the effectiveness of Blitzkrieg, for example. Because there's, there is some, I mean, I should say there is something really compelling about a singular theory that explains everything and you can fall in love with it too much as an explainer. So can you steal man his criticism or criticism you see and also argue against it? I think he's absolutely right that you shouldn't argue in a monocausal way. And this is actually what mom's not also said to me. Because of course I was enthusiastic about all my drug findings and he said, don't argue in a monocausal way, especially the war. There's a lot of variables, a lot of factors, a lot of things going on. Yes. So that sentence of his, don't argue in a monocausal way that always stayed with me. And I think that I didn't deviate from that path actually. But it was still interesting that Evans thought that I put too much emphasis on the drugs. It's, I think it's, it's a, it's a totally fine, you know, opinion. I would disagree. Otherwise I wouldn't have written the book. What is, what I can state here is that I invented nothing. In all of my three nonfiction books, nothing is invented. If you are a good writer and I trained as a novelist, for me, it was also very unusual to write a nonfiction book. I wanted to write a novel about Nazis and drugs. My publisher said, no, this is, he looked at the, you know, at the facts. You know, he said, someone has to write the facts. So I said, but the nonfiction books are boring. He said, not necessarily, maybe you can find a way to write it with your novelistic style, but based 100% on the facts. And that is like, in German we say Spagat. How do you say that, a split? Like when you do with your legs, like, it's hard, you know? Because with a very fluent, sophisticated language, you can easily overpower the reader. If I describe how the German guys, 19 year old guys took the math and went into the tank and the math started kicking in five guys on math after like one hour of ride into France, you can write that in a powerful way that if you are the reader, you would think, yeah, I mean, the Blitzkrieg without math is unthinkable. There is a bit of a, man, I wish I found that kind of feeling for historians, right? Like, how did I miss this piece? So some historians, like great historians like Kershaw obviously see, they kind of give you a, like a slow clap, applaud. And some historians are a little bit skeptical. Like this is a little too good. So totally understandable. And also they have a different techniques to write texts like this. I used a totally different technique. And I have an apparatus. So it really feels like it could be an academic work. But still, it's written in a way that it kind of overpowers, it kind of colonializes the story in a weird way. I never thought about it like that. But while I was writing it, I was just trying to write it as well as I could. I didn't think about these questions we're talking about now. I just, I got carried away obviously, but I never left the area of facts. Yes. So we should talk about your process. That's also super fascinating. You went to the archives, you went to the sources. What's that take? What does it feel? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it, what does it entail? How much text is there? What language is it in? What's the process there? I never thought of going to the archives. And my girlfriend at the time, she said, you have to go to the archives. And she's an academic. So she, and I was like, yeah, okay, I'll go. I'm fine. I'll check it out. And then when I met a historian, he claims that without methamphetamine, there would be no Blitzkrieg victory of Germany. Like he's monocausal. But he was also extremely helpful to me. And he's an academic. He gave me the signatures it's called in German, where you find stuff in the archives. Signatures like, then it's like H2 slash 5, 3, 8, something like this. And these were the files of Professor Ranker. Then Professor Ranker was, he was the head of the Institute for Army Physiology. His job was to improve the performance of the soldier. And all of his stuff was filed in a certain place in the military archives, which in Germany is in Freiburg in the South, in a small town, not in Berlin, because Germany is a bit of a decentralized country. We don't want to put everything into Berlin again like the Nazis did. We try to avoid our mistakes. So the military archive is in Freiburg. And I went there. And because I had this signature, immediately I got original documents that were all relating to my research. I could read, I had the original. What does it look like? Is it sheets of paper? Yeah, it's like, it's so it's not scanned. It's different things like the guy who did the math into the into the army, the Professor Ranker, he was writing a war diary. That's what the name was war diary. So every day he would write it by hand. So this war diary was given to me. So you're reading that? Yeah. So it's like dated, like you have a date, the diary. It was a bit funny with him because he took a lot of math himself. Because he thought it was great. He just thought it increases your performance. By now we know a little bit more that methamphetamine is not so healthy because you get used to it and you burn out, you get depressed, and then you have to take more big problem. And he became depressed and burned out. And he didn't realize it's because of the math that he is like describing to the whole German army. Like he was he made a convincing case. And I can explain that in detail how that actually happened. But just to have his war diary was great. And then also like he would write he would type letters writing to the company of Temmler how fast they could produce stuff in which time. So I have you have all these original documents, you have like 500 documents and it goes like he writes like reports what happened in this battle on methamphetamine. Like there's a lot of stuff you can find in the archives if you find them. But the tricky thing is that you can only look you kind of look at a so-called find book. And the find book you cannot type in drugs. It wouldn't find anything because at the time when they were taking all the notes from this doctor his war dive everything they didn't put the label drugs there they put the label his name his position World War two French campaign stuff like that. So because at the time they didn't know that I would at one point come and look for drugs in that you know but he was the drug guy but also they didn't realize he was the drug guy you know no one realized that he was the drug guy. So it's not easy to find stuff in the archives. So the archives you go it's a it's a Kafkaesque experience you go into this building and you have to understand the rules and you will never fully understand what's going on. Also the archivist they don't really know what's going on because there's so many documents no one's read them all you know no one knows like there's history kind of lying there somehow organized somehow stored. I mean it does sound like a very Kafkaesque it's thing but it's great if you find something but you can also sit there for a week and not find anything. So what was the process for you you're just reading open-minded seeing trying to see is there some truth here to be discovered. Well I have a friend he's a DJ and we talked about Berlin we probably talk about it more and he takes a lot of drugs and he knows his let's put it that way he knows his drugs and one day he said to me when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next he said the Nazis took a lot of drugs you should write about that and I said the Nazis didn't take drugs because you know when you grow up in Germany you get educated about the Nazis quite intensely especially in West Germany like they teach you everything but they don't teach you drugs I mean now they do maybe you know but it was not known so and the Nazis always had this aura of being law and order no drugs of course no chaos everything my grandfather he was a Nazi always said well at least there was discipline in the country there was law and order so this doesn't match with drugs you know. You know I should also say I think that's the experience for a lot of people before reading your book you know I had the same kind of feeling that the Nazi ideology was all about like law and order and purity and surely they would not be doing drugs so this was like this really blew my mind I think I wasn't quite ready similar to like Richard Evans like this is a big like okay a narrative transforming into a deeper more complicated understanding what Nazi forces and the Hitler in a circle actually look like. That's why I didn't believe Alex. Always take the DJ the drug expert with the grand assault. I didn't believe him but I said it's a great topic maybe I could invent he said no we don't invent this this is real I said how do you know and he said I have a friend and I know this guy by now I met him he's an antique dealer in Berlin and he had bought an old medicine chest in an old Berlin apartment this was in 2010 and he found pavitine tablets inside which were the methamphetamine product that was marketed in Germany in the late 30s and this guy the antique dealer took some tablets and they were quite old you know 70 years old but they still had an effect on him and I later asked him and he said well we took them for about a month it was the greatest month we ever had like we had so much fun we were so productive because that methamphetamine back then was also like a quality product it was not crystal meth made in a in a trailer lab you know. So this is many decades later. They were still potent. They were still potent. Especially Alex convinced me because Alex has a high tolerance and he said okay they still had some so I said to him can I have some also and I took one and he's like this was we were standing in my riding tower which is at the river in Berlin and he was like I took one and I could feel something then I took another one and then it's you know I could feel more and then I took a third one typical Alex he would like take three you know instead of taking one he's take he took three methamphetamine tablets from the 40s and he said and then I felt like and he looked at the river and there was a big like big ship like a cargo ship going by and he said I felt like this ship suddenly there was a soup he said in German like a emotion that was like energy that was grabbing me and I could like I felt so powerful and he told me this and I was like wow this is like and I googled like methamphetamine Nazi Germany this was in 2010 and there was this one professor at the university in Uylm who said the Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine so I called up this guy and he said sure I'll meet you and then I he gave me the signature for the archive then I went to the archive and then I really started to do my own research and then I went to different archives and I tried to find everything on Nazis and drugs and that came everything is in the book so that crazy meeting with Alex and my writing tower that kind of got me on this research journey. It makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives do you think there's stuff like that in there that we deeply don't understand? About for example there's a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand maybe about the concentration camps maybe about the eastern front the interplay between Stalin and Hitler maybe maybe about Britain that could be discovered in the letters in the data that were completely missing. I think so and I think that also there are archives that are not open let's say the Vatican archive some secret archives that some very powerful structures have structures that we might not even know you know now of the top of our head which still have a huge influence so I think that the human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that's that's just one version I think there's several versions and I think that it goes much deeper and is much more interesting and so I guess like this history is a very active thing which also didn't know you know I was writing a historical non-fiction book and I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool like because the history defines the future or is very connected. Our history teacher always said if we don't know where we come from we cannot know where we go and that is I think true that is what I now really am interested in for my next book I'm trying to really understand human history and obviously I'm not the first there's a few you know alternative historians that go like because you have to go back in time quite a bit and then it's it's not easy to to write about it but it's very interesting to think about and I would love to find like the truth on Atlantis which I don't believe in actually and we can also talk about that but maybe there's an archive where we can actually see that they had this king ruling I don't think this could be found but I think we can still also find a lot of documents but I think especially in enclosed archives so we won't find them. You said a lot of really interesting things it's so important to have people like you that do the daring work of going to the archives of the sources the evidence and trying to find a thing that completely transforms history as we thought we understood it that's revisionist history at its best. There's revisionist history has a sort of negative connotation sometimes because you go to conspiratorial land without much evidence and you're just being a rebel for rebel's sake but when you ground it in data and and dare to challenge the historical narrative that's really powerful so now I should also mention that we've been just setting the laying out the context. Yeah we're still in the context phase. Context phase and for the next 10 hours and maybe for the rest of our lives we will be continuing just setting the context but let us dare return to the original question of Purvitan how did that come about? Take me to 1930s Nazi Germany the Munich and the Berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully how did Purvitan come into the picture? Well the Nazis managed to grab power on January 30th 1933 and they immediately become an anti-drug regime that is important to them because the only intoxication they allow from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication it's the ideological intoxication so they quickly install concentration camps which were at the time run by the SR not the SS takes over later and turns the concentration camps into an industry. The first SR concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside and some of the first people that landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users also anti-semitic policies which were very important from the day one for the Nazis like they anti-semitism is the defining pillar of national socialism the core of it really they quickly connected anti-drug policies with anti-semitic policies they claimed the Jews in Germany the German Jews were taking more drugs than the non-Jewish Germans and national socialism's goal was to purify the German body so they saw the whole folk the country the people as a one body and that has to be purified so all Jews are poisoned but not only Jews everyone who thinks differently communist are also poisoned Jews are the worst poison but you know a lot of you know yeah and then you create this clean body and obviously drugs play have no position in that if you are addicted to drugs that's weak you know you're a morphinist you use cocaine that's all degenerate that's Jewish that's Jewish doctors are all morphinists you know so that Nazi Germany and Hitler was the shining example of the person who doesn't take drugs he was he didn't have a private life he didn't even have he didn't even have a body he just led the the the folks body you know so Hitler was not putting any poisons into him he stopped smoking cigarettes in the 20s already he never touched alcohol vegetarian vegetarian no caffeine even so he was that's what he was in the beginning story of course changes at a certain point in time but he started as this as far as you understand that's true yeah beginning sure i'm pretty sure that this is true also vegetarianism was a right-wing thing in Germany it was an elitist thing if you were vegetarian you had a higher frequency which kind of gave you a superiority over let's say like these workers who need like to eat the sausage so you can you know do the work like Wagner the composer he was a vegetarian Hitler was impressed by Wagner so vegetarianism all i think that's all true i think Hitler was like that and and it's hard to be like that actually and i think that gave him an attraction inside the movement which were all like drunk you know drunkers and girl and using morphine all the time because he of his pain and got used to morphine so they were it was not the movement wasn't like this but he was like this so he was um he symbolized but he symbolized that whole approach of cleanliness like purity so then how does methamphetamine come into the picture it's totally absurd that's why i thought it was fun researching this because it doesn't make sense you know um and you know they used this simple trick by you know defining what is a drug an illegal drug and what is not because drugs don't have it written on them this is an illegal dangerous drug you know drugs are basically neutral these are these are molecules you know so the methamphetamine molecule was found in a berlin based company called the temla company um and the head of temla he was very upset with the olympics in 1936 because an afro-american athlete jessie owens was running faster than german superheroes with the best genes you know how could how can this be so they thought that he was on something because he won i think five gold medals it was ridiculous you know this was supposed to be germanese games you know and then the afro-american runs better than than the arian uber mensch so the only explanation is he took a drug he took probably benzedrine which was a legal amphetamine and also there were no doping checks at the olympics and if you take an amphetamine of course you can run a bit faster maybe that you know when it kicks in that this has to do with the immense release of of dopamine in the brain but it was never proven that owens used any type of drugs but the head of the temla company he said we have to prevent this we have to invent a better amphetamine we have to we have to make a german amphetamine that is stronger than the american benzedrine so his main chemist hauschild fritz hauschild he did research and he found that in 1917 in tokyo a japanese chemist had made methamphetamine and he remade that methamphetamine and they tested it among themselves the chemist in the berlin pharmaceutical lab and they loved it like they made pure methamphetamine and you know they had a really good time and they were like more active they would talk it to because that's what happens on methamphetamine so the company really thought this is a great product and they turned it into a product they went to the patent bureaucracy and got the patent for methamphetamine and then it quite quickly came on to the market it was labeled as pervitin which is kind of a great name because it has like the perverse already in it and this pervitin perverton uh was available in any pharmacy so you just you didn't need a prescription a child could go and buy 10 packs of pure methamphetamine so methamphetamine was also very cheap so it became quite popular because people you know talked about it did they understand the the side effects and negative effects of methamphetamine did they care they didn't really know what it was i mean i also read i went to the archive of that company also of course so they were like what is it good for like i just feel great when i take it and i have more energy and they didn't know if that could be a product like they it was 1937 38 when they were discovering it but also did they how did they think about the fact that this is a drug well it it was they called it a performance enhancer got it is drinking a coffee in the morning a drug i mean it is a drug but we don't think of it as a drug you know it's legal and this was kind of how meth was treated in Germany it was normal to use it like you had a very important business meeting of course you would take a pavitine there's a movie by billy wilder called 123 very good movie and he shows the american executive it was it the movie said right after the the end of the second world war so we see like i think it's a coca cola executive american and he says to his secretary uh how should i have the morning coffee i think half of a pavitine so pavitine was also normal it wasn't stigmatized it was it it it was not the american just say no propaganda where your teeth fall out and i mean it was a german quality product people liked it of course they did uh tests at universities like but most of them were quite positive like yeah it reduces your fear today we might you know look for different things but this was also a performance driven total interior society moving towards war so if someone takes pavitine and says in the clinical tests at the university i have i'm not afraid of anything anymore so that's positive that's actually what got the guy who worked for the german army interested because he read university reports like i also saw all of these reports they were also in the military archive so he's like okay you're not afraid anymore if you take methamphetamine you don't need to sleep anymore you don't need to eat so much because the appetite is lowered like this is perfect for a soldier so negative effects only became public in 1940 when the first pavitine opponent he was actually a relative of albert speyer hitlers architect and later armament arm arms minister he was the despair psychologist he was the first one who said wait a minute first of all methamphetamine is against the nazi ideology because now we're all taking a drug to be high performers we have to be high performers without a drug and he also said you know this the obvious this is going to make you addicted etc this will create a tolerance so only then the first negative reports came out before that what temla did and then what the universities did they all thought methamphetamine is really good so what was the process of convincing the german military the wehrmacht army to use it at scale where professor ranke was employed by the army so it was his job to find things that would improve the performance of the german soldier i always imagine him like a james bond character like q develops like gadgets and stuff because he also developed gadgets so he was quite a you know he was an academic but he was also a soldier you know he was employed but he was basically running this institute examining it and he was so convinced that pavitine is the answer to his question how to beat the main opponent of the german soldier and that was not the british soldier not the french soldier not the russian soldier that was fatigued he had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer so when he read these reports from universities he did his own tests in the military academy with young medical officers they came together at 8 p.m in the evening and then they received either methamphetamine caffeine pill or placebo or benzedrine like he had different experiments and he always concluded at the end like at like they started 8 p.m and like at 10 a.m in the morning one time he notes the pavitine people still want to go out and party well like the the caffeine guys are like sleeping on the bench and the you know it was clear that pavitine is the strongest it gives you the most energy lets you work for the longest time so he was convinced but his superior like the surgeon general of the german army he was like an old school dude and he was like he didn't even react to these like rancourt write letters we have to use a synthetic drug in the next campaign which was against poland which he knew about and because pavitine was quite known in the civil society people were using it already so he said he even said a lot of soldiers will just take it with them and we should we should control that we should make it an official drug but the surgeon general didn't understand he he didn't reply so germany had attacked poland without a clear like regulatory system on methamphetamine and indeed a lot of soldiers used it and what rancourt then did was he requested from all the the medical officers in the field in poland the war was over after a few weeks so but the german army was occupying poland he said send me all back reports and tell me what did did your people take pavitine and what were the effects and he collected all these reports which i also studied in the military archive and he came to the conclusion this is a really good fighting drug and it probably is because people are still using it today methamphetamine is still being used and rancourt discovered this he had hid everything in front of him and poland was beaten and then hitler wanted to attack the west and the west was a different story than poland because the west was the world empire of great britain combined with la grande arme the strongest army in the world the french army these two combined you know how can you win that poland they could overpower they had you know better army than poland but is the german wehrmacht really better than both of these armies combined his officers didn't think so high command said no we're not going to attack the west we're going to lose and hitler hitler was fanatic about it he really wanted to attack it they were planning a coup against him in november 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the west because it would have been a catastrophe for for germany because they really cared you know if you're a high command you don't want to start a war that you're going to lose you know very bad can you just briefly uh give us a sense of do you think this is genius or insanity on hitler's part to think that he can take on probably what's perceived as to be the most powerful military in the world which is the french military or at least in europe i think his hatred for the french was very very deep he really he really wanted to go to war with him it was an ideological irrational decision that's why he was he was not he didn't hate the the empire he kind of looked down he admired it and looked down on you mean the british empire yeah yeah but the french he really hated and france had been the app find the genetic enemy of the german people at least right wingers would say so um there had been two wars uh the first one germany had won then first world war germany had lost so hitler wanted to kind of revenge and also stop the versai treaty so he really needed to attack the west at least in his in his mindset but it was an irrational decision and that's why high command said no we're not going to do it basically and hitler's position at the time was not that he could do anything he wanted i mean high command is still a high command of the german wehrmacht that's a very old you know it's it's a tradition it's they they they do whatever they they want you know but also they have to obey hitler's order so it's a it's a power struggle basically um but to invade france was a totally stupid idea but it changed in the morning on the morning of february 17th 1940 hitler invited three young tank generals to his office and they had a plan which was the plan to go through the aden mountains that was the victorious idea so it's not the drugs actually that idea to go through the aden mountain if you if you think monocosal you would say that's the reason that idea was genius and hitler immediately understood it because before the plan was to attack in the north of belgium which is the same as world war one it comes a stalemate and they fight for months and no one really moves and it's bloody and nothing's happening it's a bad but that was the only plan that they had that's why the high command said no we're not going to do it it's stupid um but these three tank generals they had kind of like somehow they were able to snuck into hitler's office and they said look if you if we go with the whole army through the aden mountains and like hitler hey this is not possible this is like a mountain range how can the whole german army fit through this eye of a needle basically and they said no we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do tanks are not slow machines in the back that kind of wait for the action to happen and then you know i don't know support this somehow we're going to use tanks in the front as race cars basically we're going to overpower the enemy we're going to be in france before the french who are stationed all with the with the british in northern belgium and also on the marge no line but not really in the aden mountains that was hardly fortified because no one could imagine that germany would go through there and before they know it we are already behind them basically we are already in france and they're still hanging out in northern belgium because it takes quite a while you know to travel this was a different time also so that he was convinced and he then ordered the attack the attack would happen and that is then and but it would only work if you would reach cédon the border city of france within three days and three nights so the whole army or at least you know the avant garde of the of the machinery had to be like a big part of the army had to be in cédon after three days and three nights and that was only possible if you don't stop and that was the problem the sleep was really then suddenly became a huge problem and hitler said when i was fighting in world war one of course i could stay awake for a week i'm a german you know even though he's not even german he's austrian but that was a problem but suddenly ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe how people could stay awake for three days and three nights so ranke suddenly became before that he was kind of an outsider like the freak with the drug idea suddenly he became like okay tell us how does it work and he gave like lectures in front of the officers and he wrote a stimulant decree where like a whole army is prescribed a drug in this case methamphetamine how much should be taken at what intervals what are the side effects so this was a this became a very big thing and then temla had to deliver 35 million dosages to the to the front lines which were no not the front yet i mean it was they were stationed in the west of germany and then on may 10th they took their methamphetamine and they started the surprise attack through the aden mountain so the 35 million dosages for the french campaign i mean we could probably talk for many hours about this particular campaign because um it is i think it's fair to say the most successful military campaign from the german side ended with a big mistake duncurg duncurg it was brilliant up until that point that is a turning point that was the first big mistake hit that did and it also had to do with drugs we'll talk about it but let's just link on this three days right so uh we should also mention that's where blitzkrieg really shined so it wasn't just the tank so it was the infantry it was the aircraft moving very fast behind the the french lines i mean what can you speak to just the execution of that campaign and the role of drugs in it and it is we should say a really bold strategic decision to use meth i mean it's a big risk there's a lot of risks taken here which could could be seen as military genius and military insanity and uh our mixture of both well they were very lucky that it all worked out like it also the the guys in the tanks could all have freaked out on the meth because then it was never tested before can you actually be in a combat situation in a tank in enemy territory on meth can people actually cope with that and be better fighters going through the mountains it's insane against the biggest military in europe well what meth does is because i read reports of depressed the depressed atmosphere right before the attack started because they were afraid they thought they would lose like they didn't want that you know soldiers maybe some you know really hardcore nazi soldiers but most people were just normal guys you know they didn't want to start that but once they had the methamphetamine it kind of it you're like in a party mood so you're also when you're in the tank you know and everyone likes it you know it's rather an uplifting thing like they were they were really getting into it and they were really you know they started fighting then it's also intoxication you know it's a it's a rush like what is what is meth what does meth feel like well meth creates the so-called fight or flight motors so either you like it releases all the neurotransmitters in the brain which are released in situations of high danger for example so in a highly dangerous situation you become very alert so you can cope with the situation if you feel like under life threat and you don't even react to it you're probably gonna be dead you know but the body does that and methamphetamine does that so you take a pill of methamphetamine or a snort a line of methamphetamine and you're like and you're like this you're like and then it's the fight of flight mode either you run away like it's too much you know but on meth you usually don't run away you kind of think it's really cool what's happening you like to move you like to be with your pals you like to you know be in a tank's grave so there is a party aspect to it I think it was very joyful for the German soldiers because it was springtime they had immediate successes and it wasn't heavy fighting it was all it was just being in the tank I mean there was of course fighting and there were also war crimes and I read a report when Rommel high on meth like at night doesn't stop of course because they're all you know they don't stop at night but every army usually stops at night so the french army were stopping they were in a village camping out and the German Rommel was going with the tank through that village with his division just running over people and he was standing like in the open lid of the tank and he was like going through that thing you know and you know like a berserk type of you know warrior and that was when that to me is a war crime that is when the wehrmacht lost its innocence in that push of Rommel through the french countryside because you don't do that you know your enemy is sleeping because the french also had a drug regulation they received three quarters of a of a liter of red wine per man per day so and of course at night they're going to be sleepy on red wine and the Germans were like on meth and they were just running over them there's descriptions of the chains of the tank becoming bloody I don't think he did it he was like oh my god what did I just do I'm sorry I you know what what am I doing here he was in the in the movie you know this is the dark thing about human nature that in war if you dehumanize if you allow your brain to dehumanize the enemy the opponent the humans on the other side you can actually I think hate can take over and in that hate you can find pleasure when you murder the other and people have written about this talked about this it's probably a thing that a person like me can't possibly comprehend unless I experienced it and you have to be in the mania in the hysteria in the insanity intensity of war I mean what Evans for example said is that I excuse the Germans of the war crimes because they were just in an intoxication I understand that argument but and if you look at individual soldiers it's quite tricky like it's a 19 year old guy he's been drafted and in Nazi Germany if you don't go you land in the concentration camp so you can choose you know concentration camp or you just join the ranks and then you get pavettine and then you invade France that was a trial in Germany because someone said all soldiers are murderers and I think then the German Bundeswehr like sued him no soldiers are not murderers and he actually won in court so it's legal in Germany to call every soldier a murderer but it's a it's a tricky it's a tricky question yeah I remember seeing the documentary on the ordinary people I mean there's also social pressure again saying it is to say I think the documentary ordinary people was looking at the Germans that were a part of the shooting squads and you know they didn't understand what they're signing up for and they were told that they're free to leave once they understand what they're doing and many of them didn't and they didn't have hate for Jews or for the people who are they're murdering you are again a 19 20 year old young kid like it's so hard to comprehend the moral insanity that's happening all around you and you just kind of want to fit in I mean that's why I wrote the book the Bohemians because there were a few people in Berlin that didn't react this way but they reacted in a different way they said we cannot be part of this but it's hard to be the first it's very hard yeah and most people are part of it because it's much more safe or at least it seems more safe I mean it has its own perils you know because you might become a genocidal murderer you know that might happen are you responsible I would say you are responsible but that's just my personal gut feeling like I always thought my grandfather was responsible for the genocide because he was working for the German railway system and he once saw a train car full of Jews in a cattle wagon and he only said to me yeah this was against German railway regulations I said so what did you do and he said well they were SS at the station where I was working and I was too too scared I didn't do anything so I thought that he was he made himself guilty I thought that's and my father for example reacted very strongly because of that he never called him by his first name the father of his wife because he still had that you know he was a Nazi because he was working for the railway so I wouldn't excuse I wouldn't excuse people actually and I certainly would not excuse high-ranking politicians that make policies because the the genocidal policies that the Nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs and I never write that in any you know because there's no documents if I would find documents that say yeah when we you know but this did the Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs maybe with alcohol you know but it's and I spoke with my father who had been a high judge in Germany what is actually the law say and the law says if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it you are under the influence it does not diminish your responsibility your responsibilities only diminish let's say you are totally normal person never done any harm to anybody and suddenly you take a drug that you're totally drunk and you don't know what you're doing and you kill someone then a judge could say maybe you have a lesser responsibility but this is not the case with the crimes of national socialism and I never even hinted at that in my book so I think that criticism by Evans was short-sighted I wouldn't I think he's he's not right about that yeah I think I agree with you totally I didn't get that sense he thought the book was very successful because a lot of right-wing people bought it but that's not simply not true I think you booked it a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative to the contrary I got an angry letter by a German army employee quite a high officer and a military historian and he said that I he also thought I overemphasized the drug use of the methamphetamine in the in the western campaign because he said the German army was just so good and you kind of diminish their capability by saying they were only so good because they took methamphetamine I thought that was kind of funny because the wehrmacht doesn't exist anymore and the the new germ the current german army is called the bundeswehr and they're not historically they're not supposed to be connected like there was a clear cut but he still felt that I was kind of hurting the pride of the wehrmacht I generally sort of agree with him in general it seems like great historians often I'm just a human so I'm not a historian but they undermine the importance of the heroes that make up an army the Soviet army the British army the French army the the German army like these are humans and some of the great military campaigns involve people really stepping up now like the effectiveness of the military tactics with Blitz Grieg the effectiveness of meth the strategic decisions around where to invade the timing the speed all those are important there's humans there there's real heroes and sometimes historians kind of diminish that I don't know what to make sense of it I might be just an idiot but I've had a great conversation with James Hollen I've gotten to know him well he kind of analyzed the mistakes made by hitler and by Stalin and the operation Barbarossa but I just through generations because I grew up in the Soviet Union you hear these stories that these heroes you know my grandfather was a was a machine gunner and miraculously survived and like I just knowing those stories Stalin grad would not have happened without the heroes on the Soviet side and it's easier to say there's a lot of blunders a lot of bad tactics all this kind of stuff but to me from the human side I just know through my blood line the people that have fearlessly given their life to defend their homeland and that sometimes could be a little bit easily dismissed so I don't know what to make sense of it maybe I'm romanticizing or maybe I'm speaking to the suffering that the people have felt and they just propagate themselves through my my life story and then maybe the gratitude I have for the people who have stopped the the Nazi forces I think it's amazing what the Russian soldiers actually did because they beat the wehrmacht it was really the red army on the ground that did the job you know and did they love communism and their system I don't think so and I think they were I mean of course some people but basically they were defending their country and I'm also very grateful to them yeah they're defending their families quick pause bathroom break okay all right we're back so can we say a bit more about the French campaign so in there was over in six weeks it took six weeks to completely defeat and occupy most of France and the initial operation three days was from a military perspective successful what else do we what else can we say about the role of drugs the effectiveness what was learned from that experience by the wehrmacht I mean for me to research the western campaign was very interesting because I didn't really know anything about it except that Germany won very quickly so to actually look at the details is very interesting and the drugs give you kind of a way in what are some things you found in the archives they were interesting like about maybe letters reports diaries they gave you some insights about the the human story of it all well there is letters for example by Heinrich Böhl who won the Nobel Prize later in literature he writes to his parents describing in detail what what pavitine did to him how it kept his mood up and that without pavitine he wouldn't have been able to do the job but also military documents I found very interesting for example I could see exactly how the methamphetamine was distributed because it was not distributed equally it was done in a way that the tank troops who were leading the advance received the most math and they also needed it I could like see how many pills on which date were delivered to Rommel's troops and Rommel became I call him the crystal fox in my book for obvious reasons like his division was using a lot of math and he was using math as well I just have descriptions how he like totally crazy stands in the open lid of the tank and all his people well they had the math but so you can infer from that there's no they maybe they didn't use it maybe he didn't use it but it looks like he used it like there was also never any reports that all the math was given back I mean a lot of soldiers write that they take it but Rommel specifically I like I wouldn't write in my in blitz that like Rommel would take methamphetamine like on such a day or something if there was no record for it but Rommel there is a record for it that Rommel's division used the most math of any tank division so I'll write about that that's that all that already makes him the crystal fox because you know in his division crystal math is you know rampant you know it's like an animal farm when the pigs discover alcohol animal farm by George Orwell there's no evidence that they drank it's just the next day that they're all hung over I mean Rommel is a very interesting character in general because later he turned apparently turned against Hitler he was part of the conspiracy of the operation valkyrie he received you know the offer to shoot himself in the forest which he did instead of being tried and executed is he just part of the this general tension that the generals the military had with Hitler that'd be fair to say I would say so yes um I'm not an expert on the wehrmacht this is a very complex large organization but I see most of the officers of the wehrmacht as not necessarily Nazis in the way that they would you know shout hi Hitler all the time they were highly intelligent highly trained super professionals that ran a very effective war machine and at one point more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler were given were not really helping you know and they have their men dying because of it so that creates a lot of tension and that's that led to the mistake that Hitler did in Dunkirk basically what Churchill called the sickle cut which was the idea to storm through the aden mountains and kind of cut off the british and french troops who were still you know in the north of belgium trying to figure out what was going on suddenly the germans are behind them so that they kind of cut as like a sickle into enemy territory the sickle cut that was so successful um that basically the campaign was won already um so then the germans invaded like occupied all the cities on the on the canal uh back to england to kind of cut off the british completely so they couldn't you know even flee but there was just Dunkirk was open the last port that was open and the german army was like you know they were already on the outskirts of Dunkirk they could have just taken it and closed that you know that uh hole for for the british military to get out but hitler uh then did his famous and this is all the dynamic of the western campaign you know a lot of things happen every day and then they're saying like we're gonna have Dunkirk tomorrow and then it's over and then hitler stops the tanks it's his famous haltebefeel the the order to stop and you know they were all on meth you know they didn't want to stop but hitler was not on meth uh hitler was uh he was he basically it was a little bit similar than berlin munich uh thing hitler didn't really understand that campaign it was too fast for him he because they didn't say like oh they're all on meth they're not gonna sleep they're gonna they're gonna behave you radically they don't didn't discuss this they discuss this in the old-fashioned terms and hitler was seeing like they do not protect their flanks what if the british come from the north this is terrible like militarily it was they were already fighting world war two while hitler was still fighting world war one and especially the allies they were still fighting world war one but the tank generals on meth or the tank generals without meth the tank generals per se they were fighting a new type of war and hitler then got a visit from gehring the head of the air force the Luftwaffe and gehring was a morphinist that was that is very well documented like he was on morphine he was high as a kite most of the time and that comes with losing touch with reality i would say or at least it it changes your grip on reality you know maybe you're still a good decision maker but it could lead to you know if you're intoxicated let's say you're writing and you're intoxicated you think it's great but the next day you read it and shit you know so gehring was using morphine in the morning then met met hitler at the felsen nest which was hitler's headquarters to to command the western campaign the felsen nest and gehring said to him if the army generals are now gonna take duncurg then basically the army has won this campaign and that will give army high command which is already against you because they were you know for them hitler was always like the their kleine gefreite like the small kind of regular army guy because that's what hitler had been in first world war and now suddenly he was the big decision maker so they never they thought they make much better decisions than him so gehring says their power will be so overwhelming that they will for now uncalled the shots how this war will continue and what will be done next you should let me with the Luftwaffe do the job from the air the national socialist Luftwaffe is going to end the western campaign so he thought that he could destroy it doesn't make sense you know even destroy the british military from muth planes maybe you can do it but certainly he couldn't do it so the tank generals received the haltebefehl the whole the stopping order they didn't believe it when they received it because the victory this would have been complete victory over great britain this would have been the end of great britain the whole british military was encircled but they did get out through duncurg that's why the movie duncurg by christopher nollin is not good because he doesn't describe what happened on the german side it's just this heroic british thing yeah we just got out and we reformed and then we beat you know this was just because hitler was afraid of the power of his of army high command and convinced by gehring's morphine high vision that he would stop it with with the air force which he couldn't which he couldn't i mean he bombed and then the british you know they weren't ships and few ships were sunk but basically they got they got out you need to do this on the ground at least back then you would have needed to do it on the ground so that was the a big mistake by hitler that's why von manstein one of the three tank generals from february 17 was rommel von manstein and gutterian and von manstein lehi later said he spoke of a verlore naziq a lost victory he said the western campaign was a lost victory because we really could have achieved the victory we could have dominated you know brit they could have you invaded brit there was no more military well okay on land where there was still the royal air force uh and the and the navy and the navy yeah so like so invading invading britain i think any invasion of actual britain is a gigantic mistake on the nazi part but if britain doesn't have a standing army anymore it's much easier than well i still have one i think it's still extremely difficult to invade but it's much easier to sort of neutralize make sure that that that that britain is not a player in the war i mean the for sure maybe hitler wouldn't wouldn't have invaded at all anyhow also because of his sort of not respect but non-hatred right of the british empire because they also white supremacists so why why why would we fight them you know doesn't make sense while the french they were already like half black basically in hitler's eyes if we're to talk about counterfactual history of the possible trajectories of the war that would lead to nazi victory one of the big mistakes is uh the invasion of britain so you already mentioned a mistake with dunkirk but beyond that if they even captured mainland europe the they could have just neutralized the british threat and not invaded britain and then go after the oil which is much needed maybe in the middle east so focus on that campaign before invading the soviet union and then maybe wait for the soviet union to invade them through poland which will be likely coming or wait until 1943 something like this to invade east without the western front having to be been there and the the other really big mistake is is uh declaring war against the united states having complete disrespect for the united states and and and declare one united states which would didn't have to be done at all right so it's collecting enemies when those didn't have to be uh uh done so there is to me actually there's a lot of paths there as dark as it is to imagine for nazi germany to be successful in the invasion the soviet union even well i think that's why the wehrmacht officers were pissed at hitler because they knew that they could actually win if it was done in a certain way but hitler's ideology and his stupidity and later also his the degeneration of his cognitive abilities did not allow the wehrmacht to fight in the most effective way so they had a hitler was a very bad leader after duncurt so can you speak to the morphine what kind of drug is morphine morphine was developed in the 19th century by a german a young chemist called satyana and he wanted to know what is the potent alkaloid in opium because opium is a natural drug but there's something in the opium that actually is decisive and that's morphine so he was able to extract that from the opium so he basically this young guy he invented morphine which then became you know very important in wars especially like the american civil war is unthinkable without morphine or at least it would have been very different because with morphine you can treat people you can amputate people you can fix people up so and and send them back into battle and that that also corresponded with the development of the hypodermic needle the injection needle that was around in the mid 19th century so the injection needle and morphine together became a very efficient way to treat soldiers and that prolonged for example the civil war in america so gurring was taking morphine yeah morphine is like the classic it's like you don't eat opium you know that's you take what is active in opium and you inject it and that's much that's a very potent you know that numbs all your pain like you don't have you don't have pain anymore if you're on morphine also affects judgment i've never taken morphine so i cannot i cannot really say i like there's a few junkies that have highly creative on it like a lot of musicians in the 60s were using heroin which is a more potent form or like it's a it's a half synthetic it's an opioid morphine is an opiate and heroin is an opioid i guess you could be quite sharp on it also that's why hitler liked oikodal which is oxy cotton oxycodone and he injected that i actually there's another opiate heroin like it was a product by the merc company from damstadt germany they made oikodal which when germany lost the war the patent was basically taken by america and then ended up in oxycodone so if you inject oikodal that was a very popular drug in the 20s because apparently it gives you the most beautiful high on earth you're like super hard like you feel extremely well and you can think very clearly and you feel like this is how this is how life should feel on high on oikodal this is like claus man the son of tomas man he used oikodal quite a few doctors actually used it also and probably quite a few jewish doctors also used it because this was like a doctor's drug doctors knew how to you know set the the injection and it was you know a great experience and hitler he really loved to be on oikodal like he would use oikodal every second day in the beginning 10 milligrams intravenously then he raised to 20 milligrams and i spoke to someone who's actually done exactly that drug application because i wanted to know how hitler felt and i didn't feel like doing it myself for some reason i was i don't like needles so i didn't want to put a needle in my vein to have like the hitler drug experience i should have done it like a historian a proper historian never does that okay so i take i but i thought i should take quite a few drugs that are right about to understand it better but this drug i didn't take i didn't i never shot oikodal intravenously into my veins but i met someone who did and he said it's it's like the it's like the king's high you know if you do that properly obviously you get addicted to it you know i'd be scared to try very intense experience i think it's a very bad ass thing to do for historian by the way but i think it's a big risk i think i i think i mean there is a risk that comes along with it right well but not for hitler because he got the oikodal from the pharmacy he know exactly like his doctor know exactly what was inside it was made by a pharmaceutical company no i mean the risk of addiction yeah that is a big risk that is a big risk but there's also the risk of getting impure stuff and like heroin on the street and die from an overdose or but the addiction thing is very i think it happens quite quickly with oikodal because it's such a great feeling so why wouldn't you do it over and over again because and then the opioid receptors in the brain wants you to take it and if you don't take it you get withdrawal symptoms and you feel like shit and you have to so that's the problem with opioids with morphine that's what happens and that's what happened to hitler i generally say yes to most things but those those drugs like cocaine doesn't scare me heroin scares me like the opiate scare me oxycodone scares me because they really make you physically dependent i don't even know if cocaine makes you physically dependent it makes you psychologically addicted but they actually they you have to get it otherwise you feel bad that's a physical terrible addiction for life to feel like less when you're not on it right that scares me that's the problem also with methamphetamine people who use a lot of methamphetamine on days they don't use it they don't feel great at all especially not compared to the methamphetamine days so that became a problem in germany when people were really using more and more of the pavitine all right you got to take me through the full drug cocktail that hitler was on patient a of morales let's start at the beginning we're big on setting context here so tell the story of uh dr. theodore morale how did he meet hitler when morale was he had his practice on kua first and dam which is like the main boulevard berlin in the west of berlin kind of a fancy street and he was a celebrity doctor which was a new type of doctor in a way a doctor feel good he kind of was one of the first doctor feel good so he didn't go to him when you had a disease you went to him when you were let's say you were like an opera star in the berlin opera and you had a big premiere so he would go to morale in the afternoon and he would give you a nice shot and then you would you know be really good on stage um so he but he was not a quack i mean he was he just knew his drugs and he believed in you know why shouldn't you treat someone even if that person doesn't have a disease if you can make that person feel better it's good especially if that person pays like he said everyone who pays my and he wasn't cheap who comes to me and wants a testosterone hormone injection or a vitamin injection or an opioid injection you get it from him he didn't have any scruples i mean but we should also say he was pretty innovative and extremely knowledgeable so you mentioned hormones but also you know like probiotics like you're talking about yeah right just he knew his shit he was a bit of a nerd yeah he was like a legit doctor just didn't have boundaries about what he used he had a very unappealing physical appearance and i think that was a problem for him and he was known to have very bad eating habits like sauce was running and so people were easily disgusted by him he was like an outsider he was really like a freak but when people looked at him after he had given them an injection and they said thank you and i feel so great now that's what kind of made his day you know so one day a man entered his uh doctor's office on kufisten dum named hubertus hofman and hubertus hofman was a photographer and he had gonorrhea and uh morel because he knew about alternative ways to treat he actually cured him and uh hubertus hofman said to morel i have a good friend and i think you should meet him and i'm gonna have a dinner in munich and i think it would be really worth your time to come and uh morel came and the good friend was hitler because hubertus hofman was the photographer of hitler and they were in german we have uh a u a formal u which is c like if i don't even know you so well i say z and if you're my close friend i say do you and hitler only had like four people he would say you to he was always like to see like the distance it was always about distance and respect and borders and boundaries what are the two again c and what do c and do yeah c is the formal one and do is the is the informal one yeah you know in russian there's the same thing v and t and so there's a big that's a big thing also in friend in french you also have that you have that in spanish only in english you don't have it and there it is part of the cultural sort of discourse uh of like when you upgrade from the v to the t from the c to the do or from the do to the c from the c to the do that would be the upgrade because you become more intimate yeah like and you ask can i go yeah see the do yeah like the older person must suggest it i think yeah okay the beautiful language so hofman was a do for a friend a dudes friend we say of hitler so he was quite close to hitler and so that's why he could also make that close connection so he had a dinner with just him hitler eva braun hitler's girlfriend and morel came like they sent a plane to berlin to pick him up so it's like vip treatment it was the whole thing and this is 36 36 yeah they had spaghetti with tomato sauce on the side i read in the this like a description of this event the tomato sauce was on the side and there was muscat what is muscat it's a spice nutmeg nutmeg yeah it was a nutmeg which is an unusual recipe i guess but that's what they had and spaghetti wasn't a fancy thing you know it came from idli from musolini who invented fascism in idli and who was like hitler's role model for a long time until hitler surpassed him obviously so the spaghetti the spaghetti they came from idli and it was like a big thing and morel had the big problem that spaghetti is hard to eat right and he couldn't even like it was a catastrophe but he got out of it because hitler complained about stomach problems because hitler was a terrible vegetarian he was a so-called cake vegetarian he would only eat like sweets like cake no meat of course but like he wouldn't like eat healthy stuff you know so he was bloated the whole time because we only eat like cake and white bread and it's not good so he voiced that and there was also uh brandt was there like his an official doctor from the from the from the s s that was like his doctor and and hitler said my doctors can't cure me and morel was like this is my chance thank thank you god and he told hitler about the probiotics which hitler had never heard of and like also brandt the doctor he hadn't heard of because that was a new thing that you give and he hitler was asking what is that and morel said these are live bacteria from like German soldiers from the war in the first world war that were fighting in Serbia there was one guy who didn't get the stomach flu and all the others like drank the water in Serbia and all got sick but this one guy so his bacteria and this is a true story his gut bacteria were cultivated into a medicine called mutaflora and morel told hitler about this he said this is amazing like i have to try this you know and it helped you know he got the mutaflora he did the mutaflora kind of therapy and it cured him he suddenly had no bloating anymore and the farting of hitler was really bad so bad that it would like he like constantly like it diminished his you know ability to work you know so suddenly he could work he said he felt bad he didn't have the pain he felt great so he really thought that morel is a wonder doctor and he asked morel pretty quickly afterwards do you want to be my personal physician and morel was like his wife was very much against it because she said if you become the personal physician of hitler you won't have any time for me anymore and he said like come on man this is like the chance you only get once in your life i mean at this point hitler is a really big deal he's the most powerful man in europe and there have not been war crimes because the war hasn't started yet obviously there's concentration camps and a lot of crimes have been committed but it's also kind of hushed up you know it was it's not such a huge thing as now we know it became so morel never really has any conscientious problems he just think it's great you know i'm going to be the doctor i'm going to be part of history so he becomes the personal physician and being this vitamin guy like vitamins were really his thing like he believed in the power of vitamins and today i think we know that he was right vitamins are good but back then no one knew uh and hitler was like okay he told hitler and then hitler said okay i want to try these vitamins and and what they did from the beginning was injections because hitler didn't want to take a pill because the pill takes too long and it goes through the the track that he has the problems with like the digestion like he didn't want to take a pill he believed in the injection and morel was the masterful injector so morel because the needles were thicker than they are today but morel could give you an injection without you feeling any pain so hitler was quite impressed so he got like a vitamin c injection but hitler loved the daily injection so he got hooked on the daily injection once he got the injection the day was good and he never got sick actually like and he could stand like for a long time with the arm raised he did like uh he he went to the gym basically i mean he had a gym where he was like doing exercise so he could have the the arm up for like hours when a military parade would walk by so he was quite fit and he was never sick and morel was not giving him the daily injection and they they lived happily ever after basically until the soviet union attack well he literally lifted so you can do the the howl hitler salute yeah i found a document for that oh god that's dark he had an expander we say i don't know do you use that word in english expander oh like a band yeah it's like this you do like yeah i have one of those yeah that's what that's what that's what he did in front of the window well at least he's not doing in front of a mirror okay wow that's dark okay that's i mean those little details and yet another reminder that he's just a human being i mean it's hard to keep your arm up for like hours you can't let it down if you keep it up that's what it's all about you know i mean he was very much about the facade right he's very important to present himself in a certain kind of way when he's giving the speeches yeah it was everything was orchestrated the nazis were masters in propaganda they really knew how to create the perfect image uh okay so let's go into the the cocktail started with the vitamins this is in 36 right i think it was pretty harmless in the beginning just but the addiction to the injection was the main thing that i think happened that hitler needed his doctor but from 36 to 41 only like vitamins are being injected and glucose so i don't think it really harms you i made it might benefit you he never got sick he was fit i mean that's the thing that there was phase one of his drug use were the vitamins until 41 so you think the tweaking at the olympics though you've talked about before but still so you're saying this person we're watching a video of here is not on drugs i don't know i don't think so so that the video could be fake it could be sped up i think it's fake because i think someone read my book that hitler was on thought that hitler was always on math and created this but i might be wrong and the narrative takes hold and uh i think the thing you mentioned he could be on sugar uh so it could be a lot of elements he was also a weird guy maybe he was really just rocking because he was so happy what he saw you know maybe he really got into it maybe it was a sexual thing for him what he saw i don't know there's no document showing that he took a drug on that day let's put it that way i think i've been especially like stay up all night i'll go i've been fidgety you can just be caught in a certain moment when you're being like very like like fidgety i think he probably rocked a few times and then the video was cut in a way that he rocks more or something also methamphetamine wasn't yet available in 1936 that's important to say for sure he was not so what is what is said here uh on hitler tweaking on math at the 1936 olympics is definitely false okay there you go so when did it start getting more serious the the injection and the kind of drugs he was taken this was a day in august of 1941 germany had invaded the soviet union on june 22nd so this is about six weeks into the campaign which was called unternehmen babarossa and germany was doing pretty well and it came to a crucial moment where high command said now we're going to take mosco and hitler said no we're going to split up the troops and take leningrad which is now san petersburg in the north and in the south we're going to go for the for the oil fields basically that was his plan he said let's not do mosco and high command was like this is the biggest mistake we must take mosco if we if we take mosco we're going to win uh and hitler became ill for the first time on the day this decision or that might mean this is a dynamic thing that's going on you know the they're moving and now they have to decide will we split up or we will continue towards mosco and he had the russian flu in german the ruhr which is a like a flu type disease with very high fever it comes like they were in the field like so they were in the east you know camping out maybe he drank water that wasn't good or he had some you know they tested everything meticulously but he got you know he got sick high fever he felt like shit and he said to morel and you know you can see that morel's notes like morel describes this very vividly and in his notes which are at the federal archives which no historian ever ever looked at except me the non historian which is kind of funny uh so he describes how hitler then asks of him basically says vitamins are not enough anymore like he's very weak he must must go to the military briefing but if you the flu is quite a severe disease i think if you have a heavy flu you really feel like you're gonna die you can't go to a military briefing but morel's kind of fought with himself and then he decided to inject an opioid into hitler's veins intravenously like the strongest application possible and this was dolantin which is a german opioid that was legal and um i was once an exchange student in flint michigan 1988 and i was number one of the tennis team because i was quite a good tennis player we were playing our main enemy i think it i was at flint powers catholic high school in flint michigan and i think it was power central and they had a number one mark restyner still remember wow he was feared and no one no one could beat him yes and on the day of the match i had the russian flu basically i was and i was the hope i was the number one the wonder kid from germany and they took me to a doctor and the doctor gave me an injection and i don't know until this day because i just i was you know kid i got the injection i was 17 and i felt great like the flu was gone like this it was probably an opioid something you know something that just shuts off all the pain and gives you you know energy and i beat this guy in a way i totally i i thought of a new technique by playing like very high balls like in the in the in the direct like fearful competition i would have lost so i played something that in germany we call futilen which is something you don't really do you just play high ball yeah which is not pretty to look at but it's very effective and he just lost he just lost his nerve and i beat him like 6060 something like that sensational so hitler receives this this dolandine injection and he gets up he goes into the meeting room he dominates the meeting room he feels great he decides you know in front of everybody and no one is able to no one overpowers him in that meeting he was very good in the room and the the troops are split up like leading god is now a target this weakens the general thrust towards mosco this is probably why they didn't take mosco they probably could have taken it or maybe not you know but that's the decision was made in august who i think is one of the biggest blunders of the do not take mosco do not take mosco i think they had a straight shot given this organization they had the one time thing the one time moment where they could have done it and the german war machine could only win in so-called speed wars like lightning war only if they would do it very fast and surprise because they were always weaker basically they just had this moment this dynamic moment and this was fueled by the methamphetamine also in the soviet union hundreds of millions of dosages were given so the germans were really going and at one point this ends you know you can't take meth for the rest of your life you're just gonna end up being a nervous wreck but you can do it for like two months you could do it but then it stops i think if you're really honest about where you have the the asymmetry of power which is in the speed of the blitzkrieg so that's similar to jengaskhan who had a very small military but their advantage was i mean i think at the peak it would be probably a hundred thousand uh and but but every soldier of jengaskans had five horses so the the whole point was they can move really fast they and they not just fast but they can move on all terrain so they can go around you know if wars were fought on normal roads you're supposed to travel a certain kind of way if you go fast and around uh not on paths that are usually taken attack from all kinds of sides that's why you can conquer as much as jengaskhan was able to conquer and the same thing with the with the nazi forces this is their biggest advantage and the not using that is is is essentially the end of its effectiveness i think that's also why the tank troops were such a good weapon because they can go off-road while military vehicles cars cannot do it like a tank can even go through a forest and just you know kill you know small trees and just run over it so that was that those are kind of the five horses that uh that was the idea that they had at this working breakfast that's what they presented to hitler we're going to use the tank force in a very different way and that's going to enable us to win the lightning war campaigns it was that one of the first times he he he he tried an opiate like that an intense one that was the first time and then it that was it for him he well not immediately like you can see when you study his medications that that is a turning point in a way that now he he deviates from the vitamins like he becomes more interested in what's out there and like from 41 to 43 he tries out a lot of medications that he didn't try out before before that it was quite conventional mostly vitamins and glucose but now he becomes experimental and he discusses this with morel and morel is also very experimental like they got really they really nerded themselves into like what can we use like bulls testicle extracts so morel in order to present those things to his patient a he created a pharmaceutical company that he ran he was so he was the personal physician of hitler and he was also the ceo of hammer pharmaceuticals which had its production site in occupied Czechoslovakia and for example at one point when germany had invaded the ukraine morel asked for a monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals from all the slaughterhouses in the ukraine so this was a huge logistical operation like all the slaughtered animals all the organs were removed for the personal physician of the Führer sent in military trains back to the to the factory in occupied Czechoslovakia and like the the military became really upset with that because they said we need our trains to transport beggar wounded soldiers now we're like cars are full with like awful and pigs hearts and pigs and and livers and it was totally bizarre and morel but morel then became like he was just like good nature dr. feel good in the beginning and then when the ukraine was occupied he became just like business freak who like made a lot of money with his dubious hormonal concoctions where like he would threaten the army if you don't let the train with my raw materials go to my factory i will tell hitler and you will have a problem he was up he was acting like that he became quite an asshole actually and the war criminal because he also at his factory where he would make the famous pig liver extract that was then tested by hitler and hitler said it was that's a that's a good medication i feel more i have more energy so this can also be sold to the german military that's how it worked because the regulations at the time were that it was very difficult to bring out a new medication onto the market because medications to bring them onto the market you need certain test phases and all of that stuff so that's hard to do in a war especially in the world war two so hitler said to morel i'm going to be your guinea pig you just make it in your factory i tested and if i think it's good then i'm just going to write a today you would say like a decree you know because i'm the president you know i can like order it that it's going to be legal all over germany so hitler was a real drug guy he liked drugs well he liked to experiment i would say with his with with drugs and with morel they never like he was against drugs you know he was but that's a crazy thing for a guy who didn't do anything right it's a big uh contradiction or it's a big irony where it's very weird but isn't it even a bit of a mystery because at that stage i'm sure he was paranoid about being killed and all that kind of stuff so he must have really trusted morel right yeah he trusted morel because morel was not part of any organization he was the loner coming from the vip doctors his own vip doctors office and now he was basically hitler's toy like hitler could get access to all kinds of medications through him and morel would never say it to anybody you know he would just write it down but this was kept quite secret no one knew what was going on between the two men this is so interesting because like why why would he there might there might be can you maybe even speak to that why did hitler trust another human being this much because you could probably make the case nobody was closer to hitler than morel that is that is certainly the story i'm telling isn't that crazy like what is it what is it about morel this guy who's he's i guess he's fat and weird and like uh nobody really likes him he was not a threat to hitler like hitler hated all of super smart medicine people like he didn't he never undressed before them he never let himself be seen naked because he didn't want anyone to know anything you know about him that he couldn't control so morel was harmless morel would basically did what hitler wanted they wouldn't say we're gonna take today we're gonna take drugs together it's gonna be fun you know hitler was always about optimizing his performance because he knew only i'm doing this i have to and he always thought he's gonna die young so he always like i don't have unlimited time the clock was always ticking so i have to be always the high performer so hitler when he when he first experienced the beauty of the opioid high that was given to him in august 1941 intravenously when he experienced that kind of his eyes opened and he didn't think this was a drug i mean this is a medicine this is a medicine that helps me function this is a medicine that my doctor gives me in a very controlled manner and that lets me be extremely sharp for like eight hours i can convince all the generals i can do my job i'm happy because hitler was also depressed you know i mean this is he need he need like he really appreciated what the drug gave him but he never thought no one becoming like a drug addict or so it begins to oxycodone in general begins to work within 30 60 minutes and lasts for about 46 hours this is a long lasting thing yeah but these are these this you swallow if you get a intravenous injection it works after one second get the injection you're high but it lasts for many hours yeah that's why people love heroin would take it because you feel like shit you take the injection you feel great i mean it's in your system for quite a while like you can go into the meeting quite comfortably into the meeting yeah okay i mean there's the briefing it starts at one morel comes and you can see this in the notes like i have to be at the furor in his bedroom at 12 and then you know he chatter bit and then hitler rolls up his uniform sleeve and then he gets the injection maybe at maybe 12 30 then the high comes on and then it's very stable like you feel great this is a pure product from the merc company this is not some herring from the street and more I know exactly how what dosage you want right now so you feel at the top of your game you you don't feel you're not intoxicated I mean you are but it makes you clear you know so the mind is clear the mind's totally clear your body feels fantastic you know exactly your points you know exactly how the others because the others are just mortals you know because they're sober they just sit there and they just they haven't slept very well or they have problems with with them you know and you're way above them what do we know about general psychological effects of it so does it boost your confidence does it boost aggressiveness what effect did it have on his vision of the world it makes you feel extremely confident you have a lot of energy but it's not too much like let's say you take cocaine or methamphetamine you're like that's why hitler was never a meth guy that's also why I think this video is fake he was he didn't take meth I mean I studied more else the things he gave me he gave a lot of things and only twice was meth so that was that's not a lot for hitler like twice I read that the multivitamin had some amphetamine and maybe meth a little bit or no multi I mean I'm vita mutin vita mutin I mean vita mutin is interesting because it was a little bar of a sweet that was lying next to his food so he would just you know eat and then at the end he would take this was nice tasting and had some sugar in it and I read through all of the you know ingredients of it there were different types and never there's never methamphetamine in it there wasn't s s doctor shank and he claimed that morel made special vita mutin in his lab with meth in it but I think he just made that up okay there's there was never any proof of that I mean that's a really important like line to draw the the army the Nazi army at scale not everybody but some fraction especially during the french campaign used meth right and then there's hitler which used a lot of drugs but meth was not one of them really no meth for him was just for the foot soldiers you know I mean he didn't even talk about meth this is not nothing that's concerned him you know this is something that makes you function maybe he signed I mean it went over his desk the stimulant decree but I don't know if you really read it or understood it I mean he probably knew pervitine because everyone knew it and maybe you know they discussed it but they would probably also not I mean there was there there's a point when there's a conflict about meth amphetamine in the army this is when the secretary of health of the german government the nazi government Conti he starts writing to the army and he says you must stop this this is against nazi ideology but the army basically doesn't listen to him and keeps on using meth all the way to the end so maybe that guy Conti maybe he discussed this with Hitler but also Hitler never you know if Hitler would have said we stopped the methamphetamine it probably would have stopped but Conti's saying that wasn't wasn't enough I don't think Hitler was really into meth it was not his thing he was more into the opioids into these weird hormonal things like those things were especially the opioids were interesting to him because you can function on opioids for a long time if you have a proper product and a doctor that gives you the injections I mean Göring was higher I was addicted to morphine from 1923 until when the Americans captured him in 45 that's 22 years he was functioning on morphine and when they captured him he had I write about it in blitz like the amount of morphine capsules he had on him so what the Americans did was first take away all the morphine from him and then he went through withdrawal in American you know incarceration and he lost you know a lot of pounds and he became like a more of a haggard Göring which was standing Nuremberg you know this haggard kind of guy defending what he did and so um Hitler was really an he was really an opioid guy while the army was really methed up that's that's how you could sum it up briefly he did try cocaine why didn't he get into cocaine he started cocaine after the bomb attack by Staufenberg on July 20th 1944 when this bomb went off which actually killed a few people in the room this was during a military briefing Staufenberg put a bag with explosives under the table and the table actually saved Hitler's life because it was a good German quality oak table so the table was so stable that the bomb explosion kind of just kind of blew up the table but Hitler behind the table was protected by this table yeah this is the closest assassination attempt yeah I mean it's very weird that it didn't succeed because he had the bomb he put it next to Hitler he took out some of the explosives before he went into the room this is one of the big mysteries why did Staufenberg take out some of the explosives there's no explanation for it but Hitler survived but he was quite injured which Nazi propaganda always denied like they always said the Hitler the Fuhrer was miraculously unharmed but he was quite harmed there were like over 100 splinters from the wood everywhere his eardrums were blown which was you know it's quite an injury I guess you know he was bleeding internally and he was shell shocked basically and then a new doctor comes in his name is Giesing because Morrell was not in Germany we have well I guess it's worldwide it's the ear nose and throat specialist right so an ear nose and throat specialist from the German army called Dr. Giesing he was ordered to come into headquarters after the bomb attack to treat Hitler's blown ear uh drums and Giesing gave Hitler cocaine because cocaine at the time was being was you know it was used it was not schedule one you know it was it had the effect that it would numb the pain and you could you could like use it uh you would like put it on a certain place where you had the pain and then it would numb that area but Hitler was like he he'd never taken cocaine before but he got very interested in it and Giesing writes a meticulous report about his experiences with Hitler alone that report is it's really fun to read it's about a 15 page report that he did for American military after the war when he was being interrogated by American military he like described what happened with Hitler and him and he realized that Hitler really liked the cocaine and then he's like started saying now give it in the nose that I want and then it was a liquid that he could apply like with a dab like into the nose like it was cocaine powder but he could like liquefied yeah liquefied cocaine and Hitler loved it and he's the same things like finally I can think clear again and he had this cocaine rush which is a rush of uh superiority it's a dangerous drug because you think you know more than the other it's not very humble drug you know it it it it just increases the ego and um that actually he liked that because that was you know after the bomb attack he he thought everyone is a traitor like he didn't feel safe anymore in his own bunker you know and he was like Nazis and the right wing is always paranoid like who's the enemy like they're behind us like they're stabbing us in the back so Hitler was this type of person so the cocaine kind of stabilized him and Giesing realized that this guy is like a drug guy like he didn't know he like came in he saw the fueler for the first time he's like he was like in awe and like a drug wreck was approaching him and as soon as he had some cocaine in his system because this was summer 44 he already had taken a lot of opioids and a lot of drugs so he and a lot of these dubious hormonal concoctions which led to autoimmune diseases in Hitler maybe even had Parkinson's he was morale basically turned him into a physical wreck that Giesing also writes about this like he's like trembling before he goes into the room for the first time where the Führer is and then this is like old guy like in a blue kind of pyjama is kind of coming up to him and kind of shaking his hand that's the Führer you know and Giesing is like totally shocked because he's like you know the the destiny of the germination the whole Europe everything's like there hangs on this guy you know and then whenever he takes cocaine he's a little bit better like but the cocaine had the problem that Giesing was more of at least later in his discussions with the US military he described himself as a conscientious guy and he's like I became like I had the kind of problems giving Hitler more cocaine and yeah I mean and I'm sure Hitler could have sensed that and then Morel started disliking Giesing because Hitler spent more time now with Giesing than with him and there was this as the what I call the doctor's war ensued because Giesing then tried to get rid of Morel because Giesing could suddenly see that Hitler was receiving a lot of drugs and he was taking cocaine with Giesing Giesing left the room then Morel would come in and give him the opioid intravenously which is the speedball effect cocaine and an opioid you know at the same time that's like that creates a really crazy high but that's a high that's not stable anymore you know that's a that's a high that you that's like at the end of your drug career you take the speedball so speedball is a combination of a stimulant right and a depressant cocaine and heroin yeah so combining cocaine and heroin huh wow I've never had a speedball but I think it's like the most hardcore drug experience you can have you know and Hitler had this in the summer of 1944 for quite some time and then the the doctors really fought for influence over Hitler and Giesing teamed up with Himmler head of the SS and basically said to Himmler this Morel guy and Himmler was already suspicious of Morel obviously because Morel spending so much time with Hitler there's no control like Himmler was a control freak what is he actually giving to the Fuhrer the Fuhrer doesn't look good anymore so Giesing was trying to get Morel out maybe because he wanted Hitler to have a better health maybe he wanted to have the job himself he certainly tried to get rid of Morel and it came to like the high a high noon situation like the duel between the two doctors it's by the way why I think it's completely insane that Hollywood hasn't bought the rights yet along this doctor's war you mean for the entire blitz story yeah of course yeah yeah that's really I mean some of the greatest movies I mean like Fear on Lowland Las Vegas you can do a drug movie on the Nazis you know one of my favorite movies probably Downfall which is Hitler in the bunker which does I guess does downfall have a drug no they missed they missed the drug angle because my book hadn't been out yet they didn't they didn't know about it that's why that'd be a different story they can't really explain why Hitler became a physical wreck there's no explanation for it except the drugs well opioid addiction you could explain it is a part of it that you're you're it's an extremely stressful position he's in yeah but don't become a physical wreck if you the physical wreck aspect yeah and there were two bedrooms in the bunker in Berlin two bedrooms one of course for Hitler the other one for Morel no one else was sleeping in the bunker I mean you can you can see the importance of especially in those last months of Morel in the bunker and they didn't get that when they made the movie the downfall but it's still an interesting movie but I can't take it seriously because they didn't see this as a drug component again I don't think it has to be the main thing but it has to be a part of it a serious movie on bliss would be really nice it's not easy to do no there's something about drugs if you do a movie on drugs that involve drugs that it makes it you can go too far into like Tarantino territory well it's more like which is also incredible and awesome but it's a different thing he invents history and he's like very open about it like this is not what actually happened I think a blitz movie would have to stick to the facts and I spoke with some directors very good German directors and it's just very hard to do but but if you do it well that's a legendary movie yeah yeah that would be incredible what can you just speak high level from from what is it you said 41 to 45 what were some behavioral changes or changes in decision-making that we can trace in Hitler that that could be attributed to drugs like how did it change him well an interesting event is July 1943 in a villa in northern Italy where Hitler meets Mussolini and Mussolini is basically fed up with the war and he wants Italy to leave the axis of evil and Hitler is really pissed when he hears that he knows that's what the meeting is all about and Mussolini I mean the Italians invented that modern type of fascism and they were all Italy was the role model for Nazi Germany but by now Nazi Germany of course has been much more powerful but you know Italy is the most important ally and now Mussolini is like quitting in the middle of the war I mean what is going on here so Hitler becomes and Morel writes about this quite a lot he's in a terrible mood he really he doesn't want to go like he might lose his you know temper whatever he's not happy and that's actually that's the day when he receives the oikodal for the first time and because he says to Morel I'm under such stress I'm not gonna go he threatens like he calls off the whole thing like the plane's already waiting in in Ubers-Alzberg everything is ready and he says I'm not meeting this guy and then Morel gives him oikodal and you can see you know the time when he gets the oikodal and that's when he has this effect for the first time this like I can do anything this is great I'm gonna I'm gonna explain to Mussolini that he's not gonna leave the war effort and on the way to the plane he says to Morel that this oikodal is really helping him and he wants another shot and he receives another shot so he has he has quite a lot of oikodal in him when he speaks to Mussolini and there's like the people who take who write the protocol of the meeting and also other people around it's not like it's not just two people in the room it's like I don't know 15 or 20 people in the room and a lot of people talk about that meeting in their memoirs and Mussolini is not able to say one word basically because Hitler is so high and so charged and he's like just telling him the whole time how great this is you know what they are doing right now and of course there's not even a it's not possible that you're gonna leave you know we are in this together from the you know he explains everything you know the whole thing for like two hours and Mussolini is just like it's like then a messenger comes in and says Rome has just been bombed he's like he knows he can't say anything and he stays you know so that was very much influenced that meeting by his oikodal and that's probably because it was so successful in Hitler's eyes what happened is why oikodal became a very attractive drug for him and this happened this was the first time in July 1943 and then so he didn't take oikodal through the whole time you know it only started in July 43 he started with the with the regular opioid use you can see that he takes it more and more regular no not every day but sometimes like there's a the September 1944 he takes oikodal every second day which like the junky rhythm you take it then the next day you don't take it then you take it again why is that junky rhythm you don't take it all the time because you need to I don't know relax or you don't taste like you take it maybe a Saturday night you take it and the high lasts till Sunday morning and then Sunday when the high slowly wears off you sleep and then you wake up and you're hungry maybe you eat and then the next day Monday you're going to do it again so that's that's this rhythm and it was more potent than what is it? Dallantine? Dallantine oikodal is said to have the best effect the best it's in the in the sense of it's not about strength you know you just increase the dosage and you have a stronger effect but you can't increase it too much because then you're going to die you know that's also the problem with opioids if you take too much you're going to die because you just have a heart attack so but there's nuance differences that it's hard to convert into words I guess yeah different molecules have different effects so oikodal apparently had the best effect that's why you had the oxycodone epidemic in America because people take this pill I mean thank god they're not injecting it all like Hitler did they take a pill so it's not so dangerous as injecting but apparently the effect is so pleasant of this oikodal of this of this particular type of opioid that it just is more attractive maybe than Dallantine. Is it possible to try to reverse engineer the effect of Hitler's drug use on the outcome of World War II so if he didn't use any drugs would the Nazis be more successful or less successful what do you think? I think it would be speculative to answer but I can try but it's very the war is so complex I mean there's many different ways this war could have played out and ended but I think it would always have ended with a German defeat. I don't think it would have ended with a German defeat. Well if you don't attack the Soviet Union then of course you can win but as soon as you attack the Soviet Union that was like. As we talked about I think the probability of success is low but you know I would put it like I don't know 10% again extremely speculative but yeah if you do blitzkrieg type of attack very rapid don't split the forces in Operation Barbarossa go straight from Moscow don't invade Britain don't declare war on the United States and really focus on gaining oil from the Middle East so maybe making the Africa campaign the central point in the very beginning so that you have the resources that are essential for the industrial capacity of Germany that's required to you know keep manufacturing and keep fueling the planes the tanks the mechanized aspect of the army so there's a lot of paths to this I mean but I don't think I think it's probably fair to say that reasonable thoughtful calculated disciplined leader would not have done any of the things Hitler did even in the beginning I mean it requires insanity it requires hatred it requires ideological self-capture where you tell yourself narratives that rapidly deviate from like ground truth from first principles of things and you just you're an insane person you're an insane dictator that's drunk on power and it's impossible for you to make great military decisions at that point yeah you would need like an impossible Hitler that is as crazy as he was but still wouldn't make any irrational mistakes so that doesn't exist Hitler can only be imagined or understood as this in a way as the the drugs Hitler without drugs is unthinkable for me and it doesn't it makes he was the drug guy you cannot you cannot separate this so Hitler was a self-destructive personality a national socialism is a self-destructive movement that's why I said I think the Germans would have lost in any case you know except if there was this this perfect Hitler which is theoretically impossible a theoretical impossible in the 20th century I mean you could think of a Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great type characters that would really internalize the sense of in case of Hitler that the German people are like without the hatred without the ideology but with the murderous with the ability to dehumanize the rest of the world and see as the German people as superior the superior and so it's fair to do the Leibnzraum and all of that kind of stuff right it's hard to it's just the reason you want to think about that kind of stuff is Hitler got to me at least close to capturing a very large part of the world and it's it's it's terrifying and sort of unbelievable that somebody could get close to that I mean what you described as this feeling of superiority and conquering countries that was basically what the wehrmacht the high command that's what they were going for yeah and they wanted to eliminate Hitler in the Operation Valkyrie not because they thought he's an evil guy is killing the Jews or you know they wanted to eliminate him because he was not this effective decision maker anymore that they needed to win the war or to end it in a different way and I spoke with Anthony Beaver once about the attempt of British intelligence to assassinate Hitler and he had seen some evidence that at the point in time they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler or malfunctioning Hitler which he was after you know the summer of 1943 it is better for Britain than you know killing Hitler and then having to deal with like some kind of you know maybe the army would have taken over the country and that would have been more uncomfortable for Great Britain than having the continuation of the degenerating maniac. What do we know about the very end Hitler and the bunker the the moments the days the weeks the months leading up to the suicide all those kinds of things. It's quite well documented because people at the time were keeping diaries and writing about it writing about the experiences also Morel wrote quite a bit what happened in the bunker one thing that changed was that Eukodal was not available anymore so the drug that Hitler actually had become physically addicted to was suddenly not available anymore this had to do with the bombardment of the Merck company the factory in December 1944 British bombers destroyed the production facilities and Morel there's a report of Morel the overweight person riding on a motorcycle through bombed out Berlin from pharmacy to pharmacy basically going into the pharmacy is trying to score Eukodal and he couldn't find it anymore it was nowhere to be found and that's when Hitler goes into withdrawal what I find surprising is that he didn't use another opioid because morphine was available all the way till the end but he never kind of made that switch then like he doesn't also he didn't realize for a long time that he becomes physically dependent on a drug that he becomes a drug addict but this realization happens in the last weeks in the bunker because Goebbels he understood it and Goebbels wanted that bedroom the second bedroom so he said to Hitler do you understand what's going on that Morel makes turns you into a drug addict and he does like and at one point he realized what Goebbels is saying is true because he felt the withdrawal he was shaking he felt like shit and and Morel is like giving him weird stuff in the end like one time he gives him Harmin which is an MAO inhibitor which is part of ayahuasca actually because he still had that in his doctor's bag that hadn't been used yet so it gives him that which also creates some kind of a weird high but you know Hitler at one point realizes really what's going on this is late April so very late in the game and there's a few reports of what actually happens like some say that Morel has to kneel in front of him and that Hitler puts a gun on his head and says you've been making me addicted to opiates get the hell out of the bunker for sure he fires him that day and the Morel is described as being in tears like leaving the bunker he gets one of the last planes out of Berlin he has a research lab in the south of Bavaria close to the backhoof and he makes like the one of the last or the last plane out of Berlin he survives yeah and he goes to this research lab and this is like May 2nd 1945 he has like a little apartment in his research lab his wife is still in Berlin he's like all alone and he starts doing his taxes and that kind of shows you that he was probably insane at that point you know just totally out of touch why would you do your tax maybe he was bored you know maybe it's like he didn't do his taxes for so long because he always had to treat Hitler and then these things like no what am I going to do you know I'm just going to do my tax at least I'm going to do my taxes no very german thing to do this is just a strange character I mean you tell us I would put that in the movie for sure he's doing his taxes that's how the movie ends well then the americans move into Bavaria liberate Bavaria from national socialism which was a great job they did there and so I'm also thankful not only to the red army but also to the american forces really very thankful that they because national socialism was hard to beat it was a beast you know it was hard to beat so they capture morel and they interrogate him and he actually lives for another two years in american custody in germany in a military prison and after these two years his health's really bad he has heart problems and the americans dump him in front of the munich train station in a much too small kind of uniform jacket like probably an american uniform and he's like lying on the pavement in front of the train station and a half jewish nurse walks around there finds him and he says I'm teo mo and he's like it's really like in a movie I'm teo mo right I was the personal physician of the Führer she's like this is 1947 germany's in ruins and she brings him to a hospital his wife comes from Berlin for her last time they meet in the hospital at Tegansee beautiful lake in Bavaria and then he dies so that was the end of morel so we know pretty much what happens in the end did somebody try to talk to hitler about this like what about aver brawn has anybody close to him try to talk about well gobbels did well that at the very end but you would imagine maybe the generals or friends are in inner circle I mean that the reason I mentioned ava is because you know like personal people close to him there is a certain tension between ava brawn and morel and I could very well imagine that she talked with hitler about it but there's no record so I don't know exactly but they had a very intimate relationship so ava brawn was not just the the dumped lawn that plays no role they actually spoke every day and when hitler was in the military headquarters he would phone her every night at 10 p.m. they would have a long phone conversation so they had a very deep relationship and I'm pretty sure she didn't really like morel because you know of for the obvious reasons he was closer to hitler than herself and you know if you you know count one plus one it's two you know but she could have maybe not liked him because he might have cared for hitler and you can see the effects of drugs on humans that you care for she also had a good relationship with him at times because he was often at the backhoof the backhoof was like the the what is it called ma del lago uh oh the mar lago yeah yeah that's that was kind of what it was and it was actually it became an official headquarter for hitler so he would actually make decisions from there it was not just a vacation place and morel was often there and ava brawn was always there that was her place she was running that that place she was like the woman of that place and hitler was often of course in the field in the headquarters but he came as much as he could to the backhoof because it's quite beautiful i went up there is quite interesting um and she also had a good relationship with morel and there's like a paper that i found where um like they were very intimate and very close like there's a paper of morel where she comes to him in the morning and she's she has like scratch marks so apparently they had violent sex so morel is like also kind of witnessed to that that that that i found in washington dc in the national where hitler and ava had violent sex what do we know about hitler's sex life it's like not known right i found it interesting that morel describes these scratch marks i mean it's it's interesting so they they had some kind of kinky sex maybe maybe they also had normal sex and sometimes it was kinky or yeah maybe hitler was aggressive in bed but it doesn't really matter it's just what happened between ava and him yeah i don't think that affected the military operations of the drug use did his sex if he would have had sex with like a lot of people maybe with his generals maybe then you know it would be worth writing about it because maybe he dominated his generals in bed or something but he was just having sex with ava and i don't think that's historically relevant it might be interesting for the movie but also i don't want to see hitler having sex i don't think anyone wants to see hitler but ava braun is an interesting character because she had more of a say than historians for a long time attributed to her than a biography was written on her by a female german historian and that's a very good biography it really shows that she had you know quite a lot to say in this relationship she was not the dumb blonde that just she was quite you know opinionated and and active so it's and she was she was filming him a lot like she had she was always filming in the back hoof you can go online and look at the ava braun clips and you will see hitler and kala at the back hoof how he's like meeting children patting their head and you know this is a she was contributing to the myth of this private the private man the good private man so ava braun is is an interesting character for sure but i found one note that she in the beginning when morrell started with his drugs said to morrell that she wants the same drugs the same medications not drugs the same medications as hitler so she would be on one the same wavelengths with him she wanted to be she didn't want to lose this world but i mean hitler became such a drug polytoxicomanic user that of course ava couldn't keep up with that they weren't a drug couple i don't i didn't see any evidence for that that they would like take all the crazy drugs together and then have crazy sex or something like that that's not that's not how it was so i think she was sympathetic to morrell in the beginning and then changed her opinion and i'm pretty sure she talked with hitler about it but there's no records about their private conversations let's talk about another perspective on this whole story that you document you book the bohemians the subtitle is the lovers who let germany's resistance against the nazis so this is the story of the people who resisted from within germany right can you tell their story and in particular it's told to the story of the two key figures in the movement who happened to also be in love well the main guy is haro haro schulze boisen he he caught my attention when i was doing research in a in an archive in munich researching drugs in the luftwaffe gehring's luftwaffe gehring being the morphinist i mean the luftwaffe was a drug uh a very promiscuous place like a lot of people in the luftwaffe are high also more for entertainment versus the practical aspect of so it's less about like the meth optimizing the human performance and more about just exploring like the number three of the luftwaffe ans udet he committed suicide in the fall of 1941 and he had had seven pervitin tablets for breakfast and okay so he was really high on meth he really enjoyed but he loved to take meth and then drink alcohol was a big thing in the luftwaffe you can drink a lot more when you're in methamphetamine and i found this letter and there was really a coincidence while i was looking through like the drug stuff i was searching for you know drugs and i found this letter by haro schulze boisen who had nothing to do with drugs but still i found this letter i don't know why i can't i can't remember how exactly it happened that i was suddenly reading this letter and it was the last letter that he wrote in his life he wrote it to his father and he said that everything i have done i'm totally fine with it and i know it's very hard for you and i really am mostly sad for you and mother and my brother uh that you have to go through this and i'm very sorry but i'm fine with it and i have a clean conscience i did what i could to stop this madness and i'm like what who is this guy you know and i googled him and there were not so many hits on him but i read a little bit and he actually had formed together with his wife libertas which means freedom good name he had formed the largest resistance network against the nazis that ever existed over a hundred people in berlin that were all connected and they were they were like from all flights of life like there were some were artists other were workers some were leftists other were patriots uh how always believed that people could come to an agreement like it's possible to actually talk about things and he was a he was a true democrat maybe you could say or true i don't know libertarian or you know he was a he had to learn a hard lesson that with nazis you cannot argue because they they are always right they're not that they it it doesn't work at least it didn't work during the third right like he could he had he had published a newspaper during the weimar republic called gegner which means opponent and in the gegner opponents could all write like who would be on the streets opponents they could all write in the in the opponent and so it was a you read all kinds of texts and and in opinions and he thought when hitler took over power in 33 that he could continue to publish the opponent because the opponent he's he thought even you know in a in a nazi led germany you know this keeps the discourse you have to have a discourse you have we have to discuss we have to disagree you know and then in in april 1933 two months after hitler took power they had a meeting with with the editorial staff and they discussed the new issue and then there was a knock on the door and it was the ss and they beat up everybody and they destroyed the typewriters and the printing press that they had in the office in berlin and they took haro and his best friend who was half jewish to one of these early concentration camps and they tortured both of them and the the jew was killed he didn't make it hendry erlanger and haro at that moment he realized who he's against you know that he has to he decided to become to to fight the system and the way he fought the system was later during the sixties we also had a sixties kind of cultural and political changes in germany and then our our sixties they they called it march through the institutions that is a way to infiltrate the system like to become part of the system and then you know change the system from within so you don't leave the country you stay you go into the institutions you march through the institutions so haro decided to go into the luftwaffe and he was working in the air force luftwaffe ministry huge building still intact today in berlin wilhelm straße quite an interesting building that was like the power center of the luftwaffe like one of the most important structures in the whole nazi regime and he was working there and he worked his way up and he received quite a lot of information for example when germany for the first time became militarily active again this was in 1936 when the germans supported the fascists in spain in the spanish civil war this was a clandestine operation the luftwaffe did this and they like german soldiers went to spain like in plaincloth like to like posing as vacationers but then they you know were actually soldiers and supporting franco's you know were part of franco's victory later on and haro had this information and he passed he tried to pass this on to the bbc he failed by passing it on well he's he met a bbc journalist during the olympic games in in in berlin and told him about this and the bbc guy was too afraid to make this public and he kind of buried that information um so haro it's just a very interesting character and he was in love with libertas and libertas with him haro came from like a bourgeois family very educated his great-grand uncle was frontier pits who built up the marine the navy for the kaiser so he came from this like influential german family but they were all patriots they were not nazis they were democrats patriots and militarists i i guess you could say or like you know very straight laced also in a way uh and and libertas she came from a castle north of berlin she was this like bohemian like aristocratic bohemian type very good-looking always playing music and they fell in love they met on the vansi on boats uh they were both on haro was rowing and she was on a sailboat of a guy that haro also knew so he was rowing and he saw the his friend on the sailboat and he looked at libertas she looked at him and they were in love in 1934 and the the other guy the friend of haro he left his sailboat because he realized i'm like the the fifth wheel on the car like not really needed right like how do you say that in the sailboat terms i don't know the third third sail it's not needed you know but what happened at night haro didn't sleep with libertas for her that was very unusual because everyone wanted to sleep with her but haro like he wanted to keep his clothes on it was a very warm night and i researched this quite thoroughly like i know exactly the temperature and so also the bohemians when you read the bohemians you really experience the life of these people what like what they experience but everything is nothing is invented uh which is very tricky to do uh so what happens that night like libertas wants to take off his clothes and he doesn't want to take them off because why from the torture in april 1933 he has quite a lot of scars they even burned swastikas into his thighs like not burned sorry they uh with knives the ss so he doesn't want to show that to her he just and he hadn't had a girlfriend for a while like he can't open up emotionally because he's fighting the knots it's very secret like no one knows about this that he's long-term planning his life to fight the system that he hates so much because they killed his best friend in front of his eyes but at one point libertas does you know take off his clothes and she sees this and she's like naive she's even a member of the nazi party but she's not a very active party member she's just you know she works for mgm actually in berlin maria hollywood film studio office in berlin germany was one of the biggest movie markets and she was the press girl um she did the campaigns for the big uh hollywood movies uh in germany so just a regular german girl well she wasn't regular she was from a very high family um actually her grandfather had been in a relationship with the german emperor which is a side story that i found out when i researched researched the bohemians uh the german emperor apparently was uh bisexual uh and was going to that castle and they had homosexual kind of meetings there with libertas's grandfather so she came from a very unusual family uh but what i mean actually in a usual german girl what i mean by that is it's not obvious that a person like that would be would hold a crucial role in the resistance against the nazis no not at all that was always a problem because for her it was weird that someone was against the system but haro told haro was totally convinced that fascism is wrong and that he has to fight it and more and more libertas was convinced and then more friends uh kind of came into the group and the way haro organized this resistance group was through parties like they were like a power couple of berlin and they had a great love department they moved together to a to a love department on also uh side street from kudam a huge room and there they had parties every second thursday night and they would invite friends and then once they trusted someone personally then they would spill the beans and say this is actually not just a party but they would like test it they like at the party they would say something critical of the regime and you immediately you know either the person jumps on it responds or like you know go somewhere else gets a drink at the bar you know not not into it so that was the way of recruiting people and that was such an efficient way that the gestapo was not able to understand this group for a long time not even recognize that there is a group because gestapo was very good in infiltrating for example communist resistance groups because you just had to go in as a gestapo guy and be a communist just say the right words and they would at one point you know take you but with haro and libertas it wasn't so easy you know they would they would sniff you out you know these parties were what like intellectuals like uh like artists and that kind of stuff yeah yeah they had music they would dance they would sleep with each other they also sex stuff too well they had and this is again kind of a parallel to the 60s they had the idea that if you're against fascism if you're for freedom of yeah free love the whole thing yeah they were they had free love but it wasn't a dogma like there were also there was a doctor a female doctor there she was quite square I guess you would say and she was like against this and she said this is too complicated we have we are resistance group like what if like there's jealousy and what like that this could compromise operations and it did sometimes so that's why the bohemian is a very interesting subject because sometimes it just doesn't work in a way it works that love really bonds them together but also especially libertas and haro they have a terrible marriage sometimes like they really fight because libertas is not so much intellectually convinced she's she's more resistance fighter from the heart like she feels that the Nazis are not good but haro is more like the analytical guy so they have a lot of friction also and it's a it's a fascinating story they came quite far I mean they made there was a point in time when haro had militarily relevant information through his position at the Luftwaffe ministry ministry and he passed that on to allies to western allies and to the soviet union so he went a step further than just being like a resistance guy he became you could say a traitor or he would give information to the Soviets yeah he would because he said as part of the resistance yeah they can beat Germany but that was also discussed like in the group it's very interesting to see like some say we can't do this because the soviet union is also totalitarian regime but then haro says yeah but they will they are going to beat Hitler like we had like so it's the bohemians is a very interesting topic what lessons do you learn from these folks maybe about why so few resisted Hitler for one thing Germany I mean it was extremely dangerous it's purely the danger is it also people believed it's hard to it's hard to take yourself like be an independent thinker take yourself outside the propaganda because they're also swimming in propaganda I mean the chances of succeeding are quite small because the system was extremely strong and if you'd made a joke about Hitler and the wrong person heard it like in a restaurant and would rat on you you would land in the concentration camp so people were very very careful also at parties with like how on Libertas and she was singing and they were drinking and dancing and then suddenly the political discussion started that's you know you have to have guts to then actually not leave the party but to stay because they were risking their lives basically as soon as they would be found out they would be dead and people don't want to die when they're like in the mid 20s they were all they were they were pretty young and and also Libertas she would often say like we can't win you know it's why are we risking our lives for like for like what you know so one time they did a Kleberzettel-Akhtzeo and Kleberzettel like they produced because one guy had access to a printing press and they produced leaf like small papers that had glue on one side and the paper said what the Nazis did they they set up a huge exhibition hall which was called the Soviet Paradise and this exhibition hall was in the center of Berlin I'd never heard about this before I found this when I researched the Bohemians and it was the most popular exhibition during the whole of the of the war like two million people two million Germans saw this they went into this exhibition and they saw how horrible the Soviet Union is how horrible communism is to people so it was a propaganda show and the group decided to make these leaflets which didn't say the Soviet Paradise but it said the Nazi Paradise torture SS torture hunger war how long will it last and they glued over a thousand of these stickers everywhere in Berlin in May 1942 at night and they organized it in a way that they always two a man and a woman would go out and they had like the stickers with them and then they would pretend to kiss and would like lean on a wall and then while they were kissing one would like put the put the sticker on then they would move on in the dark so in the morning of that May 1942 tens of thousands of Berliners saw that the city was like saw these things so is does it make a difference it made one on that day you know it was a very dangerous thing to do and no one was no one got caught and in the morning a lot of people saw that there is actually resistance that there are people who do something against it so I think they did something yeah I was reading about protests in recent human history and then most of them many of them don't have an effect until they do it's like this threshold effect it's very hard to know it's very hard to know because it's a match that lights a fire and sometimes the spark that takes takes a little bit of time to propagate through the whispers what happens is the people whispering it's the whisper network of people talking and sometimes it just takes that one sticker to begin the whispers and then a few months later the regime is overthrown it's funny it's but it's hard to sort of trace back what was affecting what was not I mean Harro was convinced that the system would lose so he thought that maybe we can make a contribution that it's going faster no maybe we will be that spark so yeah unless I when I think that there's this possibility I must try it you know that's that was his conviction so he would put his life on the line for that possibility how did they get caught they were approached by the Soviet Union who wanted to recruit them as spies and they didn't want to do that Harro refused the Soviet intelligence these are documents that were found in the early 90s one of the sons of one of the members of that group of Harro good friend of Harro one of his sons went to Moscow to look at the files and he found a kind of furious Soviet KGB kind of descriptions of this weird guy Harro that doesn't want to be a proper soviet spy and just says yes I'm going to give you information so you can hurt Hitler but I'm not going to play your game I'm not going to be one of you so still they did collaborate with the Soviet Union they accepted a radio transmitter from the Soviet Union with which they were supposed to send military information but via radio to Moscow and they like struggle with the technology the Russians give them like an apparatus only with like a Russian instruction and it's like very difficult they make mistakes but what actually then gets them caught is the Russians at one point answer and send a message to them through the ether and in and that message is coded but the Nazis intercept that message and are able to decode it and in the message it gives the clear names of Harro and his address which is a total like intelligence blunder or maybe they just wanted to give them up and and had their revenge because Stalin did crazy stuff like that you know so they suddenly know that Gestapo knows Harro Schulze Boys and the high-ranking officer and the Luftwaffe ministry is giving military information to the Soviet Union and apparently like he's meeting with all kinds of friends so they started the Gestapo started observing the group for months and the group at one point realizes that they've been basically found out and but then it's already too late then they capture quite a few of them and quite a few get a trial military trial and receive the death penalty and are also being executed and Harro and Libertas are among them and also that last chapter of their lives is very well documented and it's actually ends with that letter you know that I found in the beginning that's the last thing that Harro does is write that letter to his father that's very interesting what happens with Libertas because she gets in custody the Gestapo asks one of their secretaries get through the Breite to go in and pose as a friend to Libertas and Libertas actually falls for it and starts telling that secretary who pretends to be her friend and kind of helps her with certain things tells her secrets and that kind of breaks the neck of the group it's very it's very it's a very tragic ending so while my books always contain as much humor as possible that is not a funny story but it's a very dramatic story even though they had a lot of humor obviously I mean they they had parties to recruit people what lessons can we learn from that about how to resist totalitarian regimes is there some deeper wisdom I just think it's admirable to be brave and not not do things that you cannot really that you cannot really justify in front of your own conscience I don't know if I would have been so brave I don't even know obviously how my conscience would have been but I'm probably more the fleeing type like a lot of writers would just leave Germany like Thomas Mann just left Germany and lived in pacific palisades and then and then maybe write criticize but leave first and he criticized it from the outside and he was quite influential like he worked for the bbc they did like shows against the nazis so you can all maybe you can do more when you leave it's just you have it's like today let's say we see something we live in a system that suddenly changes and we're not happy with it anymore do we just go along and you know continue to stare at our smartphone or do we do something against it what do we do I mean every situation has very different you know conditions you know I think it's probably even harder now to to be in the resistance than it was back then but I think it does at the end of the day boil down to facing yourself looking yourself in the mirror you're facing your conscience and then doing the the courageous thing and I think that in itself that like it's the tree falling in the forest even if there's nobody there to hear it just the fact that that exists somehow through the karma channels of the world can materialize into progress into a revolution against oppression something about that that human spirit still shining through can start a revolution I mean it is that spirit that actually made us human it is that that neuro plastic neuro plasticity in our brain that we do not just repeat the conditioned sets that we we ought to repeat but that we actually dim down the command center in the brain and let other parts of the brain react which is the psychedelic experience basically that I think contributes to the to the evolution of our species and our species is certainly threatened by extinction so I think if we are somehow care for the human race then resistance becomes a very immediate and important topic you know because you can resist obviously your brain is yours you can resist in many ways you know my thinking just by thinking that's actually why I became a writer when I was a teenager I was very political I wanted to change the system I thought this is not this is not good what's happening this was in the cold war very I don't know if conservatives even the right word but you know Ronald Reagan was president so I thought my writing could change the brain waves of the readers basically and therefore have a a neuro plastic effect on the reader and just because that is what literature is literature and I started off as a as a novelist so that's really literature it's about what what do you see right now how do you describe it so you do it in ways that when you read it when you read a good book you feel good because suddenly you see different things your brain changes you become more free I think if you read good literature that was always my form of of resistance communist resistance cells would probably say this is nothing you know but I think it is resistance and that's a little bit I think it resembles a little bit what this group did just living differently not living you know that's why I said in the beginning Nazis are bad dancers because they I think they were good dancers at the parties you know and they were like I think it's dancing can be a form of resistance yeah but I also like the scale when you resist and through that resistance you have impact the scale and I do think writing is that so if you can encapsulate your sort of the spirit of that resistance into writing that's that's beautiful and some of the greatest literature does exactly that right that is the aim of my next book so is this still called stone sapiens yeah it's called stone sapiens great title great title so what what is this lens that you're looking at at all of human history through I discussed this with already mentioned Anthony Beaver who is like the master in historical non-fiction books I said is it also possible to write a world history like about everything basically and he said yes it is possible it's not easy because you have to understand like a lot you know and obviously it will always be a selection it's clear you know that's why I also think that the historical science is basically a fictional science I mean I have a forward the blitz forward basically tells that story don't take it with a grain of salt not only blitz but every historical book because we weren't there you know that's what Johnny Depp said when the when the when the guy said so you had like a mega pint of red wine he just said were you there you know the guy wasn't there so historical sciences is a fiction yeah but you know it's a certain type of fiction and it's based on facts so I'm not inventing anything in stone sapiens and I'm highly interested in the very early human history and there are not a lot of sources so the beginning of the book is more speculative than for example the Vietnam War chapter in the Vietnam War chapter I'm in Hanoi speaking to vietcong generals asking them did they supply heroin to the to the gis which would diminish which diminished their fighting capability that's you can research that and that's that's that's also a chapter by the way the Vietnam War is not called the Vietnam War in Vietnam it's called the American War and also I was like sitting with these vietcong generals in Hanoi just like a few weeks ago for researching for stone sapiens and I said so did the vietcong bring heroin because it's there's there's never been evidence that it happened this way and they just looked at me and they said there's no vietcong like what are you talking about you are the vietcong they said no this is the american propaganda term whether we were the north vietnamese army we never call ourselves the vietcong so the book is full of surprises obviously but the very early beginning of stone sapiens goes back to about 1.5 million years ago when homo erectus which who who also has become kind of famous by now homo erectus it's like the first human that really gets shit done you know they get moving yeah they move yeah and why were they moving why were they moving I mean then you can examine exactly where they originated which was I mean it's also disputed by now that it's the great rift valley that only the most fossils have been found there but that doesn't mean that they originated there maybe they originated in the central african rainforest where fossils disintegrate and only there in the rift valley we still find it so but we know for sure that in the great rift valley there was a plant called cut which is like a plant speed so they were using that it's still being used now in these countries in Ethiopia, Yemen around the horn of Africa cut is very normal to use you chew the leaves and it gives you like it's like an amphetamine it's a plant amphetamine basically so homo erectus you can there's no proof that they actually used it but they were living in that area and the plant was there so you can you can write about that so it's interesting because they they were able to do certain things like they shed the fur they were the first ones to have to suddenly be naked and that has the effect that sweat glands are produced homo erectus could sweat it out basically when they when they when they were very hot what animals couldn't do because they had the fur so an antelope can run faster as a homo erectus but at a at like after 10 minutes the antelope has to like stop like what what dogs do like they the tongue goes out and humans didn't have to do that because they were sweating so they could they developed the jog jogging mode basically so they were jogging they were not sprinting to get the animal they were jogging it and when the animal couldn't do it had to rest then the humans would come and hunt it down so homo erectus was a very evolutionary very good and then later that one of the species coming out of homo erectus is homo sapiens and homo sapiens at one point there were only like about 1500 people left there were not a lot of homo sapiens there was a point in time when there were quite a few of them and the problem became inbreeding and there was a real danger of extinction they were vulnerable you know they were not on top of the food chain yet so they had to develop consciousness consciousness is what say what basically saved us from extinction without the human consciousness we wouldn't be here you know that is what made us in the end then superior to to the other animals so how did this happen you can kind of trace how they moved you can trace that they went through the central african rainforest and there's one plant there which elephants are like and that's iboga and iboga now is like the hot thing of the psychedelic renaissance iboga iboga iboga but it's also the oldest drug in the book basically they saw that elephants were eating iboga the root and the leaves and suddenly we were like walking backwards and we behaving in an unusual way and then people were also using this and this was going on over like a hundred thousand years in the rainforest so you can you can write a story about that you know that was it maybe iboga of course you can prove it you know maybe the frontal cortex grew by itself you know that's a really compelling story that's one of the great mysteries of how did the light turn on the the magic of human cognition and consciousness and the like like sapiens by harari which is a great book he also misses that like when when he comes to those moments he writes like we don't understand how the first cognitive revolution and the second cognitive revolution actually happened so i find it interesting to kind of look could have could it have been drugs like i include like everything he leaves out i i i look at uh thoroughly i mean he doesn't say he does a good explanation of interesting consequences you know our ability to imagine ideas and share them and you know collaborate on them and the imagination all that kind of stuff but the why the transitions of why did it happen he doesn't provide right i mean there's some theories but if iboga is one of them that's a compelling one that's a really compelling one yeah i mean i'm still researching this book and writing it i also want to go there because they still take iboga in the in in gabon for example i also interviewed one of the leading iboga experts at colombia university and um for stone sapiens and he described how iboga works in the brain because that's and he's never taken iboga himself oh interesting he just relies on the data he doesn't want to be personally influenced but he said he will take it at a certain point in time but right now he's still just working on data just on with patients you know and what he found and also examining in the brain through brain scanners what actually happens and the classic psychedelics like lsd or psilocybin they dock at certain points they interact with certain receptors it's quite well understood how they work and he said iboga is completely different it's like and he also showed this with his hands because he's so mesmerized by his own findings like it kind of it's kind of everywhere at the same time in the brain like he says like a spa for the neurons basically like it's it's it is his findings show and these are academic findings at colombia that iboga it's like as if he says he said to me as if iboga would know our brain from a long time like it knows exactly like if you're addicted to something or if you're depressed a depression literally is a depression in the neuronal network a depression is a thought loop for example i'm you know a system of thought loops that you're that i'm not worthy i'm not whatever i can't do it you always go back like this is it really kind of depresses your brain in a way and iboga sees this immediately and kind of takes the depression out and and makes your brain cut basically well again so that this is this is what he this is what his findings are so it's it seemed he says he's totally convinced this is like uh he doesn't call it um a plan he calls it like a neural technology of the 22nd century so iboga really seems to be uh in a different kind of category that's why i really feel that stonsepians must be written because there's so much uh that historians just shied away from and um it all it all started when i was on the island of creed the biggest island of greece creed for that's another like harari moment uh on creed was the first what is called high culture of europe the minoan culture you might have heard of the minoan culture and no one can explain so far why there on on creed suddenly in europe they started making amazing structures and amazing art and what how did it happen there that this like totally backwards place creed became i mean backwards is any other place you know why did it happen there that such intricate objects were being made and that the the culture was uh was developing so intensely and i was kind of thinking about that that's how the book started i was with my uh kids on vacation in creed and if you go to like knossos or festos the big archaeological sites or to the museum in heraklion you don't find an answer why did it happen there and then i found like an old book in a in an old bookshop and it described an excavation site at the sea and that it was like maybe a maritime uh place where like a harbor basically and then while i was swimming there i found on the seafloor the remnants of a wall that was a harbour wall that was out that was breaking the waves and then i climbed over the fence because the archaeological site is still fenced off like it's not explained officially what it is and the the walls in there are the biggest walls of the whole bronze era and it was actually quite a big harbour and then the next step is what did they trade and they traded olive oil because creed was the first place to produce olive oil and then i also found and this is historically documented opium was made in creed and the poppy flower was growing there and this was the harbour basically they became incredibly wealthy through olive oil and opium trade through that harbour so you could say that the whole of the european high culture which we got because from minowa it goes to athens so it all started basically with with you know they were drug dealers in a way or they i mean it was the most potent medicine because it was the only medicine that numbs the pain for sure you know opium works and the minowens developed that so i mean it's kind of it's a bit similar to the blitz experience the more i started i did research the more i found that there's this whole component to human history that could be a really critical component i mean i am really interested about the word there are certain leaps like the the origins of human civilization and then the origins of homo sapiens those are really big leaps i mean there's some evidence you know like they came through the area where iboga was but there's no academic proof so i guess an academically trained historian couldn't really write about that um but i can write about it i can i can i can write about possibilities yeah sometimes i mean that's what the the farther into history you go the more it's about writing the possibilities i mean it's also interesting why did the neanderthals die out and what we can compare is the cave art and the cave art of the neanderthals is much simpler than ours like if you really get into the cave art i don't know if you've done that i've not no it's quite fascinating piccasso looked at some of the cave paintings in southern france and he said we didn't learn anything new and if you study them they're really good but only the humans are good the neanderthals they were like worse artists than us and um you can also see there's a very famous one that comes from alger with like a shaman and around his body like mushrooms grow out of his body so he was like a mushroom shaman so mushrooms seem to have been like part at least in that area and i mean that's the stoned ape theory that uh that that taryn smicana uh did and i think i a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the neanderthals who had did not have a drug culture they were basically too sober for the future they we assimilated them they had no chance against our impetus of boldly going where no one has gone before they were much more like happy with what they had they were not progressing all the time like we have the transcendental kind of moment which uh which is you know the psychedelic experience i guess you could think of it without it but to imagine sapiens makes more sense to imagine sapiens as stone sapiens as a species that was able to incorporate psychoactive components into his development it it makes a lot of sense what about one of the great if you could think of it that way technologies that human have developed is religion religion of all different kinds do you think there's a connection between psychedelics and religion the development of religion throughout different parts of the world well i think moses is quite interesting moses was a traumatized man that had fled egypt where he had killed a per killed a man who had been uh beating up a hebrew so moses kind of took revenge and killed him so he was running from the law and he was together with um in the bible it says i think 66 people they were in the desert in the in the Sinai and they had been fasting for days and no alcohol so it was kind of a psychedelic retreat basically i mean this is being examined uh by israeli scholars and i think it's very interesting work like they examine in detail what does the bible say in the bible mentions in that passage where moses sees the burning bush and then gets the 10 commandments in that bible passage there's a lot of uh several times the akasha is mentioned and the akasha the the the egyptian akasha grows right in the in that Sinai area and contains dmt um so there's uh there there's this israeli research that moses was actually having a trip basically he was seeing he had he was hallucinating the burning bush was you know if you take lsd and you look at a bush in the heat you know it it it will move you know it might resemble like uh a burning and you you know experience then he went up the mountain which takes three hours while the other the others were staying down and with the dmt type of experience it's not that everyone in the group has the same experience similar to ayahuasca sometimes like one guy has like incredible experience while another person might not feel that much at all and moses felt a lot and you do feel a lot when you you know when you are when you have something to work through and he had certainly something to work through the trauma of killing a man so it's also no surprise that he receives one of the commandments you you should not kill you know so for him it's like extremely extremely important and uh what he receives on the on the mountain like god is like there's someone speaking to me and he understands that god is not that there's not many gods just one god like he has a revelation you know and it i think when i when i read you know these examinations by these scholars i think it makes a lot of sense to to imagine that the jewish religion comes from moses trip and also if you look at the jewish religion they are quite open to drugs i don't know if that you know that could be an unconscious reaction to that to that to that kind of trippy beginning like they have purim where it's like you're supposed to get intoxicated to get closer to god um they're not as straight laced as the christians like they were just you know they just allow alcohol this like the blood of christ so also stone sapiens is a book about religion also the is the islam and intoxication is also a very interesting topic because you have the sufis who intoxicate themselves to get into ecstasy to have to be closer to god and then you have like the conservative islamist scholar ibn tamir who defended the mascos against the the mongols by combining anti-drug rhetoric like they're bringing drugs to us and they are not good moslems so it's um it drugs and religion sometimes drugs kind of uh help religion to like i used in religious context but then you can also see that religions work as prohibitionist movements against drugs like the christian church uh also the purity law for example it's very famous in germany it's called the reinheitsgebot beer can only contain three things water hops and barley or something like that's that's the purity law and that was done by the church in 16th century and in germany for a long time this was seen as like this is like a quality control like beer has to be pure only has these ingredients but it's actually a move by the church to weed out all the other ingredients that had been put in beer before like nightshade plants so beer also witches were brewing crazy beer you drink it and you have like visions and you dance around the fire it's like and the church didn't like this so the church said this is the beer now and and especially the hops was the was the new ingredient for the beer and this so the purity laws is the first prohibitionist law in in in in the middle ages in europe another fascinating yeah i think a society becomes develops more and more it seems to resist certainly psychedelics seems to resist drugs i don't know what that's about one of the very fascinating turning points that i have been able to kind of uh pinpoint or at least i think this is what happened is uh when do the first kings come up they weren't kings for a very long time the first king that i can identify was in the so-called Sumerian high culture was in uruk was Gilgamesh and they wrote the Gilgamesh epic about you know the great king but that was uh four or five thousand years ago something like that but what happened in the thousands of years before there's no source that there were rulers it seems like humans were quite good in organizing themselves without kings before these first kings came and i mean thousands of years from the end of the ice age until the Sumerian high culture there were no kings so people were quite able to organize their communities there was for example Katal Huyuk in eastern turkey that was working for like 2000 years without any hierarchies i think that is that is quite interesting and then why do suddenly the hierarchy start and what makes the hierarchy stronger and again i'm still researching this but in Sumeria we can see that it's the beer that destroys the hierarchy free society because they sudden they are able i mean beer is quite old the first beer was made in Gobekli Tepe the famous first kind of structure of mankind i also write about that because it's very interesting small detail what is Gobekli Tepe no one knows how did they make it no one knows but they made it but why did they make it i think they made it because they were creating a meeting place and why was that so important they were not so many humans at the time they were like one to four million those are the estimates on the whole planet and they were usually living in small communities of like a hundred people up to 500 not more but in Go... so the problem then is again inbreeding inbreeding means it's a degeneration so it's it's it's a problem we are genetically not so diverse actually as humans so and but Gobekli Tepe people were meeting from different areas having sex with people they usually wouldn't see creating healthy children and Gobekli Tepe was working for 1600 years and I think it was like an evolutionary kind of machine like without without that idea we're gonna create like a fucking place or party place you know it was a party basically they were eating very well they found a lot of bones but no one lived there they just came together there for parties and then after 800 years they start making beer there and then the situation slightly changes they found these beer these places where they made beer you can still find the chemicals and kind of it's it's sure that they made beer there and then once they make beer they create different stone circles and then somehow it changes and we can see clearly how it changes in the Sumerian high culture when beer beer then becomes a business beer become is being done by the by the priests by the ruling class or ruling class emerges like monasteries often brew beer and that was also the case in in the Sumerian high culture they make beer they they they labeled the beer like the temple that would make the beer the beer would be attributed to that temple it would be sold so that temple kind of rises in status makes money so that's how hierarchies started up so the hierarchy which is the big problem right now that we have these hierarchies that we have these kings everywhere that kind of steal our money or at least make it very difficult for us as humans to organize on an egalitarian planetary scale which is our only chance for survival if we at one point overcome the hierarchies overcome the nation states and create a planetary probably a i assisted open source a i assisted planetary society and everyone has the same political rights there's no more borders there's a planetary minimum income so no one is starving everyone has at least what everyone needs which is totally possible it's just a what it's just a problem of organizing and of breaking the resistance of those who don't like that and there's a lot of resistance obviously i mean i'm talking about what's happening on the planet in 50 years not what's going to happen tomorrow but that is where we slowly are moving towards and you can see that this actually comes from you know a time when we were able to organize ourselves without kings we don't we don't need kings kings always say if you don't have me then someone else some other guy will come and but you know it's it's it's this that's why i mean that's why i'm not you know if a nation state makes war against another nation state i'm not taking a position and saying this country is like better than basically the the both nation states are doing war and who has to suffer is us you know is stone sapiens is the human is the human species speaking of which i have to ask you so i've done psilocybin a bunch and i've done ayahuasca but have never done lsd acid and you have quite a bit so maybe the big general question is what's lsd like in the space of psychedelics which funny enough we haven't really spoken a lot about psychedelics except in the context of stone sapiens what's lsd like well this is probably the third book that uh we want to talk about is is tripped because tripped is an examination of the history of lsd and that sounds maybe less interesting than it actually is it's it's i mean i find it fascinating i had tried lsd it was given to me by my girlfriend at the time ania in lower manhattan on a saturday night 1993 so i was like 23 and she said let's take lsd and i'd never really taken any drug like i maybe smoked a bit of weed but i didn't know what a strong drug is and she gave me this paper and i took it and we walked around in the east village pre-gentrified east village it's pretty cool actually and it didn't work for like one hour i felt nothing and then i went into the toilet i had a falafel or something i went into the toilet and there was a mirror like i was peeing and then there was this mirror and but the walls had like lines like they were painted in lines suddenly these lines were started to like vibrate and that's then the trip started and it was such an powerful experience that i thought i would go insane like it was the worst trip i've ever had like it was because you got so strong i was totally scared i didn't know what it was i suddenly i walked i i said i said to my girlfriend it's it's working and she said yes it's working i feel it also and i went into no tell motel which was my favorite bar just to be in a familiar environment it's not a good idea on your first very strong lsd trip to be out in lower manhattan on a saturday night but i also didn't know this you know so i was in the bar and i saw my friend dora espinoza from peru she was quite a a small woman like she was only like i don't know the american system like maybe one meter 50 so she was quite short short is the right word but on lsd she was like this so i saw her down there like i said dora do i look normal because you look very small yeah dora is like no you look fine i'm like okay i gotta get out of here and then we walked up to second avenue and we saw like a bunch of puttorecan kids killing one of their it was like a gang kind of it was more of a druggie kind of i mean manhattan back then was kind of dangerous in the east village and one they killed one of them on the hood of the car in front of our eyes we saw it and i said do you see my god and then the and then they resurrected him like they gave him mouth to mouth and the guy was fine again and we walked past we were not sure anymore what what we were seeing and this was this was a very strong hallucination and then we saw a full-blown racial riot on second avenue like people were smashing in uh taxi windows pulling the drivers out like getting like it was like a GTA grand theft auto right it was like that and most of this is basically hallucinating i think so yeah and i have to it felt real it felt totally real and uh so i was happy when this trip was over because i thought i have gone insane basically i thought like there was a switch in my brain that had been like something chemical like i have i have now a chemical imbalance in my brain i'm gonna be crazy for the rest of my life i thought that but after like 10 hours it suddenly got you know the effects wore off and i became normal again and i thought that was quite fascinating so in hindsight i thought it was a great experience even though it was quite scary but it also had moments of incredible perceptions like i could see that the atoms are not you know rigid obviously everything's moving in our universe everything with there's nothing fixed you know so i could see that i could see that that that everything was basically alive and that my previous perceptions how the world is it's just my conditioned perception and that the world was very different and you know just how you look at it it looks different and so it's freeing in a way yeah totally freeing also it was much stronger than all the lsd i've taken since and i've taken high dosages so i'm not even sure if that was lsd like there's also other compounds that are quite rare like dom or whatever maybe it was something else but then i also spoke to lsd experts by now also for the book Tript and it can happen that your first trip is much stronger than all the other trips because your brain is kind of reacts very strongly to it because what happens in the brain is basically that the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain there think more communicate better so if this happens for the first time like your brain maybe is totally surprised by this like firework that's going on and then creates like hallucinations so somehow makes sense of it like there's a lot of things firing and then so you see things that maybe are not there but that's not usual on an lsd trip like you don't have i've never had such hallucinations afterwards again you know what's the usual experience uh on lsd it really depends on the dosage if you micro dose uh it's just like drinking an espresso that lasts maybe for two three hours in a very pleasant way so you're just slightly buzzed is it visual artifacts like no color then you would take like more maybe if you take 50 micrograms you start the colors become more intense but if you take a micro dose of 10 micrograms nothing happens the trip starts with about 100 micrograms and then you could see maybe it would be like i took a i took a swimming trip in thailand in january and i took about 200 micrograms which is quite a lot i just because it was so beautiful on this island and it was kind of will it be more beautiful if i'm on lsd now and of course every lsd trip also tells you about your life like some things you didn't understand suddenly you see like oh it's like this like you it's very good for you know reflecting on your life but it's also a lot of fun so i swam for like three hours through the ocean which is something you usually don't do you know i like swimming but after like 10 minutes or 20 minutes i go out but i was swimming and swimming and uh so yeah for me on the silsab and in ayahuasca there's a intensification of beauty of the world around you whether that's nature whether that's people or whether that's your own memories of your past or maybe your imagination manifesting itself in different kinds of visuals you know and ayahuasca i saw dragons of different kinds and they were just really beautiful um and maybe i've never taken it like a heroic dose of psilocybin but it was always everything was just always so beautiful and i was just grateful to be alive and grateful to be in this world to get to appreciate in in this most intense way there's something about like like you said you said you could see the individual atoms like there are certain ways to deconstruct or maybe to visualize or reinterpret, re-visualize the world that makes you like appreciate holy s**t this is really this is really awesome this is really special and that can only be done through the process of like showing you like a different version of it a little bit i mean when the swiss pharmaceutical company sundos developed lsd in 1943 like they were having the to solve the big question what is it good for like albert hoffman the chemist he found it basically involuntarily and uh he reported to the ceo i had very strong reactions basically in the brain so they set up an intoxication room i found the documents about this intoxication room in the novates archive when i researched tripped because novates bought sundos in the 90s so all the lsd stuff is in the novates archive and this intoxication room i always think is kind of interesting to imagine this was 1943 there's a world war going on everywhere in europe acceptance wittseland which is a neutral country but basel where the lsd was found is like a stone throw from the german border so you actually hear the war going on and so they created a nice room within the company and then all the employees voluntarily could go and take lsd so they they were the first people to take lsd and they had no idea that there was at one point you know mk ultra and we know they were just trying out something that one of their guys had developed and i read through all these reports they all had a great experience they were like sitting in a nice chair and they looked outside the window and they were like reporting stuff like i just had to laugh the whole time i felt so good i realized about my life and or it kind of created in them the feeling like a heightened sensitivity and a feeling of that this is the light this is how life should feel kind of so the ceo atrashtol he was really trying to figure out what he could market it for because he thought maybe this is a game changer in mental health because this was before anti-depressants before anti-psychotics and it was in the middle of world war two which had created already millions of traumatized people how do you treat these people so they thought lsd could be really a big a big big big thing and i mean i i came up i just told you when i first took lsd and i somehow was interested in lsd but i never thought i would write a book about it i just used it once in a while when i wanted to understand something about my life i just enjoy a day in the in the ocean but i read a study that micro doses of lsd at one point help against alzheimer and my mother has alzheimers so i discussed this with my father who takes care of my mother and this was an academic study i i i discussed this also with a leading alzheimer expert that i interviewed for tripped and he's like wow this is amazing like because lsd interacts with the very same receptors the five ht2a receptors in the brain that lsd interacts with those receptors and alzheimer destroys those receptors so lsd basically does the opposite that alzheimer does and i discussed this with my father and he said so why can't i buy lsd in the pharmacy if it's so good you know he was a judge before he actually put people in prison for drugs so he said you better bring me the story so i did kind of a research loop this is the book tripped yeah then i came back to him in the end with the true story of why lsd has been made illegal and that is quite that is quite fascinating because the swiss oh stoll he had learned biochemistry this is very nerdy but i think it's quite interesting he had learned biochemistry from the jewish-german god of biochemistry will stetter richard will stetter was noble prize winner for chemistry and his work was he would extract the potent alkaloids from so-called poisonous plants and make you know the poison paracelsus all taught us it's the dosage that makes the poison you know if you take too much of a potent alkaloid maybe it's a poison but if you if you extract a potent alkaloid maybe you can turn it into a medicine so stoll learned this from wilts stetter and there was another guy that was learning from wilts stetter richard kuhn so it was kuhn and stoll those were the two students of wilts stetter and they stoll left and made became the CEO of sundos and developed the the pharmaceutical branch of sundos and kuhn became hitlers leading biochemist and was responsible in finding a truth drug and also developing nerve gas so but the two guys kuhn and stoll stayed friends also when the nazis took power like i researched the papers of stoll in the archive and in the 20s he would all communicate all the ergot research elastizian ergot product ergot is a fungus that grows on rye he would communicate all this with kuhn and kuhn would come to the sundos lab and they did experiments together and then in 43 kuhn was you know hardcore nazi scientist and especially looking for the truth drug at the time and i was looking through the archive i wanted to find the connection that you know stoll also uh sent lsd to kuhn because when i was researching for blitz in dahau i had found that the ss had done in the concentration camp of dahau experiments with mescaline and another hallucinogenic substance which was not named and mescaline has the problem the truth drug idea is i give you something without you noticing it like something that doesn't smell or doesn't taste like anything and then after like half an hour i know that something's working in your brain and you become insecure because suddenly something's working in your brain and i can play with that situation and therefore extract all the secrets from you because i it's a power i'm suddenly above you because i know something about you that you don't know that was the idea the problem with mescaline was it has a bitter taste and it's kind of hard to make it and lsd is very easy to make not very easy but it's quite easy and lsd is odorless and tasteless so i was trying to i somehow had the notion that lsd has a nazi past you know which is something that no one ever thinks about lsd is like the hippie drug right it's a drug of the peace people but i wanted to see all the papers of this of the ceo of stoll and the archivist he already knew like he was the swiss archivist and this is not a public archive in a public archive you basically like a national archive of the united states you see what's there you have the right to see it freedom of information but a company archive like novartis archive the archivist can just say no you know i i can't find this right you know he you basically at his mercy so i bribed him with lsd i said because he didn't want to show me he didn't want to show me the stoll papers and i said to him just to distract him i said did you ever have you ever seen lsd and he's like no why would i see it and i said well i have some here and i had some i just had gotten it from a friend lsd look like tabs it was yeah i had a paper and the funny thing about yeah this is a different you know different design and you could put it on your tongue is that right yeah then you take it like that and the one i had was given to me by a swiss friend and it had like here you see certain prints on it oh yeah and he had the the print was the old logo of sundos from the 40s so the guys who make this illegal lsd and bazaar in some kind of lab they know where it comes from so they made like a joke to make like the old logo of sundos i showed this to the archivist he said this has the old logo of a company he said well it was made by your company he said i know this but it was it's not this is very interesting actually and i said you i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna gift you one of these trips now and he said wow you really you would do this and i said you can archive it he's like ha ha ha then he actually took one he was then the ice broke that's great and then he said okay i'm gonna show you know the correspondence of stoll our ceo it's no problem and he just went to the next room and he looked for like 10 minutes and then he brought me these boxes and then i saw actually the correspondence between stoll and kuhn between the swiss ceo and the german nazi scientist what they were talking about and then i found the smoking gun uh october 1943 kuhn acknowledges that he receives half a gram of ergatamine which is the precursor drug to lsd and so it's highly it's highly likely that the nazis used lsd together with mescaline in dahau and when the americans liberated the dahau camp um they had a special unit called alsos with them and alsos job was to find german scientists and kind of interview them get their knowledge for the nuclear program mostly but also for biochemical weapons and one of the first persons they interrogated was richard kuhn and richard kuhn immediately collaborated because he didn't want to go to the nuremberg trial he wanted to continue his career actually he was an opportunist so i guess his nazi convictions were not so strong after all because he also liked the americans so he's like he told the americans immediately about lsd and uh the next day a very high general flew from the states uh to frankfurt went to heidelberg spoke to kuhn again went then took off his uniform and went in civil clothing to basel because switzerland is neutral and received the first lsd from stolzang so he the american general had lsd this was in 45 in the summer and then the american military started to uh examine lsd could lsd be the true drug because if the nazis think so maybe it's true you know because the nazis were you know cutting-edge scientists as evil as they were in dahau this was presumably used for the different experimentation that was done well i read one report from a guy who was an inmate and he received it in coffee and he had a full-blown psychodontic trip and he had this ss guy who was like asking him questions and the guy had such a great trip yeah i would always imagine you have a terrible trip in the concentration camp and he was like seeing fractals and colors and he could see that there was something bigger than these nazis and there was something bigger than the concentration camp and he only said it was so horrible when the trip ended and he kind of became sober again it was just an inmate again in the concentration camp i mean one of the things you get from books like mansers from me meaning by victor franko is that in the concentration camp actually the slightest good things are so rich of feeling you just get so like i would actually expect to have incredible trips there because you're just grateful for anything positive anything positive yeah i didn't i didn't think about that becomes intensified but from the perspective of the nazis they're trying to develop the truth drug they miserably failed because lsd is not the truth drug lsd maybe leads you closer to your own truth because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more and the brain becomes a neuroplastic you know the neuroplasticity of the brain is is enhanced and is stimulated you might understand something about your life you might not you know i mean lsd doesn't necessarily turn you into a more knowledgeable person you could also focus that on your orthodox belief system but many people realize different things have different ideas um so it doesn't work as this conditioning drug but also the the cia then kind of took over the lsd experiments that the u.s military took over from the ss so now it's now it's in cia hands in 1947 central intelligence agencies found it because america didn't have an central intelligence agency before they had like the military agencies like os s now they have the cia and the cia makes it uh dallas uh the the first director he says the brain warfare is going on now between the soviet union and us this is cold war we have to you know maybe they are using uh something against us we have to be really on or you know we have to be prepared you know for the brain warfare because communism is a propagandistic system so they were always like either really afraid or just pretending to be afraid soviet union would you know develop the truth drug quicker than them so at the lsd truth drug program which was labeled mk ultra the infamous mk mk ultra is a mind control program i mean it is and lsd played a big part in it and it's a deeply illegal one certainly i mean it was never approved by the congress or anything like that probably deeply unethical maybe one of the more unamerican unethical things done in in recent times it's certainly unethical it continues the nazi human experiments right that's what the cia did it's continuing one of the worst aspects of what the nazis were doing absolutely yeah defeated the nazis and carried the flag forward it's it's just dark and this is basically the reason why lsd at one point became illegal because it did not get the chance stoll still wanted to put it on the market but sydney godley the head of mk ultra he really didn't want lsd to be on the market he wanted not because he thought it's not good or dangerous for anybody he just wanted to control lsd he wanted lsd to be his so he could use it for mk ultra for experiments he didn't but he couldn't really stop there was also legit lsd research always going on until it was prohibited in 1966 there was legit lsd research done in universities which came to all kinds of you know conclusions but the decisive thing was a visit by godley in the office of stoll in basel where he basically says to he comes with a suitcase with 240 000 us dollars to buy the world supply of lsd and because he he has the information from the american ambassador like he has he said like i think we think by now sundos has produced like 400 kilograms of lsd so that was the price for these four and stoll said no actually we have produced only 400 grams and but i'll sell everything to you of course i mean because the pressure that he received from the cia was because the cia and the fda they're like quite friendly organizations so the cia has a certain influence on the fda at least back then you know so the the pressure was if you want to put your medicines on the market which is of course the biggest market in the world and sundos you know i'm sure you want to thrive and as a pharmaceutical company then lsd is not going to be one of these products and stoll basically betrayed lsd uh so he said okay and lsd was only distributed as a research drug it was never sold by the company so researchers could actually write to sundos and say i i'm doing this in this test and i'm a neuroscientist i need lsd and then they would receive it but mostly what happened to the lsd was it went into the cia's hands and then it was used in mk ultra but then it spilled out obviously because one of the guinea pigs uh was kankisi he received 75 us dollars for taking lsd for the cia and he was working in menlo park in a psychiatric ward and on lsd he basically had the idea to write one flu over the cuckoo's nest he understood you know that these people maybe are not crazy it's just a different way of seeing that's like that's like an lsd revelation these are not bad crazy people they just see the world differently uh because that neuroplasticity that kind of leads you away from one way of thinking you realize that there's different ways so it it does i would say lsd the tendency of lsd is more to increase empathy is that kind of empathy diversity all these all all these because you mentioned uh you mentioned the effect of lsd on you as a writer that it at least changed the way you write well i mean the book tripped is a book where i come back with that story to my father and then my father decides to give lsd to my mother and we did do the lsd the three of us on christmas and we did mushrooms on mother's day and whenever my mother takes lsd and i'll say my is a horrible disease obviously for example on mother's day there was the newspaper lying on the balcony we were like sitting in the sun and she was on mushrooms it's just microdose you know it's not that you have a trip but you have that stimulation of the of of of your brain that's what you have even in her brain attacked by alzheimer reacted stronger than my father like he he always says i never feel anything from a micro dose and you're not supposed to feel anything but my mother suddenly picked up the newspaper which she hadn't looked at for a year so on mushroom microdoses she picks up the newspaper and starts reading the headline to us which was about the ukraine war and she never heard about the ukraine war so when she like she had problems like pronouncing the word ukraine because that was a new word for her because she hadn't you know been part of the news cycle in about a year and this was because of the mushroom microdose so this book how did it change my writing this on a on a on an emotional level writing right taking lsd and then writing about lsd changed something in my family like it improved the health of my mother that made me very happy of course very satisfied you know yeah there's a deep personal connection but i even mean on a kankizi side like i know what you mean i mean what does it do like practice writing i don't know again me as a fan of writing it feels like writing is suffering kind of when i see like just these great writers in history talk about writing it seems like it's really hard it's a kind of torture you know hemmingway and you know there you have the caroac stories that you just kind of flows out of you but a lot of times it's like really disciplined day after day you're really digging and digging and so it's interesting what that looks like under the different supplements right like steven king famously i mean there's a lot of people you know they go to the drugs to the alcohol you have the hunter s thompson who goes you know when given the option just says yes to all of it and the mind is a weird thing and a lot of writers talk about like they're not really developing the ideas they're plugging into some they're channeling a voice from somewhere else and with psychedelics that's certainly it feels like you're modifying the channel or you're expanding the channel or you're directing the channel to a different direction that's why i ask i think for me writing has two important parts and one of them is the actual writing part and that's the painful part that you talk about it's basically discipline focus it becomes harder and harder to focus because of the telephone yeah distractions there's a place in switzerland the niche house i go there as much as i can to write it's in silz maria it's quite high up niche went there every summer from 1882 to 1888 with the exception of 1887 didn't go that that summer i don't know why and in those he stayed there for three months and wrote most of his work in in that room in that room is still there and his desk is still there and you can rent rooms in that niche house and i rent it's it's it's great and i do this as often as i can and only there am i able to switch off the phone in the morning i don't i don't even switch it on and i'm like a soldier i'm in the niche house also niche house magical so it gives you you don't i would never take drugs in the niche house because it would disturb that clarity that is in that house when niche wrote like tsar at hustra and you can sense his presence a little bit yeah i speak to him quite a bit like yeah his door is always open is he an asshole's a nice guy no he's a nice guy nice guy his room it cannot be rented it's always it's like a museum type room and i mean i never thought of him as an asshole i mean he's a total weirdo obviously had issues like struggled getting laid yeah i think he had a lot of problems that's one of them yeah but he had a lot of good qualities too but he's also part of stone sapiens because he did experiment with drugs there and he writes about it it's very hard to find but in the niche house i found a book on on niche's medicine history and he takes quite a bit of hashish he smokes is it he could help with the stomach issues or whatever oh he's interested in what happens in the brain and this this comes back to your question how did the drugs change my writing well first of all it's this one it's this discipline i can do it up in the niche house i can also do it sometimes in berlin it's just sitting there trying to focus and writing but what you need of course is the inspirational part and lsd helped me just the first trip to realize that it's not all black and white the world is quite colorful and uh there's like the abyss and it's there's also the horror and like i was i was a happy go lucky kid you know i i never thought that the world is so deep as i understand it now so the lsd makes the world deeper so i think for me to understand the world better to understand myself better it improved my writing but i would not write on lsd because on lsd you're like you want to walk in the forest or you want to go up the mountain or that's what i like i don't i would never like sit in front of the ugly computer with a stupid like screen and write you know maybe i would lie in the mountains with a notebook and kind of write like poetic lines and i that could be done on lsd because you have like when i was researching stone sapiens i did one lsd trip and from the niche else i went quite high up in the mountains on lsd and i came and it was not i just it's just i just thought about the book and kind of looked at the different chapters does it work together like kind of like macro without taking too many notes just kind of letting it you know play out in front of in my mind and then but then when i walked down i k i passed the cave and i realized a lot about people's relationship to caves and the cave paintings uh how you know actually the the cave walls you see all the arteries of the rocks and i mean on lsd you see all of that and you like see how alive that is and how beautiful it actually was by humans to then use that canvas and and and work your your cave paintings in there i mean i never had the appreciation of that before you're right you are able to uh detect the on psychedelics the aliveness of the details if you can put it this way it's a very for me it's a very creative drug but for other people it might not be you know so i cannot also i cannot advertise it because also if you have a psychological problem maybe it's overwhelming yeah that's actually a good thing to say at this moment um like from my perspective or maybe you can comment on it in general when people ask me because i've done psilocybin a few times and i did ayahuasca and i've talked about it when people ask me if i recommend those things i as a general statement i say no you know to the general population and then as a second step if i'm talking to specific people on a case by case basis i can just discuss my experience and let that be kind of an inspiration because i'm very hesitant to recommend a thing that could be so powerful because i don't know yeah like i had a tremendously positive experience and i was sure i would be meeting some demons like i thought i would have some demons in the basement or something but i didn't meet them not yet and my but people might have some demons that they meet and it might destroy them or might um change them in the way they don't like um and actually it's a good question for me whether it's good to do psychedelics when you're in a good place in life or in a bad place in life because i know that you know even scientifically there've been studies where psilocybin helps with extreme sort of with depression and PTSD and all these kinds of things um but i'd be very nervous about that too because like the mind is such a powerful thing and it's such a complicated thing that with these really powerful tools it's unclear where it's going to take you but i have heard a lot of stories of people have taken incredible journeys sometimes difficult journeys with psychedelics and have come out much happier and much um freer and have have healed some of the things that have been going through but if when people ask me to recommend or not i'm just too afraid to say yes i think i think the right thing is always as a general know be very careful yeah i think it would be irresponsible to recommend it to people you don't see right you know yeah uh maybe if you know a friend and a friend asks you maybe then you could maybe i wouldn't say too friendly i think i think you would be fine taking it but even that is a big responsibility you know because lsd in german the book trip is called the strongest substance and it is actually the strongest substance because it works in microgram dosages like even the strongest snake poison cobra toxin if you use that in microgram dosages you don't feel anything but if you take 250 micrograms of lsd it can totally overpower you and if you have an unstable psyche it could you know make turn you mad you know do you understand how it compares to psilocybin and ayahuasca and dmt how does lsd compare to those is it similar land territory just more tense lsd and psilocybin are like cousins and i spoke cousins or no quite close cousins and i spoke to a neuroscientist from university clinic in ziric who's been researching psilocybin and lsd since the early 90s and he puts people in in brain scanners for example so he sees exactly what happens in the brain on lsd or in psilocybin and he said to me when i asked him that very same question he said lsd is the more sophisticated molecule he meant by that is that lsd docks onto more receptors than psilocybin like psilocybin interacts with like five different types of receptors in the brain and lsd like with nine so that makes lsd more complex molecules so that's why it already works in very small quantities because it's like the key is like perfect for our brain our brain really reacts strongly to lsd for psilocybin you have to take milligrams not micrograms with milligrams so mushrooms is also described as the softer you know psychedelic experience because it only lasts for like five hours while lsd lasts like eight hours and lsd can be more lsd is also a mushroom but it's it's it's it's ergot which is a mushroom but it's turned into a diathlamide it's that you extract the potent acid from ergot which is lysergic acid and you turn that into a diathlamide so it's a processed drug in a way it's a potent processed drug that works also for mass movements quite well that's why it was so popular in the 60s because people could just make it while mushrooms they kind of they have to grow like the the hippie movement they could never have you know sustained on mushrooms because so many mushrooms don't even grow but a good lsd chemist can make lsd for the whole world basically can we go back to something we talked about in the in the beginning about berlin is just it'd be fascinating to learn more about this culture do you still are you still connected i'm sure you've been to some wild parties i've been told that berlin has some wild parties well it had them in the 90s i mean it had the best clubs that i i mean it was just a dream you know you go into this club but i was also in my mid 20s so i go into this club i take mdma and the dj is amazing and the sound system is crazy and there's like 500 people on mdma just dancing for like eight hours and that's when electronic music was really yeah it was really good yeah like a friend of mine he he runs now club of visionaries which is kind of a famous underground club in berlin and he asked me in the early 2000s when this club was offered to him should i do this i said i said greg or techno is over you know electronic music is dead but obviously it's not dead it's still going on but in the 90s it was new so it was you really went into the club and you heard something you'd never heard before and the first time i came from new york and new york was a very old school kind of urban place i mean rock and roll or grunge music and i came to berlin it was a in a club called aima bucket in east berlin doesn't exist anymore like in a rundown totally rundown like a squat and i went to the bar and i had a beer and i looked and there was just a few people on the dance floor and this like electronic music which i'd never heard before and the guy in front of me he was like he looked like an east berlin skinhead kind of type of guy but like totally smiling i'm sure he was an ecstasy and he was disassembling like an imaginary machine and i just looked at this guy he was like for one hour he was just like doing the most complicated like things and i was like this is totally totally different way of of moving and i like that actually i i liked to dance in clubs yeah and i did this for like two years very intensely with my girlfriend at the time we went out a lot like for friday to monday basically but it means and a lot a lot of people still do that in berlin but it means that you cannot really work i mean yeah you escaped out it's it's it's it's interesting that you were able to do that for a short time this is an experience and then go on to be extremely productive for me it was also kind of research even though i didn't know this i mean life is research in a way if you allow it to be i could not have written these books on history and drugs without having had these drug experiences because that i mean also like when i wrote about metham fedamine and the nazis i asked at the time weed was illegal in germany so i asked the friend of mine she's a she's a cannabis dealer i guess you would say i said can you also get me crystal meth she was like shocked like no because she was a weed dealer but then she found like a polish guy who actually had crystal meth i just wanted to have it it was like the paul schrader thing when he wrote the screenplay to taxi driver he had like a gun in his drawer so he would like you know get the vibe of like danger and so i wanted to have this crystal meth so this polish guy sold it to me and he gave me a zero without me saying anything and maybe my french maybe she said he's a writer or something but he gave me a xerox he gave me the methamphetamine one gram and the xerox copy of the the patent of pavitine from 1938 so this was a crystal meth dealer that actually had a historical knowledge knowledge about it so did you did you ever try yeah well then i tried it because i really wanted i could not really write about it in the same way without having tried it i can't recommend it it feels very toxic like when you take a psychedelic i can say this with a clear conscience it's not toxic lsd is not toxic it doesn't poison you you might have reactions in your brain that are too much for you but if you snort crystal meth it goes on your central nervous system your heart starts pounding your blood pressure rises so it's stressful on the organism it's toxic you know but still you know the effect in the brain is not so interesting as with lsd like you couldn't go crazy i would say on on crystal meth you just have like you're just very much awake but you don't have like crazy thoughts that you can't you know evaluate anymore so it's a very very very different drug but taking that of course made me understand better how a soldier feels in the tank taking it yeah yeah i think that's really really important to do um after i ask your friend alex who sounds like he's taking every single drug there is uh has he spoken about like what's the most interesting drug like what's his favorite drug he seems like a connoisseur right but he's not a psychedelic guy so oh well then okay more he's more into the addictive drugs it's very difficult i guess yeah that would be a special person that can be a really sort of um yeah a full-on explorer of the drug space because if you get into psychedelics then you don't really want to do the hard drugs even get the hard drugs you don't want to yeah right they contradict each other they do contradict each other yeah that's why we spend less and less time together um uh since you mentioned caroak listen i love caroak do we know any sort of famous writers that have used drugs as part of the writing so caroak is one do we any do we know any famous writers who have not used drugs as part of their writing interesting so wait i didn't actually know uh to be honest the story i i love that's the good thing about being a writer you can take drugs on the job and no one will cancel you for it you're like a politician you can't really do it that's right rock you could be a rock star you can be a writer you can be an artist and take drugs you mentioned that caroak did what amphetamine and fast speed basically speed the legend has it that on the road was written in two weeks on speed basically without sleeping and using an endless paper roll yeah in this type writers which just write in and i can imagine that you can write a hell of a lot on amphetamines and i do it sometimes but i don't do it a lot you know so i can take amphetamines and have a really good time and write like 20 pages but then the next day i wouldn't do it any i wouldn't do it anymore but he decided okay for 14 days i'm gonna do it philip k dick was an amphetamine writer and also i think if you take a lot of amphetamines you get into kind of psychedelic spaces at a certain point in time where you start hallucinating and like if you write a you know blade runner maybe it helps you so amphetamines are also they can't be creative i guess it's just not i don't it's not my type of of drug and they're certainly not as creative as but it also depends on the person like melcom laurel uh under the volcano he was drinking a lot or hemmingway was drinking a lot and they could only write when they're drunk when i'm drunk i can't write i just can't do it right drunk edit sober and that's advisable like if i would write something on amphetamines i would certainly edit it sober of course because on amphetamines your self criticism is lowered because you feel so good like you feel so confident you just write and but writing is about nuances especially literary writing maybe a non-fiction book would be easy on amphetamines but a novel it's all about you have to be very very open amphetamines close you you become like a machine like you write but if you are on the right track like karak was on the road he had the right you know he was on he was going you know but you could also be on the wrong one and then writes 200 pages and you just have to throw it away and probably he did a lot of that also you know yeah yeah and and also on the road is a particular kind of book it's an amphetamine book you want the spontaneity the speed of it's about speed it's about moving fast but not stopping it is a speed book yeah it's a great book it's such a great book it's such a great book but then i recently been rereading all of the stiosky so so going to notes on the ground to the idiot to cry in punishment to brothers karamazov and that was your favorite brothers karamazov well i read in both russian and english and for the longest time it was the idiot until it's a complicated feel the soft glacial i i when i was younger i thought prince michigan the main character and the idiot was not as flawed as i believe he is now i think the says he tried to create a jesus like character in prince michigan and i think kind of failed because he was uh too giving in a way that it was actually counterproductive and destructive to the world was just he tried to fix in the brothers karamazov with alia karmazov so but anyway i don't think that you could do that i'll be very surprised to learn that does the ski did any drugs also there was not so much available that's true alcohol of course nicotine coffee that's that those are really powerful drugs and i'm also doing a podcast with chuck ponick author of fight club and many other amazing books and yeah he's a great writer he fight club influenced me quite a bit i think the novel is even better maybe than the movie yeah the movie is great i mean in that case as he said like the movie is great and that it's almost like a bigger than life thing and sometimes like the book and the movie and those things can influence culture that certainly influence culture to where like okay this has a life of its own i'd like to think some of your work might influence the how we perceive history that's really important that's really powerful to not just change but sort of expand our conception of history which is important to do is there particular books fiction and nonfiction so you were both a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer is there books that influence on you yeah um it's uh ulysses by james joys ulysses is good but only when you're like in your early 20s living in new york and you're writing your first book and you just have taken lsd oh nice then i read it and then it made sense well it just showed it's just a very experimental novel so it opens up you don't have to understand everything but it shows you that there's many different ways of telling a tale and that was that was quite interesting to me but the most influential book maybe is the stranger by camu uh because i like the language so much and i'm really mostly interested in language i don't really care what it's about um i was lying on the beach in morocco when i was 20 and reading uh the stranger and then a moroccan came and he said why are you reading a racist book i'm like what are you talking about this is world literature he said yeah right he's like killing an arab uh without consequence no actually there's consequence but no reason basically just because he's bored so this is racist that was like made no sense to me that argument because i was just interested in how camu constructed uh it was just for me a stylistical um experience to read that i always love books and stranger's a short book i love books they're able to accomplish so much in so little pages and so few pages and so few words uh the stranger there's nothing unnecessary in the stranger and i always try to write a book where every sentence is just there's nothing unnecessary in the book but it's very hard to do actually nicha could do this yeah peterson talked about this that every sentence in nicha is like chiseled and is like perfect and i think not every i mean but it's that's his tendency he tries to write like this and that's very hard to achieve that's actually where the writing becomes poetic so for me nicha also is like a poet the aphorisms is poetry so nicha also stylistically uh since you asked was very important to me so camu nicha james joys and then just in kafka also i like kafka always um and i like tomas man i don't know how well he translates but in german it's interesting his take on how to this funny he's very he's a very funny guy even though he's like he talks too much but he's good uh so i always wanted to have these guys as my colleagues basically are they there somewhere in your head as you're writing uh less and less but uh it was like an incentive to be part of that club like to be able to write a book and it's out there and it's perfect and it's and and and you are on one level with camu you know it's very hard to do let's say you become a carpenter which is also you know a very challenging job but you don't have these kind of great well you have jesus i guess as you're called potential poly yeah but for the i just like these writers these two so the ones i mentioned and also then tomas tomas pinchin who wrote gravities rainbow which i think is one of the best novels of the 20th century and i read that in berlin in the late 90s and really blew my mind i thought i think it's an absolute masterpiece the intensity of this novel gravities rainbow is unparalleled and i'm still puzzled by how he did it and it's not known how he did it because he lives he lives a completely obscure life no one knows basically who he is uh so he's also a very interesting colleague it's widely regarded as one of the most challenging and significant works of postmodern literature set primarily in europe at the end of world war two the novel centers on the design production and deployment of the german v2 rocket the narrative follows several characters it lists the characters uh sloth rob is the american agent who's the main character he works for america allied intelligence and he's really a funny guy he smokes a lot of weed and he's like in berlin and bombed out berlin after the war and it's just funny to to go with him through that he's a great character it's a great novel it really is so it does it does give a window into history also it does yeah but that's not why it's interesting to me but it makes it especially interesting because the way he describes these situations is just the way he writes is phenomenal it's a Pulitzer prize and oh but i'm sure he didn't take it on lists because yeah he declined well no one knows who he is i know a little bit i know who his wife is but i'm not gonna talk about it he really wants to protect his privacy and i think that's also amazing i think that's a beautiful thing but for me from my perspective he wouldn't appear in the podcast he would not it would be great if he would not right well i i i believe it's possible but with people like that it has to be a long journey and it has to you have to like for me for example i just interviewed Terence Tao who's one of the greatest mathematicians one of the greatest living mathematicians probably one of the greats in history and there's another i want to speak with which is Grisha Grigori Perlman who's a russian mathematician who's more akin to thomas pension he declined the millennial prize the one one million dollars he declined all the prize of the fields medal the breakthrough prize in mathematics he declined everything and he's just lives with his mom now quit mathematics like kiro he also lived with his mom there's something really beautiful about a human being like that right especially because in his case it was done for principles like he has a certain set of principles and no amount of money nothing can buy him or yeah that's amazing actually yeah i had somebody tell me this a really interesting guy i met a few days ago uh said that there's nothing there's nothing more exhilarating uh perhaps only a rich person can say this but there's nothing more exhilarating than saying no to a lot of money but he said he said it was so much confidence that i somehow believed him but it is the more the deeper truth there is living by principles and having integrity there is there is something deeply fulfilling if that means saying no to money or if that means standing up to hitler that's it and then risking your life that's a deeply fulfilling thing uh big ridiculous question i thought you're a good person to ask what's the point of this whole thing what's the meaning of life in our existence here on earth i somehow think that the universe has a big story to tell or it's telling a big story the whole time and our consciousness is part of that bigger story so the consciousness of the whole of the universe the big the huge story is something that is probably the meaning of life and or the meaning of life of our individual life is to understand that story and that that is something for example that i understood quite well on lsd when i walked in the mountains uh about a month ago because the mountains they actually you know they they're quite high up into the atmosphere and they are made of all kinds of minerals and so they are receiving cosmic energy that comes you know that hits our planet and walking up there and it doesn't i guess if you're on lsd you're more open somehow because you're not closing with your default mode network that you know this is the tree and this is the path and this is the mountain and now it's two o'clock and i have to go back and the rain like this you're more you're more open so you're more like perceiving i i that's at least the that's the impression i had and i couldn't put it in words what exactly i was perceiving but i was perceiving more of the bigger story and i think that is inspiration and i think those moments bring you quite close to the meaning of life and i wouldn't i wouldn't put that meaning on life in words it it is an experience and i think that for me as an artist it was an important experience to make to get close to that and and that is uh that is what you can achieve in each of your professions you know like a mathematician he comes to that point when he like hears more like he grasps like connections and he might not be able to put it into a formula yet but if he's if he's an open person he might be a better mathematician because he can understand a bit more of the of the meaning of everything of this bigger story that's being written yeah and uh i mean i mentioned to you my i mean i mentioned to you my sub-stack which i think is going to be the best sub-stack do you think it's possible it's the greatest sub-stack of all time in history that's what it's going to be it's going to be yeah stone sapient sub-stack but something else i just hope you actually do it well you should become a subscriber i will definitely subscribe i i really realized that that there is a great as a bigger story and it's somehow interesting to try to open up because if we live that's why i like to be in nature also quite a lot you you get you get how you have a better access we live boxed in valta beniamin called us like the boxed human beings like we're living in the cities we're doing we're waking up we're doing it it's good to be therefore it's good to be outside the system and i hope that my art can contribute to you know freeing the brainwaves to you know understanding a bit more what that is i don't know but i think the process of understanding more and connecting in different ways that is what i'm going for because i think that is the meaning of life well uh thank you for doing that with all of your work and for inspiring us all to do the same thank you so much for talking to me it was great thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with norman oler to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel and now let me leave you with some words from the great terence mckenna nature loves courage you make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under it will lift you up this is the trick this is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted who really touched the alchemical gold this is what they understood this is the shamanic dance in the waterfall this is how magic is done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it is in fact a feather bed thank you for listening and hope to see you next time