Juice Jacking, DMT and War Games

Smart home security is not just about locking your Wi-Fi router anymore. The modern “Internet of Things” turns ordinary household devices into networked sensors, and the episode highlights how anything with a battery plus a remote connection can become a privacy risk. Smart TVs, voice remotes, phone chargers, light bulbs, even USB wall outlets can collect data or become entry points for hackers. The bigger issue is surveillance capitalism: data created for convenience gets repurposed for profiling, advertising, and sometimes far darker uses. When you click “I agree,” you often authorize persistent logging that keeps running even when a device looks “off,” and that gap between expectation and reality is where privacy collapses.

The smart TV examples are especially blunt. Warnings like “be careful what you say in front of the television” are not paranoia, they are legal disclosures that voice data can be captured and transmitted. Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) pushes it further by fingerprinting what appears on your screen, including HDMI inputs, then sharing viewing behavior with third parties. Add cameras and microphones that can be activated invisibly, and the living room becomes a surveillance surface. The phone conversation lands the same punch: a smartphone is a constant tracking system, collecting location, app habits, and behavioral signals, with observed spikes of data leaving the device overnight. Even if you disable a feature, you may only be disabling the “trigger,” not the sensor.

Then the episode moves from passive tracking to active compromise. A malicious “OMG” style cable demonstrates how a charger can hide a Wi-Fi chip and emulate a keyboard at extreme speed, pushing commands before you notice anything is wrong. Juice jacking extends that threat to public USB ports, where a port can transfer data as well as power, and modified outlets can deliver spyware while your battery icon happily shows “charging.” Smart bulbs show how weak encryption, outdated wireless protocols, and credential storage can let an attacker pivot from a single compromised bulb into the hub, then into phones and routers. These are not niche hacker fantasies; they are practical attack paths that thrive on the fact that people assume small devices are harmless.

The second half pivots into altered states and social systems. The DMT segment walks through ayahuasca history, laboratory research, and why people report intense entity encounters, telepathy, and life-changing shifts in belief. Researchers describe serotonin receptor activity, global hyperconnectivity, and the idea that a DMT trip resembles dreaming with eyes open, only far more vivid. The episode also stresses harm reduction: set and setting, mental health screening, and professional guidance matter because psychedelics can worsen instability. Finally, the conversation widens into gaming, surveillance, and influence. Online games become data funnels and social spaces for infiltration, recruiting, and narrative shaping, with examples ranging from World of Warcraft monitoring to military consulting in blockbuster franchises, to location-based games building massive geospatial datasets. The practical takeaway is simple: treat connected tech like a permanent boundary negotiation, minimize permissions, avoid unknown cables and USB ports, disable or physically cover microphones and cameras, and choose devices that prioritize real security over frictionless setup.

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Transcript

Why Everyday Tech Can Spy

SPEAKER_32 1:13

They're really popular. But you know who actually made them and who's actually lurking around back there, you know, because all these games are online nowadays. And you know, one of the strangest drugs, like we said, is DMT. It's being studied by scientists, governments, normal, just everyday Joes want to go on a little trip for a little while.

SPEAKER_29 1:33

Like uh I think even uh uh what was it, Joe Rogan's even kind of messing around with that?

SPEAKER_32 1:38

A lot of people, like even, you know, some elitist type people, some rich people, all the way down to people that are down there by the street, you know. So we'll talk a little bit about that. And we also have some stuff about, you know, normal everyday devices that are probably in your home right now, like say a phone charger or even just a regular smart TV or a vacuum or anything that could be hackable. We'll talk about a lot of different things that are in your home right now that you probably should be paying a little bit of attention to.

SPEAKER_28 2:12

Anything remote, infrared, like a TV remote. I mean, everything, anything with a battery and a connection, a remote connection in any type of way where it reaches the outside of that device is hackable or has been hacked.

SPEAKER_34 2:25

We're

The Internet Of Things Trap

SPEAKER_34 2:26

talking about the internet of things. We're talking about putting uh chips into physical objects and connecting them to the internet. And what that does is create a lot of data, and that data can be used for convenience, for efficiency, um, but it can also be a very attractive nuisance for hackers, and it also doesn't receive privacy protection under the Fourth Amendment in the way that you and I, I think, would like to say is protective.

SPEAKER_21 2:52

What big tech has created in surveillance capitalism is more pervasive and more intrusive than anything you could ever possibly. It's more, it's more pervasive than Marcus Wolfe of the Stasi or Beria of the KGB of the NKWD could ever possibly that happens in contemporary North Korea. Yes, exactly.

Smart TV Remotes That Listen

SPEAKER_26 3:14

Samsung issued this updated uh warning, or whatever you want to call it, um, on their products that that this may be happening. Sort of an ominously worded document, right?

SPEAKER_33 3:25

It was a little ominous. It said, you know, be careful about what you say in front of the television. Try not to have any sensitive conversations in your living room because the TV is going to be recording what you say and sending that data off to another company.

SPEAKER_21 3:39

People still close the bathroom stall when you go into the toilet. You still close the shower curtain. We still do lots of things that we expect to have a a privacy, but yet people with a regular phone put it on their nightstand and are surprised that the microphone is listening. They didn't break in.

SPEAKER_19 3:59

They didn't need to, because you let them in. A few smart upgrades, a voice assistant here, a connected TV there, maybe even a charger that seemed a little too convenient. You clicked, I agree, without reading the fine print, because everyone does. But in that moment, you didn't just make your life easier, you opened the door to something else. Now your home runs on data, and it's not just collecting yours, it's sending it somewhere. Quietly, constantly, without ever asking again. So think about it, how many devices inside your house are actually spying on you? The answer is more than you think.

SPEAKER_28 4:34

Anything remote, infrared, like a TV remote that goes for projectors, uh, audio devices, ceiling fans, I mean very simple stuff, along with access control badges, uh, anything sub-gigahertz, like like key fobs or remote controls for anything, parking gates, so much. Everything. Everything.

SPEAKER_19 4:54

You think you're alone in your living room, while the TV is on standby and the remote is just sitting there on the couch. But what if that remote, the one inches from your face, is constantly collecting data? In 2015, Samsung quietly dropped a line into their smart TV manual. Not a bug warning, not a battery tip, a sentence that read, If your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted. They weren't warning you about a glitch, they were admitting the remote could hear everything. It was a disclosure, legal protection for behavior they knew would raise questions, and it did. The story exploded after the Guardian reported on it. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, filed a complaint to the FTC. They accused Samsung of collecting user voice data without proper disclosure or consent, and the EFF went further, comparing it to something straight out of 1984. Their warning? Ever. And what can happen if you leave your remote lying around?

SPEAKER_28 5:55

I mean everything, anything with a battery and a connection or remote connection in any type of way where it reaches the outside of that device is hackable or has been hacked.

SPEAKER_19 6:05

Anything remote and connected to a network, just like your TV remote, can be easily hacked to get all your personal data. Even if you try disabling the mic in your remote for a second, it looks like it worked. The voice command icon disappears. But that's just for show. The system doesn't stop listening, it just stops responding to you. What you've disabled isn't the microphone, it's the trigger. The hardware stays active, the logs keep building, and the light? It's just for show. And that's the part they don't advertise. Because this wasn't just Samsung. Most smart remotes now include wakeware detection, which means the mic is always on standby. So ask yourself, if a device can hear you when you're not speaking to it, who's it really designed to serve? And also, what could happen when the same power isn't tucked behind your TV, but sitting in your pocket? Yes,

Phones That Send Data Overnight

SPEAKER_19 6:56

we're talking about your mobile phone. It's the one device that never leaves your side. Your alarm clock, your camera, your bank, your map. But underneath all that convenience is the most advanced tracking system you've ever owned. And you carry it around willingly. You don't need to open an app, you don't even need to touch it. Your phone is collecting data all the time. Whether it's in your hand, on your nightstand, or stuffed in a drawer. Here's what your phone is doing while you're asleep.

SPEAKER_13 7:23

So what happens to those recordings?

SPEAKER_21 7:25

Well, we've been doing a study following our device, a Google mobile services phone, any Android running Google Mobile Services, which is all of them, or an iPhone. And at about 3 a.m., we're seeing a spike of data leaving the phone. About 50 megabytes. That is basically that phone dialing home to the mothership, exporting all of your goings on.

SPEAKER_37 7:49

All your pillow talk is going to pillow talk, whatever.

SPEAKER_19 7:53

We think of our phones as passive tools, but they're not. They watch, they listen, they predict. People often joke, my phone heard me when an ad pops up seconds after a private conversation. But when thousands of people experience this, maybe it's not a joke at all. And it's not just what you say. Your movements, your browsing, your app habits, everything builds a detailed fingerprint of your behavior, a digital version of you constantly being tracked, bought, and sold without your permission. But tracking is just the beginning.

The Hidden Hacker Charging Cable

SPEAKER_19 8:24

Because the next threat? It doesn't need your data, just a charging cable.

SPEAKER_28 8:28

What is this? Just out of curiosity.

SPEAKER_22 8:31

This looks like something I would use to charge my phone. Yeah. With a charger, yeah.

SPEAKER_28 8:36

And you know, that's so I have every every single charger you can imagine, and all of them, right? So actually, what this is, the reason why I have this little orange thing here is because there is no way I'd ever know that this was a charger. Uh I'm sorry, that this was not a charger without this orange tag because it is that that uh that perfect. So the NSA is selling these for $20,000. So this is a charger that will work. I could hand this to you and say, hey, here's my charger, man, or replace yours, right? Whatever you got plugged in, I'm sure I have a replacement for that. Guys, uh, you bring this home, it could act like a charger forever, or but as soon as this plugs in, inside of this tiny little plastic right here, this inside of this is a Wi-Fi chip, a mini computer, uh, and this thing emulates a keyboard and can type at 860 characters per second.

SPEAKER_19 9:24

That's what makes it so dangerous. The OMG cable works even after it's unplugged, using a tiny onboard chip that can transmit commands over Wi-Fi. It doesn't just act like a hacker tool, it is one. And yes, they're sold online to anyone. I'm gonna plug this into USB-C.

SPEAKER_28 9:42

Which, you know, you can pick whatever one you want. So that's plugged into USB C. This side I'm not gonna connect to anything. I could charge my phone with it, I could do whatever I want with it, but what I'm gonna do is on my phone, I'm gonna go to Wi-Fi, I'm gonna click OMG. Now I've just created a network from this cable that's plugged in. It's not plugged into it.

SPEAKER_22 10:00

We don't have an OMG network here.

SPEAKER_28 10:02

No, no, no. No, and this is not plugged into anything. Okay. So this is creating a Wi-Fi network. Yep. I'm gonna go to it in my browser, and then I have now I have a uh an interface here that I can connect with. So I'm gonna go in the file menu, I'm gonna load payload one. There we go. Alright, so ready? Now I'm gonna hit build and run. Which I could be very far away from the computer. This is just showing an example of it. See how fast that's typing.

SPEAKER_16 10:31

What's it doing?

SPEAKER_28 10:33

It's typing PBD podcast and Zero Day was here. Get out of it. So that could have been anything. Yeah. That could have been a malicious command, that could have been a virus that it downloaded, that could have been anything that I wanted it to be, and I have now remote control over this cable. And what if I plug right into my phone? Watch. Plug it into my phone, charges. Charging. You would have no idea that there's this implant is in your house.

SPEAKER_19 10:58

MG, the creator of the cable, confirmed that modified versions have been tested on iPhones, Androids, Windows laptops, and even car diagnostic systems. The attack happens instantly, often before you realize anything's off. And if a single cable can do that much damage, what do you think a Wi-Fi connected light bulb is capable of? You screw

Smart Bulbs That Breach Wi-Fi

SPEAKER_19 11:16

it into a lamp, you open an app, suddenly your room is bathed in blue light, synced to your playlist, and dim just right for the evening. That's what smart bulbs promise comfort and convenience. But what most people miss is that every one of those bulbs is also a potential entry point into your home network. A light bulb shouldn't need Wi-Fi, but when it does, hackers start paying attention. Watch how a standard smart bulb can be hijacked to monitor your network.

SPEAKER_28 11:43

This light bulb can monitor your Wi-Fi network and steal your password. Check this out. Now I'm gonna put this bulb inside of a regular lamp. And it turns on like a regular bulb. As soon as the bulb receives power, it creates a Wi-Fi network that I can connect to. And here's the panel I can choose from other Wi-Fi networks. I'm gonna choose my own, select the monitor option, and now we have a bunch of what appears to be random data. I can download this file and I'll show you what that can do. There are many things you can do with this bulb, including determining if someone is home with Bluetooth low energy, cracking your Wi-Fi password, or in my case, showing an insecure camera stream that runs over HTTP. I extracted the PCAP file into a tool called Wireshark, and now you see there's frames. Don't get intimidated. Watch what happens next. Constructing all them frames from Wireshark now shows a live view of my backyard because the camera is transferring over HTTP.

SPEAKER_19 12:37

It doesn't just pull data from your Wi-Fi, it can analyze traffic, log what's happening in your system, and even act as a launch pad for further attacks. And the worst part? It still dims on command, still changes color when you say so, all while quietly cracking the digital lock behind your firewall. In 2020, Checkpoint Research exposed a critical vulnerability in Philips Hughes smart bulbs. They showed that by compromising a single bulb using the Zigbee protocol, an attacker could infect the bulb, jump into the lighting hub, and from there, into the user's phone, and finally into the Wi-Fi router itself. From a mood light to a full network access in just a few silent hops. And the scary part is, most smart bulbs often ship with weak or no encryption. Some even use outdated wireless protocols and retain your network credentials. Most brands favor easy setup over actual security, which means your light bulb might be flashing signals to someone who isn't you. And if a light bulb, something that's only supposed to glow, can be turned into a back door. What do you think is possible with a screen that sees, hears, and streams everything?

Smart TV Cameras And ACR Tracking

SPEAKER_19 13:44

It starts the second you turn it on. Not just the show, but the tracking. Your smart TV doesn't just know what you're watching, it knows how long you hovered before you clicked, it knows when you paused, it knows when you walked away, and that's not a bug. That's the whole point. In one chilling demo, a cybersecurity expert pulls up a seemingly harmless smart TV, but behind that clean interface, there's a lot more going on. The smart TV has a webcam and a microphone, he explains, and it can be turned on without you ever knowing. He moves through the settings, revealing just how easily hackers can hijack the TV's hardware, turning it into a surveillance device aimed directly at your living room.

SPEAKER_23 14:24

What's really eye-opening here is you watch your TV, but with this hack, your TV can watch you. Show us how that works.

SPEAKER_24 14:31

So one of the things that we were able to do with the Smart TV platform was actually um abuse the browser to the extent that we could actually gain access to the camera that's built into the TV. And so what we can prove here is that with a little bit of extra code, we can turn the camera on in your browser.

SPEAKER_23 14:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_24 14:50

And while this is evident to you right here because we uh because we've designed it that way, this is something that we can do invisibly and actually have the camera running behind the web page that you're that you're looking at.

SPEAKER_23 15:01

So what this means is I could be sitting here watching TV from my from my bedroom, and you could be anywhere in the world looking at this image of me watching.

SPEAKER_24 15:11

Yep, I could be sitting on a laptop in a cafe in Paris. And as long as I have a network connection, I'd be able to get into your TV and access the camera.

SPEAKER_17 15:18

The kind of scary things about it is that it doesn't actually give any indication that the camera's on. Um, and there is no little LED that shows up when the camera's on. So it could actually be watching you and you never even know.

SPEAKER_19 15:28

The backbone of it all is something called automatic content recognition, or ACR. It doesn't just log what you stream, it scans everything on your screen, from Netflix and YouTube to HDMI inputs. It fingerprints each frame, tracks how long you watch, when you pause, what you skip, and quietly sends it all out. Not just to the TV brand, but to third-party servers, advertisers, and data brokers paying for access to your habits. Most of the time, it's running in the background, buried behind settings you probably never touched. In 2017, Visio was fined $2.2 million by the FTC for secretly using ACR to spy on over 11 million TVs. Users weren't warned. The setting was enabled by default, and the data? Sold, ripped straight from your living room without a word. Today, many modern TVs still ship this way. Some even include cameras and mics buried behind menus with vague labels like experience enhancement.

SPEAKER_11 16:24

If your smart TV has a camera on it, or like the new uh Facebook portal, which is a uh TV-like device, it's a smart screen with a camera on the front of it. Many of the Alexa devices sold by Amazon also have cameras on the front of those. So whether it's a TV or just a device with a screen, yeah, you want to make sure that that uh little slider is uh covering the camera and that the microphones are also physically covered. Now, the new Alexa devices uh sold by Amazon have what they call privacy protections built in. You want to make sure that you are covering your device camera with tape yourself, and that you're covering those microphone holes. If you want this to be truly offline, also make sure you unplug it.

SPEAKER_19 17:07

And most people never turn them off because they never know they're on. And if the screen you trust can betray you that easily, what about something even more invisible?

Juice Jacking Through USB Outlets

SPEAKER_19 17:17

Something hiding inside the walls. They're built into hotels, airports, cafes, and even brand new homes. USB wall outlets, sleek, modern, and always right where you need them. You think they're there to give your phone a quick boost, but sometimes they're doing something else entirely. These ports are capable of transferring data as well as power, and attackers have figured out exactly how to exploit that. The cybersecurity world has a name for this, Juice Jacking, a method where malware is secretly delivered through a USB port when you plug in your device. Once connected, it can install spyware, skim data, even take remote control of your phone, all while it's charging like normal. Back in 2016, the SANS Institute and the NSA issued early warnings about it, mostly in relation to shady public charging stations. But in 2023, the FBI made it official, releasing public advisories urging travelers to avoid USB outlets in airports, hotels, shopping centers, anywhere a port could have been tampered with.

SPEAKER_27 18:15

Any public place where somebody could have tampered with a USB port. Just remember that's a data that that that has a potential for data transfer, not just power transfer. Yeah, your local coffee shop or something. Anywhere. Power outlets good, USB outlets, not so much, avoid them.

SPEAKER_19 18:31

And these ports don't just deliver power, they're a potential back door. All it takes is a modified outlet with altered hardware, and your phone could be giving up its contacts, location, save passwords without a single warning screen. And now that same attack vector is moving into private homes. Some smart USB wall outlets sold online come preloaded with malicious firmware. Once installed behind your wall panel, they're almost impossible to detect and there's no way to unplug. But not every threat hides in hardware. Some don't need to be installed in your wall. Just one click and they're already inside your device. You click

Incognito Mode And Silent Malware

SPEAKER_19 19:06

a link in private mode, but private doesn't mean anonymous. In that moment, you might be inviting more than a video to play, it could trigger keyloggers and trackers to slip quietly into your device. And this isn't hypothetical. Researchers from Norton Labs and McAfee have documented cases of malware distribution through adult sites, often disguised as video enhancements or innocuous plugins. And once installed, these programs can remain hidden for weeks, tracking your keystrokes and browsing history, even in incognito tabs. That private moment can quickly become a public record. Even John McAfee reveals how hackers, through sophisticated scripts embedded in adult websites, can silently download Android browsers into your systems and wipe out your bank account.

SPEAKER_37 19:49

Every pornography site in the world, if you have ever, I'm sure nobody here has ever looked at pornography. But if you have, you have keystone locking software. How do you think they make their money? See, this is this is the issue. It costs millions of dollars to maintain these massive databases and have the bandwidth to disperse this pornography. And yet you don't pay. Yes, you're paying. The instant you visit the site, if you have an Android, for example, the site runs a JavaScript which sets the download unauthorized application flag. The very first video that you watch, you now, because that's a click-through, you clicked, you did something. Said yes, oh good, that's yes, I'll do that. Umloads first and foremost a remote routing function. If it's an iPhone, uh a remote jailbreaking program. All can be remotely uh rooted now. After it's rooted, they download a key key logger, and all this takes just a matter of seconds. And from that point on, somebody is watching every single one of your keystrokes. Now, people pay these pornography sites for the ability to put their keylogging software on your phones. Now, why has this not happened to you already? Because hackers are not stupid. In order to take something, they have to download additional software. If they only take four or five hundred people's bank accounts in one day, then the next day the white hat hackers are gonna say, ah, this is how they did it. Everybody, you can protect yourself. No. They're gonna wait until one day this year or next year, and a hundred million people in one day are gonna have your bank accounts eradicated. Zero balance. Or your identity will be stolen, or your Bitcoin wallet will be emptied. Or maybe they've been watching your keystrokes to see if you know, maybe you're saying something to a friend or a lover that maybe could compromise you. Maybe they can blackmail you. If they get lucky, you might be a United States congressman or Senator. In which case, now not only do they have money, they have power.

SPEAKER_19 22:05

According to a 2019 study in New Media and Society, a staggering 93% of adult sites share user data with third parties, even when users believe they're undercover in privacy mode. These aren't just ads. Many of them deploy aggressive JavaScript that can deliver keylogging software and tracking pixels without requiring any clicks or downloads. You type your password, private messages, banking details, and it's all being logged permanently. Android users are especially vulnerable. Certain browsers permit silent downloads, meaning that JavaScript can bypass prompts and install components instantly. All you need to do is visit. One click in everything you type account info, messages, personal searches, could be scooped up in the background. The result is a trail of digital breadcrumbs that leaves you exposed well after you've left the website. You thought you bought convenience, but what you really got was a network of quiet observers, each one logging, syncing, transmitting. This isn't paranoia. It's the new baseline. In 2025, privacy is something you have to fight to keep.

SPEAKER_32 23:15

That is nuts, bro. Like anything that has a camera, anything that's got some kind of listening device.

SPEAKER_29 23:22

You know, I I I it's just crazier and crazier. I mean, I I remember back in the day when they were talking about, you know, how uh neighbors were hacking into people's TVs and watching them get busy and just on dressing and all that stuff. And now yeah, and I mean it's just even more. I I just uh I mean like Wayne's World was hacking.

SPEAKER_32 23:42

Right. That's like hacking into the the satellite so you can put your basement TV show on. But now we're talking about this kind of stuff where it's a a typical charger. This is just a USB C charger, and this is just a remote. Right. And this one actually controls the lights in here, so I don't know what this one would do or might do something, who knows? But this one's a Samsung remote. Um the monitor we use is a is a Samsung monitor. We talk about whatever we want to talk about in here. Right. Um my phone looks at us, the computer's looking at us, I have a smart light back there. That's not a smart light, but those those lights that have the changing colors, all those are smart lights. I don't ever use Alexa or I don't even use Siri even if even though I have an uh an Apple phone, I get mad when I say seriously and she what would you like? I didn't ask her for nothing. Go away. You know, it's but it's always listening, and I understand that.

SPEAKER_29 24:42

Well it's like on mine, it's the Gemini, you know.

SPEAKER_32 24:45

Yeah, Google Android phones are you know, I don't know which one's worse and which one's not. They're listening through everything, and it doesn't even matter what platform or your phone. Um and you know, when he said that just the little cameras on or the camera on the Samsung phones, you know, it's like we have no privacy anymore. And you know, we've done podcasts before previous episodes where we've talked about flop cameras and I don't know what we're worried about that for. We're they're inside our house. Right. You know?

SPEAKER_29 25:16

That's totally it. You know, I I you know I know uh speaking of that flop camera, just to kind of mention it is that uh I guess Fort Collins is gonna take theirs down. Yeah, so which is you know, good for now.

SPEAKER_32 25:25

That one was implemented by the police department. And then they actually were saying in other counties and cities it's not for the police. It's like well then what is it for? Why did the police department at Fort Collins implement it and have to get it taken down? There's a lot of stuff that none of this stuff makes sense. It's all semantics, you know, like when a builder says they don't want to worry about all this water and then they build something and then afterwards then they sue. They just said they didn't need the water so they could get the rights to actually build in the first place, and then after it's done, then they sue the place so they can get the water. It's all a bunch of crooked bureaucracy crap. You know, and this happens to be where, you know, just any Yahoo on the other side of the pond or in, you know, next door can basically just hack into your system at home and find all your information, you know, and and especially what we have up next. If you're on one of them DMT trips, they might not want to see what you're doing. You might be able to see what they're doing, right?

SPEAKER_10 26:28

So

DMT From Ritual Brew To Lab

SPEAKER_10 26:35

this is Test Subject 34. She has just been given a substance often described as the most powerful psychedelic drug in the world. It makes her feel like she's being launched into outer space. Other users report near-death experiences, profound insights, and mythical encounters with spiritual beings. The drug appears to shape the very foundations of human perception.

SPEAKER_05 27:05

It is one of the most weird and unexpected things a person can go through.

SPEAKER_10 27:13

We're talking about dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. In its pure synthetic form, it looks like an inconspicuous crystalline powder.

SPEAKER_05 27:20

It's a very simple molecule.

SPEAKER_10 27:22

And yet, DMT has been puzzling scientists around the globe for more than a century. The substance has been used in indigenous cultures for thousands of years. It occurs naturally in plants, animals, and even in the human body. But when it interacts with our brain, things seem to go completely off the rails. Many users say DMT fundamentally changed their lives. And yet, other experiences suggest there's more to DMT than profound revelations, mystical encounters, and medical promise. For some people, the substance can also open doors to the darkest corners of their consciousness. This is the enduring mystery of DMT. For the past three years, he's been making his way through the Amazon rainforest to study plants. He's particularly interested in mosses. Along the way, he keeps encountering indigenous communities living deep in the jungle. He learns their languages and studies their customs. Right now, Spruce is staying with an indigenous group in what is now northwestern Brazil. Today is a special occasion. The tribe is about to hold a spiritual ceremony, and at the center of it all is this ritual brew. Its key ingredient is a specific type of liana. Indigenous people have been drinking or chewing it for thousands of years. Some groups call it Napa, others baco or pinde. This group calls it kapi. And tonight, Spruce is going to try it himself. He watches several young members of the community drink the mixture before him. He notes that for about 10 minutes, they appear to be possessed with reckless fury. Then they comb down and simply continue dancing. Then it's his turn. But the tribe didn't just prepare copy for him.

SPEAKER_13 29:37

I had scarcely dispatched one cup of the nauseous beverage when the ruler of the feast came up with a woman bearing a large calabash of mandioka beer called casheri.

SPEAKER_10 29:47

After that, Protocol demands that he top things off with a cigar and a cup of palm wine. Spruce has to fight off the urge to vomit and stretches out in a hammock. The copi is slowly kicking in. He later notes in his journal that white men taking capi all seem to report the same experience.

SPEAKER_13 30:09

The sight is disturbed, and visions pass rapidly before the eyes, wherein everything gorgeous and magnificent they have heard or read of seems combined. And presently the scene changes to things uncouth and horrible.

SPEAKER_10 30:26

Spruce calls the plant Banisteria Kapi. Banisteria was the term used at the time for a class of tropical climbing plants. Capi is an indigenous word for grass. He samples a couple of those vines, dries them, and has them shipped to England. Over the following years, Spruce keeps traveling to South America and repeatedly comes across Capi. One of these encounters takes place in 1857 among an indigenous group in Peru. They also use the vine to prepare a powerful brew. They mix it with other plants and call it ayahuasca. Spruce apparently doesn't drink it himself this time. Instead, he asks the locals to describe their experiences to him. To Spruce, the brew remains an unsolved mystery. He simply can't figure out which particular substances cause these extreme effects. He is already familiar with opium and cannabis, but copy seems to be much more potent. What he doesn't realize is that he's been looking in the wrong place. The plant he sent back to Europe isn't the key ingredient. Technically, it's not the liana or benisteria copy that produces the intoxicating effect. The real trigger is a special compound found in the leaves mixed into the brew. DMT, more precisely, N, NDMT. Its molecular structure is surprisingly simple compared to other psychedelics. Its complete name is N and dimethyltryptamine, but we'll simply refer to it as DMT throughout this video. German-Canadian chemist Richard Manske was the first to synthesize the substance in the early 1930s. Back then, he had no idea of its extraordinary psychoactive effects. At its core, DMT is characterized by a nitrogen atom bonded to two methyl groups, hence the name dimethyl. A methyl group consists of one carbon atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms. It's one of the simplest building blocks in organic chemistry. The nitrogen atom is connected via a short carbon chain to the most important part of the molecular structure, the so-called endol ring. The same structural feature can also be found in other known psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin. And within the molecular structure of serotonin, serotonin is a neurotransmitter, a molecule that carries chemical messages or signals between nerve cells. It plays a key role in some of our most essential bodily functions, from mood, sleep, digestion, and nausea to wound healing and sexual desire. Because of their structural similarity, psychedelics like DMT combine to the same receptors usually used by serotonin. This is Chris Timmerman. He's a neuroscientist and one of the world's leading researchers on DMT. He spends much of his time traveling for research, so we're lucky enough to catch him on a video call. It's likely that DMT was also the main active compound in the brew that spruce encountered back in the jungle. Today, that mixture is widely known as ayahuasca. To produce it, you mainly need two ingredients. The first one consists of plants that contain DMT. They grow across large parts of the Amazon basin, though not exclusively there. The second ingredient is the capi liana, documented by spruce. It doesn't contain DMT itself, but it is crucial for making the DMT in the brew psychoactive. Mixing and boiling the two together produces the psychedelic plant drink known as ayahuasca. Psychedelics are generally considered physiologically safe and non-addictive. That's one of the key differences between them and drugs like cocaine or amphetamines. Those primarily act as stimulants. They artificially increase dopamine and neuroeprinephrine levels in the brain and strongly activate our reward system. Psychedelics, on the other hand, alter perception itself. Users may see or hear things that aren't there, hallucinate, and lose their sense of time and space. Some report life-changing experiences. In many ways, psychedelic substances seem to fundamentally alter how we think and feel, which is precisely why DMT continues to fascinate scientists to this day. This is Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman. He works as a researcher for a Swiss pharmaceutical company. Riding next to him is his lab assistant. He explicitly asked her to come along. He's desperately trying to get home. Earlier that day, he started conducting an experiment on himself. He dissolved 250 grams of lycurgic acid, diathyamide, in water and ingested it. He had synthesized the compound in the lab after isolating it from the ergot fungus. And right now, he's feeling a bit under the weather.

SPEAKER_15 35:33

I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had traveled very rapidly.

SPEAKER_10 36:20

Albert Hoffman has just embarked on the world's first LSD trip. He has no idea what the substance does. He believed 250 micrograms to be a prudently safe dough, but it turns out to be extraordinarily potent, and now he fears he may lose his mind. A few hours later, the effects slowly begin to soften. The trip becomes more pleasant. As he steps out into his garden after a spring rain, it feels as though he's seeing everything for the very first time.

SPEAKER_15 36:45

Everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light.

SPEAKER_10 36:49

From that day on, Hoffman is convinced that this tiny molecule holds enormous power, that it could someday be of great value to medicine and psychiatry. His discovery jump starts the entire field of psychedelic research. Hoffman inspires many other scientists to follow his lead, and in the 1950s, he becomes the first to isolate the psychoactive compound psilocybin from psychedelic mushrooms. That's another major milestone. But psychedelic research also turns its attention to DMT. Scientists discover more and more plants that contain the substance. To date, it has been found in at least 50 different plant species. DMT has also been found in mammals like rats and rabbits. In the 1960s, a German researcher team even found traces of the substance in human blood. Shortly after, U.S. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Julius Axelrod provided evidence that DMT occurs naturally in the human brain. It's even considered endogenous, meaning our own bodies produce it naturally. Throughout the 1960s, scientists keep isolating DMT in humans, animals, and plants. And meanwhile, psychedelics are starting to seep into popular culture.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

How often have you taken LSD? About four times.

SPEAKER_10 38:08

The swinging 60s are the peak years of the hippie movement and psychedelics like LSD. The Cultural Revolution is fueled by activists, intellectuals, and artists alike. One of them is Terence McKenna. He is just studying at Berkeley. He's 18 years old and has already done his fair share of experiments with psychedelics like LSD. But what he is about to experience tonight will eclipse everything he has ever felt. A friend has come to visit and brought this white crystalline powder. He claims it was stolen from a U.S. Army chemical research facility. It's DMT. And for the first time in his life, young Terrence McKenna is about to smoke it.

SPEAKER_07 38:58

And there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them. These self-transforming machine elf creatures were speaking in a colored language, which condensed into rotating machines that were like Fabroger eggs. All this stuff was so weird and so alien and so unenglishable that it was a complete shock. I mean the literal turning inside out of my intellectual universe. It's like being struck by noetic lightning.

SPEAKER_10 39:32

The experience completely changes McKenna's view of life and reality. He becomes convinced that there is another secret world, one we normally can't see or access. He drops out of university to chase this mystery. He travels to Nepal to meet Tibetan shamans. He works as a professional butterfly collector in Indonesia. And he ventures deep into the Colombian jungle with his brother and three friends. McKenna's description of the so-called machine elves becomes a cultural reference. Countless DMT users later report encountering mystical entities that closely match what he described. He dies in 2000, leaving behind an extensive audio archive with over 500 hours of theories on psychedelics and spirituality.

SPEAKER_08 40:16

Do people realize this is the same thing as has been taken for thousands of years down there? Do they realize its role in shamanic healing?

SPEAKER_01 40:28

By the late 1960s, authorities begin cracking down on the widespread drug use in the U.S., you know, it's illegal and everything, it's silly to say that.

SPEAKER_10 40:39

In 1966, California and Nevada become the first states to outlaw the production, sale, and possession of LSD. Two years later, the drug is banned across the entire country.

SPEAKER_35 40:49

America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

SPEAKER_10 40:53

America's war on drugs soon extends to much of the rest of the world. In 1971, the United Nations adopts the Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Many countries outlaw psychedelic substances and sharply restrict their use, including DMT. From that point on, only a handful of approved scientific institutions are allowed to continue their research on them, and even they have to adhere to extremely strict regulations. For decades, DMT research effectively grinds to a halt.

Test Subject 34 And Entity Encounters

SPEAKER_10 41:44

His study is the first attempt to observe the effects of psychedelic substances in humans in the U.S. in over 20 years. He wants to know what DMT does to our mind and body. The participants are numbered. Sarah is subject 34. She's in her early 40s and lives with her second husband. She has three children and works as a freelance writer. She has told the researchers that an angel once visited her when she had a high fever as a child, and that every now and then she communicates with spirit guides for advice and support. She also suffers from depression. In her 20s, she overdosed on tranquilizers and was hospitalized for two weeks following the suicide attempt. Today she wants to find out whether DMT can help her gain a deeper understanding of herself and her relationship to the universe. The experiment is set to begin in just a few seconds. The onset of DMT's effects largely depends on how you consume it. Most recreational users smoke DMT using a glass pipe. This makes the effects kick in extremely fast, usually in under one minute. The peak experience tends to last only a couple of minutes before wearing off. The smoke tastes unpleasant and can trigger coughing fits. Another substance closely related to N and DMT is called 5Mio DMT. This YouTuber smoked it for one of his videos. Others try to consume it like this. 5Mio DMT occurs naturally in secretions of the Colorado River toad. A common misconception is that licking the toad will get you high. It won't, and it can be extremely toxic. Most research today focuses on synthetic 5M ODMT. It also kicks in very fast and strong, but tends to produce far fewer visual hallucinations than NN DMT. DMT can also be snorted. In that case, the effects take a few minutes to kick in, but the trip also lasts a bit longer. Two things are paramount for a pleasant DMT experience set and setting, the right mix of emotional stability and soothing surroundings. Experts recommend a calm environment where users feel safe and are able to lie down comfortably. Mixing substances can be extremely dangerous. Some users avoid Alcohol, masturbation, and watching the news before attending an ayahuasca retreat. But not even the best preparation can guarantee DMT won't produce what many call a bad trip. Some users online describe experiences that leave them shaken for days, with flashbacks to vivid hallucinations of falling or flying through tunnels and encounters with frightening beings. Psychedelics can also worsen existing mental health issues. People who suffer from psychotic disorders or are mentally unstable should not take them. In general, DMT should never be used without professional guidance. Sarah's experience will be guided by Dr. Strassmann. In clinical settings like this one, DMT is administered via IV injection and hits almost instantly. Sarah has previously been given a low introductory dose to see how her body reacts to the substance. Recreational users are advised to start with similar test doses. Sarah's low dose experience has been pleasant and relaxing. Now she's about to receive five full doses. She will go on five consecutive trips. After each one, Strassman will let her come down to check in with her. She's all set. Sarah can feel the cool touch of Strassman's hand, and she's trying to count her heartbeats.

SPEAKER_04 45:07

I got to three beats. Then there was a sound. Like a hum that turned into a whoosh. And then I was blasted out of my body at such speed, with such force, as if it were the speed of light. The colors were aggressive, terrifying. I felt as if they would consume me. As if I were on a warp speed conveyor belt heading straight into the cosmic psychedelic buzzsaw. I was terrified. I felt abandoned. I'm completely and totally lost. I have never been so alone. I was scared. But I kept telling myself, relax, surrender, embrace. It was all flashing and whirling lights. I was rather disappointed. Here I'm expecting this profound spiritual experience, and I get Las Vegas. But then, before I had much time to be disappointed, I flew on and saw clowns performing. They were like toys or animated clowns. I had the overwhelming urge to laugh. I was kind of self-conscious about it at first, but I couldn't contain myself and I laughed out loud watching those clowns. Suddenly, a pulsating entity appeared in the patterns. It sounds weird to describe it as tinkerbell-like. It was trying to coax me to go with it. At first I was reluctant, but I did want to go with it. I could tell the drug was starting to wear off, and I wasn't high enough to follow it. I told it I can't go with you now. See, they want me back. It didn't seem to be offended and in fact followed me back until I sensed it had reached its boundary. I felt like it was saying goodbye.

SPEAKER_05 47:18

They are interacting with beings. Spirits, entities, jesters, clowns, a range of different ways in which people see these beings that interact with the participants, that they engage with them, invite them to do something, to communicate, and so forth and so on.

SPEAKER_10 47:36

Encounters with such beings seem to be a common experience in many DMT trips. For one of his studies, Timmerman analyzed nearly 4,000 DMT experiences posted on Reddit. Almost half mentioned similar entity encounters. In a 2021 field study with 36 participants, almost everyone reported an encounter with some sort of sentient being. But how do these encounters actually unfold? That's what Baltimore's John Hopkins University asked over 2,500 DMT users in an online survey. The first question was about the primary senses involved in the encounter. Most participants reported seeing them, and more than half described hearing them. About a third said they could touch them, while some could even smell or taste them. A whopping 85% described their encounter as extrasensory or telepathic. The most common descriptive labels for the entities were beings, guides, spirits, aliens, and helpers. Less common labels were clowns, demons, gnomes, monsters, or devils. As to the emotions involved, most participants reported feelings of love, trust, and joy. Only a minority experienced fear. 11% believed they had encountered religious figures, meaning some people think they saw God in these beings. DMT appears to have a significant impact on people's religious beliefs and their sense of spirituality. This study surveyed users who reported so-called God encounter experiences during psychedelic trips. 25% described them as atheists before their trip, meaning they didn't believe in God. Afterwards, their number dropped to just 7%. Among ayahuasca users, atheist identification declined from 12 to 3%. Sarah 2 is deeply moved by these encounters. She's about to receive her final injection.

SPEAKER_04 49:43

Again, they wanted something from me, not just physical information. They were interested in emotions and feelings. I told them, we have something we can give you, spirituality. I guess what I really meant was love. I tried to figure out how to do this. I felt a tremendous energy, brilliant pink light with white edges, building on my left side. I knew it was spiritual energy and love. They were on my right. So I reached out my hands across the universe and prepared to be a bridge. I let this energy pass through me to them. I said something like, see, there I did it for you. You have it. They were grateful. I was coming down off the DMT, losing altitude.

SPEAKER_10 50:35

Sarah didn't expect to become what she called an earthly spiritual emissary during her trip. She doesn't feel comfortable with that role, but has done her best to live up to it. Now it's the next participant's turn, number 35. Over the course of five years, Strassman observes hundreds of these trips. He administers about 400 doses of DMT to 60 volunteers. He eventually calls DMT the spirit molecule because of the spiritual and metaphysical experiences it appears to induce. Strassmann's work in the 1990s was groundbreaking research, but it also raised more questions than he could answer. Since then, many neuroscientists have picked up where he left off. So,

What DMT Does In The Brain

SPEAKER_10 51:15

what's actually happening inside our brain when we take DMT? Modern neuroscience suggests that our brain has a hierarchical modular organization. Modular means that certain nerve cells work together in different types of clusters or brain networks specialized in specific functions. There appears to only be a limited amount of communication between these networks. Hierarchical means that higher order areas, like the prefrontal cortex, collect signals from different areas across the brain to coordinate appropriate responses. But that entire organization seems to pretty much collapse when our brain is on DMT. The key players here are these special serotonin receptors. They determine how sensitive neurons react to incoming signals. That in turn impacts how information is transmitted and processed within and across brain regions. When DMT binds to these receptors, the brain's usual top-down control mechanisms become less effective. It's like the neurochemical reins come off. One of the experts we talked to thinks DMT makes the brain become more democratic. Another calls it anarchy. Either way, the brain suddenly enters a state in which far more areas communicate with each other than usual. Scientists call this global hyperconnectivity. It's completely different from how the brain normally operates. But how does this explain these extremely vivid hallucinations? Why do some users feel as if they're entering an entirely different reality? One explanation is that the brain sort of disconnects from external information. In this paper, Chris Timmerman proposes that DMT disrupts the brain's normal way of processing sensory input. The technical term is functional deaffrontation.

SPEAKER_05 52:50

It's a state of disconnected consciousness. We're disconnected from the external environment individuals feel.

SPEAKER_10 52:56

Instead, the brain shifts into a completely new state, a kind of internal simulation.

SPEAKER_05 53:01

They report that they are an immersive world of experience.

SPEAKER_10 53:05

But where does this other world come from? One clue to unravel this mystery could be dreaming. All those weird things that happen in our dreams seem similar to what people describe on DMT.

SPEAKER_05 53:15

They are disconnected from their immediate environments, and their own brains and the organism as a whole is reconstructing an alternative world of experiences.

SPEAKER_10 53:29

Timmerman and colleagues found that the strongest rhythms of theta waves in the brain correlate with the peak of a DMT trip. The same patterns are found during REM sleep. He writes that a DMT trip is like dreaming with your eyes open, except that DMT trips are usually far more intense and vivid than normal dreams. Neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore has a theory about why that is. In our dreams, the brain sort of rebuilds our real life experiences, drawing on established patterns of information. But on DMT, those familiar templates come undone. Everything becomes more open, chaotic, and unpredictable.

SPEAKER_06 54:04

It's like you're seeing the world anew, like you've never seen it before. Your brain, you haven't decided what you're seeing. And coupled with this increased sensitivity to sensory information, the world becomes transcendent. It becomes much more vivid.

SPEAKER_10 54:24

Which brings us to one of the wildest DMT experiences of all: encountering spiritual entities or sentient beings. There are different theories about these types of encounters. One study examined how these two brain regions behave under the influence of DMT. These areas are essential for recognizing social cues and processing the emotional dynamics of human interaction.

SPEAKER_05 54:45

So when we have our normal experiences and we interact with our partners or co-workers, our sons and daughters, these same systems also start engaging in the brain.

SPEAKER_10 55:57

Such experiences can occur during traffic accidents, suicide attempts, and cardiac arrests. Many report a sense of brightness, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, losing track of time and space, or gaining insight into some ultimate truth. Timmerman thinks these near-death experiences could also be linked to global hyperconnectivity. In other words, there's so much going on in the brain during a DMT trip that the brain blows all of its fuses. It basically thinks it's dying. And yet there's one major difference between DMT trips and near-death experiences.

SPEAKER_05 56:56

DMT is more visual and near-death experiences are more disembodied.

SPEAKER_10 57:01

Then again, near-death experiences are also far from being fully understood. This makes it even harder to draw reliable scientific conclusions with regard to DMT. Back in the 90s, Rick Straussman proposed a bold hypothesis that the spirit molecule, DMT, might be released during crucial life events like birth, death, or profound mystical experiences. Today there is strong evidence suggesting that DMT is produced naturally from mammalian brains. Scientists are still investigating why that is. Early findings suggest that DMT release in the brain correlates with a massive surge of stress hormones. One experiment with lab rats showed a significant increase in DMT levels following cardiac arrest. Another study suggests that releasing DMT in the brain could also have a protective function. The compound appears to activate a receptor that helps brain cells survive oxygen deprivation and oxidative stress. So DMT might as well be a kind of built-in emergency medication for life-threatening situations. And a very recent study suggests that DMT levels in our brain might be much higher than previously assumed, and that it may be involved in a number of physiological processes. So here's what we know so far. DMT occurs naturally in plants, mammals, and humans. It's even considered endogenous, meaning our own bodies may produce it. We also know that when on DMT, our brain seems to be far more interconnected, that it activates so many different areas that it can feel like entering an entirely different world, one where we can communicate with all sorts of otherworldly beings. And in some cases, our brain gets so overwhelmed by this hyperconnected state that it thinks it's dying. But all of this is just the beginning, early clues, hypotheses, and indications, nothing more and nothing less. Most of the questions DMT poses to science are still wide open. For now, DMT remains a vast, unsolved mystery. We still don't fully understand how it creates such vivid hallucinations. We don't really know why our own body produces it, and we certainly don't understand how 50 milligrams of this tiny molecule can reshape entire lives in just 20 minutes. We're back in the Amazon rainforest, about 170 years after Richard Spruce. Once again, a British researcher is attending an ayahuascer, but things are different this time. Simon Ruffle is not a botanist, he's a psychiatrist. Unlike Spruce, he knows exactly what active compound he's dealing with. For the past decade, he's been studying ayahuasca to explore its potential role in healing trauma, like PTSD in war veterans. But so far, the number of participants has been too small for conclusive results, and some of them feel their mental health has worsened after the ayahuasca experience. But others show first signs of improvement. In some participants, Ralph has observed significant reductions in depression and anxiety outcomes. Timmerman has seen similar indicators in his own research. His theory. Some studies suggest that meditation and other mindfulness-based practices could offer positive effects that are similar to those of psychedelic experiences. But research on that is also just beginning. Chris Timmermann will continue to explore DMT's medical use, but he's also looking to unravel an even bigger mystery, human consciousness itself.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:38

I'm particularly interested in using DMT to help us understand how we construct our usual worlds of experience. I'm interested in using DMT to help us understand that construction.

Hosts React To Psychedelic Risks

SPEAKER_29 1:01:10

Well, that is freaking uh roller coaster ride of a trip, I would imagine so. That's a trippy like I I've heard stories, man. I I so um I have a friend, you know, you know Rob. Uh well I don't know if you were well you remember Rob. I remember Rob. Yeah, he's told me kind of uh a few things about that uh roller coaster of a ride and stuff like that. And he's like, hey man, you know, if you blah blah. I'm like, yeah. Uh and then I was dating this witch lady that told me uh she's like, uh it's it's pretty intense, but she actually um she said that you know you could go through um uh not eating, you know. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:01:49

Well they said it was like make you sick if you drank it like a tea. Right, yeah. See, I I remember like when back in the nineties and stuff like that when it was kind of popular among our generation um that it was like peyote or something like that.

SPEAKER_29 1:02:06

Yeah, the mescaline and all that good. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:02:08

So I don't I don't I don't think I heard a lot about DMT until later on, but you know, I just thought it was interesting when I saw like that, you know, obviously things like that need to be studied. You know, you don't want people to be like, I don't know what that plant does, just eat it.

SPEAKER_29 1:02:25

Right. Well like how you were saying, I remember uh back in the day it was like you know, toad licking how they were talking about it. It's like, you know, don't go licking toads in uh I thought um I know they said it was a Colorado River toad, but I also think it's uh the Sonoran desert toad as well. I think that's what Mike Tyson did. He did the uh toad, I believe. To uh hey, he said he was like he's he's all about it, I th I I believe from what I I uh I recall. Because I think him and uh Joel Rogan were kind of told we were talking about their DMT uh uh experiences. And uh yeah, I I mean I don't know. I've I I've done my fair share of hallucinogenics and uh I know you have as well, but that one is kind of uh it's a questionable one. Scared of it. A little bit, man. I mean, I I don't know. They said you gotta be pretty sound in the head, and uh at the moment I I don't know how sound I am.

SPEAKER_32 1:03:16

Well, the thing that I thought that was interesting about that was how they said you know that they were all about making sure that they were studying this, they were doing it for a long time in all these universities, and then that all of a sudden they made 'em it leg made it illegal to possess or own and only a certain amount of you know, colleges or clinics or whatever they want to call it have the right or the ability legally to study it. And then you have like the boom that you know, everybody thinks that the psychedelic age ended when the with the sixties and like you know, once Woodstock happened and it was like, okay, it's over. That's not the truth, man. They like I remember just in the n the early nineties, there was people that had like sugar cubes that were covered with liquid stuff. Yeah. There was brown glass looking stuff, it was like plastic. There was there was stuff that looked like literally like it was a piece of plastic that somebody just molded into like little squares. Gel tabs? Yeah. Gel tabs, that's what you have. There's all kinds of weird different things, and that wasn't because you know some random person just knew how to make it. Yeah. This stuff was distributed just like crack was in the eighties. You know, it's like there's a reason for it, and then you know how they took a took it away. I mean, that totally jives one hundred percent with like, oh, you found something, oh, you've created something. Oh, we could use that in a way. Okay, we're we're just gonna take that. We'll take that for now. Don't worry about it. We'll we'll talk to you later. They never talk to them later if you even live. And then they take your technology or whatever you were working on, and you never see it again, but they know exactly where it's at. It's like this is it's a story that gets repeated over and over and over. No matter you find some glowing ball in your backyard, don't ever tell anybody about it, man. If you do, they're gonna c the men in black will show up and take that out of your hands. Definitely for sure. Find a a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Don't ever tell anybody about it.

SPEAKER_29 1:05:23

You know, the the more the more that we dig into some of these things, it's like, you know, Mel's Hole or or or you know, um the the Grand Canyon, you know, it it's there there's been stuff that's been being found and uh yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:05:34

Well and this is something that's been studied, and once you start studying it, then they come and take the scientists, and it's a l I mean what's happening right now with all these scientists that are missing, you know, with knowledge about different technologies, whatever they may be. It's all

Gaming As A Surveillance Channel

SPEAKER_32 1:05:53

the same story. Which you know leads us into our next segment because it's one something that all of us have probably We had in our homes, I'm really, really bad. Like, absolutely terrible at first person shooter games. I am like if it doesn't have a up, down, a left, right, and a BA and a select start, I'm probably not gonna be able to play it very good. Just like not that good. I'll be looking at the ground like, what am I doing? And all of a sudden the screen turns red and it's like game over, you know. There's no way I'm going online with that kind of credentials, but you know, I've always wondered who makes these games.

SPEAKER_20 1:06:36

Some of the games you grew up playing were not the safe private spaces you thought they were. Some of the people who paid for them were not the people named in the credits. Some of them weren't really games at all. They were something else entirely dressed up in a game's clothing.

SPEAKER_25 1:06:53

This is really what has changed. We have built a panopticon, but what sits at the top of it is a computer. That computer witnesses everything we do.

SPEAKER_18 1:07:03

Billions of dollars are spent spying on Americans, whether it's NSA or CIA or FBI.

SPEAKER_20 1:07:11

Imagine the data you've shared and all the hours you've spent gaming. Then scale that up to three billion people from every country on the planet, across the US, UK, all of Europe, China, Russia, Iran.

SPEAKER_25 1:07:22

And all this information that used to be ephemeral, right? Where were you when you were eight years old, you know? Um, where were you? Where'd you go after you had a bad breakup? You know, who'd you spend the night with? Who'd you call after? All this information used to be ephemeral, meaning it disappeared, right? Like the morning dew, it would be gone. No one would remember it. But now these things are stored. Now these things are saved.

SPEAKER_20 1:07:45

But the real truth is, if mass surveillance were the only crime here, this would be a much shorter story. But it's also about changing the past and engineering the future, maybe permanently for all of us.

SPEAKER_12 1:07:56

I think the military knows full well what it's doing, and I think their intent is to indoctrinate children at the youngest age.

SPEAKER_20 1:08:03

And the twisted irony is that the very medium intelligence agencies are actively targeting is the same medium that's been warning us for decades.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:12

What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context.

SPEAKER_20 1:08:24

That's from Metal Gear Solid 2, a game released in November 2001, two months after 9-11. It describes a shadowy AI network called the Patriots that secretly filters what information reaches the public, which is not far from what the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world years later. And then there's this prescient theory from Juice X, released in 2000. Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.

SPEAKER_34 1:08:49

The need to be observed and understood is once satisfied by God. Now, we can implement the same functionality with data market algorithms.

SPEAKER_20 1:08:58

Since then, gaming has evolved into a new frontier for intelligence operations and interventions, like when government intelligence operatives practically invaded World of Warcraft and Second Life.

SPEAKER_14 1:09:09

Anyone playing the game World of Warcraft as druids, death knights, warlocks could also have another designation, surveillance targets. According to newly disclosed classified documents, the NSA and its British counterpart have been infiltrating World of Warcraft, another online game called Second Life, and the Xbox Live console.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:30

There was actually one fictitious scenario presented at a conference in which players in the game were talking about casting a fire spell, but really they were talking about setting off a bomb outside the White House.

SPEAKER_20 1:09:40

Eventually, there were so many government agents in World of Warcraft from so many different agencies that they kept bumping into each other. The NSA had to set up a dedicated unit whose only job was to stop spies from one US agency from surveilling spies from another US agency inside a fantasy game. The official justification for this was counter-terrorism. And there was some truth in that. The Islamic State once revealed custom modifications of Grand Theft Auto V built to recruit fighters and let players re-enact real terror attacks. They also built playable replicas of terrorist attacks inside Minecraft, used as recruitment material aimed at children. And by the 2020s, the FBI was issuing formal public warnings about groups using Roblox to radicalize, groom, and in some cases coerce kids into harmful acts on camera.

SPEAKER_36 1:10:30

There's a lot of different approaches they take, but always employing some kind of deception, uh some kind of threat, or promises of money or gifts to get that young person to open up and talk to them.

SPEAKER_20 1:10:41

But there's also a long track history of sensitive military information getting leaked on games or by gamers that show you why the CIA wants a presence here. In April 2023, the most serious US intelligence breach in Snowden surfaced through a Minecraft Discord server called Thug Shaker Central. The leaker was a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman named Jack Texera, an intelligence analysis who'd been granted top secret clearance at the age of 19. He'd been photographing classified Pentagon documents on his family kitchen's table and posting them to roughly 40 gamers in his Discord group to win arguments and show off. He was eventually sentenced to 15 years in prison. And it wasn't a one-off. For years, players of the tank game War Thunder have been leaking genuine classified military documents to win forum arguments about how accurately their tanks are modeled in the game. That list includes the British Challenger 2 tank, the American F-15E Strike Eagle, the A864 Apache Technical Manual, the AV8B Harrier, multiple Russian and Chinese main battle tanks, and a full 730-page dossier on the Eurofighter Typhoon.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:58

An action that quickly got the UK Ministry of Defense involved. Then three months later, a French player claiming to be a crew member in a Leclerc Serie 2 tank in service since 1992, again got into an argument about the capabilities of their tank. And again posted part of the tank's operation manual.

SPEAKER_20 1:12:15

Come on, guys! But what the intelligence community really wants from gaming isn't just what you did inside of it. It's what you believe when you come out. And they might just change the course of someone's life in the time between. And nowhere is this more pervasive than in the biggest video game franchise of all time. That

Call Of Duty And Context Control

SPEAKER_20 1:12:35

franchise is Call of Duty. Call of Duty is the biggest video game franchise in history. It's bigger even than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And for over 20 years, the US military has helped dictate its content. Since 2005, almost every mainline Call of Duty has employed a Pentagon military advisor. The most prolific is Hank Kearsey, a retired lieutenant colonel who served in the 82nd Airborne and taught at West Point. He stated his assistance was mostly for the purposes of gameplay and realism.

SPEAKER_31 1:13:05

So I'm able to give the last little bit of fidelity on making sure the game is as close as possible to what you would hear, feel, sound like as a as a real soldier in a game.

SPEAKER_20 1:13:16

When Modern Warfare came out, about six hours in, the player reaches a mission set on a road the game calls Tariq Amot. In English, that means the highway of death. It involves a convoy of civilians trying to flee, bombed from the air, and hundreds of dead. In the game, the narrator says it was the Russians. On the night of February 26, 1991, US-led coalition forces bombed a retreating column of Iraqi soldiers and civilians, trying to escape at the end of the Gulf War. Aircraft disabled the vehicles at the front and rear to trap everyone in between, then spent hours bombing what was left. Seymour Hirsch later documented a US tank platoon opening fire on 350 surrendered unarmed Iraqi soldiers. The road earned its name because of what the coalition did to it under George H.W. Bush, and it's all publicly documented. The 2019 Modern Warfare reboot took that event, renamed the attackers, and handed it to the world as an example of what Russia was doing in the present day. This is exactly what the Colonel in Metal Gear Solid 2 described. Not just the control of content, but the control of context. And the loop goes both ways, with COD actively galvanizing interest in US Army recruitment and supporting training.

SPEAKER_31 1:14:51

He also thought, told me it's a great training product. I've had him link the Xboxes together, and the sergeant will actually train his teams with the Modern Warfare game.

SPEAKER_20 1:15:00

Call of Duty Rabbit Hole gets a whole lot stranger though. By 2014, the franchise had released Black Ops and Black Ops 2, and the man who directed both of them was called Dave Anthony. In September 2014, he left Activision and joined the Atlantic Council, one of Washington's most influential foreign policy institutions, funded by Lockheed Martin, NATO, and the US State Department. Specifically, he joined the Art of Future War project, hired to imagine new forms of terrorist attacks. For his first conference appearance, Anthony presented a scenario arguing how easy it would be for terrorists to carry out a lone wolf attack on a hotel in Las Vegas.

SPEAKER_38 1:15:38

One of my great fears, which I'm going to use as an example of this, is what would happen if this attack took place on our mainland, and I'm going to use Las Vegas as an example. It could be that you have 100 each of these guys who may be on soil on our soil right now, who may even be US citizens, who could legally walk into whatever gun store they choose, buy some assault rifles, and start attacking soft targets. And that the instability that this would cause to our country would be incredible and immense.

SPEAKER_20 1:16:13

Three years later, on October 1st, 2017, very eerily, three years to the exact date of that talk getting posted online, a man named Steven Paddock checked in to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas and opened fire on a country music festival below. 60 people were killed and 800 wounded, and it remains one of the deadliest and most mysterious mass shootings by a single perpetrator in American history. Incidentally, in that same talk, Anthony explicitly names Edward Snowden as a villain.

SPEAKER_38 1:16:46

Edward Snowden looks like the sort of head of the chess club. And um you know, he one individual with technology in the wrong hands and information in the wrong hands can cause massive instability and destabilization to the country these days.

SPEAKER_20 1:17:01

And he isn't an outlier. Activision is bristling with people who've spent careers in the national security state. Cod, meanwhile, is just the tip of this iceberg. While there are many examples of games created with military consulting, which is fair from an accuracy and gameplay perspective, Full Spectrum Warrior released on Xbox in 2004 is a more unique case. What looks like a normal retail game was actually a Pentagon training simulator with a civilian skin pulled over the top. There was a cheat code that unlocked the military training build underneath. This is the cheat code itself. When you enter it, an in-game message pops up to tell you this is for the US military only. There are a handful of other obvious titles that were guided by government interests too. Like the Tom Clancy series, which reinforced US military dominance while stereotyping numerous other nations as their own moral enemies. But once, the opposite happened. Take Speckops the line, which halfway through forces the player to commit a white phosphorus attack on civilians that was deliberately modeled on a real US war crime in Iraq. Clearly, this did not have Pentagon support. And then it suspiciously bombed. The lead writer later said no major publisher would ever find anything like it again. So when you stop and think about that, games have drifted a long way from their origins as a form of social critique or even political dissent. In the late 90s and 2000s, games like Juice X, Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock, and Command and Conquer Red Alert stood toe-to-toe with the best films of their era. They warned us about surveillance states, military-industrial corruption, the dangers of unchecked AI, and the moral cost of war. They didn't just entertain you, they argued with you and critically they challenged your worldview. Snowden has said that he played Metal Gear Solid as a teenager, and that this affected how he came to think about how governments would spy on their populations. Even Call of Duty was once more willing to push into uncomfortable territory. In Modern Warfare 2 back in 2009, the player goes undercover with a Russian ultra-nationalist terror cell that then massacres civilians at a Moscow airport. At the end of the mission, the cell's leader kills the undercover American operative and then leaves his body behind, making it look like the US carried out the attack. The attack is a false flag designed to frame the United States and trigger a war with Russia. The mission was infamously called No Russian. But you've got to notice the boundary it never crosses. The US isn't behind the attack. The player is placed inside the atrocity, but the responsibility is still with the enemy despite it being deliberately provocative. By 2019, that line had hardened. The ambiguity was stripped away, the enemies made clearer, and in that one case, a real-world US military action was reworked into something attributed to Russian forces. Today, the biggest games on the planet do something close to the opposite of what they once did. They model real US military hardware in extreme detail. The enemies reinforce an orchestrated worldview. They then get reviewed for the realism of their gunplay, not the seriousness of their politics, and the quality has dropped through the floor. Who can remember being excited by Call of Duty release or any big game title release at all? Probably one of the few major games that effectively paradises and criticizes America is GTA, because the studio Rockstar North is based in Scotland. While manipulating games and their narratives have clearly been a top priority for decades, at other times the strategy has been much more deliberate and intentional. There's another game deliberately engineered over decades to recruit people, more specifically young people and kids, into the armed forces.

Recruitment Games And Military Twitch

SPEAKER_20 1:20:35

In July 2002, the US Army released a video game called America's Army. It's not only a game about the army, it's a game by the army. Free to download, free to play, funded with tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars and designed from the ground up as a recruitment tool for teenagers. And it worked. US Army surveys found that by 2008, the game had more impact on recruiting than any other form of army advertising combined. One in five military academy cadets entering West Point in 2005 had played the game before enlisting. The US military is legally barred from enlisting anyone under 17. America's army was built to start the marketing conversation much earlier, which they themselves admitted. The guy who designed that game was called Casey Wadniski, who allegedly wrote the following: America's Army was explicitly designed to target 12 and 13-year-old boys who had yet to decide what to do with their lives. It then shut down in 2022 after 20 years, but by then the recruitment strategy had already moved with the times and ventured onto social media. In late 2018, the US Army then entered Generation Z by opening up an official Twitch channel. The Navy and the Air Force followed. Recruiters, soldiers in uniform paid by the taxpayer started spending their working days playing Call of Duty and Fortnite on livestream, all just happily chatting with the audience. And the audience was mostly children. To pull kids in, the channel ran what looked like giveaways for free stuff. Except the link didn't go to a contest, it went to a military recruitment form, and there were no winners. Gamers started doing speedrun competitions to see who could get banned by the US Army the fastest. Twitch eventually went to war with the US Army, ordering them to stop running the fake giveaways because they violated gambling laws. But it still happens on a smaller scale today. Up until now, the agency's influence in gaming has mostly been about guns and war, but it actually hides in some really unsuspecting places, including in benign games that don't even look American. In July

Pokemon Go And Mapping The World

SPEAKER_20 1:22:54

2016, a mobile game launched that got a billion people to walk outside, point their phone cameras at their own streets, and then send the footage back to a server. If you didn't play it yourself, you know people who did, and that game was Pokemon Go. It was developed by Neantic, a company founded by a former US State Department official. So if you thought this game was a Japanese export, you were wrong. Before Neantic, that official had run a satellite mapping startup called Keyhoe, and in February 2003, Keyhole received early stage funding from InQtel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. The Q is a reference to Q from James Bond. Within weeks of the CIA's investment, Keyhole's mapping software was used by the Pentagon to brief US military commanders on bombing targets in Iraq. Google eventually acquired the company in 2004 for $35 million and renamed the software Google Earth. Pokemon Go launched with more daily users than Twitter within a week. Every street, every park, every schoolyard all scanned and sent to the server with full user permissions. The US Energy Department got worried enough to call Neantic directly because Pokestops had started appearing inside top secret nuclear facilities. The IDF even banned soldiers from playing Pokemon Go in July 2016 after Pokestops and Pokemon spawned inside active military bases. Some marinas crewed in the UK's nuclear submarines weren't allowed to play the game because it gave away their position. At its peak, Pokemon Go would have revealed more about top secret locations than the world's most powerful satellite imagery systems. It was nothing short of an international espionage crisis delivered in the form of the most harmless game imaginable. And this cuts right to the heart of why gaming is an amazing tool for intelligence. It's an interactive Trojan horse that no one suspects of harm. Many countries banned the game outright or called it a spy front. Then in 2024, an Iantic executive was asked on camera whether the company's large geospatial model, meaning a 3D map of the real world, built from a decade of Pokemon Go player footage, could then be sold to governments and militaries. Listen to his answer. Could you see uh militaries' governments seeking to use LGMs and purchase them from you? I I could definitely see it. I could definitely see it. That's pretty ominous when you remember that the company at the center of it was three degrees removed from the CIA and its investors. While the CIA's fingerprints on Pokemon Go are oblique, traceable only through corporate history and venture capital filings, another game developer's story is much more direct. Because there are very human consequences to the geopolitical side of gaming. The same as there was for Gary DeVore, who was found at the bottom of a ravine with his hands chopped off when he was making a film about exposing top US officials. This story ends with a developer in a cell on the other side of the world on television confessing to things he says he didn't do. He only just scraped his way out of the situation alive. His name is Amir Hekmati. Born in Arizona in 1983 to Iranian American parents. He served four years as a US Marine. After leaving the military, he worked as a contractor on projects for the US Department of Defense, including consulting on Arabic language content for a New York-based video game studio called Kuma Games. Kuma made a free-to-play first-person shooter called Kuma War. It was a strange, controversial product. Every few weeks, Kuma released a new playable mission recreating a real US military operation, often within days of its happening, like killing Osama bin Laden, which you can see here.

SPEAKER_16 1:27:04

So I tried my best to, you know, keep my head up and uh withstand all the pressures that were put upon me, some of which were very inhumane and unjust.

SPEAKER_20 1:27:12

And then in December 2011, Iranian State Television broadcast a videotaped confession and sentenced him to death for espionage. The sentence was overturned on appeal, and he was finally released in January 2016 as a part of the prisoner swap. The details surrounding the whole situation remain mysterious today.

SPEAKER_16 1:27:31

You know, I was at a point where um I had just sort of accepted the fact that I was gonna be spending 10 years in prison. Um, so this this was a surprise, and I I just feel extremely blessed to see my government do so much for me and the other Americans.

SPEAKER_20 1:27:45

At some point, you've got to ask where all of this

Training The Next Drone Operators

SPEAKER_20 1:27:48

is heading. Because gaming is linked to intelligence operations is now in the process of coming full circle. Games offer a unique field of intervention as we both interact with them and consume them. They also direct. And indirectly train people in the art of modern warfare. And the indirect part is almost more nefarious. Joe Rogan and Theo Von discussed how movies helped engage soldiers' instincts to shoot to kill.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:12

So in World War One, people were shooting, but they weren't shooting at the actual enemy. And so then they realized, well, we've got to do something about that. And so after that, they started creating all these really patriotic war movies where the guys are heroes, so then the next group of people that go to war are all gonna be indoctrinated with these films.

SPEAKER_20 1:28:31

Arguably, however, games did much more work here. The military started using game type software and Xbox controllers for drone strikes in the mid-2000s, and it was a deliberate planned move. The Pentagon even openly explained why they made that choice. A leading defense researcher P.W. Singer put it plainly in 2009 in his book Wired for War. Quote, you have a generation coming in that's already been trained in their use, so they learn very quickly. A UN special investigator Philip Austin looked at the setup and described it at a risk of, quote, developing a PlayStation mentality to killing. And just look at how it's progressed. Militaries around the world are actively developing systems that automatically generate targets from surveillance data. Every person inside a given population gets a score. The software can pick who lives and who dies. A human might spend a few seconds reviewing the recommendation before it's approved, but that loop is getting closed all the time. It is quite literally the video game the whole industry has been moving toward for 40 years, and the people who would one day run the system could have been training since childhood without even realizing it. Slowly but surely the Overton window of cyber warfare has creaked open, leading us to a future that those 2000 cyberpunk dystopias warned us about.

SPEAKER_25 1:29:50

That observes everyone and judges everyone in a way that we already know is not fair. It is not used properly, it is not used appropriately, it is not used effectively, and I believe uh does more harm than good. Uh and why are we trying to create uh a system that sees everything we do and judges us, which is effectively trying to invent God uh when we know that it is a dark and vengeful one, um we need to think about the kind of technologies that we are putting in place that rule us, but we do not effectively control. You can't awaken someone who's pretending to be asleep.

SPEAKER_20 1:30:36

That's the line Snowden closed his last long interview on. He took it from a friend who told him it was an old Native American saying. It means you can shout as loudly as you want at someone, but if they decided not to hear you, you'll never get through to them. The story the public got about mass surveillance was absorbed, repackaged, and moved on from. The strategy behind it didn't shrink. It evolved exponentially. It implemented cutting-edge cameras, it wrote smarter software, it created friendlier interfaces, it entered every corner of our lives. The television, the console next to it, the monitor, the laptop, the controller in your hand, the headset on your head, the friends in the chat, the map of your house, the face on the camera, the voice on the mic. They built the world you play in. And so while you were playing it, they were learning everything about you. They turned one of the last bastions of hope and freedom into yet another field of intervention. And in the end, after all of it is said and done, the most dangerous game ever made probably wasn't the one you played, it was the one playing you.

SPEAKER_32 1:31:38

Yep. Bloody games, man.

SPEAKER_29 1:31:42

I mean, i i it's not surprising, right? I mean, you know, it's surprised me. Once again, uh keeping track of uh of the citizens and finding out who has uh maybe a special talent or just anything like that.

SPEAKER_32 1:31:55

Well, not only you know, and I remember back it it was probably 10, over 10 years ago, uh one of my neighbors, he was, you know, uh really good at playing the NHL game on the PlayStation. Like like really, really good. And so the EA sports people showed up to his house to like interview and watch him play the game and ask him all kinds of questions and all this stuff because he was that good at online hockey. Um and that's just a video game company, man.

SPEAKER_29 1:32:27

That's crazy. Do you think so?

SPEAKER_32 1:32:29

If that's just a video game company and you've got war games that are so sophisticated that they show exact spec specifications of tanks and guns and rocket launchers and grenades, and it's literally teaching these people tactical warfare. Why would they not have CIA or some special interest show up at their door and recruit them?

SPEAKER_29 1:32:54

Well, here it is, too, is like, you know, uh they have all this AI and and remote control stuff, you know. I mean, they just rescue.

SPEAKER_32 1:33:00

That's where the future of the warfare is.

SPEAKER_29 1:33:03

Right. And they just rescue those two guys from the helicopter that crashed in the uh the vermouth with uh with the uh those boats, and they were all remote control, so I don't imagine you know, it just uh yeah, they're training people without us knowing that they're training us. Right. I mean it it it it it's crazy.

SPEAKER_32 1:33:18

And I was telling Eric before we started this that you know last week on our episode we were talking and they actually brought it up about how James Holmes was top three in the world on World of Warcraft. Right, and now on this video they're talking about how the CIA has been it's been known that they've infiltrated that game to spy on people to gain interest or special interest stuff, you know. It's like how is this not all connected, man? I've told I I literally was saying it last week, and then I found this video and I was like, you gotta be kidding me, dude.

SPEAKER_29 1:33:56

Right. And we all know that you know the CIA will eliminate people just because they need to know what will happen.

SPEAKER_32 1:34:04

Well, and especially like you've seen videos where or movies back in the day where I can't remember the um the Irish guy he was pretty popular for a little while. Anyway, he was like recruited by like Al Pacino. Al Pacino is like the head of the CIA or something, but this guy had some kind of technology where he could basically like hack computers and he was doing it as some expo sneakers or something like that, or no, okay but uh hackers or something like maybe.

SPEAKER_29 1:34:38

Yeah, because I think there was a movie called Hack.

SPEAKER_32 1:34:40

Yeah, it was something like that, but it was basically where they recruited him into the CIA, you know, and it's the same exact thing, dude, where they just show up at like some expo. Hey, this kid's got some knowledge. James Holmes was one of those smart kids, one of the ones that stood out. They always said, Well, he was you know, one of the isolated people didn't really, you know, do much except for hide in his bedroom, but then they were talking about all these different programs he was in after school. Right. Well, he's even in track. Maybe that's why that's not a person that isolates.

SPEAKER_29 1:35:13

It could be an MK Ultra, you know, an MP.

SPEAKER_32 1:35:15

That's why it's easy to manipulate him because he wasn't isolated and he was, you know, uh just uh so all of this stuff, even the DMT and the hacker stuff at the very beginning, all of this stuff is all connected. We 100% live in a dystopian surveillance state now.

SPEAKER_29 1:35:34

Which is funny, right? Because you know, in that they talked about the whole Russian thing, and you remember back in the 80s, you know, oh the Russians are doing this and doing that. Well, tables have turned, don't we think for reels, man.

SPEAKER_32 1:35:47

I mean, think about how it was when we were kids, dude. Like back in the late 80s, even. You know, nobody cared about this kind of stuff. They were worried about gas prices, right? You know, prices of groceries and stuff, but we didn't, you know, all this by the time it gets to 2026, they're gonna be flying cars, man. That's what we thought. You know, sneakers that you don't have to tie.

SPEAKER_29 1:36:08

Fly flying, uh, flying skateboards.

SPEAKER_32 1:36:11

Like magnetically float. You know, which they do have some pretty rad rides out there or like these one-wheels and scooters.

SPEAKER_29 1:36:22

We do have the Jetsons kind of thing. I mean, we can FaceTime somebody with the phone.

SPEAKER_32 1:36:26

So I mean they're they got the Dick Tracy watches.

SPEAKER_22 1:36:43

Yeah.

MKUltra LSD Town And Final Thoughts

SPEAKER_22 1:36:45

The CIA secretly dosed an entire French town with LSD. 500 people hallucinated for days. 1951, Pont Saint-Esprit. Citizens woke up screaming that their food was poisoned, their neighbors were monsters, their own bodies were melting. One man tried to drown himself, believing he was a snake. Another jumped from a window convinced he could fly. Five died. For 50 years, it was blamed on bad bread, until declassified documents revealed the CIA had spiked the town's water supply as part of Project MK Ultra. They wanted to see if an entire population could be controlled with drugs. The answer was yes. Terrifyingly, yes.

SPEAKER_32 1:37:26

Not really, man. That totally makes sense. Well, right, but I mean exactly what we've been saying.

SPEAKER_29 1:37:31

Yeah, it's it's you know Oh, it was the bread. It was the bread. You know, five five people died. Well, geez, man, how much acid did they give them? I mean, holy moly, dude.

SPEAKER_32 1:37:40

For well, I mean, it probably wasn't that they died from the acid. Well, no, probably what they did after they were high on the acid.

SPEAKER_29 1:37:47

Yeah, I mean, that one guy tried flying. I mean, shit, you know what they do, man. And that's the thing, is they don't care about you know the sacrifices that you know.

SPEAKER_32 1:37:54

It's all study, it's an experiment. Everything's an experiment, man. Like COVID was an experiment. All this stuff, it's an experiment.

SPEAKER_29 1:38:04

Pretty trippy though. Literally, bro.

SPEAKER_32 1:38:10

They didn't ban bread. How come they didn't ban bread?

SPEAKER_29 1:38:14

Right? You know, it's still around. Oh, just don't eat the mold though. Right. And then they found out that, you know, that mold makes penicillin. I mean, you know, that helps you out. Don't eat the moldy bread.

SPEAKER_32 1:38:25

A lot of people can't take penicillin.

SPEAKER_29 1:38:27

You know what I just realized? We we we've been talking about tripping a lot, and I've got a freaking freaking title. That's like, wow, that's kind of a weird coincidence day that it kind of just all came together like that. We're reformed. We're reform no we're not.

SPEAKER_32 1:38:49

I'm reformed, man. I don't do anything wrong. Like I don't I don't think it's wrong. You know, if you want to d trip out and get all like spiritual and all that stuff, hey man, good for you. Just not for me, just because I you know, I just don't do certain things anymore because it's just not for me. Right. But, you know, hey, to each his own, and especially like, you know, if you're gonna be experimented on at least you should have a good time doing it. So why not have a smile on your face and watch some trippy stuff? For sure.

SPEAKER_29 1:39:21

I'm not, you know, oh no, it's w with all that.

SPEAKER_32 1:39:23

I mean, that's just uh I uh I think they should have been able to continue to experiment on things to find out what it can be used for and good reasons, not just for wow, look at what it makes you trip, you know, how much it makes you trip and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_29 1:39:40

There should be a little bit more around to it, but I think they started doing that with the uh psilocybin now, which is kind of nice. You know, they kind of lightened up on uh the psilocybin side, but uh yeah, the DMT, that's yeah, I could definitely see why you'd want to be w with somebody that guide you through it.

SPEAKER_32 1:39:56

Yeah, that's a that's a trip, man. That's a lot of normal everyday stuff nowadays.

SPEAKER_29 1:40:05

Yeah, man. I mean it was everyday stuff with us. I mean, back in you know, our youth.

SPEAKER_32 1:40:11

Did it ever make you wonder where it came from?

SPEAKER_29 1:40:14

What?

SPEAKER_32 1:40:15

What? The stuff that you used to take. Oh do you ever think, I wonder who made this? Well, I when you'd be all tripped out like in the middle of the night, it's two o'clock in the morning, and you're like, you know, probably peaking or just just after the peak, and you're like, man, whoever made this did a good job. You're like, whoa, I wonder who did make it.

SPEAKER_29 1:40:38

Uh

Thanks For Listening And Wrap

SPEAKER_29 1:40:39

yeah. All right, everybody. Thank you once again for tuning in to our anything and everything and podcast. It was definitely episode this one, wasn't it? That's right.