#963 - John Lisle - Investigating The True History Of MKUltra & CIA Mind Control

Modern Wisdom

Chris Williamson

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Lisle is a historian and an author. The government’s history of secret experiments feels stranger than fiction. Covert projects, UFOs, mind reading, even studies of the occult. But no operation is more infamous than MKUltra. What really happened inside the CIA’s most notorious mind control experiment, and how much of its legacy still shapes our world today? Expect to learn where the CIA got their interest in mind control from, what the origins of MKUltra were and how it got it’s name, the double lives of the head scientists behind the project, how LSD and other drugs we’re used in secret mind control experiments by the government and if any of their findings had any objective value, the most unethical experiments MKUltra did and what ended up leading to it's downfall and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% off Echo’s Hydrogen Flask at https://echowater.com/modernwisdom Get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (00:00) Researching MKUltra, The CIA, & Mind Control (15:14) MKUltra's Origin & LSD Experiments (26:41) The Main Scientists Behind MKUltra (30:41) CIA Funding & Celebrity Involvement (41:30) Experiments On Mental Health (47:27) The Worst & Unethical Brain Experiments (52:27) Did MKUltra Create Anything Useful? (1:01:14) The Downfall Of MKUltra (1:09:30) The "Project Monarch" Conspiracy Theory (1:14:44) Find Out More About John Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	how did you find all of this out? Like, where did you do all of the research for this stuff?
0:04.6	This is, I didn't think that you could top the insanity of the last book that you wrote, but you've
0:10.3	managed to do it. Congratulations. Thank you. This book was really exciting because I found a lot
0:16.5	of new documents about MK Ultra, specifically some depositions, about maybe over a dozen
0:22.9	depositions that were taken in the 1980s as part of a lawsuit against the perpetrators of
0:27.9	MK Ultra, against the CIA. And as part of these depositions, I have the perpetrators,
0:34.3	Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MK Ultra, his right-hand man, Robert Lashbrook,
0:38.1	the head of the CIA, Richard Helms, they are questioned by these attorneys. And I have the
0:42.4	verbatim transcript of them talking about what they were doing in the CIA as part of MKULtra,
0:47.5	why they wanted to do this, how they got away with it. So I have some great transcript. So that's, that's really the basis of the book
0:54.4	are these verbatim dialogues, which is so exciting for a historian. Because usually in history,
0:59.6	you never get dialogue because nobody's there to write it down. You know, I'm not going to quote
1:02.8	something if I don't have the verbatim quote. That's usually a thing you can do in fiction to get
1:07.1	inside the heads of the readers or into the heads of the characters. But for me, I now have this dialogue, so I get to play with it and work with it.
1:13.9	And it's just been so fun getting into their heads and seeing what they say.
1:19.6	I'm interested in why the CIA was keen to look at mind control in any case.
1:27.3	What happens during the 40s and the 50s for them to consider, yeah, this would be a good idea.
1:34.1	This seems like an appropriate direction to go in.
1:37.1	There are a few triggering events that lead them to want to perform experiments in mind control.
1:42.7	And it's not just from the 40s or 50s, even further back,
1:45.4	if you go back to the 1890s, you have Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who's doing his
1:50.1	famous behavioral conditioning experiments. You know, if you ring a bell, can you get a dog to salivate?
	...

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