The Joe Rogan Experience - #2419 - John Lisle

John Lisle has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas, where he is now a professor of the history of science. His two books on the intelligence community are "The Dirty Tricks Department" and "Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA."www.johnlislehistorian.comhttps://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250338747/projectmindcontrol/ Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visible. Live in the know. Join today at https://www.visible.com Don’t miss out on all the action - Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up at https://dkng.co/rogan or with my promo code ROGAN •GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY).Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). Pass-thru of per wager tax may apply in IL. 1 per new customer. Must register new account to receive reward Token. Must select Token BEFORE placing min. $5 bet to receive $200 in Bonus Bets if your bet wins. Min. -500 odds req. Token and Bonus Bets are single-use and non-withdrawable. Token expires 1/11/26. Bonus Bets expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Ends 1/4/26 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Duration: 2h 45m
Broadcast on: 27 Nov 2025
Audio Format: other

Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visible. Live in the know. Join today at https://www.visible.com Don’t miss out on all the action - Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up at https://dkng.co/rogan or with my promo code ROGAN •GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY).Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). Pass-thru of per wager tax may apply in IL. 1 per new customer. Must register new account to receive reward Token. Must select Token BEFORE placing min. $5 bet to receive $200 in Bonus Bets if your bet wins. Min. -500 odds req. Token and Bonus Bets are single-use and non-withdrawable. Token expires 1/11/26. Bonus Bets expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Ends 1/4/26 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I know you're in the middle of a project. You're doing a project with David Chase, right? It's about MKUltra. Yes, he has gotten the rights to this book, you know, this book project mind control. And he's interested in adapting it into a series. Well, I am endlessly fascinated with the subject. So as soon as I heard about it, and the series is coming, but you could talk to the guy who wrote the book down like, "Let's go." So here we go, project mind control, Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy of MKUltra, which really is a tragedy. You know, I really got, and I knew about it, but I really didn't get completely obsessed with it until chaos, Tom O'Neill's book, if you read that. And when you realize what the MKUltra program involved, and how long it ran, and how insane it is, and it essentially had no oversight, and these people were just running these wild mind experiments on American citizens, and nobody went to jail for it. Yeah, that's part of the crazy thing. One of the things I really try to focus on in the book, especially the second half of the book, are the consequences of MKUltra in society, but also just what happened to these people afterwards, the victims of MKUltra. They launched several lawsuits against the CIA, and basically really nothing much came out of it. They got paid a little bit of money, but the people who perpetrated MKUltra, they didn't really face any consequences. And so I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things I really try to talk about in the latter part of the book are what are the failures of oversight that allowed this to happen? How is that possible? Within the CIA, be doing these kinds of drug experiments on people unwittingly, and yet never face any hardly consequences for their actions, so I delve into that pretty deeply. How did you get interested in the subject, like what was your introduction to it? I feel like my introduction is a little bit different probably from most people, because I didn't know that much about MKUltra, and I was doing my PhD at UT. And I studied the history of science, but my dissertation was on a group of scientists within the intelligence, they had connections to the intelligence community. They were called the science attachees out of the State Department. The State Department would send these science attachees to different embassies, American embassies around the world, and the CIA was very interested in these people, because hey, we have these scientists going abroad, maybe they can interrogate foreign scientists and figure out what kind of research they're doing. So that kind of led me into being interested in scientists within the intelligence community. From that, I learned about Sydney Gottlieb, but also mostly my initial interest was this man named Stanley Lovell, who was essentially the Sydney Gottlieb of the OSS. So prior to the CIA, the U.S. had the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and that was the U.S. kind of intelligence agency. And Stanley Lovell was in charge of a branch within the OSS called the Research and Development branch, and that was the branch that was composed of a group of scientists whose job was to basically invent the deadly weapons, create ingenious disguises, forge documents for secret agents that are center-broad. So my first book, the Jersey Tricks Department, it's about Stanley Lovell in that group. And one of the things they do are drug experiments, in truth drug experiments, trying to find

Transcription truncated.