諾曼·奧勒：希特勒、納粹、毒品、二戰、閃電戰、LSD、MKUltra 與 CIA

Norman Ohler (00:00:00): Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it’s not the drugs, actually that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountain. If you, if you think monocausal, you would say that’s the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. You, it, it becomes a stalemate and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it’s bloody, and it’s nothing’s happening. It’s bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That’s why the high command said, “No, we’re not gonna do it. Norman Ohler (00:00:39): It’s stupid. But these three tank generals said, “Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains,” and Hitler was like, “Eh, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle,” basically. And they said, “No, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that wait for the action to happen, and then support this somehow. We’re going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We’re going to overpower the enemy. We’re going to be in France before they know it. Norman Ohler (00:01:16): We are already behind them, but it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights, and that was only possible if you don’t stop.” Suddenly, Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe for how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. Before that, he was kind of an outsider, like the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly, he became like… Norman Ohler (00:01:38): …”Okay, tell us, how does it work?” And he gave lectures in front of the officers and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case, methamphetamine. How much should be taken, at what intervals. This became a very big thing. And then Temmler had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines. And then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains. Lex Fridman (00:02:09): The following is a conversation with Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, a book that investigates what role psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, played in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians, Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor, give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as, “Very well-researched, serious piece of scholarship.” And Antony Beevor describes it as, “Remarkable work of research.” And it is, indeed, a remarkable work of research. Norman went deep into the archives using primary sources to uncover a perspective on Hitler and the Third Reich that has before this been mostly ignored by historians. He also wrote Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. Lex Fridman (00:03:04): And he’s now working on a new book with the possible title of Stoned Sapiens, a great title, looking at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Norman Ohler. Lex Fridman (00:03:31): Tell me the origin story of meth, methamphetamine, and Pervitin, its brand-name drug version, in the context of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Let’s start there. Norman Ohler (00:03:43): I think you’re right to ask about the context because without the context, it’s not really understandable. So what was the situation? In the ’20s, the Nazi movement basically started, and it started in Bavarian beer halls. So alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy that didn’t drink was Hitler. He was a teetotaler, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich. So alcohol and national socialism are very closely connected. At the same time, in the ’20s, in Berlin, there was a completely different thing going on. People were taking all kinds of drugs. This had to do, actually, with the defeat of Germany in the First World War. I mean, the context is a big context. Norman Ohler (00:04:32): The Versailles Treaty had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty was written basically by the Western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. And I’m certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Versailles Treaty treated Germany somewhat unfairly. I mean, it laid all the blame on Germany. And, I mean, a war is a very complex thing, and the First World War, to examine how it actually started, is a very complex story, and there are many factors to it. But the Versailles Treaty just said it was Germany’s fault, and then Germany had to make all these payments to the allies. It couldn’t create a new economy. It couldn’t have a new army. Norman Ohler (00:05:31): So the economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap, and the people were also using substances that were very cheap in huge quantities. So while in Bavaria, they were drinking alcohol, and alcohol in the brain stimulates behavior, group behavior, us against them. You can actually examine this. A neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. While in Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphine, there was cocaine, there was mescaline, there was ether. So people were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset. It was all… You know, you didn’t behave in a way that some kind of authority would like you to behave in, because the authority had just lost the First World War, and there was no real authority in Berlin. Norman Ohler (00:06:23): People were doing whatever they wanted to do, and they were intoxicating themselves in the way they wanted to. So the population, in a way, if you just look at Munich and Berlin, was growing apart. Like, there were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, and then there were these weird, diverse, LGBTQ, whatever kind of scene in Berlin, like actresses sniffing ether in the morning and then making crazy moves. Lex Fridman (00:06:51): Could you speak to the nature of the motivation for the drug use in Berlin at the time? Was it rebellion? Was it a way to deal with the difficult economic depression? Was it just the natural thing that young people do to explore themselves, to understand the world, to develop their culture? What do we understand about drug use there? Norman Ohler (00:07:14): All of these factors come together. But it was the first time in modern history, in Germany at least, that there was no emperor. Before that, Kaiser Wilhelm, everything was very strict, you know? You had to… You couldn’t go crazy, you know, as a young person. You couldn’t be a young person. But now in the Weimar Republic in the ’20s, you could. No one stopped you, so people went crazy. That’s what made Berlin into the city that it still somehow is. And maybe later we’ll talk about contemporary Berlin. It kind of… It still has that vibe, you know? That’s why people still come to Berlin. Drugs are cheap, you can move however you want, there’s no authority. Norman Ohler (00:07:54): So that created a rift between the Nazis in Munich, and they always hated Berlin and what was going on in Berlin. So, for example, Goebbels, the later propaganda minister, he called the situation in Berlin the “hated asphalt reality of Berlin.” He hated that. And when the Nazis then were able to take power in 1933, one of the first things they did was to really prosecute people who were taking drugs, because they wanted to, you know, bring everyone back into the fold. And I think that’s… You asked what was the reason for people taking so many drugs. They were accessible, they were cheap, but I think the most important thing is that they let you find yourself, maybe, or lose yourself, you know? Also possible, you know? Lex Fridman (00:08:42): Can we also focus attention there, because you have a connection to this place, Berlin, and this part of the world. Can you just briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even deeper the personal aspect of this? Because you understand the music of the people, the land, its history. There’s something you can only really understand if you’ve been there and you’ve taken it in. And we’ll return to this topic in multiple contexts, but in this particular way, as one human being who writes about this place, what’s your own story? Norman Ohler (00:09:19): I grew up in West Germany, and this was during the Cold War. And Berlin, the walled-in city, was always like a big fascination because there was a wall, there was actually a wall in the city preventing people from moving into another part. And I was from the west, fortunate enough to be from the free west, so I could travel to Berlin, and I could leave. I could look at it, and I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very vibey place. And then when the wall came down, I was still in school, but I immediately got into the car of my parents and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. And then Berlin really, in the ’90s, became a place that was very attractive to me, and I moved there then in the ’90s. Norman Ohler (00:10:04): I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York, and I loved New York before Giuliani became mayor. It was… He ruined the city. Before that, it was not gentrified. Or let’s say he introduced gentrification, and gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in the ungentrified New York City for like 300 bucks a month rent, and everyone I knew was an artist. Lex Fridman (00:10:27): You loved the diversity of it? Norman Ohler (00:10:28): Yeah, I loved it. I wrote my first novel there. I took LSD for the first time in Downtown Manhattan on a Saturday night. Lex Fridman (00:10:35): So you’re kind of like a German Kerouac-type character, but moved a few decades forward. Norman Ohler (00:10:40): I wouldn’t compare myself to another writer, but I think Kerouac is pretty cool. But he’s an amphetamine writer. On The Road was apparently written in two weeks on amphetamines. And it’s good. You know, amphetamines are not bad per se. We can also talk about these so-called bad drugs, you know, because basically they’re neutral. But let’s not lose the thread. Lex Fridman (00:11:00): Yes, yes. New York, Berlin… Norman Ohler (00:11:01): Even though New York was… Oh, yeah. And then I was in New York. I was in a health food store, one of the first. There weren’t health food stores back then a lot, but there was one on First Avenue. And suddenly there was an announcement, which was unusual in the health food store. I think it was called Prana, Prana Foods. And the announcement was that Kurt Cobain had just shot himself. It was like… And I had been, actually, and still am, a Nirvana fan. I’ve seen one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York City, and it was amazing. But he killed himself, and the next day, I received a music cassette from a friend of mine from Berlin with electronic music, and I realized that there had been a paradigm shift, obviously. Rock music with the hero on stage was dead. Norman Ohler (00:11:47): Now it was, you know, dance, electronic music, which a lot of people today think it’s a kind of simplistic music form, but it’s actually a very highly intelligent music form. At least it was in the ’90s. People were really experimenting with that music. That was the new music. That was actually the reason I moved to Berlin. I really… I decided I’d leave New York City and move to Berlin. And then in Berlin, to answer your question, I fell in love with something that probably reminded me of the ’20s, even though I wasn’t there in the ’20s. But that really… The city was very open. The wall had just… Was still, you know… I mean, it’s a few years later, but still, the wall, it felt like it just came down. There was… Germany was… Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany. Norman Ohler (00:12:35): That was still in Bonn. So Berlin was a very cheap, and cultural, and crazy city, probably a bit like in the ’20s, actually. And that’s how I fell in love with it, and that’s how I became interested in this electronic scene. I mean, I visited many dance venues then, so-called clubs. Lex Fridman (00:12:56): It’s one of the hubs in the world of electronic music. Norman Ohler (00:12:59): They claim that techno was kind of invented in Berlin, but it also comes from Detroit. So Detroit and Berlin are like the techno hubs, I would say. Lex Fridman (00:13:09): Electronic music is a soundtrack for some of the most interesting experiences this earth has ever created, right? It just gets people together in some interesting ways. So it’s not just the music itself, it’s the experiences that the music enables. Norman Ohler (00:13:23): Well, in Germany, we had a situation that the wall actually kept people apart. People didn’t know each other. But because the wall came down, people suddenly met in abandoned buildings in the center of Berlin, which had been owned by the socialist state of East Germany. The most famous club, Tresor… Tresor means, like, vault. It was the big vault with the big doors, so that’s where Tresor was, the club. Lex Fridman (00:13:50): It’s so funny that the echo 100 years later, Berlin had all these young partygoers using drugs, and then Munich with the beer, and that’s where Hitler came out. So is that what we’re supposed to imagine in the early days of the Nazi party when Hitler’s giving the speeches to just a handful of folks, they’re all drunk? Norman Ohler (00:14:12): Well, it is a fact that the movement came out of the Bürgerbräukeller. It’s a certain restaurant pub in Munich, and that was not only a beer hall, that was also a political venue. And it was a right-wing venue. It was for right-wing populists. People like communists wouldn’t use it, even though communists are in many ways quite similar to the right wing, especially back then. But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn’t mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you’re drunk you also get aggressive against others. He could play with that, you know? Lex Fridman (00:14:59): So drunk, aggressive towards others, but drunk in a group. Norman Ohler (00:15:03): It constitutes the group also. If everyone is on the same alcohol level. You know, you can just go to Oktoberfest in Munich, which is not a political thing, but everyone… You can kind of sense how it originated. And actually, the first time the Nazis tried to grab power was the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. I mean, that’s a historical event. It took place in 1923, and it was after a drunk night where they suddenly decided, “Now we’re going to do it.” So they came out of the Bürgerbräukeller, and they were all drunk except Hitler, and they just tried to overtake the Munich government, and they miserably failed because it was just a stupid drunk idea. They were like, “Yeah, let’s just do it.” And the Bavaria police, quite sober that day, they just shot them to the ground. Norman Ohler (00:15:49): Hitler was almost killed. He just jumped behind his bodyguard. Göring, during the Beer Hall Putsch, was wounded in his stomach with a, I think a gunshot. That’s why he became a morphine addict. So this Beer Hall Putsch in ’23 had severe effects. Also, they were sentenced to prison, and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison. Lex Fridman (00:16:11): All these little events come together. It’s so interesting that for them it was just life, but now we look back at these critical moments in history that turned the tides of human civilization, right? So Hitler could have died there, and these characters, Göring, that became larger than life… …That influenced the lives and the deaths and the suffering of millions, all… First of all, it could have been stopped then, and whatever that means when you look back at history. But all those are just human beings developing their ideas, growing, developing groups, developing ideologies, and using drugs or drinking. Norman Ohler (00:16:53): I mean, that’s why I thought it’s interesting, for example, to examine Hitler’s drug use. When I announced that to a historian while I was doing research, he helped me a lot with methamphetamine and the army, a proper medicine historian from the University of Ulm. And then I said, “Now I’m interested in Hitler.” He said, “No, don’t. This is not interesting. This is not serious…” He said, “This is not serious history.” But it’s… You know, even Hitler was a person, you know? And if you understand, for example, the substance abuse of a person, of course you understand more about that person. And historians never had that idea before. Kershaw, for example, who is really a great… He’s very knowledgeable about national socialism. Norman Ohler (00:17:36): Like many British historians, they always know more about German history than the German historians, but Kershaw really does. I think he’s really good. But in his biography of Hitler, he just writes one sentence like, “And then he had a crazy doctor called Morell who gave him dubious medications and drugs,” and he stops there, and then he goes on to describe whatever. Lex Fridman (00:18:01): Yeah, we should say that Ian Kershaw is widely considered to be probably one of the greatest biographers of Hitler. Norman Ohler (00:18:07): I think he wrote the best biography of Hitler. Lex Fridman (00:18:10): Which is so important. Your work is really important because it opens a whole new perspective on the lives of the individuals and the machinery of the Nazi military that historians haven’t looked at. It’s so interesting that you can unlock those perspectives. And that’s the underlying, really, the foundation of our conversation today and of your work, is there are layers to this thing. You can look at the tactics of war and the strategic level of war, the operational level of war. You could look at the human suffering of war, the love stories. You could look at the hate, the psychology of propaganda, or you could look at the individual things, substances consumed by the individuals that make up the Nazi Party leadership and the soldiers. Lex Fridman (00:19:00): And all those are critically important to understand the war, right? And this piece of drug use and supplement use have been ignored by historians. Norman Ohler (00:19:11): That was very surprising to me, you know. I didn’t know this myself. I never planned to write this book. It kind of happened to me. And I decided to team up with the leading German historian on National Socialism, Hans Mommsen, who has passed away by now. He was quite old, but quite ready to be my mentor for this book, Blitzed. And he was maybe even shocked when I came back from the military archive of Germany with a lot of copies, all relating to the systematic drug use of the German army, including an experiment done by the Navy, who had always pretended to be the clean, in German we say Waffengattung, weapon. Like you have the Army, you have the Air Force, you have the Navy. And in Germany they had the SS. Norman Ohler (00:20:15): And the Navy always pretended to be like, “We weren’t really Nazis. We were like, you know, the German Navy. We had our ethics code.” But I found in the archive that the Navy did human experiments in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, trying to find a new wonder drug, because they had new, what they called ‘wonder weapons’ or what Hitler called ‘wonder weapons’. He always talked about these wonder weapons. Wonder weapons were basically mini submarines, one or two people going in, staying underwater for up to a week and torpedoing, you know, allied ships. So the Navy was trying to develop a drug that would keep you awake and combat-ready for seven days and seven nights without sleep and without, you know, burning out. Very difficult to find. Norman Ohler (00:21:02): So they hired a penalty unit in the concentration camp. They hired… The SS had a so-called ‘shoe walking unit’. It was a penalty unit within the concentration camp testing shoe soles for the German shoe industry, walking for like days. And then they would measure how the soles, you know, kept up in the stress, and they had different layers in the concentration camp, like all the surfaces the German soldiers would touch when they conquered Europe. So this is a very elaborate thing, you know. And if you go to the concentration camp today, it’s a museum. You can still see that running track of the shoe runners unit. Norman Ohler (00:21:43): So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it. And Mommsen, who knew everything about National Socialism, the old, you know, authority. And I’m like the young, like I didn’t study history. I just, you know, I just try to make sense, you know. But I present him all these documents. He’s reading like from this Pill Patrol and he said, “Wow.” Like he said, “We historians, we never do drugs. We don’t understand drugs. This, we missed this.” You know. So he was very clear that we missed this. Norman Ohler (00:22:30): And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler’s degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs. You can explain a lot of Hitler through the drugs, but you can also look at this point that historians so far had not been able to figure out, basically. What happened to Hitler? Why did he get crazy? And I mean, he was crazy, but why did he get so bad as a leader? Because he was very effective for a long time and then there’s this moment where it turns. Lex Fridman (00:23:17): Yeah, the degeneration of decision-making, psychology, behavior, all of that. You cannot understand that fully without understanding his drug use. And we should also say that some of the historians you mentioned, Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beevor, these legends of history, they all gave you compliments. So Kershaw said that “Your work is very good, extremely interesting, and a serious piece of well-researched history.” Anthony Beevor said that it’s a remarkable work of research. So props to them. You have received a bunch of criticism from historians, but you’ve also received, obviously, a lot of props. I mean, Kershaw, the legendary historian of Hitler, complimenting how deep your work is. That must feel good. Lex Fridman (00:24:09): Maybe this is a good moment to also, since we’re talking about historians, to address some of the criticism. So Richard Evans has been also a great historian, has been one of the bigger critics. He said that your work is crass and dangerously inaccurate account, and is morally and politically dangerous. I think that’s grounded in the idea that if you say that, “Well, all the Nazi forces and Hitler were on drugs, so therefore their evil can be… They’re not really evil. Accountability can be removed because they were using drugs.” Norman Ohler (00:24:48): Right. Lex Fridman (00:24:49): And also another criticism of his, which I also understand and probably can steel man, is if you look too much through the singular lens of drugs, you can overemphasize it. You can overemphasize how important it was as an explainer of the effectiveness of Blitzkrieg, for example. Because there is some… I mean, I should say there is something really compelling about a singular theory that explains everything, and you can fall in love with it too much as an explainer. So can you steel man his criticism or a criticism you received, and also argue against it? Norman Ohler (00:25:32): I think he’s absolutely right that you shouldn’t argue in a monocausal way. And this is actually what Mommsen also said to me because, of course, I was enthusiastic about all my drug findings. And he said, “Don’t argue in a monocausal way, especially the war.” Lex Fridman (00:25:50): There are a lot of variables, a lot of factors, a lot of things going on. Norman Ohler (00:25:53): So that sentence of his, “Don’t argue in a monocausal way,” that always stayed with me. And I think that I didn’t deviate from that path, actually. But it was still interesting that Evans thought that I put too much emphasis on the drugs. It’s… I think it’s a totally fine opinion. I would disagree. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have written the book. What I can state here is that I invented nothing. In all of my three non-fiction books, nothing is invented. If you are a good writer, and I trained as a novelist, for me, it was also very unusual to write a non-fiction book. I wanted to write a novel about Nazis and drugs. My publisher said, “No, this is…” And he looked at the facts, you know? Norman Ohler (00:26:43): He said, “Someone has to write the facts.” So I said, “But the non-fiction books are boring.” He said, “Not necessarily. Maybe you can find a way to write it with your novelistic style, but based 100% on the facts.” And that is like… In German we say Șpagat. How do you say that? A split, like when you do with your legs. It’s hard, you know? Lex Fridman (00:27:08): Yeah. Norman Ohler (00:27:09): Because with a very fluent, sophisticated language, you can easily overpower the reader. If I describe how the German guys, 19-year-old guys, took the meth and went into the tank, and the meth started kicking in, five guys on meth after one hour of ride into France, you can write that in a powerful way that if you are the reader, you would think, “Yeah. I mean, the Blitzkrieg without meth is unthinkable.” Lex Fridman (00:27:38): There is a bit of a… Man, I wish I found that kind of feeling for historians, right? Like, “How did I miss this piece?” So some historians, like great historians like Kershaw, obviously, they kind of give you a slow clap, applaud. And some historians are a little bit skeptical, like, “This is a little too good.” So totally understandable. And… Norman Ohler (00:28:02): Also, they have different techniques to write texts like this. I used a totally different technique. And I have an apparatus, so it really feels like it could be an academic work. But still, it’s written in a way that it kind of overpowers. It kind of colonializes the story in a weird way. I never thought about it like that. But while I was writing it, I was just trying to write it as well as I could. I didn’t think about these questions we’re talking about now. Lex Fridman (00:28:35): Yes. Norman Ohler (00:28:36): I just… I got carried away, obviously, but I never left the area of facts. Lex Fridman (00:28:43): Yes. So we should talk about your process. That’s also super fascinating. You went to the archives. You went to the sources. What does that take? What does it feel? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it entail? How much text is there? What language is it in? What’s the process there? Norman Ohler (00:29:01): I never thought of going to the archives. And my girlfriend at the time, she said, “You have to go to the archives.” And she’s an academic. So she… And I was like, “Yeah, okay. I’ll go. I’m fine. I’ll check it out.” And then when I met a historian, he claims that without methamphetamine, there would be no Blitzkrieg victory of Germany. Like he’s monocausal. But he was also extremely helpful to me, and he’s an academic. He gave me the signatures, it’s called in German, where you find stuff in the archives. Signature is like… Then it says like H2/538, something like this. And these were the files of Professor Ranke. And Professor Ranke was the head of the Institute for Army Physiology. His job was to improve the performance of the soldier. Norman Ohler (00:30:00): And all of his stuff was filed in a certain place in the military archives, which in Germany is in Freiburg, in the south, in a small town, not in Berlin. Because Germany is a bit of a decentralized country. We don’t want to put everything into Berlin again like the Nazis did. We try to avoid our mistakes. So the military archive is in Freiburg, and I went there. And because I had this signature, immediately I got original documents that were all relating to my research. Like, I could read the original. I had the original. Lex Fridman (00:30:34): What does it look like? Is it sheets of paper? Norman Ohler (00:30:36): Yeah, it’s like… Lex Fridman (00:30:37): Like, so it’s not scanned, it’s… Norman Ohler (00:30:39): Well, it’s different things, like the guy who put the meth into the army, Professor Ranke. He was writing a war diary. That’s what the name was, War Diaries. So every day he would write it by hand. So this war diary was given to me. Lex Fridman (00:30:56): So you’re reading that? Norman Ohler (00:30:57): Yeah, yeah. Lex Fridman (00:30:57): So it’s like dated, you have a date… Norman Ohler (00:30:59): Yeah Lex Fridman (00:30:59): … the diary? Norman Ohler (00:31:00): It was a bit funny with him because he took a lot of meth himself, because he thought it was great. He just thought it increases your performance. By now we know a little bit more that methamphetamine is not so healthy because you get used to it and you burn out, and you get depressed, and then you have to take more. Big problem. And he became depressed and burnt out, and he didn’t realize it’s because of the meth that he’s like describing to the whole German army, like he was, he made a convincing case. And I can explain that in detail how that actually happened. But just to have his war diary was great, and then also he would type letters writing to the company of Temmler, how fast they could produce stuff, in which time. Norman Ohler (00:31:46): So we have, you have all these original documents. You have like 500 documents and it goes like, he writes like reports what happened in this battle on methamphetamine. There’s a lot of stuff you can find in the archives if you find them. But the tricky thing is that you can only look, you can kind of look at a so-called find book. In the find book you cannot type in “drugs.” It wouldn’t find anything because at the time when they were taking all the notes from this doctor, his war diary, everything, they didn’t put the label “drugs” there. They put the label his name, his position, World War II, French campaign, stuff like that. So, because at the time they didn’t know that I would at one point come and look for drugs in that, you know? Norman Ohler (00:32:36): But he was the drug guy, but also they didn’t realize he was the drug guy. No one realized that he was the drug guy. So it’s not easy to find stuff in the archives. So the archives you go, it’s a very Kafkaesque experience. You go into this building, and you have to understand the rules, and you will never fully understand what’s going on. Also, the archivists, they don’t really know what’s going on because there’s so many documents. No one’s read them all, you know? No one knows, like there’s history kind of lying there, somehow organized, somehow stored. Lex Fridman (00:33:05): I mean, it does sound like a very Kafkaesque… Norman Ohler (00:33:07): It’s- Lex Fridman (00:33:08): … thing. Norman Ohler (00:33:09): But it’s great if you find something, but you can also sit there for a week and not find anything. Lex Fridman (00:33:14): So what was the process for you? You’re just reading, open-minded, seeing, trying to see, is there some truth here to be discovered? Norman Ohler (00:33:26): Well, I have a friend. He’s a DJ, and we talked about Berlin. We’ll probably talk about it more, and he takes a lot of drugs. And he knows his drugs, let’s put it that way. He knows his drugs. And one day he said to me when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next, he said, “The Nazis took a lot of drugs. You should write about that.” And I said, “The Nazis didn’t take drugs,” because, you know, when you grow up in Germany you get educated about the Nazis quite intensely, especially in West Germany. They teach you everything, but they don’t teach you drugs. Now they do, maybe, you know. But it was not known, so, and the Nazis always had this aura of being law and order. No drugs, of course. No chaos. Everything… Norman Ohler (00:34:15): My grandfather, he was a Nazi, always said, “Well, at least there was discipline in the country. There was law and order.” So this doesn’t match with drugs, you know? Lex Fridman (00:34:24): You know, I should also say I think that’s the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling that the Nazi ideology was all about law and order and purity, and surely they would not be doing drugs. So this really blew my mind. I think I wasn’t quite ready, similar to Richard Evans. This is a big, like, okay, a narrative transforming into a deeper, more complicated understanding what Nazi forces and the Hitler inner circle actually looked like. Norman Ohler (00:35:00): That’s why I didn’t believe Alex. Lex Fridman (00:35:03): Always take the DJ, the drug expert, with a grain of salt. Norman Ohler (00:35:07): I didn’t believe him, but I said, “It’s a great topic. Maybe I could invent it.” He said, “No, we don’t invent this. This is real.” And I said, “How do you know?” And he said, “I have a friend,” and I know this guy by now. I met him. He’s an antique dealer in Berlin, and he had bought an old medicine chest in an old Berlin apartment. This was in 2010, and he found Pervitin tablets inside, which were the methamphetamine product that was marketed in Germany in the late ’30s. And this guy, the antique dealer, took some tablets, and they were quite old, you know, 70 years old, but they still had an effect on him. And I later asked him and he said, “Well, we took them for about a month. It was the greatest month we ever had. Like, we had so much fun.” “We were so productive.” Norman Ohler (00:35:54): ‘Cause that methamphetamine back then was also like a quality product. It was not crystal meth made in a trailer lab, you know? Lex Fridman (00:36:03): So this is many decades later. Norman Ohler (00:36:05): They were still potent. Lex Fridman (00:36:06): They were still potent. Norman Ohler (00:36:07): Alex especially convinced me because Alex has a high tolerance, and he said, “Okay, they still had some.” So I said to him, “Can I have some also?” And I took one, and he’s like, “And this was, we were standing in my writing tower, which is at the river in Berlin,” and he was like, “I took one, and I could feel something. Then I took another one…” and then it’s, you know, I could feel more. And then I took a third one. Typical Alex, he would take three, you know. Norman Ohler (00:36:33): Instead of just taking one, he took three methamphetamine tablets from the ’40s, and he said, “And then I felt like…” and he looked at the river, and there was a big cargo ship going by, and he said, “I felt like this ship.” Suddenly there was this, “Shoop,” he said in German, like a motion that was like energy that was grabbing me, and I felt so powerful. And he told me this, and I was like, “Wow, this is like…” And I Googled “methamphetamine Nazi Germany.” This was in 2010. And there was this one professor at the university in Ulm who said, “The Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine.” So I called up this guy, and he said, “Sure, I’ll meet you.” And then he gave me the signature for the archive. Norman Ohler (00:37:14): Then I went to the archive, and then I really started to do my own research. And then I went to different archives, and I tried to find everything on Nazis and drugs. And that came… Everything is in the book. So that crazy meeting with Alex in my writing tower, that kind of got me on this research journey. Lex Fridman (00:37:34): It makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives. Do you think there’s stuff like that in there that we deeply don’t understand? I mean about, for example, there’s a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand, maybe about the concentration camps, maybe about the Eastern Front, the interplay between Stalin and Hitler. Maybe, maybe about Britain, that could be discovered in the letters, in the data that were completely missing. Norman Ohler (00:38:07): I think so. And I think that also there are archives that are not open. Let’s say the Vatican archive. Some secret archives that some very powerful structures have, structures that we might not even know now off the top of our head, which still have a huge influence. So I think that human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that’s just one version. I think there are several versions, and I think that it goes much deeper and is much more interesting. And so, I guess, this history is a very active thing, which I also didn’t know. You know, I was writing a historical nonfiction book, and I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool because history defines the future or is very connected. Norman Ohler (00:39:03): Our history teacher always said, “If we don’t know where we come from, we cannot know where we go.” And that is, I think, true. That is what I’m now really interested in for my next book. I’m trying to really understand human history. And obviously, I’m not the first. There are a few, you know, alternative historians that go like… Because you have to go back in time quite a bit, and then it’s not easy to write about it, but it’s very interesting to think about. And I would love to find the truth on Atlantis, which I don’t believe in actually, and we can also talk about that. But maybe there’s an archive where we can actually see that they had this king ruling. Norman Ohler (00:39:41): I don’t think this could be found, but I think we can still also find a lot of documents, but I think especially in closed archives. So we won’t find them. Lex Fridman (00:39:51): You said a lot of really interesting things. It’s so important to have people like you that do the daring work of going to the archives, the sources, the evidence, and trying to find a thing that completely transforms history as we thought we understood it. That’s revisionist history at its best. Revisionist history has a sort of negative connotation sometimes because you go to conspiratorial land without much evidence, and you’re just being a rebel for a rebel’s sake. But when you ground it in data and dare to challenge the historical narrative, that’s really powerful. So now, I should also mention that we’ve been just laying out the context. Norman Ohler (00:40:37): Yeah. We’re still in the context phase. Lex Fridman (00:40:39): Context phase. And for the next 10 hours, and maybe for the rest of our lives, we will be continuing just setting the context. But let us dare return to the original question of Pervitin. How did that come about? Take me to 1930s Nazi Germany. The Munich and the Berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully. How did Pervitin come into the picture? Norman Ohler (00:41:03): Well, the Nazis managed to grab power on January 30th, 1933, and they immediately became an anti-drug regime. That is important to them because the only intoxication they allowed from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication, it’s the ideological intoxication. So they quickly installed concentration camps, which were at the time run by the SA, not the SS, which takes over later and turns the concentration camps into an industry. The first SA concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside. And some of the first people that landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users. Also, anti-Semitic policies which were very important from day one for the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is the defining pillar of national socialism. Norman Ohler (00:42:05): The core of it, really. They quickly connected anti-drug policies with anti-Semitic policies. They claimed the German Jews were taking more drugs than the non-Jewish Germans. And National Socialism’s goal was to purify the German body. So they saw the whole Volk, the country, the people, as one body, and that has to be purified so all Jews are poison. But not only Jews, everyone who thinks differently. Communists are also poison. Jews are the worst poison, but, you know, a lot of, you know… Yeah, and then you create this clean body. And obviously drugs have no position in that. If you’re addicted to drugs, that’s weak, you know, you’re a morphinist. Norman Ohler (00:42:56): You use cocaine, that’s all degenerate, that’s Jewish, that’s… Jewish doctors are all morphinists, you know? So Nazi Germany and Hitler were the shining examples of a person who doesn’t take drugs. He didn’t have a private life, he didn’t even have a body. He just led the Volksbody, you know? So Hitler was not putting any poisons into him. He stopped smoking cigarettes in the ’20s already. He never touched alcohol. Lex Fridman (00:43:32): Vegetarian. Norman Ohler (00:43:33): …vegetarian, no caffeine even. So he was… That’s what he was in the beginning. The story, of course, changes at a certain point in time, but he started as this. Lex Fridman (00:43:47): As far as you understand, that’s true? The beginning? Norman Ohler (00:43:50): Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure that this is true. Also, vegetarianism was a right-wing thing in Germany. It was an elitist thing. If you were a vegetarian, you had a higher frequency, which kind of gave you superiority over, let’s say, these workers who need to eat the sausage so you can, you know, do the work. Like Wagner, the composer, he was vegetarian. Hitler was impressed by Wagner. So vegetarianism, all… I think that’s all true. I think Hitler was like that. And it’s hard to be like that actually, and I think that gave him an attraction inside the movement to all the drunkards, like Goering using morphine all the time because of his pain. He got used to morphine, so they were… Norman Ohler (00:44:37): The movement wasn’t like this, but he was like this. So he symbolized that whole approach of cleanliness, like purity. So then how does methamphetamine come into the picture? It’s totally absurd. That’s why I thought it was fun researching this, because it doesn’t make sense, you know? And, you know, they use this simple trick by defining what is an illegal drug and what is not. Because drugs don’t have it written on them, “This is an illegal, dangerous drug.” You know, drugs are basically neutral. These are molecules, you know? So the methamphetamine molecule was found in a Berlin-based company called the Temmler Company. Norman Ohler (00:45:23): And the head of Temmler, he was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an Afro-American athlete, Jesse Owens, was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes, you know? How could this be? So they thought that he was on something, because he won, I think, five gold medals. It was ridiculous. You know, these were supposed to be Germany’s games, and then the Afro-American runs better than the Aryan ubermensch. So the only explanation is he took a drug. He took probably Benzedrine, which was an illegal amphetamine, and also there were no doping checks at the Olympics. And if you’re taking amphetamine, of course you can run a bit faster maybe, when it kicks in. Norman Ohler (00:46:16): That this has to do with the immense release of dopamine in the brain. But it was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs, but the head of the Temmler Company, he said, “We have to prevent this. We have to invent a better amphetamine. We have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine.” So his main chemist, Fritz Hauschild, he did research and he found that in 1917, in Tokyo, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine, and he remade that methamphetamine and they tested it among themselves, the chemists in the Berlin pharmaceutical lab, and they loved it. Like, they made pure methamphetamine, and, you know, they had a really good time, and they were more active, they were talkative. Norman Ohler (00:47:07): Because that’s what happens with methamphetamine. So the company really thought this is a great product, and they turned it into a product, they went to the patent bureaucracy and got the patent for methamphetamine, and then it quite quickly came onto the market. It was labeled as Pervitin, which is kind of a great name, because it has the perverse already in it. And this Pervitin was available in any pharmacy, so you didn’t need a prescription. A child could go and buy 10 packs of pure methamphetamine. So methamphetamine was also very cheap, so it became quite popular because people, you know, talked about it. Lex Fridman (00:47:44): Did they understand the, the side effects and negative effects of me- methamphetamine? Did they care? Norman Ohler (00:47:49): They didn’t really know what it was. I mean, I also read, I went to the archive of that company also, of course. So they were like, “What is it good for?” Like, “I just feel great when I take it and I have more energy,” and they didn’t know if that could be a product. It was 1937, ’38 when they were discovering it. Lex Fridman (00:48:08): But also, did they… How did they think about the fact that this is a drug? Norman Ohler (00:48:14): Well, they called it a performance enhancer. Lex Fridman (00:48:17): Got it. Norman Ohler (00:48:18): Is drinking a coffee in the morning a drug? I mean, it is a drug, but we don’t think of it as a drug, you know? It’s legal. And this was kind of how meth was treated in Germany. It was normal to use it. Like, you had a very important business meeting, of course you would take a Pervitin. There’s a movie by Billy Wilder called “One, Two, Three,” a very good movie, and he shows… the American executive, the movie was set right after the end of the Second World War. So we see, I think it’s a Coca-Cola executive, American, and he says to his secretary, “How should I have the morning coffee? I think half of a Pervitin.” So Pervitin was also normal, it wasn’t stigmatized. It wasn’t the American “just say no” propaganda, where your teeth fall out and… Norman Ohler (00:49:11): I mean, it was a German quality product, people liked it. Of course, they did tests at universities, like… But most of them were quite positive. Like, yeah, it reduces your fear. Today, we might, you know, look for different things, but this was also a performance-driven, totalitarian society moving towards war. So if someone takes Pervitin and says in the clinical tests at university, “I’m not afraid of anything anymore.” So that’s positive. That’s actually what got the guy who worked for the German army interested, because he read university reports, like I also saw all of these reports. They were also in the military archive. So he’s like, “Okay, you’re not afraid anymore if you take methamphetamine. You don’t need to sleep anymore. Norman Ohler (00:49:56): You don’t need to eat so much, because your appetite is lowered.” Like, this is perfect for a soldier. So negative effects only became public in 1940, when the first Pervitin opponent, who was actually a relative of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later arms minister, this Speer psychologist, he was the first one who said, “Wait a minute. First of all, methamphetamine is against the Nazi ideology, because now we’re all taking a drug to be high performers. We have to be high performers without a drug.” And he also said, “You know the obvious, this is going to make you addicted,” et cetera. “This will, you know, create a tolerance.” So only then the first negative reports came out. Norman Ohler (00:50:44): Before that, what Temmler did and then what the universities did, they all thought methamphetamine was really good. Lex Fridman (00:50:51): So what was the process of convincing the German military, the Wehrmacht army, to use it at scale? Norman Ohler (00:50:59): Well, Professor Ranke was employed by the army, so it was his job to find things that would improve the performance of the German soldier. I always imagined him like a James Bond character, like Q who develops gadgets and stuff, because he also developed gadgets. So he was quite a… You know, he was an academic, but he was also a soldier, you know? He was employed, but he was basically running this institute, examining it, and he was so convinced that Pervitin is the answer to his question, how to beat the main opponent of the German soldier. And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer. Norman Ohler (00:51:48): So when he read these reports from universities, he did his own tests in the military academy with young medical officers. They came together at 8:00 PM in the evening, and then they received either methamphetamine, a caffeine pill or a placebo, or Benzedrine. Like they had different experiments, and he always concluded at the end, like, they started at 8:00 PM and like at 10:00 AM in the morning, one time he notes the Pervitin people still want to go out and party, while the caffeine guys are sleeping on the bench and the… You know, it was clear that Pervitin is the strongest. It gives you the most energy, lets you work for the longest time. Norman Ohler (00:52:30): So he was convinced, but his superior, like the surgeon general of the German army, he was like an old-school dude, and he didn’t even react to these, like… Ranke would write letters, “We have to use this synthetic drug in the next campaign,” which was against Poland, which he knew about. And because Pervitin was quite known in the civil society, people were using it already, so he said, he even said, “A lot of soldiers will just take it with them, and we should control that. We should make it an official drug.” But the surgeon general didn’t understand. He didn’t reply. So Germany attacked Poland without a clear regulatory system on methamphetamine, and indeed, a lot of soldiers used it. Norman Ohler (00:53:15): And what Ranke then did was he requested from all of the medical officers in the field in Poland… The war was over after a few weeks, so… But the German army was occupying Poland. He said, “Send me all back reports, and tell me what… Did your people take Pervitin and what were the effects?” And he collected all these reports, which are also studied in the military archive, and he came to the conclusion, “This is a really good fighting drug.” And it probably is, because people are still using it today. Methamphetamine is still being used, and Ranke discovered this. He had everything in front of him. And Poland was beaten, and then Hitler wanted to attack the West. Norman Ohler (00:53:54): And the West was a different story than Poland, because the West was the world empire of Great Britain combined with La Grande Armée, the strongest army in the world, the French army. These two combined, you know, how can you win that? Poland, they could overpower. They had, you know, better army than Poland. But is the German Wehrmacht really better than both of these armies combined? His officers didn’t think so. High command said, “No, we’re not going to attack the West; we’re going to lose.” And Hitler was fanatic about it, he really wanted to attack it. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the West, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany. Because they really cared, you know? Norman Ohler (00:54:41): If you’re a high command, you don’t want to start a war that you’re going to lose, you know? Very bad. Lex Fridman (00:54:46): Can you just briefly give a sense of, do you think this is genius or insanity on Hitler’s part to think that he can take on probably what’s perceived to be the most powerful military in the world, which is the French military, or at least in Europe? Norman Ohler (00:55:06): I think his hatred for the French was very, very deep. He really, he really wanted to go to war with them. It was an ideological, irrational decision. That’s why he was not… He didn’t hate the empire. He kind of looked down, he admired it and looked down on it. Lex Fridman (00:55:23): You mean the British Empire? Norman Ohler (00:55:24): Yeah. But the French he really hated, and France had been the Erzfeind, the genetic enemy of the German people, at least right-wingers would say so. There had been two wars. The first one Germany had won, then World War I, Germany had lost. So Hitler wanted to kind of revenge and also stop the Versailles Treaty, so he really needed to attack the West, at least in his mindset. But it was an irrational decision, and that’s why high command said, “No, we’re not going to do it,” basically. And Hitler’s position at the time was not that he could do anything he wanted. I mean, high command is still a high command of the German Wehrmacht. That’s a very old, you know, it’s a tradition. It’s… They do whatever they want, you know? Norman Ohler (00:56:13): But also, they have to obey Hitler’s orders. So it’s a power struggle, basically. But to invade France was a totally stupid idea, but it changed in the morning. On the morning of February 17th, 1940, Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it’s not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that’s the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. You… Norman Ohler (00:56:56): It becomes a stalemate, and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it’s bloody, and nothing’s happening. It’s bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That’s why the high command said, “No, we’re not going to do it. It’s stupid.” But these three tank generals, they somehow were able to sneak into Hitler’s office, and they said, “Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains,” and Hitler said, “Eh, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. Norman Ohler (00:57:22): How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle, basically?” And they said, “No, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do.” Tanks are not slow machines in the back that kind of wait for the action to happen and then, you know, support this somehow. “We’re going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We’re going to overpower the enemy. We’re going to be in France before the French, who are stationed with the British in northern Belgium and also on the Maginot Line, but not really in the Ardennes Mountains. That was hardly fortified because no one could imagine that Germany would go through there. And before they know it, we are already behind them, basically.” Norman Ohler (00:58:09): We are already in France, and they’re still hanging out in northern Belgium because it takes quite a while, you know, to travel. This was a different time also. So he was convinced, and he then ordered the attack. The attack would happen, and that is then… But it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights. So the whole army, or at least, you know, the avant-garde of the machinery had to be a big part of the army, had to be in Sedan after three days and three nights. And that was only possible if you don’t stop, and that was the problem. The sleep was really then… Norman Ohler (00:58:51): Suddenly became a huge problem, and Hitler said, “When I was fighting in World War I, of course I could stay awake for a week. I’m a German.” You know, even though he’s not even German, he’s Austrian. But that was a problem, but suddenly Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. So Ranke suddenly became… Before that, he was kind of an outsider, like the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly, he became like, “Okay, tell us, how does it work?” And he gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case methamphetamine. How much should be taken? At what intervals? What are the side effects? So this was a… Norman Ohler (00:59:41): This became a very big thing. And then Temmler had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines, which were… No, not the front yet. I mean, they were stationed in the west of Germany, and then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine, and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains. Lex Fridman (01:00:01): So the 35 million dosages for the French campaign, I mean, we could probably talk for many hours about this particular campaign because it is, I think it’s fair to say, the most successful military campaign from the German side. Norman Ohler (01:00:19): Ended with a big mistake, Dunkirk. It was brilliant up until that point. That is the turning point. That was the first big mistake Hitler did, and it also had to do with drugs. Lex Fridman (01:00:29): We’ll talk about it, but let’s just linger on this three days. So we should also mention that’s where Blitzkrieg really shined. So it wasn’t just the tanks, it was the infantry, it was the aircraft moving very fast behind the French lines. What can you speak to just the execution of that campaign and the role of drugs in it? And it is, we should say, a really bold strategic decision to use meth. I mean, it’s a big risk. There are a lot of risks taken here, which could be seen as military genius or military insanity, or a mixture of both. Norman Ohler (01:01:08): Well, they were very lucky that it all worked out. Like, it… Also, the- the guys in the tanks could all have freaked out on the meth. Because then it would… It was never tested before, can you actually be in a combat situation, in a tank, in enemy territory on meth? Can people actually cope with that and be better fighters? Lex Fridman (01:01:26): Going through the mountains… Norman Ohler (01:01:29): It’s insane, yeah. Lex Fridman (01:01:29): …against the biggest military in Europe. Norman Ohler (01:01:33): Well, what meth does is… I read reports of a depressed atmosphere right before the attack started because they were afraid. They thought they would lose, they didn’t want that. You know, soldiers, maybe some really hardcore Nazi soldiers, but most people were just normal guys, you know? They didn’t want to start that. But once they had the methamphetamine, it kind of… you’re like in a party mood. So also when you’re in the tank, everyone likes it, you know? It’s rather an uplifting thing, they were really getting into it and they really, you know, they started fighting then. It’s also intoxication, it’s a rush. Lex Fridman (01:02:14): What does meth feel like? Norman Ohler (01:02:19): Well, meth creates the so-called fight or flight mode. So either you run… it releases all the neurotransmitters in the brain which are released in situations of high danger, for example. So in a highly dangerous situation, you become very alert, so you can cope with the situation. If you’re under life threat and you don’t even react to it, you’re probably going to be dead, you know? But the body does that, and methamphetamine does that. So you take a pill of methamphetamine or you snort a line of methamphetamine and you’re like… and you’re like this, you’re like… And then it’s the fight or flight mode. Either you run away like it’s too much, you know? Norman Ohler (01:03:01): But on meth, you usually don’t run away. You kind of think it’s really cool what’s happening. You like to move, you like to be with your pals, you like to, you know, being in a tank is great on meth. Lex Fridman (01:03:10): So there is a party aspect to it? Norman Ohler (01:03:12): I think it was very joyful for the German soldiers because it was springtime. They had immediate successes. And it wasn’t heavy fighting; it was just being in the tank. I mean, there was, of course, fighting, and there were also war crimes. I read a report when Rommel, high on meth, at night, doesn’t stop, of course, because they all, you know… they didn’t stop at night, but every army usually stops at night. So the French army was stopping, they were in a village camping out, and the German, Rommel, was going with the tank through that village with his division, just running over people. And he was standing in the open lid of the tank and he was going through that thing, you know, like a berserk type of warrior. Norman Ohler (01:04:01): And that was when… that to me is a war crime. That is when the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in that push of Rommel through the French countryside, because you don’t do that, you know? Your enemy is sleeping. Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So, of course, at night they’re going to be sleepy on red wine, and the Germans were on meth and they were just running over them. There are descriptions of the chains of the tank becoming bloody. I don’t think he did it and he was like, “Oh my God, what did I just do? I’m sorry.” You know, “What am I doing here?” He was in the movie, you know? Lex Fridman (01:04:41): This is the dark thing about human nature, that in war, if you dehumanize, if you allow your brain to dehumanize the enemy, the opponent, the humans on the other side, you can actually… I think hate can take over, and in that hate you can find pleasure when you murder the other. And people have written about this, they’ve talked about this. It’s probably a thing that a person like me can’t possibly comprehend unless they experienced it. And you have to be in the mania, in the hysteria, in the insanity intensity of war. Norman Ohler (01:05:21): I mean, what Evans, for example, said is that, “I excuse the Germans of the war crimes because they were just in an intoxication.” I understand that argument, but… And if you look at individual soldiers, it’s quite tricky. Like, it’s a 19-year-old guy, he’s been drafted. And in Nazi Germany, if you don’t go, you land in the concentration camp. So you can choose, you know, concentration camp or you just join the ranks and then you get Pervitin and then you invade France. There was a trial in Germany because someone said all soldiers are murderers. And I think then the German Bundeswehr sued him. “No, soldiers are not murderers.” And he actually won in court. So it’s legal in Germany to call every soldier a murderer. But it’s a tricky question. Lex Fridman (01:06:12): Yeah, I remember seeing this documentary on ordinary people. I think there’s also social pressure. Again, insane it is to say, I think the documentary, “Ordinary People,” was looking at the Germans that were a part of the shooting squads. And, you know, they didn’t understand what they were signing up for, and they were told that they’re free to leave once they understand what they’re doing, and many of them didn’t. And they didn’t have hate for Jews or for the people they’re murdering. You are, again, a 19, 20-year-old young kid; it’s so hard to comprehend the moral insanity that’s happening all around you and you just kind of want to fit in. Norman Ohler (01:06:54): I mean, that’s why I wrote the book, “The Bohemians,” because there were a few people in Berlin that didn’t react this way, but they reacted in a different way. They said, “We cannot be part of this.” Um… Lex Fridman (01:07:07): But it’s hard to be the person… Norman Ohler (01:07:07): It’s very hard, yeah. And most people are part of it because it’s much more safe, or at least it seems more safe. I mean, it has its own perils, you know, because you might become a genocidal murderer, you know. That might happen. And are you responsible? I would say you are responsible, but that’s just my personal gut feeling. I always thought my grandfather was responsible for the genocide because he was working for the German railway system, and he once saw a train car full of Jews in a cattle wagon, and he only said to me, “Yeah, this was against German railway regulations.” And I said, “So what did you do?” And he said, “Well, there were SS at the station when I was working, and I was too scared. I didn’t do anything.” So I thought that he was… Norman Ohler (01:07:58): he made himself guilty, I thought. And my father, for example, reacted very strongly because of that. He never called him by his first name, the father of his wife, because he still had that, you know, he was a Nazi because he was working for the railway. So I wouldn’t excuse… I wouldn’t excuse people actually, and I certainly would not excuse high-ranking politicians that make policies because the genocidal policies that the Nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs. And I never write that, you know, because there are no documents. If I would find documents that say, “Yeah, when we…” you know, but the Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs. Maybe with alcohol, you know, but it’s… Norman Ohler (01:08:49): And I spoke with my father, who had been a high judge in Germany. What does the law actually say? And the law says if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility. Your responsibilities are only diminished… Let’s say you’re a totally normal person, never done any harm to anybody, and suddenly you take a drug that… or you’re totally drunk, and you don’t know what you’re doing and you kill someone. Then a judge could say maybe you have a lesser responsibility. But this is not the case with the crimes of National Socialism, and I never even hint at that in my book. So I think that criticism by Evans was short-sighted. I wouldn’t… I think he’s not right about that. Lex Fridman (01:09:39): Yeah, I, I think I agree with you totally. I didn’t get that sense. Norman Ohler (01:09:43): He thought the book was very successful because a lot of right-wing people bought it, but that’s not… it’s simply not true. Lex Fridman (01:09:50): I think your book did a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative. Norman Ohler (01:09:59): To the contrary, I got an angry letter by a German army employee, quite a high officer and a military historian, and he said that I… he also thought I overemphasized the drug use of methamphetamine in the Western campaign because he said the German army was just so good, and you kind of diminish their capability by saying they were only so good because they took methamphetamine. I thought that was kind of funny because the Wehrmacht doesn’t exist anymore, and the new German… the current German army is called the Bundeswehr, and historically, they’re not supposed to be connected. Like, there was a clear cut, but he still felt that I was kind of hurting the pride of the Wehrmacht. Lex Fridman (01:10:46): I, I generally sort of agree with him. In general, it seems like great historians often… I’m just a human, so I’m not a historian, but they undermine the importance of the heroes that make up an army. The Soviet Army, the British Army, the French Army, the German Army. These are humans, and some of the great military campaigns involve people really stepping up. Now, the effectiveness of the military tactics with Blitzkrieg, the effectiveness of meth, the strategic decisions around where to invade, the timing, the speed, all those are important, but there are humans there. There are real heroes. And sometimes historians kind of diminish that. I don’t know what to make sense of it. Lex Fridman (01:11:39): I might be just an idiot, but I’ve had a great conversation with James Holland. I’ve gotten to know him well. He kind of analyzed the mistakes made by Hitler and by Stalin in Operation Barbarossa. But through generations, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, you hear these stories of these heroes, you know. My grandfather was a machine gunner and miraculously survived. And just knowing those stories, Stalingrad would not have happened without the heroes on the Soviet side. Lex Fridman (01:12:13): It’s easy to say there are a lot of blunders, a lot of bad tactics, all this kind of stuff, but to me, from the human side, I just know through my bloodline, the people that have fearlessly given their life to defend their homeland, and that sometimes can be a little bit easily dismissed. So, I don’t know what to make sense of it. Maybe I’m romanticizing, or maybe I’m speaking to the suffering that the people have felt, and they just propagate themselves through my life story, and then maybe the gratitude I have for the people who stopped the Nazi forces. Norman Ohler (01:12:50): I think it’s amazing what the Russian soldiers actually did because they beat the Wehrmacht. It was really the Red Army on the ground that did the job, you know. And did they love communism and the system? I don’t think so. I think they were… I mean, of course, some people, but basically, they were defending their country. I’m also very grateful to them. Lex Fridman (01:13:15): Yeah, they’re defending their families. Quick pause. Bathroom break? Norman Ohler (01:13:18): Okay. Lex Fridman (01:13:20): Alright, we’re back. So can you say a bit more about the French campaigns? It was over in six weeks. It took six weeks to complete a defeat and occupy most of France. And the initial operation, three days, was, from a military perspective, successful. What else can we say about the role of drugs, the effectiveness, what was learned from that experience by the Wehrmacht? Norman Ohler (01:13:53): I mean, for me to research the Western campaign was very interesting because I didn’t really know anything about it except that Germany won very quickly. So to actually look at the details is very interesting, and the drugs give you kind of a way in. Lex Fridman (01:14:10): What are some things you found in the archives that were interesting, like, about maybe letters, reports, diaries, that gave you some insight about the human story of it all? Norman Ohler (01:14:21): Well, there are letters, for example, by Heinrich Böll, who won the Nobel Prize later in literature. He writes to his parents describing in detail what Pervitin did to him, how it kept his mood up, and that without Pervitin, he wouldn’t have been able to do the job. But also military documents I found very interesting. For example, I could see exactly how the methamphetamine was distributed because it was not distributed equally. It was done in a way that the tank troops who were leading the advance received the most meth, and they also needed it. I could see how many pills on which date were delivered to Rommel’s troops. And Rommel became, I call him the Crystal Fox in my book for obvious reasons. His division was using a lot of meth. Lex Fridman (01:15:11): And he was using meth as well? Norman Ohler (01:15:14): I just have descriptions of how he, like, totally crazy stands in the open lid of the tank and all his people… Well, they had the meth, but there’s no- Lex Fridman (01:15:23): So you can infer from that. Norman Ohler (01:15:24): There’s no, they- they, maybe they didn’t use it. Maybe he didn’t use it. But it looks like he used it. Like, there were also never any reports that all the meth was given back. I mean, a lot of soldiers write that they take it, but Rommel specifically, I wouldn’t write in my book Blitz that Rommel would take methamphetamine on such a day or something if there was no record for it. But Rommel, there is a record for it that Rommel’s division used the most meth of any tank division. So I write about that. And that already makes him the Crystal Fox because, you know, in his division, crystal meth is rampant. Lex Fridman (01:16:06): You know, it’s like in Animal Farm when the pigs discover alcohol. Animal Farm by George Orwell. There’s no evidence that they drank. It’s just the next day that they’re all hungover. Norman Ohler (01:16:18): Rommel is a very interesting character in general because later he apparently turned against Hitler. He was part of the conspiracy of Operation Valkyrie. He received, you know, the offer to shoot himself in the forest, which he did, instead of being tried and executed. Lex Fridman (01:16:40): Is he just part of the- this general tension that the generals, the military had with Hitler? That’d be fair to say? Norman Ohler (01:16:48): I would say so, yes. I’m not an expert on the Wehrmacht. This is a very complex, large organization. But I see most of the officers of the Wehrmacht as not necessarily Nazis in the way that they would, you know, shout, “Heil Hitler,” all the time. They were highly intelligent, highly trained, super professionals that ran a very effective war machine. And at one point, more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler was giving were not really helping, you know, and they have their men dying because of it. So that creates a lot of tension. And that’s what led to the mistake that Hitler did in Dunkirk, basically. Norman Ohler (01:17:34): What Churchill called the sickle cut, which was the idea to storm through the Ardennes Mountains and kind of cut off the British and French troops who were still, you know, in the north of Belgium trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly the Germans are behind them so that they, they kind of cut as a, like a sickle into enemy territory, the sickle cut. That was so successful that basically the campaign was won already. So then the Germans invaded, like occupied all the cities on the canal back to England to kind of cut off the British completely so they couldn’t even flee. But Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open. And the German army was, you know, already on the outskirts of Dunkirk. Norman Ohler (01:18:19): They could have just taken it and closed that, you know, that hole for the British military to get out. But Hitler then did his famous… And this is all the dynamic of the Western campaign, you know, a lot of things happen every day. And then they’re saying like, “We’re going to have Dunkirk tomorrow and then it’s over.” And then Hitler stops the tanks. It’s his famous Halte Befehl, the order to stop. And you know, they were all on meth, you know, they didn’t want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. Hitler was, he basically, it was a little bit similar to the Berlin-Munich thing. Hitler didn’t really understand that campaign, it was too fast for him. He… Norman Ohler (01:19:05): Because they didn’t say like, “Oh, they’re all on meth, they’re not going to sleep, they’re going to behave erratically.” They didn’t discuss this. They discussed this in old-fashioned terms. And Hitler was seeing like, “They do not protect their flanks. What if the British come from the north?” This is terrible. Militarily, it was… They were already fighting World War II while Hitler was still fighting World War I, and especially the Allies, they were still fighting World War I. But the tank generals on meth or the tank generals without meth, the tank generals per se, they were fighting a new type of war. And Hitler then got a visit from Goering, the head of the air force, the Luftwaffe. And Goering was a morphinist. That is very well documented. Norman Ohler (01:19:49): He was on morphine. He was high as a kite most of the time. And that comes with losing touch with reality, I would say. Or at least it changes your grip on reality, you know. Maybe you’re still a good decision maker, but it could lead to… You know, if you’re intoxicated, let’s say you’re writing and you’re intoxicated, you think it’s great, but the next day you read it and it’s shit, you know? So Goering was using morphine in the morning, then met Hitler at the Felsennest, which was Hitler’s headquarters to command the Western campaign. The Felsennest. Norman Ohler (01:20:25): And Goering said to him, “If the army generals are now going to take Dunkirk, then basically the army has won this campaign, and that will give army high command, which is already against you,” because they were, you know. For them, Hitler was always, like, the der kleine Gefreite, like this small kind of regular army guy because that’s what Hitler had been in the First World War, and now suddenly, he was the big decision maker. So they never… They thought they made much better decisions than him. So Goering says, “Their power will be so overwhelming that they will, from now on, call the shots how this war will continue and what will be done next. You should let me with the Luftwaffe do the job from the air. Norman Ohler (01:21:12): The National Socialist Luftwaffe is going to end the Western campaign.” So he thought that he could destroy… It doesn’t make sense, you know. Even to destroy the British military with planes, maybe you can do it. But certainly, he couldn’t do it. So the tank generals received the Halte Befehl, the stopping order. They didn’t believe it when they received it because this would have been a complete victory over Great Britain. This would have been the end of Great Britain. The whole British military was encircled, but they did get out through Dunkirk. That’s why the movie Dunkirk with Christopher Nolan is not good because he doesn’t describe what happened on the German side. Norman Ohler (01:21:53): It’s just this heroic British thing, “Yeah, we just got out and we reformed, and then we beat…” You know. This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command, and convinced by Goering’s morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn’t. I mean, he bombed, and then the British, you know, they were on ships, and a few ships were sunk, but basically, they got out. You need to do this on the ground. At least back then, you would have needed to do it on the ground. So that was a big mistake by Hitler. Norman Ohler (01:22:26): That’s why von Manstein, one of the three tank generals from February 17th — it was Rommel, von Manstein, and Guderian — and von Manstein, he later said, he spoke of a lost victory. He said the Western campaign was a lost victory because we really could have achieved the victory. We could’ve dominated, you know, Britain. They could’ve, you know, invaded Britain. There was no more military. Lex Fridman (01:22:50): Well, okay. On land, yes. Norman Ohler (01:22:52): There was still the Royal Air Force. Lex Fridman (01:22:54): And the, and the Navy. Norman Ohler (01:22:56): And the Navy, yeah. Lex Fridman (01:22:57): So invading Britain, I think any invasion of actual Britain is a gigantic mistake on the Nazi part, but— Norman Ohler (01:23:06): But if Britain doesn’t have a standing army anymore, it’s much easier— Lex Fridman (01:23:10): Well, I- Norman Ohler (01:23:10): …than still having one. Lex Fridman (01:23:11): …I think it’s still extremely difficult to invade, but it’s much easier to neutralize, make sure that Britain is not a player in the war. I mean, the— Norman Ohler (01:23:21): For sure. Maybe Hitler wouldn’t have invaded at all anyhow. Lex Fridman (01:23:24): Also, because of his sort of, not respect, but non-hatred— Norman Ohler (01:23:29): Right Lex Fridman (01:23:30): …of the British Empire. Norman Ohler (01:23:31): ‘Cause they’re also white supremacists, so… Why, why, why would we fight them? You know, it doesn’t make sense. While the French, they were already like half black, basically, in Hitler’s eyes. Lex Fridman (01:23:40): If we’re to talk about counterfactual history of the possible trajectories of the war that would lead to Nazi victory, one of the big mistakes is the invasion of Britain. So you already mentioned the stake with Dunkirk, but beyond that, if they even captured mainland Europe, they could’ve just neutralized the British threat and not invaded Britain, and then go after the oil, which is much needed, maybe in the Middle East. So focus on that campaign before invading the Soviet Union. And then maybe wait for the Soviet Union to invade them through Poland, which would be likely coming, or wait until 1943, something like this, to invade east without the Western front having to have been there. Lex Fridman (01:24:38): And the other really big mistake is declaring war against the United States. Having complete disrespect for the United States and declaring war on the United States. Norman Ohler (01:24:49): Very stupid. Lex Fridman (01:24:49): Which didn’t have to be done at all. Norman Ohler (01:24:51): Right. Lex Fridman (01:24:52): So it’s collecting enemies when those didn’t have to be done. So there is, to me actually, there’s a lot of paths there, as dark as it is to imagine for Nazi Germany to be successful in the invasion of the Soviet Union, even. Norman Ohler (01:25:13): Well, I think that’s why the Wehrmacht officers were pissed at Hitler, because they knew that they could actually win if it was done in a certain way. But Hitler’s ideology and his stupidity, and later also, his degeneration of his cognitive abilities, did not allow the Wehrmacht to fight in a most effective way. So they had a… Hitler was a very bad leader after Dunkirk. Lex Fridman (01:25:38): So can you speak to the morphine? What kind of drug is morphine? Norman Ohler (01:25:42): Morphine was developed in the 19th century by a German, a young chemist called Sertürner. He wanted to know what the potent alkaloid in opium was. Because opium is a natural drug, but there’s something in the opium that’s actually decisive, and that’s morphine. So he was able to extract that from the opium. So, he basically, this young guy, invented morphine, which then became very important in wars, especially. Like the American Civil War is unthinkable without morphine. Or at least it would have been very different, because with morphine, you can treat people, you can amputate people, you can fix people up and send them back into battle. And that also corresponded with the development of the hypodermic needle, the injection needle that was around in the mid-19th century. Norman Ohler (01:26:43): So the injection needle and morphine together became a very efficient way to treat soldiers. And that prolonged, for example, the Civil War in America. Lex Fridman (01:26:52): So Göring was taking morphine. Norman Ohler (01:26:54): Yeah. Morphine is like the classic. You don’t eat opium, you know? You take what is active in opium, and you inject it, and that’s a much… That’s a very potent… You know, that numbs all your pain. You don’t have pain anymore if you’re on morphine. Lex Fridman (01:27:13): Also affects judgment. Norman Ohler (01:27:15): I’ve never taken morphine. So I cannot really say. I’m… There are a few junkies that are highly creative on it. A lot of musicians in the ’60s were using heroin, which is a more potent form, or it’s a half-synthetic, it’s an opioid. Morphine is an opiate and heroin’s an opioid. I guess you could be quite sharp on it also. That’s why Hitler liked Eukodal, which is OxyContin, oxycodone. And he injected that. I actually… Lex Fridman (01:27:52): Which is another opiate, heroin-like. Norman Ohler (01:27:55): It was a product by the Merck company from Darmstadt, Germany. They made Eukodal, which when Germany lost the war, the patent was basically taken by America and then ended up in oxycodone. So if you inject Eukodal, that was a very popular drug in the ’20s, because apparently it gives you the most beautiful high on Earth. You’re super high. You feel extremely well, and you can think very clearly. And you feel like this is how life should feel. High on Eukodal, this is like Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, he used Eukodal. Quite a few doctors actually used it also, and probably quite a few Jewish doctors also used it, because this was like a doctor’s drug. Doctors knew how to, you know, set the injection. And it was, you know, a great experience. Norman Ohler (01:28:42): And Hitler, he really loved to be on Eukodal. He would use Eukodal every second day. In the beginning, 10 milligrams intravenously, then he raised to 20 milligrams. And I spoke to someone who’s actually done exactly that drug application, because I wanted to know how Hitler felt, and I didn’t feel like doing it myself for some reason. I don’t like needles, so I didn’t want to put a needle in my vein to have the Hitler drug experience. I should have done it. A historian, a proper historian never does that, okay? So, I… But I thought I should take quite a few drugs that I write about to understand it better. But this drug I didn’t take. I never shot oxycodone intravenously into my veins. Norman Ohler (01:29:24): But I met someone who did, and he said it’s like the king’s high. You know, if you do that properly, obviously you get addicted to it, you know? Lex Fridman (01:29:34): I’d be scared to try. Norman Ohler (01:29:36): Very intense experience. Lex Fridman (01:29:37): I think it’s a very badass thing to do for a historian, by the way. But I think it’s a big risk. I think there is a risk that comes along with it, right? Norman Ohler (01:29:47): Well, but not for Hitler, because he got the Eukodal from the pharmacy. He knew exactly, like his doctor knew exactly what was inside. It was made by a pharmaceutical company. Lex Fridman (01:29:57): No, I mean, the risk of addiction. Norman Ohler (01:29:59): Yeah, that is a big risk. That is a big risk. But there’s also the risk of getting impure stuff and… …Like heroin on the street and dying from an overdose or… But the addiction thing is very… I think it happens quite quickly with Eukodal, because it’s such a great feeling. So why wouldn’t you do it over and over again? And then the opioid receptors in the brain want you to take it. And if you don’t take it, you get withdrawal symptoms and you feel like shit. And you have to… So that’s the problem with opioids, with morphine. That’s what happens. And that’s what happened to Hitler. Lex Fridman (01:30:31): I generally say yes to most things, but those drugs, like cocaine doesn’t scare me. Heroin scares me. The opioids scare me. Oxycodone scares me. Norman Ohler (01:30:45): Because they really make you physically dependent. I don’t even know if cocaine makes you physically dependent. It makes you psychologically addicted. But they actually… You have to get it, otherwise you feel bad. That’s a physical, terrible addiction. Lex Fridman (01:31:01): And also for life to feel less when you’re not on it. Norman Ohler (01:31:04): Right. Lex Fridman (01:31:05): That scares me. Norman Ohler (01:31:06): That’s the problem also with methamphetamine. People who use a lot of methamphetamine, on days they don’t use it, they don’t feel great at all, especially not compared to the methamphetamine days. So that became a problem in Germany when people were really using more and more of the Pervitin. Lex Fridman (01:31:22): All right, you’ve got to take me through the full drug cocktail that Hitler was on, patient A of Morell’s. Let’s start at the beginning. We’re big on setting context here. So tell the story of Dr. Theodor Morell. How did he meet Hitler? Norman Ohler (01:31:39): Well, Morell was… He had his practice on Kurfürstendamm, which is like the main boulevard of Berlin, in the west of Berlin. Kind of a fancy street. And he was a celebrity doctor, which was a new type of doctor in a way, a Dr. Feelgood. He was one of the first Dr. Feelgoods. So you didn’t go to him when you had a disease. You went to him when you were… let’s say you were an opera star in the Berlin Opera, and you had a big premiere, so you would go to Morell in the afternoon, and he would give you a nice shot, and then you would, you know, be really good on stage. He was not a quack. I mean, he just knew his drugs, and he believed in, why shouldn’t you treat someone even if that person doesn’t have a disease? Norman Ohler (01:32:30): If you can make that person feel better, it’s good, especially if that person pays. He said, “Everyone who pays my…” And he wasn’t cheap. “Who comes to me and wants a testosterone hormone injection or a vitamin injection or an opioid injection, you get it from him.” He didn’t have any scruples. Lex Fridman (01:32:50): I mean, but we should also say, he was pretty innovative and extremely knowledgeable. So you mentioned hormones, but also you know, like probiotics. You talk about… Norman Ohler (01:33:00): Yeah. Right. Lex Fridman (01:33:00): He knew his shit. Norman Ohler (01:33:02): He was a bit of a nerd. He was- Lex Fridman (01:33:04): Like, a legit doctor, just didn’t have boundaries about what he used. Norman Ohler (01:33:09): He had a very unappealing physical appearance, and I think that was a problem for him, and he was known to have very bad eating habits. Like, sauce was running, and… So people were easily disgusted by him. He was like an outsider. He was really like a freak. But when people looked at him after he had given them an injection and they said, “Thank you,” and “I feel so great now,” that’s what kind of made his day, you know? So one day, a man entered his doctor’s office on Kurfürstendamm named Hubertus Hoffmann. And Hubertus Hoffmann was a photographer, and he had gonorrhea, and Morell, because he knew about alternative ways to treat, he actually cured him. Norman Ohler (01:33:58): And Hubertus Hoffmann said to Morell, “I have a good friend, and I think you should meet him, and I’m going to have a dinner in Munich, and I think it would be really worth your time to come.” And Morell came, and the good friend was Hitler, because Hubertus Hoffmann was Hitler’s photographer. And they were… In German, we have a formal “you,” which is “Sie.” Like, if I don’t know you so well, I say “Sie.” And if you’re my close friend, I say “du,” you. And Hitler only had about four people he would say “du” to. He always liked the “Sie,” like the distance. It was always about distance, respect, and borders and boundaries. Lex Fridman (01:34:37): What are the two again? “Sie” and what? Norman Ohler (01:34:39): Du. Lex Fridman (01:34:40): Sie and du? Norman Ohler (01:34:41): Yes. “Sie” is the formal one, and “du” is the informal one. Lex Fridman (01:34:44): Yeah. No, in Russian, there’s the same thing: “vy” and “ty.” And so that’s a big thing. Norman Ohler (01:34:50): Also, in French, you also have that. You have that in Spanish. Only in English you don’t have it. Lex Fridman (01:34:55): And it is part of the cultural discourse of, like, when you upgrade from the “vy”… …To the “ty,” from the “Sie” to the “du”… …Or from the “du” to the “Sie.” Norman Ohler (01:35:06): From the “Sie” to the “du.” Lex Fridman (01:35:07): Sie to the du. Norman Ohler (01:35:07): That would be the upgrade because you become more intimate. Lex Fridman (01:35:10): Yeah, like, you ask, “Can I go…” …from Sie to du?” Norman Ohler (01:35:13): Yeah. Like, the older person must suggest it, I think. Lex Fridman (01:35:16): Yeah. Okay. Beautiful language. Norman Ohler (01:35:19): So Hoffmann was a “du freund,” a “du freund,” we say, of Hitler. So he was quite close to Hitler, and that’s why he could also make that close connection. So he had a dinner with just him, Hitler, Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend, and Morell came. Like, they sent a plane to Berlin to pick him up. So it’s like VIP treatment. It was… …The whole thing. Lex Fridman (01:35:40): And this is 1936? Norman Ohler (01:35:42): ’36. Yeah, they had spaghetti with tomato sauce on the side, I read. There’s like a description of this event. The tomato sauce was on the side. And there was muscat. What is muscat? It’s a spice. Nutmeg. Lex Fridman (01:35:58): Nutmeg. Norman Ohler (01:35:58): Yeah, it was with nutmeg, which is an unusual recipe, I guess, but that’s what they had. And spaghetti wasn’t a fancy thing, you know? It came from Italy, from Mussolini, who invented fascism in Italy, and who was Hitler’s role model for a long time until Hitler surpassed him, obviously. So the spaghetti that came from Italy, it was a big thing. And Morell had the big problem that spaghetti’s hard to eat, right? It was a catastrophe. But he got out of it because Hitler complained about stomach problems, because Hitler was a terrible vegetarian. He was a so-called cake vegetarian. He would only eat sweets, like cake. No meat, of course, but he wouldn’t eat healthy stuff, you know? Norman Ohler (01:36:41): So he was bloated the whole time because he only ate cake and white bread, and it’s not good. So he voiced that, and there was also Brandt there, an official doctor from the SS, who was his doctor. And Hitler said, “My doctors can’t cure me.” And Morell was like, “This is my chance. Thank you, God.” And he told Hitler about the probiotics, which Hitler had never heard of, and also Brandt, the doctor, he hadn’t heard of, because that was a new thing. Norman Ohler (01:37:15): And Hitler was asking, “What is that?” And Morell said, “These are live bacteria from German soldiers from the First World War that were fighting in Serbia.” There was one guy who didn’t get the stomach flu when all the others drank the water in Serbia and all got sick, but this one guy, so his bacteria… And this is a true story. His gut bacteria were cultivated into a medicine called Mutaflor. And Morell told Hitler about this and he said, “This is amazing. I have to try this.” You know? And it helped. He got the Mutaflor, he did the Mutaflor therapy, and it cured him. He suddenly had no bloating anymore, and the farting of Hitler was really bad. Norman Ohler (01:37:58): So bad that it would diminish his ability to work, you know? So suddenly he could work. He said he felt better. He didn’t have the pain. He felt great, so he really thought that Morell was a wonder doctor. And he asked Morell pretty quickly afterwards, “Do you want to be my personal physician?” And Morell’s wife was very much against it because she said, “If you become the personal physician of Hitler, you won’t have any time for me anymore.” And he said, “Come on, man. This is like the chance you only get once in your life.” Lex Fridman (01:38:35): Yeah, I mean, at this point, Hitler’s a really big deal. Norman Ohler (01:38:37): He’s the most powerful man in Europe. And there had not been war crimes because the war hadn’t started yet. Obviously, there were concentration camps and a lot of crimes had been committed, but it was also kind of hushed up, you know? It’s not such a huge thing as we now know it became. So, Morell never really had any conscientious problems. He just thought it was great, you know? “I’m gonna be the doctor. I’m gonna be part of history.” So he becomes the personal physician, and being this vitamin guy, like vitamins were really his thing. He believed in the power of vitamins. And today, I think we know that he was right. Vitamins are good, but back then, no one knew. Norman Ohler (01:39:24): And Hitler was like, “Okay.” He told Hitler, and then Hitler said, “Okay, I want to try these vitamins and…” And what they did from the beginning was injections because Hitler didn’t want to take a pill, because the pill takes too long and it goes through the track that he has problems with, like the digestion. He didn’t want to take a pill. He believed in the injection, and Morell was the masterful injector. So Morell, because the needles were thicker than they are today, but Morell could give you an injection without you feeling any pain. So Hitler was quite impressed, so he got a vitamin C injection, but Hitler loved the daily injection, so he got hooked on the daily injection. Once he got the injection, the day was good. Norman Ohler (01:40:09): And he never got sick, actually. He could stand for a long time with his arm raised. He went to the gym, basically. He had a gym where he was doing exercises so he could have his arm up for hours when a military parade would walk by. So he was quite fit and he was never sick, and Morell was giving him the daily injection, and they lived happily ever after basically until the Soviet Union attacked. Lex Fridman (01:40:34): Wait, wait, wait. He literally lifted so he could do the Heil Hitler salute? Norman Ohler (01:40:39): Yeah, I found a document for that. Lex Fridman (01:40:42): That’s funny. Oh God, that’s dark. Norman Ohler (01:40:45): He had an expander, we say. I don’t know, do you use that word in English? Expander? Lex Fridman (01:40:49): Oh, like a band. Norman Ohler (01:40:51): Yeah, it’s like this. You do like… Lex Fridman (01:40:52): Yeah, yeah, I have one of those. Norman Ohler (01:40:54): Yeah, that’s what, that’s what- That’s what he did. In front of the- Lex Fridman (01:40:57): And I do those kinds of exercises. Norman Ohler (01:40:58): …in front of the window. Lex Fridman (01:41:00): Well, at least he’s not doing it in front of a mirror. Okay, wow, that’s dark. That’s… I mean, those little details, yet another reminder that he’s just a human being. Norman Ohler (01:41:11): I mean, it’s hard to keep your arm up for like hours. You can’t let it down. If you keep it up, that’s what it’s all about, you know? Lex Fridman (01:41:18): I mean, he was very much about the façade, right? He’s very important to present himself in a certain kind of way when he’s giving the speeches. Norman Ohler (01:41:26): Yeah, it was, everything was orchestrated. The Nazis were masters in propaganda. They really knew how to create the perfect image. Lex Fridman (01:41:35): Okay, so let’s go into the cocktail. It started with the vitamins in ’36. Norman Ohler (01:41:41): Right. I think it was pretty harmless in the beginning. But the addiction to the injection was the main thing that I think happened—that Hitler needed his doctor. But from ’36 to ’41, only vitamins and glucose were being injected, so I don’t think it really harms you. It might benefit you. He never got sick; he was fit. Lex Fridman (01:42:06): This, I mean, this is the thing that… Norman Ohler (01:42:08): That was phase one of his drug use were the vitamins, until ’41. Lex Fridman (01:42:12): So, you think the tweaking at the Olympics, you’ve talked about before, but still, so you’re saying this person— … we’re watching a video of here, is not on drugs. Norman Ohler (01:42:23): I don’t know. I don’t think so. Lex Fridman (01:42:26): So the- the video could be faked. Norman Ohler (01:42:27): There are no records. Lex Fridman (01:42:28): It could be sped up. Norman Ohler (01:42:29): I think it’s fake, because I think someone read my book that Hitler was on, thought that Hitler was always on meth and created this. But I might be wrong. Lex Fridman (01:42:36): Yeah, and the narrative takes hold. I think the thing you mentioned is he could be on sugar, so it could be a lot of elements. Norman Ohler (01:42:43): He was also a weird guy. Maybe he was really just rocking- … because he was so happy what he saw, you know? Maybe he really got into it. Maybe it was a sexual thing for him what he saw. I don’t know. There’s no document showing that he took a drug on that day, let’s put it that way. Lex Fridman (01:42:57): I think I’ve been fidgety, especially staying up all night. You can just be caught in a certain moment when you’re being very fidgety. Norman Ohler (01:43:08): I think he probably rocked a few times, and then the video was cut in a way— Lex Fridman (01:43:12): Sped up? Norman Ohler (01:43:12): …that he rocks more or something. Also, methamphetamine wasn’t yet available in 1936. So— Lex Fridman (01:43:18): That’s important to say. Norman Ohler (01:43:19): …for sure he was not. So, what is said here on Hitler tweaking on meth at the 1936 Olympics is definitely false. Lex Fridman (01:43:28): Okay, there you go. So when did it start getting more serious? The injections and the kind of drugs he was taking? Norman Ohler (01:43:37): This was a day in August of 1941. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd. So this is about six weeks into the campaign, which was called Operation Barbarossa. And Germany was doing pretty well, and it came to a crucial moment where high command said, “Now we’re going to take Moscow.” And Hitler said, “No, we’re going to split up the troops and take Leningrad,” which is now Saint Petersburg in the north, and in the south, we’re going to go for the oil fields, basically. That was his plan. He said, “Let’s not do Moscow.” And high command was like, “This is the biggest mistake. We must take Moscow. If we take Moscow, we’re going to win.” And Hitler became ill for the first time on the day this decision was made. I mean, this is a dynamic thing that’s going on, you know? Norman Ohler (01:44:38): They’re moving, and now they have to decide, will we split up or will we continue towards Moscow? And he had the Russian flu, in German, the Ruhr, which is a flu-type disease with a very high fever. It comes… Like, they were in the field, so they were in the east, you know, camping out. Maybe he drank water that wasn’t good, or he had some, you know, they tested everything meticulously, but he got sick. High fever, he felt like shit, and he said to Morell… And, you know, you can see it in Morell’s notes. Morell describes this very vividly in his notes, which are at the Federal Archives, which no historian ever looked at except me, the non-historian, which is kind of funny. Norman Ohler (01:45:21): So he describes how Hitler then asks of him, basically says, “Vitamins are not enough anymore.” Like he’s very weak. He must go to the military briefing, but if you… The flu is quite a severe disease, I think. If you have a heavy flu, you really feel like you’re going to die, you can’t go to a military briefing. But Morell kind of fought with himself, and then he decided to inject an opioid into Hitler’s veins intravenously, like the strongest application possible, and this was Dolantin, which is a German opioid that was legal. And I was once an exchange student in Flint, Michigan, 1988, and I was number one of the tennis team ’cause I was quite a good tennis player. Norman Ohler (01:46:11): We were playing our main enemy. I think it was Flint Powers Catholic High School in Flint, Michigan, and I think it was Power Central, and they had a number one, Marc Resstiner. Lex Fridman (01:46:24): Still remember, wow. Norman Ohler (01:46:26): He was feared, and no one could beat him. And on the day of the match, I had the Russian flu, basically. I was the hope, I was the number one, the wonder kid from Germany. And they took me to a doctor, and the doctor gave me an injection. And I don’t know until this day because I was just a kid, I got the injection, I was 17, and I felt great. Like, the flu was gone like this. It was probably an opioid, something, you know, something that just shuts off all the pain and gives you energy. And I beat this guy— …in a way, I totally, I thought of a new technique by playing very high balls. Like, in the direct, fierceful competition, I would have lost, so I played something that in Germany, we call “Lüddeln,” which is something you don’t really do. You just play high balls— Lex Fridman (01:47:24): Lobbying, yeah, yeah. Norman Ohler (01:47:25): …which is not pretty to look at, but it’s very effective. And he just lost, he just lost his nerve, and I beat him like 6-0, 6-0, something like that. Sensational. So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn’t take Moscow. They probably could have taken it, or maybe not, you know, but the decision was made in August to… Lex Fridman (01:48:11): I think it’s one of the biggest blunders of the Eastern Front. Norman Ohler (01:48:14): To not take Moscow. Lex Fridman (01:48:15): To not take Moscow. I think they had a straight shot given the… Norman Ohler (01:48:18): Right Lex Fridman (01:48:18): …disorganization. Norman Ohler (01:48:20): They had the one-time thing, the one-time moment where they could have done it. And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically. They just had this moment, this dynamic moment, and this was fueled by the methamphetamine. Also, in the Soviet Union, hundreds of millions of dosages were given, so the Germans were really going. And at one point, this ends, you know? You can’t take meth for the rest of your life. You’re just going to end up being a nervous wreck. But you can do it for like two months. You could do it, but then it stops. Lex Fridman (01:48:55): I think if you’re really honest about where you have the asymmetry of power, which is in the speed of the Blitzkrieg, so that’s similar to Genghis Khan, who had a very small military, but their advantage was, I mean, I think at the peak it would be probably 100,000, and but every soldier of Genghis Khan’s had five horses. So the… Norman Ohler (01:49:22): Right Lex Fridman (01:49:22): …the whole point was they can move really fast. They, and they, not just fast, but they can move on all terrain, so they can go around. You know, if wars were fought on normal roads, you’re supposed to travel a certain kind of way. If you go fast and around, not on paths that are usually taken, attack from all kinds of sides, that’s why you can conquer as much as Genghis Khan was able to conquer. And the same thing with the Nazi forces, this is their biggest advantage. And not using that is essentially the end of its effectiveness. Norman Ohler (01:49:59): I think that’s also why the tank troops were such a good weapon, because they can go off-road while military vehicles, cars, cannot do it. Like a tank can even go through a forest and just, you know, kill small trees and just run over it. So that was those are kind of the five horses that was the idea that they had at this working breakfast. That’s what they presented to Hitler. “We’re going to use the tank force in a very different way, and that’s going to enable us to win the lightning war of campaigns.” Lex Fridman (01:50:29): Was it one of the first times he tried an opiate like that? An intense one? Norman Ohler (01:50:34): That was the first time. Lex Fridman (01:50:36): And then that was it for him? He loved it? Norman Ohler (01:50:38): Well, not immediately. You can see when you study his medications, that that is the turning point in a way, that now he deviates from the vitamins. He becomes more interested in what’s out there. And from ’41 to ’43, he tries out a lot of medications that he didn’t try out before. Before that, it was quite conventional, mostly vitamins and glucose. But now he becomes experimental, and he discusses this with Morell. And Morell is also very experimental. They really nerded themselves into, like, “What can we use?” Like, bull’s testicle extracts. So, Morell, in order to present those things to his patient A, he created a pharmaceutical company that he ran. Norman Ohler (01:51:32): He was, so he was the personal physician of Hitler, and he was also the CEO of Hammer Pharmaceuticals, which had its production site in occupied Czechoslovakia. And for example, at one point when Germany had invaded Ukraine, Morell asked for a monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals from all the slaughterhouses in Ukraine. So, this was a huge logistical operation. All the slaughtered animals, all the organs were removed for the personal physician of the Fuhrer, sent in military trains back to the factory in occupied Czechoslovakia. Norman Ohler (01:52:16): And the military became really upset with that, because they said, “We need our trains to transport back our wounded soldiers.” Now there are cars full with offal and pigs’ hearts and pigs’ livers, and it was totally bizarre. But Morell then became, he was this good-natured Dr. Feelgood in the beginning, and then when Ukraine was occupied, he became just a business freak who made a lot of money with his dubious hormonal concoctions, where he would threaten the army. “If you don’t let the train with my raw materials go to my factory, I will tell Hitler, and you will have a problem.” He was acting like that. He became quite an asshole, actually. Norman Ohler (01:53:04): And a war criminal, because he also, at his factory where he would make the famous pig liver extract that was then tested by Hitler, and Hitler said, “That’s a good medication. I feel more, I have more energy. So, this can also be sold to the German military.” That’s how it worked. Because the regulations at the time were, and that it was very difficult to bring out a new medication onto the market. Because medications, to bring them onto the market, you need certain test phases and all of that stuff. So, that’s hard to do in a war, especially in World War II. So, Hitler said to Morell, “I’m going to be your guinea pig. Norman Ohler (01:53:44): You just make it in your factory, I test it, and if I think it’s good, then I’m just going to write a…” Today, you would say, like, a decree. “You know, because I’m the president, you know, I can, and I can order it, that it’s going to be legal all over Germany.” Lex Fridman (01:53:58): So, Hitler was a real drug guy. He liked drugs. Norman Ohler (01:54:02): Well, he liked to experiment, I would say, with drugs and with Morell. They never… He was against drugs, you know? He was… Lex Fridman (01:54:11): But that’s a crazy thing for a guy who didn’t do anything, right? Norman Ohler (01:54:14): It’s a big contradiction, or it’s a big irony, or it’s very weird. Lex Fridman (01:54:21): But isn’t it even a bit of a mystery? At that stage, I’m sure he was paranoid about being killed and all that kind of stuff. So, he must have really trusted Morell, right? Norman Ohler (01:54:31): Yeah, he trusted Morell because Morell was not part of any organization. He was the loner coming from the VIP doctors, his own VIP doctor’s office, and now he was basically Hitler’s toy. Hitler could get access to all kinds of medications through him and Morell would never say it to anybody, you know? He would just write it down. But this was kept quite secret. No one knew what was going on between the two men. Lex Fridman (01:54:54): See, it’s just so interesting, because, like, why would he? There might be… Can you maybe even speak to that? Why did Hitler trust another human being this much? You could probably make the case nobody was closer to Hitler than Morell. Norman Ohler (01:55:10): That is certainly the story I’m telling. Lex Fridman (01:55:13): Isn’t that crazy? What is it about Morell? This guy who’s… I guess he’s fat and weird, and nobody really likes him. Norman Ohler (01:55:26): He was not a threat to Hitler. Hitler hated all the super smart medicine people. He never undressed before them. He never let himself be seen naked, because he didn’t want anyone to know anything, you know, about him that he couldn’t control. So, Morell was harmless. Morell basically did what Hitler wanted. They wouldn’t say, “We’re going to take— Today we’re going to take drugs together. It’s going to be fun.” You know, Hitler was always about optimizing his performance, because he knew, “Only I’m doing this. I have to…” And he always thought he was going to die young, so he always thought, “I don’t have unlimited time. Norman Ohler (01:56:06): The clock was always ticking, so I have to always be the high performer.” So Hitler, when he first experienced the beauty of the opioid high that was given to him in August 1941 intravenously, when he experienced that, his eyes opened. And he didn’t think this was a drug. I mean, this is a medicine. This is a medicine that helps me function. This is a medicine that my doctor gives me in a very controlled manner, and that lets me be extremely sharp for, like, eight hours. I can convince all the generals. I can do my job. I’m happy. Because Hitler was also depressed, you know? I mean, he really appreciated what the drug gave him, but he never thought, “Now I’m becoming a drug addict,” or… Lex Fridman (01:56:57): So, oxycodone in general begins to work within 30 to 60 minutes, and lasts for about four to six hours. This is a long-lasting thing. Norman Ohler (01:57:06): Yeah, but this is, you swallow. If you get an intravenous injection, it works after one second. Lex Fridman (01:57:11): Wow. Norman Ohler (01:57:11): Get the injection, you’re high, but that— Lex Fridman (01:57:13): But it lasts for many hours. Norman Ohler (01:57:15): Yeah. That’s why people who take heroin love it, because you feel like shit, you take the injection, you feel great. I mean, it’s in your system for quite a while. You can go into the meeting quite comfortably. Lex Fridman (01:57:28): Into the meeting. Yeah, okay. Norman Ohler (01:57:30): I mean, there’s the briefing. It starts at 1:00. Morell comes, and you can see this in the notes. Like, “I have to be at the Fuhrer in his bedroom at 12:00.” And then, you know, you chat a bit, and then Hitler rolls up his uniform sleeve, and then he gets the injection maybe at 12:30. Then the high comes on, and then it’s very stable. You feel great. This is a pure product from the Merck company. This is not some heroin from the street. And Morell knows exactly what dosage you want right now, so you feel at the top of your game. You don’t feel… You’re not intoxicated. I mean, you are, but it makes you clear, you know? Lex Fridman (01:58:11): So the mind is clear? Norman Ohler (01:58:12): The mind’s totally clear. Your body feels fantastic. You know exactly your points. You know exactly how the others… Because the others are just mortals, you know, because they’re sober. They just sit there, and they just… They haven’t slept very well, or they have problems with them, you know? And you’re way above them. Lex Fridman (01:58:30): What do we know about its general psychological effects? Does it boost your confidence? Does it boost aggressiveness? What effect did it have on his vision of the world? Norman Ohler (01:58:40): It makes you feel extremely confident. You have a lot of energy, but it’s not too much. Let’s say you take cocaine or methamphetamine, you’re like— That’s why Hitler was never a meth guy. That’s also why I think this video is fake. He didn’t take meth. I studied Morell’s, the things he gave him. He gave a lot of things, and only twice was meth. So that’s not a lot for Hitler, like twice. Lex Fridman (01:59:07): I read that the multivitamin had some amphetamine and maybe meth, a little bit, or no? Norman Ohler (01:59:13): It’s- Lex Fridman (01:59:13): Multi- Norman Ohler (01:59:14): I mean, I’ve s- Lex Fridman (01:59:15): Vitamultin. Norman Ohler (01:59:15): Vitamultine. Lex Fridman (01:59:16): Multine. Norman Ohler (01:59:17): Vitamultine is interesting because it was a little bar of a sweet that was lying next to his food, so he would just, you know, eat, and then at the end, he would take this. It was nice-tasting. It had some sugar in it. And I read through all of the, you know, ingredients. There were different types, and there was never methamphetamine in it. Lex Fridman (01:59:37): Oh, there isn’t? Okay. Norman Ohler (01:59:39): No. There was an SS, Dr. Schenck, and he claims that Morell made special Vitamultine in his lab with meth in it, but I think he just made that up. There was never any proof of that. Lex Fridman (01:59:54): I mean, that’s a really important line to draw. The army, the Nazi army, at scale, not everybody, but some fraction, especially during the French campaign, used meth. And then there’s Hitler, who used a lot of drugs, but meth was not one of them, really. Norman Ohler (02:00:14): No, meth, for him, was just for the foot soldiers, you know? Norman Ohler (02:00:18): He didn’t even talk about meth. This is nothing that concerned him, you know? This is something that makes you function. Maybe… He signed… I mean, the stimulant decree went over his desk, but I don’t know if he really read it or understood it. I mean, he probably knew Pervitin because everyone knew it. And maybe, you know, they discussed it, but they would probably also not… I mean, there was a point when there’s a conflict about methamphetamine in the army. This is when the Secretary of Health of the German government, the Nazi government Conti, he starts writing to the army, and he says, “You must stop this. This is against Nazi ideology.” But the army basically doesn’t listen to him and keeps on using meth all the way to the end. Norman Ohler (02:01:03): So maybe that guy, Conti, maybe he discussed this with Hitler, but… Also, Hitler never… You know, if Hitler would have said, “We stop the methamphetamine,” it probably would have stopped. But Conti saying that wasn’t enough. I don’t think Hitler was really into meth. It was not his thing. He was more into the opioids, into these weird hormonal things. Like, those things were, especially the opioids, were interesting to him, because you can function on opioids for a long time if you have a proper product and a doctor that gives you the injections. Göring was high on, was addicted to morphine from 1923 until when the Americans captured him in ’45. That’s 22 years he was functioning on morphine. And when they captured him, he had… Norman Ohler (02:01:53): I write about it in Blitz, like the amount of morphine capsules he had on him. So the Americans did was first take away all the morphine from him, and then he went through withdrawal in American, you know, incarceration. And he lost a lot of pounds, and he became more of a haggard Göring, which was then in Nuremberg, you know, this haggard kind of guy defending what he did. So Hitler was really an opioid guy, while the army was really meth-ed up. That’s how you could sum it up briefly. Lex Fridman (02:02:26): He did try cocaine. Why didn’t he get into cocaine? Norman Ohler (02:02:30): He started cocaine after the bomb attack by Stauffenberg on July 20th, 1944. When this bomb went off, which actually killed a few people in the room, this was during a military briefing. Stauffenberg put a bag with explosives under the table, and the table actually saved Hitler’s life because it was a good German quality oak table. So the table was so stable that the bomb explosion kind of just, it kind of blew up the table, but Hitler behind the table was protected by this table. Lex Fridman (02:03:00): Yeah, this is the closest assassination attempt, probably. Norman Ohler (02:03:04): Yeah. I mean, it’s very weird that it didn’t succeed because he had the bomb. He put it next to Hitler. He took out some of the explosives before he went into the room. This is one of the big mysteries. Why did Stauffenberg take out some of the explosives? There’s no explanation for it. But Hitler survived, but he was quite injured, which Nazi propaganda always denied. They always said the Führer was miraculously unharmed. But he was quite harmed. There were over a hundred splinters from the wood everywhere. His eardrums were blown, which was, you know, it’s quite an injury, I guess. You know, he was bleeding internally and he was shell-shocked basically. And then a new doctor comes in. His name is Keesing. Because Morell was not a… Norman Ohler (02:03:51): In Germany, we have, well, I guess worldwide, it’s the ear, nose, and throat specialist, right? So an ear, nose, and throat specialist from the German army called Dr. Keesing, he was ordered to come into headquarters after the bomb attack to treat Hitler’s blown eardrums. And Keesing gave Hitler cocaine, because cocaine at the time was being, was… You know, it was used. It was not Schedule 1, you know. It had the effect that it would numb the pain. And you could, you could like use it, you would like put it on a certain place where you had the pain and then it would numb that area. Norman Ohler (02:04:35): But Hitler was like, he had never taken cocaine before, but he got very interested in it. And Keesing writes a meticulous report about his experiences with Hitler. Alone, that report is really fun to read. It’s about a 15-page report that he did for American military after the war. When he was being interrogated by American military, he described what happened with Hitler and him. And he realized that Hitler really liked the cocaine, and then he started saying, “Now give it in the nose now,” and then it was a liquid that he could apply with a dab like into the nose. Lex Fridman (02:05:12): Oh, shit. Norman Ohler (02:05:12): Like, it wasn’t cocaine powder, but he could like… Lex Fridman (02:05:14): It was liquified. Yeah, interesting. Norman Ohler (02:05:16): Liquified cocaine. And Hitler loved it, and he’s just saying things like, “Finally, I can think clear again.” And he had this cocaine rush, which is a rush of superiority. It’s a dangerous drug because you think you know more than the other. It’s not a very humble drug, you know. It just increases the ego. And that actually… he liked that because that was… you know, after the bomb attack, he thought everyone was a traitor. He didn’t feel safe anymore in his own bunker, you know. And he was like, “Nazis…” The right wing is always paranoid. Like, “Who’s the enemy?” Like, “They’re behind us.” Like, “They’re stabbing us in the back.” So Hitler was this type of person. Norman Ohler (02:05:58): So the cocaine kind of stabilized him, and Keesing realized that this guy is like a drug guy. He didn’t know. He came in. He saw the Führer for the first time. He was in awe. And like a drug wreck was approaching him. And as soon as he had some cocaine in his system, ’cause this was summer of ’44, he had already taken a lot of opioids and a lot of drugs. So he, and a lot of these dubious hormonal concoctions, which led to autoimmune diseases in Hitler, maybe even had Parkinson’s. He was… Morell basically turned him into a physical wreck. That Keesing also writes about this like he’s trembling before he goes into the room for the first time where the Führer is. Norman Ohler (02:06:35): And then there’s like an old guy in a blue kind of pajama, kind of coming up to him and kind of shaking his hand. “That’s the Führer,” you know. And Keesing is totally shocked because it’s like, you know, the destiny of the German nation, the whole Europe, everything is like… …Hangs on this guy, you know. And then whenever he takes cocaine, he’s a little bit better, like… But the cocaine had the problem that Keesing was more of a, at least later in his discussions with the US military, he described himself as a conscientious guy. And he’s like, “I became like… I had the kind of problems giving Hitler more cocaine.” And… Lex Fridman (02:07:18): Yeah, and I’m sure Hitler could have sensed that. Norman Ohler (02:07:20): And then Morell started disliking Keesing because Hitler spent more time now with Keesing than with him. And there was this, what I call, the doctor’s war ensued, ’cause Keesing then tried to get rid of Morell, because Keesing could suddenly see that Hitler was receiving a lot of drugs. And he was taking cocaine with Keesing. Keesing left the room, then Morell would come in and give him Eukodal opioid intravenously, which is the speedball effect. Cocaine and an opioid, you know, at the same time. That’s like, that creates a really crazy high. But that’s a high that’s not stable anymore, you know. That’s a high that you… That’s like at the end of your drug career, you take the speedball. Lex Fridman (02:08:08): So speedball is a combination of a stimulant… Norman Ohler (02:08:10): Right Lex Fridman (02:08:10): …and a depressant. Cocaine and heroin. Norman Ohler (02:08:13): Opioids are depressants. Lex Fridman (02:08:15): Yeah. So combining cocaine and heroin, huh? Wow. Oh. Norman Ohler (02:08:20): I’ve never had a speedball, but I think it’s like the most hardcore drug experience you can have, you know. And Hitler had this in the summer of 1944 for quite some time. And then the doctors really fought for influence over Hitler. And Keesing teamed up with Himmler, head of the SS, and basically said to Himmler, “This Morell guy…” And Himmler was really suspicious of Morell, obviously, because Morell’s spending so much time with Hitler. There’s no control, like Himmler was a control freak. What is he actually giving to the Führer? The Führer doesn’t look good anymore. Norman Ohler (02:08:53): So Keesing was trying to get Morell out. Maybe because he wanted Hitler to have better health, maybe he wanted to have the job himself. He certainly tried to get rid of Morell, and it came to like, a high noon situation, like the duel between the two doctors. It’s, by the way, why I think it’s completely insane that Hollywood hasn’t bought the rights yet, alone this doctor’s war. Lex Fridman (02:09:19): You mean for the entire Blitz story, or? Norman Ohler (02:09:21): Yeah, of course. Lex Fridman (02:09:22): Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s really… I mean, some of the greatest movies… I mean, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Norman Ohler (02:09:28): You can do a drug movie on the Nazis. Lex Fridman (02:09:31): You know, one of my favorite movies, probably Downfall, which is Hitler in the bunker, which does, I guess… Does Downfall have a drug… Norman Ohler (02:09:38): No. Lex Fridman (02:09:38): … component to that? Norman Ohler (02:09:39): They missed, they missed the drug angle. Because my book hadn’t been out yet, they didn’t know about it. That’s why they can’t… Lex Fridman (02:09:45): That’d be a different story. Norman Ohler (02:09:46): They can’t really explain why Hitler became a physical wreck. There’s no explanation for it except the drugs. Lex Fridman (02:09:53): Well- Norman Ohler (02:09:53): The opioid addiction. Lex Fridman (02:09:54): You could explain it. It is a part of it that you’re… it’s just an extremely stressful position he’s in. Norman Ohler (02:10:01): Yeah, but you don’t become a physical wreck if you’re… Lex Fridman (02:10:03): And he’s losing the war. The physical wreck aspect, yeah. Norman Ohler (02:10:06): And there were two bedrooms in the bunker in Berlin. Two bedrooms. One, of course, for Hitler, the other one for Morell. No one else was sleeping in the bunker. I mean, you can see the importance of, especially in those last months, of Morell in the bunker. And they didn’t get that when they made the movie, The Downfall. But it’s still an interesting movie, but I can’t take it seriously because they didn’t see this as a… Lex Fridman (02:10:33): As a drug component. Norman Ohler (02:10:34): It’s missing. Lex Fridman (02:10:34): Again, I don’t think it has to be the main thing, but it has to be a part of it. A serious movie on Blitzed would be really nice. It’s not easy to do. Norman Ohler (02:10:45): No. Lex Fridman (02:10:46): There’s something about drugs, if you do a movie that involves drugs, that makes it… You can go too far into like Tarantino territory… Norman Ohler (02:10:56): Right Lex Fridman (02:10:57): … where it’s more like… which is also incredible and awesome, but it’s a different thing. Norman Ohler (02:11:02): Well, he invents history, and he’s very open about it. Lex Fridman (02:11:05): Yeah. Norman Ohler (02:11:05): Like, this is not what actually happened. I think a Blitzed movie would have to stick to the facts. And I’ve spoken with some directors, very good German directors, and it’s just very hard to do. But… Lex Fridman (02:11:17): But if you do it well, that’s a legendary movie. Norman Ohler (02:11:19): I think it would be. Yeah. Yeah. Lex Fridman (02:11:20): That would be incredible. Can you just speak high level from, from… What is it? You said ’41 to ’45. What were some behavioral changes or changes in decision-making that we can trace in Hitler that could be attributed to drugs? How did they change him? Norman Ohler (02:11:43): Well, an interesting event is July 1943 in a villa in Northern Italy where Hitler meets Mussolini. Mussolini is basically fed up with the war and he wants Italy to leave the Axis of Evil. Hitler is really pissed when he hears that. He knows that’s what the meeting is all about. Mussolini, I mean, the Italians invented that modern type of fascism, and Italy was the role model for Nazi Germany, but by now, Nazi Germany, of course, has been much more powerful. Italy is the most important ally, and now Mussolini is quitting in the middle of the war. What is going on here? So Hitler becomes… Morell writes about this quite a lot. He’s in a terrible mood. He really doesn’t want to go. Norman Ohler (02:12:36): He might lose his temper or whatever. He’s not happy. That’s actually the day when he receives Eukodal for the first time. He says to Morell, “I’m under such stress, I’m not going to go.” He threatens, he calls off the whole thing. The plane’s already waiting in Obersalzberg. Everything is ready, and he says, “I’m not meeting this guy.” Then Morell gives him Eukodal, and you can see the time when he gets the Eukodal. That’s when he has this effect for the first time, this like, “I can do anything. This is great. Norman Ohler (02:13:11): I’m going to explain to Mussolini that he’s not going to leave the war effort.” On the way to the plane, he says to Morell that this Eukodal is really helping him, and he wants another shot, and he receives another shot. So he has quite a lot of Eukodal in him when he speaks to Mussolini. The people who write the protocol of the meeting and also other people around, it’s not just two people in the room. It’s like, I don’t know, 15 or 20 people in the room. A lot of people talk about that meeting in their memoirs. Norman Ohler (02:13:45): Mussolini is not able to say one word basically, because Hitler is so high and so charged. He’s just telling the whole time how great this is, what they’re doing right now. Of course, it’s not even possible that you’re going to leave. We are in this together from the… He explains everything, the whole thing for like two hours, and Mussolini is just like… Then a messenger comes in and says, “Rome has just been bombed.” He’s like, he knows, but he can’t say anything, and he stays. So that meeting was very much influenced by his Eukodal. That’s probably because it was so successful in Hitler’s eyes… Norman Ohler (02:14:28): is why Eukodal became a very attractive drug for him. This was the first time in July 1943. He didn’t take Eukodal the whole time. It only started in July ’43. He started with regular opioid use. You can see that he takes it more and more regularly now. Not every day, but sometimes. Like in September 1944, he takes Eukodal every second day, which is like a junkie rhythm. You take it, and the next day you don’t take it. Then you take it again. Lex Fridman (02:14:58): Why is that junkie rhythm? Norman Ohler (02:14:59): You don’t take it all the time because you need to relax. You take it maybe Saturday night, and the high lasts until Sunday morning. Then Sunday, when the high slowly wears off, you sleep, and then you wake up and you’re hungry. Maybe you eat. Then the next day, Monday, you’re going to do it again. So that’s this rhythm. Lex Fridman (02:15:24): And it was more potent than what is it, Dolantine? Norman Ohler (02:15:27): Dolantine. Lex Fridman (02:15:28): Do- Dolan- Norman Ohler (02:15:28): Eukodal is said to have the best effect, the best in the sense that it’s not about strength. You just increase the dosage and you have a stronger effect, but you can’t increase it too much because then you’re going to die. That’s also the problem with opioids. If you take too much, you’re going to die because you’re just going to have a heart attack. So but… Lex Fridman (02:15:46): There are nuanced differences that… Norman Ohler (02:15:48): Yeah, th- Lex Fridman (02:15:48): …it’s hard to convert into words, I guess. Yeah. Norman Ohler (02:15:50): Different molecules have different effects. So Eukodal apparently had the best effect. That’s why they had the oxycodone epidemic in America, because people take this pill. Thank God they’re not injecting it like Hitler did. They’d take a pill, so it’s not as dangerous as injecting. But apparently the effect of this Eukodal, of this particular type of opioid, is so pleasant that it’s more attractive, maybe, than Dolantine. Lex Fridman (02:16:19): Is it possible to try to reverse engineer the effect of Hitler’s drug use on the outcome of World War II? So if he didn’t use any drugs, would the Nazis have been more successful or less successful? What do you think? Norman Ohler (02:16:38): I think it would be speculative to answer, but I can try. The war is so complex. There are many different ways this war could have played out and ended, but I think it would always have ended with a German defeat. Lex Fridman (02:16:55): I don’t think it would have ended with a German defeat. Norman Ohler (02:16:58): Well, if you don’t attack the Soviet Union, then of course you can win. But as soon as you attack the Soviet Union… Lex Fridman (02:17:02): As we talked about, I think the probability of success is low. But, you know, I would put it like, I don’t know, 10%. Again… …Extremely speculative. But if you do a blitzkrieg type of attack, very rapid, don’t split the forces in Operation Barbarossa, go straight for Moscow. Don’t invade Britain. Don’t declare war on the United States, and really focus on gaining oil from the Middle East. So maybe making the Africa campaign the central point in the very beginning, so that you have the resources that are essential for the industrial capacity of Germany that’s required to, you know, keep manufacturing and keep fueling the planes, the tanks, the mechanized aspect of the army. So there are a lot of paths to this. Lex Fridman (02:17:58): I mean, but I think it’s probably fair to say that a reasonable, thoughtful, calculated, disciplined leader would not have done any of the things Hitler did, even in the beginning. I mean, it requires insanity, it requires hatred, it requires ideological self-capture where you tell yourself narratives that rapidly deviate from like ground truth, from first principles of things. And you just, you’re an insane person. You’re an insane dictator that’s drunk on power. And it’s impossible for you to make great military decisions at that point. Norman Ohler (02:18:39): Yeah, you would need like an impossible Hitler that is as crazy as he was but still wouldn’t make any- Lex Fridman (02:18:44): Mistakes Norman Ohler (02:18:44): irrational mistakes. So that doesn’t exist. Hitler can only be imagined or understood in a way, as the drugs. Hitler without drugs is unthinkable for me. It doesn’t, it makes, he was the drug guy. You cannot separate this. So Hitler was a self-destructive personality, and National Socialism is a self-destructive movement. That’s why I said I think the Germans would have lost in any case, except if there was this perfect Hitler, which is theoretically impossible. Lex Fridman (02:19:22): Theoretically possible in the 20th century. I mean, you could think of a Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great type characters that would really internalize the sense of, in the case of Hitler, that the German people are, like, without the hatred, without the ideology, but with the murderous with the ability to dehumanize the rest of the world and see the German people as, uh— Norman Ohler (02:19:48): Superior Lex Fridman (02:19:49): … the superior and so it’s fair to do the Lebensraum and all of that kind of stuff. It’s hard to—it’s just the reason you want to think about that kind of stuff is Hitler got, to me at least, close to capturing a very large part of the world. And it’s terrifying and sort of unbelievable that somebody could get close to that. Norman Ohler (02:20:17): I mean, what you described as this feeling of superiority and conquering countries, that was basically what the Wehrmacht, the high command, that’s what they were going for. Norman Ohler (02:20:26): And they wanted to eliminate Hitler in the Operation Valkyrie— not because they thought, “He’s an evil guy, he’s killing the Jews,” or, you know, they wanted to eliminate him because he was not this effective decision-maker anymore that they needed to win the war, or to end it in a different way. And I spoke with Anthony Beevor once about the attempt of British intelligence to assassinate Hitler, and he had seen some evidence that at the point in time, they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler or malfunctioning Hitler, which he was after, you know, the summer of 1943, is better for Britain than, you know, killing Hitler and then having to deal with, like, some kind of, you know, maybe the army would have taken over the country, and that that would Norman Ohler (02:21:23): have been more uncomfortable for Great Britain than having this- having the continuation of the degenerating maniac. Lex Fridman (02:21:31): What do we know about the very end, Hitler in the bunker? The moments, the days, the weeks, the months leading up to the suicide, all those kinds of things? Norman Ohler (02:21:45): It’s quite well-documented because people at the time were keeping diaries and writing about it, writing about their experiences. Also, Morell wrote quite a bit what happened in the bunker. One thing that changed was that Eukodal was not available anymore, so the drug that Hitler actually had become physically addicted to was suddenly not available anymore. This had to do with the bombardment of the Merck company, the factory in December 1944. British bombers destroyed the production facilities. And Morell, there’s a report of Morell, the overweight person, riding on a motorcycle through bombed-out Berlin from pharmacy to pharmacy, basically going into the pharmacies, trying to score Eukodal, and he couldn’t find it anymore. Norman Ohler (02:22:43): It was nowhere to be found, and that’s when Hitler goes into withdrawal. What I find surprising is that he didn’t use another opioid because morphine was available all the way till the end, but he never kind of made that switch then. He doesn’t… Also, he didn’t realize for a long time that he becomes physically dependent on a drug, that he becomes a drug addict, but this realization happens in the last weeks in the bunker ’cause Goebbels, he understood it, and Goebbels wanted that bedroom, the second bedroom. Norman Ohler (02:23:15): So he said to Hitler, “Do you understand what’s going on, that Morell turns you into a drug addict?” And Hitler, at one point, realized what Goebbels was saying is true because he felt the withdrawal, he was shaking, and he felt like shit, and Morell is, like, giving him weird stuff in the end. Like, one time he gives him harmine, which is an MAO inhibitor, which is part of ayahuasca, actually, because he still had that in his doctor’s bag. It hadn’t been used yet, so he gives him that, which also creates some kind of a weird high, but, you know, Hitler at one point realizes really what’s going on. Norman Ohler (02:23:59): This is late April, so very late in the game, and there are a few reports of what actually happens. Like some say that Morell has to kneel in front of him and that Hitler puts a gun on his head and says, “You’ve been making me addicted to opioids. Get the hell out of the bunker.” For sure he fires him that day, and then Morell’s described as being in tears, like, leaving the bunker, he gets one of the last planes out of Berlin. He has a research lab in the south of Bavaria close to the Berghof, and he makes one of the last or the last plane out of Berlin. Lex Fridman (02:24:34): He survives? Norman Ohler (02:24:35): Yeah. And he goes to this research lab, and this is like May 2nd, 1945. He has like a little apartment in this research lab. His wife is still in Berlin. He’s like all alone, and he starts doing his taxes, and that kind of shows you that he was probably insane at that point, you know? Lex Fridman (02:24:52): Just totally out of touch. Norman Ohler (02:24:53): Why would you do your taxes? Maybe he was bored, you know, maybe he didn’t do his taxes for so long because he always had to treat Hitler, and then he thinks, “Now what am I going to do? I’m just going to do my taxes now.” Very German thing to do. Lex Fridman (02:25:05): He’s just a strange character. I mean, you tell this whole story, it’s— Norman Ohler (02:25:09): I would put that in the movie for sure, him doing his taxes and… Lex Fridman (02:25:12): That’s how the movie ends. Norman Ohler (02:25:14): Well, then the Americans move into Bavaria, liberate Bavaria from National Socialism, which was a great job they did there, and so I’m also thankful not only to the Red Army but also to the American forces. Really, very thankful that they… Because National Socialism was hard to beat. It was a beast, you know? It was hard to beat. So they capture Morell and they interrogate him, and he actually lives for another two years in American custody in Germany in a military prison, and after these two years, his health’s really bad. Norman Ohler (02:25:48): He has heart problems, and the Americans dump him in front of the Munich train station in a much too small uniform jacket, probably an American uniform, and he’s lying on the pavement in front of the train station, and a half-Jewish nurse that walks around there finds him, and she says, “I’m Theo Morell.” It’s really like in a movie. “I’m Theo Morell, I was the personal physician of the Fuhrer.” She’s like, this is 1947, Germany’s in ruins. And she brings him to a hospital. His wife comes from Berlin for the last time, they meet in a hospital at Tegernsee, a beautiful lake in Bavaria, and then he dies. So that was the end of Morell. So we know pretty much what happens in the end. Lex Fridman (02:26:33): Did somebody try to talk to Hitler about this? Like, what about Eva Braun? Has anybody close to him tried to talk about this? Norman Ohler (02:26:40): Well, Goebbels did. Lex Fridman (02:26:41): Well, that at the very end. But you would imagine maybe the generals or friends or inner circle. I mean, the reason I mentioned Eva is because, you know, people close to him. Norman Ohler (02:26:54): There is a certain tension between Eva Braun and Morell. And I could very well imagine that she talked with Hitler about it, but there’s no record, so I don’t know exactly. But they had a very intimate relationship. So Eva Braun was not just the dumb blonde that plays no role. They actually spoke every day. And when Hitler was in the military headquarters, he would phone her every night at 10:00 PM. They would have a long phone conversation. So they had a very deep relationship, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t really like Morell because, you know, for the obvious reasons. He was closer to Hitler than herself. And, you know, if you count one plus one, it’s two, you know. So… Lex Fridman (02:27:34): But she could have maybe not liked him because she might have cared for Hitler. And you can see the effects of drugs on humans that you care for. Norman Ohler (02:27:42): She also had a good relationship with him at times because he was often at the Berghof. The Berghof was like, what is it called? Mar-a-Lago. Lex Fridman (02:27:52): Oh, the Mar-a-Lago? Yeah. Norman Ohler (02:27:54): Yeah, that’s kind of what it was. And it was actually, it became an official headquarter for Hitler, so he would actually make decisions from there. It was not just a vacation place. And Morell was often there, and Eva Braun was always there. That was her place. She was running that place. She was like the woman of that place. And Hitler was often, of course, in the field in the headquarters, but he came as much as he could to the Berghof because it’s quite beautiful. I went up there. It’s quite interesting. And she also had a good relationship with Morell, and there’s a paper that I found where they were very intimate and very close. There’s a paper of Morell where she comes to him in the morning and she has scratch marks. Norman Ohler (02:28:42): So apparently, they had violent sex. So Morell is also kind of a witness to that. That I found in Washington, D.C. in the National Archive. Lex Fridman (02:28:51): Wait, Hitler and Eva had violent sex? What do we know about Hitler’s sex life? It’s not known, right? Norman Ohler (02:28:57): I found it interesting that Morell describes these scratch marks. I mean, it’s interesting. So they had some kind of kinky sex maybe. Maybe they also had normal sex and sometimes it was kinky, or… Maybe Hitler was aggressive in bed, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s just what happened between Eva and him. Lex Fridman (02:29:16): Yeah, I don’t think that affected… …Military operations of the Wehrmacht. Norman Ohler (02:29:19): The drug use did. His sex… If he would have had sex with a lot of people, maybe with his generals, then maybe, you know, it would be worth writing about it, because maybe he dominated these generals in bed or something. But he was just having sex with Eva, and I don’t think that’s historically relevant. It might be interesting for the movie, but also, I don’t want to see Hitler having sex. Lex Fridman (02:29:41): I don’t think anyone wants to see Hitler having sex. Norman Ohler (02:29:45): But Eva Braun is an interesting character because she had more of a say than historians for a long time attributed to her. Then a biography was written on her by a female German historian, and that’s a very good biography. It really shows that she had, you know, quite a lot to say in this relationship. She was not the dumb blonde that just… She was quite, you know, opinionated and active. So, it’s… And she was filming him a lot. Like, she was always filming in the Berghof. You can go online and look at the Eva Braun clips, and you will see Hitler in color at the Berghof, how he’s, like, meeting children, petting their head. And this is her contributing to the myth of this private, the good private man. Norman Ohler (02:30:30): So Eva Braun is an interesting character for sure. But I found one note that she, in the beginning when Morell started with his drugs, said to Morell that she wants the same drugs, the same medications, not drugs, the same medications as Hitler so she would be on the same wavelength with him. She wanted to be… She didn’t want to lose this world. But, I mean, Hitler became such a drug polytoxicomanic user that, of course, Eva couldn’t keep up with that. They weren’t a drug couple. I didn’t see any evidence for that, that they would, like, take all the crazy drugs together and then have crazy sex or something like that. That’s not how it was. So I think she was sympathetic to Morell in the beginning and then changed her opinion. Norman Ohler (02:31:15): And I’m pretty sure she talked with Hitler about it, but there are no records about their private conversations. Lex Fridman (02:31:21): Let’s talk about another perspective on this whole story that you document in your book, “The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis.” So this is the story of the people who resisted from within Germany. Norman Ohler (02:31:37): Right. Lex Fridman (02:31:37): Can you tell their story? In particular, let’s talk through the story of the two key figures in the movement who… …Happened to also be in love. Norman Ohler (02:31:49): Well, the main guy is Harro Schulze-Boysen. He caught my attention when I was doing research in an archive in Munich, researching drugs in the Luftwaffe, Goering’s Luftwaffe. Goering being the more finist… I mean, the Luftwaffe was a very promiscuous drug place. A lot of people in the Luftwaffe were high. Lex Fridman (02:32:15): Oh, so more for entertainment versus the practical aspect of… So it’s less about the meth optimizing human performance and more about just exploring? Norman Ohler (02:32:26): Like the number three of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet, he committed suicide in the fall of 1941. And he had had seven Pervitin tablets for breakfast. Lex Fridman (02:32:39): Okay. Norman Ohler (02:32:40): So he was really high on meth. He really enjoyed it. But he loved to take meth and then drink. Alcohol was a big thing in the Luftwaffe. You can drink a lot more when you’re on methamphetamine. And I found this letter, and that was really a coincidence while I was looking through the drug stuff. I was searching for, you know, drugs, and I found this letter by Harro Schulze-Boysen, who had nothing to do with drugs, but still I found this letter. I don’t know why. I can’t remember how exactly it happened that I was suddenly reading this letter, and it was the last letter that he wrote in his life. Norman Ohler (02:33:14): He wrote it to his father, and he said that “Everything I have done, I’m totally fine with it, and I know it’s very hard for you, and I really am mostly sad for you and mother and my brother that you have to go through this. And I’m very sorry, but I’m fine with it, and I have a clean conscience. I did what I could to stop this madness.” And I’m like, “What? Who is this guy?” And I Googled him, and there were not so many hits on him, but I read a little bit, and he actually had formed, together with his wife, Libertas, which means freedom… Lex Fridman (02:33:51): Good name. Norman Ohler (02:33:53): He had formed the largest resistance network against the Nazis that ever existed. Over 100 people in Berlin that were all connected, and they were, they were from all flights of life. Like there were, some were artists, others were workers, some were leftists, others were patriots. Harro always believed that people could come to an agreement, like it’s possible to actually talk about things, and he was a, he was a true democrat, maybe you could say, or a true, I don’t know, libertarian. Or, you know, he was a… He had to learn a hard lesson that, with Nazis, you cannot argue, because they are always right. It doesn’t work. At least it didn’t work during the Third Reich. Like, he could… Norman Ohler (02:34:54): He had, he had published a newspaper during the Weimar Republic called “Gegner,” which means opponent. And in the “Gegner,” opponents could all write, like who would be on the street’s opponents, they could all write in “The Opponent.” And so it was a… You read all kinds of texts and opinions, and he thought when Hitler took over power in ’33 that he could continue to publish “The Opponent,” because “The Opponent,” he thought even, you know, in a Nazi-led Germany, you know, this keeps the discourse. You have to have a discourse. We have to discuss. We have to disagree, you know. And then in April 1933, two months after Hitler took power, they had a meeting with the editorial staff. Norman Ohler (02:35:38): They discussed the new issue, and then there was a knock on the door, and it was the SS, and they beat up everybody, and they destroyed the typewriters and the printing press that they had in the office in Berlin. And they took Harro and his best friend, who was half Jewish, to one of these early concentration camps, and they tortured both of them, and the Jew was killed. He didn’t make it. Henry Erlanger and Harro, at that moment he realized who he’s against, you know, that he has to… He decided to become… to, to fight the system. And the way he fought the system was later during the ’60s we also had a ’60s kind of cultural and political changes in Germany. And then our ’60s they, they called it march through the institutions. Norman Ohler (02:36:30): That is a way to infiltrate the system, like to become part of the system, and then, you know, change the system from within. So you don’t leave the country, you stay, you go into the institutions. You march through the institutions. So Harro decided to go into the Luftwaffe, and he was working in the Air Force, Luftwaffe Ministry, a huge building still intact today in Berlin Wilhelmstrasse. Quite an interesting building that was like the power center of the Luftwaffe or like one of the most important structures in the whole Nazi regime. And he was working there, and he worked his way up, and he received quite a lot of information. For example, when Germany, for the first time, became militarily active again. Norman Ohler (02:37:19): This was in 1936, when the Germans supported the fascists in Spain in the Spanish Civil War. This was a clandestine operation. The Luftwaffe did this. And they, like German soldiers went to Spain like in plain clothes, like posing as vacationers. But then they, you know, were actually soldiers and supporting Franco’s… You know, were part of Franco’s victory later on. And Harro had this information, and he passed… He tried to pass this on to the BBC. He failed passing it on. Well, he met a BBC journalist during the Olympic Games in Berlin, and told him about this, and the BBC guy was too afraid to make this public, and he kind of buried that information. Norman Ohler (02:38:04): So Harro is just a very interesting character, and he was in love with Libertas and Libertas with him. Harro came from like a bourgeois family, very educated. His great-grand uncle was von Tirpitz, who built up the marine, the Navy for the Kaiser. So he came from this influential German family, but they were all patriots. They were not Nazis. They were democrats, patriots and militarists, I guess you could say, or like even, you know, very straight-laced also in a way. And Libertas, she came from a castle north of Berlin. She was this like Bohemian, like aristocratic Bohemian type. She’s very good-looking, always playing music. And they fell in love. They met on the Wannsee on boats. They were both on a… Norman Ohler (02:38:53): Harro was rowing, and she was on a sailboat of a guy that Harro also knew. So he was rowing, and he saw his friend on the sailboat, and he looked at Libertas, she looked at him, and they were in love in 1934. And the other guy, the friend of Harro, he left his sailboat, because he realized, “I’m like the fifth wheel on the car, not really needed,” right? Like, how do you say that in sailboat terms? I don’t know, the third sail is not needed. Norman Ohler (02:39:21): You know, but what happened at night, Harro didn’t sleep with Libertas. For her, that was very unusual because everyone wanted to sleep with her, but Harro, he wanted to keep his clothes on, and it was a very warm night, and I researched this quite thoroughly. I know exactly the temperature, and so also The Bohemians, when you read The Bohemians, you really experience the life of these people, what they experienced, but everything is nothing is invented, which is very tricky to do. So what happens that night, Libertas wants to take off his clothes and he doesn’t want to take them off, because why? From the torture in April 1933, he has quite a lot of scars. They even burned swastikas into his thighs. Not burned, sorry, they… With knives. Norman Ohler (02:40:11): The SS. So he doesn’t want to show that to her. He just, and he hadn’t had a girlfriend for a while. He can’t open up emotionally because he’s fighting the Nazis. It’s very secret. No one knows about this, that he’s long-term planning his life to fight the system that he hates so much because they killed his best friend in front of his eyes. But at one point, Libertas does take off his clothes and she sees this, and she’s naive. She’s even a member of the Nazi party, but she’s not a very active party member. She just, you know, she works for MGM actually in Berlin, a Hollywood film studio office in Berlin. Germany was one of the biggest movie markets, and she was the press girl. She did the campaigns for the big Hollywood movies in Germany. Lex Fridman (02:40:57): So just a regular German girl? Norman Ohler (02:40:59): Well, she wasn’t regular. She was from a very high family. Actually, her grandfather had been in a relationship with the German emperor, which is a side story that I found out when I researched The Bohemians. The German emperor apparently was bisexual and was going to that castle, and they had homosexual meetings there with Libertas’ grandfather. So she came from a very… …Unusual family. Lex Fridman (02:41:28): Yeah. But what I mean in a usual German girl, what I mean by that is it’s not obvious that a person like that would hold a crucial role in the resistance against the Nazis. Norman Ohler (02:41:42): No, not at all. That was always a problem because for her, it was weird that someone was against the system. But Harro told me… Harro was totally convinced that fascism is wrong and that he has to fight it, and more and more Libertas was convinced, and then more friends came into the group. And the way Harro organized this resistance group was through parties. They were a power couple of Berlin, and they had a great loft apartment. Norman Ohler (02:42:12): They moved together to a loft apartment on also a side street from Ku’damm, a huge room, and there they had parties every second Thursday night and they would invite friends, and then once they trusted someone personally, they would spill the beans and say, “This is actually not just a party.” But they would test it. At the party, they would say something critical of the regime and you immediately, you know, either the person jumps on it, responds, or, you know, goes somewhere else, gets a drink at the bar, not into it. Norman Ohler (02:42:48): So that was the way of recruiting people, and that was such an efficient way that the Gestapo was not able to understand this group for a long time, not even recognize that there is a group, because Gestapo was very good at infiltrating, for example, communist resistance groups, because you just had to go in as a Gestapo guy and be a communist. Just say the right words and they would, at one point, you know, take you. But with Harro and Libertas, it wasn’t so easy. They would sniff you out, you know? Lex Fridman (02:43:20): These parties were what, like, intellectuals, artists and that kind of stuff? Norman Ohler (02:43:26): Yeah. They had music. They would dance. They would sleep with each other. They also… Lex Fridman (02:43:31): Oh, sex stuff too. Norman Ohler (02:43:33): Well, they had, and this is again a parallel to the ’60s, they had the idea that if you’re against fascism, if you’re for freedom of everything… Lex Fridman (02:43:45): Yeah, free love, the whole thing. Norman Ohler (02:43:46): …Yeah, they had free love, but it wasn’t a dogma. There was also a female doctor there, she was quite square, I guess you would say, and she was against this. She said, “This is too complicated. We are a resistance group. What if there’s jealousy and what if this could compromise operations?” And it did sometimes. So that’s why The Bohemians are a very interesting subject because sometimes it just doesn’t work. In a way, it works that love really bonds them together. Norman Ohler (02:44:15): But also, especially Libertas and Harro, they have a terrible marriage sometimes. They really fight because Libertas is not so much intellectually convinced. She’s more a resistance fighter from the heart, she feels that the Nazis are not good. But Harro is more like the analytical guy. So they have a lot of friction also, and it’s a fascinating story, and they came quite far. I mean, they made… There was a point in time when Harro had militarily relevant information through his position at the Luftwaffe ministry, and he passed that on to allies, to Western allies and to the Soviet Union. So he went a step further than just being a resistance group. He became, you could say, a traitor. Lex Fridman (02:45:03): He would give information to the Soviets. Norman Ohler (02:45:05): Yeah, he would, because he said- Lex Fridman (02:45:07): As part of the resistance. Norman Ohler (02:45:08): Yeah, they can beat Germany. But that was also discussed in the groups. Very interesting to see some say, “We can’t do this because the Soviet Union is also a totalitarian regime.” But then Harro says, “Yeah, but they are going to beat Hitler.” So The Bohemians is a very interesting topic. Lex Fridman (02:45:26): What lessons do you learn from these folks, maybe about why so few resisted Hitler while in Germany? Norman Ohler (02:45:38): I mean, it was extremely dangerous. Lex Fridman (02:45:40): Is it purely the danger? Is it also people believed it’s hard to be an independent thinker and take yourself outside the propaganda? Because they’re also swimming in propaganda. Norman Ohler (02:45:55): I mean, the chances of succeeding are quite small because the system was extremely strong. And if you made a joke about Hitler and the wrong person heard it in a restaurant and would rat on you, you would land in a concentration camp. So, people were very, very careful. Also, at parties, when Libertas was singing and they were drinking and dancing, and then suddenly the political discussion started, you know you have to have guts to then actually not leave the party but to stay, because they were risking their lives basically. As soon as they would be found out, they would be dead. And people don’t want to die when they’re in their mid-20s. They were all pretty young. Norman Ohler (02:46:37): And Libertas, she would often say, “We can’t win. Why are we risking our lives for what?” So, one time they did a Gelbe Sättel Aktion, Gelbe Sättel. They produced… because one guy had access to a printing press, and they produced leaflets, small papers that had glue on one side, and the paper said, um… What the Nazis did, they set up a huge exhibition hall which was called the Soviet Paradise, and this exhibition was always in the center of Berlin. I’d never heard about this before. I found this when I researched The Bohemians, and it was the most popular exhibition during the whole of the war. Two million people, two million Germans saw this. Norman Ohler (02:47:29): They went into this exhibition, and they saw how horrible the Soviet Union is, h- how horrible communism is to people. So, it was a propaganda show. Norman Ohler (02:47:39): And the group decided to make these leaflets which didn’t say “The Soviet Paradise,” but it said “The Nazi Paradise”: torture, SS torture, hunger, war, how long will it last? And they glued over a thousand of these stickers everywhere in Berlin in May 1942 at night. They organized it in a way that always two people, a man and a woman, would go out. They had the stickers with them, and then they would pretend to kiss and would lean on a wall. And then while they were kissing, one would put the sticker on. Then they would move on in the dark. So, in the morning of that May 1942, tens of thousands of Berliners saw that the city saw these things. Does it make a difference? It made one on that day, you know? Norman Ohler (02:48:35): It was a very dangerous thing to do, and no one was, no one got caught. And in the morning, a lot of people saw that there is actually resistance, that there are people who do something against it. So, I think they did something. Lex Fridman (02:48:48): Yeah, I was reading about protests in recent human history, and most of them, many of them, don’t have an effect until they do. It’s like this threshold effect. It’s very hard to know. It’s very hard to know because it’s a match that lights a fire. And sometimes the spark takes a little bit of time to propagate through the whispers. What happens is the people whispering, it’s the whisper network of people talking, and sometimes it just takes that one sticker to begin the whispers, and then a few months later, the regime is overthrown. It’s funny. It’s hard to trace back what was effective and what was not. Norman Ohler (02:49:35): I mean, Harro was convinced that the system would lose, so he thought that maybe we can make a contribution that makes it go faster. Maybe we will be that spark. When I think that there’s this possibility, I must try it. That was his conviction. So, he would put his life on the line for that possibility. Lex Fridman (02:49:59): How did they get caught? Norman Ohler (02:50:01): They were approached by the Soviet Union, who wanted to recruit them as spies. Norman Ohler (02:50:06): And they didn’t want to do that. Harro refused the Soviet intelligence. These are documents that were found in the early ’90s. One of the sons of one of the members of that group, a good friend of Harro’s, one of his sons went to Moscow to look at the files, and he found a kind of furious Soviet KGB description of this weird guy, Harro, that doesn’t want to be a proper Soviet spy and just says, “Yes, I’m going to give you information so you can hurt Hitler, but I’m not going to play your game. I’m not going to be one of you.” So still, they did collaborate with the Soviet Union. They accepted a radio transmitter from the Soviet Union, with which they were supposed to send military information via radio to Moscow. Norman Ohler (02:51:03): And they struggled with the technology. The Russians gave them an apparatus only with Russian instructions, and it’s very difficult. They made mistakes. But what actually gets them caught is the Russians at one point answered and sent a message to them through the ether. And that message is coded, but the Nazis intercepted that message and were able to decode it. And in the message, it gives the clear names of Harro and his address, which is a total intelligence blunder. Or maybe they just wanted to give them up, and had their revenge because Stalin did crazy stuff like that, you know? Norman Ohler (02:51:51): So they suddenly knew, the Gestapo knew Harro Schulze-Boysen, the high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe ministry, was giving military information to the Soviet Union, and apparently, he was meeting with all kinds of friends. So the Gestapo started observing the group for months. And the group at one point realized that they had been basically found out, but then it was already too late. Then they captured quite a few of them, and quite a few got a military trial and received the death penalty, and were also being executed. And Harro and Libertas were among them. And also, that last chapter of their lives is very well-documented, and it actually ends with that letter, you know, that I found in the beginning. That’s the last thing that Harro does, is write that letter. Lex Fridman (02:52:44): To his father. Norman Ohler (02:52:45): That’s very interesting what happens with Libertas because she gets in custody. The Gestapo asks one of their secretaries, Gertrude Breiter, to go in and pose as a friend to Libertas. And Libertas actually falls for it and starts telling that secretary, who pretends to be her friend and kind of helps her with certain things, tells her secrets, and that kind of breaks the neck of the group. It’s a very tragic ending. So while my books always contain as much humor as possible, that is not a funny story, but it’s a very dramatic story. Even though they had a lot of humor, obviously. I mean, they had parties to recruit people. Lex Fridman (02:53:31): What lessons can we learn from that about how to resist totalitarian regimes? Is there some deeper wisdom? Norman Ohler (02:53:44): I just think it’s admirable to be brave and not do things that you cannot really justify in front of your own conscience. I don’t know if I would have been so brave. I don’t even know, obviously, how my conscience would have been, but I’m probably more the fleeing type. Like, a lot of writers would just leave Germany. Like Thomas Mann just left Germany and lived in Pacific Palisades. Lex Fridman (02:54:12): And then, and then maybe write, criticize, but leave first. Norman Ohler (02:54:16): And he criticized it from the outside, and he was quite influential. He worked for the BBC. They did shows against the Nazis. So you could maybe do more when you leave. It’s just you have… Like today, let’s say we see something. We live in a system that suddenly changes, and we’re not happy with it anymore. Do we just go along and, you know, continue to stare at our smartphone, or do we do something against it? What do we do? I mean, every situation has very different conditions. It’s… I think it’s probably even harder now to be in the resistance than it was back then. Lex Fridman (02:54:58): But I think it does, at the end of the day, boil down to facing yourself, looking yourself in the mirror- Norman Ohler (02:55:03): Right. Lex Fridman (02:55:03): that you’re facing your conscience and then doing the courageous thing. And I think that in itself, like… it’s the tree falling in the forest, even if there’s nobody there to hear it. Just the fact that that exists, somehow through the karma channels of the world… …Can materialize into progress, into a revolution against oppression. Something about that human spirit still shining through can start a revolution. Norman Ohler (02:55:40): I mean, it is that spirit that actually made us human. It is that neuroplasticity in our brain that we do not just repeat the conditioned sets that we ought to repeat. But that we actually dim down the command center in the brain and let other parts of the brain react, which is the psychedelic experience, basically. That, I think, contributes to the evolution of our species. And our species is certainly threatened by extinction. So I think if we somehow care for the human race then resistance becomes a very immediate and important topic, you know. Because you can resist, obviously. Your brain is yours. You can resist in many ways, you know, by thinking, just by thinking. That’s actually why I became a writer when I was a teenager. I was very political. Norman Ohler (02:56:56): I wanted to change the system. I thought, “This is not good, what’s happening.” This was in the Cold War. Very… I don’t know if conservative is even the right word, but you know, Ronald Reagan was president. So I thought my writing could change the brain waves of the readers, basically, and therefore have a neuroplastic effect on the reader. And just because that is what literature is. Literature, and I started off as a novelist, and that’s really literature. It’s about what do you see right now? How do you describe it? So you do it in ways that when you read it, when you read a good book, you feel good because suddenly you see different things, your brain changes. You become more free, I think, if you read good literature. Norman Ohler (02:57:45): That was always my form of- of resistance. Communist resistance cells would probably say this is nothing, you know, but I think it is resistance. And that’s a little bit… I- I think it resembles a little bit what this group did. Just living differently, not living, you know… That’s why I said in the beginning, Nazis were bad dancers, because… I think they were good dancers at the parties, you know, and they were like… I think dancing can be a form of resistance. Lex Fridman (02:58:19): Yeah, but I also like the scale when you resist and through that resistance you have impact at scale, and I do think writing is that. So if you can en- encapsate your, sort of the spirit of that resistance into writing, that’s- that’s beautiful. And some of the greatest literature does exactly that. Norman Ohler (02:58:39): Right. That is the aim of my next book. Lex Fridman (02:58:43): So is it still called Stone Sapiens? Norman Ohler (02:58:45): Yeah, it’s called Stoned Sapiens. Lex Fridman (02:58:46): Great title, great title. So what is this lens that you’re looking at all of human history through? Norman Ohler (02:58:54): I discussed this with the already mentioned Antony Beevor, who is like the master in historical non-fiction books, and said, “Is it also possible to write a world history?” Like, about everything, basically. And he said, “Yes, it is possible.” It’s not easy, because you have to understand a lot, you know? And obviously, it will always be a selection. It’s clear, you know. That’s why I also think that historical science is basically a fictional science. I mean, I have a foreword, the Blitz foreword basically tells that story. Take it with a grain of salt. Not only Blitz, but every historical book, because we weren’t there, you know? That’s what Johnny Depp said when the guy said, “So you had like a megapint of red wine.” He just said, “Were you there?” Norman Ohler (02:59:42): You know, and the guy wasn’t there. So, history, historical sciences, is a fiction. But, you know, it’s a certain type of fiction, and it’s based on facts. So I’m not inventing anything in Stoned Sapiens, and I’m highly interested in the very early human history, and there are not a lot of sources. So the beginning of the book is more speculative than, for example, the Vietnam War chapter. In the Vietnam War chapter, I’m in Hanoi speaking to Viet Cong generals, asking them did they supply heroin to the GIs, which diminished their fighting capability. You can research that, and that’s also a chapter. By the way, the Vietnam War is not called the Vietnam War in Vietnam. It’s called the American War. Norman Ohler (03:00:36): And also, I was sitting with these Viet Cong generals in Hanoi just a few weeks ago for researching for Stoned Sapiens, and I said, “So did the Viet Cong bring heroin?” Because there’s never been evidence that it happened this way, and they just looked at me and they said, “There’s no Viet Cong.” Like, “What are you talking about? You are the Viet Cong.” They said, “No, this is an American propaganda term. We were the North Vietnamese Army. We never called ourselves the Viet Cong.” So the book is full of surprises, obviously. But the very early beginning of Stoned Sapiens goes back to about 1.5 million years ago when Homo erectus, who has also become kind of famous by now, Homo erectus, is like the first human that really gets shit done, you know. They- Lex Fridman (03:01:24): Yeah, they get moving. Norman Ohler (03:01:26): Yeah, they move. Yeah. Lex Fridman (03:01:27): And why were they moving? Norman Ohler (03:01:28): Why were they moving? I mean, then you can examine exactly where they originated, which was, I mean, it’s also disputed by now that it’s the Great Rift Valley, that only the most fossils have been found there, but that doesn’t mean that they originated there. Maybe they originated in the Central African rainforest where fossils disintegrate, and only there in the Rift Valley do we still find it. So but we know for sure that in the Great Rift Valley there was a plant called khat, which is like a plant speed. So they were using that. It’s still being used now in these countries, in Ethiopia, Yemen, around the Horn of Africa. Khat is very normal to use. You chew the leaves and it gives you… It’s like an amphetamine. It’s a plant amphetamine, basically. Norman Ohler (03:02:16): So Homo erectus, there’s no proof that they actually used it, but they were living in that area and the plant was there, so you can write about that. So it’s interesting because they were able to do certain things, like they shed their fur. They were the first ones to suddenly be naked. And that has the effect that sweat glands are produced. Homo erectus could sweat it out basically when they were very hot. What animals couldn’t do because they had the fur. So an antelope can run faster than a Homo erectus, but after 10 minutes, the antelope has to stop, like what dogs do, their tongue goes out. And humans didn’t have to do that because they were sweating, so they developed the jogging mode, basically. Norman Ohler (03:03:07): So they were jogging. They were not sprinting to get the animal, they were jogging, and when the animal couldn’t do it, had to rest, then the humans would come and hunt it down. So Homo erectus was very… was evolutionary very good. And then later, one of the species coming out of Homo erectus is Homo sapiens. Norman Ohler (03:03:27): At one point, there were only about 1,500 people left. There were not a lot of Homo sapiens. There was a point in time when there were quite a few of them, and the problem became inbreeding, and there was a real danger of extinction. They were vulnerable, you know? They were not on top of the food chain yet, so they had to develop consciousness. Consciousness is what basically saved us from extinction. Without human consciousness, we wouldn’t be here, you know? That is what made us, in the end, superior to other animals. So, how did this happen? You can kind of trace how they moved. You can trace that they went through the Central African rainforest, and there’s one plant there which elephants like, and that’s iboga. Norman Ohler (03:04:13): And iboga now is like the hot thing of the psychedelic renaissance. Iboga, iboga, iboga. But it’s also the oldest drug in the book, basically. They saw that elephants were eating iboga, the root and the leaves, and suddenly were like, walking backward and were behaving in an unusual way, and then people were also using this. And this was going on for about 100,000 years in the rainforest. So, you can write a story about that, you know. Was it maybe iboga? Of course, you can’t prove it. You know, maybe the frontal cortex grew by itself, you know? Lex Fridman (03:04:49): That’s a really compelling story. That’s one of the great mysteries of… How did the light turn on? Norman Ohler (03:04:56): Right. Lex Fridman (03:04:56): The magic of human cognition and consciousness, and the- Norman Ohler (03:04:59): Like Sapiens by Harari, which is a great book, he also misses that. When it comes to those moments, he writes, “We don’t understand how the first cognitive revolution and the second cognitive revolution actually happened.” So, I find it interesting to kind of look, could it have been drugs? Like, I include everything he leaves out, I look at thoroughly in Stoned Sapiens. Lex Fridman (03:05:24): I mean, he does a good explanation of interesting consequences. You know, our ability to imagine ideas and share them and, you know, collaborate on them, and the imagination, all that kind of stuff. But the why, the transitions of why did it happen, he doesn’t provide, right? I mean, there are some theories, but if iboga is one of them, that’s a compelling one. That’s a really compelling one. Norman Ohler (03:05:51): Yeah. I mean, I’m still researching this book and writing it. I also want to go there, because they still take iboga in Gabon, for example. I also interviewed one of the leading iboga experts at Columbia University for Stoned Sapiens, and he described how iboga works in the brain because that’s… and he’s never taken iboga himself. Lex Fridman (03:06:17): Oh, interesting. Norman Ohler (03:06:18): He just relies on the data. He doesn’t want to be personally influenced. But he said he will take it at a certain point in time. But right now, he’s still just working on data, just with patients, you know? And what he found, and also examining in the brain through brain scanners, what actually happens in the classic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, they dock at certain points. They interact with certain receptors. It’s quite well understood how they work. And he said iboga is completely different. It’s like… And he also showed this with his hands, because he’s just so mesmerized by his own findings. It kind of—it’s kind of everywhere at the same time in the brain, like… He says it’s like a spa for the neurons, basically. It is… Norman Ohler (03:07:02): His findings show—and these are academic findings at Columbia—that iboga, it’s like, as if, he said to me, as if iboga would know our brain from a long time. Like, it knows exactly if you’re addicted to something, or if you’re depressed. The depression literally is a depression in the neuronal network. Depression is a thought loop, for example, or, you know, a system of thought loops that you’re on, that, “I’m not worthy, I’m not whatever, I can’t do it.” You always go back. It really kind of depresses your brain in a way. And iboga sees this immediately, and kind of takes the depression out and makes your brain go basically well again. So, this is what his findings are. So, it seems… Norman Ohler (03:07:53): He says he’s totally convinced this is like a… He doesn’t call it a plant. He calls it like a neurotechnology of the 22nd century. So, iboga really seems to be in a different kind of category. That’s why I really feel that Stoned Sapiens must be written, because there’s so much that historians just shied away from. And it all started when I was on the island of Crete, the biggest island of Greece. Crete, that’s another, like, Harari moment. On Crete was the first what is called high culture of Europe, the Minoan culture. You might have heard of the Minoan culture. Norman Ohler (03:08:37): And no one can explain, so far, why there, on Crete, suddenly in Europe, they started making amazing structures and amazing art, and how did it happen there that this, like, totally backwards place, Crete, became… I mean, backwards as any other place, you know? Why did it happen there that such intricate objects were being made and that the culture was developing so intensely? And I was kind of thinking about that. That’s how the book started. I was with my kids on vacation in Crete. And if you go to, like, Knossos or Phaistos, the big archaeological sites, or to the museum in Heraklion, you don’t find an answer. Why did it happen there? Norman Ohler (03:09:28): And then I found an old book in an old bookshop, and it described an excavation site at the sea, and that it was maybe a maritime place, or like a harbor basically. And then while I was swimming there, I found on the seafloor, the remnants of a wall that was a harbor wall that was out, that was breaking the waves, and then I climbed over the fence because the archaeological site is still fenced off, like it’s not explained officially what it is, and the walls in there are the biggest walls of the whole Bronze Era, and it was actually quite a big harbor. And then the next step is what did they trade? And they traded olive oil because Crete was the first place to produce olive oil. Norman Ohler (03:10:24): And then I also found, and this is historically documented, opium was made in Crete and the poppy flower was growing there. And this was the harbor. Basically, they became incredibly wealthy through olive oil and opium trade through that harbor. So you could say that the whole of the European high culture, which goes from Minoan, goes to Athens, so it all started basically with, you know, they were drug dealers in a way. Or they… I mean, it was the most potent medicine, because it was the only medicine that numbs the pain for sure. You know, opium works, and the Minoans developed that. So, I mean, it’s kind of, it’s a bit similar to the Blitz experience. You know what, the more I did research, the more I found— Lex Fridman (03:11:17): That there’s this whole component to human history- …that could be a- a really critical component. I mean, I am really interested about the origin… There’s certain leaps, like the- the origins of human civilization, and then the origins of homo sapiens. Those are really big leaps. Norman Ohler (03:11:32): I mean, there’s some evidence, you know, like, they came through the area where Iboga was, but there’s no academic proof. So I guess an academically trained historian couldn’t really write about that. But I can write about it. I can write about possibilities. Lex Fridman (03:11:51): Yeah, sometimes… I mean, that’s what… The- the farther into history you go, the more it’s about writing the possibilities. Norman Ohler (03:12:01): I mean, it’s also interesting why did the Neanderthals die out? And what we can compare is the cave art. And the cave art of the Neanderthals is much simpler than ours. Like, if you really get into the cave art, I don’t know if you’ve done that- Lex Fridman (03:12:15): Have not, no. Norman Ohler (03:12:16): It’s quite fascinating. Picasso looked at some of the cave paintings in Southern France, and he said, “We didn’t learn anything new.” And if you study them, they’re really good, but only the humans are good. The Neanderthals, they were worse artists than us. And you can also see there’s a very famous one that comes from Algeria with a shaman and around his body like mushrooms grow out of his body, so he was like a mushroom shaman. So mushrooms seem to have been, like, part, at least in that area, and, I mean, that’s the stoned ape theory- Norman Ohler (03:12:53): …that Terence McKenna did. And I think, a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the Neanderthals, who did not have a drug culture. They were basically too sober for the future. We assimilated them. They had no chance against our impetus of boldly going where no one has gone before. They were much more happy with what they had. They were not progressing all the time. Like, we have the transcendental kind of moment, which is, you know, the psychedelic experience. I guess you could think of it without it, but to imagine sapiens makes more sense to imagine sapiens as Stoned Sapiens, as a species that was able to incorporate psychoactive components into its development. It makes a lot of sense. Lex Fridman (03:13:52): What about one of the great, if you can think of it that way, technologies that humans have developed is religion. Religion evolved different kinds. Do you think there’s a connection between psychedelics and religion, the development of religion throughout different parts of the world? Norman Ohler (03:14:07): Well, I think Moses is quite interesting. Moses was a traumatized man that had fled Egypt, where he had killed a man who had been beating up a Hebrew. So Moses kind of took revenge and killed him. So he was running from the law and he was, together with, in the Bible it says, I think 66 people. They were in the desert, in the Sinai, and they had been fasting for days and no alcohol. So it was kind of a psychedelic retreat, basically. I mean, this is being examined by Israeli scholars and I think it’s very interesting work. They examine in detail what the Bible says, and the Bible mentions in that passage where Moses sees the burning bush and then gets the Ten Commandments. Norman Ohler (03:15:03): In that Bible passage, several times the acacia is mentioned. And the Egyptian acacia grows right in that Sinai area and contains DMT. So there’s this Israeli research that Moses was actually having a trip, basically, that he was seeing, he was hallucinating the burning bush. You know, if you take LSD and you look at a bush in the heat, you know, it will move, you know? It might resemble a burning experience. And he went up the mountain, which takes three hours, while the others were staying down. And with the DMT type of experience, it’s not that everyone in the group has the same experience, you know, to Ayahuasca. Norman Ohler (03:15:54): Sometimes, like one guy has an incredible experience, while another person might not feel that much at all, and Moses felt a lot. And you do feel a lot when you, you know, when you have something to work through, and he certainly had something to work through, the trauma of killing a man. So it’s also no surprise that he receives one of the commandments, “You should not kill,” you know? So for him, it’s extremely, extremely important what he receives on the mountain, that God is like, “There’s someone speaking to me,” and he understands that God is not, that there’s not many gods, just one God. He has a revelation, you know? Norman Ohler (03:16:38): And I think when I, when I read, you know, these examinations by these scholars, I think it makes a lot of sense to imagine that the Jewish religion comes from Moses’ trip. And also, if you look at the Jewish religion, they are quite open to drugs. I don’t know if that, you know, that could be an unconscious reaction to that, to that kind of trippy beginning. Like, they have Purim where it’s like, you’re supposed to get intoxicated to get closer to God. They’re not as straight-laced as the Christians. Like, they just, you know, they just allow alcohol; it’s like the blood of Christ. So also, Stoned Sapiens is a book about religion. Norman Ohler (03:17:16): Also, Islam and intoxication is also a very interesting topic, because you have the Sufis who intoxicate themselves to get into ecstasy, to be closer to God, and then you have, like, the conservative Islamic scholar, Ibn Taimiyya, who defended Damascus against the Mongols by combining anti-drug rhetoric, like, “They’re bringing drugs to us and they are not good Muslims.” So drugs in religion, sometimes drugs kind of help religion to, like, are used in religious contexts, but then you can also see that religions work as prohibitionist movements against drugs, like the Christian church. Norman Ohler (03:18:01): Also the Purity Law, for example, it’s very famous in Germany. It’s called the Reinheitsgebot. Beer can only contain three things: water, hops and barley or something like that. That’s the Purity Law. And that was done by the church in the 16th century. And in Germany, for a long time, this was seen as like, this is like a quality control, like beer has to be pure, it only has these ingredients. But it’s actually a move by the church to weed out all the other ingredients that had been put in beer before, like nightshade plants. So beer… Also, witches were brewing crazy beer you drink and you have visions and you dance around the fire. It’s like… Norman Ohler (03:18:44): And the church didn’t like this, so the church said, “This is the beer now,” and especially the hops was the new ingredient for the beer. And so the Purity Law is the first prohibitionist law in the Middle Ages in Europe. Another fascinating… Lex Fridman (03:19:02): Yeah. I- I think as society becomes, develops more and more, it d- seems to resist, certainly psychedelics, s- seems to resist drugs. I don’t know what that’s about. Norman Ohler (03:19:16): One of the very fascinating turning points that I have been able to kind of pinpoint, or at least I think this is what happened, is when did the first kings come up? They weren’t kings for a very long time. The first king that I can identify was in the so-called Sumerian high culture, was in Uruk, was Gilgamesh, and they wrote the Gilgamesh Epic about, you know, the great king. But that was four or 5,000 years ago, something like that. But what happened in the thousands of years before, there’s no source that there were rulers. It seems like humans were quite good in organizing themselves without kings before these first kings came. And I mean, thousands of years from the end of the Ice Age until the Sumerian high culture, there were no kings. Norman Ohler (03:20:14): So people were quite able to organize their communities. There was, for example, Çatal Hüyük in Eastern Turkey- that was working for like 2,000 years without any hierarchies. I think that is, that is quite interesting, and then why do suddenly the hierarchies start and what makes the hierarchy stronger? And again, I’m still researching this, but in Sumeria, we can see that it’s the beer that destroys the hierarchy-free society, because they are able… I mean, beer is quite old. The first beer was made in Gobekli Tepe, the famous first kind of structure of mankind. I also write about that, because it’s very interesting. Norman Ohler (03:20:56): Small detour, what is Gobekli Tepe? No one knows. How did they make it? No one knows. But why did they make it? I think they made it because they were creating a meeting place, and why was that so important? There were not so many humans at the time, there were like one to four million, those are the estimates, on the whole planet. And they were usually living in small communities of like a hundred people up to 500, not more. But so the problem then is, again, inbreeding. Inbreeding means it’s a degeneration, so it’s a problem. We are genetically not so diverse, actually, as humans, so it… But Gobekli Tepe people were meeting from different areas, having sex with people they usually wouldn’t see… … Creating healthy children. Norman Ohler (03:21:47): And Gobekli Tepe was working for 1,600 years, and I think it was an evolutionary kind of machine. Like, without that idea, we’re going to create a fucking place… …Or a party place. Norman Ohler (03:22:00): It was a party, basically. They were eating very well. They found a lot of bones, but no one lived there. They just came together for parties. And after 800 years, they started making beer there, and then the situation slightly changed. They found these places where they made beer; you can still find the chemicals, and it’s sure that they made beer there. And then once they make beer, they create different stone circles, and it changes. We can see clearly how it changes in the Sumerian high culture when beer becomes a business. Beer is being done by the priests, by the ruling class, or a ruling class emerges. Norman Ohler (03:22:46): Monasteries often brew beer, and that was also the case in the Sumerian high culture. They make beer. They labeled the beer, and the temple that would make the beer, the beer would be attributed to that temple. It would be sold, so that temple rises in status, makes money. That’s how hierarchies started up. So the hierarchy, which is the big problem right now, that we have these hierarchies, that we have these kings everywhere that steal our money, or at least make it very difficult for us as humans to organize on an egalitarian planetary scale, which is our only chance for survival. Norman Ohler (03:23:26): If we, at one point, overcome the hierarchies, overcome the nation-states, and create a planetary, probably AI-assisted, open-source AI-assisted planetary society, and everyone has the same political rights, there are no more borders, there’s a planetary minimum income so no one is starving, everyone has at least what everyone needs, which is totally possible. It’s just a problem of organizing and of breaking the resistance of those who don’t like that, and there’s a lot of resistance, obviously. I mean, I’m talking about what’s happening on the planet in 50 years, not what’s going to happen tomorrow, but that is where we are slowly moving towards. And you can see that this actually comes from a time when we were able to organize ourselves without kings. Norman Ohler (03:24:12): We don’t need kings. Kings always say, “If you don’t have me, then someone else, some other guy will come,” but you know, that’s why I’m not… If a nation-state makes war against another nation-state, I’m not taking a position and saying, “This country is better.” Basically, both nation-states are doing war, and who has to suffer is us, you know? It’s Stoned Sapiens, it’s the human species. Lex Fridman (03:24:39): Speaking of which, I have to ask you… I’ve done psilocybin a bunch, and I’ve done ayahuasca, but I’ve never done LSD, acid, and you have quite a bit. So, maybe the big general question is what’s LSD like? In the space of psychedelics, which funny enough, we haven’t really spoken a lot about psychedelics— Norman Ohler (03:25:04): Right Lex Fridman (03:25:04): …except in the context of Stoned Sapiens. What’s LSD like? Norman Ohler (03:25:09): Well, this is probably the third book that we want to talk about, is— Lex Fridman (03:25:15): Tripped Norman Ohler (03:25:16): Tripped, because Tripped is an examination of the history of LSD. And that sounds maybe less interesting than it actually is. It’s… I mean, I find it fascinating. I had tried LSD. It was given to me by my girlfriend at the time, Anya, in Lower Manhattan on a Saturday night, 1993. So, I was like 23. Norman Ohler (03:25:48): And she said, “Let’s take LSD.” And I’d never really taken any drug. I’d maybe smoked a bit of weed, but I didn’t know what a strong drug is. And she gave me this paper, and I took it, and we walked around in the East Village, pre-gentrified East Village. It’s pretty cool, actually. And it didn’t work. For like one hour, I felt nothing, and then I went into the toilet. I had a falafel or something. I went into the toilet, and there was a mirror. I was peeing, and then there was this mirror, but the walls had lines. They were painted in lines. Suddenly, these lines started to vibrate, and then the trip started, and it was such an overpowerful experience that I thought I would go insane. It was the worst trip I’ve ever had. It was, because— Lex Fridman (03:26:43): You got scared? Norman Ohler (03:26:43): It was so strong. I was totally scared. I didn’t know what it was. I suddenly… I walked. I said to my girlfriend, “It’s working.” And she said, “Yes, it’s working, I feel it also.” And I went into No-Tell Motel, which was my favorite bar, just to be in a familiar environment. It’s not a good idea on your first very strong LSD trip to be out— …in Lower Manhattan on a Saturday night, but I also didn’t know this. You know? So, I was in the bar, and I saw my friend, Dora Espinoza from Peru. She was quite a small woman. I don’t know the American system, maybe 1 meter 50, so she was quite short. Short is the right word. But on LSD, she was like this. Lex Fridman (03:27:25): Like tiny. Norman Ohler (03:27:25): So I saw her down there, like, and I said, “Dora! Do I look normal? Because you look very small.” And Dora’s like, “No, you look fine.” I’m like, “Okay, I gotta get out of here.” And then we walked up to 2nd Avenue, and we saw a bunch of Puerto Rican kids killing one of their… It was a gang. It was more of a druggy kind of… I mean, Manhattan back then was kind of dangerous in the East Village. And they killed one of them on the hood of the car. In front of our eyes, we saw it, and I said, “Do you see this? Thank you, my God.” And then they resurrected him, they gave him mouth-to-mouth, and the guy was fine again. And we walked past, and we were not sure anymore what we were seeing. And this was- Norman Ohler (03:28:14): This was a very strong hallucination. And then we saw a full-blown racial riot on 2nd Avenue. People were smashing in taxi windows, pulling the drivers out. It was like GTA. Lex Fridman (03:28:31): Grand Theft Auto? Yeah. Norman Ohler (03:28:32): Right, it was like that. And… Lex Fridman (03:28:34): So most of this is basically hallucinating. Norman Ohler (03:28:36): I think so, yeah. And I have taken… Lex Fridman (03:28:37): But it felt real. Norman Ohler (03:28:38): It felt totally real. And so I was happy when this trip was over, because I thought I had gone insane, basically. I thought there was a switch in my brain that had been, like, yeah, something chemical. I thought I now have a chemical imbalance in my brain. I’m going to be crazy for the rest of my life. I thought that. But after about 10 hours, it suddenly got, you know, the effects wore off, and I became normal again. And I thought that was quite fascinating. So in hindsight, I thought it was a great experience, even though it was quite scary. But it also had moments of incredible perceptions. Like, I could see that the atoms are not rigid. Obviously everything’s moving in our universe. Everything. There’s nothing fixed, you know? So I could see that. Norman Ohler (03:29:27): I could see that everything was basically alive, and that my previous perceptions of how the world is, is just my conditioned perception, and that the world was very different, and, you know, just how you look at it, it looks different, and… Lex Fridman (03:29:44): So it was freeing in a way? Norman Ohler (03:29:45): Yeah, totally freeing. Also, it was much stronger than all the LSD I’ve taken since. And I’ve taken high dosages, so I’m not even sure if that was LSD. There are also other compounds… Norman Ohler (03:29:56): that are quite rare, like DOM or whatever. Maybe it was something else. But then I also spoke to LSD experts by now, also for the book Tripped. And it can happen that your first trip is much stronger than all the other trips, because your brain kind of reacts very strongly to it. Because what happens in the brain is basically that the default mode network receives less energy, and other parts of the brain think more, communicate better. So if this happens for the first time, your brain maybe is totally surprised by this firework that’s going on, and then creates hallucinations, so it can somehow make sense of it. There are a lot of things firing, and then so you see things that maybe are not there. But that’s not usual on an LSD trip. Norman Ohler (03:30:41): I’ve never had such hallucinations afterwards again, you know? Lex Fridman (03:30:47): What’s the usual experience on LSD? Norman Ohler (03:30:50): It really depends on the dosage. If you microdose, it’s just like drinking an espresso that lasts maybe for two or three hours in a very pleasant way, so you’re just slightly buzzed. Lex Fridman (03:31:01): Is it visual artifacts, like… Norman Ohler (03:31:03): No Lex Fridman (03:31:04): color? Norman Ohler (03:31:05): Then you would take more. Maybe if you take 50 micrograms, the colors become more intense. But if you take a microdose of 10 micrograms, nothing happens. The trip starts with about 100 micrograms. And then you could see maybe it would be… I took a swimming trip in Thailand in January, and I took about 200 micrograms, which is quite a lot. Just because it was so beautiful on this island, and it was kind of, “Will it be more beautiful if I’m on LSD now?” And of course, every LSD trip also tells you about your life, like some things you didn’t understand. Suddenly you see, “Oh, it’s like this.” It’s very good for, you know, reflecting on your life, but it’s also a lot of fun. So I swam for like… Norman Ohler (03:31:50): three hours through the ocean, which is something you usually don’t do, you know? I like swimming, but after like 10 or 20 minutes, I go out. But I was swimming and swimming and… Lex Fridman (03:32:02): Yeah, for me, on psilocybin and ayahuasca, there’s an intensification of the beauty of the world around you. Norman Ohler (03:32:11): Right. Lex Fridman (03:32:11): Whether that’s nature, or whether that’s people, or whether that’s your own memories of your past, or maybe your imagination manifesting itself in different kinds of visuals. You know, on ayahuasca, I saw dragons of different kinds, and they were just really beautiful. And maybe I’ve never taken a heroic dose of psilocybin, but it was always, everything was just always so beautiful, and I was just grateful to be alive and grateful to be in this world and get to appreciate it in this most intense way. There’s something about, like you said, you could see the individual atoms. Lex Fridman (03:32:49): There are certain ways to deconstruct or maybe to visualize or reinterpret, revisualize the world that makes you appreciate, “Holy shit, this is really, this is really awesome. This is really special.” And that can only be done through the process of showing you a different version of it a little bit. Norman Ohler (03:33:15): I mean, when the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz developed LSD in 1943, they were having to solve the big question: what is it good for? Norman Ohler (03:33:28): Albert Hofmann, the chemist, he found it basically involuntarily, and he reported to the CEO, “I had very strong reactions in the brain.” So they set up an intoxication room. I found the documents about this intoxication room in the Novartis archive when I researched Tripped because Novartis bought Sandoz in the 90s. So all the LSD stuff is in the Novartis archive. And this intoxication room, I always think, is kind of interesting to imagine. This was 1943; there’s a World War going on everywhere in Europe, except in Switzerland, which is a neutral country. But Basel, where the LSD was found, is like a stone’s throw from the German border, so you actually hear the war going on. Norman Ohler (03:34:17): And so they created a nice room within the company, and then all the employees voluntarily could go and take LSD. So they were the first people to take LSD, and they had no idea that there was, at one point, you know, MKUltra. They were just trying out something that one of their guys had developed. And I read through all these reports, and they all had a great experience. They were sitting in a nice chair, and they looked outside the window, and they were reporting stuff like, “I just had to laugh the whole time. I felt so good. I realized about my life.” It kind of created in them the feeling like a heightened sense of sensitivity and a feeling that this is how life should feel. Norman Ohler (03:35:05): So, the CEO, Arthur Stoll, he was really trying to figure out what he could market it for, because he thought maybe this is a game changer in mental health. Because this was before antidepressants, before antipsychotics, and it was in the middle of World War II, which had created already millions of traumatized people. How do you treat these people? So they thought LSD could be really a big, big, big thing. And I mean, I just told you when I first took LSD, and I somehow was interested in LSD, but I never thought I would write a book about it. I just used it once in a while when I wanted to understand something about my life or just enjoy a day in the ocean. Norman Ohler (03:35:50): But I read a study that microdoses of LSD, at one point, help against Alzheimer’s, and my mother has Alzheimer’s. So I discussed this with my father who takes care of my mother, and this was an academic study. I discussed this also with a leading Alzheimer’s expert that I interviewed for Tripped, and he’s like, “Wow, this is amazing.” Because LSD interacts with the very same receptors, the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain, that LSD interacts with those receptors and Alzheimer destroys those receptors. So LSD basically does the opposite that Alzheimer does. And I discussed this with my father and he said, “So why can’t I buy LSD in the pharmacy if it’s so good?” You know? He was a judge before. He actually put people in prison for drugs. Norman Ohler (03:36:42): So he said, “You better bring me the story.” So I did a kind of a research loop. This is the book Tripped. Then I came back to him in the end with the true story of why LSD has been made illegal, and that is quite fascinating because the Swiss CEO, Stoll, he had learned biochemistry. This is very nerdy, but I think it’s quite interesting. He had learned biochemistry from the Jewish German god of biochemistry, Willstätter. Richard Willstätter was a Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, and his work was he would extract the potent alkaloids from so-called poisonous plants and make, you know, poison. Paracelsus taught us it’s the dosage that makes the poison, you know? Norman Ohler (03:37:31): If you take too much of a potent alkaloid, maybe it’s a poison, but if you extract a potent alkaloid, maybe you could turn it into a medicine. So Stoll learned this from Willstätter, and there was another guy that was learning from Willstätter, Richard Kuhn. So it was Kuhn and Stoll. Those were the two students of Willstätter, and Stoll left and became the CEO of Sandoz and developed the pharmaceutical branch of Sandoz. And Kuhn became Hitler’s leading biochemist and was responsible in finding a truth drug and also developing nerve gas. So the two guys, Kuhn and Stoll, stayed friends also when the Nazis took power. I researched the papers of Stoll in the archive, and in the ’20s, he would communicate all the ergot research. Norman Ohler (03:38:21): LSD is an ergot product. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. He would communicate all this with Kuhn, and Kuhn would come to the Sandoz lab, and they did experiments together. And then in ’43, Kuhn was, you know, a hardcore Nazi scientist, and especially looking for the truth drug at the time. I was looking through the archive, I wanted to find the connection that, you know, Stoll also sent LSD to Kuhn, because when I was researching for Blitzed in Dachau, I had found that the SS had done, in the concentration camp of Dachau, experiments with mescaline and another hallucinogenic substance which was not named. And mescaline has the problem… Norman Ohler (03:39:06): The truth drug idea is I give you something without you noticing it, like something that doesn’t smell or doesn’t taste like anything, and then after like half an hour, I know that something’s working in your brain and you become insecure because suddenly something’s working in your brain, and I can play with that situation, and therefore extract all the secrets from you because it’s a power. I’m suddenly above you because I know something about you that you don’t know. That was the idea. The problem with mescaline was it has a bitter taste and it’s kind of hard to make it. And LSD is very easy to make. Not very easy, but it’s quite easy. And LSD is odorless and tasteless. So I was trying to… Norman Ohler (03:39:47): I somehow had the notion that LSD has a Nazi past, you know, which is something that no one ever thinks about. LSD is like the hippie drug, right? It’s a drug of the peace people. But I wanted to see all the papers of the CEO, of Stoll. And the archivist, he already knew, like he was the Swiss archivist. And this is not a public archive. In a public archive you basically, like the National Archives of the United States, you see what’s there, you have the right to see it, freedom of information. But a company archive, like the Novartis archive, the archivist can just say, “No,” you know, “I can’t find this right…” You know, you’re basically at his mercy. So I bribed him with LSD because he didn’t want to show me the Stoll papers. Norman Ohler (03:40:31): And I said to him, just to distract him, I said, “Did you ever, have you ever seen LSD?” And he’s like, “No. Why? How would I see it?” And I said, “Well, I have some here.” And I had some, I just had gotten it from a friend. Lex Fridman (03:40:45): What does LSD look like? Tabs or… Norman Ohler (03:40:47): Yeah, a tab. I had a paper. And the funny thing about, yeah, these are different, you know, different designs. Lex Fridman (03:40:54): Oh, so and you can put it on your tongue? Is that how people usually take it? Norman Ohler (03:40:57): Right. Just, yeah. Then you take it like that. And the one I had was given to me by a Swiss friend and it had… Like here you see certain prints on it. Uh… Lex Fridman (03:41:05): Oh, yeah. Norman Ohler (03:41:06): And it had the print of the old logo of Sandoz from the 40s. So the guys who make this illegal LSD in Basel, in some kind of lab, they know where it comes from. So they made like a joke to make like the old logo of Sandoz. I showed this to the archivist and he said, “This has the old logo of our company.” I said, “Well, it was made by your company.” He said, “I know this, but it’s not… This is very interesting actually.” And I said, “I’m going to gift you one of these trips now.” And he said, “Wow, you really, you would do this?” And I said, “You can archive it.” And he’s like, “Ha-ha-ha.” And then he actually took one, and then the ice broke. Lex Fridman (03:41:42): That’s great. Norman Ohler (03:41:42): And then he said, “Okay, I’m going to show you now the correspondence of Stoll, our CEO. It’s no problem.” And he just went to the next room and he looked for like 10 minutes, and then he brought me these boxes. And then I saw actually the correspondence between Stoll and Kuhn, between the Swiss CEO and the German Nazi scientist, what they were talking about. And then I found a smoking gun: October 1943. Kuhn acknowledges that he receives half a gram of ergotamine, which is the precursor drug to LSD. And so it’s highly likely that the Nazis used LSD together with mescaline in Dachau. And when the Americans liberated the Dachau camp, they had a special unit called Alsos with them. Norman Ohler (03:42:28): And Alsos’ job was to find German scientists and kind of interview them, get their knowledge for the nuclear program mostly, but also for biochemical weapons. And one of the first persons they interrogated was Richard Kuhn, and Richard Kuhn immediately collaborated because he didn’t want to go to the Nuremberg trial. He wanted to continue his career actually. He was an opportunist, so I guess his Nazi convictions were not so strong after all, because he also liked the Americans. So he told the Americans immediately about LSD. And the next day, a very high general flew from the States to Frankfurt, went to Heidelberg, spoke to Kuhn again. Norman Ohler (03:43:06): He then took off his uniform and went in civil clothing to Basel, because Switzerland is neutral, and received the first LSD from Stoll’s son. So the American general had LSD. This was in ’45 in the summer. And then the American military started to examine LSD. Could LSD be the truth drug? Because if the Nazis think so, maybe it’s true, you know, because the Nazis were cutting-edge scientists, as evil as they were. Lex Fridman (03:43:35): In Dachau, this was presumably used for the different experimentation that was done. Norman Ohler (03:43:40): Well, I read one report from a guy who was an inmate, and he received it in coffee, and he had a full-blown psychedelic trip. And he had this SS guy who was asking him questions, and the guy had such a great trip. I would always imagine you’d have a terrible trip in a concentration camp, but he was seeing fractals and colors, and he could see that there was something bigger than these Nazis, and there was something bigger than the concentration camp. He only said it was so horrible when the trip ended and he became sober again and was just an inmate again in the concentration camp. Lex Fridman (03:44:16): I mean, one of the things you get from books like Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is that in a concentration camp, the slightest good things are so rich of… Norman Ohler (03:44:28): Right. Lex Fridman (03:44:29): …feeling. You just get… So, I would actually expect to have incredible trips there because you’re just grateful for anything positive, anything positive. Norman Ohler (03:44:40): Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t think about that. Lex Fridman (03:44:42): It becomes intensified. Norman Ohler (03:44:43): Makes sense. Lex Fridman (03:44:43): But from the perspective of the Nazis, they’re trying to develop the truth drug. Norman Ohler (03:44:47): They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life. You might not, you know. I mean, LSD doesn’t necessarily turn you into a more knowledgeable person. You could also focus that on your Orthodox belief system. But many people realize different things, have different ideas. So it doesn’t work as this conditioning drug. But also, the CIA then took over the LSD experiments that the U.S. military took over from the SS. So now it’s in CIA hands. Norman Ohler (03:45:37): In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was founded because America didn’t have a Central Intelligence Agency before. They had military agencies like OSS. Now they have the CIA, and Dulles, the first director, says, “Brain warfare is going on now between the Soviet Union and us. This is Cold War. We have to…” You know, maybe they are using something against us. We have to be really on our, you know, we have to be prepared for the brain warfare, ’cause communism is a propagandistic system. So they were always either really afraid or just pretending to be afraid the Soviet Union would develop the truth drug quicker than them. So the LSD truth drug program, which was labeled MKULTRA, the infamous MKULTRA, is a mind control program. I mean, it is, and LSD played a big part in it. Lex Fridman (03:46:32): It’s a deeply illegal one. Norman Ohler (03:46:35): It certainly… I mean, it was never approved by Congress or anything like that. Lex Fridman (03:46:39): Yeah. It’s probably deeply unethical, maybe one of the more un-American, unethical things done in recent times. Norman Ohler (03:46:48): It’s certainly unethical. It continues the Nazi human experiments. Lex Fridman (03:46:52): Right. Norman Ohler (03:46:52): That’s what the CIA did. Lex Fridman (03:46:53): It’s continuing one of the worst aspects of what the Nazis were doing. Defeated the Nazis and carried the flag forward. It’s just dark. Norman Ohler (03:47:04): And this is basically the reason why LSD at one point became illegal, because it did not get the chance. Stoll still wanted to put it on the market, but Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKULTRA, he really didn’t want LSD to be on the market. He didn’t want it because he thought it’s not good or dangerous for anybody, he just wanted to control LSD. He wanted LSD to be his so he could use it for MKULTRA, for experiments. But he couldn’t really stop. There was also legit LSD research always going on until it was prohibited in 1966. There was legit LSD research done in universities which came to all kinds of conclusions. Norman Ohler (03:47:46): But the decisive thing was a visit by Gottlieb in the office of Stoll in Basel where he basically says to Stoll, he comes with a suitcase with 240,000 US dollars to buy the world’s supply of LSD, because he has the information from the American ambassador. He said, “I think we think by now Sandoz has produced 400 kilograms of LSD,” so that was the price for this 400. And Stoll said, “No, actually we have produced only 400 grams. But I’ll sell everything to you, of course.” I mean, because the pressure that he received from the CIA was, because the CIA and the FDA, they’re quite friendly organizations. So the CIA has a certain influence on the FDA, at least back then, you know? Norman Ohler (03:48:40): So the pressure was if you want to put your medicines on the market, which is, of course, the biggest market in the world, and Sandoz, I’m sure you want to thrive as a pharmaceutical company, then LSD is not going to be one of these products. And Stoll basically betrayed LSD. So he said okay, and LSD was only distributed as a research drug. It was never sold by the company. So researchers could actually write to Sandoz, “I’m doing this and this test, and I’m a neuroscientist, I need LSD,” and then they would receive it. But mostly what happened to the LSD was it went into the CIA’s hands, and then it was used in MKULTRA. But then it spilled out obviously, because one of the guinea pigs was Ken Kesey. Norman Ohler (03:49:27): He received 75 US dollars for taking LSD for the CIA, and he was working in Menlo Park in a psychiatric ward. And on LSD, he basically had the idea to write One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He understood that these people maybe are not crazy. It’s just a different way of seeing. That’s like an LSD revelation. These are not bad, crazy people. They just see the world differently, because that neuroplasticity kind of leads you away from one way of thinking. You realize that there are different ways. So it does, I would say, the tendency of LSD is more to increase… Lex Fridman (03:50:06): Empathy? That kind of thing? Norman Ohler (03:50:07): …empathy, diversity, all these kinds of things. Lex Fridman (03:50:10): So, because you mentioned the effect of LSD on you as a writer, that it at least changed the way you write. Norman Ohler (03:50:19): Well, I mean, the book Tripped is a book where I come back with that story to my father, and then my father decides to give LSD to my mother. And we did do the LSD, the three of us, on Christmas. And we did mushrooms on Mother’s Day. And whenever my mother takes LSD, and Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease, obviously. For example, on Mother’s Day, there was the newspaper lying on the balcony. We were sitting in the sun, and she was on mushrooms. It’s just a microdose, you know? It’s not that you have a trip, but you have that stimulation of your brain. That’s what you have. Even her brain, attacked by Alzheimer’s, reacted stronger than my father’s. Norman Ohler (03:51:00): He always says, “I never feel anything from a microdose.” And you’re not supposed to feel anything, but my mother suddenly picked up the newspaper, which she hadn’t looked at for a year. So on mushroom microdoses, she picks up the newspaper and starts reading the headline to us, which was about the Ukraine war. She’d never heard about the Ukraine war. So when she, she had problems pronouncing the word Ukraine, because that was a new word for her, because she hadn’t been part of the news cycle in about a year. And this was because of the mushroom microdose. So this book, how did it change my writing? On an emotional level, taking LSD and then writing about LSD changed something in my family. It improved the health of my mother that made me very happy, of course, very satisfied, you know? Lex Fridman (03:51:55): Yeah, there’s a deep personal connection, but I even mean on Ken Kesey’s side, like… Norman Ohler (03:51:59): I know what you mean. Lex Fridman (03:52:03): I mean, what does it do? Like, writing, I don’t know. Again, me as a fan of writing, it feels like writing is suffering. When I see these great writers in history talk about writing, it seems like it’s really hard, it’s a kind of torture. You know, Hemingway, and you have the Kerouac stories that it just kind of flows out of you. But a lot of times it’s really disciplined, day after day, you’re really digging and digging. And so it’s interesting what that looks like under the different supplements, right? Lex Fridman (03:52:39): Stephen King famously, I mean, there’s a lot of people, you know, they go to the drugs, to the alcohol. You have Hunter S. Thompson who, when given the option, just says yes to all of it. And the mind is a weird thing. And a lot of writers talk about, like, they’re not really developing the ideas, they’re plugging into some… They’re channeling- … a voice from somewhere else. And- … with psychedelics, that’s certainly, it feels like you’re modifying the channel or you’re expanding the channel- …or you’re directing the channel to a different direction. That’s why I asked. Norman Ohler (03:53:18): I think for me, writing has two important parts, and one of them is the actual writing part, and that’s the painful part that you talk about. It’s basically discipline, focus. It becomes harder and harder to focus because of the telephone. Lex Fridman (03:53:42): Yeah, distractions. Norman Ohler (03:53:43): There’s a place in Switzerland, The Nietzsche House. I go there as much as I can to write. It’s in Sils Maria, it’s quite high up. Nietzsche went there every summer from 1882 to 1888, with the exception of 1887. He didn’t go that summer, I don’t know why. He stayed there for three months and wrote most of his work. In that room. And that room is still there, and his desk is still there. You can rent rooms in that Nietzsche House, and I rent. It’s great. I do this as often as I can, and only there am I able to switch off the phone. I don’t even switch it on. I’m like a soldier. I’m in the Nietzsche House. Also, the Nietzsche House is magical, so it gives you… I would never take drugs in the Nietzsche House, because it would disturb that clarity that is in that house. Norman Ohler (03:54:33): Nietzsche wrote Zarathustra and… Lex Fridman (03:54:37): You can sense his presence a little bit? Norman Ohler (03:54:39): Yeah, I speak to him quite a bit. His door is always open. Lex Fridman (03:54:43): Is he an asshole? Is he a nice guy? Norman Ohler (03:54:44): No, he’s a nice guy. Lex Fridman (03:54:45): Nice guy. Norman Ohler (03:54:46): His room, it cannot be rented. It’s always open. It’s like a museum-type room. I never thought of him as an asshole. I mean, he’s a total weirdo, obviously. Lex Fridman (03:54:58): He had issues, like, struggled getting laid. Norman Ohler (03:55:01): Yeah, I think he had a lot of problems. Lex Fridman (03:55:04): That’s one of them. But he had a lot of good qualities too. Norman Ohler (03:55:07): But he’s also part of Stoned Sapiens, because he did experiment with drugs there, and he writes about it. It’s very hard to find, but in the Nietzsche House, I found a book on Nietzsche’s medical history, and he takes quite a bit of hashish; he smokes. Is it to help? Lex Fridman (03:55:24): Does it help with the stomach issues or whatever? Or is it? Norman Ohler (03:55:25): No, he’s interested in what happens in the brain, and this… Lex Fridman (03:55:28): Oh, interesting. Norman Ohler (03:55:28): this comes back to your question: How did the drugs change my writing? Well, first of all, it’s this discipline. I can do it up in the Nietzsche House. I can also do it sometimes in Berlin. It’s just sitting there, trying to focus and writing. But what you need, of course, is the inspirational part. LSD helped me with just the first trip to realize that it’s not all black and white. The world’s quite colorful, and there’s like the abyss, and there’s also the horror. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, you know. I never thought that the world is so deep as I understand it now. So the LSD makes the world deeper. So I think for me to understand the world better, to understand myself better, it improved my writing, but I would not write on LSD. Norman Ohler (03:56:19): Because on LSD, you want to walk in the forest or you want to go up the mountain. That’s what I like. I would never sit in front of the ugly computer with a stupid screen and write, you know. Maybe I would lie in the mountains with a notebook and kind of write poetic lines. And that could be done on LSD. Because when I was researching Stoned Sapiens, I did one LSD trip from the Nietzsche House. I went quite high up in the mountains on LSD, and I just thought about the book and kind of looked at the different chapters, just did work together, like, kind of like macro without taking too many notes, just kind of letting it play out in my mind. And then, when I walked down, I passed a cave. Norman Ohler (03:57:11): And I realized a lot about people’s relationship to caves and the cave paintings, how, you know, actually the cave walls, you see all the arteries of the rocks. And I mean, on LSD, you see all of that and you see how alive that is and how beautiful it actually was by humans to then use that canvas and work your cave paintings in there. I mean, I never had the appreciation of that before. Lex Fridman (03:57:43): Yeah, you’re right, you are able to detect the aliveness of the details on psychedelics, if I can put it this way. Norman Ohler (03:57:51): For me, it’s a very creative drug. But for other people, it might not be, you know? So I cannot advertise it, because also if you have a psychological problem, maybe it’s overwhelming. Lex Fridman (03:58:03): Yeah, that’s actually a good thing to say at this moment. From my perspective, and maybe you can comment on it. In general, when people ask me, because I’ve done psilocybin a few times and I did Ayahuasca and I’ve talked about it, when people ask me if I recommend those things, I, as a general statement, I say no. You know, to the general population. And then as a second step, if I’m talking to specific people on a case-by-case basis, I can just discuss my experience and let that be an inspiration. Because I’m very hesitant to recommend a thing that could be so powerful. Because I don’t know- Like I had a tremendously positive experience and I was sure I would be meeting some demons. I thought I would have some demons in the basement or something, but I didn’t meet them. Not yet. Lex Fridman (03:58:49): But people might have some demons. That they meet and then it might destroy them or it might change them in a way they don’t like. And actually, it’s a good question for me whether it’s good to do psychedelics when you’re in a good place in life or in a bad place in life. Because I know that, you know, even scientifically there have been studies where psilocybin helps with extreme sort of, with depression and PTSD and all these kinds of things. But I’d be very nervous about that too, because the mind is such a powerful thing and it’s such a complicated thing that with these really powerful tools, it’s unclear where it’s going to take you. Lex Fridman (03:59:32): But I have heard a lot of stories of people have taken incredible journeys, sometimes difficult journeys, with psychedelics and have come out much happier and much freer and have healed some of the things they have been going through. But when people ask me to recommend or not, I’m just too afraid to say yes. I think the right thing is always just in general no. Be very careful. Norman Ohler (03:59:59): Yeah, I think it would be irresponsible to recommend it to people you don’t see. Lex Fridman (04:00:04): Right. Norman Ohler (04:00:04): You know? Maybe if you know a friend and the friend asks you, maybe then you could… Maybe I would say to a friend, “Yeah, I think you would be fine taking it.” But even that is a big responsibility, you know, because LSD in German, the book Trip, is called The Strongest Substance, and it is actually the strongest substance because it works in microgram dosages. Even the strongest snake poison, cobra toxin, if you use that in microgram dosages, you don’t feel anything. But if you take 250 micrograms of LSD, it can totally overpower you. And if you have an unstable psyche, it could turn you mad, you know? Lex Fridman (04:00:51): Do you understand how it compares to psilocybin and ayahuasca and DMT? How does LSD compare to those? Is it similar territory, just more intense? Norman Ohler (04:01:02): Well, LSD and psilocybin are like cousins. Lex Fridman (04:01:04): Distant cousins, or? Norman Ohler (04:01:05): No, quite close cousins. And I spoke to a neuroscientist from a university clinic in Zurich, who’s been researching psilocybin and LSD since the early ’90s. And he puts people in brain scanners, for example, so he sees exactly what happens in the brain on LSD or on psilocybin. And he said to me when I asked him that very same question, he said, “LSD is the more sophisticated molecule.” He meant by that is that LSD docks onto more receptors than psilocybin. Psilocybin interacts with like five different types of receptors in the brain, and LSD like with nine. So that makes LSD a more complex molecule. That’s why it already works in very small quantities, because it’s like the key is perfect for our brain. Our brain really reacts strongly to LSD. Norman Ohler (04:02:06): For psilocybin, you have to take milligrams, not micrograms, but milligrams. So mushrooms are also described as the softer psychedelic experience because it only lasts for like five hours, where LSD lasts like eight hours. And LSD can be more… LSD is also a mushroom, but it’s an ergot, which is a mushroom, but it’s turned into a diethylamide. You extract the potent acid from ergot, which is lysergic acid, and you turn that into a diethylamide. So it’s a processed drug in a way. It’s a potent processed drug that works well for mass movements. That’s why it was so popular in the ’60s, because people could just make it, while mushrooms, they have to grow. Norman Ohler (04:02:58): The hippie movement could never have sustained itself on mushrooms because so many mushrooms don’t even grow. But a good LSD chemist can make LSD for the whole world, basically. Lex Fridman (04:03:12): Can we go back to something we talked about in the beginning about Berlin? It’d be fascinating to learn more about this culture. Are you still connected? I’m sure you’ve been to some wild parties. I’ve been told that Berlin has some wild parties. Norman Ohler (04:03:30): Well, it had them in the ’90s. I mean, it had the best clubs that I… It was just a dream. You go into this club. But I was also in my mid-20s, so I would go into this club, I’d take MDMA, and the DJ is amazing and the sound system is crazy and there’s like 500 people on MDMA just dancing for like eight hours. Lex Fridman (04:03:48): And that’s when electronic music was really… Norman Ohler (04:03:50): Yeah, it was really good. A friend of mine, he runs an underground club of visionaries, which is a famous club in Berlin, and he asked me in the early 2000s when this club was offered to him, “Should I do this?” I said, “Gregor, techno is over, electronic music is dead.” But obviously, it’s not dead, it’s still going on, but in the ’90s it was new. You really went into the club and you heard something you’d never heard before. And the first time, I came from New York, and New York was a very old-school, kind of urban place, rock and roll or grunge music, and I came to Berlin. It was in a club called I Am A Bucket in East Berlin, it doesn’t exist anymore, like, in a rundown, totally rundown squat. Norman Ohler (04:04:35): And I went to the bar and I had a beer, and I looked and there were just a few people on the dance floor and this electronic music which I’d never heard before. And the guy in front of me, he was like… He looked like an East Berlin skinhead type of guy, but totally smiling. I’m sure he was on ecstasy, and he was disassembling an imaginary machine. And I just looked at this guy, he was like… For one hour he was just doing the most… Norman Ohler (04:05:02): …complicated things. And I was like, this is a totally different way of moving, and I liked that actually. I liked to dance in clubs. And I did this for like two years very intensely with my girlfriend at the time. We went out a lot, from Friday to Monday, basically, but it means… And a lot of people still do that in Berlin, but it means that you can’t really work. Lex Fridman (04:05:29): Yeah, you escaped that. It’s interesting that you were able to do that for a short time, just as an experience, and then go on… …To be extremely productive. Norman Ohler (04:05:39): For me, it was also kind of research, even though I didn’t know this. Lex Fridman (04:05:41): Life is research in a way, if you allow it to be. Norman Ohler (04:05:45): I could not have written these books on history and drugs without having had these drug experiences because… also, like, when I wrote about methamphetamine and the Nazis, I asked… at the time weed was illegal in Germany, so I asked a friend of mine, she’s a cannabis dealer, I guess you would say. I said, “Can you also get me crystal meth?” And she was, like, shocked, like, “No,” because she was a weed dealer, but then she found a Polish guy who actually had crystal meth. I just wanted to have it. It was like the Paul Schrader thing when he wrote the screenplay to Taxi Driver, he had a gun in his drawer. Norman Ohler (04:06:23): So he would play, you know, get the vibe of danger. And so I wanted to have this crystal meth, so this Polish guy sold it to me and he gave me a Xerox without me saying anything, and maybe my friend, maybe she said “He’s a writer” or something, but he gave me the methamphetamine, one gram, and the Xerox copy of the patent of Pervitin from 1938. So this was a crystal meth dealer that actually had historical… Lex Fridman (04:06:50): Mm-hmm. Knowledge, yeah. Norman Ohler (04:06:52): …knowledge about it. So… Lex Fridman (04:06:53): Did you, did you ever try? Norman Ohler (04:06:55): Yeah, well then I tried it because I really wanted… I could not really write about it in the same way without having tried it. I can’t recommend it. It feels very toxic. When you take a psychedelic, I can say this with a clear conscience, it’s not toxic. LSD is not toxic; it doesn’t poison you. You might have reactions in your brain that are too much for you, but if you snort crystal meth, it goes on your central nervous system, your heart starts pounding, your blood pressure rises. So it’s stressful on the organism; it’s toxic, you know. Norman Ohler (04:07:29): But still, the effect in the brain is not so interesting as with LSD. You couldn’t go crazy, I would say, on crystal meth. You’re just very much awake, but you don’t have crazy thoughts that you can’t evaluate anymore. So it’s a very, very different drug, but taking that, of course, made me understand better how a soldier feels in the tank taking it. Lex Fridman (04:07:50): Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s really, really important to do. I have to ask, your friend Alex, who… it sounds like he’s taken every single drug there is. Has he spoken about, like, what’s the most interesting drug? What’s his favorite drug? He seems like a connoisseur, right? Norman Ohler (04:08:11): But he’s not a psychedelic guy, so. Lex Fridman (04:08:13): Oh, well then, okay. Norman Ohler (04:08:15): He’s more into the addictive drugs. Lex Fridman (04:08:18): It’s very difficult, I guess. Yeah, that would be a special person that can be a really, sort of, a full-on explorer of the drug space, because if you get into psychedelics, then you don’t really want to do the hard drugs, and if you get the hard drugs, you don’t want to… Norman Ohler (04:08:37): Right. They contradict each other. Lex Fridman (04:08:38): They do contradict each other. Yeah. Norman Ohler (04:08:40): It’s why we spend less and less time together. Lex Fridman (04:08:46): Since you mentioned Kerouac, I love Kerouac. Do we know any famous writers that have used drugs as part of their writing? So Kerouac is one. Norman Ohler (04:08:59): Do we know any famous writers who have not used drugs as part of their writing? Lex Fridman (04:09:03): Interesting. So wait, I didn’t actually know, to be honest, this story. I love Kerouac. Norman Ohler (04:09:08): That’s the good thing about being a writer, you can take drugs on the job and no one will cancel you for it. If you’re like a politician, you can’t really do it. Lex Fridman (04:09:16): That’s right. You can be a rock star or you can be a writer. Norman Ohler (04:09:19): You can be an artist and take drugs. Lex Fridman (04:09:20): You mentioned that Kerouac did what? Norman Ohler (04:09:22): Amphetamine. Lex Fridman (04:09:23): Amphetamine. Norman Ohler (04:09:23): Speed. Basically, speed. The legend has it that On the Road was written in two weeks on speed, basically without sleeping and using an endless paper roll… Lex Fridman (04:09:34): Yeah, the whole scroll. Yeah. Norman Ohler (04:09:35): …in this typewriter, so he was just writing. And I can imagine that you can write a hell of a lot on amphetamines. I do it sometimes, but not a lot, you know. So I can take amphetamines and have a really good time and write, like, 20 pages, but then the next day, I wouldn’t do it anymore. But he decided, “Okay, for 14 days, I’m going to do it.” Philip K. Dick was an amphetamine writer. Also, I think if you take a lot of amphetamines, you get into kind of psychedelic spaces at a certain point in time where you start hallucinating. Like, if you write Blade Runner, maybe it helps you. So amphetamines are also… they can be creative, I guess. It’s just not, it’s not my type of drug. Norman Ohler (04:10:20): And they’re certainly not as creative as… But it also depends on the person. Like, Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, he was drinking a lot, or Hemingway was drinking a lot, and they could only write when they’re drunk. When I’m drunk, I can’t write. I just can’t do it. Lex Fridman (04:10:37): Write drunk, edit sober. Norman Ohler (04:10:40): And that’s advisable. Like, if I would write something on amphetamines, I would certainly edit it sober, of course, because on amphetamines, your self-criticism is lowered because you feel so good, you feel so confident. You just write. But writing is about nuances, especially literary writing. Maybe a non-fiction book would be easy on amphetamines, but a novel, it’s all about you have to be very, very open. Amphetamines close you. You become like a machine, you write. But if you’re on the right track, like Kerouac with On the Road, he had the right, you know, he was on, he was going, you know? But you could also be on the wrong one and then write 200 pages, and you just have to throw it away. And probably he did a lot of that also, you know? Lex Fridman (04:11:26): Yeah, yeah. And also, On the Road is a particular kind of book. Norman Ohler (04:11:31): It’s an amphetamine book. Lex Fridman (04:11:32): You want the spontaneity, the speed of… Norman Ohler (04:11:36): It’s about speed. It’s about moving fast… …But not stopping. It is a speed book. That’s a great book. Lex Fridman (04:11:43): It’s such a great book. It’s such a great book. But then I’ve recently been rereading all of Dostoevsky. So going through Notes from Underground up to The Idiot, to Crime and Punishment, to Brothers Karamazov, and that, I don’t think— Norman Ohler (04:11:55): Which one’s your favorite? Lex Fridman (04:11:56): Brothers Karamazov. Well, I read in both Russian and English. And for the longest time, it was The Idiot. Until… It’s a complicated philosophical issue. When I was younger, I thought Prince Myshkin, the main character in The Idiot, was not as flawed as I believe he is now. I think Dostoevsky tried to create a Jesus-like character in Prince Myshkin. And I think kind of failed, because he was too giving in a way that was actually counterproductive and destructive to the world, which he tried to fix in The Brothers Karamazov with Alyosha Karamazov. But anyway, I don’t think you could do that. I’d be very surprised to learn that Dostoevsky did any drugs. Norman Ohler (04:12:46): Also, there was not so much available. Lex Fridman (04:12:48): That’s true. Norman Ohler (04:12:49): Alcohol, of course, nicotine, coffee. Those are really powerful drugs. Lex Fridman (04:12:55): And I’m also doing a podcast with Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and many other amazing books. Norman Ohler (04:13:02): He’s a great writer. Fight Club influenced me quite a bit. I think the novel is even better, maybe, than the movie. But the movie’s great. Lex Fridman (04:13:12): I mean, as he said, the movie is great, and that is almost like a bigger than life thing. Sometimes the book and the movie and those things can influence culture. Norman Ohler (04:13:24): That certainly influenced culture. Lex Fridman (04:13:26): To where, like, “Okay, this has a life of its own.” I’d like to think some of your work might influence how we perceive history. That’s really important. That’s really powerful. To not just change, but to sort of expand our conception of history, which is important to do. Are there particular books, fiction or non-fiction? So you are both a fiction writer and a non-fiction writer. Are there books that had an influence on you? Norman Ohler (04:13:53): Yes. It’s Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is good, but only when you’re like in your early 20s, living in New York, and you’re writing your first book, and you just have taken LSD. Lex Fridman (04:14:06): Oh, nice. Norman Ohler (04:14:07): Then I read it, and then it opened… Lex Fridman (04:14:09): It made sense? Norman Ohler (04:14:11): Well, it just showed, it’s just a very experimental novel, so it opens up. You don’t have to understand everything, but it shows you that there are many different ways of telling a tale, and that was quite interesting to me. But the most influential book, maybe, is The Stranger by Camus. Norman Ohler (04:14:31): Because I like the language so much and I’m really mostly interested in language. I don’t really care what it’s about. I was lying on the beach in Morocco when I was 20 and reading The Stranger, and then a Moroccan came and he said, “Why are you reading a racist book?” I’m like, “What are you talking about? This is world literature.” He said, “Yeah, right. He’s, like, killing an Arab without consequence. No, actually there’s consequence, but no reason, basically. Just because he’s bored. So this is racist.” That argument made no sense to me, because I was just interested in how Camus constructed it. It was just for me a stylistic experience to read that. Lex Fridman (04:15:16): I always love books, and Stranger’s a short book. I love books that are able to accomplish so much in so few pages, in so few words. The Stranger. Norman Ohler (04:15:28): There’s nothing unnecessary in The Stranger, and I always try to write a book where every sentence is just… There’s nothing unnecessary in the book. But it’s very hard to do, actually. Nietzsche could do this. Peterson talked about this, that every sentence in Nietzsche is chiseled and it’s perfect. Norman Ohler (04:15:46): And I think not every… I mean, that’s his tendency. He tries to write like this, and that’s very hard to achieve. That’s actually where the writing becomes poetic. So for me, Nietzsche also is like a poet. The aphorisms are poetry. So Nietzsche, stylistically, since you asked, was very important to me. So Camus, Nietzsche, James Joyce, and Kafka also. I always like Kafka. And I like Thomas Mann. I don’t know how well he translates, but in German it’s interesting, his take on how to… It’s funny. He’s a very funny guy. Even though he talks too much, but he’s good. So I always wanted to have these guys as my colleagues, basically. Lex Fridman (04:16:30): Are they there somewhere in your head as you’re writing? Norman Ohler (04:16:33): Less and less. But it was an incentive to be part of that club. Like, to be able to write a book and it’s out there and it’s perfect, and it’s… and you are on one level with Camus, you know? It’s very hard to do. Let’s say you become a carpenter, which is also a very challenging job, but you don’t have these kind of great… Well, you have Jesus, I guess, as your potential colleague. Lex Fridman (04:16:59): Yeah, true. Norman Ohler (04:16:59): But for the… I just like these writers, these two. So the ones I mentioned, and also then Thomas Pynchon. Who wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, which I think is one of the best novels of the 20th century. And I read that in Berlin in the late ’90s, and it really blew my mind. I think it’s an absolute masterpiece. The intensity of this novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, is unparalleled, and I’m still puzzled by how he did it. And it’s not known how he did it because he lives a completely obscure life. No one knows basically who he is. So he’s also a very interesting colleague. Lex Fridman (04:17:40): It’s widely regarded as one of the most challenging and significant works of postmodern literature. Norman Ohler (04:17:46): It’s pretty good. Lex Fridman (04:17:47): Set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, the novel centers on the design, production, and deployment of the German V-2 rocket. The narrative follows several characters. It lists the characters. Norman Ohler (04:17:58): Well, Slothrop is the American agent who’s the main character. He works for Allied Intelligence, and he’s really a funny guy. He smokes a lot of weed and he’s in Berlin, in bombed out Berlin after the war, and it’s just funny to go with him through that. He’s a great character. It’s a great novel. It really is. Lex Fridman (04:18:17): So it does give a window into history also. Norman Ohler (04:18:20): It does, yeah. But that’s not why it’s interesting to me. But it makes it especially interesting because the way he describes these situations, the way he writes is phenomenal. Lex Fridman (04:18:32): Oh, it’s a Pulitzer Prize and all. Norman Ohler (04:18:34): Oh, but I’m sure he didn’t take it. Lex Fridman (04:18:35): On lists. Norman Ohler (04:18:37): Yeah, he declined. Lex Fridman (04:18:39): Because like… Norman Ohler (04:18:39): Well, no one knows who he is. I know a little bit. I know who his wife is, but I’m not going to talk about it. He really wants to protect his privacy. And I think that’s also amazing. Lex Fridman (04:18:48): I think that’s a beautiful thing, but for me, from my perspective… Norman Ohler (04:18:52): He wouldn’t appear in the podcast? Lex Fridman (04:18:53): He would not. Norman Ohler (04:18:54): It would be great if he would come on the podcast. Lex Fridman (04:18:55): He would not, right. Well, I believe it’s possible, but with people like that, it has to be a long journey, and you have to… For example, I just interviewed Terence Tao, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians, one of the greatest living mathematicians, probably one of the greats in history. And there’s another I want to speak with, which is Grigori Perelman, who’s a Russian mathematician, who’s more akin to Thomas Pynchon. He declined the Millennial Prize, the one million dollars. He declined all the prizes, the Fields Medal, Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He declined everything, and he just lives with his mom now, quit mathematics. Norman Ohler (04:19:34): Like Kirilov, he also lived with his mom. Lex Fridman (04:19:37): There’s something really beautiful about a human being like that. Especially because in his case it was done for principles. Like, he has a certain set of principles, and no amount of money, nothing could buy him or … Norman Ohler (04:19:52): Yeah, that’s amazing actually. Lex Fridman (04:19:54): I had somebody tell me this, a really interesting guy I met a few days ago, said that there’s nothing, there’s nothing more exhilarating. Perhaps only a rich person can say this, but there’s nothing more exhilarating than saying no to a lot of money. But he said it with so much confidence that I somehow believed him. But the deeper truth there is living by principles and having integrity. There is something deeply fulfilling. If that means saying no to money or if that means standing up to Hitler and then risking your life, that’s a deeply fulfilling thing. Big ridiculous question, I thought you’re a good person to ask. What’s the point of this whole thing? What’s the meaning of life and our existence here on Earth? Norman Ohler (04:20:54): I somehow think that the universe has a big story to tell, or it’s telling a big story the whole time, and our consciousness is part of that bigger story. So the consciousness of the universe, the huge story, is something that is probably the meaning of life. Or the meaning of our individual life is to understand that story. And that is something, for example, that I understood quite well on LSD when I walked in the mountains about a month ago. Because the mountains, they actually, you know, they take quite high up into the atmosphere, and they are made of all kinds of minerals. So they are receiving cosmic energy that comes, you know, that hits our planet. And walking up there, it doesn’t… Norman Ohler (04:21:50): I guess if you’re on LSD, you’re more open somehow because you’re not closing with your default mode network that, you know, this is the tree and this is the path and this is the mountain, and now it’s 2:00 and I have to go back, and the rain. You’re more open so you’re more, like, perceiving. That’s at least the impression I had. And I couldn’t put it in words what exactly I was perceiving, but I was perceiving more of the bigger story. And I think that is inspiration, and I think those moments bring you quite close to the meaning of life. And I wouldn’t put that meaning of life in words. Norman Ohler (04:22:34): It is an experience, and I think that for me as an artist, it was an important experience to make, to get close to that. And that is what you can achieve in each of your professions, you know? Like a mathematician, he comes to that point when he, like, hears more or, like, he grasps connections. And he might not be able to put it into a formula yet, but if he’s an open person, he might be a better mathematician because he can understand a bit more of the meaning of everything. Lex Fridman (04:23:15): Of this bigger story that’s being written. Norman Ohler (04:23:17): Yeah. And I mean, I mentioned to you my Substack which I think is gonna be the best Substack. Lex Fridman (04:23:23): What’s, do you think it’s possible it’s the greatest Substack of all time in history? Norman Ohler (04:23:27): That’s what it’s gonna be. Lex Fridman (04:23:28): It’s gonna be, yeah. Norman Ohler (04:23:29): Stoned Sapiens Substack. But something else… Lex Fridman (04:23:32): I just hope you actually do it. Norman Ohler (04:23:35): Well, you should become a subscriber. Lex Fridman (04:23:38): I will definitely subscribe. Norman Ohler (04:23:39): I really realized that there is a greater, a bigger story, and it’s somehow interesting to try to open up. Because if we live… That’s why I like to be in nature also quite a lot. You have better access. We live boxed in. Walter Benjamin called us like the boxed human beings. Like we’re living in the cities, we’re waking up, we’re doing… It’s good to be, therefore, it’s good to be outside the system. And I hope that my art can contribute to, you know, freeing the brain waves to understanding a bit more. What that is, I don’t know, but I think the process of understanding more and connecting in different ways, that is what I’m going for because I think that is the meaning of life. Lex Fridman (04:24:23): Well thank you for doing that with all of your work and for inspiring us all to do the same. Thank you so much for talking today. Norman Ohler (04:24:31): It was great. Thank you. Lex Fridman (04:24:34): Thanks for listening to this conversation with Norman Ohler. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now let me leave you with some words from the great Terence McKenna: “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. Lex Fridman (04:25:21): This is how magic is done, by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it is in fact a featherbed.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.