37. CIA Mind Control: Sex, Drugs, and Mysterious Deaths (Ep 3)

Summary

Episode 37: CIA Mind Control: Sex, Drugs, and Mysterious Deaths

Release Date: April 13, 2025
Hosts: David McCloskey & Gordon Carrera
Podcast: The Rest Is Classified

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Introduction to MKUltra and Sidney Gottlieb

The episode opens with David McCloskey setting the stage for a deep dive into the CIA’s infamous MKUltra program, a clandestine project aimed at exploring mind control techniques. McCloskey introduces Sidney Gottlieb, the enigmatic figure behind MKUltra, highlighting his role as a former CIA analyst who transitioned into a spy novelist.

David McCloskey [00:39]: "It has become increasingly obvious over the last several years that the general area had less and less relevance to current clandestine operations."

Gordon Carrera echoes the complexity and ethical dilemmas surrounding the use of such unconventional methods in intelligence operations.

Gordon Carrera [00:22]: "I wash like this."

The Genesis of MKUltra and Ethical Concerns

McCloskey recounts the origins of MKUltra during the Cold War era, driven by fears that Soviet and communist forces were developing sophisticated mind control techniques. This led the CIA to spearhead its own program under Gottlieb’s leadership, experimenting with substances like LSD on both himself and fellow agents.

David McCloskey [02:06]: "In our last episodes, we saw how at the start of the Cold War, there was this fear that the communists had developed ways of manipulating the brain..."

The hosts discuss the moral and ethical implications, noting that many senior operations officers began to distance themselves from these dark experiments.

Gordon Carrera [02:02]: "Some people had moral and ethical distaste for trying to control the human mind."

The Tragic Case of Frank Olson

A significant portion of the episode focuses on Frank Olson, a chemist involved in MKUltra who became a victim of the program’s excesses. In November 1953, Olson attends a CIA-sponsored retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, where he and others unknowingly consume LSD-laced drinks provided by Gottlieb’s deputy, Robert Lashbrook.

David McCloskey [03:27]: "Gottlieb, as part of MK Ultra, the story we're gonna focus on here now takes place in 1953."

Post-retreat, Olson exhibits severe psychological distress, leading to his confinement to psychiatric care orchestrated by MKUltra subcontractors. Despite these interventions, Olson tragically dies after falling from a hotel window under suspicious circumstances. While officially ruled a suicide, inconsistencies in the forensic reports fuel ongoing debates about the CIA’s possible involvement.

David McCloskey [17:01]: "...there was one forensic pathologist on the team who said that the skull had fractures consistent with him having been struck before he went out the window..."

Gordon Carrera [19:05]: "I don't think there's any really solid evidence to suggest that the CIA killed him..."

Operation Midnight Climax and Expanded Experiments

The narrative progresses to 1954, highlighting the expansion of MKUltra through Operation Midnight Climax, led by George Hunter White. This operation involved setting up brothels in San Francisco and New York, where prostitutes unknowingly administered LSD to unsuspecting clients while CIA operatives observed and recorded their behaviors from behind one-way mirrors.

Gordon Carrera [28:38]: "Operation Midnight Climax... it's a brothel where he's employing prostitutes... to slip LSD into the johns' drinks."

The hosts describe the bizarre and unethical nature of these experiments, emphasizing the lack of subtlety and the criminal underpinnings of the operations.

Sidney Gottlieb [28:56]: "That's Right. Basically the CIA is testing through White what happens when people are dosed with LSD."

The Ineffectiveness of Mind Control Techniques

Despite extensive experimentation, MKUltra consistently failed to achieve its primary objective of reliable mind control. Techniques like sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and chemical alterations only succeeded in destabilizing subjects rather than controlling them.

Gordon Carrera [37:53]: "I mean, it's kind of like if you were very conspiratorially minded, in which you've got someone who's been tipped over the edge..."

David McCloskey [46:40]: "But as with the LSD, I mean, all of this kind of effort... it doesn't work. At the end of the day, they've not found the ability to control minds..."

The Legacy and Aftermath of MKUltra

The episode concludes by reflecting on the lasting impact of MKUltra. Despite its failures, the program left a legacy of mistrust and ethical breaches within intelligence operations. Gottlieb’s personal struggles and the CIA’s minimal repercussions highlight the enduring shadows cast by these secretive experiments.

David McCloskey [20:24]: "He doesn't appreciate receiving that letter... what a guy."

Gordon Carrera [37:53]: "And maybe they're Gordon with yet another pathway toward mind control blocked."

Conclusion and Teaser for Next Episode

As MKUltra’s dark chapters unfold, McCloskey and Carrera tease the next episode, promising to explore how the CIA inadvertently fueled the 1960s counterculture movement and how Gottlieb’s research continued to influence emerging intelligence strategies.

Gordon Carrera [47:22]: "And see how Gottlieb's dark research will at last come to light."

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Notable Quotes

• David McCloskey [02:51]: "It's fair to say a different era."
• Gordon Carrera [11:07]: "It's a disgusting lack of subtlety in Operation Midnight Climax."
• Sidney Gottlieb [37:25]: "Right. And Godlib, though I will say he is very curious and I think stubborn."

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Key Takeaways

1. MKUltra’s Origins: Initiated during the Cold War, MKUltra aimed to develop mind control techniques to counter perceived Soviet advancements.
2. Frank Olson’s Death: A pivotal and tragic event showcasing the potential human costs of these experiments.
3. Operation Midnight Climax: An unethical expansion of MKUltra involving the use of prostitutes to administer LSD to unsuspecting individuals.
4. Ineffectiveness of Techniques: Despite extensive efforts, MKUltra failed to achieve reliable mind control, often resulting in psychological harm.
5. Enduring Legacy: MKUltra left a lasting impact on ethical standards within intelligence operations and fueled public mistrust in government agencies.

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This comprehensive exploration of MKUltra in Episode 37 sheds light on one of the CIA’s most controversial programs, blending historical facts with captivating storytelling to unravel the complexities of intelligence-driven mind control experiments.

Transcript

[Meghan Trainor]

Meghan Trainor, Laundry retrainer.

Meghan Trainor. You're tossing out my gunky laundry detergent bottle.

Ooey, it's got that booty, that juicy boom boom.

That gunk, that alive arm and hammer power sheets. Toss like this.

Cause I toss like this.

[Gordon Carrera]

I wash like this.

[Meghan Trainor]

It's a no mess. Laundry blaze arm and hammer power sheets. More power to.

[David McCloskey]

It has become increasingly obvious over the last several years that the general area had less and less relevance to current clandestine operations. The reasons for this are many and complex, but two of them are perhaps worth mentioning. Briefly, on the scientific side, it has become very clear that these materials and techniques are too unique, unpredictable in their effect on individual human beings under specific circumstances to be operationally useful. Our operations officers, particularly the emerging group of new senior operations officers, have shown a discerning and perhaps commendable distaste for using these materials and techniques. They seem to realize that in addition to moral and ethical considerations, the extreme sensitivity and security constraints of such operations effectively rule them out. Welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

[Gordon Carrera]

And I'm David McCloskey.

[David McCloskey]

And that was Sidney Gottlieb, the man in charge of the weird, crazy, dark world of the CIA's mind control programs, also known as MK Ultra. That's my best kind of over the top voice.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

That was very ominous.

[David McCloskey]

It was ominous.

[Gordon Carrera]

I do like in the quote how Sidney Guy never really says what they're working on. Right. He just sort of alludes to what they were doing.

[David McCloskey]

Something with ethical and moral issues, I think, which we're going to be looking at.

[Gordon Carrera]

Some people had moral and ethical distaste for trying to control the human mind.

[David McCloskey]

In our last episodes, we saw how at the start of the Cold War, there was this fear that the communists had developed ways of manipulating the brain, developing truth serums, brainwashing people like captured soldiers in the Korean War, and then reprogramming their minds. That's the only reason you could explain someone going communist, of course. And as a result, the CIA thought it wanted a piece of the action, creating its own program, MK Ultra, and placing Sidney Gottlieb in charge. And we saw how he'd begun experimenting with LSD on himself and also using fellow CIA officers as, I think, witting and unwitting guinea pigs. It's fair to say a different era. David.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

A guinea pig can't truly consent though, can they?

[Gordon Carrera]

Gordon? A true guinea pig is an unwitting lab rat, I guess you could say.

[David McCloskey]

They don't do consent forms for guinea Pigs.

[Gordon Carrera]

No, I think you're right, Gottlieb. We do have to say, to his credit, the guy rolls up his sleeves, doesn't he? Because, I mean, we mentioned this in the last episode. He himself went on 200 LSD acid trips for purposes of national security. So the guy is willing to put his money where his mouth is. And the story, though, that we're going to start this episode with, I think Gordon is fair to say, is maybe one of the darker.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

We keep saying this.

[Gordon Carrera]

I keep trying to not say it.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

But we keep saying it just keeps getting darker. And as we go into the world.

[Gordon Carrera]

Of MK Ultra, each of these stories are bizarre and increasingly sort of dark. And in this story, this is a case of Gottlieb's, I guess, preference for testing on his own guinea pigs, as you mentioned, going horribly wrong. So Gottlieb, as part of MK Ultra, the story we're gonna focus on here now takes place in 1953. So MK Ultra has actually just gotten going. And Gottlieb, as part of this work, is gonna sponsor his kind of occasional work retreats at a cabin on Deep.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Creek Lake in Maryland. And work retreat makes this sound much more normal than it's actually going to be.

[Gordon Carrera]

Right? This is not a corporate retreat with trust falls and that kind of thing. This is 11 people from Gottlieb shop at CIA, the technical services staff, particularly the chemical division and the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the center of the United States bioweapon biowarfare program. And they go to this cabin in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, to kind of talk shop, talk about their research. There is some fishing, so there's some, you know, sort of extracurricular activities. And the people from Dietrich who are brought to this, you know, sort of retreat are totally normal people who collaborate with the CIA on poisons, chemical and biological weapons, creation of, you know, suicide pills. We talked in back in the Tolkachev.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Episodes about L pills.

[Gordon Carrera]

You know, some of the initial research for those would have come out of Dietrich. At this point, they're actually starting developing.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Pills to give to U2 pilots in.

[Gordon Carrera]

Case they're shot down over the Soviet Union. Aphrodisiacs for operational use. So these sorry.

[David McCloskey]

Aphrodisiacs for operational use. Yeah, that sounds mighty suspicious.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And the details on this are vague.

[Gordon Carrera]

This is a crew of people who are sort of, I guess, joined at the hip with Gottlieb in, you know, his. His maniacal research. So in mid November of 1953, one such group goes out to Deep Creek.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Lake Again, there's 11 scientists there.

[Gordon Carrera]

One of them is a man named Frank Olson. Now, Frank Olson is a chemist. He's also from Ira Baldwin's circle of sort of the intersection of chemistry and.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

National security pulled from the University of Wisconsin.

[Gordon Carrera]

Frank Olson had been one of the.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

First scientists assigned to Dietrich. He is an expert in aerosol delivery systems for biological agents.

[Gordon Carrera]

And he has done research on developing.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

A range of kind of lethal aerosols.

[Gordon Carrera]

That you can put in handy containers disguised as, like, shaving cream or insect repellents.

[David McCloskey]

Useful. Yeah.

[Gordon Carrera]

Now, he apparently is kind of already pretty stressed with his work as he's.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Heading to this retreat.

[Gordon Carrera]

His son will say he's kind of.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

It's taken a bit of a moral toll on him.

[Gordon Carrera]

On November 18, 1953, though, they go out to the cabin and they socialize. They have dinner. They have a round of drinks at around 7:30pm Now, Gottlieb's deputy, a guy named Robert Lashbrook, is also there.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

He's the one pouring the drinks.

[Gordon Carrera]

They're apparently drinking Cointreau straight. Someone will send us a nasty gram to say that, you know, we're sort of uncultured in this area, but I've never heard of anyone drinking Cointreau straight. They're drinking Cointreau, and after about 20 minutes, about half of them start to feel weird and say they're feeling strange. And it is, of course, because their drinks have been spiked with lsd, obviously.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, obviously. I mean, it's like a kind of weird party. But you'd also think they might have almost expected it, given the context.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

It's kind of early days for MK Ultra at this point, I guess.

[Gordon Carrera]

And I suppose it's possible that you're not maybe fully aware of the coffee pots being spiked at Langley if you're coming in from Dietrich. Or maybe you just assume, you know, hey, tonight's not our night. But Lashbrook, the deputy, has spiked the drinks. Now, Gottlieb, later in depositions, will say he doesn't think any of the sort of maybe seven or eight people who.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Received the spike drink knew it was coming.

[Gordon Carrera]

Right? So it's.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

They seem unwinning.

[Gordon Carrera]

People start laughing uncontrollably, the conversation becomes unintelligible, the walls start spinning, and by 1am everyone's passed out except for Frank Olsen. Now, Olson is having a hard go at it. So the next day their work retreat is over, and I guess he home feeling there's something very off, right? So when he comes back, he tells his family, you Know I've made terrible mistake. He's feeling disoriented. All mixed up was one way. His wife said that he put it said that he'd done something wrong and that he felt that he was incompetent to do the type of work he was doing. And at first he might think, and his wife thinks, well, maybe he's got food poisoning or something like that. But it becomes apparent pretty quickly that and his colleagues will agree, that he needs some kind of psychiatric help. Now, at this point, MK Ultra has only been running for about seven months. Barely two dozen people know its true nature. And, you know, a good portion of those are people who were at Deep Creek Lake for this retreat and had been dosed with lsd. And so he's kind of in a very, very uncomfortable position here because you have a guy who has access to.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

An understanding of one of the deepest secrets at the heart of the US.

[Gordon Carrera]

Government, who now is having a mental collapse and needs psychiatric help because of the bad LSD trip that you put him on. Olson is summoned or brought to Gottlieb for a chat.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And then they send him to see.

[Gordon Carrera]

Dr. Harold Abramson in New York, who.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Is an MK Ultra subcontractor.

[David McCloskey]

So he's in on the secret.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

He's already in on the secret.

[Gordon Carrera]

That's why they go to New York, because they're not just going to take him to see a psychiatrist in D.C. who's not already cleared for this. Olson is escorted up there by Lashbrook, the guy who spikes his quantro, and his own boss, a guy named Vincent Rou. And this is in the run up to Thanksgiving of 1953. And again, as they travel, Olson is feeling all mixed up, still acting paranoid, starting to talk about how people are out to get him.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And Olson has two days of sessions with Abramson.

[Gordon Carrera]

On the 24th and 25th of November, Olson tells Abramson, can't work, can't sleep, can't concentrate, can't spell anymore. He's not sleeping. So then the next morning, after those sessions with Abramson, they take him to see a magician. He had been mentored by Harry Houdini and had written a manual for how to embed illusion and deceit and trickery into CIA operations, because every intelligence agency.

[David McCloskey]

Needs a magician and he's their man.

[Gordon Carrera]

And you have to say, at this point, maybe this isn't the care that Frank Olsen needed because he's being taken to an MK Ultra subcontractor who's also dealing LSD in New York, and a magician.

[David McCloskey]

So this is it's not top quality care.

[Gordon Carrera]

This is not the way you would want to. To run the play. Later, it will be reported that Mulholland.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The magician may have tried to hypnotize Olson. So maybe the idea here was that.

[Gordon Carrera]

They would try to hypnotize the guy as part of his psychiatric career. And it doesn't seem to work very well. By one account, Olson becomes agitated when he, quote, thought Mulholland was going to.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Make him disappear like one of the magician's rabbits. And so he is deeply paranoid at.

[Gordon Carrera]

This point in the story. Now, for some bizarre reason, they then take Olson to see a play in New York. So he's up there with Lashbrook and his boss. They go see a play, Me and Juliet, which I've not not seen. Olson stands up and leaves halfway through and says later that he's trying to.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Escape from the people outside who are.

[Gordon Carrera]

Waiting to arrest him that night, Olson sneaks out of the hotel, tears up.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

His money, throws his wallet in a.

[Gordon Carrera]

Trash bin, and claims when they discover him later, sort of in the lobby the next morning, looking completely disheveled, like.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

He'S been out in the town all.

[Gordon Carrera]

Night, which he has. You know, he's been wandering on the city, and he says, look, people were following me. I was actually eluding a chase team. So this is bad, right? So now it's Thanksgiving week. Really bad timing. They fly back to D.C. for Thanksgiving.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And then on the drive from the.

[Gordon Carrera]

Airport, Olson basically says, I can't go face my wife. I'm just too ashamed. And he tries. Frank Olson tries to tell these guys to just let him go, but they say there's no way we can do that, right? So Ruit stays behind in D.C. and Lashbrook takes Olson back to New York. They just turn around and go back onto a plane. They go out to Dr. Abramson's pad on Long island, then they go to Manhattan to his office. Abramson diagnoses Olson as being in a psychotic state and eventually will convince Olson.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

That he should be hospitalized voluntarily.

[Gordon Carrera]

And Olson actually agrees to commit himself. So they're starting these kind of logistical arrangements to get him actually committed to a sanitarium. But apparently they need a day or so to prep the room. And so they go back to the hotel. They have what is arguably the worst Thanksgiving dinner of 1953, where they literally sit there at the hotel, have dinner. Olson is during the Thanksgiving meal saying that he's terrified because everyone. And he's eating with Lashbrook and he's pointing at Lashbrook. He's saying, everyone, including you, is out to get me, you know, while he's eating the Thanksgiving turkey.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Right?

[Gordon Carrera]

And at this point in the story, you're starting to wonder. This guy's got. Maybe he's got a point here. So next day, they meet again with Abramson. They watch tv, they have martinis. It doesn't seem like what you'd want to do in a, you know, psychotic state. They check into room 1018A at the Statler Hotel. Olson calls his wife for the first time in three days and says, look.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

I'll see you soon.

[Gordon Carrera]

Seems encouraging. Olson washes his socks in the sink. That night, they watch television for a while, and he goes to bed. Now, Lashbrook wakes up around 2:30 in.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The morning to the sound of a.

[Gordon Carrera]

Very loud noise, and Frank Olson has.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Gone out the window.

[David McCloskey]

When you say got out the window, you mean gone out the window.

[Gordon Carrera]

He's fallen or. Or was potentially pushed out of the window. And the Statler Hotel's doorman is screaming downstairs, you know, we got a jumper. We got a jumper. And he'll later describe Olson's fall as like the guy was just diving with.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

His hands out in front of him, his body twisting.

[Gordon Carrera]

He comes down feet first, his arms kind of grabbing at the air above him.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And Olson isn't dead immediately.

[Gordon Carrera]

Apparently he's struck a piece of wood on the way down, but he's dead in.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

In moments.

[Gordon Carrera]

And Lashbrook sees all of this upstairs because they're. They're sharing a room.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And he doesn't go downstairs.

[Gordon Carrera]

He immediately calls Sid Gottlieb, and the.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Police eventually question Lashbrook and ask him.

[Gordon Carrera]

You know, why didn't you go downstairs? It does kind of seem like maybe.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The natural human thing to do would.

[Gordon Carrera]

Have been to immediately go downstairs to check on the situation. But again, that's not what he does. And Lashbrook will say later, you know, what could I have done? I mean, he was dead. So the night manager asked the hotel's operator if any calls had been made that night. And one had.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

During the call, a man had said, it's all over.

[Gordon Carrera]

And the other said, that's too bad. And that was the call. And so five hours later, at 8 in the morning, a CIA officer named.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Named James McCord Jr. Who will later.

[Gordon Carrera]

Be an accomplice in the Watergate break in, he's going to come, he's going to meet with Lashbrook, accompany him to the police. They don't mention, of course, any of the LSD dosing to the police, and.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

It is ruled a suicide.

[David McCloskey]

Is it, though? I mean, lots of people over the years have suggested he was pushed or thrown out of that window to kind of keep the MK Ultra secret going. I mean, there have been some, you know, documentaries in which people have suggested this. It's hard to know, isn't it?

[Sidney Gottlieb]

I don't think he was killed.

[Gordon Carrera]

So most of that theory has really come from the Olsen family, in particular Frank Olsen's son, who's kind of haunted.

[David McCloskey]

By it throughout his whole life.

[Gordon Carrera]

Really, really haunted by it. I mean, for very obvious reasons. Right. And actually ended up years later having the body exhumed and actually hired a team of forensic pathologists to look at the corpse. And of course, there's no sort of toxicity reading they could take, you know, decades later. But there was one forensic pathologist on the team who said that the skull had fractures consistent with him having been struck before he went out the window, because, again, you know, he goes feet.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

First onto the ground.

[Gordon Carrera]

Right. And other forensic pathologists on the team said, well, those could be consistent with him having hit something like, you know, we talked about him hitting a piece of wood going on the way down. I mean. So I don't think there's any particularly strong evidence to suggest that he was killed. I think that what you do have is a situation where the CIA is.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Absolutely keen to keep this as quiet as possible.

[Gordon Carrera]

So the family's situation is not being.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Taken into consideration here.

[Gordon Carrera]

Right. But I don't think there's been good.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Evidence that has come out to suggest.

[Gordon Carrera]

That anyone inside the CIA actually tried.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

To kill this guy. I think he had a breakdown after he took LSD and jumped out a window.

[David McCloskey]

But in a sense, the CIA and Sidney Gottlieb are still responsible perhaps for his death because they created the conditions by feeding that lsd, which tipped him over the edge. So maybe not direct murder in that sense, but somehow complicity in his death, I guess, is how you'd see it with Gottlieb, who I think feels some guilt about it, even though this is kept pretty quiet within the CIA.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

That's right.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, I think you have to draw a line between his death and the lsd. I mean, he could have been dealing with some kind of emotional trauma or.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Disturbance before he took it.

[Gordon Carrera]

But it seems that there's a pretty straight line from the dosing via Cointreau to, yeah, jumping out the window of the hotel, because you can create a.

[David McCloskey]

Scenario, if you were very conspiratorially minded, in which you've got someone who's been tipped over the edge, the risk is in his treatment or whatever happens next. The secret of MK Ultra is going to come out. But equally, this is one of their own people that we're talking about. That's the bit which makes me a bit cautious about the idea they simply bump him off. He's one of theirs, isn't he? He's one of their kind of colleagues and friends. But I don't know, I think, on balance, I'd go with you that it's less likely, but you can see why people might think it.

[Gordon Carrera]

I don't think there's any really solid evidence to suggest that the CIA killed him, but I think it is maybe a bit of a moot point because, I mean, even the CIA's, the IG, wrote years later on this that there was a direct connection between Frank Olson's death and the LSD experiment, quote, unquote. I mean, he was drugged without his consent by CIA officers at Deep Creek Lake, and then from there you go to the hotel.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

I mean, there's a direct connection between the two things.

[Gordon Carrera]

Right?

[David McCloskey]

But here's the question, what does it do to MK Ultra? Does it lead? I think we all know the answer is, does it lead to them going suddenly, hey, let's stop this. No more of this crazy mind control and experimenting on. On people. We'll just quit at that point. I think the answer is an emphatic no, isn't there?

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Well, for those who have been listening.

[Gordon Carrera]

To the last two episodes, Gordon, the.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Bureaucratic controls on, on Sidney Gottlieb are.

[David McCloskey]

Light, light touch regulation.

[Gordon Carrera]

There's no punishment. There's no real change in the way MK ULTRA is being managed. There is a, I guess you'd call it almost a formal reprimand from Alan Dulles, the CIA director, to Gottlieb. And you know, he basically says you.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Exercised poor judgment in this case.

[Gordon Carrera]

And years later, Gottlieb will claim that he felt personal anguish over what happened to Frank Olsen.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

He'd even say that he considered resigning from the CIA to go into other.

[Gordon Carrera]

Work because he was so affected. But he doesn't. And MK ULTRA doesn't change. And you have to say that a formal reprimand from the CIA director, while not great, is certainly not a punishment really. And work more or less goes on as.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

As it had.

[Gordon Carrera]

Right.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The program just keeps moving.

[Gordon Carrera]

So maybe, I mean, Gordon there with this tragedy kind of almost inaugurating MK ultra. Let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to revisit George Hunter White and see what.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

That pervert has gotten up to on his latest adventures.

[David McCloskey]

See you after the break.

[Meghan Trainor]

Meghan Trainor, laundry retrainer.

Meghan Trainor. You're tossing out my gunky laundry detergent bottle.

It's got that booty that you see boom, boom, that gonna fly.

All right. Arm and hammer power sheets. Toss like this.

Arm and hammer power sheets. More power to you.

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[David McCloskey]

Welcome back to the strange world of MKUltra and the CIA's efforts at mind control. Frank Olson may have passed away, but Sidney Gottlieb is still going. And it's getting even weirder, isn't it, David?

[Gordon Carrera]

At this point, as if it were possible, but I would argue, yes, it is getting weirder. So in about 1954, Gottlieb is dealing with a couple problems, right? And these are. These are actually going to be problems that plague the program throughout. One of them is the LSD supply. And we talked a little bit in the last episode about how a Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, had actually patented lsd, right? And there was actually very little supply in the world. I mean, the CIA was concerned that.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Sandoz was selling it to the Soviets.

[Gordon Carrera]

That turned out to be not true. And in response to those fears, though, Gottlieb had actually subcontracted with Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, and by 1954, they've done that. So the CIA pays $400,000, it's the.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Largest subcontract under the MK Ultra banner.

[Gordon Carrera]

For a mass purchase of LSD. So he's kind of, by 54, Gottlieb has worked out his supply.

[David McCloskey]

He's got the supply line. What's he gonna do with it, though?

[Sidney Gottlieb]

He needs guinea pigs.

[Gordon Carrera]

He really does. He needs people to participate in these experiments. And of course, as we talked about, you know, he's been testing it at CIA with tragic result in the case of Frank Olsen.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

But Gottlieb needs to widen his reach.

[Gordon Carrera]

He can't just be, you know, from, I guess, a scientific perspective. He can't just be spiking the coffee pot at Langley and trying to figure out what sort of the results are. He's gotta get this out in the wild. He needs to test it on more people.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And critically, and this is where it.

[Gordon Carrera]

Gets really weird, is you would think, well, CIA, Foreign Intelligence Service, maybe you'd want to go and test this outside the United States.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

But Gottlieb does not want the Soviets.

[Gordon Carrera]

To find out that the CIA is studying this.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And he wants to do it in.

[Gordon Carrera]

A, I guess a more controlled environment. Now, as a side note, I mean, much of what we're talking about in the series MK Ultra is actually the US centric piece of the mind control work.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Right? It's the experiments, the research, the projects.

[Gordon Carrera]

That take place in the United States.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

John Lyle, in his book on Gottlieb.

[Gordon Carrera]

And the quest for CIA mind control, notes that MK Delta was actually the overseas component of the mind control work. And there were a handful of operations.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Conducted under that banner, including in one.

[Gordon Carrera]

Case, some circumstantial evidence that John Lyle points out in his book that the CIA may have tried to actually slip.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

LSD to the President of the Philippines.

[Gordon Carrera]

Who the CIA at the time was trying to replace with someone more pro American. And the idea is that an asset would slip, you know, put LSD in his drink or something like that, go.

[David McCloskey]

Crazy, and then, yeah, discredit him in the election.

[Gordon Carrera]

He would not be elected. So anyway, but the focus has been domestic. So this is where George Hunter White is going to reappear in the MK Ultra story.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah. So just to recap, because we met him previously, I think of him as the kind of baddie, the kind of henchman from a film noir. He's, he looks it as well. He's got the kind of slightly sweaty, you know, kind of big guy.

[Gordon Carrera]

He does look like a man who was always sweating.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, he's just got this kind of. I mean, he did work in counter narcotics, but he seems to have skirted between being on the right side and the wrong side of the light.

[Gordon Carrera]

He's on both sides of the line.

[David McCloskey]

Both sides. And he's also got a bit of a background in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA in World War II. Been involved in the McCarthy hearings. I was reading stuff about him. He infiltrated a Chinese opium smuggling ring at one point called the Hip Sing Tong in Seattle. But he also was trained at a British Special Operations Executive camp in Canada during World War II. So he's kind of got crazy background in sabotage, subversion and infiltrating drug smuggling gangs and kind of working for them.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Also got a high heel fetish.

[David McCloskey]

And he's got a high heel fetish. I don't think he's a very nice person. I'm going to just put that out there. When we do our hero, a villain, I think I'm going to put, definitely put him in the villain category. Yeah, we agreed on that. I think we're not going to argue about that, are we? No, no.

[Gordon Carrera]

He's very villainous. And listeners will recall that George Hunter White had set up a safe house sort of slash brothel in New York City under an MK Ultra subcontract to begin testing drugs on unwitting subjects. And I think, you know, to put.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

This in sort of business terms here.

[Gordon Carrera]

Like they didn't have the scale right.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

It was just a smaller operation.

[Gordon Carrera]

And by the time we get to 1955, MK Ultra has been up and running for a couple years. George Hunter White has relocated as part of his counternarcotics duties to San Francisco and he is going to set up a similar operation in San Francisco that is going to become known as Operation Midnight Climax. Which is really the name of the operation.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah. And when we get to the details of the operation, they're not trying to hide what this is about. I mean, that's just kind of, it's not subtle.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

There's a disgusting lack of subtlety in Operation Midnight Climax.

[David McCloskey]

So he's got this apartment overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, but it's, it's a problem brothel basically, isn't it? It's a brothel where he's employing prostitutes. That's. That's the simple way of putting it.

[Gordon Carrera]

That's Right. So basically the CIA is testing through White what happens when people are dosed with lsd. And in particular what happens when you mix sex in. And White assembles, at Gottlieb's direction, a group of prostitutes whose job is going.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

To entail bringing clients to the pad.

[Gordon Carrera]

By the way, this is not my lingo. George Hunter White refers to the safe house as the pad exclusively in his writings. They dose the johns with LSD while White watches and records their interactions and reactions. And so again, we have a similar setup where he's like in New York, he wires up this safe house, it's stocked with booze and sex toys. An FBI informant who's spying on White. Okay, so White's working for the CIA, but there's an FBI informant who's spying on White. And this informant says that it contains the largest library pornographic material he'd ever seen.

[David McCloskey]

There's one more detail which I find particularly weird though, which is that White watches all this take place through a kind of two way mirror while sitting on a portable toilet. And so he expenses a portable toilet so he, he doesn't have to leave while he's watching everything take. Is that right? While he just watched it.

[Gordon Carrera]

I suppose you could be locked in there for hours. Like maybe he can't. I mean, given the layout, maybe he couldn't extract himself.

[David McCloskey]

You know, weirdest, I mean, craziest thing, this guy's just spending hours there, sat on a portable toilet, not moving, watching people with LSD and prostitutes.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, weird, weird NCIA funded and directed, which is even weirder. And Gottlieb, we mentioned this last time.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

He has a bit of an all.

[Gordon Carrera]

Or nothing approach to documenting these operations. And so the reason we know about this is not because he's written up extensive reports. It's because Gottlieb is a stickler for.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The financial accounting bit of this.

[Gordon Carrera]

And so every bit of furniture, every sex toy, every, you know, handle of booze that White is purchasing, he is.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Itemizing it and sending it to Gottlieb for reimbursement. The only thing that's not being itemized.

[Gordon Carrera]

As part of Operation Midnight Climax are the payments to the prostitutes. But everything else is. That's how we know that George Hunter White has his portable toilet with him.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

In that little room.

[David McCloskey]

Just let me get this right. The idea of it is to see whether, under the influence of lsd, the clients will talk openly. I mean, that's the point, the purpose of it, like what the effect is of the LSD on their willingness to what share secrets to open up. Because we're back to this idea that they're after a kind of truth serum or a way of, of getting people to, to spill the beans, that that's what this is about. And I mean, do we know if it's effective?

[Gordon Carrera]

Well, what actually they end up learning, and I should use scare quotes, is that the LSD seems to have almost no impact on any of these. John's willingness to share secrets. What actually helps them to share secrets is if the prostitute encourages them to stay after and talk and then they're willing to share secrets, which is sort of obvious, I guess, like, I mean, you know, already probably understood by certainly the prostitutes themselves. So I mean that was the effective.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Bit of this is from the standpoint of trying to elicit a secret.

[Gordon Carrera]

The LSD had really no impact. But the CIA is sending, golly, sending drugs out to San Francisco regularly to test them. In one quote, someone said, look, if we were scared enough of a drug not to try it ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco. And then they would get it to White. And by the way, White, you know, like Gottlieb, was a fervent believer in trying everything himself, so he would try everything on his own person and then.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Give it to the prostitutes to slip.

[Gordon Carrera]

Into the johns drinks. Now White also opens up another safe house outside of San Francisco in Marin County, a little more privacy for experiments.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

That went beyond the sex and drugs.

[Gordon Carrera]

So there Gottlieb, he's kind of using it as a bit of a proving grounds for a lot of crazy tech that the technical services division is working on. So they test stink bombs, itching powder, sneezing powder, diarrhea inducers, a drug laced swizzle stick, an ultra thin hypodermic needle that you could use to poison a wine bottle through the cork glass capsules that would release noxious gases when they were crushed underfoot.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

They sent a fountain pen out there.

[Gordon Carrera]

That shot out tear gas and White sprayed it into his own eyes to test it apparently.

[David McCloskey]

I mean, it's like kind of weird schoolboyish pranks gone wild. But with a massive budget and the kind of scientific base of the CIA behind you to try it out. It's, it's kind of almost childish. It feels this attitude. I mean, maybe that's the wrong word. I don't know. It's just weird.

[Gordon Carrera]

What's crazy is that there are just unwitting ordinary Americans who are being pulled into this. You go out there and someone slips.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

A diarrhea inducing pill into your drink.

[Gordon Carrera]

Because you got invited to a party at a nice house out in Marin County. Now, Gottlieb, he apparently was a participant.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

He would frequent the prostitutes in San Francisco.

[Gordon Carrera]

He carried on, allegedly, an affair with White's wife, Albertine. And there's a wild story about one of Gottlieb's visits to San Francisco where he's. He's out with one of White's henchmen, I guess you'd say. And they're. They're driving and Gottlieb sees a eucalyptus tree up ahead on the side of the road. He says, pull over. Gottlieb gets out. He's got a dart gun with him, and he shoots the eucalyptus tree with a dart and gets back in the car and tells White's associate, he says.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Come back in two days and check.

[Gordon Carrera]

On this tree and tell me what happened. And the guy does. He goes back in two days and the whole tree is dead and wilted. There's not a leaf on it. No idea what was in the dart, Right? Now, Gottlieb estimated later that White conducted.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

30 to 40 unwitting drug tests in San Francisco.

[Gordon Carrera]

But John Lyle, in his book, notes.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

That the hundreds of checks issued to.

[Gordon Carrera]

White suggest that that number is really. It's garbage, right? It's way more than that. As does the testimony of the safe.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

House neighbors who said that for years.

[Gordon Carrera]

This guy had a feeling that something was going on in there. Quote, people were screaming out the windows. I mean, because I guess he's essentially next to a. He's living next to a brothel that is being used to test exotic drugs, right?

[David McCloskey]

I love this. White writes a letter to Gottlieb about all this. I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic. But I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. White wrote, where else could a red blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest? Pretty good stuff, brother. I mean, what a guy. I mean, this is.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

I'm sure Gottlieb did not appreciate receiving that letter.

[Gordon Carrera]

That is not the kind of thing you want in writing, but it does give you a sense of how unlawful.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

This entire thing was and how wild it was.

[Gordon Carrera]

And I think for a CIA. I mean, even though we're talking about.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The CIA of another era that was.

[Gordon Carrera]

Much less constrained and regulated.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Gottlieb is an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, right?

[Gordon Carrera]

And for him to think that this stuff is permissible is really, I think, an insight both into his personality and character, but also into the times. Right. That the stakes were perceived as so high that this sort of Operation Midnight.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Climax could be justified.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, it's.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

It's wild.

[David McCloskey]

And David, it's not just drugs, is it? Because MK Ultra is also getting involved in psychiatry and psychology and using kind of real doctors and academics to do that.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And we should say, Gordon, that by.

[Gordon Carrera]

The mid to late 50s, I think.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

It is becoming apparent to Gottlieb and.

[Gordon Carrera]

The people around him that they're so unpredictable that they're not a particularly effective.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Way to gain control of someone's mind.

[Gordon Carrera]

It seems like they're pretty effective for destroying it, but not necessarily for reprogramming it. And Godlib, though I will say he is very curious and I think stubborn. And he has on his desk a carving of a turtle that bears the inscription, behold the turtle. It never advances unless it sticks its neck out.

[David McCloskey]

So in other words, he wants to push the boundaries.

[Gordon Carrera]

You've got to take risks, keep going, take risks.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

We can only learn if we take risks.

[Gordon Carrera]

And that's where you get this dip into psychiatry and psychology. And again, you know, he's out of his depth.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Right?

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, he's. He's not a psychiatrist, he's not a psychologist, he's a chemist.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And the CIA doesn't have the scale.

[Gordon Carrera]

Or the personnel to run that sort of research. And so he again partners with a string of independent research foundations that would appear independent but actually serve as a.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Conduit for MK Ultra money. Right.

[Gordon Carrera]

And that way he can dispense that cash to physicians, psychologists, chemists, other scientists. The cutouts kind of take a handling fee to make it worth their while. But it allows the CIA to essentially wash the money through legitimate psychiatric institutions.

[David McCloskey]

But this is what I find amazing, is that you've got really established, you know, universities, hospitals, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Mount Sinai Hospital, all involved in MKUltra. I mean, they're getting the money effectively from the CIA to subsidize research. Do you think they know about it? Is it quite well masked where this is coming from?

[Sidney Gottlieb]

I think it is a mix.

[Gordon Carrera]

We should say again that maybe in 2025, the idea of a psychiatrist taking CIA money to conduct crazy research feels, you know, icky. But I think in 1955, there. There is a patriotic sense of when your government comes calling, you know, you sort of, you know, standards. We should also say that when we get to the psychiatry piece of this, the CIA isn't directing the experiments. What they're doing is actually going out and finding researchers who are engaged in work that they find interesting and supporting that research. Right now, one of Gottlieb's principal cutouts was an organization the CIA called the.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.

[Gordon Carrera]

Which I think I'm going to have.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

To work into a spy novel at.

[Gordon Carrera]

Some point because that's got a great ring to it. It's run by two research partners at Cornell Medical School and they use that essentially as a mechanism to fund a massive number of these MK Ultra sub projects throughout the 1950s. Gottlieb is one of the more secretive pieces of this, actually tries to gain access to a part of it, this.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Kind of new addition at Georgetown University Hospital.

[Gordon Carrera]

He wanted to put a secret essentially CIA lab inside the hospital to be used for experiments on human subjects. Stephen Kinzer, in his book Poisoner In Chief writes that it was extraordinary even by MK Ultra standards. And in fact the approvals for that.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Had to go all the way to.

[Gordon Carrera]

The White House, which was very rare for the program. Now little is known about what the.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

CIA did at Georgetown.

[Gordon Carrera]

And Stan Turner, friend of the POD and future CIA director who's going to takeover under Carter in the late 70s.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

When he's pressed for details later, he.

[Gordon Carrera]

Says there's actually no factual evidence of what went on.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

It's just missing. It's not that it didn't happen, it's.

[Gordon Carrera]

Just that we do not know exactly what happened there. So tons of really crazy research ends up getting funded through these cutouts.

[David McCloskey]

But there is one bit of this that we do know more about maybe than some of the other parts and which is absolutely fascinating and again pretty weird. And that's run by A guy called Dr. Ewan Cameron, originally Scottish, I think, trained in Scotland, then I think in Switzerland a bit, but then ends up in Canada, doesn't he? And he seems to be someone who is very involved in the kind of psychological aspect of breaking people down, which is clearly something that the CIA are interested in.

[Gordon Carrera]

What Dr. Cameron is studying in the mid-50s and he's already studying this and.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And working on it prior to the.

[Gordon Carrera]

CIA finding him is something called psychic driving, which sounds awful, right? Already off the bat and In January.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Of 56, a CIA psychologist comes across.

[Gordon Carrera]

An article in which Dr. Cameron is referencing or discussing the psychic driving becomes. So that's how the CIA starts to.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Get interested in him.

[Gordon Carrera]

Now Cameron is an absolute giant in the field of psychiatry. In the mid-50s he's president of the American Psychiatric association, the Canadian Psychiatric association and the World Psychiatric Association. So he's got the three Biggies. Gordon. He is a very strong willed and domineering, maybe borderline psychotic individual who is.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The director of the Allen Memorial Institute.

[Gordon Carrera]

In Montreal, which is a stone mansion turned psychiatric hospital and sounds like it's basically straight out of horror film central casting. And Cameron is fascinated with extreme stress as a way to get access to the human psyche. And so he's kind of a, I guess you'd say a behaviorist who thinks that mental illnesses are the result of negative environmental factors. And if you essentially stress someone out sufficiently, you can reduce them back to a blank slate and then condition that blank slate into performing better behavior. Right. And if that sounds like it could be damaging to a human being, you are absolutely right. Because Dr. Cameron is a fan of.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Very unorthodox treatments for mental illness.

[Gordon Carrera]

And one of those is by subjecting mental patients to repeated auditory messages. So it could be something like, if.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

You don't keep quiet, I'm going to leave you behind.

[Gordon Carrera]

And that would be replayed on like loop while you're sitting in a room.

[David McCloskey]

By yourself for 20 hours a day.

[Gordon Carrera]

For like 20 hours.

[David McCloskey]

This is the Ipcrest File, a famous novel and then film. I mean, this is that world, isn't it? Of breaking people down, making them malleable. And I guess the medical reason is because you think you can get rid of some kind of something like schizophrenia or something like that and remove it. But the CIA are obviously interested in it for other reasons.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

The theory of the case here that.

[Gordon Carrera]

Cameron is testing, and this is why Gottlieb is so interested, is the idea that could you break someone down so that you can control what gets built back in its place? And the breaking down is where this kind of works.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Right.

[Gordon Carrera]

Because one of the things that Cameron does is something called sleep therapy, which is a chemically induced coma where those psychic driving messages are played endlessly through.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Speakers beside their pillows.

[Gordon Carrera]

And so Cameron has actually built a version of that so he'll place people.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

In sensory deprivation chambers.

[Gordon Carrera]

In one case, he did that for up to 35 days, to the point where people hallucinate. They see squirrels running through fields, someone saw an eyeglass walking down the street. I mean, so he's very effectively turning people into mush. But again, he's not able to kind of reprogram someone to be under your control if you're the CIA or just.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

To cure their mental illness.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, and I mean, I watch documentaries about decades later. People never recovered from their treatment under Cameron. I mean, never recovered. You know, they talk about family members never being the Same again. Never recovering. It's pretty grim stuff. And I guess the point is he was doing this anyway, but the CIA were funding it and learning from it to see if they could understand it by 63.

[Gordon Carrera]

So 10 years into MK Ultra, Cameron has come to the conclusion that psychic driving is useless.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

A study that was done after Cameron.

[Gordon Carrera]

Left Allen showed that three quarters of his patients felt that they were worse off after the treatment that he provided now. And I think you'd also have to say here that a lot of the patients that he was seeing believed they were coming to him for psychiatric treatment.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And for a cure.

[Gordon Carrera]

And he, he was essentially just trying.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

New techniques and kind of frontier crazy.

[Gordon Carrera]

Ideas on people who. They're not psychiatrists themselves. They have no sense of where the field is at this point in time. But he's really kind of taking advantage of and preying on people who come to him as a potential healer and he's kind of using them as lab rats is really what's going on here.

[David McCloskey]

But as with the lsd, I mean, all of this kind of effort, all of this trauma and basically it doesn't work. At the end of the day, they've not found the ability to control minds, Wipe them, you know, truth serums, none of it. I mean, it's in the sense, all for nothing.

[Gordon Carrera]

It is. One of many tragedies in this story is that really every time Gottlieb and his crew go down a particular pathway, different types of drugs, sensory deprivation, isolation, all these things, what they're finding is that there are plenty of ways to wreck the human mind, but really no good way to sort of reprogram it or control it. And maybe they're Gordon with yet another pathway toward mind control blocked. Let's end. And when we pick it up next time, we'll see how the CIA becomes.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

Really the first drug cartel to popularize.

[Gordon Carrera]

LSD in the States.

[Sidney Gottlieb]

And how all of those pipe smoking.

[Gordon Carrera]

Squares at Langley fueled the countercultural rebellion of the 1960s. And then how Gottlieb's dark research will at last come to light.

[David McCloskey]

See you next time.

[Steph McGovern]

Hello, it's Steph McGovern and Robert Peston from the Rest Is Money here now. It's absolute carnage at the minute on the stock market across the world, all thanks to Donald Trump and his tariffs. So this week we've gone daily. We're going to bring you shorter episodes every lunchtime. Just trying to make sense of it all. Because Robert, I mean, we've been in crises before, haven't we?

[Robert Peston]

Yeah, I mean, I've been at the front line of reporting financial crises for decades, from Black Monday in 1987 through the global financial crisis through to the COVID crisis. I mean, you know, the list goes on. This is a unique crisis because it is driven by one man, Donald Trump, but it does share lots in common with those sagas we have lived through before. And as we know, although what people see is falling share prices, it is to an extent what goes on in debt markets, financial markets, which is more important to our prosperity. And we are seeing absolute turmoil in bond markets, for example. So this is going to affect every part of our lives.

[Steph McGovern]

Yes. And so we'll be looking at things like what do we think is going to happen next? How much pain is Trump willing to take and what similarities are there with things like the credit crunch that you and I covered together. So to try and make sense of all the rest, join us on the Rest is Money, wherever you get your podcasts.