 On this episode of Skapta Cove, a show about hypnosis, history, and how Hitler became such a mesmerizing speaker. So on this episode I have an interview coming up with Jimmy Fallen Gaunt. Yes, that is a pseudonym. But anyways, Jimmy, who is the host of a podcast called Program to Chill, has done a terrific job of uncovering some super interesting important history that connects to a lot of the things that we talk about here on Skeptco. So let me see if I can lay out a little bit of the backstory. Having to do with Hitler and World War One. So yes, Hitler was in World War One. He was this foot soldier frontline kind of guy. And near the end of the war, he's in the bunker and they get hit by mustard gas. And miraculously they get let out of this situation. But him and a couple of his comrades are blinded from the mustard gas. Common horrible thing that happens. Now all the other guys get sent to the medical hospital. But Hitler is the one and only and this is a really interesting part that our guest today, Jimmy Fallen Gaunt, has uncovered and revealed. I didn't know any of this stuff. But Hitler gets sent to this mental hospital because when they examine him in the field, they realize he isn't really blind. I mean, he has what you might call hysterical blindness. So as history turns out, he arrives at the mental hospital and he undergoes hypnosis by a guy who is at this point probably one of the world leaders in hypnosis and happens to be having an ongoing kind of feud, one-upsmanship kind of thing with his other hypnotist where he's showing him how to really do it. And he has this hypnosis session with Hitler that probably changes history forever. Here's how Jimmy describes it in his show on the 6th of November in 1918. Dr. Edmund Forster ordered Hitler to his consulting room after examining the patient's eyes carefully. Forster replaced the instruments in his case and blew out the candles. Your eyes have been terribly damaged. He told him regretfully, I should never have assumed that you, a pure Aryan, a good soldier, a knight of the iron cross, first class would lie or deceive. Everyone has to accept their lot. The individual is powerless where fate is concerned. Miracles do not happen anymore. He paused before adding more optimistically. But that goes only for the average person. Miracles still happen frequently to chosen people. There have to be miracles and great people before whom nature bows. Don't you agree? Now as you're about to hear in this interview, we can't be sure that this is verbatim exactly what happened, but we have a lot of good circumstantial evidence pointing for the fact that this is very, very close to what happened. Jimmy will explain that later in this interview. And then of course, you can listen to his many, many hours on the subject where he's delved into it on his own podcast. But back to the story because you get what's going on. This is quite a feat that this hypnotist is about to pull off and he's laid the hook in here. He's going to start reeling them in. As you say, Dr. Hitler meekly agreed. I am no charlatan, no performer of miracles. Dr. Forster went on. I am a simple doctor. But maybe you yourself have the rare power that occurs only once every millennium to perform a miracle. Jesus did this. Muhammad, the saints. I could show you the method by which you could see again despite the fact that your eyes have been damaged by mustard gas. With your symptoms, an ordinary person would be blind for life. But for a person with exceptional strength of willpower and spiritual energy, there are no limits. Scientific assumptions do not apply to that person. The spirit removes any such barrier. In your case, the thick white layer in your cornea, but maybe you do not possess this power to perform miracles. How can I tell, said Hitler? By the way, one of the reasons we suspect this is what happened is that back then people didn't really recover from blindness caused by mustard gas. Or if they did regain sight, it was like regaining partial sight or clouded sight or something like that. Hitler comes out of it. Man, he's got that stare. You can see perfectly well, which fits much better with the hysterical blindness kind of thing. Now the implications for this are much, much, much further than just the blindness thing because it really shapes Hitler's understanding of mesmerism, of the mind, of mind control. All that stuff folds into this experience potentially. Anyways, that's something that we talk about in this upcoming interview. But the other thing we talk about that is related is this idea of retracing our steps in history. Here's a clip from Jimmy on that point. I'm very fond of like this documentary. It sounds pretty far afield from what we're talking about, but it's Room 237. It's a creative look at the Stanley Kubrick movie, The Shining. The little boy, Danny, in the movie, The Shining, he's lost in this maze and he's running away from his father who's going to kill him if he finds him. And it's only through tracing his steps backwards. And in walking backwards, he steps where he stepped so his dad can't see where he's going anymore. And then he basically walks backwards out of the maze following his own footsteps. And humanity is essentially lost in a maze of history where everywhere you turn, there are just massacres and horrible events. And if we turn around or if we just stop, we might get axed to death by like our maniac father. We have to be engaged with history. We have to trace it back if we ever want to make any progress in this maze. This is a super interesting interview. I really, really enjoyed it. I loved it so much that we broke the interview into two parts. And part of the reason I did that is because in the second part, I'm not so nice, but that's okay. You don't always have to be nice. I wanted to leave this as a separate part because I really wanted to focus in on this important part of history and retracing the steps of history. Here goes. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host Alex Charis. And today I'm very excited to welcome Jimmy Fallon Gong from Gordito Beach, California to Skeptico. Okay, wait a minute. Fallon Gong, isn't that that crazy Chinese cult? And Jimmy Fallon, what's going on there? And I've never heard of Gordito Beach. I live here in California. Wait a minute. That's, that's a reference to a fictional place from a Thomas Pynchon novel. What's going on here? Our guest is Jimmy Fallon Gong. I have up on the screen his Twitter site, which is quite exceptional. I first heard about him from his really terrific podcast that we're going to talk about, Program to Chill, where he's done an incredible job of dating to and exposing and allowing us to reorient ourselves to some really important history. And it's just such a great show. And I've been glued to it for so many hours now that I was super excited and glad that he's agreed to come on and talk with us here on Skeptico. Jimmy, welcome to Skeptico. Thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. You're a bit of an enigma. Any, any chance you can kind of let it down a little bit? Let us in. What's going on here? Who is Jimmy Fallon Gong? For you, absolutely. I'll do my best to share a little bit. I am certainly private. I think that I have, I keep, you know, I stay a little more guarded than maybe most of your guests. But that's not because I'm mistrustful or anything. I just, I'm not exactly worried about like, you know, anything coming to my employers or anything. It's just, it keeps it easier. You know what I'm saying? Like, I like you. Of course. Of course. Right. Simple. Keep it chill. So. Right. But, but in terms of, I mean, I am curious a little bit about, you know, your background, where you're coming from, your kind of professional interests and who is this guy who's doing all this stuff? Yeah. So lifelong reader, pretty voracious reader. Professionally, I'll say that I work associated with finance and fraud. And in turn, I'm not associated with the Fallon Gong. That was a stupid name that I came up with. And I did not anticipate building a brand or anything. So that's why it's so stupid. But then you ought to maybe tell people who the Fallon Gong are because, you know, especially given you kind of have some interesting political year, this tinfoil left kind of thing that we're going to kind of talk about. So and Fallon Gong, I mean, that sends us all for a kind of head spinner. Who are the Fallon Gong? I know, I should honestly contemplate changing it. But the Fallon Gong are a cult. And I believe they were banned in China. Oh, yeah. They are the cult that runs the Shen Yun dance troupe that often does performances in cities across the country. And sometimes like in places like Seattle, you can see them out distributing literature as well. Yeah. So so you'll be approached by these people and you see these women in these ornate dresses around on a stage and they'll say, come see the presentation and stuff like that. And they are there. They're a moony kind of thing. If you've ever, if you've ever dived into the history of the moonies and the kind of thing, it's kind of this crazy, crazy thing. But the flip side of it is like, you just mentioned kind of the Chinese government. I mean, it shows the worst or the worst of the Chinese government too, because the Chinese government says, oh, well, in order to maintain social order and protect the people, we have to ban this group, you know, and it's the in the language they use is so, I don't know, so crazy, crazy Marxist stuff that it kind of sends you the other way. It's like, well, they are a cult, but should we be banning them? And, you know, the whole thing. So I just thought it was kind of an interesting. Yeah. And in some ways, it's like a weird pairing because Jimmy, like I am a pretty normal person with innocuous name. And then there's like this crazy side to it. So and then like the whole Marxist element of China banning them, but in that mix, there's a lot of my interests all in one, I guess you could say. Exactly, exactly, but not exactly in the way that you would take it. But I don't want to get down too many blind alleys before we have a chance to just tell people about some of the work that you've done and the work that attracted me, which you've chosen to do on your podcast, Jimmy, is kind of do these deep dive multi-part series like Who Financed Hitler? I don't know, you did five or six shows on that hours each hours long. But it just provides such a depth that we've I've never heard from someone else. And I guess I could read all the books that you've read and kind of synthesize all that stuff together, but you really put it together in just this kind of terrific way. Tell us about that and tell us about in particular, your method, kind of what you're trying to do there, what your goal is, and then also why the World War II and the Hitler stuff are all kind of drawn to it. But why are you drawn to it? Yeah, I mean, I think that like a lot of people, you know, in the past couple of years, Nazis, you know, Weimar Germany was on the tip of a lot of people's tongues. And in some ways, rightfully so. But in other ways, most people who mention it or talk about it don't really know the history or really know what they're talking about. And so I like to read a lot. And so I started reading about this period, not solely because of current events, but you know, not not because of it. And I started to pick up on these like weird little details that didn't really, like, that seemed significant to me, like, for instance, the fact that Hitler, he's often framed as a failed artist, which he absolutely is, right? He was also a police spy. And when people tell the conventional history of Hitler, they don't often mention that they might not even know it, you know. So like, I talk about that I talk about especially when Hitler was hypnotized. That was a really big incident in his life. He specifically talks about it in Mein Kampf. And yet, it's not well, he doesn't exactly mention it in Mein Kampf, I shouldn't say. And so like, they're all of these weird little details about Hitler's life that nobody talks about. So I thought that I would be the person to do that. And I think to your credit, Jimmy, it's not even just talking about it, but you frame it up quite nicely in a very, not beat anyone over the head with it. But as the story unfolds and you let it unfold, it kind of paints a different picture. And we're going to connect the dots a little bit on two of the points that you just made there. One is the hypnosis. And then two is this spying for the police and becoming an intelligent asset. But really what it's more about is that his connection to the military never really ends when we think it does. But let me play this clip from, I guess this is episode four, esoteric Nazism, reexamined part one, and the hypnosis of Hitler. I'll play this and then you can tell people about it. Let's talk about the interaction between Dr. Forster and Hitler. Before Foster met Hitler, he knew that Hitler was busy raving about the Jews to the other patients. Forster developed a plan for treatment by using a tremendous lie. On the 6th of November in 1918, Dr. Edmund Forster ordered Hitler to his consulting room and guided him into an upright chair before a table on which stood two lit candles. After examining the patient's eyes carefully, Forster replaced the instruments in his case and blew out the candles. Your eyes have been terribly damaged. He told him regretfully, I should never have assumed that you, a pure Arian, a good soldier, a knight of the iron cross first class would lie or deceive. Everyone has to accept their lot. The individual is powerless or fate is concerned. Miracles do not happen anymore. He paused before adding more optimistically. But that goes only for the average person. Miracles still happen frequently to chosen people. There have to be miracles and great people before whom nature bows, don't you agree? As you say, Dr. Hitler meekly agreed. I am no charlatan, no performer of miracles. Dr. Forster went on. I am a simple doctor, but maybe you yourself have the rare power that occurs only once every millennium to perform a miracle. Jesus did this, Muhammad, the saints. I could show you the method by which you could see again, despite the fact that your eyes have been damaged by mustard gas. With your symptoms, an ordinary person would be blind for life. But for a person with exceptional strength of willpower and spiritual energy, there are no limits. Scientific assumptions do not apply to that person. The spirit removes any such barrier. In your case, the thick white layer in your cornea, but maybe you do not possess this power to perform miracles. How can I tell, said Hitler? You know, I'll cut it right there. Exceptional. So you have to go listen to this whole episode and the ones before it and the ones that follow it. Because at this point, you've got to be hooked into what's going on here. So first, Jimmy, you're very upfront with what this is, but you kind of let us go down a little path. What is it that you are reading there? So that is actually from a novel by, I think his name was Ernst Weiss. And there's a really interesting story about that because it was a novel published, I want to say in like the 40s. And it basically tells the story because Hitler had psychosomatic blindness. And we know that it was psychosomatic because of basically people who went and blind from poison gas would permanently go blind. No one went temporarily blind unless it was psychosomatic. And so Hitler was treated in a mental institution. And there's a lot of documentation for which one and that it was certainly because a lot of shell shock cases were, they called it malingering. And so basically, Hitler had a malingering psychosomatic blindness. And the way they would treat it is they would either threaten them or they would just hypnotize them. There really weren't that many good ways to treat PTSD back then or related issues. And so basically, there was a medical file that Hitler was hypnotized. And that medical file became really hot once Hitler became chancellor. And people were murdered over like who had copies of this medical file. And there's a whole story for someone sneaking it out. And then they gave it to this novelist to publish. And so there's this whole body of like novels that tell more truth than you would think, right? Because they don't have that burden of journalism. But then they can tell like a different or almost occluded truth, which is so interesting to me. Yeah, me too. So you do an awesome job because so that's a fictionalized account. We didn't have someone in there rolling tape when Forrester was doing the session. But all the evidence that we do have, as you point out in the show, suggests that this is exactly what did happen. And I thought, you know, a couple of more of the details of this because this is such this is worth all the time that you put into it. And all the work that you did and sharing it to people because this is such an important event as it turns out and you pointed out to be. But a couple of things I would add to it. One, Forrester, the hypnotherapist and psychiatrist who's working with Hitler is tops like tops in the world. It just so happens that Hitler stumbles into his mental hospital. And this guy, because he is so good and because the Germans are kind of leading this mesmerism hypnotism from a medical standpoint, he's like kind of wants to use Hitler, who is a nobody, a complete nobody, just some other PTSD soldier that shows up, you know, but he wants to show his colleagues that hypnosis really can work if you know how to do it. And part of the way of doing it is kind of this stage magic kind of stuff that he does to Hitler, where like, you know, gosh, you know, like you said, he hears that he's ranting on the juice. So then he plays up this Aryan thing to him, you know, like, gosh, an Aryan strong man like you once in a while, you know, unbelievably powerful and meaningful when you put into context. And then as you add, this becomes much more than just a matter of his medical records. It becomes this secret that he doesn't want out, because like you just mentioned, this not only affects Hitler in all these ways that we can't even begin to estimate, but he becomes, it's part of the reason his speeches are being coached by some of the world leaders in hypnotism and mesmerism and crime, he's totally on board with the thing, but it also connects him and I want you to speak to this Jimmy. It also connects him to the German military and German military intelligence, or at least the faction of it, that is an ongoing relationship that leads to this spying that he does. And he's not the lone assassin that history has painted him out to be. No, for sure, because during World War One, I believe Hitler was like a lance corporal, like not particularly high in the military, he was essentially a nobody. And prior to that, he was a failed artist. So like, nobody really knew who he was, no reason to care about him. But after World War One, Hitler essentially stays in the army as long as he can, partially because there's, you know, nothing waiting for him, he might as well stay partially because after World War One, there was essentially like a series of basically revolutions in Germany that very well could have had Germany go the way of like the Bolsheviks in Russia, right. And so Hitler found himself involved in this subterranean group of basically army officers who were fighting to keep Germany from going red, basically. And so he was on their payroll before and after he quote unquote, left the army. But he never appears to have actually stopped working with these groups of people. And there's all kinds of interesting incidents from his life. Like, Hitler at different points, well, like, before his tradition, like his parties rise to power, he would do things like buy weapons and hand them over to the police. He was involved in traveling, like he was involved in the, oh shoot, what's the name, the Freikor. Like, right, he knew all of the players in that he was not one of the top guys, he was, you know, lower down on the totem pole, but like he was involved in all of these things. And so he was essentially a police snitch, my words, but like he was a asset for them. And more or less because the the army and the Navy were worried about Germany going red, they started to fund these interesting political groups that would take aspects of communism or socialism. And then maybe tweaken, right? So like that, of course, is where the national socialism thing comes in. And so Hitler already being on their payroll already being someone they trust is chosen to head one of these groups of which there was a whole, a whole bunch of them, right? And that is the start. So essentially with Hitler, everybody thinks they know the story, but he was hypnotized. He was a police spy. He was funded at every single point by either the German army, the German Navy, or German heavy industry. And so like all of a sudden you have a very different picture than what you might see on like television documentaries, right? And I think that's one of the key points because what you help in leading us towards is why is there a rewrite of that history? Because when you take those facts that you're putting together and then you contrast it with the kind of low nut assassin picture we get of Hitler, one of the questions, the deeper questions is why? Why do we want to write it that way versus the other way? Because a lot of the stuff you're talking about from a political sense is really rather ordinary stuff. It's not extraordinary that the Germans after World War One and after the just crushing craziness of the Versailles Treaty realized that they as a country had been backed into a corner and really had no future. And that is a political reality and economic reality that they were facing. And as you point out, there's a number of different groups who are trying to jockey for position there because something is going to change. And it's not a clear path towards Hitler. As you point out fairly in your show, like the industrialists, for example, they're doing what corporations do all the time. They're betting on every horse in the race, right? Why do you think that history is written the way that it is given what you now know? Yeah, I mean, I think that personally, putting everything on Hitler, it functions as like a scapegoat rule, right? Because then if it's uniquely Hitler's fault, then we don't have to blame German heavy industry. We don't have to look at how the army and the navy have always basically done this. And that is true for just about every country. And of course, high finance. So basically, if all of these groups have some degree of culpability, including British banks, then, you know, that is such a more complicated story, we might draw some different conclusions from World War Two. But if we can just say it was Hitler, he was uniquely evil, therefore, story closed, low nut, right? Then we don't have to think about it very much. It's almost reassuring in a way. But the truth of the matter is that a lot of people were very responsible for Hitler's rise. And it isn't just Hitler, not to say that, you know, he isn't guilty as well. Well, not to say that he isn't like super duper guilty, because because we don't want to kind of wade into the holahawks or kind of stuff, because it's ridiculous. Well, I will go firmly on the record and say that, yeah, it was not a hoax or anything like Hitler, certainly guilty of everything he's been accused of doing. It's just that his rise had a lot of players involved as well. Yeah. Great. So then the level three kind of thing that is interesting is at what point does this become tail wag dog kind of thing? Because he starts making some decisions at various points in the war that are completely kind of off the rails from a military, from a strategic, from a geopolitical standpoint. And he kind of goes down this path that a lot of people around him and particularly the industrialists and the politicians and the people in the arm air going, this is insane. How did this guy get this much power? What are your thoughts? Well, I mean for one thing, he was super high on amphetamines. So we have to take that into account. And then, yeah, I mean, there were certainly decisions that Hitler made that I still do not understand, because they didn't seem to work for anyone's benefit, including his own. There were things that just don't make sense. One of the major things is that British banks basically back roll, like they funded Hitler's rise before, during and after certain points. And Jimmy, expound on that, expound on that like you do in the show, because in a very subtle way, they do it in a way that allows them plausible deniability of it, right? They guarantee loans. That's right. They essentially like the highest banker in Britain met with like the highest banker in Germany and said, yeah, just pay off the Nazis debt. It's fine. We got it. And it was a verbal agreement. Like, and they were meeting secretly, like, and then they structured certain debts to make it so that not like no money was actually going. They were just guaranteeing the guarantee of a guaranteed debt. So it was like structured to keep their name off of it, keep them far away, in fact. But like, if you get into the weeds of it, yeah, Britain signed off on the Nazi parties, like having their debts covered. And I don't know why they would do that because it almost immediately backfired. And they went to war with the United Kingdom. So like, clearly, if this was the plan, then it went sideways. And you can draw a lot of conclusions from that. But like, no matter what, you should probably be critical of what the banks do, right? That I think that's a fair lesson to learn. Well, I mean, I guess that's not the lesson that I take away from it, because all these business interests have an interest. That's why it's a business interest, right? So, you know, how are they supposed to play it, I guess, is the question. And it's tough to know either way. It's like when you talk about the industrialists. I don't really know what you're supposed to do if you're, like I forget the guy in the region who's running the coal mines in the region between Germany and France, that France has completely created a slave labor situation, not letting them export the coal. And this guy's even gone to the laborers, to his workers, who aren't usually aligned. It's like, look, we're all screwed here. I'm screwed as the owner of the company. You're screwed as the employee. Let's not do it. Let's not go along with the French. So all these lines are very blurry when money is involved. So I'm not sure that, you know, the line to the banks is like, the banks, the banks is, it gets people crazy in the same way it gets Henry Ford crazy. And he says, oh, the banks, well, those are all Jews. So now we hate you. It's like, no, there's no, it's, there's like some reality to the preponderance of people who happen to be Jewish and have been kind of ostracized and then found a way to connect and stay connected and that they are, dominate certain industries. I mean, that's just like, that's why all the Greeks own all the coffee shops in Chicago where I was brought up. And that's just how stuff is done. But you know what I'm saying? I think it's easy to kind of take that stuff too far. It's like, oh, it's the banks. Oh, it's the industrialists. I don't know. Yeah. Because like at every point, there's a bunch of lessons from the Nazi party's rise. And no one thing is the answer, right? Because it's like Hitler was hypnotized. That's a whole thing. He was a police spy. That's a thing. Henry Ford funded the Nazis. British banks funded the Nazis. The German army and the German Navy did. There's a whole occult interest, like in the Nazis coming from like the Tule society with these really weird like Rosicrucian esoteric ideas floating in the mix. There's the element of them just copying Marxism, but then like making it amenable to capital in general. Like, there's so many things happening that there's never one answer. I completely agree with you on that. So one of the great stories that you tell us about in your podcast, Program to Chill, and I forget which episode this is, but I think it'd be pretty easy to find. I think it's like the first episode in the financing of the Nazis. And it tells about Henry Ford. And I didn't know this history, but he kind of has this grandiosity about him. And he says, well, I'll solve this World War One problem. I'll just take a big boat, put all of my friends on it, and we'll go negotiate this. Which, you know, in and of itself is not like a super bad idea, because he is in a position to have influencers and maybe make some progress there. But it doesn't turn out. And the grandiosity of it is interesting, because through that it really, he kind of winds up in this weird anti-Semitic space, like we're talking about, where he is convinced that there is this Jewish conspiracy against him connected to all these bankers who are trying to put him out of business who are all Jewish. I mean, let's be for real, you know. But he makes the connection that this is somehow some, it is their Jewishness that is, you know, somehow attacking. Like, it's interesting because he put himself out there. Like, I almost feel bad for him in that particular story, because he wanted to stop World War One. That's a good thing. Like, he tried, he paid money to put his money where his mouth is, and like, try to stop World War One. Like, that's admirable. I wish it would have worked. That would have been really cool. But it didn't. And it was, it's really funny, because like, I don't know, there's something about Americans. Like, we just, there's a certain subset of us where we're just like, if we could just get a businessman in there, and he'll just solve all the problems. And every generation we keep, we have at least one guy where we think that'll work. But like, it never does, because it's always a lot more complicated. Henry Ford thought he could stop in a World War by just like, talking it out. That is kind of delusional. Well, I say, I don't know that that's not the part that I would call out as delusional. And there's just so many subtle things that we could go down so many rabbit holes. But I don't want to skip over the fact that talking about that a lot of the bankers who were really putting the financial squeeze on Ford happen to be Jewish. That's like a historical fact. So it's like, when we talk about Ford's anti-Semitism, we can't then leave out that other part of the story. And we don't have to draw any conclusions about it. It just means that that's who they were. I'll tell you that, you know, the other story that I was going to add to the kind of free-ranging discussion we're having here. Have you ever heard about Florandia? Is that the Henry Ford community? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Henry Ford, again, the grandiosity, which kind of, I think, is a better indicator of this guy's headspace and how he gets into, oh, it's all about the Jews. Let's give Hitler, hates the Jews. Let's give Hitler money kind of crazy line of logic. He went down to Brazil because he was being squeezed by, he felt, by the rubber companies. And they were, it was a monopoly. And then the rubber colonists were horrible, what they did to people, enslaving people. And, you know, all that stuff. So he says, Henry Ford, I got a better way. I'll go down to Brazil. I'll create my own community. And it'll be, of course, a rubber plantation that will serve us Ford Motor Company. But it'll also be a whole new way of living. We'll teach these people, these natives, you know, all this stuff. And it's kind of a classic example of go-getterism gone wild in that he goes and he tells all the people, you got to work nine to five. And the people go, dude, we live in the tropics. You can't work during the middle of the day. It just doesn't work. He goes, nope, got to be in there nine to five. Got, you know, because he was really into the schedule stuff. And it, the production goes way, way down. The other thing he says is you have to build proper houses like this. And all the people go, no, you don't want to build walls and stuff like that. I mean, it's really hot down here. We need, you know, the walls to be totally open. So when you do get that, all this kind of common sense stuff, he's like, nope, nope, there's only one way to do it. And this is the way to do it. And the whole project just fails miserably. He loses millions of dollars. And then they invent synthetic rubber and he's kind of saves the day. But to me, that's the parallel that I draw. You know, what's so interesting about that is just like stopping World War One, it shows Henry Ford had good intentions up to a point because, like you said, the rubber industry was so insanely like brutalizing that like literally any other type of production of that rubber would have been amazing. Like the amount of people who died in the rubber trade during those years was just staggering. And so like, it really almost shows you that like Henry Ford did sort of have these quasi-socialist sort of ideas, but then he fell into the classic socialism of fools, which is anti-Semitism. Well, yeah. I mean, I just think that's just one way to connect it, you know, is the anti-Semitism. I think it gets kind of too much play, way too much play, but that'll get into another discussion we may or may not have. And that is, you know, what is this thunder god Jewish religion thing all about to begin with? Why is that dragged through history and kind of propped up? Well, it's propped up because of Christianity. Well, how solid is Christianity really? How solid is the notion of the historical Jesus? How solid is the Bible and all the rest of that stuff? Those are all topics we've explored in depth on this show. I don't think it's appropriate for what we're talking about right now. But I think once you start to unravel it, it just puts a whole different spin on it. It's like, I don't Jewish. I mean, it's kind of a goofy, you know, obey all these rules, spin around three times, don't eat this and that. It's not anything from a contemporary standpoint. We'd say, wow, that's, they really got some insights into the divine nature of the human consciousness experience, you know, not that any other religion would as well or Falun Gong or Moonies or Scientologists. But we never, we never bring that to the table when we talk about anti-Semitism. You know what I mean? It's just like, oh, it's anti-Semitic and oh my God, that's led to the Holocaust. Well, yeah, it did because crazy people can do crazy kind of stuff and they can do it for long periods of time. So, I don't know, it's kind of a ramp, but maybe you want to jump in there with kind of part of that because I think it does parse this anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish thing a little bit differently. Yeah, I mean, in the case of the Nazis, they would scapegoat the Jews, and it really, a lot of the things they were complaining about were not actually the Jews' fault. I know that is kind of an obvious statement, but the scapegoating function, it can really be any group. It can be pretty arbitrary sometimes, but it feels good to blame people for things and it's more effective if you can blame them for some true things. But yeah, I mean, I agree. It doesn't even necessarily have to correspond that closely with reality, honestly. Yeah, that's not exactly where I was going. So, Jimmy, you're a Christian? Yes, I was actually raised Mormon. Oh, you were raised Mormon. I saw you have an episode on the farm with my buddy, Steven Snyder. I haven't listened to it yet and you guys get into the Mormonism thing. Very interesting that you're Mormon because, I mean, do you think Mormonism is a cult? Well, okay, you know how sometimes you hear that sound, that's like every religion used to be a cult and a cult eventually becomes a religion. I get what they mean in a certain sense, but ancient cults didn't necessarily have this weird confluence of intelligence agencies and funding them and they weren't necessarily instrumentalized in all of the same ways. I mean, there were a few cases where you could make that claim, actually, but you know what I mean? When people say cults, they think Jonestown and then that's not necessarily what they mean when a professor of religion says it. You know what I'm saying? I do. I just think it's kind of tricky because the professors of religion have kind of a different agenda in processing that, right? Because they can't, they have to function inside of academia who kind of has a hands-off position vis-a-vis Christianity or an uncomfortable kind of, well, we can't totally throw them under the bus. I guess the point that I was kind of going towards before is it's not so much that, like the thing with the antisemitic thing and the scapegoating with Hitler, the one part I think that is more obvious that people point out is that the only way they're able to do that is because there are factions of antisemitism, prominent factions in every country in Europe. I just did an interview with a guy named Scott Che and he's written this book on kind of conspiracy theories in academia and he's Orthodox Jew. He's very, very successful guy, very successful banker in New York. The guy's probably worth a billion dollars. I give him a ton of credit for somebody who has that kind of financial means but he's still engaged in the same kind of dialogues that you and I are in digging through this stuff and his book is an expose on kind of antisemitic and anti-zionist conspiracy theories. So like one of the really fascinating points about his story is his father. His father is in Lithuania and he's 14 years old and the Nazis come in and suddenly all the neighbors, all the people he's lived with for generations, his family has lived with for generations, go, yep, there he is, there's the Jew. So they make it so easy for the Nazis because there's this long-standing antisemitism that's just barely beneath the surface. Scott's dad is sent to Auschwitz. He should have died by all accounts. It's a horrific, horrific thing. So this part of history that we just got to make sure we understand, they were tapping into this thing that had been repeated over and over and over again through history, 1492, the Spanish, you know, the same time they send Columbus off on those boats, they also send all the Jews students and get the hell out of our country. And I would roll that back all the way to early Christianity. I mean, the only reason Judaism stays around is kind of as the punchline to the joke of who killed Jesus. Well, it's the Jews. I mean, yeah, it's kind of the Romans, yeah, but it's really the Jews. They are the antagonist in the story, which I think is a sigh up. I don't want to get into, we can get into all that at a later time, but I think that's how history plays out and that's why we forget how deeply embedded this antisemitism is. No, I think that that's by and large the case like they were put, they were sort of forced into a bunch of different professions and then, you know, historically like doctors, dentists, jewelers, bankers, like there's obviously these certain professions that they were sort of forced into and then they just stayed in those professions. So yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we've kind of drifted a little bit from program to chill your excellent show. So bring us back. What are some of the other storylines? I don't want to say storylines because this is history, history rediscovered and history recalibrated. What are some of the other major threads or what you're most proud of in terms of exploring on the show? Yeah, so I did a it might not sound that enticing to listeners, but I did a 12 part series on crop steel, which was in that rur valley where basically the Germans took all of the ore they made steel. And I sort of like lay that out across like 400 years and like map it onto different major events in world history, mainly World War One and World War Two. And there's all kinds of interesting, interesting little subplots that, you know, go along that. I also have done a lot of work examining different authors and their intelligence connections, because if you are a fan of like JD Salinger, you know, I or 11 William Peter Bladdy, Aldous Huxley, you know, like you read George Orwell, like you read these authors and you think of their works and you don't think of them as spies necessarily, but a lot of them were. And so I sort of thread the needle on that. And there's really interesting things that can be gleamed from looking at their careers with an eye to intelligence. Absolutely. You do tune into the intelligence connection. You also connect it to business in a really smart way that not a lot of people do. And that's that, you know, our intelligence organizations, a lot of them started out as business internal intelligence, you know, spy on our competition, make sure our competition isn't spying on us. And then from a legal perspective, the first couple episodes with Sullivan Cromwell and the Dulles Brothers, great, great, great stuff. Talk a little bit about that as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that all the modern intelligence agencies seem to be tied in with banking and finance. And that's especially true for Great Britain and the United States. So I did a couple episodes on Alan Dulles, John Foster Dulles, and the law firm that they worked for, Sullivan and Cromwell. And Sullivan and Cromwell, they're still around. They're in fact doing deals on mergers and acquisitions to this day that have a global impact. But Sullivan and Cromwell started off as the law firm for different cliques of basically slave owners. And they never really stopped being what I would characterize as almost cartoonishly evil. And that is the skull duggery that basically the intelligence agencies recruited a bunch of these Wall Street lawyers to do their spying. It's interesting. And along the way, you give us a much deeper insight into the Dulles Brothers. So, as kind of a 10,000 foot view for those who aren't familiar with it, who are they and why are they important? Why do you say at some point they are probably two of the most important attorneys in history and in American history of the last at least 100 years? Yeah, I mean, you'd really have to go to either the founding fathers or Lincoln or something to find someone like a lawyer who is more important to US history. John Foster, well, the Dulles family like they occupied important positions in various presidential administrations. But it was really John Foster Dulles and his brother Alan Dulles who achieved that high level because Alan Dulles was director of the CIA and John Foster Dulles, I'm pretty sure was Secretary of State. And together, like they controlled the covert and overt like foreign policy for the United States for like decades, essentially, it's just remarkable. Yeah, they certainly influenced it heavily and I've doubt about it. And you know, so you do this long thing. You haven't even gotten up to the Kennedy assassination, which I can't wait, you know, because most people when they think of Dulles, they think JFK. And again, you're just doing a marvelous job of filling in the backstory in a very important way. At some point in one of the shows, you kind of speak to where you'd like to see your show fit in in terms of making a difference in terms of kind of changing the paradigm a little bit. How do you see that, Jimmy? Yeah, I mean, I think that with history, like we don't really have a framework to understand the present if we don't understand history. And I think that a lot of times it's benign, but a lot of times it's, you know, bad intense. The history that we're fed is a it's like a, I wouldn't say fake, but it's like, we get almost like these just so stories that just so happen to reinforce what certain, you know, groups want us to believe. And so like, we talked about the Hitler one where it's like, if we can just write it off as Hitler was just this uniquely bad actor, or someone like Lee Harvey Oswald just a lone nut, okay, that's an easy story problem solved. But if we are really engaged with history, and trust me, I understand it's it can be exhausting. But like if we're engaged in history, then we can start to understand what's happening right now. And I don't mean that like a facile level. I mean, like, if we really try our best to understand the ins and outs of something like, you know, the periods of history like that I was looking at, then I'm like, I'm very fond of like this documentary that it sounds pretty far afield from what we're talking about. But it's room 237. It's a creative, like, look at the Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining. And in that they talk about, you know, the little boy Danny in the movie The Shining, he's lost in this like maze, and he's running away from his father who's going to kill him if he finds him. And it's only through tracing his steps backwards. And in walking backwards, he steps where he stepped. So his dad can't see where he's going anymore. He's he and then he basically walks backwards out of the maze following his own footsteps. And humanity is essentially lost in a maze of history, where everywhere you turn, there are just massacres and horrible events. And if we turn around, or if we just stop, we might get axed to death by like our maniac father. So we have to be engaged with history. We have to trace it back if we ever want to make any progress in this maze for humanity, essentially. So that is my personal philosophy on history, I guess you could say. Wonderful. I love how you connected it to that excellent movie, Room 237, which I really enjoyed too. One of the things I thought was interesting is when they're talking about the possibility that one of the themes that Kubrick is trying to get across to us in the movie The Shining is about the Holocaust of the Native American people that was done in our country. But anyways, I was watching the movie with my wife, and she's like, Oh, come on. I think this is definitely a stretch, you know, they're saying that when they shoot the scene and there's the baking soda cans in the background and they all have an Indian chief on it. Oh, come on. That's just, you know, it's just what's in the storeroom. And then the guy brings up the still shot of Kubrick. Actually, when they were doing the filming and he's turning each can individually in order to bring the Indian right to the front and you go, Oh, shit, it really is kind of on that level. Do you remember that part? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, it's so fun to watch. Like, I've made different people in my life watch that movie just to see how they all process the information, because I have seen the full spectrum of like responses from like, this is the most insane schizophrenic movie I've ever seen to like, I am completely sold on every theory. Right. And it's so interesting. So, you know, back if we can just trace back those steps, not to pick up on the metaphorical thread that you laid out there. The thing about history that you're revealing is what we normally hear kind of standard trope is if we don't understand history, we're doomed to repeat it. And what I hear you saying is something quite different. And I hear you saying, if we don't understand the parapolitical nature of all history we're given, we don't even have a chance to process it, let alone repeat it. And I just wonder if there's how that relates to you to more contemporary issues and what's going on today. Oh, yeah, I mean, I think it's a, I try not to blackbill or doom doom people with any of my analysis. And to a certain extent, I like to talk about things several decades old, because for one thing, a lot of sources are in flux, it can be hard to process a more recent event, you know, very well. But I try not to talk too much about current events for those reasons. But I've said this before, I think that we are in a period of history where there have never been as many professional liars and people whose literal job it is to spread disinformation. Like, we've never had this many people who full time put out literally inaccurate information as their job. And that has such weird widespread implications for like, just consensus reality, like, there are people whose job it is to just make things up about UFOs, there are people whose job it is to, you know, take your pick almost with certain topics, like somewhere there's probably an intelligence agency somewhere in the world trying to influence you on something like I'm very fond of the metaphor that James Jesus Angleton head of counterintelligence for the CIA used to say, which was that, you know, he would talk about a wilderness of mirrors. And to a very large degree, I feel like we are all all of us trapped in a wilderness of mirrors because we're constantly confronted with stories and people and hot takes that don't correspond to reality. And are people reacting to a fake story in the first place? You know what I'm saying? It's very, it's a very strange state of affairs we find ourselves in. And I agree with you on a number of fronts. One, I like you prefer history that has a little bit of a age to it, a little bit of a crust to it, because it does settle down and it gives us some distance from it also emotionally, it's kind of hard to even process that. At the same time, the problem with that is as it moves further and further into the sunset, it's more prone to being rewritten and irrecoverably rewritten in a way that we can't get back to it. No one talks about 9-11 anymore. It's like it's gone. It's like no one talks about building seven. What the heck happened with building seven? But, you know, one of the points that I thought would be interesting to kind of talk about, and I don't even know that I might even divide this interview into two sections because there are two shows. And that's what I did. I got two shows with Jimmy. The second one is coming up. We get into some really interesting stuff about the tinfoil left and about worldview collide with regard to UFOs and some other stuff that I just think is fantastic and I haven't seen slash heard that conversation anywhere else. I was really appreciative of Jimmy for engaging with it. So you'll find that in part two, but there's still some more to go. In part one, I returned to program to chill in his work with the Nazi history and how we're to understand it. Here it goes. Okay, Jimmy, fantastic. I really, really appreciate the way you've kind of allowed us to go places and do the worldview collide kind of thing in an interesting way. And I hope we've turned people on to your excellent show because you really got to check out program to chill. I guarantee if you are into history at all, like I am, you're going to love this because you're going to discover a ton of stuff that you didn't know before. Tell me this though, if we were going to connect what we know now about the Nazi operation, which it was and its connection to government, big business, big money and big politics in Italy and in Great Britain and in other places, but if we were going to particularly connect it to big business, what are the corollaries with today? Who is the semen? So Nazi party, you know, you can look at Bayer or IG Farben or Siemens or you could go through the list of all the people, all the companies that it just gouged or that benefited tremendously from this operation that was the Nazi party. I think we are in the middle of such a great reset now today. And a lot of people have, you said, have made it particularly relevant because it feels like a forthright thing. So let's go out and speculate a little bit. Who is Siemens today? Who is Bayer today? And what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think that if you look and it's not exactly hidden knowledge, you look at who's benefiting from COVID, like obviously first and foremost, we're thinking pharmaceutical companies. But if you look at certain firms that were funding, work from home technologies, certain things, basically everything that has shot up in value over the past several years because of COVID, I think that it's fair to question some of these things. I think that we have also seen an increase and there's almost a market increase in capital accumulation from the before the pandemic and now. And basically, this has always been the case, like the rich generally get rich quicker than the rest of us. But there are specific policies being put in place that are squeezing the middle class, squeezing small business owners. And trust me, I am not exactly crying for the small business owner, but I don't think it's healthy for America for those to dry up. You know what I'm saying? I mean, I know what you're saying, but I am crying for the small business owner. That is the best chance. Yeah, and it's really the best chance that we have as America in any sense of whatever that means continuing. Again, to me, it's about class mobility and the consolidation of wealth at the super, super elite level, which is really beyond even talking about because it's not wealth at that point. It's really about control and it's about social engineering. It's not about money. Their goal is to limit class mobility. They don't want, they want everyone on universal basic income. What are you going to do when you're on UBI? You are. And yet so many people on the left think that's like the way out. Just give me enough food, give me enough water. It's like, bro, you will have no chance in that thing. So I think it's about class mobility. But what kind of concerns me is that to me, it seems obvious when Google is Siemens, you know, Twitter to a certain extent, Twitter, I mean, what the media is so completely controlled towards one message. It's ridiculous. And oh, but now we're going to get another voice because Trump has a billion dollars and he's going to buy the other thing. Do you think Trump is truly an independent kind of voice there? I don't. The idea that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Moderna, these are companies that for the most part are kind of supported or championed by people I see on the left or kind of the social wokeness kind of folks. They don't say the social wokeness folks, they don't see Facebook as a threat. They don't see Twitter as a threat. They see it as gosh darn it, they're doing the right thing because they're not letting those crazy ideas out there, those dangerous and crazy ideas. What an op. I mean, it's a complete op. That's the parallel to me with the Nazism. Yeah, absolutely. Like I agree with you on UBI. Like it's the way it would be implemented would be to undercut people's ability to, you know, rebel or basically pose any meaningful, you know, resistance to the people implementing the policy in the first place. And yeah, like there's no reason to trust tech companies. They do not have people's best interest in mind. And to go one step further, like they were all basically astroturfed by DARPA in the first place. So like they were never a meaningful challenge. They're just an extension of the soft power of essentially the Pentagon like network of businesses in the first place. So it's like it's all one big network essentially. I'd agree with that to a certain extent. I'm just reluctant to take that too far because I think it's like the MK Ultra thing when you take it too far and you start seeing all of it as some organized. No, there are 150 MK Ultra programs spreading through all these universities and there are all these different people have different spins on what it should be. And I think the same thing with the DARPA and the Google. And like if you're some guy at DARPA or if you're some guy in some intelligence agency, of course you want to have an in with Google. You want to have an in with all these companies. But that doesn't mean you control them completely. Any more than the history that you reveal to us about Hitler is very telling, right? They had a connection with Hitler. But from what I learned from you, I think it's also wrong to think that Hitler from the very beginning, from the early 1920s, is somehow a puppet of some agency and is, you know, that he is totally doing this under the direction of some guys in a smoky dark room in the back. What are your thoughts? Yeah, with something like Google, Facebook, you know, it's almost like you're throwing like your John like DARPA is Johnny Apple seed throwing seeds everywhere. And you know, some of them aren't going to grow. You know, some of them will. And then you planted that seed. And you will have a relationship there. And they will never forget that, but they won't always do what you say. And vice versa. Like, it's yeah, it would be wrong to say that like DARPA controls Google, but like, you know, but like Google was essentially taking research done at universities, and they basically privatized it. And then they do, then they are basically beholden to those, you know, organizations, and they share the data with government bureaucracies, you know, and so and so on and so on. Same with Facebook, you know, specifically that life log program, like it's almost more transparent there, but like yeah, I agree. It's not a one to one control thing. Jimmy, what's coming up for us on program to chill? There's so many given what you've done so far. There's so much more you could do. Where are you going to take us? Well, I'm currently taking the listeners on a ride into Japan, where we're looking at fascinating Imperial Japan. So we're talking like the colonization of Korea, Manchuria, China, we're going to look at Japan's bio weapons program. We're going to look at their banking system. The Yakuza, different right wing organizations, different cults that they've funded. So it's going to be a pretty wild ride. It's, I got to say, it's an absolutely great, great choice on your part, if you don't mind me saying, because again, it takes us out of this cultural, myopic framework that we always want to apply on things. And it's like, when, and this is your intent, because you tell us that it is. But when the same patterns start emerging again, you go, Oh, shit, you mean, it's really not just about the Nazis, you know? Yeah, exactly. Like Japan, like Americans sometimes think Japan functions differently for some reason. But like, it really isn't that different from Germany in terms of like the political, like, like, body politic and like the difference, how the economy interacts with the politics. And that is also true for America. Like, the same industries tend to fund certain wings of politics. And it's like, it's been pretty consistent over many decades. So it's just really interesting to flesh that out. Well, best of luck with that. You have a huge fan in me, and I can't wait for the next episode and where you're going to go with that. And when you get around to talking about the Dallas brothers and their involvement with JFK and the missile crisis, it's something I can't wait to hear. Folks, make sure you check out program to chill. Jimmy Fallon Gong. Hey, Jimmy, any plans for any other media ventures, books, other things that you might be up to? Not in the near future. I've thought about writing a book, but maybe maybe one day I would like to, but nothing in the works right now. Great, great. Well, it's been great having you on to spend a couple hours, maybe we'll break it into two, maybe I'll leave it as one, but thanks so much for joining me on Skeptico. Thank you very much. Thanks again to Jimmy Fallon Gong for joining me today on Skeptico. If you liked it, remember to stick around for part two. I think you'll find it interesting. The one question I tee up from this interview is go do a little research and see if you think Jimmy's right about the blindness thing, the mesmerism thing. It's a fact that you ought to be able to wrestle down to the ground one way or another and it's important regarding retracing this history. I think, isn't it? Isn't it important? Let me know your thoughts, plenty more to come. As always, take care and bye for now.