Episode Transcript: #2183 - Norman Ohler

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

There you go. Pleasure to meet you.

I'm very happy to be here. I'm actually quite thrilled.

I'm quite thrilled to have you here.

This is your book. It's called Tripped, Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the dawn of the psychedelic age.

First of all, how did you get involved in studying this?

Well, this had a lot to do with my previous book, which is called Blitz, Drugs in the Third Reich.

And the Nazis were really into math, basically.

They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can change the war effort.

They basically doped their soldiers.

So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitz.

And also, I spoke about Hitler's consumption, which is quite outrageous, actually.

And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives because I'm not a historian.

I usually write novels. I started out writing three novels, and then suddenly I became a nonfiction writer.

I was trying to understand what does that mean, and I thought it meant to do historical writing,

to actually go into archives and look at original documents and not just lean on other books,

which is what many historians actually do, which I found out later.

They just read books from colleagues and then make up their own shit.