Joe Rogan Experience #1903 - Kurt Metzger

Kurt Metzger joins Joe Rogan for a sprawling, weed-fueled conversation that starts with addiction stories and the brutality of opiate and Suboxone withdrawal. From there it sprawls into deep conspiracy territory: CIA drug-running exposed by ex-cop Michael Ruppert on C-SPAN, MKUltra's possible link to Charles Manson, FBI entrapment of would-be terrorists, and the marketing fraud behind the serotonin theory of depression. They dissect the FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried collapse, war propaganda around Ukraine and Libya, and how media outlets flip narratives overnight. The episode closes with lighter but equally rabbit-hole tangents on parasitic wasps, dinosaurs, didgeridoos, the 'gay bomb,' and Haiti's reparations to France.

• Metzger details getting hooked on Oxycontin and heroin, and says tapering off Suboxone over nearly a year produced worse withdrawal than the opiates themselves.
  00:10:26
• They replay Michael Ruppert's 1996 C-SPAN confrontation publicly accusing the CIA of dealing drugs in South Central to fund covert operations.
  00:36:58
• Extended riff on FBI entrapment: most so-called terror plots are run by informants, and 12 of the 14 people in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot were FBI informants.
  01:51:19
• Joe lays out Tom O'Neill's 'Chaos,' linking MKUltra figure Jolly West to visiting Charles Manson in prison and supplying LSD.
  02:56:45
• Discussion of the real 1994 US military 'gay bomb' proposal designed to make enemy soldiers irresistibly attractive to one another.
  02:58:48
• Reveal that Haiti was forced to pay France reparations (nearly $30 billion in today's money) for freeing its own slaves, paying it off until the 1980s.
  03:33:43
• Allegation aired that a US-based security firm helped recruit the Colombian mercenaries behind Haitian President Jovenel Moise's 2021 assassination.
  03:31:39

• Vitamin D acts more like a hormone than a vitamin, and covid survival rates were cited as roughly four times higher in people with adequate levels.
  00:21:18
• The Parkinson's drug Requip was pulled after a lawsuit where a man developed compulsive gambling and hypersexuality, winning a settlement.
  01:11:14
• The serotonin 'chemical imbalance' theory of depression was heavily pushed by drug companies (e.g. Eli Lilly's Prozac) and is not supported by the evidence.
  01:17:33
• Modern vaccine hesitancy traces partly to an early polio vaccine manufacturer accidentally including live poliovirus; vaccine-derived poliovirus 2 is a documented real strain.
  01:37:23
• California prison inmates make up roughly one-third of the state's firefighting force, earning between about $2.90 and $5 a day.
  02:52:36
• California's legal cannabis is taxed so heavily (about $817 million collected in 2020-21) that the illegal market has grown larger than the legal one.
  02:45:51
• The last person legally freed from slavery in the US (via debt peonage) was around 1942, prompted partly by WWII propaganda concerns.
  02:49:31
• Parasitic wasps inject larvae and a fungus into hosts like caterpillars; one wasp-release program was credited with saving around 20 million from crop loss.
  03:02:29
• The famous Nixon/Jackie Gleason 'dead frozen aliens' story falls apart because the cited Esquire interview appears never to have existed.
  00:46:18

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