- California has a history of cults and there are still active cults today
- Some cults are from the 60s and 80s/90s, while others are more recent
- Many cults have leaders, but modern cults also have an internet component
- The speaker is generally pro-cult and sees them as part of the fringe and chaos of San Francisco
- The speaker mentions a conspiracy theory about the military's involvement in the hippie movement and faking nuclear bomb tests

The video discusses various conspiracy theories, including the possibility of faked moon landings and the idea that certain historical events may have been exaggerated. The speakers question the authenticity of the footage and raise doubts about the explanations provided. They also mention Garry Kasparov's theory about missing centuries and question the accuracy of historical records.

Taken from JRE #2010 w/Marc Andreesson:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3EWIFUOpaM9s7Pmei0r2C3?si=760bef20f5d64e8f

There historically, you know, California has been the world leader in cults for a very long time.

And I would say that has not stopped and that continues.

Did you know that the building that I bought for my comedy club initially was owned by a cult?

It was owned by a cult from West Hollywood called the Buddhafield that migrated out to Austin when they were being investigated by the Cult Awareness Network.

There's a great documentary on it called Holy Hell.

The People's Temple, Part of this great story of San Francisco is the People's Temple which became famous for the Jim Jones that were He killed everybody everybody killed everybody with poison kool-aid and in the jungles in Guyana He that That was a San Francisco cult for like a decade before they went to the jungle.

And everybody talks about the jungle, nobody talks about the San Francisco part.

So are there a bunch that are running right now that are successful?

There's cults all over the place, a bunch of them, yeah.

There's 2 sort of groupings There's the sort of 60s cults that are still kind of running There's what is it there's 1 called the family in like Southern California that's still going from the 60s There's there's a bunch of them, you know running around, you know, there's there's you know There was There was a big cult for a long time, sort of cult-ish kind of thing around, what was it?

And then there were a bunch of sort of tech cults in the 80s and 90s with names like the Extropians and there were a bunch of these guys.

And then more recently, there's a lot of this.

You'll hear these terms like rationalist, post-rationalist, effective altruism, existential risk, long-termism, They sometimes say.

And what you find is, again, the people associated with these tend to be very smart.

And then they end up with, let's say, alternative living arrangements, alternative food and sex configurations.

And lots of group-oriented, you know, and it's like, what's the line, right?

What's the line between basically a, What's the line between a social group that all lives together, that all has sex together, that all eats the same foods, that is not a cult, that engages in lots of, at some point they start to form belief systems that are not compatible with the outside world and they start to kind of go in their own orbit.

I think he talks about it in the book, Chaos.

There's typically a male-female dynamic that plays out inside these things that you see over and over again.

They often end up with more women than men for mysterious reasons.

And then, yeah, there's usually some kind of leader.

Although, the other thing that's happening now is a lot of modern cults, or quasi-cults, there'll be a physical component, but there's also an internet component now, right?

And so the ideas will spread online, right?

So there'll kind of be members of the cult, or quasi-members of the cult, or quasi-members of the quasi-cult that'll be online, and maybe at some point they actually come and physically join up.

And by the way, let me say, generally I'm pro-cult.

Well, the reason is the same reason I'm pro-fringe, which is like, If you're gonna have people who are gonna be thinking new things, they're gonna tend to be these kinds of people.

They're gonna be people who are on the fringe.

When they come together in groups, they're gonna exhibit cult-like characteristics.

But how did you get to these conclusions?

It seems that accepting fringe and accepting the chaos of San Francisco, this is good, this is a part of it, this is how this works, this is why it works.

a historical perspective, it's just like, okay, I mean, it's like, as an example, If you like rock music, it just basically came, modern rock and roll basically came from the Haight-Ashbury in the basically mid to late 60s, and then from Laurel Canyon, which was another 1 of these sort of cultish environments in the mid to late 60s.

And there was like specific moments in time in both of these places.

And basically all of the great rock and roll from that era that determined everything that followed basically came out of this.

I'll give you, here's a crazy, here's a crazy.

It's the, There's the other book about Laurel Canyon that's even crazier than Chaos.

It's the book called Weird Scenes in the Canyon.

So Laurel Canyon was like the Haight-Ashbury of Los Angeles, right?

So Laurel Canyon was like the music scene, the sort of music and drug and hippie scene of the, Laurel Canyon's actually where the hippie movement started.

There was actually a specific group in Laurel Canyon in LA in about 1965.

There was a guy named Vito Policus and he had a group called the Freaks.

And they were like a non-violent version of the Manson cult.

And it was all these young girls And they basically would go to clubs and they have they were the ones to do the beads and the hair and like all the Leather like all the all the hippie stuff like they got they got that rolling And so like they were they were in low can and then little Canyon it was like ground 0 there was like this moment where it's like Jim Morrison and the doors and Crosby Stills and Nash and Frank Zappa and it was at John Phillips And was the mamas the papas and the birds and the monkeys and like all of these like iconic bands of that time basically catalyzed over about a two-year period in Laurel Canyon.

The conspiracy theory in this book basically is that the whole thing was an op and the military intelligence op.

And the evidence for the theory is that there was an Air Force military propaganda production facility at the head of Laurel Canyon called Lookout Mountain, which today Jared Leto owns and actually

was a in that era in the 50s through the 70s it was a vertically integrated Military.

It was a production facility for film and music

1 of the most interesting guys I've ever talked to.

Totally normal, like really fun to talk to, not like what you would think of as a famous actor at all.

If you believe the moon landing was fake.

I thought they'd supposed to do it in the Nevada desert.

No these are the sounds because they had sound Contains on stages they had full sound production capability And so that the theory goes basically that was so there were 3 parts to the conspiracy theory.

So 1 is they had the production facility right there, right where all these musicians showed up.

2 is the musicians, like a very large percentage of these young musicians were sons and daughters of senior US military and intelligence officials.

Including Jim Morrison, whose father was the head of naval operations for the Vietnam War at the time.

And there were these other, I forget which ones, but there were these other musicians at the time where their parents were like senior and like military, like psychological operations.

And then third is the head of the Rand Corporation who was 1 of the inspirations for the dr Strange love character in the movie.

So he was the guy doing all the nuclear plant and planning for nuclear war He lived right in the heart of the hippies in Laurel Canyon in this in this famous house That's that's still there And so the theory basically goes that the anti-war movement before the hippies was basically a square movement.

It was all these basically young people, very clean cut, the men were all wearing, if you look at old like Vietnam War protests, like everybody's all like dressed up like they're going to a business meeting.

It was like, and it was developing into a real threat and so the theory is the hippie movement and rock and roll and the drug culture of the 60s was developed in order to basically sabotage the anti-war movement right and which which basically is what happened right because then what happened is the anti-war movement became associated with hippies and that caused Americans to decide what side they were on.

And then that led to Nixon being elected twice.

Which was also a part of chaos because that was the idea behind the Manson family and get funneling acid to them.

The facility was equipped with a soundstage, screening rooms, filled storage vaults, and naturally a bomb shelter.

During its 22 years of operation, Lookout Mountain Laboratory produced approximately 6, 500 classified films for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, documenting nuclear test series such as Operation Greenhouse, Operation Teapot, and Operation Buster Jangle.

So 1 of the conspiracy theories, okay, here's another conspiracy theory.

You've seen all the grainy footage of nuclear test blasts that you've seen with the mushroom clouds.

And there's always these grainy things and there's all these little houses lined up and these little trees

Well, there's always been a conspiracy theory that those were all basically fabricated at this facility, that those bombs actually were never detonated.

And basically the US military was basically faking these bomb tests to freak out the Russians, to make us think that we had weapons, we had basically a potency to our nuclear weapon arsenal that we actually didn't have at the time.

So what happened, okay, so this is great, Okay, you'll love this.

How is that happening if the camera is like totally stable and fine By the way in the film is fine the radio the radiation that didn't cause any damage to the film.

By the way, we'll do the loop 1 more time here.

And look at the, yeah, and look at the, when the house blows, look at the wood.

Does that look like it's, those are full size, like, you know, giant lumber beams as they go flying?

Is that a house or is that like, is that a 12 inch scale model?

Anyway, I don't know, like I have no idea.

Having said that, if that was fake, it was fake to look out mountain.

But did they have the kind of special effects to do something like that in the 40s?

Well, so the full conspiracy theory is it was Stanley Kubrick.

Yeah, the camera didn't move at all either.

Like it's, the volume, like the size of it, it looks small.

I mean, it looks like we're looking at something that's like a few inches tall

So if you watch like making of Star Wars any of the you know any movies before CGI whenever they do anything like that It's always these tiny models.

and they just basically that's what they do is they slow it down and then they add sound.

It looks like they're too big and they move too quickly back and forth.

even still, the camera got knocked over and not destroyed.

Is there some sort of a response to that?

Have they come with some sort of an explanation?

Does that make you wonder about other things?

Well, I mean, it's like in our time, right?

It's like how much stuff do you read in the news where you're like, okay, I know that's not true.

And then you're like, okay, everything I read in the history books, like I was told it was true.

There's definitely, that 1 though was really weirdly compelling.

There's another video of them setting up these houses, which I mean I guess you could make after the fact and say this is fake, but this is here, them setting it up.

I assume this is all not true, but it is fun to think about

Why would you assume it's not true the camera alone like this alone like yeah, where is the phone?

Because they have to have an explanation someone must have asked him at some point

or nobody asked We know the Soviets did it to Yuri Gagarin When he was in that capsule in space you you can clear if you see the actual capsule And then you see the film footage that was supposedly of him in the capsule there's like 2 different sources of light there's shadows the camera somehow another is in front of them this big-ass camera there's no room in the thing like they filmed it afterwards and it looks fake like I'm sure he really did go into space but that wasn't it that was some weird propaganda


Speaker 0: The Jorogun Experience.

Speaker 1: There historically, you know, California has been the world leader in cults for a very long time. And I would say that has not stopped and that continues.

Speaker 0: Did you know that the building that I bought for my comedy club initially was owned by a cult?

Speaker 1: Fantastic.

Speaker 0: It was owned by a cult from West Hollywood called the Buddhafield that migrated out to Austin when they were being investigated by the Cult Awareness Network.

Speaker 1: God, it's fantastic. Are they gone or are they still there?

Speaker 0: No, they're gone. There's a great documentary on it called Holy Hell. You should watch it. It's pretty bonkers.

Speaker 1: But they're from California.

Speaker 0: From California.

Speaker 1: The People's Temple, Part of this great story of San Francisco is the People's Temple which became famous for the Jim Jones that were He killed everybody everybody killed everybody with poison kool-aid and in the jungles in Guyana He that That was a San Francisco cult for like a decade before they went to the jungle. And everybody talks about the jungle, nobody talks about the San Francisco part.

Speaker 0: So are there a bunch that are running right now that are successful?

Speaker 2: Big time, yeah, totally. Really? Oh yeah, totally.

Speaker 1: Do you

Speaker 0: know them?

Speaker 1: There's cults all over the place, a bunch of them, yeah. Wow.

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0: And how are they run?

Speaker 1: Well, some of them are older. There's 2 sort of groupings There's the sort of 60s cults that are still kind of running There's what is it there's 1 called the family in like Southern California that's still going from the 60s There's there's a bunch of them, you know running around, you know, there's there's you know There was There was a big cult for a long time, sort of cult-ish kind of thing around, what was it? Not Erewhon, but Eslon. So there's still that whole orbit. That's the psychedelic groups.

All that stuff, yeah. That's from the 60s. And then there were a bunch of sort of tech cults in the 80s and 90s with names like the Extropians and there were a bunch of these guys. And then more recently, there's a lot of this. You'll hear these terms like rationalist, post-rationalist, effective altruism, existential risk, long-termism, They sometimes say.

And what you find is, again, the people associated with these tend to be very smart. They tend to be very prolific. They tend to do a lot. Many of them are involved in tech. And then they end up with, let's say, alternative living arrangements, alternative food and sex configurations.

And lots of group-oriented, you know, and it's like, what's the line, right? What's the line between basically a, What's the line between a social group that all lives together, that all has sex together, that all eats the same foods, that is not a cult, that engages in lots of, at some point they start to form belief systems that are not compatible with the outside world and they start to kind of go in their own orbit.

Speaker 0: Do they generally have a leader?

Speaker 1: So I mean, there are generally leaders. I mean, there is a pattern. I think he talks about it in the book, Chaos. I mean, there typically is a pattern. It's typically a guy.

There's typically a male-female dynamic that plays out inside these things that you see over and over again. They often end up with more women than men for mysterious reasons. And then, yeah, there's usually some kind of leader. Although, the other thing that's happening now is a lot of modern cults, or quasi-cults, there'll be a physical component, but there's also an internet component now, right? And so the ideas will spread online, right?

So there'll kind of be members of the cult, or quasi-members of the cult, or quasi-members of the quasi-cult that'll be online, and maybe at some point they actually come and physically join up. Yeah, so. And by the way, let me say, generally I'm pro-cult. I'm actually quite pro-cult. Well, the reason is the same reason I'm pro-fringe, which is like, If you're gonna have people who are gonna be thinking new things, they're gonna tend to be these kinds of people.

They're gonna be people who are on the fringe. They're gonna come together in groups. When they come together in groups, they're gonna exhibit cult-like characteristics.

Speaker 0: What you're saying resonates. Everything you're saying makes sense. But how did you get to these conclusions? It seems that accepting fringe and accepting the chaos of San Francisco, this is good, this is a part of it, this is how this works, this is why it works. How did you develop that perspective?

Well,

Speaker 2: it's just, if you take

Speaker 1: a historical perspective, it's just like, okay, I mean, it's like, as an example, If you like rock music, it just basically came, modern rock and roll basically came from the Haight-Ashbury in the basically mid to late 60s, and then from Laurel Canyon, which was another 1 of these sort of cultish environments in the mid to late 60s. And there was like specific moments in time in both of these places. And basically all of the great rock and roll from that era that determined everything that followed basically came out of this. So do you want that or not? Right.

Right. If you want it, that's what you get. I'll give you, here's a crazy, here's a crazy. It's the, There's the other book about Laurel Canyon that's even crazier than Chaos. It's the book called Weird Scenes in the Canyon.

Oh, okay, you would love this 1. So Laurel Canyon was like the Haight-Ashbury of Los Angeles, right? So Laurel Canyon was like the music scene, the sort of music and drug and hippie scene of the, Laurel Canyon's actually where the hippie movement started. There was actually a specific group in Laurel Canyon in LA in about 1965. There was a guy named Vito Policus and he had a group called the Freaks.

And they were like a non-violent version of the Manson cult. And it was all these young girls And they basically would go to clubs and they have they were the ones to do the beads and the hair and like all the Leather like all the all the hippie stuff like they got they got that rolling And so like they were they were in low can and then little Canyon it was like ground 0 there was like this moment where it's like Jim Morrison and the doors and Crosby Stills and Nash and Frank Zappa and it was at John Phillips And was the mamas the papas and the birds and the monkeys and like all of these like iconic bands of that time basically catalyzed over about a two-year period in Laurel Canyon. The conspiracy theory in this book basically is that the whole thing was an op and the military intelligence op. And the evidence for the theory is that there was an Air Force military propaganda production facility at the head of Laurel Canyon called Lookout Mountain, which today Jared Leto owns and actually

Speaker 0: yeah Yeah, but it's it

Speaker 1: was a in that era in the 50s through the 70s it was a vertically integrated Military. Yes. It was a production facility for film and music

Speaker 0: But by the way, have you met Jared Leto?

Speaker 1: Briefly, yeah.

Speaker 0: 1 of the most interesting guys I've ever talked to.

Speaker 1: Incredible, and it makes total sense.

Speaker 0: Totally normal, like really fun to talk to, not like what you would think of as a famous actor at all. Yeah. I had dinner with him and drinks. He's a fucking great guy.

Speaker 1: But he lives in a military- He

Speaker 0: showed me all the pictures. He showed me, I'm like, this is wild.

Speaker 1: It's amazing. If you believe the moon landing was fake. This is where they faked it like

Speaker 0: I thought they'd supposed to do it in the Nevada desert.

Speaker 1: No these are the sounds because they had sound Contains on stages they had full sound production capability And so that the theory goes basically that was so there were 3 parts to the conspiracy theory. So 1 is they had the production facility right there, right where all these musicians showed up. 2 is the musicians, like a very large percentage of these young musicians were sons and daughters of senior US military and intelligence officials. Including Morrison. Including Jim Morrison, whose father was the head of naval operations for the Vietnam War at the time.

Oh. And there were these other, I forget which ones, but there were these other musicians at the time where their parents were like senior and like military, like psychological operations. And like that's all real. Like that's all documented. And then third is the head of the Rand Corporation who was 1 of the inspirations for the dr Strange love character in the movie.

So he was the guy doing all the nuclear plant and planning for nuclear war He lived right in the heart of the hippies in Laurel Canyon in this in this famous house That's that's still there And so the theory basically goes that the anti-war movement before the hippies was basically a square movement. It was all these basically young people, very clean cut, the men were all wearing, if you look at old like Vietnam War protests, like everybody's all like dressed up like they're going to a business meeting. It was like, and it was developing into a real threat and so the theory is the hippie movement and rock and roll and the drug culture of the 60s was developed in order to basically sabotage the anti-war movement right and which which basically is what happened right because then what happened is the anti-war movement became associated with hippies and that caused Americans to decide what side they were on. And then that led to Nixon being elected twice.

Speaker 0: Which was also a part of chaos because that was the idea behind the Manson family and get funneling acid to them. The facility was equipped with a soundstage, screening rooms, filled storage vaults, and naturally a bomb shelter. During its 22 years of operation, Lookout Mountain Laboratory produced approximately 6, 500 classified films for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, documenting nuclear test series such as Operation Greenhouse, Operation Teapot, and Operation Buster Jangle.

Speaker 1: So 1 of the conspiracy theories, okay, here's another conspiracy theory. You've seen all the grainy footage of nuclear test blasts that you've seen with the mushroom clouds. And there's always these grainy things and there's all these little houses lined up and these little trees

Speaker 0: lined up

Speaker 1: and it blows everything down. Well, there's always been a conspiracy theory that those were all basically fabricated at this facility, that those bombs actually were never detonated. And basically the US military was basically faking these bomb tests to freak out the Russians, to make us think that we had weapons, we had basically a potency to our nuclear weapon arsenal that we actually didn't have at the time.

Speaker 0: How did they fake it?

Speaker 1: They just did, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0: This is it?

Speaker 1: Well, so there's a, yeah. Okay, so here's a question, right? So what happened, okay, so this is great, Okay, you'll love this. So what happened to the camera? How is that happening if the camera is like totally stable and fine By the way in the film is fine the radio the radiation that didn't cause any damage to the film.

Speaker 0: Oh my god.

Speaker 2: This looks like how

Speaker 1: you shoot movie miniature.

Speaker 2: By the way, we'll do the loop 1 more time here.

Speaker 1: Where's the car? The car's

Speaker 2: right behind the house. It just showed up.

Speaker 1: Oh, it

Speaker 0: just showed

Speaker 1: up. Wait a minute. It wasn't there. First of all, where'd the

Speaker 0: car come from? No car. No car. Second, does it really look like a car?

Speaker 1: Does that look like a real car?

Speaker 0: That's insane.

Speaker 1: And look at the, yeah, and look at the, when the house blows, look at the wood. Does that look like it's, those are full size, like, you know, giant lumber beams as they go flying? Yeah. That's hard to say. Is that a house or is that like, is that a 12 inch scale model?

What?

Speaker 0: Right, so like. The fucking car.

Speaker 1: Anyway, I don't know, like I have no idea. Having said that, if that was fake, it was fake to look out mountain. Wow. Right, at the exact same place and time.

Speaker 0: But did they have the kind of special effects to do something like that in the 40s?

Speaker 1: Well, so the full conspiracy theory is it was Stanley Kubrick. Which again, I have no idea.

Speaker 0: Boy, that does look fake.

Speaker 2: Yeah, the camera didn't move at all either.

Speaker 0: You know what it looks like? Go back to that real quick. It looks like the smoke is too big. Watch. Watch when it hits.

Like it's, the volume, like the size of it, it looks small.

Speaker 2: You know

Speaker 0: what I'm saying? I mean, it looks like we're looking at something that's like a few inches tall

Speaker 1: So if you watch like making of Star Wars any of the you know any movies before CGI whenever they do anything like that It's always these tiny models.

Speaker 0: Yes,

Speaker 1: and they just basically that's what they do is they slow it down and then they add sound.

Speaker 0: Yeah, this looks fake as shit. The clouds just don't look realistic. It looks like they're too big and they move too quickly back and forth. This is

Speaker 1: another 1. It's like, okay, the Camera's fine.

Speaker 0: That's hilarious. Here we go.

Speaker 2: Okay, there may be the camera got. Okay, but even though, but even,

Speaker 1: even still, the camera got knocked over and not destroyed.

Speaker 0: Is there some sort of a response to that? Have they come with some sort of an explanation?

Speaker 1: Not that I know of.

Speaker 0: That seems so vague. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

Speaker 1: Who can tell?

Speaker 0: Does that make you wonder about other things?

Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it's like in our time, right? It's like how much stuff do you read in the news where you're like, okay, I know that's not true.

Speaker 2: Right. And then you're like, okay, everything I read in the history books, like I was told it was true. It's like, yeah.

Speaker 0: There's definitely, that 1 though was really weirdly compelling.

Speaker 2: There's another video of them setting up these houses, which I mean I guess you could make after the fact and say this is fake, but this is here, them setting it up.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you just do the slide of hand. Huh. I don't know, I don't know. I assume this is all not true, but it is fun to think about

Speaker 0: Why would you assume it's not true the camera alone like this alone like yeah, where is the phone? Where's that camera?

Speaker 2: Because they have to have an explanation someone must have asked him at some point

Speaker 0: or nobody asked We know the Soviets did it to Yuri Gagarin When he was in that capsule in space you you can clear if you see the actual capsule And then you see the film footage that was supposedly of him in the capsule there's like 2 different sources of light there's shadows the camera somehow another is in front of them this big-ass camera there's no room in the thing like they filmed it afterwards and it looks fake like I'm sure he really did go into space but that wasn't it that was some weird propaganda

Speaker 1: Garry Kasparov has a theory you know this is a theory they're missing centuries.

Speaker 0: What?

Speaker 1: Yeah, Kasparov has a theory that there are centuries that didn't happen.

Speaker 0: What do you mean?

Speaker 1: Well, just literally centuries, like this whole idea of the Middle Ages lasted 1, 200 years or whatever is just like not true. Really?

Speaker 0: Yeah. Why does he think that?

Speaker 1: There's something about the, you know, whatever, is there like enough historical evidence to support it and, you know, various people over, you know, various authorities over time who wanted to tell various stories about how long, you know, regimes had been in place or whatever.

Speaker 0: Oh, so he thinks it's exaggerated.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, that Not as much time has passed as we think.

Speaker 0: Well, that's quite possible, right?

Speaker 1: How would we know?

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California Cults and The Laurel Canyon Conspiracy