California Cults and The Laurel Canyon Conspiracy

The Joe Rogan Experience they're 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 and that continues did you know that the building that I bought for my comedy club initially was owned by a cult fantastic it was owned by a cult from West Hollywood called the Buddha field that migrated out to uh Austin when they were being investigated by the occult awareness Network you got it fantastic yeah are they gone are they still there no they're gone there's a great

documentary on it called holy hell I used to watch it it's pretty Bonkers but they're from California from California you know people the people's Temple you know part of this is a great story of San Francisco is the people's Temple which became famous for the Jim Jones that where he killed everybody killed everybody with poison Kool-Aid in the jungles and Guyana uh he he that that was a San Francisco cult for like a decade right 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 big time yeah totally really oh yeah totally yeah you know it's called all over the place I know a bunch of them yeah wow yeah yeah and how would they run well some of them are older there's two sort of groupings there's the sort of 60s Cults that are still kind of running uh there's what is it there's one called the family in like Southern California that's still going from the 60s um there's uh 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 cultish kind of thing around what was it um not Erawan but it was um you know so they're still like that that whole orbit uh 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 extropeans um and um you know there were a bunch of these guys and then um more recently there's a lot of this you'll hear

these terms like rationalist post-rationalist uh effective altruism yes existential risk um long-termism they sometimes say um and what you find is the people again the people associated with these tend to be very smart uh they tend to be very prolific they tend to do a lot many of them are involved in in Tech and then they end up with let's say alternative living arrangements alternative food and sex configurations um and you know lots of group oriented you know and it's like what's the line right what's 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 you know engages in lots of you know at some point they start to form you know belief systems that are not you know compatible with the outside world and they start to kind of go on their own orbit do they generally have a leader um so I mean there are generally leaders I mean there is a pattern I think he talks about it in in the book chaos I mean there typically is

a pattern it's typically it's typically a guy um you know there's typically a there's there's a there's a male female Dynamic right that plays out inside these things that you kind of see over and over again um and so they often they often end up with more women than men um you know for for mysterious reasons but um yeah and then yeah there's there's usually some kind of leader although you know the other thing is happening now is you know a lot of modern Cults you know they're kind of quasi-cults there's like there'll be a

physical component but there's also an internet component now right and so the the ideas will spread online right so there'll kind of be members of the call or quasi members of The Cult or quasi members of the quasi-cult that'll be you know online and maybe at some point they actually come and physically join up um yeah so and by the way let me say like generally I'm Pro cult like I'm actually quite Pro cult um well the reason it's the same reason I pro-fringe right which is like you're gonna have P if you're gonna have

people who are going to be thinking new things they're going to tend to be these kinds of people they're going to be people who are in the French they're going to come together in groups when they come together in groups they're they're going to exhibit called like characteristics what you're saying resonates everything you're saying makes sense but how did you get to these conclusions like like it seems that like accepting Fringe and exciting like accepting the chaos of San Francisco like this is good this is a part of it this is how this works this

is why it works like how did you develop that perspective well it's just if you take a historical perspective it's just like okay I mean it's like an easy example if you like rock music it just basically came modern rock and roll basically came from the hate Ashbury in the basically mid to late 60s and then from Laurel Canyon which was another one of these sort of cultish environments in the middle late 60s and there was like specific moments in time in both of these places and you know basically all of the great rock and

roll from that era that determine everything that followed basically came out so you know do you want that or not right right if you want on it you know that's what you get um I'll give you here's the crazy here's a crazy um it's the um uh there's the other book about Laurel Canon that's even crazier than chaos it's the book called uh weird scenes in the canyon oh okay you would love this one so so Laurel Canyon was like the hate Ashbury of Los Angeles right so Laurel Canyon was like the music scene the

sort of music and drug and hippie scene of the it's Laurel County is actually where the hippie movement started um there was actually a specific group in Laurel Canyon in LA in about 1965. um there's a guy named Vito pelicus um and uh and he had a group called The Freaks and they were like uh they were like a non-violent version of the Manson cult um and it was all these young girls and and they basically would go to clubs and they had they were the ones to do the beads and the hair and like

all the leather and like all the all the hippie stuff like they got they got that rolling um and so like they were they were in location and then Laurel Canyon it was like Ground Zero there was like this moment where it's like Jim Morrison the doors and Crosby Stills and Nash and Frank Zappa and it was it John Phillips um and um 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 little canyon um the

the conspiracy the conspiracy theory in this book basically is that the whole thing was an op and the the the the military intelligence op um and the the evidence for the theory is that there was an air force uh uh military propaganda production facility at the head of Laurel Canyon called Lookout Mountain uh which uh right which today Jared Leto owns and actually yeah so I'm just gonna say that yeah but it's it was a in in that era in the 50s through the 70s it was a vertically integrated uh military yes uh it was

a production facility uh for film and music um but by the way if you met Jared Leto uh briefly yeah one of the most interesting guys I've ever talked incredible and it makes total sense totally normal like really fun to talk to not like what you would think of as a famous actor at all I had dinner with him and drinks he's [ __ ] great guy but he lives in a military boat he showed me all the pictures he showed me I'm like this is wild yeah so it's amazing if you believe the moon

landing was fake this is where they affected like this this is I thought they'd supposed to do it in the Nevada desert no these are the sounds because they had sound stations that totally contained sound stages they had full sound production capability um and so the theory goes basically that so there were three parts to the conspiracy theory so one is they have the production facility right there right where all these musicians showed up two is the musician's like a very large percentage of these young musicians um were uh Sons and Daughters of senior U.S

military and intelligence including Morrison including Jim Morrison whose father was the head of Naval operations for the Vietnam War at the time um and there were these other 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 that's all real like that's all documented and then third is the head of the Rand Corporation who was one of The Inspirations for the Dr Strangelove character in the movie um so he was the guy doing all the nuclear plant planning for

nuclear war he lived right in the heart of the hippies uh 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 business meeting it was like 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 uh in order to basically sabotage the anti-war movement wow right uh and which which basically is what happened right because then what happened is the anti-war boom it became associated with hippies and that caused Americans to right 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 funneling acid to them the facility was equipped with a Sound Stage screening rooms film storage vaults and naturally

a bomb shelter during its 22 years of operation Lookout Mountain laboratory produced approximately 6500 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 one of the conspiracy theories okay here's another conspiracy theory the you've seen all the you've seen all the granny footage of nuclear test blasts that if you're sure the mushroom clouds and they're always these grainy things and there's all these like little houses lined up in these little trees lined up and it blows everything down

well it's always been a conspiracy theory that those were all basically fabricated at this facility that those bombs actually were never detonated um and basically the US military was uh was basically faking these bomb tests to freak out the Russians to make us think that we had um uh weapons we had basically a potent potency to our nuclear weapon Arsenal that we actually didn't have at the time how did they fake it um they just did yeah exactly this is it well so there's a um yeah okay so here's the question right so what happened

okay so this is great okay you'll love this so what happened to the camera you son of a [ __ ] you son of a [ __ ] how is that happening if the camera is like totally stable and fine oh my God and by the way in the film is fine the radio the the radiation that didn't cause any damage to the film oh my God this looks like well by the way okay we'll do this we'll do a little one more time here where's the closest of the car behind the house it just

showed up oh okay wait a minute first it wasn't there no comes from no car second is it really look like a car does that look like a real car that's insane and look at the um yeah and look at the when the house blows look at the uh the wood does that look like it's those are full-size like you know giant Lumber beams as they go flying yeah is that a house or is that like you know a you know is that a 12 foot you know 12 inch uh you know scale model what

right so like the [ __ ] car anyway I don't know like I have no idea having said that if that was fake it was faked at Lookout Mountain right at the exact same place and time well did they have the kind of special effects to do something like that in the 40s well so the the conspiracy the full conspiracy theories it was uh Stanley Kubrick which again I I I I have no idea well that does look fake there's also the camera didn't move it all year 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 I mean you know what I'm saying I mean it looks like something 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 with these tiny models yes and they just basically that's what they do is they slow it down and then they add

sound yeah this looks fake as [ __ ] right the the the clouds just don't look realistic right like it looks like they're too big and they move too quickly back and forth let's get another one it's like okay what the camera camera's fine that's hilarious here we go okay they're moving the camera gun okay but even though but even even still the camera got knocked over right now what is then not destroyed is there a death uh like some sort of a response to that have they come with some sort of an explanation not

that I know of that seems so fake yeah yeah wow who can tell 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 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 it was definitely that that one though is 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 yeah this is fake but this is here them setting it up yeah you just do real-size houses huh I don't know I don't know I I I assume this is all 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 where's that camera camera because they have to have an explanation someone must have asked them at some point or nobody asked maybe yeah it might be one

of those wow look what they did we know the Soviets did it too Yuri Gagarin when he was in that uh 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 two different sources of light there's Shadows the camera somehow or 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 oh I'm sure he really did go into space but that

wasn't it that was some weird propaganda Gary Kasparov has the theory you know this is the theory they're missing centuries what yeah yeah Castro has the theory that there are centuries that didn't happen what do you mean which is it just literally centuries that like this whole idea the Middle Ages lasted 1200 years or whatever is just like not true really yeah why does he think that uh there's 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 oh so he thinks it's exaggerated yeah yeah basically not not as much time has passed as we think well that's quite possible yeah how would we know