Podbit · Lex Fridman Podcast
The German Navy hired the SS's 'Shoe Runners Unit' at Sachsenhausen concentration camp — prisoners who tested shoe soles by walking for days on different terrain replicas — and gave them cocktails of methamphetamine, cocaine, and experimental combinations in chewing gum. The goal: find a drug to keep soldiers awake and combat-ready for seven days straight.
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At 24:49 · chapter starts 23:45
Ohler grew up fascinated by the walled city of Berlin and drove there the night the Wall fell. In New York in the early 1990s, he was a novelist living for $300/month in pre-Giuliani Manhattan, took LSD for the first time, and heard about Kurt Cobain's death just before a cassette of Berlin techno arrived and changed his musical world. He moved to Berlin in the mid-90s for the electronic music scene — parties in abandoned East German buildings, the famous Tresor club in a former bank vault. His friend Alex the DJ first told him 'the Nazis took a lot of drugs.' Ohler didn't believe it — but an antique dealer had found original 1940s Pervitin tablets in an old Berlin apartment, and they were still potent decades later. That story, combined with a professor's claim that 'there would be no Blitzkrieg without methamphetamine,' launched Ohler into the archives.
The German Navy paid SS concentration camp prisoners in the Shoe Runners Unit to test drug combinations including methamphetamine mixed with cocaine in chewing gum.
Kierkegaard lost five of six siblings and his mother before adulthood, grew up under a shame-ridden father, fell in love, proposed, then mailed back the ring and fled to Berlin. His inability to live up to his own most important commitment became the engine of his entire philosophical project.
Casanova escaped from Venice's inquisition prison, met Voltaire, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, and Mozart — then died completely alone in a Slovak castle, broke, telling stories to children who thought he was a crazy old man. His 2,000-page memoir sat unread for decades. A life full of fireworks that meant nothing.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
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