All Episodes

December 28, 2024 55 mins

In the early 1960s, one of the most unethical experiments in psychology’s history was quietly conducted in a state hospital in Michigan. It sought to upend the delusions of the three patients involved, but ultimately disabused the experimenter of his own. Tune in to this classic episode to hear Josh and Chuck explore this disturbing project.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, everybody, it's your old pal Josh. For this week's
Select I've chosen our episode from August of twenty twenty one,
where we take a look at one of the most
unethical social psychology experiments in the history of the field,
where doctor Martin roe Keach assembled three men who each
believed he was christ, put them in a room together
and sat back and waited for the fireworks to start.

(00:22):
And what came out of it is both an indictment
and an inspiring affirmation of humanity. And on a personal note,
I would like to wish my sweet sweet wife Yum,
a very big happy birthday. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to

(00:50):
the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Dave is
here with us today and we're all just quietly holding hands.
Now we have to stop and I'm into the real
world and start talking to you find people for this
episode of Stuff You Should Know. My lip got caught
in my tooth when I said you, and it came

(01:12):
out a little weird.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
It's funny. My daughter finally lost her first tooth and
it's you know, it's changing the way she talks. She's
got a little funny little lisp and she's always tongue
in on it, and I'm like, I'm gonna be there
with you soon, you know, I gotta get this front
one redone right. So yeah, I'm gonna wait till write
before we have live shows so I could pull that

(01:35):
front tooth again.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Nice. That'll be a special treat for everybody, especially me.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Oh, you were used to it.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
I really was. The worst was when when you had
that little case that you would put it in and
that they had events so the smell could waft out
of it.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah. I gave up after the first one on wearing
that thing. I was just like, who cares?

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, No, it's great. It was very liberating.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
It was, as is this podcast episode.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
I think this is going to be a good one
because Chuck, I've been wanting to talk about this for
a really long time. This is one of those things
that you like hear about and you're like, wait what
that can't be right, And then you read a little
more about it, and a little more and it just
keeps getting worse and worse. But yet it's it's just
kind of one of the like a landmark study in

(02:25):
the field of psychology that we're talking about today.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, the Three Christs of Hypsilanti, and I study this.
I remember this from studying it in psychology class in
college and got kind of into it at the time, and.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
You started wearing like Three Christ t shirts and stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
I followed them on tour. It was great. I don't
for some reason, I thought I read the book. But
I don't think I read the book. I think we
just covered the book in college and in the psychology class, Like,
I don't think they major read the whole book. We
basically just kind of went over it. But I had
been pretty fascinated for years, and you know, eventually, when

(03:07):
Hollywood made a movie about it four years ago, I
was excited and even paid to rent that thing.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
How'd that work out? Pretty good?

Speaker 2 (03:17):
I watched the first half hour and realize, oh man,
they've just sort of disneyfied this thing and it's not good. Yeah,
Ohtho or Budd Kevin Pollack isn't it And he's always great?

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Hey, that guy can steal a scene better than the Hamburglar.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Yeah. The movie, just so everyone knows, is called The
Three Christ of Hipsolani from John Abnett starring Richard gear
as the name changed doctor and then the Three Christ
in the movie you're portrayed by Peter Dinklage, one of
my favorite actors, Walton Goggins.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Yeah, he's great, man, I went back. I told you
I was watching The Shield again. That guy was amazing
in that.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Oh was he in that?

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah? Yeah, he played one of the main characters.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
He's just the best. And then, uh, what's a guy's
named Bradley Whitford who's also great. Everyone in it is good.
It just it's one of those movies that they I
think just over sanitized and should have made a documentary instead.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
But they didn't, and that's okay, and we don't have
to talk about that movie ever again now that we'll
have instead, I think we should start by giving a
little background on the guy whose idea the Three Christs
of if Silani experiment was, and it was a researcher,
a psychologist, a social psychologist, your favorite named Milton Rokeach.

(04:37):
And Milton Rokeach had some ideas about what it was
to make up an identity, what made up a person's
sense of who they were. Yeah, and he basically had
broken it out into beliefs, a series of different kinds
of beliefs, which we'll kind of talk about here there
a little more. But there's this anecdote that's frequently passed

(04:57):
around that kind of like lays the early groundwork for
this idea that someone's belief in who they are could
conceivably be challenged. And it came one night when he
was sitting around the dinner table with his wife and
his two young daughters, and he accidentally, in like a
moment of frustration telling them to settle down at dinner,

(05:19):
called one another by their opposite names, and the girls
just thought that was like the funniest thing that I
ever heard.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
At first, Yes, was that is that my cue?

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah? I even stuck my finger up like all right
now you but you can't see it, can you?

Speaker 2 (05:35):
No, because we just listened to each other, Yeah, at first,
and that was a little fun game. And then I
think the five year old even said, you know, this
is just a game, right dad, And Dad said no,
it's real, and I hear him saying it in that voice,
and you know, pretty soon they were begging for him
to stop. And I can verify that this is a

(05:56):
thing I've been I think as a parents, sometimes you'll
call your kid by another name as a joke, like
I know I've done it, like called my daughter my
dog's name. If she's like she'll come into the room
and like bark or something as a joke. So, oh,
you're Nico, and she'll say, yeah, I'm Nico, and then
for a few minutes later, I'm like, hey, come here, Nico,
and then it's fun for about five minutes and then

(06:19):
she's like no, like I am not. So there is
very much a thing to a child's identity, especially from
their parents, where they kind of get their identity and
seek their identity. When that is challenged, it is very
quickly kind of traumatic.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, he learned a couple of things that One, you
can very quickly challenge somebody, or you can very quickly
push someone to a state of like trauma or anxiety
or panic even Yeah, by just by simply challenging their
identity by calling them the wrong name purposefully.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
That's right, Jerry.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
He also right, Yeah, I know, Jerry, call each other.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Jerry, I think it would cancel e you there, out.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Do it one more time and I will crumble, okay, Jachiffer,
Oh god, but he also learned like, Okay, there's consequences
to this. You can't take somebody with a with a
well formed, well developed sense of identity and I guess
a normal sense of identity and push push them to
the edge, mess around with that sense of identity. There's
there's harmful consequences to that. So he's starting to kind

(07:25):
of explore this, and like I was saying, like he
had broken everybody's belief system into a handful of different
types of beliefs, and the belief that you are who
you are, which is what we call our identity. He
ascribed to primitive beliefs, which are just like basic truths
in the same neighborhood as you know, I'm wearing a

(07:47):
headphone on one ear and I have the other one
behind my head. Right now, I have brown hair. My
name is Josh, your chuck, Like, just basic truths of
the universe that anyone you talk to is going to
generally agree with. Right, That's where the personality comes from.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, and that that is the very bedrock and foundation
of how we think about ourselves. And he already saw
messing with that can be bad, So he was like, hey,
why not take it a step further.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
Right right, So what I was saying a minute ago
with like how we saw that there's consequences to messing
with saying person I just made air quotes. If you
couldn't tell from my intonation messing with a sane person's identity,
you can't really do that. But this is the mid
century in America, and there's a whole group of people
that you can do basically whatever you want to with

(08:41):
as far as mental stuff goes. And that were people
who are suffering from mental conditions who were locked up
in state institutions at the time. And so Rokeach came
up with this idea like, Okay, wait a minute, what
if I got my hands on some mentally unstable people,
some possibly diagnosed people, and messed with their sense of identity,

(09:04):
took their delusion and challenged it. That could be okay,
because hey, their lives are basically useless anyway, I'm paraphrasing
Rokeich here, and if something does come of it, there's
a good chance that it could be positive instead. So
let me have it, let me add them basically.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, there's a quote here from the book, And big
thanks to Dave Ruse for putting this one together. I
know this was a huge it's a tough one to wrangle,
but he did a great job. Here's the quote from
the book. Because it is not feasible to study such
phenomena with normal people, he didn't even put in quotes.
It seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief
in the hope that in subjecting them to strain, that

(09:44):
would be little to lose and hopefully a great deal
to gain. And like, I read that sentence and I'm like,
stop there, dude, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
That's like the perfect motto for the misguided intentions of
this study.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah yeah, he is like, and die himself with that
one quote.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Exactly, just right out of the gate. And I read
this commentary magazine article from nineteen sixty four by Oh
I can't remember who it was. I don't have it
pulled up, but he's a famous poet at the time,
and he was basically saying, like, you know, surely ro Keach,
the guy who's writing the book, well, it understands that
roe Keach, the character this doctor is like out of

(10:23):
his mind, and he likes he's like slowly realizing, oh wait,
this guy, even the author of the book has no
idea that the doctor character who's himself has has any
idea just how unethical this is. And that's a that's
a that's a great example of it, that demonstrates it
right off the bat.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, there's there's a I don't know if you listened
to the Snap judgment on this, did you hear that?

Speaker 1 (10:45):
No? Huh?

Speaker 2 (10:46):
It was good step, you know, great podcast or public
radio program turned podcast.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Sure, I've heard public radio before. Yeah, I used to.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
I used to listen to a lot more of it.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Same here, fresh Air. I always still love fresh Air. Yeah,
but it's one of those things where I just bulk
it up and then, like when I'm painting a room
in our house, I listened to just fresh Air the
whole time or something, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Yeah, what is dairy GROW's going to have us on?
Do we need to get to twenty years? Would that
do it?

Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah? I wouldn't even begin to bother her until we
hit twenty years and then maybe yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Then we just start asking basically hi, Terry Hi.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
So in that Snap judgment, they pointed out that he
that Roki actually read a Harper's article about two women
who believe they were the Virgin Mary, and that put
an idea into his head. And I know that. In
his book he also talked about being inspired a little
bit by some stuff that Voltaire wrote about it.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
Right, Yeah, there was a man in the seventeenth century
that Voltaire wrote about named Simone Morin who was deranged
in the parlance at the time, and he thought that
he was Christ. And so he was locked up in
a mad house and he met in that place, in
that institutional asylum, another man who thought he was Christ.

(12:07):
And Simone Morin saw just how like crazy this guy
seemed and was like, wait a minute, maybe I'm crazy.
And in confronting this other guy who claimed to have
the same identity, he regained his sanity to a certain extent,
and unfortunately he relapsed and ended up being burned at
the stake for heresy. But there was a moment there

(12:29):
where he had kind of like been knocked out of
his delusion. That's a huge deal. Like if you have
schizophrenia or delusional beliefs, like if your mental disorder is
to the degree where you hold delusions, and we should
say a delusion is not like, you know, a made
up belief where you know you made your belief up,

(12:51):
like this is what you think is real. It is
real to you, and you will defend it when it's challenged.
So the idea that somebody who was delusional could be
knocked out of their delusion by being confronted with somebody
else who had the same delusion, that is groundbreaking. And
I can see why roe Keach was like, there we go,
that's it, there's my there's my methodology for this or

(13:13):
for this this experiment.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, and I'm sure he was, you know, he was
turned on a little bit about the idea of three
Christs or however many Christs he could find.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
He thought so hot.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
Well, I mean not even like that, you know what
I mean though, But as a social psychologists he was
probably like, you know, this would make for a pretty
mind blowing experiment.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Plus a great book title. It's one of the great
understated book titles of all time.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Yeah, it was not like the three Richard Nixon's of
his Bilante.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
No, And I mean like Yipsilani is like this just
this town outside of ann Arbor where you know, that's
where one of the mental asylums were in Michigan at
the time, And it's just like you know, it might
as well be Walla, Walla or Lakawana, or it's just
an unusual name in a town that doesn't really have

(14:07):
much of a claim to anything, you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, I'm sure all three of those towns are like,
is he insulting all of us or none of us?

Speaker 1 (14:15):
No, No, it's not an insult. It's just it's just
it's not like a hot happen in town and it's
been like the Three Christs of New York that loses
something or the Price of London. It's just a rather
generally unremarkable place, guys, ipsil Any if you live there
and you don't know that it's generally unremarkable, I'm sorry

(14:35):
to be breaking this news to you. I don't mean
it in an unkind way at all.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
I know you don't. And I think generally back then,
that's where a lot of these institutions were because they
needed like lots of land. And so they'll just leave
it at that, and okay, maybe take a break.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Okay to let everybody really stew on what I said
that we'll.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Take a break and we'll find out how he found
his pacetions right after this, all right, So we're back.

(15:29):
There were twenty five thousand total patients in the system
in Michigan State, in Michigan State hospitals, and he went
through all of these, you know, he sort of tried
to cull them down to ideally to Christ figures. He'd
found a man who thought he was Cinderella, he found
a Missus God, and then about six people who thought

(15:53):
they were Christ. And three of them were really into
this idea and really consistent with belief that they were Jesus.
And two of them happened to be at Hipsolani. So
he was like, this is perfect, I'll just transfer the
third in and we'll get going.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah. And so these guys being inmates of the state
at a time where Ipsilani had like four thousand people,
four thousand patients in just this one institutions. And if
you were already like on the margins society and then
moved into a place where you're with four thousand other
people on the margins of society, it's a really good

(16:29):
place to get lost, to not get any real help.
And so one of the things that was part of
this experiment design is to make participating in these discussions.
This group of these three Christs as attractive to these
three men as possible. So they were moved toward d

(16:51):
twenty three. They were given their own private day room
to eat in, to sleep or not sleeping, but to
hang out in away from everybody else. They got some
like place to stretch out and to have some company.
We got a lot of attention, a lot of perks.
Like basically their lives were changed in like incalculable ways

(17:12):
by being part of the study. And so when they
say like these were voluntary meetings and these men were
voluntary members of the study, that's that's definitely true. There
were voluntary participants, but the perks on offer were just
so amazing they like you would you could not turn
down you know, participating in some degree.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, exactly. So they were willing participants insofar as yeah,
they got these great perks worth running out. So he
changed the names of the guys to protect their families
and to protect them to some degree. But we should
go over sort of the bios of the three men.

(17:50):
Should we say who played them in the movies? Willout
help people?

Speaker 1 (17:53):
I don't think so? Okay, I don't want to disparage
those great actors' names.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Again, Well, I mean the acting, they did a good job.
It was just the material. They're all great actors, you know, Sure, yeah,
I know, it's just when you write it. I don't
want to call out the scriptwriter. But it wasn't there good.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
So let me ask you this, because I didn't see
the movie. Was it like and I loved the fact
that they made a movie about Freddy Mercury and the
other members of Queen, But was it like in the
in the movie what was the name of that movie.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
The Queen Movie? That's what I called it.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Okay, well in but Heymian in Mars City, that's right.
Do you remember like every time like Freddy Mercury did
something brilliant, they would have Brian May, they'd do a
pan in close up of him just looking like in
awe and astonished. And that's maybe pushing it doing that
once in a movie, but they did that every like
fifteen or twenty minutes. Was it kind of like that

(18:56):
same sentiment?

Speaker 2 (18:57):
It wasn't so much that, And again I only watched
the first act before I realized it was just it
was just really sanitized and like a feel good type
of thing.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Got so, yeah, so you're similar, yeah, right, exactly. This
is not a this is not a feel good story.
I wonder if it was performance art you accidentally stumbled upon.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
I mean, was there was some tough stuff in there.
It's not like it was completely like, hey, this is great,
but it kind of reeked of like an Awakenings kind
of thing.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
And I liked Awakening I got it all right, all right,
I liked Awakenings too, But it sounds like what you're
describing is more along the line of the Greatest Showman,
like that kind of sanitization. I didn't see that, Okay,
did you no? But he did that episode just tearing
it apart. Yeah, yeah, we hadn't even seen it.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
More comfortable doing that at times.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, kind kind of.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
So. The first guy was in his late fifties, Joseph
Kassel fifty eight. He had been in the hospital for
about twenty years and was Canadian born and raised in Quebec.
And he was named after his after Josephine, his female
relative in his family named Joseph, And I think the

(20:06):
big takeaway from his childhood was that it was not good.
A very abusive father, very quick tempered man who abused
his mom, and his mom actually died while giving birth
to her ninth kid, and so he had a rough
go of it from the beginning.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
I think his name actually was Josephine as well, and
he went by Joseph. So he wanted to be a writer.
I think, did you say he was fifty eight at
the time, Yeah, okay, and he did not really take
to working outside of the house. He and his wife

(20:43):
did not have a very good relationship. Necessarily, he didn't
want kids, she did. They ended up having three daughters,
and he later on came to believe that they were
not his children after all, and that may have been correct.
But then things started to take kind of a turn
for the worse, and that he started to become really paranoid.

(21:04):
He started to accuse people of poisoning his food. He
became a bit of a hoarder, especially with books, and
probably the greatest crime a man could commit in the
mid century America, he did not want to work right,
So that was basically that he ended up getting sent
to an asylum in Canada and then on to Ipsilany eventually,

(21:26):
and he'd been been in Ipseilany for I think about
twenty years, or at least in and out of the
hospital system for about twenty years, and for about ten
of those years he had been he had decided that
he was God or Jesus Christ or both.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, And by the time he got around to Rokeach,
or Rokeach found him, he was in a pretty bad state.
After those twenty years, he had about half of his
teeth left in his mouth. He was still hoarding books,
carrying around books everywhere, and when, you know, when asked
who he was, he said his name was Joseph, and

(22:04):
he said that I am God, and I guess Rokeach said, well,
you'll do just.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
Fine, very splendid. Yeah. So Joseph, despite you know, his
inability to take care of himself and you know the
fact that he hoarded and all of that, he was
a very sharp person. So yeah, remember remember to keep
that in mind. Like that he was. He was very
sharp and a good writer as well. Clyde and these

(22:31):
are these men's names were changed. Clyde Benson. He was seventy,
he'd been hospitalized for the last seventeen years.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
He was in pretty rough shape.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
He really was. And I wrote, Keatch definitely starts to
recognize that pretty quickly after meeting Clyde, and ends up
almost letting him just stay in the group even though
he's not really participating any longer. But Clyde was apparently
raised in an overprotected manner and didn't really learn how
to make his own decisions and kind of ended up

(23:02):
stunted as a result. Which you can make your way
through life like that if you if you want to.
But he ended up turning to alcohol and became a
really hardcore alcoholic to where it was starting to wreck
his life. And apparently that came into collision with a

(23:26):
diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at some point.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Right, Yeah, And you know, it seems like the drinking
was the anytime you have an undiagnosed condition like this
and you pour alcoholism on top of it or any
kind of you know, drug addiction, it's gonna it's just
gonna be even worse. And eventually he was arrested for
public drunkenness. It was a pretty violent arrest and in

(23:51):
jail he was violent, and he was saying he was
Jesus Christ, that he was God, and that he was
reborn through his first wife. Surely I believe she had
passed away, and he did get remarried, and it was
surely the queen of heaven. And at this point they
committed him to a mental hospital when he was fifty three,
where he got that diagnosis, and he was the one

(24:15):
that was easily the most far gone and toughest to
reach and sort of walked around mumbling. He also didn't
have many, if any of his teeth, but occasionally would
like still have that violence in him where he would
have these sort of violent outbursts but then kind of
calm down again.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, And when he did, he was very direct and
to the point. And I don't think he was actually
physically violent, was he.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
I don't think so. I think it just could be
scary at times.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Right, So he would say things like I am him.
See now understand that, Like that was the extent of
how he would explain that he was God. He didn't
need it to be challenged, and if you did try
to challenge it, he would just shut you down kind
of thing, in a very yeah, like you said, kind
of a scary way.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
So Leon was perhaps one of the saddest of the
three cases, and that he was had only been hospitalized
for about five years. He was younger, he was thirty
eight years old, and he was the snap judgment is
great because they had his two initial graduate assistants on,
Richard Bonnier and Ron Hoppey, so like real firsthand experience

(25:27):
on the podcast, and they were saying that he was
the one that broke their heart the most because he
was the one that most likely could have been rehabilitated,
and it just tore them up that they and they
liked him a lot. He was a real personable guy
and it was very engaging with his stories and they
really thought that they could have helped him had it

(25:48):
not been you know, in part by what happened with Rokeach.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Which is sad because that means that Rokeach made things
much much worse. Yeah, these people, and that's something to
really understand. That there were three men who were living,
you know, their delusional lives in this statemental hospital, but
they were generally unmolested until they were dragged into this
study and messed with like in ways that you just
don't do to other people, you know, and that their

(26:14):
lives probably were worse, far worse than they would have
been had they never met Milton Roki.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah. So Leon's deal was his mother was almost certainly
schizophrenic as well. And had delusions, religious delusions. So he
was raised in a household with these with basically a
religious fanatic, and that impacted him from the very beginning.
Of course, he was ended up diagnosed with schizophrenia as well,

(26:44):
but growing up, I mean in that kind of environment, definitely,
I think led to the Christ thing for sure.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, And he had like there was a time where
he was living a normal life. He served in World
War Two, he worked at different jobs back in Detroit,
he tried to go to college. He was trying to
make a life for himself, but he suffered from fatigue,
which I looked up is apparently a really tough comorbidity
with psychotic disorders, and it's like got a terrible positive

(27:16):
feedback where you know, the more tired you get, the
worshier disorder is, and the worship disorder is, the harder
it can be to sleep, and it's just not good.
So he had that, and then he also started hearing
voices himself that we're telling him that he was Jesus Christ,
and that didn't really jibe very well with his mother's
own religious fanaticism because he saw that she was, you know,

(27:39):
worshiping these other what he considered idols, and he went
on a bit of a violent tear once, removing all
the pictures of the saints and breaking all of the
figurines and all that stuff, and demanding that his mother
worship him as Jesus Christ, and threatening that as she didn't,
he would strangle her. And so that was enough to

(28:00):
get him locked up for good. He'd already been locked
up one time for a brief period, and then about
six months after that he was locked up from then
until the time that he met Milton roe Keach, right.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
And that was Walton goggins.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Man.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Sorry.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
So he he went by not Leon, and again Leon
was a fake name that ro Keach gave him for
the book. But he went by doctor Domino Dominorum at
rex reserum simplest Christianist, purist mentalist doctor, which is Latin
for lord of lords, king of King's simple Christian boy psychiatrist.

(28:36):
But he asked everyone to call him Rex for short, and.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
They said thanks sure.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
And he was he was, like you said, like the
most probably the most personable. He liked Joseph. He was
very sharp too, but also like from a very early
stage he saw quite clearly what Roe Keach was trying
to do, and he thought that it was morally repugnant,
that it was not a nice thing to do to somebody,

(29:04):
that you shouldn't mess with people like that, and he
said as much multiple times throughout the study.

Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, so this is when he hires those two grad assistants,
is when he finds the guys, gets this experiment going
in earnest and you know, his hypothesis was that if
I can have these three men confront one another about
them being the real Christ, that it could rock them

(29:30):
into what he saw as reality and get them out
of these delusions. And that didn't happen. Well, it didn't
happen at all through the experiment, But initially they what
they did was they really dug in, and they each
had their own way of doing so, but they each
dug in and said no, no, no, I am the

(29:51):
real Christ. And they each had different sort of methods
of dealing with the others, but none of them wavered initially.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
No. And it was really, really it was kind of
in and of itself, just that finding that not only
did they not have their identity shattered, but they just
rebuilt and reinforced their identities. However, they could find a
way to do it to their own satisfaction. That's a
pretty big psychological finding in and of itself, you know,

(30:19):
although it doesn't seem worth putting these men through that
just to find that out.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
You know, Yeah, for sure, I think Joseph said. Joseph
was more one to sort of laugh it off. He said,
there's nothing wrong. Yesterday I knew I was what I am. Today,
I am what I am. I'm not worried about losing
my identity. And we also should point out that Joseph,
and this was portrayed in the movie too by Peter Dinklage.

(30:46):
He was spoke with an English accent. He thought he
was convinced himself that he was from England, that he
was descendant of royalty, and that the hospital was an
English stronghold.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
Don't think I didn't notice you just slipped Peter Inklige
in there.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
I know that only leaves one more, so I don't
need to do the third.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
So one of the other things about Joseph was his
interpretation of why they were there in this study. Why
the three of these men had been brought together was
so that they could sort out with the other two
that they weren't Christ, that he was the one who
was actually Christ, so he could do his work here
on earth better without having these two basically harassing him

(31:27):
or whatever. So then Leon, like I was saying, Leon,
was the one who kind of saw the most through
ro Keach's saw ro Kech's intentions and saw that they
were just wrong. And like Clyde, I think Clyde said
that that they were a rerise, that's what he considered

(31:50):
the other two, or a hick. Joseph said, you know,
I am who I am, and also, by the way,
we all know that I'm really God. And the Leon
he said that, he said the the other two were
instrumental gods. They were hallowed out gods. They were possibly
dead already, and machines were operating them and making them
say these things. But even in that like, he wasn't

(32:12):
attacking them personally. It was what he felt forced to
explain his position, and so that's what he said his
position was. But as he was saying this, he would
turn to Joseph. He would turn to Clyde, and he
would say, you know, I mean this, you know, respectfully,
I don't mean to be to tear you down. Whatever
your belief is your belief and I don't want it.

(32:34):
I'm not trying to take it from you. I have
my beliefs and you have your beliefs, and that's good enough.
And so through that kind of like truce that was
kind of established between these three men, they basically kept
the researchers at bay. The researchers would try to come
in and bust things up and get them to like

(32:54):
argue or you know, make them confront one another. But
if when left alone, those three men just generally did
not argue about who was God. They avoided the subject
altogether and just let the other ones be and just
kind of entered this live and let live kind of position,
which I think is pretty heartening, you know it is.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
And that was one of the things that came through
on that snap judgment with the two research assistants was
that their take was that these men were generally, like
after the initial sort of denial stuff, that they were
generally pretty respectful and wanted to give each other the
space to believe that they were christ if they wanted to.

(33:35):
And what that showed was empathy and that's something that
none of them saw coming at this point. Rokeach is
being kind of hassled by these two grad assistants saying, hey, listen, man,
these guys are kind of okay with this, and you're
taking this thing too far. And eventually he was he

(33:55):
ignored them basically, and eventually they quit before this phase starts.
Oh okay, And because they didn't agree with what was
going on, because they saw these three guys that were
generally respectful for one another, they saw ro Kech would
do things like a journalist wrote a story about them
at one point that was obviously not flattering at all

(34:16):
to the three Christs, and Rokeach read this aloud to
them like he was just trying to push their buttons
and initiate this conflict, and the two grat assistants eventually
are like, we're out of here.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah. That story, in particular, it was about how ro
Keach was treating three psychotic men who thought they were
christ and to read that to them is it's really mean. Again.
He was trying to see what would happen if they
were confronted with their identities being considered delusional by other people,
and Leon in particular didn't like that. He said that

(34:48):
a doctor is or a person who's supposed to be
a doctor, is supposed to lift up, build up, guide,
direct inspire. He said that what you've just done is deploring,
and roe Keach said, you know, deploring. I've try leveled
seventy five miles in snow and storm to come see you.
And Lee had said, yes, but what was your intention
in coming to see me, sir? And so he didn't

(35:09):
put up with Roketch's bs at all, which is pretty cool,
you know, to hold delusions and to have your delusions
attacked like that, and then to be able to push
back but also in still a respectful way. Is I
think Leon's one of these one of the great unsung
heroes of twentieth century America.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Totally. Should we take a break before phase two?

Speaker 1 (35:30):
Yeah, I say we take a break man, all right.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
We'll be right back. So before stage two starts, when

(36:02):
things get really unethical, well not before this was kind
of part of the unethical. The two grat assistant assistants
had left, and he hires this new young pretty woman
as a grad assistant and basically tells her to flirt
with Leon and to see if he can make her
make him fall in love with her. And that's exactly
what happened, and Leon fell in love with her and

(36:25):
was destroyed when he basically came to realize on his
own that that was never gonna happen for him.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
Man, it's just brutal keeps getting better and better.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, when those when those grad assistants said you've gone
too far, I think Rokeach probably said something along the
lines of too far. I haven't begun to go too far.
Richard gears to watch What's next? Yeah, but there was like.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Upbeat music, Yeah, like Salisbury Hill.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Exactly. That is exactly what I was thinking of. Thank
you for putting it into words, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
So what happened next?

Speaker 1 (36:58):
So what happened next is as follows. They're Rokets basically
saw like, these guys are not going for this. For this,
the level of prodding that I've been doing, I'm going
to really kind of turn up the heat. And he
wondered if you took the members people that were part
of these patient's delusional belief systems and personified them, like

(37:20):
pretended you were them, say he started communicating with them
through letters or whatever, Yeah, what would happen? Could you
conceivably get these people to abandon their delusions under the
guidance of these authority figures that were actually part of
their delusions. It's really kind of mind boggling when you
lay it out in like a float chart like that.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
You know, yeah, that this like just kept getting worse
and worse. So he identified these authority figures in all
three of them. I guess to his credit, he laid
off of Clyde because, I mean, I don't know if
it was so much empathy as it was, he knew
he wasn't getting very far with.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
Clyde, or maybe he was scared of what would happen
if Clyde.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Maybe yeah, because Clyde was definitely could be a little scary.
But so he laid off of Clyde. But he found
that Joseph said that a superintendent of the hospital named
doctor Yoder yod E r. Was his dad. And Leon
said that he had a wife. He had a couple.
His wife the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was an uncle

(38:22):
reincarnated as Michael, the archangel archangel arch angel.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Those are two different. So he was married to the
Blessed Virgin Mary and had that uncle.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, he had those two.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
But there was he wasn't married to his uncle. He
had another wife later on named Madam Yetti Woman after
he stopped being married to the Blessed Virgin Mary because
his uncle, Michael the Archangel married Blessed the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Right, it sounds a little confusing, but when you're dealing
with stuff like this, I think it just has to
be a little confusing.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
Well, the upshot of it is Rokeach started posing as
as Madame Yetti Woman and started a letter writing campaign
as Madame Yetti Woman, basically reaching out to say, Hey, Leon,
I just want to say hi, and I'm thinking of
you and let's start talking. So there was correspondence that

(39:17):
was established as as Leon's delusion like wife Madame Yetti Woman.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah, and we should point out that he supposedly had
gotten not supposedly, I think he did get the hospital's
permission to sign off on this as long as he said, listen,
it's all going to be positive stuff. I'm not going
to be writing them letters saying to go start a
fight or anything like that. So I'm gonna send them
positive message messages and I'm going to stop if this

(39:46):
becomes upsetting to these guys. And so they said, sure, go.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
Ahead, yeah, and so he did. He did go ahead
first with Leon, I believe, and by this time Leon
had One of the things that he had done to
transform his identity was to become doctor Righteous Ideal Dung
or doctor ri I Dong. And apparently the head nurse
asked him directly, like can I please not call you
doctor Dong? And he said, yes, you can call me Ri,

(40:12):
but everybody else called him doctor ri I Dong. And
he did this, Rokeach concluded, to basically make himself not
worthy of being harassed anymore. But he was still secretly god,
like he knew he was God. He was just pretending
to be something else. And during that period he became
married to Madame Yetti woman. So ro Keech started addressing

(40:33):
letters is to doctor ri I Dong and basically saying,
you know, here's a dollar, why don't you go buy
yourself something nice in the hospital store and then share
the change with Clyde and Joseph and or. One of
the things that they would do is they would take
turns between the three patients. Is who was going to
lead the session that day. And one of the things

(40:55):
you did when you led the session was you chose
what song everybody sung at the beginning and at the
end of the session, which is adorable, and so Madame
Yetti Woman suggested that he choose Onward Christian Soldiers, and
he chose Onward Christian Soldiers, and so like to rokech
he's seeing like there's this there's like an actual influence

(41:16):
that is being exerted by this delusional figure. And also
it demonstrates that that Leon is showing like he definitely
believes Madame Yetti Woman's a person for sure.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
Yeah, And eventually what broke it was as posing as
Madame Yetti Woman asked Leon to stop using the name
doctor Dung. The name thing seems to have been a
sticking point with a lot of people. Or maybe he
just thought that that would since he held onto that
so strongly, that would have been like the toughest thing
to make him do.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
And.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
That was sort of it. He was asked about the letter,
and Leon doesn't really say anything about asking to be
to drop the name doctor Doung. He just starts talking
more and more about God being both male and female,
insane and insane and said I don't care for the
insanity of God, and then said I don't want any
more letters and basically kind of shut it down.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
And so with those with Leon's letters in particular, there
was a couple of like really sad things, like the
whole thing was sad to begin with. But there's this
passage in the book where Leon gets a letter and
roe Keach realizes that he's holding back tears and he
starts to ask him, like, why are you, like, you know,
are you happy? He said, yes, I'm very happy. It's

(42:32):
a very pleasant feeling to have someone think of you
like like he was. He was moved to tears by
the idea that Madame Yetti woman was writing to him
and talking about caring for him and sending him money
to go buy himself things with. And rather than just
say like, oh, we might want to back this off,
ro Kech used it to step that up and arranged

(42:55):
for a meeting with Madame Yetti Woman. Yeah, but there
was no Madame Yetti woman who was supposed to show up.
He was just he was going to get stood up
from the outset. But still Leon went to go meet
Madame Yetti Woman and had his heart broken. I think
it was after that that he stopped responding to the letters.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah, and you know, when he said I don't want
these letters anymore. I don't want to receive them. You
would think that that's when Rokeach would say, all right, well,
let's just stop this all together. But he didn't because
he remembered that Leon had another authority figure in his life,
which was his uncle, George Bernard Brown aka the archangel Michael,

(43:37):
and so he said, hey, I'll have someone call and
pose as his uncle now. And this didn't work from
the beginning, Leon, I guess the voice was just so
far off, or maybe Leon was just really wise to
it at this point said you know, no, no, no,
this isn't this is even close to the voice, goodbye,
and hung up. And then they asked him about the call,

(43:59):
and he said, I don't believe in mental torture, sir.
So it seems like he was sort of onto him
at this point, or you know, it was on to
him from the beginning, but onto him about this ruse.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
I don't think he was on to him from the beginning.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
I think that he no, I mean from the beginning
of the experiments, he was wearing, Oh.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
I gotcha, I see what you're saying. But yeah, but
it's really easy to forget because you're reading roe Keach's
accounts that these men weren't in on the idea that
it was from roe Keach. They believed that these letters
were coming from sure their delusional figures.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, that's the whole point, which makes it.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Just even more gut wrenching when you stop and remember that,
you know.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
So then he says, okay, all right, Leon's done. I'm
done writing letters to him. Who can I write letters
to next? And he moves on to Joseph.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Right, Yeah, so this was the one where the superintendent,
the fictional doctor Yoder, was the authority figure for Joseph,
who he saw as a father figure. And so of
course Rokeach is gonna play up this whole father figure
thing in the letters, saying that he loved him like
his son. He just wanted the best things for him.

(45:05):
And if you remember from the original sort of quick bio,
Joseph's father was awful and abusive, So he's really playing
into his deepest sort of insecurities here.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yeah, he said, be assured that I will always love you,
just exactly like a father who deeply loves his own son.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
It's really tough to even research this stuff.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
Yeah. So so just like with Leon, through these letters,
as doctor Yoder, he tried to get Joseph to start
doing stuff, innocuous stuff at first, like saying stop. He didn't,
he stopped saying that he was from England and he
was from Quebec, started going to church services, that kind
of stuff. So there was an influence on Joseph, just

(45:46):
like there was on Leon, using their delusional characters or
delusional friends, authority figures, whatever. And I think even doctor
Yoder prescribed for the fake Doctor Yoder prescribed placebo for
Joseph's stomach ailments. He had, like digestive problems or stomach hurt,
and these placebo pills just fixed him right up.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah, so the stomach pills placebo supposedly worked. And then
he said, all right, well that worked, so I'm going
to give you pills to basically cure your mind. And
if you want to fix fix yourself for good, take
these pills. Which is I mean, this is so far
off the charts of unethical, like I can't even describe

(46:32):
how far off the charts it is. And he said, basically,
I think he said he gave him an ultimatum. He
says I'm only going to continue to give these pills
that will supposedly make your mind right if you admit
that you're in a mental hospital. And it's not an
English stronghold. And Joseph finally said, like, sign something, and
Joseph said no, I'm not going to sign this, and

(46:55):
he cut off this placebo medication that he believed might
be fixing his brain. And it kind of petered out
after that, and it was just like, it's just brutal
to think about these guys going through this like hope
that they're getting better and it was all fake.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
Yeah, he apparently stopped writing to doctor Yoder and moved
on to JFK, started writing letters to JFK asking to
be one of his speech writers, because remember he was
a writer as well, right, So ro Keech is like, okay,
all right, let's see what's next. Oh, nothing's next. This
is the end of the line. He finally realized, like, okay,
this is not going anywhere. Not only had he not

(47:32):
at all moved Clyde's delusions or Joseph's delusions. The only
persons whose delusions had changed at all was Leon's, and
his had just gotten more complex and intricate, certainly not
any closer to reality. They got further away from reality
because of this influence from ro Kechen is his experiment,

(47:54):
and he has like a pretty rich little admission in
the book that he says that we do not know
to what extent our very presence, behavior and questions may
have influenced the results obtained, which is bizarre to say,
because the whole point of the experiment was to influence
these people through this experiment. So it's a really weird

(48:17):
thing that even put it in there from some of
the stuff that I've read kind of picking apart this
book at the end, it really just kind of peters
out and like he's just kind of slashing in the
air with his sword trying to figure out, you know,
what the point was of all this stuff, and even
without like a satisfying conclusion or end, and ended up

(48:38):
getting published in nineteen sixty four and became like a
really big success in the field psychology, but also got
widely criticized right out of the gate because even though
this was mid century America and we're talking about mental
patients in mid century America who have very little rights
or were treated very poorly, like there was still like

(48:58):
a lot of people around, Really, you don't do this
to human beings. This is not okay, not everybody did,
but some, you know, some critics definitely came out immediately.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Yeah. It took Rokeich a long time, though, to really
kind of come to terms with what he had done,
and he eventually did though, about seventeen years later. They
reissued the book in nineteen eighty one, and he wrote
a new ForWord. He admitted in interviews in other places
as well, that he was also, you know, innocent, suffering

(49:31):
from godlike delusions and that he was playing God with
these men and regretted it. He regretted publishing. He said,
I regret having written and published a study when I did.
I don't know if that means that he wishes he
could have reflected more on it or what.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
But yeah, I don't know either.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
He did sort of recant and say he didn't do
the right thing. It's worth pointing out that this was
six years into his suffering from spinal cants, so I
don't know if that had, you know, knowing the end
was near for him had something to do with his
sort of self reflection. But he eventually died in nineteen

(50:09):
eighty eight at the age of seventy after a thirteen
year battle with spinal cancer, and you know, left the
social psychology world sort of rocked. Like like I said,
I studied this in college, and it became sort of
like the Stanford prison experiment, right, it became worth studying,

(50:30):
but not for the reasons that they initially launched the
study to begin with.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
No, he finally figured out the point of the book,
and the point of the book where was for him
to figure out that it was unethical what he was doing,
and you finally come to terms with what he'd done
to these poor men, and that you have a right
to just be left alone and not have your identity
challenged no matter what you believe you are who you
believe you are. And so he actually changed his methods.
His general belief in the idea of belief systems remained

(50:59):
the same, but he changed his tactics in that he
got involved in self confrontation, where you try to present
people with you know, self examination where they would examine
what their values were, what their beliefs were, and then
they would kind of be challenged on that like, Okay,
you believe in freedom, you place a high value on freedom,

(51:19):
but you also rated equality pretty low. But isn't equality
freedom for everybody? So you care about your freedom but
not other people's freedom. How does that really jibe? And
then the hope was that they would go back and
self reflect and be like, no, I really do care
about freedom, I do care about other people. Maybe I
should care about more about equality and improve as a person.
And that's ultimately how he ended up making his name

(51:40):
starting in the seventies.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah, and I gotta tell you, when you read some
of his regret about it, he says things like or
he said things like you know, and in the end,
someone was cured and it was me. It's it just
that all bothered me a little bit too. How he
he still made it about himself somehow, even though he

(52:04):
did say he regretted it and everything. I just I
never heard as much regret about these three men and
just and putting them in the positions of like they
were the ones who helped me out in the end.
It was just I didn't like that.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
I know exactly what you mean. It just it's still
smacks of self involvement. And you get to see, Yeah,
and also like what happened to these men. After the
experiment was done, they're just cast right back into the
general populations, right, like used clean nex basically to deal
with what they'd just been through. It's just it's just
rotten all around for sure. And at the very least

(52:42):
it does exist to make Milton Roekeach feel better. Right,
You got anything else? No?

Speaker 2 (52:49):
I mean, if you want to see some of his
later work that you were talking about the value stuff,
there are all kinds of really wacky YouTube videos from
people about that stuff.

Speaker 1 (52:57):
Nice And if you want to see the movie that
they remade about this, don't. Yeah, Well, since I said
don't see that movie, it's time, of course for listener
mail everybody.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
I'm gonna call this a guy who has the same
step on a crack thing as I do. Okay, this
is from Jared Miller. Hey, guys, I gotta say, Chuck
is the only other person I've heard to express the
same compulsion that I have. If I step on a
surface that is different from the majority of where I'm walking,
I try to get my other foot to have the
same sensation. This can be the line between the sidewalk segments,

(53:35):
or a traction sticker, an unpaved patch, et cetera. I
gotta say, Jared, it's the same with me. It's not
just cracks, can be anything, sure, even which part of
the foot is affected. Same with me, Dude. If I
do it on my heel, I have to do the
next one with my heel. It's very interesting. I've even
found myself doing it with the colors of tiles on
a patterned floor. Same here for me. It's about symmetrical sensations.

(54:00):
I sometimes realize I'm doing it when I'm eating and
have equal chewing time on each side. I don't do that.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
Once a chill like cherry, you're so weird.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
Yeah, you're really out there. Once I became aware of
it at a fully conscious level, I also became self
conscious about it and tried different things to break myself
of the habit. At times, it's been an extreme, as
extreme as forcing myself to maintain an even gait no
matter what. Yeah, I've done that while consciously reminding myself
that sensations are temporary and that it will even even

(54:33):
out or go away, especially if I ignore it. Thanks
for all the hours of entertainment you were in early
discovery of mine in the podcast world back in two
thousand and nine, and almost none of the shows I
started listening to back then are still going. That's our mono, Jared,
just keep doing.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
It no matter what. If everybody tells you to stop,
please God stop.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Don't quit.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
You just you don't listen.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
So that's Jared and Anaheim by way of Idaho.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Way to go, Jared from all over the.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Place or was it Iowa? I don't remember, Sorry Idaho,
I know how. The worst thing to confuse apologize.

Speaker 1 (55:08):
So let's see. If you want to get in touch
with this, like Jared did, please email us, won't you?
You can send us an email to stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Should Know News

Advertise With Us

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Chuck Bryant

Chuck Bryant

Josh Clark

Josh Clark

Show Links

AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSS

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

The Bobby Bones Show

The Bobby Bones Show

Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.