Inside the Mind of Manson: Part 3

March 21st, 1967. Charlie had both dreaded and dreamed of this day. The day was finally here. This would mean that he would have to leave his familiar surroundings of the institution he had called home for the past six years.

Charlie walked down the long dark corridor of McNeil Island Penitentiary to freedom. I tried, he thought. I asked to stay. In front of him the heavy metal doors loomed.

The doors slowly creaked open and Charles Manson stepped out into the humid air of the 1967 Summer of Love and made his way down to San Francisco. It was in this environment of cultural revolution that Charlie started his family.

The Psychology of True Crime and Human Depravity

All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to our first ever cultish true crime series. This is the continuation of our series. We are this is our third episode into this whole journey into the mind of Manson.

We are focusing in on really the formulation of Charlie and Charles Manson's as known as the Manson family. The environment, the summer of love and all that took place from 1967 to 1969. So much took place within two years.

We're going to try and get that in two episodes. We're going to try. So, as always, Andrew, do we give you a name for the art? Do we give you a true crime name? You're the super sleuth. I thought we gave you.

Did we give you a special name? That is totally a true crime. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll give you super sleuth. You're a detective. Yes. There you are. You are. You are one of the detectives on call figuring out all the different mysteries and intricacies of this crime that has fascinated.

Really, America is part of American culture. It's why I was just thinking about this.

It's captivated, captivated. In the era of Manson, he would like to hold people captive.

Yeah. And here we are. 2020 in the craziest year that I've known pretty much. We've got we've got pandemics. We've got murder hornets and all the racial tension. There's so many similarities, especially what we're going to kind of delve into.

Right. So as always, we have Dr. Robin Hall. Hi. With you. And we actually gave you a name.

We call you mine. The mine hunter. Yes. I love that. So I'm aware that with pride.

Yes. It's almost like a fighter name, like Robin Mine Hunter. Oh, yeah. Yes. So as we discussed before, you have your doctorate is in clinical psychology. Your primary focus is really trauma. That's right.

Yes. And you have a huge interest and fascination just as a whole, almost a recreation, which is a fascination to with true crime. And a lot of people do. Yeah. And so just real quickly, I mean, you may have talked about is about this when it comes just a true crime in general, because this is our first time delving into it.

There's tons of podcasts out there. Right. What's your fascination about it yourself? And why do you think like true crime really is a pop is almost a culture in and of itself? Yeah. Let's talk about that just real quickly.

And then we'll jump into this environment of Manson.

Well, I think you're absolutely right. And I think my fascination with it is probably akin to most people's fascination with it. Just the total depravity of human nature. It's like a train wreck that you can't really pull your eyes from.

And I love the psychology behind it. You know, figuring out what drives people, what motivates people to participate and and act in the ways that they do. And when you get individuals like Manson, who were so good at understanding the psychology of others and manipulating that psychology for somebody like me, it's just utterly fascinating.

And then the fallout of that, I think we see we see a lot of God's common grace. We don't recognize that. And then when we look at somebody like Manson, you you really do see the juxtaposition of, yeah, this is God restraining people.

And this is what it looks like when he doesn't. Right. For me that, you know, that's really the fascination that I have with true crime. And, you know, we were talking earlier. Yeah. I mean, Jesus being convicted, tried and convicted as guilty is really the ultimate true crime story.

You know, for so for people, even though like, you know, nonbelieving people wouldn't identify their fascination as, you know, looking at total depravity or use those words. But really, we're all drawn to it for that reason.

I think we see ourselves in it. Yes. And, you know, it's fascinating. You know, like I've even asked myself the question, you know, oh, my goodness, you know, like what would it take for me to get there?

You know, and not that I imagine myself as Manson, but it is it's like a train wreck. You can't really put your eyes from him. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

And so, yeah, I would definitely agree. I think that one of the things, too, is that when you look at just the fascination, I think that people like people have were creating, I would say, from a Christian standpoint, obviously, that's how I view it with our podcast is based on.

That's the only really way you can give a true accounting for making sense of the world, that it's only through understanding a total depravity or the fact that sin, that we live in a sinful and fallen world where you can give an accounting where true crime makes sense.

Right. So when you look at someone like whether it's Charles Manson or Ted Bundy or almost even you go, because I was thinking about this the other day, too, that cult with cultish, which primarily do with cults, they're celebrity leaders like Jim Jones, David Koresh, kind of these celebrity names.

And even true crime kind of has a celebrity to like Ted Bundy. Like what are some other popular names to John Wayne Gacy?

Oh, my gosh. I'm going to Jeffrey Dahmer. Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey Dahmer, the Whitechapel killer whose name is going to completely escape me at the moment. Yeah, they're they're really, really famous people. When you think of like horrific crimes, there are certain images, faces that pop in mind.

And that's you know, that's really interesting from a psychological standpoint, because you hear narcissism. And what you know, what drives that is this like really at the bottom of this kind of grandiose sense of self is an ego to use a secular psychology term.

That's just not there.

Right.

So you've got somebody like Charles Manson who grew up in a situation where he was unwanted by really everybody in his blood family. So he decided to go out and create his own and to make himself the leader to feel important.

And you see a lot of comment like BTK, Dennis Rader, the BTK killer buying torture kill. He wanted credit for what he did, what you know, after he was caught. And it really was his arrogance that got him caught.

He was talking with one of the detectives. They were communicating with him through the newspaper. And the lead detective on the case convinced him that he could send in a floppy disk drive and they would have no way of tracing it back to who it was, which was, of course, inaccurate.

And that's how he was caught. So as soon as he was caught and they started interrogating him, he really didn't falter at all. He immediately confessed and he wanted credit for everything he had done. And you see that a lot with serial killers.

They want credit for their crimes. And if you kind of tie that back into ego, you've got somebody that really underneath all that, like superficial arrogance believes that they're worthless. They don't understand they're made in the image of God.

Truly.

Why wouldn't they? You know, they want to be famous. They want to be loved. They want to be adored. And even if that's going to be through this really infamous way, it doesn't it doesn't matter.

Manson’s Prison Years and the Summer of Love

OK.

No, that's really good. So let's just let's just jump into the story of Manson. We've got a good foundation and this is definitely so much to unpack here. So the first thing that fascinated me, I want to get your take on this.

And Andrew, you can give me your take, too, is that I was thinking about this. So Charlie spent a good amount of time prior to 1967 just being in prison. Really, in a sense that you talk about cults, how they isolate people from the outside world.

Charlie experienced that at expense of he experienced that at expense of the state.

Right.

So imagine right now it's 2020. We have so many crazy things right now. So imagine you go to prison. So you just get a year sentence. And it's a 2019, say, June. You get a six and a half month sentence or not six and a half months.

Let's just say you get out around this year sentence. And so you get out around this time and you're here. And all of a sudden you see people wearing face masks everywhere. The news there's riots. There's riots going back and forth.

Things are on fire. There's things the news about murder hornets. And just up and up people. And you're thinking, what happened?

Right.

But just real quickly. But going back to Charles Manson. You guys haven't listened to the first two episodes. We talked a lot about his upbringing and what happened during his prison. So what do you think.

The aspect of just being in prison for a long extended amount of time. Being in prison and all of a sudden being thrown out of prison when he wanted to stay there.

Sure.

Then going into an environment like 1967. The summer of love of this real time of culture revolution. There's all these different things were going back and forth. What do you think? How do you think that affected the psyche of Manson?

Just the isolation for the extended period of time. Given all the troubles they had prior to that.

Right.

So I think like isolation away from the culture is one thing. But he wasn't isolated within the context of prison.

Right.

Right.

You know, and Andrew, you and I were talking about this. He really he didn't want to be paroled. He actually asked the parole board to let him remain in prison.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think people want to believe that that's because, you know, deep down he had this empathetic understanding of the true monster that he was. And if he was released, then if he wasn't released, then maybe he wouldn't go on to become this monster.

But I think in truth, what what was really going on is that he had become very, very good at manipulating the people around him. He knew the environment he was in. He knew the people that he was working with, you know, the other inmates, the clinical staff, you know, prison staff.

And he flourished there. I mean, by all accounts, that's why he was paroled. You know, he was the model inmate, model prisoner. And he had made progress, quote unquote. So why would you want to leave an environment that you understand so well?

You know, it's really quite scary if you think about leaving this this very familiar place that he's kind of got all of his ducks in a row. And he he doesn't have to work so hard because he knows the psychology of the people there, the way the system works.

And now he's he's coming into this brand new world. And, you know, outside of newspapers, you know, he wouldn't really have known what was going on. So I think it's important, too, that, you know, just like now we've got this huge cultural revolution going on, you know, in 2020.

There was this huge cultural revolution going on in the 60s. You know, we were moving away from family driven households. You know, people were preaching, you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll, which was new, you know, essentially.

And we're going to talk a little bit later about Dennis Wilson and the Beach Boys and kind of, you know, his connection with Manson and the, you know, internal evolution he was going through and why that really made Manson what he was preaching.

Yeah. So interesting to Dennis. But for Charlie, any environment that he would have come into was going to be new. Right. So he in the same way that he learned to be adaptive in prison. He saw this revolution occurring and he capitalized on it.

That's it right there. Like, imagine coming out of prison, you're there for six years. Right. And the society that you have been that you had been formed to is a society that's changing so fast. So once he gets out, he goes, well, where do I want to go?

Do I want to go to, let's say, I'm just gonna use Texas as an example where everyone's super conservative, the opposite of how he is and how he grew up. Or am I going to go to Haight-Ashbury where people are accepting these thoughts and this type of culture that I've kind of already been living for this time?

I'm the master. The master is going to go to Haight-Ashbury now and I'm going to go ahead and, you know.

Create my, you know, my domain.

Yeah, exactly.

So a couple of things too, just we mentioned the summer of love. There are a couple of things culturally that kind of really formulated the hotbed of that environment. Like I said, we were talking about the song, the infamous song, A Ballad of San Francisco.

Are you going to San Francisco? The infamous ballad. And I'm not going to try and say the lyrics. I'm not going to try and say it because I'm neither a lyricist nor a singer. But that was just an example.

You had really influential artists around that time. I watched a documentary. It's really good. Called Charles Manson, Music from an Unsound Mind. It's on free on Amazon Prime. It's really good. So there you go, Amazon.

You got a plug right there. Check out the documentary. It's really, really intriguing. But you had people not only like Dennis Wilson from the Beats Boys, but you had people like Neil Young, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane.

Like the really infamous, some of the most infamous people in music history. Some of the biggest influencers. It was all this time around the summer of love. I think one of the real pinpoints that was a couple of years prior when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

That was kind of one of the turning points where people really did not trust their government as far as the official story goes. That's a whole other episode in itself. But that was a real pinpoint where not only that affected the culture, but it also affected how people felt about the Vietnam War.

So you had the Vietnam War going on. You had the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which is one of the pinnacle turning points. Because prior to that, the American culture really kind of had this very Tinseltown, Saturday evening post, Norm Rockwell sort of feel to it.

And this was the glass ceiling being shattered as far as the JFK assassination. And then obviously in the middle of this period from 1967, 1969, you had the assassination too of Martin Luther King Jr.

So you had that. And so you had all these different things going on. But I think the pinnacle point of the summer of love started primarily when JFK was assassinated. And then he had all this point where people were trying to delve and find meaning.

And so go ahead with it.

You really have this innocence lost kind of concept. Right. So you move out of the home where mom stays home and raises kids. That kid's dad goes to work too. We don't we don't as a culture need to abide by that structure.

Nuclear family.

Yeah. Nuclear family. Right. So JFK is assassinated. The Vietnam people start really questioning what business we have in Vietnam. Right. So that that trust, that kind of that inherent trust people were giving to their leadership and their government wasn't there anymore.

They felt like they couldn't trust what what they were being told. And you see this really just running away from those traditional what really are like biblical views, you know, of the structure of the family and culture towards, I mean, anything else.

The idealization of it doesn't matter. You know, free love, free, freed with freedom with your body. You know, experimentation with drugs. And I mean, a lot of drugs, really psychedelic drugs. And we'll talk about that a lot today because it was a huge part of what Manson used to manipulate his followers.

But I think that the point is, is this innocence lost and Manson never had that innocence. Right. So he knew that world. And I think that's why hate Ashbery really appealed to him, like what you were saying, Andrew.

So why would I go to Texas when I could go to kind of the, you know, the epicenter of this revolution that I'm as far as I'm concerned, as Manson, I'm already living in. Exactly.

Yeah. And so one of the things that always fascinated me, too. So in Hate Ashbery, when he is there, one of the things that Charlie did is that, you know, as much time as he spent in prison, he wasn't he didn't he didn't just he got he got very familiar with his environment.

His strength was manipulating people. But it's almost if you think about there's my one of my favorite books, Sun Tzu, The Art of War, when it talks about knowing your enemy, knowing the battlefield. So one of the things he did when Charlie, because he said he got out of prison and he worked his way down to San Francisco, is that he spent a good amount of time just walking around and just observing his environment.

The whole place was a hotbed of colds. So I watched one or two documentaries on the Summer of Love. And just the footage you see, you see like Hare Krishnas, you see all sorts of people that look like some sort of Celtic druid on one corner.

You see a bunch of scantily clad hippies on one corner trying to propagate this. So you just see all these different religious groups and you have all these different people trying to say, hey, our way is the truth, kind of do this sort of thing.

Almost in a way, kind of almost me, maybe with the Apostle Paul, when he walked into a place like Ephesus, where you have this whole broad variety of paganism. So, but here it is, Charlie, he's going around and just observing, looking around, seeing what makes people tick.

And so one of the things that he really became aware of was LSD. Which is interesting enough, because we talked about current environment and things going on today when it comes, especially now with 2020 and current events with racial tensions.

But one of the big things that really has taken a huge resurgence is the interest in psychedelics. And from a spirit, we've talked a couple of times that when it goes to the UFO phenomena, but it's also, I think, just culturally, it's making a huge comeback.

As far as doing that, and especially, you know, you work in clinical psychology. So that's one of the things that Charlie got familiar with and understood the power of LSD. This is a huge part of the culture in the 70s.

But talk to us real quickly just about, so people understand from a psychological standpoint, what these psychedelics do to the person. Why would that be appealing to someone like Charles Manson, knowing his love and ability to manipulate?

Because that's where his strength was.

Absolutely. So LSD, lysergic acid diethyl thalamide, is what the abbreviation stands for. So it's a psychedelic drug. It's a hallucinogenic drug. And actually, you know, just to touch on what you were saying, Jerry, we're using it in research right now to treat post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety.

And the research actually has some very interesting results. There's some promising results. And I think the results are promising for the same reason we're going to talk about right now. Why Charlie thought, you know, saw what they could be used for and then use them.

So one of the things that happens when you are under the influence of a psychedelic drug is you become extremely suggestible. So your environment is manipulated by essentially the poison, because that's what you're taking is poison.

It's what causes the hallucinations. You can have visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, tactile hallucinations. So, you know, feeling things on your skin. You could even have gustatory hallucinations.

You can smell things that aren't there. So when you're in that state, you become extremely suggestible. So somebody who's already really good at manipulating people who aren't under the influence is going to see a substance like this and what it does in terms of making people vulnerable.

And, oh, yeah, I mean, this is magic, you know. So and as we talk a little bit more about what Charles Charlie Manson's like specific ideas were, you know, his whole helter skelter and really what his, you know, quote unquote theology was, you'll see that it would probably take being under the influence of a psychedelic to believe some of that stuff.

So he experimented himself. But also we'll see, too, when he used psychedelics like LSD with his followers, a lot of the time he wasn't ingesting the substance. He was just doling it out.

You dished it out. Right. Making sure they take it.

Which happens a lot of times in the world of cults, where usually the leader will propagate an ideology to which he will which he'll tell the followers to do one thing. But then they don't follow through with it.

Right. Right. So like Osama bin Laden, for example, he would tell his followers, you know, blow yourselves up, commit jihad and you'll go and have 72 virgins. But why didn't he lead the charge in that?

He had everyone else do it for him, even though it is wonderful and glorious thing.

Right.

That's just one extreme example. But you always see that all the time where it's so it's always you do as I say. Not as I do. Not as I do.

Right.

There's something I think that's really important before we move on. It's like what's what was the spiritual climate of people then? Right. So I like the term that you use when you're referring to LSD.

You said the term magic. All right. So so here's Walter Martin. This is a quote in regards to the countercultural movement, the sexual revolution, he says, referring to the people of the countercultural movement.

He says they're tired of everything having to be examined by the empirical method and of all the truth and validity being placed in one category. They're looking for something outside for reality, and they are revolting against that system.

There's a rebellion, secondly, against materialism in an affluent society, which has given us so much. The young people of our day have turned to drugs and they have turned to alcohol and they have turned to sex.

They have turned to rebellion in multiple forms. For what reason? Because they are turning off the affluency of a society which has so much so little concern for many. What are they going to turn to some kind of reality to fill the vacuum of the soul?

And Satan stands ready to supply that reality. That's the spiritual climate of the time during the sexual revolution.

So and just to to to kind of expand on that. If if you are under the influence of a drug that causes the walls to breathe, you know, you've got marble tiling swimming. You know, you become very open to the suggestions of somebody that might be more magical, you know, magically oriented.

So it's less difficult for you to believe that. And we'll talk about this again in detail. But Manson believed that during Helter Skelter, they were going to travel to the center of the earth. That's where they were going to hide out until everything was over.

That becomes a lot more believable when the walls are breathing around you. Right. So it it it was just a really a perfect kind of mechanism for him to use to suggest some of this more fantastical stuff.

Timothy Leary, LSD, and the Countercultural Search for Meaning

Right. So, again, people are trying to have escape to this utopia. They are one. It was the San Francisco wasn't enough. They then had to ingest LSD while they're in San Francisco. So one thing, Andrew, you meant you mentioned and in the documentary mentioned this too.

And I watched it is Timothy Leary. Yeah. You just you can introduce me to him when you're doing your research. He had his very infamous saying. And just tell me a little about his his thoughts and what sort of influence influence did he have?

Oh, wow. OK, so I'll try to make it fairly brief. But Timothy Leary was a Harvard psychology professor. Yes. And he and I forget who the other person that worked with him. I don't have it pulled up right now, but they pioneered the way in LSD research that they were getting, you know, funding through the education system to provide for that.

And he actually spoke at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. And he phrased the famous words, turn on, tune in and drop out. And so he spoke to all of these hippies essentially. And he gave that phrase.

And I don't mean to be derogatory when I say hippies. I'm just, you know, just describing the people of that time. Yeah. But so what we what we can see is not only was this countercultural movement supplied by like de facto, like resurgence.

Also, we have an education system that was also breathing in to this cultural environment. And I mean, if we look at nowadays, it's very similar in regards to critical race theory, intersectionality, you name it.

Breathing into the culture and also the church nowadays. But, you know, fueling the atmosphere for rebellion. But Timothy Leary many times also said he wasn't necessarily trying to create this revolution, but he is one of the main figures.

Him and Richard Alpert, who is later known as Ram Dass, who was a guru. Yeah. They were really the two main educational proponents to LSD research, the United States of America, who also did influence the countercultural movement where it's turn on.

So listen to what's going on in reality. Right. So tune in and then drop out of it. Go do your own thing. Go search for this other metaphysical type of knowledge somewhere.

Go to your happy place. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. And one of the things, too, so what you'll notice, too, if you listen to the second episode, we're talking, we spent a good amount of time talking about Charlie's time in prison. And as we noticed, there's lots of different influences that he sort of dealt.

He kind of grabbed from every little aspect of it. And so there is a book that he this one, I think it was a science fiction book or just. And but also it was like Scientology and all these other different things.

You just sort of grab and put together. And so what happened in prison, I am sort of grabbing from everything that also in the inside prison began to manifest on the outside of prison and hate aspirate all these different groups.

Like I said, he's watching all these different gurus. He is trying to say, OK, what works, what sticks, what doesn't, how can I kind of grab and put all these things together? Now I have LSD, which everyone's taken anyways.

I can figure out a way to weaponize. Now I can weaponize this to manipulate that. So it's almost sort of like I've got an expansion pack to my manipulation ability.

So I love that. That's the gamer nerd part of me. Right. The frosting to it. Yes. It's so you've got people like Timothy Leary, who, you know, by all accounts is this extremely respected. Brilliant. I mean, professor of psychology.

He is a psychologist. He's you know, he's part of this psilocybin project in the early 60s. So it's not it's not he's not a government official. He's not somebody in authority paid to be touting one way or the other.

He's an academic and people put their faith in that. Right. He's he's seen as this kind of unbiased authority figure because of that. And I'm just I'm reading here. Richard Nixon once described Leary as the most dangerous man in America.

And he actually there was when we get into the Manson's trial, the Manson and the girls tried to have tried to have their declared a mistrial because of what Richard Nixon commented about.

I'm hearing about that. Leary sounds like someone who would be on the Joe Rogan experience. Oh, easily.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure he died before Joe Rogan started doing his podcast or he probably would be.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Joe Rogan. I'd like to introduce, ladies and gentlemen, the great and powerful Timothy Leary.

So in psychology, the whole idea behind using things like a hallucinogen. And again, you know, like I said, we're we're using this right now in research. If I can escape my reality. So if I'm a combat veteran who has post-traumatic stress disorder, my everyday reality is really hellacious.

You know, the post-traumatic stress is no joke at all. You've got people who are in kind of a chronic state of hyper anxiety. And if my reality is that every waking moment, why would I want to stay in it?

You know, and so when you introduce something like a psych, you know, a psychedelic that allows me in a very real metaphysical way to escape that reality and create my own. Right. Especially with a controlled dose, which, you know, the people that are researching this aren't, you know, just eating paper of LSD in the way that somebody in Haight-Ashbury would have done it.

You know, in a really controlled environment, it allows me to escape. Right. And it allows me to make sense in this other reality. You know what's going on. And so that's the same idea that Manson is using to manipulate his his followers.

Right. So we got the spiritual climate, the cultural climate, and then we have the LSD that Manson has weaponized. So with everything going on, one of the things that was very interesting is that during this time that you had roughly about 300 kids a day just just arriving in Haight-Ashbury, just trying to find their way.

So and all of them were kind of in that point of really a vulnerable and susceptible. They're trying to find purpose and meaning and things like that. And one thing I mentioned, too, is that it was mean the Manson family is very popular because of everything that happened.

But for every person that's named, who knows how many unnamed people in Haight-Ashbury were completely sucked into the world of the cults. There are so many different groups. Like I said, there is Hare Krishna's.

There's all sorts of different. There's a guru in every corner.

Those are the guys that were the like. You have the flowers right in the airport.

Yes. OK. Yeah. Like when a society wants to reject materialism, that's where gurus thrive. Because if you think about Hinduism and many cults that come off of that, it's all about overcoming the material.

Right. You know, into a more spiritual sense of reality.

The Manson Family and the Women He Manipulated

So let's talk about the formulation of family. So this time there's some famous names that now are kind of part of this whole story. They delve on to San Francisco and they get in connection with Charlie.

So let's talk about a couple of them. People like Susan Atkins. Sure. Mary Bruner, people like that. Let's just talk about a couple of those people. And just real briefly, so people kind of get an idea of what it was like.

We don't just name every single person. Sure. But just get an idea of some of the big players, how they get into Manson. What was kind of Manson's role with each particular person?

Sure. So the five original female family members were Susan, Sadie Mae Atkins, Lynette Squeaky Fromm, Patricia, Katie Krenwinkel, Mary Bruner and Ella Jo Bailey. So let me pull up my notes on each one of them.

So we see a really common thread with these girls, and I think that's pretty important. See, we can talk about Susan Atkins first. She you know, there were a few people that were kind of at the front of of the trials.

So, you know, we associate these, you know, the very famous pictures of the three girls arm in arm walking into the courtroom after Manson, you know, etches on his forehead the the other the girls do the same thing in solidarity with him.

And it's just cultish all the way. Right. Yes, it really is. And OK, so let's see. So Leslie Van Houten, that's a name that you hear all the time associated with the Manson family. So she became associated with the Manson family at 19.

She was a high school dropout and a runaway. So this is the kind of theme that we're going to see happen here.

Patricia Kronwinkle. Well, while you're pulling that up to like one of the other people that come into the family later on, even though she wasn't directly involved in the murders, I skimmed through her book as Diane Lake.

And she got into the Manson family when she was 14 years old. And she was. And so she got caught up into it. And both of her she wasn't a runaway, but her parents, while you pull it up, her her parents got involved in the whole hippie movement and taking LSD together and saw them kind of go their own way.

But they joined her parents, joined this free love commune, which is very interesting because she talks about in her book how this commune was all about free love and going against society and not being bound by the rules and love the one you're with.

Even though, you know, that infamous song, even though it came out in 1970, it still is prominent, kind of a commentary on the culture there. But so they said you could just basically, you know, sleep around, have sex with whoever you want.

This is the cultural rebellion system. Don't be told what to do. And however, she got kicked out of the commune because she's 14 years old. So because she wasn't legal. Right. So for her in her mindset, she was saying this doesn't make any sense because here this culture is telling me free love, free love.

Don't listen to what society tells them. But then they kick her out based off of a construct that the society tells her, which goes to show if you don't have a ultimate foundation of truth, you end up that worldview ends up collapsing on itself.