True Crime Campfire · Jan 30, 2026 · 42:03
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Winston Churchill once said, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” That’s a nice sentiment—I mean, by and large it’s good to let failure be a learning experience, to not let it discourage you from following your dreams. But…hear me out here: What if you’re just a hot mess? What if every time you go from one failure to the next, you leave a pile of bodies in your wake? Can you be a little TOO good at failure? Should you sometimes maybe acknowledge “Hey, maybe this thing I’m trying to do isn’t one of my strengths”? I think some of the people in this week’s episode would have left the world a better place if they’d thrown in the towel.
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Sources:
Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test
CBC news: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/oak-ridge-st-thomas-psychiatric-treatment/
IFL Science: https://www.iflscience.com/canadas-dark-history-of-giving-lsd-to-prisoners-69821
Washington University: https://library.washu.edu/news/bizarre-but-true-happenings-at-the-1904-olympics-in-st-louis/
Wikipedia, "Truth serum": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum
CBC's "The Fifth Estate," episode "Psychiatric Treatment or Torture? The Oak Ridge Experiment"
Hidden Persuaders: http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/happened-oak-ridge-psychiatric-unit/
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief
Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-1904-marathon-became-one-of-the-weirdest-olympic-events-of-all-time-14910747/
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