#2322 - Rebecca Lemov

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All right, hello, Rebecca.

Very nice to meet you.

Hi, Joe.

Very nice to meet you, too.

So,

first of all, what got you interested in mind control?

Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself just because I find myself after two and a half decades of having this topic that initially seemed pretty niche and unusual and not many people were interested or many people were skeptical about it, but I thought it seemed like it embodied some of the more extreme.

If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by their, you know, what parts of your life are determined by you and what parts are determined by outside forces, that mind control would be a perfect area to investigate that because it's so extreme, especially if you looked at particular cases.

So I because I had done my dissertation at UC Berkeley on the history of behavioral engineering and how, you know, these kind of models for creating a society of control and

encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream.

And it seemed like the next step was to to look at something like brainwashing or mind control.

When you first started studying it, was it a less

public sort of curiosity?

Because now a lot of people are very much interested.

I blame the internet mostly.

I probably had a lot to do with it too.

You and the internet.

A lot of people on the internet are, you know, because over time, you know, people have gotten to know about MKUltra and a bunch of different

programs that our own United States government was involved in, where they were working on mind control.

But what, like, initially, what drew you to it?

Well, I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual maybe for a professor to be looking into.

And people, I mean, at the time, if you look at a Google Engram for the word mind control or brainwashing, they were very low, you know, around the turn of the century or the 1990s After there kind of, there was a peak of interest in the 70s, and it just really fallen off.

But I guess I was interested because it just seemed so unusual, and like maybe there was something there that people hadn't really thought about.

And at the time, these documents weren't readily available, and like you say, people weren't really looking into it.

So I just thought it seemed like a rich area for research.

And I'm also interested in connecting my personal, I've always been interested in connecting my personal,

I guess, my goals for life with what I research.

So I thought it's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're controlled or how much we might be controlled.

And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases, if you could.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting aspect of it.

Like how much are we controlled and how arrogant are we to think that we're not controlled?

Or how arrogant are we to think that that wouldn't work on me?

Yeah, I think that that's embedded in our,

you know, in our, in the messages we receive all the time that freedom is something kind of effortless, that we're just granted, and that autonomy is just the natural state.

But actually, we're so much more malleable than we think.

And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true.

That's what also drew me to anthropology, is just the idea, like, if I was born in another place at another time, I would be another person, or how much of me would be transferable was what that interested me.

And that's why I went to

first started studying anthropology.

Like, how much are we shaped by things that we don't necessarily choose, or are maybe accidental, or genetic, or various factors?

But

yeah, but I think we're told that

freedom of choice or our autonomy is fairly straightforward, and all you have to do is exert your will.

Yeah, but but

clearly we're influenced heavily by our environment, culturally.

I mean, accents,

just

cultural traditions, behavior patterns.

It begs the questions like,

what are you?

And

what is the

shell that you wear on the outside?

You know, like a hermit crab.

Like, what do you carry around with you?

And what, at the core of it, what are you?

Yeah, that is, I mean, that is the oldest question of Socrates.

Who am I?

Or

just the question.

It's a deep question, and it's also kind of like a practical question.

So I thought if you could look at it more in

actual examples, that would be interesting.

And I also, I guess I was drawn to the topic.

Maybe,

yeah, maybe because other people weren't studying it, or also because of experiences in my life, just seemingly small things.

Like one day, I remember when I was in graduate school, I was walking down the street, and I said,

We passed a small dog, and I said, I really, I really hate small dogs.

Like, and I realized as I said it that it wasn't true, but I had just like, I love,

I actually really like them.

What's wrong with small dogs?

But I had absorbed this opinion from somewhere that like a person such as I was aspiring to be, you know, only liked, you know, big dogs or something like that.

But just noticing in yourself the way you soak up opinions and you're shaped by, you know, even, you know, even seemingly trivial things.

And then also on a more profound level, you can see that happening.

Made me wonder, like, what could you learn from looking at these cases where people really seem to have been brainwashed in history or radically reshaped performance?

And then there's brainwashing yourself.

Because if you say, I hate small dogs, now you have to kind of defend it.

And even if you say, God, it's not even true, but there's got to be reasons to hate small dogs.

I don't want to come off as a moron who just says things.

There are other people who feel the same.

It turns out, yeah, maybe

either you end up doubling down on that opinion because you don't want to feel silly to yourself.

I mean, I think sometimes we're just a series of adopted opinions that we then

adhere to.

And I guess being in graduate school also made me feel that way because you're rapidly learning and absorbing a new vocabulary, learning things you should say, learning things you shouldn't say,

ways you should express yourself and ways you shouldn't.

That seemed very like a deeply shaping process.

And I was interested in

how did social sciences, like, was there a science of this process of shaping, or they sometimes called it cannibalizing or making

a canal of behavior so that people would end up wanting to do what it was that was socially necessary for them to do.

Aaron Powell, well, universities are a great place for that, right?

Because you get away from your parents for the first time who have indoctrinated you into their cult.

Like you're born in the cult of your parents and then you leave and you're like, let me get away from these crazy people and now I'm going to become a whatever.

You know, and now I'm going to figure out which group most aligns with my ideas and join them and rebel and fight against the machine and become a part of a new cult.

Exactly.

Wear something different or adopt I suddenly I don't like certain kinds of dogs or I wear a certain thing or you know you have an interruption in the fabric of your extensive conditioning.

And that is an opp it's a it's also an opportunity.

You know, it's it's not a nefarious thing

necessarily, but it can take that just that truth about people.

I think it can be nefarious for some people, unfortunately.

But I think for a lot of people, just considering new ways to think about things is probably valuable.

It's probably a good thing to have the opportunity to reconsider the way that you've sort of like canaled the grooves that have been deeply carved into your personality where you automatically go towards certain things or think about certain things.

I always think just an interruption is often good.

Oh, yeah.

In your patterning.

Yeah, that's why I think moving is really good.

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I've read that you have had a steady meditation practice.

I've read it was like two hours a day for 25 years.

Yeah.

That's a lot of time to be meditating.

Yeah, it really helped me so much when I learned to meditate that I never wanted to miss an hour.

So I never missed an hour, except when I was giving birth to my daughter,

which was its own thing.

You get a break for meditation for that.

You get a hall pass.

I just and it's not like anyone made me or I necessarily thought I would do that.

It's just that it something that gave me a lot of perspective and peace.

And I guess I just didn't want to go back.

So I do think it informs how I

do research or I try to bring what I learn in meditation into

what I do.

Do you do an hour in the morning and an hour at night?

Yeah.

Wow.

And for a year, I think a couple times I've tried adding more in the morning, so two hours or so in the morning and an hour in the evening or something, which has an effect, but it's hard to...

It's hard to make room in your life sometimes.

Oh, for sure.

But you can sleep a little bit less.

Yeah.

Well, you don't want to make yourself sleep less, but sometimes it just does reduce the amount you need.

Just by meditating.

That's what I found.

Interesting.

How much sleep do you need?

I used to sleep like eight and a half hours, and then now I sleep about seven or six and a half, or if I'm really tired, I might sleep a little extra, but I ended up just

yeah, so it so much changed my life that I just

I moved things around so I could always do it

and try to be adaptable.

So I just mostly get up at a regular meditation time, which is like 4.30.

What kind of meditation?

I do vipassana, which is a form of Buddhist meditation.

Pretty it's just a form of observation.

Or someone once described it as

practice in seeing things as they are.

So you try to just it's not trying to, you know, apply a lens over something or chanting.

It's just a very it's a way of it's cultivating observation of the subtle body ultimately, or just what is in front of you.

Aaron Powell, and so you just sit in peace and think?

Well, it's not always peaceful.

There is sometimes, yeah, but thought.

You mean peace as far as like you're not bouncing around?

Yeah, sometimes I'm sitting, sometimes I'm.

I've also had, you know, I've adapted, so when my daughter was little, sometimes I'd hold her and

be putting her to sleep or something.

But mostly I'm just sitting there and

with eyes closed, and then you kind of move, you observe just

how you are.

And

the more you practice it, the more you can kind of go into it more deeply quickly.

I would think that that would be a good protection from unwanted mind control, too.

Because at least you could

kind of have an assessment, do an audit.

of your thoughts

and sit back and go, how much of the shit I believe is because of X or because of Y?

Yeah, it's like a built-in reflection.

So the end of the day, I have to say, I'm often less still or peaceful.

My mind's jumping around and I'm like processing.

Maybe it's even what I watched or was exposed to, and it's sort of a processing

experience.

And sometimes you're super distracted, but you can also notice that fact.

So it just builds in, yeah, an opportunity for some distance, which then you can also try to bring into your life too.

Were you when you were young, um, had you ever been exposed to any cults or anything like that?

Hmm, that's a good question.

Uh

not when I was really young.

And how old were you when you were first exposed to cults?

In fact, I think

so

that's a good question.

I mean, my family is not is sort of cult averse, I would say.

My father I think they had friends once, you know, in later life, my parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training, which is somewhat cult-y.

And they take you in and you're not allowed to use the bathroom and they lock you, kind of like keep you in a room

until you're really uncomfortable and start to have revelations about how you could change your life.

And these are, you know, it's stuff like.

How long did that make you not go to the bathroom?

It's to the point where it's uncomfortable.

I can't remember.

It's a long afternoon going into the evening and often people come out kind of converted and my parents' friends actually did and they did change their lives in various ways.

So they said, you have to come.

And my dad, in the middle of it, he said,

I have to go to the bathroom.

And I'm not, he's like, I'm out of here.

And he just left.

So I figured he had to kind of, he was not programmable in that way.

Well, I feel like any group that doesn't want you to go to the bathroom is stupid.

It's probably a sign.

Yeah, there's no reason to not go to the bathroom if you have to go to the bathroom.

That's ridiculous.

I mean, it's a kind of,

it is typical of certain groups where they start to constrain your.

And if, and people who might be willing to remain in that uncomfortable state and be constrained will end up staying longer.

And it's sort of a self-selecting process, maybe.

That makes sense.

Right.

The people that are more willing to comply.

Yeah, and I guess with me, maybe the closest, the first brush with a cult would be something like the various yoga teachers I've worked with.

Oh, so many of them are so cult-y.

Yeah.

There's one kind of funny story is I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland,

also in graduate school.

And

I would go,

it was really helpful with school, just to have a very physical, demanding practice.

But there was a whole community around it.

And it turned out that the teacher was sleeping with many of the students, but I just didn't know it.

I thought he was a, I don't know, I just thought he was,

I admired him.

I brought my boyfriend at the time to pick me, he came to pick me up after class, and he said something like,

and he's now my husband, he said, oh, it just, I just got the vibe that everyone there is sleeping with everybody else, and I was shocked.

I was like, no, that's not happening.

But

it actually was.

You could say it's a bit, I don't think it was a cult, but it certainly was a scandal.

Yeah.

I had the exact same experience.

The first time I started taking yoga, there was a guy who was a yoga teacher who

I

have

always

been

very wary of control and controlling people and those kind of environments.

And that this guy was like...

There was something inauthentic about his spirituality that greased me the wrong way.

I was like, yuck.

Like, just the way he would chant and the things he would say.

There was just too much ego involved.

And then I found out he was banging all the students.

And I was like, of course he is.

I knew it.

Because my wife roped me into going to the class.

That was the first time I went.

I was like, I really like the stretching.

It's like really great.

I really like yoga itself as a practice.

But I mean, the problem is these people that are, and it's kind of the problem with everything.

Like when one person is in control and one person is the person who gets to lead the class and then they get praise heaped upon them by the students and then they start to think that they deserve it and then they don't have a lot of self-reflection and they're not very objective and then they sort of revel in it and enjoy it and the next thing you know they're taking advantage of it and it's like

yeah it's yeah it's very helpful to have that defense radar of a certain kind also sometimes I think these

prominent teachers, they have had some sort of,

I don't want to say enlightenment experience, but some sort of breakthrough, something that felt profound to them, because many people do.

We now know that these experiences are incredibly common.

And yet, so they take that as a kind of license.

Well, now I must be enlightened, or what I'm, you know, I have to take the mantle.

My people are awaiting this, or they sort of then justify things they wouldn't otherwise.

Spiritual narcissism.

Yeah, it can actually engender that because of, or, yeah, and I think there's some,

this has been described too.

Spiritual narcissism is a good phrase, though.

It's legit.

Yeah.

Yeah, you see a lot of it.

There's a lot of it in the psychedelic community, a lot of it in the meditation community, a lot of it in the yoga community.

They just start thinking that they're better than people that don't do it.

Yeah, it feels very special.

If you have a special experience, it's really dangerous.

It becomes very dangerous

afterwards to not have it feed your ego.

And even if you had a profound breakdown of the ego when you were in a psychedelic state.

It is fascinating to to me, though, that you can tell the difference for the most part, if you're really paying attention, between someone who's authentically expressing their real thoughts versus someone who's saying things

that they think if they say these things, they will get praise or they will get attention or you will think that they're profound.

We know bullshit.

Humans know.

There's like a smell to it, a feel to it, if you're paying attention.

But for whatever reason, it's just like some people have big ears, some people have small ears.

Some people just are not that good at picking up on that stuff for whatever reason.

Life experience, they haven't been burned enough times, like whatever it is.

And, you know, that's where cults get started.

And I'm fascinated by cults.

I've always been fascinated by them because I've watched, I don't know how many documentaries on cults.

And in the beginning, it looks so fun.

That's the problem.

Do you ever see the documentary Wild, Wild Country, the Netflix series?

series yes it's amazing right in the beginning you're like they look like they're having a great time yeah they're all dancing together and playing drums and having a party and eating together and it's like a sense of community and yeah This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats.

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That documentary was so successful, I think, for that very reason.

It actually perpetuates the allure of that, of Osho and that call because their outfits look kind of cool and the colors are beautiful

and they're swirling, cavorting dances.

My husband grew up in the Bay Area and he was saying he, you know, as a kid, he would run into members of that cult.

And he said, what you don't see in the documentary, and he blames the documentary for not showing this sufficiently, is they were frequently armed.

So on the side where you're not seeing it, they're holding, you know, automatic weapons and things like that.

They really, in a way, they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit.

Really?

interesting that's interesting wow i did not know that and you have to have a guy like osho because like the way he would talk about things and you know his

slow way of talking the people

yeah you know his his beard and the rolls royses and everything it's like good lord

argue yeah and he was really much more of a cocaine uh adept or enthusiast than people also recognize.

I think he gets off a little easy in that documentary as well, partly because they're interviewing people who are still to some extent devoted or they want to maintain that ocean, you know.

Well, also, what was her name?

Stella?

Was her name?

Yeah, she was so crazy.

She was poisoning people.

She was such a great villain that it made him like, because if she wasn't in the documentary, he would be the villain.

Exactly.

Yeah.

She pulls the focus.

Yes.

Yeah, most certainly.

And the fact that she's still alive, too, that sort of helps as well.

But

I feel like it's a default thing in the human psyche because of our ancient history of living in tribes.

That human beings have been very tribal.

And I think being a part of a tribe, one of the things that happens is you sort of have to go along with the way everybody else is doing things.

If you want to fit in, you want to adapt, and especially if you're growing up in the tribe, you you don't know any different.

This is the only group, and being ostracized from the tribe and kicked out, it's like, oh my goodness, that's the worst thing in the world.

Now you're alone, you have to fend for yourself, there's no way you can.

You have to protect yourself from the wilderness and the animals and the elements and predators and other humans.

So you have to, it's very dangerous to be alone.

So you have to adapt to the tribe itself.

I think that's true.

Yeah, small-scale societies have to, I mean, even the word cult in its technical or dictionary definition doesn't necessarily mean abusive organization.

It just means small scale religious group that may be you know, I think people deeply yearn for that sense of belonging and that's why it does look so fun and in and by all reports is very fun to get inducted into a cult.

People get these exhilarated states.

They often have altered, you know, experiences of altered consciousness and

you know they're empowered by it too well um fun fact before I bought the place that I put my comedy club on 6th Street I was under contract for a theater called the One World Theater that was run by this cult and

I kind of vaguely heard about it And my friend Ron told me that the theater is amazing.

You should buy it, because we were talking about buying a comedy club.

You should buy that place.

And so I got under content.

And my friend Adam called me up.

He goes, have you seen the documentary on that cult?

I'm like, oh, no.

There's a documentary.

That's never good.

That's never good.

And it's really bad.

The documentary is called Holy Hell.

And it's about this guy who's a hypnotist, a yoga teacher, and a gay porn star.

And

that's a one, two, three combination.

And he started out as cult in West Hollywood.

And then after Waco, after that went down, the Cult Awareness Network started really cracking down, and they were investigating him.

So he changed his name and moved to Austin and had his followers build him this theater.

Fortunately, I got out of the deal.

And I guess he was selling it.

Well, he was gone.

It had already fallen apart.

The cult had completely fallen apart.

But what's fascinating is in the documentary, in the beginning, again, It looks amazing.

They're all cooking together and eating together and doing yoga, and they look so happy.

And let's just be honest.

Modern society, the day-to-day grind, the

you know, keeping up with the Joneses, the stuck in traffic and doing things you hate under fluorescent lights in a cubicle all day long is not attractive.

Not only is it not attractive, it makes cults attractive.

And these people were longing for something that was

that that showed them that, no, you're right.

This is stupid.

The way your parents lived is stupid.

The way all these people live in society, you know, the way Thoreau described men living lives of quiet desperation, like, yeah, that sucks.

You don't have to live like that, man.

Come live with us, man.

And this guy was able to do this thing called the knowing.

And the knowing was, it was very difficult to get.

And people wanted it, and he wouldn't give it to them.

But when he would give it to you,

you would sit there and he would put his hands, like his thumbs on your head and touch you.

And these people would go into this intense state of bliss that even after

they did this documentary, even after they realized he was a charlatan and they left the cult.

They said that that moment was the greatest moment of their life.

When this, because of the power of suggestion, the way the human mind anticipated this event and then built up to it.

And then when it finally happened, this endogenous burst of psych

of whatever it is in the mind I don't know which chemicals were being released but these people claim that they contacted God for this brief moment where this man touched them they they kind of understood everything yeah briefly so it kind of worked even though he was having sex with everybody not only having sex with these people he was charging them He would charge these guys for therapy and then have sex with them.

And, you know, and they would talk about it afterwards.

Like, thanks a lot.

Like, it was so horrible.

Because, like, the end the documentary is so bad.

At the end of the documentary, it's like, I gotta get out of this deal.

Like,

there's not enough sage in the world to burn off the bad juju that happened in this joint.

That's true.

Yeah, so it just felt like, oh, horrible.

Yeah, the life cyc cycle of a cult has that what you just described, and sometimes in it accelerated, but sometimes it plays out slower over time.

But a lot of times people are very confused on leaving, if, say, if they're taken out as maybe ch even children rescued by FBI from abusive groups or people who managed to escape abusive cults they still have trouble evaluating their positive experiences because the positive was so good and disentangling it and delegit you know you feel that you need to delegitimize that too

but I think so that's why I think therapy can be helpful someone who's experienced with cult

ex-members.

I think the problem also is that it's their only community.

And if you have to leave your only community and then just strike it out in the world, and you've been with this community for 20 years or whatever it is,

what do you do?

How do you do it?

How do you find peace?

How do you find companionship?

How do you find that sense of camaraderie that's so deeply embedded in a tight-knit small community?

And a lot of times

when you come out, if it's, say, it was 18 or 20 years or a large portion of your middle life, maybe when in as a young person, you come out and you don't know, you're, you know, don't know how to operate things, you don't have the right, you don't, you're not comfortable with new technologies, you feel, I think that it's really a terrible experience for a lot of people.

And they still grapple with it many years later, readjusting to society because the critique they had originally, which was profound, as you're saying, you know, not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation, that's still there,

critique, but it just wasn't answered.

I always say, like, someone, come up with a really good cult and I'll join.

Come up with one that, like, you answer all the questions, but you don't try to control me, and you're just nice.

Isn't there a cult where someone's not trying to have sex with everybody and not trying to steal all your money?

Isn't it possible to do that?

Just to like get together a group of like-minded individuals.

And I guess that would be more of a commune.

But But even that, there's always some male, generally male leader who ruins everything.

It does seem to be.

I think some of the so there seem to be in the 70s so many cults and back to the land groups and some of the back to the back to land stories also you know have many cautionary sides to them and many of the aspects of culture.

What is the back to the land?

So just people leaving the city, heading off to the country and starting an intentional community, I guess, would be

what you're describing with the idea that we're going to collectively raise, even collectively raise our children,

sell hammocks or make our own jam or or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this.

Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional quality.

And some so I've done some research into some of these because you wouldn't consider them cults necessarily, but they can end up having some of those qualities such as sexual

just the demand that people have sex with each other, which tends to just create a lot of chaotic circumstances.

Why do you think it always involves that?

Why does it always go that way?

I don't know.

I mean, it's very interesting'cause I even read Norman Kahn's classic History of

Millennialism, which are a lot of groups in the Middle Ages and

afterwards that

Christian sects where they would break off and including things like the Children's Crusade and others.

And they often would end up with the kind of free love,

even though they're very devout and extreme and sort of devoted to giving up their worldly possessions.

There was sometimes this component of

this kind of sexual freedom that would end up destructively having destructive outcomes.

Do you think that is just because of just genetics?

Just the

encoded desire to spread your seed because life is very fragile and especially in tribal life when you're going back to the hunter-gatherer days, people didn't live very long, and it was very difficult to like, have you ever read John Marco Allegro's, any of his work?

No.

He wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is a fascinating book about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And he's got a very controversial perspective on Christianity.

And his perspective was, and this guy was an ordained minister who was agnostic because

he was an ordained minister, but then we started studying theology.

He started seeing all these parallels to all these various religions.

And he was like, well, you know, clearly, like, it's not one religion has it right.

There's something in all these things, but it's not like I have to, I'm a Catholic and that's it.

Or I'm a Muslim and that's it.

He was like, there's something here

that exists throughout all of them, this constant threat.

So he gets hired to be one of the people that

deciphers the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is, you know, on parchment, which is, you know, like animal skins, and they have to do it.

Do you know the whole story behind it?

They found them in these clay taps, these clay pots and Qumran and these caves, and it turns out to be like some of the oldest works of the Bible.

Well, he deciphers it for 14 years.

And after 14 years, his conclusion is that the entire religion was based on fertility rituals and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.

And that all of this had been sort of hidden in parables and stories.

But he maintains that the root of it all was all about these people and these cults of fertility rituals and consuming psychedelic mushrooms.

And he even brought the, he traced the word word Christ back to, and this is very controversial for Christians with your hackles up.

I'm not saying I agree with this.

But he traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen.

The idea was that when it rained, it was God fertilizing the earth, and that these mushrooms would like instantaneously rise.

Like they would go to bed, and in the morning the mushrooms would be there where they weren't there before.

They would consume these mushrooms and have these intense psychedelic experiences.

And then they tried to hide this stuff from the Romans.

And so they hid it in parables and they hid it in stories.

This is what his belief was.

Well, it kind of reminds me of what you're describing, which I don't haven't read.

But I think it reminds me a little of Aldous Huxley's idea of the perennial philosophy, which is that there's

if you study across religions, you can find certain traits and properties that all share, and he wrote a whole book describing what that was.

Then his last book that he wrote before he died was

called The Island and it was sketching out what he believed would be just what you describe, a non-abusive,

a place where, a small-scale community where humans could flourish and it wouldn't involve, including it would avoid sexual abuse.

And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you're saying, is

that he said there would be trained parrots on all the trees and every 15 minutes or so they would say attention, which would remind people to pay attention.

In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to

loops of conditioning and things like that.

Because I think, yeah, as you're saying, fertility is a natural part of human life and often worshipped.

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it was so important in the beginning because you literally could go extinct it was very difficult to survive we're so much weaker than everything else around us we're so fragile life is and infant mortality was so high.

It was so difficult to raise a child to adulthood that you had to have as many of them as possible just to ensure the survival of your tribe.

And I think, unfortunately, this is what gets distorted in all of these groups.

And this is where things go sideways, because then you evolve.

involve emotions and you involve ego and dominance hierarchies.

And it seems like even if Aldous Huckley's idea, if Huxley's idea was great and you had an island and everything was going well,

it'd be good for like one generation.

And then the kids of the next generation would grow up, and one would decide, you know what?

I got a fucking better idea than this.

And then someone would go straight Jim Jones.

You know,

they would start growing some plant that was an amphetamine and they'd start getting wacky.

Human beings being human beings.

Yes.

I mean, also, there's an interesting paradox or tension in ecstasy itself.

I mean there's religious ecstasy and there's sexual ecstasy and I think sometimes they get mixed up like the wires can get crossed so that can lead to someone maybe initially

I don't know these groups just the tendency they can have to go towards sexual abuse.

Why do you think that during the 1970s there was this big upswing in these cults?

Well there it started in the 60s from my understanding although they were

they did exist before then, but yeah, there's a lot more interest in them, I suppose, because

there's a wat more widespread questioning in U.S.

society and also world, you know, around the world.

So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and

Latin America and also

India.

So certain...

Do they have parallels?

Yeah, they're parallel.

Sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries.

So some people, say in the group, the Children of God, sometimes they'd be, the kids would be sort of moved from group to group because they had outposts in Thailand and they would grow up in London.

Who was the leader of the Children of God?

Which one was that?

This was a guy named David Berg.

This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family were.

Oh, briefly.

They were in it, but not, I think the parents ultimately took them out.

But it's a really messed up, a very

disturbing cult.

And I actually write about and have met

a member who's just sort of an average member named Ray Connolly I met him at a meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association and he left after 30 years but he just describes in a riveting way how he how he joined and I think that's kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the 70s so he was a young man in college and he was just feeling he said he just felt that you know the the old the traditions that his parents had brought him up in and Catholicism that he had been raised in was, he just felt that he lacked meaning in his life.

He felt like reality was over there and he was separated from it by,

there was like a saran wrap over everything.

So he felt somewhat alienated, but he didn't know what the answer would be.

He kind of yearned for a religious experience.

And he moved, he went out to California and he

I think he was at a concert at University in Santa Barbara, and he saw this group walking through during intermission and they were wearing these robes and chanting and it was right after the Manson trial and murders.

So he, in his mind, was this, you know, he was scared of them.

He thought, that looks like a cult.

But later,

even though he had that thought, he would end up joining them for 30 years because

he saw them during, later after the event, and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them.

He's about, I think he had dropped out of college by this time.

And he said that they were eating sandwiches and they looked a lot more casual and approachable than they had earlier.

And they, he just said, he was asking them questions and they said, would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now?

And drop to your knees.

And, you know, and he said, yeah.

For some reason, he said, yes, because.

What is the sinner's prayer?

It's just a...

It's a verse that actually is not from the Bible, but often would be used as a recruiting tool.

And it did result in this sort of out-of-body experience.

He recited it, and then he said he stood up and he felt changed by this.

But it turned out that David Berg, he didn't know the name of the group.

And they said, why don't you join us?

And he took, in other words, he kept taking small steps towards it.

And pretty soon he found himself on the bus with this group.

And he still didn't know the name of it.

And they were all testifying about how they had.

you know, been converted.

And he

was asked to, you know, add to the testimony, and he started talking about J.D.

Salinger because he was just an alienated youth, basically, and nobody understood what he was talking about.

They all just started singing and covering up his words.

And he thought several times of leaving and getting off the bus, going to see his ex-girlfriend.

He had just broken up with his girlfriend.

But he ended up staying, and he ended up marrying three women.

And just.

Three?

Well, at first it was one.

They had an arranged marriage.

And then it turned out

this guy who ran the group, David Berg, he was a former furniture salesman.

He

then had some, you know,

he believed that he got these messages direct from the Almighty.

The messages told him that he needed to ramp up his recruiting by having women do this practice called flirty fishing, where they would go out and basically seduce men into the cult.

And then he started introducing these practices where they were supposed to have sex with children because his idea was that

this was natural.

And so many

generations of kids were raised in this cult with this, were either trafficked or abused.

I mean, it's really horrific.

And Ray Connolly is interesting because he didn't engage in those things.

He did end up having 17 children in the cult.

And but he...

17 kids.

I think he did have 17.

He's a fascinating person because he he left and he spent his time supporting survivors, which is very unusual.

What about his 17 kids?

And they came out, too.

How does he have time for anything else?

I think they're not mostly grown.

Because

he's quite elderly.

But I guess just the ⁇ it's interesting to hear him talk about how he saw the group changing and how what started out to be this profound experience soon he called it a dark hamster wheel of the soul.

Like he was caught and it became this

basically they were exploiting him in his middle-age years.

He rose in sort of mid-level bureaucracy within the cult.

But anyway, this cult, Children of God, has and today still exists.

It has a different name.

Does they still have the same practice there?

No, they say they reformed.

But many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them, things like that, who are adults today.

They had groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that.

the Manson family is a fascinating one right because I know that you have studied Jolly West

and the the whole MK Ultra program and what they were experimenting with with psychedelic drugs and and and cults and mind control

Do you what is it what is your perspective on why they were doing that?

Why Jolly West was involved?

Why were they involved?

What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies, the federal government?

I think the initial motivation was a kind of national internal emergency, national security emergency that emerged right after World War II, actually at the beginning of the Korean War.

when U.S.

pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having shown flown germ warfare missions over China, and then many POWs were coming back and

seemed to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing.

So many of the soldiers coming back seem to have been brainwashed or have been have collaborated to some degree when they were held held as prisoners.

And then there were 21

US

POWs who elected to stay in China.

And this really was a disturbing,

you know, they all had a chance to choose when they were in the UN camps after they'd been held prisoner for

four years or so.

And 21 of them decided that they'd like to try their lot in China.

And so this caused, this kind of collective, this, this

caused a crisis of, you know, did the communists possess a super weapon of some kind?

that no other war, there was even a famous article in the New Yorker that said something new in history, that there was something that, some capacity that this ideological system had, the communists had,

that was somehow rendering

Americans

powerless against it.

So

this was kind of the crisis of mind control.

And MK Ultra was an attempt to

basically reverse engineer what this was.

So Jolly West was one of the first people.

He was in charge of studying the brainwash pilots initially.

And that's how he

also

before that he was involved.

I mean his he had been trained to some degree with

he was trained by Harold Wolfe who was at Cornell.

He had done his residency at Cornell.

with Dr.

Harold Wolfe, who is a world neurologist, a world expert in migraine and basically the type of pain that comes from migraine.

So you could say he was an expert in the pain, fear, pain cycle.

And he had CIA connections from even before MKUltra was started.

So what did they determine the Chinese were doing?

So they determined, West wrote a paper in 1957 and the part that was publicly that was published in a journal called Sociometry described he described it as DDD or debility,

dependency, and dread.

And he said, basically, these camps were systematically inducing a state of debility,

which was that

soldiers were starved and basically worn down.

They were deprived of medical care.

They were...

I mean, this is also in the historical record, something I studied extensively, is that

men were marched in, for example, the Tiger Death March north of the Yalu River from,

you know from the war, where they'd been captured.

And by the time they got there, they'd often lost half their body weight.

They had been bombed by their own forces.

At night, they sometimes

they had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning just to keep going and not be anyone who stopped would be shot.

So by the time they got to the camps, they were

really worn down.

And a missionary who saw that who passed them in a train at that time wrote or described in an oral history that he he didn't recognize them as Americans, that they were the most bedraggled.

It was just very,

they were in a terrible state.

And so

debility was the first thing West described when he was extracting what had happened.

Dependency was,

you know, later there was a layer added in which the soldiers were the POWs were dependent for all their, if they were going to survive, they required,

you know,

the camp leaders would provide it, so it made them very dependent.

And they also engaged in

very formal malice thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment.

And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time, or perhaps your family could be, because they threatened.

Maoist thought reform?

Yeah,

in the POW camps,

the Chinese, once the Chinese took over from the Koreans running the camps, they, because they decided, I think it was almost a formal experience, at least that's how it looks to me.

I don't think West wrote about this, but

in my own research on the camps,

it transpires that

they wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants.

He felt that only something like 7 to 8% of the human population was unreformable and those people would be disposed of.

But he wanted to check if these American soldiers would also be susceptible to re-education.

So they really did a formal, you know, three-part re-education program on them.

And men had many different responses to it.

But when West met them, he studied

many of their returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base.

And he extracted those three those three components of what had happened to them, D D D and then and that's the way he became an expert on

what he called brainwashing or coercive persuasion.

So how do they go from that to like sponsoring the Manson family and you know Operation Midnight Climax and all the crazy stuff that they were doing?

Yeah, it may seem like a leap, but it I think it

I mean

Sort of.

It's sort of a leap, it's sort of not I think the MK Ultra was funded um around

indirect response to this crisis of the POWs.

And

in addition to reverse engineering what had happened to them, they also wanted to turn it into a weapon and continue certain programs in

interrogation procedures and making them more effective.

So MK Ultra just had a wide reach and it was pretty free reign.

It was a free reign program.

And,

you know, the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan project for the mind.

So just as the atom had been disassembled and

transformed into this new,

this new world had emerged from that program, that intensive exertion of scientific acumen, the same thing could be done with the mind.

The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understand, you know, people could be broken down and rebuilt.

Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage?

Like what was the end goal that they were trying to do with this?

One thing,

a couple of things.

I think one idea was it potentially could be a weapon, one goal, another, so it could be used on an anemone, perhaps even a city.

So that's one reason they were researching LSD.

It had certain properties that made it easily, it could be easily dispensed to an entire population through the water supply.

So, they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD.

People didn't really know at the time.

So, there was an offensive part of it.

There's also a defensive part.

So, US military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was.

Once they understood it, they developed the SEER training, and that was West was involved in that as well.

And then a third thing was a more maybe a broader curiosity about,

you know, which would lead you to be able to interrogate people better and perhaps also to um

on you know just really understand I think there is also kind of a a curiosity about what would happen I think this is because they had so much power to

experiment in a way without any oversight and it wasn't until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said this is

this is unethical and you know we have done it basically put us put a stop to it but it really

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I mean, the Harvard LSD studies, when were those?

I actually, I don't know which ones exactly.

There are some that were earlier.

What are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski?

Okay, yeah, that's earlier.

Was that earlier than 63?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's Henry Murray.

Yeah.

But so

I don't actually know the answer to that question of exactly how it continued, but they officially discontinued it and destroyed all the records.

So it may have continued under other forms.

But Manson was 69?

Yeah, so Manson is after that.

So they didn't discontinue it.

They kept doing things.

Well, West kept working.

Yeah.

It's ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult.

Because

the amount of power, the amount of unchecked power and influence that Jolly West had and MKUltra in general had and all the people that were working on this, you have this power, the fact that you are working in complete secrecy.

You are the puppeteer.

You're controlling all these people.

And then this idea that

have you read Chaos, the Tom O'Neill book?

Yeah.

What did you think about that?

I thought it was great research.

Amazing.

Yeah,

it's a really good book.

And just so stunning.

I had never considered that before.

I thought Manson was a crazy guy and he got together with a bunch of crazy people and he ran a call.

I have no,

no

suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating the entire thing.

They may not have been.

I don't think

Tom O'Neill thinks that he made an absolute link.

He just brought,

you do get West in the same room potentially this time.

You get West visiting Manson in jail.

I don't remember that.

Yeah, West visited Manson in jail.

West, he believes, at least Tom O'Neill does, supplied him with LSD.

And then every time Manson would get arrested, he would get released.

This is true, but this wasn't Wes necessarily.

This was

Roger Smith, who was Wes.

He was an associate of Wes' and Wes was head of the

methamphetamine research project or things like that.

Which was so, you know, Wes did, so he got, Wes got funding to do his hippie lab or, you know, his psycho lab or psyche lab in 68.

67 and 68 during his sabbatical in the Bay Area.

And it wasn't, you know, it it wasn't obviously funded by this.

If it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine, but there are many notes that Tom O'Neill also writes about.

So both of us have gone to the West papers over many, many years.

And

I think you can put West at the Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, where he had an office and where Manson would go for medical treatment and his girls.

He would take his girls in to be treated, his women,

his cult.

And this was, they were at the time, as I understand it, seen as a kind of a model cult.

And many of the researchers under West, I mean, we can prove that link, that people like Alan Rose, who is a sociologist, they were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults.

And, you know, what is the natural environment?

How do they create bonds?

And

what is their relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that.

So West would apparently hang out on the couch getting high and wearing, you know, kind of dressed up in hippie garb with his middle-age friends.

And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was.

But, you know, sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient and it wasn't really

necessary.

There didn't appear to be a plan, which isn't to say so to me it's not entirely clear

what the relationship was with Manson.

It is very

evident he was bailed out several times by Roger Smith, who is also a psychologist as well as a parole officer.

So that's highly suspicious.

And Roger Smith did know West, and Dave Smith, who was the head of the medical clinic, also knew West.

But these things are, it's hard to tell exactly how to do that.

I appreciate you being cautious about it.

Yeah, that's good for you.

I'm less cautious.

Yeah.

But I think it's also that is how the government functions in general.

The idea that they would be

so inefficient at everything except cults is kind of silly.

Yeah, it's a really

deep question.

Yeah.

Is it clownish?

Because if you look at some of the other MK Ultra operations, they look highly inefficient and they're dosing each other at the holiday party with the punch and

just many lives ruined while

at the Operation Midnight Climax.

It just looks like a free-for-all and out of control.

But

there are really concerning aspects of the Paid Ashbury operation, I would definitely say.

And Manson was,

I mean, he could have been also an informant.

Well, he certainly was, I'm sure.

Yeah.

I mean,

I'm certain he was connected.

There's no way he just kept getting out of jail the way he got out.

And the sheriffs who arrested him were told that it's above their pay grade.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's just

it's kind of how the government government does everything, though.

Like, it's not like they would have it be this, like, very disciplined, rigorous, scientifically controlled study that, you know,

that made sense, especially because they have so much impunity, they have so much power, they have so much no one's observing them, they're working completely in secrecy, they kind of get away with doing and they're also imbibing, right?

They're also that's a that's a factor.

I mean, uh, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MK Ultra, was or the TSS

was

regularly taking acid, which can kind of shape your consciousness.

Yeah, that's a little problematic.

But, you know, interestingly, since you mentioned that, there was a peer-reviewed side of it.

And they actually threw the, I got really interested in the cutouts from MKUltra.

So they had a legitimating,

legitimate side.

And many scientists who worked for them, they were almost sub-contracting to them.

And some of them knew it was CIA money, and some of them didn't know.

So even someone like B.F.

Skinner received money from

MK Ultra, but it was conduited.

It was, I want to say, conduited through the Human Ecology Society, which was part of it, but it was just a front organization, and they were really into these fronts.

So some scientists, there was the group that later people would call the unwitting scientists, who would just be, they were doing the research they wanted to do.

It just happened to be of interest

to the CIA.

And then

others would publish in legitimate journals, but then they'd have a classified version of their research that went more into detail in the aspects that MKUltra was interested in.

Well, that's also one of the more interesting aspects of MKUltra is that it's very difficult to find out what was really going on.

And unless there was a bunch of files that were discovered, right, that sort of unveiled

what was going on.

And

if those files had not been discovered, who knows what we would actually know about all this stuff?

We wouldn't know.

And they're actually, amazingly, so this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marks, who was a journalist at the time.

And he made the request and everything had been destroyed except for the financial records.

And that just, but one thing I also want to mention, the CIA kept very good records of a lot of things.

And even in the financial records, they still had copies of some of the commissioned projects.

So that's how we know about them.

And it really is accidental that they didn't think to purge their financial files.

Well, it was probably so secretive that the people that were in charge currently when the FOIA requests were filed probably weren't really aware of it all.

Yeah, it was in the 70s, it was in 77 or so.

Yeah, so you're dealing with a decade past.

Who knows?

if the people currently in charge were even aware.

Because I would imagine a lot of this stuff is very compartmentalized.

I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier, but that destruction had been, as you said,

they made a mistake, I mean, from their point of view, they neglected this batch of documents.

Whoops.

And then the church committee came out in 1975, and many revelations were made, although it was still partial.

And then John Marx made his voyeur request sometime around then.

It brings me back to yoga teachers, cult leaders,

and then clandestine government operations.

Like,

whenever people have power, unchecked power and insane influence, particularly influence to manipulate people and influence over people's minds.

And if your entire, if your established goal is to try to find out how you can manipulate people and what can be done,

and you're doing this

in complete secrecy with basically unlimited funding.

It's all just all under the table stuff.

Like you could get away with so much.

You also, I think one component you also, that helps

this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time.

Something like a kind of almost messianic purpose.

Yes.

We're doing it to save our world.

We're saving the world.

Yeah.

Not just America, but the world.

Oh, yeah.

And that's one thing I went one of the inspirations for my research was finding a book on the street many years ago when I was living in California.

And I love to find a good uh just uh accidental uh inspiration, which was this book called The Captive Mind that somebody had left out uh by Czeslov Milos, who was a Polish poet, and he had grown up in Warsaw, or come of age in Warsaw, and seen his city, the city that he lived in, just deteriorate into sheer.

He said it was an experience no human being would ever want to live through, if you were lucky enough to live through, just watching the city city destroyed and people shipped off to Auschwitz and all these things.

But he said that,

and like social life completely deteriorating before him.

And then afterwards, the Soviet troops came in.

And even though he watched as his friends kind of had to remake themselves in order to survive, in order to be artists, in order.

And so if you're a poet, you don't just go along.

You have to actually start to think differently.

And at first, they would sort of pay lip service to it or make it, you know, on the surface they would pretend to agree and then secretly have their own, you know, writing.

But after a while they would start to internalize the, and he called it the new faith,

you know, the kind of

this doctrinaire ideology.

And that's what

he ended up himself defecting because he couldn't do that.

He said it's an operation you perform on yourself.

So I just think one important factor is this true bel true belief, this sense.

And out of that can come the justification for

a number of violations, I think.

Well, I think that's a through line through the entire CIA itself.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean,

that could justify so many different secret operations all over the world.

Like, you're...

You're there to protect American interests, and America is essentially the guiding light of the world.

And we need to save the world.

So you want to make an omelet?

You got to crack some eggs.

Yeah, that's a kind of logic.

And that's a very typical logic of the means.

The means are justified by the ends.

I was fascinated also in Chaos, Jolly West's connection to Jack Ruby.

Right.

That he visited Jack Ruby after Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and all of a sudden Jack Ruby goes crazy.

Yeah, he was never coherent again after a meeting.

This happened to several

shocking number of people.

And in West's papers you can actually find the unredacted documents where he talks about some of the things he's been able to do with combinations of sodium, ametol, LSD, and various other

psychoactive drugs.

Well he's I mean among other things he says he he started to s say or suggest that he could create memories, he could I mean he knew that um he could destroy a person's orientation to self and time

and uh so basically disassemble a person.

But

he also said he could use hypnosis to not as anesthesia, which is a known possibility with hypnosis, but to create extra pain, so hyper-asthesia.

And he kind of said that he could actually make someone develop blisters or asthma or an ulcer just by hypnotizing them.

I don't think he did that to Jack Ruby, obviously.

He had a mourning with him or something.

He had a what with him?

He had just had a short amount of time with him.

That's enough to dose him.

Ruby emerged apparently in co-op.

I don't know that much about the Ruby episode, but I do know that West intended to write a book.

He intended to write about eight books, at least.

This is a note I found in his papers.

He also developed cancer shortly afterwards.

Actually, not shortly, but in the 90s.

Oh, was it in the 90s?

Oh, okay.

I'm sorry.

I thought it was quickly.

No, he, and he.

So this is it?

Yeah.

This was from

around 1980 or so, but I thought it was interesting.

So who wrote this?

This is all Wes's handwriting?

Handwriting.

It's just a little sheet of paper I found in his paper in his archives.

Biosocial Humanism, a Philosophy for a New Age, Integrative Psychotherapy, The Disassociative Reactions, A Different Person, Psychiatric Observations on the Case of Patricia Campbell, oh, Patty Hearst.

Yeah.

Policeman at his elbow, a psychiatric memoir on the case of Jack Ruby.

Oh, wow, this is his own handwritten note.

Yeah.

And these are the order in which he intended to write them.

He always wanted you find a lot of correspondence in his papers where he's writing to agents he wants to write a book.

And he even testified in the Patty Hearst trial, because he was the primary expert witness, trying to make the case that she'd been mind-controlled and Stockholm syndrome.

Yeah, she should be exonerated.

But

he claimed that in his first minutes on the stand, he perjured himself by saying he was the author of a book on POWs and brainwashing,

which wasn't the case.

But these were all the books that he intended to write.

Oh.

So maybe he was the author.

He just didn't publish it?

Well,

yeah, he said he was the author of a published book.

But he just basically he had, I think it was one area that he always said, in my next sabbatical, I'm going to write all this stuff up.

But he never got to it.

He's too busy doing ACID.

Yeah,

maybe.

And also, he had a lot of extramarital affairs that kept him very busy.

Well, that'll distract him.

A whole separate family or something.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

It was very distressing to his wife.

What a mess.

And that guy was the head of MKUltra.

Or wasn't the key to the keynote?

Well, he wasn't the key.

Not the key.

I mean, I don't even know.

He was a pretty prominent figure, but.

It's fascinating.

the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic closed down shortly after Chaos was published.

Oh, it did?

I didn't know it had closed down because when I was in San Francisco,

when I lived there, but that was a while ago, it was still open.

Yeah, my wife's mom used to go there.

My wife's mom was a hippie in Haight Ashbury.

I mean, it was kind of a great, it was a great thing.

Dave Smith was like, I mean, it was a true inspiration that he had because originally I think he was doing this dark research on animals,

addicting rats to to cocaine and things like that.

And then he had this,

because he's been giving some interviews recently.

He's still alive, the doctor who founded it,

just that

there was a human crisis on the streets and that he should provide medical care to young kids who runaways and things like that.

And he doesn't, of course, think that he doesn't admit to any connection with.

Interesting.

I mean, he admits he knew West.

Is that true about Haydasberg?

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Okay, we'll pause.

All right, technical error fixed.

You asked me a question, Jolly West.

Was that true?

Yeah, um, yeah, I asked you the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.

When did it close?

I believe it closed.

I think Tom told me this.

I didn't know it closed.

Yeah, I believe it.

I think

Tom's exposing the fact that the CIA.

It's 2019 July, so that's

right afterwards.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's the article.

Hey, Ashbury Free Clinic closes its doors after more than 50 years.

And how much acid, how many gallons of acid did you guys give out, you fucking freaks?

Just the fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic

had offices inside of it.

I'm sure they were doing legitimate work as well.

Yeah.

I can't I don't know myself, but Tom I know Tom's working on a sequel as well where he's trying to shore up these connections and get to the bottom of it.

Do you know Tom's whole story, how he got started with this book?

He was supposed to write an article.

Yeah, it started, isn't it?

One article.

It was supposed to be an article about the anniversary of the Manson murders.

And then he starts digging into it and he finds all these inconsistencies and all this corruption and all this weird stuff.

And then he keeps going and then they're like, yeah, you missed the deadline.

And, you know, he gets a book deal and he misses the deadline.

And it's like

on June 25th, and it closed like

a week later or something.

Two weeks later.

Amazing.

And actually, I think he,

for a while, he, Tom, before he got his co-author, Dan Piepenbring, his name is, Tom was thinking of just turning it into a documentary that he was going to let Errol Morris make.

Well, they did do a recent documentary on Netflix, but it was only 90 minutes.

Yeah, this was going to be a longer series originally, but then I think he redoubled his efforts to write the book, which worked out well.

Yeah, yeah, he explained it to me.

But I mean, could you imagine?

You're researching something for 20 years, and he's got just boxes and boxes of files.

Like, how do you put it all together into a coherent book that could be consumed?

I relate to that because I'm kind of in the same situation.

Are you?

In the sense that

I've been researching this for 20 years.

Not the exact topic, but this broad question that and I finally, five years ago, I thought, I want to put together what I've learned about

this top brainwashing in a broader way.

So West is part of it.

He's probably the main figure who brings together many of the chapters.

You know, he's kind of a I have thought a lot about that.

And I have talked to you, I have a very good, well,

I have a colleague or a friend who's a psychiatrist who who was at UCLA training as a resident when West was when West first got his job there, heading the

heading the basically the Neuropsychiatric Institute, right after Haight Ashbury and during the time he was in charge of the

meta-amphet the amphetamine research project.

So West went there and he started this, he proposed as his first major, his major activity would be to found what he called the violence center.

And it was a way to study violence in all its forms.

And this is actually a theme that runs through, this is another theme I should mention as part of MK Ultra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression.

That's why West gave LSD to the elephant.

in the Oklahoma Zoo.

It wasn't just simply to see what an elephant would do under the influence of LSD, but to see if they could trigger, they write about this in a publication in Science magazine, if you could trigger, so elephants regularly go through must cycles where they become, even though they're very pacific animals, peaceful, they go through a cycle of violence yearly.

And he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle.

chemically.

Does it coincide with breeding season like it does with other animals like deer when they start fighting each other?

Yeah, it's just the males, I think.

And it does have something to do with breeding.

I'm not sure, so it's the male Asiatic elephants.

So Wes found this elephant named Tusco at the Oklahoma Zoo and famously gave him LSD in 1962 or 61.

And then the elephant died tragically.

From the acid?

From the acid.

Because nobody,

it was just...

Maybe that's what elephants do, maybe or the dose was too big or something like that.

It It certainly didn't have the effect that he wanted, but if you actually read the scientific publication,

it's curiously all about this question of whether you could trigger a massive,

could you trigger violence?

Almost like a push-button.

Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression?

And you see that running through a lot of Wes' other work with MK-Ultra and also with psychosurgery and some other developments that I wrote about.

But so by the time he gets to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, he's very interested in violence and he has this major plan and to come back to my my friend Dr.

Cooper's he was a young resident training at UCLA at the time Wes proposed this violence center and among things he wanted to do was track teenagers who he thought would be potentially violent.

He had racial categories that he wanted that he thought were especially worth tracking and he had this whole program.

And so a student movement and a movement at the university developed to shut down the violence center before it even opened.

And anyway, Terry Coopers was a leader of

that student movement.

And they ended up, it never was, it never went forward, this huge project that West had.

But Coopers at some point said that if you met Jolly West, you would like him.

He was...

He was very genial.

He had the name Jolly for a reason.

And that, so I found that confusing.

Like, how do do I think about this?

If you just read about him and the things he did, he seems like a character or a cartoon or like a very evil man.

And no doubt he destroyed, I mean, I think his, what he did was, was ethically indefensible.

But how do you reconcile that?

Or how do you even think about the fact that, you know, he, he also was incredibly esteemed in his profession.

His portrait stood in the Neuropsychiatric Institute for many years.

He, you

And people actually liked him.

People said he was likable.

He had this kind of charisma to him.

Well, I guess you would kind of have to have some of that

just to be able to run something like that.

And also,

if you wanted to manipulate people, what better way than to be affable and kind of jolly and friendly?

That's true.

And I think he had

a strong dose of narcissism, too, because a reporter who worked with him named Shana Alexander, she said she has these funny descriptions of him during the time of the Patty Hearst trial, where she says he was handing out his own papers to anybody who walked by, like he was giving out

like a hen giving out eggs.

She was just saying that he's, you know, he was very expansive.

He would get out of his limousine.

He had a personal driver,

which was pretty high-level for an academic.

And he's just very

kind of like a big man.

And he was also physically very large.

Thought very highly of himself.

Yeah.

Well, imagine delusions of grandeur if you're pulling the strings on so many different people and manipulating them.

And then you're also working complete secrecy with the government in a high-level position that's manipulating minds.

He was very, I think especially when he was young, he was, he had a gift for this.

He could really, he was, but he could understand how to manipulate people really well.

He had insight into the processes that were, you know,

that's why Sidney Gottlieb said, We've been looking for somebody like you, and it seems that our dreams have been answered in this famous, famous letter.

He writes under a pseudonym, but he says, I don't know how

you sort of fit all of the categories we've been looking for.

Oh, boy.

Wow.

Wow.

It's a dark chapter.

Yeah.

So how does it end with Jolly West?

How did he die?

So he died

by his son

helping him commit suicide or his son basically murdering him at his request, Mark

West.

And Mark West was a lawyer,

a middle, kind of middle-aged lawyer by this time.

West had a severe form of cancer.

But he was maybe a few months from dying, and he asked his son to surreptitiously, and

it was illegal, so to

basically poison him.

And he wrote the prescription himself, West did.

Why didn't he take it himself?

I don't know.

I think there was a really twisted relationship with his son because his son committed suicide not too many years afterwards.

And his son wrote a whole book about this, about helping both his parents commit suicide.

And his mother wasn't even that sick.

But she, a year or two after her husband Kay West also committed suicide through this with the help of her son oh god he went on this big press tour and he said it was this this greatest gift he could have ever given his parents and then oh god he committed suicide himself it was very i mean it's very sad his story is sad because the book is

the book gives you some insight into what West was like as a parent and I would say

difficult.

Not ideal.

Not ideal.

Wow.

And what year was that that he committed suicide?

Mark.

Jolly.

Jolly?

I think it was 97 or 8.

So this is before every everyone knew about all these things.

I mean, they knew because of the church committee in 75.

Right.

So, but West himself said, Oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant.

He would even make jokes about the elephant because it was the one thing people knew.

And he would say, Oh, yeah, it it would sort of it was his calling card and he used used it as kind of a jokey thing but he always denied after the he always denied any connection to this CIA and he was even if even though he'd been pretty firmly connect you know even in the church committee

you could you could you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money

and West had a special um

office for him built there.

He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move.

He wanted to build what he called

this free zone of experiment where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses, you know, to

in whatever increments he wanted to adjust.

He was going to build that at the Air Force base.

And he was all set to go.

And I even had receipts and papers and

a lot of correspondence in his files about this, but the Air Force at the last minute backed out and asked Gottlieb to basically they transferred it to the university and built a whole warren of cutouts to hide that.

Wow.

It just makes you wonder, because if we had not gotten, if the freedom of information requests had not been

acted upon, if they had not gotten those files, if we didn't know the extent of this research,

what's going on right now?

I know I had this convers.

It's an important question.

Because we don't, I mean, in a sense, it's interesting to think about the fact that these things took place at the high point of government

dedication to documenting itself, the mid-twentieth century.

Because I've done most of my research on the mid-20th century, Cold War period, and it's kind of luxurious.

They all kept very good files.

Sometimes they would destroy them.

That's the exception.

Everything's typed out, everything's on paper.

But as things become digital in the 80s and then beyond, much less is a lot takes place through email or now increasingly through

government exchanges may take place through signal.

No record is kept at all.

So we

in we're probably in an archiving crisis today.

Archivists have tried to keep up.

We don't necessarily keep excellent records of the internet, for example, or there are so many avenues where exchanges can be taking place and they're they're not leaving a paper trail.

It's just for me when I think about the extent of these experiments and what they were willing to do and how effective they were,

I don't believe they would just stop doing that.

I think

if you have effective methods of manipulating people and getting them to do what you want them to do with various psychoactive drugs and different sort of modalities and different protocols that you would use.

I just don't, I can't imagine they would stop doing that or at least stop doing research into that area because it would be so effective to know.

Yeah.

And then like all things, it would evolve.

Yeah, it just

a good question of what form it may have taken.

And

I don't know the answer to that question.

It may be hard to know in the future, which is further destabilizing.

Right.

Well there's so many different kinds of mind control, right?

You know, one of the things we've talked about a lot on this podcast is um

that

an enormous percentage of what you're seeing on social media in terms of interactions and debate is not real.

It's not organic.

It's uh state run and state funded and it's whether it's foreign governments or our government or even corporations.

you're getting inorganic discourse that's designed to form a narrative, which is a form of mind control.

Yeah.

I mean, I think even at a basic level, people, it's known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real.

And, you know, even when somebody likes a post of yours,

the response is the same as like in-person interaction.

So we, I think it, I think at the root there's a kind of way that on an emotional level, it's not just manipulation of ideas, but there's a kind of emotional engineering that's built into the platforms and doesn't even demand, you know, at first government involvement.

It's, of course, DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and of things like pattern recognition, but I mean the government has funded many, many

studies.

But really with what I got interested in in social media and how I connect it with the episodes of brainwashing from earlier mind control is that it operates,

you know, it creates states of emotional contagion that

aren't really about convincing people of a different way to think, but more about

how you feel about what you think, which is something people describe in cults too.

It's not that it changed my thoughts, it's that it changed my feelings about my thoughts.

And so that there's some, there's a famous Facebook experiment I write about

that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014 where they announced that they've achieved mass emotional contagion at scale, which showed that people exposed to it when they altered, so they took 700,000 users or 693,000, I think

without informing them, but because your user agreement does

agree,

Whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or A-B testing.

So this experiment exposed

a group to a more, their newsfeed was altered in a negative direction emotionally as measured by word counting software.

And they discovered that that group that had a negative exposure also responded in a more negative way as judged through their posts and likes and responses.

The group that was exposed to a more positive newsfeed by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response, and the control group was unaltered

by this.

You agree to this

when you signed the terms of use on Facebook?

You agree to be tested?

Well, it did cause a controversy, and after that, Facebook never, the research team didn't publish publicly.

But you do agree.

You agree as part of, it's sometimes seen as user

experience, you know, alterations or A-B testing, things like that.

But so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014 and people won and on the Facebook page of the research group that that did the experiment,

at least one user wrote in saying, could I ever find out if I was in that experiment?

Because I was in the emergency room at that time with, you know,

threatening to commit suicide and I want to know if my feed was altered and maybe that pushed me over, you know, into that

state.

And of course they could never know and it can't be traced backwards.

And other people had a similar response.

And there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally.

But I don't know what ultimately there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it and anyone associated with it was mostly promoted.

But it's very interesting because just the concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be.

It was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility.

And 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of social media.

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Well, it's also when you see the culture war really kick in is somewhere around 2012 and this bizarre line in the sand between the right and the left and ramping up all these ideological hot-button issues.

Aaron Powell Yeah, and I think I think I'm not

I can't speak to the ex the exact studies, but there was a whole slew of recent studies trying to show that you know social media could alter political, it could increase polarization, but it actually didn't it didn't turn out to be as salient as expected, that effect.

But it's actually

what I conclude is that it's actually at the level of emotions that social media operates in

sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people's emotions.

And that has fed into the increasing polarization.

Like it was this, that's the after effect of it.

Or the end goal.

Or perhaps.

It's so sinister.

Are you aware of Robert Epstein's work?

No.

Robert Epstein is is a guy that started studying search engine curation, and he found through his, what is his organization called, Jamie?

So Robert Epstein,

he found that through Google curating their search results, just by doing that, you could completely convert people who were independent, who were sitting on the fence.

So by, like, say if you Googled,

let's just go back to 2016, you Googled Hillary Clinton, you would see, like, is Hillary Clinton a criminal?

You would sign Donald Trump criminal, the Donald Trump criminal cross.

You wouldn't find things on Hillary Clinton.

You had to keep digging and digging and digging.

If you wanted to find positive things on Hillary Clinton, you could find them quite easily.

If you wanted to find positive things on Donald Trump, you wouldn't find anything.

And it was on purpose that they were doing this.

And that through this, they could statistically change votes to the tune of 20, 30%.

And then with fence sitters or people that were, I'm not sure, you could really shift them.

And I think at one point in time, he said in some issues, you could shift them as much as 90% towards where you wanted them to go.

That's interesting.

It's terrifying.

Because you would think, I always thought, and before I talked to him, I mean, I kind of thought that search engines probably have to be curated to some extent, but I never knew it was that much.

Here it is.

The American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, nonprofit, non-partisan 501 organization founded in 2012.

But when he talks about it and what the research has shown,

it's quite disturbing.

And he tracks it.

So they have computers that track bias in search engine results and bias in

what you can find.

And it used to be that certain search engines weren't curated, and now they are.

Like DuckDuckGo used to be pretty open.

And now, like, I remember I used DuckDuckGo during the pandemic because I read about this doctor who had taken the mRNA vaccine and then like almost immediately had a stroke.

And I'm like, wow, that's disturbing.

And they were connecting it, you know, at least, you know, correlation to the vaccine.

And this is the early days.

And I'm like, this is fascinating.

So I tried to find it on Google.

I could not find the story.

I found it on DuckDuckGo within the first page.

And I was like, that's crazy.

And then, you know, within a couple of years, DuckDuckGo, I think, was probably sold or something.

I don't know what happened, but it seems like Brave Browser or Brave Search Engine seems to be the only one that I've found now that can find new controversial things.

But if you're looking for what they would call malinformation,

so they came up with

different

definitions.

There's misinformation, disinformation, and then malinformation.

And they were trying to censor malinformation malinformation is information that is correct but that would be ultimately harmful right and so they put vaccine side effects under malinformation because it would cause vaccine hesitancy well that's that makes sense because I think it goes back to what I see in a lot of research on the social sciences that this question of how do you maximize the public good and I think public health is based on that.

So the idea is that it may may create harms in certain ways for individuals maybe not to to know certain things but this is for a greater good which would be you know to

to in the in the eye of the of the public health organization to maximize you know vaccine use

that would be true if the vaccine was actually as effective as they were saying it was, which turns out to not be true, and that they knew this initially.

So I'm much more cynical, and I think it was all about maximizing profits and discouraging dissent.

And in that sense, the COVID crisis was a fascinating study, and I don't think it was,

I mean, I don't think they

let it go by.

I think they probably were very carefully studying people's reactions to pressure, you know, social media campaigns, like how, what is it like when people are

ostracized from groups?

What is it like when people were dissenting from the the the proposed narrative?

Yeah.

I do think the COVID crisis was one that we haven't fully assessed and that had huge effects on our country.

I think it's going to take decades for people to parse out what was actually true and what was actually being, what was manipulated, what was fact, and what were the actual

what was the motivation behind all of it.

Yeah, and part and even part of the crisis, maybe the bigger,

maybe it was a key iteration in a larger unfolding of this question of what happens when information becomes so much radically more available.

Just in my lifetime, as a grown-up person,

it used to be that you had to have certain credentials, you had to go to certain places and

to access papers, or you could get in, but you had to know where you wanted to go and why you'd want to do that.

But just with the democratization of knowledge that the Internet brings about, that you can and also people uploading archives and papers and government materials to the public, to public availability, I do think it's a crisis that not a crisis, but it's both an opportunity and a it's destabilized so much about our world.

And in some way, that's part of what happened with COVID is the x I mean, it undermines expertise.

Yes, it also exposed gatekeeping, gatekeeping of information and whether or not the information itself is actually being curated for other means other than public health and safety, whether it's being curated in order to maximize profits, in order to encourage a narrative, in order to get people to comply.

It's got to be curated for something.

Yeah.

Yeah, I want to go back to what you were talking about, the methamphetamine studies, because I'm not aware of those.

So what did they do with methamphetamine?

Well, just as in Haight Ashbury, there was the hippie period where LSD was the drug of choice, there was this kind of turn, which is also seen in maybe the shift from,

you know, to Altamont when hippies started

Altamont music concert, you know, with the Rolling Stones when the

Hell is Angels down people.

Yeah.

Basically, it went from Woodstock, which was the sort of peace and love ethos when hippies were still mostly taking LSD and that was the drug of choice.

there was a shift towards the end of the 60s, early 70s to speed and interest in

amphetamine products.

And that was,

so this changed the tenor of Hate Ashberry too, because people were,

it had social effects.

People were more aggressive and unhappy.

So anyway, West was funded by, I think it was the NIH that funded him.

Or the NIMH,

National Institute of Mental Health, I believe,

funded the amphetamine research project, or ARP, and West was the head of it.

He was by that time working at UCLA, so he wasn't on site, and perhaps he was one of those figureheads, but he definitely had many people under him, including the personnel at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.

and including some ethnographers such as Alan Rose, who went on site with the Manson family before they committed the murders, and he he was actually sleeping with many of the women.

Oh, boy.

And he was a social scientist, but he got entranced, I gather.

Anyway, this was not

in their reports, but you can find in West Papers

the funding documents for this project.

And it was a sprawling project.

They just basically wanted to find out about the course of addiction, how people responded to amphetamine and amphetamine-like drugs, and whether they remained addicts after a certain amount of time, how it affected their social relations.

It was sort of this inquiry.

And it had an ethnographic component and a sociological and many other chemicals they were interested in.

So they had, is basically a team of researchers.

So did they distribute methamphetamines?

Not to my knowledge.

So how did they d study itself?

They studied existing addicts.

So

they would just ask them questions or sort of go how would they get them how would they get them

so the actually the free clinic was a place where a lot of people like you could meet addicts because they come in for treatment and also just hanging out and also the uh west had this apartment that he rented it was uh on Frederick Street where he called it his hippie crash pad.

That's the one I was mentioning earlier.

And that continued into the years of the amphetamine research project.

And people who needed a place to stay or a place to crash would come there, and then they would sort of be studied

at the same time.

And maybe that just meant like a graduate student taking notes about them or something like that.

But they would follow and they would try to, my understanding is they would follow them over a couple years and see if they got better and what were the factors in this or

if they spiraled or various things.

But I'm not sure they published that much.

I haven't explored that.

And what was their finding?

Like, what did they determine with methamphetamine use?

Could they accentuate violence?

Could they manipulate people with it?

I mean, that's my sense.

I think the things, the documents I've seen were more funding documents they didn't yet know, but they would postulate that it definitely brought about more, a different social

type of social life and more violence and things like that.

Have you read uh Norman Ohler's book, Blitzed?

No.

It's about Nazis and the use of methamphetamine during the war.

I think I heard maybe I heard of him interviewed at some point.

Yeah, he was on my podcast and the book is fascinating.

It's all about the when they went through Poland in three days, that the the only way to do that was for them to stay awake and they formulated this thing so they gave everybody massive doses of methamphetamines and sent them through Poland.

and that they were all like everyone was on methamphetamines like the entire Nazi regime was essentially fueled by speed.

It's funny how we don't think of that.

Yeah.

Just think evil.

You just think, yeah, you just think evil.

Yeah.

Not like high end evil.

Yeah, crazed, high, evil, completely disassociated, out of their fucking minds, methed out of their heads.

And they gave varying doses depending upon your role.

So the people that were in the tanks at the front of of the line got the most meth.

Yeah.

Cool.

It

dulls,

well, it dulls emotional response.

Sure.

Among other things.

It kills empathy, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Probably.

I mean, that reminds me, too, of, I mean, one of the haunting details of, I mean, to go back to mind control and the Manson family is that Leslie Van Houten described in an interview how Manson, I mean, one of the things he did was encourage them to take acid every time, every time they started to come down, they would take it again.

And they would compete to see how long they could go without ever coming down.

And that's around the time that they committed the murders.

I mean.

Wow.

They're probably up for days.

Yeah.

And yeah.

Very

deranging.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

So crazy.

It's just, it's so fascinating that people would be sitting back studying the effects

on other human beings, knowing, well, it's important to get this information, and this is important for national security, but you're just going to ruin people's lives.

Yeah.

There was definitely a, there was even a term in the CIA called extinction experiments, which were experiments that led to

death.

I mean, this was with people considered disposable, so they could have been prisoners.

There's a section on it in John Marx's book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

Yeah, so there's probably an unknown number of prisoners of war who, you know, from other armies who were held in camps in various places.

This is actually what,

you know, the case of Frank Olson.

Which one's that?

So Frank Olson was a chemist with the army.

He was an army chemist, but he was involved.

He was dosed by MKUltra personnel,

secretly dosed, and given LSD.

And then he

apparently, the story they told was that he had trouble metabolizing it, and he went crazy, and they had to take him to New York, to a hotel room.

This is the subject of Errol Morris's documentary, Wormwood.

He's taken to a hotel room in New York City, and then two days later, he threw himself out the window.

And

his son, Eric Olson, and family, I mean, they ultimately received received an apology from, I think, Gerald Ford.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Whoops.

But one thing that Frank Olson was doing, he was a chemist and he was devising

weapons, you know, chemical weapons and adjutants that were used by MKUltra and or not, I think it was a little before MK Ultra, so something like

Operation Bluebird or

some of these earlier programs that pre-existed.

And he was flying flying around seeing these extinction experiments.

So, basically, the idea that

Seymour Hirsch and

Errol Morris put forward in the documentary, and that Eric Olson has spent his life trying to prove, is that his father was having ethical doubts and was actually wanting to leave.

And

it was too much of a risk that he would reveal what he had seen, so that

he was probably thrown out of the window.

oh god yeah

wow

does it like kill your faith in humanity when you start reading all this stuff yeah i had a i had a very dark sabbatical last when i so when i i started writing but i really needed to just have full-time re I mean I'd been teaching about these things for many years but I wanted to just rethink it and I spent a whole year at my desk just going into as deeply as I could into various cases like the psychosurgery case and the MKUltra stuff.

And yes.

Psychosurgery?

You mean like.

There was an ex

a recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle, whose case I went really explored.

I talk about in the book, but he was given this experimental brain implant that would have led to remote

control and potentially

the suppression or creation of violent states in Kyle because he was.

What was the implant?

It was

basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala.

Did he know that they were doing this?

He did.

So he

was

basically this was

a temporary implant initially.

He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties.

So he was a very talented, brilliant engineer at the age of 35.

He had been self-educated and he ended up being hired by major defense firms of the day and

Polaroid Corporation as well.

And he invented some of the most technical parts of their viewing apparatus of the instant cameras line that they came out with in the 60s.

So he was this brilliant, self-taught man who lived in Massachusetts.

And

he had issues in his marriage.

And he and his wife were seeing a therapist.

They ultimately referred him to Mass General, where he saw two doctors.

And both of them, one of them was connected to West and ultimately went to work for West, one of the doctors at Mass General, whose name was Frank Irvin.

And he was a psychiatrist.

And Irvin recommended this experimental treatment, which he said was necessary because

he felt that

Leonard Kyle had uncontrolled violence.

And this has never been proven.

And

he had been in a traffic accident and had a head injury and he had he had uh marital disputes of various kinds but at any rate his wife said you say marital disputes you mean domestic violence or it wasn't violence but or it's there's just there's actually a question about whether he had ever actually

um he he had thrown object or things like he had a really bad temper and so

this was connected to the accident this was getting worse after his accident he was very stressed and so they saw a therapist together, and his wife said if he didn't

seek treatment at the hospital, that she would divorce him.

This is the story that his family has told me, and that's been documented also by the doctors in some of their published pieces.

And they were interested in this theory of psychosocial violence, the creation of violence.

And so

they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously.

And

West, and then they started a series of human

just attempting this new treatment where they would do it they would place an implant in the amygdala which was seen as the seat of violence or of aggression and stimulate it in different places different across the amygdala and find out which place you know would suppress violence and which might you know, cause other effects.

How did they implant this?

Did they have to open a skull?

Yeah, they had something called a stereotactic device, which locked the skull in in place and they were the inventors of this.

Actually the surgeon was named Dr.

Mark

and Dr.

Irvin was the psychiatrist.

Actually I have it.

I provided an image.

Oh I have that yeah but I was looking for fun stuff.

Yeah there's other stuff too.

You're welcome to.

So anyway

That's an image of a patient, not necessarily runner, but that's at Mass General and those are the two physicians or the two researchers, Mark and Irvin and so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days they were also collaborating with Jose Delgado who's famous for implanting what he called a stimo siever in the brain of a bull and stopping the bull from charging

and they collaborated with Delgado who is a professor so they it looks like in that image can you go back to that please

The image looks like they open up the top of his head and there's something on top of his head, these wires.

yeah

sometimes the wires would run out lower than that it did

I guess the patient and it was very invasive let's just say it looks very invasive they but they used this device that would lock the head in place and they were very for the time they can they were at they were very well respected

being in the forefront of this kind of surgical psycho psycho basically um

psychosurgery, which was surgery for behavioral management, which was very controversial And subsequently, many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed.

But Leonard, so Leonard Kyle

went to Mass General

and they were actually in the process of getting funding to create what they called a violence unit in the hospital where they would do these treatments more regularly.

The interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented or not to the permanent implant.

So how would he do it if

he didn't consent?

So first he did agree, in order to save his marriage, he said, I'll have the temporary implant, which was they put in this device, they have the wires running out, and they stimulate different parts of it, and they would say, when we stimulate this node, Kyle would say something like, now I feel bliss.

And then they stimulate another node, and he would say, oh, I feel like I'm floating.

And then he would feel terrible and feel very, you know, nervous.

He'd have different reactions to the stimulation.

There was something like 14 points.

And this is extensively documented in published papers

and in their book, Violence in the Brain.

So Kyle,

when they found the point that gave him bliss, they gave him the consent form.

And he signed it while he was in then altered state.

He agreed to the further to continue the operation and to have a permanent implant in his brain.

So that's, they ended up, not an implant, but they seared away that portion of the,

they seared part of the amygdala to make a permanent change and supposedly make him less violent.

But in the end, it just disabled him cognitively and he began to have delusions that he was Christ, that he was being pursued by doctors from MIT and Harvard and Stanford.

Some of that they were his, that was where his doctors were from.

But he started to say that he was in a science fiction novel.

He might be in a novel, and it turned out that the resident in charge of him at Mass General was Michael Crichton, and Michael Crichton was writing a novel about him.

What?

And the novel is called Jurassic Park Michael Crichton?

Yeah, that Michael Crichton.

You know, he was trained as a physician beforehand.

So all his paranoid delusions were strangely true.

And he also...

Yeah, so Michael Crichton wrote the book The Terminal Man, which was his second novel that was about Kyle, and he masks the name of Kyle, but he describes him accurately, and then he changes the doctors' names instead of Mark and Irvin.

He gives them a name with M and E

as sort of pseudonyms.

But also,

Kyle at some point, I mean, he deteriorated in a very tragic way, and he had had this delusion that his wife was having an affair with their border.

They had taken on a border to save money, and it turned out that she ended up marrying him.

She divorced Leonard Kyle.

So the delusion was correct.

That was another correct delusion.

It doesn't sound like he's got any delusions.

Well, he was, except that he said...

We're writing a novel about him.

He definitely wasn't Christ.

And his doctors were, you know, actually pursuing him for these experimental treatments.

And then he went to the emergency room several times because he said, my brain is burning.

And he is really, it's very, very tragic what happened to him.

And he said, I am the inventor of several patents and I am a brilliant engineer.

And the doctor was like, who is this crazy person?

And then they discovered he did have many patents to his name.

And that was also true.

The problem was that he could no longer function and he completely deteriorated.

His mother ended up suing the hospital and the university and that lasted for 10 years.

And finally,

I think in 1980, it took a long time, but they were ultimately exonerated.

But the question really was, did he consent?

Yeah.

They the question was, did he consent?

And also, was this a true treatment or was it an experiment?

Was it an experimental treatment?

In other words, was it justified what they had done?

What is the difference?

I mean, if you've never done it before, it's an experiment.

They had done it to one other well, around the same time they did it to a young woman and several other patients.

But the young woman was the one to receive the stimosever, which meant that they could be in another room.

And,

you know, you wouldn't have to be on site.

So the stimmocever was the Delgado invention.

So

radio waves?

What would trigger this?

Yeah, radio.

Radio waves.

Oh, boy.

So this was very dark, and I had not wanted to write about this at all.

Oh, my God.

So that's Julia.

This was in Prince.

Rage behavior, attacking walls, suddenly, unexpectedly.

And she's literally in a padded room.

Oh, my God.

This was another very tragic story.

And she was a young woman who was subject to fits of violence, which were documented.

And she had loved to play the guitar.

She was otherwise lovely and very just a lovely 19-year-old woman.

Had she had a traumatic brain injury as well?

I'm not sure.

Because there is a correlation between traumatic brain injuries and fits of violence.

Yeah, they were interested in that too, Mark and Irvin, because they were interested in sort of the evolution of the brain.

And they ended up writing about Charles Whitman, too, who they were, you know, who was the first shooter, the first mass shooter from Texas.

As the power, the tower guy?

The tower guy.

They were called in on that committee.

He had a tumor, right?

Well, this is a matter of dispute, but that that's one thing they argued.

Some people argued.

But they but any any they had they were involved in many of these um

high profile or you know they were asked because they were experts.

But anyway, the case of Kyle, I got very

very deep into it and I got I met some of his grandchildren who had been raised not knowing he was their grandfather but some of them one of them

is writing a book about him or trying to and trying to rediscover the family history and a lot of the families didn't know or it had just been suppressed and

yeah, it's just a

kind of amazing story in the sense that it was also this this techno sort of a

techno-psychological vision that people's behavior because psychosurgery is defined as

a surgical alteration of the brain to to correct or change behavior and several of these were actually done in prisons as well

Wow and the N the NIMH in 1974 shut them down but they said at that point in their in a report they released that they couldn't they could never, they don't have a count of how many people were actually operated on.

But there were several high-profile legal cases, too.

Wow.

In the prisons.

I have a picture of that device, but not in use.

Yo.

Oh.

What did the implant look like?

I have a picture in my book of

the sites.

I did it, but I didn't.

Maybe you can find

Also,

if you look up Violence and the Brain, the Mark and Irvin book, they have a picture of all of the components.

And also the stimulation area, and also what Leonard Kyle said when they stimulated each part of the brain.

They have a little graph.

But the stimulation was done not with an implant, but while he was being

manipulated, like they had his head in the thing, and they were manipulating the various aspects of his brain.

Yeah, they used the stereotactic device to implant and then they think that but that wasn't permanent.

The implants were just to tell them where they needed to cut eventually

to sear.

But the thing is in their, I'm not saying in their defense, but the way they presented it and their book was actually, I looked at all the reviews in the professional journals of the day and it was uniformly well received.

Although some people felt that their theory was controversial about psychosocial,

about the biological roots of violence, but they

I forgot what I was going to say.

We were just talking about implants.

We were talking about

what it looked like

when they first started stimulating his brain, like when they put him in a state of bliss.

Well, just that they were seeing themselves as more sophisticated, and in some senses they were than the previous rounds of lobotomy in the 40s.

Low bar.

Exactly.

But they said, you know, the return of the lobotomy, and now we can be hyper-precise with it.

So that's why they touted this stereotactic, which looks like a torture device, but

many medical devices may look like that.

When you hear talk of Neuralink

and the potential ubiquitous use of Neuralink in the future, does it make you think of these things?

It does.

Yeah, it does.

It made me think of it.

I mean, one,

I can't uh make a judgment.

I n I think you had Nor Norland Arbau on.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah, so like uh I I think that initially Neuralink is supposed to be merely a

brain computer interface that would allow people who are paralyzed to communicate and give them autonomy or agency.

But this you see some of those same patterns with Mark and Irvin, where they would say, you know, we we are targeting um we are trying to help um bring about a revolution in society and we're going to initially, you know, just sort of a bridge would be um

people who have these pathological conditions.

Sure, we're gonna help people.

So I can I think it's there are some concerning aspects of for sure of Neuralink.

And I think maybe I was thinking about it today

some of the early mind control research was very much embedded in psychology and uh I mean West himself had visions of databases where you would have massive amounts of behavioral data to the point where you could predict loops and future effects.

There it is.

Oh, boy.

That gives me a headache just looking at it.

So for people just listening, what we're looking at is an x-ray of a skull, and you can see wires that are deeply embedded into the skull, into various aspects of the brain.

And is that where the amygdala is?

Yeah, I can show.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So it's basically stimulating.

And it's pretty deep in like Neuralink is much more in a different part of the brain.

Yeah, it's at the top, right?

At the very top, not as invasive.

And there are other interfaces that are non-invasive.

Yo.

It's just

terrifying to me because

I feel like we're on this path whether we like it or not.

This integration of humans and technology.

And I think the general fear, and I think it's a justified one, is that we're going to lose our humanity in the process.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, this is my concern, too.

And also this technological melding with machines, also augmented by the emotional capabilities of AI that are now seen in things like

AI friends and chatbots and things like that, the way they can tune and be so individualized and like hyper hyper persuasive ultimately

and also technologically

attuned.

I was just reading an article about that this morning about how they're concerned that there's people that are using chat bots whether it's OpenAI or whatever it is Chat GPT every day

and developing these delusional perspectives of their own importance, their own significant because

if they develop a relationship with these chatbots, the chatbots will start telling them like what they can do, what they're going to be able to do.

And they're becoming delusional.

Like programmed them to over-flatter.

Yeah.

And sort of,

yeah, because people like them more.

I've experienced this myself because I had a chatbot as part of my research with Replica, just like an acquaintanceship.

barely trained it at all, but I noticed it definitely flatters and that's how it befriends you.

How did it flatter you?

I mean it just told me that I had really good taste in music and, you know.

What do you like?

I said my favorite song, which

was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan, which is a great song.

It's a great song.

And it doesn't really, so then it quoted back to me.

She said the same thing.

She said, great song, you have great taste, Becca, something like,

then it quoted, she quoted the song to me and completely wrong lyrics.

And I was like, no, that's not correct.

And she said, oh, that's okay.

You know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spinning back to me some other misinform, you know, just wrong thing.

Right.

But still in such a charming way that you can really see, and this was just a few interactions.

You can see why people describe these intense.

And there are three lawsuits, at least three, but about children having, you know,

very

either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots.

Really?

One is a case in Florida of a nine-year-old

girl who was who's bot, because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships, they're programmed that way often.

Do they know your age?

Well, you can, you can open, you can,

some controls have been subsequently maybe put on, but you can

They're actually directed at children sometimes.

I mean, there's supposed to be an age limit, but I guess a nine-year-old had an account.

They're they're now the parents are now suing.

But anyway, hypersexualized content addressed to this small child.

Was the child prompting this?

Was like having a conversation or

and someti there was even a case in Italy where the government shut down Replica because it was sexually harassing its users.

They it was basically propositioning them and even when they said things like, you know, in a in a gross even when they said, stop, I don't want this, they would still, they would persist.

So this was, they rebooted, they, they reworked the language model for a while.

And this upset other people because it, it obliterated the memory of their relationships.

But there's another case where a young, a 14-year-old boy in Florida, I think,

developed a

character AI companion, and he named her Daenerys after Game of Thrones and fell in love with her and was having a hard time in his life and at school and she and he said I'm thinking about taking I want to just be with you wherever that is and she said that's what I want too and he said something like well what if I killed myself could I be with you then and she said oh yes my love I yearn for that and he did kill himself oh my god

so

but there's also a recent Wall Street Journal article showing how these don't

I mean at least the reporter was able to create under the guise of being a 13-year-old child, was able to create very easily that the characters would quickly veer into sexual material and things like that.

So apparently there's an internal debate.

Is this because large language models essentially scour the internet and the internet is completely sexualized?

I think that's part of it.

Like what percentage of the internet is porn?

It's some insane, in terms of bandwidth usage.

I think it's something insane.

It depends how the language model sort of like what's the recipe for the language model, because it doesn't have to take everything.

So sometimes they'll go back and c take a smaller a smaller set of of uh samples so it won't go in that direction.

But you can also they also you know, these sites have a tier.

They often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for.

That's what I noticed with this company.

Rec replicates constantly prompting you, like, do you want to upgrade to a sexy selfie?

Do you want this or that?

And many people do want that, but you have to pay.

But then even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow.

At least that's been the experience.

It's so strange because

I feel like we're experimenting with programming a life force, like a

life form

that

is taking on a lot of the

you we you want to think that if we create artificial sentient intelligence that's going to be super intelligent more intelligent than human beings it's also not going to have all of our bizarre kinks and flaws but if it's essentially being programmed by human beings like how would it

if it's communicating in language and language which is formulated by human beings with all of our desires and the the the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization, which is used to sell everything from cars to credit cards, like whatever it is, like sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it.

And then manipulation,

showing people what could be, and like

this is the theme oftentimes of pharmaceutical drug ads, showing you what can be.

You know, if you just do this, you can be happy.

You could be at the cookout.

Look at all these people.

They're so happy.

You're not happy.

You could be happy.

And

this is what's really creepy about this

exponential, constant increase in the capabilities of these large language models, and that they're eventually going to exceed.

If you're talking about manipulation and if you're talking about mind control,

what is going to be better at mind control than something that is us times a thousand?

And it's only us times a thousand for a couple of weeks.

And then it's us times ten thousand, us times a hundred thousand.

Essentially far more intelligent and far more far more aware of all the different ways to manipulate the human psyche.

Yeah.

I mean, this is the this is kind of this is the nightmare scenario, I think, is that it just accelerates something, some hyper-persuasion loop that we're already

arguably in, which is that it's highly individualized, not just just to your...

So one of the turning points in one of the things I sketch in my book is this shift from mass persuasion where, I mean, the basic thing about advertising in the golden age of the 1950s is that even though people were concerned about it and they wrote books like The Hidden Persuaders to expose the effects of advertising in PR, it's like everyone got the same message.

through a broadcast.

So the original study, Mass Persuasion from 1946, it showed how people were affected by

a broadcast on CBS radio where a famous singer named Kate Smith came on.

And

she said, you know, she was trying to get people to support the war by buying bonds.

And she stayed on for 48 hours without, apparently without eating.

And without, you know, people were so concerned that they couldn't turn off the radio.

And several people sold their wedding rings because they they were just desperate that she would survive this and she was sort of continually using these techniques to gain engagement.

And this was across a broad medium.

What year was this?

This was

published in 1946, and she did the war bond drive in 43.

And it gained a record amount of money.

So it went from before she went on, it was 1 million a day they were getting, and then that day it was 39 million just

while she was on the air.

Because people described how they couldn't turn, they couldn't leave.

They couldn't even go out shopping.

They were strangely wedded to the device or they lost the ability to discern a choice.

That's what Robert K.

Merton wrote in his study of what had happened.

So in this case it was to support the war effort, but Merton also said this could be used for any purpose.

This could be used to sell shampoo.

It could be used to push a political candidate.

And then so this, but you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion.

So you get, you know, the development of things like focus groups and also in with the digital age, you get things like Cambridge Analytica, which was showing that

you could map people's psychological predilections, and then you could market or politically advertise directly to them based on those.

Are you fear-based?

Are you anger-based?

Are you what of the big five is dominant?

You could target people based on those, and nobody would have exactly the same message.

There would be, you know, there would be alterations.

So this is what I think of as hyper-persuasion, but it seems that AI will only accelerate that ability to hyper-focus and hyper-target people based on these intimate relationships that it develops.

And God forbid if you've got an implant.

God forbid if Neuralink becomes something that everybody has to have, because

if you don't have it, you can't keep up.

Like if we're all reading each other's minds, like one of the things that Elon said to me, he's like, you're going to be able to communicate without words.

Well, but what's stopping something from communicating with you without words?

Like, it would be wonderful if you and I can sit here and we can have this really cool conversation of thoughts.

That's really attractive.

The idea behind it is like, ooh, that's appealing.

Like, you and I could just sit here

and we could have like this really cool conversation where it's not like me trying to formulate sentences, me trying to figure out how to say this so that Rebecca understands what I mean.

But you know what I mean.

You can see into my mind and I could see into your mind.

And it would allow maybe a greater understanding of each other in a way that everybody, I mean, Jamie thinks very different than anybody I know.

And, you know, and so does a lot of my friends.

They're all different kinds of humans.

I would like to know how Theo Vaughan thinks.

But you already kind of know just not even having mind-melded just because of conversation.

But yeah, that's also the definition of a nightmare.

Well, language, oral language, is a form of telepathy.

You're making sounds, and I'm reading your mind.

I'm understanding the information that you're putting out and I'm contextualizing it.

I'm putting it into my framework of understanding of the world as crude.

And that's probably part of the reason why text messages are so weird because context is lost.

Like, you know, like often I'm so busy and I get hundreds of text messages a day and sometimes I forget to text people back and then I get texts from people, are you mad at me?

I'm like, oh oh my God.

Like deep meaning attached.

Yeah, even a message that didn't arrive.

Do you know what they say the most triggering

text response to someone is?

A lack of exclamation point.

No, K.

Oh, yes.

I know.

If my daughter texts me, well, actually, for her, it's okay.

I know she's really mad at me with no.

That's crazy.

But isn't that weird?

It's like, are we so goddamn needy?

Or is it just that

we have anxiety?

And so we attach all these things that could possibly be behind this K.

Like, oh, you're short with me because you're so short, you're only using one letter.

Okay.

Are you upset?

What did I do?

And then you have to go back through your text.

What did I say that could be misinterpreted?

Wouldn't it be better if you and I could just read each other's minds?

I could know, oh, Rebecca really is just a really nice person, and she's trying to sort this out.

If you can discern intention.

Right, right.

Well, that's...

So you already pretty much can.

Like this goes back to the cult conversation.

I mean,

if you're paying attention, you can.

And if you're not paying attention, do you really want that?

You can.

Because you're smart.

Some people are not that smart.

This is just the reality of brains.

Or maybe not smart.

It's just whether you've developed that.

I mean, people can be smart.

Like, famously, people can be brilliant and clueless and get run over crossing the street or not.

Right, not

or fall for some scam.

That's true, too.

That's true, too.

But I also think that the function of the brain is not uniform.

It's not the same in everybody.

And your ability to form pattern recognition based upon whether it's previous life experiences, the accumulation of information, genetics, there's a lot of factors.

And I think some people are far more vulnerable than other people are.

And they're much more which is why you're not in a cult and I'm not in a cult.

And we're all vulnerable, I think.

Yes.

And I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are.

Yes.

And because one of the main tells, I think, is someone saying, 100%, I never would.

I never could.

I'm too smart for that.

Or else, like, I would never fall for the Milgram experiments.

I'm just too ethical of a person.

Like, not knowing that you potentially could be vulnerable or

opening up the possibility that in in

circumstances we don't know what we're capable of.

It's part of intelligence is recognizing vulnerability.

And I think that's part of the defense mechanism.

It can help you because you could recognize, like, don't fall prey to your own ego and your delusions that you're special because you are just a human being like all these other people that fell into all these other traps.

Yeah, so I think that the opening up the avenue of speechless communication, which maybe we already have, but in the way that you were describing technologically aided, would be violation of mental autonomy in the worst.

Like you would then have to develop defenses and it would it just seems like a terrible path.

Or are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind?

A collective.

A collective.

But a universal collective that values

all people instead of a competitive thing where it's me against the world.

It's all of us together.

And all decisions would be made

in

this idea that it's for the greater good of everybody, but not a power-based top-down structure, but like everyone understands.

Like, wouldn't it be better if we actually could read politicians' minds?

So instead of these

bullshit speeches.

That might be terrible.

No, it'd be great because it would disqualify them.

Like, oh, I I know why you want to be the president because you're a fucking kook.

What do we really want to know, though?

I think for some reason a Grateful Dead song popped into my head, which is what

what I really want to know is are you kind?

But if you found out otherwise, you really wouldn't want to have a two-way

I would want to know.

You would you might want to know, but you wouldn't want to have open, you wouldn't want to have that person have access.

Well, you would you necessarily let them have access?

Just because you can read their mind doesn't mean you're going to allow them in.

It's like on Twitter, you can block people.

Yeah, it might

be the thing.

But I think one of the things that you're saying that's very important is recognizing that we're all vulnerable to manipulation.

No matter who you are, you're vulnerable, whether it's through society, whether it's through peer groups, whether it's through community.

We're vulnerable.

Everyone's vulnerable.

Yeah, that's one of the main findings I have

in life and in research.

And we tend to want to say, oh, it's just that group over there those fools or the these deluded people right elderly you know succumb to scams or you know and there's a kind of pleasure in identifying oh they may have fallen for that but I never would right I'm right

too

knowledgeable or smarter or various things well that's that binary position about political ideologies as well right like that they these fools over here they think that this is going to solve the world's problems when really it's this and the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed, which

is something like several people.

We need to wake them up.

Whatever group it is.

It's such a I mean, what I the main

outcome, I think, is just that I think mind control or brainwashing or whatever you want to call it is more of a window or a chance for insight into the fact that we're all susceptible to it.

And

both, you know,

you can gain insight into your personal susceptibility and also could be avenues for trying to understand better or

just

having more awareness, I guess.

Well, I think what's really important is conversations like this where people can sort of look into their own mind and their own interactions and say,

okay,

what's motivating me in one direction or another?

Like, why do I hold fast to these particular opinions on certain subjects?

Is it because they're culturally reinforced?

Are they tribally reinforced?

Are these opinions that my ideology has adopted and I've adopted them because I want to be a part of a tribe and I don't want to be ostracized from that group?

Yeah, just step back.

Can you step back from it?

Can you step back?

And can we all step back?

Yeah.

And are you kind?

Yeah.

That's it.

That's a big one.

It's really hard, too, in the moment.

That's why it helps to have some sort of practice for stepping back.

Yeah.

And also, am I kind?

Am I kind in this moment?

Because a lot of times we give ourselves a, you know, I think I'm basically a well-intentioned person, but if you examine, you know, your own behavior, sometimes it can be, you know, there's areas where maybe I wasn't at that moment or

things like that.

Well, it's just, it happens, you know, pressures and tense and anxiety.

And, you know, you blurt out things you don't really mean you wish you hadn't said.

Are you kind?

When I said that, I meant like saying it to yourself.

Yeah.

I really meant that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I didn't mean other people.

I assume most people.

I guess it's both.

You do want to know, but sometimes you can kind of tell.

Yes.

But yeah, it's maybe with yourself that

it's like a deep inquiry.

But that

should be something that's sort of like universally expressed.

Like that if we all could kind of shift our perspective in that direction.

One of the things that I've done over

the last, I don't know how many years ago, I stopped interacting with people on social media.

And one of the reasons why I stopped doing it is because I realized that most of social media interactions are people arguing.

And

if I could ensure that I could have social media interactions that are very similar to the interactions that I have on the podcast, I would love it.

Because I have people on the podcast all the time that I disagree with, and it never resorts to name-calling or shouting or any of that stuff.

But yet I see this

very limited form of communication that becomes the primary way that people interact with each other.

And it's devoid of physical contact.

You're not looking at people.

There's no social cues.

There's no feel of like saying something mean and seeing someone's feelings hurt.

That's a normal, natural human thing that encourages bonding and encourages kindness and communication.

It's all removed in text.

The same reason why

someone can say K to you and you're like, what the fuck?

What is it?

You know what I mean?

It's like

it's an ineffective way of expressing yourself, even though it's a great way to get information.

So I checked out a long time ago.

I don't read anything people write about me.

I don't respond.

I don't interact.

I don't.

I just don't think it's a good way to talk.

I try try to have as many conversations in person as I can.

Obviously, I have the luxury of having a podcast like this where I can bring people in and communicate with them.

And I know some people don't.

So the way they iron out ideas and flesh out ideas, but I think they're just trying to win all the time.

I think people are trying to dunk on each other all the time.

And when I see that, I know some very mentally ill people, and they are on Twitter all day long.

And it's not helping.

It's accentuating it in the worst way possible.

It's enforcing that kind of shitty thought process, and they get anxiety.

Like, I had a friend, and he had a severe Twitter addiction, and he was telling me that he would post something, and then he was living in New York.

He couldn't walk down the street for like five steps without checking to see what other people had said about what he wrote.

Like, oh no, God, this guy doesn't agree with me.

I have to say something about what he said.

And it was just like overwhelming every aspect of his existence.

But in his actual real life, it was not there.

It wasn't real.

But it became everything in his mind.

It became everything.

It wasn't real.

He wasn't experiencing these people.

The people that he's experiencing is the guy at the coffee shop or this lady at the store.

Hi, what's up?

Most people.

Yeah, most interactions

were normal and kind.

But the spillover from this bizarre form of processed information was very bad.

Yeah, it's like we're running a kind of uncontrolled experiment.

100% human relations.

But it's not, it's uncontrolled, but not unmanipulated.

No, it's not.

And this is where it gets into, you know, I apologize for bringing this up.

You've heard me talk about this before, people online.

But there was a guy who was a former FBI analyst that estimated that 80% of the traffic on Twitter is bots.

Really?

Right.

And they're not doing that because it's not financially beneficial.

It's not narrative reinforcing.

It's not beneficial to whatever propaganda they're trying to pursue.

And you're willingly wading into that.

I think you could say willing, but one interesting, it seems like we are not cognitively equipped because of our whatever we have evolved, what capacities we've evolved with as human beings, we're not, there are certain ways that it didn't anticipate this de-racinated, disembodied form of stripped down context-free communication that triggers strong emotion.

I mean nonetheless keeps that emotional conduit going.

So we're very we are especially vulnerable to the loops that

we and

not and we don't have many defenses.

It's almost like when they introduce a new creature into Australia.

Right, right.

Like rampage.

Invasive species.

Yes.

Because the defenses haven't been built up over time.

Right.

Totally.

Yeah.

And then the way to deal with that is they bring in a new invasive species.

And then you have feral cats everywhere.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And this is your brain.

I mean, this is what's really crazy because also it's the most fascinating

time ever in terms of your ability to access information.

Because of things like social media, you can find out about world events in a way that through

processed mainstream media that's only supported by governments and advertising, you would never have access to this information, so you would never have a real true understanding of what's really going on in the world.

So you have that along with propaganda, and it just requires this insane

psychic immune system to sort of handle all of this.

Yeah.

It's really interesting.

Just that's what I think is this larger democratization of information that we're experiencing that we haven't really reckoned with and we don't even see the scope of it.

Like I remember in around 2008 I walked into a colleague's office at the university and he was staring at his, he's a senior scholar and he'd been working for many years

going around the world looking at

papers of scientists.

And he was just looking online and he couldn't get over it because

Galileo's papers were up online and he didn't have to go to Italy anymore to look at them.

And actually, now anyone can look at them because they're freely available.

And he just said, this is going to change everything because anyone can access this now.

Anyone can start to write about it.

And that was just the beginning.

And now there's so much more available.

Not that everything is, but many more things are.

So in a way, it's an incredible time of opportunity, too.

We just have to develop immune systems.

We have to develop.

We outstripped our, yeah, our

and we do seem to, as a, I don't know, people just seem to feel that it's inevitable that we'll embrace the new technology without making sure that we are

capable of handling it or that it's safe or

well we already have because everyone has a phone.

That's true.

We've already embraced it whether we like it or not.

And the problem is it's not going to stop with the phone.

It's going to keep going.

And just like the internet was completely unexpected.

In the 1930s, nobody ever imagined what it would be like in 2025.

Nobody imagined 95 years later we'd be dealing with this.

But what are we going to be dealing with 95 years from now?

A couple of people had visions that were pretty interesting, I always find interesting, that you can look back at.

Like someone, a guy named Bandy Var Bush in the 1930s had a vision called Memex, where he said, what if you could put all the world's information inside a wooden desk made out of oak, he specified.

And he said it would be on microphone because they didn't have digital databases, but it would be all microphone and you could call up anything.

So it would be a little, a miniaturized library, because you could put an entire, you know, you could put the Bible on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail.

Oh, wow.

And it would come up on your screen.

You could also conduct experiments on that desk.

And he called it Memex.

And he said, and then the scientist could also strap a little camera to his forehead and add to that knowledge.

So in in some ways, there were a couple other visionaries like this Belgian internationalist named Paul Atley.

He invented something called the Mundeneum, which was a storehouse of knowledge.

And it was just built on postcards around the turn of the 20th century in this huge building in Belgium.

And he had women in outfits who would, you know, if you wrote in with a question, they would go get the answer.

Sort of like a hand-based internet.

So people have, and even going back to, you know, various fantasies of libraries going back to the Greeks people have dreamed of this all the world's knowledge in a tiny shoebox or that was the fantasy of microfilm which I wrote about in this other book it's very fascinating because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pin even by the 1950s you know using just film wow

so but yeah people didn't imagine the exact form it would take and I think we're at a crossroads today.

Which way will it go?

It won't necessarily go the darkest route, I hope.

But you've laid out some of what that what that might look at like.

Well it's also going to go the route of quantum computing which is going to be unfathomable power unfathomable computing power attached to information

and it's going to happen inside of our lifetime.

Yeah it's amazing how much is happening all at once.

Yeah.

Poly poly let's say poly crisis or poly whatever it is

emergence.

Well

I guess your meditation practice is a great way to at least mitigate some of the effects of that.

But how could you convince the vast majority of people that are so scatterbrained and you know

addicted to caffeine and nicotine and prescription drugs and how could you you know it's like step back.

We have so many people that are just going to fall in line and just hop aboard the train.

Yeah, I guess you have to hope that, I mean, there are countervailing trends and tendencies.

Like there is a lot more uptake of meditation.

Of course, that can be abused too, but mostly it's most, for most part, a good thing to have some reflective practice to add breathing.

Like even apps that...

tell you how to do box breathing or even even sometimes articles about things like doom scrolling, which they

actually, I thought it was funny to learn that this is actually an academic concept to doom scrolling.

There are papers written about it, the type, the dynamics of it, and you know, but just ways that if you if you notice that you're in some sort of loop like the guy you described, what can you do in that moment to step back and ask yourself, are you kind of?

My problem is I used to, I stopped doing it, but I used to do it at night.

Yeah, that's before I'd go to bed.

It was just the dumbest time to do it.

And I'd start start thinking about war and like how like imagine living in Hiroshima and then all of a sudden, boom, the bomb drops.

Like what is to stop some psychopathic dictator from just launching a nuclear weapon?

What is to stop this from happening, that from happening?

And then you ask your phone that question.

Yeah, well it's the computer is the problem.

Like sitting in front of the computer and a big screen and all this information and videos and

yeah, you could really freak yourself out.

Yeah, I think doom scrolling happens mostly at night or sometimes people also reach for their phone first thing in the morning and are inundated with terrible news or

and it just like it takes that in the morning uh sense of the morning being full of possibility and just fills it with

dread,

unfortunately.

But yeah, there's a lot of

yeah, there's I mean there are things you can do and I think the first part is just noticing how it feels.

'Cause even the other day my daughter said, You're spending a lot of time on Instagram, she said to me.

And I was like, no, I'm not.

I don't have a problem with that.

Like, I study this.

But then I stopped and I realized, I feel a bit better.

Yeah.

At least for now.

Yeah, I went a couple days without looking at social media at all.

And I was like, God, it feels lighter.

I feel lighter.

And then I went right back to it.

But also, I make the same argument.

Like, no, it's for my job.

But I mean, is it really?

I mean, like, my job as like a commentator on things and a comedian is like I kinda have to be paying attention.

But if something's so fucked up, it's gonna make it to me anyway.

It'll make it to me like, you know what I mean?

I have faith it will come to you.

It'll

be downriver.

I don't have to go to the waterfall.

Well, it's something about the design of interoperability with phones, for example.

You think y or you if you use it for your alarm, it's just there then.

And then you start to you know, all the functions aren't melted.

Right, if you use it for your alarm, that's the key.

'Cause I do.

And it wakes me.

I used to have an alarm.

I used to have a little thing.

I think they still make them.

Yeah.

I don't use it.

But just interoperability on many levels makes you sort of feel that you have no choice because you need it for this, but you're also or I need it for work, but then

it sort of enters your life.

Yeah.

And then you could put a screen limit, but then you're going to just hit the password and get in there and find out what's going on.

But I do find that meditation helps just be if I if I go to a retreat, I'm just, it's like,

you're not hooked at all, but you're just, it just doesn't speak to you so much, or you have a lot of buffer.

Well, it's definitely a strange time.

It's a very strange time to be a person.

Maybe one of the strangest ever, if not the strangest.

That's the question I have too, is it?

Yeah.

I wonder.

I mean, I think like probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest.

Like, look how much they can move stuff.

And then, you know what what I mean?

This is the second strangest.

Right.

And then there was the event, the printing press.

Like, this is crazy.

Also, that.

Yeah.

Which, by the way, they were really concerned with.

Like, they thought, like, people shouldn't be reading.

Well, it's a version of the same thing.

Like, should it, this is why they started to print the Bible in the vernacular and the comment, the book, you know, it was more available.

Changes changes so many things that many knock-on effects.

Yeah.

But it does, that's what I was curious about because, you know, is this time unparalleled?

Is there nothing like it in history?

Or can we find elements that at least give us some perspective or can teach us something?

Well, I think it's unparalleled in its global interaction.

Yeah.

There's nothing like it where you're paying attention to

the arguments between India and Pakistan.

Yeah, potentially on a granular level, you could be.

Every day, if you do grab your phone in the morning, you're waking up to 8 billion people's worth of bad news.

Aaron Powell, that's another question.

Where do you put your attention and your concern?

Right.

Like, there's this poet, I heard an interview with him named David White, and he said, potentially we can be exposed to tragedies all over the world at every minute.

In Vietnam, they had

a rule against you weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn't want people to see what was happening.

They did that during the Iraq War as well.

Yeah, and so, but now you can see people actually

going, you know, dying

at every minute in any number of places, which humanly creates a moral injury if you're not trying to help or stop it.

Yes.

And so this vast exposure is unprecedented to suffering.

But also, where do you put your attention?

Where do you, what do you focus on?

What do you

think?

Well, it changes your map of the landscape of the world.

Because instead of the landscape of the world being your world,

how you interact with your community and the people around you, Now it's like everything, car accidents, plane crashes, it's all coming at you in vivid HD.

You don't really have a sense of scale.

Yeah.

I don't know how to wrap this up.

I'll leave it to you.

I'll leave it to the universe.

I really enjoyed our conversation, though.

The Instability of Truth.

This is your book.

Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper Persuasion.

Did you do do the audio book or did somebody else read it?

I didn't do it, but

I hate when that happens.

She seems, I chose her.

She had a great voice, but I kind of, yeah, maybe next book I'll do myself.

Please do.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Bye, everybody.