American Thought Leaders - Exposing the ‘Nudge Units’ Helping Governments Control People’s Behavior: Laura Dodsworth

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“Now you have nudge units embedded in governments or advising governments all around the world. And what they’re really trying to do is change the will of the people from the top down. Now, there’s no democratic mandate for this. So, governments are sneakily using pre-conscious subliminal and covert techniques to change the way we behave, to make us model citizens. And maybe it’s supposedly in our best interests, but we haven’t been consulted upon it.”In this episode, I sit down with Laura Dodsworth, one of the first journalists to expose COVID-era government manipulation and how “nudge units” used fear to change behavior.“I feel it and I think I know a lot of people do—this feeling of something quite dark brewing, socially and politically. There’s a feeling of a net tightening and of truth being squashed, of more surveillance, more censorship, institutions captured by woke ideology,” says Ms. Dodsworth.We discuss the new book she co-authored: “Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It.”“Your mind is wonderous. You do deserve to be sovereign of it. And you can be in charge of your own decision-making capability. You’re not on a sliding scale with a piece of machinery at all,” says Ms. Dodsworth.What is the real threat of AI? Of social media? Of pornography? Of net-zero?“One study in 2007 estimated that the human brain receives the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information every day. So, that’s the first thing. You’re overwhelmed with information. And the human brain simply can’t cope with it all. So, what you do is you depend upon shortcuts—cognitive biases to make sense of the world,” says Ms. Dodsworth.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Now you have nudge units embedded in governments or advising governments all around the world and what they're really trying to do is change the will of the people from the top down. So governments are sneakily using pre-conscious, subliminal and covert techniques to make us model citizens and maybe it's supposedly in our best interests but we haven't been consulted upon it. In this episode I sit down with Laura Dodsworth, one of the first journalists to expose COVID-era government manipulation and how so-called nudge units used fear to change behavior. I feel it, and I think I know a lot of people do.

This feeling of something quite dark brewing socially and politically. There's a feeling of a net tightening and of truth being squashed, of more surveillance, more censorship, institutions captured by woke ideology. We discuss the new book she co-authored, Free Your Mind, the new world of manipulation and how to resist it.

Your mind is wondrous. You do deserve to be sovereign of it and you can be in charge of your own decision-making capability. You're not on a sliding scale with a piece of machinery at all. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year,

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Call 855-862-3377. That's 855-862-3377. Or text AMERICAN to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377. Or text AMERIC American to 65532. Laura Dodsworth, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me. Laura, some years ago now, you brought to the attention of the world the existence of these nudge units in the UK government and how they were actually seeding fear into the populace to affect behavioral change. You were ahead of your time. Since that time, we've learned

that this has been happening at a mass scale across all sorts of what I call legacy media in use and that we're being bombarded by propaganda daily. Propaganda and censorship, two sides of the same coin. I just wanted to give kudos where they're due here before we start. Now you've come up with something astonishing, which is a book that explains how to try to inoculate yourself in a whole myriad of ways from this. Tell me about Free Your Mind. Free Your Mind, the new world of manipulation, how to resist it, is very much my follow-on to my last book,

which you've just been very kind about, A State of Fear. I've co-written this book with fabulous behavioural scientist, psychologist called Patrick Fagan. The idea behind the book is that we do live in quite a unique time. We are bombarded with information and propaganda. It will sound dramatic for people to hear it this way, but there's a war on for your mind. Your brain is a battlefield. One study in 2007 estimated that the human brain receives the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information every day. So that's the first thing, you know, you're overwhelmed with information and the human brain simply can't cope with it all. So what you do is you depend upon shortcuts, cognitive biases to make sense of the world. I don't think we really live in a democracy in the same way that we used to think that we do. Democracy is about enacting the will of the people

but now you have nudge units embedded in governments or advising governments all around the world and what they're really trying to do is change the will of the people from the top down. Now there's no democratic mandate for this. So governments are sneakily using preconscious, subliminal and covert techniques to change the way we behave, to make us model citizens. And maybe it's supposedly in our best interests, but we haven't been consulted upon it. You know, there's a confluence of this kind of sophisticated psychology, nudging and behavioural insights combined with AI and social media platforms and big tech and I think the world is changing in ways which we cannot begin to understand the ramifications of. So there are thousands of books that teach people how to use

propaganda, nudging, persuasion and advertising. And I don't think until now that anyone has really tried to write a book that is a defence against the dark arts, that teaches people how to identify and resist the manipulation. And that's what Free Your Mind is about. Not everybody's going to want to resist the manipulation. Not everyone's going to agree that they're under the spell of so much manipulation. You know, it takes quite a lot of humility to admit that this happens. When I wrote A State of Fear, for me, that was such an epiphany that governments could weaponise our emotion and our fear against us to make us stay in our homes,

to lock us up, to change all the normal rhythms and rituals of life, to make us follow the rules. Again, you know, it's supposedly in our best interest, but life changed in a way that we never could have imagined before. And I realised I'd lost all of these essential freedoms, but I did have one, there was one domain that I could have freedom over if I wanted, and that was my mind. And so it set me on this path of trying to understand how we reclaim sovereignty of the mind. You know, often there are nudges, but sometimes, you know, they're extremely heavy-handed attempts. And I'm thinking about Google Gemini here. You know, there was so much ideology embedded in the system. And now it's astonishing how heavy handed that manipulation

is in this case. We're so lucky to have seen it. It's one of those moments when the curtain's drawn back. Do you remember all the furore in the media not that long ago, just several months ago, when we had big tech leaguers and AI leaders and politicians telling us that AI could develop sentience, it could write religious tomes, rule the world, and it presented a threat to humanity that was at the level of nuclear weapons. It was an extinction level threat. I mean, I didn't agree with any of that. I can come on to telling you what I think the real threat is. In a nutshell, it's that AI can be sedimented with psychology and nudging. It's a brainwasher's dream, frankly. But the thing about AI is it

doesn't have sentience. It doesn't really generate language. What it's doing is riding on the coattails of humanity's achievements. And you can't forget the humans. It's the humans that code it. So people like to think they're above ideological influence, that they can't be manipulated, that they're not brainwashed, that they're not brainwashers. But what we've seen, what we've seen with Google is the pure, unadulterated, ideological bias of the programmers. They want to change the way we imagine the world. And very transparently, I think in this case, and the thing that, you know, we've kind of increasingly been realizing, or I've been increasingly realizing over the last five, seven years, is that almost every power structure in our societies, in our

Western democracies today, is kind of filled with people that share this ideology or are ready to be on board with it as a way to success, I suppose. You're absolutely right. I think it's everywhere. And I think it's something that so many of us can sense. It might even sound a little bit dramatic, but I feel it. And I think I know a lot of people do. this feeling of something quite dark brewing socially and politically. There's a feeling of a net tightening and of truth being squashed, of more surveillance, more censorship, institutions captured by woke ideology. And the answer is to what's causing this. I don't have it. I don't really know. I think it's complex. It's multifactorial, but we can feel it. And what we

can see, what we can see is the foot soldiers of it. So they're the technocrats. They're the behavioural scientists. They're the people that are trying to change how we think. They want to get into your brain and change how you think. They want you to imagine the world in the same way as them. You know, the Google AI is a fantastic example of it, but it's absolutely everywhere. The idea that we all had to wear masks with no decent underlying scientific evidence that it would stop transmission of a virus. But they love the masks because they're signals. They're signals of danger. You know, there's danger in the air. They're made of walking billboards for danger. But also the fact that we were then compliant, we were conformists, they didn't like those odd ones out. We see it with climate change, you know, this constant push

that we must change our behaviour to avert some catastrophe. In order to try to take us down a path they want us to go down, this desire to capture your brain and to make you think the right way as a woke citizen of some new, unpleasant, dystopic world. And this is what we need to fight against. There's different kinds of personality traits in our societies. And some people just kind of believe that others should think as they do, that they think the right way and others should think as they do. You don't want to give those people the levers of power, so to speak, right?

Like that's kind of the corollary to that. I want to touch on something, you know, before we get into thinking about how to inoculate ourselves, which is, of course, the substance of your book. And I have to say that, you know, to me, every single chapter of this book is useful. I want to touch on this AI a little bit. TV changed the world. The internet changed the world. And this is going to be another game changer. Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World Revisited that technology had disadvantaged the little man in favor of the big man. And he wrote that before the internet even existed.

There's something called the picture superiority effect, which means that pictures affect us more emotionally. They're more persuasive than text, which would be why if you want to consume information rationally, if you want to make the most wise decision for yourself, it's best to get in writing. Read a newspaper without pictures would be the ideal way to not be manipulated when you consume the news. And of course, we're not doing that. We're scrolling through video very fast. If you imagine a world where we're wearing Apple Vision Pro, or you can create video just from text, the options for where this could go could be almost

endless. What I'd find concerning is the exact kind of safety mechanisms they want to put in. The thing about these big tech platforms and social media and this new technology is it knows a lot about you. You know, we stomp around with very heavy digital footprints. One study that's now, I think it's about a decade old, actually showed that from just 200 likes, Facebook knew you better than anyone except your spouse. Facebook could detect your sexuality. You know, you can imagine a world where Facebook would know that a young teenager is gay before the teenager knows they're gay. And that's pretty old now. So you have a completely personalised digital footprint. And there's no such thing as a neutral platform online.

It's increasingly personalised towards us. So not only does it know you, that means that it can predict you and it can shape your behaviour. You can imagine a world where we're all in separate little, separate digital pictorial worlds that are awash with symbolism, affecting how we see the world, how we interact with it. It's not even really the real world. And I think that's really the threat that's posed by AI more than this kind of nebulous idea that it's going to develop sentience and new class. A case in point, I suppose, is some of this work that Dr. Robert Epstein has done, showing, for example, that based on just simply altering the order of the results in Google around, he created experiments where he was able to demonstrate that for people who are,

for example, undecided on who they're going to vote for in a particular setup, you can actually manipulate them to pick somebody with very high probability without them being aware of the fact that they've been manipulated in the first place simply by reordering the search results. So this is something that happens through something called ephemeral experiences, meaning that no one ever knows what you saw. And you don't even know what you saw, actually, because you go to your next search, and you've already been effectively programmed if you were someone who was undecided on a topic. It's that easy, never mind generative video that has subtle,

subliminal messages embedded within according to the biases or ideological views of the creator? Yeah, I mean, it happens in a more blunt way already. So for instance, if I search for knives on Google, I'll probably get something quite straightforward about Swiss army knives or whittling or kitchen knives or something but if I was black in a city and listened to drill music it's quite conceivable already that I would be getting something about reducing knife crime. This kind of thing already happens, operated by government agencies and again you know it's supposedly in our best interests. It's not really very well understood, it could be that if you see a video about knife crime it might make you more likely to buy a knife and commit a crime with it. Just like

there are studies that show that if you put up no smoking signs, you might be more likely to smoke because it reminds you about your cravings. You know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Oh, I'm reminded of the Deli Cobra effect. Do you know about this one, Jan? Tell me about it, please. It's an old example of nudging. Back in the British Raj, the British authorities wanted to deal with the appalling number of cobras. So they incentivised the citizens to bring in a dead cobra in return for an incentive money. And to their delight, this scheme worked really well. The citizenry were bringing in piles of dead cobras and being rewarded handsomely for it. It turned out that

the locals had been breeding cobras in exchange for money. And when the scheme ended, what happened was loads more cobras released into the wild. All of these schemes that are put in place already, and they're quite blunt, may be leading to unintended consequences, is my point. But it is going to become a lot more sophisticated. The thing about this confluence of AI, you know, this video effect, picture superiority effect with search and social media is that you'll be an increasingly personalised digital world that can be scaled up like never before, scaled up to the whole world, basically. 83% of the world owns a smartphone now and it can be sedimented with totally unique nudging based on you. I mean,

if you think about, say, when they were trying to persuade everyone to get the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic, that started with nudges. You can learn a lot about the government's intentions from its gentle nudges because they then proceed you know it's the first the first tool in a deployment of policies that go through from a shove to a prod to a you know a cattle prod we were given stickers you know in this country when you got your covid19 vaccine to make you know to show your social conformity your social proof that you're part of one big group of people that have had a vaccine you know evidenced by your sticker. And then there were some other enticing incentives, such as raffle tickets or shopping vouchers for people that had the vaccine. And then there were some really weird incentives around the world,

such as marijuana for vaccines in Washington state, and lap dances and even brothel trips for vaccines in Austria. You know, it got crazy. College education raffles in the States. Then you get through to mandates. Imagine a world where your Google search results, everything you see on social media or some kind of like metaverse world around you is shaped exactly to your particular reasons for vaccine hesitancy. It's not a nudge anymore. A nudge should be a choice that you're able to make yourself. It's supposed to be choice architecture. You can choose one thing or another thing, but you won't really be aware what choice is put in front of you. And

it's totally unique to you and based upon your psychological profile. You know, Laura, I can't help but think of, you know, one of your chapters contains a beautiful, beautiful phrase. Social media distancing is required here, I think. Absolutely right. I mean, gosh, we all know we could benefit from less social media time. I think there's a study that says that on average, people think they pick up their phone 25 times a day, but it's up to 80 or 90 times a day. I really had to confront myself when writing this book that I'm quite addicted to social media. I put myself into an experiment where I went into a convent for 24 hours for digital detox. Now I'll make a, you know, confess something to you. It was actually supposed to be

two days but I decided I couldn't face it and I made it one day which says a lot. That did allow me to kind of step back just that one day and it affected my social media consumption for another week or two. But then I got back to normal. So we do have a chapter called social media distancing, which, while it seems to spell out an obvious message, which is that you can be manipulated on social media. You know, it's designed to be sticky. It's designed to be addictive. And there are bots and there are trolls and it runs on emotion. And you can receive personalised messaging to make you buy stuff. Really, the answer for a lot of people would just be to use it more mindfully rather than not use it at all. But there are all kinds of ways you can hack yourself. So while other people

can nudge us, we can also nudge ourselves. And it's a technique that psychologists called pre-boosting, I think. So, you know, you can hack your phone. There's the obvious ones like setting screen time limits or turning your notifications off. You can make your phone grayscale. That makes it a lot less enticing. So there are lots of things you can do to manage your own social media use as well. But that also takes the will to do it, right? Because these things are inherently addictive. And this is actually one of the challenges. We manipulate people and that is the perfectly moral, reasonable thing to do. And what happens, it's an arms race of manipulation. You're absolutely right. I don't know how long this has been going on for. When I became really alive to it was COVID. And there are a lot of people that thought that all

that fear mongering and nudging and propaganda was the right thing to do, because otherwise, people would be too irresponsible and stupid. They don't believe in the wisdom of crowds. They don't trust the individual to make the right decision for themselves or society. And the problem is that's exactly how the nudgers think. So David Halpern is the head of the Behavioural Insights team, what's colloquially known as the Nudge Unit. And he was interviewed several months ago talking about his part in the covid19 pandemic for an interview that was happening around the covid19 inquiry and he said that the use of fear was justified if people's brains were wrongly calibrated and i remember that really struck me because i thought what an interesting word to use well how interesting to talk about calibrating a brain.

We don't normally talk about calibrating people. We talk about calibrating machinery. It's as though people are little units to be shuffled around the board. You know, I like to joke that we don't live in the age of misinformation. We live in the age of myth information because people are totally open and I'd say shameless and brazen about this nudging, about how it's good for us. I started at the beginning, I think, of the interview saying that there's no democratic mandate for it. And it's important to remind ourselves that when all this nudging started, when it became embedded into governments, the behavioural scientists themselves

actually talked about the legitimacy of the government influencing the public this way. And these smart people are just as susceptible to brainwashing as anybody else. In fact, there are some studies that show that smart people are more brainwashable. I know everybody clever watching this will be thinking, no, no, no, not me. I'm too intelligent to fall for any sort of brainwashing technique. But it's not true. The thing is that smart people are better at justifying it. There's motivated reasoning. So if you are smart, you can intellectually justify an emotional position you hold. There's also the cultural mediation hypothesis. Smart people are very good at working out what sort of norms and ideologies and behaviours that they should adopt in order to

fall in with the right crowd and do better in life. You know, this is like Rob Henderson's theory of luxury beliefs. We used to have material objects to indicate our social status, but it's increasingly become about the beliefs we hold and they're pure luxuries. That's why you get people, you know, kind of an elite class in metropolitan cities who believe such mad things as men can be women or you can identify as a cat. These are not the preoccupations of the developing global south. So smart people are very good at taking on crazy ideas and justifying them because they've got the brains to do it. Recently, we've had the second anniversary of the truckers convoy in Canada.

Thankfully, the Canadian High Court ruled officially that this was an unconstitutional act. The shutting down of the protests through invoking the Emergencies Act is what I'm talking about. My sense, however, is that the Canadian leaders really believed that there were dangerous people coming to Ottawa to wage an insurrection and so forth because a compliant and funded media told them what they wanted to hear ad nauseum. In any area of endeavor if the elite class can decide to brainwash itself in effect to believe something crazy and so is this now I'm starting to ask myself is this how societies collapse right yeah you make a good point I think that I mean we we don't know exactly what the politicians in in Canada thought about the truck convoy. But you do get a sense, of course, that within a group you get these thought frameworks that perpetuate and it can become like a sick dog eating its own tail.

What you say makes a lot of sense to me. And it would be almost impossible not to pick the example of climate because it's something that's really being pushed down our throats. I've seen one review of the book where the reviewer complained that we don't seem to be on board with the climate agenda because we've used this example but to anybody like that I would say you know you may approve of any means if it justifies the ends if you believe the end is climate catastrophe but you need to learn what these means look like so you can spot them in any example in life, in any situation. So last summer, quite a few techniques really came to my attention at the time that the book came out. I don't know what it was like on your side of the Atlantic, but we had a lot of news stories about terrifying temperatures. And that uses something called salience. So the news would say it's going to reach 48 degrees. They would talk about a predicted temperature. Now, we never reached the predicted temperatures, but that

doesn't matter because they put that one big shocking number in your head. And once it's there, it's there. So that uses salience. They used the picture superiority effect. There were so many pictures and videos of cars on fire or scrubland on fire. And the headlines and the newsreaders would link it to climate change. But it wasn't provably linked to climate change. And later on, if you remember, there's stories that come out about arsonists being involved in fires. We know that cars don't really explode on highways because of climate change. But, you know, it's too late. People have seen the video and the picture and that link has been made.

The use of modelling, that's happening more and more with climate, just like it was used with Covid, for instance, and it's used with public health. So we heard about the number of heat-related deaths. And when I first heard that, I thought, "'Gosh, this is astonishing. "'How has somebody worked out how many people have died "'from heat all around Europe "'and they're reporting it back in real time "'because they won't have the coroner's reports yet?'

I looked into it, it was modelling. So basically, it's made up. You might as well chuck chicken in trails on the ground this is outrageous i'm sorry to jump in but like really yeah yeah i mean it was it really was incredible um so what they're doing with the the again with the heat modeling is trying to create this this salience effect you get this big number and and how many people really then look at the report that's the behind the headline and then work out its modelling and how the modelling works. You know, I did it because I'm interested,

but a lot of people will take it at face value. I mean, the truth is many more people die in the winter from cold than die in the summer from heat. Otherwise, nobody would live around the equator or in the south. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense at all. And then it goes even further. It becomes embedded into drama and children's programming, not just the news, not just weather reports, not just public health announcements. Oh,

public health announcements. So we now have colour-coded warnings for the weather. So you can have an amber alert or a red alert. And what this is supposed to be doing is signalling danger. So something that we just would have thought of as quite normal before, like a very hot day or a storm, gets a color coded alert, which is to kind of sacral by the nudge unit the behavioral insights team and sky the broadcaster which talked about how to use the power of tv in order to nudge people towards net carbon zero behavior and quite shamelessly it talked about using drama news children's programming documentaries the whole gamut of tv. So brazen. They would talk about putting in characters or storylines that would encourage people to have electric vehicles or to do recycling. It talked about using children's programming in order to influence

children but create multi-generational spillover into the house. It talked about using weather reports to explain the impacts of climate change catastrophe. So you can see there's this very concerted top-down programme to programme us actually into being really worried, fearful and anxious about climate change. Because you see, you would have to be fearful and anxious in order to adopt net zero behaviour, which is going to involve not having your heating on in the winter, not having cars, not buying many clothes, changing how you eat, because it's always about our behaviour that's the problem. It's never, you know, even if you go along with anthropogenic climate change, it's never China or India, it's our

behaviour right here in these countries that needs to change, that's never China or India. It's our behaviour right here in these countries that needs to change. That's the problem. We as the citizens become the policy problem that requires a solution. And that solution involves manipulating us and nudging us into behaving differently. The corollary means lowering your standard of living dramatically. So most people are not going to be on board for that if you were to tell them, this is our plan. Of course not. It involves donning a number of hair shirts. Of course, by the time you're living in that world, you might be grateful for the hair shirts because you're going to be pretty cold because you won't be able to afford your heating in the winter. I mean, I would say as well, I'd be really careful about any movement that has a zero in it. I just hear the zero now and I shiver.

You know, we had zero COVID, net zero. And it just puts me in mind, to be honest, of Pol Pot's year zero. You know, be aware of the zero. What is a zero? A zero is nothing. It's a big gaping hole. It's an eternal nothingness. It's a moral flatlining.

Never aim for a zero. I don't think that there's anything necessarily deliberate about this. I don't think that the people that aimed for zero COVID and the people that aim for net zero have got some kind of like dastardly zero plan going on. It's more that it's symbolic of something quite nihilistic. Both Zero Covid and Net Zero were about a constriction of humans to a nothingness. You know, to achieve Zero Covid, you had to be cut off from the world, a hermit kingdom, never leave your house, never see your face. There was something so miserly and anti-human about it. It involves rewinding to a kind of a pre-industrial era where we live in mud huts and we don't have

anything and we can't have heating, you know, the things that have saved us, you know, good diets, heating, you know, lots of farming, they don't want that. They want us to rewind and live like serfs. They're such unpleasant, miserly visions of the world. So I don't think there's anything deliberate. I just think the symbolism comes through because it's people that have this really miserly view of the world. So I don't think there's anything deliberate. I just think the symbolism comes through because it's people that have this really miserly view of humanity. You know, one of the things you talk about is dataism as a kind of quasi new religion. And this actually reminds me, I recently spoke with Mihai Nadine, who's a very interesting man. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he views our current predicament as a kind of a machine theology, which reminded me of this dataism that you've talked about.

You know, we created the machines and then we started imagining that we are ourselves the machines. Yes. So dataism is an idea that some people have of a kind of philosophical, almost religious movement that goes alongside this pivotal time we're in when we're entering the fourth industrial revolution, as it's known, where the biological and the physical fuse with the technological. And a philosopher who writes about this is Harari, for instance, he seems to see human beings as nothing more than organic algorithms. We're just thought processes.

It's a very bleak and dismal way of viewing people, that we're just a collection of decision-making processes, fleshy algorithms. It's not a view of the world that I share. I don't see what they see coming to pass. But where it's interesting is understanding them, the kind of people who advise the World Economic Forum or other supranational bodies or governments, the people that are sort of embedded in public health and science. And if you see human beings as organic algorithms, then you can't really argue for human agency or the existence of a human soul. And that is the complete opposite of everything I believe. And it's the complete opposite of the purpose of a book like Free Your Mind, which is all about trusting you, trusting the individual, saying your mind is actually wondrous

and unique. I mean, I believe you have a soul. You may not believe you have a soul. That's neither here nor there, really. But your mind is wondrous. You do deserve to be sovereign of it. And you can be in charge of your own decision making capability. You're not on a sliding scale with a piece of machinery at all. In the book, there's a chapter, Don't Be a Slave to Sex. One of the elephants in the room around our social disruption today is this ubiquitous, on-demand, to anyone of any age, availability of hardcore extreme pornography i think you're the only person to interview me about the chapter don't be a slave to sex it's funny because um

i mean patrick and i thought we'd get a lot of questions about this chapter because it's one of the more controversial ones and i don't think people have been brave enough to bring it up so well done you get you get the prize it's not just that people don't want to study it it's also frankly and this i i've only covered it maybe two or three times out of almost a thousand interviews and american thought leaders now because it seems like people aren't interested in hearing about it but i i feel like we need to discuss this i i think you know if i'm really honest there's a way in which pornography has influenced quite a lot of my work. Actually, my first three books were a trilogy about the body and a documentary, which was called 100 Vaginas. A lot of that was really about countering the

pernicious effects of pornography. So it's something I'd thought about before. And Patrick and I really debated whether this chapter should go in. Now, he was initially very keen. I was like, we can't do it. It's actually a whole book talking about sex and manipulation. It's just, it's so big. How are we going to get it into a chapter? But he persuaded me. And it's, we really, we really wrote this chapter very closely together. It seemed like it was one that was very important that a man and a woman bring really equal parts to. And pornography is part of it, but it's not the only part. I mean, the first thing we should start with is by saying that sex or other rape is a weapon of war. It always has been. The other thing I want to say is there's

nothing wrong with sex. You know, you're not interviewing some kind of weird prude here who's not sex positive or whatever they say. I mean, sex is brilliant. I love sex. Sex is wonderful. It's very pleasurable and very powerful. Maybe it's so pleasurable and powerful we should be treating it a bit more seriously. The thing about pornography is it's always existed in one form or another, really, so far as we know. But it's different now. It's very ubiquitous. Like you's um it's on everyone's phone or computer the um reach of pornography i was going to say the penetration you have to be so careful about the words you use talking about pornography because everything ends up sounding like a weird double entendre we've known since the 1960s that people can be conditioned to develop paraphilias. One example of a study that didn't actually make

it into the book, but I love this one, is that male rats have been conditioned to fancy female rats wearing jackets. So you can train a male rat to prefer a clothed rat, not a normal furry naked rat. It's incredible what you can do because sex has this powerful reward. It's the classic way to condition people really because it has this powerful reward at the end of it. In another study men were conditioned to find boots attractive on their own by being shown first of all pictures of women in boots, naked women in boots and then the boots on their own. So if you can do that to people and animals, what are we doing with pornography? I mean, I will say that I went through some of the major pornography sites, you know, one day in a lot of

depth as research for the book. And I was just astonished at the kind of things that are on there. I mean, what's really obvious to me from the homepage of one of the biggest sites, which I'm not going to name, I'm not going to give it airtime, it's well known enough as it is, was incest. So while they're not pushing actual incest by blood, they're kind of circumventing it by talking about doing things with your stepmom or your stepsis. You know, it's about kind of like weird step-sibling sex. They're really pushing those frontiers. There's a lot of stuff about sex with machines and you'll see a lot of sex that's increasingly kind of not real. It's sort of AI generated and cartoonish and featuring strange, all kinds of strange activities which stretch the realms of

what normal sexual activity is. We interviewed transgender people who said that they felt that pornography had been complicit in them developing transgender identities. I've interviewed men who developed erectile dysfunction problems. I've interviewed women who felt like they needed to have surgery, including labiaplasty, after watching pornography. So we know it can affect body image. There are studies that show correlation, if not causation, with divorce in relationships. We know that it can change sexual tastes, even to the extent of creating paraphilias. So, yeah, we do advise that people shouldn't really watch it. I don't know if most people understand what a paraphilia is. Maybe just explain that very briefly.

So a paraphilia would be a sexual fetish. So it's when you develop a taste for something that is outside of the ordinary, outside of the normal. That's but it's associated with sex. Associated with sex. Yes, absolutely. Right. It's this furtive thing that people do illuminated by their screens at home. And because also in the real world, that's mirrored by this sex positivity movement where we're supposed to say anything goes as long as it doesn't harm anyone we don't really have enough honest conversations about pornography there's a conversation about protecting children from

pornography and that's not happening at all that's not working but we don't talk about what the impact of it is on adults or society. And I think, you know, there's a lot to be said for whatever people do in their bedrooms. That's up to them as long as it doesn't harm anyone. But is it harming us? Is it harming society? This is kind of for my viewers here. This is something that I'm going to be tackling more. And I'd love to hear from people about who the people doing credible research around this issue are.

Even if pornography isn't harming the viewer, and it's not harming society, what about the performers? Unfortunately, you know, the current model is based very much on homemade pornography. And there's plenty of evidence and anecdotes and news reports about people that have been coerced, effectively raped, including underage, including minors. So is this an industry that relies, unfortunately, on criminal activity and exploitation of people? And I think I just don't see how that's in question. So the other side of the industry is harmful anyway. I like to think at this moment we're going to get to that I call Apple Amish. And I was envisaging the Apple Vision Pro and the Amish community.

You know, people like Harari have said, you know, they see society dividing into two. Those who are willing to go along with the technological world, you know, they see society dividing into two. Those who are willing to go along with the technological world, be enhanced, you know, they embrace the transhumanism and all the technology. And, you know, the Luddites will step out. And I think, you know, for me, there'll be a point where I don't really want to be in that world anymore. Fertility rates aren't too good in the Western world and I think actually that people that really go down that road are going to end up dying out to be honest you know if people are in this this world where they're completely immersed in a fantasy AI driven symbolically drenched

artificial world they're not participating. They're not really having relationships. They're not really having families. They're not having children. I don't see it as a healthy, prosperous, long-term way for a society to function. I don't see how it's actually possible. Whereas the aim is to keep having babies. Let's talk about something that's age old and incredibly beneficial. It's something I do every day, and that's meditation. I think this is a very powerful tool to inoculate yourself if you do it right. Yes, that's absolutely right.

I mean, there are a few places that meditation pops up in the book as a tool. One reason would be that mindful meditation has been shown to reduce your susceptibility to your own cognitive biases. There's a chapter in the book about self-haunting. Really, it's the work of a lifetime. But the more you get to know yourself, the less susceptible you will be to any form of manipulation because half of the problem is the message but half of the problem is you. So whether it's advertising, online shopping, whether it's government propaganda or you know more sinister nudging, whatever it is, it's got to play upon you. That's your cognitive biases, you can learn what they are, we have a whole chapter on those

called Get Immunity, but it's also your weaknesses, foibles it could be fear of death it could be your own issues with body image it could be your insecurities about your children's financial future whatever it is if you know yourself you will be more resistant to the messages and that's especially pertinent in an online world where we get advertising that is shaped particularly to us because we're followed around by cookies etc on the internet and because we're known so well by the platforms I mean even just taking time out helps you because the you know your cognitive brain you can only cope with so much we've only got so much space for information which is why we do rely upon shortcuts, psychological shortcuts, to make decisions. I mean, there are good evolutionary reasons for them.

But there are studies that have shown that if you overload people with information, they can be manipulated more easily. So just taking time out, away from that overload of information, meditating in itself makes you more resistant. Well, Laura, so here we go. We've just been talking for quite a while now. And, you know, we've only scratched the surface of Free Your Mind here. You know, I'm thinking back to the chapter, you know, Be the First to Speak Up. I hope I got the title of that chapter right. But, you know, in there you look a lot at conformity and various

studies related to that and how actually you can break through conformity and this whole concept is incredibly important to avoid manipulation so why don't we touch on that a little bit and maybe some of the other tools that you identify that aren't avoiding pornography and meditation don't watch porn don't go on your phone and meditate. And everyone's going to think, gosh, I don't want that book. I know I have to do all that good stuff. They'll think we'll be telling them to eat vegetables next. Because actually, you know, a broader point I want to make about the book, of course I do. It's my book. I want people to buy it and read it. I want to influence you to read it, is that it is hopefully quite fun and

entertaining. There may be times you want to go to a festival or to church. These are places where you could say some degree of manipulation happens and you want to let go and submit to it and enjoy it. But by the time you've read this book, you know what to submit to and how. You know how to do it. But there are lots of practical tools contained in each chapter. Be the first to speak up, I really think is important because it's this convergence of free speech and free thinking. We hear a lot about free speech

and it's good that we do because it's really important. But of course, free speech means nothing without free thinking. I think that free thinking is as vital as clean air and clear water. I think that you could look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you should put free thinking right on the bottom. Because if you don't know how to think for yourself, you're basically just, you're a slave, you're an automaton. Once you know how to think for yourself, the next thing is you have to speak, you have to be able to influence the group you're in. You know, we are group animals. We're very tribal and we conform and there are good evolutionary reasons for it. You know, we don't eat the berries on the poison bush. If you see everybody running past you, there's a good reason. Maybe they're

running away from a tiger. Maybe you should join them. You know, there's reasons why we conform. It's how we have successful societies. But you can get these cascades of conformity, which can be dangerous. One of the best things I've taken away from writing the book myself, actually, is having the confidence to be the one to speak up in a social or professional situation to defend somebody else. We interviewed whistleblowers. You've got to have someone who is the voice of sanity, who can turn around a cascade of conformity. Because you know what? Nothing good really comes from the centre of the pack. Every innovation, scientific discovery, artistic endeavour, all the great religious and faith leaders of the world, everybody has come from those outlying

regions. So we have to develop the confidence to speak up. And one thing I like about this is even if it's hard, even if you're somebody who's naturally very agreeable on the big five personality traits or you're anxious and you like to please, everyone can practice because you don't have to do something dramatic. You don't have to cut off all your friends or say something wildly unpopular, you can practice, you can do little bits at a time and you learn how to do it and feel less vulnerable and less fearful. It's like the story of the emperor who wore no clothes, so if you remember there's weavers who give an emperor this fantastic outfit, which they've woven from magical thread. And only really intelligent people can see it. Of course, nobody can see it. And nobody wants to look stupid. Nobody wants to lose their position at court or insult the emperor.

So everyone tells him how fabulous he looks. And he goes on a parade through the town. And it took just one innocent child's voice to say the emperor's got no clothes on. You know, we shouldn't really have to wait for the innocence of a child. We can all be that voice. You know, what a powerful story. In this information warfare morass that we're in, I see a lot of these stories also being kind of adulterated or changed. And a story like this, it just struck me how important it is to keep these old stories because they essentially all talk about the human condition. They do, that's right.

And The Emperor's New Clothes isn't just a story about being the boy. It's also a story about remembering that our leaders are sometimes quite foolish, vain and naked. You draw back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and the wizard is just a very small little man. It's also a story about the fallibility of leaders. So, you know, there's two sides to that story which I really love. Any final thoughts as we finish? Learn to understand your biases. Again, we explain what the psychological biases are. And learn to understand yourself.

You need to stand for something or you'll fall for anything. Stop haunting yourself and learn to be the first to speak up. Well, Laura Dodsworth, it's such a pleasure to have you on again. Thank you very much for having me, Jan. Thank you all for joining Laura Dodsworth and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.