Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Rebecca Lemov (The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion) is a historian of science, author, and associate professor at Harvard. Rebecca joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the meet cute with her husband at the cafe where she was struggling to write her dissertation, how she fell under a romantic spell with anthropology as well as opioids, and the relationship between addiction and brainwashing. Rebecca and Dax talk about how Patty Hearst used brainwashing as a defense for her actions, why it's such an effective mind control tactic to strip someone of their name, and how Korean War soldiers’ health and wellness bounce back after trauma hid evidence of their suffering. Rebecca explains the normalization of brutal torture training of troops, that cult leaders intuitively act out a guidebook of hierarchical dynamics of desire and power, and Facebook’s experiment on emotional contagion as an example of soft brainwashing.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Leslie Stahl. And we're all brainwashed.

And we've been brainwashed. Our guest today is Rebecca Lomov. She's a historian of science at Harvard University and her research explores data. I'm trying to change the way I say data. Yeah, because now we- Because it's wrong. Are you sure? Yeah, every scientist we have says data because it's D-A-T-A.

If it was data, it'd be two T's or even D-A-D-D-A. Data. Data. Okay, explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences. She's written a bunch about a database of dreams. How reason...

You did it wrong. What part did I do wrong? Database. Oh, database? dreams, how reason- You did it wrong. What part did I do wrong? Database. Oh, database? Yeah, see? That doesn't sound right. Database of dreams, how reason almost lost its mind, world as laboratory.

Her new book, that's what we're here to talk about, it's very tasty, the Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and hyper persuasion. This is wild. It's scary and it's good. Yeah, it's very, very scary and very good. And I love the history of where all this stuff was kind of discovered and workshopped.

It's dark. Yeah, it's not, no one's, I mean, obviously some people stumbled in, but it's calc, a lot of this is very calculated. Yeah, they learned how to do this at a certain point. Yeah, as you'll hear. So please enjoy Rebecca Lamov. He's an armchair expert.

He's an armchair expert. He's an armchair expert. We had a guest this morning and Dax was wearing that shirt but it was inside out on accident. Which Monica pointed out to me once we left. Well, I didn't notice it until it was way too far in anyway. Really passed the point of the shirt. I actually, what was really funny is I kept looking at your shirt. One, I was like, I I kept looking at your shirt. One, I was like, I've never seen it, it's new.

Great novel. And two, I have a shirt very similar. So I was like, oh, it looks like my Elizabeth. I think he's borrowed my shirt. I think he's stretching it out. It took a while. She didn't recognize it. Yeah.

You're back in California. Yeah. How often do you come? Pretty often, partly my husband's family lives here. Did you guys meet in college? We met afterwards, but in Oakland. I was struggling to write my dissertation and he was working at the cafe where I was struggling.

Me cute! It really was. There was a mix tape involved. Yes, and he was heavily tipped during the dot com bubble, but then it collapsed and then the tips dried up. Very true. It was a version of Cheers, but with coffee, where people would just come to gather around

and chat with him. Why? Because he had that kind of air about him, but I was so involved in trying to write that I would sneak by and hide behind the jukebox. You were playing hard to get. You just had to wait for him to approach you. It was unlikely we would ever meet, actually.

How did you? I think I made a comment that I liked the music he was playing. Flattery. On the jukebox? Maybe it was through the jukebox. Desmond Decker. And then he offered to make me a mixtape. Whoa, hold on, that's a huge first swing.

Or a tape of this. Oh, okay. But it was a handmade tape and then inside he wrote his number, but then he erased it and hoped that I would call him, although it was non-existent. Oh, that you'd have to look. Or take charcoal and tissue paper. He's playing a game here. This is masterful.

He's using various detective methods, but instead, somehow we ended up meeting. He was going to give me a photography lesson. Another great hack. He's throwing all of it at you. If he tells you he's great at foot massage, you're like, okay. That's actually true.

Yeah. That's lovely. I hadn't really thought about how cliche written that story is. But that's the nature of love. It is all cliche. And then it feels very special and unique to you. And that's what's so sweet.

Yeah, it's really true. So that means you guys have been together for 25 years. So embarrassingly, you were graduating from graduate school the same year I graduated from undergrad. But I imagine I'm older than you. So I think you must have boogie. Maybe not. I was born in, but I imagine I'm older than you, so I think you must have boogie. Maybe not.

I was born in 75. I was born in 66. Oh my god, you look incredible. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you do look great. I don't know if you're supposed to comment on professors' looks, but I guess you're human. I don't either, but I always like a compliment.

I accept a compliment under any conditions. There you go, yeah. Where are you from originally? I was born in New York City, but grew up in Washington, D.C. or the outskirts. Okay. And then now you're in Boston. So you've really done the tri-state. And we lived in Seattle.

My daughter was born in Seattle. That's where I started teaching. That's where I actually taught my first class on brainwashing. And then why Berkeley? Did you fancy yourself an antisocial misfit or just they had the best program? Well, after I graduated from college at Yale, everyone I knew seemed to be heading across the country. I saw people I knew on I-80.

Oh, you did? Oh my god. Other graduates? Like midway through the country, others fleeing the East Coast. But when I tell students today I make a joke about going to California to find myself, they don't know what I'm talking about. Oh, really? Like that reference doesn't mean anything?

It doesn't mean anything. Oh, no. That's probably sad for us. That's why our population's declining and, that's probably sad for us. That's why our population's declining and everyone else's is on the rise. Maybe you go to California to take a job in tech. Yeah, not to go surfing and drop acid and get counter-cultural.

Learn yoga, yeah. So I was already living there and then I applied to several graduate schools. Well, I got interested in anthropology. How could you not? Oh right, we shared. I thought, why not just think of the most interesting thing you could study and the most interesting questions you could ask? Surely it's anthropology. How could you die? Oh, right, we share it. I thought, why not just think of the most interesting thing you could study and the most interesting questions you could ask? Surely it's anthropology.

I originally went to study ethnobotany, which I thought of in a kind of Carlos Castaneda way. Meaning expand your mind kind of way? Yes, but then ethnobotany, it turns out the way they were studying at UC Berkeley was highly technical and it involved cognitive networks and taxonomies. What's your story of why you were so drawn to brainwashing? Well, it did happen during graduate school. So I finally ended up studying something like the history of the social sciences

because I got interested in questions about why people do the things they do or how free are we really or to what extent people can be controlled. And that's kind of a cultural question. One of the reasons I got drawn to brainwashing is that we became enamored of this kind of French post-structural theory and not that there's anything necessarily wrong with these writers, but just the way it was treated was a bit cultish, people weaving the books around and trying to find this ultimate meaning and I found it transformed the way I was writing and I became very proud of writing highly complicated things just at the very edge of being understood.

Oh yeah. Probably more often not understood. And then I would be kind of proud. Oh that must mean it's very smart. Yeah, I'm not even sure if I get it. Exactly, the thing you're not supposed to say. I proudly showed this to a friend who is a journalist and he said, this doesn't sound like you.

And I just remember that moment later I thought, was there an element of something like brainwashing, even though it's very mild? Or you fell under a romantic spell almost. Yeah, it was kind of a spell. I think that's the journey of finding your identity in some way, is you fall under the spell of these different things and then they stick or they don't.

Filed under youthful enthusiasm or just enthusiasm, which is kind of a good thing. And then the other part of it was I also fell into a kind of bad spell, addiction and an abusive relationship. Oh, my kind of spell. Yeah. Wow, you guys share anthropology and addiction. That's a lot of crossover.

We would have had so much fun. Indeed. If you know what I mean, asking what was your flavor of addiction? It was hard drugs, opioids. So I kind of fell into this because I found myself in just a impossible emotional situation and a friend had shown me how to use this. I felt that it alleviated my emotional burden.

It was such a relief and I thought, this is just a great invention. And especially opiates, they have the illusion of manageability because you can function. It's not like you're inebriated drunk and you can't do anything. And then I found someone who was a link to that

or could purvey these things, so I fell into a relationship with him, and that compounded the whole situation. You know, it started off just weekends and kind of seemed manageable. I wouldn't have used the word functional, but I probably thought that I was functional. But after a couple years, I lost friends

and I lost touch with a lot of my family and I found myself very isolated. So good two years of that opioid hole. How were you able to quit? I feel daily fortunate that I was able to because it just becomes so much a reality that you don't think you're going to be able to get out or you don't even think you deserve to. It's its own brainwashing, right?

It alters your brain in a very significant way and you can actually not even see any longer. I remember a moment where I thought, could I go out today? Do I actually deserve to see the sun? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The deserving piece is so heartbreaking. Yeah, but I had one friend I continued to see who's really wonderful and we went out for coffee

and she said something like, I just wanted to observe that your boyfriend walks around like he's smarter than you, better looking and funnier, but he's not any of those things. And he acts like he has his foot on your neck all the time. And that was very shocking to me. Did you feel like that in the relationship? Like this person's so much better than me.

Yeah, I felt he was very accomplished. And also I was kind of scared of him. Did he feel familiar? Probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if he felt aspirational and also kind of scary. I felt like he could tell me truths about myself that I always needed to know.

I mean, there are ways that these dark relationships have a cult-like element to them. And when I went to travel, the spell would break. This also happened. And it would just be like it lifted. It's so cult-like, these really, really controlling relationships and even the strategies of separating you from your friends and all your support network.

And then yeah, I was even thinking, did you watch couples therapy by chance? I watched a bit of it. I really like it. It's incredible. And then this one woman, and I won't use names because I don't want to get sued, but one woman is with a bona fide narcissist.

And when she's explaining what they're going through to Orna, you can see that Orna's presence anchors her back into reality in a way that she's hearing what she's saying almost with an entirely new lens, and realizing, oh yeah, this motherfucker's crazy. Yeah, you can remove yourself from being inside of it for a second when there's someone there who's just a third party.

I mean, that's why therapy is so effective. You have to consider how this person's hearing the story. Exactly. Yeah, just being there to either witness it or give you some sort of feedback can be this miraculous thing. Yeah. Well, first of all, you're a professor of the history of science, which again, that's a discipline made up by Harvard, yeah?

Exactly. It first existed at Harvard. I wasn't even aware that that was a discipline. But as I read the description, I'm like, oh, I love that. I think I'd be very interested in that. I think anyone who studies or is interested in the kind of questions anthropology asks would like history of science too, because it kind of asks similar questions

and it's infinitely interesting. And am I right that a lot of the question is like, how do we know what we know and how do we trust what we know in a sense? Is that a common exploration in that? Yeah. Also, how does science gain its authority? What is the nature of scientific truth?

I mean, it really asks big questions and then, of course, as with any field, people get very specialized but it's all kinds of interesting sub-questions because we have history of medicine and I do history of behavioral sciences, which is more unusual. Okay. So, let's start with, well, before we start that, I do want to ask,, which is more unusual. Okay, so let's start with, well before we start there, I do want to ask, two hours a day of meditation? Well, at least two hours. At least two hours.

Were you meditating when we came in? I was. I know, I felt kind of interrupted. It's just like a little moment. That's great. I do that before I have to go on stage or anything like that. I know, I was thinking I could review my notes.

A little part of you wants to be like, what is in my book? Yes. It's much better time used to just observe your sensations. So a great gift that came after this whole dark episode was learning to meditate and just having that practice. And I've kept it up two hours a day. I've never missed a day since 2000. Wow.

Except the three days my daughter was being born. The three days. Yeah, that's fair. In 2002. Yeah, like's fair. In 2002. Yeah, like I was busy laboring. Will you do an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening generally? Yeah, I do the same kind that you've all know

a Harare does, just because I saw that you was on your show. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Just love him. Knowing what it was like not having that practice, I just never don't want to, and I get to choose to do it. Yeah, and your family knows not to. Well, when my daughter was little, I mean, I adapted to my wife's circumstances.

So for 10 years, I would hold her hand while she was falling asleep, and I would be meditating or holding her when she was a baby, but that would be the nighttime one, just to be flexible about it, because life doesn't always give you an hour. When brainwashing has been studied in the past,

I guess you kind of lay out two methodologies, the analyst and the actor. Can you break that down for us? These are methods from the history of science that I borrowed to apply to brainwashing. So with a topic that's as complex as brainwashing, you do have many definitions and philosophical questions and many directions you could go.

You can use the actors category, which really means just look at how people were using the word, how your actors were using it. And if your actors are scientific figures, then also look at how they're using it, even though they're also using it to analyze. So it's kind of combination. Can we get an example? Yeah. So one of the main figures in my book is this psychiatrist named Louis Jolion West, whose papers I've been visiting for 16 years now. So I feel like I kind of know him. He

was one of the most prominent brainwashing experts and he said many different things about brainwashing. One pivotal moment is he was called to stand at the Patty Hearst trial which was framed as a brainwashing trial. That was the defense right? For Stockholm Center is that the first time we heard that? Yeah she never embraced that term and the legal team never used it but people have applied that. Brainwashing was a term that her lawyer did try to use in her defense, and they brought forward the most prominent experts in the world to make the case that she had not been responsible for her actions.

And for people who don't know, she was kidnapped. She lived with this far left-wing terrorist group for a while. They ended up robbing a bank and she participated in the robbery. It's also relevant that she was kidnapped from her apartment and held in a closet for about 70 days and blindfolded and subjected to the reading of Maoist tracks and raped and horrors beyond what you could imagine. Ungrounded as you would say. She was ungrounded.

So these experts from the Korean War who had been military experts were called to examine her and they saw parallels to what had happened. But anyway, so the moment when Louis Jolly and West takes the stand, the prosecutor asks him, what do you mean by brainwashing? And he says, well, actually it's not a very scientific term, but what I really mean is, and he kind of starts to ramble on a little bit and say it's coercive persuasion,

but the judge cuts him off and says, could you get to the point, Dr. West? At that moment, it seems like the case that Patty Hearst was trying to advance was lost minutes into his testimony because he was saying it doesn't have medical or scientific authority, but just methodologically looking at that moment

and seeing how the term appeared in public and it was rejected by the public as something that made sense. So it allows me to follow these threads through the book and it gave me some organizing principles. But the actor analysts would be, if I'm getting this right, anyone that's studying something else, they might be confident in just their observations without ever really asking what the personal experience and point of view of the person being studied

is and incorporating that aspect. Yeah, that's a good way to put it too. So many people are tempted to stick to an analyst point of view or look at how to analyze a phenomenon that's very complicated, but it's almost giving credence to the actors themselves and how they interacted even with ideas. Even the Jonathan Haidt Moral Dumbfounding things, they're gonna be as provocative as possible. When you learn cultural relativism and anthropology,

the one that they're gonna hit you with every time is infanticide among Inuits, right? That they had some practice of killing firstborn daughters. And so if you were to only just observe this practice to make a conclusion, you would never have learned from the actor, well, a boy has to hunt for us to feed us as we get old. So first we have to have that.

When that's secured, we can now afford, like you would never have learned even what the rationale behind it all was. I think it's a very generous and respectful thing to assume the person you're studying has a total rhyme and reason for what they're doing, that they're not doing something completely void of any logic. Exactly, and that's interesting in itself. So this one will be even harder to explain, but you say the other superpower is second-order observer. I borrowed it from this sociologist named Nicholas

Luhmann, but what I mean by it is the idea of observing your observer. So after you've gone in and tried to see from the point of view of people involved, even if they're experts, they're also your actors, then you pull back and try to observe the system itself. Is this a good example? I always think of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Initially, they think they're studying the students

who have gotten too much authority and abuse it quickly and abuse these people. But then if you pull back further, you have to acknowledge that the constructor of the actual experiment is himself. Philip Zimbardo. Nice, Zimbardo. Oh, nice.

Yes. This has been a... It's been a lot of us trying to remember his name. Well, getting it wrong most often, and then finally it's cemented. Actually, I think there might be more than a second order observer, but you can keep pulling back the frame, as you're saying.

That he himself, Zimbardo, was a victim of the exact same behavior he was observing and trying to understand, because he himself had elevated his authority in detachment from everything. This makes my husband very upset, actually, because he feels that Zimbardo should not have taken credit for this brilliant experiment and profited off it

when he basically became part of the experiment, but he does say that. He acknowledges it. He acknowledges it, yeah. Then everyone becomes part of it. If you are the analyst, you also are entering in, and then where do you break off, or we're all just a part of everything? It's also a law of physics,

which is if you observe light, depending on how you observe it, it's either a particle or it's a wave. A wave, thank you. And that can change depending on the observation of it. So certainly brainwashing has existed probably since humans have been humans, but we get kind of aware of it from the Korean War. Is that where we start really trying to study it, understand it?

Yeah, that's when it actually has a moment when it enters the English language. Edward Hunter, who was an operative and journalist who worked for the OSS in China in the 1930s, started collecting a lot of examples of propaganda and observing what he thought was this new weapon that communists had as they rose to power. At that time, would we not say it would be propaganda? Exactly. There is a distinction. He had that background as an expert in propaganda, but he starts to talk about brainwashing right before the Korean War. Around the time that this famous incident was

that Cardinal Minzenty, who was a Polish high-level priest and religious hero and just national treasure, he was arrested in 1948. He disappeared for 28 days, and nobody knew what happened to him. But he was taken by the secret police of Hungary. And then he came back, and he looked like a shadow of himself, like a gray puppet.

And he was paraded before the newsreel cameras and he confessed to these outrageous crimes that he couldn't even have possibly committed. Like he had stolen religious artifacts and he said he had taken money from the church. And even though he'd left a note, he said, if I'm arrested, don't believe anything I say when I come back.

Yet this still happened to him. And it was almost like he left a note, he said, if I'm arrested, don't believe anything I say when I come back. Yet this still happened to him. And it was almost like he was a trophy for these new communist governments, like an announcement that we can do this. And he did return to himself within a couple of years. And he said, without knowing what had happened to me, I had become another person. And you say, yeah, becoming someone else

was alarming enough, but the nightmarish part was that you had no ability to recognize that this had happened. So even scarier than becoming different is you wouldn't have even noticed it. Yeah, that first part without knowing. So within 28 days, fairly fast. And then he also revealed what had happened to him, although I didn't have full memory of it. And if you think of your stereotype of someone susceptible to this type of thing, it's not a leader in the church who's got charisma and all these people skills and a great education

and all these other tropes we think would inoculate you from this. A hero to his people and he knew what was coming. He knew that there was a possible threat to himself. So he could have been prepared or he probably did try to prepare himself. But one interesting thing about it, he said he thinks he was drugged and he was pushed around. He was not a young man and he was sleep deprived. But one of the things that struck me was that he recalled that he was stripped of his clerical robes

and he was made to wear a clown costume and he kind of had to crawl. And so there are these status-based humiliations. Also a quite literal stripping of someone's identity. Exactly. Well, it's often the case that literal stripping of someone's identity. Exactly. Yeah, well it's often the case that removal, even of someone's name, is very effective. Like in the Stanford Prison Experiments,

one of the first things they do is the guards only refer to the prisoners as numbers. It's very effective. How much were people doing brainwashing things that they didn't even know they were doing? So like a long-standing tradition is to shave all of the cadets' heads. That's part of it. You're actually stealing their identity from them. How

calculated was it? Are some of these things just naturally happened? I think it's often not calculated which is kind of surprising because it follows a seemingly ironclad series of steps but people seem to invent it spontaneously in some cases like in the case of Patty Hearst we're just talking about the guy who was in charge of her abduction and reeducation. He kept asking her, you're not brainwashed, are you? Because he wanted to believe that she was truly converted to his cause. That it wasn't that she had been, you know, not allowed to go to the bathroom and she

had been raped. For him, it had to be real. He was also, I guess, in it. Yeah, definitely. And you can see that with Cardinal Mencenti. I mean, there was a Soviet method that was borrowed by the Hungarian police and there's a long history of what they say in pulp fiction getting medieval on your... Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are ways to unmake someone that seemed to be part of the human

repertoire. But what was different maybe in the middle of the 20th century is that psychiatrists and sociologists and experts would choreograph it sometimes. And then in the US of the 20th century, there's that psychiatrists and sociologists and experts would choreograph it sometimes. And then in the US, they actually responded to this crisis by. Outdevelop their opponent. Yeah, weaponize it. So I guess I didn't know a lot of this, which is shameful,

but you do a great job of painting a picture of what the Korean War was, which was initially it was called a police action. These young kids went, one of the main characters in your book is a 17 year old boy who's in 11th grade and he signs up before his senior year and he goes over there thinking he's a part of a police mission.

They arrive, they are using all the equipment from World War II. They don't have any new guns, new tanks, new anything. Things are breaking, helicopters are falling apart. The enemy has all new Russian stuff because they're backed by Russia by proxy of China. So they're getting slaughtered and outgunned, and their full sense of what an American is at that point

is starting to really fracture. Like, we're supposed to be indomitable. We're supposed to have the highest tech everything. And all these young guys end up as prisoners of war. Tell us about the Tiger March. That was particularly grueling. Almost the definition of brutal. So the Tiger Death March, thousands of U.S. soldiers,

when they were captured, they were marched north and stayed overnight in these kind of series of impromptu camps, sometimes in old mines and sometimes in ramshackle buildings. It was under the oversight of a commander, nicknamed Tiger. And sometimes when they walked along these mountain roads, he would just push soldiers off.

Oh my God. Who are all completely malnourished. They have zero energy. They're already physically quite diminished. They don't have the right gear. It's freezing. And they were joined by some civilians on this march because there were monks and nuns and missionaries

who were being captured in Korea who had been serving in churches, seen as enemies. So they were being marched too. So during this march, soldiers, even though they were emaciated, sometimes they'd lost half their body weight, they would try to help one of their compatriots or a civilian.

There was a nun named Mother Beatrix, I think, and she was in her 80s, and she was struggling, of course. And the North Korean soldiers said, just leave her, we'll take her in the cart and then they heard gunshots and never saw her again. Other times soldiers would just drop dead along the road because they couldn't take another step so it was one of the most grueling and demoralizing. A missionary who had passed by them on a train said he couldn't recognize them as American soldiers. And when they made it after these long marches

and they got in these camps, then the camps were often even more brutal. They would have thought once the walking was done. Long story short, it's all really, really heartbreaking and worth learning about. But at the end of all this, there are 21 of these guys who go through this process, who choose to stay in China and take on Korean wives,

have children, they do get completely converted to some degree and there's a process by which they do it. And I wonder, we get into now Mao Zedong, he is the leader of China and he has something called the method or reeducation or thought reform and it has a very predictable and formatted approach which is discussion, criticism, and unity. So take us from these guys who are in these camps. As you would say, ungrounding. I think it's worthwhile to explain

what ungrounded is. I like to think of it as a series of successive shocks to the point of disorientation or sometimes utter demoralization. So again, your expectations are not met to say the least. And the soldiers had been told you'll be home by Thanksgiving and instead they're being marched north. They're in the camps. Men would die in the camps initially when the North Koreans were running them before the Chinese took over. They would die just by falling in the latrine and not having the strength to get out, which was a pit. And then seeing your compatriots die that way, sometimes they were also bombed by the US, sometimes napalm by their own side. So it was destabilizing of sense of faith in one's own nation. But sometimes they would

also just die overnight. They were living with corpses. So this prepares the way for a more targeted ideological remolding, which is what happened. And then interestingly enough, I learned this at a conference a few years ago by the scholar named Amanda Smith, who specializes in Chinese history, that people who know about this consistently underestimate the extent to which the POWs were subjected. It was kind of an experiment that Mao was running. He wanted to see if the method he used on Chinese people would also work on American GIs and officers. Yeah, because the method was designed to treat peasants one way and landowners and landlords another way. It was a very rigid prescription and his

conclusion was, well these infantrymen are the peasants, right? They're not the landowners. The generals are the landowners, so they would receive those two different approaches. Exactly. But it's really interesting, the discussion part, this kind of re-education or the method would start with urging these people over and over again for a very, very long time to journal their life story.

And in some fascinating way, none of these people had experienced therapy prior to this. This wasn't a thing people did. So this is like a very unique experience and comforting versus what they had just experienced. Because when you're journaling, you get to sit next to a stove. So there's these little incentives along the way.

And through the telling of your story over and over and over again, you then get into a zone of criticism, and this is where you have to defend your nation's ethics, how they treat black people, that was a big issue they would remind everyone of, and they're now putting you in a position to have to defend your story or your identity or your sense of reality. And then lastly is unity, and now they're going to explain this other way of thinking that is so much more beneficial and so much more collaborative and helpful. One example, this isn't from the camps

themselves but from a re-education center that a western doctor was subjected to. So he was seen as more elite so I think it was more brutal in a way. He was chained and brutally interrogated. But one thing as he slept at night if he moved, because he was in a small cell with 10 to 12 people, they called it capitalist expansion. He had to justify just sleeping or moving. Man-spreading. Oh my God. That's the earliest version of man-spreading.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again.

So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful. Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. And they also reinterpret because they would take your own words, your own journal. Ninety one percent of the troops, hundreds of U.S. troops, some U.N. troops were given these books and they were actually made to answer questions about their family life and their relationship at school. What's interesting about that and I think why as we see it come up in modern society in a far more innocuous way, often people haven't ever taken the time to try to explain their worldview.

Probably nobody really has taken the time to write out what their worldview is, what the ethics are of the country they are loyal to. So in doing that, it's a very clever way to establish a little anxiety in your own understanding of why and what you do. You know, it's probably the first time you've questioned any of this. The guy you were just mentioning,

Morris Wills, who's enlisted at 17, he said, we were never taught a word in high school about our system or about communism. He said, it would have been helpful. We should have been taught, just so we would know what we were fighting and also how to defend our own system. But he felt really unequipped.

So now's a good time to also introduce because there's two waves, right? There's the small wave and the big wave of men starting to return. The first wave is like 139 guys. And then over time, it's 3,600 or something massive like that. And people are coming back with varying levels of vacancy

and being visibly disturbed. Then you have the people who stayed, and that was where we should learn our understanding of trauma doesn't exist to the point where the word trauma is almost not even a word in the 50s, right? So as they're seeing all this bizarre behavior, everyone stateside is assuming this is brainwashing, not, oh, this is a traumatic response

to this horrendously traumatic experience. Yeah, the trauma was invisible, partly because people didn't think the way we do, of course, today. We complain that we've gone too far the other direction. Perhaps that we see it everywhere at every moment. Like if your latte order didn't turn out right then I was traumatized. But a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist, he was trained in the 60s and he said you just didn't

expect to see it. You might see one or two cases in your lifetime. But you would also think if there were one or two cases, these men would have seemed to be qualified. But I did not find them ever described as traumatized. And I think there are a number of political and social reasons why. Although there's one mentioned by Robert J. Lifton, not diagnosing them as traumatized,

but just mentioning their experience was traumatic. But other than that, in the hundreds of pages, there's no mention of this. And I think it's partly one thing I call the volleyball problem, which is that even though the men had been starved to the point of nutritional deficiency and often death, by the time the Chinese took over the camps, which is sometimes a year later, they were eating better and they were able to gain back weight. And the Chinese ran this P.O.W. Olympics, which they kind of used as a PR opportunity and they

showed pictures of the men in uniforms having fun doing gymnastics, rope pulling, volleyball. Yeah, so that's why I call it the volleyball problem because it looks like it's okay. It was also just propaganda for the international courts. I think this is one of the profound parts of it is because it didn't have marks. Their suffering didn't show. The men themselves despaired that anyone would ever understand. Yeah, maybe the amputees that came back, which there were, they would have maybe been like, oh, they went through some shit, but the rest of the guys played volleyball. You would have just been like, that's war, not this psychological element.

You can't see that. Right. But after a time, the Korean War, it means known as the Forgotten War, but it became synonymous with these brainwashed men. They were seen as either cowards or freaks. Weak that they had succumbed to this propaganda easily. And also it's worth pointing out that in the entire Korean War, there was only a single psychologist on the ground at the time.

And then when they returned though, now dozens of psychiatrists and psychologists are deployed to now study these guys. And so what do they find? Because now this sets us in motion on our own program. It does. It very much has waves of effects. The only time they compare them with veterans of other wars or POWs from other wars is initially. They think that maybe it's something like what happened in World War II, which was a

condition called rice brain, which involved men drinking too much and unable to control their behavior. We'd probably call it PTSD today. They were said never to recover. There was one article that initially right after the men came back compared them to that, but subsequently was more framed as something unique and knew that was happening. And it fell into this narrative that the communists had a weapon that had never before had been seen in history. and the level of collaboration or indoctrination among American troops was said to be a national emergency. And the different experts found different things, used different methods. Sometimes they gave them the Rorschach

test. They gave them some sort of psychoanalysis sometimes, but mostly not for healing, but more to try to understand what had happened to them and whether this could be distilled into a method that could either be protected against or learned and used, perhaps used. Defended against or deployed on your enemies. Yes, so, SIR comes out of this survival evasion resistance escape. Exactly. So there were survival schools already used to prepare

troops for deployment. They would be sent off to the wilderness and had to survive for three days with limited amount of equipment. But they added a resistance component. So it was called SEER, Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. This was developed directly out of the Korean War by Lewis Jolly and Weston and others.

And the resistance was really to create a mock POW camp stocked by Eastern European. There were stand-ins for the Koreans? Well, stand-ins for just who might be capturing you in the future. Men would be interrogated there and brutalized and waterboarded. In the training?

In the training, yeah. It often involved really being punched until you fell down to the ground, and then when you struggled to stand up, being kicked or punched again over time. And so the person would lose track of the fact that their antagonist torturing them was actually a fellow member of the military, but they would fall under this disorienting condition.

They would then maybe be locked in a Syrian box, which meant this tiny box, sometimes in the sun where you couldn't move your limbs, and they would start to lose their minds. So we were doing this to our own people. To get them ready for this. Inoculating them from this. How is that going to do anything

if you're just doing the exact same thing? Well that's my question. That was the question. So I wonder how effective it was. The men who went to Vietnam, had they received this training? They had. 30,000 men initially right after 1956

went through this training to see if it was working. So it was regularized and routinized and then applied to any service member who was in danger of being captured. They also instilled a uniform code of conduct which mandated that you couldn't say anything more than name, rank, and serial number, which was supposed to address the brainwashing problem.

So during Vietnam, brainwashing didn't really arise again, but I don't necessarily think it was being attempted either. I was going to say, yeah, how do we know if that was a failed attempt by the Vietnamese or the great training the GIs received? There was classic torture that John McCain or Admiral Stockdale experienced. It had different purpose. Yeah. They weren't that interested in ideological remolding or converting during Vietnam, but

nonetheless the training continued and they were finding that troops themselves were damaged that it was so brutal. Even if it's pretend. Yeah, it's not pretend if you're actually going through all this stuff. Pretend broken ribs. So they brought in the same experts to modify the training

so that it wasn't actually crippling the men. Nonetheless, it was still very brutal. And even today, there are legends about it. And if you get in the company of veterans, they'll often tell you their seer stories, although technically they're not really supposed to talk about it. It's also really easy to underestimate

just how young all these people were. They're frontal lobes. Their identity isn't even solidified yet. I think people who think they could never be brainwashed could definitely be brainwashed, maybe the most. I agree with you that 100% certainty is probably a sign. You could even use the Milgram experiments as another example of that. We talk about him too, shocks. We've learned some stuff over the years here. It probably comes up sometimes in interviews. There's like five studies we give, marshmallow, delayed gratification.

Classic touchstones. Yes, they're good. They're ubiquitous. They're so good because they're almost parables of our time. Yes. They're our Bible in a sense. I teach a whole class on them because the deeper you go in them,

historically they're very interesting. But with Milgram, as people watch the film, they often become convinced one way or the other. It's rare for someone to become convinced that they are sure they would have given shocks. I've heard of one person saying that, which I think is admirable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.

She's a psychologist, but most students, I can see them wrestling and people don't always talk about what they think, but when you see someone who's 100% certain and even mocking those who gave shocks or who succumbed to this kind of intensive situation, it shows a kind of lack of imagination potentially of what it might be like and also who's being tortured

in this experiment. It's kind of invisible to us. Right. If you told Monica she could get an A if she's at people, she would've done it. That's mean. That's not even about brainwashing. That's just like trying to get ahead.

No, Milgram. You said you get an A plus if you shock those people. Oh, so mean. I know. No, I have a lot of integrity. I know you do. But I definitely think I could have ended up doing that with the thought that I guess it's fine.

I mean, I could just see it. And we had somebody on that I thought was so interesting who talked about this experiment, but also talked about the rookie cops in the George Floyd situation and her whole take was everyone watches and thinks how come they didn't do anything this is crazy and she's like most people in that position would not do anything and to walk around with this moral high ground when you've never been in any of these positions is crazy to

me I'm always like yeah I think I probably wouldn't have done anything. You just don't know. And I think living your life so that should that occasion arise, you would know how to act. Yeah, I think there's something really, I mean, this is a weird way of looking at it, but with you with addiction and probably with you and I have some things that I've done that I am shocked I did, my identity would not have lined up with certain actions. And so if you have experienced that, I think it's easier to say, you know,

we all sometimes do things we don't think. Who knows what I'm capable of? Who knows? Yeah, what anyone is. People like Thich Nhat Hanh write about, it's easy to be sympathetic of the victim, but to understand the capacity we all have. I was thinking about the fascination with scams we have,

which is somewhat related to how people respond to brainwashing or cults. It's very reassuring to say, that's so absurd. If anyone details a scam that someone fell for, I even do this too, where you think, at this point, I never would have believed they were an FBI, there's something wrong with them. You try to identify that moment where you wouldn't have,

or it's not you, just not me. So that you're not scared. You can turn it around and make it reassuring, but actually these things are profoundly destabilizing because we're all subject to them. Yeah. So how did MKUltra and the CIA take what they had learned from these Korean POWs and improve them and or perfect them?

So MKUltra was secretly funded in 1953 by the CIA to be a comprehensive program investigating various roots for massive behavioral change, or to go back to Cardinalman's empty the idea, could you make someone into another person and perhaps even like a perfect assassin or just an operative or could it be used for interrogation purposes

or things like that. So really they created zones of free investigation clandestinely and they funded them through conduits or cutouts and there were about 150 sub-projects. 150? I think around 150. Some of them quite small, some of them involving dolphins, potential dolphin assassins.

Some fell in love with those dolphins, we talked a lot about that. But then a lot of them involving dolphins, potential dolphin assassins. Some fell in love with those dolphins. We talked a lot about that. But then a lot of them involving LSD or hypnosis or the ability to create dissociative states and unground systematically subjects in different ways so that they could be transformed. And so they really took the brainwashing episodes and created a scientific and military mandate. A lot of what the social sciences were interested in was creating a better running society in which people would assume their roles without being asked.

So they would internalize codes and normalize routines. —Behave. —Yeah, kind of behave, because I guess you could really say that too much democracy was seen as concerning, because surely each person couldn't just go about living as they wanted to. So there were ways that behaviorism and learning theory that was also flourishing during this time.

Do we have any smoking gun from the very top with a president's awareness going like, this is the goal, we're going to start subliminally doing this, or we're gonna try to start on a huge grand scale doing this? Dean Acheson actually the Secretary of State. Under Truman? Yeah he said in the United States we're willing to let the rest of the world live as they want to live as long as they believe as we do. There is a sense that if you could have a kind of inner conformity people could go about their

business. I don't know that he intended it exactly as I'm interpreting it, but I would say that this describes the project that you also see among many behavioral scientists, which was seen in rats running through mazes, in elaborate, skinnerian systems where people are just responding to these kind of conditioning messages in order to take on certain roles. Actually, that it was for the common good

because people don't actually know what they want, so might as well. We have a rise of cults as well. It was like the heyday, the 70s. When does the cult phenomena start taking up? I think it picks up in the late 60s. Manson's late 60s. And he overlaps or intersects with MKUltra.

He was a participant. That's a theory. I've been hot on the trail of this. And you may know about the book, Chaos, by Tom O'Neill, where he investigates this as well. But in the Lewis Jolly and West papers, where I just was yesterday, I found more evidence that West, who was one of the CIA's main behavioral experts

who went back to the Korean War, he had investigated the pilots, the soldiers. He'd done many other things. But he ran a project in Haight-Ashbury that was affiliated with the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, and he was calling it the Amphetamine Research Project, and he had several people working under him, some of whom went to do ethnographic field work with the Manson family in Mendocino, and the Amphetamine Research Project was run by Roger Smith, who was Charles Manson's parole officer,

in addition to being a psychologist. And Roger Smith got a grant with Louis Jolion-West. So you can bring them very close together. This was before the Manson family committed the crimes for which they're known. I guess my question is, do these cult leaders stumble upon this stuff intuitively, or was there at some point a guidebook for people?

I think mostly intuitively there's a kind of guidebook that they intuitively play out, is my sense. Often it comes out of these extreme hierarchical power relationships that they cultivate, the effects of charisma, also just the cycles of blissful release that their followers get in cults creates this kind of dynamic where the cult leader is almost jealous of his followers and then it leads to a kind of abuse. Some kind of sadism? There's all sorts of dynamics that emerge in cults

and in the late 60s, before the Manson murders, cults are still kind of seen as intriguing. Yeah, what's the difference between an ashram and a cult? People are starting to live communally as the love movement's happening. There are all kinds of love movements. There are many back to the land, which I have always found fascinating. Of course, the definition of a group as a cult

is not always ironclad. In some cases, it is very damaging for one person, but could be briefly healthy or liberatory for someone else, so it's tricky. Well, I'm obsessed with cult docs. I think I've watched every single one of them. Everyone is. And what's undeniable is there's a huge period

of bliss, of improvement, of growth, of community, of connection. You look at the Rajneeshis, if they don't go to war with their neighbors, I don't know that the thing ever goes sideways. It's like they're all pretty happy, but now they need to outvote the town, so they got to bring in homeless people

and they lose control of that. Now they're to outvote the town. So they got to bring in homeless people and they lose control of that. Now they're poisoning a salad bar in town. You know, before this dispute happened, they're all kind of dancing and moaning and yelling. If I were going to write a review of wild, wild country, I would say that they selectively framed it because the cavorting wild dances and the realization, sexual splendor. My husband grew up in the Bay area around this time and he's like, they're not showing the automatic weapons

they were all carrying that whole time. They were heavily into gun trafficking and drugs and the documentary also takes the focus off of Osho as if he was kind of blissfully going along and his second in command was poisoning the salad bars. Ma na Sheila, she's like my biggest crush ever. Yeah. God, what a powerhouse. Sitting like a 23 year old girl from India to the US

and said, build me a city and she did? What a woman! Think about what she could have done if she didn't get some left up. I don't know if she were for MKUltra? Yeah. I kind of bought that because of my addiction background. So Osha's, as we learned, he's a benzo addict.

He's like, on a ton of value. I did buy into like, yeah, I bet he was checked out and fucking occasionally, but there's no way he would have bothered himself with any of the. Yeah, I suppose that's true, but he still was heavily involved in the manipulative practices. I mean, he had all these books too. Yeah, he did have the special access

that no one had without him. He also had a lot of needs for all the roles, voices. Yeah. So incongruous, the whole flashy nature of him. It's always so wild. The big party conversation people have is like, would you be susceptible to a cult? But are we all susceptible to starting cults?

Is everyone equally like, maybe you give someone enough power and we can all be that? She's sub-tweeting me right now. No one asking a real question. Remember the term. That's an interesting twist on the question. Not would you join a cult, but might you start a cult. Exactly.

You can see people get carried away by a little bit of power. I used to say that with teaching assistants sometimes in graduate school. Give them a little bit of power, suddenly they're patrolling the classroom and causing all kinds of trouble. They're guards.

But not everyone did that in the Stanford Prison Experiments. A couple people show a real aptitude for it, like the John Wayne character in that one. So it's a complex condition that we're all involved in. So can you tell us the steps of how it works in a cult? You enter, hey, my name is Dax, and then I wake up and I'm clearly a devotee of a cult. What things have to happen? If you're talking about an abusive cult, often there has to be a condition where you encounter

a recruitment that you may not know is a recruitment or you may be misinformed about the nature of the group. Sometimes it's just you're standing on one street corner or not another, you're waiting for one bus where they happen to be sending people out, but you're maybe misinformed, you attend a meeting. So you're drawn in to some degree, you are exposed to group activities, you're probably love bombed. It can happen extremely quickly, and I think many people are surprised by that. Would it be fair to say they would be already

over indexing and being ungrounded? Because that seems consistent when I look at the people who join Nexium or the people who join all these groups. They already felt a little untethered or unmoored, and they were in search already of something. I think we underestimate how incredibly socially attuned we all are. When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I,

on one of the first days of school, we saw a flyer that said free vegetarian dinner and we were very excited. We presented ourselves there, there was indeed a free dinner. And then afterwards, these members of the group said, could you just sign this piece of paper and just say it's just pro forma but you would be the vice president of our group. And we were two days into school and we signed it and then the next day the Dean of the

college called us and said did you really mean to do this? And we were like no. We didn't even know what it meant. What did it mean? It meant that they had the right to be on campus. They just wanted a toe holding campus. It was Krishna maybe, but they didn't really tell us what they were. They are vegetarian. So often, yeah, the vegetarian. It feels so friendly, right?

Be careful of vegetarians. Like you get invited to like a barbecue. You're like, shit, there might be some fights, but you hear free vegetarian food and you just think, yeah, this is gonna be some peace love with people. Well, there's many things that work quite well, especially for a seeker.

Most people are seekers to some degree. An invitation to an environmental group or something that seems very benign or altruistic, and especially if it's misrepresented, just getting the person there, exposing them to these intense conversations, not letting them be alone, sometimes not letting them even go to the bathroom alone,

if they'll agree. Well, I was thinking of the Maoist stuff, the method that seems really present in a lot of these cult documentaries I've watched is like you have food restriction quite often, you have the narrative part where you're telling your own story, there's kind of a therapy aspect,

the discussion where you're implored to talk about your childhood and explore that. It's like, you can see that it has the same arc almost as the Mount. It really does. And that's why the experts who had studied the POWs recognize this. There's a revelation of the self. There's also exposure to texts and lectures and discussions. Oh, there's often sleep deprivation too. A famous cult deprogrammer from the 70s, Ted Patrick, his son at 14 was almost lured onto this school bus that was commandeered by the children of God, which is one of the most

notorious cults. And his son luckily escaped. But he then went the next day to see what was happening and he stayed overnight. And he said, even though he was a 45 year old veteran and a lot of experience and a man of God. He said, you're bombarded by so much information and this intense eye contact and never getting to go to the bathroom by yourself. You're very sleep deprived. They're playing scripture over and over because they will mobilize biblical sayings

to change the tone. Also being asked about your bank account simultaneously. He said he found himself being unmoored, even though he had explicitly come there to understand and demystify it. Have either of you thought to yourself, I am in a cult, I have two personal experiences? I've had cult-like, definitely not for real,

but cult-like experiences. I mean, part of that is a good business sometimes has that. SoulCycle had cult-like things around it. Its own language. I know all of our tech companies have all of that. They have rungs in their own language. And it's very cult-y. I wouldn't call it a cult though. And UCB, that was an improv school and theater, but it was cult-y. You wanted to rise in the ranks. You wanted to be beloved there, but no, not for real, for real. Or even Harvard people say it resembles a cult

in a certain way, just because there's certain language we use. You're very in-group, out-group. It's a powerful experience just to be socialized in that way, and it can have resonances with a cult, but I'm curious. For me AA for sure, in so many ways it is a cult. And then I definitely look at the methodology by which they get you as A, anyone coming

to an AA meeting for their first time is already ungrounded. That's why they're there. Their life is obliterated. They don't know who they are. They've been acting in all these ways that are inconsistent with their morals. So we did the work for you. We show up kind of deconstructed and it's a group and there's language and there's a text and it has a lot of built in non falsifiable claims.

Like you don't have to believe in God, but you do. There's a lot of clever. There's a lot of story building and sharing. Oh my God, yeah. Confessing. It's almost exclusively sharing your story, exploring it, learning a new way to live. So it's interesting, I've been in it and I'm aware of that and yet I go,

well the alternative for me was death, so this is far preferable. I can handle being in this cult. Now, forget cult, what I really think is brainwashing. What is a little bit unique and good about AA is there's no leader. I think that's what saves it from being potentially destructive

because this is a very powerful mechanism that could destroy people if there were even a single leader. There's not even a person in charge of the room. So that's it's kind maybe built-in safety net, but the way I think over 21 years of being there is I find myself recognizing, oh, it's very regimented, that's very myopic, that's very unflexible, that doesn't account for the variety of human beings there are in the world. There's a lot of things I have to confront.

I was having a conversation with a great friend of mine who's been in it roughly the same time as me. He's older, he's a genius. And we were talking and we share a therapist. And the therapist comes from this very unique point of view, which is he was in the program for a long time. He was an addict. He stopped going and he also treats a lot of people.

And he's like, there are some givens we learned that I don't know that I believe are givens and then hearing someone in authority who is smart and trustworthy even just that little poke and then I found myself saying to my friend the other night like this part's a little weird and it's fascinating to me I would probably put it more in the brainwashing category and I don't even think nefariously again there's no one in, but I do recognize I have to weed through a lot of thinking that's pretty ironclad in my head. Yeah, I've had similar experiences.

A lot of former addicts gravitate towards Ashtanga yoga, which I did too. Well, I love yoga anyway for the last 35 years, but Ashtanga is this particular form that's very intensive. It did have a guru who passed away. I wasn't interested in that personally, but it just felt like such a health-giving practice. And even though I could hear the criticisms,

it turns out he was making these invasive adjustments of women, pelvic adjustments that he claimed were a little bit like those gymnastics. Larry Nassar. And like Bikram. I think he was just having sex with people. He was doing it all, yeah. He was mandating massages.

Right. But with Ashtanga, it was this interesting reckoning over the last five or six years, but I had already, for other reasons, modified my yoga practice, but people who were present when it was happening, but said they either didn't see it or didn't think it was what it was,

or the person involved seemed fine, or they told themselves it was happening, but said they either didn't see it or didn't think it was what it was, or the person involved seemed fine, or they told themselves it was okay, or, you know, this whole reckoning in the community. Also the fact that the adjustments can be quite abusive and cause so much damage and so many injuries over the years, but people want an extreme experience and it will deliver that. Yeah. So it's like a high. I think it's bringing awareness to whatever you do. You may feel like, I finally found this. This is the antidote. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Okay, so all the things we've talked about are what we might call hard brainwashing. Tell us what's soft brainwashing and tell us what's pervasive in our current landscape that we need to be aware of and tell us how it works and what things are out there. The history is meant to bring us up to the present moment and give us some tools to think about our current destabilizing environment. I looked at the emergence of social media and some key moments that are often not talked about. So if you look at, there's a famous experiment Facebook ran in 2012, but it was published in 2014, where 700,000 users, they changed the emotional valence of their feed

without telling them, although it's part of your user agreement that you could be experimented on, but people didn't know that. So some of the people received, they said a more positive feed, as judged by the word count and the emotional valence, and others received a more negative one, and those whose feed was adjusted negatively, they then counted how they reacted.

Did they post more negatively or react more negatively? Were they counting how much time spent on the app itself? They've counted engagement in subsequent experiments, but in this one they mostly counted how they responded and they found that there was a statistically significant shift in the emotional content of the responses when your feed was altered more negatively and sometimes to a greater degree

than your posting or reactions would be more negative. And so this was confirmed as a case of proving or operationalizing emotional contagion at a distance. People just could be exposed to this change and then their internal states would then change. And so the interesting thing I found in examining this experiment was first of all that Facebook published it in a prominent journal, PNAS, and that it's sort of a self-congratulatory move, which they never really repeated because

it caused so much controversy. But when you look at the actual article, they cite a 1990 definition where they get this idea of mass emotional contagion at scale. And this was from a team of researchers at the University of Hawaii. And if you look at how they defined emotional contagion, they were actually drawing on a memoir of trauma at the University of Hawaii. And if you look at how they defined emotional contagion, they were actually drawing a memoir of trauma that was written by Vivian Gornick called, Fierce Attachment. They say this is how we define emotional contagion

is what happened between this woman and her mother, who was an extremely disturbed woman. And she had a really complex relationship with her daughter and Vivian Gornick wrote this wonderful book, Fierce Attachment, which is kind of a masterpiece describing the spread of trauma between a mother and daughter and these intense emotions. And that's the definition that Facebook was using of emotional contagion. So it's kind of built into the experiment, I'm arguing. In a second way, when they use the word counting software that they drew on, which is called

Luke, this software was based on the diaries of people who had been asked to write about the worst experience of their lives, and that was how they came to define the words they used. We focus on messaging, but what I want to show is that there's a level of trauma and intense emotional suffering that's kind of built into the operations of the app.

There's also, Catherine Lu, this interesting scholar at University of California, shows that trauma, I think she's writing a new book about this, but that it's very profitable in the apps. It draws eyes, it draws traffic. So it's kind of like a trafficking. And people who do content moderation are constantly exposed to it. Similar to the brainwashing episodes of classic brainwashing or hard brainwashing, there's a way it's steeped in trauma and yet not necessarily recognized as such. And people will now point out people voluntarily complied with that. We started just giving you a full-time access to ourselves and filming everything we do,

but both sides are working, right? Because people are posting their trauma. That's why I like the definition of brainwashing as coercive persuasion, because it's not pure coercion. There's why I like the definition of brainwashing as coercive persuasion, because it's not pure coercion. There's an element of participation. There's a kind of a yes. Even if it's unknown to yourself or not perfectly understood, there's a collaborative element, which I think is what makes it interesting and why it's uncomfortable to think about.

Well, we're a lot more comfortable with the notion someone chose to smoke cigarettes and that's why they have lung cancer. They just lived a perfect life and they got lung cancer. We don't like that, that's very scary. That means we might get lung cancer. But we do love an element of complicity. It helps us not take on so much anguish because you go, oh, they kind of elected to do that.

But I think we also like a victim and a villain. Oppressor. Yeah, but to know that everyone's kind of doing both things makes everything very complicated. Cults are perfect examples of that as well, because you forget that everyone except the leader at the top is both victimized, but also victimizing. It's hard to know where to draw the line.

Yeah, they're on mission, they're converting. Yeah. I have to say, they're converting. Yeah. I have to say, and this sounds dismissive to other cult members, but NXIVM interested me the most because of all the subjects of these cults I had met in these other documentaries. So many of them were outwardly searching so hard for something.

They were just waiting for a guru to walk in front of them. But the NXIVM crew, they were above average intelligence, most of them. They were very critical thinkers. That's what they were bound by. And then I got obsessed with, well, what's this guy's magic spell on these very critically thinking smart adults? And I think what I observed was he weaponized that against them. Every time they asked him some big philosophical question, his response would be, well, what do you think? And they were so keen to impress him

that they would come up with their very best explanation. And in doing that, they gave themselves the answer and he just would sign off on it. He outsourced the actual dogma to them. He used their intelligence against them and then back to your point of people thinking they wouldn't be susceptible or they would be, it's like, well here's this group that he figured out

how to get them to indoctrinate themselves. That's beautifully put. I completely agree because if you look at Keith Raniere who presented himself as world's smartest man and world's most handsome man, it's hard to believe that. He also used to say that the rain didn't fall on him. He could be walking outside and it fell on other people,

but not on him. So you'd think that an intelligent person wouldn't necessarily believe that, but he did attract. And they do say this, that cult members are often highly intelligent. Intelligence does not protect you. It actually can make the web tighter and more effective because you're very good at convincing yourself and others.

But Ranieri, what he was really good at was turning them against themselves, turning their gifts against them. Yeah. In some ways it's love bombing, like you said. He's allowing them to feel like, oh my God, I impressed him and he's the smartest person in the world.

I guess I must be my best version of myself here. I think there's a lot of that, like, oh my God, he's bringing out the best of me. Yeah, and when you're watching those guys, they're on the Santa Monica pier, now they've been deprogrammed and disillusioned and they're just chatting and they're recognizing some of the things they believed

and one of the guys just goes, yeah, he was a judo champ at seven. And they both are like, oh my God, how did we? How do we believe? What does that fucking mean, a seven year old doodle champ? It's like a spell is broken. Yes, and the absurdity of these things they had heard now has come flooding out and I imagine just the shame that that induces.

So to continue that to today, it seems like the stakes are much smaller, but I argue that that's not the case, even though we're dealing with ordinary circumstances, yet they are always connected to the extraordinary. It's very easy now to silo yourself in terms of what you're exposed to and to find news or information that just confirms your predilections. So I think that if you are finding that, or if you're not exposing yourself to challenging material

or just things that don't agree with what you already think, that's something to be concerned about or something to kind of disrupt. These dynamics can feed on your altruism and also your repository of unresolved emotions and then just crank them up so the point where you're not really paying attention. So bringing down the temperature and in whatever way you can not contribute to polarization.

I hope everyone checks out the instability of truth, brainwashing, mind control and hyper persuasion I'm a slow reader and I was blasting through it. There's so much historical stuff in there. I love the history I mean, it's just so many elements of the Korean War that I hadn't known about or properly sympathize with isn't that profound? It's such a forgotten war. No one talks about it. Well, the sequel was so much longer heavily protested Cultural the whole experience of researching it was amazing to me. All right, Well, the sequel was so much longer, heavily protested. Cultural. The whole experience of researching it was amazing to me. All right, well, Rebecca, this was so fun.

Thank you so much. That was so fun. Thank you both. Thank you. Stay tuned to hear Miss Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. That's okay, though. We all make mistakes. I screen grabbed something.

Tell me. I know if I want you to find this interesting, it cannot be about the Cold War. Thank you. So hopefully I didn't screen grab something about the Cold War. I hope it's about fashion. Okay, fun to hear updates

and the subject synthesized so well. For Monica's anxiety about death, you are on the right track with one of the ways to manage that response. I did CBT for anxiety about death, you are on the right track with one of the ways to manage that response. I did CBT for anxiety about death and the training is what you say, look at probabilities and odds, focusing on stats and having self-compassion

when the worries override the stats and likelihoods. Also acceptance that we actually have so little control from an existential standpoint and being truly Zen about that from a place of gratitude for each day helps. It's tough to get to that place though, took me years. People like Monica and me are prone to rumination aka sticky brain. It sucks so much and is tough to understand if you don't experience it. Similar to obsessional thinking, Monica's brain is micro obsessing about death now and making her anxious.

Just a perspective since I know you don't suffer anxiety the same way. Wow, that was nice. That was a nice comment. Someone really took some time to try to help. They did, thank you. Sticky brain, I've never heard that. Sticky, that's what I'm gonna start calling you now.

Sticky brain. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Rather and joined by Sticky Brain. I hate the way that sounds. I could tell. Yeah, I'm Dan Rather and joined by Sticky Brain. I hate the way that sounds. I could tell. Yeah, I had a hunch it was gonna not sit right. I didn't like that.

Is it rude for me to talk about this? Oh, that's always a good start. When somebody is reaching out to you a lot about hanging out, but you don't really know them well. Right. And so that's just not gonna be your priority. How do you handle? Well, and this might tip you into child ownership. I have much better built-in excuses than you do,

and they're legit, which is I don't do anything. Every night of the week, I'm home with my kids eating dinner and then watching TV, right? Yeah. So I can just always go like, oh yeah, I don't, which is true also, we get a babysitter like six times a year. Right.

So I really make it kind of clear, I just, I don't, I'm not social. And you really- It's not true though, like you go to breakfast with people, you make time for the people that you are prioritizing. Yeah, so I can do a breakfast. Yeah. Once every month and a half,

I'll do a dude's dinner, maybe two months. There are times that you prioritize it. But that's like top tier best friend maintenance. That's what I have time for. Yes. And I feel like I don't know, cause I'll say like, oh, sometimes I'll say, I can't for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, now, so that I gotta put that on them. If I ask someone to hang out and they said I can't for the foreseeable future, I would go, okay, yeah, they don't wanna hang out. Yeah, but it's not, okay, and it's not personal. It's not like I don't wanna hang out with this person specifically. I just only have time for the people that I,

barely that, to prioritize. Right, that you're closest to. Yeah. And I wanna use that time for those people and not, like, you know, it sounds mean. It really sounds mean. And I understand that it sounds mean, which is why I find this to be troublesome.

Right. Get a kid. No, because I... I thought you were going to, though. Right. Get a kid. No, cause I... I thought you were going to though. I haven't decided. Oh, but after... Mindy. Mindy, you kind of were...

I was thinking about it, I'm still thinking about it. But well, and then this is like part of the overall thing. As a parent, you can say that, right? Like you can say like, oh, I just, I'm with the kids every night. I've been with the kids. I don't think I'll really be able to make it happen. Yeah.

And. And it's true, which is great. Yeah, but my stuff is true too. Oh yeah, I'm just saying. No, I know. It's an excuse and it's not an excuse. Like I really am at home every night. And you go to your meetings,

you prioritize the things in your life, and so do I. And I guess that's like, it's the same thing, but if a single person says it, it sounds more like you're just saying you don't want to. Yes. And it seems more rude when really it's the same thing. It's like, I'm prioritizing the things in my life that are important to me and I don't think

I can add anything new in right now. Same with young parents and old parents. Like me. I wasn't pointing to you. Grandparent parents. Yeah. If I am working, that's one category, right? That's one category of things I have to do during the day.

Category two is being by myself. I need some time to myself. That leaves a small amount of time for social. And there's two types of social. There is social with basically family, like friends who are basically family. And you don't have to be or do anything, but be yourself, show up as you.

That's right, come as you are. Yeah. BYOB. That's right. Then there's the other bucket of social, which is you have to be on a little bit, because you don't know them as well. Yeah, right, yes, yes, yes.

You just have to be the best version of yourself. Yes Let alone the category of dates which we haven't even thrown in the mix. Sure. Sure. Sure. Okay. Yeah, so currently my time is Your voice got high my time Apparently counted for because we also have to be on during this job quite a lot Yeah, many hours a week. Yeah, and so I'm a little spent of that mode You want to be a dud you want to be able to get done? Yeah, and my other people my close friends will allow that yeah, they accept the dud version my fear is I'm

Have I'm telling people, like, I don't have time to do this. I'm sorry, basically. And then those people are gonna see me out. Sure, with Jess and Anna. I go out with, exactly, with my friends and be like, fuck you, you said you couldn't. And for me, what I wanna say is like,

that's a different category. Right. That I do make time for because I need that restoratively. I don't think any of these people are entitled to all that information. I think you just need to relieve yourself of the guilt. Should I write a note, make 80 copies,

and then pass it out? Well, look, I do have a set thing in my notes that I have. You do? Yes, because I get asked very often to ask Kristen to do things. Oh. You mean go out? No.

Hey, I've got this project Kristen would be great for. Hey, this charity event, can Kristen host? Sure. And it's a very sincere, and it's true, which is I won't be a conduit of requests to Kristen. She gets it all the time and it's not gonna come from me. It's damaging to the relationship for us to be not wanting to hear

what each other has to say. So I took the time at some point to write out a very thoughtful version of that, but I don't wanna have to do that every single time. So I have it in my notes and I just copy and paste. Oh my God, do you want to read it? So maybe, I wonder if I can find it now that I've said that.

Now, I mean, if you've received this, then you know. See, this is- That's okay, because it's legit and I stand by it. No, I can't find it. Oh, wow. I think the parents deal with it the most. What do you mean? Like, my mom gets a lot of requests.

I think Kristen's mom gets a lot of requests. And I get it, because you're like, oh, a parent can ask their kid anything. Right. Right. Yeah, that's true. Like, if I wanted Ace to do something, I'd be like, I'll just ask Charlie. He'll ask him.

He's got no autonomy. He's got to listen to this request. I should ask Ace if he'll host a gala. He'd be great. He would, if he danced. Oh yeah, he's such a good dancer. He and Lincoln were so cute at Disneyland. It's so fun to watch.

They really get along really. They weren't dancing. That's the problem, that's the annoying and attractive thing about Ace is he's the world's best dancer, but he won't. I know, I love that. He won't give it to you.

I get it. Like if I were him, all I would do is dance. I know, and then people would be like, can you stop? I know, I would exploit it and wring it out for every bit of attention I could, and he doesn't. He's like, he was right to be trusted with that superpower.

Yeah. Although he needs to lighten up the reins a little bit. I think like on Thanksgiving, he should right to be trusted with that superpower. Although he needs to lighten up the reins a little bit. I think on Thanksgiving he should do a dance performance for us. Once a year he should put on, we sit through these other talent shows with the kids and the videos they make. We got an actual bonafide talent in the mix

and he's not showing us. But he is, it's exactly correct because we are like, oh, I just wish he would dance for us. Yeah. That's what you want. You want people to want you bad. Do you think it's weird, I think everyone does this,

but do you think it's weird to look at a kid and go like, oh my God, he's gonna do so well with the ladies? Like every time I'm around him, all I can think is like, God, this guy's, every option's gonna be available to him. Great dancer, sweetheart, gorgeous. I do think that's your first instinct.

Everyone's are daxes. Daxes. Okay, yeah. It's not my first instinct. It's not. No, I think you put a lot of emphasis on dancing. On romantic love. Oh, dancing.

Yeah. I mean, dancing's hot, but it's not like. You don't think it's a silver bullet? I don't. I do. I know you think. If you look good dancing. Yeah.

It's not like you can just know the running man. If you look stupid doing the running man, that's a pass. Yeah, but there's just so few opportunities in this world to dance. It's not like when we were in college and everyone was dancing every night. Well, no, if you're into dancing, you go out dancing and people see you.

They see you. But when you're an adult. I see you, your dog, Charlie. Okay. Rottweiler. When I, as an adult, there are so many adults I know that I've never seen them dance.

I have no idea what they look like dancing. Well, you know what everyone in the pod looks like dancing. No. Sure, we've been to weddings, we've been to... Yeah, but like nothing stands out. Oh. At all. Come on, roller skate parties. Roller skate parties isn't dancing.

You can name the great dancers. Erika, great dancer, we know it. She's a great dancer, but I know that because she posts videos of her dancing in a dance class. Yeah, and you've seen her. But not, like, she's not, that's not. Matt and Laura's wedding. It doesn't resonate with me.

It's not a priority for you. At all. Yeah. And in fact, like you say, Matt and Laura, I'm like, I don't know what Laura looks like dancing. Maybe because you never were, that wasn't anything you were into personally. In college we danced every,

we went out five times a week dancing. Well I think a woman that dances well is very sexy. And it's a way to look cool. Yeah. You know, that's not for you. It's not not for me. It's not like I'm not attracted to it, but it's not on my top five.

But what about Anderson Paak? If she can't dance, then she can't, ooh. Okay, I don't think that's true. Yeah, I think you can have sex if you can't dance. Right. So that's a lie that he said that. Yeah, but I do think someone who's very in touch with their body and knows how to move their body,

it's a good signal. Let me just ask you this. There's two guys, they're identical twin brothers. They look the same, they have the same personality. The exact same personality. Yes, one of them is dancing like a dad. Okay. And the other one is dancing very well.

Okay, listen, that's not a good. It's a perfect one. No, it's not because you made them the same you made them the same the only different The only variable is they're dancing obviously, so which one do you want to get in bed with? No, that's not how you play this game. You have to give me different sets of of Good things and one of them is dancing on one person Yeah, the other has other stuff and I have to pick. If obviously they're the exact same and they're dancing,

I'm obviously gonna pick that. Great, cause you would say it's more attractive than not. Yes, I already said that. Oh, okay. I thought it was like a who cares? No, you're not listening. Okay, I'm trying. I said it's not that it's not attractive, it is attractive, but it's not on my list.

It's not like top five things. So yes, of course if top five things are met with two people and they're the same person and they look exactly the same and have the exact same personality, I'm not gonna say no to good dancing. But if it's like guy A. And really quick, when you look at them and you're like,

I wonder who's better in bed, would you not assume that the guy that's coordinated and on rhythm is better in bed? If they have the exact same everything, yeah. Yeah, okay, good. Anyways, ace is a spectacular answer. Lincoln and he were having so much fun together. That's fun.

And we were, again, we were gay dads, as you know. Great. At Disneyland. Uh-huh. But we were not as built this trip. We're not as big. You are. Well, I'll just keep it neutral.

This whole episode's a disaster. Oh my God. Just keep it neutral. This whole episode's a disaster. Oh my God. I'm a little bigger than Charlie at the moment, which is very rare. First time in our whole friendship, I'm a little bigger than him.

So I think what people assume changed. Remember last time he was like, he was an Adonis and they thought, I must be an architect. Do you remember this whole thing only vaguely they're like, oh the the one man's much older than his husband, right? But he looks kind of cool he looks artistic he's got tattoos he must be an architect This is what they think that when people look at tattoos they think artsy Yeah, I think if you're seeing someone

who is heavily tattooed and successful. Well, how do they know that? Because we have a guide. Oh. I mean, that's a giveaway. Okay. Right? Yeah. Just being honest.

But maybe your husband is rich. Okay, great. So yes, we're just going with like most people think. So you see an older dude with a younger man, they have a guy. Got it, okay. And he has tattoos. 90 plus percent of people are gonna go,

oh, the older dude's got some money. Okay. Oh wow, he's made some money, but he's also heavily tattooed. So he either owns a restaurant. You go to a- This is very LA. Yeah, most likely.

Yeah, if you were in the Midwest and I saw a dude heavily tattooed and I knew he was rich, I'd go, oh, he owns a tool and die shop. Like this is- Exactly. What environment could he make a ton of money, but also look like a fucking junkie. Scary guy.

Yes. Okay, so that was last year's scenario that we both thought was most likely. People definitely thought I was an architect. And this was my boy toy. Okay. But now it was a little bigger this year. So now I'm not sure what they think.

I didn't have as clear of a conclusion of what people thought. Other than people, again, were very excited and happy that we had a family. That seems to be consistent. That's nice. Families are great. What do you think about the fact, did you notice that during this whole time

we've been talking, I've picked up my fingernail and now I have this piece and I've been putting it places. Different places in hopes that you'll remember it. I see you grab your phone, which is disheartening because I'm like, oh, she's checking her phone in the middle of this story about me being an architect. I wasn't. And now you're, yeah.

You should eat it, just eat it. No, I've never eaten it. Oh, you dropped it between your legs. Yeah, I was worried about that. Oh yeah, well, there it is. One of our guests will be sitting there and be like, God, I just keep stabbing my butt cheek. See, some people will be like so disgusted

by what just happened. Well, remember you would put your feet on the couch and people would really lose their marbles. Yeah, they wouldn't like it. And I am not that grossed out by nails. And I guess I'm not that grossed out by hair. I guess I'm like very chill. You are.

You're afraid of death, but everything before then, you're kind of fine with. Yeah, okay. Pootie, nails. Yeah, actually. Pootie, nails, plan. Yeah, actually. I'm proud of myself for that. Yeah, you're cool, you're cool. You're cool.

You're cool. Can't dance, but you're cool. Can't dance to save your life, but if you shave that side, you'll pull it off. I was a good dancer. Well, no one will ever know. I had a, I danced well with this one person. We danced a lot together.

Okay, oh, I pulled this up to show you something and now I have forgotten. Phew, I'm all over the, well, we just did Armchair Anonymous. This is what happens. Our brain gets a little jammy. That's an Easter egg. That's an Easter egg for?

No, don't say that. Okay. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. This is for Rebecca Lamov, and this was interesting because this was brainwashing and eesh, scary. You think you've been brainwashed? and this was interesting because this was brainwashing and eesh, scary. You think you've been brainwashed? By you. You tried, you tried to brainwash me into thinking

dancing was the best quality. I just think it's a very hot, attractive quality. It's hot and it's attractive. It turns things sexual. I guess that's really what I'm saying. It breaks through, like you could meet a dude and he'd be like, oh, he's good, but I'm in the friend zone. You could see him dancing and be like, you know what?

It's definitely an in-route. You're right about that. Thank you. But it's not going, what it's not a bad dancer, if I like them. Yeah, you'll, that's fine. It's not a deterrent. But I guess you're right.

A good dancer can be an additive. Yeah, it could change the dynamic of everything. That's true. Yeah, that's been my experience. Which is I think some girls were like, whatever, I don't know, he's loud. And then on the dance floor are like, oh, this is interesting, he is very loud, louder.

As a dancer. Even louder. Okay, population decline. You said California's population is declining and everyone else's is on the rise. Now I'm gonna read you the list here. Okay. This is most decline all the way up to most growth.

Okay. Okay, so the most- You do like the top 10 and bottom 10? Sure, but I'm not gonna count. I'm gonna read them all. All 50 states. Yep, okay, so the most decline, New York. They're hemorrhaging people.

Yeah, 0.91% population change downward. 0.19? 9.1. Oh, 9.1, almost 10% of the state left? Or 9.1 out of 100,000 people. 0.91% Oh, 0.91, sorry. Change in population.

Okay, so almost fell a percent. Okay, New York, so that's the worst. Then Illinois, yikes. Sorry, Rob. Because Rob left. Yeah, that's true. You're part of it. You're part of it. Makes it look good. You're part of it.

New York, Illinois, Louisiana, West Virginia, Hawaii, Oregon, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, California. So already there's a lot worse off than us. I'm just gonna say that. Yeah. Then Maryland, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Alaska, New Jersey, Ohio, Kansas, Michigan, Vermont, Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota.

All losing people. Uh oh, fuck. Michigan is the last loser. Oh, okay. Last of the losers. Last of the losers is Michigan. Which is first place in losers. That's right. 0.03% population decline. That could be a miscount. Now, it wasn't. This is on World world population review. Okay, very trusted brand. I'm always on there now. We're gonna go

Neutral up. Okay, so Vermont has point one percent growth. Okay in population Statistical error go ahead Connecticut, Iowa Minnesota Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Indiana, Virginia, Wyoming, Alabama, Colorado, New Hampshire, Washington, Maine, Oklahoma, Nevada, Georgia, ding ding ding, Tennessee, ding ding ding, Utah, North Carolina, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana, South Dakota, Texas, South Carolina, Idaho, Florida. Man, I would have definitely thought Tennessee and Texas were higher on that list.

Tennessee's pretty high. What's the percentage change? It's the 12th. But what percentage change? 1.19%. 1.1. So that's higher than the biggest loser. Yeah.

The biggest loser is 0.9. Florida is 1.91% population growth. 2% a year. Almost. Wow. Yeah. So I just, as a Californian, people are worse off than us.

Yeah. And I just want that to be known. Okay. You want more people to come or you want to stay the same or you want people to leave? Oh, I don't have an opinion on that. Okay. Okay. Infanticide among Inuits.

Until recently, certain Eskimo groups were reported to practice female infanticide in the belief that the time spent suckling a girl would delay the mother's next opportunity to bear a son, males being preferred to females because of their future role as providers in a hunting economy. From sex ratios and census data, rates of female infanticide of up to 66% for some groups have been inferred, leading some- 66%. Leading some ethnographers to conclude that these

groups were headed for extinction. Eskimo beliefs regarding the effects of infanticide on fertility, however, are in accord with the results of research on the relation of fertility and lactation. The cessation of lactation following infanticide would significantly shorten the expected interval until the next birth. Given this fact and available field data regarding the parameters of Eskimo population growth, the present computer simulation indicates that Eskimo populations could sustain a rate

of 30% female infanticide and still survive. You reading that just reminded me I have something much better that is what I screen grabbed to tell you. Okay, tell me. Can I interrupt this portion of the fact check? Yeah, something much better. That is what I screen grabbed to tell you. Okay, tell me. Can I interrupt this portion of the fact check? Yeah, that was it. That was it? I mean, it's sad.

Okay, this is really something. And I probably need to send these to Rob right now so he can get them up on the TV. Oh, great. Okay, so for the listener who can't see this, it's a picture of a very white woman on the left and a very, very black woman on the right. Thirty-six-year-old German model, who now identifies as black, plans to move to Africa

after taking melatonin injections. She and her partner are now preparing for the move with the influencer stating, My husband and I had already planned to emigrate a few years ago, but then the pandemic hit. It hasn't been easy choosing where in Africa, but we currently have Kenya and Namibia on our shortlist. Now scroll through the other pictures there, Rob. Oh my God. This is...

Wait till you see the one in her and her tribe outfit. Oh, are we sure it's her? She's dressed like... It is her. It is her. And she's dressed like she's a messiah or something. This is nuts. Do you think this will be like,

will people sign on to this? Yeah, so that's, there's a peptide you can take. No! Bodybuilders use it to be darker, so they's a peptide you can take. No! Bodybuilders use it to be darker so they don't have to use as much self-tanner. And apparently she's just on an elephant dose of it. And she is black and identifies as black. She's dark, very dark skin.

You can't identify as black. No! Right? No! Do you think, is there any conceivable way in the future this will be a very protected group? No, because this isn't fair to black, in a very marginalized group.

Yes. I mean, unless, okay, look, here's how it, this is the only way it could happen. Okay. If the black community was like, great. We love it. Send us your whites. Then? Send us your whites. Then?

Send us your previous whites. I guess we can't have a problem with it. I'm actually, I'm more okay with her just dying herself black. No, why? Over saying, I identify as black. Oh. My issue is the identify as black.

Exactly. Not, I don't really care if you take too many peptides. Okay, what did exactly, what did she say? Hold on, let's go back real quick. Okay. She said. Who now identifies as black. Has announced plans to move to Africa

after injecting melatonin, a synthetic hormone to darken her skin. But yeah, I guess people probably, there's no way people who can't see this are imagining her skin is as dark as it is. And she is as white as it gets on the left. This is nuts, right? There's like something you used to see

in the old days in the Inquirer. This happened, remember, with the woman that was somehow became president of the NAACP and she said she identified as black. Right, exactly. It is called melanitin. It is peptide hormone stimulating. Like.

Go ahead. I mean, no. But then is it okay to make me white? I mean, I don't want to anymore. But like, this then gets into that, where to me that's way worse. What she's doing is way worse than the other way around. Yes, because I would say imply,

yes, she also has ginormous augmented breasts, which is interesting. If you've not experienced racism your entire life, to say you identify as black is, how could you? It's unacceptable. Yeah. It's unacceptable. I just think it's white entitlement to the nth degree.

It is. Yeah, like as Joy would say, the caucasity. The caucasity to say you identify as black. Oh, I can't believe I haven't sent this to, I guess in all this right now. You know what's kind of, obviously I think this is atrocious. This is a no, no, this is bad, bad, bad.

But what you just said, like if you are a white person, you can't say you identify as black because you've never experienced what it's like to be a black person in this country. I will say, she's not gonna be a black person in this country. She's gonna be a black person in Africa where racism is gonna be not looked like.

Oh yeah, that's fair. And that's kind of, that was Kirby's kind of, what she illuminated for us was like, it's different in England because people chose to come there. The whole dynamic is completely different. And yeah, I don't know. I guess if you were, I mean, now we're trying to pick

maybe what's the best place to do this in. I mean, this is insane. Like it's insane to do, it's entitled, it's wild. I guess also who cares, a little bit of who cares. She's on some weird journey. She's not hurting anyone. I guess I shouldn't care. Well, I care on behalf of a marginalized group

that has experienced a lot of hardship and racism. Yeah, but to your point, in Africa, they're not marginalized. And she's from Germany. marginalized group that has experienced a lot of hardship and racism. Yeah, but to your point, in Africa they're not marginalized. Yeah. And she's from Germany. I don't know, it complicates everything. I hate her. Okay, you can resume your facts.

Also, I don't, as someone with brown skin, God, I mean, this is like, what are we doing? What are we doing with peptides? What if a white person, me, and I said, I'm Indian. I wanna identify as Indian, and I took this peptide. What would you do with your actions? But you're not.

But I identify as. Stop. Ever since I went to India, I realized I'm Indian. Okay, I guess I'd say, what about, what makes you feel Indian? I like the food. Okay, so you like Indian food. And it feels like I was designed to eat that food.

It made me think, huh, that's weird. Why does this food sit so right? It's like I've evolved to eat this food. Oh, I don't- And then I realized, oh my God, I know what's going on. I'm from Bombay. Okay, it's like I've evolved to eat this food. And then I realized, oh my God, I know what's going on. I'm from Bombay. Okay, it's actually Mumbai. But now when I left, it was still Bombay.

Cause you didn't leave, cause you are never from. Yeah, I was there, clearly I was there. Oh, okay. So you think, what do you think happened? Do you think that you were born there? I was assigned the wrong ethnicity at birth. I was assigned Caucasoid, but I'm Indian. And you were born there? I was assigned the wrong ethnicity at birth. I was assigned Caucasian, but I'm Indian. And were you born there?

I'm reincarnated. I'm a Buddhist too. I have a lot. You can be Buddhist. I'm Sid Arthur. You can be Buddhist. I'm fine with that. But I was an Indian Buddhist and I was reincarnated in this stupid Caucasian body.

I'm Indian and the food tastes so good to me. So you might. And I'm of a high caste, I found out. From? Because of course I am. Okay, so you might've been an Indian Buddhist and you have been reincarnated. I can't deny that, but you have been reincarnated

as an American white person. The oppressor, no. Maybe you wanna be the oppressor, but I don't. I am the oppressor. I dropped my, on your nail again. I can't believe you even found it. I know. I thought it was lost to the. I feel complicated about Melaniton,

or Melanitin, okay? And I feel, we were talking about this yesterday, like peptides are a lot of the rage right now in LA. And there is the real chance that you can just change your whole being with them. Yeah. I am very skeptical of it. Interesting.

And now with this, this makes me like even more. But this, hey, this is the most extreme case imaginable. But it's a real peptide. I love peptides. Yeah. And I feel like this is the most extreme case imaginable. But it's a real peptide. I love peptides. Yeah. And I feel like this is a little reminiscent of your initial- Ozempic.

Ozempic issue. Which is like, why not? Like I don't, who cares? But why not? Like no, like no, I don't think it's fair for you to decide tomorrow to take melanin, melanatin, and then become my color.

Like, I don't think that's. Well, that's a very extreme version of peptides, but do I deserve to take a peptide that elevates my HGH levels naturally? Well, it's not naturally I'm taking a peptide. Nothing's natural. My thyroid, my pituitary gland's making the HGH. It's not exogenous HGH.

What's the problem? Yeah, I just think all of this is a really, really, really intense obsession with anti-aging and optimization that I find overall just like, not you, this overall conversation about it, obsessive and vary the substance. Yeah, but let's take me as an example. Okay.

Like I have a crazy workout regimen and a diet regimen and I'm gonna take anything that doesn't have bad side effects that's gonna help me in that pursuit. In the pursuit of what? Being as physically fit as I possibly can. Okay. And I can afford to.

Yeah. Right? Now, is it fair or not that I can and other people, that's a side conversation. But just assume everyone has access to everything. Yep. And I'm 50, I just was at CODA, I think that's a side conversation. But just assume everyone has access to everything. And I'm 50, I just was at COTA, and I rode a motorcycle all day long on the racetrack.

And I felt great and I was able to do that, and primarily because of my fitness. A lot of the 50 year old dudes are not doing the sessions like I can do. So I am, my life is really good, because I can still pursue my hobbies with vigor and it makes my life better. And that is solely an outcome

of how I've taken care of my body. And this is yet another tool like eating well is or like that protein is or vitamins are. It's just another thing. It's a very arbitrary line between should I take vitamin D or take a peptide? Well, there is a difference in that a lot of these peptides aren't approved. I looked on the website yesterday of one

and they all say not for human use. Yeah, so that, I go through a doctor. So, yes, without a prescription, you're gonna get on a website, and it's gonna say for animal use or something. I have no claim on that, but I'm talking about going to a doctor and having the human version of a

peptide prescribed to you. I guess if a doctor is prescribing it. And I get blood panels every two and a half, three months that monitors everything. Look, I don't think it's like a moral. I think it's, I think society

has become really obsessed with anti-aging. You think more than? Yeah, this is extreme. I mean, to me, injecting yourself with a massive concoction of things and you're tweaking to make you look 30 for the rest of your life, to me is literally the substance, like that movie.

Yeah, well, but the substance was robbing your futures, your current self. So there was a heavy price to pay. but the substance was robbing your futures, your current self. So there was a heavy price to pay. There was a price to pay. Yeah, and I'm not seeing the price to pay other than the financial. We don't know. Well, no, anything I'm on has been in the market

and has been used on HIV patients for 35, 40 years. I know, but you don't have HIV. No. So you don't have HIV. No. So you don't know technically, I mean, there's a reason these things aren't FDA approved. They have not been tested for long enough. No, no, all of these are FDA approved if you get a prescription.

And they're also a category that can be used in lab testing, which is what you're seeing on the website. But no, all of any peptide I'm on from a doctor has been FDA approved and used in medical trials. One in this case I'm referencing is HIV patients. Got it. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. I think it's fine, obviously.

I have no say in what other people do, but it is, it does, it sprouts all this interesting, all these interesting questions because I don't want to. But then, I think, but if literally everyone else is doing this. You feel pressured to do it. It's not even that I feel pressured. It's like, I'm gonna look so old.

Oh. Or I'm gonna look so, even though I'm actually aging naturally, I'm gonna be left behind. Well, you're aging naturally, but with Botox and injections. Yeah. It's an identical argument for someone

who's like looking at you and going like, well, fuck, do I have to get Botox? Cause everyone's doing it and I don't want to get Botox, but Monica's getting it and now I have to. So it's like, that's the same argument as this peptide thing to me. It is, I mean, that's why I did that. Cause over time it's like, oh my God,

everyone is doing this. And I guess if everyone has a face that looks wrinkle free and I'm the only one rocking around with wrinkles, that's gonna look insane now when it used to look normal. Well, this is an interesting side thing that will take too long. But I'm more thinking about, yes, I've talked about this with Eric and stuff.

It's like, well, everyone's gonna be on trisapatite or some GLP-1 at some point. It's gonna be over the counter. Let's just say everyone's gonna be on it. It's four cents. Everyone's skinny. Let's just say everyone's skinny. But what I think is like,

well, in a world where everyone's skinny, people that aren't skinny will be very interesting and exciting. So if no one has wrinkles, it's all interesting to think of just if everything's neutralized. But I guess that's my whole, I'm like, we're becoming one thing. Yeah. And that is boring.

But also we're not. But we kind of are. It's like if everyone can get the exact same coloring, if you can change your features, if you can make yourself not age, if you can change your features, if you can make yourself not age, if you can be all one body weight, like that is so boring, really, I think, for me anyway. Or you might, silver lining, it might actually be, well then all you'd be deciding on is personality.

Everything else has been neutralized. I guess. I mean- Doesn't that sound like utopia a little bit? No. Yeah, sure, sure. I don't know, it's interesting, it's fascinating. If mine was, I don't think I'd look any hotter.

I don't think my face looks better. There's nothing I'm taking to look better. But there are peptides like that. There are- I want taking to look better. But there are peptides like that. There are skin. I want them. I know. What are they? I'll just ask my doctor if I can be on those.

But yeah, I'm up for everything that makes me feel better and doesn't have a big cost associated with it. You know what's wild is the other day, a old video popped up on Instagram of, do you remember from the Hills, Heidi, Heidi and Spencer? Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. And do you remember she got so much- Surgery?

Plastic surgery. Or she did, I didn't know that, but- It was a huge thing. She like got a ton of plastic surgery. They did this episode where she was basically talking to her mom and her sister. Her mom and her sister were bawling. And she was explaining everything she did. And she was talking kind of weird.

And it was sad. It was presented as, oh my god, cautionary tale. And this popped up, and I was like, that is not how I remember it. She looks kind of like so many people now. Oh, nowadays. Like her in quotes, like crazy things she did. This is kind of standard.

Yes. Yeah, well, I will say when I'm in Beverly Hills, I will pass like six or seven women in a row that have identical shaped faces because the filler ends up making every face. And they get nose jobs that their nose is the same and lip injections that make their lips all the same. Yeah.

Yeah. I just don't care. I mean, I am gonna get chin filler again. Right, right, yeah. I just don't care. About what? That people do that stuff. It doesn't bother yeah. I just don't care. About what? That people do that stuff. It doesn't bother me.

I don't care individually. I don't care that that person in Beverly Hills is doing it. But societally, I start to pull back and I think, oh my God, we really are shifting into this other realm and that is where I start questioning that. I just think people have always been doing everything they could. So they wore perfume when that was invented

and they got hair brushes to keep their hair pretty and they got combs and they got hairstyles and everything that was ever at your disposal, people have been pursuing looking the best they can. Yeah. And we're just, there's more and more products in the mix. Yeah. But I do think people have been trying to look

their very best for, I don't think that's new. I haven't brushed my hair in like four days, so. Well, we pick what things, I know me too. My jeans are dirty, but I need to work out. Anyway, that's all very interesting. Yeah. Okay, that's it. All right, love you.

Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.