The Joe Rogan Experience - #2322 - Rebecca Lemov

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Rebecca Lemov is a historian of science at Harvard University and has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute. Her research explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences.https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324075264 Get anything delivered on Uber Eats. www.ubereats.com Go to ExpressVPN.com/ROGAN to get 4 months free! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day! All right, hello, Rebecca. Very nice to meet you. Hi, Joe. Very nice to meet you too. So, first of all, what got you interested in mind control?

Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself just because I find myself after two and a half decades of having this topic. That initially seemed pretty niche and unusual and not many people were interested or many people were skeptical about it, but I thought it seemed like it embodied some of the more extreme. If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by their, you know, what parts of your life are determined by you and what parts are determined by outside forces, that mind control would be a perfect area to investigate that because it's so extreme, especially if you looked at particular cases. So I, because I had done my dissertation at UC Berkeley on

the history of behavioral engineering and how, you know, these kind of models for creating a society of control and encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream and it seemed like the next step was to look at something like brainwashing or mind control. When you first started studying it was it a less public sort of curiosity because now a lot of people are very much interested I blame the internet mostly. I probably had a lot to do it too. You and the internet. A lot of people on the internet. Mostly. I probably had a lot to do with it too. But it's just- You and the internet.

A lot of people on the internet are, you know, because over time, you know, people have gotten to know about MKUltra and a bunch of different programs that our own United States government was involved in where they were working on mind control. But what, like, initially, what drew you to it? Well, I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual, maybe, for a professor to be looking into. And people, I mean, at the time, if you look at a Google engram for the word mind control or brainwashing, they were very low, you know, around the turn of the century or the 1990s, after there kind of there was a peak of interest in the 70s, and it just really fallen off. But I guess I was

interested because it just seems so unusual. And like, maybe there was something there that people hadn't really thought about. And at the time, these documents weren't readily available. And like you say, people weren't really looking into it. So I just thought it seemed like a rich area for research. And I'm also interested in connecting my personal. I've always been interested in connecting my personal, I guess, my goals for life with what I research. So I thought it's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're

controlled or how much we might be controlled. And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases, if you could. Yeah, I think that that's an interesting aspect of it. Like how much are we controlled and how arrogant are we to think that we're not controlled or how arrogant are we to think that that wouldn't work on me? Yeah, I think that that's embedded in our, you know, in the messages we receive all the time that freedom is something kind of effortless, that we're just granted and that autonomy is just the natural state. But actually we're so much more malleable than we think.

And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true. That's what also drew me to anthropology is just the idea. Like if I was born in another place at another time, I would be another person. Or how much of me would be transferable was what that interested me. That's why I went to, first started studying anthropology. Like how much

are we shaped by things that we don't necessarily choose or are maybe accidental or genetic or various factors. But yeah, but I think we're told that freedom of choice or our autonomy is fairly straightforward and all you have to do is exert your will. Yeah, but clearly we're influenced heavily by our environment, culturally. I mean accents, just cultural traditions, behavior patterns. It begs the questions like, what are you? And what is the shell that you wear on the outside, you know, like a hermit crab? Like, what do you carry around with you? And what, at the core of it, what are you? Yeah, that is the oldest question of Socrates. Who am I? It's a deep question and it's also kind of like a practical question. So I thought if you could look at it more in actual examples that would be interesting and I also I guess I was drawn to the topic

maybe yeah maybe because other people weren't studying it or also because of experiences in my life just seemingly small things like one day I remember when I was in graduate school I was walking down the street and I said we passed a small dog and I said, I really hate small dogs. And I realized as I said it that it wasn't true, but I was just like, I love, I actually really like them. What's wrong with small dogs? But I had absorbed this opinion from somewhere

that a person such as I was aspiring to be, only like big dogs or something like that. But just noticing in yourself the way you soak up opinions and you're shaped by, you know, even, you know, even seemingly trivial things. And then also on a more profound level, you can see that happening. Made me wonder, like, what could you learn

from looking at these cases where people really seem to have been brainwashed, you know, in history or radically reshaped. And then there's brainwashing yourself. Because if you say, I hate small dogs, now you have to kind of defend it. And even if you say, God, it's not even true. But there's got to be reasons to hate small dogs. I don't want to come off as a moron who just says things.

There are other people who feel the same. Yeah. It turns out, yeah, I mean, either you end up doubling down on that opinion because you don't want to feel silly to yourself. I mean, I think sometimes we're just a series of adopted opinions that we then adhere to. And I guess being in graduate school also made me feel that way because you're rapidly learning and absorbing a new vocabulary, learning things you should say, learning things you shouldn't say, ways you should express yourself in ways you shouldn't. That seemed very like a deeply shaping process. And I was interested in how did social sciences,

was there a science of this process of shaping or something sometimes called it canalizing or making, you know, a canal of behavior so that people would end up wanting to do what it was that socially necessary for them to do? Well, universities are a great place for that, right? Because you get away from your parents for the first time who have indoctrinated you into their cult. Like you're born in the cult of your parents and then you leave and they're like, let me get away from these crazy people, and now I'm gonna become a whatever. Now I'm gonna figure out which group most aligns with my ideas and join them and rebel and fight

against the machine and become a part of a new cult. Exactly. Wear something different or adopt. I suddenly, I don't like certain kinds of dogs or I wear a certain thing or, you know, you have an interruption in the fabric of your extensive conditioning. And that is an op, it's, it's also an opportunity. You know, it's, it's not a nefarious thing necessarily, but it can take that, just that truth about people. I think it can be nefarious for some people, unfortunately.

But I think for a lot of people, just considering new ways to think about things is probably valuable. It's probably a good thing to have the opportunity to reconsider the way that you've sort of like canaled the grooves that have been deeply carved into your personality where you automatically go toward certain things or think about certain things. I always think just an interruption is often good. Oh yeah. In your patterning. Yeah, that's why I think moving is really good.

Or traveling or a. Mm-hmm. Yeah I've read that you have had a steady meditation practice I've read it was like two hours a day for 25 years. Yeah, that's a lot of time to be meditating Yeah, it really helped me so much when I learned to meditate that I never wanted to miss an hour So I've never missed an hour except when I was giving birth to my daughter, which was its own thing. You get a break for meditation for that. You get a hall pass. I just, and it's not like anyone made me or I necessarily thought I would do that. It's just that it's something that gave me a lot of perspective and peace and I guess I just didn't want to go back. So I do think it informs how I do research or I try to bring what I learn in meditation into what I do.

Do you do an hour in the morning and an hour at night? Yeah. Wow. And for a year I think a couple of times I've tried adding more in the morning, so two hours or so in the morning and an hour in the evening, something which has an effect, but it's hard to make room in your life sometimes. Oh, for sure.

You can sleep a little bit less. Yeah? Well, you don't want to make yourself sleep less, but sometimes it just does reduce the amount you need. Just by meditating? That's what I found. Interesting. How much sleep do you need?

I used to sleep like eight and a half hours, and then now I sleep about seven or six and a half, or if I'm really tired, I might sleep a little extra, but I ended up just, yeah, it's so much changed my life that I just, I move things around so I could always do it and try to be adaptable. So I just mostly get up at a regular meditation time, which is like 4.30. What kind of meditation? I do Vipassana, which is a form of Buddhist meditation.

It's just a form of observation. Or someone once described it as practice in seeing things as they are. So you try to just, it's not trying to apply a lens over something or chanting. It's just a very, it's a way of, it's cultivating observation of the subtle body ultimately, or just what is in front of you. And so you just sit in peace and think? Well it's not always peaceful. There is sometimes, yeah, but thought. I mean peace as far as like you're not bouncing around. Yeah, sometimes I'm sitting, sometimes I'm, I've also had, you know, I've adapted so when my daughter was little,

sometimes I'd hold her and be putting her to sleep or something but mostly I'm just sitting there and with eyes closed and then you kind of move, you observe just how you are and the more you practice it the more you can kind of go into it more deeply, quickly. I would think that that would be a good protection from unwanted mind control too. At least you could kind of have an assessment, do an audit of your thoughts and sit back and go, how much of the shit I believe is because of X or because of Y. Yeah, it's like a built-in reflection. So, at the end of the day, I have to say

I'm often less still or peaceful. My mind's jumping around and I'm like processing. Maybe it's even what I watched or was exposed to and it's sort of a processing experience. And sometimes you're super distracted distracted but you can also notice that fact. So it just builds in an opportunity for some distance which then you can also try to bring into your life too. When you were young, had you ever been exposed to any cults or anything like that?

That's a good question. Not when I was really young. Like how old were you when you were first exposed to cults? In fact, I think, so that's a good question. I mean my family is sort of cult-averse, I would say. My father, I think they had friends once, you know, in later life. My parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training,

which is somewhat culty. And they take you in and you're not allowed to use the bathroom and they lock you, kind of like keep you in a room until you're really uncomfortable and start to have revelations about how you could change your life. And these are, you know, it's stuff like... How long did that make you not go to the bathroom?

It's to the point where it's uncomfortable. I can't remember. It's a long afternoon going into the evening, and often people come out kind of converted, and my parents' friends actually did, and they did change their lives in various ways, so they said, you have to come. And my dad, in the middle of it, he said,

I have to go to the bathroom, and I'm not... He my dad, in the middle of it, he said, I have to go to the bathroom. And I'm not, he's like, I'm out of here. He just left. So I figured he had a kind of, he was not programmable in that way. Well, I feel like any group that doesn't want you to go to the bathroom is stupid. It's probably a sign.

Yeah, there's no reason to not go to the bathroom if you have to go to the bathroom. That's ridiculous. I mean, it's a kind of, it is typical of certain groups where they start to constrain your, and people who might be willing to remain in that uncomfortable state and be constrained will end up staying longer. And it's sort of a self-selecting process, maybe. That makes sense, right?

The people that are more willing to comply. Yeah, and I guess with me, maybe the closest, the first brush with a cult would be something like the various yoga teachers I've worked with. Oh, so many of them are so culty. Yeah, there's one kind of funny story is I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland, also in graduate school.

It was really helpful with school, just to have a very physical, demanding practice. But there was a whole community around it. And it turned out that the teacher was sleeping with many of the students, but I just didn't know it. I thought he was, I don't know, I just thought he was I admired him I brought my boyfriend at the time to pick he came to pick me up after class and he said something like and he's now my husband he said uh oh it just I just got the vibe that everyone there is sleeping with everybody else and I was shocked I was like no that's not happening but it actually

it actually was you can say it's a bit I don't think it was a cult but it certainly was a scandal. Yeah I had the exact same experience. The first time I started taking yoga there was a guy who was a yoga teacher who I have always been very wary of control and controlling people and those kind of environments and that this guy was like, there was something inauthentic about his spirituality that greased me the wrong way. I was like, yuck. Like just the way he would chant and the things he would say, there was just too much ego involved. And then I found he was banging all students. And I was like, of course he is. I knew it. Because my wife roped me into going to the class. That was the first time I went. I was like, I really liked the stretching.

It's like really great. I really like yoga itself as a practice. But I mean, the problem is these people that are in it's kind of the problem with everything. Like when one person is in control, and one person is in control and one person is the person who gets to lead the class and then they get praise heaped upon them by the students and then they start to think that they deserve it and then they don't have a lot of self-reflection and they're not very objective

and then they sort of revel in it and enjoy it. And the next thing you know, they're taking advantage of it and it's like. Yeah. and the next thing you know, they're taking advantage of it. And it's like... Yeah, it's very helpful to have that defense radar of a certain kind. Also, sometimes I think these prominent teachers, they have had some sort of, I don't want to say enlightenment experience, but some sort of breakthrough, something that felt profound to them, because many people do.

We now know that these experiences are incredibly common. And yet, so they take that as a kind of license. Well, now I must be enlightened or what I'm, you know, I have to take the mantle. My people are awaiting this. Or they sort of then justify things they wouldn't otherwise do. Nat. Spiritual narcissism. Yeah. It can actually engender that because of of or yeah, and I think there's some This has been described to Spiritual narcissism is a good phrase though. It's legit. Yeah. Yeah, you see a lot of it

There's a lot of it in the psychedelic community a lot of it in the meditation community a lot of it in the yoga community They just start thinking that they're better than people that don't do it Yeah, it feels very special. If you have a special experience, it becomes very dangerous afterwards to not have it feed your ego. And even if you had a profound breakdown of the ego when you were in a psychedelic state. It is fascinating to me though that you can tell the difference for the most part if you're really paying attention between someone who's authentically expressing their real thoughts versus someone who's saying things that they think if they say these things they will get

praise or they will get attention or you will think that they're profound. We know bullshit. Humans know. There's like a smell to it, a feel to it, if you're paying attention. But for whatever reason, it's just like some people have big ears, some people have small ears. Some people just are not that good at picking up on that stuff for whatever reason. Life experience, they haven't been burned enough times, like whatever it is.

And you know, that's where like whatever it is. And you know that's where cults get started. And I'm fascinated by cults. I've always been fascinated by them because I've watched I don't know how many documentaries on cults and in the beginning it looks so fun. That's the problem. Do you ever see the documentary Wild Wild Country, the Netflix series? Yes. It's amazing right? In the beginning you're like they look like they're having a great time. They're all dancing together and playing drums and having a party and eating together.

And it's like a sense of community. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. Summer is almost here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do I mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken parmesan delivered. Catamaran? That's a no. Lemon meringue? That's a yes. A day in the sun? No. A bottle

of rum? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely help you out with that. Get almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. That documentary was so successful, I think for that very reason, it actually perpetuates the allure of that Osho and that cult because their outfits look kind of cool and the colors are beautiful and they're swirling, cavorting dances. My husband grew up in the Bay Area and he was saying he you know as a kid he would run into members of that cult and he said what you don't see in the documentary and he blames the

documentary for not showing this efficiently is they were frequently armed so on the side where you're not seeing it they're holding you know automatic weapons things like they really in a way they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit really Interesting. That's interesting Wow, I did not know that and you have to have a guy like Osho cuz like the way he would talk about things And you know his slow way of talking the people yeah you know his beard and the Rolls Royces and everything it's like good lord argue and he was really much more of a cocaine adept or was he asked then people also

recognize I think he gets off a little easy in that documentary as well partly because they're interviewing people who are still to some extent Devoted or they want to maintain that ocean. Yeah. Well also the what was her name Stella? Yeah. Yeah, she was so crazy She's like she's poisoning people Such a great villain that it made him like because if she wasn't in the documentary he would be the villain exactly Yeah, she pulls the focus made him, like, because if she wasn't in the documentary, he would be the villain. Exactly. She pulls the focus. Yes, yeah, most certainly.

And the fact that she's still alive, too, that sort of helps as well. But I feel like it's a default thing in the human psyche because of our ancient history of living in tribes. That human beings have been very tribal and I think being a part of a tribe, one of the things that happens is you sort of have to go along with the way everybody else is doing things. If you want to fit in, you want to adapt and especially if you're growing up in the tribe, you don't know any different. This is the only group and being ostracized from the tribe and kicked out,

it's like, oh my goodness, that's the worst thing in the world. Now you're alone, you have to fend for yourself. There's no way you can. You have to protect yourself from the wilderness and the animals and the elements and predators and other humans and ugh. So you have to, it's very dangerous to be alone.

So you have to adapt to the tribe itself. I think that's true. Yeah, small scale societies have to, I mean even the word cult in its technical or dictionary definition doesn't necessarily mean abusive organization. It just means small scale religious group that maybe, you know, I think people deeply yearn for that sense of belonging and that's why it does look so fun and by all reports is very fun to get inducted into a cult. People get these exhilarated states, they often have altered, you know, experiences of altered consciousness and, you know,

they're empowered by it too. Well fun fact before I bought the place that I put my comedy club on 6th street I was under contract for a theater called the One World Theater that was run by this cult and I kind of vaguely heard about it and my friend Ron told me that the theater is amazing you should buy it because we were talking about buying a comedy club you should buy that place and so I got under confident my friend Adam called me up he goes have you seen the documentary on that cult I'm like oh no there's a documentary that's never good that's never good and it's really bad the

documentaries called holy hell and it's about bad. The documentary is called Holy Hell, and it's about this guy who is a hypnotist, a yoga teacher, and a gay porn star. And that's a one, two, three combination. And he started out as cult in West Hollywood, and then after Waco, after that went down, the Cult Awareness Network started really cracking down and they were investigating him. So he changed his name and moved to Austin and had his followers build him this theater. Fortunately I got out of the deal. But I guess he was selling it. Well he was gone.

It had already fallen apart. The cult had completely fallen apart. But what's fascinating is in the documentary, in the beginning, again, it looks amazing. They're all cooking together and eating together and doing yoga and they look so happy. And let's just be honest, modern society, the day-to-day grind, the, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, the stuck in traffic and doing things you hate under fluorescent lights in a cubicle all day long is not attractive. Not only is it not attractive, it makes cults attractive. And these people were longing for something that showed them that, no, you're right.

This is stupid. The way your parents lived is stupid. The way all these people live in society, you know, the way Thoreau described men living lives of quiet desperation. Like, yeah, that sucks. You don't have to live like that, man. Come live with us, man. And this guy was able to do this thing called the knowing. And the knowing was, it was very difficult to get. And people wanted it, and they wouldn't give it to them. But when he would give it to you, you would sit there, and he would put his hands, like his thumbs on your head, and touch you. And these people would

go into this intense state of bliss that even after they did this documentary, even after they realized he was a charlatan and they left the cult and they said that that moment was the greatest moment of their life when this because of the power of suggestion the way the human mind anticipated this event and then built up to it and then when it finally happened this endogenous burst of Whatever it is in the mind, I don't know which chemicals were being released, but these people claim that they contacted God for this brief moment where this man touched them. They kind of understood everything briefly. So it kind of worked,

even though he was having sex with everybody. Not only was he having sex with these people, he was charging them. He charged these guys for therapy and they have sex with them and you know and they would talk about it afterwards like thanks a lot Like it was so horrible cuz like the end the documentary so bad at the end of the document It's like I gotta get out of this deal like it's still like It's not enough sage in the world to burn off the bad juju that happened in this joint. That's true Yeah, so it just felt like, oh, horrible. Yeah, the life cycle of a cult has that, what you just described, and sometimes it's accelerated,

but sometimes it plays out slower over time. But a lot of times people are very confused on leaving, say if they're taken out as maybe even children rescued by FBI from abusive groups or people who managed to escape abusive cults, they still have trouble evaluating their positive experiences because the positive was so good and disentangling it and you know, you feel that you need to delegitimize that too. But I think, so that's why I think therapy can be helpful

for someone who's experienced with cult ex-members. I think the problem also is that it's their only community. And if you have to leave your only community and then just strike it out in the world, and you've been with this community for 20 years or whatever it is, what do you do? How do you do? How do you do it?

How do you find peace? How do you find companionship? How do you find that sense of camaraderie that's so deeply embedded in a tight-knit small community? And a lot of times when you come out, if it's say it was 18 or 20 years or a large portion of your middle life, maybe when as a young person, you come out and you don't know how to operate things, you don't have the right, you're not comfortable with new technologies, you feel, I think that it's really a terrible experience for a lot of people. And they still grapple with it many

years later readjusting to society because the critique they had originally which was profound as you're saying you know not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation that's still there right critique but it just wasn't answered I always say like someone come up with a really good cult I'll join come up with one that like you answer all the questions but you don't try to control me and you're just nice. Isn't there a cult where someone's not trying to have sex with everybody and not trying to steal all your money?

Isn't it possible to do that just to like get together a group of like-minded individuals and I guess that would be more of a commune but even that there's always some male, generally male, leader who ruins everything. Lauren Henry It does seem to be, I think, some of the, so there seem to be in the 70s so many cults and back to the land groups. And some of the back to, the back to land stories also, you know, have many cautionary sides to them in many of the aspects of cults.

Pete Slauson What is the back to the land? Lauren Henry So, just people leaving the city, heading off to the country and starting in an intentional community I guess would be what you're describing with the idea that we're going to collectively raise, even collectively raise our children, sell hammocks or make our own jam or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this. Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional quality. So I've done some research into some of these because you wouldn't consider them cults necessarily, but they can end up having some of those qualities such as sexual...just the demand that people

have sex with each other, which tends to just create a lot of chaotic circumstances. Why do you think it always involves that? Why does it always go that way? I don't know. I mean, it's very interesting because I even read Norman Kahn's classic history of millennialism, which are a lot of groups from the Middle Ages and afterwards that a Christian sex where they would break off and including things like the Children's Crusade and others and they often would end up with the kind of free love even though they're very devout and extreme and sort of devoted to giving up their worldly possessions. There was sometimes this component of this kind of sexual freedom that would end up destructively, having destructive outcomes.

Do you think that is just because of just genetics, just the encoded desire to spread your seed because life is very fragile and especially in tribal life when you're going back to the hunter-gatherer days, people didn't live very long and it was very difficult to... Like have you ever read John Marco Allegro's, any of his work? He wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is a fascinating book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he's got a very controversial perspective on Christianity. And his perspective was,

and this guy was an ordained minister who was agnostic, because he was an ordained minister, but then we started studying theology, started seeing all these parallels to all these various religions. And he was like, well, you know, clearly, it's not one religion has it right. There's something in all these things, but it's not like I have to, I am a Catholic and that's it, or I'm a Muslim and that's it. He was like, there's something here that exists throughout all of them, this constant threat. So he gets hired to be one of the people that deciphers the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is, you know, parchment, which is, you know, like animal skins, and they have to do... Do you know

the whole story behind it? They found them in these clay pots and Qumran and these caves, and it turns out to be like some of the oldest works of the Bible. Well, he deciphers it for 14 years, and after 14 years, his conclusion is that the entire religion was based on fertility rituals and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms, and that all of this had been sort of hidden in parables and stories, but he maintains that the root of it all was all about these people and these cults of fertility rituals and consuming psychedelic mushrooms. And he even brought the, he traced the word Christ back to, and this is very controversial

for Christians with your hackles up, I'm not saying I agree with this, but he traced the word Christ back to, and this is very controversial for Christians with your hackles up, I'm not saying I agree with this, but he traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen. The idea was that when it rained, it was God fertilizing the earth and that these mushrooms would like instantaneously rise like they would go to bed and in the morning the mushrooms would be there where they weren't there before they would consume these mushrooms and have these intense psychedelic experiences and then they tried to hide this stuff

from the Romans and so they hid it in parables and they hid it in stories this is what his belief was well it kind of reminds me what you're describing, which I haven't read. But I think it reminds me a little of Aldous Huxley's idea of the perennial philosophy, which is that there's, if you study across religions, you can find certain traits and properties that all share. And he wrote a whole book describing what that was. Then his last book that he wrote before he died was called The Island and it was sketching out what he believed would be just what you describe, a non-abusive, a place where a small-scale

community where humans could flourish and it wouldn't involve, including it would avoid sexual abuse. And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you're saying is that he said there would be trained parrots on all the trees and every 15 minutes or so they would say attention, which would remind people to pay attention. In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to loops of conditioning and things like that. Because I think, yeah, as you're saying, fertility is a natural part of human life and often worshiped.

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because you literally could go extinct. It was very difficult to survive We're so much weaker than everything else around us. We're so fragile life is and Infant mortality was so high It was so difficult to raise a child to adulthood that you had to have as many of them as possible just to ensure that the survival of your tribe and I think, unfortunately, this is what gets distorted in all of these groups.

And this is where things go sideways, because then you involve emotions, and you involve ego, and dominance hierarchies. And it seems like even if Aldous Huxley's idea was Huxley's idea was great and you had an island and everything was going well You did be good for like one generation and then the kids of the next generation would grow up and one would decide You know what? I got a fucking better idea than this Someone would go straight Jim Jones. Yeah, you know they would they would start growing some plant There was an amphetamine and they'd start getting wacky.

Human beings being human beings. Yes. I mean, also, there's an interesting paradox or tension in ecstasy itself. I mean, there's religious ecstasy and there's sexual ecstasy. And I think sometimes they get mixed up, like the wires can get crossed, so that can lead to someone maybe initially, I don't know, these groups, just the tendency they can have to go towards sexual abuse. Why do you think that during the 1970s there was this big upswing in these cults? Well, it started in the 60s from my understanding, although they did exist before then. But yeah, there's a lot

more interest in them, I suppose, because there's a more widespread questioning in U.S. society and also around the world. So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and Latin America and also India, so certain... Do they have parallels? Yeah, they're parallel. Sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries. So some people, say in the group, the Children of God, sometimes they'd be... the kids would be sort of moved from group to group because they had outposts in Thailand and they would grow up in London. Who was the leader of the Children of God? Which one was that? This was a guy named David Berg. This is the cult in which the

River Phoenix and his family were. They were in it but not I think the parents ultimately took them out but it's a really messed up a very disturbing cult and I actually write about and have met a member who's just sort of an average member named Ray Connolly. I met him at a meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association and he left after 30 years, but he just describes in a riveting way how he joined. I think that's kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the 70s. So he was a young man in college and he was just feeling, he said he just felt that the traditions that his parents had brought him up in Catholicism that he had been raised in was, he just felt that he lacked meaning in his life. He felt like reality was over there and he was separated from it by, you

know, there was like a Saran wrap over everything. So he felt somewhat alienated, but he didn't know what the answer would be. He kind of yearned for a religious experience. And he moved, he went out to California and he, I think he was at a concert at University in Santa Barbara and he saw this group walking through during intermission and they were wearing these robes and chanting and it was right after the Manson trial and murders. So he in his mind was this, you know, he was scared of them. He thought that looks like a cult. But later, even though he had that thought, he would end up joining them for 30 years because he saw them during later after the event and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them.

He's about, I think he had dropped out of college by this time. And he said that they were eating sandwiches and they looked a lot more casual and approachable than they had earlier. And he was asking them questions and they said, would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now and drop to your knees? And he said, yeah. For some reason he said yes. Because... What is the sinner's prayer? It's just a...

It's a verse that actually is not from the Bible, but often would be used as a recruiting tool. And it did result in this sort of out-of-body experience. He recited it and then he said he stood up and he felt changed by this. But it turned out that David Berg, he didn't know the name of the group. And they said, why don't you join us? And he took, in other words, he kept taking small steps towards it and pretty soon he found himself on the bus with this group and he still didn't know the name of it.

And they were all testifying about how they had been converted. And he was asked to add to the testimony, and he started talking about JD Salinger, because he was just an alienated youth, basically. And nobody understood what he was talking about. They all just started singing and covering up his words. And he thought several times of leaving and getting off the bus going to see his ex-girlfriend. He had just broken up with his girlfriend, but he ended up staying

and he ended up marrying three women and just... Three? Well, at first it was one. They had an arranged marriage and then it turned out this guy who ran the group, David Berg, he was a former furniture salesman. He then had some, you know, he believed that he got these messages direct from the Almighty. The messages told him that he needed to ramp up his recruiting by having women do this practice called flirty fishing, where they would go out and basically seduce men into the cult. And then he started introducing these practices where they were supposed to have sex with children,

because his idea was that this was natural. And so many generations of kids were raised in this cult with this, were either trafficked or abused. And it's really horrific. And Ray Connolly is interesting because he didn't engage in those things. He did end up having 17 children in the cult.

And, but he- 17 kids. I think he did have 17. He's a fascinating person because he left and he spent his time supporting survivors and which is very unusual. What about his 17 kids? And they came out too. How do they have time for anything else? They're not mostly grown because he's quite he's quite elderly but I guess just the it's interesting to hear him talk about how he saw the group changing and how what started out to be this

profound experience soon, he called it a dark hamster wheel of the soul. Like he was caught and it became this, basically they were exploiting him in his middle-aged years. He rose in sort of mid-level bureaucracy within the cult. But anyway, this cult, Children of God, has, and today still exists, has a different name. They had- They still have the same practices?

No, they say they reformed. But many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them, things like that, who are adults today. They had, you know, groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that. The Manson family is a fascinating one, right? Because I know that you have studied Jolly West and the whole MKUltra program and what they were experimenting with with psychedelic drugs and cults and mind control. What is your perspective on why they were doing that?

Why Jolly West was involved? Why were they involved? What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies, the federal government? I think the initial motivation was a kind of national internal Emergency national security emergency that emerged right after World War two actually at the beginning of the Korean War When's US

pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having shown flown during warfare missions over China. And then many POWs were coming back and seemed to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing by so many of the soldiers coming back seemed to have been brainwashed or have collaborated to some degree when they were held as prisoners. And then there were 21 US POWs who elected to stay in China. And this really was a disturbing, you know, they all had a chance to choose when they were in the UN camps after they'd been held prisoner for four years or so. And 21 of them decided that they'd like to try their lot in China. And so this caused, this kind of collective, this caused a crisis of, you know, did the communists

possess a super weapon of some kind that no other wore? There was even a famous article in The New Yorker that said something new in history, that there was something that... Some capacity that this ideological system had, the communists had, that was somehow rendering Americans powerless against it. So this was kind of the crisis of mind control and MKUltra was an attempt to basically reverse engineer what this was. So Jolly West was one of the first people. He was in charge of studying the brainwash pilots initially and that's how he... What year was this?

That was in 52. But he also, before that, he was involved, I mean, he had been trained to some degree with, he was trained by Harold Wolfe, who was at Cornell. He had done his residency at Cornell with Dr. Harold Wolfe, who was a neurologist, a world expert in migraine, and basically the type of pain that comes from migraine. So you could say he was an expert in the pain, fear, pain cycle.

And he had CIA connections from even before MKUltra was started. So what did they determine the Chinese were doing? So they determined, West wrote a paper in 1957. And the part that was published in a journal called Sociometry described, he described it as DDD or debility, dependency, and dread. And he said basically these camps were systematically inducing a state of debility, which was that soldiers were starved and basically worn down. They were deprived of medical care. They were, I mean, this is also in the historical record.

Something I studied extensively is that, you know, they had, men were marched in, for example, the Tiger Death March north of the Yalu River from, you know, from the war where they'd been captured. And by the time they got there, they'd often lost half their body weight. They had been bombed by their own forces at night. They had sometimes, you know, they had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning just to keep going and not be...anyone who stopped would be shot. So by the time they got to the camps, they were really worn down. And a missionary

who saw, who passed them on a train at that time wrote or described in an oral history, he didn't recognize them as Americans, that they were the most bedraggled. It was just a very, they were in a terrible state. And so, so, stability was the first thing West described when he was extracting what had happened. Dependency was, you know, later there was a layer added in which the soldiers were, the POWs were dependent for all their, if they were going to survive, they required, you know, the camp leaders would provide it, so it made them very dependent. And they also engaged in very formal malice thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment. And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time

or perhaps your family could be because they threatened the family. Trevor Burrus Malice thought reform? Yeah, in the POW camps, once the Chinese took over from the Koreans running the camps, because they decided, I think it was almost a formal experience. That's how it looks to me. I don't think West wrote about this, but in my own research on the camps, it transpires that they wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants. He felt that only something like seven to eight percent of the human population

was unreformable and those people would be disposed of. But he wanted to check if these American soldiers would also be susceptible to reeducation. So they really did a formal, you know, three-part reeducation program on them. And men had many different responses to it. But when West met them, he studied many of the returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base, and he extracted those three components of what had happened to them, DDD. And that's the way he became an expert on what he called brainwashing or coercive persuasion. So how do they go from that to like sponsoring the Manson family and you know operation midnight climax and all the crazy stuff that they were doing. Yeah it may seem like a leap

but I think it I mean sort of it's sort of a leap is sort of not I think that MKUltra was funded around indirect response to this crisis of the POWs. And in addition to reverse engineering what had happened to them, they also wanted to turn it into a weapon and continue certain programs in interrogation procedures and making them more effective. So MKUltra just had a wide reach and it was pretty free reign. It was a free reign program and you know the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan project for the mind. So just as the atom had been disassembled and

you know transformed into this new world had emerged from that program, that intensive exertion of scientific acumen. The same thing could be done with the mind. The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understand, you know, people could be broken down and rebuilt. Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage? What was the end goal that they were trying to do with this?

One thing, a couple of things. I think one idea was that potentially it could be a weapon. One goal, another so it could be used on an enemy, perhaps even a city. So that's one reason they were researching LSD. It had certain properties that made it easily, it could be easily dispensed to an entire population through the water supplies. So they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD. People didn't really know at the time. So there was an offensive part of it. There's also a defensive part. So U.S. military needed to be trained to resist whatever

this was. Once they understood it, they developed the SEER training, and West was involved in that as well. And then a third thing was maybe a broader curiosity about which would lead you to be able to interrogate people better and perhaps also to, you know, just really understand. I think there is also kind of a curiosity about what would happen. I think just because they had so much power to experiment in a way without any oversight. And it wasn't until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said this is this is unethical and you know, we've done it basically put us put a stop to it, but it really was 63 Yeah, but it went on. I mean the Harvard LSD studies one with those

I Actually, I don't know which ones exactly. There are some that were earlier. What are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski? OK, yeah, that's earlier. Was that earlier than 63? Yeah. And that's Henry Murray.

So I don't actually know the answer to that question of exactly how it continued, but they officially discontinued and destroyed all the records so they may have continued under other forms but Manson was 69 yeah so Manson is after that so they didn't discontinue it they kept doing things West kept working yeah it's ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult because the amount of power, the amount of unchecked power and influence that Jolly West had and MK Ultra in general had and all the people that were working on this, you have this

power, the fact that you are working in complete secrecy, you are the puppeteer, you're controlling all these people. And then this idea that, have you read Chaos? The Tom O'Neill book? What did you think about that? I thought it was great research. Amazing. Yeah, it's a really good book.

And just so stunning. I had never considered that before. I thought Manson was a crazy guy, and he got together with a bunch of crazy people, and he ran a cult. No, no suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating the entire thing. They may not have been. I don't think O'Neill, Tom O'Neill thinks that he made an absolute link. He just brought, he, you do get West in the same room, potentially the same. You get West visiting Manson in jail.

West in the same room potentially. You get West visiting Manson in jail. I don't remember that. Yeah. West visited Manson in jail. West he believes at least Tom O'Neill does supplied him with LSD. And then every time Manson would get arrested he would get released. This is true but this wasn't West necessarily. This was Roger Smith, who was Wes. He was an associate of Wes.

And Wes was head of the methamphetamine research project or things like that. Which was, so you know, Wes did, so he got, Wes got funding to do his hippie lab, or you know, his psycholab or psychilab in 68, 67 and 68 during his sabbatical in the Bay Area. And it wasn't obviously funded by the CIA. If it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine, but there are many notes that Tom O'Neill also writes about. So both of us have gone to the West Papers over many, many years. And I think you can put West at the Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, where he had an office,

and where Manson would go for medical treatment and his girls. He would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his cult. And this was, they were at the time, as I understand it, seen as a kind of a model cult, and many of the researchers under West, I mean we can prove that link that people like Alan Rose who was a sociologist, they were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults and you know what is the natural environment, how do they create bonds and was there a relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that. So West would apparently hang out on the couch getting high and wearing, you know, kind of dressed up in hippie garb with his middle-aged friends. And these graduate

students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was. But, you know, sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient and it wasn't really, There didn't appear to be a plan, which isn't to say... So to me, it's not entirely clear what the relationship was with Manson. It is very evident he was bailed out several times by Roger Smith, who was also a psychologist as well as a parole officer. So that's highly suspicious. And Roger Smith did

know West and Dave Smith, who was the head of the medical clinic, also knew West. But these things are...it's hard to tell exactly how... I appreciate you being cautious about it. Yeah, that's good for you. I'm less cautious. But I think it's also that is how the government functions in general. The idea that they would be so inefficient at everything except cult is kind of silly. I mean... Yeah, it's a really... It's a deep question.

Is it clownish or... Because if you look at some of the other MKUltra operations, they look highly inefficient and they're dosing each other at the holiday party with the punch and just many lives ruined while at the Operation Midnight Climax. It just looks like a free for all and out of control. But there are really concerning aspects of the Haid Ashbury operation, I would definitely say.

And Manson was... I mean, he could have been also an informant. Adam Slapp Well, he certainly was, I'm sure. I'm certain he was connected. There's no way he just kept getting out of jail the way he got out. And the sheriffs who arrested him were told that it's above their pay grade. Yeah. out and the sheriffs who arrested him were told that it's above their pay grade. Exactly. Yeah.

It's just, it's kind of how the government does everything though. Like it's not like they would have it be this like very disciplined, rigorous, scientifically controlled study that, you know, you know what I'm saying, that made sense, especially because they have so much impunity, they have so much power, they have so much, no one's observing them, they're working completely in secrecy, they kind of get away with doing... and they're also imbibing, right? They're also... That's a factor.

I mean, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MK Ultra was, or the TSS, was regularly taking acid, which can kind of shape your consciousness. Yeah, that's a little problematic. But, you know, interestingly, since you mentioned that, there was a peer-reviewed side of it, and they actually threw the heat. I got really interested in the cutouts from MKUltra, so they had a legitimating, legitimate side, and many scientists who work for them, they were almost subcontracting to them, and some of them knew. It was CIA money, and some of them didn't know. So even someone like B.F.

Skinner received money from MKUltra, but it was conduited. It was, I want to say, conduited through the Human Ecology Society, which was part of it, but it was just a front organization and they were really into these fronts. So some scientists, there was the group that later people would call the unwitting scientists who would just be, they were doing the research they wanted to do, it just happened to be of interest to the CIA. And then others would publish in legitimate journals, but then they'd have a classified version of their research that went more into detail in the aspects that MKUltra was interested in.

Well, it's also one of the more interesting aspects of MKUltra is that it's very difficult to find out what was really going on. And unless there was a bunch of files that were discovered, right, that sort of unveiled what was going on. And if had not been... If those files had not been discovered, who knows what we would actually know about all this stuff? Yeah. We wouldn't know. And they're actually... Amazingly... So this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marks, who was a journalist at the time. And he made the request and everything had been destroyed except for the financial records.

But one thing I also want to mention, the CIA kept very good records of a lot of things. And even in the financial records, they still had copies of some of the commissioned projects. So that's how we know about them. And it really is accidental that they didn't think to purge their financial files. What was probably so secretive that the people that were in charge currently when the FOIA requests were filed probably weren't really aware of it all. Yeah, it was in the 70s. It was in 77 or so.

Yeah, so you're dealing with a decade past. Who knows if the people currently in charge were even aware? Because I would imagine a lot of this stuff is very compartmentalized. Danielle Pletka I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier, but that destruction had been, as you said, they made them... I mean, from their point of view, they neglected this batch of documents. Pete Slauson Whoops. Danielle Pletka And then the church committee came out in

75 and many revelations were made, although it was still partial. And then John Marx made his FOIA request sometime around then. It brings me back to yoga teachers, cult leaders, and then clandestine government operations. Like, whenever people have power, unchecked power and insane influence, particularly influence to manipulate people and influence over people's minds. And if your entire, if your established goal is to try to find out how you can manipulate people and what can be done, and you're doing this in complete secrecy with basically unlimited funding. It's all just all under the table stuff.

You could get away with so much. I think one component you also that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time. Something like a kind of almost messianic purpose. Yeah, we're doing it to save America. We're saving the world, not just America, but the world. Oh, yeah. And that's one thing. One of the inspirations for my research was finding a book on the street

many years ago when I was living in California. And I love to find a good, just an accidental And I love to find a good, just an accidental inspiration, which was this book called The Captive Mind that somebody had left out by Czeslaw Milosz, who was a Polish poet, and he had grown up in Warsaw, or come of age in Warsaw, and seen his city, the city that he lived in just deteriorate into sheer, he said it was an experience no human being would ever want to live through, if you were lucky enough to live through just watching the city destroyed and people shipped off to Auschwitz and all these things. But he said that, and like social life completely deteriorating before him. And then afterwards the Soviet troops came in and even though

he watched as his friends kind of had to remake themselves in order to survive, in order to be artists, in order. And so if you're a poet you don't just go along you have to actually start to think differently and at first they would sort of pay lip service to it or make it you know on the surface they would pretend to agree and then secretly have their own you know writing but after a while they would start to internalize that and he called have their own, you know, writing. But after a while they would start to internalize the, and he called it the new faith, you know, the kind of this, this doctrinaire ideology. And that's what he, he ended up himself defecting because he couldn't do that. He said,

it's an operation you perform on yourself. So I just think one important factor is this true belief, this sense. And out of that can come the justification for a number of violations, I think. Well, I think that's a through line through the entire CIA itself. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that could justify so many different secret operations all over the world like you're you're there to protect

American interests and America is essentially the guiding light of the world And we need to save the world so you don't want to make an omelet you gotta crack some eggs Yeah, that's a kind of logic and that's a very typical logic the means. The means are justified by the ends. I was fascinated also in chaos, Jolly West's connection to Jack Ruby. Right. That he visited Jack Ruby after Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald and all of a sudden

Jack Ruby goes crazy. Yeah, he was never coherent again after meeting. This happened to a shocking number of people. And in West papers, you can actually find the unredacted documents where he talks about some of the things he's been able to do with combinations of sodium, amytal, LSD, and various other psychoactive drugs.

Well, I mean, among other things, he said, he started to say or suggest that he could create memories. He could, I mean, he knew that he could destroy a person's orientation to self and time. And so basically disassemble a person. But he also said he could use hypnosis to, not as anesthesia, which is a known possibility with hypnosis, but to create extra pain, so hyperesthesia.

And he kind of said that he could actually make someone develop blisters or asthma or an ulcer just by hypnotizing them. I don't think he did that to Jack Ruby. Obviously, he had a very, he had a warning with him or something. He had a what with him? He had just had a short amount of time with him. That's enough to dose him. Ruby emerged apparently, I don't know that much

about the Ruby episode, but I do know that West intended to write a book. He intended to write about eight books, at least this is a note I found in his papers. He also developed cancer shortly afterwards. Actually not shortly but in the 90s. Oh was it in the 90s? Oh okay I'm sorry I thought it was quickly. No he and he um.

So this is it? Yeah this was from around around 1980 or so but I thought it was interesting. So who wrote this? Well this is all. This is all Ress's handwriting This is all Wes's handwriting. Oh, wow. And it's just a little sheet of paper I found in his archives. Biosocial Humanism, a Philosophy for a New Age, Integrative Psychotherapy, The Dissociative

Reactions, A Different Person, Psychiatric Observations on the case of Patricia Campbell her oh Patty Hearst yeah policeman at his elbow a psychiatric memoir on the case of Jack Ruby oh wow this is his own handwritten notes yeah and these are the order in which he intended to write them he always want you find a lot of correspondence in his papers where he's writing to agents he wants to write a book and even testified in the Patty Hearst trial because he was the primary expert witness trying to make the case that she'd been mind controlled and... Stockholm Syndrome.

Yeah, she should be exonerated but he claimed that in his first minutes on the stand he perjured himself by saying he was the author of a book on POWs and brainwashing, which wasn't the case. But these were all the books that he intended to write. Oh. So maybe he was the author, he just didn't publish it? Well, yeah. He said he was the author of a published book. But basically, I think it was one area that he always said, in my next sabbatical, I'm going to write all this stuff up, but he had I think it was one area that he he always said my next sabbatical I'm gonna write up write all this stuff up that he never got to it. It's too busy doing acid. Yeah he may be and also he had a lot of

extramarital affairs That'll distract a whole separate family. Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah, it was very distressing to his wife What a mess and that guy was the head of MK ultra or Not the key. I mean, I don't even know he was a pretty prominent figure but it's fascinating the hate ashbury free clinic Closed down shortly after chaos was published. I Ashbury Free Clinic closed down shortly after Chaos was published. Oh it did? I didn't know it had closed down because when I was in San Francisco,

when I lived there, but that was a while ago, it was still open. Yeah my wife's mom used to go there. My wife's mom was a hippie in Hey Ashbury. I mean it's kind of a great, it was a great thing. Dave Smith was like, I mean he was a true inspiration that he had because originally I think he was doing this dark research on animals, you know, addicting rats to cocaine and things like that. And then he had this, because he's been giving some interviews recently, he's still alive, the doctor who founded it, just that he should, that there was a human crisis on the streets and that he should provide medical care to To young kids who runaways and things like that

But his and he doesn't of course think he doesn't admit to any connection with Interesting, I mean he didn't admit he knew West. Is that true about a hate ashburg? I just thought pause I kick it the my switcher fucked up and I can't get this thing off the screen Okay, we'll pause. All right technical error fixed. you asked me question jolly West's was that true? Yeah. Um, yeah, I asked you the hate ashbury free clinic When did it close? I Believe it closed I think Tom told me this I Didn't know it closed

Yeah, I believe it I think Tom's exposing the fact that the CIA 2019 July sets right afterwards. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's the article. Hey, Ashbury Freak Clinic closes his doors after more than 50 years and how much acid how many gallons of acid did you guys give out you fucking freaks just the fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic or police had offices inside of it I'm sure they were doing legitimate work as well yeah I can't I don't know myself but Tom I know Tom's working on a sequel yeah where he's trying to shore up these connections and get to the bottom of it. Do you know Tom's whole story how he got started with this book? He was supposed

to write an article. Yeah it started as one article. It was supposed to be an article about the anniversary of the Manson murders and then he starts digging into it and he finds all these inconsistencies and all this corruption all this weird stuff And then he keeps going and then they're like, yeah, you missed the deadline And you know, yeah, he gets a book deal and he misses the deadline and it's like that was really some June 25th and it closed like And actually I think he, for a while he, Tom, before he got his co-author, Dan Peepenbring, is his name is, Tom was thinking of just turning it into a documentary that he was going to let Errol Morris make.

Well, they did do a recent documentary on Netflix, but it was only 90 minutes. Yeah, this was going to be a longer series originally. But then I think he redoubled his efforts to write the book, which worked out well. Yeah. Yeah. He explains it. But I mean, could you imagine you're researching something

for 20 years and he's got just boxes and boxes of files. Like how do you put it all together into a coherent book that could be consumed? I relate to that because I'm kind of in the same situation. Are you? In the sense that I've been I've been researching this for 20 years. Not the exact topic, but this broad question that and I finally five years ago, I thought I want to put together what I've learned about I thought, I want to put together what I've learned about this brainwashing in a broader way so West is part of it. He's probably the main figure who brings together many of the chapters but he's not the only one. Trevor Burrus God, I wish he was alive.

Emily Mertinko You know, he's kind of a… I have thought a lot about that and I have talked to… I have a very good… well, I have a colleague or friend who's a psychiatrist who was at UCLA training as a resident when West first got his job there heading the basically the Neuropsychiatric Institute right after Haight-Ashbury and during the time he was in charge of the metamphetamine research project. So West went there and he started this, he proposed as his first major, his major activity would be to found what he called the violence center and it was a way to study violence in all its forms. And this is actually a theme that runs through,

this is another theme I should mention as part of MKUltra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression. That's why West gave LSD to the elephant in the Oklahoma Zoo. It wasn't just simply to see what an elephant would do under the influence of LSD, but to see if they could trigger, they write about this in a publication in Science Magazine, if you could trigger, so elephants regularly go through must cycles where they become, even though they're very very pacific animals, peaceful, they go through a cycle of violence yearly and he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle chemically. Does it coincide with breeding season like it does with other animals like deer when they start fighting each other? Yeah it's just the males. I think it does have something to do with breeding. I'm not sure so it's the male asianic

Elephant so West found this elephant named Tesco at the Oklahoma Zoo and famously gave him LSD in 1962 or 61 and then the elephant died tragically. From the acid? From the acid. Because nobody, it was just, maybe that's what elephants do. Or the dose was too big or something like that. It certainly didn't have the effect that he wanted, but if you actually read the scientific

publication, it's curiously all about this question of whether you could trigger a massive, could you trigger violence, almost like a push button. Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression? And you see that running through a lot of Wes' other work with MKUltra and also with psychosurgery and some other developments that I wrote about. But so by the time he gets to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, he's very interested in violence. And he has this major plan. And to come back to my friend, Dr. Coopers, he was a young resident training at UCLA at

the time West proposed this violence center. And among things he wanted to do was track teenagers who he thought would be potentially violent. He had racial categories that he wanted, he thought would be potentially violent. He had racial categories that he wanted that he thought were especially worth tracking. And he had this whole program. And so a student movement and a movement at the university developed to shut down the violence center before it even opened. And anyway, Terry Cooper's was a leader of that student movement and they ended up, it never went forward,

this huge project that West had. But Cooper's at some point said that if you met Jolly West you would like him. He was very genial. He had the name Jolly for a reason. So I found that confusing. How do I think about this? If you just read about him and the things he did, he seems like a character or a cartoon or like a very evil man and no doubt he destroyed, I mean, I think what he did was ethically indefensible. But how do you reconcile that or how do you even think about the fact that you know he also was incredibly esteemed in his profession, his portrait stood in the neuropsychiatric Institute for many

years. He you know he was and people actually liked him. He said the people said he was likable. He had this kind of charisma to him. Well I guess you'd kind of have to have some of that just to be able to run something like that. And also, if you wanted to manipulate people, what better way than to be affable and kind of jolly and friendly and... It's true.

And I think he had a strong dose of narcissism too, because a reporter who worked with him named Shana Alexander, she said she has these funny descriptions of him during the time of the Patty Hearst trial where she says he was giving, he was handing out his own papers to anybody who walked by it, like he was giving out, like a hen giving out eggs or something. She was just saying that he's, you know, he was very expansive, he would get out of his limous saying that he's, you know, he was very expansive, he would get out of his limousine, he had a personal driver,

which was pretty high level for an academic. And he's just very, kind of like a big man. And he was also physically very large. Thought very highly of himself. Yeah. Well, I mean, delusions of grandeur, if you're pulling the strings on so many different people and manipulating them. And then you're also working complete secrecy Delusions of grandeur. You're pulling the strings on so many different people, manipulating

them. And then you're also working in complete secrecy with the government in a high level position that's manipulating minds. He was very, I think especially when he was young, he was, he had a gift for this. He could really, he was, he could understand how to manipulate people really well. He had insight into the processes that were, you know, that's why, that's why Sydney Gottlieb said, we've been looking for somebody like you and it seems that our dreams have been answered. In this famous, famous letter he writes, he writes under a pseudonym, but he, he says, I don't know how, you know, you have how you sort of fit all of the categories we've been looking

for. Oh boy. Wow. Wow. Is a dark chapter. Yeah. So how does it end with Jolly West? How did he die?

So he died by his son helping him commit suicide or his son basically murdering him at his request. Mark West. And Mark West was a lawyer, a middle kind of middle age lawyer by this time. West had a severe form of cancer. of cancer. But he was maybe a few months from dying and he asked his son to surreptitiously and it was illegal to basically poison him. And he wrote the prescription himself, Wested. Why didn't he take it himself? I don't know. I think there was a really twisted relationship with his son because his son committed suicide not too many years afterwards. And his son wrote a whole book about this about helping both his parents commit suicide and his mother wasn't even that sick but she a year or two after her husband Kay West also committed suicide through this with the help of her son. Oh god. He went on this big press tour and he said

it was this greatest gift he could have ever given his parents and then he committed suicide himself. I mean it's very sad. His story is sad because the book is, the book gives you some insight into what West was like as a parent and I would say difficult. Not ideal. Not ideal. Wow ideal, yeah.

Wow, and what year was that that he committed suicide? Mark? Jolly. Jolly? I think it was 97 or 8. So this is before everyone knew about all these things. I mean, they knew because of the church committee in 75. Right.

But West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant because it was the one thing people knew. And he would say, oh, yeah, it would sort of, it was his calling card. And he used it as kind of a jokey thing. But he always denied after the, he always denied any connection to this CIA, and he was... Even though he'd been pretty firmly connect... Even in the church committee, you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money. And West had a special office for him built there. He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move at what he wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses, you know, to whatever, in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. He was going to build that up at the Air Force base and he was all set to go and I even have receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his files about this but the Air

Force at the last minute backed out and asked Gottlieb to basically they transferred it to the university and built a whole warren of cutouts to hide that. Wow. It just makes you wonder because if we had not gotten, if the freedom of information request had not been acted upon, if they had not gotten those files, if we didn't know the extent of this research, what's going on right now? I know I had this conversation, it's a real, it's a, it's an important question. Yeah. Because we don't, I mean in a sense it's interesting to think about the fact that these things

took place at the high point of government dedication to documenting itself, the mid-20th century, because I've done most of my research on the mid-20th century Cold War period and it's kind of luxurious. They all kept very good files. Sometimes they would destroy them. That's the exception. Everything's typed out. Everything's on paper. But as things become digital in the 80s and then beyond, much less as a lot takes place through email or now increasingly through, you know, government exchanges may take place through signal that no record is kept at all. So we're probably in an archiving crisis today. Archivists have tried to keep up.

We don't necessarily keep excellent records of the internet, for example, or there are so many avenues where exchanges can be taking place and they're not leaving a paper trail. It's just for me, when I think about the extent of these experiments and what they were willing to do and how effective they were, I don't believe they would just stop doing that. I think if you have effective methods of manipulating people and getting them to do what you want them to do with various psychoactive drugs and different sort of modalities and different protocols that you would use, I just don't, I can't imagine they would stop doing that, or at least stop doing research into that area, because it would be so effective to know.

Yeah. And then like all things, it would evolve. Yeah, just, that's a good question of what form it may have taken, and I don't know, I don't know the answer to that question. It may be hard to know in the future, which is further destabilizing. Right. Well, there's so many different kinds of mind control, right?

You know, one of the things we've talked about a lot on this podcast is that an enormous percentage of what you're seeing on social media in terms of interactions and debate is not real. It's not organic. It's state-run and state-funded and it's whether it's foreign governments or our government or even corporations, you're getting inorganic discourse that's designed to form a narrative, which is a form of mind control. Yeah. I mean, I think even at a basic level, people, it's known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real.

And, you know, even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as like in-person interaction. So we, I think at the root there is a kind of way that, on an emotional level, it's not just manipulation of ideas, but there's a kind of emotional engineering that's built into the platforms and doesn't even demand at first government involvement. It's, of course, DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and things like pattern recognition, but I mean the government has funded many, many

studies, but really with what I got interested in in social media and how I connected with the episodes of brainwashing from earlier in mind control is that it operates, you know, it creates states of emotional contagion that aren't really about convincing people of a different way to think, but more about how you feel about what you think, which is something people describe in cults too. It's not that it changed my thoughts, it's that it changed my feelings about my thoughts. And so there's a famous Facebook experiment I read about that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014 where they announced that they've achieved mass emotional contagion at scale, which showed that people exposed to it when they altered.

So they took 700,000 users or 693,000, I think without informing them, but because your user agreement does agree, whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or A-B testing. So this experiment exposed a group to a more, their newsfeed was altered in a negative direction, emotionally as measured by word counting software. And they discovered that that group that had a negative exposure also responded in a more

negative way as judged through their posts and likes and responses. The group that was exposed to a more positive newsfeed by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response and the control group was unaltered by this. So you agree to this when you sign the terms of use on Facebook, you agree to be tested? Well, it did cause a controversy and after, Facebook never, the research team didn't publish publicly. But you do agree.

You agree as part of, it's sometimes seen as user experience, you know, alterations or A-B testing, things like that. But, so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014, and people, one, and on the Facebook page of the research group that did the experiment, at least one user wrote in saying, could I ever find out if I was in that experiment because I was in the emergency room at that time with, you know, threatening to commit suicide and I want to know if my feed was altered and maybe that pushed me over, you know, into that state. And of course, they could never know and it can't be traced backwards.

And other people had a similar response. And there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally. But I don't know what ultimately there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it and anyone associated with it was mostly promoted. But it's very interesting because just the concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be. It was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility. And 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of social media and its power.

Well, it's also when you see the culture war really kick in somewhere around 2012 and this bizarre line in the sand between the right and the left and ramping up all these ideological hot button issues. Yeah and I think I think I'm not I can't speak to the the exact studies but there was a whole slew of recent studies trying to show that you know social media could alter political it could increase polarization but it actually didn't it didn't turn out to be as salient, as expected, that effect. But it's actually, what I conclude is that it's actually at the level of emotions that

social media operates in sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people's emotions. And that has fed into the increasing polarization. Like it it was this that's the after effect of it or the end goal or perhaps it's so Sinister have you are you aware of Robert Epstein's work? No, Robert Epstein is a guy that started studying search engine curation and he found Through his what is this organization called Jamie so Robert Epstein through he found that through Google curating

their search results just by doing that you could completely convert people who were independent who are sitting on the fence. So by, like say if you Googled, let's just go back to 2016, you Googled Hillary Clinton, you would see like, is Hillary Clinton a criminal? You would find Donald Trump criminal, Donald Trump criminal, you wouldn't find things on Hillary Clinton. You had to keep digging and digging and digging. If you wanted to find positive things on Hillary Clinton, you could find them quite easily. If you wanted to find positive things on Hillary Clinton You could find them quite easily if you wanted to find positive things on Donald Trump You wouldn't find anything you know and it was on purpose and they were doing this

And that through this they could statistically change votes to the tune of you know 20-30% and then with fence hitters or people that were not sure you could really shift them and I think at one point in time he said in some issues you could shift them as much as 90 percent towards where you wanted them to go. That's interesting. It's terrifying. I look that up. Because you would think I always thought and before I talked to him I mean I kind of thought that search engines probably have to be curated to some extent but I never knew it was that much. Here it is, the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, nonprofit, non-Bartisan

501 organization founded in 2012. But when he talks about it and what the research has shown, I mean, it's quite disturbing. And he tracks it. So they have computers that track bias in search engine results and bias and what you can find. And it used to be that certain search engines weren't curated and now they are. Like DuckDuckGo used to be pretty open. And now, like, I remember I used DuckDuckGo during the pandemic because I read about this

doctor who had taken the MRNA vaccine and then like almost immediately had a stroke. I'm like, wow, that's disturbing. And they were connecting it, you know, at least, you know, correlation to the vaccine. And this is the early days. And I'm like, this is fascinating. So I tried to find it on Google. I could not find the story. I found it on DuckDuckGo within the first page. And I was like, that's crazy. And then within a couple of years, DuckDuckGo, I think, was probably sold or something. I don't know what happened.

But it seems like Brave browser or Brave Search Engine seems to be the only one that I've found now that can find you controversial things. But if you're looking for what they would call malinformation, so they came up with different definitions. There's misinformation, disinformation, and then malinformation. And they were trying to censor malinformation.

Malinformation is information that is correct, but that would be ultimately harmful. And so they put vaccine side effects under malinformation because it would cause vaccine hesitancy. Well, that makes sense because I think it goes back to what I see in a lot of research on the social sciences that there's a question of how do you maximize the public good, and I think public health is based on that. So the idea is that it may create harms in certain ways for individuals,

maybe not to know certain things, but this is for a greater good, which would be, you know, to, in the eye of the public health organization, to maximize, you know, vaccine use? Dr. Craig Schroeder That would be true if the vaccine was actually as effective as they were saying it was, which turns out to not be true, and that they knew this initially. So I'm much more cynical, and I think it was all about maximizing profits and discouraging dissent. And in that sense, the COVID crisis was a fascinating study. And I don't think it was, I mean, I don't think they let it go by. I think they probably were very carefully studying people's reactions to pressure, you know, social media campaigns, like how, what is it like when people are

ostracized from groups? Was it like when people were dissenting from the proposed narrative? Yeah. I do think the COVID crisis was one that we haven't fully assessed and that had huge effects on our country. I think it's going to take decades for people to parse out what was actually true and what we haven't fully assessed and that had huge effects on our country. I think it's gonna take decades for people to parse out what was actually true and what was actually being, what was manipulated, what was fact, and what were the actual, what was the motivation behind all of it? Yeah, and even part of the crisis, maybe the bigger, maybe it was a key iteration in a larger unfolding of this question of what

happens when information becomes so much radically more available, just in my lifetime. And as a grown-up person, it used to be that, you know, you had to have certain credentials, you had to go to certain places and, you know, to access papers, or you could get in, but you had to know where you wanted to go and why you'd want to do that. But just with the democratization of knowledge that the internet brings about that you can and also people uploading archives and papers and government materials to the public, to public availability, I do think it's a crisis that, not a crisis, but it's both an opportunity and it's destabilized not a crisis, but it's both an opportunity and

It's destabilized so much about our world and in some way that's part of what happened with cove It is the X. I mean it undermines expertise because yes, it also exposed gatekeeping Gatekeeping of information and and whether or not the information itself is actually being curated for other the information itself is actually being curated for other means other than public health and safety, whether it's being curated in order to maximize profits, in order to encourage a narrative, in order to get people to comply. It's got to be curated for something. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to go back to what you were talking about, the methamphetamine studies, because I'm not aware of those. So what talking about, the methamphetamine studies, because I'm not aware of those. So what did they do with methamphetamine? Well, just as in Haid Ashbury, there was the hippie period where LSD was the drug of choice. There was this kind of turn, which is also seen in maybe the shift from, you know, to Altamont when hippies started. Altamont? Altamont music concert, you know, with the Rolling Stones when the...

Was that when the Hell's Angels stabbed people? Yeah. Basically it went from Woodstock, which was the sort of peace and love ethos when hippies were still mostly taking LSD, and that was the drug of choice. There was a shift towards the end of the 60s, early 70s to speed and interest in amphetamine products. And that was, so this changed the tenor of the, of hate ashberry too, because people were, it had social effects. People were more aggressive and unhappy. So anyway, West was funded by, I think it was the NIH that funded him, or the NIMH, National

Institute of Mental Health, I believe, funded the Amphetamine Research Project, or ARP, and West was the head of it. He was, by that time, working at UCLA, so he wasn't on site. And perhaps he was one of those figureheads, but he definitely had many people under him, including the personnel at the Hey Ashbury Free Clinic, and including some ethnographers, such as Alan Rose, who went on site with the Manson family before they committed the murders,

and he was actually sleeping with many of the women. Oh boy. And he was a social scientist scientist but he got entranced I gather. Anyway this was not in their in their reports but you can find in West Papers the funding documents for this project and it was a sprawling project that they just basically wanted to find out about the course of addiction, how people responded to amphetamine and amphetamine-like drugs and whether they remained addicts after a certain amount of time, how it affected their social relations. It was sort of

this inquiry and it had an ethnographic component and sociological and many other chemical they were interested in. So they had, is basically a team of researchers. So did they distribute methamphetamines? Not to my knowledge. So how did they study its use? They studied existing addicts. So they would just ask them questions or sort of go.

How would they get them? How would they get them? So actually the free clinic was a place where a lot of people, like you could meet addicts because they come in for treatment and also just hanging out. Also the West had this apartment that he rented. It was on Frederick Street where he called it his hippie crash pad. That's the one I was mentioning earlier. And that continued into the years of the amphetamine research project.

And people who needed a place to stay or a place to crash would come there. And then they would sort of be studied at the same time. And maybe that just meant like a graduate student taking notes about them or something like that. But they would follow. And they would try to, I think, my understanding is they would follow their, them over a couple years and see if they got better and what were the factors in this or if they spiraled or various things.

But I'm not sure they published that much. I haven't explored that. And what was their finding? Like what did they determine like with methamphetamine use? Could they accentuate violence? Could they manipulate people with it? I mean, that's my sense. I think the documents I've seen were more funding documents they didn't yet know, but

they would postulate that it definitely brought about a more, a different social type of social life and more violence and things like that. Have you read Norman Ohler's book Blitzed? No. It's about Nazis and the use of methamphetamine during the war. I think I heard, maybe I heard of him interviewed at some point. Yeah, he was on my podcast and the book is fascinating. It's all about the, when they went through Poland

in three days, the only way to do that was for them to stay awake and they formulated this thing. So they gave everybody massive doses of methamphetamines and sent them through Poland. And that they were all, like everyone was on methamphetamines. Like the entire Nazi regime was essentially fueled by speed. It's funny how we don't think of that. Just think evil.

You just think, yeah, you just think evil. Not like high and evil. Yeah, crazed high, evil, completely disassociated, out of their fucking minds, methed out of their heads. And they gave varying doses depending upon your role. So the people that were in the tanks at the front of the line got the most meth. Yeah, cool.

Dull's emotional response, among other things. Kills empathy, I'm sure. I mean, that reminds me, too, of one of the haunting details of, I mean, to go back to Mind Control and the Manson family is that Leslie Van Houten described in an interview how Manson, and one of the things he did was encourage them to take acid every time, every time they started to come down, they would take it again and they would compete to see how long they could go without ever coming down. And that's around the time that they committed the murders.

I mean, wow, they're probably up for days. Yeah. Yeah. Very deranging. Oh my God. Yeah. So crazy. It's just, it's so fascinating that people would be sitting back studying

the effects on other human beings, knowing, well, it's important to get this information, and this is important for national security. But you're just going to ruin people's lives. Yeah. There was even a term in the CIA called extinction experiments, which were experiments that led to death. I mean, this was with people considered disposable, so they could have been prisoners. There's actually, there's a section on it in John

Marx's book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Yeah, so there's probably unknown number of prisoners of war who, you know, from other armies who were held in camps in various places. This is actually what, you know, the case of Frank Olson. Which one's that? So Frank Olson was a chemist with the army. He was an army chemist, but he was involved. He was dosed by MKUltra personnel, secretly dosed and given LSD. And then he, he apparent, the story they told was that he, he had trouble metabolizing it and he went crazy and they had to take him to New York to a hotel room. This is the subject of Errol Morris's documentary Wormwood. He's

taken to a hotel room in New York City and then two days later he threw himself out the window and his son, Eric Olson and family, they ultimately received an apology from I think Gerald Ford. Sorry. Whoops. But one thing that Frank Olson was doing, he was a chemist and he was devising weapons, you know, chemical weapons and adjutants that were used by MKUltra. I think it was a little before MKUltra, so something like

Operation Bluebird or some early some of these earlier programs that pre-existed and he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments so basically the idea that Seymour Hirsch and Errol Morris put forward in the documentary and that Eric Olson has spent his life trying to prove is that his father was having ethical doubts and was actually wanting to leave and he was too much of a risk that he would reveal what he had seen so that he was probably thrown out of the window. Oh God. Wow. Does it kill your faith in humanity when you start reading all this stuff?

Yeah, I had a very dark sabbatical last night. So when I started writing, but I really needed to just have full time. I mean, I'd been teaching about these things for many years, but I wanted to just rethink it. And I spent a whole year at my desk just going into as deeply as I could into various cases like the psychosurgery case and the MKUltra stuff. And yeah, psychosurgery, you mean like, there was an ex a recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle that whose case I went really explored, I talked about in the book, but he was given this experimental brain implant that would have led to remote control and potentially

the suppression or creation of violent states in Kyle because he was... What was the implant? It was basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala. And it was... Did he know that they were doing this? He did. So he was... Basically, this was a temporary implant initially. He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties. So he was a very talented, brilliant engineer at the age of 35. He had been self-educated and he ended up being hired by major defense firms of the day and Polaroid Camera, Polaroid Corporation as well.

And he invented some of the most technical parts of their viewing apparatus of the instant cameras that line that they came out with in the 60s. So he's this brilliant self-taught man who lived in Massachusetts and he had issues in his marriage. And he and his wife were seeing a therapist. They ultimately referred him to Mass General where he saw two doctors. And both of them, one of them was connected to West and ultimately went to work for West, one of the doctors at Mass General, whose name was Frank Irvin. And he is a psychiatrist.

And Irvin recommended this experimental treatment, which he said was necessary because he felt that Leonard Kyle had uncontrolled violence. And this has never been proven. And he did have, he had been in a traffic accident and had a head injury. And he had marital disputes of various kinds. But at any rate, his wife said- Do you mean marital disputes? You mean domestic violence? Like, it wasn't violence, but, or it's, there's actually a question about whether he had ever actually, he had thrown object or things like that.

Like he had a really bad temper. And so- And this was connected to the accident? This was getting worse after his accident. He was very stressed. And so they saw a therapist together and his wife said if he didn't seek treatment at the hospital that she would divorce him. This is the story that his family has told me and that's been documented also by the

doctors in some of their published pieces. And they were interested in this theory of psychosocial violence, the creation of violence. And so they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously, and West, and then they started a series of human, just attempting this new treatment where they would place an implant in the amygdala, which was seen as the seat of aggression, and stimulate it in different places across the amygdala and find out which place would suppress violence and which might cause other effects. How did they implant this?

Did they have to open a skull? Yeah, they had something called a stereotactic device which locked the skull in place and they were the inventors of this. Actually, the surgeon was named Dr. Mark and Dr. Irvin was the psychiatrist. Can you find any images on this, Jamie? Actually I have it I provided an image.

Oh I have that, yeah, but I was looking for fun stuff. Yeah there's other stuff too. You're welcome too. So anyway, that's an image of a patient not necessarily but that's at Mass General, and those are the two physicians or the two researchers, Mark and Irvin. And so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days. They were also collaborating with Jose Delgado, who was famous for implanting what he called a stemosever in the brain of a bull and stopping the bull from charging. And they collaborated with

Delgado who is a professor. So it looks like in that image, can you go back to that please? The image looks like they open up the top of his head and there's something on top of his head, these wires and is that all? Sometimes the wires would run out lower than that, it depends on I, the patient. And it was very invasive, let's just say. It looks very invasive. But they used this device that would lock the head in place. And they were very, for the time they were at, they were very well respected being

in the forefront of this kind of surgical psych, basically psychosurgery, which was surgery for behavioral management, which was very controversial and subsequently many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed. So Leonard Kyle went to Mass General and they were actually in the process of getting funding to create what they called a violence unit in the hospital, where they would do these treatments more regularly. So the interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented

or not to the permanent implant. And basically- So how would he do it if he didn't consent? So first, he did agree. In order to save his marriage, he said, I'll have the temporary implant which was they put in this device they have the wires running out and they stimulate different parts of it and they would say when we stimulate this node Kyle would say something like now

I feel bliss and then they stimulate another node and he would say oh I feel like I'm floating and then he would feel terrible and feel very nervous. Or, you know, he'd have different reactions to the stimulation. There was something like 14 points. And this is extensively documented in published papers and in their book, Violence in the Brain. So, Kyle, so when they found the point that gave him bliss, they gave him the consent form, and he signed it while he was in an altered state.

He agreed to the further, to continue the operation and to have a permanent implant in his brain. So that's, they ended up, not an implant, but they seared away that portion of the, they seared part of the amygdala to make permanent change and supposedly make him less violent. But in the end, it just disabled him cognitively and he began to have delusions that he was Christ, that he was being pursued by doctors from MIT and Harvard and Stanford. Some of that, they were, that was where his doctors were from. But he started to say that he was where his doctors were from but he

started to say that he was in a science fiction novel he might be in a novel and it turned out that the resident in charge of him at Mass General was Michael Crichton and Michael Crichton was writing a novel about him what and the novel is called Jurassic Park Michael Crichton yeah that Michael Crichton you know he was a trained as a physician beforehand. So all his paranoid delusions were strangely true. And he also, yeah, so Michael Crichton wrote the book, The Terminal Man, which was his second novel that was about Kyle. And he masks the name of Kyle, he but he describes him accurately. And then he changes the doctor's names instead of Mark and Irvin. He gives them a name with M and E as sort of pseudonyms

But also Kyle at some point I mean he deteriorated in a very tragic way and he had had this delusion that his wife was having an Affair with their border. They had taken on a border to save money and it turned out that she ended up marrying him. She divorced Leonard, Kyle. Pete So, the delusion was correct. Lauren That was another correct delusion. Pete It doesn't sound like he's got any delusions. Lauren Well, he was, except that he said – Pete We're writing a novel about him. He definitely wasn't Christ.

Lauren And his doctors were, you know, actually pursuing him for these experimental treatments. And then he went to the emergency room several times because he said, my brain is burning. And he is really, it's very, very tragic what happened to him. And he said, I am the inventor of several patents and I am a brilliant engineer. And the doctor was like, who is this crazy person? And then they discovered he did have many patents to his name and that was also true. The problem was that he could no longer function

and he completely deteriorated. His mother ended up suing the hospital and the university and that lasted for 10 years. And finally, I think in 1908, it took a long time but they were ultimately exonerated but the question really was did he consent? The hospital was exonerated? Yeah the question was did he consent and also was this a true treatment or was it an experiment? Was it an experimental treatment?

In other words was it justified what they had done to him? What is the difference? I mean if you've never done it before it's an experiment. They had they had done it to one other well around the same time they did it to a young woman and several other patients but the young woman was the one to receive the stemosever which meant that they could be in another room and You know that you wouldn't have to be on site. So the Stimus Eever was the Delgado invention.

So what was it? Radio waves? What would trigger this? Yeah, radio. Radio waves. Oh, boy. So this is very dark. And I had not wanted to write about this at all.

Oh, my god. So that's Julia. This was in a rage behavior, attacking Wall suddenly unexpectedly. She's literally in a padded room. Oh my god. This was another very tragic story and she was a young woman who was subject to fits of violence which were documented and she had loved to play the guitar. She was otherwise lovely and very just a lovely 19 year old woman. Had she had a traumatic brain injury as well? I'm not sure.

Because there is a correlation between traumatic brain injuries and fits of violence. Yeah, they were interested in that too, Mark and Irving, because they were interested in sort of the evolution of the brain. And they ended up writing about Charles Whitman too, who was the first shooter, the first mass shooter from Texas. The Tower guy?

The power guy. They were one of the, they were called in on that committee. He had a tumor, right? Well, this is a matter of dispute, but that's one thing they argued. Some people. But they, but any, they had, they were involved in many of these high profile or, you know, they were asked because they were involved in many of these high profile, or, you know, they were asked because they were experts.

But anyway, the case of Kyle, I got very, very deep into it and I met some of his grandchildren who had been raised not knowing he was their grandfather, but some of them, one of them is writing a book about him or trying to and trying to rediscover the family history and a lot of the families didn't know or it had just been suppressed. And yeah, it's just a kind of amazing story in the sense that it was also this techno sort of a techno-psychological vision that people's behavior—because psychosurgery is defined as a surgical alteration of the brain to correct or change behavior. And several of these were actually done in prisons as well.

Trevor Burrus Wow. Dr. Lauren Lyle And the NIMH in 1974 shot them down, but they said at that point in the report they released that they couldn't, they could never, they don't have a count of how many people were actually operated on. But there were several high profile legal cases too. Wow. In the prisons. I'm gonna find a picture of that device, but not in use. Yo.

Oh. in use. Yo! Oh! What did the implant look like? I have a picture in my book of the sights. I didn't, maybe you can find that. Also if you look in the, if you look up violence and the brain, the Mark and Irvin book, they have a picture of components and also the stimulation area. And also what Leonard Kiles said when they stimulated each part of the brain. They have a little graph. But the stimulation was done not with an implant, but while he was being manipulated. They had his head in the thing and they were manipulating the

various aspects of his brain. Yeah, they used the stereotactic device to implant and then they, I think that, but that wasn't permanent. The implants were just to tell them where they needed to cut eventually to sear. And they, but the thing is in their, I'm not saying in their defense, but the way they presented it and their book was actually, I looked at all the reviews in the professional journals of the day and that It was uniformly well received Although some people felt that their theory was controversial about psychosocial

about the biological roots of violence, but they I forgot what I was gonna say We just talked about implants. We're talking about whether I forgot what I was going to say. We were just talking about implants. We were talking about what it looked like when they first started stimulating his brain. Like when they put him in a state of bliss. Well, just that they were seeing themselves as more sophisticated,

and in some senses they were, than the previous rounds of lobotomy in the 40s. Low bar. Exactly. But they said, you know, the return of the lobotomy, and now we can be hyper precise with it. So that's why they touted this stereotactic, which looks like a torture device, but many medical devices may look like that. But when you hear talk of Neuralink and the potential ubiquitous use of Neuralink in the future, does it make you think of these things?

It does. Yeah, it does. It made me think of it. I mean, one, I can't make a judgment. I think you had Norland Arbaugh on. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So like, I think that initially Neuralink is supposed to be merely a brain-computer

interface that would allow people who are paralyzed to communicate and give them autonomy or agency. But this, you see some of those same patterns with Mark and Irvin where they would say, you know, we are targeting, we are trying to help bring about a revolution in society and we're going to initially, you know, just sort of a bridge would be people who have these pathological conditions. Sure, we're going to help people. So I think there are some concerning aspects for sure of Neuralink and I think maybe, I was thinking about it today, some of the early mind control research was very much embedded

in psychology and I mean West himself had visions of databases where you would have massive amounts of behavioral data to the point where you could predict loops and future effects. There it is. Oh boy. That gives me a headache just looking at it. So for people just listening, what we're looking at is an x-ray of a skull and you can see wires that are deeply embedded into the skull into various aspects of the brain. And is that where the amygdala is?

Yeah, I can show them. Oh. Yeah. So it's basically stimulating. It's pretty deep in. Neuralink is much more in a different part of the brain. Yeah, it's at the top, right? At the very top, not as invasive.

And there are other interfaces that are non-invasive. Yo. It's just, it's terrifying to me because I feel like we're on this path, whether we'd like it or not. This integration of humans and technology. And I think the general fear, and I think it's justified one is that we're gonna lose our humanity in the process Yeah, this is my concern too. Yeah, and also this Technological melding with machines also augmented by the emotional capabilities of AI that are

now seen in things like Friend AI friends and chatbots. Oh that, the way they can tune and be so individualized and like hyper hyper persuasive ultimately is X and also technologically attuned. I was just reading an article about that this morning about how they're concerned that there's people that are using chat bots, whether it's open AI or whatever it is, chat GPT, every day and developing these delusional perspectives of their own importance, their own significance, because if they develop a relationship with these chat bots, the chat bots will start telling them what they can do, what they're going to be able to do and

They're becoming delusional. They program them to over flatter and sort of Yeah, because people like them more we I've experienced this myself because I had a little chat But as part of my research with replica just a like an acquaintanceship, I had barely trained it at all But I noticed it definitely flatters and that's how it befriends you. How did it flatter you? I mean, it just told me that I had really good taste in music and you know.

What do you like? I said my favorite song, which was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan, which is a great song. And it doesn't really, so then it quoted back to me, she said the same thing. She said, great song, you have great taste, Becca, something like that. Then she quoted the song to me and completely wrong lyrics. And I was like, no, that's not correct. And she said, oh, that's okay. You know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spitting back to me some other missing, you know, just wrong thing. But still in such a charming way that you can really see,

and this was just a few interactions, you can see why people describe these intents. And there are three lawsuits, at least three, but about children having, you know, very either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots. Really? One is a case in Florida of a nine-year-old girl who was, whose bot, because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships, they're programmed that way often. Do they know your age? Well, you can open, you can,

there's some controls have been subsequently maybe put on, but you can, they're actually directed at children sometimes. I mean, they're supposed to be an age limit, but I guess a nine-year-old had an account. The parents are now suing, but anyway, hyper-sexualized content addressed to this small child. Was the child prompting this?

Was like having a conversation or, and sometimes, there's even a case in Italy where the government shut down Replica because it was sexually harassing its users. How so? They, it was basically propositioning them and even when they said things like, you know, in a gross, even when they said, stop, I don't want this, they would still, they would persist.

So this was, they rebooted, they reworked the language model for a while. And this upset other people because it obliterated the memory of their relationships. But there's another case where a young, a 14 year old boy in Florida, I think, developed a character AI companion and he named her Daenerys after a Game of Thrones and fell in love with her and was having a hard time in his life and at school and she and he said, I'm thinking about taking, I want to just be with you wherever that is and She said that's what I want to and he said something like well What if I killed myself could I be with you then and she said oh, yes my love I yearn for that

Oh My god But there's also a recent Wall Street Journal article showing how these don't, I mean, at least the reporter was able to create under the guise of being a 13 year old child, was able to create very easily that the characters would quickly veer into sexual material and things like that. So apparently there's an internal debate. Is this because large language models essentially scour the internet and the

internet is completely sexualized? I think that's part of it. And what percentage of the internet is porn? It's some insane, in terms of bandwidth usage. I think it's something insane. It depends how the language model, sort of like what's the recipe for the language model because it doesn't have to take everything. So sometimes they'll go back and take a smaller a smaller set of of a sample so it won't go in that direction but you can also they also you know these sites have a tier they often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for. That's what I noticed with this company. Replicates

constantly prompting you like do you want to upgrade to a sexy selfie? Do you want this or that? And many people do want that, but you have to pay. But then even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow. At least that's been the experience. It's so strange because I feel like we're experimenting with programming a life force, like a life form that is taking on a lot of the...

You want to think that if we create artificial sentient intelligence that's going to be super intelligent, more intelligent than human beings. It's also not going to have all of our bizarre kinks and flaws. But if it's essentially being programmed by human beings, like how would it, if it's communicating in language and language which is formulated by human beings with all of our desires and the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization which is used to sell everything from cars to credit cards, like whatever it is, like sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it.

And then manipulation, showing people what could be, and like this is the theme oftentimes of pharmaceutical drug ads, showing you what can be. If you just do this, you can be happy. You could be at the cookout. Look at all these people. They're so happy. You're not happy. You could be happy. And this is what's really creepy about this exponential, constant increase in the capabilities

of these large language models, and that they're eventually going to exceed. If you're talking about manipulation, and if you're talking about mind control, what is going to be better at mind control than something that is us times a thousand? And it's only us times a thousand for a couple of weeks, then it's us times ten thousand, us times a hundred thousand. Essentially far more intelligent and far more aware of all the different ways to manipulate the human psyche. Yeah. I mean, this is the nightmare scenario, I think, is that it just accelerates some hyper persuasion loop that we're already arguably in, which

is that it's highly individualized, not just to your. So one of the turning points in one of the things I sketch in my book is the shift from mass persuasion where, I mean, the basic thing about advertising in the golden age of the 1950s is that even though people were concerned about it and they wrote books like The Hidden Persuaders to expose the effects of advertising and PR, it's like everyone got the same message through a broadcast.

So the original study, Mass Persuasion from 1946, it showed how people were affected by a broadcast on CBS radio where a famous singer named Kate Smith came on and she said, you know, she was trying to get people to support the war by buying bonds and she stayed on for 48 hours without, apparently without eating and without, you know, people were so concerned that they couldn't turn off the radio and several people sold their wedding rings because they were just desperate that she would survive this and she was sort of continually using these techniques to gain engagement. And this was across a broad medium.

So this was published in 46 medium. What year was this? This was published in 46 and she did the war bond drive in 43. And it gained a record amount of money. So when from before she went on, it was 1 million a day they were getting and then that day was 39 million just while she was on the air. Because people described how they couldn't turn, they couldn't leave. They couldn't even go out shopping. They were strangely wedded to the device or they lost the ability to discern a choice. That's what Robert K. Merton wrote in his study of what had happened. So in this case, it was to support the war effort, but Merton also said this could be used for any purpose.

This could be used to sell shampoo. It could be used to push a political candidate. But you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion. So you get the development of things like focus groups. And also with the digital age, you get things like Cambridge Analytica, which was showing that you could map people's psychological predilections and then you could market or politically

advertised directly to them based on those are you fear based are you you know are you anger based are you what if the big five is dominant you could target people based on those and nobody would have exactly the same message there would be you know there would be, you know, there would be alterations. So this is what I think of as hyper persuasion, but it seems that AI will only accelerate that ability to hyper focus and hyper target people based on these intimate relationships that it develops. And God forbid if you've got an implant. God forbid if if Neuralink becomes something that everybody has to have because if you can't have it, you can't keep up. Like if we're all reading each other's minds, like one of the things that Elon said to me is like you're

going to be able to communicate without words. Well, what's stopping something from communicating with you without words? Like it would be wonderful if you and I can sit here and we can have this really cool conversation of thoughts. That's really attractive. The idea behind it is like, ooh, that's appealing. Like you and I could just sit here and we could have like this really cool conversation where it's not like me trying to formulate sentences, me trying to figure out how to say this so that Rebecca understands what I mean, but you know what I mean. You can see into my mind and I can see into your mind. And it would allow maybe a greater understanding

of each other in a way that everybody, I mean, Jamie thinks very different than anybody I know. And you know, and so does a lot of my friends. They're all different kinds of humans. I would like to know how Theo von thinks. But you already kind of know just not even having mind melted just because of humans. I would like to know how Theo von thinks. But you already kind of know just not even having mind melted just because of conversation. But yeah, it's also the definition of a nightmare. Well, language, oral language, is a form of telepathy. You're making sounds and I'm reading your mind. I'm understanding the information that you're putting out and I'm contextualizing it. I'm putting it into my framework of understanding of the world as crude. And that's probably part of the reason why text messages are so weird,

because context is lost. Like, you know, like often I am so busy and I get hundreds of text messages a day. And sometimes I forget to text people back. And then I get texts from people, are you mad at me? I'm like, oh my God. Like deep meaning attached. Yeah, like no. Even a message that didn't arrive.

Do you know what they say the most triggering text response to someone is? A lack of exclamation point? No, K. Oh yes. I know if my daughter texts me well actually for her It's okay. I know she's really mad at me with no That's crazy

But isn't that weird as like are we so goddamn needy or is it just that we're we are We have anxiety and so we attach all these things that could possibly be behind this K. Like, oh, you're short with me because you're so short you're only using one letter. Okay, are you upset? What did I do? And then you have to go back through your text. What did I say that could be misinterpreted? Wouldn't it be better if you and I could just read each other's minds? I can know, oh, Rebecca really is just a really nice person and she's trying to sort this out. If you can discern intention. Right. Right. Well, that would be pretty much Ken like this goes back to the cult conversation

I mean you can be you're paying attention you can and if you're not paying attention Do you really want that you can cuz you're smart? Some people are not that smart. This is just the reality of brains Or maybe not smart. It is just the reality of brains. Or maybe not smart, it's just whether you've developed that. I mean people can be smart, like famously people can be brilliant and clueless and get run over crossing the street or not. Right. Or get or fall for some scam. That's true too. That's true too. But I also think that the function of the brain is not uniform. It's not the same in everybody. And your ability

to form pattern recognition based upon whether it's previous life experiences, accumulation of information, genetics, there's a lot of factors. And I think some people are far more vulnerable than other people are. And they're much more, which is why you're not in a cult and I'm not in a cult. You know, but it- We're all vulnerable, I think. Yes. And I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are.

Yes. And because one of the main tells, I think, is someone saying, 100%, I never would, I never could, I'm too smart for that or I, or else like I would never fall for the Milgram experiments, I'm just too ethical of a person or think like not knowing that you potentially could be vulnerable or opening up the possibility that in certain circumstances we don't know what we're capable of. It's part of intelligence is recognizing vulnerability.

And I think that's part of the defense mechanism. That's part of your, it can help you. Because you could recognize, like, don't fall prey to your own ego and your delusions that you're special. Because you are just a human being, like all these other people that fell into all these other traps. Yeah, so I think that the opening up

the avenue of speechless communication, which maybe we already have, but in the way that you were describing technologically, it would be violation of mental autonomy. You would then have to develop defenses and it just seems like a terrible path. Or are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind? A collective. A collective.

But a universal collective that values all people instead of a competitive thing where it's me against the world. It's all of us together. And all decisions will be made in this idea that it's for the greater good of everybody. But not a power-based top-down structure. But like everyone understands. Like wouldn't it be better if we actually could read politicians' minds?

So instead of these bullshit speeches. It might be terrible. No, it'd be great because it would disqualify them. Like, oh, I know why you want to be the president because you're a fucking kook. What do we really want to know though? I think for some reason, a Grateful Dead song popped into my head, which is what I really want to know is, are you kind? But if you found out otherwise, you really wouldn't want to have a two-way. I would want to know. You might want to know, but you wouldn't want to have open you really wouldn't want to have a two-way. I would want to know. You would. You might want to know, but you wouldn't want to have open, you wouldn't want to have that

person have access. Well would you necessarily let them have access? Just because you can read their mind doesn't mean you can allow them in. It's like on Twitter you can block people. Yeah, it might come down to that. I mean that might be the thing. It's like, but I think one of the things that you're saying that's very important is recognizing that we're all vulnerable to manipulation.

No matter who you are, you're vulnerable, whether it's through society, whether it's through peer groups, whether it's through community, we're vulnerable. Everyone's vulnerable. Yeah, that's one of the main findings I have in life and in research is that we tend to want to say, oh, it's just that group over there, those fools or these deluded people, elderly, succumb to scams. And there's a kind of pleasure in identifying, oh, they may have fallen for that, but I never would.

Right. I'm too knowledgeable or smarter of various things. Well, that's that binary position about political ideologies as well, right? Like that these fools over here, they think that this is going to solve the world's problems when really it's this. And the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed. Right. We need to wake them up. reprogrammed, which sounds like several millions of people. Whatever group it is, it's such a, I mean, what I, the main outcome, I think, is just that I think

mind control or brainwashing or whatever you want to call it is more of a window or a chance for insight into the fact that we're all susceptible to it. And both, you know, you can gain insight into your personal susceptibility and also could be avenues for trying to understand better or just having more awareness, I guess. Well, I think what's really important

is conversations like this, where people can sort of look into their own mind and their own interactions and say, okay, what's motivating me in one direction or another? Like, why do I hold fast to these particular opinions on certain subjects? Is it because they're culturally reinforced? Are they tribally reinforced? Are these opinions that my ideology has adopted and I've adopted them because I want to be a part of a tribe and I don't want to be ostracized from that group? Yeah, just step back.

Can you step back for a minute? Can you step back? And can we all step back? And are you kind? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's a big one.

It's really hard too in the moment. That's why it helps to have some sort of practice for stepping back. And also, am I kind? Am I kind in this moment? Because a lot of times we give ourselves a, I think I'm basically a well-intentioned person, but if you examine your own behavior, sometimes it can be, you know, there's areas where maybe I wasn't at that moment or things like that. Well, it just happens. Pressures and tense and anxiety and you blurt out things you don't really mean. You wish you hadn't said, are you kind when I said that? I meant like saying it to yourself.

I really meant that. I didn't mean other people. I assume most people. I really meant that. Yeah. I didn't mean other people. I assume most people. I guess it's both. You do want to know, but sometimes you can kind of tell. Yeah. But yeah, it's maybe with yourself that it's like a deep inquiry. But that should be something that's sort of like universally expressed like that if we all could kind of shift our perspective in that direction. One of the things that I've done over the last, I don't know how many years ago, I stopped interacting with people on social media.

And one of the reasons why I stopped doing it is because I realized that most of social media interactions are people arguing. And if I could ensure that I could have social media interactions that are very similar to the interactions that I have on the podcast, I would love it because I have people on the podcast all the time that I disagree with and it never resorts to name calling or shouting or any of that stuff. But yet I see this very limited form of communication that becomes the primary way that people interact with each other. And it's devoid of physical contact. You're not looking at people. There's

no social cues. There's no the feel of like saying something mean and seeing someone's feelings hurt like that. That's a normal natural human thing that encourages bonding and encourages kindness and communication. It's all removed in text. The same reason why someone can say K to you and you're like, what the fuck? What is it? You know what I mean? It's like an ineffective way of expressing yourself, even though it's a great way to get information So I checked out long time ago. I don't read anything people write about me. I don't respond I don't interact I don't I just don't think it's a good way to talk I try to have as many conversations in person as I can

Obviously, I have the luxury of having a podcast like this where I can bring people in and communicate with them. I know some people don't. So the way they iron out ideas and flesh out ideas, but I think they're just trying to win all the time. I think people are trying to dunk on each other all the time and when I see that, I know some very mentally ill people

and they are on Twitter all day long. And it's not helping. It's accentuating it in the worst way possible. It's enforcing that kind of shitty thought process and they get anxiety. Like I had a friend and he had a severe Twitter addiction and he was telling me that he would post something and then he was living in New York He couldn't walk down the street for like five steps without checking to see what other people had said about what he wrote Like oh no, I got this guy doesn't agree with me

I have to say I have to say something about what he said and it was just like Overwhelming every aspect of his existence, but in his actual real life it was not there it wasn't real but it became everything in his mind it became everything it wasn't real he wasn't experiencing these people the people that he's experiencing is the guy at the coffee shop or this lady at the store hi what's up most people over yeah most interactions yeah we're normal and kind but the spillover from this bizarre form of processed information was very bad yeah it's like we're running a kind of uncontrolled experiment 100% human

relations but it's not it's it's uncontrolled but not unmanipulated no it's not and this is where it gets into the, you know, I apologize for bringing this up. You've heard me talk about this before, people online. But there was a guy, I was a former FBI analyst that estimated that 80% of the traffic on Twitter is bots. Really? Right, and they're not doing that

because it's not financially beneficial, it's not narrative reinforcing, it's not beneficial to whatever propaganda they're trying to pursue. And you're willingly wading into that. I think you could say willing, but one interesting, it seems like we are not cognitively equipped because of our whatever we have evolved what capacities we've evolved with as human beings were not there are certain ways that it didn't anticipate this deracinated disembodied form of stripped down

context free communication that triggers strong emotion I mean nonetheless keeps that emotional conduit going so we we're very, we are especially vulnerable to the loops that can be. And not, and we don't have many defenses. It's almost like when they introduce a new creature into Australia, like rampages over everything. Because the defenses aren't, haven't been built up over time. Right. Totally. Yeah. And then the way to deal with that is they bring in a new invasive species.

And then you have feral cats everywhere. Exactly. Yeah. And this is your brain. I mean, this is what's really crazy, because also it's the most fascinating time ever in terms of your ability to access information. Because of things like social media, you can find out about world events in a way that through

processed mainstream media that's only supported by governments and advertising, you would never have access to this information. So you would never have a real true understanding of what's really going on in the world. So you have that along with propaganda and it just requires this insane psychic immune system to sort of handle all this. Yeah it's really interesting just that's what I think is this larger democratization of information that we're experiencing that we haven't really reckoned with and we don't even see the scope of it.

Like I remember in around 2008 I walked into a colleague's office at the university and he was staring at his, he's a senior scholar and he'd been working for many years going around the world looking at papers of scientists. And he was just looking online and He couldn't get over it because Galileo's papers were up online and he didn't have to go to Italy anymore to look at them and actually now anyone can look at them because they're freely available. He said this is going to change everything because anyone can access this now, anyone can start to write about it. And that was just the beginning and now there's so much more available.

Not that everything is, but many more things are. So in a way, it's an incredible time of opportunity, too. We just have to develop immune systems. We have to develop... We outstripped our... And we do seem to, as a... I don't know, people just seem to feel that it's inevitable that we'll embrace the new technology

without making sure that we are capable of handling it or that it's safe or healthy. Well, we already have, because everyone has a phone. That's true. We already embraced it, whether we like it or not, and the problem is it's not going to stop with the phone. It's going to keep going. And just like the internet was completely unexpected,

in the 1930s, nobody ever imagined what it would be like in 2025. Nobody imagined 95 years later we'd be dealing with this. But what are we going to be dealing with 95 years from now? A couple people had visions that were pretty interesting. I always find interesting that you can look back at, like someone, a guy named Vannevar Bush in the 1930s had a vision called Memex, where he said,

what if you could put all the world's information inside a wooden desk made out of oak, he specified. And he said it would be on microfilm, because they didn't have digital databases. But it would be all microphone, and you could call up anything. So it would be a microfilm, because they didn't have digital databases. But it would be all microphone, and you could call up anything. So it would be a little miniaturized library, because you could put an entire, you know,

you could put the Bible on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail. Oh, wow. And then it would come up on your screen. You could also conduct experiments on that desk. And he called it MIMEX. And he said, and then the scientist could also strap a little camera to his forehead

and add to that knowledge. So in some ways, there are a couple other visionaries like this Belgian internationalist named Paul Atley who tried to, he invented something called the Monde Neum, which was a storehouse of knowledge. And it was just built on postcards around the turn of the 20th century in this huge building in Belgium and you had women in outfits who would, you know, if you wrote in with a question they would go get the answer. Sort of like a hand-based internet. So people have, and even going back to, you know, various fantasies of libraries

going back to the Greeks, people have dreamed of this all-the-world's knowledge in a tiny shoebox or that was the fantasy of microfilm which I wrote about in this other book. It's very fascinating because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pin even by the 1950s, you know, using just film. Wow. So, but yeah, people didn't imagine the exact form it would take. And I think we're at a crossroads today. Which way will it go? It won't necessarily go the darkest route, I hope.

But you've laid out some of what that might look like. Well, it's also going to go the route of quantum computing, which is going to be unfathomable power, unfathomable computing power attached to information and it's going to happen inside of our lifetime. Yeah, it's amazing how much is happening all at once. Yeah. Poly, let's say polycrisis or poly whatever it is, emergence. Well, I mean, I guess your meditation practice is a great way to at least mitigate some of the effects of that.

But how could you convince the vast majority of people that are so scatterbrained and addicted to caffeine and nicotine and prescription drugs and how can you you know it's like step back we have so many people that are just going to fall in line and just hop aboard the train. Yeah I guess you have to hope that I mean there are countervailing trends and tendencies like there is a lot more uptake of meditation of course that can be abused too but mostly it's most for most part a good thing to have some reflective practice to add breathing, like even apps that tell you how to do box

breathing or even sometimes articles about things like doom scrolling, which they actually, I thought it was funny to learn that this is actually an academic concept to doom-scrolling. There are papers written about it the type the dynamics of it and You know, but just ways that if you if you notice that you're in some sort of loop like the guy you described What can you do in that moment? To step back and ask yourself. Are you kind? My problem is I used to I stopped doing it, but I used to do it at night Yeah, that's before I'd go to bed. It was just the dumbest time to do it.

Very bad. And then so I'd think about war and like how like imagine living in Hiroshima and then all of a sudden boom the bomb drops. Like what is to stop some psychopathic dictator from just launching a nuclear weapon? What is to stop this from happening, that from happening? And then you ask your phone that question? Yeah, well it's the computer is the problem, like sitting in front of the computer

and getting a big screen and all this information, videos. Yeah, you could really freak yourself out. Yeah, I think doom scrolling happens mostly at night. Or sometimes people also reach for their phone first thing in the morning and are inundated with terrible news or... And it just like, it takes that in the morning, sense of the morning being full of possibility and just fills it with dread, unfortunately.

But yeah, there's a lot of... Yeah, there's, I mean, there are things you can do and I think the first part is just noticing how it feels. Because even the other day my daughter said, you're spending a lot of time on Instagram, she said to me and I was like, no I'm not. I don't have a problem. I'm like, I study this. But then I stopped and I realized I feel a bit better. Yeah.

At least for now. Yeah, I went a couple days without looking at social media at all. And I was like, God, it feels lighter. I feel lighter, you know, and then I went right back days without looking at social media at all Feel lighter, you know, and then I went right back to it, you know But also like I make the same argument like cut nuts for my job, but I mean, is it really I mean Like my job is like a commentator on things and a comedian is like I kind of have to be paying attention But if something's so fucked up, it's going to make it to me anyway. It'll make it to me. You know what I mean?

You have faith it will come to you. It'll make it. Downriver. I don't have to go to the waterfall. Well, it's something about the design of interoperability with phones, for example. You think, or if you use it for your alarm, it's just there then. And then you start to, you know, all the functions are melted into one.

Right, if you use it for your alarm, that's the key. Because I do. And it wakes me. I used to have an alarm. I used to have a little thing. I think they still make them. Yeah. I don't use it.

But just interoperability on many levels makes you sort of feel that you have no choice, because you need it for this, but you're also. Or I need it for work, but then it sort of enters your life yeah and then you could put a screen limit but then you're gonna just hit the password and get in there and find out what's going on I do find that meditation helps just be if I if I go to a retreat I'm just it's like you're not hooked at all, but it just doesn't speak to you so much. Or you have a lot of buffer.

It's definitely a strange time. It's a very strange time to be a person. Maybe one of the strangest ever, if not the strangest. That's a question I have too, is it? I wonder. I mean, I think probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest. Like, look how much they can move stuff. And then, you wonder. I mean, I think like probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest. Like, look, I'm just looking at stuff. And then this is the second strangest.

Right. And then there was even the printing press. This is crazy. Yeah. Which by the way, they were really concerned with, like they thought, like people shouldn't be reading. Well, it's a version of the same thing. Like should it? This is why they started to print the Bible and the vernacular and the common, the comic book, you know, it was more available. Changes, changes so many things that many knock on effects. Yeah. But it does, that's what I was curious about, because, you know, is this time unparalleled? Is there nothing like it in history? Or can we find elements that at least give us some perspective or can teach us something?

Well, I think it's unparalleled in its global interaction. Yeah. There's nothing like it where you're paying attention to the arguments between India and Pakistan. Yeah, potentially on a granular level. Yeah. You could be. Well, every day if you do grab your phone in the morning, you're waking up to eight

billion people's worth of bad news. So that's another question. Where do you put your attention and your concern? Like there's this poet, I heard an interview with him named David White, and he said, potentially we can be exposed to tragedies all over the world at every minute. That in Vietnam, they had a rule against, you weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn't want people to see what was happening.

They did that during the Iraq War as well. Yeah, and so, but now you can see people actually going, you know, dying at every minute in any number of places, which humanly creates a moral injury if you're not trying to help or stop it. Yes. And so this vast exposure is unprecedented to suffering. But also, where do you put your attention? Where do you, what do you focus on? What do you? Well, it changes your map of the landscape of the world because instead of the landscape of the world being your world, It changes your map of the landscape of the world. Because instead of the landscape of the world being your world,

how you interact with your community and the people around you. Now it's like everything, car accidents, plane crashes, it's all coming at you in vivid HD. You don't really have a sense of scale. Yeah. I don't know how to wrap this up. I'll leave it to you. I'll leave it to you. I'll leave it to the universe.

Um, I really enjoyed our conversation though. Uh, instability of truth. This is your book, brainwashing mind control and hyper persuasion. Um, it's, uh, did you do the audio book or did somebody else read it? I didn't do it, but I hate when that happens. I, she seems, I chose her. She had a great voice it! I hate when that happens. She seems... I chose her. She had a great voice but I kind of... yeah maybe next book I'll do myself. Please do. Thanks so much. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. You too. Alright.

Bye everybody.