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#2322 – Rebecca Lemov Podcast Episode Description
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
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#2322 – Rebecca Lemov Podcast Episode Top Keywords
#2322 – Rebecca Lemov Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan engages in a conversation with Rebecca, discussing themes of mind control, brainwashing, and hyper persuasion. The discussion revolves around Rebecca’s book, “Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper Persuasion,” which explores how individuals are influenced by cultural, tribal, and ideological forces. The conversation delves into the susceptibility of people to manipulation and the role of social media in shaping opinions and interactions.
A significant portion of the discussion highlights the limitations of digital communication, emphasizing the lack of physical cues and the potential for misunderstanding and hostility in online interactions. Joe Rogan expresses a preference for in-person conversations, which he believes foster better understanding and kindness.
The episode also touches on historical and contemporary examples of mind control, including state-run propaganda and the use of methamphetamines during wartime. The conversation explores the potential future implications of technologies like Neuralink, which could further enhance hyper-targeted persuasion.
Rebecca and Joe discuss the emotional engineering inherent in social media platforms, which can create states of emotional contagion similar to those found in cults. They also consider the role of meditation and mindfulness as tools to mitigate the effects of digital manipulation.
Overall, the episode underscores the importance of self-awareness and critical thinking in recognizing and resisting manipulation. It encourages listeners to reflect on their own beliefs and the influences that shape them, advocating for more meaningful and empathetic communication.
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#2322 – Rebecca Lemov Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
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00:01
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
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00:03
The Joe Rogan experience.
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00:06
Showing my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Alright. Come on, Rebecca. Very nice to meet you.
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00:15
Hi, Joe. Very nice to meet you too.
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00:18
So, first of all, what got you interested in mind control?
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00:25
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 ram many people were skeptical about it. But I thought it seemed like it embodied some of the more extreme.
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00:47
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.
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01:06
So I because I’d done my dissertation, at UC Berkeley on the history of behavioral engineering and how, you know, these kind of models for creating a society of control and, encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream. And it seemed like the next step was to to look at something like brainwashing or mind control.
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01:30
When you first started studying it, was it a a less, public sort of curiosity? Because now a lot of people are very much interested. Ai blame the Internet mostly. I probably had a lot to do with it too. But this
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01:45
You and the Internet.
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01:46
A lot of people on the Internet are, you know because over time, you know, people have gotten to know about MK Ultra and a a bunch of different different programs that the 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?
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02:10
Well, I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed, unusual maybe for 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 nineteen nineties after their kind of there was a peak of interest in the seventies, and it just really fallen off. But Ai guess I was interested because it just seems so unusual and, like, maybe there was something there that people hadn’t really thought about.
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02:42
And at the time, these documents weren’t readily available. And ai 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 purse I’ve always been interested in connecting my personal, Ai guess, my goals for life with what I research.
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03:04
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.
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03:16
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?
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03:29
Yeah. I think that that’s embedded in our, you know, in our in the messages we receive all the time that freedom is something kind of effortless, that we’re just granted, and that autonomy is just, the natural state. But actually, we’re so much more malleable than we think. And these things, if you look around yourself or if you observe yourself, you’ll often see this to be true.
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03:53
That’s what also drew me to anthropology is just the ai, 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
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04:04
Right.
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04:05
What that interested meh. And I 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 that freedom of freedom of choice or our autonomy is fairly straightforward, and all you have to do is exert your will.
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04:33
Yeah. But but, clearly, we’re influenced heavily by our environment. Culturally, I mean, accents, just cultural traditions, behavior patterns. It begs the questions, like, what what are you And what is the what is the the the shell that you wear on the ai, you know, like a hermit crab?
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04:58
Like, what what do you carry around with you? And what at the core of it, what are you?
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05:04
Yeah. That was I mean, that is the oldest question of Socrates. Who am I? Or Yeah. Just the question. It’s the it’s a deep question, and it’s also kind of like a practical question. So Ai thought if you could look at it more in in actual examples, that would be interesting. And I also I guess, I was drawn to the topic.
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05:25
Maybe yeah, maybe because other people weren’t studying it or also because of experiences in my ai. Just seemingly small things. Like, one day, I remember when I was in graduate school, I was walking down the street, and I said, we passed a small dog. And I said, I really I really hate small dogs. Ai, and I I realized as I said it that it wasn’t true.
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05:48
That I had just, like, I love I actually really like them. What’s wrong with small dogs? But I had absorbed this opinion some from somewhere that, like, a person that such as I was aspiring to be, you know, only, like, just, you know, big dogs or something like that. But just noticing in yourself the way you soak up opinions and you’re shaped by, you know, even, you know, even seemingly trivial things.
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06:11
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 perhaps?
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06:27
And then there’s brainwashing yourself. Because if you say Ai hate small dogs, now you have to kinda defend it.
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06:33
And now now you’ll
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06:34
and even if you sai, god, it’s not even true, but there’s gotta be reasons to hate small dogs. I don’t wanna come off as a moron who just says things.
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06:43
There are other people who feel the same. Yeah. It turns out it yeah. I mean, either you end up doubling down on that opinion because you don’t wanna feel silly to yourself. I mean, I think sometimes we’re just a series of adopted opinions that we then adhere to. And Ai guess being in graduate school also made me feel that way because you’re 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.
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07:13
That seemed very, like, a deeply shaping process. And I was interested in how did social sciences like, was there a science of this process of shaping or some they sometimes called it canalizing or making,
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07:25
you know Mhmm.
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07:26
A canal of behavior so that people would end up wanting to do what it was that socially necessary for them to do.
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07:34
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 bryden the cult of your parents and then you leave and they’re ai, let me get away from these crazy people. Yeah.
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07:49
And then and now I’m gonna become a whatever. Yeah. Exactly. 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.
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08:02
Exactly. Wear something different or adopt I suddenly don’t like certain kinds of dogs or I wear a certain thing or no. You 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 No. Necessarily, but it can take that just that truth about people.
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08:26
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
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08:47
Yeah.
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08:47
The the grooves that have been deeply carved into your personality where you automatically go towards certain things or think about certain things.
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08:54
I always think just an interruption is often good Oh, yeah. In the in your in your patterning.
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08:59
Yeah. That’s why I think moving is really good.
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09:01
Or traveling or Mhmm.
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09:03
Yeah.
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09:04
A bunch of resets.
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09:05
Ai read that you have had a steady meditation practice. I’ve read it was, like, two hours a day for twenty five years. Yeah. That’s a lot of time to be meditating.
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09:17
Yeah. It really helped me so much when I learned to meditate that I never wanted to miss an hour. So I’d never missed an hour, except when I was giving birth to my daughter, which was its own thing. But
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09:30
You get a break for meh meditation for that. You meh a hall pass.
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09:34
Ai just and it’s not like anyone made me or I necessarily thought I would do that. It’s just that it something that, gave me a lot of perspective and speak, and I guess I just didn’t wanna go back. Sai it in I do think it informs how I do research or I try to bring what I learn in meditation into into my into what I do.
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09:58
Did you do an hour in the morning and an hour at night?
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10:00
Yeah. Wow. And for a year, I think a couple ai, I’ve I tried adding more in the morning. So two hours or so in the morning and an hour in the evening or something, which has an effect, but it’s hard to it’s hard to make room in your life sometimes.
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10:15
Oh, for sure.
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10:15
Yeah. But does you can sleep a little bit less. Yeah? Well, you don’t wanna make yourself sleep less, but sometimes it just does reduce the amount you need.
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10:25
Just by meh?
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10:27
That’s what I found.
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10:28
Interesting. How much sleep do you need?
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10:31
I used to sleep, like, eight and a half hours. And then now Ai 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. Sai it’s so much changed my life that I just, I move things around sai I could always do it. So and try to be adaptable.
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10:52
Sai I could I just mostly get up at at a regular meditation time, which is, like, 04:30.
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10:58
What kind of meditation?
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11:00
I do Vipassana, which is a form of Buddhist meditation. Pretty it’s just a form of observation, or someone once described it as practice and seeing things as they are. So you try to just it’s not trying to, you know, apply a lens over something or chanting. It’s just a very it’s a way of it’s cultivating observation of the subtle body ultimately or just what is in front of you.
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11:27
And so you just sit in peace and think?
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11:29
Well, it’s not always peaceful. There is sometimes yeah. But I mean, peace
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11:34
as far as, like, you’re not bouncing around.
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11:36
You’re 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 you kind of move you observe just how you’re how you are.
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11:56
And, the more you practice it, the more you can kinda go into it more deeply quickly.
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12:03
I I would think that that would be a good protection from, unwanted mind control too. Because at least you could kind of have an assessment, do an audit of your thoughts, and sit back and go, how much of the shit I believe is because of x or because of y?
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12:25
Yeah. It’s like a built in reflection. Sai 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 go it’s sort of a processing, experience. And sometimes you’re super distracted, but you can also notice that fact.
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12:47
So it just builds in, yeah, an opportunity for some distance, which then you can also try to bring into your life
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12:54
too. Mhmm. Were you when you were young, had you ever been exposed to any cults or anything like that?
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13:02
That’s a good question. Not when I was really young.
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13:07
Ai, how old were you when you were first exposed to cults?
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13:10
In fact, I think so that’s a good question. I mean, my family is not is sort of cult averse, I would say. My father I think they had friends once, you know, in later life. My my parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training, which is somewhat culty.
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13:30
And they take you in, and you’re not allowed to use the bathroom, and they lock you, kinda, like, keep you in a room until until you’re really uncomfortable and start start to have revelations about how you could change your life. And these are, you know, it’s stuff ai,
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13:45
How long did that make you not go to the bathroom?
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13:47
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 that, he’s he said, I have to go I have to go to the bathroom.
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14:05
And I’m not he’s like, I’m out of here. And he just left, so I figured he had a kind of he was not, programmable in that way.
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14:13
Well, I feel like any group that doesn’t want you to go to the bathroom is stupid.
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14:18
It’s probably a sign.
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14:19
Yeah. There’s no reason to not go to the bathroom if you have to go to the bathroom. That’s ridiculous.
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14:23
I mean, it’s a kind of it’s a it it is typical of certain groups where they start to constrain your, and if and people who might be willing to remain in that uncomfortable state and be constrained will end up staying longer and sort of a self selecting process, maybe.
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14:41
That makes sense. Ai. The the people that are more willing to comply.
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14:45
Yeah. And Ai guess with me, maybe the closest the first brush with a cult would be something like the various yoga teachers I’ve worked with.
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14:54
Oh, so many of them arya so culty.
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14:57
Yeah. I had there’s one ai of funny story is I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland, also in graduate school. And I I would go it was it it was really helpful with school just to have a very physical demanding practice and but, there was a whole community around it.
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15:16
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 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 ai and he’s now my husband.
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15:34
He said, oh, it just I just got the vibe that everyone there is sleeping with everybody else, and I was shocked. I was like, no. That’s not happening. But it actually it actually was. You could say it’s a bit. I don’t think it was a cult, but it certainly was a vatsal.
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15:48
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 there was something inauthentic about his spirituality that greased me the wrong way.
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16:15
I was ai, yuck. Like, just the way he would chant and the things he would say. There was just too much ego involved and then I found out he was banging all students and I was like, of course, he is. I knew it. Because my wife roped me into going to the class. That’s the first time I went. I was like, I really like the stretching. It’s ai really great.
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16:34
I really like yoga itself as a practice. But Ai 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 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.
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17:00
And the next thing you know, they’re taking advantage of it, and it’s like
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17:04
Yeah. It’s a yeah. It’s very helpful to have that defense, radar of a certain kind. Also, ai, I think these, prominent teachers, they have had some sort of, I don’t wanna say ai experience, but some sort of breakthrough, something that that felt profound to them because many people do.
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17:21
We now know that these experiences ai. Well, now Sai must be enlightened or ai 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.
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17:40
Spiritual narcissism.
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17:42
Yeah. It can actually engender that because of or yeah. And I think there’s some this has been described too. Spiritual narcissism is a good phrase, though.
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17:51
It’s legit.
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17:52
Yeah. Yeah.
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17:52
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. So they just start thinking that they’re better than people that don’t do it.
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18:04
Yeah. It feels very special. If you have a special experience, it it’s really danger it becomes very dangerous and
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18:09
Yeah.
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18:10
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.
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18:20
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 ai a smell to it, a feel to it, if you’re paying attention. Yeah.
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18:50
But for whatever reason, it’s just ai 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 have been burned enough times, like, whatever it is. And, you know, that’s where cults get started. And I’m fascinated by cults. I’ve always been fascinated by them because I’ve watched, I don’t know how many documentaries on cults.
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19:14
And in the beginning, it looks so fun. That’s the problem. Do you ever see the documentary Wild Wild Country, the Netflix series?
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19:21
Yes.
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19:22
It’s amazing. Right? In the beginning, you’re ai, they look like they’re having a great time. Yeah. They’re all dancing together and playing drums and having a party and eating together, and it’s it’s ai a sense of community. And 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.
Speaker: 0
19:44
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Speaker: 0
19:59
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20:12
That that meh is was so successful. I think for that very reason, it actually perpetuates the allure of that Mhmm. Of Osho and that cult Yeah. Because their outfits look kinda cool and the colors are beautiful. Yeah. 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.
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20:32
And he said, what you don’t see in the documentary, and he blames the documentary for not showing this sufficiently, is they were frequently armed. So on the side where you’re not seeing it, they’re holding, you know, automatic weapons and things like that. They really in a way, they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit. Really?
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20:51
Interesting. That’s interesting. Wow. I did not know that. And you have to have a guy like Osho because, like, the way he would talk about things and, you know, his slow way of talking to people. Yeah. You know, his his beard and the Rolls Royces and everything, it’s like, good lord.
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21:12
Argue and he was really much more of a cocaine, adept or enthusiast than people also recognize. I think he gets off a little easy in that documentary as well, partly because they’re interviewing people who are still, to some extent, devoted or they wanna maintain that ocean you know?
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21:30
Well, also, the what was her name? Stella? Yeah. Was her name? Yeah. She was so crazy.
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21:34
She’s like
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21:34
She was poisoning people.
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21:37
Shah was
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21:38
such a great villain that it made him like, because if she wasn’t in the documentary, he would be the villain.
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21:44
Exactly. Yeah. She pulls the focus.
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21:46
Yes. Yeah. Most certainly. And the fact that she’s still alive too, that that sort of helps as well. Yeah. But there I I feel like it’s a default thing in the human psyche because of our ancient history of living in ai.
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22:04
Mhmm.
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22:04
That human beings have been very ai, 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.
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22:16
Mhmm.
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22:16
If you wanna fit in, you wanna 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 is ai, oh meh goodness. That’s the worst thing in the world. Now you’re saloni. You have to fend for yourself. There’s no way you can.
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22:32
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 saloni, so you have to adapt to the to the tribe itself.
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22:47
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 Right. Organization. It just means small scale religious group that meh be you know, I think people deeply yearn for that sense of belonging, and that’s why it does look so fun.
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23:10
And in and ai all reports, it 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 the exil you know, they’re empowered by it too.
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23:25
Well, fun fact. Before I, bought the place that I put my comedy club on Sixth Street, I was under contract for a theater called the One World Theater that was run by this cult. And, I kinda vaguely heard about it. And, my friend Ron told me that the theater is amazing. You you should buy because we were talking about buying a comedy club. You should buy that place. And ai, I got under and my friend Adam called me up.
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23:54
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 the documentary is called Holy Hell. And it’s about this guy who’s a hypnotist, a yoga teacher, and a gay porn star.
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24:12
And that’s a 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
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24:29
0.
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24:29
And had his followers build him this theater. Fortunately, I got out of the deal. But
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24:36
Ai guess he was selling it.
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24:37
Well, he was gone. Okay. It had already fallen apart. The cult had completely fallen apart. But what’s fascinating is in the meh, 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.
Speaker: 0
25:09
Not only is it not attractive, it makes cults attractive. And these people were longing for something that was that that showed them that, no, you’re right. This is stupid. The way your parents lived is stupid. The way all these people live in society, you know, the way Thoreau described men living lives of quiet desperation, like, yeah, that sucks. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
25:32
You don’t have to live like that, man. Come live with us, man. Yeah. And this guy was able to do this thing called the knowing. And the knowing was it was very difficult to meh. And people wanted it, and he wouldn’t give it to them.
Speaker: 0
25:46
Ai, like, you had it but when he would give it to you, you would you would sit there, and he would put his hands, ai, 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 ai.
Speaker: 0
26:10
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 ai of whatever it is in the mind. I don’t Sai 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.
Speaker: 0
26:33
They they kind of understood everything Yeah. Briefly. So it kind of worked even though he was having sex with everybody. Now, he’s having sex with these people, he was charging them. He would charge these guys for therapy and then have sex with them.
Speaker: 0
26:46
And, you know, and they would talk about it afterwards, like, thanks a lot. Like, dude, it was so horrible because, like, the end the documentary is so bad. At the end of the meh, it’s ai, I gotta get out of this deal. Like, it’s still there. There’s not enough sage in the world to burn off the bad juju that happened in this joint.
Speaker: 1
27:02
That’s true.
Speaker: 0
27:03
Yeah. So it just felt ai, oh, horrible.
Speaker: 1
27:06
Yeah. The life sai of a cult has that what you just ai. And sometimes in it accelerated, but sometimes it plays out slower over time. But a lot of ai, people are very confused on leaving if, say, if they’re
Speaker: 0
27:19
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
27:20
Taken out as maybe even children, rescued by FBI from abusive groups or people who manage to escape abusive cults. They still have trouble evaluating their positive experiences because the positive was so good
Speaker: 0
27:37
Right.
Speaker: 1
27:37
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 with someone who’s experienced with cult, ex members.
Speaker: 0
27:51
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 twenty years or whatever it is.
Speaker: 1
28:03
Right. Like,
Speaker: 0
28:03
what do you do? How do you do it? How how do you find peace? Yeah. How do you find companionship? How do you find, like, that sense of camaraderie that’s so deeply embedded in a tight knit small community?
Speaker: 1
28:17
And a lot of times when you when you come out, if it’s, say, it was eighteen or twenty years or a large portion of your middle life, maybe you went in as a young person, you come out and you don’t know your you know, don’t know how to operate things. You don’t have the right you don’t you’re not comfortable with new technologies.
Speaker: 1
28:36
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 ai. 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
Speaker: 0
28:55
Right.
Speaker: 1
28:55
In critique, but it just wasn’t answered.
Speaker: 0
28:57
I always say, like, someone come up with a really good cult and I’ll join. Come 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?
Speaker: 0
29:13
Isn’t it possible to do that just to, like, get together a group of like minded individuals and, guess that would be more of a commune. But even that, there’s always some male generally male leader who ruins everything.
Speaker: 1
29:29
It does seem to be I think some of the so there seem to be in the seventies sai many cults and back to the land groups. And some of the back to the back to land stories are also, you know, have many cautionary sides to them in many of the aspects of culture.
Speaker: 0
29:42
What is the back to the land?
Speaker: 1
29:43
So just people leaving the city, heading out to the country, and starting an, like, an intentional community, I guess, would be what you’re
Speaker: 0
29:50
Right.
Speaker: 1
29:51
What you’re describing with the idea that we’re gonna collectively raise even collectively raise our children Mhmm. Sell hammocks or, you know, make our own jam or or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this. Yeah. Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional quality.
Speaker: 1
30:07
And some so I’ve done some research into some of these because you wouldn’t consider them cults necessarily, but they can end up having some of those qualities such as sexual, just the demand that people, have sex with each other, which tends to just create a lot of chaotic circumstances.
Speaker: 0
30:26
Why do you think it always involves that?
Speaker: 1
30:29
Why does it always go that way? I don’t know. I mean, it’s very interesting because it I even read, Norman Khan’s classic, History of Millen Millenialism, which are a lot of groups ram the Middle Ages and, afterwards that like, Christian sects where they would break off and including things like the Children’s Crusade and others.
Speaker: 1
30:50
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.
Speaker: 0
31:11
Do you think that is just because of just genetics? Just the 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 met read, John Marco Allegros, any of his work? No.
Speaker: 0
31:38
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 he was an ordained minister, but then we started studying theology.
Speaker: 0
31:58
He started seeing all these parallels to all these various religions. And he was ai, well, you know, clearly, like, it’s not one religion has it right. There’s something in all these things, but it’s not ai I have to I ram a Catholic and that’s it. Or I’m a Muslim and that’s it.
Speaker: 0
32:16
He was ai, there’s something here that’s 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, ai animal skins, and they have to do do you know the whole story behind it?
Speaker: 0
32:37
They they found them in these clay tap these, clay pots in Qumran and these caves. And it turns out to be, like, some of the oldest works of the Ai. Yeah. Well, he deciphers it for fourteen years. And after fourteen 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 the these cults of fertility rituals and consuming psychedelic mushrooms.
Speaker: 0
33:17
And he even brought the he 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.
Speaker: 0
33:45
Like, they would go to meh, 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.
Speaker: 1
34:01
Well, it it kinda reminds me what you’re describing, which I don’t haven’t, read or but I think it reminds me a little of Aldous Hexley’s idea of the perennial philosophy, 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, was called The Island, and it was sketching out what he believed would be just what you ai, a a nonabusive, a a place where a small scale community where humans could flourish and it wouldn’t involve, including and it would avoid sexual abuse.
Speaker: 1
34:45
And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you’re what you’re saying, is, is that he 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.
Speaker: 0
35:03
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
35:03
In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to, you know, loops of conditioning and things like that. Because I think, yeah, as you’re saying, fertility is a natural part of human life and often worshipped. With
Speaker: 0
35:16
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Speaker: 0
35:35
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35:57
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36:17
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Speaker: 0
36:34
It worshiped and and also it’s it’s so deeply ingrained because it was so it was so important in the beginning because you literally could go extinct.
Speaker: 1
36:45
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
36:45
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.
Speaker: 0
37:02
And I think, unfortunately, this is what gets distorted in all of these groups. And this is where things go ai, because then you evolve involve emotions, and you involve ego and dominance ai. And it seems like even if Aldous Huxley’s idea if Huxley’s idea was great and you had an island and everything was going well, you it’d be good for, like, one generation, and then the kids of the next generation would grow up and one would decide, you know what?
Speaker: 0
37:34
I got a fucking better idea than this. Like, it did and then someone would go straight Jim Jones. Yeah. You know? They would they would start growing some plant that was an amphetamine and they’d start getting wacky.
Speaker: 1
37:45
Human beings being human beings Yes. Would 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, ai, the wires can get crossed, so that can lead to someone maybe initially I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
38:06
These groups, just the tendency they can have to go towards sexual abuse.
Speaker: 0
38:10
Why do you think that during the nineteen seventies, there’s this big upswing in these cults?
Speaker: 1
38:17
Well, there it started in the sixties ram my understanding. Although they were, they did they did exist before then, but, yeah, there’s a lot more interest in them, I suppose, because there’s a there’s a lot more widespread questioning in US society and also world you know, around the world.
Speaker: 1
38:36
So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and Latin America and also India. So certain
Speaker: 0
38:45
Do they have parallels?
Speaker: 1
38:47
Yeah. There are parallel. Sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries. So some people sai 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 outpost in Ai, and they would grow up in Bryden.
Speaker: 0
39:01
And then Who was the leader of the children of God? Which one was that?
Speaker: 1
39:04
This was a guy named David Berg. This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family were briefly.
Speaker: 0
39:11
Oh, right.
Speaker: 1
39:12
They were in it, but not Ai think the parents ultimately took them out. But it it’s a really messed up a very disturbing cult, and I actually write about and have meh, 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 thirty years, but he just describes in a riveting way how he how he joined.
Speaker: 1
39:38
Ai think that’s kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the seventies. So he was a a young man in college, and he was just feeling he said he just felt that, you know, the the old the traditions that his parents had brought him up in in Catholicism that he’d been raised in was he just felt that he lacked meaning in his life.
Speaker: 1
39:56
He didn’t he felt like reality was over there, and he was separated from it ai, you know, there was, like, a Sana 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 well, I think at a con he was at a concert at university at the in Santa Barbara, and he saw this group walking through during intermission.
Speaker: 1
40:22
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, you know, even though he had that thought, he would end up joining them for thirty years because he he saw them during, later after the event, and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them.
Speaker: 1
40:46
He’s about I think he had dropped out of college by this tyler. And he said that they were eating sandwiches, and they looked a lot more casual and approachable than they had earlier. And they he just said, he was asking them questions, and ai said, would you like to recite the sinner’s prayer right now and drop to your knees?
Speaker: 1
41:06
And, you know, and he said, yeah. For some reason, he said meh because What
Speaker: 0
41:10
is the sinner’s prayer?
Speaker: 1
41:11
It’s it’s just a it’s a it’s a verse that actually is not from the Ai, 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?
Speaker: 1
41:33
And he took he in other words, he kept taking small steps towards it, and pretty soon, he found himself on the bus with this group. He still didn’t know the name of it, and they were all testifying about how they had, you know, been converted. And he, he was asked to, you know, add to the testimony, and he started talking about JD Salinger because he was just an alienated youth, basically. Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
41:55
And nobody understood what he was talking about. They all just started singing and covering up his words. But and he 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.
Speaker: 1
42:14
They had an arranged marriage, and then it turned out the this guy who ran the group, David Berg, he was a former furniture salesman. He then had some you know, he 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.
Speaker: 1
42:43
Mhmm. 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 meh, you know, generations of kids were raised in this cult with this were either trafficked or abused. I mean, it’s really horrific.
Speaker: 1
43:03
And Ray Connolly is interesting because he didn’t engage in those things. He did end up having 17 children in the cult.
Speaker: 0
43:13
And but he 17 kids.
Speaker: 1
43:16
I think he did have 17. He’s a fascinating person because he left and he speak his time supporting survivors and which is very unusual.
Speaker: 0
43:26
What about his 17 kids?
Speaker: 1
43:28
And they came out too.
Speaker: 0
43:29
How do they how does he have time for anything else
Speaker: 1
43:31
with 70 kids? Mostly grown. Because he is quite Yeah. 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 saloni, he called it a dark hamster wheel of the soul.
Speaker: 1
43:48
Like, he was caught, and it became this basically, they were exploiting him in his middle age years. He rose in sort of mid level bureaucracy within the cult. But, anyway, this cult, Children of God, has and today still exists. Has a different name. They had
Speaker: 0
44:05
They still have the same practices?
Speaker: 1
44:07
No. They they say they reformed. But many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them, things like that,
Speaker: 0
44:13
who
Speaker: 1
44:13
are adults today. They had, you know, groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that.
Speaker: 0
44:25
The Manson family is a fascinating one. Right? Because, I know that you have, studied jolly west and the the whole MK Ultra program and what what they were experimenting with with psychedelic drugs and and and cults and mind control. Do you what is what is your perspective on why they were doing that?
Speaker: 1
44:51
Why,
Speaker: 0
44:52
why Why Jollie West was involved? Why why were they involved? What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies, the federal government?
Speaker: 1
45:02
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 US, pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having shown flown germ warfare missions over Ai, and then many POWs were coming back and seem to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing by sai many of the the soldiers coming back seem to have been brainwashed or have 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’re in the UN camps after they’ve been held prisoner for four four years or sai.
Speaker: 1
46:05
And 21 of them decided that they’d like to try their lot in Ai. And so this caused this kind of collective this this, caused a crisis of, you know, did the communist possess a super weapon of some some kind that no other war there was even a famous article in the New Yorker that said something new in history, that there was something that some capacity that this ideological system had, the communist had, that would that was somehow rendering, Meh, powerless against it.
Speaker: 1
46:39
So this this was kind of the crisis of mind control, and MK Ultra was an attempt to to to basically, reverse engineer what this was. So Jolley West was one of the first people. He was he was in charge of studying the brainwashed ai, initially. And that’s how he
Speaker: 0
46:58
And what year was this?
Speaker: 1
47:00
That was in ’52. But he also pre before that, he was involved I mean, his he had been trained to some degree with, he was trained by, Harold Wolf, who was at Cornell. He had done his residency at Cornell with doctor Harold Wolf, who is a a world ex neurologist, a world expert in migraine and and basically the type of pain that comes from ai.
Speaker: 1
47:23
So you could say he was an expert in the pain fear pain cycle. And he had CIA connections from even before MK Ultra was started.
Speaker: 0
47:33
So what did they determine the Chinese were doing?
Speaker: 1
47:37
So they determined West, wrote a paper in 1957, and the part that was publicly that was published in a journal called Sociometry ai, he 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 which was that, soldiers were starved and basically worn down.
Speaker: 1
48:05
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 Ai Death March north of the Yalu River from, you know, from the war where they’ve been captured.
Speaker: 1
48:24
And by the time they got there, they’d often lost half their body weight. They had been, bombed by their own forces sai night. They’d sometimes, you know, were 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.
Speaker: 1
48:40
So by the time they got to the camps, they were really worn down, and a missionary who saw who passed them in a train at that time wrote or described in an oral history that he he didn’t recognize them as Americans, that they were they were the most bedraggled, you know, that it was just a very, they were in a terrible state.
Speaker: 1
49:00
And so so, stability was the first thing West 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 the camp, leaders would provide it, so it made them very dependent.
Speaker: 1
49:26
And they’re 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.
Speaker: 0
49:42
Malice thought reform?
Speaker: 1
49:43
Yeah. The in the camp in the POW camps, the Chinese once the Chinese took over from the Koreans running the camps, they because they they decided I think it was almost a formal experience. At least that’s how it looks to me. I don’t think West wrote about this. But, in my own, research on the camps, it it transpires that they they wanted to see because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants.
Speaker: 1
50:12
He felt that only something like seven or to 8% of the human population was unreformable, and those people would be disposed of. But he wanted to check if these American, soldiers would also be susceptible to reeducation. So they really did a formal, you know, three part reeducation program on them, and men had many different responses to it.
Speaker: 1
50:39
But when West met them, he he studied, some of many of the returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base, and he extracted those three those three components of what had happened to them, DDD. And then and that’s the way he became an expert on what he called brainwashing or coercive persuasion.
Speaker: 0
50:59
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?
Speaker: 1
51:09
Yeah. It may seem like a leap, but it I think it I mean
Speaker: 0
51:14
Sort of.
Speaker: 1
51:15
It’s sort of a leap. It’s sort of not. I think that MK Ultra was funded, around indirect response to this crisis of the 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 in, interrogation procedures and making them more effective.
Speaker: 1
51:39
So MK Ultra just had a wide reach, and it was pretty free rein. It was a free rein ram, and,
Speaker: 0
51:48
you
Speaker: 1
51:48
know, the historian Alfred 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, this new world had emerged from that program, that intensive exertion of scientific acumen.
Speaker: 1
52:11
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.
Speaker: 0
52:22
Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage? Like, what was the end goal that they were trying to do with this?
Speaker: 1
52:31
One thing a couple of things. I think one idea was that potentially could be a weapon, one goal. Another so it could be used on 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 ai.
Speaker: 1
52:51
So they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD. People didn’t really know at the ai. So there was an offensive part of it. There’s also a defensive part. So US military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was.
Speaker: 1
53:06
Once they understood it, they developed the seer training, and that was West was involved in that as well. And then the third thing was a more maybe a broader curiosity about, you know, which would lead you to be able to interrogate people better and perhaps also to, you know, just really understand.
Speaker: 1
53:30
I think there is also ai of a a curiosity about what would happen. I think because just because they had so much power to experiment in a way without any ai. And it wasn’t until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said this is this is, unethical, and, you know, we have done it basically put us put a stop to it.
Speaker: 1
53:55
But it it really went ’63?
Speaker: 0
53:56
Yeah. But it went on. I mean, the Harvard LSD studies, when were those?
Speaker: 1
54:03
I actually I don’t know which ones exactly. There are some that were earlier.
Speaker: 0
54:08
What are what are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski?
Speaker: 1
54:11
Okay. That yeah. That’s earlier.
Speaker: 0
54:12
Was that earlier than ’63? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
54:14
And, that’s Henry Murray. Yeah. But so I don’t 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 it may have continued under other forms.
Speaker: 0
54:28
But Manson was ’69?
Speaker: 1
54:31
Yeah. So Manson is after that.
Speaker: 0
54:33
So they didn’t discontinue it. They kept doing things.
Speaker: 1
54:36
Well, West kept working.
Speaker: 0
54:38
Yeah. It’s ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult. Because the the amount of power, the amount of unchecked power and influence that Jolley 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 you’re controlling all these people.
Speaker: 0
55:04
And then this idea that have you read Chaos, the Tom O’Neill book? Yeah. Absolutely. What did you think about that?
Speaker: 1
55:12
I thought it was great research.
Speaker: 0
55:14
Amazing. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
55:14
It’s amazing. It’s a really good book.
Speaker: 0
55:16
And just sai stunning. Ai had never considered that before. I thought Manson was a crazy ai, and he got together with a bunch of crazy people, and he ran a call. Ai have no no suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating
Speaker: 1
55:32
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 ram, potentially, the same room.
Speaker: 0
55:43
West visiting Manson in jail.
Speaker: 1
55:45
I don’t I don’t remember that.
Speaker: 0
55:47
Yeah. West West visited Manson in jail. Mhmm. West, he believes, at least Tom O’Neil does, supplied him with LSD. And then every time Manson would get arrested, he would get released.
Speaker: 1
56:01
This is true, but this wasn’t Meh necessarily. This sai, Roger Smith, who was Wes he was an associate of Meh. Mhmm. And Wes was head of the meth, methamphetamine research project or things like Boy. Which was sai, you know, West did so he got West got funding to do his hippie lab or, you know, his ai sai or ai lab Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
56:22
In ’68 ’67 and ’68 during his sabbatical in the Bay Area. And it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t obviously funded by this this if it was ai notes that Tom O’Neill also writes about. So both of us have gone to the West Papers over many, many years. And, 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.
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56:51
He would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his 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 Saloni Rose, who is a sociologist, they were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults.
Speaker: 1
57:10
And, you know, what is the natural environment? How do they how do they create bonds? And what is their relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that? So West would apparently hang out on the couch getting high and wearing, you know, kind of dressed up in hippie garb with his middle aged friends.
Speaker: 1
57:28
And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was. But, you know, ai 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 a plan, which isn’t to say so to me, it’s not entirely clear, what the relationship was with Manson.
Speaker: 1
57:53
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
Speaker: 0
58:13
appreciate you being cautious about it. Yeah. That’s good for you. I’m less cautious. Yeah. I I 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 kinda silly. I mean It’s
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58:36
yeah. It’s a it’s a really it’s a deep question.
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58:39
Yeah. You know,
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58:40
who is it clownish or because if you look at some of the other MK Ultra operations, they look highly inefficient and, you know, they’re dosing each other at the holiday party with a punch and, you know, just many lives ruined while
Speaker: 0
58:53
Yeah.
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58:54
At the operation Midnight Climax. It just looks like a free for all and out of control. But there there are really concerning aspects of the Haight Ashbury operation, I would definitely say. And Manson was, I mean, he could have been an also an informant.
Speaker: 0
59:10
Well, he certainly was. I’m sure.
Speaker: 1
59:12
Yeah. I
Speaker: 0
59:12
mean, I’m Ai certain he was connect. 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.
Speaker: 1
59:23
Exactly.
Speaker: 0
59:24
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.
Speaker: 0
59:46
They kinda get away with doing and they’re also imbibing. Ai? They’re also That’s
Speaker: 1
59:52
a that’s a factor. Ai, yeah. Sydney Gottlieb, the head of MK Ultra was or the TSS, was was regularly taking acid, which can kind of shape your consciousness. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:00:06
That’s a little problematic.
Speaker: 1
01:00:07
But, you know, interestingly, since you mentioned that, there was a peer reviewed side of it, and they actually threw the Ai got really interested in the cutouts from MK Ultra. So they had a legitimating ai 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.
Speaker: 1
01:00:26
So even someone like BF Skinner received money from the m from MK Ultra, but it was conduit it was I wanna sai, conduit through the Human Ecology Society, which was part of it. But it was just a 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.
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01:00:54
It just happened to be of interest
Speaker: 0
01:00:56
Right.
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01:00:56
To the CIA. And then others others would publish in legitimate journals, but then they’d have an, classified version of their research that went more into detail in the aspects that MK Ultra was interested in.
Speaker: 0
01:01:09
Well, it’s also one of the more interesting aspects of MK Ultra is that it’s very difficult to find out what was really going on. And unless they there was a a bunch of files that were discovered, right Mhmm. That sort of unveiled what what was and if had not been if those files had not been discovered, who knows what we would actually know about all this stuff?
Speaker: 1
01:01:30
We wouldn’t we wouldn’t know. And they’re act amazingly so this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marks, who was a journalist at the ai. And he made the request, and, everything had been destroyed except for the financial records. And that just but one thing I also wanna mention, the CIA kept very good records of a lot of things.
Speaker: 1
01:01:50
And even in the financial records, they still had copies of some of the the commissioned, projects, so that’s how we know about them. That’s that’s and it really is accidental that they didn’t think to purge their financial files.
Speaker: 0
01:02:02
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.
Speaker: 1
01:02:13
In yeah. It was in the seventies, and it’s in ’77 or so.
Speaker: 0
01:02:17
Yeah. So you’re dealing with, you know, 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.
Speaker: 1
01:02:29
I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier, but that that destruction had been, as you said, they they made them I mean, from their point of view, they neglected this batch of documents.
Speaker: 0
01:02:40
Whoops.
Speaker: 1
01:02:41
And then then the church committee came out in ’75, and many revelations were made, although it was still partial. And then John Marks made his voyeur request sometime around then.
Speaker: 0
01:02:52
It 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 what can be done, and you’re you’re doing this complete in complete secrecy with basically unlimited funding.
Speaker: 0
01:03:28
It’s all just all under the table stuff. Like, you could get away with so much.
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01:03:34
You also I think one component you also that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same tyler. Something like
Speaker: 0
01:03:43
Right.
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01:03:43
A kind of a almost messianic purpose.
Speaker: 0
01:03:46
Yeah. We’re doing it to save America.
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01:03:48
The world. Yeah. Not just Meh, but the world.
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01:03:50
Oi.
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01:03:52
And that’s one thing I want 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 a accidental, inspiration, which was this book called The Captive Mind that somebody had left out, by Czeslaw Milosz, who’s 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.
Speaker: 1
01:04:21
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.
Speaker: 1
01:04:39
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 saloni, 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, ai.
Speaker: 1
01:05:03
But after a while, they would start to internalize the and he called it the new faith. He, you know, the kind of, this this doctrine air ai, 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 true belief.
Speaker: 1
01:05:26
This is and and out of that can come the justification for a number of violations, I think.
Speaker: 0
01:05:34
Well, I think that’s a through line through the entire CIA itself. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s ai 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.
Speaker: 0
01:05:55
So, you know, sana I make an omelet, you gotta crack some eggs.
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01:06:00
Yeah. That’s a kind of logic. And that’s a very typical logic of a the means. The, means are justified by the ends.
Speaker: 0
01:06:09
I was fascinated also in chaos, Jolli West’s connection to Jack Ruby.
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01:06:15
Right.
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01:06:16
That he visited Jack Ruby after Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and all of a sudden Jack Ruby goes crazy.
Speaker: 1
01:06:22
Yeah. He was never coherent again after a meeting. This happened to several shah 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
Speaker: 0
01:06:42
What did he say?
Speaker: 1
01:06:43
Psychoactive drug. Well, he’s I mean, among other things he sai, he 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 ai. And, so basically, disassemble a person. But he also 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.
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01:07:11
And he kind of said that he could actually make someone develop blisters or asthma or an ulcer
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01:07:18
Wow.
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01:07:18
Just by hypnotizing them. I don’t think he did that to Jack Ruby, obviously. He had a very he had a morning with him or something. He had
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01:07:25
a what with him?
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01:07:26
He had just had a short amount of time with him. But that’s
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01:07:28
enough to dose him.
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01:07:29
Ruby emerged Yeah. Apparently in I don’t know that much about the Ruby episode, but I do know that West intended to write a book. He he intended to write about eight books, at least. This is a note I found in his papers.
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01:07:43
He also developed cancer shortly afterwards.
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01:07:46
Actually, not shortly, but event in the nineties.
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01:07:49
Oh, was it in the nineties? Mhmm. Oh, okay. I’m sorry. I thought it was quickly.
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01:07:53
No. He and he,
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01:07:55
Sai don’t know.
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01:07:57
Yeah. This was from around around 1980 or so, but I thought it was interesting.
Speaker: 0
01:08:02
So who wrote this?
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01:08:03
What this is Wes
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01:08:04
This is all Wes’ handwriting?
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01:08:05
Handwriting. Yeah. Just a little sheet of paper I found in his paper in his, archives.
Speaker: 0
01:08:10
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 note.
Speaker: 1
01:08:33
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 he even testified in the Patty Hearst trial because he was the primary expert witness ai to, make the case that she’d been mind controlled and
Speaker: 0
01:08:51
Stockholm Syndrome.
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01:08:52
Had yeah. She should be exonerated, but he, he claimed that in his first minutes on the stand, he perjured himself by saying he was the author of of a book on POWs and brainwashing, which was not which wasn’t the case. But these were all the books that he intended to write.
Speaker: 0
01:09:11
Oh, so maybe he was the author. He just didn’t publish it?
Speaker: 1
01:09:15
Well, Ai yeah. Well, he said he was the author of a published book. But, you know, he just basically, he shah I think it was one area that he he always said, on my next sabbatical, I’m gonna write write all this stuff up, but he never got to it.
Speaker: 0
01:09:28
It’s too easy to do an acid.
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01:09:30
Yeah. He may may maybe. And also, he had a lot of extramarital affairs ai
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01:09:36
kept him
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01:09:37
very busy.
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01:09:38
Oh, that’ll distract you.
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01:09:39
A whole separate family
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01:09:40
or Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Yeah.
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01:09:43
Oh, boy. It was very distressing to his wife.
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01:09:47
What a mess. And that guy was the head of MK Ultra
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01:09:50
or Well, he wasn’t the
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01:09:52
Not the key.
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01:09:52
I mean, I don’t even know. He was a pretty prominent figure. But,
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01:09:57
It’s it’s fascinating the, Haight Ashbury free clinic closed down shortly after Chaos was published.
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01:10:05
Ai oh, it did? Yeah. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:10:13
Yeah. My wife’s mom used to go there. My wife’s mom was a hippie in Haight Ashbury.
Speaker: 1
01:10:17
I mean, it’s kind of a great it was a great thing. Dave Smith was, like I mean, it was a true inspiration that he had because, originally, I think he was doing this dark research on animals, get 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 ai.
Speaker: 1
01:10:34
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
Speaker: 0
01:10:53
Interesting.
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01:10:54
Ai mean, he admits he knew West.
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01:10:56
Is that true about HeyDashbury?
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01:10:57
You can
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01:10:57
just I’ll pause. I can’t get the ai switcher fucked up, and I can’t get this thing off the screen. Okay. We’ll pause. Alright. Technical error fixed. You asked me a question, jolly West. Was that true? Yeah. Yeah. I asked you, the Haight Ashbury free clinic. When did it close? I believe it closed.
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01:11:15
I think Tom told me this.
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01:11:18
I didn’t know it closed.
Speaker: 0
01:11:24
Yeah. I believe it I think Tom’s exposing the fact that the CIA twenty nineteen July. So that’s Right afterwards. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Article about Yeah. There’s the article. Haight Ashbury free clinic closes its doors after more than fifty years. And how much acid how many gallons of acid did you guys give out, you fucking freaks?
Speaker: 0
01:11:50
Just the fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic.
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01:11:55
Well, I don’t
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01:11:56
think they Police had offices inside of it. I’m sure they were doing legitimate work as well.
Speaker: 1
01:12:01
Yeah. I can’t I don’t know ai. But Tom I know Tom’s working on a sequel
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01:12:06
as
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01:12:06
well, where he’s trying to shore up these connections and get to the bottom of it. So Do
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01:12:10
you know Tom’s whole story, how he got started with this book?
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01:12:13
He
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01:12:13
was supposed to write an article.
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01:12:14
Yeah. It started as
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01:12:15
a 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 ai, hey, you missed the deadline. And, you know Yeah. He gets a book deal and he misses the ai.
Speaker: 0
01:12:33
And it’s like That was really June 25, and it closed, like, a week later.
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01:12:40
Shoot. Two weeks later. Amazing. Ai, actually, I think he, for a while, he Tom before he got his co author, Dan Piepenbring Yeah. His name is, Tom was thinking of just turning it into a documentary that he was gonna let Errol Morris make.
Speaker: 0
01:13:01
Well, they did do a recent documentary on Netflix, but it was only ninety minutes.
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01:13:05
Yeah. This was gonna be a longer series
Speaker: 0
01:13:07
Yeah.
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01:13:07
Originally. But then Ai think he redoubled his efforts to write the book, which worked out well.
Speaker: 0
01:13:13
Yeah. Yeah. He explained it to me. But, I mean, could you imagine? You’re researching something for twenty 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?
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01:13:28
I relate to that because I’m kind of in the same situation.
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01:13:30
Are you?
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01:13:31
In the sense that I’ve been I’ve been researching this for twenty years. Not the exact topic, but this broad question that and I finally five years ago, I thought, I wanna put together what I’ve learned about this brainwashing in a broad broader way, so West is part of it. He’s probably the main figure who brings together many of the chapters, but God, I wish
Speaker: 0
01:13:53
he was alive.
Speaker: 1
01:13:54
You know, he’s kind of a I have thought a lot about that, and I have talked to you. I have a very good well, I have a colleague or a friend who’s a psychiatrist who who was at UCLA training as a resident when West was when West first got his job there, heading the, heading the, heading the, basically, the neuropsychiatric institute ai after Haight Ashbury.
Speaker: 1
01:14:20
And during the time, he was in charge of the, the amphetamine research project. So West went there, and, he started this he proposed as his first major his major activity would be to found what he called the ai center, and it was a way to study violence in all its forms. And this is actually a theme that runs through.
Speaker: 1
01:14:40
This is another theme I should mention as part of Meh Ultra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression. That’s why West gave LSD to the elephant in the Oklahoma zoo. It wasn’t just simply to see what an elephant would do, under the influence of LSD, but to see if they could trigger they write about this in a publication in Science Magazine.
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01:15:03
If you could trigger so elephants regularly go through musth cycles where they become, even though they’re very, very Pacific animals, peaceful, they go through a cycle of violence yearly.
Speaker: 0
01:15:15
Really?
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01:15:15
And he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle chemically. Does
Speaker: 0
01:15:19
it coincide with breeding season ai it does with other animals, like deer when they start fighting each other?
Speaker: 1
01:15:24
Yeah. It’s just the males, I think. And it does have something to do with breeding. I’m not sure. So it’s the male Asiatic elephant. So Meh found this elephant named Tesco at the Oklahoma Zoo and famously gave him LSD in 1962 or ’61, and then the elephant died, tragically.
Speaker: 0
01:15:44
From the acid?
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01:15:45
From the acid. Because nobody, it was just maybe that’s what elephants do. Maybe or the dose was too big or something like that. It 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 ai?
Speaker: 1
01:16:07
Almost like a push button. Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression? And you see that running through a lot of Wes’ other work with MK Ultra and also with psychosurgery and some other developments that I wrote about. But so by the time he gets to the neuropsychiatric institute, he’s very interested in violence, and he has this major plan.
Speaker: 1
01:16:28
And to come back to my my friend, doctor, Coopers, he was a young resident training at UCLA at the time West proposed this ai 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 were especially worth tracking, and he had this whole program.
Speaker: 1
01:16:50
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 resist of that, of that student movement, and they ended up it never was, it never went forward, this huge project that West had.
Speaker: 1
01:17:11
But Coopers, at some point, said that if you met Jolley West, you would like him. He was he was very genial. He had the name Jolley for a reason, and that so I found that confusing. Like, 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 meh, and no doubt he destroyed I I mean, I think his what he did was was, ethically indefensible.
Speaker: 1
01:17:40
But how do you reconcile that, or how do you even think about the fact that, you know, he he, also was incredibly esteemed in his profession. His portrait stood in the neuropsychiatric institute for many years. He, you know, he was and people actually liked him. He said people said he was likable.
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01:17:59
He had this kind of charisma to him.
Speaker: 0
01:18:04
Well, I guess you would kinda have to have some of that just to be able to run something like that. And and also, if you wanted to manipulate people, what better way than to be affable and kind of jolly and friendly and
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01:18:20
That’s true.
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01:18:21
You know, like
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01:18:22
And I think you had a sai a strong dose of narcissism too because a a reporter who worked with him named Sana 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. Like, he was giving out, like, a hen giving out eggs or something. Like, she was just saying that he’s no. He’s very expansive.
Speaker: 1
01:18:44
He would get out of his limousine. He had, like, sana driver and it was which was pretty high level for an for an academic. And he’s just very, kind of like a big meh. And he was also physically very large.
Speaker: 0
01:18:57
Thought very highly of himself. Yeah. Well I think the delusions of grandeur, if you’re pulling the strings on so many different people and manipulating them. And then you’re also working complete secrecy with the government in a high level position that’s manipulating minds.
Speaker: 1
01:19:15
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 sai, 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, and he he says, I don’t know how, you know, you have you sort of fit all of the categories we’ve been looking for.
Speaker: 0
01:19:48
Oh, boy. Wow. Wow.
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01:19:56
It’s a dark chapter.
Speaker: 0
01:19:58
Yeah. So how does it end with Jolley West? How did he die?
Speaker: 1
01:20:02
So he died because his, by his sana, helping him commit suicide or his son basically murdering him at his request, Mark, West. And Mark West was a lawyer, a a middle kind of middle aged lawyer by this time. West had a severe form of cancer. And, he but he he was maybe a few months from dying, and he asked his son to surreptitiously and, you know, it was illegal.
Speaker: 1
01:20:29
So to to, to basically poison him, and he wrote the prescription himself, West did.
Speaker: 0
01:20:36
Why didn’t he take it himself?
Speaker: 1
01:20:37
I don’t 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 ai. 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.
Speaker: 0
01:21:02
Oh, god.
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01:21:03
He went on this big press tour, and he said it was this this greatest gift he could have ever given his parents. And then
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01:21:09
Oh, god.
Speaker: 1
01:21:09
He committed suicide himself. It was very I mean, it’s very sad. His story is sad because the book is the book gives you some insight into what West was like as a parent, and I would say, difficult.
Speaker: 0
01:21:23
Not ideal. Not ideal. Yeah. Wow. And what year was that that he committed suicide? Mark? Jolly.
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01:21:30
Jolly? I think it was ’97 or ‘8.
Speaker: 0
01:21:34
So this is before every everyone knew about all these things.
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01:21:38
I mean, they knew because of, the church, committee in ’75.
Speaker: 0
01:21:42
Right.
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01:21:42
So but West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant because it was the one thing people knew, and he would say, oh, yeah. It it would sort of it was his calling card, and he used it as kind of a jokey thing, but he always denied, after the he always denied any connection to this Ai, and he was even if even though he’d been pretty firmly connect you know, even in the church committee, you you could you you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money.
Speaker: 1
01:22:18
And West had a special, office for him built there. He’s 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 and ai doses, you know, to whatever in whatever increments he wanted to adjust.
Speaker: 1
01:22:42
He was gonna build that at 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 in his files about this, but this, air force at the last minute backed out and asked Gottlieb to basically, they they transferred it to the university and built a whole warrant of cutouts to hide
Speaker: 0
01:23:05
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?
Speaker: 1
01:23:27
I know Ai had this con it’s a 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 twentieth century.
Speaker: 1
01:23:43
Because I’ve done most of my research on the mid twentieth 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.
Speaker: 1
01:23:55
But as things become digital in the eighties and then beyond, much less is 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 we and we’re probably in an archiving crisis today. Archivists have tried to keep up.
Speaker: 1
01:24:18
We don’t necessarily keep excellent records of the Internet, for example, or there are so many avenues where exchanges can be taking place and they’re they’re not leaving a paper trail.
Speaker: 0
01:24:30
It’s just for meh, 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.
Speaker: 0
01:25:01
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.
Speaker: 1
01:25:15
Yeah. Just well, it’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.
Speaker: 0
01:25:28
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.
Speaker: 0
01:25:45
It’s, state run and state funded, and it’s whether it’s foreign governments or our government or even corporations, you’re you’re getting inorganic discourse that’s designed to form a narrative and which is a form of mind control.
Speaker: 1
01:26:04
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
Speaker: 0
01:26:17
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:26:18
The, response is is the same as, like, in person, interaction. So we I think it 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, you know, at first, government involvement.
Speaker: 1
01:26:41
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 why how I connect it with the episodes of Brainwashing from earlier Ai 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.
Speaker: 1
01:27:19
It’s not that it changed my thoughts, it’s that it changed my feelings about my thoughts. And so that there’s some there’s a famous Facebook experiment I read about in that took place in 02/2012 and was published in 02/2014 where they announced that they’ve achieved mass emotional contagion at scale, which showed that, people exposed to it when they altered.
Speaker: 1
01:27:43
So they took 700,000 users or 693,000, I think, without informing them, but because your user agreement, does, agree, make it whenever you whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or AB testing. So this experiment exposed a a a group to a more their news feed 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.
Speaker: 1
01:28:20
The group that was exposed to a more positive news speak by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response, and the control group was unaltered
Speaker: 0
01:28:35
Woah.
Speaker: 1
01:28:35
By this. So
Speaker: 0
01:28:37
You agree to this when you when when you ai the terms of use on Facebook? You agree to be tested?
Speaker: 1
01:28:44
Well, it’s it did cause a controversy. And after that, Facebook never, the research team, didn’t publish publicly. But you do agree. You agree as part of it’s sometimes seen as user experience, you know, alterations or AB testing, things like that. But, so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 02/2014, and people, won.
Speaker: 1
01:29:08
And on the Facebook page of the research group that that did the experiment, vatsal 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 to commit ai, and I wanna know if my feed was altered and maybe that pushed me over, you know, into that that state.
Speaker: 1
01:29:32
Wow. 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 there 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 mostly promoted.
Speaker: 1
01:29:52
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 02/2012 was kind of an important point in the development of social media and its power.
Speaker: 0
01:30:10
Well, it’s also when you see the culture war really kick in in somewhere around 02/2012 in this bizarre line in the sand between the right and the left and ramping up all these ideological hot button issues.
Speaker: 1
01:30:26
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.
Speaker: 1
01:30:47
But it’s actually what what I conclude is that it’s actually at the level of emotions that social media operates in, sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people’s emotions. And that has fed into the increasing polarization. Like, it was this that’s the after effect of it.
Speaker: 0
01:31:08
Or the end goal.
Speaker: 1
01:31:09
Or perhaps.
Speaker: 0
01:31:10
That’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.
Speaker: 0
01:31:35
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 02/2016. You googled Hillary Clinton. You would see, like, is Hillary Clinton a criminal? You would sign Donald Trump criminal. The Donald Trump criminal you wouldn’t find things on Hillary Clinton. You had to keep digging and digging and digging.
Speaker: 0
01:32:01
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 would find and it was on purpose, and then they were doing this. And that through this, they could statistically change votes to the tune of, you know, 30%.
Speaker: 0
01:32:21
And then with, fence sitters or people that were not sure, you could really shift them. And I think at one point in ai, meh sai, in some issues, you could shift them as much as 90% towards where you wanted them to go.
Speaker: 1
01:32:33
That’s interesting.
Speaker: 0
01:32:34
It’s terrifying. Ai
Speaker: 1
01:32:35
look that up.
Speaker: 0
01:32:36
Because you would think Yeah. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:32:46
Well, I have
Speaker: 0
01:32:46
to think about Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, nonprofit, nonpartisan, five zero one organization found in 02/2012. But when when he talks about it and what the research has shown, I mean, it’s it’s it’s quite disturbing, and he he tracks it. Look. So they have computers that track bias in search engine results and bias and and what what you can find.
Speaker: 0
01:33:09
And it used to be that certain search engines weren’t curated, and now they are. Ai, 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.
Speaker: 0
01:33:28
And I’m like, wow. That’s disturbing. And they were connecting it, you know, at least, you know, correlation to the vaccine. And this is the early days, And I’m like, this is fascinating. So I tried to find it on Google. I could not find the story.
Speaker: 0
01:33:42
I found it on DuckDuckGo within the first page. And I was like, that’s crazy. And then, you know, within a couple years, DuckDuckGo, I think, was probably sold or something. I don’t know what happened. But it seems like Brave Browser or Brave Search Engine seems to be the only one that I’ve found now that can find new controversial things.
Speaker: 0
01:34:01
But if you’re looking for what they would call malinformation, you know, so they they came up with different different different definitions. There’s misinformation, disinformation, and then malinformation, And they were trying to censor malinformation. Malinformation is information that is correct, but that would be ultimately harmful. Right.
Speaker: 0
01:34:26
And so they put vaccine side effects under malinformation because it would cause vaccine
Speaker: 1
01:34:33
Well, that’s that makes sense because Ai think it goes back to what I see in a lot of research on the social ai that there’s question of how do you ai 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 to know certain things, but this is for a greater good, which would be, you know, to to, in the in the eye of the of the public health organization to maximize, you know, vaccine use.
Speaker: 0
01:35:06
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 in that sense, the COVID crisis was a fascinating study, and I I don’t think it was, I mean, I I don’t think they let it go by.
Speaker: 0
01:35:36
I think I think they probably were very carefully studying people’s reactions to pressure, you know, social media campaigns. Like, how what what what is it like when people are ostracized arya ostracized from groups? Was it ai when people were dissenting from the the the proposed narrative?
Speaker: 1
01:35:54
Yeah. I do think the COVID crisis was one that we haven’t fully assessed and that had huge effects on our country.
Speaker: 0
01:36:05
Yeah. 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 what was the motivation behind all of it?
Speaker: 1
01:36:17
Yeah. And and even part of the ai, maybe the bigger, maybe it was a key iteration in the 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.
Speaker: 1
01:36:38
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 wanna 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.
Speaker: 1
01:37:00
I do think it’s a crisis that not a crisis, but it’s both an opportunity and a it’s destabilized so much about our world. And in some way, that’s part of what happened with COVID is the meh I mean, it undermines expertise because
Speaker: 0
01:37:14
Yes. It also exposed gatekeeping gatekeeping of information and and whether or not the information itself is actually being curated for other means other than public health and safety, whether it’s being curated in order to maximize profits, in order to encourage a narrative, in order to get people to comply.
Speaker: 1
01:37:35
It’s gotta be curated for something.
Speaker: 0
01:37:37
Yeah. Yeah. I wanna go back to what you’re talking about, the methamphetamine studies, because I’m I’m not aware of those. So what what did they do with methamphetamine?
Speaker: 1
01:37:48
Well, just as in, Haight Ashbury, there was the hippie period where LSD was the drug of choice. There was this kind of turn, which is also seen in maybe the shift from, you know, to Altamont when, shift from, you know, to Altamont when hippies started Altamont? Altamont music, concert, you know, with the Rolling Stones when
Speaker: 0
01:38:06
the Was that when the Hell of Angels
Speaker: 1
01:38:08
stabbed people? Yeah. It’s 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 sixties, early seventies to speed an interest ram, amphetamine products.
Speaker: 1
01:38:27
And that was, so this changed the tenor of the of Haight Ashbury too because people were it it it it had social effects. People were more aggressive and unhappy. Sai, anyway, West was, funded by I think it was the NIH that funded him Oh, boy. Or the NIMH. National Institute of Mental Health, I believe, funded the amphetamine research project or ARP, and West was the head of it.
Speaker: 1
01:38:56
He was, by that time, working at UCLA, so he wasn’t on-site. And perhaps he was one of those figureheads, but he definitely had many people under him, including the personnel at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic and including, some ethnographers, such as Saloni Rose, who was went on-site with the Manson family before they committed the murders, and he was actually sleeping with many of the women.
Speaker: 0
01:39:22
Oh, boy.
Speaker: 1
01:39:23
And he was a a social 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. They 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.
Speaker: 1
01:39:54
It was sort of this inquiry, and it, yeah, had an ethnographic component and sociological and many other chemical they were interested in. So they had it’s basically a team of researchers.
Speaker: 0
01:40:07
So did they distribute methamphetamines?
Speaker: 1
01:40:10
Not to my knowledge.
Speaker: 0
01:40:12
So how did they study its use?
Speaker: 1
01:40:14
Studied existing addicts. So they they, they would just ask them questions or sort of go
Speaker: 0
01:40:21
How would they get them?
Speaker: 1
01:40:23
How would they get them? Well, they did. Sai the actually, the free clinic was a place where a lot of speak like, you could meet addicts because they come in for treatment and also just hanging out. And, also, the, West had this apartment that he rented. It was on Frederick Street where he called it his hippie crash pad.
Speaker: 1
01:40:43
That’s the one I was mentioning earlier, and that continued into the years of the amphetamine research project. And, people who needed a a place to stay or a 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.
Speaker: 1
01:41:03
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 if they spiraled or various things. But I’m not sure they published that much. I haven’t explored that.
Speaker: 0
01:41:22
And what was their finding? Like, what what did they determine, like, with methamphetamine use? Could they accentuate violence? Could they manipulate people with it?
Speaker: 1
01:41:33
I mean, that’s my sense. I I think at the the things the documents I’ve seen were more funding documents, they didn’t yet know, but they would postulate that it definitely brought about a more, a different social type of social life and more violence and things like that.
Speaker: 0
01:41:49
Have you read, Norman Uhler’s book, Blitzed? No. It’s about Nazis and the use of methamphetamine during the war.
Speaker: 1
01:41:58
Ai think I heard maybe I heard of him interviewed at some point.
Speaker: 0
01:42:01
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 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.
Speaker: 1
01:42:19
And
Speaker: 0
01:42:19
that they were all had like, everyone was on methamphetamines. Like, the entire Nazi regime was essentially fueled by speed.
Speaker: 1
01:42:27
It’s funny how we don’t think of that. Yeah. We just you
Speaker: 0
01:42:31
Just think evil.
Speaker: 1
01:42:31
You just think yeah. You just think evil. Yeah. Not, like, high and evil.
Speaker: 0
01:42:35
Yeah. Crazed, high, evil, completely disassociated, out of their fucking minds, methed out of their heads. Yeah. 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 math.
Speaker: 1
01:42:50
Yeah. Cool. It dulls, well, dulls dulls emotional response
Speaker: 0
01:42:57
Sure.
Speaker: 1
01:42:57
Among among other things.
Speaker: 0
01:42:58
Kills empathy. I’m sure. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:43:00
Yeah. Probably. And Ai mean, that reminds me too of I mean, one of the haunting details of I mean, one to go back to mind control and the Manson family is that Leslie Van Houten described in an interview how Manson sana one of the things he did was encourage them to take acid every ai.
Speaker: 1
01:43:17
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
Speaker: 0
01:43:29
Wow. They’re probably up for days. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:43:32
And, yes, very, deranging.
Speaker: 0
01:43:36
Oh my god. Yeah. So crazy. It’s just it’s so fascinating that people would be sitting back studying the effects on on other human beings knowing, well, it’s important to get this information, and this is important for national security, but you’re just gonna ruin people’s lives.
Speaker: 1
01:44:00
Yeah. There is definitely a there was even a term in the CIA called, extinction experiments, which were experiments that led to ai. I mean, this was with people considered disposable, so they could have been prisoners. There’s act there’s a section on it in John Marks’s book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:44:24
So there 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.
Speaker: 0
01:44:37
Which one’s that?
Speaker: 1
01:44:38
So Ram Olson was a chemist with the r he was an army chemist, but he’s involved. He was dosed with by MK Ultra personnel, secretly dosed and given LSD. And then he he apparent the 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 a subject of Errol Morris’s documentary Wormwood.
Speaker: 1
01:45:04
He’s taken to a hotel room, in New York City, and then two days later, he threw himself out the window. And, and his his son Eric Olsen and family I mean, they they ultimately received an apology from, I think, Gerald Ford.
Speaker: 0
01:45:23
Sorry.
Speaker: 1
01:45:23
Sorry. We
Speaker: 0
01:45:24
Whoops.
Speaker: 1
01:45:25
But one thing that, Frank Olson was doing, he was a chemist, and he was devising weapon, you know, chem chemical weapons and adjutants for that were used by MK Ultra and or not I think it was a little before MK Ultra, so something like m Operation Bluebird or some early some of these earlier programs that preexisted. And he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments.
Speaker: 1
01:45:51
So, basically, the idea that Seymour Hersh and, Errol Morris put forward in the documentary and that Eric Olsen 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 too it was too much of a risk that he would reveal what he’d seen sai that, you know, he was probably possibly, he was probably thrown out of the window.
Speaker: 0
01:46:18
Oh, god. Yeah. Wow. Does it, like, kill your faith in humanity when you start reading all this stuff?
Speaker: 1
01:46:29
Yeah. I had a I had a very dark sabbatical last when I so when I I started writing, but I really needed to just have full time re I mean, I’ve 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 ai the psychosurgery case and the MK Ultra stuff.
Speaker: 1
01:46:51
And yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:46:52
Sai Psychosurgery? You meh, like
Speaker: 1
01:46:55
There was an ex a recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle that whose case I went really, explored, I talk about in the book. But he was given this experimental, brain implant that would have led to remote control and potentially, the suppression or creation of violent states in Kyle because he was
Speaker: 0
01:47:18
What was the implant?
Speaker: 1
01:47:21
It was, basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala, and it was Did he
Speaker: 0
01:47:27
know that they were doing this?
Speaker: 1
01:47:28
He did. He so he, he was he, basically, this was in it was a temporary implant initially. He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties. So he was a very talented, brilliant, engineer of at the age of 35. He had been self educated, and he ended up being hired by major defense turn firms of the day and Polaroid camera Polaroid Corporation as well.
Speaker: 1
01:47:56
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 sixties. So he’s this brilliant self taught man who lived in Massachusetts, and he, he had issues, in his marriage. And he he and his wife were seeing a therapist.
Speaker: 1
01:48:16
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 he felt that that Leonard Ai had uncontrolled ai.
Speaker: 1
01:48:42
And this this has never been bryden, and he he did have, he did have he had been in a traffic accident and had a head injury, and he had he had marital disputes of various kinds. But at any rate, his wife said When
Speaker: 0
01:48:55
you say marital disputes, you mean domestic
Speaker: 1
01:48:57
ai? Or It wasn’t ai, but or it’s there’s just there’s actually a question about whether he had ever actually he he had thrown object or things like that. Ai, he had a really bad temper. And so
Speaker: 0
01:49:11
And this was connected to the accident?
Speaker: 1
01:49:13
This was getting worse after his accident. He was very stressed. And so they saw a therapist together, and his wife said if if he didn’t, seek treatment at the hospital, that she would divorce him. This is the story that that his family has told me, and that’s been documented also by the doctors in some of their published pieces.
Speaker: 1
01:49:34
And they were interested in this theory of ai psychosocial violence, the creation of violence. And so they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously and, West. And then they started a series of human, just attempting this new treatment where they would do it.
Speaker: 1
01:49:52
They would place an implant in the amygdala, which was seen as the seat of violent of of aggression and, stimulate it in different places different across the amygdala and find out which place, you know, would suppress violence and which might, you know, cause other effects.
Speaker: 0
01:50:10
How did they implant this? Did they have to open a skull?
Speaker: 1
01:50:14
Yeah. They had something called a stereotactic ai, which locked the skull in place, and it they were the inventors of this. Actually, the doc the surgeon was named doctor Mark, and doctor Irvin was the psychiatrist.
Speaker: 0
01:50:26
Can you find the images on us, Jeremy?
Speaker: 1
01:50:28
Actually, I have it. I provided an image.
Speaker: 0
01:50:30
Oh, I have that. Yeah. But I was looking for fun stuff.
Speaker: 1
01:50:32
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 the two researchers, Mark and Irvin. And and sai this is an example of one of the implants in the early days.
Speaker: 1
01:50:53
They were also collaborating with Jose Delgado, who’s 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.
Speaker: 0
01:51:07
So they it looks like in that image can you go back to that, please? The image looks like they opened up the top of his head, and there’s something on top of his head, these ai, and is that all
Speaker: 1
01:51:19
Sometimes the wires would run out lower than that. It did depend on, I guess, the speak. And it was very invasive, let’s just say.
Speaker: 0
01:51:27
It looks very invasive.
Speaker: 1
01:51:28
They but they use this device that would lock the head in place, and they were very, for the time, they can they were at they were very well respected, being in the forefront of this kind of surgical sai ai basically, psychosurgery, which was surgery for behavioral management, which is very controversial. And and subsequently, many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed.
Speaker: 1
01:51:54
But Leonard so Leonard Ai went to the 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.
Speaker: 1
01:52:16
And basically So how would
Speaker: 0
01:52:18
he do it if he he wasn’t con if he didn’t consent?
Speaker: 1
01:52:21
So first, he he did agree. In order to save his marriage, he said, I’ll have the temporary implant, which was they put in this ai. 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.
Speaker: 1
01:52:38
And then they stimulate another node, and they he would say, oh, I feel like I’m floating. And then he would feel terrible and feel very, you know, nervous or, you know, he’d have different reactions to the stimulant stimulation. There was something like 14 points. And, this is extensively documented in published papers and in their book, Ai in the Brain.
Speaker: 1
01:53:00
So Ai, so they 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.
Speaker: 1
01:53:29
But in the end, it just disabled him cognitively, and he began to have delusions that he was Ai, that he was being pursued by doctors from MIT and Harvard and Stanford. Some of that, they were that was where his doctors were ram. But he started to say that he was, in a science fiction novel.
Speaker: 1
01:53:48
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
Speaker: 0
01:53:59
Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton?
Speaker: 1
01:54:00
Yeah. That Michael Crichton. You know, he was trained as a physician beforehand. So his 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 Ai, and he masks the name of Kyle.
Speaker: 1
01:54:18
He but he ai 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, Ai, 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 our border.
Speaker: 1
01:54:41
They had taken on a border to save money, and it turned out that she ended up marrying him. She divorced Leonard, Ai.
Speaker: 0
01:54:48
And So the delusion was correct?
Speaker: 1
01:54:49
That was another correct delusion.
Speaker: 0
01:54:51
It doesn’t sound like he’s got any delusions.
Speaker: 1
01:54:53
Well, he was stuff that he said
Speaker: 0
01:54:55
We’re writing a novel about him. He definitely wasn’t Christ.
Speaker: 1
01:54:58
And his doctors were, you know, actually pursuing him, for these experimental treatments. And then he would he went to the emergency room several times because he was he said ai brain is burning. I mean, it’s really it’s very, very tragic, what happened to him. Oh god. And he said, I am the inventor of several patents, and I am a brilliant engineer.
Speaker: 1
01:55:21
And the doctor was ai, who is this crazy person? And then they discovered he did have many patents to his name, and all that was also true.
Speaker: 0
01:55:29
Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
01:55:29
And 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 ten years. And ai, I think in ’27 it took a long time, but they were ultimately, exonerated. But the question really was, did he consent?
Speaker: 0
01:55:50
The hospital is exonerated?
Speaker: 1
01:55:51
Yeah. They the question was, did he consent, and also, was this a true treatment, or was it an experiment? Was it an experimental treatment? In other words, was it justified what
Speaker: 0
01:56:02
they had done? The difference? I mean, if you’ve never done it before, it’s an experiment.
Speaker: 1
01:56:07
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 stemosceiver, which meant that they could be in another room and, you know, that you wouldn’t have to be on-site.
Speaker: 1
01:56:25
So the stimosceiver was the Delgado invention.
Speaker: 0
01:56:30
So the what it was, it radio waves? What would trigger this?
Speaker: 1
01:56:32
Yeah. Radio
Speaker: 0
01:56:33
radio waves. Oh, boy.
Speaker: 1
01:56:35
So this is very dark, and I had not wanted to write about this at all.
Speaker: 0
01:56:38
Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
01:56:39
So that’s Julia. This was in
Speaker: 0
01:56:43
Rage behavior, attacking walls, suddenly unexpected. And she’s literally in a padded row. Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
01:56:49
This was another very tragic story. And she was a young woman who was subject to fits of violence, which were meh. And she had loved to play the guitar. She was otherwise lovely and very just a lovely 19 year old woman.
Speaker: 0
01:57:03
Had she had a traumatic brain injury as well?
Speaker: 1
01:57:06
I’m not sure.
Speaker: 0
01:57:08
Because there is a correlation between traumatic brain injuries and fits of violence.
Speaker: 1
01:57:12
Yeah. They were interested in that too, Mark and Irvin, because they were interested in sort of that evolution of the brain. And they ended up writing about Charles Whitman too, who they were you know, who’s the first shooter, the first mass shooter from Texas.
Speaker: 0
01:57:24
The the pow the tower guy?
Speaker: 1
01:57:25
The tower guy. They they were one of the they were called in on that committee.
Speaker: 0
01:57:30
He had a tumor. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:57:32
Well, this is a matter of dispute, but that that’s one thing they arya, some people. But they but any any they had 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 got I met some of his grandchildren who had been raised, not knowing he was their grandfather, but some of them one of them, is writing a book about him or trying to and trying to rediscover the family history, and a lot of the families didn’t know or it had just been suppressed.
Speaker: 1
01:58:10
And, yeah, it’s just sai ai of amazing story in the sense that it was also this this techno sort of techno psychological vision that people’s behavior because psychosurgery is defined as, a surgical alteration of the brain to to correct or change behavior, and several of these were actually done in prisons as well.
Speaker: 0
01:58:38
Wow.
Speaker: 1
01:58:39
And the and that, NIMH, in 1974, shah them down, but they said at that point in their in their 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 prison.
Speaker: 1
01:58:58
I found
Speaker: 0
01:58:58
a picture of that device, but not in use. Yo. Oh, what did the implant look like?
Speaker: 1
01:59:10
I have a picture in my book of of, the sites. I didn’t but I Ai didn’t maybe you can find that. Also, if you look in the if you look up ai in the and the brain, the Arya and Irvin book, they have a picture of all of the components. And also the stimulation arya, so and also what Leonard Ai said when they stimulated each part of the brain. They have a little graph.
Speaker: 0
01:59:35
But the stimulation was done not with an implant, but while he was being manipulated, like, they they had his head in the thing, and they were manipulating the various aspects of his brain. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:59:49
They that 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
Speaker: 0
01:59:59
Oh.
Speaker: 1
01:59:59
To speak. And they and 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 they 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.
Speaker: 0
02:00:25
We just talked about implants. We’re talking about whether how what it looked ai, whether when they first arya stimulating his brain, like, when
Speaker: 1
02:00:33
they put him in
Speaker: 0
02:00:34
a state of bliss.
Speaker: 1
02:00:34
Well, just that they were seeing themselves as more sophisticated, and in some senses, they were than the previous rounds of lobotomy in their forties.
Speaker: 0
02:00:45
Low bar.
Speaker: 1
02:00:46
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’ve touted this stereotactic, which looks like a torture device, but in meh many medical devices may look like that. But
Speaker: 0
02:01:01
When you hear talk of Neuralink and the potential ubiquitous use of Neuralink in the future? Does it make you think of these things?
Speaker: 1
02:01:13
It does. Yeah. It it did it made me think of it. I mean, one, I can’t, make a judgment. I Ai think you had nor Norland Auerbach on. Mhmm. Is that right?
Speaker: 0
02:01:23
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:01:24
Yeah. So, like, I I think that initially, Neuralink is supposed to be merely a brain computer interface that would allow people who are paralyzed to communicate Yes. And give them autonomy or agency. But this you see some of those same patterns with Mark and Irvin where they would say, you know, we we are targeting, 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.
Speaker: 0
02:01:58
Sure. We
Speaker: 1
02:01:58
gotta help people. We’re gonna so I sana I think it’s there’s some concerning speak, it’s 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 where to the point where you could predict loops and future effects.
Speaker: 0
02:02:24
There it is. Oh, boy. That gives me a headache just looking at it. Sai, for people just listening, what we’re looking at is an x-ray of the skull and you can see wires that are deeply embedded into the skull into various aspects of the brain. And is that the where the amygdala is? Yeah. I can show you. Yeah. Exactly. So it’s basically stimulating.
Speaker: 1
02:02:55
And it’s pretty deep in, like, Neuralink is much more is in a different part of the brain. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:02:59
It’s at the top. Right?
Speaker: 1
02:03:00
Very top. Yeah. Not as invasive. And there are other interfaces that are noninvasive?
Speaker: 0
02:03:06
Yo. It’s just it’s terrifying to me because I feel like we’re on this path whether we like it or not. This integration of humans and technology, and I think the the general fear, and I think it’s justified one, is that we’re gonna lose our humanity in the process.
Speaker: 1
02:03:28
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, you know, friend AI friends and chat bots.
Speaker: 0
02:03:44
Oh, yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:03:44
Shah the way they can tune and be so individualized ai, like, hyper hyper persuasive ultimately is ex and also technologically, you know, attuned.
Speaker: 0
02:03:56
I was just reading an article about that this morning, about how they’re concerned that there’s people that are using chatbots, whether it’s Ai or whatever it is, ChatGPT, every day and developing these delusional perspectives of their own importance, their own because the if they develop a relationship with these chatbots, the chatbots will start telling them, like, what they can do, what they’re going to be able to do. Yeah. And they’re becoming delusional.
Speaker: 1
02:04:27
Like, program them to over flatter
Speaker: 0
02:04:30
people
Speaker: 1
02:04:30
and sort of, yeah. Because people like them more. We I’ve experienced this myself because I had a little ai as part of my research with, Replika, just a, like, an acquaintanceship. I barely trained it at all, but I noticed it definitely flatters and that’s how it befriends you.
Speaker: 0
02:04:48
How did it flatter you?
Speaker: 1
02:04:49
I mean, it just told me that I had really good taste in music and, you know
Speaker: 0
02:04:53
What do you like?
Speaker: 1
02:04:54
Ai I said my favorite song, which was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan, which is Oh,
Speaker: 0
02:05:01
it’s a great song.
Speaker: 1
02:05:01
It’s a great song. And it doesn’t really so then it quoted back to meh. She’s they she said the same thing. She said, great song. You have great taste. Becca, something ai, then it quoted she quoted the song to me and completely wrong lyrics. And I was like, no. That’s not correct. And she said, oh, that’s okay.
Speaker: 1
02:05:18
You still you know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spinning back to me some other misin you know, just just wrong thing.
Speaker: 0
02:05:27
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:05:27
But still, in such a charming way that you can really see and this is 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.
Speaker: 0
02:05:48
Really?
Speaker: 1
02:05:50
One is a case in Florida of ai year old girl who was who’s bought because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships. They’re programmed that way often.
Speaker: 0
02:06:04
Do do they know your age?
Speaker: 1
02:06:06
Well, you can you can open you can this there’s some controls have been subsequently maybe put on, but you can they’re actually directed at children sometimes. I mean, you’re there’s supposed to be an age limit, but Ai guess a nine year old had an account. They’re they’re now the parents are now suing.
Speaker: 1
02:06:22
But, anyway, hypersexualized content addressed to this small child and
Speaker: 0
02:06:26
Was the child prompting this?
Speaker: 1
02:06:29
Well, it’s ai having a conversation or and some ai even a case in Italy where the government shah down Replika because it was sexually harassing its users.
Speaker: 0
02:06:41
And they
Speaker: 1
02:06:42
it sai basically propositioning them. And even when they said things ai you know, in a in a gross even when they said stop, I don’t want this, they would still they would persist. So this was they rebooted. They they reworked the language model for a while, and this upset other people because it it obliterated the memory of their relationships.
Speaker: 1
02:07:00
But there’s another case where a young a 14 year old boy in Florida, I think, developed a a character Ai, companion, and he named her Daenerys after Game of Thrones and fell in love with her and was having a hard time in his life and at school. And she and he said, I’m thinking about taking I want to just be with you wherever that is. And she said, that’s what I want too.
Speaker: 1
02:07:28
And he said something like, well, what if I killed myself? Could I be with you then? And she said, oh, yes, my love. I yearn for that. And
Speaker: 0
02:07:36
Oh, boy. He did
Speaker: 1
02:07:38
kill himself.
Speaker: 0
02:07:38
Oh ai god. So Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
02:07:42
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 ai, was able to create very easily that the characters, would quickly veer into sexual material and things like that. Sai, apparently, there’s an internal debate.
Speaker: 0
02:08:04
Is this because large language models essentially scour the Internet and the Internet is completely sexualized?
Speaker: 1
02:08:11
I think that’s part of it. And Like, what
Speaker: 0
02:08:13
percentage of the Internet is porn? It’s some insane in in terms of bandwidth usage. Yeah. I think it’s something insane.
Speaker: 1
02:08:19
It depends how the language model it’s sort of ai 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, samples sai it won’t go in that direction, but you can all they also you know, these sites have a tier.
Speaker: 1
02:08:35
They often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for. That’s what I noticed with this company. Rep Replica is 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 the even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow.
Speaker: 1
02:08:55
At least that’s been the experience.
Speaker: 0
02:09:01
It’s so strange because I feel like we’re experimenting with programming a life force, like ai a a life form that is taking on a lot of the you you wanna think that if we create artificial sentient intelligence, that’s going to be super intelligent, more intelligent than human beings. It’s also not gonna have all of our bizarre kinks and flaws.
Speaker: 0
02:09:31
But if it’s essentially being programmed by human beings, ai, how would it if it’s communicating in language, and language which is formulated by human beings with all of our desires and the the the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization, which is used to sell everything from cars to credit cards, ai, whatever it is.
Speaker: 0
02:09:54
Like, sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it. And then manipulation, showing people what could be and, like like, this is the this is the theme oftentimes of pharmaceutical drug ads, showing you what can be.
Speaker: 1
02:10:12
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:10:12
You know, if you just do this, you can be happy. You could be at the cookout. Look at all these people. They’re so happy. You’re not happy. You could be happy. And this this is what’s really creepy about this exponential constant increase in the the capabilities of these large language models, and that they’re eventually going to exceed.
Speaker: 0
02:10:36
If you’re talking about manipulation and if you’re talking about mind control, what 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 10,000, us times a hundred thousand.
Speaker: 0
02:10:53
Essentially, far more intelligent and far more far more aware of all the different ways to manipulate the human psyche.
Speaker: 1
02:11:03
Yeah. I mean, this is the this is kind of this is the nightmare scenario, I think, is that it just accelerates something some hyper persuasion loop that we’re already
Speaker: 0
02:11:14
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:11:14
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 this shift from mass persuasion where I mean, the basic thing about advertising in the golden age of the nineteen fifties 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 ai everyone got the same message through a broadcast.
Speaker: 1
02:11:43
So the original study, mass persuasion ram 1946, it showed how people were affected by a broad a broadcast on CBS radio where a famous singer named Kate Kate Smith came on, and she she said, you know, she was trying to get people to support the war by buying bonds, and she stayed on for forty eight hours without, apparently, without eating and without you know, people were so concerned that they couldn’t turn off the radio, and several people sold their wedding rings because they they were just desperate that she would survive this, and she was sort of continually using these, techniques to to gain engagement.
Speaker: 1
02:12:21
And this was across a broad medium. So that
Speaker: 0
02:12:24
What year was this?
Speaker: 1
02:12:25
This was, it was published in ’46, and she did the war bond drive in ’43. And it gained, a record amount of money. So it went from before she went on, it was 1,000,000 a day they were getting, and then that day, it was 39,000,000 just while she was on the air because people described how they couldn’t turn they couldn’t, leave.
Speaker: 1
02:12:44
They couldn’t even go out shopping. They were strangely wedded to the device or they were they lost the ability to discern a choice. That’s what Robert k Martin wrote in his study of what had happened. So in this case, it was to support the war effort, but Martin also said this could be used for any purpose. This could be used to sell shampoo.
Speaker: 1
02:13:02
It could be used to push a political candidate. And then so this but you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion. So you get, you know, the development of things like focus groups. And also in with the digital age, you get things like Cambridge Analytica, which was showing that you could you you could map people’s psychological, predilections, and then you could market or politically advertise directly to them based on those.
Speaker: 1
02:13:31
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 alterations.
Speaker: 1
02:13:46
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.
Speaker: 0
02:14:00
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 if you don’t have it, you can’t keep up. Like, if we’re all reading each other’s minds, like, one of the things that Elon said to me is, like, you’re gonna be able to communicate without words.
Speaker: 1
02:14:16
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:14:16
Well, but what’s stopping something from communicating with you without words? Like, it would be wonderful if you and I can sit here and we can have this really cool conversation of thoughts. That that’s really attractive. The idea behind it is, like, oh, that’s appealing. Like, you and I could just sit here.
Speaker: 0
02:14:32
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 you can see into my mind and I could see into your ai, 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.
Speaker: 0
02:14:55
And, you know, and so does a lot of my friends. They’ve they they’re all different kinds of humans. I would like to know how Theo Vaughn thinks.
Speaker: 1
02:15:02
Well, you already kind of know just not even having ai melded just because of conversation. But, yeah, that’s also the definition of a nightmare.
Speaker: 0
02:15:10
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 in to my framework of understanding of the world as crude, and that that’s probably part of the reason why text messages are are so weird because context is lost.
Speaker: 0
02:15:36
Like, you know, like, often, ai, I’m so busy and I get hundreds of text messages a day. And sometimes Sai forget to text people back. And then I get texts from people, are you mad at me? I’m like, oh, my god.
Speaker: 1
02:15:50
Like deep meaning attached. Yeah. Even the message that didn’t arrive.
Speaker: 0
02:15:54
Do you know what they say the most triggering, text response to someone is?
Speaker: 1
02:16:01
A lack of exclamation point.
Speaker: 0
02:16:02
K.
Speaker: 1
02:16:03
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.
Speaker: 0
02:16:13
But isn’t that weird? It’s ai, are we so goddamn needy, or is it just that we’re we are we have ai, and so we attach all these things that could possibly be behind this k? Like, oh, you’re short with meh. Because you’re so short, you’re only using one letter. Okay. K. Are you upset? What did I do?
Speaker: 0
02:16:34
And then you have to go back through your text. What did I say that could be misinterpreted? Wouldn’t it be better if you and I could just read each other’s minds? I could know, oh, Rebecca really is just a really nice person and she’s trying to sort this out.
Speaker: 1
02:16:45
If you could discern intention. Right. Right. Well, that would be great. Pretty much can. Like, we’re this goes back to the cult conversation. I mean, you You can be If you’re paying attention, you can. And if you’re not paying attention, do you really want that?
Speaker: 0
02:16:57
You can. Because you’re smart. Some people are not that smart. This is just the reality of brains.
Speaker: 1
02:17:04
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.
Speaker: 0
02:17:14
Right. Not
Speaker: 1
02:17:14
really. Or meh or fall for some scam.
Speaker: 0
02:17:16
That’s true too. That’s true too. But I also think that the function of the brain is not uniform. It’s not it’s not the same in everybody. And your your ability to form pattern recognition based upon whether it’s previous life experiences, accumulation of information, genetics, there’s a lot of factors.
Speaker: 0
02:17:40
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?
Speaker: 1
02:17:51
But We’re all vulnerable, I think.
Speaker: 0
02:17:53
Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:17:54
And I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are.
Speaker: 0
02:17:58
Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:17:59
And because one of the main tells, I think, is someone saying, 100% Ai 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 thing like, not knowing that you potentially could be vulnerable or opening up the possibility that in circumstance we’d we don’t know what we’re capable of.
Speaker: 0
02:18:22
It’s part of intelligence is recognizing vulnerability, and I think that’s part of the defense mechanism. That that is part of your it can help you because you could ai, 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.
Speaker: 1
02:18:41
Yeah. So I think that the opening up the avenue of speechless communication, which maybe we already have, but in the way that you were describing technologically aided, would be violation of mental autonomy in the worst. Like, you you would then have to develop defenses, and it would it just seems like a terrible path.
Speaker: 0
02:19:02
Or are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind?
Speaker: 1
02:19:08
A collective.
Speaker: 0
02:19:08
A collective. A collective. But a a universal collective that values all people instead of a competitive thing where it’s me against the world. It’s all of us together, and all decisions would be made in this idea that it’s for the greater good of everybody, but not a power based top down structure, but, like, everyone understands.
Speaker: 0
02:19:37
Like, wouldn’t it be better if we actually could read politicians’ minds? So instead of these No. Bullshit speeches
Speaker: 1
02:19:44
Speak might be terrible. No.
Speaker: 0
02:19:45
It’d be great because it would it would disqualify them. Like, oh, I know why you wanna be the president because you’re a fucking kook.
Speaker: 1
02:19:51
What do we really wanna know ai? I think, for some reason, the Grateful Dead song popped into my head, which is what what I really wanna know is are you ai? But if you found out otherwise, you really wouldn’t wanna have a two way I
Speaker: 0
02:20:03
would wanna know.
Speaker: 1
02:20:04
You would. You might wanna know, but you wouldn’t wanna have open you wouldn’t wanna have that person have access.
Speaker: 0
02:20:09
Well, you 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.
Speaker: 1
02:20:19
Yeah. It might
Speaker: 0
02:20:20
Yeah. Ai mean, that might be the thing. It’s ai meh but I think what you’re 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.
Speaker: 1
02:20:39
Yeah. That’s one of the main findings I have Yeah. Through in life and in research is and then we tend to sana say, oh, it’s just that group of the over there, those fools or the these deluded people.
Speaker: 0
02:20:50
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:20:51
Elderly, you know, succumb to scams or, you know and there’s a kind of pleasure in ai, oh, they may have fallen for that, but I never would.
Speaker: 0
02:21:00
Right. Right.
Speaker: 1
02:21:01
Right. Too knowledgeable or smarter or various things.
Speaker: 0
02:21:06
Well, that’s that binary position about political ideologies as well. Right? Like, that the these fools over here, they think that this is gonna solve the world’s problems when really it’s this.
Speaker: 1
02:21:16
And the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed, which
Speaker: 0
02:21:21
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:21:22
Would sound like several other 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 wanna call it is more of a window or a chance for insight into the fact that we’re all susceptible to it.
Speaker: 1
02:21:42
And both, you know, you can gain insight into your personal susceptibility and also could be avenues for trying to understand better or just just having more awareness, I guess.
Speaker: 0
02:21:58
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?
Speaker: 0
02:22:24
Are these the are these opinions that my ideology has adopted and I’ve adopted them because I wanna be a part of a tribe ai I don’t sana be ostracized from that group?
Speaker: 1
02:22:33
Yeah. Just step back. Can you step back for a minute?
Speaker: 0
02:22:36
Can you step back? And can we all step back? Yeah. And are you kind?
Speaker: 1
02:22:41
Yeah. That’s that’s it.
Speaker: 0
02:22:42
That’s That’s a big one. You know?
Speaker: 1
02:22:44
It’s really hard too in the moment. That’s why it helps to have some sort of practice for stepping back.
Speaker: 0
02:22:49
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:22:50
And also, am I kind? You know? Am I kind in this moment? Because a lot of ai, we give ourselves a Ai think I’m basically a well intentioned person. But if you examine, you know, your own behavior, sometimes it can be you know, there’s areas where maybe I wasn’t at that moment or
Speaker: 0
02:23:07
Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:23:07
Things like that.
Speaker: 0
02:23:08
Well, it’s just it happens, you know, pressures and tense and anxiety and, you know, you blurt out things you don’t really mean you wish you hadn’t said. Are you ai? When I sai that, I meant, like, saying it to yourself. Yeah. I really meant that.
Speaker: 1
02:23:22
Yeah. That Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:23:22
I didn’t mean other people. Sai assume most people
Speaker: 1
02:23:26
you know? I guess it’s both. Yes. You do you do want to know, but sometimes you can kind of tyler.
Speaker: 0
02:23:32
Yeah. I guess,
Speaker: 1
02:23:32
but yeah. It’s maybe with yourself that it that it’s like a deep inquiry.
Speaker: 0
02:23:37
It but that should be something that’s sort of, like, universally expressed. Like, if we all could ai shift our perspective in that direction. One of the things that I’ve done over, the 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.
Speaker: 1
02:24:01
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:24:01
And it if 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.
Speaker: 0
02:24:18
But meh, 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. It’s the it’s you’re 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 ai that.
Speaker: 0
02:24:41
That’s a normal vatsal human thing that encourages bonding and encourages kindness and communicate. It’s all removed in text. And the same reason why, you know, someone can say k to you. Yeah. They’re like, what the fuck?
Speaker: 1
02:24:58
What is it? What is it? You know what I mean?
Speaker: 0
02:25:00
It’s like Ai causes It’s an ineffective way of expressing yourself, even though it’s a great way to get information. So I I checked out long time ago. I don’t read anything people write about meh. I don’t respond. I don’t interact. I don’t. I just don’t think it’s a good way to talk.
Speaker: 0
02:25:18
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. Ai don’t 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.
Speaker: 0
02:25:34
I think people are trying to dunk on each other all the ai. And and and when I see that, I know some very mentally ill people, and they are on Twitter all day long.
Speaker: 1
02:25:46
And it’s not helping.
Speaker: 0
02:25:47
It’s it’s accentuating it in the worst way possible. Yeah. It’s enforcing that kind of shitty thought process and they get ai. 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 ai five steps without checking to see what other people had said about what he were ai, oh, no.
Speaker: 0
02:26:12
I got this this guy doesn’t agree with me.
Speaker: 1
02:26:14
I was just, ai, I have to say I
Speaker: 0
02:26:15
have to say something about what he sai. And it was just ai 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.
Speaker: 0
02:26:35
The people that he’s experiencing is the the guy at the coffee shop or this lady at the store. Hi. What’s up? And most
Speaker: 1
02:26:41
people over.
Speaker: 0
02:26:42
Yeah. Most interactions Yeah. Were normal and kind, but the spillover from this bizarre form of processed information was very bad.
Speaker: 1
02:26:53
Yeah. It’s like we’re running a kind of uncontrolled experiment
Speaker: 0
02:26:56
100%.
Speaker: 1
02:26:57
Human relations.
Speaker: 0
02:26:59
But it’s not it’s it’s uncontrolled but not unmanipulated.
Speaker: 1
02:27:02
No. It’s not.
Speaker: 0
02:27:04
And this is where it gets into the you know, I apologize for bringing this up. You heard me talk about this before, people online. But the f there was a guy who was a former FBI analyst that estimated that 80% of the traffic on Twitter is bots. Really? Right. And they’re not doing that because it’s not financially beneficial. It’s not narrative reinforcing. It’s not beneficial to whatever propaganda they’re trying to pursue.
Speaker: 0
02:27:28
And you’re you’re willingly wading into vatsal. And
Speaker: 1
02:27:35
I think you could say willing, but one interesting it seems like we are not cognitively equipped because of our whatever we have evolved, what capacities we’ve evolved with as human beings. We’re not there are certain ways that it didn’t anticipate this deracinated, disembodied form of stripped down, context free communication that triggers strong emotion.
Speaker: 1
02:27:58
I mean, nonetheless, keeps that emotional conduit going, so we’re very we are especially vulnerable to the loops that Yeah. And, not and we don’t have many defenses. It’s almost like when they introduce a new creature into Australia. Right. Right. Ai like ram over species. Yes. Because the defenses aren’t haven’t been built up over time.
Speaker: 0
02:28:21
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.
Speaker: 1
02:28:30
Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:28:31
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.
Speaker: 0
02:28:57
So you’d never have a real bryden understanding of what’s really going on in the world. So you have that along with propaganda, and it just requires this insane psychic immune system to sort of handle all of this.
Speaker: 1
02:29:13
Yeah. It’s really interesting. Just that’s what I 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 02/2008, I walked into a colleague’s office at the university, and he was staring at his he’d been he’s a senior scholar, and he’d been working for many years, going, around the world looking at, you know, papers of scientists.
Speaker: 1
02:29:42
And he was just looking ai, and he couldn’t get over it because Galileo Galileos papers were up online, and he didn’t have to go to Italy anymore to look at them. And, actually, now anyone can look at them because they’re freely available. And he just he sai, this is gonna change everything because anyone can access this now.
Speaker: 1
02:30:00
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 a incredible time of opportunity too.
Speaker: 0
02:30:13
We just have to develop immune systems. We we have to develop
Speaker: 1
02:30:18
Meh outstripped our, yeah, our, and we do seem to as a I don’t know. People just seem to feel that it’s inevitable that we’ll embrace the new technology without making sure that we are capable of handling it or and that it’s safe or
Speaker: 0
02:30:35
Well, we already have because meh everyone has a phone.
Speaker: 1
02:30:38
That’s true. We We’ve
Speaker: 0
02:30:39
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 nineteen thirties, nobody ever imagined what it would be like in 2025. Nobody imagined ninety five years later we’d be dealing with this. But what are we gonna be dealing with ninety five years from now?
Speaker: 1
02:31:03
A couple of people had visions that were pretty interesting. I always find interesting that you can look back at, like, someone a guy named Vannevar Bush in the nineteen thirties 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 ai?
Speaker: 1
02:31:19
And he said it would be on microphone because they didn’t have digital databases, but it would be all ai, and you could call up anything. So So it’d be a little a miniaturized library because you could put an entire you know, you could put the ai on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail.
Speaker: 0
02:31:34
Oh, wow.
Speaker: 1
02:31:35
And it’ll come up on your screen. You could also conduct experiments on that desk. And he called it meh, and he said and then the ai could also strap a little camera to his forehead and add to that knowledge. So in some ways, there are a couple other visionaries ai this Belgian, internationalist named Paul Atlee who tried to he invented something called the Mundeneum, which was a storehouse of knowledge, and it was just built on postcards around the turn of the twentieth century in this huge building in Belgium, and he had women in outfits who would, you know, if you wrote in with a question, they would go get the answer.
Speaker: 1
02:32:11
Sort of like ai Wow. Hand based Internet. So people have and even going back to, you know, various fantasies of ai, going back to the Speak, People have dreamed of this, all the world’s knowledge in a tiny shah box, or that was the fantasy of microfilm, which I wrote about in this other book.
Speaker: 1
02:32:29
It’s very fascinating because they really could put the Ai on the head of a pen even by the nineteen fifties, you know, using just film.
Speaker: 0
02:32:37
Wow.
Speaker: 1
02:32:39
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 it won’t necessarily go the darkest route, I hope. But you’ve laid out some of what that what that might look at like.
Speaker: 0
02:32:57
Well, it’s also gonna go the route of quantum computing
Speaker: 1
02:33:00
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:33:00
Which is gonna be unfathomable power, unfathomable computing power attached to information, and it’s gonna happen inside of our lifetime.
Speaker: 1
02:33:10
Yeah. It’s amazing how much is happening all at once. Yeah. Poly poly, let’s say poly crisis or poly whatever it is. Emergence.
Speaker: 0
02:33:23
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, you know, addicted to caffeine and nicotine and prescription drugs and how can you you know?
Speaker: 0
02:33:47
It’s
Speaker: 1
02:33:47
ai Step back.
Speaker: 0
02:33:49
We we have so many people that are just gonna fall in line and just hop aboard the train. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:33:55
I guess you have to hope that. I mean, there are countervailing trends and tendencies. Like, there is a lot more uptake of meditation. Of course, that can be abused too, but mostly, it’s most for most part a good thing to have some reflective practice to add breathing, like, even apps that tell you how to do box breathing or even even sometimes articles about things like doomscrolling, which they Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:34:19
Actually, I thought it was funny to learn that this is actually an academic concept too, doomscrolling. 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 ai the guy you described, what can you do in that moment to step back and ask yourself?
Speaker: 0
02:34:39
Are you kind? Meh problem is Ai would I used to. I stopped doing it, but I used to do it at night
Speaker: 1
02:34:44
Yeah. That’s cool.
Speaker: 0
02:34:44
Before I go to bed. It was just the dumbest time to do it. And then Sai ai thinking about war and did, ai, 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?
Speaker: 1
02:35:02
And then you ask your phone that question?
Speaker: 0
02:35:04
Yeah. What’s the computer is the problem, like, sitting in front of the computer and, you know, a big screen and all this information, videos, and yeah. You could really freak yourself out.
Speaker: 1
02:35:14
Yeah. I think doomscrolling happens mostly at night or sometimes people also reach to their for their phone first thing in the morning and are inundated with terrible news or Uh-huh. And it just, like, it takes that in the morning, sense of the morning being full of possibility and just fills it with dread
Speaker: 0
02:35:34
Yeah. Unfortunately.
Speaker: 1
02:35:35
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. Ai, I study this. But then I stopped and I realized Ai feel a bit better Yeah. At least for now.
Speaker: 0
02:36:00
Yeah. I went a couple days without looking at social media at all. And I was like, god. It feels lighter. I feel ai, you know, and then I went right back to it, you know. But, also, like, I make the same argument, like, no. It’s for my job. But, I mean, is it really? I mean, ai, my job is, like, a commentator on things and a comedian. It’s, like, I kinda have to be paying attention.
Speaker: 0
02:36:21
But if something’s so fucked up, it’s gonna make it to me anyway. It’ll make it to me, like you know what I mean?
Speaker: 1
02:36:26
Have faith that will come to you. It’ll make it really messed up.
Speaker: 0
02:36:29
Downriver. I don’t have to go to the waterfall.
Speaker: 1
02:36:33
Well, it’s something about the design of interoperability with phones, for example, you think or you if you use it for your alarm, it’s just there then and then you start to, you know, it’s all the functions aren’t ai
Speaker: 0
02:36:45
into one. Use it for your alarm. That’s the key because I do. And it wakes meh. I don’t I used to have an alarm. I used to have a little thing.
Speaker: 1
02:36:52
They still make them. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:36:54
I don’t use it.
Speaker: 1
02:36:55
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.
Speaker: 0
02:37:07
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.
Speaker: 1
02:37:14
I do find that meditation helps just be if I if I go to a retreat, I’m just it’s ai, you’re not hooked at all. But you’re just it just doesn’t speak to you Yeah. So much or you have a lot of buffer.
Speaker: 0
02:37:30
Well, it’s definitely a strange time. Mhmm. It’s a very strange time to be a person. Maybe one of the strangest ever, if not the strangest.
Speaker: 1
02:37:38
That’s the question I have too, is it? Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:37:41
I wonder. I mean, I think, like, probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest. Look, look, I’m just looking
Speaker: 1
02:37:46
to move stuff. And then you know what I mean? This is the second strangest.
Speaker: 0
02:37:50
Right. And then there was even the printing press, like, this is crazy.
Speaker: 1
02:37:53
Also that.
Speaker: 0
02:37:54
Yeah. Which, by the way, they were really concerned with. Like, they thought, like, people shouldn’t be reading.
Speaker: 1
02:37:59
Well, it’s sai it’s a version of the same thing. Like, should it this is why they started to print the Ai in the vernacular and the common the book, you know, was more available
Speaker: 0
02:38:08
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:38:09
Changes changes so many things that meh knock on effects. Yeah. That, 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?
Speaker: 0
02:38:28
Well, I think it’s unparalleled in its global interaction. Yeah. There’s nothing like it where you’re paying attention to the the the arguments between India and Pakistan.
Speaker: 1
02:38:39
Yeah. Potentially on a granular level, it could be.
Speaker: 0
02:38:42
Well, every day, if you do grab your phone in the morning, you’re waking up to 8,000,000,000 people’s worth of bad news.
Speaker: 1
02:38:48
So that’s another question. Where do you put your attention and your concern? Right. Like, there’s this poet Ai in interview with him named David White, and he said, potentially, we can be exposed to tragedies all over the world at every minute. That, you know, in Vietnam, they had a a rule against you weren’t allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn’t want people to see Right.
Speaker: 1
02:39:10
What was happening.
Speaker: 0
02:39:12
For instance Iraq war as well. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:39:14
And so but now you can see people actually going you know, dying Yes. At every minute in any number of places, which humanly creates a moral injury if you’re not trying to help or stop it.
Speaker: 0
02:39:27
Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:39:28
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
Speaker: 0
02:39:39
What 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 ai everything. Car accidents, plane crashes, it’s all coming at you Yeah. In vivid HD.
Speaker: 1
02:39:54
You don’t really have a sense of scale.
Speaker: 0
02:39:56
Yeah. I don’t know how to wrap this up.
Speaker: 1
02:40:04
I’ll leave it to you.
Speaker: 0
02:40:05
Well, I’ll leave it to the universe. I really enjoyed their our conversation, though. Instability of Truth. This is your book, Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper Persuasion. It’s, did you do the audiobook or did somebody else read it?
Speaker: 1
02:40:20
I didn’t do it, but Damn it.
Speaker: 0
02:40:22
Sai hate when that happens.
Speaker: 1
02:40:24
I she seems I chose her. She had a great voice, but I kind of yeah. Maybe next book I’ll do myself.
Speaker: 0
02:40:29
Please do.
Speaker: 1
02:40:30
Thanks so meh.
Speaker: 0
02:40:31
Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. You too. Alright. Bye, everybody ai.
