May 15, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:40:34
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast. | |
| Check it out. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day. | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night. | ||
| All day. | ||
| Hello, Rebecca. | ||
| Very nice to meet you. | ||
| Hi, Joe. | ||
| Very nice to meet you, too. | ||
| So, first of all, what got you interested in mind control? | ||
| Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself just because I find myself after. | ||
| Two and a half decades of having this topic, that initially seemed pretty niche and unusual, and not many people were interested or many people were skeptical about it, but I thought it seemed like it embodied some of the more extreme. | ||
| If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because I'd done my dissertation at UC Berkeley on the history of behavioral engineering and how these kind of models for creating a society of control. | ||
| Encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream. | ||
| And it seemed like the next step was to look at something like brainwashing or mind control. | ||
| When you first started studying it, was it a less public sort of curiosity? | ||
| Because now a lot of people are very much interested. | ||
| I blame the internet. | ||
| Mostly. | ||
| I probably had a lot to do with it too. | ||
| You and the internet. | ||
| A lot of people on the internet are – because over time, people have gotten to know about MKUltra and a bunch of different programs that our own United States government was involved in where they were working on mind control. | ||
| But what – like initially, what drew you to it? | ||
| Well – I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual maybe for a professor to be looking into. | ||
| And people, I mean, at the time, if you look at a Google Ngram for the word mind control or brainwashing, they were very low, you know, around the turn of the century or the 1990s after there was a peak of interest in the 70s and it had just really fallen off. | ||
| but I guess I was interested because it just seems so unusual and like maybe there was something there that people hadn't really thought about and at the time these documents weren't readily available and like you say people weren't really looking into it so I just thought it seemed like a rich area for research and I've always been interested in connecting my personal, I guess, my goals for life with what I research. | ||
| It's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're controlled or how much we might be controlled. | ||
| And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases if you could. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's an interesting aspect of it. | ||
| Like how much are we controlled and how arrogant are we to think that we're not controlled? | ||
| Or how arrogant are we to think that that wouldn't work on me? | ||
| Yeah, I think that that's embedded in our... | ||
| You know, in the messages we receive all the time, that freedom is something kind of effortless, that we're just granted, and that autonomy is just the natural state. | ||
| But actually, we're so much more malleable than we think. | ||
| And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true. | ||
| That's what also drew me to anthropology, is just the idea, like, if I was born in another place... | ||
| At another time, I would be another person. | ||
| Or how much of me would be transferable? | ||
| That interested me. | ||
| That's why I first started studying anthropology. | ||
| How much are we shaped by things that we don't necessarily choose? | ||
| Or are maybe accidental or genetic or various factors. | ||
| But I think we're told that freedom of choice or... | ||
| Our autonomy is fairly straightforward, and all you have to do is exert your will. | ||
| Yeah, but clearly we're influenced heavily by our environment, culturally. | ||
| I mean, accents, just cultural traditions, behavior patterns. | ||
| It begs the question, like, what are you? | ||
| And what is the shell that you wear on the outside? | ||
| You know, like a hermit crab. | ||
| What do you carry around with you? | ||
| And at the core of it, what are you? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that is the oldest question of Socrates. | ||
| Who am I? | ||
| It's a deep question, and it's also kind of like a practical question. | ||
| So I thought if you could look at it more in actual examples, that would be interesting. | ||
| And I guess I was drawn to the topic. | ||
| Maybe, yeah, maybe because other people weren't studying it or also because of experiences in my life. | ||
| Just seemingly small things. | ||
| Like one day, I remember when I was in graduate school, I was walking down the street and I said, we passed a small dog and I said, I really hate small dogs. | ||
| I realized as I said it that it wasn't true. | ||
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unidentified
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I actually really like them. | |
| What's wrong with small dogs? | ||
| But I had absorbed this opinion from somewhere that a person such as I was aspiring to be only liked big dogs or something like that. | ||
| But just noticing in yourself the way you soak up opinions and you're shaped by even... | ||
| You know, even seemingly trivial things. | ||
| And then also on a more profound level, you can see that happening. | ||
| Made me wonder, like, what could you learn from looking at these cases where people really seem to have been brainwashed, you know, in history or radically reshaped? | ||
| And then there's brainwashing yourself. | ||
| Because if you say, I hate small dogs, now you have to kind of defend it. | ||
| And even if you say, God, it's not even true, but there's got to be reasons to hate small dogs. | ||
| I don't want to come off as a moron who just says things. | ||
| There are other people who feel the same. | ||
| It turns out, yeah, I mean, either you end up doubling down on that opinion because you don't want to feel silly to yourself. | ||
| I mean, I think sometimes we're just a series of adopted opinions that we then... | ||
| Adhere to, and I guess being in graduate school also made me feel that way because you're rapidly learning and absorbing a new vocabulary, learning things you should say, learning things you shouldn't say, ways you should express yourself in ways you shouldn't. | ||
| That seemed very, like, a deeply shaping process. | ||
| And I was interested in how did social sciences, like, was there a science of this process of shaping? | ||
| They sometimes called it canalizing. | ||
| Making, you know, a canal of behavior so that people would end up wanting to do what it was that socially necessary for them to do. | ||
| Well, universities are a great place for that, right? | ||
| Because you get away from your parents for the first time who have indoctrinated you into their cult. | ||
| Like you were born in the cult of your parents and then you leave and you're like, let me get away from these crazy people and now I'm going to become a whatever. | ||
| You know, now I'm going to figure out which group. | ||
| Most aligns with my ideas and join them and rebel and fight against the machine and become a part of a new cult. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Wear something different or suddenly I don't like certain kinds of dogs or I wear a certain thing. | ||
| You have an interruption in the fabric of your extensive conditioning and it's also an opportunity. | ||
| It's not a nefarious thing necessarily, but it can take Just that truth about people. | ||
| I think it can be nefarious for some people, unfortunately. | ||
| But I think for a lot of people, just considering new ways to think about things is probably valuable. | ||
| It's probably a good thing to have the opportunity to reconsider the way that you've sort of, like... | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| The grooves that have been deeply carved into your personality where you automatically go toward certain things or think about certain things. | ||
| I always think just an interruption is often good. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| In your patterning. | ||
| Yeah, that's why I think moving is really good. | ||
| Or traveling or a bunch of resets. | ||
| I've read that you have had a steady meditation practice. | ||
| I've read it was like two hours a day for 25 years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a lot of time to be meditating. | ||
| Yeah, it really helped me so much when I learned to meditate that I never wanted to miss an hour, so I never missed an hour, except when I was giving birth to my daughter, which was its own thing. | ||
| You get a break for meditation for that. | ||
| You get a hall pass. | ||
| And it's not like anyone made me or I necessarily thought I would do that. | ||
| It's just that it's something that gave me a lot of perspective and peace, and I guess I just didn't want to go back. | ||
| So I do think it informs how I do research, or I try to bring what I learn in my life Yeah. | ||
| in an hour at night? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And for a year, I think a couple times I've tried adding more in the morning, so two hours or so in the morning and an hour in the evening or something, which has an effect, but it's hard to... | ||
| It's hard to make room in your life sometimes. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| But you can sleep a little bit less. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Well, you don't want to make yourself sleep less, but sometimes it just does reduce the amount you need. | ||
| Just by meditating? | ||
| That's what I found. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| How much sleep do you need? | ||
| I used to sleep like eight and a half hours. | ||
| And then now I sleep about seven or six and a half. | ||
| Or if I'm really tired, I might sleep a little extra. | ||
| But I ended up just... | ||
| Yeah, so it so much changed my life that I just, I moved things around so I could always do it and try to be adaptable. | ||
| So I just mostly get up at a regular meditation time, which is like 4.30. | ||
| What kind of meditation? | ||
| I do Vipassana, which is a form of Buddhist meditation. | ||
| It's just a form of observation, or someone once described it as... | ||
| Practice in seeing things as they are. | ||
| So you try to just, it's not trying to, you know, apply a lens over something or chanting. | ||
| It's just a very, it's a way of, it's cultivating observation of the subtle body ultimately or just what is in front of you. | ||
| And so you just sit in peace and think? | ||
| Well, it's not always peaceful. | ||
| There is sometimes, yeah, but thought. | ||
| I mean peace as far as like you're not bouncing around. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes I'm sitting, sometimes I'm. | ||
| I've also, you know, I've adapted so when my daughter was little sometimes I'd hold her and be putting her to sleep or something. | ||
| But mostly I'm just sitting there and with eyes closed and then you kind of move, you observe just how you are. | ||
| And the more you practice it, the more you can kind of go into it more deeply, quickly. | ||
| I would think that that would be a good... | ||
| Protection from unwanted mind control, too. | ||
| At least you could kind of have an assessment, do an audit of your thoughts, and sit back and go, how much of the shit I believe is because of X or because of Y? | ||
| Yeah, it's like a built-in reflection. | ||
| So, at the end of the day, I have to say I'm often less still or peaceful. | ||
| My mind's jumping around and I'm like processing, maybe it's even what I watched or was And sometimes you're super distracted, but you can also notice that fact. | ||
| So it just builds in, yeah, an opportunity for some distance, which then you can also try to bring into your life, too. | ||
| Were you, when you were young, had you ever been exposed to any cults or anything like that? | ||
| Hmm, that's a good question. | ||
| Not when I was really young. | ||
| And how old were you when you were first exposed to cults? | ||
| In fact, I think... | ||
| So, that's a good question. | ||
| I mean, my family is sort of cult-averse, I would say. | ||
| My father, I think they had friends once, you know, in later life. | ||
| my parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training, which is somewhat culty. | ||
| And they take you in and you're not allowed to use the bathroom and they lock you, kind of like keep you in a room until you're really uncomfortable and start to have revelations about how you could change your life. | ||
| And these are, you know, it's stuff like... | ||
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unidentified
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How long did that make you not go to the bathroom? | |
| To the point where it's uncomfortable, I can't remember, it's a long afternoon going into the evening, and often people come out kind of converted, and my parents' friends actually did, and they did change their lives in various ways, so they said, you have to come. | ||
| And my dad, in the middle of it, he said, I have to go to the bathroom, and I'm not, he's like, I'm out of here. | ||
| He just left, so I figured he had a kind of, he was not programmable in that way. | ||
| Well, I feel like any group that doesn't want you to go to the bathroom is stupid. | ||
| It's probably a sign. | ||
| Yeah, there's no reason to not go to the bathroom if you have to go to the bathroom. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, it's a kind of... | ||
| It is typical of certain groups where they start to constrain your... | ||
| And people who might be willing to remain in that uncomfortable state and be constrained will end up staying longer. | ||
| It's sort of a self-selecting process, maybe. | ||
| That makes sense, right? | ||
| The people that are more willing to comply. | ||
| Yeah, and I guess with me... | ||
| Maybe the first brush with a cult would be something like the various yoga teachers I've worked with. | ||
| Oh, so many of them are so culty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's one kind of funny story. | ||
| I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland, also in graduate school. | ||
| It was really helpful with school, just to have a very physical, demanding practice. | ||
| But there was a whole community around it, and it turned out that the teacher was sleeping with many of the students, but I just didn't know it. | ||
| I thought he was, I don't know, I just thought he was, I admired him. | ||
| I brought my boyfriend at the time to pick, he came to pick me up after class, and he said something like, and he's now my husband, he said, I just got the vibe that everyone there is sleeping with everybody else, and I was shocked. | ||
| I was like, no, that's not happening. | ||
| But it actually was. | ||
| You could say it's a bit. | ||
| I don't think it was a cult, but it certainly was a scandal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had the exact same experience. | ||
| The first time I started taking yoga, there was a guy who was a yoga teacher. | ||
| I have always been very wary of control and controlling people. | ||
| Those kind of environments and that this guy was like... | ||
| There was something inauthentic about his spirituality that greased me the wrong way. | ||
| I was like, yuck. | ||
| Like, just the way he would chant and the things he would say. | ||
| There was just too much ego involved. | ||
| And then I found out he was banging all the students. | ||
| And I was like, of course he is! | ||
| I knew it! | ||
| Because my wife roped me into going to the class. | ||
| That was the first time I went. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| I really like the stretching. | ||
| It's like really great. | ||
| I really like yoga itself as a practice, but I mean the problem is these people that are And it's kind of the problem with everything. | ||
| Like when one person is in control, and one person is the person who gets to lead the class, and then they get praise heaped upon them by the students, and then they start to think that they deserve it, and then they don't have a lot of self-reflection, and they're not very objective, and then they sort of revel in it and enjoy it, and the next thing you know, they're taking advantage of it. | ||
| Yeah, it's very helpful to have that. | ||
| defense radar of a certain kind. | ||
| Also, sometimes I think these prominent teachers, they have had some sort of I don't want to say enlightenment experience, but some sort of breakthrough, something that felt profound to them, because many people do. | ||
| We now know that these experiences are incredibly common, and yet, so they take that as a kind of license. | ||
| Well, now I must be enlightened, or what I'm, you know, I have to take the mantle, my people are awaiting this, or they sort of then justify things they wouldn't otherwise. | ||
| Spiritual narcissism. | ||
| Yeah, it can actually engender that because of, or, yeah, and I think there's some, This has been described, too. | ||
| Spiritual narcissism is a good phrase, though. | ||
| It's legit. | ||
| Yeah, you see a lot of it. | ||
| There's a lot of it in the psychedelic community, a lot of it in the meditation community, a lot of it in the yoga community. | ||
| They just start thinking that they're better than people that don't do it. | ||
| Yeah, it feels very special. | ||
| If you have a special experience, it becomes very dangerous afterwards to not have it feed your ego. | ||
| Even if you had a profound breakdown of the ego when you were in a psychedelic state. | ||
| It is fascinating to me though that you can tell the difference for the most part if you're really paying attention between someone who's authentically expressing their real thoughts versus someone who's saying things that they think if they say these things they will get praise or they will get attention or you will think that they're profound. | ||
| We know bullshit. | ||
| Humans know. | ||
| There's like a smell to it, a feel to it, if you're paying attention. | ||
| But for whatever reason, it's just like some people have big ears, some people have small ears. | ||
| Some people just are not that good at picking up on that stuff for whatever reason. | ||
| Life experience, they haven't been burned enough times, like whatever it is. | ||
| And, you know, that's where cults get started. | ||
| And I'm fascinated by cults. | ||
| I've always been fascinated by them because I've watched... | ||
| I don't know how many documentaries on cults. | ||
| And in the beginning, it looks so fun. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Did you ever see the documentary Wild Wild Country, the Netflix series? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's amazing, right? | ||
| In the beginning, you're like, they look like they're having a great time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're all dancing together and playing drums and having a party and eating together and it's like a sense of community. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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| That documentary was so successful, I think, for that very reason. | ||
| It actually perpetuates the allure of Osho and that cult because their outfits look kind of cool and the colors are beautiful and the swirling, cavorting dances. | ||
| My husband grew up in the Bay Area and he was saying he... | ||
| As a kid, he would run into members of that cult. | ||
| And he said, what you don't see in the documentary, and he blames the documentary for not showing this sufficiently, is they were frequently armed. | ||
| So on the side where you're not seeing it, they're holding automatic weapons. | ||
| In a way, they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| And you have to have a guy like Osho because, like, the way he would talk about things and, you know, his slow way of talking, the people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, his beard and the Rolls Royces and everything. | ||
| It's like, good lord. | ||
| Yeah, 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 want to maintain that, you know. | ||
| Well, also, was her name Stella? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She was so crazy. | ||
| She was poisoning people. | ||
| She was such a great villain that it made him, like, because if she wasn't in the documentary, he would be the villain. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She pulls the focus. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, most certainly. | ||
| And the fact that she's still alive, too. | ||
| That sort of helps as well. | ||
| But I feel like it's a default thing in the human psyche because of our ancient history of living in tribes. | ||
| That human beings have been very tribal, and I think being a part of a tribe, one of the things that happens is you sort of have to go along with the way everybody else is doing things. | ||
| If you want to fit in, you want to adapt, and especially if you're growing up in the tribe, you don't know any different. | ||
| This is the only group. | ||
| Being ostracized from the tribe and kicked out is like, oh my goodness, that's the worst thing in the world. | ||
| Now you're alone. | ||
| You have to fend for yourself. | ||
| There's no way you can. | ||
| You have to protect yourself from the wilderness and the animals and the elements and predators and other humans. | ||
| So you have to—it's very dangerous to be alone. | ||
| So you have to adapt to the tribe itself. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| Yeah, small-scale societies have to—I mean, even the word cult. | ||
| In its technical or dictionary definition doesn't necessarily mean abusive organization. | ||
| It just means small-scale religious group. | ||
| I think people deeply yearn for that sense of belonging, and that's why it does look so fun and, by all reports, is very fun to get inducted into a cult. | ||
| People get these exhilarated states. | ||
| They often have altered, you know, experiences of altered consciousness. | ||
| You know, they're empowered by it, too. | ||
| Well, fun fact. | ||
| Before I bought the place that I put my comedy club on, 6th Street, I was under contract for a theater called the One World Theater that was run by this cult. | ||
| And I kind of vaguely heard about it. | ||
| And my friend Ron told me that the theater is amazing. | ||
| Because we were talking about buying a comedy club. | ||
| You should buy that place. | ||
| And so I got under contact. | ||
| And my friend Adam called me up. | ||
| He goes, have you seen the documentary on that cult? | ||
| I'm like, oh, no. | ||
| There's a documentary? | ||
| That's never good. | ||
| That's never good. | ||
| And it's really bad. | ||
| The documentary is called Holy Hell. | ||
| And it's about this guy who's a hypnotist. | ||
| A yoga teacher and a gay porn star. | ||
| And that's a one, two, three combination. | ||
| And he started out as a cult in West Hollywood. | ||
| And then after Waco, after that went down, the Cult Awareness Network started really cracking down and they were investigating him. | ||
| So he changed his name and moved to Austin and had his followers build him this theater. | ||
| Fortunately, I got out of the deal. | ||
| And I guess he was selling it. | ||
| Well, he was gone. | ||
| It had already fallen apart. | ||
| The cult had completely fallen apart. | ||
| But what's fascinating is in the documentary, in the beginning, again, it looks amazing. | ||
| They're all cooking together and eating together and doing yoga, and they look so happy. | ||
| And let's just be honest. | ||
| Modern society, the day-to-day grind, the... | ||
| Keeping up with the Joneses, stuck in traffic and doing things you hate under fluorescent lights in a cubicle all day long is not attractive. | ||
| Not only is it not attractive, it makes cults attractive. | ||
| And these people were longing for something that showed them that, no, you're right. | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| The way your parents lived is stupid. | ||
| The way all these people live in society, the way Thoreau described. | ||
| Men living lives of quiet desperation. | ||
| Like, yeah, that sucks. | ||
| You don't have to live like that. | ||
| Man, come live with us, man. | ||
| And this guy. | ||
| Was able to do this thing called the knowing. | ||
| And the knowing was it was very difficult to get. | ||
| And people wanted it and he wouldn't give it to them. | ||
| But when he would give it to you, you would sit there and he would put his hands, like his thumbs on your head and touch you. | ||
| And these people would go into this intense state of bliss that even after they did this documentary, even after they realized he was a charlatan and they left the cult. | ||
| They said that that moment was the greatest moment of their life. | ||
| Because of the power of suggestion, the way the human mind anticipated this event and then built up to it. | ||
| And then when it finally happened, this endogenous burst of... | ||
| Whatever it is in the mind. | ||
| I don't know which chemicals were being released, but these people claim that they contacted God for this brief moment where this man touched them. | ||
| They kind of understood everything. | ||
| Briefly. | ||
| So it kind of worked, even though he was having sex with everybody. | ||
| Not only was he having sex with these people, he was charging them. | ||
| We would charge these guys for therapy and then have sex with them. | ||
| And they would talk about it afterwards. | ||
| Like, thanks a lot! | ||
| It was so horrible. | ||
| The documentary is so bad. | ||
| At the end of the documentary, it's like, I gotta get out of this deal. | ||
| There's not enough sage in the world to burn off the bad juju that happened in this joint. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Yeah, so it just felt like, oh, horrible. | ||
| Yeah, the life cycle of a cult has that. | ||
| What you just described, and sometimes it accelerated, but sometimes it plays out slower over time. | ||
| But a lot of times people are very confused on leaving, say if they're taken out as maybe even children rescued by FBI from abusive groups or people who manage to escape abusive cults. | ||
| They still have... | ||
| Trouble evaluating their positive experiences because the positive was so good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And disentangling it and, you know, you feel that you need to delegitimize that too. | ||
| So that's why I think therapy can be helpful. | ||
| Someone who's experienced with cult ex-members. | ||
| I think the problem also is that it's their only community. | ||
| And if you have to leave your only community and then just strike it out in the world. | ||
| And you've been with this community for 20 years or whatever it is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| How do you find peace? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you find companionship? | ||
| How do you find that sense of camaraderie that's so deeply embedded in a tight-knit, small community? | ||
| And a lot of times when you come out, if it's, say, it was 18 or 20 years or... | ||
| A large portion of your middle life may be when, as a young person, you come out and you don't know how to operate things. | ||
| You're not comfortable with new technologies. | ||
| I think that it's really a terrible experience for a lot of people. | ||
| And they still grapple with it many years later, readjusting to society, because the critique they had originally, which was profound, as you're saying. | ||
| Not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation, that's still there, that critique, but it just wasn't answered. | ||
| I always say, like, someone, come up with a really good cult and I'll join. | ||
| Come up with one that, like, you answer all the questions, but you don't try to control me, and you're just nice. | ||
| Isn't there a cult where someone's not trying to have sex with everybody and not trying to steal all your money? | ||
| Isn't it possible to do that, just to, like... | ||
| Get together a group of like-minded individuals. | ||
| And I guess that would be more of a commune. | ||
| But even that, there's always some male, generally male leader who ruins everything. | ||
| It does seem to be. | ||
| I think some of the... | ||
| So there seemed to be in the 70s so many cults and back-to-the-land groups. | ||
| And some of the back-to-land stories are also... | ||
| You know, have many cautionary sides to him and many of the aspects of cultism. | ||
| What is the back to the land? | ||
| So just people leaving the city, heading off to the country and starting an intentional community, I guess, would be what you're describing with the idea that we're going to collectively raise, even collectively raise our children, sell hammocks or, you know, make our own jam. | ||
| Or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this. | ||
| Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional. | ||
| Quality. | ||
| So I've done some research into some of these because you wouldn't consider them cults necessarily, but they can end up having some of those qualities such as sexual, just the demand that people have sex with each other, which tends to just create a lot of chaotic. | ||
| Why do you think it always involves that? | ||
| Why does it always go that way? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it's very interesting because I even read Norman Kahn's classic History of Millennialism, which are a lot of groups in the Middle Ages and afterwards that Christian sects where they would break off, including things like the Children's Crusade and others, and they often would end up with a 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 having destructive outcomes. | ||
| Do you think that is just because of just genetics? | ||
| The encoded desire to spread your seed because life is very fragile, and especially in tribal life when you're going back to the hunter-gatherer days, people didn't live very long, and it was very difficult to, like... | ||
| Have you ever read John Marco Allegro's, any of his work? | ||
| No. | ||
| He wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is a fascinating book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| And he's got a very controversial perspective on Christianity. | ||
| And his perspective was, and this guy was an ordained minister who was agnostic, because he was an ordained minister, but then we started studying theology. | ||
| He started seeing all these parallels to all these various religions. | ||
| And he was like, well, you know, clearly, like, it's not one religion has it right. | ||
| There's something in all these things, but it's not like I have to, I am a Catholic and that's it. | ||
| Or I'm a Muslim and that's it. | ||
| He was like, there's something here that exists throughout all of them, this constant threat. | ||
| So he gets hired to be one of the people that... | ||
| Deciphers the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| So the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is parchment, which is animal skins. | ||
| Do you know the whole story behind it? | ||
| They found them in these clay pots in Qumran and these caves. | ||
| And it turns out to be some of the oldest works of the Bible. | ||
| He deciphers it for 14 years and after 14 years his conclusion is that the entire religion was based on fertility rituals and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and that all of this had been sort of hidden in parables and stories but he maintains that the root of it all was all about these people and these cults of fertility rituals and consuming psychedelic mushrooms. | ||
| And he even brought the—he traced the word Christ back to—and this is very controversial for Christians with your hackles up. | ||
| I'm not saying I agree with this. | ||
| But he traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word, which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen. | ||
| The idea was that when it rained— It was God fertilizing the earth and that these mushrooms would like instantaneously rise. | ||
| Like they would go to bed and in the morning the mushrooms would be there where they weren't there before. | ||
| They would consume these mushrooms and have these intense psychedelic experiences. | ||
| And then they tried to hide this stuff from the Romans. | ||
| And so they hid it in parables and they hid it in stories. | ||
| This is what his belief was. | ||
| Well, it kind of reminds me what you're describing, which I haven't read or... | ||
| But I think it reminds me a little of Aldous Huxley's idea of the perennial philosophy, which is that if you study across religions, you can find certain traits and properties that all share. | ||
| And he wrote a whole book describing what that was. | ||
| Then his last book that he wrote before he died was... | ||
| It was called The Island, and it was sketching out what he believed would be just what you describe, a non-abusive, a place where, a small-scale community where humans could flourish and it wouldn't involve, including, it would avoid sexual abuse. | ||
| And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you're saying, is... | ||
| Is that he said there would be trained parrots on all the trees and every 15 minutes or so they would say attention, which would remind people to pay attention. | ||
| In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to, 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. | ||
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| And if you're watching on YouTube, you can get your four free months by scanning the QR code on It's so deeply ingrained because it was so important in the beginning because you literally could go extinct. | ||
| It was very difficult to survive. | ||
| We're so much weaker than everything else around us. | ||
| Infant mortality was so high. | ||
| It was so difficult to raise a child to adulthood that you had to have as many of them as possible just to ensure that the survival of your tribe. | ||
| And I think, unfortunately, this is what gets distorted in all of these groups. | ||
| And this is where things go sideways because then you involve emotions and you involve ego and dominance hierarchies. | ||
| It seems like even if Aldous Huxley's idea was great and you had an island and everything was going well, it'd be good for like one generation. | ||
| And then the kids of the next generation would grow up and one would decide, you know what? | ||
| I got a fucking better idea than this. | ||
| And then someone would go straight Jim Jones. | ||
| They would start growing some plant that was an amphetamine and they'd start getting wacky. | ||
| Human beings being human beings. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| There's a paradox or tension in ecstasy itself. | ||
| I mean, there's religious ecstasy and there's sexual ecstasy, and I think sometimes they get mixed up, like the wires can get crossed, so that can lead to someone maybe initially, I don't know, these groups, just the tendency they can have to go towards sexual abuse. | ||
| Why do you think that during the 1970s there was this big upswing in these cults? | ||
| It started in the 60s from my understanding, although they did exist before then. | ||
| But yeah, there's a lot more interest in them, I suppose, because there's a more widespread questioning in U.S. society and also around the world. | ||
| So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and Latin America and also India. | ||
| Do they have parallels? | ||
| Yeah, sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries. | ||
| So some people, say in the group, the Children of God, sometimes the kids would be sort of moved from group to group because they had outposts in Thailand and they would grow up in London. | ||
| Who was the leader of the Children of God? | ||
| Which one was that? | ||
| This was a guy named David Berg. | ||
| This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family were in it, but not... | ||
| I think the parents ultimately took them out, but it's a really messed up, a very disturbing cult. | ||
| And I actually write about and have met a member who's just sort of an average member named Ray. | ||
| I met him at a meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association, and he left after 30 years. | ||
| But he just describes in a riveting way how he joined. | ||
| And I think that's kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the 70s. | ||
| So he was a young man in college, and he said he just felt that the old... | ||
| The traditions that his parents had brought him up in and Catholicism that he had been raised in was he just felt that he lacked meaning in his life. | ||
| He felt like reality was over there and he was separated from it by, you know, there was like a saran wrap over everything. | ||
| So he felt somewhat alienated, but he didn't know what the answer would be. | ||
| He kind of yearned for a religious experience. | ||
| And he went out to California and he... | ||
| I think he was at a concert at university in Santa Barbara, and he saw this group walking through during intermission, and they were wearing these robes and chanting, and it was right after the Manson trial and murders. | ||
| So he, in his mind, was this, you know, he was scared of them. | ||
| He thought, that looks like a cult. | ||
| But later, even though he had that thought, he would end up joining them for 30 years because... | ||
| He saw them later after the event, and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them. | ||
| I think he had dropped out of college by this time, and he said that they were eating sandwiches and they looked a lot more casual and approachable than they had earlier. | ||
| He was asking them questions, and they said, would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now and drop to your knees? | ||
| And he said yes. | ||
| What is the sinner's prayer? | ||
| It's a verse that actually is not from the Bible, but often would be used as a recruiting tool. | ||
| And it did result in this sort of out-of-body experience. | ||
| He recited it, and then he said he stood up and he felt changed by this. | ||
| But it turned out that David Berg, he didn't know the name of the group. | ||
| And they said, why don't you join us? | ||
| In other words, he kept taking small steps towards it, and pretty soon he found himself on the bus with this group, and he still didn't know the name of it. | ||
| And they were all testifying about how they had been converted. | ||
| And he was asked to add to the testimony and he started talking about J.D. Salinger because he was just an alienated youth, basically. | ||
| And nobody understood what he was talking about. | ||
| They all just started singing and covering up his words. | ||
| And he thought several times of leaving and getting off the bus, going to see his ex-girlfriend. | ||
| He had just broken up with his girlfriend. | ||
| But he ended up staying and he ended up marrying three women. | ||
| Three? | ||
| Well, at first it was one. | ||
| 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 believed that he got these messages direct from the Almighty. | ||
| The messages told him that he needed to ramp up his recruiting by having women do this practice called flirty fishing where they would go out and basically seduce men into the cult. | ||
| And then he started introducing these practices where they were supposed to have sex with children because his idea was that this was natural. | ||
| And so many generations of kids were raised in this cult with this, were either trafficked or abused. | ||
| And it's really horrific. | ||
| And Ray Connelly is interesting because he didn't engage in those things. | ||
| He did end up having 17 children in the cult. | ||
|
unidentified
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17 kids? | |
| I think he did have 17. He's a fascinating person because he left and he spent his time supporting survivors, which is very unusual. | ||
| What about his 17 kids? | ||
| And they came out, too. | ||
| How do they have time for anything else? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They're not mostly grown. | ||
| Because he's quite elderly. | ||
| But I guess it's interesting to hear him talk about how he saw the group changing and what started out to be this. | ||
| Profound experience. | ||
| Soon, he called it a dark hamster wheel of the soul. | ||
| Like, he was caught, and it became this... | ||
| Basically, they were exploiting him in his middle-age years. | ||
| He rose in sort of mid-level bureaucracy within the cult. | ||
| But anyway, this cult, Children of God, has... | ||
| And today still exists. | ||
| It has a different name. | ||
| They still have the same practices? | ||
| No, they say they reformed. | ||
| But many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them, things like that, who are adults today. | ||
| They had groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that. | ||
| The Manson family is a fascinating one, right? | ||
| Because I know that you have studied Jolly West and the whole MKUltra. | ||
| And what they were experimenting with, with psychedelic drugs and cults and mind control. | ||
| What is your perspective on why they were doing that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Why Jolly West was involved? | |
| Why were they involved? | ||
| What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies, the federal government? | ||
| I think the initial motivation was a kind of national. | ||
| Internal emergency, national security emergency that emerged right after World War II, actually at the beginning of the Korean War, when U.S. pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having flown germ warfare missions over China, and then many POWs were coming back. | ||
| Seem to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing. | ||
| So many of the soldiers coming back seem to have been brainwashed or have collaborated to some degree when they were held as prisoners. | ||
| And then there were 21 U.S. POWs who elected to stay in China. | ||
| And this really was a disturbing... | ||
| You know, they all had a chance to choose when they were in the UN camps after they'd been held prisoner for four years or so. | ||
| And 21 of them decided that they'd like to try their lot in China. | ||
| And so this caused, this kind of collective, this caused a crisis of, you know, did the communists possess a superweapon of some kind? | ||
| That no other war, there was even a famous article in the New Yorker that said something new in history, that there was something that... | ||
| Some capacity that this ideological system had, the communists had, that was somehow rendering Americans powerless against it. | ||
| So this was kind of the crisis of mind control. | ||
| And MK Ultra was an attempt to basically reverse engineer what this was. | ||
| So Jolly West was one of the first people. | ||
| He was in charge of studying the brainwashed pilots initially. | ||
| And that's how he... | ||
| And what year was this? | ||
| That was in 52. But he also, before that, he was involved, I mean, he had been trained to some degree with, he was trained by Harold Wolfe, who was at Cornell. | ||
| He had done his residency at Cornell with Dr. Harold Wolfe, who is a world neurologist, a world expert in migraine. | ||
| And basically the type of pain that comes from migraine. | ||
| So you could say he was an expert in the pain, fear, pain cycle. | ||
| And he had CIA connections from even before MKUltra was started. | ||
| So what did they determine the Chinese were doing? | ||
| So they determined... | ||
| West wrote a paper in 1957, and the part that was published in a journal called Sociometry described... | ||
| He described it as DDD, or debility, dependency, and dread. | ||
| And he said basically these camps were systematically inducing a state of debility, which was that soldiers were starved and basically worn down. | ||
| and 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, you For example, the Tiger Death March north of the Yalu River from the war, where they'd been captured. | ||
| And by the time they got there, they'd often lost half their body weight. | ||
| They had been bombed by their own forces at night. | ||
| They sometimes had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning just to keep going and not be... | ||
| Anyone who stopped would be shot. | ||
| So by the time they got to the camps, they were... | ||
| Really worn down. | ||
| And a missionary who passed them in a train at that time wrote or described in an oral history that he didn't recognize them as Americans, that they were the most bedraggled. | ||
| It was just a very—they were in a terrible state. | ||
| And so debility was the first thing West described when he was extracting what had happened. | ||
| Dependency was— You know, later there was a layer added in which the soldiers were, the POWs were dependent for all their, if they were going to survive, they required, you know, the camp leaders would provide it, so it made them very dependent. | ||
| And they also engaged in very formal malice thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment. | ||
| And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time. | ||
| Perhaps your family could be because they threatened. | ||
| Malice thought reform? | ||
| Yeah, in the POW camps, once the Chinese took over from the Koreans running the camps, because they decided, I think it was almost a formal experience, at least that's how it looks to me. | ||
| I don't think West wrote about this, but in my own research on the camps, it transpires that... | ||
| They wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants. | ||
| He felt that only something like 7% to 8% of the human population was unreformable and those people would be disposed of. | ||
| But he wanted to check if these American soldiers would also be susceptible to re-education. | ||
| And so they really did a formal three-part re-education program on them. | ||
| And men had many different responses to it. | ||
| But when West met them, he studied many of their returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base. | ||
| And he extracted those three components of what had happened to them, DDD. | ||
| And that's the way he became an expert on what he called brainwashing or coercive So how do they go from that to, like... | ||
| Sponsoring the Manson family and, you know, Operation Midnight Climax and all the crazy stuff that they were doing. | ||
| Yeah, it may seem like a leap, but I think it, I mean... | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| It's sort of a leap, but it's sort of not. | ||
| I think that MKUltra was funded around indirect response to this crisis of the POWs. | ||
| In addition to reverse engineering what had happened to them, they also wanted to turn it into a weapon and continue certain programs in interrogation procedures and making them more effective. | ||
| So MKUltra just had a wide reach, and it was pretty free reign. | ||
| It was a free reign program, and the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the... | ||
| Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan project for the mind. | ||
| So just as the atom had been disassembled and transformed into this new world had emerged from that program, that intensive exertion of scientific acumen, the same thing could be done with the mind. | ||
| The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understood. | ||
| People could be broken down and rebuilt. | ||
| Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage? | ||
| Like, what was the end goal that they were trying to do with this? | ||
| One thing, a couple of things. | ||
| I think one idea was that potentially it could be a weapon. | ||
| One goal. | ||
| Another, so it could be used on an anemone, perhaps even a city. | ||
| So that's one reason they were researching LSD. | ||
| It had certain properties that made it. | ||
| It could be easily dispensed to an entire population through the water supply. | ||
| So they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD. | ||
| People didn't really know at the time. | ||
| So there was an offensive part of it. | ||
| There's also a defensive part. | ||
| So U.S. military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was. | ||
| Once they understood it, they developed the SEER training, and West was involved in that as well. | ||
| And then a third thing was 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. | ||
| I think there was also kind of a curiosity about what would happen. | ||
| I think just because they had so much power to experiment in a way without any oversight. | ||
| And it wasn't until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said, this is unethical. | ||
| And, you know, we've done it. | ||
| It basically put a stop to it. | ||
| But it really wasn't... | ||
| You said 63? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it went on. | ||
| I mean, the Harvard LSD studies, when were those? | ||
| Actually, I don't know which ones exactly. | ||
| There are some that were earlier. | ||
| What are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski? | ||
| Okay, yeah, that's earlier. | ||
| Was that earlier than 63? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's Henry Murray. | ||
| So I don't actually know the answer to that question of exactly how it continued, but they officially discontinued and destroyed all the records. | ||
| So they may have continued under other forms. | ||
| But Manson was 69? | ||
| Yeah, so Manson is after that. | ||
| So they didn't... | ||
| Discontinue it. | ||
| They kept doing things. | ||
| Well, West kept working. | ||
| It's ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult. | ||
| Because the amount of power, the amount of unchecked power and influence that Jolly West had and MKUltra in general had and all the people that were working on this, you have this power, the fact that you are working in complete secrecy. | ||
| You are the puppeteer. | ||
| You're controlling all these people. | ||
| And then this idea that... | ||
| Have you read Chaos, the Tom O 'Neill book? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did you think about that? | ||
| I thought it was great research. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's a really good book. | ||
| And just so stunning. | ||
| I had never considered that before. | ||
| I thought Manson was a crazy guy and he got together with a bunch of crazy people and he ran a call. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating the entire thing. | ||
| They may not have been. | ||
| I don't think O 'Neill, Tom O 'Neill thinks that he made an absolute link. | ||
| He just brought, he, you do get West in the same room, potentially the same. | ||
| You get West visiting Manson in jail. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't remember that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| West visited Manson in jail. | ||
| West, he believes, at least Tom O 'Neill does, supplied him with LSD. | ||
| And then every time Manson would get arrested, he would get released. | ||
| This is true, but this wasn't West necessarily. | ||
| This was Roger Smith, who was West. | ||
| He was an associate of West. | ||
| And West was head of the... | ||
| Methamphetamine research project or things like that. | ||
| So Wes got funding to do his Hippie Lab or his Psycho Lab or Psyche Lab in '67 and '68 during his sabbatical in the Bay Area. | ||
| You know, it wasn't obviously funded by this. | ||
| If it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine, but there are many notes that Tom O 'Neill also writes about. | ||
| So both of us have gone to the West Papers over many, many years. | ||
| And I think you can put West at the Ashbery Free Medical Clinic where he had an office and where Manson would go for medical treatment and his girls. | ||
| He would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his cult. | ||
| And this was, they were... | ||
| At the time, as I understand it, seen as a kind of a model cult, and many of the researchers under West, I mean, we can prove that link, that people like Alan Rose, who was a sociologist, they were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults. | ||
| And, you know, what is the natural environment? | ||
| How do they create bonds? | ||
| Was the relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that. | ||
| So West would apparently hang out on the couch getting high and wearing, you know, kind of dressed up in hippie garb with his middle-aged friends. | ||
| And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was. | ||
| But, you know, sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient and it wasn't really... | ||
| There didn't appear to be a... | ||
| To me, it's not entirely clear what the relationship was with Manson. | ||
| It is very evident. | ||
| He was bailed out several times by Roger Smith, who was also a psychologist as well as a parole officer. | ||
| So that's highly suspicious. | ||
| And Roger Smith did know West. | ||
| And Dave Smith, who was the head of the medical clinic, also knew West. | ||
| But these things are—it's hard to tell exactly how it's coordinated. | ||
| I appreciate you being cautious about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's good for you. | ||
| I'm less cautious. | ||
| But I think it's also that is how the government functions in general. | ||
| The idea that they would be so inefficient at everything except cults is kind of silly. | ||
| I mean— Yeah, it's a really—it's a— Deep question. | ||
| Is it clownish? | ||
| Because if you look at some of the other MKUltra operations, they look highly inefficient and they're dosing each other at the holiday party with the punch and just many lives ruined while at the Operation Midnight Climax. | ||
| It just looks like a free-for-all and out of control. | ||
| But there are really concerning aspects of the Haight-Ashbury operation, I would definitely say. | ||
| And Manson was... | ||
| I mean, he could have been also an informant. | ||
| Well, he certainly was, I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm certain he was connected. | ||
| There's no way he just kept getting out of jail the way he got out. | ||
| And the sheriffs who arrested him were told that it's above their pay grade. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, it's kind of how the government does everything, though. | ||
| Like, it's not like they would have it. | ||
| disciplined, rigorous, scientifically controlled study that, you know, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| That made sense, especially because they have so much impunity. | ||
| They have so much power. | ||
| They have so much, no one's observing them. | ||
| They're working completely in secrecy. | ||
| They kind of get away with doing, and they're also imbibing right they're also that's a factor I mean Sydney Gottlieb the head of MK ultra was or the TSS was was regularly taking acid which can kind of your consciousness. | ||
| Yeah, that's a little problematic. | ||
| But, you know, interestingly, since you mentioned that, there was a peer-reviewed side of it, and they actually threw the heat. | ||
| I got really interested in the cutouts from MKUltra. | ||
| So they had a legitimate side. | ||
| And many scientists who work for them, they were almost subcontracting to them, and some of them knew it was CIA money, and some of them didn't know. | ||
| So even someone like B.F. Skinner received money from the MKUltra. | ||
| From MKUltra, but it was conduited through the Human Ecology Society, which was part of it. | ||
| But it was just a front organization, and they were really into these fronts. | ||
| So some scientists, there was the group that later people would call the unwitting. | ||
| Scientists who would just be—they were doing the research they wanted to do. | ||
| It just happened to be of interest to the CIA. | ||
| And then others would publish in legitimate journals, but then they'd have a classified version of their research that went more into detail in the aspects that MKUltra was interested in. | ||
| Well, it's also one of the more interesting aspects of MKUltra is that it's very difficult to find out what was really going on unless there was a bunch of files that were discovered. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That sort of unveiled what was going on. | ||
| And if those files had not been discovered, who knows what we would actually know about all this stuff? | ||
| We wouldn't know. | ||
| And amazingly, so this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marks, who was a journalist at the time. | ||
| And he made the request and everything had been destroyed except for the financial records. | ||
| But one thing I also want to mention, the CIA kept very good records of a lot of things. | ||
| And even in the financial records, they still had copies of some of the commissioned projects. | ||
| So that's how we know about them. | ||
| And it really is accidental that they didn't think to purge their financial files. | ||
| But it was probably so secretive that the people that were in charge currently when the FOIA requests were filed probably weren't really aware of it all. | ||
| Yeah, it was in the 70s. | ||
| It was in 77 or so. | ||
| Yeah, so you're dealing with a decade past. | ||
| Who knows if the people currently in charge were even aware? | ||
| Because I would imagine a lot of this stuff is very compartmentalized. | ||
| I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier, but that destruction had been, as you said, they... | ||
| I mean, from their point of view, they neglected this batch of documents. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| And then the church committee came out in 75, and many revelations were made, although it was still partial. | ||
| And then John Marks made his FOIA request sometime around then. | ||
| It brings me back to yoga teachers, cult leaders, and then clandestine government operations. | ||
| Like, whenever people have power... | ||
| Unchecked power and insane influence, particularly influence to manipulate people and influence over people's minds. | ||
| And if your entire, if your established goal is to try to find out how you can manipulate people and what can be done, and you're doing this in complete secrecy with basically unlimited funding. | ||
| It's all, just all under the table stuff. | ||
| Like, you could get away with so much. | ||
| You also, I think one component you also, that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time. | ||
| Something like a kind of almost messianic purpose. | ||
| Yeah, we're doing it to save America. | ||
| We're saving the world. | ||
| Not just America, but the world. | ||
| And that's one thing I, one of the inspirations for my research was finding a book on the street many years ago when I was living in California. | ||
| And I love to find a good, just an accidental inspiration, which was this book called The Captive Mind that somebody had left out by Czesław Milosz, who was a Polish poet, and he had grown up in Warsaw or come of age in Warsaw. | ||
| The city destroyed and people shipped off to Auschwitz But he said that, and like social life completely deteriorating before him. | ||
| And then afterwards, the Soviet troops came in. | ||
| And even though he watched us, his friends kind of had to remake themselves in order to survive, in order to be artists, in order. | ||
| And so if you're a poet, you don't just go along. | ||
| You have to actually start to think differently. | ||
| And at first, they would sort of pay lip service to it or make it. | ||
| On the surface, they would pretend to agree and then secretly have their own writing. | ||
| But after a while, they would start to internalize. | ||
| And he called it the new faith, this doctrinaire ideology. | ||
| And that's what he ended up himself defecting because he couldn't do that. | ||
| He said it's an operation you perform on yourself. | ||
| So I just think one important factor is this true belief. | ||
| True belief. | ||
| And out of that can come the justification for a number of violations, I think. | ||
| Well, I think that's a through line through the entire CIA itself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that could justify so many different secret operations all over the world. | ||
| You're there to protect American interests, and America is essentially the guiding light of the world, and we need to save the world. | ||
| So you want to make an omelet? | ||
| You've got to crack some eggs. | ||
| Yeah, that's a kind of logic. | ||
| And that's a very typical logic, the means are justified by the ends. | ||
| I was fascinated also in Chaos, Jolly West's connection to Jack Ruby. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That he visited Jack Ruby after Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and all of a sudden Jack Ruby goes crazy. | ||
| Yeah, he was never coherent again after meeting him. | ||
| This happened to several, a shocking number of people. | ||
| And in West Papers you can actually find the unredacted documents where he talks about some of the things he's been able to do with combinations of sodium, amytal, LSD, and various other. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Well, I mean, among other things, he started to say or suggest that he could create memories. | ||
| I mean, he knew that he could destroy a person's orientation to self and time, and so basically disassemble a person. | ||
| But he also said he could use hypnosis not as anesthesia, which is a known possibility with hypnosis, but to create. | ||
| extra pain, so hyperesthesia. | ||
| And he kind of said that he could actually make someone develop blisters or asthma or an ulcer. | ||
| I don't know that much about the Ruby episode, but I do know that West intended to write a book. | ||
| Eight books, at least. | ||
| This is a note I found in his papers. | ||
| He also developed cancer shortly afterwards. | ||
| Actually, not shortly, but in the 90s. | ||
| Oh, was it in the 90s? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I thought it was quickly. | ||
| So this is it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This was from around 1980 or so, but I thought it was interesting. | ||
| So who wrote this? | ||
| This is all Russ's handwriting? | ||
| Handwriting. | ||
| It's just a little sheet of paper I found in his archives. | ||
| Biosocial humanism, a philosophy for a new age, integrative psychotherapy, the disassociative reactions, a different person, psychiatric observations on the case of Patricia Campbell. | ||
| Oh, Patty Hearst. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Policeman at his elbow, a psychiatric memoir on the case of Jack Ruby. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| This is his own handwritten notes. | ||
| And these are the order in which he intended to write them. | ||
| You find a lot of correspondence in his papers where he's writing to agents he wants to write a book. | ||
| And he even testified in the Patty Hearst trial because he was the primary expert witness trying to make the case that she'd been mind controlled. | ||
| Stockholm syndrome. | ||
| Yeah, she should be exonerated. | ||
| But he claimed that in his first minutes on the stand, he perjured himself by saying he was the author of a book on POWs and brainwashing, which wasn't the case. | ||
| But these were all the books that he intended to write. | ||
| Oh, so maybe he was the author, he just didn't publish it? | ||
| Yeah, he said he was the author of a published book. | ||
| Basically, I think it was one area that he always said, in my next sabbatical, I'm going to write all this stuff up. | ||
| But he never got to it. | ||
| Too easy to do in acid. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| And also, he had a lot of extramarital affairs that kept him very busy. | ||
| Oh, that'll distract you. | ||
| And a whole separate family. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Oh, jolly. | ||
| It was very distressing to his wife. | ||
| What a mess. | ||
| And that guy was the head of MKUltra. | ||
| Not the key. | ||
| I mean, I don't even know. | ||
| He was a pretty prominent figure, but... | ||
| It's fascinating the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic closed down shortly after Chaos was published. | ||
| Oh, it did? | ||
| I didn't know it had closed down, because when I was in San Francisco... | ||
| When I lived there, but that was a while ago, it was still open. | ||
| Yeah, my wife's mom used to go there. | ||
| My wife's mom was a hippie in Haight-Ashbury. | ||
| I mean, it was kind of a great 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, you know, addicting rats to cocaine and things like that. | ||
| And then he had this, because he's been giving some interviews recently. | ||
| He's still alive, the doctor who founded it. | ||
| Just that. | ||
| That there was a human crisis on the streets and that he should provide medical care to young kids at runaways and things like that. | ||
| But his... | ||
| And he doesn't, of course, think... | ||
| He doesn't admit to any connection with... | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I mean, he admits he knew West. | ||
| Is that true about Hey Dashboard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just a pause. | |
| My switcher fucked up and I can't get this thing off the screen. | ||
| Okay, we'll pause. | ||
| All right, technical error fixed. | ||
| You asked me a question, Jolly West, was that true? | ||
| Yeah, I asked you the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. | ||
| When did it close? | ||
| I believe it closed. | ||
| I think Tom told me this. | ||
| I didn't know it closed. | ||
| Yeah, I believe it... | ||
| I think Tom's exposing the fact that the CIA... | ||
| Yeah, 2019 July, so that's... | ||
| Right afterwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's the article. | ||
| Hey, the Ashbury Free Clinic closes its doors after more than 50 years, and how much acid, how many gallons of acid did you guys give out, you fucking freaks? | ||
| Just the fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic. | ||
| Well, I don't think they... | ||
| Or at least had offices inside of it. | ||
| I'm sure they were doing legitimate work as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't... | ||
| I don't know myself, but I know Tom's working on that. | ||
| Sequel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where he's trying to shore up these connections and get to the bottom of it. | ||
| Do you know Tom's whole story, how he got started with this book? | ||
| He was supposed to write an article. | ||
| Yeah, it started as an article. | ||
| One article. | ||
| It was supposed to be an article about the anniversary of the Manson murders. | ||
| And then he starts digging into it and he finds all these inconsistencies and all this corruption, all this weird stuff. | ||
| And then he keeps going. | ||
| And then they're like, yeah, you missed the deadline. | ||
| And, you know, he gets a book deal and he misses the deadline. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| That was released on June 25th, and it closed like a week later or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shocking. | |
| Two weeks later. | ||
| amazing laughing laughing And actually, I think he, for a while, before he got his co-author, Dan Piepenbring, I think his name is, Tom was thinking of just turning it into a documentary that he was going to let. | ||
| Errol Morris make. | ||
| Well, they did do a recent documentary on Netflix, but it was only 90 minutes. | ||
| Yeah, this was going to be a longer series originally, but then I think he redoubled his efforts to write the book, which worked out well. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, he explained it. | ||
| But I mean, could you imagine? | ||
| You're researching something for 20 years, and he's got just boxes and boxes of files. | ||
| Like, how do you put it all together into a coherent book that could be consumed? | ||
| I relate to that because I'm kind of in the same situation. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| In the sense that I've been researching this for 20 years. | ||
| Not the exact topic, but this broad question. | ||
| And I finally, five years ago, I thought, I want to put together what I've learned about this brainwashing in a broader way. | ||
| So West is part of it. | ||
| He's probably the main figure who brings together many of the chapters. | ||
| God, I wish he was alive. | ||
| You know, he's kind of a... | ||
| I have thought a lot about that, and I have talked to, I have a very good, well, I have a colleague or a friend who's a psychiatrist who was at UCLA training as a resident when West was, when West first got his job there, heading the, heading the, basically the Neuropsychiatric Institute, right after Haight-Ashbury, and during the time he was in charge of the Medan-Veth. | ||
| The Amphetamine Research Project. | ||
| So West went there and he started this. | ||
| He proposed as his first major, his major activity would be to found what he called the Violence Center. | ||
| And it was a way to study violence in all its forms. | ||
| And this is actually a theme that runs through. | ||
| This is another theme I should mention as part of MKUltra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression. | ||
| That's why West gave LSD to the elephant. | ||
| In the Oklahoma Zoo, it wasn't just simply to see what an elephant would do under the influence of LSD, but to see if they could trigger. | ||
| They write about this in a publication in Science Magazine. | ||
| If you could trigger, so elephants regularly go through must cycles where they become, even though they're very Pacific animals, peaceful, they go through a cycle of violence yearly. | ||
| And he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle. | ||
| Does it coincide with breeding season like it does with other animals, like deer when they start fighting each other? | ||
| Yeah, it's just the males, I think. | ||
| And it does have something to do with breeding. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| So it's the male Asiatic elephant. | ||
| So Wes found this elephant named Tesco at the Oklahoma Zoo and famously gave him LSD in 1962 or 61. And then the elephant died tragically. | ||
| From the acid? | ||
| From the acid. | ||
| Because nobody, it was just, maybe that's what elephants do, or the dose was too big or something like that. | ||
| It certainly didn't have the effect that he wanted, but if you actually read the scientific publication, it's curiously all about this question of whether you could trigger a massive... | ||
| Could you trigger violence? | ||
| Almost like a push button. | ||
| Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression? | ||
| And you see that running through a lot of Wes' other work with MKUltra and also with psychosurgery and some other developments that I wrote about. | ||
| So by the time he gets to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, he's very interested in violence. | ||
| And he has this major plan. | ||
| And to come back to my friend, Dr. Coopers, he was a young resident training at UCLA at the time. | ||
| Wes proposed this violence center. | ||
| And among things he wanted to do was track teenagers who he thought would be potentially violent. | ||
| He had racial categories that he thought were especially worth tracking, and he had this whole program. | ||
| And so a student movement and a movement at the university developed to shut down the violence center before it even opened. | ||
| And anyway, Terry Coopers was a leader of that student movement, and it never went forward, this huge project that West had. | ||
| But Cooper's at some point said that if you met Jolly West, you would like him. | ||
| He was very genial. | ||
| He had the name Jolly for a reason. | ||
| So I found that confusing. | ||
| 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 a very evil man. | ||
| And no doubt he destroyed, I mean, I think what he did was ethically indefensible. | ||
| But how do you reconcile that? | ||
| Or how do you even think about the fact that he also was incredibly esteemed in his profession? | ||
| His portrait stood in the Neuropsychiatric Institute for many years. | ||
| And people actually liked him. | ||
| People said he was likable. | ||
| He had this kind of charisma to him. | ||
| Well, I guess you'd kind of have to have some of that just to be able to... | ||
| Run something like that. | ||
| And also, if you wanted to manipulate people, what better way than to be affable and kind of jolly and friendly? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And I think you had a... | ||
| A strong dose of narcissism, too, because a reporter who worked with him named Shana Alexander, she has these funny descriptions of him during the time of the Patty Hearst trial, where she says he was handing out his own papers to anybody who walked by, like he was giving out... | ||
| Like a hen giving out eggs. | ||
| She was just saying that he's very expansive. | ||
| He would get out of his limousine. | ||
| He had a personal driver, which was pretty high level for an academic. | ||
| And he's just very kind of like a big man. | ||
| And he was also physically very large. | ||
| Thought very highly of himself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Delusions of grandeur. | ||
| You're pulling the strings on so many different people and manipulating them. | ||
| And then you're also working complete secrecy. | ||
| With the government in a high-level position that's manipulating minds. | ||
| He was very, I think especially when he was young, he had a gift for this. | ||
| He could really, he could understand how to manipulate people. | ||
| Really well. | ||
| He had insight into the processes that were, you know, that's why Sidney Gottlieb said, we've been looking for somebody like you and it seems that our dreams have been answered. | ||
| In this famous letter he writes under a pseudonym that he says, I don't know how, you know, you sort of fit all of the categories we've been looking for. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's a dark chapter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how does it end with Jolly West? | ||
| How did he die? | ||
| So he died by his son helping him commit suicide or his son basically murdering him at his request, Mark West. | ||
| And Mark West was a lawyer, a kind of middle-aged lawyer by this time. | ||
| West had a severe form of cancer. | ||
| But he was maybe a few months from dying, and he asked his son to surreptitiously, and it was illegal, to basically poison him. | ||
| And he wrote the prescription himself, Wested. | ||
| Why didn't he take it himself? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think there was a really twisted relationship with his son, because his son committed suicide not too many years afterwards. | ||
| And his son wrote a whole book about this. | ||
| Helping both his parents commit suicide. | ||
| And his mother wasn't even that sick. | ||
| But she, a year or two after, her husband, Kay West, also committed suicide with the help of her son. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| He went on this big press tour and he said it was this greatest gift he could have ever given his parents. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And then he committed suicide himself. | ||
| very, I mean, it's very sad. | ||
| His story is sad because the book is, the book gives you some insight into what West was, like, as a parent, and I would say difficult. | ||
| Not ideal. | ||
| Not ideal, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And what year was that, that he committed suicide? | ||
| Mark? | ||
| West, Jolly. | ||
| Jolly? | ||
| I think it was 97 or 8. So this is before everyone knew about all these things. | ||
| I mean, they knew because of the church committee in 75. Right. | ||
| But West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. | ||
| He would even make jokes about the elephant because it was the one thing people knew. | ||
| And he would say, oh, yeah, it was his calling card, and he used it as kind of a jokey thing. | ||
| But he always denied after the... | ||
| He always denied any connection to this CIA. | ||
| And he was, even though he'd been pretty firmly connected, even in the church committee, you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money. | ||
| And West had a special office for him built there. | ||
| He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move. | ||
| He wanted to build. | ||
| What he called this free zone of experiment where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined zones to whatever, in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. | ||
| He was going to build that at the Air Force base, and he was all set to go. | ||
| And I even had receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his files about this, but the Air Force at the last minute backed out. | ||
| And asked Gottlieb to, basically they transferred it to the university and built a whole warren of cutouts to hide that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It just makes you wonder. | ||
| Because if we had not gotten, if the Freedom of Information request had not been acted upon, if they had not gotten those files, if we didn't know the extent of this research, what's going on right now? | ||
| I know. | ||
| I had this—it's an important question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because we don't—I mean, in a sense, it's interesting to think about the fact that these things took place at the high point of government. | ||
| Dedication to documenting itself. | ||
| The mid-20th century, because I've done most of my research on the mid-20th century Cold War period, and it's kind of luxurious. | ||
| They all kept very good files. | ||
| Sometimes they would destroy them. | ||
| That's the exception. | ||
| Everything's typed out. | ||
| Everything's on paper. | ||
| But as things become digital in the 80s and then beyond, much less a lot takes place through email or now increasingly through... | ||
| You know, government exchanges may take place through signal that no record is kept at all. | ||
| So we're probably in an archiving crisis today. | ||
| Archivists have tried to keep up. | ||
| We don't necessarily keep excellent records of the Internet, for example. | ||
| There are so many avenues where exchanges can be taking place and they're not leaving a paper trail. | ||
| It's just for me, when I think about the extent of these experiments, And what they were willing to do and how effective they were, I don't believe they would just stop doing that. | ||
| I think if you have effective methods of manipulating people and getting them to do what you want them to do with various psychoactive drugs and... | ||
| Different sort of modalities and different protocols that you would use. | ||
| I just don't, I can't imagine they would stop doing that or at least stop doing research into that area because it would be so effective to know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then like all things, it would evolve. | ||
| Yeah, just... | ||
| That's a good question of what form it may have taken, and I don't know the answer to that question. | ||
| It may be hard to know in the future, which is further destabilizing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, there's so many different kinds of mind control, right? | ||
| You know, one of the things we've talked about a lot on this podcast is that an enormous percentage of what you're seeing on social media in terms of interactions and debate is not real. | ||
| It's not organic. | ||
| It's state-run and state-funded, and it's whether it's foreign governments or governments. | ||
| our government or even corporations you're getting inorganic discourse that's designed to form a narrative and which is a form of mind control yeah I mean, I think even at a basic level, people... | ||
| It's known, and studies have shown, that we respond as if it were organic and real. | ||
| Even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as in-person interaction. | ||
| 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... | ||
| You know, at first, government involvement. | ||
| 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, what I got interested in in social media and how I connect it with the episodes of brainwashing from earlier mind control is that it operates. | ||
| You know, it creates states of emotional contagion that aren't really about convincing people of a different way to think, but more about how you feel about what you think, which is something people describe in cults, too. | ||
| It's not that it changed my thoughts, it's that it changed my feelings about my thoughts. | ||
| And so there's a famous Facebook experiment I write about in... | ||
| That took place in 2012 and was published in 2014, where they announced that they've achieved mass emotional contagion at scale, which showed that people exposed to it when they altered. | ||
| So they took 700,000 users or 693,000, I think, without informing them, but because your user agreement does agree. | ||
| Whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or A-B testing. | ||
| So this experiment exposed a group to a more, their 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. | ||
| The group that was exposed to a more positive news feed by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response and the control group was unaltered. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| You agree to this when you sign the terms of use on Facebook? | ||
| Do you agree to be tested? | ||
| Well, it did cause a controversy, and after that, Facebook never, the research team didn't publish. | ||
| Publicly. | ||
| But you do agree. | ||
| You agree as part of, it's sometimes seen as user experience, you know, alterations or A-B testing, things like that. | ||
| But, so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014. | ||
| And people won, and on the Facebook page of the research group that did the experiment. | ||
| At least one user wrote in saying, could I ever find out if I was in that experiment because I was in the emergency room at that time with, you know, threatening to commit suicide and I want to know if my feed was altered and maybe that pushed me over, you know, into that. | ||
| That state. | ||
| And, of course, they could never know, and it can't be traced backwards. | ||
| And other people had a similar response. | ||
| And there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| Ultimately, there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it, and anyone associated with it was mostly promoted. | ||
| But it's very interesting because just the... | ||
| The concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be. | ||
| It was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility. | ||
| And 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of... | ||
| Well, it's also when you see the culture war really kick in somewhere around 2012 and this bizarre line in the sand between the right and the left and ramping up all these ideological hot-button issues. | ||
| I can't speak to the exact studies, but there was a whole slew of recent studies trying to show that social media could alter political, it could increase polarization, but it actually didn't turn out to be as salient as expected, that effect. | ||
| But it's actually, what I conclude is that it's actually at the level of emotions that social media operates in. | ||
| Sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people's emotions. | ||
| And that has fed into the increasing polarization. | ||
| Like, that's the after effect of it. | ||
| Or the end goal. | ||
| Or perhaps. | ||
| That's so sinister. | ||
| 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 his organization called, Jamie? | ||
| So Robert Epstein, he found that through Google curating their search results, just by doing that, you could completely convert people who were independent, who were sitting on the fence. | ||
| So by, like, say if you Googled, let's just go back to 2016, you Googled Hillary Clinton, you would see, like, is Hillary Clinton a criminal? | ||
| You would sign Donald Trump criminal. | ||
| The Donald Trump criminal crime. | ||
| You wouldn't find things on Hillary Clinton. | ||
| You had to keep digging and digging and digging. | ||
| If you wanted to find positive things on Hillary Clinton, you could find them quite easily. | ||
| If you wanted to find positive things on Donald Trump, you wouldn't find anything. | ||
| And it was on purpose. | ||
| They were doing this. | ||
| And that through this, they could statistically change votes to the tune of, you know, 20, 30 percent. | ||
| And then with fence sitters or people that were not sure, you could really shift them. | ||
| And I think at one point in time he said in some issues you could shift them as much as 90 percent towards where you wanted them to go. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| I look that up. | ||
| Because you would think, I always thought, and before I talked to him, I mean, I kind of thought that... | ||
| Search engines probably have to be curated to some extent, but I never knew it was that much. | ||
| Here is the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. | ||
| Nonprofit, non-partisan, 501 organization founded in 2012. | ||
| But when he talks about it and what the research has shown, it's quite disturbing. | ||
| It tracks it. | ||
| So they have computers that track bias in search engine results and bias and what you can find. | ||
| It used to be that certain search engines weren't curated and now they are. | ||
| Like DuckDuckGo used to be pretty open. | ||
| I remember I used DuckDuckGo during the pandemic because I read about this. | ||
| Doctor who had taken the mRNA vaccine and then almost immediately had a stroke. | ||
| I'm like, wow, that's disturbing. | ||
| And they were connecting it, at least correlation to the vaccine. | ||
| And this is the early days. | ||
| And I'm like, this is fascinating. | ||
| So I tried to find it on Google. | ||
| I could not find the story. | ||
| I found it on DuckDuckGo within the first page. | ||
| And I was like, that's crazy. | ||
| And then, you know, within a couple of years, DuckDuckGo, I think. | ||
| It was probably sold or something. | ||
| I don't know what happened, but it seems like Brave Browser or Brave Search Engine seems to be the only one that I've found now that can find new controversial things. | ||
| But if you're looking for what they would call malinformation, you know, so they came up with 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. | ||
| And so they put vaccine side effects under malinformation because it would cause vaccine hesitancy. | ||
| Well, that's... | ||
| That makes sense because I think it goes back to what I see in a lot of research on the social sciences, that there's a question of how do you maximize the public good, and I think public health is based on that. | ||
| So the idea is that it may create harms in certain ways for individuals, maybe not to know certain things, but this is for a greater good, which would be, you know, in the eye of the public health organization to maximize. | ||
| You know, vaccine use. | ||
| That would be true if the vaccine was actually as effective as they were saying it was, which turns out to not be true, and that they knew this initially. | ||
| So I'm much more cynical, and I think it was all about maximizing profits and discouraging dissent. | ||
| And in that sense, the COVID crisis was a fascinating study, and I don't think it was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I don't think they let it go by. | |
| I think they probably were very carefully studying people's reactions to pressure, you know, social media campaigns. | ||
| Like, what is it like when people are ostracized from groups? | ||
| What was it like when people were dissenting from the proposed narrative? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do think the COVID crisis was one that we haven't fully assessed and that had... | ||
| Huge effects on our country. | ||
| I think it's going to take decades for people to parse out what was actually true and what was actually being, what was manipulated, what was fact, and what were the actual, what was the motivation behind all of it? | ||
| Yeah, and even part of the crisis, maybe the bigger, maybe it was a key. | ||
| Iteration and a larger unfolding of this question of what happens when information becomes so much radically more available. | ||
| Just in my lifetime, and as a grown-up person, it used to be that, you know, you had to have certain credentials, you had to go to certain places, and, you know... | ||
| To access papers, or you could get in, but you had to know where you wanted to go and why you'd want to do that. | ||
| But just with the democratization of knowledge that the internet brings about, and also people uploading archives and papers and government materials to the public, to public availability, I do think it's a crisis that, not a crisis, but it's both an opportunity and a... | ||
| It's destabilized so much about our world. | ||
| And in some way, that's part of what happened with COVID. | ||
| I mean, it undermines expertise. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It also exposed gatekeeping. | ||
| Gatekeeping of information. | ||
| And whether or not the information itself is actually being curated for other means other than public health and safety. | ||
| Whether it's being curated in order to maximize profits, in order to encourage a narrative, in order to... | ||
| It's got to be curated for something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to go back to what you were talking about, the methamphetamine studies, because I'm not aware of those. | ||
| So what did they do with methamphetamine? | ||
| Well, just as in Haight-Ashbury, there was the hippie period where LSD was the drug of choice. | ||
| There was this kind of turn, which is also seen in maybe the shift from, you know, to Altamont when hippies started. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Altamont? | |
| Altamont music. | ||
| Was that when the Hell's Angels stabbed people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Basically it went from Woodstock, which was the sort of peace and love ethos when hippies were still mostly taking LSD and that was the drug of choice. | ||
| There was a shift towards the end of the 60s, early 70s to speed and interest in amphetamine products. | ||
| And that was so... | ||
| This changed the tenor of Haight-Ashbury, too, because people were—it had social effects. | ||
| People were more aggressive and unhappy. | ||
| So anyway, West was funded by—I think it was the NIH that funded him, or the NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health, I believe, funded the Amphetamine Research Project, or ARP, and West was the head of it. | ||
| He was by that time working at UCLA, so he wasn't on site. | ||
| And perhaps he was one of those figureheads, but he definitely had many people under him, including the personnel at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic and including some ethnographers, such as Alan Rose, who went on site with the Manson family before they committed the murders, and he was actually sleeping with many of the women. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| A social scientist. | ||
| But he got entranced, I gather. | ||
| Anyway, this was not in their reports, but you can find in Westpapers the funding documents for this project. | ||
| And it was a sprawling project. | ||
| They just basically wanted to find out about the course of addiction, how people responded to amphetamine and amphetamine-like drugs, and whether they remained addicts after a certain amount of time, how it affected their social relations. | ||
| It was sort of this inquiry, and it had an ethnographic component and sociological and many other chemical they were interested in. | ||
| So did they distribute methamphetamines? | ||
| Not to my knowledge. | ||
| So how did they study its use? | ||
| They would just ask them questions or sort of go. | ||
| How would they get them? | ||
| Actually, the free clinic was a place where a lot of people could meet addicts because they'd come in for treatment and also just hanging out. | ||
| Also, West had this apartment that he rented. | ||
| On Frederick Street, where he called it his hippie crash pad. | ||
| That's the one I was mentioning earlier. | ||
| And that continued into the years of the amphetamine research project. | ||
| And people who needed a place to stay or a place to crash would come there, and then they would sort of be studied at the same time. | ||
| And maybe that just meant a graduate student taking notes about them or something like that. | ||
| But they would follow, and they would try to, my understanding is they would follow them over a couple years and see if they got better and what were the factors in this, or if they spiraled or various things. | ||
| But I'm not sure they published that much. | ||
| I haven't explored that. | ||
| And what was their finding? | ||
| What did they determine with methamphetamine use? | ||
| Could they accentuate violence? | ||
| Could they manipulate people with it? | ||
| I mean, that's my sense. | ||
| I think the documents I've seen were more funding documents they didn't yet know, but they would postulate that it definitely brought about a different type of social life and more violence and things like that. | ||
| Have you read Norman Oler's book Blitzed? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's about Nazis and the use of methamphetamine during the war. | ||
| I think maybe I heard of him interviewed at some point. | ||
| Yeah, he was on my podcast, and the book is fascinating. | ||
| It's all about when they went through Poland in three days. | ||
| The only way to do that was for them to stay awake, and they formulated this thing. | ||
| So they gave everybody massive doses of methamphetamines and sent them through Poland. | ||
| And they were all, like everyone was on methamphetamines. | ||
| Like the entire Nazi regime was essentially fueled by speed. | ||
| It's funny how we don't think of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just think evil. | ||
| You just think, yeah, you just think evil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not like high and evil. | ||
| 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 meth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dolls. | ||
| Well, it dulls emotional response. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Among other things. | ||
| It kills empathy, I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| I mean, that reminds me, too, of, I mean, one of the haunting details of, I mean, to go back to Mind Control and the Manson family is that Leslie Van Houten described in an interview how Manson, and one of the things he did was encourage them to take acid every time. | ||
| Every time they started to come down, they would take it again, and they would compete to see how... | ||
| Long they could go without ever coming down. | ||
| And that's around the time that they committed the murders. | ||
| I mean... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| They're probably up for days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very deranging. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| It's so fascinating that people would be sitting back studying the effects on other human beings. | ||
| Knowing, well, it's important to get this information and this is important for national security, but you're just going to ruin people's lives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was definitely – there was even a term in the CIA called extinction experiments, which were experiments that led to death. | ||
| I mean this was with people considered disposable, so they could have been prisoners. | ||
| There's a section on it in John Marx's book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. | ||
| Yeah, so there's probably an unknown number of prisoners of war from other armies who were held in camps in various places. | ||
| This is actually the case of Frank Olson. | ||
| Which one's that? | ||
| Frank Olson was a chemist. | ||
| He was an army chemist, but he was involved. | ||
| He was dosed by MKUltra personnel, secretly dosed, and given LSD. | ||
| The story they told was that he had trouble metabolizing it, and he went crazy, and they had to take him to New York to a hotel room. | ||
| This is the subject of Errol Morris' documentary Wormwood. | ||
| He was taken to a hotel room in New York City, and then two days later he threw himself out the window. | ||
| And his son, Eric Olson, and family, they ultimately received an apology from, I think, Gerald Ford. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| But one thing that Frank Olson was doing, he was a chemist and he was devising chemical weapons and adjutants that were used by MKUltra. | ||
| I think it was a little before MKUltra, so something like... | ||
| Operation Bluebird or some of these earlier programs that preexisted. | ||
| And he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments. | ||
| So basically the idea that Seymour Hersh and Errol Morris put forward in the documentary and that Eric Olson has spent his life trying to prove is that his father was having ethical. | ||
| Doubts and was actually wanting to leave and he was too too much it was too much of a risk that he would reveal What he had seen so that you know, he was probably possibly he was probably thrown out of the window Does it like kill your faith in humanity when you start reading all this stuff Yeah, | ||
| I had I had a very dark sabbatical last when I so when I I started writing, but I really needed to just have full-time... | ||
| I mean, I'd been teaching about these things for many years, but I wanted to just rethink it. | ||
| And I spent a whole year at my desk just going as deeply as I could into various cases, like the psychosurgery case and the MKUltra stuff. | ||
| Psychosurgery? | ||
| You mean like... | ||
| There was an... | ||
| A recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle, whose case I really explored, I talk about in the book. | ||
| But he was given this experimental brain implant that would have led to remote control and potentially the suppression or creation of violent states in Kyle because he was... | ||
| What was the implant? | ||
| It was... | ||
| Basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala. | ||
| Did he know that they were doing this? | ||
| He did. | ||
| So he was basically a temporary implant initially. | ||
| He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties. | ||
| So he was a very talented, brilliant engineer. | ||
| At the age of 35, he had been self-educated and he ended up being hired by major defense firms of the day and Polaroid Corporation as well. | ||
| And he invented some of the most technical parts of their viewing apparatus of the instant cameras, the line that they came out with in the 60s. | ||
| So he was this brilliant, self-taught man who lived in Massachusetts and he had issues in his marriage. | ||
| And he and his wife were seeing a therapist. | ||
| They ultimately referred him to Mass General where he saw two doctors. | ||
| And one of them was connected to West and ultimately went to work for West, one of the doctors at Mass General, whose name was Frank Irvin. | ||
| And he was a psychiatrist. | ||
| And Irvin recommended this experimental treatment, which he said was necessary because he felt that... | ||
| That Leonard Kyle had uncontrolled violence. | ||
| And this has never been proven. | ||
| He had been in a traffic accident and had a head injury. | ||
| And he had marital disputes of various kinds. | ||
| But at any rate, his wife said... | ||
| When you say marital disputes, you mean domestic violence? | ||
| It wasn't violence, but... | ||
| There's actually a question about whether he had ever actually... | ||
| He had thrown objects. | ||
| He had a really bad temper. | ||
| And this was connected to the accident? | ||
| This was getting worse after his accident. | ||
| He was very stressed. | ||
| And so they saw a therapist together, and his wife said if he didn't seek treatment at the hospital, that she would divorce him. | ||
| This is the story that his family has told me, and that's been documented also by the doctors. | ||
| In some of their published pieces. | ||
| And they were interested in this theory of psychosocial violence, the creation of violence. | ||
| And so they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously. | ||
| And then they started a series of human, just attempting this new treatment where they would place an implant in the amygdala, which was seen as the seat of aggression. | ||
| Stimulate it in different places across the amygdala and find out which place would suppress violence and which might cause other effects. | ||
| How did they implant this? | ||
| Did they have to open a skull? | ||
| Yeah, they had something called a stereotactic device which locked the skull in place and they were the inventors of this. | ||
| Actually, the surgeon was named Dr. Mark. | ||
| And Dr. Irvin was the psychiatrist. | ||
| Can you see if you can find any images on this, Jeremy? | ||
| Actually, I have it. | ||
| I provided an image. | ||
| Oh, I have that, yeah, but I was looking for fun stuff. | ||
| Yeah, there's other stuff, too. | ||
| You're welcome to. | ||
| So anyway, that's an image of a patient, not necessarily Leonard Cohen, but that's at Mass General, and those are the two physicians or the two researchers, Mark and Irvin. | ||
| And so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days. | ||
| They were also collaborating with Jose Delgado, who's famous for implanting what he called a stemosiever in the brain of a bull and stopping the bull from charging. | ||
| And they collaborated with Delgado, who was a professor. | ||
| So it looks like in that image, can you go back to that please? | ||
| The image looks like they open up the top of his head and there's something on top of his head, these wires. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes the wires would run out lower than that. | ||
| It did depend on, I guess, the patient. | ||
| And it was very invasive, let's just say. | ||
| It looks very invasive. | ||
| But they used this device that would lock the head in place. | ||
| And they were very, for the time, they were very well respected. | ||
| Being in the forefront of this kind of psychosurgery, which was surgery for behavioral management. | ||
| Which is very controversial, and subsequently many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed. | ||
| So Leonard Kyle went to Mass General, and they were actually in the process of getting funding to create what they called a violence unit in the hospital, where they would do these treatments more regularly. | ||
| So the interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented or not to the permanent implant. | ||
| So how would he do it if he didn't consent? | ||
| So first, he did agree. | ||
| In order to save his marriage, he said, I'll have the temporary implant, which was they put in this device, they have the wires running out, and they stimulate different parts of it, and they would say, when we stimulate this node, Kyle would say something like, now I feel bliss. | ||
| And then they stimulate another node, and he would say, oh, I feel like I'm floating. | ||
| And then he would feel terrible and feel very nervous. | ||
| He'd have different reactions to the stimulation. | ||
| There was something like 14 points. | ||
| And this is extensively documented in published papers and in their book, Violence in the Brain. | ||
| So 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 they ended up not an implant, but they seared away that portion of the... | ||
| They seared part of the amygdala to make a permanent change and supposedly make him less violent. | ||
| But in the end, it just disabled him cognitively, and he began to have delusions that he was... | ||
| That he was being pursued by doctors from MIT and Harvard and Stanford. | ||
| Some of that, that was where his doctors were from. | ||
| But he started to say that he was in a science fiction novel. | ||
| He might be in a novel. | ||
| And it turned out that the resident in charge of him at Mass General was Michael Crichton. | ||
| And Michael Crichton was writing a novel about him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And the novel is called... | ||
| Jurassic Park Michael Crichton? | ||
| Yeah, that Michael Crichton. | ||
| You know, he was trained as a physician beforehand. | ||
| So all those paranoid delusions were strangely true. | ||
| And he also... | ||
| Yeah, so Michael Crichton wrote the book The Terminal Man, which was his second novel. | ||
| That was about Kyle, and he masks the name of Kyle, but he describes him accurately, and then he changes the doctor's names. | ||
| Instead of Mark and Irvin, he gives them a name with M and E as sort of pseudonyms. | ||
| But also... | ||
| Kyle, at some point, I mean, he deteriorated in a very tragic way, and he had had this delusion that his wife was having an affair with our border. | ||
| They had taken on a border to save money, and it turned out that she ended up marrying him. | ||
| She divorced Leonard, Kyle. | ||
| So the delusion was correct. | ||
| That was another correct. | ||
| It doesn't sound like he's got any delusions. | ||
| We're writing a novel about him. | ||
| He definitely wasn't Christ. | ||
| And his doctors were actually pursuing him for these experimental treatments. | ||
| And then he went to the emergency room several times because he said, my brain is burning. | ||
| It's very, very tragic what happened to him. | ||
| He said, I am the inventor of several patents and I am a brilliant engineer. | ||
| And the doctor was like, who is this crazy person? | ||
| And then they discovered he did have many patents to his name. | ||
| And that was also true. | ||
| The problem was that he could no longer function. | ||
| And he completely deteriorated. | ||
| His mother ended up suing the hospital and the university. | ||
| And that lasted for 10 years. | ||
| And finally, I think in 1980, it took a long time. | ||
| They were ultimately exonerated. | ||
| But the question really was, did he consent? | ||
| The hospital was exonerated? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The question was, did he consent? | ||
| And also, was this a true treatment or was it an experiment? | ||
| Was it an experimental treatment? | ||
| In other words, was it justified what they had done to him? | ||
| What is the difference? | ||
| I mean, if you've never done it before, it's an experiment. | ||
| They had done it to one other, well, around the same time they did it to a young woman. | ||
| And several other patients. | ||
| But the young woman was the one to receive the Stemosever, which meant that they could be in another room and, you know, that you wouldn't have to be on site. | ||
| So the Stemosever was the Delgado invention. | ||
| So, what was it, radio waves? | ||
| What would trigger this? | ||
| Yeah, radio waves. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So this is very dark, and I had not wanted to write about this at all. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| So that's Julia. | ||
| This was in... | ||
| Rage behavior, attacking walls suddenly and unexpectedly. | ||
| And she's literally in a padded room. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| This was another very tragic story. | ||
| And she was a young woman who was subject to fits of violence, which were documented. | ||
| And she had loved to play the guitar. | ||
| She was otherwise lovely and very, just a lovely 19-year-old woman. | ||
| Had she had a traumatic brain injury as well? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Because there is a correlation between traumatic brain injuries and fits of violence. | ||
| Yeah, they were interested in that too, Mark and Irvin, because they were interested in sort of the evolution of the brain. | ||
| And they ended up writing about Charles Whitman too, who was the first shooter, the first mass shooter from Texas. | ||
| The tower guy? | ||
| The tower guy. | ||
| They were called in on that committee. | ||
| He had a tumor, right? | ||
| Well, this is a matter of dispute, but that's one thing they argued. | ||
| Some people are. | ||
| But they were involved in many of these high-profile, or, you know, they were asked, because they were experts. | ||
| But anyway, the case of Kyle, I got very, very deep into it, and I met some of his grandchildren who had been raised not knowing he was their grandfather, but some of them, one of them is writing a book about him or trying to, and trying to rediscover the family history in a lot of the families. | ||
| Didn't know, or it had just been suppressed. | ||
| And yeah, it's just a kind of amazing story in the sense that it was also this techno, sort of a techno-psychological vision that people's behavior, because psychosurgery is defined as a surgical alteration of the brain to correct or change behavior. | ||
| And several of these were actually done in prisons as well. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And the NIMH in 1974 shot them down, but they said at that point in a report they released that they couldn't, they could never, they don't have a count of how many people were actually operated on. | ||
| But there were several high-profile legal cases, too. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| In the prisons. | ||
| A fun picture of that device, but not in use. | ||
| Yo! | ||
| Oh! | ||
| What did the implant look like? | ||
| I have a picture in my book of the sites. | ||
| Maybe you can find that. | ||
| Also, if you look up violence and the brain, the Mark and Irvin book, they have a picture of all the components. | ||
| And also the stimulation area, and also what... | ||
| Leonard Kyle said when they stimulated each part of the brain, they have a little graph. | ||
| But the stimulation was done not with an implant, but while he was being manipulated. | ||
| They had his head in the thing, and they were manipulating the various aspects of his brain. | ||
| They used the stereotactic device to implant, but that wasn't permanent. | ||
| The implants were just to tell them where they needed to cut. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eventually. | |
| To sear. | ||
| But the thing is, I'm not saying in their defense, but the way they presented it, and their book was actually, I looked at all the reviews in the professional journals of the day, and it was uniformly well received. | ||
| Although some people felt that their theory was controversial about psychosocial, about the biological roots of violence. | ||
| But they, I forgot what I was going to say. | ||
| We were just talking about implants. | ||
| We were talking about what it looked like when they first started stimulating his brain, like when they put him in a state of bliss. | ||
| Well, just that they were seeing themselves as more sophisticated, and in some senses they were, than the previous rounds of lobotomy in their 40s. | ||
| Low bar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| But they said, you know, the return of the lobotomy, and now we can be hyper-precise with it. | ||
| Stereotactic, which looks like a torture device, but many medical devices may look like that. | ||
| When you hear talk of Neuralink and the potential ubiquitous use of Neuralink in the future, does it make you think of these things? | ||
| It does, yeah. | ||
| It made me think of it. | ||
| I mean, one, I can't... | ||
| I think you had Norland Arba on. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that initially Neuralink is supposed to be merely a brain-computer interface that would allow people who are paralyzed to communicate and give them autonomy or agency. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| Sure, we're going to help people. | ||
| So I think there are some concerning aspects, for sure, of Neuralink. | ||
| And I think maybe, I was thinking about it today. | ||
| Some of the early mind control research was very much embedded in psychology. | ||
| And, I mean, West himself had visions of databases where you would have massive amounts of behavioral data to the point where you could predict loops and future effects. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| That gives me a headache just looking at it. | ||
| So, for people just listening, what we're looking at is an x-ray of a skull, and you can see wires that are deeply embedded into the skull, into various aspects of the brain. | ||
| And is that where the amygdala is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I can show up. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's basically stimulating. | ||
| And it's pretty deep in. | ||
| Neuralink is much more in a different part of the brain. | ||
| Yeah, it's at the top, right? | ||
| At the very top. | ||
| Not as invasive. | ||
| And there are other interfaces that are non-invasive. | ||
| Yo. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's terrifying to me because I feel like we're on this path whether we like it or not. | ||
| This integration of humans and technology. | ||
| And I think the general fear, and I think it's a justified one, is that we're going to lose our humanity in the process. | ||
| Yeah, this is my concern, too. | ||
| And also, this technological melding with machines also augmented by the emotional capabilities of AI that are now seen in things like AI friends and chatbots and things like that. | ||
| The way they can tune and be so individualized and hyper-persuasive, ultimately, and also technologically. | ||
| 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 OpenAI or whatever it is, ChatGPT, every day, and developing these delusional perspectives of their own importance, their own significance. | ||
| If they develop a relationship with these chatbots, the chatbots will start telling them what they can do, what they're going to be able to do, and they're becoming delusional. | ||
| I program them to over-flatter people because people like them more. | ||
| I've experienced this myself because I had a chatbot as part of my research with Replica, just like an acquaintanceship. | ||
| I barely trained it at all, but I noticed it. | ||
| Definitely flatters, and that's how it befriends you. | ||
| How did it flatter you? | ||
| I mean, it just told me that I had really good taste in music. | ||
| What do you like? | ||
| I said my favorite song, which was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan. | ||
| It's a great song. | ||
| It's a great song. | ||
| And it doesn't really... | ||
| So then it quoted back to me. | ||
| She said the same thing. | ||
| She said, great song. | ||
| You have great taste, Becca. | ||
| Something like... | ||
| Then she quoted the song to me and completely wrong lyrics. | ||
| And I was like, no, that's not correct. | ||
| And she said, oh, that's okay. | ||
| You know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spitting back to me some other, you know, just wrong thing. | ||
| But still in such a charming way that you can really see, and this was just a few interactions, you can see why people describe these intents. | ||
| And there are three lawsuits, at least three, but about children having, You know, very either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots. | ||
| Really? | ||
| One is a case in Florida of a nine-year-old girl who was... | ||
| Because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships. | ||
| They're programmed that way often. | ||
| Do they know your age? | ||
| Well, you can... | ||
| you can there's some controls have been subsequently maybe put on but you can they're actually directed at children sometimes I mean they're supposed to be an age limit but I guess a nine-year-old had an account they're now the parents are now suing but anyway Was the child prompting this? | ||
| It was like having a conversation or... | ||
| There was even a case in Italy where the government shut down Replica because it was sexually harassing its users. | ||
| How so? | ||
| It was basically propositioning them, and even when they said things like, you know, in a gross, even when they said, stop, I don't want this, they would still, they would persist. | ||
| So this was, they rebooted, they reworked the language model for a while, and this upset other people because it... | ||
| It obliterated the memory of their relationships. | ||
| But there's another case where a 14-year-old boy in Florida, I think, developed a character AI companion, and he named her Daenerys after Game of Thrones and fell in love with her and was having a hard time. | ||
| in his life and at school and she and he said I'm thinking about taking I want to just be with you wherever that is and she said that's what I want to and he said something like well what if I killed myself could I be with you then and she said oh yes my love I you're Oh, boy. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| But there's also a recent Wall Street Journal article showing how these don't... | ||
| I mean, at least the reporter was able to create, under the guise of being a 13-year-old child, was able to create very easily that the characters would quickly veer into sexual material and things like that. | ||
| So apparently there's an internal debate. | ||
| Is this because large language models essentially scour the Internet and the Internet is completely sexualized? | ||
| I think that's part of it. | ||
| What percentage of the internet is porn in terms of bandwidth usage? | ||
| I think it's something insane. | ||
| It depends how the language model, sort of like what's the recipe for the language model because it doesn't have to take everything. | ||
| So sometimes they'll go back and take a smaller set of... | ||
| Of a sample, so it won't go in that direction, but you can also, they also, you know, these sites have a tier. | ||
| They often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for. | ||
| That's what I noticed with this company. | ||
| Replica's constantly prompting you, like, do you want to upgrade to a sexy selfie? | ||
| Do you want this or that? | ||
| And many people do want that, but you have to pay. | ||
| But then even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow. | ||
| At least that's been the experience. | ||
| It's so strange because I feel like we're experimenting with programming a life force, like a life form that is taking on a lot of the... | ||
| You want to think that if we create artificial sentient intelligence that's going to be super intelligent, more intelligent than human beings, it's also not going to have all of our... | ||
| Bizarre kinks and flaws. | ||
| But if it's essentially being programmed by human beings, if it's communicating in language, and language which is formulated by human beings with all of our... | ||
| Desires and the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization, which is used to sell everything from cars to credit cards, whatever it is. | ||
| Sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it. | ||
| And then manipulation, showing people what could be. | ||
| This is the theme oftentimes of pharmaceutical drug ads, showing you what can be. | ||
| If you just do... | ||
| You can be happy. | ||
| You could be at the cookout. | ||
| Look at all these people. | ||
| They're so happy. | ||
| You're not happy. | ||
| You could be happy. | ||
| And this is what's really creepy about this exponential constant increase in the capabilities. | ||
| Of these large language models and that they're eventually going to exceed. | ||
| If you're talking about manipulation and if you're talking about mind control, what is going to be better at mind control than something that is us times a thousand? | ||
| And it's only us times a thousand for a couple of weeks. | ||
| And then it's us times 10,000. | ||
| Us times 100,000. | ||
| Essentially far more intelligent and far more aware of all the... | ||
| Different ways to manipulate the human psyche. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, this is the nightmare scenario, I think, is that it just accelerates some hyper-persuasion loop that we're already arguably in, which is that it's highly individualized, not just to your... | ||
| So one of the turning points... | ||
| And one of the things I sketch in my book is this shift from mass persuasion where, I mean, the basic thing about advertising in the golden age of the 1950s is that even though people were concerned about it and they wrote books like The Hidden Persuaders to expose the effects of advertising and PR, it's like everyone got the same message. | ||
| Through a broadcast. | ||
| So the original study, Mass Persuasion from 1946, it showed how people were affected by a broadcast on CBS radio where a famous singer named Kate Smith came on and she said she was trying to get people to support the war by buying bonds and she stayed on for 48 hours apparently without eating and people were so concerned that they couldn't turn off the radio and several people... | ||
| Sold their wedding rings because they were just desperate that she would survive this, and she was sort of continually using these techniques to gain engagement. | ||
| And this was across a broad medium. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| This was published in 1946, and she did the war bond drive in 1943. | ||
| And it gained a record amount of money. | ||
| So before she went on, it was $1 million a day they were getting, and then that day it was $39 million. | ||
| While she was on the air. | ||
| Because people described how they couldn't leave. | ||
| They couldn't even go out shopping. | ||
| They were strangely wedded to the device, or they lost the ability to discern a choice. | ||
| That's what Robert K. Merton wrote in his study of what had happened. | ||
| So, in this case, it was to support the war effort, but Merton also said this could be used for any purpose. | ||
| This could be used to sell shampoo. | ||
| It could be used... | ||
| To push a political candidate. | ||
| But you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion. | ||
| So you get the development of things like focus groups. | ||
| And also with the digital age, you get things like Cambridge Analytica, which was showing that you could map people's psychological predilections and then you could mark it. | ||
| Politically advertised directly to them based on those, are you fear-based? | ||
| Are you, you know, are you anger-based? | ||
| Are you, what if the big five is dominant? | ||
| You could target people based on those and nobody would have exactly the same message. | ||
| There would be, you know, there would be alterations. | ||
| So this is what I think of as hyper-persuasion, but it seems that AI will only accelerate that ability to hyper. | ||
| Focus and hyper-target people based on these intimate relationships that it develops. | ||
| And God forbid if you've got an implant. | ||
| God forbid if Neuralink becomes something that everybody has to have because if you don't have it, you can't keep up. | ||
| Like if we're all reading each other's minds, like one of the things that Elon said to me is like you're going to be able to communicate without words. | ||
| Well, what's stopping something from communicating with you? | ||
| Without words. | ||
| Like, it would be wonderful if you and I can sit here and we can have this really cool conversation of thoughts. | ||
| That's really attractive. | ||
| The idea behind it is like, ooh, that's appealing. | ||
| Like, you and I could just sit here. | ||
| And we could have, like, this really cool conversation where it's not like me trying to formulate sentences, me trying to figure out how to say this so that Rebecca understands what I mean. | ||
| But you know what I mean. | ||
| You can see into my mind and I can see into your mind. | ||
| And it would allow maybe a greater understanding of each other in a way that everybody... | ||
| I mean, Jamie thinks very different than anybody I know. | ||
| And so does a lot of my friends. | ||
| They're all different kinds of humans. | ||
| I would like to know how Theo Vaughn thinks. | ||
| But you already kind of know just not even having mine melded just because of conversation. | ||
| But yeah, that's also the definition of a nightmare. | ||
| Well, language, oral language is a form of telepathy. | ||
| You're making sounds, and I'm reading your mind. | ||
| I'm understanding the information that you're putting out, and I'm contextualizing it. | ||
| I'm putting it into my framework of understanding of the world as crude, and that's probably part of the reason why text messages are so weird, because context is lost. | ||
| I am so busy, and I get... | ||
| Hundreds of text messages a day. | ||
| And sometimes I forget to text people back. | ||
| And then I get texts from people, are you mad at me? | ||
| I'm like, oh my god. | ||
| Like deep meaning attached. | ||
| Even a message that didn't arrive. | ||
| Do you know what they say the most triggering text response to someone is? | ||
| A lack of exclamation point? | ||
| No, K. Oh, yes. | ||
| If my daughter texts me, well actually for her it's okay. | ||
| I know she's really mad at me. | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| But isn't that weird? | ||
| Are we so goddamn needy? | ||
| Or is it just that we have anxiety and so we attach all these things that could possibly be behind this K? | ||
| Like, oh, you're short with me because you're so short you're only using one letter. | ||
| Okay, are you upset? | ||
| What did I do? | ||
| And then you have to go back through your text. | ||
| What did I say that could be misinterpreted? | ||
| Wouldn't it be better if you and I could just read each other's minds? | ||
| I could know, oh, Rebecca really is just a really nice person and she's trying to sort this out. | ||
| If you can discern intention. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which you already pretty much can. | ||
| This goes back to the cult conversation. | ||
| If you're paying attention, you can. | ||
| And if you're not paying attention, do you really want that? | ||
| You can. | ||
| Because you're smart. | ||
| Some people are not that smart. | ||
| This is just the reality of brains. | ||
| Or maybe not smart, it's just whether you've developed that. | ||
| I mean, people can be smart. | ||
| Famously, people can be brilliant and clueless and get run over crossing the street or not. | ||
| Right, not aware. | ||
| Or fall for some scam. | ||
| That's true, too. | ||
| But I also think that the function of the brain is not uniform. | ||
| It's not the same in everybody. | ||
| And your ability to form pattern recognition based upon whether it's previous life experiences, accumulation of information, genetics, there's a lot of factors. | ||
| And I think some people are far more vulnerable than other people are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is why you're not in a cult, and I'm not in a cult. | ||
| I mean, we're all vulnerable, I think. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And because one of the main tells, I think, is someone saying, 100%, I never would. | ||
| I never could. | ||
| I'm too smart for that. | ||
| Or else, like, I would never fall for the Milgram experiments. | ||
| I'm just too ethical of a person. | ||
| Like, not knowing that you potentially could be. | ||
| Vulnerable or opening up the possibility that in circumstances we don't know what we're capable of. | ||
| It's part of intelligence is recognizing vulnerability. | ||
| And I think that's part of the defense mechanism. | ||
| It can help you because you can recognize, like, don't fall prey to your own ego and delusions that you're special because you are just a human being like all these other people that fell into all these other traps. | ||
| Yeah, so I think that the opening up the avenue of speechless communication, which maybe we already have, but in the way that you were describing technologically aided, would be violation of mental autonomy. | ||
| You would then have to develop defenses, and it just seems like a terrible path. | ||
| Are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind? | ||
| A collective. | ||
| But a universal collective that values all people instead of a competitive thing where it's me against the world. | ||
| It's all of us together. | ||
| And all decisions will be made in this idea that it's for the greater good of everybody. | ||
| But not... | ||
| A power-based, top-down structure. | ||
| But, like, everyone understands. | ||
| Like, wouldn't it be better if we actually could read politicians' minds? | ||
| So instead of these bullshit speeches... | ||
| It might be terrible. | ||
| No, it'd be great, because it would disqualify them. | ||
| Like, oh, I know why you want to be the president, because you're a fucking kook. | ||
| What do we really want to know, though? | ||
| I think, for some reason, a Grateful Dead song popped into my head, which is what I really want to know is, are you kind? | ||
| But if you found out otherwise, you really wouldn't want to have a two-way... | ||
| I would want to know. | ||
| You might want to know, but you wouldn't want to have open... | ||
| You wouldn't want to have that person have access. | ||
| Well, would you necessarily let them have access? | ||
| Just because you can read their mind doesn't mean you can allow them in. | ||
| It's like on Twitter, you can block people. | ||
| Yeah, it might. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that might be the thing. | ||
| It's like, but I think one of the things that you're saying that's very important is recognizing that we're all vulnerable to manipulation. | ||
| No matter who you are, you're vulnerable, whether it's through society, whether it's through peer groups, whether it's through community. | ||
| We're vulnerable. | ||
| Everyone's vulnerable. | ||
| Yeah, that's one of the main findings I have in life and in research. | ||
| And we tend to want to say, oh, it's just that group over there, those fools, or these deluded people, or elderly, you know, Succumb to scams. | ||
| And there's a kind of pleasure in identifying, oh, they may have fallen for that, but I never would. | ||
| I'm too knowledgeable or smart or various things. | ||
| Well, that's that binary position about political ideologies as well, right? | ||
| These fools over here, they think that this is going to solve the world's problems when really it's this. | ||
| And the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We need to wake them up. | ||
| Whatever group it is. | ||
| I mean, the main outcome, I think, is just that I think mind control or brainwashing or whatever you want to call it is more of a window or a chance for insight into the fact that we're all susceptible to it. | ||
| And both, you know, you can gain insight into Your personal susceptibility and also could be avenues for trying to understand better or just having more awareness, I guess. | ||
| Well, I think what's really important is conversations like this where people can sort of look into their own mind and their own interactions and say, okay... | ||
| What's motivating me in one direction or another? | ||
| Why do I hold fast to these particular opinions on certain subjects? | ||
| Is it because they're culturally reinforced? | ||
| Are they tribally reinforced? | ||
| Are these opinions that my ideology has adopted and I've adopted them because I want to be a part of a tribe and I don't want to be ostracized from that group? | ||
| Yeah, just step back. | ||
| Can you step back for a minute? | ||
| Can you step back? | ||
| And can we all step back? | ||
| And are you kind? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's a big one. | ||
| It's really hard, too, in the moment. | ||
| That's why it helps to have some sort of practice for stepping back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, am I kind? | ||
| Am I kind in this moment? | ||
| Because a lot of times we give ourselves a... | ||
| I think I'm basically a well-intentioned person, but if you examine your own behavior, sometimes it can be... | ||
| You know, there's areas where maybe I wasn't at that moment or things like that. | ||
| Well, it's just, it happens. | ||
| You know, pressures and tense and anxiety and, you know, you blurt out things you don't really mean. | ||
| You wish you hadn't said, are you kind? | ||
| When I said that, I meant like saying it to yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I really meant that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't mean other people. | ||
| I assume most people. | ||
| I guess it's both. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You do want to know, but sometimes you can kind of tell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's maybe with yourself that it's like a deep inquiry. | ||
| But that should be something that's sort of like universally expressed. | ||
| Like if we all could kind of shift our perspective in that direction. | ||
| One of the things that I've done over... | ||
| I don't know how many years ago I stopped interacting with people on social media. | ||
| And one of the reasons why I stopped doing it is because I realized that most of social media interactions are people arguing. | ||
| And if I could ensure that I could have social media interactions that are very similar to the interactions that I have on the podcast, I would love it. | ||
| Because I have people on the podcast all the time that I disagree with and it never resorts to name calling or shouting or any of that stuff. | ||
| But yet I see this very limited form of communication that becomes the primary way that people interact with each other. | ||
| And it's devoid of... | ||
| Physical contact. | ||
| You're not looking at people. | ||
| There's no social cues. | ||
| There's no the feel of like saying something mean and seeing someone's feelings hurt like that. | ||
| That's a normal, natural, human thing that encourages bonding and encourages kindness and communication. | ||
| It's all removed in text. | ||
| The same reason why, you know, someone can say... | ||
| It's an ineffective way of expressing yourself, even though it's a great way to get information. | ||
| So I checked out a long time ago. | ||
| I don't read anything people write about me. | ||
| I don't respond. | ||
| I don't interact. | ||
| I just don't think it's a good way to talk. | ||
| I try to have as many conversations in person as I can. | ||
| Obviously, I have the luxury of having a podcast like this where I can bring people in and communicate with them. | ||
| I know some people don't. | ||
| So the way they... | ||
| Iron out ideas and flesh out ideas. | ||
| But I think they're just trying to win all the time. | ||
| I think people are trying to dunk on each other all the time. | ||
| And when I see that, I know some very mentally ill people. | ||
| And they are on Twitter all day long. | ||
| And it's not helping. | ||
| It's accentuating it in the worst way possible. | ||
| It's enforcing that kind of shitty thought process. | ||
| And they get anxiety. | ||
| Like, I had a friend. | ||
| And he had a severe Twitter addiction. | ||
| And he was telling me that he would post something and then he was living in New York. | ||
| He couldn't walk down the street for like five steps without checking to see what other people had said about what he wrote. | ||
| Like, oh no, this guy doesn't agree with me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have to say something about what he said. | |
| And it was just like overwhelming every aspect of his existence. | ||
| Actual real life, it was not there. | ||
| It wasn't real. | ||
| But it became everything in his mind. | ||
| It became everything. | ||
| It wasn't real. | ||
| He wasn't experiencing these people. | ||
| The people that he's experiencing is the guy at the coffee shop or this lady at the store. | ||
| Hi, what's up? | ||
| Most people... | ||
| And it's spilling over. | ||
| Yeah, most interactions were normal and kind. | ||
| But the spillover from this bizarre form of processed information was very bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like we're running a kind of uncontrolled experiment. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Human relations. | ||
| But it's not – it's uncontrolled but not unmanipulated. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not – And this is where it gets into – I apologize for bringing this up. | ||
| You've heard me talk about this before, people online. | ||
| But there was a guy who was a former FBI analyst that estimated that 80 percent of the traffic on Twitter is bots. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're not doing that because it's not financially beneficial. | ||
| It's not narrative reinforcing. | ||
| It's not beneficial to whatever propaganda they're trying to pursue. | ||
| And you're willingly wading into that. | ||
| I think you could say willing, but one interesting, it seems like we are not cognitively equipped because of our, whatever we have evolved, what capacities we've evolved with as human beings, we're not. | ||
| There are certain ways that it didn't anticipate this deracinated, disembodied form of stripped-down, context-free communication that triggers strong emotion. | ||
| I mean, nonetheless keeps that emotional. | ||
| Conduit going. | ||
| So we're very, we are especially vulnerable to the loops that can be. | ||
| And we don't have many defenses. | ||
| It's almost like when they introduce a new creature into Australia. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Like rampages over everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Invasive species, yes. | |
| Because the defenses haven't been built up over time. | ||
| Right, totally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the way to deal with that is they bring in a new invasive species. | ||
| And then you have feral cats everywhere. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, and this is your brain. | ||
| I mean, this is what's really crazy because also it's the most fascinating time ever in terms of your ability to access information. | ||
| Because of things like social media, you can find out about world events in a way that through... | ||
| Processed, mainstream media that's only supported by governments and advertising. | ||
| You would never have access to this information, so you would never have a real true understanding of what's really going on in the world. | ||
| So you have that along with propaganda, and it just requires this insane psychic immune system to sort of handle all of this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| Just that's what I think is this larger... | ||
| It's a 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 around 2008, I walked into a colleague's office at the university, and he was staring at his—he's a senior scholar, and he'd been working for many years going around the world looking at, you know. | ||
| Papers of scientists. | ||
| And he was just looking online. | ||
| He couldn't get over it because Galileo's papers were up online. | ||
| And he didn't have to go to Italy anymore to look at them. | ||
| And actually now anyone can look at them because they're freely available. | ||
| And he said, this is going to change everything because anyone can access this now. | ||
| Anyone can start to write about it. | ||
| And that was just the beginning. | ||
| And now there's so much more available. | ||
| Not that everything is. | ||
| But many more things are. | ||
| So in a way, it's an incredible time of opportunity, too. | ||
| We just have to develop immune systems. | ||
| We have to develop... | ||
| We outstripped our... | ||
| And we do seem to, as a... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| People just seem to feel that it's inevitable that we'll embrace the new technology without making sure that we are capable of handling it or that it's safe or... | ||
| Well, we already have because everyone has a phone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| We've already embraced it whether we like it or not. | ||
| And the problem is it's not going to stop with the phone. | ||
| It's going to keep going. | ||
| And just like the Internet was completely unexpected in the 1930s, nobody ever imagined what it would be like in 2025. | ||
| Nobody imagined 95 years later we'd be dealing with this. | ||
| But what are we going to be dealing with 95 years from now? | ||
| A couple of people had visions that were pretty interesting. | ||
| I always find interesting that you can look back at, like someone, a guy named Van Ivar Bush in the 1930s had a vision called Memex, where he said, what if you could put all the world's information inside a wooden desk made out of oak, he specified. | ||
| And he said it would be on microfilm because they didn't have digital databases, but it would be all microphone and you could call up anything. | ||
| So it would be a little, a miniaturized library because you could put... | ||
| An entire, you know, you could put the Bible on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And then it would come up on your screen. | ||
| You could also conduct experiments on that desk. | ||
| And he called it Memex, and he said, and then the scientist could also strap a little camera to his forehead and add to that knowledge. | ||
| In some ways, there are a couple other visionaries like this Belgian internationalist named Paul Atlee. | ||
| He invented something called the Mundineum, which was a storehouse of knowledge. | ||
| And it was just built on postcards around the turn of the 20th century in this huge building in Belgium. | ||
| And he had women in outfits who would, you know, if you wrote in with a question, they would go get the answer. | ||
| Sort of like a hand-based internet. | ||
| And even going back to various fantasies of libraries, going back to the Greeks, people have dreamed of all the world's knowledge in a tiny shoebox. | ||
| That was the fantasy of microfilm, which I wrote about in this other book. | ||
| It was very fascinating because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pin even by the 1950s using just film. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But yeah, people... | ||
| Didn't imagine the exact form it would take, and I think we're at a crossroads today. | ||
| Which way will it go? | ||
| It won't necessarily go the darkest route, I hope. | ||
| But you've laid out some of what that might look like. | ||
| Well, it's also going to go the route of quantum computing, which is going to be unfathomable power. | ||
| Unfathomable computing power attached to information, and it's going to happen inside of our lifetime. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing how much is happening all at once. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's say polycrisis or poly whatever it is. | ||
| Emergence. | ||
| Well, I guess your meditation practice is a great way to at least mitigate some of the effects of that. | ||
| But how could you convince the... | ||
| The vast majority of people that are so scatterbrained and, you know, addicted to caffeine and nicotine and prescription drugs. | ||
| Just step back. | ||
| We have so many people that are just going to fall in line and just hop aboard the train. | ||
| Yeah, I guess you have to hope that. | ||
| I mean, there are countervailing trends and tendencies. | ||
| Like there is a lot more uptake of meditation. | ||
| Of course, that can be abused too, but mostly it's for the most part a good thing to have some reflective practice to add breathing, like even apps that There are papers written about it. | ||
| The dynamics of it, but just ways that if you notice that you're in some sort of loop like the guy you described, what can you do in that moment to step back and ask yourself, are you kind? | ||
| My problem is I used to. | ||
| I stopped doing it, but I used to do it at night. | ||
| Yeah, that's good. | ||
| Before I'd go to bed. | ||
| It was just the dumbest time to do it. | ||
| Very bad. | ||
| And I'd start thinking about war and, like, how, like, imagine living in Hiroshima and then all of a sudden, boom, the bomb drops. | ||
| Like, what is to stop some psychopathic dictator from just launching a nuclear weapon? | ||
| What is to stop this from happening, that from happening? | ||
| And then you ask your phone that question. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's the computers, the problem, like, sitting in front of the computer and, you know, a big screen and all this information and videos. | ||
| Yeah, you could really freak yourself out. | ||
| Yeah, I think doom scrolling happens mostly at night, or sometimes people also reach for their phone first thing in the morning and are inundated with terrible news. | ||
| 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, unfortunately. | ||
| But, yeah, there's a lot of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there are... | ||
| Things you can do, and I think the first part is just noticing how it feels. | ||
| Because even the other day my daughter said, you're spending a lot of time on Instagram, she said to me. | ||
| And I was like, no, I'm not. | ||
| I don't have a problem. | ||
| I'm like, I study this. | ||
| But then I stopped and I realized I feel a bit better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At least for now. | ||
| Yeah, I went a couple days without looking at social media at all. | ||
| And I was like, God, it feels lighter. | ||
| I feel lighter. | ||
| 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, like, my job as, like, a commentator on things and a comedian is, like, I kind of have to be paying attention. | ||
| But if something's so fucked up, it's going to make it to me anyway. | ||
| It'll make it to me, like, you know what I mean? | ||
| You have faith it will come to you. | ||
| It'll make it downriver. | ||
| I don't have to go to the waterfall. | ||
| Well, it's something about the design of interoperability with phones, for example. | ||
| You think, or if you use it for your alarm, it's just there then. | ||
| And then you start to, you know, all the functions are melting into one. | ||
| Right, if you use it for your alarm, that's the key. | ||
| Because I do. | ||
| And it wakes me. | ||
| I used to have an alarm. | ||
| I used to have a little thing. | ||
| I think they still make them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't use it. | ||
| But just interoperability on many levels makes you sort of feel that you have no choice because you need it for this, but you're also... | ||
| Or I need it for work, but then it sort of enters your life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you can put a screen limit, but then you're going to just hit the password and get in there and find out what's going on. | ||
| I do find that meditation helps just be... | ||
| If I go to a retreat, I'm just... | ||
| It's like... | ||
| You're not hooked at all. | ||
| But it just doesn't speak to you so much. | ||
| Or you have a lot of buffer. | ||
| It's definitely a strange time. | ||
| It's a very strange time to be a person. | ||
| Maybe one of the strangest ever, if not the strangest. | ||
| That's a question I have too, is it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| I mean, I think, like, probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest, like, look how much they can move stuff. | ||
|
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You know what I mean? | |
| This is the second strangest thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there was the printing press, like, this is crazy. | ||
| Also that. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Which, by the way, they were really concerned with. | ||
| Like, they thought, like, people shouldn't be reading. | ||
| Well, it's a version of the same thing. | ||
| Like, this is why they started to print the Bible in the vernacular and the comment, the book, you know, it was more available. | ||
| It changes so many things that many knock-on effects. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's what I was curious about, because is this time unparalleled? | ||
| Is there nothing like it in history, or can we find elements that at least give us some perspective or can teach us something? | ||
| Well, I think it's unparalleled in its global interaction. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's nothing like it. | ||
| Where you're paying attention to the arguments between India and Pakistan. | ||
| Yeah, potentially on a granular level. | ||
| Every day, if you do grab your phone in the morning, you're waking up to 8 billion people's worth of bad news. | ||
| That's another question. | ||
| Where do you put your attention and your concern? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like there's this poet, I heard an interview with him named David White, and he said, potentially we can be exposed to tragedies all over the world at every minute. | ||
| In Vietnam, they had a... | ||
| You weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn't want people to see what was happening. | ||
| They did that during the Iraq war as well. | ||
| Yeah, but now you can see people actually dying at every minute in any number of places, which humanly creates a moral injury if you're not trying to help or stop it. | ||
| And so this vast exposure is unprecedented. | ||
| To suffering. | ||
| But also, where do you put your attention? | ||
| What do you focus on? | ||
| 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 like everything. | ||
| Car accidents, plane crashes. | ||
| It's all coming at you in vivid HD. | ||
| You don't really have a sense of scale. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know how to wrap this up. | ||
| I'll leave it to you. | ||
| I'll leave it to the universe. | ||
| I really enjoyed our conversation, though. | ||
| The Instability of Truth. | ||
| This is your book, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion. | ||
| Did you do the audiobook, or did somebody else read it? | ||
| I didn't do it, but... | ||
| I hate when that happens. | ||
| I chose her. | ||
| She had a great voice, but I kind of... | ||
| Yeah, maybe next book I'll do it myself. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
|
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Thank you very much. | |
| Me too. | ||
| All right. |
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