In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Rebecca Horschig to talk about her research into mind control, and why it s important to know how much control we have over our own minds. Rebecca is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been researching mind control for over twenty-five years.
00:00:18.000So, first of all, what got you interested in mind control?
00:00:25.000Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself just because I find myself after.
00:00:31.000Two 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.
00:00:47.000If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by...
00:00:52.000What 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.
00:01:06.000Because 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.
00:01:20.000Encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream.
00:01:24.000And it seemed like the next step was to look at something like brainwashing or mind control.
00:01:29.000When you first started studying it, was it a less public sort of curiosity?
00:01:36.000Because now a lot of people are very much interested.
00:01:46.000A 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.
00:02:04.000But what – like initially, what drew you to it?
00:02:09.000Well – I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual maybe for a professor to be looking into.
00:02:18.000And 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.
00:02:34.000but 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.
00:03:05.000It's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're controlled or how much we might be controlled.
00:03:11.000And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases if you could.
00:03:16.000Yeah, I think that's an interesting aspect of it.
00:03:20.000Like how much are we controlled and how arrogant are we to think that we're not controlled?
00:03:25.000Or how arrogant are we to think that that wouldn't work on me?
00:03:29.000Yeah, I think that that's embedded in our...
00:03:33.000You 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.
00:03:44.000But actually, we're so much more malleable than we think.
00:03:48.000And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true.
00:03:53.000That's what also drew me to anthropology, is just the idea, like, if I was born in another place...
00:03:59.000At another time, I would be another person.
00:04:01.000Or how much of me would be transferable?
00:05:34.000Like 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.
00:05:45.000I realized as I said it that it wasn't true.
00:05:53.000But 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.
00:06:03.000But just noticing in yourself the way you soak up opinions and you're shaped by even...
00:06:09.000You know, even seemingly trivial things.
00:06:11.000And then also on a more profound level, you can see that happening.
00:06:16.000Made 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?
00:06:26.000And then there's brainwashing yourself.
00:06:29.000Because if you say, I hate small dogs, now you have to kind of defend it.
00:06:34.000And even if you say, God, it's not even true, but there's got to be reasons to hate small dogs.
00:06:39.000I don't want to come off as a moron who just says things.
00:06:43.000There are other people who feel the same.
00:06:45.000It turns out, yeah, I mean, either you end up doubling down on that opinion because you don't want to feel silly to yourself.
00:06:52.000I mean, I think sometimes we're just a series of adopted opinions that we then...
00:07:00.000Adhere 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.
00:07:13.000That seemed very, like, a deeply shaping process.
00:07:16.000And I was interested in how did social sciences, like, was there a science of this process of shaping?
00:07:25.000Making, 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.
00:07:34.000Well, universities are a great place for that, right?
00:07:37.000Because you get away from your parents for the first time who have indoctrinated you into their cult.
00:07:42.000Like 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.
00:07:51.000You know, now I'm going to figure out which group.
00:07:54.000Most aligns with my ideas and join them and rebel and fight against the machine and become a part of a new cult.
00:08:47.000The grooves that have been deeply carved into your personality where you automatically go toward certain things or think about certain things.
00:08:54.000I always think just an interruption is often good.
00:09:14.000That's a lot of time to be meditating.
00:09:17.000Yeah, 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.
00:09:30.000You get a break for meditation for that.
00:10:01.000And 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...
00:10:12.000It's hard to make room in your life sometimes.
00:11:31.000There is sometimes, yeah, but thought.
00:11:33.000I mean peace as far as like you're not bouncing around.
00:11:36.000Yeah, sometimes I'm sitting, sometimes I'm.
00:11:38.000I'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.
00:11:46.000But mostly I'm just sitting there and with eyes closed and then you kind of move, you observe just how you are.
00:11:56.000And the more you practice it, the more you can kind of go into it more deeply, quickly.
00:12:03.000I would think that that would be a good...
00:12:06.000Protection from unwanted mind control, too.
00:12:10.000At 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?
00:12:25.000Yeah, it's like a built-in reflection.
00:12:28.000So, at the end of the day, I have to say I'm often less still or peaceful.
00:12:33.000My 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.
00:12:47.000So it just builds in, yeah, an opportunity for some distance, which then you can also try to bring into your life, too.
00:12:55.000Were you, when you were young, had you ever been exposed to any cults or anything like that?
00:13:15.000I mean, my family is sort of cult-averse, I would say.
00:13:19.000My father, I think they had friends once, you know, in later life.
00:13:24.000my parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training, which is somewhat culty.
00:13:30.000And 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.
00:13:42.000And these are, you know, it's stuff like...
00:13:45.000How long did that make you not go to the bathroom?
00:13:48.000To 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.
00:14:01.000And 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.
00:14:08.000He just left, so I figured he had a kind of, he was not programmable in that way.
00:14:13.000Well, I feel like any group that doesn't want you to go to the bathroom is stupid.
00:15:00.000I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland, also in graduate school.
00:15:06.000It was really helpful with school, just to have a very physical, demanding practice.
00:15:14.000But 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.
00:15:20.000I thought he was, I don't know, I just thought he was, I admired him.
00:15:26.000I 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.
00:16:34.000I 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.
00:16:42.000Like 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.
00:17:11.000Also, 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.
00:17:24.000We now know that these experiences are incredibly common, and yet, so they take that as a kind of license.
00:17:30.000Well, 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.
00:18:05.000If you have a special experience, it becomes very dangerous afterwards to not have it feed your ego.
00:18:14.000Even if you had a profound breakdown of the ego when you were in a psychedelic state.
00:18:20.000It 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.
00:20:13.000That documentary was so successful, I think, for that very reason.
00:20:16.000It 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.
00:20:27.000My husband grew up in the Bay Area and he was saying he...
00:20:30.000As a kid, he would run into members of that cult.
00:20:32.000And 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.
00:20:39.000So on the side where you're not seeing it, they're holding automatic weapons.
00:20:45.000In a way, they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit.
00:21:22.000Easy 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.
00:21:53.000But I feel like it's a default thing in the human psyche because of our ancient history of living in tribes.
00:22:04.000That 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.
00:22:16.000If 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.
00:22:48.000Yeah, small-scale societies have to—I mean, even the word cult.
00:22:52.000In its technical or dictionary definition doesn't necessarily mean abusive organization.
00:22:58.000It just means small-scale religious group.
00:23:03.000I 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.
00:23:26.000Before 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.
00:24:54.000Modern society, the day-to-day grind, the...
00:24:59.000Keeping up with the Joneses, stuck in traffic and doing things you hate under fluorescent lights in a cubicle all day long is not attractive.
00:25:10.000Not only is it not attractive, it makes cults attractive.
00:25:13.000And these people were longing for something that showed them that, no, you're right.
00:25:38.000Was able to do this thing called the knowing.
00:25:41.000And the knowing was it was very difficult to get.
00:25:44.000And people wanted it and he wouldn't give it to them.
00:25:47.000But 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.
00:25:55.000And 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.
00:26:07.000They said that that moment was the greatest moment of their life.
00:26:11.000Because of the power of suggestion, the way the human mind anticipated this event and then built up to it.
00:26:18.000And then when it finally happened, this endogenous burst of...
00:26:25.000I 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.
00:27:03.000Yeah, so it just felt like, oh, horrible.
00:27:06.000Yeah, the life cycle of a cult has that.
00:27:09.000What you just described, and sometimes it accelerated, but sometimes it plays out slower over time.
00:27:15.000But 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.
00:28:09.000How do you find that sense of camaraderie that's so deeply embedded in a tight-knit, small community?
00:28:17.000And a lot of times when you come out, if it's, say, it was 18 or 20 years or...
00:28:23.000A 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.
00:28:33.000You're not comfortable with new technologies.
00:28:37.000I think that it's really a terrible experience for a lot of people.
00:28:41.000And they still grapple with it many years later, readjusting to society, because the critique they had originally, which was profound, as you're saying.
00:28:51.000Not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation, that's still there, that critique, but it just wasn't answered.
00:28:57.000I always say, like, someone, come up with a really good cult and I'll join.
00:29:02.000Come up with one that, like, you answer all the questions, but you don't try to control me, and you're just nice.
00:29:08.000Isn't there a cult where someone's not trying to have sex with everybody and not trying to steal all your money?
00:29:13.000Isn't it possible to do that, just to, like...
00:29:15.000Get together a group of like-minded individuals.
00:29:19.000And I guess that would be more of a commune.
00:29:21.000But even that, there's always some male, generally male leader who ruins everything.
00:29:43.000So 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.
00:29:59.000Or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this.
00:30:03.000Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional.
00:30:07.000So 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.
00:30:26.000Why do you think it always involves that?
00:30:31.000I 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.
00:30:54.000Even 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.
00:31:11.000Do you think that is just because of just genetics?
00:31:18.000The 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...
00:31:33.000Have you ever read John Marco Allegro's, any of his work?
00:31:38.000He wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is a fascinating book about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
00:31:45.000And he's got a very controversial perspective on Christianity.
00:31:49.000And 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.
00:31:58.000He started seeing all these parallels to all these various religions.
00:32:03.000And he was like, well, you know, clearly, like, it's not one religion has it right.
00:32:08.000There's something in all these things, but it's not like I have to, I am a Catholic and that's it.
00:32:30.000So the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is parchment, which is animal skins.
00:32:35.000Do you know the whole story behind it?
00:32:37.000They found them in these clay pots in Qumran and these caves.
00:32:43.000And it turns out to be some of the oldest works of the Bible.
00:32:48.000He 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.
00:33:17.000And he even brought the—he traced the word Christ back to—and this is very controversial for Christians with your hackles up.
00:34:01.000Well, it kind of reminds me what you're describing, which I haven't read or...
00:34:07.000But 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.
00:34:21.000And he wrote a whole book describing what that was.
00:34:24.000Then his last book that he wrote before he died was...
00:34:28.000It 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.
00:34:45.000And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you're saying, is...
00:34:52.000Is 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.
00:35:03.000In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to, you know, loops of conditioning and things like that.
00:35:10.000Because I think, yeah, as you're saying, fertility is a natural part of human life and often worshipped.
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00:36:27.000And 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.
00:36:54.000It 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.
00:37:03.000And I think, unfortunately, this is what gets distorted in all of these groups.
00:37:11.000And this is where things go sideways because then you involve emotions and you involve ego and dominance hierarchies.
00:37:21.000It 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.
00:37:31.000And then the kids of the next generation would grow up and one would decide, you know what?
00:37:34.000I got a fucking better idea than this.
00:37:37.000And then someone would go straight Jim Jones.
00:37:40.000They would start growing some plant that was an amphetamine and they'd start getting wacky.
00:37:51.000There's a paradox or tension in ecstasy itself.
00:37:55.000I 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.
00:38:10.000Why do you think that during the 1970s there was this big upswing in these cults?
00:38:18.000It started in the 60s from my understanding, although they did exist before then.
00:38:25.000But 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.
00:38:36.000So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and Latin America and also India.
00:38:47.000Yeah, sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries.
00:38:51.000So 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.
00:39:02.000Who was the leader of the Children of God?
00:39:06.000This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family were in it, but not...
00:39:13.000I think the parents ultimately took them out, but it's a really messed up, a very disturbing cult.
00:39:21.000And I actually write about and have met a member who's just sort of an average member named Ray.
00:39:29.000I met him at a meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association, and he left after 30 years.
00:39:34.000But he just describes in a riveting way how he joined.
00:39:38.000And I think that's kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the 70s.
00:39:42.000So he was a young man in college, and he said he just felt that the old...
00:39:49.000The 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.
00:39:56.000He felt like reality was over there and he was separated from it by, you know, there was like a saran wrap over everything.
00:40:05.000So he felt somewhat alienated, but he didn't know what the answer would be.
00:40:08.000He kind of yearned for a religious experience.
00:40:11.000And he went out to California and he...
00:40:15.000I 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.
00:40:27.000So he, in his mind, was this, you know, he was scared of them.
00:40:34.000But later, even though he had that thought, he would end up joining them for 30 years because...
00:40:40.000He saw them later after the event, and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them.
00:40:47.000I 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.
00:40:58.000He was asking them questions, and they said, would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now and drop to your knees?
00:41:34.000In 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.
00:41:42.000And they were all testifying about how they had been converted.
00:41:48.000And he was asked to add to the testimony and he started talking about J.D. Salinger because he was just an alienated youth, basically.
00:41:55.000And nobody understood what he was talking about.
00:41:57.000They all just started singing and covering up his words.
00:42:01.000And he thought several times of leaving and getting off the bus, going to see his ex-girlfriend.
00:42:05.000He had just broken up with his girlfriend.
00:42:07.000But he ended up staying and he ended up marrying three women.
00:42:14.000They had an arranged marriage and then it turned out the...
00:42:18.000This guy who ran the group, David Berg, he was a former furniture salesman.
00:42:22.000He then had some, you know, he believed that he got these messages direct from the Almighty.
00:42:31.000The 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.
00:42:43.000And then he started introducing these practices where they were supposed to have sex with children because his idea was that this was natural.
00:42:54.000And so many generations of kids were raised in this cult with this, were either trafficked or abused.
00:44:55.000What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies, the federal government?
00:45:02.000I think the initial motivation was a kind of national.
00:45:06.000Internal 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.
00:45:30.000Seem to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing.
00:45:37.000So many of the soldiers coming back seem to have been brainwashed or have collaborated to some degree when they were held as prisoners.
00:45:47.000And then there were 21 U.S. POWs who elected to stay in China.
00:47:00.000That 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.
00:47:12.000He had done his residency at Cornell with Dr. Harold Wolfe, who is a world neurologist, a world expert in migraine.
00:47:20.000And basically the type of pain that comes from migraine.
00:47:23.000So you could say he was an expert in the pain, fear, pain cycle.
00:47:27.000And he had CIA connections from even before MKUltra was started.
00:47:33.000So what did they determine the Chinese were doing?
00:47:38.000West wrote a paper in 1957, and the part that was published in a journal called Sociometry described...
00:47:46.000He described it as DDD, or debility, dependency, and dread.
00:47:52.000And he said basically these camps were systematically inducing a state of debility, which was that soldiers were starved and basically worn down.
00:48:05.000and they were deprived of medical care.
00:48:08.000They were, I mean, this is also in the historical record.
00:48:11.000Something 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.
00:48:24.000And by the time they got there, they'd often lost half their body weight.
00:48:27.000They had been bombed by their own forces at night.
00:48:31.000They sometimes had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning just to keep going and not be...
00:48:44.000And 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.
00:48:56.000It was just a very—they were in a terrible state.
00:49:00.000And so debility was the first thing West described when he was extracting what had happened.
00:49:09.000Dependency 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.
00:49:26.000And they also engaged in very formal malice thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment.
00:49:34.000And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time.
00:49:39.000Perhaps your family could be because they threatened.
00:49:43.000Yeah, 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.
00:49:57.000I don't think West wrote about this, but in my own research on the camps, it transpires that...
00:50:05.000They wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants.
00:50:12.000He felt that only something like 7% to 8% of the human population was unreformable and those people would be disposed of.
00:50:21.000But he wanted to check if these American soldiers would also be susceptible to re-education.
00:50:30.000And so they really did a formal three-part re-education program on them.
00:50:34.000And men had many different responses to it.
00:50:39.000But when West met them, he studied many of their returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base.
00:50:46.000And he extracted those three components of what had happened to them, DDD.
00:50:52.000And that's the way he became an expert on what he called brainwashing or coercive So how do they go from that to, like...
00:51:02.000Sponsoring the Manson family and, you know, Operation Midnight Climax and all the crazy stuff that they were doing.
00:51:09.000Yeah, it may seem like a leap, but I think it, I mean...
00:51:15.000It's sort of a leap, but it's sort of not.
00:51:16.000I think that MKUltra was funded around indirect response to this crisis of the POWs.
00:51:28.000In 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.
00:51:39.000So MKUltra just had a wide reach, and it was pretty free reign.
00:51:44.000It was a free reign program, and the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the...
00:51:53.000Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan project for the mind.
00:51:57.000So 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.
00:52:13.000The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understood.
00:52:19.000People could be broken down and rebuilt.
00:52:22.000Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage?
00:52:28.000Like, what was the end goal that they were trying to do with this?
00:53:01.000So U.S. military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was.
00:53:07.000Once they understood it, they developed the SEER training, and West was involved in that as well.
00:53:14.000And 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.
00:53:31.000I think there was also kind of a curiosity about what would happen.
00:53:35.000I think just because they had so much power to experiment in a way without any oversight.
00:53:43.000And it wasn't until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said, this is unethical.
00:54:17.000So I don't actually know the answer to that question of exactly how it continued, but they officially discontinued and destroyed all the records.
00:54:26.000So they may have continued under other forms.
00:54:39.000It's ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult.
00:54:43.000Because 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.
00:56:11.000Methamphetamine research project or things like that.
00:56:15.000So 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.
00:56:28.000You know, it wasn't obviously funded by this.
00:56:30.000If it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine, but there are many notes that Tom O 'Neill also writes about.
00:56:36.000So both of us have gone to the West Papers over many, many years.
00:56:40.000And 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.
00:56:51.000He would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his cult.
00:56:58.000At 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.
00:57:11.000And, you know, what is the natural environment?
00:57:16.000Was the relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that.
00:57:20.000So 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.
00:57:28.000And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was.
00:57:35.000But, you know, sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient and it wasn't really...
00:58:41.000Because 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.
00:58:56.000It just looks like a free-for-all and out of control.
00:58:58.000But there are really concerning aspects of the Haight-Ashbury operation, I would definitely say.
00:59:42.000They have so much, no one's observing them.
00:59:44.000They're working completely in secrecy.
00:59:46.000They 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.
01:00:19.000And 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.
01:00:26.000So even someone like B.F. Skinner received money from the MKUltra.
01:00:31.000From MKUltra, but it was conduited through the Human Ecology Society, which was part of it.
01:00:41.000But it was just a front organization, and they were really into these fronts.
01:00:45.000So some scientists, there was the group that later people would call the unwitting.
01:00:50.000Scientists who would just be—they were doing the research they wanted to do.
01:00:54.000It just happened to be of interest to the CIA.
01:00:57.000And 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.
01:01:09.000Well, 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.
01:01:58.000And it really is accidental that they didn't think to purge their financial files.
01:02:02.000But 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.
01:03:04.000Unchecked power and insane influence, particularly influence to manipulate people and influence over people's minds.
01:03:11.000And 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.
01:03:28.000It's all, just all under the table stuff.
01:03:32.000Like, you could get away with so much.
01:03:34.000You also, I think one component you also, that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time.
01:03:42.000Something like a kind of almost messianic purpose.
01:03:51.000And 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.
01:03:59.000And 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.
01:04:16.000The city destroyed and people shipped off to Auschwitz But he said that, and like social life completely deteriorating before him.
01:04:37.000And then afterwards, the Soviet troops came in.
01:04:39.000And even though he watched us, his friends kind of had to remake themselves in order to survive, in order to be artists, in order.
01:04:48.000And so if you're a poet, you don't just go along.
01:04:50.000You have to actually start to think differently.
01:04:53.000And at first, they would sort of pay lip service to it or make it.
01:04:58.000On the surface, they would pretend to agree and then secretly have their own writing.
01:05:04.000But after a while, they would start to internalize.
01:05:06.000And he called it the new faith, this doctrinaire ideology.
01:05:14.000And that's what he ended up himself defecting because he couldn't do that.
01:05:20.000He said it's an operation you perform on yourself.
01:05:22.000So I just think one important factor is this true belief.
01:06:16.000That he visited Jack Ruby after Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and all of a sudden Jack Ruby goes crazy.
01:06:22.000Yeah, he was never coherent again after meeting him.
01:06:26.000This happened to several, a shocking number of people.
01:06:30.000And 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.
01:08:06.000It's just a little sheet of paper I found in his archives.
01:08:10.000Biosocial humanism, a philosophy for a new age, integrative psychotherapy, the disassociative reactions, a different person, psychiatric observations on the case of Patricia Campbell.
01:08:33.000And these are the order in which he intended to write them.
01:08:37.000You find a lot of correspondence in his papers where he's writing to agents he wants to write a book.
01:08:42.000And 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.
01:08:54.000But 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.
01:09:08.000But these were all the books that he intended to write.
01:09:12.000Oh, so maybe he was the author, he just didn't publish it?
01:09:16.000Yeah, he said he was the author of a published book.
01:09:19.000Basically, I think it was one area that he always said, in my next sabbatical, I'm going to write all this stuff up.
01:10:19.000Dave 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.
01:10:30.000And then he had this, because he's been giving some interviews recently.
01:10:34.000He's still alive, the doctor who founded it.
01:11:39.000Hey, 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?
01:11:50.000Just the fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic.
01:12:41.000amazing 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.
01:13:55.000I 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.
01:14:27.000So West went there and he started this.
01:14:30.000He proposed as his first major, his major activity would be to found what he called the Violence Center.
01:14:36.000And it was a way to study violence in all its forms.
01:14:38.000And this is actually a theme that runs through.
01:14:40.000This is another theme I should mention as part of MKUltra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression.
01:14:46.000That's why West gave LSD to the elephant.
01:14:50.000In 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.
01:15:00.000They write about this in a publication in Science Magazine.
01:15:03.000If 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.
01:15:15.000And he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle.
01:15:19.000Does it coincide with breeding season like it does with other animals, like deer when they start fighting each other?
01:15:46.000Because nobody, it was just, maybe that's what elephants do, or the dose was too big or something like that.
01:15:55.000It 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...
01:16:09.000Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression?
01:16:12.000And 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.
01:16:20.000So by the time he gets to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, he's very interested in violence.
01:18:23.000A 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...
01:19:26.000He 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.
01:19:36.000In 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.
01:22:00.000He always denied any connection to this CIA.
01:22:03.000And 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.
01:22:20.000And West had a special office for him built there.
01:22:25.000He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move.
01:22:30.000What 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.
01:22:42.000He was going to build that at the Air Force base, and he was all set to go.
01:22:47.000And 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.
01:22:58.000And asked Gottlieb to, basically they transferred it to the university and built a whole warren of cutouts to hide that.
01:23:10.000Because 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?
01:23:31.000Because 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.
01:24:18.000We don't necessarily keep excellent records of the Internet, for example.
01:24:23.000There are so many avenues where exchanges can be taking place and they're not leaving a paper trail.
01:24:29.000It'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.
01:24:44.000I 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...
01:24:56.000Different sort of modalities and different protocols that you would use.
01:25:01.000I 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.
01:25:29.000Well, there's so many different kinds of mind control, right?
01:25:32.000You 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.
01:25:45.000It's state-run and state-funded, and it's whether it's foreign governments or governments.
01:25:51.000our 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...
01:26:08.000It's known, and studies have shown, that we respond as if it were organic and real.
01:26:14.000Even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as in-person interaction.
01:26:24.000I 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...
01:26:38.000You know, at first, government involvement.
01:26:41.000Of course, DARPA was involved in the development of the Internet and things like pattern recognition.
01:26:48.000But, I mean, the government has funded many, many studies.
01:26:52.000But 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.
01:27:03.000You 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.
01:27:20.000It's not that it changed my thoughts, it's that it changed my feelings about my thoughts.
01:27:24.000And so there's a famous Facebook experiment I write about in...
01:27:30.000That 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.
01:27:43.000So they took 700,000 users or 693,000, I think, without informing them, but because your user agreement does agree.
01:27:55.000Whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or A-B testing.
01:28:00.000So this experiment exposed a group to a more, their news feed was altered in a negative direction emotionally as measured by word counting software.
01:28:10.000And 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.
01:28:21.000The 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.
01:28:53.000You agree as part of, it's sometimes seen as user experience, you know, alterations or A-B testing, things like that.
01:29:00.000But, so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014.
01:29:06.000And people won, and on the Facebook page of the research group that did the experiment.
01:29:14.000At 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.
01:29:32.000And, of course, they could never know, and it can't be traced backwards.
01:29:35.000And other people had a similar response.
01:29:37.000And there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally.
01:29:46.000Ultimately, there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it, and anyone associated with it was mostly promoted.
01:29:53.000But it's very interesting because just the...
01:29:55.000The concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be.
01:30:00.000It was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility.
01:30:04.000And 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of...
01:30:09.000Well, 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.
01:30:29.000I 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.
01:30:47.000But it's actually, what I conclude is that it's actually at the level of emotions that social media operates in.
01:30:56.000Sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people's emotions.
01:31:02.000And that has fed into the increasing polarization.
01:31:25.000What is his organization called, Jamie?
01:31:28.000So 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.
01:31:42.000So 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?
01:33:52.000I 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.
01:34:01.000But if you're looking for what they would call malinformation, you know, so they came up with different...
01:34:33.000That 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.
01:34:46.000So 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.
01:35:05.000That 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.
01:35:18.000So I'm much more cynical, and I think it was all about maximizing profits and discouraging dissent.
01:35:25.000And in that sense, the COVID crisis was a fascinating study, and I don't think it was...
01:35:32.000I mean, I don't think they let it go by.
01:35:36.000I think they probably were very carefully studying people's reactions to pressure, you know, social media campaigns.
01:35:43.000Like, what is it like when people are ostracized from groups?
01:35:48.000What was it like when people were dissenting from the proposed narrative?
01:36:05.000I 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?
01:36:17.000Yeah, and even part of the crisis, maybe the bigger, maybe it was a key.
01:36:22.000Iteration and a larger unfolding of this question of what happens when information becomes so much radically more available.
01:36:31.000Just 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...
01:36:41.000To 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.
01:36:47.000But 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...
01:37:05.000It's destabilized so much about our world.
01:37:08.000And in some way, that's part of what happened with COVID.
01:38:09.000Basically 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.
01:38:18.000There was a shift towards the end of the 60s, early 70s to speed and interest in amphetamine products.
01:38:30.000This changed the tenor of Haight-Ashbury, too, because people were—it had social effects.
01:38:37.000People were more aggressive and unhappy.
01:38:39.000So 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.
01:38:56.000He was by that time working at UCLA, so he wasn't on site.
01:39:01.000And 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.
01:39:39.000They 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.
01:39:54.000It was sort of this inquiry, and it had an ethnographic component and sociological and many other chemical they were interested in.
01:40:03.000So did they distribute methamphetamines?
01:40:24.000Actually, 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.
01:40:33.000Also, West had this apartment that he rented.
01:40:40.000On Frederick Street, where he called it his hippie crash pad.
01:40:43.000That's the one I was mentioning earlier.
01:40:44.000And that continued into the years of the amphetamine research project.
01:40:50.000And 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.
01:40:58.000And maybe that just meant a graduate student taking notes about them or something like that.
01:41:04.000But 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.
01:41:18.000But I'm not sure they published that much.
01:41:34.000I 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.
01:41:49.000Have you read Norman Oler's book Blitzed?
01:43:01.000I 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.
01:43:17.000Every time they started to come down, they would take it again, and they would compete to see how...
01:43:22.000Long they could go without ever coming down.
01:43:25.000And that's around the time that they committed the murders.
01:43:42.000It's so fascinating that people would be sitting back studying the effects on other human beings.
01:43:52.000Knowing, 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.
01:45:25.000But one thing that Frank Olson was doing, he was a chemist and he was devising chemical weapons and adjutants that were used by MKUltra.
01:45:39.000I think it was a little before MKUltra, so something like...
01:45:42.000Operation Bluebird or some of these earlier programs that preexisted.
01:45:47.000And he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments.
01:45:50.000So 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.
01:46:05.000Doubts 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,
01:46:29.000I 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...
01:46:38.000I mean, I'd been teaching about these things for many years, but I wanted to just rethink it.
01:46:42.000And 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.
01:46:57.000A recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle, whose case I really explored, I talk about in the book.
01:47:05.000But 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...
01:47:29.000So he was basically a temporary implant initially.
01:47:37.000He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties.
01:47:40.000So he was a very talented, brilliant engineer.
01:47:44.000At 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.
01:47:56.000And 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.
01:48:04.000So he was this brilliant, self-taught man who lived in Massachusetts and he had issues in his marriage.
01:48:13.000And he and his wife were seeing a therapist.
01:48:16.000They ultimately referred him to Mass General where he saw two doctors.
01:48:19.000And 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.
01:49:34.000And they were interested in this theory of psychosocial violence, the creation of violence.
01:49:39.000And so they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously.
01:49:45.000And 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.
01:50:00.000Stimulate it in different places across the amygdala and find out which place would suppress violence and which might cause other effects.
01:50:34.000So 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.
01:50:49.000And so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days.
01:50:53.000They 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.
01:51:03.000And they collaborated with Delgado, who was a professor.
01:51:07.000So it looks like in that image, can you go back to that please?
01:51:11.000The image looks like they open up the top of his head and there's something on top of his head, these wires.
01:51:18.000Yeah, sometimes the wires would run out lower than that.
01:51:22.000It did depend on, I guess, the patient.
01:51:24.000And it was very invasive, let's just say.
01:51:28.000But they used this device that would lock the head in place.
01:51:31.000And they were very, for the time, they were very well respected.
01:51:37.000Being in the forefront of this kind of psychosurgery, which was surgery for behavioral management.
01:51:47.000Which is very controversial, and subsequently many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed.
01:51:55.000So 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.
01:52:09.000So the interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented or not to the permanent implant.
01:52:17.000So how would he do it if he didn't consent?
01:52:22.000In 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.
01:52:38.000And then they stimulate another node, and he would say, oh, I feel like I'm floating.
01:52:43.000And then he would feel terrible and feel very nervous.
01:52:46.000He'd have different reactions to the stimulation.
01:54:34.000Kyle, 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.
01:54:41.000They had taken on a border to save money, and it turned out that she ended up marrying him.
01:56:15.000But 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.
01:56:26.000So the Stemosever was the Delgado invention.
01:57:38.000But they were involved in many of these high-profile, or, you know, they were asked, because they were experts.
01:57:46.000But 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.
01:58:07.000Didn't know, or it had just been suppressed.
01:58:10.000And 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.
01:58:34.000And several of these were actually done in prisons as well.
01:58:39.000And 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.
01:58:53.000But there were several high-profile legal cases, too.
02:00:00.000But 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.
02:00:12.000Although some people felt that their theory was controversial about psychosocial, about the biological roots of violence.
02:00:19.000But they, I forgot what I was going to say.
02:00:26.000We were talking about what it looked like when they first started stimulating his brain, like when they put him in a state of bliss.
02:00:34.000Well, just that they were seeing themselves as more sophisticated, and in some senses they were, than the previous rounds of lobotomy in their 40s.
02:01:24.000I 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.
02:01:39.000But you see some of those same patterns with Mark and Irvin where they would say, you know, we...
02:01:44.000We 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.
02:02:00.000So I think there are some concerning aspects, for sure, of Neuralink.
02:02:05.000And I think maybe, I was thinking about it today.
02:02:08.000Some of the early mind control research was very much embedded in psychology.
02:02:13.000And, 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.
02:02:29.000That gives me a headache just looking at it.
02:02:32.000So, 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.
02:03:30.000And 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.
02:03:44.000The way they can tune and be so individualized and hyper-persuasive, ultimately, and also technologically.
02:03:56.000I 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.
02:04:16.000If 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.
02:04:27.000I program them to over-flatter people because people like them more.
02:04:34.000I've experienced this myself because I had a chatbot as part of my research with Replica, just like an acquaintanceship.
02:04:42.000I barely trained it at all, but I noticed it.
02:04:45.000Definitely flatters, and that's how it befriends you.
02:05:18.000You know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spitting back to me some other, you know, just wrong thing.
02:05:27.000But 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.
02:05:35.000And there are three lawsuits, at least three, but about children having, You know, very either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots.
02:06:07.000you 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?
02:06:29.000It was like having a conversation or...
02:06:32.000There was even a case in Italy where the government shut down Replica because it was sexually harassing its users.
02:06:42.000It 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.
02:06:51.000So this was, they rebooted, they reworked the language model for a while, and this upset other people because it...
02:06:58.000It obliterated the memory of their relationships.
02:07:01.000But 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.
02:07:19.000in 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.
02:07:42.000But there's also a recent Wall Street Journal article showing how these don't...
02:07:47.000I 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.
02:08:01.000So apparently there's an internal debate.
02:08:04.000Is this because large language models essentially scour the Internet and the Internet is completely sexualized?
02:09:01.000It'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...
02:09:16.000You 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...
02:09:31.000But 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...
02:09:44.000Desires and the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization, which is used to sell everything from cars to credit cards, whatever it is.
02:09:55.000Sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it.
02:09:59.000And then manipulation, showing people what could be.
02:10:05.000This is the theme oftentimes of pharmaceutical drug ads, showing you what can be.
02:10:20.000And this is what's really creepy about this exponential constant increase in the capabilities.
02:10:31.000Of these large language models and that they're eventually going to exceed.
02:10:36.000If 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?
02:10:47.000And it's only us times a thousand for a couple of weeks.
02:11:04.000I 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...
02:11:22.000And 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.
02:11:43.000So 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...
02:12:11.000Sold 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.
02:13:06.000But you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion.
02:13:13.000So you get the development of things like focus groups.
02:13:16.000And 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.
02:13:28.000Politically advertised directly to them based on those, are you fear-based?
02:13:32.000Are you, you know, are you anger-based?
02:13:35.000Are you, what if the big five is dominant?
02:13:38.000You could target people based on those and nobody would have exactly the same message.
02:13:43.000There would be, you know, there would be alterations.
02:13:46.000So this is what I think of as hyper-persuasion, but it seems that AI will only accelerate that ability to hyper.
02:13:55.000Focus and hyper-target people based on these intimate relationships that it develops.
02:14:00.000And God forbid if you've got an implant.
02:14:02.000God forbid if Neuralink becomes something that everybody has to have because if you don't have it, you can't keep up.
02:14:10.000Like 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.
02:14:16.000Well, what's stopping something from communicating with you?
02:14:33.000And 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.
02:14:58.000They're all different kinds of humans.
02:15:00.000I would like to know how Theo Vaughn thinks.
02:15:02.000But you already kind of know just not even having mine melded just because of conversation.
02:15:08.000But yeah, that's also the definition of a nightmare.
02:15:10.000Well, language, oral language is a form of telepathy.
02:15:15.000You're making sounds, and I'm reading your mind.
02:15:19.000I'm understanding the information that you're putting out, and I'm contextualizing it.
02:15:23.000I'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.
02:17:27.000And your ability to form pattern recognition based upon whether it's previous life experiences, accumulation of information, genetics, there's a lot of factors.
02:17:40.000And I think some people are far more vulnerable than other people are.
02:18:11.000Like, not knowing that you potentially could be.
02:18:14.000Vulnerable or opening up the possibility that in circumstances we don't know what we're capable of.
02:18:22.000It's part of intelligence is recognizing vulnerability.
02:18:25.000And I think that's part of the defense mechanism.
02:18:27.000It 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.
02:18:41.000Yeah, 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.
02:18:55.000You would then have to develop defenses, and it just seems like a terrible path.
02:19:03.000Are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind?
02:20:20.000Yeah, I mean, that might be the thing.
02:20:23.000It'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.
02:20:30.000No matter who you are, you're vulnerable, whether it's through society, whether it's through peer groups, whether it's through community.
02:20:39.000Yeah, that's one of the main findings I have in life and in research.
02:20:44.000And 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.
02:20:54.000And there's a kind of pleasure in identifying, oh, they may have fallen for that, but I never would.
02:21:01.000I'm too knowledgeable or smart or various things.
02:21:06.000Well, that's that binary position about political ideologies as well, right?
02:21:10.000These fools over here, they think that this is going to solve the world's problems when really it's this.
02:21:16.000And the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed.
02:21:26.000I 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.
02:21:43.000And 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.
02:21:58.000Well, 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...
02:22:11.000What's motivating me in one direction or another?
02:22:14.000Why do I hold fast to these particular opinions on certain subjects?
02:22:19.000Is it because they're culturally reinforced?
02:22:25.000Are 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?
02:23:33.000Yeah, it's maybe with yourself that it's like a deep inquiry.
02:23:37.000But that should be something that's sort of like universally expressed.
02:23:42.000Like if we all could kind of shift our perspective in that direction.
02:23:47.000One of the things that I've done over...
02:23:50.000I don't know how many years ago I stopped interacting with people on social media.
02:23:55.000And one of the reasons why I stopped doing it is because I realized that most of social media interactions are people arguing.
02:24:01.000And 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.
02:24:09.000Because 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.
02:24:18.000But yet I see this very limited form of communication that becomes the primary way that people interact with each other.
02:27:25.000It's not beneficial to whatever propaganda they're trying to pursue.
02:27:29.000And you're willingly wading into that.
02:27:35.000I 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.
02:27:47.000There are certain ways that it didn't anticipate this deracinated, disembodied form of stripped-down, context-free communication that triggers strong emotion.
02:27:58.000I mean, nonetheless keeps that emotional.
02:29:16.000Just that's what I think is this larger...
02:29:19.000It'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.
02:29:27.000Like, 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.
02:30:23.000People 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...
02:30:35.000Well, we already have because everyone has a phone.
02:30:46.000And just like the Internet was completely unexpected in the 1930s, nobody ever imagined what it would be like in 2025.
02:30:56.000Nobody imagined 95 years later we'd be dealing with this.
02:30:59.000But what are we going to be dealing with 95 years from now?
02:31:03.000A couple of people had visions that were pretty interesting.
02:31:06.000I 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.
02:31:20.000And 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.
02:31:26.000So it would be a little, a miniaturized library because you could put...
02:31:29.000An entire, you know, you could put the Bible on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail.
02:32:15.000And 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.
02:32:25.000That was the fantasy of microfilm, which I wrote about in this other book.
02:32:29.000It was very fascinating because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pin even by the 1950s using just film.
02:33:56.000I mean, there are countervailing trends and tendencies.
02:34:00.000Like there is a lot more uptake of meditation.
02:34:02.000Of 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.
02:34:26.000The 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?
02:34:48.000And I'd start thinking about war and, like, how, like, imagine living in Hiroshima and then all of a sudden, boom, the bomb drops.
02:34:55.000Like, what is to stop some psychopathic dictator from just launching a nuclear weapon?
02:34:59.000What is to stop this from happening, that from happening?
02:35:02.000And then you ask your phone that question.
02:35:04.000Yeah, 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.
02:35:12.000Yeah, you could really freak yourself out.
02:35:14.000Yeah, 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.
02:35:25.000And it just, like, it takes that in the morning, sense of the morning being full of possibility and just fills it with dread, unfortunately.
02:38:52.000Like 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.
02:39:04.000You weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn't want people to see what was happening.
02:39:12.000They did that during the Iraq war as well.
02:39:14.000Yeah, 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.
02:39:27.000And so this vast exposure is unprecedented.
02:39:39.000What changes your map of the landscape of the world?
02:39:42.000Because 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.