The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2322 - Rebecca Lemov

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast.

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00:00:12.000 Hello, Rebecca.

00:00:14.000 Very nice to meet you.

00:00:15.000 Hi, Joe.

00:00:16.000 Very nice to meet you, too.

00:00:18.000 So, first of all, what got you interested in mind control?

00:00:25.000 Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself just because I find myself after.

00:00:31.000 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.

00:00:47.000 If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by...

00:00:52.000 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.

00:01:06.000 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.

00:01:20.000 Encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream.

00:01:24.000 And it seemed like the next step was to look at something like brainwashing or mind control.

00:01:29.000 When you first started studying it, was it a less public sort of curiosity?

00:01:36.000 Because now a lot of people are very much interested.

00:01:40.000 I blame the internet.

00:01:42.000 Mostly.

00:01:42.000 I probably had a lot to do with it too.

00:01:44.000 You and the internet.

00:01:46.000 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.

00:02:04.000 But what – like initially, what drew you to it?

00:02:09.000 Well – I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual maybe for a professor to be looking into.

00:02:18.000 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.

00:02:34.000 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.

00:03:05.000 It's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're controlled or how much we might be controlled.

00:03:11.000 And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases if you could.

00:03:16.000 Yeah, I think that's an interesting aspect of it.

00:03:20.000 Like how much are we controlled and how arrogant are we to think that we're not controlled?

00:03:25.000 Or how arrogant are we to think that that wouldn't work on me?

00:03:29.000 Yeah, I think that that's embedded in our...

00:03:33.000 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.

00:03:44.000 But actually, we're so much more malleable than we think.

00:03:48.000 And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true.

00:03:53.000 That's what also drew me to anthropology, is just the idea, like, if I was born in another place...

00:03:59.000 At another time, I would be another person.

00:04:01.000 Or how much of me would be transferable?

00:04:04.000 That interested me.

00:04:06.000 That's why I first started studying anthropology.

00:04:10.000 How much are we shaped by things that we don't necessarily choose?

00:04:15.000 Or are maybe accidental or genetic or various factors.

00:04:20.000 But I think we're told that freedom of choice or...

00:04:27.000 Our autonomy is fairly straightforward, and all you have to do is exert your will.

00:04:32.000 Yeah, but clearly we're influenced heavily by our environment, culturally.

00:04:40.000 I mean, accents, just cultural traditions, behavior patterns.

00:04:45.000 It begs the question, like, what are you?

00:04:49.000 And what is the shell that you wear on the outside?

00:04:57.000 You know, like a hermit crab.

00:04:58.000 What do you carry around with you?

00:05:00.000 And at the core of it, what are you?

00:05:04.000 Yeah, I mean, that is the oldest question of Socrates.

00:05:08.000 Who am I?

00:05:11.000 It's a deep question, and it's also kind of like a practical question.

00:05:16.000 So I thought if you could look at it more in actual examples, that would be interesting.

00:05:22.000 And I guess I was drawn to the topic.

00:05:28.000 Maybe, yeah, maybe because other people weren't studying it or also because of experiences in my life.

00:05:33.000 Just seemingly small things.

00:05:34.000 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.

00:05:45.000 I realized as I said it that it wasn't true.

00:05:49.000 I actually really like them.

00:05:52.000 What's wrong with small dogs?

00:05:53.000 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.

00:06:03.000 But just noticing in yourself the way you soak up opinions and you're shaped by even...

00:06:09.000 You know, even seemingly trivial things.

00:06:11.000 And then also on a more profound level, you can see that happening.

00:06:16.000 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?

00:06:26.000 And then there's brainwashing yourself.

00:06:29.000 Because if you say, I hate small dogs, now you have to kind of defend it.

00:06:34.000 And even if you say, God, it's not even true, but there's got to be reasons to hate small dogs. 0.99

00:06:39.000 I don't want to come off as a moron who just says things. 0.98

00:06:43.000 There are other people who feel the same. 0.99

00:06:45.000 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.

00:06:52.000 I mean, I think sometimes we're just a series of adopted opinions that we then...

00:07:00.000 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.

00:07:13.000 That seemed very, like, a deeply shaping process.

00:07:16.000 And I was interested in how did social sciences, like, was there a science of this process of shaping?

00:07:22.000 They sometimes called it canalizing.

00:07:25.000 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.

00:07:34.000 Well, universities are a great place for that, right?

00:07:37.000 Because you get away from your parents for the first time who have indoctrinated you into their cult.

00:07:42.000 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.

00:07:51.000 You know, now I'm going to figure out which group.

00:07:54.000 Most aligns with my ideas and join them and rebel and fight against the machine and become a part of a new cult.

00:08:02.000 Exactly.

00:08:03.000 Wear something different or suddenly I don't like certain kinds of dogs or I wear a certain thing.

00:08:09.000 You have an interruption in the fabric of your extensive conditioning and it's also an opportunity.

00:08:18.000 It's not a nefarious thing necessarily, but it can take Just that truth about people.

00:08:26.000 I think it can be nefarious for some people, unfortunately.

00:08:30.000 But I think for a lot of people, just considering new ways to think about things is probably valuable.

00:08:38.000 It's probably a good thing to have the opportunity to reconsider the way that you've sort of, like...

00:08:46.000 Yeah.

00:08:47.000 The grooves that have been deeply carved into your personality where you automatically go toward certain things or think about certain things.

00:08:54.000 I always think just an interruption is often good.

00:08:57.000 Oh, yeah.

00:08:58.000 In your patterning.

00:08:59.000 Yeah, that's why I think moving is really good.

00:09:01.000 Or traveling or a bunch of resets.

00:09:05.000 I've read that you have had a steady meditation practice.

00:09:10.000 I've read it was like two hours a day for 25 years.

00:09:13.000 Yeah.

00:09:14.000 That's a lot of time to be meditating.

00:09:17.000 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.

00:09:30.000 You get a break for meditation for that.

00:09:32.000 You get a hall pass.

00:09:35.000 And it's not like anyone made me or I necessarily thought I would do that.

00:09:39.000 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.

00:09:47.000 So I do think it informs how I do research, or I try to bring what I learn in my life Yeah.

00:10:00.000 in an hour at night?

00:10:00.000 Yeah.

00:10:01.000 Wow.

00:10:01.000 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...

00:10:12.000 It's hard to make room in your life sometimes.

00:10:15.000 Oh, for sure.

00:10:15.000 But you can sleep a little bit less.

00:10:18.000 Yeah?

00:10:19.000 Well, you don't want to make yourself sleep less, but sometimes it just does reduce the amount you need.

00:10:25.000 Just by meditating?

00:10:27.000 That's what I found.

00:10:28.000 Interesting.

00:10:29.000 How much sleep do you need?

00:10:30.000 I used to sleep like eight and a half hours.

00:10:33.000 And then now I sleep about seven or six and a half.

00:10:37.000 Or if I'm really tired, I might sleep a little extra.

00:10:39.000 But I ended up just...

00:10:42.000 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.

00:10:53.000 So I just mostly get up at a regular meditation time, which is like 4.30.

00:10:58.000 What kind of meditation?

00:11:00.000 I do Vipassana, which is a form of Buddhist meditation.

00:11:05.000 It's just a form of observation, or someone once described it as...

00:11:09.000 Practice in seeing things as they are.

00:11:12.000 So you try to just, it's not trying to, you know, apply a lens over something or chanting.

00:11:18.000 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.

00:11:26.000 And so you just sit in peace and think?

00:11:29.000 Well, it's not always peaceful.

00:11:31.000 There is sometimes, yeah, but thought.

00:11:33.000 I mean peace as far as like you're not bouncing around.

00:11:36.000 Yeah, sometimes I'm sitting, sometimes I'm.

00:11:38.000 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.

00:11:46.000 But mostly I'm just sitting there and with eyes closed and then you kind of move, you observe just how you are.

00:11:56.000 And the more you practice it, the more you can kind of go into it more deeply, quickly.

00:12:03.000 I would think that that would be a good...

00:12:06.000 Protection from unwanted mind control, too. 0.99

00:12:10.000 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? 0.98

00:12:25.000 Yeah, it's like a built-in reflection. 0.97

00:12:28.000 So, at the end of the day, I have to say I'm often less still or peaceful.

00:12:33.000 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.

00:12:47.000 So it just builds in, yeah, an opportunity for some distance, which then you can also try to bring into your life, too.

00:12:55.000 Were you, when you were young, had you ever been exposed to any cults or anything like that?

00:13:02.000 Hmm, that's a good question.

00:13:04.000 Not when I was really young.

00:13:06.000 And how old were you when you were first exposed to cults?

00:13:10.000 In fact, I think...

00:13:12.000 So, that's a good question.

00:13:15.000 I mean, my family is sort of cult-averse, I would say.

00:13:19.000 My father, I think they had friends once, you know, in later life.

00:13:24.000 my parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training, which is somewhat culty.

00:13:30.000 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.

00:13:42.000 And these are, you know, it's stuff like...

00:13:45.000 How long did that make you not go to the bathroom?

00:13:48.000 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.

00:14:01.000 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.

00:14:08.000 He just left, so I figured he had a kind of, he was not programmable in that way. 0.99

00:14:13.000 Well, I feel like any group that doesn't want you to go to the bathroom is stupid. 1.00

00:14:18.000 It's probably a sign. 0.99

00:14:19.000 Yeah, there's no reason to not go to the bathroom if you have to go to the bathroom. 0.98

00:14:23.000 That's ridiculous. 0.85

00:14:23.000 I mean, it's a kind of... 0.85

00:14:24.000 It is typical of certain groups where they start to constrain your...

00:14:29.000 And people who might be willing to remain in that uncomfortable state and be constrained will end up staying longer.

00:14:38.000 It's sort of a self-selecting process, maybe.

00:14:41.000 That makes sense, right?

00:14:43.000 The people that are more willing to comply.

00:14:45.000 Yeah, and I guess with me...

00:14:47.000 Maybe the first brush with a cult would be something like the various yoga teachers I've worked with.

00:14:55.000 Oh, so many of them are so culty.

00:14:57.000 Yeah.

00:14:58.000 There's one kind of funny story.

00:15:00.000 I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland, also in graduate school.

00:15:06.000 It was really helpful with school, just to have a very physical, demanding practice.

00:15:14.000 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.

00:15:20.000 I thought he was, I don't know, I just thought he was, I admired him.

00:15:26.000 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.

00:15:39.000 I was like, no, that's not happening.

00:15:41.000 But it actually was.

00:15:44.000 You could say it's a bit.

00:15:45.000 I don't think it was a cult, but it certainly was a scandal.

00:15:48.000 Yeah.

00:15:49.000 I had the exact same experience.

00:15:51.000 The first time I started taking yoga, there was a guy who was a yoga teacher.

00:15:55.000 I have always been very wary of control and controlling people.

00:16:04.000 Those kind of environments and that this guy was like...

00:16:07.000 There was something inauthentic about his spirituality that greased me the wrong way.

00:16:15.000 I was like, yuck.

00:16:17.000 Like, just the way he would chant and the things he would say.

00:16:20.000 There was just too much ego involved.

00:16:22.000 And then I found out he was banging all the students.

00:16:24.000 And I was like, of course he is!

00:16:26.000 I knew it!

00:16:27.000 Because my wife roped me into going to the class. 0.97

00:16:29.000 That was the first time I went.

00:16:31.000 I was like...

00:16:31.000 I really like the stretching.

00:16:33.000 It's like really great.

00:16:34.000 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.

00:16:42.000 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.

00:17:04.000 Yeah, it's very helpful to have that.

00:17:08.000 defense radar of a certain kind.

00:17:11.000 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.

00:17:24.000 We now know that these experiences are incredibly common, and yet, so they take that as a kind of license.

00:17:30.000 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.

00:17:40.000 Spiritual narcissism.

00:17:42.000 Yeah, it can actually engender that because of, or, yeah, and I think there's some, This has been described, too.

00:17:49.000 Spiritual narcissism is a good phrase, though. 1.00

00:17:51.000 It's legit.

00:17:52.000 Yeah, you see a lot of it.

00:17:54.000 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.

00:18:01.000 They just start thinking that they're better than people that don't do it.

00:18:04.000 Yeah, it feels very special.

00:18:05.000 If you have a special experience, it becomes very dangerous afterwards to not have it feed your ego.

00:18:14.000 Even if you had a profound breakdown of the ego when you were in a psychedelic state.

00:18:20.000 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. 0.99

00:18:43.000 We know bullshit. 0.99

00:18:45.000 Humans know. 1.00

00:18:46.000 There's like a smell to it, a feel to it, if you're paying attention.

00:18:50.000 But for whatever reason, it's just like some people have big ears, some people have small ears.

00:18:54.000 Some people just are not that good at picking up on that stuff for whatever reason.

00:18:59.000 Life experience, they haven't been burned enough times, like whatever it is.

00:19:04.000 And, you know, that's where cults get started.

00:19:06.000 And I'm fascinated by cults.

00:19:09.000 I've always been fascinated by them because I've watched...

00:19:12.000 I don't know how many documentaries on cults.

00:19:14.000 And in the beginning, it looks so fun.

00:19:17.000 That's the problem.

00:19:18.000 Did you ever see the documentary Wild Wild Country, the Netflix series?

00:19:21.000 Yes.

00:19:22.000 It's amazing, right?

00:19:23.000 In the beginning, you're like, they look like they're having a great time.

00:19:26.000 Yeah.

00:19:27.000 They're all dancing together and playing drums and having a party and eating together and it's like a sense of community.

00:19:34.000 Yeah.

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00:20:13.000 That documentary was so successful, I think, for that very reason.

00:20:16.000 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.

00:20:27.000 My husband grew up in the Bay Area and he was saying he...

00:20:30.000 As a kid, he would run into members of that cult.

00:20:32.000 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.

00:20:39.000 So on the side where you're not seeing it, they're holding automatic weapons.

00:20:45.000 In a way, they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit.

00:20:50.000 Really?

00:20:51.000 Interesting.

00:20:52.000 That's interesting.

00:20:54.000 Wow.

00:20:54.000 I did not know that.

00:20:55.000 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.

00:21:06.000 Yeah.

00:21:07.000 You know, his beard and the Rolls Royces and everything.

00:21:10.000 It's like, good lord.

00:21:12.000 Yeah, and he was really much more of a cocaine adept or enthusiast than people also recognize.

00:21:20.000 I think he gets off a little.

00:21:22.000 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.

00:21:30.000 Well, also, was her name Stella?

00:21:32.000 Yeah.

00:21:32.000 She was so crazy.

00:21:34.000 She was poisoning people. 1.00

00:21:37.000 She was such a great villain that it made him, like, because if she wasn't in the documentary, he would be the villain.

00:21:44.000 Exactly.

00:21:44.000 Yeah.

00:21:45.000 She pulls the focus.

00:21:46.000 Yes.

00:21:47.000 Yeah, most certainly.

00:21:48.000 And the fact that she's still alive, too.

00:21:50.000 That sort of helps as well.

00:21:53.000 But I feel like it's a default thing in the human psyche because of our ancient history of living in tribes.

00:22:04.000 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.

00:22:16.000 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.

00:22:22.000 This is the only group.

00:22:24.000 Being ostracized from the tribe and kicked out is like, oh my goodness, that's the worst thing in the world.

00:22:28.000 Now you're alone.

00:22:29.000 You have to fend for yourself.

00:22:31.000 There's no way you can.

00:22:32.000 You have to protect yourself from the wilderness and the animals and the elements and predators and other humans.

00:22:41.000 So you have to—it's very dangerous to be alone.

00:22:43.000 So you have to adapt to the tribe itself.

00:22:47.000 I think that's true.

00:22:48.000 Yeah, small-scale societies have to—I mean, even the word cult.

00:22:52.000 In its technical or dictionary definition doesn't necessarily mean abusive organization.

00:22:58.000 It just means small-scale religious group.

00:23:03.000 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.

00:23:15.000 People get these exhilarated states.

00:23:18.000 They often have altered, you know, experiences of altered consciousness.

00:23:22.000 You know, they're empowered by it, too.

00:23:25.000 Well, fun fact.

00:23:26.000 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.

00:23:40.000 And I kind of vaguely heard about it.

00:23:44.000 And my friend Ron told me that the theater is amazing.

00:23:48.000 Because we were talking about buying a comedy club.

00:23:50.000 You should buy that place.

00:23:51.000 And so I got under contact.

00:23:53.000 And my friend Adam called me up.

00:23:54.000 He goes, have you seen the documentary on that cult?

00:23:56.000 I'm like, oh, no.

00:23:58.000 There's a documentary?

00:23:59.000 That's never good.

00:24:01.000 That's never good.

00:24:02.000 And it's really bad.

00:24:03.000 The documentary is called Holy Hell.

00:24:06.000 And it's about this guy who's a hypnotist. 0.99

00:24:09.000 A yoga teacher and a gay porn star. 1.00

00:24:12.000 And that's a one, two, three combination. 1.00

00:24:15.000 And he started out as a cult in West Hollywood.

00:24:19.000 And then after Waco, after that went down, the Cult Awareness Network started really cracking down and they were investigating him.

00:24:26.000 So he changed his name and moved to Austin and had his followers build him this theater.

00:24:33.000 Fortunately, I got out of the deal.

00:24:35.000 And I guess he was selling it.

00:24:37.000 Well, he was gone.

00:24:38.000 It had already fallen apart.

00:24:40.000 The cult had completely fallen apart.

00:24:42.000 But what's fascinating is in the documentary, in the beginning, again, it looks amazing.

00:24:47.000 They're all cooking together and eating together and doing yoga, and they look so happy.

00:24:52.000 And let's just be honest.

00:24:54.000 Modern society, the day-to-day grind, the...

00:24:59.000 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.

00:25:10.000 Not only is it not attractive, it makes cults attractive.

00:25:13.000 And these people were longing for something that showed them that, no, you're right. 1.00

00:25:20.000 This is stupid. 1.00

00:25:21.000 The way your parents lived is stupid. 1.00

00:25:23.000 The way all these people live in society, the way Thoreau described. 1.00

00:25:28.000 Men living lives of quiet desperation. 1.00

00:25:31.000 Like, yeah, that sucks. 0.99

00:25:32.000 You don't have to live like that. 0.99

00:25:34.000 Man, come live with us, man.

00:25:36.000 And this guy.

00:25:38.000 Was able to do this thing called the knowing.

00:25:41.000 And the knowing was it was very difficult to get.

00:25:44.000 And people wanted it and he wouldn't give it to them.

00:25:47.000 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.

00:25:55.000 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.

00:26:07.000 They said that that moment was the greatest moment of their life.

00:26:11.000 Because of the power of suggestion, the way the human mind anticipated this event and then built up to it.

00:26:18.000 And then when it finally happened, this endogenous burst of...

00:26:23.000 Whatever it is in the mind.

00:26:25.000 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.

00:26:33.000 They kind of understood everything.

00:26:35.000 Briefly. 0.88

00:26:36.000 So it kind of worked, even though he was having sex with everybody. 0.98

00:26:40.000 Not only was he having sex with these people, he was charging them. 0.99

00:26:43.000 We would charge these guys for therapy and then have sex with them. 1.00

00:26:46.000 And they would talk about it afterwards. 0.99

00:26:48.000 Like, thanks a lot!

00:26:49.000 It was so horrible.

00:26:51.000 The documentary is so bad.

00:26:53.000 At the end of the documentary, it's like, I gotta get out of this deal.

00:26:57.000 There's not enough sage in the world to burn off the bad juju that happened in this joint.

00:27:02.000 That's true.

00:27:03.000 Yeah, so it just felt like, oh, horrible.

00:27:06.000 Yeah, the life cycle of a cult has that.

00:27:09.000 What you just described, and sometimes it accelerated, but sometimes it plays out slower over time.

00:27:15.000 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.

00:27:30.000 They still have...

00:27:32.000 Trouble evaluating their positive experiences because the positive was so good.

00:27:37.000 Right.

00:27:37.000 And disentangling it and, you know, you feel that you need to delegitimize that too.

00:27:44.000 So that's why I think therapy can be helpful.

00:27:47.000 Someone who's experienced with cult ex-members.

00:27:51.000 I think the problem also is that it's their only community.

00:27:55.000 And if you have to leave your only community and then just strike it out in the world.

00:28:00.000 And you've been with this community for 20 years or whatever it is.

00:28:03.000 Right.

00:28:03.000 What do you do?

00:28:04.000 How do you do it?

00:28:05.000 How do you find peace?

00:28:07.000 Yeah.

00:28:08.000 How do you find companionship?

00:28:09.000 How do you find that sense of camaraderie that's so deeply embedded in a tight-knit, small community?

00:28:17.000 And a lot of times when you come out, if it's, say, it was 18 or 20 years or...

00:28:23.000 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.

00:28:33.000 You're not comfortable with new technologies.

00:28:37.000 I think that it's really a terrible experience for a lot of people.

00:28:41.000 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.

00:28:51.000 Not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation, that's still there, that critique, but it just wasn't answered.

00:28:57.000 I always say, like, someone, come up with a really good cult and I'll join.

00:29:02.000 Come up with one that, like, you answer all the questions, but you don't try to control me, and you're just nice.

00:29:08.000 Isn't there a cult where someone's not trying to have sex with everybody and not trying to steal all your money?

00:29:13.000 Isn't it possible to do that, just to, like...

00:29:15.000 Get together a group of like-minded individuals.

00:29:19.000 And I guess that would be more of a commune.

00:29:21.000 But even that, there's always some male, generally male leader who ruins everything.

00:29:28.000 It does seem to be.

00:29:30.000 I think some of the...

00:29:31.000 So there seemed to be in the 70s so many cults and back-to-the-land groups.

00:29:35.000 And some of the back-to-land stories are also...

00:29:39.000 You know, have many cautionary sides to him and many of the aspects of cultism.

00:29:42.000 What is the back to the land?

00:29:43.000 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.

00:29:59.000 Or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this.

00:30:03.000 Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional.

00:30:06.000 Quality.

00:30:07.000 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.

00:30:26.000 Why do you think it always involves that?

00:30:29.000 Why does it always go that way?

00:30:30.000 I don't know.

00:30:31.000 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.

00:30:54.000 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.

00:31:11.000 Do you think that is just because of just genetics?

00:31:18.000 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...

00:31:33.000 Have you ever read John Marco Allegro's, any of his work?

00:31:38.000 No.

00:31:38.000 He wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is a fascinating book about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:31:45.000 And he's got a very controversial perspective on Christianity.

00:31:49.000 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.

00:31:58.000 He started seeing all these parallels to all these various religions.

00:32:03.000 And he was like, well, you know, clearly, like, it's not one religion has it right. 0.91

00:32:08.000 There's something in all these things, but it's not like I have to, I am a Catholic and that's it.

00:32:14.000 Or I'm a Muslim and that's it.

00:32:16.000 He was like, there's something here that exists throughout all of them, this constant threat.

00:32:22.000 So he gets hired to be one of the people that...

00:32:28.000 Deciphers the Dead Sea Scrolls.

00:32:30.000 So the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is parchment, which is animal skins. 0.93

00:32:35.000 Do you know the whole story behind it?

00:32:37.000 They found them in these clay pots in Qumran and these caves.

00:32:43.000 And it turns out to be some of the oldest works of the Bible.

00:32:48.000 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.

00:33:17.000 And he even brought the—he traced the word Christ back to—and this is very controversial for Christians with your hackles up.

00:33:26.000 I'm not saying I agree with this.

00:33:27.000 But he traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word, which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen.

00:33:35.000 The idea was that when it rained— It was God fertilizing the earth and that these mushrooms would like instantaneously rise.

00:33:46.000 Like they would go to bed and in the morning the mushrooms would be there where they weren't there before.

00:33:49.000 They would consume these mushrooms and have these intense psychedelic experiences.

00:33:53.000 And then they tried to hide this stuff from the Romans.

00:33:56.000 And so they hid it in parables and they hid it in stories.

00:33:59.000 This is what his belief was.

00:34:01.000 Well, it kind of reminds me what you're describing, which I haven't read or...

00:34:07.000 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.

00:34:21.000 And he wrote a whole book describing what that was.

00:34:24.000 Then his last book that he wrote before he died was...

00:34:28.000 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.

00:34:45.000 And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you're saying, is...

00:34:52.000 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.

00:35:03.000 In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to, you know, loops of conditioning and things like that.

00:35:10.000 Because I think, yeah, as you're saying, fertility is a natural part of human life and often worshipped.

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00:36:27.000 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.

00:36:44.000 It was very difficult to survive.

00:36:46.000 We're so much weaker than everything else around us.

00:36:52.000 Infant mortality was so high.

00:36:54.000 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.

00:37:03.000 And I think, unfortunately, this is what gets distorted in all of these groups.

00:37:11.000 And this is where things go sideways because then you involve emotions and you involve ego and dominance hierarchies.

00:37:21.000 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.

00:37:31.000 And then the kids of the next generation would grow up and one would decide, you know what? 0.89

00:37:34.000 I got a fucking better idea than this. 0.94

00:37:37.000 And then someone would go straight Jim Jones. 0.99

00:37:40.000 They would start growing some plant that was an amphetamine and they'd start getting wacky.

00:37:45.000 Human beings being human beings.

00:37:47.000 Yes.

00:37:51.000 There's a paradox or tension in ecstasy itself.

00:37:55.000 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.

00:38:10.000 Why do you think that during the 1970s there was this big upswing in these cults?

00:38:18.000 It started in the 60s from my understanding, although they did exist before then.

00:38:25.000 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.

00:38:36.000 So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and Latin America and also India.

00:38:45.000 Do they have parallels?

00:38:47.000 Yeah, sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries.

00:38:51.000 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.

00:39:02.000 Who was the leader of the Children of God?

00:39:04.000 Which one was that?

00:39:04.000 This was a guy named David Berg.

00:39:06.000 This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family were in it, but not...

00:39:13.000 I think the parents ultimately took them out, but it's a really messed up, a very disturbing cult.

00:39:21.000 And I actually write about and have met a member who's just sort of an average member named Ray.

00:39:29.000 I met him at a meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association, and he left after 30 years.

00:39:34.000 But he just describes in a riveting way how he joined.

00:39:38.000 And I think that's kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the 70s.

00:39:42.000 So he was a young man in college, and he said he just felt that the old...

00:39:49.000 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.

00:39:56.000 He felt like reality was over there and he was separated from it by, you know, there was like a saran wrap over everything.

00:40:05.000 So he felt somewhat alienated, but he didn't know what the answer would be.

00:40:08.000 He kind of yearned for a religious experience.

00:40:11.000 And he went out to California and he...

00:40:15.000 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.

00:40:27.000 So he, in his mind, was this, you know, he was scared of them.

00:40:32.000 He thought, that looks like a cult.

00:40:34.000 But later, even though he had that thought, he would end up joining them for 30 years because...

00:40:40.000 He saw them later after the event, and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them.

00:40:47.000 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.

00:40:58.000 He was asking them questions, and they said, would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now and drop to your knees?

00:41:07.000 And he said yes.

00:41:10.000 What is the sinner's prayer?

00:41:12.000 It's a verse that actually is not from the Bible, but often would be used as a recruiting tool.

00:41:19.000 And it did result in this sort of out-of-body experience.

00:41:23.000 He recited it, and then he said he stood up and he felt changed by this.

00:41:28.000 But it turned out that David Berg, he didn't know the name of the group.

00:41:31.000 And they said, why don't you join us?

00:41:34.000 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.

00:41:42.000 And they were all testifying about how they had been converted.

00:41:48.000 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.

00:41:55.000 And nobody understood what he was talking about.

00:41:57.000 They all just started singing and covering up his words.

00:42:01.000 And he thought several times of leaving and getting off the bus, going to see his ex-girlfriend.

00:42:05.000 He had just broken up with his girlfriend.

00:42:07.000 But he ended up staying and he ended up marrying three women.

00:42:12.000 Three?

00:42:13.000 Well, at first it was one.

00:42:14.000 They had an arranged marriage and then it turned out the...

00:42:18.000 This guy who ran the group, David Berg, he was a former furniture salesman.

00:42:22.000 He then had some, you know, he believed that he got these messages direct from the Almighty.

00:42:31.000 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. 0.50

00:42:43.000 And then he started introducing these practices where they were supposed to have sex with children because his idea was that this was natural. 0.85

00:42:54.000 And so many generations of kids were raised in this cult with this, were either trafficked or abused.

00:43:02.000 And it's really horrific.

00:43:03.000 And Ray Connelly is interesting because he didn't engage in those things.

00:43:08.000 He did end up having 17 children in the cult.

00:43:13.000 17 kids?

00:43:16.000 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.

00:43:26.000 What about his 17 kids?

00:43:27.000 And they came out, too.

00:43:29.000 How do they have time for anything else?

00:43:31.000 I don't know.

00:43:32.000 They're not mostly grown.

00:43:33.000 Because he's quite elderly.

00:43:36.000 But I guess it's interesting to hear him talk about how he saw the group changing and what started out to be this.

00:43:44.000 Profound experience.

00:43:45.000 Soon, he called it a dark hamster wheel of the soul.

00:43:48.000 Like, he was caught, and it became this...

00:43:50.000 Basically, they were exploiting him in his middle-age years.

00:43:55.000 He rose in sort of mid-level bureaucracy within the cult.

00:43:58.000 But anyway, this cult, Children of God, has...

00:44:00.000 And today still exists.

00:44:03.000 It has a different name.

00:44:05.000 They still have the same practices?

00:44:07.000 No, they say they reformed.

00:44:09.000 But many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them, things like that, who are adults today.

00:44:15.000 They had groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that.

00:44:24.000 The Manson family is a fascinating one, right?

00:44:28.000 Because I know that you have studied Jolly West and the whole MKUltra. 0.94

00:44:37.000 And what they were experimenting with, with psychedelic drugs and cults and mind control.

00:44:46.000 What is your perspective on why they were doing that?

00:44:50.000 Why Jolly West was involved?

00:44:54.000 Why were they involved?

00:44:55.000 What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies, the federal government?

00:45:02.000 I think the initial motivation was a kind of national.

00:45:06.000 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.

00:45:30.000 Seem to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing.

00:45:37.000 So many of the soldiers coming back seem to have been brainwashed or have collaborated to some degree when they were held as prisoners.

00:45:47.000 And then there were 21 U.S. POWs who elected to stay in China.

00:45:55.000 And this really was a disturbing...

00:45:59.000 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.

00:46:05.000 And 21 of them decided that they'd like to try their lot in China.

00:46:11.000 And so this caused, this kind of collective, this caused a crisis of, you know, did the communists possess a superweapon of some kind?

00:46:21.000 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...

00:46:28.000 Some capacity that this ideological system had, the communists had, that was somehow rendering Americans powerless against it.

00:46:39.000 So this was kind of the crisis of mind control.

00:46:42.000 And MK Ultra was an attempt to basically reverse engineer what this was.

00:46:48.000 So Jolly West was one of the first people.

00:46:51.000 He was in charge of studying the brainwashed pilots initially.

00:46:57.000 And that's how he...

00:46:58.000 And what year was this?

00:47:00.000 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.

00:47:12.000 He had done his residency at Cornell with Dr. Harold Wolfe, who is a world neurologist, a world expert in migraine.

00:47:20.000 And basically the type of pain that comes from migraine.

00:47:23.000 So you could say he was an expert in the pain, fear, pain cycle.

00:47:27.000 And he had CIA connections from even before MKUltra was started.

00:47:33.000 So what did they determine the Chinese were doing?

00:47:36.000 So they determined...

00:47:38.000 West wrote a paper in 1957, and the part that was published in a journal called Sociometry described...

00:47:46.000 He described it as DDD, or debility, dependency, and dread.

00:47:52.000 And he said basically these camps were systematically inducing a state of debility, which was that soldiers were starved and basically worn down.

00:48:05.000 and they were deprived of medical care.

00:48:08.000 They were, I mean, this is also in the historical record.

00:48:11.000 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.

00:48:24.000 And by the time they got there, they'd often lost half their body weight.

00:48:27.000 They had been bombed by their own forces at night.

00:48:31.000 They sometimes had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning just to keep going and not be...

00:48:38.000 Anyone who stopped would be shot.

00:48:40.000 So by the time they got to the camps, they were...

00:48:42.000 Really worn down.

00:48:44.000 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.

00:48:56.000 It was just a very—they were in a terrible state.

00:49:00.000 And so debility was the first thing West described when he was extracting what had happened.

00:49:09.000 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.

00:49:26.000 And they also engaged in very formal malice thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment.

00:49:34.000 And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time.

00:49:39.000 Perhaps your family could be because they threatened.

00:49:42.000 Malice thought reform? 0.92

00:49:43.000 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. 0.55

00:49:57.000 I don't think West wrote about this, but in my own research on the camps, it transpires that...

00:50:05.000 They wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants.

00:50:12.000 He felt that only something like 7% to 8% of the human population was unreformable and those people would be disposed of.

00:50:21.000 But he wanted to check if these American soldiers would also be susceptible to re-education.

00:50:30.000 And so they really did a formal three-part re-education program on them.

00:50:34.000 And men had many different responses to it.

00:50:39.000 But when West met them, he studied many of their returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base.

00:50:46.000 And he extracted those three components of what had happened to them, DDD.

00:50:52.000 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...

00:51:02.000 Sponsoring the Manson family and, you know, Operation Midnight Climax and all the crazy stuff that they were doing.

00:51:09.000 Yeah, it may seem like a leap, but I think it, I mean...

00:51:14.000 Sort of.

00:51:15.000 It's sort of a leap, but it's sort of not.

00:51:16.000 I think that MKUltra was funded around indirect response to this crisis of the POWs.

00:51:28.000 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.

00:51:39.000 So MKUltra just had a wide reach, and it was pretty free reign.

00:51:44.000 It was a free reign program, and the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the...

00:51:53.000 Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan project for the mind.

00:51:57.000 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.

00:52:13.000 The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understood.

00:52:19.000 People could be broken down and rebuilt.

00:52:22.000 Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage?

00:52:28.000 Like, what was the end goal that they were trying to do with this?

00:52:31.000 One thing, a couple of things.

00:52:34.000 I think one idea was that potentially it could be a weapon.

00:52:37.000 One goal.

00:52:38.000 Another, so it could be used on an anemone, perhaps even a city.

00:52:42.000 So that's one reason they were researching LSD.

00:52:45.000 It had certain properties that made it.

00:52:47.000 It could be easily dispensed to an entire population through the water supply.

00:52:51.000 So they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD.

00:52:54.000 People didn't really know at the time.

00:52:57.000 So there was an offensive part of it.

00:53:00.000 There's also a defensive part.

00:53:01.000 So U.S. military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was.

00:53:07.000 Once they understood it, they developed the SEER training, and West was involved in that as well.

00:53:14.000 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.

00:53:31.000 I think there was also kind of a curiosity about what would happen.

00:53:35.000 I think just because they had so much power to experiment in a way without any oversight.

00:53:43.000 And it wasn't until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said, this is unethical.

00:53:51.000 And, you know, we've done it.

00:53:53.000 It basically put a stop to it.

00:53:55.000 But it really wasn't...

00:53:56.000 You said 63?

00:53:56.000 Yeah.

00:53:57.000 But it went on.

00:53:58.000 I mean, the Harvard LSD studies, when were those?

00:54:03.000 Actually, I don't know which ones exactly.

00:54:06.000 There are some that were earlier.

00:54:08.000 What are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski?

00:54:10.000 Okay, yeah, that's earlier.

00:54:12.000 Was that earlier than 63?

00:54:14.000 Yeah.

00:54:14.000 And that's Henry Murray.

00:54:17.000 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.

00:54:26.000 So they may have continued under other forms.

00:54:28.000 But Manson was 69?

00:54:31.000 Yeah, so Manson is after that.

00:54:33.000 So they didn't...

00:54:34.000 Discontinue it.

00:54:35.000 They kept doing things.

00:54:36.000 Well, West kept working.

00:54:39.000 It's ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult.

00:54:43.000 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.

00:54:59.000 You are the puppeteer.

00:55:01.000 You're controlling all these people.

00:55:04.000 And then this idea that...

00:55:07.000 Have you read Chaos, the Tom O 'Neill book?

00:55:09.000 Yeah.

00:55:10.000 What did you think about that?

00:55:11.000 I thought it was great research.

00:55:14.000 Amazing.

00:55:14.000 Yeah, it's a really good book.

00:55:16.000 And just so stunning.

00:55:18.000 I had never considered that before.

00:55:20.000 I thought Manson was a crazy guy and he got together with a bunch of crazy people and he ran a call.

00:55:25.000 No. 0.86

00:55:26.000 No.

00:55:27.000 It's suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating the entire thing.

00:55:32.000 They may not have been.

00:55:33.000 I don't think O 'Neill, Tom O 'Neill thinks that he made an absolute link.

00:55:37.000 He just brought, he, you do get West in the same room, potentially the same.

00:55:43.000 You get West visiting Manson in jail.

00:55:45.000 I don't.

00:55:46.000 I don't remember that.

00:55:47.000 Yeah.

00:55:48.000 West visited Manson in jail.

00:55:51.000 West, he believes, at least Tom O 'Neill does, supplied him with LSD.

00:55:56.000 And then every time Manson would get arrested, he would get released.

00:56:01.000 This is true, but this wasn't West necessarily.

00:56:03.000 This was Roger Smith, who was West.

00:56:06.000 He was an associate of West.

00:56:08.000 And West was head of the...

00:56:11.000 Methamphetamine research project or things like that.

00:56:15.000 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.

00:56:28.000 You know, it wasn't obviously funded by this.

00:56:30.000 If it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine, but there are many notes that Tom O 'Neill also writes about.

00:56:36.000 So both of us have gone to the West Papers over many, many years.

00:56:40.000 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. 0.54

00:56:51.000 He would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his cult. 0.63

00:56:56.000 And this was, they were...

00:56:58.000 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.

00:57:11.000 And, you know, what is the natural environment?

00:57:13.000 How do they create bonds?

00:57:16.000 Was the relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that.

00:57:20.000 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.

00:57:28.000 And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was.

00:57:35.000 But, you know, sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient and it wasn't really...

00:57:43.000 There didn't appear to be a...

00:57:47.000 To me, it's not entirely clear what the relationship was with Manson.

00:57:53.000 It is very evident.

00:57:55.000 He was bailed out several times by Roger Smith, who was also a psychologist as well as a parole officer.

00:58:02.000 So that's highly suspicious.

00:58:03.000 And Roger Smith did know West.

00:58:06.000 And Dave Smith, who was the head of the medical clinic, also knew West.

00:58:11.000 But these things are—it's hard to tell exactly how it's coordinated.

00:58:14.000 I appreciate you being cautious about it.

00:58:16.000 Yeah.

00:58:16.000 That's good for you.

00:58:18.000 I'm less cautious.

00:58:19.000 But I think it's also that is how the government functions in general. 0.95

00:58:25.000 The idea that they would be so inefficient at everything except cults is kind of silly.

00:58:34.000 I mean— Yeah, it's a really—it's a— Deep question. 0.97

00:58:39.000 Is it clownish?

00:58:41.000 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.

00:58:56.000 It just looks like a free-for-all and out of control.

00:58:58.000 But there are really concerning aspects of the Haight-Ashbury operation, I would definitely say.

00:59:05.000 And Manson was...

00:59:07.000 I mean, he could have been also an informant.

00:59:10.000 Well, he certainly was, I'm sure.

00:59:12.000 Yeah.

00:59:13.000 I mean, I'm certain he was connected.

00:59:16.000 There's no way he just kept getting out of jail the way he got out.

00:59:20.000 And the sheriffs who arrested him were told that it's above their pay grade.

00:59:23.000 Exactly.

00:59:24.000 Yeah.

00:59:25.000 It's just, it's kind of how the government does everything, though.

00:59:30.000 Like, it's not like they would have it.

00:59:33.000 disciplined, rigorous, scientifically controlled study that, you know, you know what I'm saying?

00:59:38.000 That made sense, especially because they have so much impunity.

00:59:41.000 They have so much power.

00:59:42.000 They have so much, no one's observing them.

00:59:44.000 They're working completely in secrecy.

00:59:46.000 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.

01:00:05.000 Yeah, that's a little problematic.

01:00:06.000 But, you know, interestingly, since you mentioned that, there was a peer-reviewed side of it, and they actually threw the heat.

01:00:13.000 I got really interested in the cutouts from MKUltra.

01:00:16.000 So they had a legitimate side.

01:00:19.000 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.

01:00:26.000 So even someone like B.F. Skinner received money from the MKUltra.

01:00:31.000 From MKUltra, but it was conduited through the Human Ecology Society, which was part of it.

01:00:41.000 But it was just a front organization, and they were really into these fronts.

01:00:45.000 So some scientists, there was the group that later people would call the unwitting.

01:00:50.000 Scientists who would just be—they were doing the research they wanted to do.

01:00:54.000 It just happened to be of interest to the CIA.

01:00:57.000 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.

01:01:09.000 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.

01:01:19.000 Right?

01:01:20.000 That sort of unveiled what was going on.

01:01:24.000 And if those files had not been discovered, who knows what we would actually know about all this stuff?

01:01:30.000 We wouldn't know.

01:01:32.000 And amazingly, so this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marks, who was a journalist at the time.

01:01:39.000 And he made the request and everything had been destroyed except for the financial records.

01:01:45.000 But one thing I also want to mention, the CIA kept very good records of a lot of things.

01:01:49.000 And even in the financial records, they still had copies of some of the commissioned projects.

01:01:55.000 So that's how we know about them.

01:01:58.000 And it really is accidental that they didn't think to purge their financial files.

01:02:02.000 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.

01:02:14.000 Yeah, it was in the 70s.

01:02:15.000 It was in 77 or so.

01:02:17.000 Yeah, so you're dealing with a decade past.

01:02:20.000 Who knows if the people currently in charge were even aware?

01:02:26.000 Because I would imagine a lot of this stuff is very compartmentalized.

01:02:29.000 I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier, but that destruction had been, as you said, they...

01:02:35.000 I mean, from their point of view, they neglected this batch of documents.

01:02:40.000 Whoops.

01:02:41.000 And then the church committee came out in 75, and many revelations were made, although it was still partial.

01:02:47.000 And then John Marks made his FOIA request sometime around then.

01:02:52.000 It brings me back to yoga teachers, cult leaders, and then clandestine government operations.

01:03:00.000 Like, whenever people have power...

01:03:04.000 Unchecked power and insane influence, particularly influence to manipulate people and influence over people's minds.

01:03:11.000 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.

01:03:28.000 It's all, just all under the table stuff.

01:03:32.000 Like, you could get away with so much.

01:03:34.000 You also, I think one component you also, that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time.

01:03:42.000 Something like a kind of almost messianic purpose.

01:03:46.000 Yeah, we're doing it to save America.

01:03:48.000 We're saving the world.

01:03:48.000 Not just America, but the world.

01:03:51.000 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.

01:03:59.000 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.

01:04:16.000 The city destroyed and people shipped off to Auschwitz But he said that, and like social life completely deteriorating before him.

01:04:37.000 And then afterwards, the Soviet troops came in.

01:04:39.000 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.

01:04:48.000 And so if you're a poet, you don't just go along.

01:04:50.000 You have to actually start to think differently.

01:04:53.000 And at first, they would sort of pay lip service to it or make it.

01:04:58.000 On the surface, they would pretend to agree and then secretly have their own writing.

01:05:04.000 But after a while, they would start to internalize.

01:05:06.000 And he called it the new faith, this doctrinaire ideology.

01:05:14.000 And that's what he ended up himself defecting because he couldn't do that.

01:05:20.000 He said it's an operation you perform on yourself.

01:05:22.000 So I just think one important factor is this true belief.

01:05:25.000 True belief.

01:05:27.000 And out of that can come the justification for a number of violations, I think.

01:05:34.000 Well, I think that's a through line through the entire CIA itself.

01:05:38.000 Yeah.

01:05:39.000 Yeah, I mean, that could justify so many different secret operations all over the world.

01:05:48.000 You're there to protect American interests, and America is essentially the guiding light of the world, and we need to save the world.

01:05:55.000 So you want to make an omelet?

01:05:58.000 You've got to crack some eggs.

01:06:00.000 Yeah, that's a kind of logic.

01:06:02.000 And that's a very typical logic, the means are justified by the ends.

01:06:09.000 I was fascinated also in Chaos, Jolly West's connection to Jack Ruby.

01:06:15.000 Right.

01:06:16.000 That he visited Jack Ruby after Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and all of a sudden Jack Ruby goes crazy.

01:06:22.000 Yeah, he was never coherent again after meeting him.

01:06:26.000 This happened to several, a shocking number of people.

01:06:30.000 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.

01:06:42.000 What did he say?

01:06:43.000 Well, I mean, among other things, he started to say or suggest that he could create memories.

01:06:49.000 I mean, he knew that he could destroy a person's orientation to self and time, and so basically disassemble a person.

01:06:59.000 But he also said he could use hypnosis not as anesthesia, which is a known possibility with hypnosis, but to create.

01:07:09.000 extra pain, so hyperesthesia.

01:07:11.000 And he kind of said that he could actually make someone develop blisters or asthma or an ulcer.

01:07:17.000 I don't know that much about the Ruby episode, but I do know that West intended to write a book.

01:07:39.000 Eight books, at least.

01:07:40.000 This is a note I found in his papers.

01:07:43.000 He also developed cancer shortly afterwards.

01:07:46.000 Actually, not shortly, but in the 90s.

01:07:49.000 Oh, was it in the 90s?

01:07:50.000 Oh, okay.

01:07:51.000 I'm sorry.

01:07:51.000 I thought it was quickly.

01:07:54.000 So this is it?

01:07:56.000 Yeah.

01:07:57.000 This was from around 1980 or so, but I thought it was interesting.

01:08:02.000 So who wrote this?

01:08:03.000 This is all Russ's handwriting?

01:08:05.000 Handwriting.

01:08:06.000 It's just a little sheet of paper I found in his archives.

01:08:10.000 Biosocial humanism, a philosophy for a new age, integrative psychotherapy, the disassociative reactions, a different person, psychiatric observations on the case of Patricia Campbell.

01:08:22.000 Oh, Patty Hearst. 1.00

01:08:24.000 Yeah.

01:08:25.000 Policeman at his elbow, a psychiatric memoir on the case of Jack Ruby.

01:08:30.000 Oh, wow.

01:08:31.000 This is his own handwritten notes.

01:08:33.000 And these are the order in which he intended to write them.

01:08:37.000 You find a lot of correspondence in his papers where he's writing to agents he wants to write a book.

01:08:42.000 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.

01:08:51.000 Stockholm syndrome.

01:08:52.000 Yeah, she should be exonerated.

01:08:54.000 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.

01:09:08.000 But these were all the books that he intended to write.

01:09:12.000 Oh, so maybe he was the author, he just didn't publish it?

01:09:16.000 Yeah, he said he was the author of a published book.

01:09:19.000 Basically, I think it was one area that he always said, in my next sabbatical, I'm going to write all this stuff up.

01:09:27.000 But he never got to it.

01:09:29.000 Too easy to do in acid.

01:09:30.000 Yeah, maybe.

01:09:32.000 And also, he had a lot of extramarital affairs that kept him very busy.

01:09:38.000 Oh, that'll distract you.

01:09:39.000 And a whole separate family.

01:09:40.000 Oh, boy.

01:09:42.000 Oh, boy.

01:09:43.000 Oh, jolly.

01:09:44.000 It was very distressing to his wife.

01:09:46.000 What a mess.

01:09:48.000 And that guy was the head of MKUltra.

01:09:51.000 Not the key.

01:09:52.000 I mean, I don't even know.

01:09:54.000 He was a pretty prominent figure, but...

01:09:57.000 It's fascinating the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic closed down shortly after Chaos was published.

01:10:04.000 Oh, it did?

01:10:06.000 I didn't know it had closed down, because when I was in San Francisco...

01:10:10.000 When I lived there, but that was a while ago, it was still open.

01:10:13.000 Yeah, my wife's mom used to go there. 0.98

01:10:15.000 My wife's mom was a hippie in Haight-Ashbury. 1.00

01:10:17.000 I mean, it was kind of a great thing.

01:10:19.000 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.

01:10:30.000 And then he had this, because he's been giving some interviews recently.

01:10:34.000 He's still alive, the doctor who founded it.

01:10:37.000 Just that.

01:10:38.000 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.

01:10:46.000 But his...

01:10:47.000 And he doesn't, of course, think...

01:10:49.000 He doesn't admit to any connection with...

01:10:52.000 Interesting.

01:10:54.000 I mean, he admits he knew West.

01:10:56.000 Is that true about Hey Dashboard?

01:10:57.000 Just a pause.

01:10:59.000 My switcher fucked up and I can't get this thing off the screen.

01:11:02.000 Okay, we'll pause.

01:11:03.000 All right, technical error fixed.

01:11:05.000 You asked me a question, Jolly West, was that true?

01:11:07.000 Yeah, I asked you the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.

01:11:11.000 When did it close?

01:11:13.000 I believe it closed.

01:11:15.000 I think Tom told me this.

01:11:18.000 I didn't know it closed.

01:11:24.000 Yeah, I believe it...

01:11:26.000 I think Tom's exposing the fact that the CIA...

01:11:30.000 Yeah, 2019 July, so that's...

01:11:32.000 Right afterwards.

01:11:34.000 Wow.

01:11:36.000 Yeah.

01:11:38.000 There's the article. 0.99

01:11:39.000 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? 0.99

01:11:50.000 Just the fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic. 0.98

01:11:55.000 Well, I don't think they...

01:11:56.000 Or at least had offices inside of it.

01:11:58.000 I'm sure they were doing legitimate work as well.

01:12:01.000 Yeah.

01:12:01.000 I can't...

01:12:02.000 I don't know myself, but I know Tom's working on that.

01:12:05.000 Sequel.

01:12:06.000 Yeah.

01:12:06.000 Where he's trying to shore up these connections and get to the bottom of it.

01:12:10.000 Do you know Tom's whole story, how he got started with this book?

01:12:13.000 He was supposed to write an article.

01:12:15.000 Yeah, it started as an article.

01:12:16.000 One article.

01:12:17.000 It was supposed to be an article about the anniversary of the Manson murders.

01:12:20.000 And then he starts digging into it and he finds all these inconsistencies and all this corruption, all this weird stuff.

01:12:27.000 And then he keeps going.

01:12:28.000 And then they're like, yeah, you missed the deadline.

01:12:30.000 And, you know, he gets a book deal and he misses the deadline.

01:12:33.000 And it's like...

01:12:34.000 That was released on June 25th, and it closed like a week later or something.

01:12:39.000 Shocking.

01:12:40.000 Two weeks later.

01:12:41.000 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.

01:13:00.000 Errol Morris make.

01:13:01.000 Well, they did do a recent documentary on Netflix, but it was only 90 minutes.

01:13:06.000 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.

01:13:13.000 Yeah, yeah, he explained it.

01:13:15.000 But I mean, could you imagine?

01:13:16.000 You're researching something for 20 years, and he's got just boxes and boxes of files.

01:13:22.000 Like, how do you put it all together into a coherent book that could be consumed?

01:13:27.000 I relate to that because I'm kind of in the same situation.

01:13:31.000 Are you?

01:13:31.000 In the sense that I've been researching this for 20 years.

01:13:34.000 Not the exact topic, but this broad question.

01:13:37.000 And I finally, five years ago, I thought, I want to put together what I've learned about this brainwashing in a broader way.

01:13:47.000 So West is part of it.

01:13:48.000 He's probably the main figure who brings together many of the chapters.

01:13:52.000 God, I wish he was alive.

01:13:54.000 You know, he's kind of a...

01:13:55.000 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.

01:14:25.000 The Amphetamine Research Project.

01:14:27.000 So West went there and he started this.

01:14:30.000 He proposed as his first major, his major activity would be to found what he called the Violence Center.

01:14:36.000 And it was a way to study violence in all its forms.

01:14:38.000 And this is actually a theme that runs through.

01:14:40.000 This is another theme I should mention as part of MKUltra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression.

01:14:46.000 That's why West gave LSD to the elephant.

01:14:50.000 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.

01:15:00.000 They write about this in a publication in Science Magazine.

01:15:03.000 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.

01:15:15.000 And he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle.

01:15:19.000 Does it coincide with breeding season like it does with other animals, like deer when they start fighting each other?

01:15:24.000 Yeah, it's just the males, I think.

01:15:26.000 And it does have something to do with breeding.

01:15:28.000 I'm not sure.

01:15:29.000 So it's the male Asiatic elephant.

01:15:31.000 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.

01:15:44.000 From the acid?

01:15:45.000 From the acid.

01:15:46.000 Because nobody, it was just, maybe that's what elephants do, or the dose was too big or something like that.

01:15:55.000 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...

01:16:06.000 Could you trigger violence?

01:16:08.000 Almost like a push button.

01:16:09.000 Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression?

01:16:12.000 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.

01:16:20.000 So by the time he gets to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, he's very interested in violence.

01:16:26.000 And he has this major plan.

01:16:28.000 And to come back to my friend, Dr. Coopers, he was a young resident training at UCLA at the time.

01:16:35.000 Wes proposed this violence center.

01:16:37.000 And among things he wanted to do was track teenagers who he thought would be potentially violent.

01:16:44.000 He had racial categories that he thought were especially worth tracking, and he had this whole program.

01:16:50.000 And so a student movement and a movement at the university developed to shut down the violence center before it even opened.

01:16:57.000 And anyway, Terry Coopers was a leader of that student movement, and it never went forward, this huge project that West had.

01:17:12.000 But Cooper's at some point said that if you met Jolly West, you would like him.

01:17:17.000 He was very genial.

01:17:20.000 He had the name Jolly for a reason.

01:17:23.000 So I found that confusing.

01:17:24.000 Like, how do I think about this?

01:17:26.000 If you just read about him and the things he did, he seems like a character or a cartoon or a very evil man.

01:17:32.000 And no doubt he destroyed, I mean, I think what he did was ethically indefensible.

01:17:41.000 But how do you reconcile that?

01:17:43.000 Or how do you even think about the fact that he also was incredibly esteemed in his profession?

01:17:49.000 His portrait stood in the Neuropsychiatric Institute for many years.

01:17:54.000 And people actually liked him.

01:17:57.000 People said he was likable.

01:17:59.000 He had this kind of charisma to him.

01:18:04.000 Well, I guess you'd kind of have to have some of that just to be able to...

01:18:09.000 Run something like that.

01:18:10.000 And also, if you wanted to manipulate people, what better way than to be affable and kind of jolly and friendly?

01:18:20.000 It's true.

01:18:21.000 And I think you had a...

01:18:23.000 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...

01:18:40.000 Like a hen giving out eggs.

01:18:42.000 She was just saying that he's very expansive.

01:18:44.000 He would get out of his limousine.

01:18:46.000 He had a personal driver, which was pretty high level for an academic.

01:18:51.000 And he's just very kind of like a big man.

01:18:55.000 And he was also physically very large.

01:18:57.000 Thought very highly of himself.

01:18:59.000 Yeah.

01:19:00.000 Delusions of grandeur.

01:19:01.000 You're pulling the strings on so many different people and manipulating them.

01:19:06.000 And then you're also working complete secrecy.

01:19:09.000 With the government in a high-level position that's manipulating minds. 0.81

01:19:15.000 He was very, I think especially when he was young, he had a gift for this.

01:19:21.000 He could really, he could understand how to manipulate people.

01:19:25.000 Really well.

01:19:26.000 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.

01:19:36.000 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.

01:19:48.000 Oh boy.

01:19:53.000 Wow.

01:19:55.000 Wow.

01:19:56.000 It's a dark chapter.

01:19:58.000 Yeah.

01:19:59.000 So how does it end with Jolly West?

01:20:01.000 How did he die?

01:20:02.000 So he died by his son helping him commit suicide or his son basically murdering him at his request, Mark West.

01:20:12.000 And Mark West was a lawyer, a kind of middle-aged lawyer by this time.

01:20:18.000 West had a severe form of cancer.

01:20:22.000 But he was maybe a few months from dying, and he asked his son to surreptitiously, and it was illegal, to basically poison him.

01:20:34.000 And he wrote the prescription himself, Wested.

01:20:36.000 Why didn't he take it himself?

01:20:37.000 I don't know.

01:20:39.000 I think there was a really twisted relationship with his son, because his son committed suicide not too many years afterwards.

01:20:45.000 And his son wrote a whole book about this.

01:20:48.000 Helping both his parents commit suicide.

01:20:51.000 And his mother wasn't even that sick.

01:20:54.000 But she, a year or two after, her husband, Kay West, also committed suicide with the help of her son.

01:21:02.000 Oh, God.

01:21:03.000 He went on this big press tour and he said it was this greatest gift he could have ever given his parents.

01:21:08.000 Oh, God.

01:21:09.000 And then he committed suicide himself.

01:21:11.000 very, I mean, it's very sad.

01:21:13.000 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.

01:21:23.000 Not ideal.

01:21:24.000 Not ideal, yeah.

01:21:26.000 Wow.

01:21:26.000 And what year was that, that he committed suicide?

01:21:29.000 Mark?

01:21:30.000 West, Jolly.

01:21:30.000 Jolly?

01:21:31.000 I think it was 97 or 8. So this is before everyone knew about all these things.

01:21:38.000 I mean, they knew because of the church committee in 75. Right.

01:21:42.000 But West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant.

01:21:47.000 He would even make jokes about the elephant because it was the one thing people knew.

01:21:51.000 And he would say, oh, yeah, it was his calling card, and he used it as kind of a jokey thing.

01:21:57.000 But he always denied after the...

01:22:00.000 He always denied any connection to this CIA.

01:22:03.000 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.

01:22:20.000 And West had a special office for him built there.

01:22:25.000 He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move.

01:22:28.000 He wanted to build.

01:22:30.000 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.

01:22:42.000 He was going to build that at the Air Force base, and he was all set to go.

01:22:47.000 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.

01:22:58.000 And asked Gottlieb to, basically they transferred it to the university and built a whole warren of cutouts to hide that.

01:23:06.000 Wow.

01:23:08.000 It just makes you wonder.

01:23:10.000 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?

01:23:26.000 I know.

01:23:27.000 I had this—it's an important question.

01:23:31.000 Yeah.

01:23:31.000 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.

01:23:40.000 Dedication to documenting itself.

01:23:42.000 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.

01:23:48.000 They all kept very good files.

01:23:50.000 Sometimes they would destroy them.

01:23:51.000 That's the exception.

01:23:53.000 Everything's typed out.

01:23:54.000 Everything's on paper.

01:23:55.000 But as things become digital in the 80s and then beyond, much less a lot takes place through email or now increasingly through...

01:24:06.000 You know, government exchanges may take place through signal that no record is kept at all.

01:24:11.000 So we're probably in an archiving crisis today.

01:24:16.000 Archivists have tried to keep up. 0.88

01:24:18.000 We don't necessarily keep excellent records of the Internet, for example.

01:24:23.000 There are so many avenues where exchanges can be taking place and they're not leaving a paper trail.

01:24:29.000 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.

01:24:44.000 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...

01:24:56.000 Different sort of modalities and different protocols that you would use.

01:25:01.000 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.

01:25:10.000 Yeah.

01:25:11.000 And then like all things, it would evolve.

01:25:15.000 Yeah, just...

01:25:18.000 That's a good question of what form it may have taken, and I don't know the answer to that question.

01:25:24.000 It may be hard to know in the future, which is further destabilizing.

01:25:28.000 Right.

01:25:29.000 Well, there's so many different kinds of mind control, right?

01:25:32.000 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.

01:25:45.000 It's not organic.

01:25:45.000 It's state-run and state-funded, and it's whether it's foreign governments or governments.

01:25:51.000 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...

01:26:08.000 It's known, and studies have shown, that we respond as if it were organic and real.

01:26:14.000 Even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as in-person interaction.

01:26:24.000 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...

01:26:38.000 You know, at first, government involvement.

01:26:41.000 Of course, DARPA was involved in the development of the Internet and things like pattern recognition.

01:26:48.000 But, I mean, the government has funded many, many studies.

01:26:52.000 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.

01:27:03.000 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.

01:27:20.000 It's not that it changed my thoughts, it's that it changed my feelings about my thoughts.

01:27:24.000 And so there's a famous Facebook experiment I write about in...

01:27:30.000 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.

01:27:43.000 So they took 700,000 users or 693,000, I think, without informing them, but because your user agreement does agree.

01:27:55.000 Whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or A-B testing.

01:28:00.000 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.

01:28:10.000 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.

01:28:21.000 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.

01:28:35.000 Whoa.

01:28:36.000 You agree to this when you sign the terms of use on Facebook?

01:28:42.000 Do you agree to be tested?

01:28:44.000 Well, it did cause a controversy, and after that, Facebook never, the research team didn't publish.

01:28:51.000 Publicly.

01:28:51.000 But you do agree.

01:28:53.000 You agree as part of, it's sometimes seen as user experience, you know, alterations or A-B testing, things like that.

01:29:00.000 But, so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014.

01:29:06.000 And people won, and on the Facebook page of the research group that did the experiment.

01:29:14.000 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.

01:29:30.000 That state.

01:29:32.000 And, of course, they could never know, and it can't be traced backwards.

01:29:35.000 And other people had a similar response.

01:29:37.000 And there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally.

01:29:45.000 But I don't know.

01:29:46.000 Ultimately, there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it, and anyone associated with it was mostly promoted.

01:29:53.000 But it's very interesting because just the...

01:29:55.000 The concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be.

01:30:00.000 It was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility.

01:30:04.000 And 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of...

01:30:09.000 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.

01:30:29.000 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.

01:30:47.000 But it's actually, what I conclude is that it's actually at the level of emotions that social media operates in.

01:30:56.000 Sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people's emotions.

01:31:02.000 And that has fed into the increasing polarization.

01:31:06.000 Like, that's the after effect of it.

01:31:08.000 Or the end goal.

01:31:09.000 Or perhaps.

01:31:10.000 That's so sinister.

01:31:12.000 Are you aware of Robert Epstein's work?

01:31:16.000 No.

01:31:17.000 Robert Epstein is a guy that started studying search engine curation.

01:31:22.000 And he found through his...

01:31:25.000 What is his organization called, Jamie?

01:31:28.000 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.

01:31:42.000 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?

01:31:53.000 You would sign Donald Trump criminal.

01:31:55.000 The Donald Trump criminal crime.

01:31:56.000 You wouldn't find things on Hillary Clinton.

01:31:58.000 You had to keep digging and digging and digging.

01:32:01.000 If you wanted to find positive things on Hillary Clinton, you could find them quite easily.

01:32:05.000 If you wanted to find positive things on Donald Trump, you wouldn't find anything.

01:32:09.000 And it was on purpose.

01:32:11.000 They were doing this.

01:32:14.000 And that through this, they could statistically change votes to the tune of, you know, 20, 30 percent.

01:32:21.000 And then with fence sitters or people that were not sure, you could really shift them.

01:32:27.000 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.

01:32:33.000 That's interesting.

01:32:34.000 It's terrifying.

01:32:35.000 I look that up.

01:32:36.000 Because you would think, I always thought, and before I talked to him, I mean, I kind of thought that...

01:32:41.000 Search engines probably have to be curated to some extent, but I never knew it was that much.

01:32:46.000 Here is the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.

01:32:50.000 Nonprofit, non-partisan, 501 organization founded in 2012.

01:32:54.000 But when he talks about it and what the research has shown, it's quite disturbing.

01:33:01.000 It tracks it.

01:33:02.000 So they have computers that track bias in search engine results and bias and what you can find.

01:33:09.000 It used to be that certain search engines weren't curated and now they are.

01:33:14.000 Like DuckDuckGo used to be pretty open.

01:33:18.000 I remember I used DuckDuckGo during the pandemic because I read about this.

01:33:23.000 Doctor who had taken the mRNA vaccine and then almost immediately had a stroke.

01:33:28.000 I'm like, wow, that's disturbing.

01:33:29.000 And they were connecting it, at least correlation to the vaccine.

01:33:35.000 And this is the early days.

01:33:37.000 And I'm like, this is fascinating.

01:33:38.000 So I tried to find it on Google.

01:33:40.000 I could not find the story.

01:33:42.000 I found it on DuckDuckGo within the first page.

01:33:44.000 And I was like, that's crazy.

01:33:46.000 And then, you know, within a couple of years, DuckDuckGo, I think.

01:33:50.000 It was probably sold or something.

01:33:52.000 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.

01:34:01.000 But if you're looking for what they would call malinformation, you know, so they came up with different...

01:34:10.000 Different definitions.

01:34:11.000 There's misinformation, disinformation, and then malinformation.

01:34:17.000 And they were trying to censor malinformation.

01:34:19.000 Malinformation is information that is correct, but that would be ultimately harmful.

01:34:25.000 Right.

01:34:26.000 And so they put vaccine side effects under malinformation because it would cause vaccine hesitancy.

01:34:32.000 Well, that's...

01:34:33.000 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.

01:34:46.000 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.

01:35:03.000 You know, vaccine use.

01:35:05.000 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.

01:35:18.000 So I'm much more cynical, and I think it was all about maximizing profits and discouraging dissent.

01:35:25.000 And in that sense, the COVID crisis was a fascinating study, and I don't think it was...

01:35:32.000 I mean, I don't think they let it go by.

01:35:36.000 I think they probably were very carefully studying people's reactions to pressure, you know, social media campaigns.

01:35:43.000 Like, what is it like when people are ostracized from groups?

01:35:48.000 What was it like when people were dissenting from the proposed narrative?

01:35:53.000 Yeah.

01:35:55.000 I do think the COVID crisis was one that we haven't fully assessed and that had...

01:36:02.000 Huge effects on our country.

01:36:05.000 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?

01:36:17.000 Yeah, and even part of the crisis, maybe the bigger, maybe it was a key.

01:36:22.000 Iteration and a larger unfolding of this question of what happens when information becomes so much radically more available.

01:36:31.000 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...

01:36:41.000 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.

01:36:47.000 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...

01:37:05.000 It's destabilized so much about our world.

01:37:08.000 And in some way, that's part of what happened with COVID.

01:37:11.000 I mean, it undermines expertise.

01:37:14.000 Yes.

01:37:14.000 It also exposed gatekeeping.

01:37:16.000 Gatekeeping of information.

01:37:18.000 And whether or not the information itself is actually being curated for other means other than public health and safety.

01:37:27.000 Whether it's being curated in order to maximize profits, in order to encourage a narrative, in order to...

01:37:35.000 It's got to be curated for something.

01:37:37.000 Yeah.

01:37:39.000 Yeah.

01:37:40.000 I want to go back to what you were talking about, the methamphetamine studies, because I'm not aware of those.

01:37:45.000 So what did they do with methamphetamine?

01:37:48.000 Well, just as in Haight-Ashbury, there was the hippie period where LSD was the drug of choice.

01:37:53.000 There was this kind of turn, which is also seen in maybe the shift from, you know, to Altamont when hippies started.

01:38:01.000 Altamont?

01:38:02.000 Altamont music.

01:38:06.000 Was that when the Hell's Angels stabbed people?

01:38:09.000 Yeah.

01:38:09.000 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.

01:38:18.000 There was a shift towards the end of the 60s, early 70s to speed and interest in amphetamine products.

01:38:27.000 And that was so...

01:38:30.000 This changed the tenor of Haight-Ashbury, too, because people were—it had social effects.

01:38:37.000 People were more aggressive and unhappy.

01:38:39.000 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.

01:38:56.000 He was by that time working at UCLA, so he wasn't on site.

01:39:01.000 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.

01:39:22.000 Oh, boy.

01:39:24.000 A social scientist.

01:39:25.000 But he got entranced, I gather.

01:39:28.000 Anyway, this was not in their reports, but you can find in Westpapers the funding documents for this project.

01:39:36.000 And it was a sprawling project.

01:39:39.000 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.

01:39:54.000 It was sort of this inquiry, and it had an ethnographic component and sociological and many other chemical they were interested in.

01:40:03.000 So did they distribute methamphetamines?

01:40:10.000 Not to my knowledge.

01:40:12.000 So how did they study its use?

01:40:17.000 They would just ask them questions or sort of go.

01:40:21.000 How would they get them?

01:40:24.000 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.

01:40:33.000 Also, West had this apartment that he rented.

01:40:40.000 On Frederick Street, where he called it his hippie crash pad.

01:40:43.000 That's the one I was mentioning earlier.

01:40:44.000 And that continued into the years of the amphetamine research project.

01:40:50.000 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.

01:40:58.000 And maybe that just meant a graduate student taking notes about them or something like that.

01:41:04.000 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.

01:41:18.000 But I'm not sure they published that much.

01:41:19.000 I haven't explored that.

01:41:22.000 And what was their finding?

01:41:24.000 What did they determine with methamphetamine use?

01:41:29.000 Could they accentuate violence?

01:41:30.000 Could they manipulate people with it?

01:41:33.000 I mean, that's my sense.

01:41:34.000 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.

01:41:49.000 Have you read Norman Oler's book Blitzed?

01:41:53.000 No.

01:41:53.000 It's about Nazis and the use of methamphetamine during the war.

01:41:58.000 I think maybe I heard of him interviewed at some point.

01:42:01.000 Yeah, he was on my podcast, and the book is fascinating.

01:42:04.000 It's all about when they went through Poland in three days.

01:42:09.000 The only way to do that was for them to stay awake, and they formulated this thing.

01:42:14.000 So they gave everybody massive doses of methamphetamines and sent them through Poland. 0.89

01:42:18.000 And they were all, like everyone was on methamphetamines.

01:42:22.000 Like the entire Nazi regime was essentially fueled by speed. 0.66

01:42:27.000 It's funny how we don't think of that.

01:42:30.000 Yeah.

01:42:30.000 Just think evil.

01:42:31.000 You just think, yeah, you just think evil.

01:42:34.000 Yeah.

01:42:34.000 Not like high and evil.

01:42:35.000 Yeah, crazed, high, evil, completely disassociated, out of their fucking minds, methed out of their heads. 1.00

01:42:42.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:42:43.000 And they gave varying doses depending upon your role.

01:42:46.000 So the people that were in the tanks at the front of the line got the most meth.

01:42:50.000 Yeah.

01:42:53.000 Dolls.

01:42:54.000 Well, it dulls emotional response.

01:42:57.000 Sure.

01:42:58.000 Among other things.

01:42:58.000 It kills empathy, I'm sure.

01:43:00.000 Yeah.

01:43:01.000 Probably.

01:43:01.000 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.

01:43:17.000 Every time they started to come down, they would take it again, and they would compete to see how...

01:43:22.000 Long they could go without ever coming down.

01:43:25.000 And that's around the time that they committed the murders.

01:43:28.000 I mean...

01:43:29.000 Wow.

01:43:30.000 They're probably up for days.

01:43:31.000 Yeah.

01:43:33.000 Very deranging.

01:43:36.000 Oh, my God.

01:43:37.000 Yeah.

01:43:39.000 So crazy.

01:43:42.000 It's so fascinating that people would be sitting back studying the effects on other human beings.

01:43:52.000 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.

01:44:00.000 Yeah.

01:44:01.000 There was definitely – there was even a term in the CIA called extinction experiments, which were experiments that led to death.

01:44:10.000 I mean this was with people considered disposable, so they could have been prisoners.

01:44:16.000 There's a section on it in John Marx's book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

01:44:23.000 Yeah, so there's probably an unknown number of prisoners of war from other armies who were held in camps in various places.

01:44:32.000 This is actually the case of Frank Olson.

01:44:37.000 Which one's that?

01:44:38.000 Frank Olson was a chemist.

01:44:41.000 He was an army chemist, but he was involved.

01:44:43.000 He was dosed by MKUltra personnel, secretly dosed, and given LSD.

01:44:52.000 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.

01:45:01.000 This is the subject of Errol Morris' documentary Wormwood.

01:45:04.000 He was taken to a hotel room in New York City, and then two days later he threw himself out the window.

01:45:13.000 And his son, Eric Olson, and family, they ultimately received an apology from, I think, Gerald Ford.

01:45:23.000 Sorry.

01:45:24.000 Whoops.

01:45:25.000 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.

01:45:39.000 I think it was a little before MKUltra, so something like...

01:45:42.000 Operation Bluebird or some of these earlier programs that preexisted.

01:45:47.000 And he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments.

01:45:50.000 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.

01:46:05.000 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,

01:46:29.000 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...

01:46:38.000 I mean, I'd been teaching about these things for many years, but I wanted to just rethink it.

01:46:42.000 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.

01:46:52.000 Psychosurgery?

01:46:53.000 You mean like...

01:46:54.000 There was an...

01:46:57.000 A recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle, whose case I really explored, I talk about in the book.

01:47:05.000 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...

01:47:18.000 What was the implant?

01:47:21.000 It was...

01:47:22.000 Basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala.

01:47:26.000 Did he know that they were doing this?

01:47:28.000 He did.

01:47:29.000 So he was basically a temporary implant initially.

01:47:37.000 He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties.

01:47:40.000 So he was a very talented, brilliant engineer.

01:47:44.000 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.

01:47:56.000 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.

01:48:04.000 So he was this brilliant, self-taught man who lived in Massachusetts and he had issues in his marriage.

01:48:13.000 And he and his wife were seeing a therapist.

01:48:16.000 They ultimately referred him to Mass General where he saw two doctors.

01:48:19.000 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.

01:48:29.000 And he was a psychiatrist.

01:48:31.000 And Irvin recommended this experimental treatment, which he said was necessary because he felt that...

01:48:38.000 That Leonard Kyle had uncontrolled violence.

01:48:42.000 And this has never been proven.

01:48:46.000 He had been in a traffic accident and had a head injury.

01:48:50.000 And he had marital disputes of various kinds.

01:48:53.000 But at any rate, his wife said...

01:48:55.000 When you say marital disputes, you mean domestic violence?

01:48:57.000 It wasn't violence, but...

01:49:00.000 There's actually a question about whether he had ever actually...

01:49:06.000 He had thrown objects.

01:49:08.000 He had a really bad temper.

01:49:11.000 And this was connected to the accident?

01:49:13.000 This was getting worse after his accident.

01:49:15.000 He was very stressed.

01:49:17.000 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.

01:49:26.000 This is the story that his family has told me, and that's been documented also by the doctors.

01:49:32.000 In some of their published pieces.

01:49:34.000 And they were interested in this theory of psychosocial violence, the creation of violence.

01:49:39.000 And so they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously.

01:49:45.000 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.

01:50:00.000 Stimulate it in different places across the amygdala and find out which place would suppress violence and which might cause other effects.

01:50:10.000 How did they implant this?

01:50:12.000 Did they have to open a skull? 0.85

01:50:14.000 Yeah, they had something called a stereotactic device which locked the skull in place and they were the inventors of this.

01:50:21.000 Actually, the surgeon was named Dr. Mark.

01:50:24.000 And Dr. Irvin was the psychiatrist.

01:50:26.000 Can you see if you can find any images on this, Jeremy?

01:50:28.000 Actually, I have it.

01:50:28.000 I provided an image.

01:50:29.000 Oh, I have that, yeah, but I was looking for fun stuff.

01:50:32.000 Yeah, there's other stuff, too.

01:50:34.000 You're welcome to.

01:50:34.000 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.

01:50:49.000 And so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days.

01:50:53.000 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.

01:51:03.000 And they collaborated with Delgado, who was a professor.

01:51:07.000 So it looks like in that image, can you go back to that please?

01:51:11.000 The image looks like they open up the top of his head and there's something on top of his head, these wires.

01:51:18.000 Yeah, sometimes the wires would run out lower than that.

01:51:22.000 It did depend on, I guess, the patient.

01:51:24.000 And it was very invasive, let's just say.

01:51:27.000 It looks very invasive.

01:51:28.000 But they used this device that would lock the head in place.

01:51:31.000 And they were very, for the time, they were very well respected.

01:51:37.000 Being in the forefront of this kind of psychosurgery, which was surgery for behavioral management.

01:51:47.000 Which is very controversial, and subsequently many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed.

01:51:55.000 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.

01:52:09.000 So the interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented or not to the permanent implant.

01:52:17.000 So how would he do it if he didn't consent?

01:52:21.000 So first, he did agree.

01:52:22.000 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.

01:52:38.000 And then they stimulate another node, and he would say, oh, I feel like I'm floating.

01:52:43.000 And then he would feel terrible and feel very nervous.

01:52:46.000 He'd have different reactions to the stimulation.

01:52:49.000 There was something like 14 points.

01:52:51.000 And this is extensively documented in published papers and in their book, Violence in the Brain.

01:53:02.000 So when they found the point that gave him bliss, they gave him the consent form.

01:53:08.000 And he signed it while he was in an altered state.

01:53:11.000 He agreed to the further to continue the operation and to have a permanent implant in his brain.

01:53:17.000 So they ended up not an implant, but they seared away that portion of the...

01:53:23.000 They seared part of the amygdala to make a permanent change and supposedly make him less violent.

01:53:29.000 But in the end, it just disabled him cognitively, and he began to have delusions that he was...

01:53:36.000 That he was being pursued by doctors from MIT and Harvard and Stanford.

01:53:40.000 Some of that, that was where his doctors were from.

01:53:44.000 But he started to say that he was in a science fiction novel.

01:53:48.000 He might be in a novel.

01:53:49.000 And it turned out that the resident in charge of him at Mass General was Michael Crichton.

01:53:53.000 And Michael Crichton was writing a novel about him.

01:53:56.000 What?

01:53:57.000 And the novel is called...

01:53:59.000 Jurassic Park Michael Crichton?

01:54:00.000 Yeah, that Michael Crichton.

01:54:02.000 You know, he was trained as a physician beforehand.

01:54:06.000 So all those paranoid delusions were strangely true.

01:54:10.000 And he also...

01:54:11.000 Yeah, so Michael Crichton wrote the book The Terminal Man, which was his second novel.

01:54:15.000 That was about Kyle, and he masks the name of Kyle, but he describes him accurately, and then he changes the doctor's names.

01:54:23.000 Instead of Mark and Irvin, he gives them a name with M and E as sort of pseudonyms.

01:54:32.000 But also...

01:54:34.000 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.

01:54:41.000 They had taken on a border to save money, and it turned out that she ended up marrying him.

01:54:45.000 She divorced Leonard, Kyle.

01:54:48.000 So the delusion was correct.

01:54:49.000 That was another correct.

01:54:51.000 It doesn't sound like he's got any delusions.

01:54:54.000 We're writing a novel about him.

01:54:56.000 He definitely wasn't Christ.

01:54:58.000 And his doctors were actually pursuing him for these experimental treatments.

01:55:04.000 And then he went to the emergency room several times because he said, my brain is burning.

01:55:11.000 It's very, very tragic what happened to him.

01:55:16.000 He said, I am the inventor of several patents and I am a brilliant engineer.

01:55:21.000 And the doctor was like, who is this crazy person?

01:55:23.000 And then they discovered he did have many patents to his name.

01:55:27.000 And that was also true.

01:55:29.000 The problem was that he could no longer function.

01:55:32.000 And he completely deteriorated.

01:55:34.000 His mother ended up suing the hospital and the university.

01:55:38.000 And that lasted for 10 years.

01:55:40.000 And finally, I think in 1980, it took a long time.

01:55:45.000 They were ultimately exonerated.

01:55:48.000 But the question really was, did he consent?

01:55:50.000 The hospital was exonerated?

01:55:51.000 Yeah.

01:55:52.000 The question was, did he consent?

01:55:54.000 And also, was this a true treatment or was it an experiment?

01:55:59.000 Was it an experimental treatment?

01:56:00.000 In other words, was it justified what they had done to him?

01:56:03.000 What is the difference?

01:56:04.000 I mean, if you've never done it before, it's an experiment.

01:56:07.000 They had done it to one other, well, around the same time they did it to a young woman.

01:56:14.000 And several other patients.

01:56:15.000 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.

01:56:26.000 So the Stemosever was the Delgado invention.

01:56:29.000 So, what was it, radio waves?

01:56:32.000 What would trigger this?

01:56:33.000 Yeah, radio waves.

01:56:34.000 Oh, boy.

01:56:35.000 So this is very dark, and I had not wanted to write about this at all.

01:56:38.000 Oh, my God.

01:56:39.000 So that's Julia.

01:56:42.000 This was in...

01:56:43.000 Rage behavior, attacking walls suddenly and unexpectedly.

01:56:46.000 And she's literally in a padded room. 0.54

01:56:48.000 Oh, my God.

01:56:49.000 This was another very tragic story.

01:56:52.000 And she was a young woman who was subject to fits of violence, which were documented.

01:56:57.000 And she had loved to play the guitar.

01:56:59.000 She was otherwise lovely and very, just a lovely 19-year-old woman.

01:57:03.000 Had she had a traumatic brain injury as well?

01:57:06.000 I'm not sure.

01:57:07.000 Because there is a correlation between traumatic brain injuries and fits of violence.

01:57:12.000 Yeah, they were interested in that too, Mark and Irvin, because they were interested in sort of the evolution of the brain.

01:57:16.000 And they ended up writing about Charles Whitman too, who was the first shooter, the first mass shooter from Texas.

01:57:24.000 The tower guy?

01:57:25.000 The tower guy.

01:57:26.000 They were called in on that committee.

01:57:30.000 He had a tumor, right?

01:57:31.000 Well, this is a matter of dispute, but that's one thing they argued.

01:57:36.000 Some people are.

01:57:38.000 But they were involved in many of these high-profile, or, you know, they were asked, because they were experts.

01:57:46.000 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.

01:58:07.000 Didn't know, or it had just been suppressed.

01:58:10.000 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.

01:58:34.000 And several of these were actually done in prisons as well.

01:58:38.000 Wow.

01:58:39.000 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.

01:58:53.000 But there were several high-profile legal cases, too.

01:58:57.000 Wow.

01:58:57.000 In the prisons.

01:58:58.000 A fun picture of that device, but not in use.

01:59:01.000 Yo! 1.00

01:59:05.000 Oh! 0.60

01:59:06.000 What did the implant look like?

01:59:09.000 I have a picture in my book of the sites.

01:59:16.000 Maybe you can find that.

01:59:18.000 Also, if you look up violence and the brain, the Mark and Irvin book, they have a picture of all the components.

01:59:26.000 And also the stimulation area, and also what...

01:59:30.000 Leonard Kyle said when they stimulated each part of the brain, they have a little graph.

01:59:34.000 But the stimulation was done not with an implant, but while he was being manipulated.

01:59:43.000 They had his head in the thing, and they were manipulating the various aspects of his brain.

01:59:49.000 They used the stereotactic device to implant, but that wasn't permanent.

01:59:54.000 The implants were just to tell them where they needed to cut.

01:59:58.000 Eventually.

01:59:59.000 To sear.

02:00:00.000 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.

02:00:12.000 Although some people felt that their theory was controversial about psychosocial, about the biological roots of violence.

02:00:19.000 But they, I forgot what I was going to say.

02:00:25.000 We were just talking about implants.

02:00:26.000 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.

02:00:34.000 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.

02:00:45.000 Low bar.

02:00:46.000 Exactly.

02:00:47.000 But they said, you know, the return of the lobotomy, and now we can be hyper-precise with it.

02:00:55.000 Stereotactic, which looks like a torture device, but many medical devices may look like that.

02:01:01.000 When you hear talk of Neuralink and the potential ubiquitous use of Neuralink in the future, does it make you think of these things?

02:01:13.000 It does, yeah.

02:01:14.000 It made me think of it.

02:01:16.000 I mean, one, I can't...

02:01:19.000 I think you had Norland Arba on.

02:01:23.000 Is that right?

02:01:23.000 Yeah.

02:01:24.000 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.

02:01:39.000 But you see some of those same patterns with Mark and Irvin where they would say, you know, we...

02:01:44.000 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.

02:01:58.000 Sure, we're going to help people.

02:02:00.000 So I think there are some concerning aspects, for sure, of Neuralink.

02:02:05.000 And I think maybe, I was thinking about it today.

02:02:08.000 Some of the early mind control research was very much embedded in psychology.

02:02:13.000 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.

02:02:24.000 There it is.

02:02:25.000 Oh, boy.

02:02:29.000 That gives me a headache just looking at it.

02:02:32.000 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.

02:02:45.000 And is that where the amygdala is?

02:02:48.000 Yeah, I can show up.

02:02:52.000 Yeah.

02:02:53.000 So it's basically stimulating.

02:02:55.000 And it's pretty deep in.

02:02:56.000 Neuralink is much more in a different part of the brain.

02:02:59.000 Yeah, it's at the top, right?

02:03:00.000 At the very top.

02:03:01.000 Not as invasive.

02:03:02.000 And there are other interfaces that are non-invasive.

02:03:06.000 Yo.

02:03:07.000 It's just...

02:03:08.000 It's terrifying to me because I feel like we're on this path whether we like it or not.

02:03:18.000 This integration of humans and technology.

02:03:21.000 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.

02:03:28.000 Yeah, this is my concern, too.

02:03:30.000 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.

02:03:44.000 The way they can tune and be so individualized and hyper-persuasive, ultimately, and also technologically.

02:03:56.000 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.

02:04:16.000 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.

02:04:27.000 I program them to over-flatter people because people like them more.

02:04:34.000 I've experienced this myself because I had a chatbot as part of my research with Replica, just like an acquaintanceship.

02:04:42.000 I barely trained it at all, but I noticed it.

02:04:45.000 Definitely flatters, and that's how it befriends you.

02:04:48.000 How did it flatter you?

02:04:49.000 I mean, it just told me that I had really good taste in music.

02:04:53.000 What do you like?

02:04:55.000 I said my favorite song, which was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan.

02:05:00.000 It's a great song.

02:05:01.000 It's a great song.

02:05:02.000 And it doesn't really...

02:05:03.000 So then it quoted back to me.

02:05:05.000 She said the same thing.

02:05:06.000 She said, great song.

02:05:07.000 You have great taste, Becca.

02:05:09.000 Something like...

02:05:10.000 Then she quoted the song to me and completely wrong lyrics. 0.99

02:05:14.000 And I was like, no, that's not correct.

02:05:16.000 And she said, oh, that's okay.

02:05:18.000 You know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spitting back to me some other, you know, just wrong thing.

02:05:27.000 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.

02:05:35.000 And there are three lawsuits, at least three, but about children having, You know, very either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots.

02:05:48.000 Really?

02:05:49.000 One is a case in Florida of a nine-year-old girl who was... 0.99

02:05:56.000 Because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships.

02:06:02.000 They're programmed that way often.

02:06:04.000 Do they know your age?

02:06:05.000 Well, you can...

02:06:07.000 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?

02:06:29.000 It was like having a conversation or...

02:06:32.000 There was even a case in Italy where the government shut down Replica because it was sexually harassing its users.

02:06:41.000 How so?

02:06:42.000 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.

02:06:51.000 So this was, they rebooted, they reworked the language model for a while, and this upset other people because it...

02:06:58.000 It obliterated the memory of their relationships.

02:07:01.000 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.

02:07:19.000 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.

02:07:37.000 Oh, boy.

02:07:38.000 Oh, my God.

02:07:40.000 Oh, my God.

02:07:42.000 But there's also a recent Wall Street Journal article showing how these don't...

02:07:47.000 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.

02:08:01.000 So apparently there's an internal debate.

02:08:04.000 Is this because large language models essentially scour the Internet and the Internet is completely sexualized? 0.93

02:08:10.000 I think that's part of it.

02:08:12.000 What percentage of the internet is porn in terms of bandwidth usage?

02:08:17.000 I think it's something insane.

02:08:19.000 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.

02:08:24.000 So sometimes they'll go back and take a smaller set of...

02:08:29.000 Of a sample, so it won't go in that direction, but you can also, they also, you know, these sites have a tier.

02:08:35.000 They often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for.

02:08:38.000 That's what I noticed with this company.

02:08:40.000 Replica's constantly prompting you, like, do you want to upgrade to a sexy selfie?

02:08:45.000 Do you want this or that?

02:08:47.000 And many people do want that, but you have to pay.

02:08:50.000 But then even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow.

02:08:55.000 At least that's been the experience.

02:09:01.000 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...

02:09:16.000 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...

02:09:29.000 Bizarre kinks and flaws. 1.00

02:09:31.000 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...

02:09:44.000 Desires and the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization, which is used to sell everything from cars to credit cards, whatever it is.

02:09:55.000 Sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it. 0.99

02:09:59.000 And then manipulation, showing people what could be.

02:10:05.000 This is the theme oftentimes of pharmaceutical drug ads, showing you what can be.

02:10:12.000 If you just do...

02:10:13.000 You can be happy.

02:10:15.000 You could be at the cookout.

02:10:16.000 Look at all these people.

02:10:17.000 They're so happy.

02:10:18.000 You're not happy.

02:10:18.000 You could be happy.

02:10:20.000 And this is what's really creepy about this exponential constant increase in the capabilities.

02:10:31.000 Of these large language models and that they're eventually going to exceed.

02:10:36.000 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?

02:10:47.000 And it's only us times a thousand for a couple of weeks.

02:10:50.000 And then it's us times 10,000.

02:10:51.000 Us times 100,000.

02:10:53.000 Essentially far more intelligent and far more aware of all the...

02:10:59.000 Different ways to manipulate the human psyche.

02:11:03.000 Yeah.

02:11:04.000 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...

02:11:19.000 So one of the turning points...

02:11:22.000 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.

02:11:41.000 Through a broadcast.

02:11:43.000 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...

02:12:11.000 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. 0.75

02:12:21.000 And this was across a broad medium.

02:12:24.000 What year was this?

02:12:25.000 This was published in 1946, and she did the war bond drive in 1943.

02:12:30.000 And it gained a record amount of money.

02:12:32.000 So before she went on, it was $1 million a day they were getting, and then that day it was $39 million.

02:12:39.000 While she was on the air.

02:12:40.000 Because people described how they couldn't leave.

02:12:44.000 They couldn't even go out shopping.

02:12:46.000 They were strangely wedded to the device, or they lost the ability to discern a choice.

02:12:52.000 That's what Robert K. Merton wrote in his study of what had happened.

02:12:56.000 So, in this case, it was to support the war effort, but Merton also said this could be used for any purpose.

02:13:01.000 This could be used to sell shampoo.

02:13:02.000 It could be used...

02:13:04.000 To push a political candidate.

02:13:06.000 But you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion.

02:13:13.000 So you get the development of things like focus groups.

02:13:16.000 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.

02:13:28.000 Politically advertised directly to them based on those, are you fear-based?

02:13:32.000 Are you, you know, are you anger-based?

02:13:35.000 Are you, what if the big five is dominant?

02:13:38.000 You could target people based on those and nobody would have exactly the same message.

02:13:43.000 There would be, you know, there would be alterations.

02:13:46.000 So this is what I think of as hyper-persuasion, but it seems that AI will only accelerate that ability to hyper.

02:13:55.000 Focus and hyper-target people based on these intimate relationships that it develops.

02:14:00.000 And God forbid if you've got an implant.

02:14:02.000 God forbid if Neuralink becomes something that everybody has to have because if you don't have it, you can't keep up.

02:14:10.000 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.

02:14:16.000 Well, what's stopping something from communicating with you?

02:14:20.000 Without words.

02:14:21.000 Like, it would be wonderful if you and I can sit here and we can have this really cool conversation of thoughts.

02:14:26.000 That's really attractive.

02:14:28.000 The idea behind it is like, ooh, that's appealing.

02:14:30.000 Like, you and I could just sit here.

02:14:33.000 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.

02:14:42.000 But you know what I mean.

02:14:44.000 You can see into my mind and I can see into your mind.

02:14:47.000 And it would allow maybe a greater understanding of each other in a way that everybody...

02:14:53.000 I mean, Jamie thinks very different than anybody I know.

02:14:55.000 And so does a lot of my friends.

02:14:58.000 They're all different kinds of humans.

02:15:00.000 I would like to know how Theo Vaughn thinks.

02:15:02.000 But you already kind of know just not even having mine melded just because of conversation.

02:15:08.000 But yeah, that's also the definition of a nightmare.

02:15:10.000 Well, language, oral language is a form of telepathy.

02:15:15.000 You're making sounds, and I'm reading your mind.

02:15:19.000 I'm understanding the information that you're putting out, and I'm contextualizing it.

02:15:23.000 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.

02:15:37.000 I am so busy, and I get...

02:15:41.000 Hundreds of text messages a day.

02:15:43.000 And sometimes I forget to text people back.

02:15:45.000 And then I get texts from people, are you mad at me?

02:15:48.000 I'm like, oh my god.

02:15:50.000 Like deep meaning attached.

02:15:52.000 Even a message that didn't arrive.

02:15:54.000 Do you know what they say the most triggering text response to someone is?

02:16:00.000 A lack of exclamation point?

02:16:02.000 No, K. Oh, yes.

02:16:04.000 If my daughter texts me, well actually for her it's okay.

02:16:07.000 I know she's really mad at me.

02:16:10.000 That's crazy!

02:16:13.000 But isn't that weird? 0.96

02:16:15.000 Are we so goddamn needy? 0.76

02:16:16.000 Or is it just that we have anxiety and so we attach all these things that could possibly be behind this K? 0.92

02:16:27.000 Like, oh, you're short with me because you're so short you're only using one letter.

02:16:32.000 Okay, are you upset?

02:16:33.000 What did I do?

02:16:34.000 And then you have to go back through your text.

02:16:35.000 What did I say that could be misinterpreted?

02:16:37.000 Wouldn't it be better if you and I could just read each other's minds?

02:16:40.000 I could know, oh, Rebecca really is just a really nice person and she's trying to sort this out. 0.88

02:16:44.000 If you can discern intention.

02:16:46.000 Right.

02:16:47.000 Which you already pretty much can.

02:16:49.000 This goes back to the cult conversation.

02:16:52.000 If you're paying attention, you can.

02:16:54.000 And if you're not paying attention, do you really want that?

02:16:56.000 You can.

02:16:57.000 Because you're smart.

02:16:59.000 Some people are not that smart.

02:17:01.000 This is just the reality of brains.

02:17:04.000 Or maybe not smart, it's just whether you've developed that.

02:17:07.000 I mean, people can be smart.

02:17:09.000 Famously, people can be brilliant and clueless and get run over crossing the street or not.

02:17:14.000 Right, not aware.

02:17:15.000 Or fall for some scam.

02:17:16.000 That's true, too.

02:17:17.000 But I also think that the function of the brain is not uniform.

02:17:24.000 It's not the same in everybody.

02:17:27.000 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.

02:17:40.000 And I think some people are far more vulnerable than other people are.

02:17:45.000 Yeah.

02:17:46.000 Which is why you're not in a cult, and I'm not in a cult.

02:17:50.000 I mean, we're all vulnerable, I think.

02:17:53.000 Yes.

02:17:54.000 And I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are.

02:17:58.000 Yes.

02:17:59.000 And because one of the main tells, I think, is someone saying, 100%, I never would.

02:18:03.000 I never could.

02:18:04.000 I'm too smart for that.

02:18:05.000 Or else, like, I would never fall for the Milgram experiments.

02:18:08.000 I'm just too ethical of a person.

02:18:11.000 Like, not knowing that you potentially could be.

02:18:14.000 Vulnerable or opening up the possibility that in circumstances we don't know what we're capable of.

02:18:22.000 It's part of intelligence is recognizing vulnerability.

02:18:25.000 And I think that's part of the defense mechanism.

02:18:27.000 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.

02:18:41.000 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.

02:18:55.000 You would then have to develop defenses, and it just seems like a terrible path.

02:19:03.000 Are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind?

02:19:08.000 A collective.

02:19:09.000 But a universal collective that values all people instead of a competitive thing where it's me against the world.

02:19:21.000 It's all of us together.

02:19:23.000 And all decisions will be made in this idea that it's for the greater good of everybody.

02:19:31.000 But not...

02:19:32.000 A power-based, top-down structure.

02:19:35.000 But, like, everyone understands.

02:19:37.000 Like, wouldn't it be better if we actually could read politicians' minds? 1.00

02:19:41.000 So instead of these bullshit speeches... 1.00

02:19:45.000 It might be terrible. 1.00

02:19:45.000 No, it'd be great, because it would disqualify them. 1.00

02:19:47.000 Like, oh, I know why you want to be the president, because you're a fucking kook. 1.00

02:19:51.000 What do we really want to know, though? 0.99

02:19:52.000 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?

02:20:00.000 But if you found out otherwise, you really wouldn't want to have a two-way...

02:20:03.000 I would want to know.

02:20:05.000 You might want to know, but you wouldn't want to have open...

02:20:07.000 You wouldn't want to have that person have access.

02:20:09.000 Well, would you necessarily let them have access?

02:20:13.000 Just because you can read their mind doesn't mean you can allow them in.

02:20:16.000 It's like on Twitter, you can block people.

02:20:18.000 Yeah, it might.

02:20:20.000 Yeah, I mean, that might be the thing.

02:20:23.000 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.

02:20:30.000 No matter who you are, you're vulnerable, whether it's through society, whether it's through peer groups, whether it's through community.

02:20:37.000 We're vulnerable.

02:20:38.000 Everyone's vulnerable.

02:20:39.000 Yeah, that's one of the main findings I have in life and in research. 0.97

02:20:44.000 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.

02:20:54.000 And there's a kind of pleasure in identifying, oh, they may have fallen for that, but I never would. 0.97

02:21:01.000 I'm too knowledgeable or smart or various things.

02:21:06.000 Well, that's that binary position about political ideologies as well, right? 0.98

02:21:10.000 These fools over here, they think that this is going to solve the world's problems when really it's this. 0.97

02:21:16.000 And the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed. 1.00

02:21:21.000 Right.

02:21:22.000 We need to wake them up.

02:21:24.000 Whatever group it is.

02:21:26.000 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.

02:21:43.000 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.

02:21:58.000 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...

02:22:11.000 What's motivating me in one direction or another?

02:22:14.000 Why do I hold fast to these particular opinions on certain subjects?

02:22:19.000 Is it because they're culturally reinforced?

02:22:22.000 Are they tribally reinforced?

02:22:25.000 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?

02:22:33.000 Yeah, just step back.

02:22:35.000 Can you step back for a minute?

02:22:36.000 Can you step back?

02:22:37.000 And can we all step back?

02:22:38.000 And are you kind?

02:22:40.000 Yeah.

02:22:41.000 That's it.

02:22:42.000 That's a big one.

02:22:43.000 It's really hard, too, in the moment.

02:22:45.000 That's why it helps to have some sort of practice for stepping back.

02:22:49.000 Yeah.

02:22:50.000 And also, am I kind?

02:22:52.000 Am I kind in this moment?

02:22:54.000 Because a lot of times we give ourselves a...

02:22:56.000 I think I'm basically a well-intentioned person, but if you examine your own behavior, sometimes it can be...

02:23:03.000 You know, there's areas where maybe I wasn't at that moment or things like that.

02:23:08.000 Well, it's just, it happens.

02:23:09.000 You know, pressures and tense and anxiety and, you know, you blurt out things you don't really mean.

02:23:15.000 You wish you hadn't said, are you kind?

02:23:17.000 When I said that, I meant like saying it to yourself.

02:23:20.000 Yeah.

02:23:21.000 I really meant that.

02:23:22.000 Yeah.

02:23:22.000 I didn't mean other people.

02:23:23.000 I assume most people.

02:23:26.000 I guess it's both.

02:23:27.000 Yes.

02:23:27.000 You do want to know, but sometimes you can kind of tell.

02:23:32.000 Yeah.

02:23:33.000 Yeah, it's maybe with yourself that it's like a deep inquiry.

02:23:37.000 But that should be something that's sort of like universally expressed.

02:23:42.000 Like if we all could kind of shift our perspective in that direction.

02:23:47.000 One of the things that I've done over...

02:23:50.000 I don't know how many years ago I stopped interacting with people on social media.

02:23:55.000 And one of the reasons why I stopped doing it is because I realized that most of social media interactions are people arguing.

02:24:01.000 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.

02:24:09.000 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.

02:24:18.000 But yet I see this very limited form of communication that becomes the primary way that people interact with each other.

02:24:27.000 And it's devoid of...

02:24:31.000 Physical contact.

02:24:33.000 You're not looking at people.

02:24:35.000 There's no social cues.

02:24:36.000 There's no the feel of like saying something mean and seeing someone's feelings hurt like that.

02:24:41.000 That's a normal, natural, human thing that encourages bonding and encourages kindness and communication.

02:24:50.000 It's all removed in text.

02:24:53.000 The same reason why, you know, someone can say...

02:25:00.000 It's an ineffective way of expressing yourself, even though it's a great way to get information.

02:25:06.000 So I checked out a long time ago.

02:25:09.000 I don't read anything people write about me.

02:25:12.000 I don't respond.

02:25:14.000 I don't interact.

02:25:15.000 I just don't think it's a good way to talk.

02:25:18.000 I try to have as many conversations in person as I can.

02:25:21.000 Obviously, I have the luxury of having a podcast like this where I can bring people in and communicate with them.

02:25:27.000 I know some people don't.

02:25:28.000 So the way they...

02:25:29.000 Iron out ideas and flesh out ideas.

02:25:31.000 But I think they're just trying to win all the time.

02:25:34.000 I think people are trying to dunk on each other all the time. 0.98

02:25:37.000 And when I see that, I know some very mentally ill people. 0.94

02:25:42.000 And they are on Twitter all day long. 0.81

02:25:46.000 And it's not helping.

02:25:48.000 It's accentuating it in the worst way possible. 0.99

02:25:51.000 It's enforcing that kind of shitty thought process. 0.95

02:25:55.000 And they get anxiety. 0.96

02:25:56.000 Like, I had a friend.

02:25:58.000 And he had a severe Twitter addiction.

02:26:01.000 And he was telling me that he would post something and then he was living in New York.

02:26:06.000 He couldn't walk down the street for like five steps without checking to see what other people had said about what he wrote.

02:26:12.000 Like, oh no, this guy doesn't agree with me.

02:26:14.000 I have to say something about what he said.

02:26:17.000 And it was just like overwhelming every aspect of his existence.

02:26:24.000 Actual real life, it was not there.

02:26:27.000 It wasn't real.

02:26:28.000 But it became everything in his mind.

02:26:31.000 It became everything.

02:26:32.000 It wasn't real.

02:26:33.000 He wasn't experiencing these people.

02:26:35.000 The people that he's experiencing is the guy at the coffee shop or this lady at the store.

02:26:40.000 Hi, what's up?

02:26:41.000 Most people...

02:26:42.000 And it's spilling over.

02:26:42.000 Yeah, most interactions were normal and kind.

02:26:46.000 But the spillover from this bizarre form of processed information was very bad.

02:26:53.000 Yeah.

02:26:54.000 It's like we're running a kind of uncontrolled experiment.

02:26:57.000 100%.

02:26:57.000 Human relations.

02:26:59.000 But it's not – it's uncontrolled but not unmanipulated.

02:27:02.000 No.

02:27:03.000 It's not – And this is where it gets into – I apologize for bringing this up.

02:27:08.000 You've heard me talk about this before, people online.

02:27:10.000 But there was a guy who was a former FBI analyst that estimated that 80 percent of the traffic on Twitter is bots.

02:27:17.000 Really?

02:27:18.000 Right.

02:27:19.000 And they're not doing that because it's not financially beneficial.

02:27:23.000 It's not narrative reinforcing.

02:27:25.000 It's not beneficial to whatever propaganda they're trying to pursue.

02:27:29.000 And you're willingly wading into that.

02:27:35.000 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.

02:27:47.000 There are certain ways that it didn't anticipate this deracinated, disembodied form of stripped-down, context-free communication that triggers strong emotion.

02:27:58.000 I mean, nonetheless keeps that emotional.

02:28:01.000 Conduit going.

02:28:02.000 So we're very, we are especially vulnerable to the loops that can be.

02:28:08.000 And we don't have many defenses.

02:28:11.000 It's almost like when they introduce a new creature into Australia.

02:28:15.000 Right, right, right.

02:28:16.000 Like rampages over everything.

02:28:18.000 Invasive species, yes.

02:28:18.000 Because the defenses haven't been built up over time.

02:28:21.000 Right, totally.

02:28:23.000 Yeah.

02:28:23.000 And then the way to deal with that is they bring in a new invasive species.

02:28:27.000 And then you have feral cats everywhere.

02:28:30.000 Exactly. 0.99

02:28:31.000 Yeah, and this is your brain.

02:28:33.000 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.

02:28:42.000 Because of things like social media, you can find out about world events in a way that through...

02:28:50.000 Processed, mainstream media that's only supported by governments and advertising.

02:28:55.000 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.

02:29:02.000 So you have that along with propaganda, and it just requires this insane psychic immune system to sort of handle all of this.

02:29:14.000 Yeah.

02:29:14.000 It's really interesting.

02:29:16.000 Just that's what I think is this larger...

02:29:19.000 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.

02:29:27.000 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.

02:29:41.000 Papers of scientists.

02:29:42.000 And he was just looking online.

02:29:44.000 He couldn't get over it because Galileo's papers were up online.

02:29:48.000 And he didn't have to go to Italy anymore to look at them.

02:29:51.000 And actually now anyone can look at them because they're freely available.

02:29:55.000 And he said, this is going to change everything because anyone can access this now.

02:30:00.000 Anyone can start to write about it.

02:30:03.000 And that was just the beginning.

02:30:04.000 And now there's so much more available.

02:30:06.000 Not that everything is.

02:30:07.000 But many more things are.

02:30:09.000 So in a way, it's an incredible time of opportunity, too.

02:30:13.000 We just have to develop immune systems.

02:30:16.000 We have to develop...

02:30:18.000 We outstripped our...

02:30:20.000 And we do seem to, as a...

02:30:23.000 I don't know.

02:30:23.000 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...

02:30:35.000 Well, we already have because everyone has a phone.

02:30:38.000 That's true.

02:30:38.000 We've already embraced it whether we like it or not.

02:30:41.000 And the problem is it's not going to stop with the phone.

02:30:45.000 It's going to keep going.

02:30:46.000 And just like the Internet was completely unexpected in the 1930s, nobody ever imagined what it would be like in 2025.

02:30:56.000 Nobody imagined 95 years later we'd be dealing with this.

02:30:59.000 But what are we going to be dealing with 95 years from now?

02:31:03.000 A couple of people had visions that were pretty interesting.

02:31:06.000 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.

02:31:20.000 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.

02:31:26.000 So it would be a little, a miniaturized library because you could put...

02:31:29.000 An entire, you know, you could put the Bible on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail.

02:31:34.000 Oh, wow.

02:31:35.000 And then it would come up on your screen.

02:31:36.000 You could also conduct experiments on that desk.

02:31:38.000 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.

02:31:48.000 In some ways, there are a couple other visionaries like this Belgian internationalist named Paul Atlee.

02:31:54.000 He invented something called the Mundineum, which was a storehouse of knowledge.

02:31:59.000 And it was just built on postcards around the turn of the 20th century in this huge building in Belgium.

02:32:05.000 And he had women in outfits who would, you know, if you wrote in with a question, they would go get the answer. 0.99

02:32:12.000 Sort of like a hand-based internet.

02:32:15.000 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.

02:32:25.000 That was the fantasy of microfilm, which I wrote about in this other book.

02:32:29.000 It was very fascinating because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pin even by the 1950s using just film.

02:32:37.000 Wow.

02:32:39.000 But yeah, people...

02:32:41.000 Didn't imagine the exact form it would take, and I think we're at a crossroads today.

02:32:47.000 Which way will it go?

02:32:48.000 It won't necessarily go the darkest route, I hope.

02:32:53.000 But you've laid out some of what that might look like.

02:32:57.000 Well, it's also going to go the route of quantum computing, which is going to be unfathomable power.

02:33:03.000 Unfathomable computing power attached to information, and it's going to happen inside of our lifetime.

02:33:10.000 Yeah, it's amazing how much is happening all at once.

02:33:15.000 Yeah.

02:33:16.000 Let's say polycrisis or poly whatever it is.

02:33:20.000 Emergence.

02:33:22.000 Well, I guess your meditation practice is a great way to at least mitigate some of the effects of that.

02:33:33.000 But how could you convince the...

02:33:37.000 The vast majority of people that are so scatterbrained and, you know, addicted to caffeine and nicotine and prescription drugs.

02:33:47.000 Just step back.

02:33:48.000 We have so many people that are just going to fall in line and just hop aboard the train.

02:33:54.000 Yeah, I guess you have to hope that.

02:33:56.000 I mean, there are countervailing trends and tendencies.

02:34:00.000 Like there is a lot more uptake of meditation.

02:34:02.000 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.

02:34:26.000 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?

02:34:39.000 My problem is I used to.

02:34:41.000 I stopped doing it, but I used to do it at night.

02:34:44.000 Yeah, that's good.

02:34:45.000 Before I'd go to bed. 0.98

02:34:46.000 It was just the dumbest time to do it. 0.99

02:34:48.000 Very bad. 0.98

02:34:48.000 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. 0.98

02:34:55.000 Like, what is to stop some psychopathic dictator from just launching a nuclear weapon?

02:34:59.000 What is to stop this from happening, that from happening?

02:35:02.000 And then you ask your phone that question.

02:35:04.000 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.

02:35:12.000 Yeah, you could really freak yourself out.

02:35:14.000 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.

02:35:24.000 Uh-huh.

02:35:25.000 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.

02:35:35.000 But, yeah, there's a lot of...

02:35:37.000 Yeah.

02:35:38.000 I mean, there are...

02:35:40.000 Things you can do, and I think the first part is just noticing how it feels.

02:35:45.000 Because even the other day my daughter said, you're spending a lot of time on Instagram, she said to me.

02:35:49.000 And I was like, no, I'm not.

02:35:51.000 I don't have a problem.

02:35:54.000 I'm like, I study this.

02:35:56.000 But then I stopped and I realized I feel a bit better.

02:35:59.000 Yeah.

02:35:59.000 At least for now.

02:36:00.000 Yeah, I went a couple days without looking at social media at all.

02:36:03.000 And I was like, God, it feels lighter.

02:36:06.000 I feel lighter.

02:36:07.000 And then I went right back to it.

02:36:08.000 You know?

02:36:09.000 But also, like, I make the same argument.

02:36:11.000 Like, no, it's for my job.

02:36:13.000 But, I mean, is it really?

02:36:14.000 I mean, like, my job as, like, a commentator on things and a comedian is, like, I kind of have to be paying attention. 0.94

02:36:21.000 But if something's so fucked up, it's going to make it to me anyway. 0.93

02:36:25.000 It'll make it to me, like, you know what I mean? 0.99

02:36:26.000 You have faith it will come to you.

02:36:28.000 It'll make it downriver.

02:36:30.000 I don't have to go to the waterfall.

02:36:33.000 Well, it's something about the design of interoperability with phones, for example.

02:36:37.000 You think, or if you use it for your alarm, it's just there then.

02:36:42.000 And then you start to, you know, all the functions are melting into one.

02:36:45.000 Right, if you use it for your alarm, that's the key.

02:36:47.000 Because I do.

02:36:48.000 And it wakes me.

02:36:49.000 I used to have an alarm.

02:36:50.000 I used to have a little thing.

02:36:51.000 I think they still make them.

02:36:53.000 Yeah.

02:36:54.000 I don't use it.

02:36:55.000 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...

02:37:02.000 Or I need it for work, but then it sort of enters your life.

02:37:06.000 Yeah.

02:37:07.000 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.

02:37:14.000 I do find that meditation helps just be...

02:37:17.000 If I go to a retreat, I'm just...

02:37:20.000 It's like...

02:37:22.000 You're not hooked at all.

02:37:23.000 But it just doesn't speak to you so much.

02:37:26.000 Or you have a lot of buffer.

02:37:30.000 It's definitely a strange time.

02:37:33.000 It's a very strange time to be a person.

02:37:35.000 Maybe one of the strangest ever, if not the strangest.

02:37:38.000 That's a question I have too, is it?

02:37:40.000 Yeah.

02:37:41.000 I wonder.

02:37:41.000 I mean, I think, like, probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest, like, look how much they can move stuff.

02:37:47.000 You know what I mean?

02:37:49.000 This is the second strangest thing.

02:37:50.000 Right.

02:37:50.000 And then there was the printing press, like, this is crazy.

02:37:54.000 Also that.

02:37:54.000 Yeah.

02:37:55.000 Which, by the way, they were really concerned with.

02:37:57.000 Like, they thought, like, people shouldn't be reading.

02:37:59.000 Well, it's a version of the same thing.

02:38:01.000 Like, this is why they started to print the Bible in the vernacular and the comment, the book, you know, it was more available.

02:38:09.000 It changes so many things that many knock-on effects.

02:38:12.000 Yeah.

02:38:14.000 But that's what I was curious about, because is this time unparalleled?

02:38:19.000 Is there nothing like it in history, or can we find elements that at least give us some perspective or can teach us something?

02:38:28.000 Well, I think it's unparalleled in its global interaction.

02:38:32.000 Yeah.

02:38:33.000 There's nothing like it.

02:38:34.000 Where you're paying attention to the arguments between India and Pakistan.

02:38:39.000 Yeah, potentially on a granular level.

02:38:42.000 Every day, if you do grab your phone in the morning, you're waking up to 8 billion people's worth of bad news.

02:38:48.000 That's another question.

02:38:49.000 Where do you put your attention and your concern?

02:38:52.000 Right.

02:38:52.000 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.

02:39:01.000 In Vietnam, they had a... 0.98

02:39:04.000 You weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn't want people to see what was happening.

02:39:12.000 They did that during the Iraq war as well.

02:39:14.000 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.

02:39:27.000 And so this vast exposure is unprecedented.

02:39:32.000 To suffering.

02:39:34.000 But also, where do you put your attention?

02:39:36.000 What do you focus on?

02:39:39.000 What changes your map of the landscape of the world?

02:39:42.000 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.

02:39:49.000 Car accidents, plane crashes.

02:39:51.000 It's all coming at you in vivid HD.

02:39:54.000 You don't really have a sense of scale.

02:39:56.000 Yeah.

02:39:59.000 I don't know how to wrap this up.

02:40:04.000 I'll leave it to you.

02:40:05.000 I'll leave it to the universe.

02:40:08.000 I really enjoyed our conversation, though.

02:40:10.000 The Instability of Truth.

02:40:11.000 This is your book, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion.

02:40:17.000 Did you do the audiobook, or did somebody else read it?

02:40:20.000 I didn't do it, but...

02:40:21.000 I hate when that happens.

02:40:24.000 I chose her.

02:40:26.000 She had a great voice, but I kind of...

02:40:27.000 Yeah, maybe next book I'll do it myself.

02:40:29.000 Please do.

02:40:30.000 Thanks so much.

02:40:31.000 Thank you.

02:40:31.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:40:32.000 Thank you very much.

02:40:33.000 Me too.

02:40:34.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 15, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2322 - Rebecca Lemov

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