Rebecca Lemov
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
This makes my husband very upset, actually, because he feels that Zimbardo should not have taken credit for this brilliant experiment and profited off it when he basically became part of the experiment. But he does say that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
He acknowledges that. Then everyone becomes part of it. If you are the analyst, you also are entering in. And then where do you break off? Or we're all just a part of everything.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, that's when it actually has a moment when it enters the English language. Edward Hunter, who was an operative and journalist who worked for the OSS in China in the 1930s, started collecting a lot of examples of propaganda and observing what he thought was this new weapon that communists had as they rose to power.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
He's an object expert. We had a guest this morning and Dax was wearing that shirt, but it was inside out on accident.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Exactly. There is a distinction. He had that background as an expert in propaganda, but he starts to talk about brainwashing right before the Korean War. Around the time that this famous incident was that Cardinal Minzenty, who was a Polish high-level priest and religious hero and just national treasure, he was arrested in 1948. He disappeared for 28 days.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And nobody knew what happened to him, but he was taken by the secret police of Hungary. And then he came back and he looked like a shadow of himself, like a gray puppet. And he was paraded before the newsreel cameras. And he confessed to these outrageous crimes that he couldn't even have possibly committed. Like he had stolen religious artifacts and he said he had taken money from the church.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And even though he'd left a note, he said, if I'm arrested, don't believe anything I say when I come back. Yet this still happened to him. And it was almost like he was a trophy for these new communist governments, like an announcement that we can do this. And he did return to himself within a couple of years. And he said, without knowing what had happened to me, I had become another person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, that first part without knowing. So within 28 days, fairly fast. And then he also revealed what had happened to him, although I didn't have full memory of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
a hero to his people and he knew what was coming. He knew that there was a possible threat to himself. So he could have been prepared or he probably did try to prepare himself. But one interesting thing about it, he said he thinks he was drugged and he was pushed around. He was not a young man and he was sleep deprived.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But one of the things that struck me was that he recalled that he was stripped of his clerical robes and he was made to wear a clown costume and he kind of had to crawl. And so there were these status-based humiliations.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, it's often the case that removal even of someone's name is very effective. Like in the Stanford prison experiments, one of the first things they do is the guards only refer to the prisoners as numbers. It's very effective.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I think it's often not calculated, which is kind of surprising because it follows a seemingly ironclad series of steps. But people seem to invent it spontaneously in some cases. Like in the case of Patty Hearst, we were just talking about the guy who was in charge of her abduction and reeducation. He kept asking her, you're not brainwashed, are you?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Because he wanted to believe that she was truly converted to his cause. That it wasn't that she had been not allowed to go to the bathroom and she had been raped. For him, it had to be real. He was also, I guess, in it. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And you can see that with Cardinal Mincenti. I mean, there was a Soviet method that was borrowed by the Hungarian police.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And there's a long history of what they say in Pulp Fiction, getting medieval on your ass. There are ways to unmake someone that seem to be part of the human repertoire. But what was different maybe in the middle of the 20th century is that psychiatrists and sociologists and experts would choreograph it sometimes. And then in the U.S., they actually responded to this crisis by...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, I didn't notice it until it was way too far in any way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Almost the definition of brutal. So the Tiger Death March, thousands of US soldiers, when they were captured, they were marched north and stayed overnight in these kind of series of impromptu camps, sometimes in old mines and sometimes in ramshackle buildings. It was under the oversight of a commander nicknamed Tiger.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And sometimes when they walked along these mountain roads, he would just push soldiers off. Oh, my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I actually, what was really funny is I kept looking at your shirt. One, I was like, I've never seen it. It's new.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And they were joined by some civilians on this march because there were monks and nuns and missionaries who were being captured in Korea who had been serving in churches, seen as enemies. So they were being marched.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
too so during this march soldiers even though they were emaciated sometimes they'd lost half their body weight they would try to help one of their compatriots or a civilian there was a nun named mother beatrix i think and she was in her 80s and she was struggling of course and the north korean soldiers said just leave her we'll take her in the cart and then they heard gunshots
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
and never saw her again. Other times soldiers would just drop dead along the road because they couldn't take another step. So it was one of the most grueling and demoralizing. A missionary who had passed by them on a train said he couldn't recognize them as American soldiers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And two, I have a shirt very similar. So I was like, oh, it looks like my Elizabethan chick. I think he's stretching it out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I like to think of it as a series of successive shocks to the point of disorientation or sometimes utter demoralization. So again, your expectations are not met, to say the least. And the soldiers have been told, you'll be home by Thanksgiving. And instead, they're being marched north. They're in the camps.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Men would die in the camps initially when the North Koreans were running them before the Chinese took over. They would die just by falling in the latrine and not having the strength to get out, which was a pit. And then seeing your compatriots die that way, sometimes they were also bombed by the U.S., sometimes napalmed by their own side.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So it was destabilizing of sense of faith in one's own nation. But sometimes they would also just die overnight. They were living with corpses. So this prepares the away for a more targeted ideological remolding, which is what happened.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And then interestingly enough, I learned this at a conference a few years ago by the scholar named Amanda Smith, who specializes in Chinese history, that people who know about this consistently underestimate the extent to which the POWs were subjected. It was kind of an experiment that Mao was running.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
He wanted to see if the method he used on Chinese people would also work on American GIs and officers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Pretty often, partly my husband's family lives here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
We met afterwards, but in Oakland. I was struggling to write my dissertation and he was working at the cafe where I was struggling. Me cute. It really was. There was a mixtape involved.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
One example, this isn't from the camps themselves, but from a reeducation center that a Western doctor was subjected to. So he was seen as more elite. So I think it was more brutal in a way. He was chained and brutally interrogated. But one thing, as he slept at night, if he moved around because he was in a small cell with 10 to 12 people, they called it capitalist expansion.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
He had to justify just sleeping or moving.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And they also reinterpret because they would take your own words, your own journal. 91% of the troops, hundreds of U.S. troops, some U.N. troops were given these books and they were actually made to answer questions about their family life and their relationship at school.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Very true. It was a version of Cheers, but with coffee, where people would just come to gather around and chat with him. Fine. Just because he had that kind of air about him, but I was so involved in trying to write that I would sneak by and hide behind the jukebox. You were playing hard to get.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
The guy you were just mentioning, Morris Wills, who's enlisted at 17, he said we were never taught a word in high school about our system or about communism. He said it would have been helpful. We should have been taught just so we would know what we were fighting and also how to defend our own system. But he felt really unequipped.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah. The trauma was invisible partly because people didn't think the way we do. Of course, today we complain that we've gone too far the other direction. Perhaps that we see it everywhere at every moment. Like if your latte order didn't turn out right, then I was traumatized. Yeah. But a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist, he was trained in the 60s and he said, you just didn't expect to see it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
You might see one or two cases in your lifetime, but you would also think if there were one or two cases, these men would have seem to be qualified, but I did not find them ever described as traumatized.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And I think there are a number of political and social reasons why, although there's one mentioned by Robert J. Lifton, not diagnosing them as traumatized, but just mentioning their experience was traumatic. But other than that, in the hundreds of pages, there's no mention of this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And I think it's partly one thing I call the volleyball problem, which is that even though the men had been starved to the point of nutritional deficiency and often death, By the time the Chinese took over the camps, which is sometimes a year later, they were eating better and they were able to gain back weight. And the Chinese ran this POW Olympics, which they kind of used as a PR opportunity.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And they showed pictures of the men in uniforms. Having fun. Having fun, doing gymnastics, rope pulling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, so that's why I call it the volleyball problem because it looks like it's okay. It was also just propaganda for the international community. Courts. I think this is one of the profound parts of it is because it didn't have marks. Their suffering didn't show. The men themselves despaired that anyone would ever understand.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It was unlikely we would ever meet, actually.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
You would have just been like, that's war, not this psychological element. You can't see that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But after a time, the Korean War, I mean, it's known as the Forgotten War, but it became synonymous with these brainwashed men. They were seen as either cowards or freaks.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I think I made a comment that I liked the music he was playing. On the jukebox? Maybe it was through the jukebox, yeah. Desmond Decker. And then he offered to make me a mixtape.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It does. It very much has waves of effects. The only time they compare them with veterans of other wars or POWs from other wars is initially. They think that maybe it's something like what happened in World War II, which was a condition called rice brain, which involved men drinking too much and unable to control their behavior. We probably call it PTSD today. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
They were said never to recover. There was one article that initially, right after the men came back, compared them to that, but subsequently was more framed as something unique and knew that was happening. And it fell into this narrative that the communists had a weapon that had never before been seen in history.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And the level of collaboration or indoctrination among American troops was said to be a national emergency. And the different experts found different things, used different methods. Sometimes they gave them the Rorschach test.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
They gave them some sort of psychoanalysis sometimes, but mostly not for healing, but more to try to understand what had happened to them and whether this could be distilled into a method that could either be protected against or learned and used. Perhaps used.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Exactly. So there were survival schools already used to prepare troops for deployment. They would be sent off to the wilderness and had to survive for three days with limited amount of equipment. But they added a resistance component. So it was called SEER, Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. This was developed directly out of the Korean War by Louis Jolly and West and others.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And the resistance was really to create a mock POW camp stocked by Eastern European soldiers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, stand-ins for just who might be capturing you in the future. Men would be interrogated there and brutalized and waterboarded. In the training? In the training, yeah. It often involved really being punched until you fell down to the ground. And then when you struggled to stand up, being kicked or punched again over time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And so the person would lose track of the fact that their antagonist torturing them was actually a fellow member of the the military, but they would fall under this disorienting condition. They would then maybe be locked in a Syrian box, which meant this tiny box sometimes in the sun where you couldn't move your limbs and they would start to lose their minds.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But it was a handmade tape, and then inside he wrote his number, but then he erased it and hoped that I would call him, although it was non-existent.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
How is that going to do anything if you're just doing the exact same thing?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, 30,000 men initially right after in 1956 went through this training to see if it was working. So it was regularized and routinized and then applied to any service member who was in danger of being captured.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
They also instilled a uniform code of conduct, which mandated that you couldn't say anything more than name, rank, and serial number, which was supposed to address the brainwashing problem. So during Vietnam, brainwashing didn't really arise again, but I don't necessarily think it was being attempted either.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
There was classic torture that John McCain or Admiral Stockdale experienced. It had different purpose. They weren't that interested in ideological remolding or converting during Vietnam. But nonetheless, the training continued and they were finding that troops themselves were damaged, that it was so brutal.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
He's playing a game here. Various detective methods. But instead, somehow we ended up meeting. He was going to give me a photography lesson.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
That's actually true. That's lovely. I hadn't really thought about how cliche written that story is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I don't either, but I always like a compliment. I accept a compliment under any conditions. There you go, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I was born in New York City, but grew up in Washington, D.C., or the outskirts.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And we lived in Seattle. My daughter was born in Seattle. That's where I started teaching. That's where I actually taught my first class on brainwashing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I think we underestimate how incredibly socially attuned we all are. When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I, on one of the first days of school, we saw a flyer that said free vegetarian dinner and we were very excited. We presented ourselves there. There was indeed a free dinner.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And then afterwards, these members of the group said, could you just sign this piece of paper and just say it's just pro forma, but you would be the vice president. What? Of our group. And we were two days into school and we signed it. And then the next day, the dean of the college called us and said, did you really mean to do this? And we were like, no. We didn't even know what it meant.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It meant that they had the right to be on campus. They just wanted a toeholding campus. It was Krishna maybe, but they didn't really tell us what they were. They are vegetarian. So often, yeah, the vegetarian.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, there's many things that work quite well, especially for a seeker. Most people are seekers to some degree. An invitation... to an environmental group or something that seems very benign or altruistic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And especially if it's misrepresented, just getting the person there, exposing them to these intense conversations, not letting them be alone, sometimes not letting them even go to the bathroom alone, if they'll agree.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, after I graduated from college at Yale, everyone I knew seemed to be heading across the country. I saw people I knew on I-80.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It really does. And that's why the experts who have studied the POWs recognize this. There's a revelation of the self. There's also exposure to texts and lectures and discussions. Oh, there's often sleep deprivation too. A famous cult deprogrammer from the 70s, Ted Patrick, his son at 14 was almost lured onto this school bus that was commandeered by the children of God, which is one of the most
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
notorious cults, and his son luckily escaped. But he then went the next day to see what was happening and he stayed overnight. And he said, even though he was a 45-year-old veteran and a lot of experience and a man of God, he said, you're bombarded by so much information and this intense eye contact. And never getting to go to the bathroom by yourself. You're very sleep deprived.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
They're playing scripture over and over because they will mobilize biblical sayings to change the tone. Also being asked about your bank account simultaneously. He said he found himself being unmoored even though he had explicitly come there to understand and demystify it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I've had cult-like, definitely not for real, but cult-like experiences. I mean, part of that is a good business sometimes has that. SoulCycle had cult-like things around it, its own language. I know all of our tech companies have all of that. They have rungs in their own language and it's very culty. I wouldn't call it a cult though.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Like midway through the country, others fleeing the East Coast. But when I tell students today I make a joke about going to California to find myself, they don't know what I'm talking about. Oh, really?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And UCB, that was an improv school and theater, but it was culty. You wanted to rise in the ranks. You wanted to be beloved there, but no, not for real, for real. It
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Or even Harvard people say it resembles a cult in a certain way just because there's certain language we use.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It's a powerful experience just to be socialized in that way. And it can have resonances with a cult. But I'm curious.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It doesn't mean anything. Oh, no. That's probably sad for us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
weird and it was fascinating to me i would probably put it more in the brainwashing category and i don't even think nefariously again there's no one in charge but i do recognize i have to weed through a lot of thinking that's pretty ironclad in my head yeah i've had similar experiences a lot of former addicts gravitate towards ashtanga yoga which i did too well i love yoga anyway for the last 35 years but ashtanga is this particular form that's very intensive it did have
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Maybe you go to California to take a job in tech.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
A guru passed away. I wasn't interested in that personally, but it just felt like such a health giving practice. And even though I could hear the criticisms, it turns out he was making these invasive adjustments of women. Pelvic adjustments that he claimed were a little bit like those gymnastics. Larry Nassar.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I think he was just having sex with people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
He was mandating massages. Right. But with Ashtanga, it was this interesting reckoning over the last five or six years. But I had already, for other reasons, modified my yoga practice. But people who were present when it was happening but said they either didn't see it or didn't think it was what it was or the person involved seemed fine or they told themselves it was OK.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Learn yoga, yeah. So I was already living there, and then I applied to several graduate schools. Well, I got interested in anthropology.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
or, you know, this whole reckoning in the community. Also the fact that the adjustments can be quite abusive and cause so much damage and so many injuries over the years, but people want an extreme experience and it will deliver that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So it's like a high. I think it's bringing awareness to whatever you do. You may feel like, I finally found this. This is the antidote.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
The history is meant to bring us up to the present moment and give us some tools to think about our current destabilizing environment. I looked at the emergence of social media and some key moments that are often not talked about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Oh, right, we shared. I thought, why not just think of the most interesting thing you could study and the most interesting questions you could ask? Surely it's anthropology. I originally went to study ethnobotany, which I thought of in a kind of Carlos Castaneda way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So if you look at, there's a famous experiment Facebook ran in 2012, but it was published in 2014, where 700,000 users, they changed the emotional valence of their feed without telling them, although it's part of your user agreement that you could be experimented on, but people didn't know that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So some of the people received, they said, a more positive feed as judged by the word count and the emotional valence. And others received a more negative one. And those whose feed was adjusted negatively, they then counted how they reacted. Did they post more negatively or react more negatively?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
They've counted engagement in subsequent experiments. But in this one, they mostly counted how they responded. And they found that there was a statistically significant shift in the emotional content of the responses when your feed was altered more negatively and sometimes to a greater degree than your posting or reactions would be more negative.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And so this was confirmed as a case of proving or operationalizing emotional contagion at a distance. People just could be exposed to this. change and then their internal states would then change.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And so the interesting thing I found in examining this experiment was, first of all, that Facebook published it in a prominent journal, PNAS, and that is sort of a self-congratulatory move, which they never really repeated because it caused so much controversy. But when you look at the actual article, they cite a 1990 definition where they get this idea of mass emotional contagion at scale.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And this was from a team of researchers at the University of Hawaii. And if you look at how they defined emotional contagion, they were actually drawing a memoir of trauma that was written by Vivian Gornick called Fierce Attachment. They say this is how we define emotional contagion is what happened between this woman and her mother. who was an extremely disturbed woman.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And she had a really complex relationship with her daughter. And Vivian Gornick wrote this wonderful book, Fierce Attachment, which is kind of a masterpiece describing the spread of trauma between a mother and daughter and these intense emotions. And that's the definition that Facebook was using of emotional contagion. So it's kind of built into the experiment, I'm arguing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
In a second way, when they used the word counting software that they drew on, which is called Luke, this software was based on the diaries of people who had been asked to write about the worst experience of their lives. And that was how they came to define the words they used.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
We focus on messaging, but what I want to show is that there's a level of trauma and intense emotional suffering that's kind of built into the operations of the app. There's also Catherine Liu, this interesting scholar at University of California, shows that trauma, I think she's writing a new book about this, but that it's very profitable in the apps. It draws eyes, it draws traffic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But then ethnobotany, it turns out the way they were studying at UC Berkeley was highly technical and it involved cognitive networks and taxonomies.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It's kind of like a trafficking and people who do content moderation are constantly exposed to it. Similar to the brainwashing episodes of classic brainwashing or hard brainwashing. There's a way it's steeped in trauma and yet not necessarily recognized as such.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
That's why I like the definition of brainwashing as coercive persuasion because it's not pure coercion. There's an element of participation. There's a kind of a yes. Even if it's unknown to yourself or not perfectly understood, there's a collaborative element, which I think is what makes it interesting and why it's uncomfortable to think about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But I think we also like a victim aspect. And a villain. Yeah. But to know that everyone's kind of doing both things makes everything very complicated.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Cults are perfect examples of that as well, because you forget that everyone except the leader at the top is both victimized, but also victimizing. It's hard to know where to draw the line.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, it did happen during graduate school. So I finally ended up studying something like the history of the social sciences because I got interested in questions about why people do the things they do or how free are we really or to what extent people can be controlled. And that's kind of a cultural question.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, because now it's wrong. Are you sure?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
That's beautifully put. I completely agree. Because if you look at Keith Raniere, who presented himself as world's smartest man and world's most handsome man, it's hard to believe that. He also used to say that the rain didn't fall on him. He could be walking outside and it fell on other people, but not on him. So you'd think that an intelligent person wouldn't necessarily believe that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But he did attract, and they do say this, that cult members are often highly intelligent. Intelligence does not protect you. It actually can make the...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
web tighter and more effective because you're very good at convincing yourself and others but Ranieri what he was really good at was turning them against themselves turning their gifts against them yeah and in some ways it's love bombing like you said he's allowing them to feel like oh my god I impressed him and he's the smartest person in the world I guess I must be my best version of myself here I think there's a lot of that like oh my god he's bringing out the best of me
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So to continue that to today, it seems like the stakes are much smaller, but I argue that. That's not the case, even though we're dealing with ordinary circumstances, yet they are always connected to the extraordinary. It's very easy now to silo yourself in terms of what you're exposed to and to find news or information that just confirms your predilections.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
One of the reasons I got drawn to brainwashing is that we became enamored of this kind of French post-structural theory and not that there's anything necessarily wrong with these writers, but just the way it was treated was a bit cultish, people weaving the books around and trying to find this ultimate meaning. And I found it transformed the way I was writing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So I think that if you are finding that, or if you're not exposing yourself to challenging material or just things that don't agree with what you already think, that's something to be concerned about or something to kind of disrupt. These dynamics can feed on your altruism and also your...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
repository of unresolved emotions and then just crank them up to the point where you're not really paying attention. So bringing down the temperature and in whatever way you can not contribute to polarization.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Isn't that profound? It's such a forgotten war. No one talks about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
The whole experience of researching it was amazing to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I didn't like that. Is it rude for me to talk about this?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
When somebody is reaching out to you a lot about hanging out, But you don't really know them well.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And I became very proud of writing highly complicated things just at the very edge of being understood. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And so that's just not going to be your priority. How do you handle?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It's not true though. Like you go to breakfast with people. You make time for the people that you are prioritizing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And I feel like- I don't know because I'll say like, oh, sometimes I'll say I can't for the foreseeable future.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, but it's not OK. And I don't it's not personal. It's not like I don't want to hang out with this person specifically. It's, I just only have time for the people that I, barely that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And I want to use that time for those people and not, like, you know, it sounds mean. It really sounds mean. And I understand that it sounds mean, which is why I find this to be troublesome.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I was thinking about it. I'm still thinking about it. But well, and then this is like part of the overall thing. As a parent, you can say that, right? Like you can say like, oh, I just.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Exactly. The thing you're not supposed to say. I proudly showed this to a friend who is a journalist and he said, this doesn't sound like you. And I just remember that moment later, I thought, was there an element of something like brainwashing, even though it's very mild?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I've been with the kids. I don't think I'll really be able to make it happen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And you go to your meetings. You do like you prioritize the things in your life. And so do I. And I guess that's like it's the same thing. But if a single person says it, it sounds more like you're just saying you don't want to.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And it seems more rude when really it's the same thing. It's like I'm prioritizing the things in my life that are important to me. I don't think I can add anything new in right now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Same with young parents and old parents.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah. If I am working, that's one category, right? That's one category of things I have to do during the day. Category two is being by myself. I need some time to myself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
That leaves a small amount of time for social.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And there's two types of social. There is social with basically family, like friends who are basically family. And you don't have to be or do anything, but be yourself. Show up as you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
That's right. Then there's the other... bucket of social, which is you have to be on a little bit because you don't know them as well. You just have to be like the best version of yourself. Yes. Let alone the category of dates, which we haven't even thrown in the mix.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So currently my time is only for- Your voice got high.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Because we also have to be on during this job quite a lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, and so I'm a little spent of that mode.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
My fear is I'm telling people, like, I don't have time to do this. I'm sorry, basically. And then those people are going to see me out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
With Jess and Anna. Exactly. With my friends. And be like, fuck you. You said you couldn't. And for me, what I want to say is, like, that's a different category.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
That I do make time for because I need that restoratively.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Should I write a note, make 80 copies and then pass it out?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Oh, my God. Do you want to read it?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
filed under youthful enthusiasm or just enthusiasm, which is kind of a good thing. And then the other part of it was I also fell into a kind of bad spell, addiction and an abusive relationship.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And then people would be like, can you stop?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But he is, it's exactly correct because we are like, oh, I just wish he would dance for us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
That's what you want. You want people to want you bad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Um, I do think that's your first instinct.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
No. I think you put a lot of emphasis on dancing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I mean, dancing's hot, but it's not like.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, but there's just so few opportunities in this world to dance. It's not like when we were in college and everyone was dancing every night.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
When I, as an adult, there are so many adults I know that I've never seen them dance. I have no idea what they look like dancing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, but like. Nothing stands out at all.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Roller skate parties isn't dancing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
She's a great dancer, but I know that because she posts videos of her dancing in a dance class.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And in fact, like you say, Matt and Laura, I'm like, I don't know what Laura looks like dancing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
In college we danced every, we went out five times a week dancing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It was hard drugs, opioids. So I kind of fell into this because I found myself in just an impossible emotional situation. And a friend had shown me how to use this. I felt that it alleviated my emotional burden. It was such a relief. And I thought, this is just a great invention.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It's not, it's not not for me. It's not like I'm not attracted to it, but it's, it's not on my.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Ooh. Okay. I don't think that's true.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Right. So that's a lie that he said that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
No, that's not how you play this game. You have to give me different sets of good things. And one of them is dancing on one person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
If obviously they're the exact same and they're dancing, I'm obviously going to pick that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I said it's not that it's not attractive. It is attractive. Okay. But it's not on my list. It's not like top five things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
So yes, of course, if top five things are met with two people and they're the same person and they look exactly the same and have the exact same personality, I'm not going to say no to good dancing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Now you think that when people look at tattoos, they think artsy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Uh-huh. You go through a- This is very LA.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And then I found someone who was a link to that or could purvey these things. So I fell into a relationship with him and that compounded the whole situation. You know, it started off just weekends and kind of seemed manageable. I wouldn't have used the word functional, but I probably thought that I was functional.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
What do you think about the fact, did you notice that during this whole time we've been talking, I've picked at my fingernail?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And now I have this piece and I've been putting it places.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
See, some people will be like so disgusted by what just happened.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, they wouldn't like it. And I am not that grossed out by nails. And I guess I'm not that grossed out by hair. I guess I'm like very chill. You're pretty chill.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I danced well with this one person. We danced a lot together. Okay. Oh, I pulled this up to show you something and now I have forgotten. I'm all over the... Well, we just did Armchair Anonymous. This is what happens. Our brain gets a little jammy. That's an Easter egg. That's an Easter egg for... No, don't say that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
This is for Rebecca Lamothe. And this was interesting because this was brainwashing and eesh, scary.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
By you. Oh, you tried. You tried to brainwash me into thinking dancing was the best quality.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But after a couple of years, I lost friends and I lost touch with a lot of my family and has found myself very isolated.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But it's not a bad dancer if I like them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But I guess you're right. A good dancer can be an additive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Okay. Population decline. You said California's population is declining and everyone else's is on the rise. Now I'm going to read you the list here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
This is most decline all the way up to... Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I feel daily fortunate that I was able to because it just becomes so much your reality that you don't think you're going to be able to get out or you don't even think you deserve to.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I remember a moment where I thought, could I go out today? Do I actually deserve to see the sun?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
The deserving piece is so heartbreaking. Yeah, but I had one friend I continued to see who's really wonderful. And we went out for coffee and she said something like, I just wanted to observe that your boyfriend walks around like he's smarter than you, better looking and funnier, but he's not any of those things. And he acts like he has his foot on your neck all the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And that was very shocking to me. Did you feel like that in the relationship?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Like this person's so much better than me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, I felt he was very accomplished. And also, I was kind of scared of him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Or he felt aspirational and also kind of scary. I felt like he could tell me truths about myself that I always needed to know. I mean, there are ways that these dark relationships have a cult-like element to them. And when I went to travel, the spell would break. This also happened. And it would just be like it lifted me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
P P P P P P G實...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N...N ay a...N...N...N...N...N...N...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G a...G P a...G P a...G P a...G, not, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don ,,,,,,,,.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
P P P P P P G實...N... ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... ..., Laboratory a in a. A. A. A. A. A. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. la, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
. . . . . . . . . a ac e in in in in in in in in in and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, set, set, en in. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. W. was P. W. W.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, I just think all of this is a really, really, really intense obsession with anti-aging and optimization that I find overall just like, not you, this overall conversation about it, obsessive and very the substance type.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I've watched a bit of it. I really like it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, there is a difference in that a lot of these peptides aren't, like, approved. I looked on the website yesterday of one, and they all say not for human use.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I guess if a doctor is prescribing it,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Look, I don't think it's like amoral. I think it's, I think society is, has become really obsessed with anti-aging.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
This is... I mean, to me, injecting yourself with a massive concoction of things that you're tweaking to make you look 30 for the rest of your life, to me, is literally the substance, like that movie.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I know, but you don't have HIV. No. So you don't know technically. I mean, there's a reason these things aren't FDA approved. They have not been tested for long enough.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Got it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think it's fine, obviously. I have no say in what other people do. But it is, it does, it sprouts all this interesting, all these interesting questions because I don't want to.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But then I think, but if literally everyone else is doing this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It's not even that I feel pressured. It's like, I'm going to look so old today. I'm going to look so—even though I'm actually aging naturally, I'm going to be left behind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It is. I mean, that's why I did that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Because over time, it's like, oh my God, everyone is doing this. And I guess... If everyone has a face that looks... wrinkle-free and I'm the only one walking around with wrinkles, that's going to look insane now when it used to look normal.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, you can remove yourself from being inside of it for a second when there's someone there who's just a third party. I mean, that's why therapy is so effective.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But I guess that's my whole, I'm like, we're becoming one thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But we kind of are. It's like if everyone can get the exact same coloring.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
If you can change your features, if you can make yourself not age, if you can be all one body weight, like that is so boring. Really, I think for me anyway.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
You know what's wild is the other day, a old video popped up on Instagram. Do you remember from the Hills, Heidi? Heidi and Spencer?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And do you remember she got so much love?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I didn't know that, but... It was a huge thing. She, like, got a ton of plastic surgery. They did this episode where she was basically, like, talking to her mom and her sister.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, just being there to either witness it or give you some sort of feedback can be this miraculous thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Her mom and her sister were bawling. Uh-huh. And she was explaining everything she did, and she was, like, talking kind of weird, and, like, it was sad. Like, it was presented as, oh, my God, cautionary tale.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And this popped up, and I was like... That is not how I remember it. She looks kind of like so many people now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Like her, in quotes, like crazy things she did.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And they get nose jobs that their nose is the same and lip injections that make their lips all the same. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't care. I mean, I am going to get chin filler again.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I don't care individually. Like, I don't care that that person in Beverly Hills is doing it. But societally, I start to, like, pull back and I think, oh, my God, we really are shifting into this other realm. And that is where I start thinking.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I haven't brushed my hair in like four days, so.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Anyway, that's all very interesting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Exactly. It first existed at Harvard.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I think anyone who studies or is interested in the kind of questions anthropology ask would like history of science, too, because it kind of asks similar questions and it's infinitely interesting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah. Also, how does science gain its authority? What is the nature of scientific truth? I mean, it really asks big questions. And then, of course, as with any field, people get very specialized. But it's all kinds of interesting sub questions because we have history of medicine and I do history of behavioral sciences, which is more unusual.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, at least two hours. At least two hours. Were you meditating when we came in? I was. I know, I felt kind of... Disturbing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It's just like a little moment. That's great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I know, I was thinking I could review my notes. A little part of you wants to be like, what is in my book? It's much better time used to just observe your sensations. So a great gift that came after this whole dark episode was learning to meditate and just having that practice. And I've kept it up two hours a day. I've never missed a day since 2000. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Except the three days my daughter was being born.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, I do the same kind that Yuval Noah Harari does, just because I saw that he was on your show.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Knowing what it was like not having that practice, I just never don't want to. And I get to choose to do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Well, when my daughter was little, I mean, I adapted to my life circumstances. So for 10 years, I... would hold her hand while she was falling asleep and I'd be meditating or holding her when she was a baby. But that would be the nighttime one just to be flexible about it because life doesn't always give you an hour.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
These are methods from the history of science that I borrowed to apply to brainwashing. So with a topic that's as complex as brainwashing, you do have many definitions and philosophical questions and many directions you could go. You can use the actors category, which really means just look at how people were using the word, how your actors were using it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
And if your actors are scientific figures, then also look at how they're using it, even though they're also using it to analyze. So it's kind of a combination. Can you give an example? Yeah. So one of the main figures in my book is this psychiatrist named Louis Jolion West, whose papers I've been visiting for 16 years now. So I feel like I kind of know him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
He was one of the most prominent brainwashing experts, and he said many different things about brainwashing. One pivotal moment is he was called to the stand at the Patty Hearst trial, which was framed as a brainwashing trial.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, she never embraced that term and the legal team never used it. But people have applied that. Brainwashing was a term that her lawyer did try to use in her defense. And they brought forward the most prominent experts in the world to make the case that she had not been responsible for her actions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
It's also relevant that she was kidnapped from her apartment and held in a closet for about 70 days and blindfolded and subjected to the reading of Maoist tracts and raped and horrors beyond what you could imagine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
This is wild. It's scary and it's good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
She was ungrounded. So these experts from the Korean War who had been military experts were called to examine her and they saw parallels to what had happened. But anyway, so the moment when Louis Jolion West takes the stand, the prosecutor asks him, what do you mean by brainwashing? And he says, well, actually, it's not a very scientific term.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
But what I really mean is, and he kind of starts to ramble on a little bit and say it's coercive persuasion. But the judge cuts him off and says, could you get to the point, Dr. West? At that moment, it seems like the case that Patty Hearst was trying to advance was lost minutes into his trial.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
testimony because he was saying it doesn't have medical or scientific authority, but just methodologically looking at that moment and seeing how the term appeared in public and it was rejected by the public as something that made sense. So it allows me to follow these threads through the book and it gave me some organizing principles.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah, that's a good way to put it too. So many people are tempted to stick to an analyst point of view or look at how to analyze a phenomenon that's very complicated, but it's almost giving credence to the actors themselves and how they interacted even with ideas.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Yeah. It's dork. Yeah. I mean, obviously some people stumbled in, but a lot of this is very calculated.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
Exactly. And that's interesting in itself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)
I borrowed it from this sociologist named Nicholas Luhmann. But what I mean by that is the idea of observing your observers. So after you've gone in and tried to see from the point of view of people involved, even if they're experts, they're also your actors, then you pull back and try to observe the system itself.