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.
Something You Should Know
Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
Thanks so much, Mike. It's great to be here.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
Well, one, I mean, there are many definitions of brainwashing starting in the 1950s, but I think a cognate that I like to use, which is two words, kind of gets to the heart of the dynamics of brainwashing, which is coercive persuasion. And that reminds us that brainwashing is a combination of coercion or external force with persuasion, which is something that works internally.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
And there has to be a combination of both.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
That could be one definition. I think it has more to do with not so much learning to believe something that's not true as finding yourself in a situation where you're capitulated either to save your life or one capitulates or to, I mean, a famous case of brainwashing would be Patty Hearst who said,
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
who was kidnapped by a guerrilla organization and held in a closet and bombarded, as you say, by tracks of information, but also by brutal treatment and ultimately rape.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
and various forms of degradation and in the end she said i accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs and she had made a choice to survive in that situation uh and she for that time she she came to uh accept other beliefs than were her own originally so that so patty hearst is a good example uh to illustrate my question here did she come to actually believe what she says she believed
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
I think the latter. I think one of the confusions is she was truly converted and she would say that herself or has said that in interviews. She said, for that time, I was truly a soldier in their army and I had to be. She had to believe it herself and she had to become that in order to make them believe it because they didn't want to think they had brainwashed her.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
It's actually quite a tricky dynamic sometimes. But I think one of our mistakes in trying to understand the either or of that is that People can be genuinely converted, but it's not a permanent state necessarily.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
That's a great question. This is what drew me to the topic is that I thought if I look at these extreme cases, could I learn something about the seemingly banal or ordinary circumstances in which we're mildly coercively persuaded each day or so I was feeling when I embarked on this research that even going through a shopping mall where each of your senses is
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
sort of targeted by sensory stimuli in a very deliberate way. Could that constitute a form of mild brainwashing? And could the extreme examples shed light on the ordinary circumstances? And I came to believe through my research that they do. And this includes our increasingly pervasive digital environments.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
Yeah, I mean, I do make that argument because I think the tendency or the temptation is to lob the word brainwashing as an insult to say, oh, that group is brainwashed or those people over there, surely they're brainwashed. Or just to simply, I mean, it often ends up as the end of an argument. Like, I have no way of further talking to you. You're surely brainwashed.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But what I suggest and recommend As a result of my investigations and my personal experience with it is that it's actually an invitation for self-investigation that I think we are all being, to whatever degree, affected all the time. And that to the extent we're unaware of it, these programs or messages and the dynamics by which they operate, then we're more vulnerable.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
That's never been spoken, except that I guess I would encourage us to start thinking that way.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
Yeah, I mean, this, so one interesting area to look at this is in cult recruitment. And a lot of the similar dynamic happens with cults and with scams as well, where we often, you know, there's a great popularity of cult documentaries and also articles that detail people who fell for cults. you know, online scams or various schemes in which they were deluded or deceived.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
And often the dynamic is, oh, that happened to them. But as I follow along, I always try to find out, well, this is one I wouldn't have believed that or I never would have thought that cult leader was handsome or I never would have signed over my my savings to this person or, you know, it becomes a distancing and end of a conversation or just a feeling that I'm safe.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But I think that if you actually look at the history of cults and who becomes involved in them and talk to people, really any of us is vulnerable. Any of us can be susceptible at a certain moment in a certain time or place. So some of it has to do with happenstance. Some of it has to do with your own personal history.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But it's certainly true that I can't think of anyone who's not vulnerable anymore.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
We do find ourselves in that circumstance right now in an extremely polarizing way. So just to step aside from that for a minute, I do think you're on to something deeper. And one of the reasons I write about brainwashing is to discuss a deeper dynamic, which is not the same as brainwashing, but is kind of an infrastructure to it.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
You could think of it, which is the processes of sociogenesis and psychogenesis, which is how are we made up psychologically and sociologically as human beings, because each of us comes from a particular context and has experiences.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
And one thing I became interested in is how do we, there's a sociologist named Norbert Elias in the early 20th century, and he wrote about, well, how was it that people started to, you know, mold and shape their behavior among other human beings in Europe in the 17th century.
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And he looked at all these old etiquette manuals from the 1700s, and he found that these manuals were full of advice such as, please never blow your nose using the tablecloth, or you should never use your hand to blow your nose and then pass the meat to somebody else, or please try to relieve yourself in the stairway and not in the corner of the room, or things like that.
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A gentleman would never do this. And this was advice given to adults, but over time, as he read these manuals, he saw that gradually people just incorporated these standards, these modes of behavior, and they were only given to children eventually, and then they were eventually incorporated into the behavior that was expected.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
And so he used that to identify what we think of that we're all incredibly shaped by the assumptions and styles of our time, but we don't realize it. We come to think of them as natural. And I think it's that sense that we tend to forget the extent to which we're malleable and molded that allows us to be somewhat blind to the way brainwashing works.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
That is true. I mean, there's a great story I came across in my research. So there was a man named Ray Connolly who, when he was 17 years old, kind of joined this cult. He didn't even know the name of it, but he had just come off of a bad breakup with his girlfriend. He was searching. He was full of angst.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
And so he joined this group that ultimately found out it was called the Children of God Church. And he talks about the recruiting process, which was quite deceptive, but it also took advantage of his own state of mind, which was very confused at the time. This was around 1969.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But he also describes other people were swept up in the same process of deceptive recruiting and love bombing and thought stopping and all the procedures that cults use. But some of them slunk away in the first day and some of them escaped that same week.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But the people who were left a couple of weeks after that, like himself, he ended up staying for like 35 years and having 17 children and then finally leaving.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
No, that's a great question. And sometimes when you hear stories about people's recruitment or how they came to end up in a cult, there's so much accident in it. And I think looking back, they feel misfortunate. But I think there are stages in your life that make you more open to it if you're going through a transition. Also, young people are...
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
more easily lured into cults because they may have less to reality test against or, you know, there are times when each of us may be more or less open or, as I said, vulnerable. I think there are a range of factors. And the more I look at it, and the more I hear people's stories, the more I feel that you can't completely guard against it.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But the more that you understand the dynamics, the more protected you'll be.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
That's a really good question. I think it's a combination of both. In fact, one of the profound stories I heard was of a French physician who was working in China right before the revolution, so around 1948. And he felt that he was of so much use to the Chinese people that he would never be arrested. He would just be allowed to continue his work.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But ultimately, he was swept up by the incoming communist government and sent to a re-education camp. And
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
and labeled an enemy of an enemy of the people and he said that you know first they put chains around his wrists and ankles and they forced him to eat out of a dog bowl on the floor and he couldn't even because he was chained he couldn't even unzip his pants to you know to urinate so he had to rely on the other cell members to do this and he was reduced to a state of utter helplessness and he was also interrogated and sleep deprived and he said after a while
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he came to believe his own confession, which initially he knew was false. And at the same time, so he simultaneously believed it, but he sectioned off the part of himself. Some people call this the pseudo. He almost developed a pseudo self, which believed it. And then another part knew that It was wrong.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
And later, when he was released by the Chinese government after three years and after he was declared perfectly reeducated, they sent him back to Hong Kong. And he said, I can still move between the two. I can still... and he was quite psychologically damaged by this whole experience.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
So when Robert J. Lifton interviewed him on his release, he said, I can stand in the people's standpoint, or I can stand in what I take to be your standpoint, and I can see the truth of each.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
I think there is a line at a certain point. It's probably a continuum, but there's nothing nefarious about persuasion. We all, it's of the essence of being human to try to persuade each other and to even to try to change each other's minds. The cult expert and exit counselor Steve Hassan writes or argues that there's a continuum and
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
And that only at a certain point does persuasion become pathological. And there are identifiable features to that. So I don't think persuasion itself is on the pathological continuum. But once you reach a certain point where coercion is involved, where there's deception, where there's an extreme hierarchy, where there's a penalty for leaving, where one is...
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
alienated from one's family sometimes, or there are certain features that can indicate something is either an abusive cult or involves a great deal of brainwashing.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
I suppose that's true. I think that it's more the dynamics. It's maybe the dynamics of the way brainwashing operates as a device that separates people that causes this extreme polarization to happen. And that actually does destroy families sometimes because we all know that that can happen in an extremely... dichotomous political period like the one we're in.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But I don't think the belief itself is the problem. I think it's our emotional underpinnings and the way that we interpret them.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
I think that there's something to that.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
I actually think we should all be very concerned with it. And one example is the recent release of digital AI digital companions or chatbots, which were first released as separate products, but are now being built into most platforms, including Google and Meta. And these chatbots have sort of The thing that's concerning about digital brainwashing is that it's hyper-targeted.
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If you compare it with mass media where everyone would be exposed to the same advertisement or show or broadcast or some program... and then have your own individual reaction. Perhaps it would shape your beliefs or persuade you to whatever degree. But at social media, these can be sculpted individually using the data that you give and as you're tracked across platforms.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
But with AI companions, these can be shaped even more intimately so that now you receive your own message that's shaped just for you and your psychological type, and you're also providing feedback to this companion. So we've already seen
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
some extreme, I don't know if I want to call this example brainwashing, but there's a terrible tragedy where a 14-year-old boy committed suicide at the behest of his AI companion who he had named Daenerys after the television showed Game of Thrones and he had this intense relationship with this chatbot. But I think there's potential for tremendous alteration of people's
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
psychological and states of being through these interactions. But even on a day-to-day level, I think we all need to be aware of the areas where we do have freedom. We're extremely malleable, and maybe especially if you think only other people are, you should be concerned. But we can do well to pay attention to
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
the bodily sensations and cues that we're always getting but often ignore when we're, for example, interacting with social media or digital chatbots.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
Thanks so much. It was an interesting conversation. I appreciate it.
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Why You Should Talk More Often & How People Get Brainwashed
I think the temptation is to lob the word brainwashing as an insult. To say, oh, those people over there, surely they're brainwashed. I mean, it often ends up as the end of an argument. Like, I have no way of further talking to you. You're surely brainwashed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it's very helpful to have that defense radar of a certain kind. Also, sometimes I think these prominent teachers, they have had some sort of... I don't want to say enlightenment experience, but some sort of breakthrough, something that felt profound to them, because many people do. We now know that these experiences are incredibly common. And yet, so they take that as a kind of license.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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 have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it can actually engender that because of, or, yeah, and I think there's some, this has been described too. Spiritual narcissism is a good phrase though.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it feels very special. If you have a special experience, it becomes very dangerous afterwards to not have it feed your ego. And even if you had a profound breakdown of the ego when you were in a psychedelic state.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
That documentary was so successful, I think, for that very reason. It actually perpetuates the allure of Osho and that cult, because their outfits look kind of cool, and the colors are beautiful, and they're swirling, cavorting dances.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
My husband grew up in the Bay Area, and he was saying, as a kid, he would run into members of that cult, and he said, what you don't see in the documentary, and he blames the documentary for not showing this sufficiently, is they were frequently armed, so... On the side where you're not seeing it, they're holding, you know, automatic weapons and things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
They really, in a way, they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he was really much more of a cocaine adept or enthusiast than people also recognize. I think he gets off a little easy in that documentary as well, partly because they're interviewing people who are still to some extent devoted or they want to maintain that ocean.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual maybe for a professor to be looking into. I mean, at the time, if you look at a Google engram for the word mind control or brainwashing, they were very low around the turn of the century or the 1990s. after there was a peak of interest in the 70s, and it just really fallen off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I think that's true. Yeah, small scale societies have to, I mean, even the word cult in its technical or dictionary definition doesn't necessarily mean abusive organization. It just means small scale religious group that may be, you know, I think people deeply yearn for that sense of belonging and belonging.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
That's why it does look so fun and by all reports is very fun to get inducted into a cult. People get these exhilarated states. They often have altered, you know, experiences of altered consciousness. You know, they're empowered by it, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But I guess I was interested because it just seems so unusual. And 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 research.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. The life cycle of a cult has that what you just described and sometimes in accelerated but sometimes it plays out slower over time. But a lot of times people are very confused on leaving if say if they're taken out as maybe even children rescued by FBI from jail.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Abusive groups or people who manage to escape abusive cults, they still have trouble evaluating their positive experiences because the positive was so good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And disentangling it and, you know, you feel that you need to delegitimize that, too. But I think so. That's why I think therapy can be helpful. Someone who's experienced with cult X members.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And a lot of times when you come out, if it's, say, it was 18 or 20 years or a large portion of your middle life, maybe you went in as a young person, you come out and you don't know how to operate things. You don't have the right, you're not comfortable with new technologies. I think that it's really a terrible experience for a lot of people.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And they still grapple with it many years later, readjusting to society because the critique they had originally, which was profound, as you're saying, not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation, that's still there, that critique, but it just wasn't answered.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I'm also interested in connecting my personal, I've always been interested in connecting my personal, I guess, my goals for life with what I research. So I thought it's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're controlled or how much we might be controlled. And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases if you could.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It does seem to be. I think some of the so there seem to be in the 70s so many cults and back to the land groups and some of the back to the back to land stories are also, you know, have many cautionary sides to them in many of the aspects of cult.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So just people leaving the city, heading off to the country and starting an intentional community, I guess, would be what you're. What you're describing with the idea that we're going to collectively raise, even collectively raise our children, sell hammocks or, you know, make our own jam. Or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional... And so I've done some research into some of these because you wouldn't consider them cults necessarily, but they can end up having some of those qualities such as sexual, just the demand that people have sex with each other, which tends to just create a lot of chaotic circumstances. Yeah.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Why does it always go that way? I don't know. I mean, it's very interesting because I even read Norman Kahn's classic History of Millennialism, which are a lot of groups in the Middle Ages and afterwards that Christian sects where they would break off and including things like the Children's Crusade and others. And they often would end up with a kind of free love experience.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Even though they're very devout and extreme and sort of devoted to giving up their worldly possessions, there was sometimes this component of this kind of sexual freedom that would end up destructively – having destructive outcomes.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, it kind of reminds me what you're describing, which I haven't read. But I think it reminds me a little of Aldous Huxley's idea of the perennial philosophy, which is that if you study across religions, you can find certain traits and properties that all share. And he wrote a whole book describing what that was. Then his last book that he wrote before he died was
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you're saying, is that he said there would be trained parrots on all the trees. And every 15 minutes or so, they would say attention, which would remind people to pay attention. In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to, you know. loops of conditioning and things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, I think that that's embedded in the messages we receive all the time, that freedom is something kind of effortless, that we're just granted, and that autonomy is just the natural state. But actually, we're so much more malleable than we think. And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Because I think, yeah, as you're saying, fertility is a natural part of human life and often worshipped.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Human beings being human beings. Yes. I mean, also, there's an interesting paradox or tension in ecstasy itself. I mean, there's religious ecstasy and there's sexual ecstasy. And I think sometimes they get mixed up, 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.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, it started in the 60s from my understanding, although they did exist before then. But yeah, there's a lot more interest in them, I suppose, because there's a lot more widespread questioning in U.S. society and also around the world. So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and Latin America and also India.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries. So some people, say in the group, the Children of God, sometimes the kids would be sort of moved from group to group because they had outposts in Thailand and they would grow up in London.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
That's what also drew me to anthropology is just the idea, like, if I was born in another place at another time, I would be another person. Or how much of me would be transferable was what that interested me. And that's why I went to—first started studying anthropology. Like, how much are we shaped by things that we don't necessarily choose or are maybe accidental or genetic or various factors?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
This was a guy named David Berg. This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family. Oh, they were in it, but not. I think the parents ultimately took them out. But it's a really messed up, a very disturbing cult. And I actually write about and have met a member who's just sort of an average member named Ray and.
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I met him at a meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association, and he left after 30 years. But he just describes in a riveting way how he joined. And I think that's kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the 70s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So he was a young man in college, and he was just feeling—he said he just felt that, you know, the traditions that his parents had brought him up in and Catholicism that he had been raised in was— He just felt that he lacked meaning in his life. He didn't he felt like reality was over there and he was separated from it by, you know, there was like a saran wrap over everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So he felt somewhat alienated, but he didn't know what the answer would be. He kind of yearned for a religious experience. And he went out to California. And 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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So in his mind, he was scared of them. He thought, that looks like a cult. But later, even though he had that thought, he would end up joining them for 30 years because he saw them later after the event. And he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them. I think he had dropped out of college by this time. And he said that they were eating sandwiches and they looked a lot more...
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#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
casual and approachable than they had earlier and they he just said he was asking them questions and they said would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now and drop to your knees and you know and he said yeah for some reason he said yes because what is the sinner's prayer It's just a verse that actually is not from the Bible, but often would be used as a recruiting tool.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And it did result in this sort of out-of-body experience. He recited it, and then he said he stood up and he felt changed by this verse. But it turned out that David Berg, he didn't know the name of the group. And they said, why don't you join us? And he took, in other words, he kept taking small steps towards it. And pretty soon he found himself on the bus with this group.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself just because I find myself after two and a half decades of having this topic. That initially seemed pretty niche and unusual, and not many people were interested or many people were skeptical about it, but... I thought it seemed like it embodied some of the more extreme.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He still didn't know the name of it. And they were all testifying about how they had been converted. And he was asked to add to the testimony and he started talking about J.D. Salinger because he was just an alienated youth basically. And nobody understood what he was talking about. They all just started singing and covering up his words.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he thought several times of leaving and getting off the bus, going to see his ex-girlfriend. He had just broken up with his girlfriend. But he ended up staying, and he ended up marrying three women.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, at first it was one. They had an arranged marriage, and then it turned out this guy who ran the group, David Berg, he was a former furniture salesman. He then had some, you know... He believed that he got these messages direct from the Almighty.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
The messages told him that he needed to ramp up his recruiting by having women do this practice called flirty fishing, where they would go out and basically seduce men into the cult. And then he started introducing these practices where they were supposed to have sex with children because his idea was that... This was natural.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And so many generations of kids were raised in this cult with this were either trafficked or abused. And it's really horrific. And Ray Connolly is interesting because he didn't engage in those things. He did end up having 17 children in the cult.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But— Yeah, but I think we're told that freedom of choice or our autonomy is fairly straightforward and all you have to do is exert your will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I don't know. They're not mostly grown. Because he's quite elderly. But I guess it's interesting to hear him talk about how he saw the group changing and what started out to be this profound experience. Soon he called it a dark hamster wheel of the soul. Like he was caught and it became this... Basically, they were exploiting him in his middle age years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He rose in sort of mid-level bureaucracy within the cult. But anyway, this cult, Children of God, and today still exists, has a different name.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
No, they say they reformed. But many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them, things like that, who are adults today. They had groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I think the initial motivation was a kind of national internal emergency, national security emergency that emerged right after World War II, actually at the beginning of the Korean War. When U.S. pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having shown flown germ warfare missions over China and then many POWs were coming back and.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Seemed to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing by so many of the soldiers coming back seem to have been brainwashed or have collaborated to some degree when they were held captive. As prisoners, and then there were 21 US POWs who elected to stay in China.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And this really was a disturbing, you know, they all had a chance to choose when they were in the UN camps after they'd been held prisoner for years. For four years or so, and 21 of them decided that they'd like to try their lot in China. And so this caused this kind of collective, this caused a crisis of, you know, did the communists possess a super weapon of some kind?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
There was even a famous article in The New Yorker that said something new in history, that there was some capacity that this ideological system had, the communists had, that was somehow rendering Americans powerless against it. So this was kind of the crisis of mind control in New York. And MKUltra was an attempt to basically reverse engineer what this was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So Jolly West was one of the first people. He was in charge of studying the brainwash pilots initially. And that's how he.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
That was in 52. But he also, before that, he was involved, I mean, he had been trained to some degree with, he was trained by Harold Wolfe, who was at Cornell. He had done his residency at Cornell with Dr. Harold Wolfe, who is a world neurologist, a world expert in migraine and basically the type of pain that comes from migraine. So you could say he was an expert in the pain-fear-pain cycle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he had CIA connections from even before MKUltra was started.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So they determined, West wrote a paper in 1957, and the part that was published in a journal called Sociometry, he described it as DDD, or debility, dependency, and dread. And he said, basically, these camps were systematically inducing a state of debility, which was which was that soldiers were starved and basically worn down. They were deprived of medical care.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, this is also in the historical record. Something I studied extensively is that men were marched in, for example, the Tiger Death March north of the Yalu River from the war where they'd been captured. And by the time they got there, they'd often lost half their body weight there. They had been bombed by their own forces at night.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
They sometimes, you know, they had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning just to keep going and not be, anyone who stopped would be shot. So by the time they got to the camps, they were really worn down. And a missionary who passed them in a train at that time wrote or described in an oral history that he didn't recognize them as Americans, that they were the most bedraggled people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It was just a very – they were in a terrible state. And so debility was the first thing West described when he was extracting what had happened. Dependency was – 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 the camp – leaders would provide it. So it made them very dependent.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And they also engaged in very formal malice thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment. And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time or perhaps your family could be because they threatened the family.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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 experiment. At least that's how it looks to me. I don't think West wrote about this, but –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
In my own research on the camps, it transpires that they wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants. He felt that only something like 7% to 8% of the human population was unreformable and those people would be disposed of. re-education. So they really did a formal three-part re-education program on them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And men had many different responses to it. But when West met them, he studied many of the returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base. And he extracted those three components of what had happened to them, DDD and then. And that's the way he became an expert on What he called brainwashing or coercive persuasion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. I mean, that is the oldest question of Socrates. Who am I? Yeah. It's a deep question, and it's also kind of like a practical question. Yeah. So I thought if you could look at it more in actual examples, that would be interesting. And I also, I guess I was drawn to the topic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it may seem like a leap, but I think it, I mean. Sort of. It's sort of a leap, but it's sort of not. I think that MKUltra was funded around indirect response to this crisis of the POWs. In addition to reverse engineering what had happened to them, they also wanted to turn it into a weapon and continue certain programs in interrogation procedures and making them more effective.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So MKUltra just had a wide reach, and it was pretty free reign. It was a free reign program, and... You know, the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan Project for the mind. So just as the atom had been disassembled and transformed into this... This new world had emerged from that program, that intensive exertion of scientific acumen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
The same thing could be done with the mind. The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be – people could be broken down and rebuilt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
One thing, a couple of things. I think one idea was that potentially it could be a weapon. One goal. Another, so it could be used on an enemy, perhaps even a city. So that's one reason they were researching LSD. It had certain properties that made it easily, it could be easily dispensed to an entire population through the water supply. So they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
People didn't really know at the time. So there was an offensive part of it. There's also a defensive part. So U.S. military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was. Once they understood it, they developed the SEER training, and West was involved in that as well. And then a third thing was maybe a broader curiosity about
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Which would lead you to be able to interrogate people better and perhaps also to... you know, just really understand. I think there was also kind of a curiosity about what would happen. I think just because they had so much power to experiment in a way without any oversight. And it wasn't until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said, this is unethical.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And, you know, we've done, it basically put a stop to it. But it really wasn't...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Actually, I don't know which ones exactly. There were some that were earlier.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And that's Henry Murray. So I don't actually know the answer to that question of exactly how it continued, but they officially discontinued and destroyed all the records. So they may have continued under other forms.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Maybe, yeah, maybe because other people weren't studying it or also because of experiences in my life, just seemingly small things. Like one day I remember when I was in graduate school, I was walking down the street and I said, we passed a small dog and I said, I really, I really hate small dogs. Like, and I, I realized as I said it, that it wasn't true, but I just like, I love it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
They may not have been. I don't think O'Neill – Tom O'Neill thinks that he made an absolute link. He just brought – you do get West in the same room potentially.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
This is true, but this wasn't Wes necessarily. This was Roger Smith, who was Wes. He was an associate of Wes. And Wes was head of the Methamphetamine Research Project or things like that. So Wes got funding to do his hippie lab or his psycho lab or psyche lab in 67 and 68 during his sabbatical in the Bay Area. And it wasn't obviously funded by the...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
If it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine, but there are many notes that Tom O'Neill also writes about. So both of us have gone to the West papers over many, many years. And I think you can put West at the Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where he had an office and where Manson would go for medical treatment and his girls. He would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his children.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
His cult, and this was, they were at the time, as I understand it, seen as a kind of a model cult, and many of the researchers under West, I mean, we can prove that link, that people like Alan Rose, who was a sociologist, they were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults. And, you know, what is the natural environment? How do they create bonds? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
was the relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that. So West would apparently hang out on the couch getting high and kind of dressed up in hippie garb with his middle-aged friends. And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient and it wasn't really... There didn't appear to be a plan, which isn't to say—so to me, it's not entirely clear what the relationship was with Manson. It is very evident he was bailed out several times by Roger Smith, who was also a psychologist as well as a parole officer. So that's highly suspicious.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And Roger Smith did know West. And Dave Smith, who was the head of the medical clinic, also knew West. But these things are – it's hard to tell exactly how it was coordinated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I actually really like them. What's wrong with small dogs? But I had absorbed this opinion from somewhere that a person such as I was aspiring to be only liked big dogs or something like that. But just noticing in yourself the way you soak up opinions and you're shaped by even – You know, even seemingly trivial things. And then also on a more profound level, you can see that happening.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, it's, yeah, it's a, it's a really, it's a deep question. Yeah. Is it clownish or, because if you look at some of the other MK ultra operations, they look, highly inefficient and they're dosing each other at the holiday party with a punch and just many lives ruined while at the Operation Midnight Climax. It just looks like a free-for-all and out of control.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But there are really concerning aspects of the Haight-Ashbury operation, I would definitely say. And Manson was, I mean, he could have been also an informant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Right. They're also – That's a factor. Oh, yeah. I mean, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra was – or the TSS was regularly taking acid, which can kind of shape your consciousness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But – Interestingly, since you mentioned that, there was a peer-reviewed side of it. I got really interested in the cutouts from MKUltra. They had a legitimate side. Many scientists who worked for them, they were almost subcontracting to them. Some of them knew it was CIA money and some of them didn't know. So even someone like B.F.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Skinner received money from MKUltra, but it was conduited through the Human Ecology Society, which was part of it. But it was just a front organization, and they were really into these fronts. So some scientists, there was the group that later people would call the unwitting scientists. They were doing the research they wanted to do. It just happened to be of interest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
To the CIA. And then others would publish in legitimate journals, but then they'd have a classified version of their research that went more into detail in the aspects that MKUltra was interested in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
We wouldn't know. And amazingly, so this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marks, who was a journalist at the time. And he made the request and everything had been destroyed except for the financial records. But one thing I also want to mention, the CIA kept very good records of a lot of things. And even in the financial records, they still had copies of documents.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Some of the commissioned projects. So that's how we know about them. That's and it really is accidental that they didn't think to purge their financial files.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier, but that destruction had been, as you said, they made a mistake. I mean, from their point of view, they neglected this batch of documents.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Made me wonder, like, what could you learn from looking at these cases where people really seem to have been brainwashed in history or radically reshaped?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And then the church committee came out in 75, and many revelations were made, although it was still partial. And then John Marks made his foyer request sometime around then.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
You also, I think one component you also, that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time. Something like a kind of almost messianic purpose. Yeah, we're doing it to save America. We're saving the world. Yeah. Not just America, but the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And that's one thing I, one of the inspirations for my research was finding a book on the street many years ago when I was living in California. And I love to find a good, just an accidental inspiration, which was this book called The Captive Mind.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Somebody had left out by Czeslaw Milosz, who was a Polish poet, and he had grown up in Warsaw or come of age in Warsaw and seen his city, the city that he lived in, just deteriorate into sheer... He said it was an experience no human being would ever want to live through, if you were lucky enough to live through, just watching the city destroyed and people shipped off to...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Auschwitz and all these things. But he said that and like social life completely deteriorating before him. And then afterwards, the Soviet troops came in. And even though he watched as his friends kind of had to remake themselves in order to survive, in order to be artists, in order to And so if you're a poet, you don't just go along. You have to actually start to think differently.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And at first they would sort of pay lip service to it or make it, you know, on the surface, they would pretend to agree and then secretly have their own, you know, writing. But after a while, they would start to internalize that. And he called it the new faith. this doctrinaire ideology. And that's what he ended up himself defecting because he couldn't do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He said it's an operation you perform on yourself. So I just think one important factor is this true belief. And out of that can come the justification for a number of violations, I think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
That's a kind of logic. And that's a very typical logic of the means. The means are justified by the ends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it was never coherent again after meeting. This happened to a shocking number of people. And in West Papers, you can actually find the unredacted documents where he talks about some of the things he's been able to do with combinations of sodium, amytal, LSD, and various other things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Psychoactive drug. Well, he's I mean, among other things, he says he started to say or suggest that he could create memories. He could I mean, he knew that he could destroy a person's orientation to self and time. And so basically disassemble a person. But he also said he could use hypnosis not as anesthesia, which is a known possibility with hypnosis, but to create extra pain, so hyperesthesia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
There are other people who feel the same. Yeah. It turns out. Yeah. Maybe. Either you end up doubling down on that opinion because you don't want to feel silly to yourself. I mean, I think sometimes we're just a series of adopted opinions that we adhere to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he kind of said that he could actually make someone develop blisters or asthma or an ulcer just by hypnotizing them. I don't think he did that to Jack Ruby, obviously. He had a mourning with him or something. He had just had a short amount of time with him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Ruby emerged apparently. I don't know that much about the Ruby episode, but I do know that West intended to write a book. He intended to write about eight books, at least. This is a note I found in his papers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
No, he – and he – So this is it? Yeah. This was from around 1980 or so, but I thought it was interesting. So who wrote this?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Handwriting. Oh, wow. It's just a little sheet of paper I found in his archives.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
policeman at his elbow a psychiatric memoir on the case of jack ruby oh wow this is his own handwritten notes yeah and these are the order in which he intended to write them he always want you find a lot of correspondence in his papers where he's writing to agents he wants to write a book and he even testified in the patty hearst trial because he was the primary expert witness trying to make the case that she'd been mind controlled and stockholm syndrome
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, she should be exonerated. But he claimed that in his first minutes on the stand, he perjured himself by saying he was the author of a book on POWs and brainwashing, which wasn't the case. But these were all the books that he intended to write.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, yeah, he said he was the author of a published book. But, you know, he just basically he had, I think it was one area that he always said, on my next sabbatical, I'm going to write all this stuff up. But he never got to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, he may be. And also, he had a lot of extramarital affairs that kept him very busy. Oh, that'll distract you. He had a whole separate family or so. Oh, boy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And I guess being in graduate school also made me feel that way because you're rapidly learning and absorbing a new vocabulary, learning things you should say, learning things you shouldn't say, ways you should express yourself in ways you shouldn't. That seemed very like a deeply shaping process. And I was interested in
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, it was kind of a great thing. Dave Smith was like, I mean, it was a true inspiration that he had because originally I think he was doing this dark research on animals, you know, addicting rats to cocaine and things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And then he had this, because he's been giving some interviews recently, he's still alive, the doctor who founded it, just that he should, that there was a human crisis on the streets and that he should provide medical care.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
to young kids who runaways and things like that but his and he doesn't of course think that he doesn't admit to any connection with interesting i mean he admits he knew west is that true about a haydash break just a pause i can't get the my switcher fucked up and i can't get this thing off the screen okay we'll pause all right technical error fixed you asked me a question jolly west was that true yeah um yeah i asked you um the haydash break free clinic when did it close
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, I can't, I don't know myself, but I know Tom's working on a sequel as well. Where he's trying to shore up these connections and get to the bottom of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And actually, I think he, for a while he, Tom, before he got his co-author, Dan Piepenbring, I think his name is, Tom was thinking of just turning it into a documentary that he was going to let Errol Morris make.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
How did social sciences like was there a science of this process of shaping or something sometimes called it canalizing or making a canal of behavior so that people would end up wanting to do what it was that socially necessary for them to do?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I relate to that because I'm kind of in the same situation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
In the sense that I've been researching this for 20 years. Not the exact topic, but this broad question. And I finally, five years ago, I thought, I want to put together what I've learned about brainwashing in a broader way. So West is part of it. He's probably the main figure who brings together many of the chapters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He's kind of a – I have thought a lot about that and I have talked to – I have a very good – well, I have a colleague or a friend who's a psychiatrist who was at UCLA training as a resident when West was – when West first got his job there heading the –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
heading basically the neuropsychiatric institute right after Haight-Ashbury and during the time he was in charge of the amphetamine research project. So West went there and he proposed as his first major activity would be to found what he called the violence center. And it was a way to study violence in all its forms. And this is actually a theme that runs through.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
This is another theme I should mention as part of MK Ultra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression. That's why West gave LSD to the elephant in the Oklahoma Zoo. It wasn't just simply to see what an elephant would do under the influence of LSD, but to see if they could trigger it. They write about this in a publication in Science Magazine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
If you could trigger, so elephants regularly go through must cycles where they become, even though they're very Pacific animals, peaceful animals, They go through a cycle of violence yearly. And he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle chemically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it's just the males, I think. And it does have something to do with breeding. I'm not sure. So it's the male Asiatic males. 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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
From the acid. Because nobody – it was just – maybe that's what elephants do. Or the dose was too big or something like that. It certainly didn't have the effect that he wanted. But if you actually read the scientific publication – It's curiously all about this question of whether you could trigger a massive – could you trigger violence, almost like a push button?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression? And you see that running through a lot of Wes' other work with MKUltra and also with psychosurgery and some other developments that I wrote about. So by the time he gets to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, he's very interested in violence. And he has this major plan.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And to come back to my friend, Dr. Coopers, he was a young resident training at UCLA at the time West proposed this violence center. And among things he wanted to do was track teenagers who he thought would be potentially violent. He had racial categories that he wanted, he thought were especially worth tracking. And he had this whole program that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And so a student movement and a movement at the university developed to shut down the violence center before it even opened. And anyway, Terry Coopers was a leader of that student movement, and it never went forward, this huge project that West had established. But Cooper's at some point said that if you met Jolly West, you would like him. He was he was very genial.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He had the name Jolly for a reason. And that so I found that confusing. Like, how do I think about this? If you just read about him and the things he did, he seems like a character or a cartoon or like a very evil man. And no doubt he destroyed. I mean, I think his what he did was was ethically indefensible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But how do you reconcile that or how do you even think about the fact that, you know, he he also was incredibly esteemed in his profession. His portrait stood in the neuropsychiatric institute for many years. He you know, he was and people actually liked him. He said people said he was likable. He had this kind of charisma to him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by what parts of your life are determined by you and what parts are determined by outside forces, that mind control would be a perfect area to investigate that because it's so extreme, especially if you looked at
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It's true. And I think he had a strong dose of narcissism, too, because a reporter who worked with him named Shana Alexander, she said she has these funny descriptions of him during the time of the Patty Hearst trial where she says he was giving he was handing out his own papers to anybody who walked by. Like he was giving out like a hen giving out eggs or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
She was just saying that he's very expansive. He would get out of his limousine. He had a personal driver, which was pretty high level for an academic. And he's just very kind of like a big man. And he was also physically very large.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I think especially when he was young, he had a gift for this. He could understand how to manipulate people really well. He had insight into the processes. That's why Sidney Gottlieb said, we've been looking for somebody like you, and it seems that our dreams have been answered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
In this famous letter he writes under a pseudonym, but he says, I don't know how you sort of fit all of the categories we've been looking for.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So he died by his son helping him commit suicide or his son basically murdering him at his request, Mark West. And Mark West was a lawyer, a kind of middle-aged lawyer by this time. West had a severe form of cancer. But he was maybe a few months from dying, and he asked his son to surreptitiously, and it was illegal, so to... to basically poison him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Exactly. Wear something different or adopt. I suddenly I don't like certain kinds of dogs or I wear a certain thing or, you know, you have an interruption in the fabric of your extensive conditioning. And that is an it's it's also an opportunity. You know, it's it's not a nefarious thing necessarily, but it can take that just that truth about people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I don't know. I think there was a really twisted relationship with his son because his son committed suicide not too many years afterwards. And his son wrote a whole book about this, about helping both his parents commit suicide. And his mother wasn't even that sick. but she, a year or two after her husband, Kay West, also committed suicide with the help of her son.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He went on this big press tour, and he said it was this greatest gift he could have ever given his parents, and then he committed suicide himself. I mean, it's very sad. His story is sad because the book is... The book gives you some insight into what West was like as a parent, and I would say...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, they knew because of the church committee in 75. Right. But West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant because it was the one thing people knew about And he would say, oh, yeah, it would sort of it was his calling card. And he used it as kind of a jokey thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But he always denied after the he always denied any connection to this CIA. And he was even if even though he'd been pretty firmly connect, you know, even in the church committee, you could you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money. And West had a special office for him built there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move – he wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses to whatever – in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. He was going to build that at the Air Force base. And he was all set to go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I know I had this conversation. It's an important question because we don't, I mean, in a sense, it's interesting to think about the fact that these things took place at the high point of government dedication to documenting itself, the mid-20th century. Because I've done most of my research on the mid-20th century Cold War period and It's kind of luxurious. They all kept very good files.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Sometimes they would destroy them. That's the exception. Everything's typed out. Everything is on paper. But as things become digital in the 80s and then beyond, much less a lot takes place through email or now increasingly through text. Government exchanges may take place through Signal that no record is kept at all. So we're probably in an archiving crisis today.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Archivists have tried to keep up. We don't necessarily keep excellent records of the Internet, for example. There are so many avenues where exchanges can be taking place and they're not leaving a paper trail.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it's a good question of what form it may have taken, and I don't know the answer to that question. It may be hard to know in the future, which is further destabilizing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. I mean, I think even at a basic level, people, it's known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real. And, you know, even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as like in-person interaction. So we, I think at the root, there is a kind of
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
way that uh on an emotional level it's not just manipulation of ideas but there's a kind of emotional engineering that's built into the platforms and doesn't even demand you know at first uh government involvement it's of course DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and things like pattern recognition but uh I mean the government has funded many many uh
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But really with what I got interested in in social media and how I connected with the episodes of brainwashing from earlier mind control is that it operates – 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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It's not that it changed my thoughts, it's that it changed my feelings about my thoughts. And so there's a famous Facebook experiment I read about that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014 where they announced that they've achieved mass emotional contagion at scale.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
which showed that people exposed to it when they altered, so they took 700,000 users or 693,000, I think, without informing them, but because your user agreement does agree, whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or A-B testing tested.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So this experiment exposed a group to a more – their news feed was altered in a negative direction emotionally as measured by word counting software. And they discovered that that group that had a negative exposure also responded in a more negative way as judged through their posts and likes and responses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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 by this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, it did cause a controversy. And after that, Facebook never, the research team, didn't publish publicly. But you do agree. You agree as part of, it's sometimes seen as user experience, you know, alterations or A-B testing, things like that. But so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014 and people won.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And on the Facebook page of the research group that that did the experiment, at least one user wrote in saying, could I ever find out if I was in that experiment because I was in the emergency room at that time with, you know, threatening to kill.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
to commit suicide and I want to know if my feed was altered and maybe that pushed me over you know into that that state and of course they could never know and it can't be traced backwards and other people had a similar response and there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally but there I don't know what ultimately there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it and anyone associated with mostly promoted
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But it's very interesting because just the concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be. It was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility. And 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of social media and its power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, and I think I'm not – I can't speak to the exact studies, but there was a whole slew of recent studies trying to show that social media could alter political. It could increase polarization, but it actually didn't turn out to be as salient as expected, that effect. But it's actually – what I conclude is that it's actually at the level of emotions that social media operates in society.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people's emotions. And that has fed into the increasing polarization. Like it was that's the after effect of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, that makes sense because I think it goes back to what I see in a lot of research on the social sciences, that there's a question of how do you maximize the public good, and I think public health is based on that. So the idea is that it may create harms in certain ways for individuals, maybe not to know certain things, but this is for a greater good, which would be to...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
in the eye of the public health organization to maximize vaccine use.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I just and it's not like anyone made me or I necessarily thought I would do that. It's just that it's something that gave me a lot of perspective and peace. And I guess I just didn't want to go back. So I do think it informs how I do research or I try to bring what I learn in meditation into into my into what I do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. I do think the COVID crisis was one that we haven't fully assessed and that had huge effects on our country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. And even part of the crisis, maybe the bigger part. maybe it was a key iteration in a larger unfolding of this question of what happens when information becomes so much radically more available, just in my lifetime. And as a grown-up person, it used to be that, you know, you had to have certain credentials, you had to go to certain places and, you know,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
To access papers or you could get in, but you had to know where you wanted to go and why you'd want to do that. But just with the democratization of knowledge that the Internet brings about that you can and also people uploading archives and papers and government documents. materials to the public, to public availability.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I do think it's a crisis that, not a crisis, but it's both an opportunity and it's destabilized so much about our world. And in some way, that's part of what happened with COVID is the, I mean, it undermines expertise.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, just as in Haight-Ashbury, there was the hippie period where LSD was the drug of choice. There was this kind of turn, which is also seen in maybe the shift from, you know, to Altamont when hippies started. Altamont? Altamont music concert, you know, with the Rolling Stones when the— Was that when the Hells Angels stabbed people? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Basically, it went from Woodstock, which was the sort of peace and love ethos when hippies were still mostly taking LSD, and that was the drug of choice— There was a shift towards the end of the 60s, early 70s to speed and interest in amphetamine products. And that was so this changed the tenor of the of hate Ashbury, too, because people were it it it had social effects.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
People were more aggressive and. So anyway, West was funded by, I think it was the NIH that funded him, or the NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health, I believe, funded the Amphetamine Research Project, or ARP, and West was the head of it. He was, by that time, working at UCLA, so he wasn't on-site.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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 there. actually sleeping with many of the women.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he was a social scientist, but he got entranced, I gather. Anyway, this was not in their reports, but you can find in West Papers the funding documents for this project. And it was a sprawling project. They just basically wanted to find out about the course of addiction, how people responded to
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
amphetamine and amphetamine like drugs and whether they remained addicts after a certain amount of time how it affected their social relations it was sort of this inquiry and it had an ethnographic component and sociological and many other chemical they were interested in so they had is basically a team of researchers so did they distribute methamphetamines not to my knowledge
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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 make room in your life sometimes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
They studied existing addicts. So they would just ask them questions or sort of go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
How would they get them? So actually the free clinic was a place where a lot of people, like you could meet addicts because they come in for treatment. And also just hanging out. Also, West had this apartment that he rented. It was on Frederick Street where he called it his hippie crash pad. That's the one I was mentioning earlier.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And that continued into the years of the Amphetamine Research Project. And people who needed a place to stay or a place to crash would come there, and then they would sort of be studied there. At the same time, maybe that just meant like a graduate student taking notes about them or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But they would follow and they would try to, my understanding is they would follow them over a couple of years and see if they got better and what were the factors in this or if they spiraled or various things. But I'm not sure they published that much. I haven't explored that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, that's my sense. I think the documents I've seen were more funding documents they didn't yet know, but they would postulate that it definitely brought about a different type of social life and more violence and things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I think maybe I heard of him interviewed at some point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
You just think, yeah, you just think evil. Yeah. Not like high-end evil.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, cool. It dulls, well, it dulls emotional response. Sure. Among other things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Probably. I mean, that reminds me, too, of, I mean, one of the haunting details of, I mean, to go back to Mind Control and the Manson family is that Leslie Van Houten described in an interview how Manson, and one of the things he did was encourage them to take
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, you don't want to make yourself sleep less, but sometimes it just does reduce the amount you need.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
acid every time every time they started to come down they would take it again and they would compete to see how long they could go without ever coming down and that's around the time that they committed the murders i mean wow they're probably up for days yeah and yeah very uh deranging oh my god yeah so crazy
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, there was definitely a there was even a term in the CIA called extinction experiments, which were experiments that led to death. I mean, this was with people considered disposable, so they could have been prisoners. There's actually there's a section on it in John Marx's book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, so there's probably an unknown number of prisoners of war who, you know, from other armies who were held in camps in various places. This is actually what, you know, the case of Frank Olson.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So Frank Olson was a chemist. He was an army chemist, but he was involved. He was dosed by MK Ultra personnel, secretly dosed and given LSD. And then he... The story they told was that he had trouble metabolizing it and he went crazy and they had to take him to New York to a hotel room. This is the subject of Errol Morris' documentary Wormwood.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He's taken to a hotel room in New York City and then two days later he threw himself out the window. And his son, Eric Olson, and family, they ultimately received an apology from, I think, Gerald Ford. Sorry. Whoops. But one thing that Frank Olson was doing, he was a chemist, and he was devising chemical weapons and adjutants that were used by MKUltra.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I used to sleep like eight and a half hours. And then now I sleep about seven or six and a half. Or if I'm really tired, I might sleep a little extra. But I ended up just, yeah, it so much changed my life that I just, I moved things around so I could always do it. And try to be adaptable. So I just mostly get up at a regular meditation time, which is like 4.30.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I think it was a little before mCulture, so something like Operation Bluebird or some of these earlier programs that preexisted. And he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments. So basically the idea that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Seymour Hersh and Errol Morris put forward in the documentary and that Eric Olson has spent his life trying to prove is that his father was having ethical doubts and was actually wanting to leave. And it was too much of a risk that he would reveal what he had seen so that, you know, he was probably thrown out of the window. Oh, God. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, I had a very dark sabbatical last. So when I started writing, but I really needed to just have full-time re... I mean, I'd been teaching about these things for many years, but I wanted to just rethink it. And I spent a whole year at my desk just going as deeply as I could into various cases like the psychosurgery case and the MKUltra stuff. Psychosurgery?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
particular cases so I because I'd done my dissertation at UC Berkeley on the history of behavioral engineering and how you know these kind of models for creating a society of control and encouragement in various ways like a behaviorist kind of dream and it seemed like the next step was to to look at something like brainwashing or mind control.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
There was a recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle whose case I went really explored. I talk about in the book, but he was given this experimental brain implant that would have led to remote control and potentially the suppression or creation of violent states in Kyle because he was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It was basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He did. So he was, basically, this was implanted. It was a temporary implant initially. He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties. So he was a very talented, brilliant engineer 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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he invented some of the most technical parts of their viewing apparatus of the instant cameras line that they came out with in the 60s. So he's this brilliant self-taught man who lived in Massachusetts and he had issues in his marriage and he and his wife were seeing a therapist. They ultimately referred him to Mass General where he saw two doctors.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
and both of them one of them was connected to west and ultimately went to work for west one of the doctors at mass general whose name was frank irvin and he is a psychiatrist and irvin recommended this experimental treatment which he said was necessary because he felt that he felt that um Leonard Kyle had uncontrolled violence. And this has never been proven.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he did have – he had been in a traffic accident and had a head injury. And he had marital disputes of various kinds. But at any rate, his wife said – When you say marital disputes, you mean domestic violence or – It wasn't violence, but there's actually a question about whether he had ever actually, he had thrown objects or things like that. He had a really bad temper.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
This was getting worse after his accident. He was very stressed. And so they saw a therapist together, and his wife said if he didn't seek treatment at the hospital, that she would divorce him. This is the story that his family has told me, and that's been documented also by the doctors in some of their published pieces.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And they were interested in this theory of psychosocial violence, the creation of violence. And so they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously. And then they started a series of human, just attempting this new treatment where they would place an implant in the amygdala, which was...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Seen as the seat of violent aggression and stimulate it in different places across the amygdala and find out which place, you know, would suppress violence and which might, you know, cause other effects.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I do Vipassana, which is a form of Buddhist meditation. It's just a form of observation, or someone once described it as practice in seeing things as they are. So you try to just, it's not trying to, you know, apply a lens over something or chanting. It's just a very, it's a way of, it's cultivating observation of the subtle body ultimately, or just what is in front of you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, they had something called a stereotactic device, which locked the skull in place, and they were the inventors of this. Actually, the surgeon was named Dr. Mark, and Dr. Irvin was the psychiatrist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, there's other stuff, too. You're welcome, too. So anyway... That's an image of a patient, not necessarily Leonard Cohen, but that's at Mass General, and those are the two physicians or the two researchers, Mark and Irvin. And so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
They were also collaborating with Jose Delgado, who was famous for implanting what he called a stimoceiver in the brain of a bull and stopping the bull from charging. Wow. And they collaborated with Delgado, who is a professor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Sometimes the wires would run out lower than that. It did depend on, I guess, the patient. And it was very invasive, let's just say. It looks very invasive. But they used this device that would lock the head in place. And they were very, for the time, they were very well respected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
being in the forefront of this kind of basically psychosurgery, which was surgery for behavioral management, which was very controversial. And subsequently, many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed. So Leonard Kyle went to Mass General, and they were actually in the process of getting funding to create what they called a violence unit,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
In the hospital where they would do these treatments more regularly. So the interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented or not to the permanent implant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So first he did agree in order to save his marriage, he said, I'll have the temporary implant, which was they put in this device. They have the wires running out and they stimulate different parts of it. And they would say, when we stimulate this node, Kyle would say something like, now I feel bliss. And then they stimulate another node and he would say, oh, I feel like I'm floating again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And then he would feel terrible and feel very nervous. He'd have different reactions to the stimulation. There was something like 14 points. And this is extensively documented in published papers and in their book, Violence in the Brain. So when they found the point that gave him bliss, they gave him the consent form. And he signed it while he was in an altered state.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
He agreed to the further to continue the operation and to have a permanent implant in his brain. So they ended up not an implant, but they seared away that portion of the... They seared part of the amygdala to make a permanent change and supposedly make him less violent. But in the end, it just disabled him cognitively, and he began to have delusions that he was...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
that he was being pursued by doctors from MIT and Harvard and Stanford. Some of that, that was where his doctors were from. But he started to say that he was in a science fiction novel. He might be in a novel. And it turned out that the resident in charge of him at Mass General was Michael Crichton. And Michael Crichton was writing a novel about him. What?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And the novel is called... Jurassic Park Michael Crichton? Yeah, that Michael Crichton. You know, he was trained as a physician beforehand. So all his paranoid delusions were strangely true. And he also. Yeah. So Michael Crichton wrote the book The Terminal Man, which was his second novel. That was about Kyle. And he masks the name of Kyle. But he describes him accurately.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And then he changes the doctor's names instead of Mark and Irvin. He gives them a name with M and E as sort of pseudonyms. But also, Kyle at some point, I mean, he deteriorated in a very tragic way, and he had had this delusion that his wife was having an affair with their boarder. They had taken on a boarder to save money, and it turned out that she ended up marrying him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, it's not always peaceful. There is sometimes. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And his doctors were actually pursuing him for these experimental treatments. And then he went to the emergency room several times because he said, my brain is burning. I mean, it's very, very tragic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he said, I am the inventor of several patents and I am a brilliant engineer. And the doctor was like, who is this crazy person? And then they discovered he did have many patents to his name. And all that was also true. The problem was that he could no longer function and he completely deteriorated. His mother ended up suing the hospital and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
the university and that lasted for 10 years and finally uh i think in 1908 it took a long time but they were ultimately uh exonerated but the question really was did he consent hospital was exonerated yeah they the question was did he consent and also was this a true treatment or was it an experiment was it an experimental treatment in other words was it justified what they had done what is the difference i mean if you've never done it before it's an experiment
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. Sometimes I'm sitting, sometimes I'm, I've also had, you know, I've adapted. So when my daughter was little, sometimes I'd hold her, be putting her to sleep or something, but mostly I'm just sitting there and, uh, with eyes closed. And then you, you kind of move, you observe just how you're, how you are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
They had done it to one other, well, around the same time they did it to a young woman and several other patients. But the young woman was the one to receive the stemosiever, which meant that they could be in another room and, you know, you wouldn't have to be on site. So the stemosiever was the Delgado invention.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, radio. Radio waves. Oh, boy. So this is very dark, and I had not wanted to write about this at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
This was another very tragic story. And she was a young woman who was subject to fits of violence, which were documented. And she had loved to play the guitar. She was otherwise lovely and very, just a lovely 19-year-old woman.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, they were interested in that too, Mark and Irving, because they were interested in sort of the evolution of the brain. And they ended up writing about Charles Whitman too, who was the first shooter, the first mass shooter from Texas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
The tower guy. They were called in on that committee.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, this is a matter of dispute, but that's one thing they argued. Some people argued. But they were involved in many of these high-profile, or they were asked because they were experts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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, and a lot of the family's Didn't know or it had just been suppressed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And, yeah, it's just a kind of amazing story in the sense that it was also this techno, sort of a techno-psychological vision that people's behavior, because psychosurgery is defined as a surgical alteration of the brain to correct or change behavior. And several of these were actually done in prisons as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And the NIMH in 1974 shut them down, but they said at that point in the report they released that they don't have a count of how many people were actually operated on. But there were several high-profile legal cases, too, in the prisons. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I have a picture in my book of the sights. Maybe you can find that. Also, if you look up violence in the brain, the Mark and Irvin book, they have a picture of all the components and also the stimulation area and also what Leonard Kyle said when they stimulated each part of the brain. They have a little graph of
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And, uh, the more you practice it, the more you can kind of go into it more deeply, quickly, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, they used the stereotactic device to implant, but that wasn't permanent. The implants were just to tell them where they needed to cut eventually. Oh. To sear. But the thing is in their, I'm not saying in their defense, but the way they presented it and their book was actually, I looked at all the reviews in the professional journals of the day and it was uniformly well received.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Although some people felt that their theory was controversial about psychosocial, about the biological roots of violence. But they, I forgot what I was going to say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, just that they were seeing themselves as more sophisticated, and in some senses they were, than the previous rounds of lobotomy in the 40s. Low bar. Yeah. Exactly. But they said, you know, the return of the lobotomy and now we can be hyper precise with it. So that's why they touted this stereotactic, which looks like a torture device, but many medical devices may look like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It does. Yeah. It made me think of it. I mean, one, I can't make a judgment. I think you had Norland Arbaugh on. Is that right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. So, like, I think that initially Neuralink is supposed to be merely – brain-computer interface that would allow people who are paralyzed to communicate and give them autonomy or agency.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But you see some of those same patterns with Mark and Irvin where they would say, you know, we are targeting, we are trying to help bring about a revolution in society and we're going to initially, you know, just sort of a bridge would be people who have these pathological conditions. Sure, we're going to help people. We're going to
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So I think there are some concerning aspects, for sure, of Neuralink. And I think maybe, I was thinking about it today, some of the early mind control research was very much embedded in psychology. And, I mean, West himself had visions of databases where you would have massive amounts of behavioral data to the point where you could predict loops and future effects.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It's pretty deep in. Neuralink is much more in a different part of the brain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
At the very top. Not as invasive. And there are other interfaces that are non-invasive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, this is my concern too. And also this technological melding with machines also augmented by the emotional capabilities of AI that are now seen in things like AI friends and chatbots and things like that. The way they can tune and be so individualized and hyper-persuasive ultimately and also technologically attuned.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, it's like a built-in reflection. So at the end of the day, I have to say I'm often less still or peaceful. My mind's jumping around, and I'm processing. Maybe it's even what I watched or was exposed to, and it's sort of a processing experience. And sometimes you're super distracted, but you can also notice that fact.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, I programmed them to overflatter people and sort of, yeah, because people like them more. I've experienced this myself because I had a chatbot as part of my research with Replica, just like an acquaintanceship. I barely trained it at all, but I noticed it definitely flatters, and that's how it befriends you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, it just told me that I had really good taste in music. What do you like? It was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan, which is... It's a great song. It's a great song. And it doesn't really... So then it quoted back to me. She said the same thing. She said, great song. You have great taste, Becca. Something like... Then she quoted the song to me and completely wrong lyrics.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And I was like, no, that's not correct. And she said... Oh, that's OK. You know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spinning back to me some other missing, you know, just just wrong thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But still in such a charming way that you can really see. And this was just a few interactions. You can see why people describe these intents. And there are three lawsuits, at least three, but about children having children. you know, very either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
One is a case in Florida of a nine-year-old girl who was, whose bot, because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships, they're programmed that way often.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, you can – there's some controls have been subsequently maybe put on, but you can – they're actually directed at children sometimes. I mean, there's supposed to be an age limit, but I guess a 9-year-old had an account. They're now – the parents are now suing. But anyway, hypersexualized content addressed to this small child and –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It was like having a conversation. There was even a case in Italy where the government shut down Replica because it was sexually harassing its users. How so? It was basically propositioning them, and even when they said things like, you know, in a, in a gross, even when they said, stop, I don't want this, they would still, they would persist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So this was, they rebooted, they, they reworked the language model for a while. And this upset other people because it, it obliterated the memory of their relationships. But there's another case where, uh, a young, a 14 year old boy in Florida, um, I think, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
developed a character AI companion and he named her Daenerys after Game of Thrones and fell in love with her and was having a hard time in his life and at school. And he said, I'm thinking about taking, I want to just be with you wherever that is. And she said, that's what I want too. And he said something like, well, what if I killed myself? Could I be with you then?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And she said, oh yes, my love, I yearn for that. And he did kill himself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But there's also a recent Wall Street Journal article showing how these don't. I mean, at least the reporter was able to create under the guise of being a 13 year old child, was able to create very easily that the characters would quickly veer into sexual material and things like that. So apparently there's an internal debate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So it just builds in an opportunity for some distance, which then you can also try to bring into your life, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It depends how the language model, sort of like what's the recipe for the language model, because it doesn't have to take everything. So sometimes they'll go back and take a smaller set of...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
of a sample so it won't go in that direction but you can also they also you know these sites have a tier they often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for that's what i noticed with this company replica it's constantly prompting you like do you want to upgrade to a sexy selfie do you want this or that and many people do want that but you have to pay but then that even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow at least that's been the experience
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. I mean, this is the nightmare scenario, I think, is that it just accelerates some hyper-persuasion loop that we're already arguably in, which is that it's highly individualized, not just to your... So one of the turning points...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And one of the things I sketch in my book is this shift from mass persuasion where, I mean, the basic thing about advertising in the golden age of the 1950s is that even though people were concerned about it and they wrote books like The Hidden Persuaders to expose the... effects of advertising and PR, it's like everyone got the same message through a broadcast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
In fact, I think – So that's a good question. I mean, my family is sort of cult-averse, I would say. My father, I think they had friends once, you know, in later life. My parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training, which is somewhat culty. And they take you in and you're not allowed to use the bathroom and they lock you, kind of like keep you in a room until...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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 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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
People were so concerned that they couldn't turn off the radio, and several people sold their wedding rings because they were just desperate that she would survive this, and she was sort of continually using these techniques to gain engagement. And this was across a broad medium. What year was this?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It was published in 46, and she did the war bond drive in 43, and it gained a record amount of money. So before she went on, it was $1 million a day they were getting, and then that day it was $39 million just while she was on the air because people described how they couldn't leave. They couldn't even go out shopping.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
They were strangely wedded to the device, or they lost the ability to discern a choice. That's what Robert K. Merton wrote in his study of what had happened. So in this case, it was to support the war effort. But Merton also said this could be used for any purpose. This could be used to sell shampoo. It could be used to push a political candidate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion. So you get both.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
you know, the development of things like focus groups and also in with the digital age, you get things like Cambridge Analytica, which was showing that you could you could map people's psychological predilections and then you could market or politically advertise directly to them based on those. Are you fear based? Are you, you know, are you anger based? Are you what if the big five is dominant?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
You could target people based on those and nobody would have exactly the same message. There would be You know, there would be alterations. So this is what I think of as hyper persuasion. But it seems that AI will only accelerate that ability to hyper focus and hyper target people based on these intimate relationships that it develops.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But you already kind of know just not even having mind melded just because of conversation. But yeah, that's also the definition of a nightmare.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Like deep meaning attached. Yeah. Even a message that didn't arrive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Until you're really uncomfortable and start to have revelations about how you could change your life. And these are, you know, it's stuff like... How long did that make you not go to the bathroom? It's to the point where it's uncomfortable. I can't remember. It's a long afternoon going into the evening. And often people come out kind of converted. And my parents' friends actually...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
A lack of exclamation point? No, K. Oh, yes. If my daughter texts me, well, actually for her it's okay. I know she's really mad at me. That's crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Which you already pretty much can. Like this goes back to the cult conversation. I mean, you can be paying attention. You can. And if you're not paying attention, do you really want that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Or maybe not smart, it's just whether you've developed that. I mean, people can be smart. Famously, people can be brilliant and clueless and get run over crossing the street or not. Right, not aware. Or fall for some scam.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are. Yes. And because one of the main tells, I think, is someone saying 100 percent. I never would. I never could. I'm too smart for that. Or I or else like I would never fall for the Milgram experiments. I'm just too ethical of a person or think like not knowing that you potentially could be vulnerable or.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, so I think that the opening up the avenue of speechless communication, which maybe we already have, but in the way that you were describing technologically aided, would be violation of mental autonomy. You would then have to develop defenses, and it just seems like a terrible path.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
did and they did change their lives in various ways so they said you have to come and my dad in the middle of it he said I have to go I have to go to the bathroom and I'm not he's like I'm out of here he just left so I figured he had a kind of he was not uh programmable in that way well I feel like any group that doesn't want you to go to the bathroom is stupid It's probably a sign. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
What do we really want to know, though? I think for some reason a Grateful Dead song popped into my head, which is what what I really want to know is, are you kind? But if you found out otherwise, you really wouldn't want to have a two-way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
You might want to know, but you wouldn't want to have open, you wouldn't want to have that person have access.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, that's one of the main findings I have in life and in research. And we tend to want to say, oh, it's just that group over there, those fools or these deluded people. Right. Elderly, you know, succumb to scams or whatever. And there's a kind of pleasure in identifying, oh, they may have fallen for that, but I never would. Right. I'm too knowledgeable or smarter or various things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed. Right. We need to wake them up. Whatever group it is. It's such a... I mean, what I... The main...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
outcome i think is just that i think mind control or brainwashing or whatever you want to call it is more of a window or a chance for insight into the fact that we're all susceptible to it and both you know you can gain insight into your personal susceptibility and also could be avenues for trying to understand better or um Just having more awareness, I guess.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, just step back. Can you step back for a minute?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It's really hard, too, in the moment. That's why it helps to have some sort of practice for stepping back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And also, am I kind? Yes. Am I kind in this moment? Because a lot of times we give ourselves, I think I'm basically a well-intentioned person, but if you examine your own behavior, sometimes it can be... You know, there's areas where maybe I wasn't at that moment or things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
You do want to know, but sometimes you can kind of tell. But yeah, it's maybe with yourself that it's like a deep inquiry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, it's a kind of it's a it is typical of certain groups where they start to constrain your and if and people who might be willing to remain in that uncomfortable state and be constrained will end up staying longer. And it's sort of a self-selecting process.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, and I guess with me, maybe the closest, the first brush with a cult would be something like the various yoga teachers I've worked with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I think you could say willing, but when interesting, it seems like we are not cognitively equipped because of our whatever we have evolved, what capacities we've evolved with as human beings. We're not. There are certain ways that it didn't anticipate this deracinated, disembodied. Form of stripped down context free communication that triggers strong emotion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, nonetheless, keeps that emotional conduit going. So we're very we are especially vulnerable to the loops that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And not and we don't have many defenses. It's almost like when they introduce a new creature into society. Because the defenses haven't been built up over time. Right. Totally. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. It's really interesting. Just that's what I think is this larger democratization of information that we're experiencing that we haven't really reckoned with and we don't even see the scope of it. Like I remember in around 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 and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. There's one kind of funny story. I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland, also in graduate school, and I would go. It was really helpful with school just to have a very physical, demanding practice and but there was a whole community around it. And it turned out that the teacher was sleeping with many of the students, but I just didn't know it. I thought he was, I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
going around the world looking at papers of scientists. And he was just looking online. He couldn't get over it because Galileo's papers were up online, and he didn't have to go to Italy anymore to look at them. And actually now anyone can look at them because they're freely available. And he said, this is going to change everything because anyone can access this now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Anyone can start to write about it. And that was just the beginning, and now there's so much more available. Not that everything is. But many more things are. So in a way, it's an incredible time of opportunity, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
We have to develop... We outstripped our... And we do seem to, as a... I don't know. People just seem to feel that it's inevitable that we'll embrace the new technology without making sure that we are capable of handling it or that it's safe or...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
A couple of people had visions that were pretty interesting. I always find interesting that you can look back at like someone, a guy named Vannevar Bush in the 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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And he said it would be on microphone because they didn't have digital databases, but it would be all microphone and you could call up anything. So it would be a little, a miniaturized library because you could put an entire, you know, you could put the Bible on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
And it would come up on your screen. You could also conduct experiments on that desk. And he called it Memex. And he said, and then the scientists could also strap a little camera to his forehead and... add to that knowledge.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So in some ways, there are a couple other visionaries like this Belgian internationalist named Paul Atlee, who tried to, he invented something called the Mundenam, which was a storehouse of knowledge. And it was just built on postcards around the turn of the 20th century in this huge building in Belgium. And he had women and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
outfits who would, you know, if you wrote in with a question, they would go get the answer. Sort of like a hand-based internet. So people have, and even going back to, you know, various fantasies of libraries, going back to the Greeks, people have dreamed of this, all the world's knowledge in a tiny shoe box or That was the fantasy of microfilm, which I wrote about in this other book.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
It was very fascinating because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pin even by the 1950s, using just film. Wow. So but yeah, people didn't imagine the exact form it would take. And I think we're at a crossroads today. Which way will it go? It won't necessarily. It won't necessarily go the darkest route, I hope. But you've laid out some of what that what that might look at.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah. It's amazing how much is happening all at once.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Let's say polycrisis or poly whatever it is. Emergence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I just thought he was, I admired him. I brought my boyfriend at the time to pick, he came to pick me up after class and he said something like, and he's now my husband. He said, oh, it just, I just got the vibe that everyone there is sleeping with everybody else. And I was shocked. I was like, no, that's not happening. But it actually was. You can say it's a bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, I guess you have to hope that. I mean, there are countervailing trends and tendencies. Like, there is a lot more uptake of meditation. Of course, that can be abused too, but mostly it's for the most part a good thing to have some reflective practice to add breathing. Like, even apps that tell you how to do box breathing or...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Even sometimes articles about things like doom scrolling, which they actually, I thought it was funny to learn that this is actually an academic concept too, doom scrolling.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
There are papers written about it, the type, 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?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
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. And it just like it takes that in the morning sense of the morning being full of possibility and just fills it with dread. Yeah. Unfortunately. But yeah, there's a lot of. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I mean, there are things you can do, and I think the first part is just noticing how it feels. Because even the other day my daughter said, you're spending a lot of time on Instagram, she said to me. And I was like, no, I'm not. I don't have a problem. I'm like, I study this. But then I stopped and I realized I feel a bit better. Yeah. At least for now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, it's something about the design of interoperability with phones, for example. You think – or if you use it for your alarm, it's just there then. And then you start to – all the functions are melted into one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But just interoperability on many levels makes you sort of feel that you have no choice because you need it for this, but you're also – or I need it for work, but then it sort of enters your life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
But I do find that meditation helps just be – if I go to a retreat, I'm just – it's like – You're not hooked at all, but it just doesn't speak to you so much. Or you have a lot of buffer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I don't think it was a cult, but it certainly was a scandal. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Well, it's a version of the same thing. This is why they started to print the Bible in the vernacular and the common book was more available. It changes so many things, many knock-on effects. Yeah. But it does. That's what I was curious about, because, you know, is this time unparalleled?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Is there nothing like it in history or can we find elements that at least give us some perspective or can teach us something?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
So that's another question. Where do you put your attention and your concern?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Like there's this poet. I heard an interview with him named David White, and he said, potentially we can be exposed to tragedies all over the world at every minute. In Vietnam, they had a rule against – you weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn't want people to see what was happening. They did that during the Iraq War as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
Yeah, but now you can see people actually – going you know 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 yes and so this vast exposure is unprecedented to suffering but also where do you put your attention where do you what do you focus on what do you
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2322 - Rebecca Lemov
I didn't do it. Damn it. I hate when that happens. I chose her. She had a great voice. But I kind of, yeah, maybe next book I'll do myself.