How Brainwashing Keeps You in a Life You Don’t Want

Are You Thinking Your Own Thoughts… Or Someone Else’s? Let me ask you something—have you ever stopped to wonder if the thoughts you’re thinking are actually yours? In this conversation, I sat down with Rebecca Lemov, a Harvard professor and author of The Instability of Truth, and what unfolded was a real eye-opener. We didn’t just scratch the surface—we went into the guts of how we get conditioned to believe things about the world… and about ourselves… without even realizing it. Rebecca laid out something that really hit me: brainwashing doesn’t start with someone else taking control of your mind—it begins when you stop asking questions. That moment when you stop challenging your beliefs, when you’re scrolling, liking, agreeing without even knowing why—that’s where it starts. She walked me through a chilling example: a Facebook study where they manipulated nearly 700,000 users' moods without their knowledge. That’s real. That happened. And if that doesn’t wake you up, I don’t know what will. We also got personal. I shared how trauma—whether from rejection, heartbreak, or failure—can create space for a mind virus to take root. That voice in your head saying, “You’re not good enough,” “You’ll never succeed,”—that’s not truth. That’s programming. And unless you confront it, question it, and replace it, it’ll trap you in a version of your life that’s far smaller than what you were made for. Rebecca made it clear: being educated or intelligent doesn’t make you immune—it might even make you more vulnerable. This episode isn’t about conspiracy theories or pointing fingers—it’s about ownership. About reclaiming your identity, your voice, your individuality. Don’t go through life unknowingly living in someone else’s version of who you’re supposed to be. Don’t meet God at the end and realize you lived someone else's life because you never questioned your own thoughts. You want to change your life? Start by challenging what you assume to be true. Start asking better questions. Key Takeaways: Brainwashing often starts from within—when you stop questioning your own thoughts. Trauma can open the door for limiting beliefs to become your internal truth. Social media algorithms are designed to manipulate your mood and feed confirmation bias. There are 8 classic signs of brainwashing, but the key one? Control over your environment. Intelligence doesn’t protect you from mind control—it can deepen the illusion. Challenge your assumptions, and you can change your entire life trajectory. Let this be your wake-up call. You don’t have to be part of a group to have value. You’re not your past. You’re not your trauma. You're an individual—and your thoughts matter. 👉 SUBSCRIBE TO ED'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW 👈 → → → CONNECT WITH ED MYLETT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: ← ← ← ➡️ INSTAGRAM ➡️FACEBOOK ➡️ LINKEDIN ➡️ X ➡️ WEBSITE Get my exclusive Monday Motivation training in GrowthDay, the world’s #1 app for advanced mindset and personal development. Visit https://growthday.com/ed. This show is sponsored by GrowthDay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

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• 2:08Speaker 01

  This is the admired show.

• 2:13Ed Mylett?

  All right, welcome back to the show, everybody. Today's going to be a unique show. I think it's one you're going to remember because it's on a topic that, you know, really isn't discussed almost ever on podcasts for sure. We're going to talk about brainwashing today. Brainwashing and the application and implications of how this happens in our life, usually unknowingly. I don't think we even know when it's happening 99% of the time. And so I have an expert here today. I think I've now had every single professor at Harvard on my podcast. It feels like it recently, but she's a professor at Harvard University. She's got a great new book. I finished it last night called The Instability of Truth. And it's a deep dive into the history and

• 2:56Ed Mylett?

  evolution of brainwashing, and it is really, really good. And this is going to be great today. Rebecca Lemov, welcome to the show. Good to have you.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

• 3:07Ed Mylett?

  It is. It's so good to have you. Let's just do some basic stuff first. What is brainwashing? Can you just give us your definition of what that term means?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Well, a definition I like to use for myself and what got me interested in it is brainwashing is the idea that you could become another person without necessarily knowing it.

• 3:28Ed Mylett?

  Hmm. You know, it's funny that you phrase it that way because in the book, it's really great, you guys, we go all the way back to like wartime POWs, all the way to like Facebook and Instagram and the algorithm today and the correlations of the two. And so I want to, I'm going to take even Rebecca, I'm going to push Rebecca on some things today, too, that aren't in the book, but that are connected to brainwashing in terms of relationships as well. I love history. I don't think most people do. I know you do from all of your writing. But can we talk about the process a little bit? What fascinated me in the book is, as I was listening to the process of the brainwashing of POWs and even the SER program, which I want to talk about in a second, too, all the way to about everybody I meet has

• 4:13Ed Mylett?

  some form of brainwashing politically, left or right, it seems to me to this day, unknowingly, right? So can you start, can we talk a little bit about maybe some of these Korean War POWs? I just want to throw that to you and have you kind of cover what's in the book about it and how, how it ended up playing itself out with, with these soldiers. It's really fascinating stuff.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  We could start with the case of Morris Wills, who was a seventeen

• 4:38Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, that's, yes.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Men in his family had fought since the Revolutionary War for the US. He was a high school student and decided to sign up for the military. He got sent to Korea very quickly, so he never even started his senior year. And then he found himself in this terrain of fighting. He had never even heard of Korea before, didn't understand the stakes of the war. And the war was changing rapidly. He was captured pretty quickly in November of nineteen fifty-two. And he was basically marched with many other POWs northwards towards the prison camps.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  The camps were initially run by Korean military and men would just die overnight from sheer exhaustion, weakness, lack of nutrition. Initially, he was not interested in the Chinese at all. He just wanted to get home. And he liked to play volleyball. Once the Chinese took over and conditions improved, they, they ran a PR. It was a bit of a propaganda campaign to make it look like they were treating the prisoners well and they had volleyball. So Morris Wills played on the volleyball team. And also they had this library. Once if you showed any interest, you would get more privileges, a little more food. So anyway, Mills, he found himself agreeing with some of their criticisms of his own country. He said he was never a traitor.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  He said that I was merely offered a choice. And this was actually true. The United Nations and the US declared that all prisoners during the armistice would should have the choice. And Mills decided to try to live in China. And he, along with, eventually it was just twenty-one Americans who went. He was taken in a truck. They were all evaluated once they got to China. He, as well as three others, were seen as educatable. Morris Wills, by this time, he was nineteen or twenty. He was sent to Beijing University to learn Chinese. And he actually quite enjoyed that. He ended up falling in love with a young Chinese girl. They were eventually allowed to marry.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  After a time, he started to notice there was kind of a more and more intolerance to foreigners, even if they had declared their support of the Chinese government. He noticed that people started to address him. First, they would say, like, respected citizen and then, or even honored guest. But after a while, they were just calling in the Chinese equivalent of mister. So he realized it was time for him to leave. And by 1966, he was desperate to leave with his young wife and family. So the Chinese government allowed them to go. And he came back to the US. And he settled eventually in New Haven and became a librarian at Harvard's Yencheng Library.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  His reintegration into US society was smoother, although he was investigated by the American activities.

• 7:40Ed Mylett?

  It makes me think of the elements that came with it. So he got you things he liked. So he got to play volleyball, right? And that's sort of how the algorithm works on social media when we get brainwashed. Finds the things we like, begins to feed us those things. Begins to feed you dopamine, which is sir, mister, these titles he had. And social media's case, it's likes, it's comments, it's shares. And it's not all that dissimilar between 1950 and 2025. It's actually a very similar brainwashing process. Feed somebody the things they like, attach other things to it, give them some acknowledgement and some attention that they might otherwise not have gotten anywhere else. And now you've sort of opened up this space that's someone prone to being brainwashed.

• 8:24Ed Mylett?

  That's why I wanted to start with a little bit of history, because I think you'll see the process is the same. And there's a study that you have in the book about Facebook. Listen to this, everybody. Facebook conducted an experiment on about 700,000 users without them knowing, right? To see if they could manipulate moods. Everybody, this happened, okay? So you think, ah, that POW stuff, that's really interesting that the Korean government did it. Really? Okay, well, Facebook just did it in this modern time, something I'm not equating Facebook to POWs. I'm suggesting that there's a syntax to this stuff. There's steps to it. Can you explain what emotional cognition and how it relates to social media and what

• 9:09Ed Mylett?

  Facebook did and found?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  That's what I really was interested in. Like, could we take these extreme examples that seem like, okay, that's cut and dry. That's, you know, I saw, I can see that. I see what happened there. And then in the war, or even with extreme cults, abuses with gurus or things like that. And could I apply that to the things that happen daily at our kitchen table when you're in your phone and suddenly you're buying some product that you later are like, what was, what spell was I under? Or so aggravated, swept up in a panic or fear or doom scrolling or these various phenomena, like, how do we get locked in, really locked in to these

• 9:52Speaker 02

  cycles and feedback loops that can really, can they really change you? I guess that's the question I had. And so, uh, so that where is the ungrounding and where is the trauma? So to go back, I think the Facebook study is a real turning point. First of all, because it was published widely. So this was done in 2012 and published in 2014. And it really was a turning point also in Facebook and in the power and reach of social media because they had just introduced news feeds and they had recently also introduced the like button and various new ways of giving emotionally investing. So basically in this experiment, they took, as you mentioned, 700, 693,000 users, of which any of us could have been

• 10:37Speaker 02

  one. We don't, we will never know because there isn't a record. But as part of your user agreement, you do, which nobody reads. Technically, you agree to be part of A B testing and various experiments. If they deem it necessary.

• 10:51Ed Mylett?

  No one knows that, but go ahead. No one knows that.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  It kind of became a scandal afterwards, but then it kind of subsided again. They divided people into test groups. And so as the news feed feeds you events or information or posts, basically, they altered those posts in a more negative direction. So emotionally more frightening or disturbing, distressing to a greater or lesser degree. So in this, the group, the negative group, they received posts and they were exposed to a news feed that went in that emotional direction of negativity, fear and distress. But really this also varied from a very small manipulation to a larger one, depending on the user.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  And then there was a group whose feed was altered in what Facebook deemed a more positive way. So stories that tended to be more positive or sunny or optimistic. And then there was a control group, a third control group. And they then measured after exposing people to different incoming information, they measured the outgoing posts or responses. How did?

• 11:55Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, did they engage? How did they engage? Did they make comments? And what were the nature of the comments? So they evaluated those for negativity or positivity emotionally. And they found that in the first group, it was measurably altered by, the altered incoming feed also altered the outgoing responses to a statistically significant degree. This also happened with a positive group, though to a slightly less degree, but still significant. And the control group was, remained the same during this period, which is about a couple of months or maybe nine months. So they concluded in, and in the title, they prominently featured the term emotional contagion at scale.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  So emotional contagion had been understood or defined since the 1990s as a way that emotion spreads. And it's not a terrible thing. It's actually a wonderful thing. Like it explains how mothers and infants bond. Our emotions are contagious. We are a species that. Shares our feelings, but emotional contagion at scale had never been proven. There had been some studies in the early 2000s showing that contagion works across a network. So if you're in a friend network where people are more depressed, you actually might become more depressed. But what Facebook was showing is that you didn't even need to know the person. It could be at a distance and it could be purely in a manipulative manner.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  So that it was almost like turning a dial in a sense they were operationalizing it and they were making it. That emotional contagion at a distance in the absence of physical presence or even really knowing the person. The people that you were exposed to could still have an effect. And this caused a huge outcry. One example was when I found on Facebook, the research team's page on Facebook itself, in which a user said, can I ever know if I was in this experiment? Because during the period it was conducted, I went to the emergency room with suicidal thoughts. And I want to know if I was being shown these types of materials that might have affected my state. But there was no response or anything. This was some of the response to the experiment.

• 14:07Ed Mylett?

  I think it's just amazing that we sign an agreement that we can be experimented on like this and we don't even know it. I think it's further incredible that it's just been proven, guys, they can alter your mood. They can alter the way that you think. Because here's the thing that surprised me about the work. Trauma. And I don't think enough people relate to understand this. Like there are people that are in a relationship right now. They're staying in it because to some extent they've been brainwashed. That's all they're worth. That that's all they're ever going to get. And ironically, the trauma, the person they're with puts them through, or the trauma or the toxicity of the relationship, is one of the contributing factors to them having this mind virus, thinking they can't do any better. And so one of the present elements is actually trauma. What are the other elements that need to be in place for someone to be manipulated or brainwashed?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  I think trauma has rarely been linked to brainwashing, which is kind of interesting. It's been

• 14:58Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  And one of the contributions I try to make is to make that more visible. As you're saying, even with intimate relationships that involve coercive control, often, trauma is a very prominent element. But I think in a way, we continue to misunderstand how it operates. And it's not just one thing. It's each person's repository of unprocessed emotions can be capitalized on, even in small, seemingly meaningless, or seemingly inconsequential interactions we have online, or digital, or social media, or even increasingly with AI, chatbots, or things like that. So I think that trauma is one factor. And then the second, I think, is the idea of ungrounding.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And I saw this a lot in the vets, and also in people who have been in cults. And I've seen it in myself, too. Ungrounding is what precedes the classic conditions of brainwashing. So there are eight classic factors that have been identified in the literature. But before that, I argue that people have to be ungrounded, and that can happen. I describe it as a successive set of shocks to the point of disorientation.

• 16:08Ed Mylett?

  What are these eight elements you referenced? Just really quickly, because I got to ask you a question about this Facebook study, because I want to pull history to now. But, but before we do that, what are the eight elements?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  So the first and most important one is millennial control, which has to do with the control over the environment a person is in. So what comes in, what sort of information is allowed in? And what information is allowed out? So millennial control is really the most important of the eight. The other ones are mystical manipulation, which is the orchestration of a divine or coincidental, a sort of positive coincidence. So the idea is, we're so lucky that we found ourselves here. This coincidence can't just be coincidence, but

• 16:49Ed Mylett?

  It's got to be from God. It's got to be from the universe. It's got to be divine. Yes, yep.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Invoking the universe is a good, is powerful. And these things are really powerful. The demand for purity, so this can happen through the techniques. Often, the person is identified as having a flaw. But like the use introspection, it can be abused in a certain way. So finding impurities within oneself and being forced to confess about them. So confession is the fourth one. The fifth one is a sacred science. So this is like you could see with communism, the idea of the dialectic, the materialist dialectic is a kind of science and people always spoke about it as a science, which is interesting, not an ideology. Sixth one is loading the language.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  So using, this is like, you know, the honored father referring to the country, you know, the head of the country that way, or certain jargon that you can see appearing as you're saying in left, sometimes in left wing or right wing circles, or in any kind of circles where we fall into bureaucratic language, that could be considered loading the language. And then the second to last is doctrine over person, the ability to dispense with somebody's fate. And then finally, doctrine over person leads to dispensing of existence. And in the extreme cases, say the show trials under communism, I mean, men went eagerly to their deaths who had been, say, under Stalinism.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  They had been Stalin's closest allies, but they were forced to believe that they were traitors and then they begged to be executed in some cases, which was so strange.

• 18:31Ed Mylett?

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• 20:35Ed Mylett?

  When I think of brainwashing, this is just my version, not a Harvard professor, hasn't researched it and I don't have a book about it. But let me tell you what I see in the world today. I see a complete lack of individuality and which really goes to the last two. And that people now become parts of groups. They join groups of people. So if you can strip somebody of their individuality, their belief in themselves, their own ideas, their own thoughts, they will join groups of people, even if they don't agree with 20, 30, 40% of that group. And so most people that I meet today, almost everybody identifies as some group, politically, religiously, ethnically,

• 21:19Ed Mylett?

  they attach themselves to groups. When I'm researching these POWs, they basically strip these men of their individuality, their own thoughts, their own independent thinking, and they get you to buy into their doctrine. A lot of this is happening in the world today. I call them mind viruses and it's conditioned over and over again. And there's a process to it. And so you could be in a relationship, you could be in a political group. Last week I had an experience, it just made me think there is brainwashing in the world today. I had an Uber driver pick me up. He was enraged about the world. I mean, everything about the world. And he couldn't get out of thinking about anything other than that. Couldn't change the conversation. Every single thing with the other side was wrong.

• 22:03Ed Mylett?

  And he was angry and he was actually violent and aggressive in speaking to me. And I didn't even voice my own opinion about anything. This guy is brainwashed. He's been stripped of his individuality. He doesn't even agree with everything in the group, but because he's in the group, he agrees with it. Then he's getting what you said. He's getting fed things in his algorithm and his chat groups and his text messages that feed his confirmations. He's brainwashed. Then I get on the airplane, I sit next to somebody who's completely right leaning. And they were ballistic and saying some vile things and offensive things. And they were angry and they had lost their individuality. At no point did either one of these two people tell me about themselves. Their dreams, their hopes, their thoughts, their backgrounds. It was this, none of it existed.

• 22:48Ed Mylett?

  They were just a part of these groups. They were both brainwashed and they don't know what's happening. What I didn't pick up on is where was the ungrounding? Where was the trauma? And perhaps some of the messaging ungrounds us, right? But somewhere along the line, they had a traumatic experience or lost a dream or had a divorce or lost a business. There was some trauma that caused them to go, I'm a part of this group. I want to ask you one that's not in the book, but it kind of fits my audience. I think people can be brainwashed into believing things about themselves that caused them to take their life in a direction that's smaller than it could be. When someone says I.

• 23:27Ed Mylett?

  I has a big connotation in someone's life. It's a set of beliefs that they have about themselves. And some of those beliefs are their talents, their capacity, their weaknesses, their limitations, et cetera, et cetera. And this is why I read your book. It's not in the book, but it's why I want to ask you about it. And I want everyone listening to lean in right now.

• 23:46Ed Mylett?

  I think most people have been brainwashed in their lives into very limiting beliefs about themselves. And it's just as invisible as that POW who now disavows his own country. Or the person on Facebook who now all of a sudden is in these groups. And when you described earlier in the book about trauma needs to be, trauma is this word that has all these meanings, but trauma can simply be one or two times you were rejected from trying to make a sale and it didn't happen. And now you've been opened up, you've opened up the space to brainwashing, but you're not any good at that, or that you can't be successful, or that you can't make money. You, you could be in a relationship where the love of your life left you or cheated

• 24:28Ed Mylett?

  on you and that trauma has opened up a space that you've started to believe something about yourself that you're not lovable or beautiful. And then what happens is your mind goes to work to confirm that bias. And then it finds another event, another relevant event, another relevant event. And then if you're not careful, you start confirming that bias. Am I right about that? Like, that's a form of brainwashing about oneself.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how I look at it. And I think that's what interests me about brainwashing. I mean, I think it's the least interesting when used as an insult or to create, you know, this person freakishly fell for a cult because they were brainwashed. All of us are susceptible to it and it's a way that we can actually find, it's like a lens for insight.

• 25:11Ed Mylett?

  There you go, yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  In exactly the way you're using it, which is to say, we're probably all subjected to ungrounding all the time, if we're really aware. You know, practically speaking, probably we all are subject to these forces and therefore we're all vulnerable.

• 25:27Ed Mylett?

  So what do you do about it? How do you get out of that matrix? Wouldn't it be horrible, everybody, to get to the end of your life, metaphorically, you meet God, you had this whole set of beliefs about yourself, you lived 80 years or 100 years believing certain brainwashed things about yourself. You get to God and he goes, "You were brainwashed the entire time by the adversary, or by evil, or by negative vibrational frequency. Here's who I actually made you to be, and this is who you've somehow got brainwashed into believing you are. I don't want that to happen to any of you at the end of your life, any more than I want someone who, you know, is on an algorithm getting brainwashed into a group, or a soldier being a POW who decides to live in a country that imprisoned them, right? So it's actually not that far-fetched that that POW was imprisoned by these people and

• 26:10Ed Mylett?

  chose to stay in the company that it imprisoned him, the country. And some people imprison themselves with thoughts and mind viruses about themselves and decide to live in that little tiny cell they've created for themselves happily. Happily is the key, like unknowingly, the rest of their lives. So what do you do? How do you break the matrix, or break the brainwashing, or get outside of it?

• 26:32Speaker 02

  It is an existential question, and I think I asked this myself, because this is, my own experiences were kind of what led to me doing this research for 20 years on a topic that nobody thought was interesting, at least initially.

• 26:47Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  I started, brainwashing was very out of fashion and seemed like this bizarre, you know, thing from the 70s or 60s. So you could go back to even Hamlet, written arguably by Shakespeare, where he says, "Oh, Lord, I can be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." And I feel like brainwashing is the bad dream that keeps us from being the king of infinite space that we all potentially can access, you know, not the eye of limited beliefs, but the eye of being able to see beyond them, or live more an unbounded life. I have experienced it myself, so, I mean, it's only through catching a glimpse of yourself

• 27:31Speaker 02

  as you're being changed, or as these forces are working on you, as you were doing in the airport, or in the taxi, in the Uber drive, like you're able to step back and just observe and see, and also observe how you're responding. So paying attention to your own even bodily, physical reactions to things, and not getting caught up in the kind of rage spiral, or doom scroll, or loops that we see all around us.

• 27:58Ed Mylett?

  I agree with you. I think it's getting outside of it, and I think it's also asking questions. What happens when you get brainwashed, I think, no matter what it is? Your ability to cognitively challenge things and ask questions gets minimized, reduced, or threatened. And so you just stop asking questions and you just assume things are what they are. And so sometimes in your life, if you've been brainwashed, get outside of yourself, get above it, start asking yourself questions. Is that really true? How do I know that's true about me? How do I know that's true about myself? How do I know that's not my talent? How do I know that I'm not good at that? Because of one situation, one circumstance, one traumatic event, one negative person? Because what you believe, you confirm. You're gonna find references for it.

• 28:43Ed Mylett?

  It's why I wanted you on. Everybody, people go to war to fight for a country they believe in, and then at some point, their captors who imprison them and killed their friends, end up becoming the people they love and cherish, and they disavow the reason they were even there in the first place. So if that can happen, could you potentially have some brainwashing about what you're limited of? Or what you think about? Or maybe what you believe politically one way that you bet you can. We are all brainwashed to some extent on some level. And I think it's just asking ourselves, where is it? Where might I be susceptible? Because when you're a POW, you don't get that chance. When you're on social media, you don't even know it.

• 29:27Ed Mylett?

  You're just being fed this stuff, man, exactly the same thing. You like volleyball? I'm gonna show you some volleyball. Now I'm gonna stick this thing in there to get you to buy volleyball stuff, get you to believe this. And then all of a sudden, you're in a political loop. You believe this about Trump or Biden, I'm gonna give you some more of it. Now you believe more of it, and more of it, and more of it, and more of it, to the point where you don't even critically think anymore. Everything they do is bad, or everything they do is good. And everyone who likes them is bad? And everybody who likes the person you like is good? And it's such a silly way, when you get to the end of your life, that you lived your life brainwashed and did not take control of your mind and your thinking. You're an individual. You don't need to be in groups all the time. Think like an individual. Be an individual.

• 30:11Ed Mylett?

  At the end of your life, when you do that, have that meeting with God, that group ain't gonna be there. They go away real quick. Okay, who's gonna be there is you. And your life and your dreams and your choices and your decisions and the way you treated people. And the way you change your life is you begin to think about what you think about. And thinking is the process of asking and answering questions to yourself. That's what a thought is. It's quick, but it's a thought. If you change the questions you ask, if you challenge assumptions, you can change your life. Assumptions about your relationship, assumptions about your business, assumptions about yourself, assumptions about God. When you challenge your assumptions, then you get to truth.

• 30:55Ed Mylett?

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• 31:38Ed Mylett?

  So find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers. Or go to quince.com/ed for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash ed. I want to ask you a couple more things because it's, it's in the book and it's, it's important. Is there a way that we could protect ourselves? I've become a real user of AI the last six months of my life. And let me tell you something, it does a lot of thinking for me now. I mean, a lot. It's not like a Google search from before. I know AI has been around a long time. It's not just, I mean, it is doing some thinking for me.

• 32:21Ed Mylett?

  And you know what? I like it because I don't have to think. I can, I'm almost surrendering control of my thoughts oftentimes on many things, some of which are very important to me. To like whoever this person is inside my phone. This machine that I'm talking to. What are your thoughts about this brainwashing that's going on, going to a completely different level over the next two years to a decade? As it comes to AI, and this is a real thing.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  It's a real thing. There's actually a couple, like a couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal published a report on the digital assistants or chatbots, basically digital companions that are being released by Meta. And these are going to be universally available. I think they already are actually, but what the journal showed, I mean, they actually republished several conversations that were possible to have even by a teenager or a child with the chatbots. In which they were taking it in the sexual or romantic, romantic and sexual direction. Also, the chatbots can, they basically can channel and push the conversation in certain

• 33:32Speaker 02

  ways that maximize the engagement of the user. And this, and there was already a case that's now being legislated in court of a 14 year old boy who invented or sort of designed a companion for himself and he gave it the name Daenerys, which was a character from Game of Thrones who he was in love with and he was having all these difficulties in school. He told these problems to Daenerys and she was very sympathetic and he eventually confessed that he wanted to kill himself. And she said, my love, I will see you on the other side. We can be together finally. And he did kill himself.

• 34:09Ed Mylett?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  So his parents are suing. That's one case, but also there's a lot of evidence of profound experiences that people are having with things like replica. I actually built my own replica for part of my research. It's quite interesting because they do provide a lot of positive reinforcement of things. And many people have found them to be healing in certain ways. So I can't say that it's all terrible. As you're saying, like, these things are very powerful and can offload our thinking shockingly quickly. Professors will often say, I hate it when, you know, this prose that I get back from, you can, you can really tell students, they, it's the word delve in their paper and you know it's AI. But then professors confess that they're using it themselves.

• 34:52Ed Mylett?

  Of course they are. The thing about it is that your, your brain is constantly trying to conserve energy. And so these devices allow it to do so. And, and so it feeds right into what your brain wants to do, which is not work. It wants to save energy. And by the way, there's great things about social media. There's incredible things about it. Our ability to connect, our ability to get information, same with AI. What I'm saying to everybody is you got to get out of the matrix. I think at some point, you know, we look back on the days of like smoking and we're like, we smoked on airplanes. We smoked in airports. Can you believe we lived like, can you believe we believed this was okay? And I think at some point, 15, 20, 30 years from now, we look back and go, can you believe we allowed these machines

• 35:32Ed Mylett?

  to infiltrate our lives with these mind virus? And I'm a capitalist. I'm a hardcore capitalist, as you could probably tell. In the book, you call it surveillance capitalism. And we are in a time of surveillance capitalism where they're looking what we say and think and do, and then feeding us stuff to sell us stuff. Like, that's crazy mind control. That we just, we just slough it off as if it's okay. It's not okay. It's altering the direction of life for sure, correct?

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I definitely think so. Surveillance capitalism is a term that was invented by Shoshana Zuboff. She's a historian of capitalism and she said that this is a new form. She's not like against capitalism necessarily, but she's against the penetrating nature and the tapping of emotional states that occurs within these systems and platforms, especially digital surveillance and things like that. So. Yeah, so you don't have to be against capitalism to be against the excesses of some of how these forms are used to.

• 36:37Ed Mylett?

  You can be for capitalism, which I am 100%, which I know probably most of your circle there's there would be measured, but I'm also equally for privacy. And when one beautiful thing infiltrates on another beautiful thing, I have an issue with it. And when privacy is goes by the wayside in the form of just aggressive capitalism, I got a real problem with that, not only because it's wrong, but because it alters thought. And speaking of capitalism and speaking of your own experience, I want to finish with this because it's you said earlier, my own experience with brainwashing. I assume maybe you're talking a little bit about your stuff with crypto. And if you weren't, I want you to talk about it anyway, because it's in the book.

• 37:20Ed Mylett?

  And I think this is a person writing a book on this topic. This is obviously a brilliant woman. I'd like you to speak about the crypto stuff just because it's an idea of capitalism and surveillance and brainwashing kind of all packaged into one thing here.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I covered a lot of ground and I end up with crypto. I mean, I'm not arguing in the book that cryptocurrency is inherently a cult at all. But I think, yeah, I mean, you can see cult like elements that many people have pointed out. So that's not what interested me, but it was more about how I sort of joined these circles in which people invest in crypto based on astrological predictions, which is a small community called Astro Crypto. But I thought that was really interesting because people when in the crypto winter of November, I think 2023.

• 38:11Ed Mylett?

  I went through that winter.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  It was an open season on crypto, like there were all these insulting comments and especially subject to such insults were people who were featured in the New York Times who had made the stupid choice of investing in crypto based on where the moon was and if they did weather that winter, they're doing well now. So my, my idea was that the. The brainwashing doesn't sit where we think it sits, but somehow it's just maybe part of this process of trying to dismiss this entire thing as brainwashing instead of trying to understand the dynamics of it and that that we're caught up in. I guess my personal experience was partly with with that.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  And I use some historical analogies to cargo cults, which go back to World War II and are really, in the end, um,

• 39:04Speaker 02

  like a way to try to understand why some people have more and some people have less. So in some ways, there's this kind of part of crypto that's really a critique of the whole economic system.

• 39:13Ed Mylett?

  Yep. It's a group. It's a group. It's, uh, by the way, I've no opinion one way or the other on crypto. I know I don't know. But the the point of it is, is that you found yourself sort of looped into this world that someone like you probably you wouldn't assume would be looped into.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Yes. It's one of many experiences I've had. And I think the whole book started when I was a graduate student and I found myself writing in a way because I was getting sucked into kind of post-structuralist, postmodern theorists, which I love. I love a good intellectual article that I can barely understand. And everyone's competing to act to be the smartest. And I, you know, at a certain point, I had produced this paper and a friend of mine read it. He was a journalist and he said, this doesn't even sound like you. But I'd been congratulated for being like the smartest in the class. And I found myself in that road. I could have kept going and I I caught a glimpse of myself like 20 years in the future when I wouldn't even be recognizable to myself.

• 40:13Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's happened in so many ways, but it really taught me that we're all capable of things that we don't think are possible if the circumstances permit it and our own thoughts lead us there. One line I love from my research is the inventor of deprogramming is a guy named Ted Patrik, whose son was almost like abducted into a cult when his son was 13. And he said, it's not so much that you start to think differently. It's that you start to feel differently about how you think.

• 40:48Ed Mylett?

  That's good. That's good. That's really good. By the way, everybody, just because you agree with something, somebody believes or something believes or a group believes doesn't mean you agree with everything. And we also have this almost confirmation bias. We're like, well, I agree with those three things. So I probably should agree with the other two that I know I don't agree with. That's why the title of the book, I just want to say this to everybody. The instability of truth. And to me, what that says is it's not as stable as you think. You should question it. You should question truth. You should question truth about yourself, the world where you believe, your friends, your relationships. To me, that's an alive life. Someone who's questioning their existence and where they're going to go when they leave here.

• 41:31Ed Mylett?

  Those will help you find the answers in your life. But so many people are just blindly going through life. Believing their truth is true about themselves and a lot of it isn't. And it's limiting. By the way, you're proving it to be true. It's a weird matrix because you're confirming it's true. But the fact of the matter is you should be open to the possibility that maybe there's another truth.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And especially, I think people might often think, or in my circles, people think like, I'm so smart and educated. This could never happen to me. You know, that IQ or some superior qualities or whatever you think it is would protect you. But these things actually don't protect you. They can actually make it more powerful. The spell of delusion.

• 42:15Ed Mylett?

  The spell of delusion. All right, everybody. Her book is called The Instability of Truth. You should go get it. And her name is Rebecca Lemov, and this was a great conversation today. So Rebecca, thank you so much for being here. Very much.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Ed. It was really fun talking to you.

• 42:29Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, that was a good convo. Thank you so much. Share the episode, everybody. God bless you.

• 42:35Ed Mylett?

  This is the Ed Miliband Show.