The CIA, MKUltra & The Patty Hearst Case: Protect Yourself From The Mind Control Techniques Today

What if you could be persuaded to confess to a crime you didn’t commit—or believe an identity that was manufactured for you? Harvard historian and sociologist Dr. Rebecca Lemov (author of The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion) explores how the manipulation of belief has shaped modern society from Cold War psychology to today’s social media. Mayim and Jonathan discuss the case of Leonard Kyle, who claimed the government implanted devices in his brain… and turns out, it was true! They deep dive into the psychological transformation of Patty Hearst and why her brainwashing defense was rejected and how government experiments like MK-Ultra still influence policy today. Plus, understand the rise of hyper-persuasion in the digital age and how social media can manipulate your emotions through harvesting your trauma using targeted algorithms. Learn how to spot the signs of mind control in abusive relationships and why false confessions are more common than you'd think. Whether you’re a fan of cults, psychology, digital ethics or government conspiracy theories, this episode is a mind-bending journey into how belief, identity, and freedom have transformed in ways we barely recognize. Rebecca Lemov's book, THE INSTABILITY OF TRUTH: Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper-Persuasion: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324075264 Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about why someone would say, "I killed her. I robbed that bank." Why would someone admit to something if they didn't do it?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  The superweapon of mind control. By the 1960s, the communists had the secret weapon. There was a great deal of effort made to reproduce the weapon, to understand the dynamics of whatever had happened to the 21 POWs who refused repatriation to the United States. It was seen as defensively necessary. So we need to know how they did it, and we need to defend against it. So this is why there was a vast program in the military to create survival evasion, resistance, and escape training. And that's where they started systematically exposing military personnel to the same brainwashing. The military sent a memo to any troops who had been POW,

• 0:53Speaker 01

  saying, "Don't comment on the Patty Hearst case."

• 0:57Mayim Bialik?

  The case of Patty Hearst, a very, very famous case of brainwashing, for which she was never exonerated. After being brainwashed, she was held in a closet. She was abused. She was held prisoner.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  How total can control become? Could you have someone so abandoned themselves that they would be actually an unrecognizable new creation?

• 1:25Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:26Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:27Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to a special MBB Reports about the instability of truth. What do you know to be true? What do you think is true? And what if I were to tell you that you are much more easily controllable than you think you are? We're going to be talking to Rebecca Lamoche, the author of "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion." She's a professor of the history of science and a historian at Harvard. And we're going to be talking about how there is a theme that runs through all of these categories that will blow your mind. You think that you know what is true. You think that under the most harsh interrogation, you'd be Able to at least hold on to who you are.

• 2:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Or what you think you know.

• 2:14Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to talk about the case of Patty Hearst, a very, very famous case of brainwashing, for which she was never exonerated after being brainwashed. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about other stories, such as the case of Leonard Kyle, who showed up at a VA hospital in the late 1960s and said that the government had implanted something in his brain to control his mind and that he was a genius and the government was after him. He was declared a paranoid schizophrenic. Turns out, he was telling the truth. We're going to talk about that entire series of experiments that he was part of. In addition, we're going to talk about current policies of the United States government, the United States Army, that continue to use mind control, hyper persuasion, and many components of brainwashing in order to try and create super soldiers.

• 2:57Mayim Bialik?

  But in the process, we're seeing how social media uses these same techniques and is impacting people very significantly. In addition, you might be in a relationship that is utilizing mind control and hyper persuasion. You may not even realize it. We're going to talk all about it. Such a pleasure to welcome to the Breakdown Rebecca Lemov. Break it down. Rebecca Lemov, welcome to the Breakdown.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

• 3:24Mayim Bialik?

  We're very, very excited to talk to you. Jonathan and I talk about the instability of truth, like the lowercase t-truth, kind of all the time. You know, the book, it's a meaty book. I'm not going to lie. Like, it's a journey. And it's like an historical journey through some of the most infamous and chilling examples of brainwashing, of mind control, and of hyper persuasion. I do want to start, though, by just reading from the first chapter of the book. You talk about kind of the context of how to frame this. And you say that this is common. This is common right now in the 21st century.

• 4:09Mayim Bialik?

  You talk about ungrounding, right, kind of as a counterpoint to sort of the notion of brainwashing. But this modern ungrounding occurs because of rapid technologically-driven social change via the digital realm. We may not experience the wartime extremes that Morris Wills did, which is one of the cases you talk about, but our environments are destabilized by small and large shocks nearly daily, hourly.

• 4:35Mayim Bialik?

  Can you just frame for us a little bit, what is happening in the 21st century that should concern us regarding the instability of truth?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Well, that's a great question at the heart of the book, really, or what motivated me to write it, which was to say, how could I connect these large events in the 20th century that were so extreme? And so, in a way, dark, you know, asking the question of whether and under which conditions people can surrender voluntary control of their subjectivity or their thinking? And how, on some level, do we agree to that? Or what were cases in which this seemed to happen? And then, how does that, how might that connect to what we're experiencing in the 21st century? So that was kind of the question I asked myself. So I think that one concept I'm kind of introducing is ungrounding,

• 5:28Speaker 01

  as you pointed to, which is really a series of successive shocks to the point of disorientation that I think people can intuitively relate to. And you can find it in these events that otherwise you might call hard brainwashing or, you know, these extreme experiences, including what happened to POWs, including what happened to soldiers under these certain conditions and also in cults. So I try to draw a connection among all of those things. But I think ungrounding comes before what the classic psychiatrists would describe as what happens in Thought Reform, which is usually starts with a description of information control or milieu control, which is what Robert J. Lifton talked about. So I think ungrounding precedes it all.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  And I think intuitively, we know that we all have daily experience in relative degrees of ungroundedness.

• 6:22Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think that's sort of where we'd love for you also to kind of to lead us. So you could have written a book just about brainwashing, and there's plenty to write about brainwashing. But you include mind control and hyper persuasion because what you present is that these three categories are actually a spectrum of kind of all the same thing, which is what do you believe and then how do you act on what you believe is true? So can you distinguish between brainwashing? Like what is brainwashing as we know it? Where did that term come from? Like what is brainwashing? And then what is mind control? And what is hyper persuasion? How are they related and is it a spectrum?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yes, so how I would distinguish among them is that brainwashing. Well, brainwashing is a kind of a colloquial term that emerged on a certain day in a way in the public, to the public in the middle of the 20th century through the work of an OSS agent and journalist named Edward Hunter. And he published an article in a newspaper in Miami that announced this new secret, previously secretive technique that seemed to be afflicting, that communists possessed, that would afflict anyone they chose to turn it on and that he called brainwashing. And he said it was widely described among the Chinese populace, but that actually wasn't really true. It wasn't a popular term. It was sometimes used by intellectuals.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  But when he used that word in the English language, he was basically waving a flag that there was some new thing to be afraid of. And it actually did take off quite quickly in the, in the public imagination. And then within a year or two after 1950, when it first appeared, people started hearing about troops, US troops, UN troops, British troops, but mostly US troops who had been, who seemed to be succumbing to this technique. So, so brainwashing, a quick definition or a quick synonym for it would be coercive persuasion, not simply torture, not simply that somebody was forced, but that they also were persuaded simultaneously.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  So there is an element of. Buy in, even if it's often the person needing to save their life. But needing to change how they think or finding themselves in a circumstance where it becomes necessary to change how you think. And it's remarkable that this is in the human capacity, in my, in my opinion and my experience, that we don't necessarily understand the extent to which we're all capable of this. Mind control is kind of a, I, I think it's a synonym for brainwashing, but maybe it could be more broadly applied to things like cults, although people also apply brainwashing to cults. So hyper persuasion is a word I coined to distinguish it from a media analysis of

• 9:18Speaker 01

  you know, mass persuasion, which was huge also in the 20th century around the time brainwashing emerged. And what I wanted to emphasize is just the hyper part of it, which is that it can be highly targeted. And so mass persuasion usually relied on broadcast, broadcast messages where everyone was hearing the same thing. And maybe there were, there were highly personalized responses, but we all heard the same message from CBS radio or from whatever. But with hyper persuasion, you actually can be exposed to either a set of messages that are in a specific order due to, because it's been algorithmically targeted at you or even political ads that may be designed particularly for you.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  So hyper persuasion is that increasing, you know, targeting.

• 10:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Why now for this book, for this information?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Well, I have been writing it for some time. But I do think that, so when I started thinking about this topic, which was about 25 years ago. And I first taught, I first taught a class, you know, 15 years ago. My colleagues, a colleague said, why would you ever want to teach a class like that? It seemed trivial to her, I guess. But if you even follow the fate of the word through Google Ngram, you see that back in the nineties and early 2000s, it really wasn't, it had fallen out of favor. And it was sort of like a relic of the seventies, but it's returned as a, as a serious concern. And people quite seriously insult each other with the term, meaning something very distinct and not referring back to some earlier period when it

• 10:55Speaker 01

  was kind of like this leftover of the Cold War.

• 10:58Jonathan Cohen?

  When we think about the salience of brainwashing right now, if you look on Hulu, for example, there are all these, "How did I escape the cult?" and "Let's start a cult." Like, media is often a reflection of the zeitgeist, and so there's an enormous amount about people who are being coerced in whatever different way. The Manson family has had a resurgence in media as well. What do you think is happening right now in society that is making us so fascinated by this?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  I have noticed the resurgence of cult documentaries, and like, you can't really avoid seeing them, and a lot of them are really excellent.

• 11:41Mayim Bialik?

  Totally good. I've seen them all.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  They're so good. And, you know, memoirs of people who grew up in cults. I mean, one factor is that the, there's a phenomenon called second generation, or SGAs, who, second generation of abuse, I think, is the term, but, or sometimes third generation, people who were born into cults and didn't really, their parents made the choice, but, raise them in a cult, and just, if that happened in the seventies, they're now reaching adulthood or middle age, and they want to tell their story. So there's a kind of chronological connection to this early period, earlier period, when cults first became a huge social phenomenon in the US. So the first reaction most people have when you hear someone was in a cult

• 12:27Speaker 01

  was, "How could you have fallen for that?" And often, when I watch those documentaries, I too think, like, Keith Raniere, not good-looking, you know, why, what were they thinking? Or, you want to always distance yourself, or with a scam, you think, "I would never have given my life savings." You like to think, "I wouldn't have fallen for that," and create some sort of distance. But part of the appeal of the documentary is, it's both distancing and identity, and a kind of fascination with, "How could that have happened?"

• 12:55Jonathan Cohen?

  And it seems like, right now...

• 13:00Jonathan Cohen?

  We have lost our centralized beacon of truth. Some say for the better, some say for the worse, and the destruction of democracy.

• 13:09Mayim Bialik?

  I'm actually, I want to push a little bit further. You know, we, we are living in an age where, you know, no matter which side you voted for, the President of the United States has introduced a notion of there being fake news, and there being fake media. And there's all sorts of conversations and restrictions about what media is allowed in the White House now. And I know that that's always been an issue, but it's never been so much part of, I think, our social vernacular to be thinking about these things. So, you know, I think, if you're asking my opinion, this is the perfect time for this book, because we're literally living in an age where we're being told, "You don't know what's true," or "We'll tell you what's true," or "Are you sure you know what's true?"

• 13:54Mayim Bialik?

  Or "Trust the government. We promise we are doing something in your best interest." But then we're finding things out that kind of aren't true. So I'm gonna push a little bit harder than even Jonathan wanted to.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Part of what seems to feed into it is polarization that we're all familiar with. But I really think that also a crisis in the domination of certain forms of media, I mean, just the fact that we can refer to legacy media as this kind of thing that seems to, that term just seems to place it in a museum. And in fact, the CBS News broadcast no longer gets as many viewers as, you know, many podcasts or many, you know, distinct points of view that are narrow, technically narrow cast. So, so we're living in a really destabilized environment where many voices gain attention

• 14:45Speaker 01

  in a way that's, I think that we don't have enough historical perspective on the moment we live in right now.

• 14:52Mayim Bialik?

  So, this is one of the places that I think... You can maybe help us understand. So, one of the kind of paradoxical aspects when we think about brainwashing, when we think about cults, and you know, I think one of the best examples, you know, for those of us who are older and have more kind of information about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, one of the paradoxical things is that oftentimes, people who are brainwashed, they seem to like their new life. They get along okay, right? And even in Patty Hearst's case, when she, you know, kind of came back and described, she was held in a closet, like she was, she was abused. She was held prisoner.

• 15:36Mayim Bialik?

  But at a certain point, and I think that the, the quote that she gives, which you talk about, she accommodated her thoughts to coincide with her captors. And her other quote was, "They got nicer every day they didn't kill me." Which is a little bit how I described my childhood. But I wonder if you can talk about this confusion. I think it happens with cults too. And, and you talk in the book about it's discussion, criticism, unity, the way we sort of, you know, see people broken down through an elaboration of their story, then a criticism of what they came from and this rebirth of a new identity. What is going on?

• 16:20Mayim Bialik?

  Because some of us might say, "Seemed like she was okay with it. What's the problem?" Like, she's guilty, right? Or even with Manson, he brainwashed everybody, but they seemed fine with it. They're guilty. What is happening when people seem okay? And then can they use that as a defense? Well, I was brainwashed. Mind the Alex Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? The bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again.

• 17:06Mayim Bialik?

  And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. I'm personally obsessed with Quince's 100% European linen wide leg pants. I can wear them year round because I live in Southern California. They feel like PJs, but it looks like I put a ton of effort in, whether I'm dressing for casual workdays, lazy weekends, or vacation vibes. I'm also obsessed with their sheets, so soft. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work with ethical factories and cut out the middle people, so you pay for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just apparel. Quince brings that same approach to everything they make, from hotel-quality bedding to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully designed furniture.

• 17:50Mayim Bialik?

  Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was my and Bialik's Breakdown. It's the best way to support our show.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Wow, that's such a great question. And you're getting to the heart of, I think, the paradoxes that are inherent in this subject matter, which can be painful. Just to get to Patty Hearst, so I could focus a little bit on Patty Hearst because she's a great example. When she was tried, so she was, she was held in a closet for 70-plus days. Subjected to malice, literature and forced to make broadcasts or tapes, cassette tapes that were then sent out to the media at first just saying how she was and then addressing her parents and then after a while declaring her revolutionary identity.

• 19:16Mayim Bialik?

  And she also was a very famous wealthy heir. She was an heiress. She was a

• 19:21Speaker 01

  She was an heiress. She was a 19-year-old kid who was going to UC Berkeley.

• 19:25Mayim Bialik?

  Right. No, but I'm saying there was a ransom component in that she was a desirable person to be kidnapped by this organization as they saw it.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Definitely. They saw it as a righteous political operation. And I think they put it and they had several possible signs of wealthy families, but she was nearby. But people might not, if they had met her, they might know she was a hearse, but they wouldn't have seen her as swanning about or anything. Nonetheless, she was abducted and she was raped. And the most terrible thing, she couldn't even go to the bathroom by herself. And she actually couldn't wash or something. I mean, it was beyond horrific. And in her trial, the juries actually toured the two closets in which she was held for all that time. And she was blindfolded. There was sensory deprivation. There was sleeplessness.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  She lost a lot of weight. The military sent a memo to any troops who had been POWs saying, please don't comment on the Patty Hearst case because it's being compared to your experience. And the same experts who had studied the POWs or worked with them were also came to testify in her case. But nonetheless, the attempt to defend her from, so she later, when she was let out of the closet, she was asked to declare, she was asked whether she wanted to join them or not. And she said at that moment, she realized she wanted to live. And if she said no, they would take it personally. They felt they had a strong bond with her

• 20:56Speaker 01

  and they felt that she had freely joined them in the closet and that she had freely given her sexual favors, things like that. So she knew at that moment that It would be too much of a risk to say I want to go home. She had to make herself also believe in the things they believed in or if she wanted to live. And she had decided at some point that she did want to live. When the prosecution was bringing up her crime, she had she had assisted in robbing a bank. And she had done it at, you know, using a machine gun or automatic weapon. She had carried a weapon thus forever, ensuring that she would be on dorm room posters. That's kind of this icon of revolutionary.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  One of the defense, one of the prosecutor said she looked so agile. She looked like she was eagerly participating. And she said, oh, well, behind me, they were holding a gun. And not only were they holding a gun on her, she had had to become a revolution. She said, I had, by the time they they were done with me, I really was one of them. But so this defense did not hold up in court. And even today, many people in the public, when it's polled, I think PBS did a poll in two thousand fourteen. Nobody thought she should be exonerated because they said she, in her, her physical body did this. It doesn't matter the conditions of coercion, it doesn't matter the rape.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Even her biographer, Jeffrey Toobin, said, like, two years ago, she was a willing participant. She was ripe for the plucking. It's this interesting way that her experience, people refuse or cannot fully identify with her sufficiently to understand what she went through. And she understood that. She said, I felt that nobody would ever understood what, understand what I had gone through.

• 22:43Mayim Bialik?

  And trauma really wasn't part of the conversation, you know, for for most of the history of discussions of brainwashing and and mind control. But you you choose to acknowledge it, you know, as this significant feature.

• 22:57Mayim Bialik?

  Of trauma and emotional processing, right? That is involved in, I mean, even the Patty Hearst case, it kind of makes me think like, well, I don't know. Who are we? Like, who was she? Right? Like, when you look in the mirror and you see Rebecca, or I look in the mirror and I see Mayim, like, there's things that I think I know about myself. But when placed in that kind of situation, you really begin to not understand, right? Who you are? And, you know, you quote Vivian Gornick and her memoir about growing up in a very, very complicated, interdependent, sick, you know, household. Her father died when she was young, and her mother never got over it

• 23:40Mayim Bialik?

  and used her essentially as a bridge for attachment. And it became this push and pull. And, you know, her mother said to her, you know, later in life, "Why don't you walk away from my life? I'm not stopping you." And you use this to sort of describe the extreme complexity of what happens when we're in a situation where we are told to question who we are and our identity is redefined by the other. And in many cases, the person who is an oppressor, an abuser, a dominant or an authority figure. So can you talk a little bit about that complexity? Because I'm kind of thinking for anyone who's raised in abuse or alcoholism, like, you have to do things in order to survive.

• 24:25Mayim Bialik?

  You have to fawn, you have to freeze, you have to fight, or you have to flee. Like, those are your choices, right? But what I kind of saw throughout this book is a lot of fawning happens when you are under threat. You have to, in some way, restructure your identity so that you can survive. But then again, who are you actually? And when you get out, can you go back to being the person you were?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  It does raise the question of who are we? And you can ask, I mean, if you follow some people, I've been to meetings of the International Cultic Studies Association and for survivors of cults and for people who work with them, counselors, but also for academics who are interested in these phenomena. But it really is a very difficult thing to find yourself on the other side of one of these. For whatever reason, you manage to get free of a coercive, controlling situation.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Into which you either were born or you you had certain strategies that allowed you to survive that were functional, at least to some degree. But afterwards, it's a really confusing experience. Many people like Patty Hearst, she almost died just from her, from physical collapse initially. And the, one of the experts who examined her said, called her a low IQ zombie. She had lost something like forty points of IQ.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Just from the experience, she was so diminished and not, not just that, but malnourished. But to people on the outside, she seemed people like, I actually found in the YouTube comments, someone wrote, "I partied with Patty Hearst when she was on the lam," because there was a whole period after the bank robbery where she was apparently free, but she was constantly in fear for her life. But they said, "I met her in, on the California coast in a car and we partied all night." It's kind of this theory of the wild ride that she had secretly wanted to happen, or somehow orchestrated her own kidnapping.

• 26:25Mayim Bialik?

  That's an historical narrative about women also, about the, the seductress who had it coming, or you know, even I've been learning a little bit about like witch folklore and like the, the, the political notions of who as a woman was not accepted, right? We had this narrative that she was stealing, stealing your babies. She was, you know, causing all sorts of usually like sexual mayhem, right? So it's kind of interesting that it's also a narrative, I think that we treat women differently in these situations than men, for sure.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Very much so. Her fiance was Stephen Weed, who was her math teacher in high school. And he told this whole story of how when she was fifteen, she was so adult and she had seduced him by just simply waiting around all the time. She's just waiting around. And therefore, you know, he had tried to resist, but there was ultimately nothing a human man could do. And so that's how she ended up in Berkeley, living with her math teacher from high school, even before any of this happened. Uh, there was this power attributed to her just simply by, you know, this sexuality or whatever they wanted to call it. But when she was finally arrested. She initially said her occupation was urban gorilla and she gave the

• 27:38Speaker 01

  the black power salute, I think. She was so, you know, deeply in this role. It's not really a return, it's a reconstruction or a construction of a new self, really. And um, I think for a lot of people who leave cults, it's, it's a really, it's a really difficult process of rea- because you've lost so much. Uh, you've usually, you know, if you think about the sunk cost analysis, you've sunk everything into this dream. And often there are real payoffs of ecstasy, you know, certain rituals that people do, um, the use of meditation, the use of bonding. Uh, love that, you know, this kind of sense being in a community, the sense of incredible meaningfulness, the sense that

• 28:20Speaker 01

  you are among the select few who understand the nature of the universe like that. These rewards that you're initially given and that are played out while, while someone is in a controlling situation. When they're removed, it can make life feel quite bleak.

• 28:36Mayim Bialik?

  You know, there are so many ways that we're all actively participating in a pretty massive m- mind control and hyper persuasion experiment. And um, you know, this is not to say, oh, social media is bad and no one should utilize social media. However, there are certain things you talk about in the book. It talks about sort of a soft brainwashing that is occurring uh, through social media. Um, you talk about doom scrolling and how that shapes our behavior. I wonder if you could speak about that first and then we'll get into some of the more insidious components of the experimentation that's been done on us with social media.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Well, doom scrolling, uh, I was surprised to learn, just because I was more familiar with the colloquial term, uh, that it actually is studied scientifically and that it's a phenomenon of being unable to unable to separate yourself from the ongoing flow of um, stimuli that you're being presented with on your, whatever device you're using. So I think we're all familiar with it. Even though it doesn't feel good, it's hard to stop doing it. It becomes compulsive, like a kind of a loop. I, it feels like you're consuming relevant information, I suppose, when you're doing it. Or that it's somehow consoling perhaps, but.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  It certainly is compulsive. So anyway, there have been a lot of studies of how this operates.

• 30:02Mayim Bialik?

  Let's talk a little bit about Facebook. Kind of since Facebook started, there's been conversation about what are we participating in? How did this start? You know, some of his early comments, you know, about his interest in the social experiment that became Facebook. You know, definitely made some people uncomfortable. But what you talk about in the book is that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people were subject to experiments involving manipulation that were only facilitated because of Facebook. Can you talk a little bit about what happened?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Well, I actually have, I have many students who take my classes and then go on to work at Facebook or they work at one of the social media companies during their summer breaks or things like that. And several of them have said things like, well, for my summer, they gave me a dataset of 20,000 users. And I, or you get to sort of do A/B testing or, you know, work with that. It's part of the user agreement that as a user, you do agree to be, have your feed manipulated or your information used in an experimental manner. I think we're, we're probably unaware of the extent to which we agree to this. There was a formal experiment that began in 2012 involving 700,000 or 693,000 users

• 31:22Speaker 01

  who were not notified that they were part of an experiment. And this was actually an unusual, so Facebook's research, research team undertook this and they published it ultimately in 2014. So for a period of months, this subset of users had, they were divided into three groups. And one of them had their, their news feed altered in a negative direction, measuring the emotional content of the news that they were exposed to. Another group had their news feed altered in a positive direction. And I'll go, I can tell you later about how they, how they gauged positivity versus negativity. And another was a control group. And they discovered that the group that had its news feed altered in a positive direction,

• 32:07Speaker 01

  then posted in response more positive items or responses or emoticons. They discovered that the group that had a feed that was skewed negatively and it was skewed Relatively more negatively for some people. And in those cases, those people posted more negatively. So the degree of skewing also was reflected in the posting that people did or the response. So you really had a stimulus response, kind of classic stimulus response experiment. And it was an announcement that massive scale contagion, emotional contagion had been achieved. And it was not so much the fact that emotional contagion exists that was significant,

• 32:48Speaker 01

  but the fact that it could be done across a network without any social presence, without any physical presence, and also without um direct interaction. And that so it's sort of an operationalization of contagion. It's caused a huge outcry when it was published.

• 33:08Mayim Bialik?

  The thought that also they may have been encouraged down a negative route that was detrimental to their mental health is kind of shocking to me.

• 33:18Jonathan Cohen?

  It's not shocking to me at all. The digital ecosystem, everything we consume online has a massive incentive structure to promote rage, anger, and that's what drives the bottom line. These companies are immoral in terms of the impact on society and our mental health because they're motivated and their sole concern is to drive shareholder value. They will do that at any cost with any amount of destruction along the way. And in fact, they will actively remove any obstacle in order to achieve that goal. What we as a society have to realize is that is what they are built to do.

• 33:59Jonathan Cohen?

  And so opting in to use the platforms and not understanding that our news and our reality in our digital experience is being curated by those forces is the risk. The problem, of course, is that there's no alternative. The, you know, counter argument about not having these is that the mainstream or quote, the previously trusted news sources have their own problems where their their incentive structure is different in terms of, you know, how they're driving clicks. But but they're equally motivated by outrage.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that the outrage cycle does apply to, you know, across media outlets. But what was interesting about the Facebook experiment. So one of the responses they got from the public were people writing in saying, "How can I know if I was one of those 693,000 users? Because I went to the emergency room with suicidal ideation that week, or one of, you know, during that time span. And I think that maybe I was in that experiment, or how would I know? And they're, they're very poignant responses from people who identified with this possibility.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  And what I think is interesting about what I try to argue is not so much that these are playing on outrage as that it's the emotion that we don't see. I think we think of it as lying people with negative ideas, or, or I think we intellectualize it too much. And what the Facebook experiment showed is that it actually pulls on kind of one's repository, which everyone has of unprocessed, deep emotion. And that, that, and, and the fact of, of the way they structured the experiment, to me, reveals this and that they did cite Vivian Gornik. I mean, Facebook was citing that book you were referring to, Mayim,

• 35:59Speaker 01

  as its model for how emotional contagion works. And what they were trying to achieve in this experiment was that level of, of a kind of inco-hate and deeply pathol- you know, deeply, deeply troubling issues that we all have, that I call trauma. They also used a word processing, a word counting software that actually pulled from people's diary entries that were, they were asked to describe the worst thing that had ever happened to them in their lives in diary, you know, journal about it for, for, for the part of the experiment. And that was drawn to build the language model on which the word counting software was built. And that was what was used to gauge the emotion. So however that operates, I think it's a good reminder

• 36:42Speaker 01

  that it's not simply a kind of propagandistic ideas that are being circulated as much as the fact that. People are emotionally vulnerable and that to the extent one can be aware of it.

• 36:55Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's unpack this for a second.

• 36:58Mayim Bialik?

  I feel depressed. I want to go home.

• 37:02Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, I don't think it's propagandist. I think it's exploitive. There are vulnerabilities in the human consciousness and the human emotional landscape that are being systematically exploited. So, explain a little bit more about the journal entries. Are they building those language models to then target news stories that include that to trigger the emotions? Or they're just using those language models to evaluate people's posts to say where is their emotionality ranking?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  In recent years, I think in the last two years, Facebook, once again, but less publicly, gave researchers some limited access to its data so they could run experiments on political persuasion. And they didn't actually find that polarization occurred more readily through alteration of the newsfeed.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  They actually found that if you made the newsfeed more boring by just making it chronological, people were just less engaged. But that, so it was more that the significance was found in, you know, going, I feel, in the harvesting of trauma, that that's the area where it's really potent. And that, I mean, there are many people going around talking about how we should be aware of our exposure to social media.

• 38:21Jonathan Cohen?

  What does that mean, harvesting of trauma in this scenario? I understand the journaling so that they can build a model to gauge how emotional posts are, but explain a little bit more about the active use of it now, just in everyday posts.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think it necessarily applies to everyday posts today, but I use it as a, I use it to illuminate what we're experiencing every day. Because I think that we could be more aware on that level of a...

• 38:56Speaker 01

  How you resp- how, how these things that seem like tiny, meaningless decisions? You know, I'll just spend an extra minute on Instagram. This happened to me recently, my family was like, you're, you're spending a lot of time on Instagram. And I, and I said, surely not, I'm just doing my research or something like that. But I really was, it's just, I think that we tend, so this is the whole design of my project is to say, what is the connection between these seemingly hard situations, these impossible, dire, you know, shocking depravations of human, human liberty and subjective control? And what is the connection between that and the seemingly meaningless choices we're making every day?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Uh, these tiny clicks and, uh, interactions and, you know, and responses and, um, so the insight, I think that I'm gleaning from sitting with this for many years and I have to say, I also use, uh, my meditation practice of 25 years and many hours a day is that there's a, that we're being, that we're responding on that level. Um, and this is what happened with the, this is what happened with the people who underwent thought reform in Maoist China. This is what happens with people in cults, this is what happened with Patty Hearst as well.

• 40:17Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so I want to talk about, though, hold on. That, that different register just went from Maoist China to cults to the social media that I literally am eating seven times a day. Like, it's, it is what is sustaining most of humanity, like, my children are on their phones half the day, like, when you look at the hours that rack up, so, you know, I don't mean to be an alarmist here, but you just took me from, you know, POWs being brainwashed and tortured to being given a new identity that might make you murder someone to-

• 40:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Fred on the couch, to Fred on-

• 41:00Mayim Bialik?

  By the way, Fred on the couch is having his trauma harvested, you know, through, and, and, and honestly, you know, I, I, I don't think you're wrong. And, and I don't mean to make this kind of, you know, e- extreme leap that social media is the same as, you know, Maoist propaganda from the Korean War. However-

• 41:25Mayim Bialik?

  When I look at the fact, and I'm trying to be super right down the middle, like for most of my adult life, but when I look at the fact that X is controlled by someone who's hanging out in the White House and who's parking his cars on the front lawn of the White House, I'm a little concerned. I'm like really, really a little bit concerned about what is happening. And I just, and you know, this speaks to the point of this book where you're trying to tell people, believe people when they say who they are, understand the larger system you're functioning in, but this is something that seems to have infiltrated everybody's life,

• 42:08Mayim Bialik?

  no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, and no matter what side of the emotional spectrum you're on, and no matter where you fall on the trauma spectrum. It feels like very, very vulnerable right now.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  I don't mean it to be a call for panic or further

• 42:21Mayim Bialik?

  No, we like you to call for panic, though, because I feel panicked.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  This is part of how a lot of extremely controlling situations can operate or change your, you know, silo people, things like that. But I think it's most useful applied to one's own circumstances, at least as a lens for reflection and for finding, you know, that some place, some space between the stimulus and the response.

• 42:48Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so that, that is, that is a perfect explanation. I didn't mean to make you panic, like you're, you know, you're a professional and you don't have to panic the way I do. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you, is one of my favorite phrases just of my life. And you use it, you use it several times because you, you take us to a place that, you know, we had Andrew Bustamante on our podcast, and he's a former CIA, you know, secret agent person. And what he said is, he said that the reason that he was recruited to do what he did is because he was crazy enough. To participate in the things he was asked to do by this government. And he was smart enough to be able to

• 43:33Mayim Bialik?

  kind of lie his way through it, right? So, one of the, the most startling and tragic aspects of the stories that you tell and the way that you tell them is, is it Leonard Kill? Is that how you pronounce his last name?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Uh, Kyle.

• 43:48Mayim Bialik?

  Kyle, okay.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Mayim Bialik?

  So, a man showed up at a VA hospital in the 1970s. And I'm gonna cry, cuz I get very emotional

• 43:59Mayim Bialik?

  about this story. And what he said was, he said, "The government put things in my brain. And they're listening to my thoughts and they're controlling my behavior." And what they said is, "You're a paranoid schizophrenic. And, and you should be locked up." And he said, "No, I really mean it." And, he was absolutely telling the truth. His name was Leonard Kyle. And, he was part of a, a set of experiments, which may or may not have been controlled by the CIA. But, he was part of a larger set of experiments that we do know that the government participated in to try and figure out

• 44:40Mayim Bialik?

  how the human brain works, and in many cases, how to control people's behavior. You know, some of the most startling aspects of this story trace back to the experiments done on prisoners in the concentration camps during World War II. And, history will keep repeating itself. It's got a really, really good carbon copy that it's making. And,

• 45:07Mayim Bialik?

  what we know, not just from the story of, of Leonard, but

• 45:14Mayim Bialik?

  through things like what we know about the MKUltra program. The government has always been involved, at least in the 20th century, with trying to control people with the use of various techniques and methods and drugs. And in many cases, it's couched in, "Oh, we want to learn more." But in many cases, it destroys not only individuals, families, and communities. For many people, it has destroyed their faith in the United States government. I watched the Netflix series Wormwood, which details the life of Frank Olson,

• 45:54Mayim Bialik?

  who was experimented on with incredibly powerful psychedelic drugs and ended up mysteriously dying. And it's a fantastic series. I highly recommend it. I want you to talk a little bit about the framework of government mind control and hyper persuasion. And then I do want you to talk about the things that the government still does. And for many of us, the torture of prisoners is never acceptable. And making people give false confessions is not something that I want our government doing, and yet it happens all the time. So can you give us a little bit of history of the government's role in mind control? And also take us to the present and what is in place today?

• 46:39Mayim Bialik?

  And how are we supposed to reconcile that with even having a structure of understanding truth?

• 46:44Speaker 01

  That's a great question, too. Yes, well, I'll just say that in the middle of the 20th century, and this is one of the great advantages of studying people I would call dusty social scientists, is that they often were part of a project that you could argue had to do with the idea of too much democracy. That if everybody had a voice and everybody was expressing their desires, you know, there was a feeling that society wouldn't run properly and in an orderly manner. It's probably a legitimate concern to some degree in that therefore you needed potentially a... Theories of and beha- of behavioral control.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And there was a great deal of effort put into that. That's what I wrote my dissertation about, which is human engineering and social engineering and behavioral engineering. So at the root of that is this kind of just uneasiness with uh with a public. And so the idea that people need to fulfill certain kind of roles and they not only need to fulfill their roles um by by kind of coercion, but really more like they need to prefer what we want them to, what is, you know, they need to want to do that role. And like behaviorists were famous for saying things like, give me a baby and I can make any kind of man, you know, a shopkeeper, a janitor, a scientist. By the nineteen sixties, um, under a very, you know, partly in response to the brainwashing

• 48:13Speaker 01

  crisis, uh, it's fairly, I mean, directly in response to the twenty-one POWs who refused repatriation to the United States and to this announcement by, you know, that that the communists had uh these the secret weapon. There was a great deal of effort made to reproduce the weapon, to understand the dynamics of of uh whatever had happened.

• 48:36Mayim Bialik?

  So, sorry, just to clarify, so we were basically taking the techniques that we saw worked to turn devoted patriotic young US soldiers into communist believing non-US citizens. And we said, gosh, that's a pretty powerful tool. Let's learn how they did it.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Right, I mean, in part, it was seen as defensively necessary.

• 48:59Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  So we need to know how they did it and we need to defend against it. So this is why there was a vast program in the military to create resistance, uh, survival, evasion, resistance and escape training, but to really add to the resistance part of it. And that's where they started systematically exposing uh troops or uh military personnel to uh the the same brainwashing. When the when the press found out about it in the fifties, when something like a hundred thousand men ran through these early, these early trainings, they said, these were schools for sadists. They're actually, why do you need to, why do you need to subject people to this in order to understand how it works or to to prevent them, to protect them?

• 49:42Speaker 01

  But this was actually seen as a process of inoculation against a kind of. The super weapon of mind control. At the same, so this is an ironic, yet, you know, somewhat predictable response from the government to fund MKUltra. And this was the purpose of MKUltra was to see how, how total can control become? And could you ultimately create something like a Manchurian Candidate? Could you have someone so abandon themselves that they would be actually an unrecognizable, you know, new creation? And there were several, there were 143 sub projects at least. And some of them ran, you know, by, were run by psychiatrists. One of them was run by a psychiatrist named Louis Jolyon West.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And he is connected to the case you mentioned of Leonard Kyle. Although not directly funded by MKUltra, it was a case in which this kind of extreme form of behavioral control was through psychosurgery was pursued. And I, I hesitated to write about this for a long time because it disturbed me so much. And like you, it, that chapter made me cry. I mean, I, I spent a sabbatical year just sitting here with these materials. I've met two of his grandsons who didn't know he was their grandfather because he was hospitalized and he was seen as a raving madman. But in fact, his two doctors at Mass General Hospital, who are also affiliated with a Harvard

• 51:07Speaker 01

  unit for the study of violence, felt that, felt that he was a worthy recipient of this new technology, which was a brain implant that would allow remote control. And it would, it would address people who are seen as problematically violent. So the question of whether Leonard Kyle, who was an engineer, he was a self-taught engineer who grew up in Cambridge from a working class family.

• 51:31Mayim Bialik?

  That was the other thing. When you showed up at the hospital, he's like, I hold patents. I hold US patents, which is like what you think mentally ill people say.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  It's really an astounding story. He showed, yeah, he showed up at the hospital raving in the late 60s in California. And yeah, he said, my two doctors from MIT and Harvard are after me. They've implanted things in my brain. I'm the inventor of many patents. I'm, you know, I'm a genius and they're coming after me in my brain. They're trying to attack me in my brain. It was actually technically all true. But his doctors, you know, the people who saw him just thought he was crazy. And he did become completely incapacitated. One of his doctors was actually connected with West, who was one of the most prominent MKUltra experimenters. And another interesting angle of part of the story is that

• 52:23Speaker 01

  one of the residents on the case when the operation was performed was Michael Crichton, the novelist, who wrote, ended up writing The Terminal Man about this case. But he kind of changed, he changed some of the elements. So it was very surreal and it did explore what appears to be paranoia can simply be a realistic description of what has happened to somebody.

• 52:47Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about what, you know, currently goes on? I'm also mildly obsessed with forced confession stories. Like, these are the documentaries that I find so fascinating, both because they're legally fascinating to me. But it is, it's a, it is a conversation about psychological persuasion. And, you know, depending on either the physical or the emotional environment that someone is placed in, people can confess to things that they did not do. Back in the news and conversation about Guantanamo Bay,

• 53:29Mayim Bialik?

  in many cases, this is a technique that is still being used and condoned. You know, to me, when you're torturing people, you are not getting any accurate information. Meaning, how do you tell what's true when the environment someone has been put in is one of physical or psychological torture? Can you talk a little bit about forced confessions?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the main connection in my research has been in Guantanamo and the way that the interrogators and the... The, uh, the dark site that was created at Guantanamo for people that were seen as the most dangerous, um, I mean, were, were, uh, systematically subjected to sleep deprivation and torture and waterboarding and all the very same techniques, in fact, by the very same people who had been trained at Sierra camps, which I had mentioned earlier, the survival and resistance training that military developed over back in the fifties but kept refining over the years, tho- they were the most practiced at, um, these, these kinds

• 54:37Speaker 01

  of techniques of, you would say, uh, enhanced interrogation. So this was done on the Guantanamo prisoners. Many of them are still there because actually they're, the evidence they gained, they gave can't, it, you can't really be used in court because it was extracted under torture, yet they also are not, they're not allowed to be released, many of them. So they're in the kind of terrible bond, but I think earlier than that, um, there's a great, there's a great book called Guantanamo Diaries, which is like a seven hundred page account of a man, I think his name is Mohamed Al Guarani, I might have his, no, Mohamed

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Slahi, uh, he, he's like, he's a really incredible writer who happened to be, uh, subjected to all these techniques. He was ultimately exonerated from any connection to Al Qaeda, but he, he, he talks about the pressure to, that, that basically they know you're guilty already. This is the nature of the types of interrogations that go on in thought reform. If the government already knows you're guilty, the main task is simply to acknowledge that guilt and to find, the Soviets were also very good at this. And you can break somebody much better through, uh, a set of techniques that also involve, um, neglect rather than, um, simple torture.

• 56:04Mayim Bialik?

  And, and also, you know, on a, on a different scale, you know, when you watch, let's say, you know, a documentary and you're watching the footage of...

• 56:14Mayim Bialik?

  You know, police aggressively interrogating someone who we know, because we've seen, you know, the preview to the documentary, we know this person didn't do it. And you're thinking, well, why would someone admit to something if they didn't do it? Can you talk a little bit about why someone would say, I killed her, I raped that person, I robbed that bank? Why would you say that? Like, what is the psychological environment that produces someone able to literally confess to something they didn't do?

• 56:47Speaker 01

  It is a real mystery. If you look at it from the outside, if you just, if you imagine yourself as like a floating camera, you'd say, why would someone ever do that? But you're not seeing all the steps that led up to that point. And if I, maybe the most, the example that springs to mind for me, just from my own research, is the example of a man named Dr. Vincent, who was a French physician, who was working in China in this earlier period. But I think it applies to today as well. He was trained in French medical school, but he always was interested in China. He took his whole family and settled there and he began treating Chinese patients. And he's basically just someone who liked to paint in the afternoons. And he was a very good doctor.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  He treated patients in town, he treated them in the country. But as people started leaving China around the early 1950s, around the time of the, you know, the Maoist consolidation and things like that, he was told he should leave with all the foreigners, but he didn't want to. So he stayed around. He said, he said, they'll never, I don't think they'll arrest me because I'm just, there's nothing about me that's threatening. I'm just treating people. But in the end, he was arrested and he was put in a cell, a struggle cell, with 12 other people in a very small space. And he was interrogated, you know, rigorously. And of course, he said, I'm not a spy. How could you think I'm a spy?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  And the judge would continually reiterate, we, the government knows you are. We would have never arrested you if you weren't guilty. So it merely becomes our task to find your guilt. And at first, he just said, here's what I've done every day. So, and, you know, within a day or two, they'd already, they put him in chains. And he can't, when he goes back to the cell, he's not allowed to, you know. Relieve himself, so he has to rely on the other prisoners to unzip him so he can pee in a cup. He has to get down on his hands and knees to eat like a dog. He, uh, you know, he's restricted in his sleep. He has to curl up in a little ball, or they say he's an imperialist.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  At every moment, his, his wrists and his legs start bleeding from the chains and he's dragging them around. So after a week or two, he's just so, he starts to think about ways he might be a spy.

• 59:08Mayim Bialik?

  Hmm.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  He, so he starts to mention little conversations he had with passersby where he said, you know, someone told him that, um, that, you know, the shoes had gone up in price and he told another French person that. And they said, oh, well, and that was passed on to an American. So they, they write that down and they say, initially, so at first he just start, tries to men- uh, mention little details that will set, satisfy them. But after a while, he starts to build himself up because he really, he says, after a while, all you want is then to remove the chains. All you want is to be out of the situation and you think the only thing that will satisfy them is a big story. So he says, I am actually a spy. I am a big spy. I've done all these things and they won't even believe that because they know that's not true. And so after a pe- you know, it's like a

• 59:55Speaker 01

  period of negotiation where he finally whittles down his story to resemble reality. And it takes, it takes shape around the things that he has identified that he actually did. But it has a whole new meaning and he says, you come to believe that meaning. He's, he's like, I wasn't deluded. But in that context, I came to believe it. It's a special kind of belief. And with that belief came this kind of elation. Because when he succumbed to it, they finally removed the chains. He was accepted by his cellmates. He was allowed to live. He was allowed to teach French two hours a day. But, you know, the re-education continued and finally, ultimately, he signed his confession.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, and it was worked out together. It was like collaborative document. And then he was allowed to leave and he went back to Hong Kong. And ultimately back to France. And at that point, he met Robert J. Lifton, who's one of the psychiatrists who'd studied brainwashing and he, uh, and he, uh, told Lifton, I still don't know which to believe.

• 1:00:57Mayim Bialik?

  That's unreal. And then when you take a system, you know, like we have with, you know, what I believe is systemic racism, systemic homophobia, you know, all these things, when you have people who are then in a position to be already taken advantage of. I want to talk a little bit about the SER program that you mentioned. It stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. And this training program was started by the government, right, as a way, the army, as a way to sort of set up practice scenarios where you might be, let's say, if you're kidnapped or taken prisoner, here are all

• 1:01:42Mayim Bialik?

  the things we're going to do to you to see if we can break you. But in the process, in my opinion, it becomes an incredibly sadistic and complicated government system by which they are then gaining control of an entire population that they have access to. Jonathan, that show that we watched, Lioness, the, I think the first episode shows kind of one of these programs, and this takes place now. Is this still something that soldiers have to go through where they're put in a box and tortured and they, in theory, are so disoriented that maybe they don't know if maybe they were actually kidnapped by a foreign government? And then like after X number of days, they're like, no, just

• 1:02:26Mayim Bialik?

  kidding, it's just us testing you. Is this still going on? And does it need to go on?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Well, I think it does still go on. Soldiers are instructed not to, I mean, you're not supposed to talk about it, but if you, I have met people who recently who have been through it, and they change some, they do some screening for psychological, you know, fitness. There was a study in the 2000s by, at Yale about, of people who went through that, this training, the SER training. And not all of it involves the extreme, the extreme, the waterboarding and the Syrian box and the physical brutality, but there's a level at which it does involve that Level C for people who are likely to be captured or, you

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  know, at some risk of being captured. So this study at Yale showed that everyone who goes through it Or pretty much, pretty much everyone experiences some trauma, traumatic effects, destabilizing, yet also they found that it can be valuable. And this is what I found talking to people who've been through it is that they do say, and even some people who experienced the worst of it, I mean, terrible, in the early days, it was really unmodified by, um, it, it was extremely brutal. And even the originators, even the originators, even Louis Jolyon West were called in to modify it because people were being destroyed and broken from their own government. And nonetheless,

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  it can teach you something about yourself. So even a guy that I comes to lecture to my class, who's a professor named Glenn Peterson, he said, I mean, he deplores it, he deplores what happened to him. It, it did draw on his trauma, his own experiences. I mean, it was incredibly destructive, but he also says it taught him something about himself that he didn't break. He found a way not to.

• 1:04:18Mayim Bialik?

  I wonder if we can kind of zoom way in. Um, there's so much conversation, you know, a lot of what we talk about here and obviously all over social media, you know, there's a lot of talk of narcissism and what if you're dating a narcissist? And I'm not going to ask you to speak to that because obviously that's not your specialty. However, many relationships have components of some aspect of mind control and in particular abusive relationships can have that component. What are some of the things that, what are some of the things that you could kind of recommend in terms of how to frame this, not just on a large scale, but on a very

• 1:04:59Mayim Bialik?

  personal level? How do you know if someone is controlling you or using techniques of hyper persuasion to either keep you in a relationship or keep you behaving a certain way in a relationship?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  You're basically subjected to the worldview of this other person and it, it becomes extremely compelling. If that person is a narcissist, person was charismatic and there were certain rewards and there are ways that they felt good and they felt finally whole. There's a way it can shatter or snap and you never quite know how that's going to happen. People have attempted deprogramming. Sometimes friends attempt to, you know, shake you and say like, girl, you can do better. You know, all sorts. That actually happened to me. That was very helpful. It was a friend who said, What are you doing? You know, he acts like he's smarter than you, better looking and funnier. But the views of people you trust or once trusted, even if you're isolated, is a very helpful thing.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  And if you can do that, I think that the danger of such relationships is that you do become isolated. And that's part of that, their dynamics. You're isolated in this hyper dimensional world that's quite compelling, where everyone else seems to be an enemy.

• 1:06:10Mayim Bialik?

  Many components of unhealthy relationships literally have exactly that formula. Meaning you're asked to like tell all about yourself and in many cases you're love bombed. And they want to know everything about you and they want to be part of your life. And then it's like a slow chipping away, especially if you're in a situation where you're being isolated from your family. They didn't do it right. I can love you better. Like, don't go talk to that friend, right? And then the unity is like, we have something special that no one else can touch. And no one understands it and you can't leave because we're meant to be together, right? Like, that's brainwashing.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a, there's something I found fascinating, which is that

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Malzadong said, he said, nobody is permanently thought reformed. Nobody is permanently reeducated. Even myself, I have to re-subject myself. So there, there's a way these relationships, I mean, this is maybe a cause for hope. They have to be continually renewed. And that's why people get sent off to the countryside. Or that's why these, you know, there's an intense cycle in abusive relationships as well. Where, you know, the person breaks and they could, they might break off, but they sometimes end up re-dedicating themselves even more so. There's the famous Festinger study of cults and cognitive dissonance. And that, like, when a predicted event doesn't occur, there's a, there's a point people reach, a choice point where they're either going to leave the group because the world didn't actually end.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Or they become even more dedicated. I think it's a cause for hope that they, it isn't, conversion is, it actually happens. We are changed, but that, that change is need not be and never really is permanent. It's, it just needs to be continually renewed. So you have an opportunity always to break that. And I think your true freedom lies in. In a sense, where you place your attention and the fact that some things can't, I mean, a lot of things can be controlled, we can be controlled a lot more than we think. But there's always some freedom, I think.

• 1:08:15Mayim Bialik?

  Before we let you go, I want to ask about kind of one specific example. And I'd love for you to give us any, you know, kind of suggestions in this framework of how we frame truth. So Jonathan and I have been talking about the Pfizer papers and, you know, what we're learning is what many paranoid people already thought, which was that the government knew about certain aspects of vaccines not being safe, causing damage, and they lied about those things. Like, that's just, I mean, I don't want to say it, but like, that's just true. It's just now we know that it's true. So I wonder, like, how are we supposed to frame that kind of information? Because it's kind of like, I remember when we were told to like wash our vegetables before we ate them during COVID.

• 1:09:00Mayim Bialik?

  And I was like, I don't know why, I was like, that's not a thing, I'm not doing that. Like, I'm not going to do it. And certain people in my life were like, no, we are washing the vegetables, we're gonna die if we don't wash the vegetables. And they believed that that was true. But then when we were told you don't have to wash vegetables, they then had to say, oh, that wasn't true, right? Or when we were told the only solution is to close playgrounds and churches and synagogues, and then we were told, oh, that wasn't the only solution. Or, oh, the way they did it in Sweden clearly had different effects, right? How do we frame? Like, how can you believe in anything with any veracity if, in theory, it might shift?

• 1:09:45Mayim Bialik?

  And especially when the authority that you're relying on is the government?

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  In a sense, public health worked the way it's supposed to work, which is to send out the messages, you know, which will necessarily obscure some of the truth. Because they're trying to speak to the greatest good for the greatest number. So they're gonna say, you should take the vaccines. They're gonna probably want to suppress evidence of vaccine injuries. I mean, that's not so surprising. But what I think was regrettable about this... Time was that the misrepresentation of science and its mobilization and weaponization. So there was a great disdain for those who are said to be not following the science. When the nature of science is an ongoing discussion, especially in a situation of an emerging unknown pathogen. So there should not have been suppression.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  There should not have been the extreme, like what you're describing, that the mobilization of just neighborhood watches to, you know, are you, are you believing correctly? Are you, if you even question or bring up certain sources, it became, you know, an occasion for disdain and the slogan, you know, trust the science. But the science was and science is, this is the nature of science. It's an ongoing process. It doesn't reach, it doesn't reach a solid state. It never really does, and that's the nature of it.

• 1:11:03Mayim Bialik?

  I think this is also a great example, you know, as you described, of, of, of mass information, which can lead to mass hysteria. And the fact is, one of the responsibilities, at least as the government sees it, is to try and statistically stack the chips in favor of what they believe the greatest good will be for the most people. And the fact is, the nuances of the amount of money that, you know, the government pays to people who have had adverse effects from vaccines, which has been going on since vaccines have existed, the overemphasis on that kind of information does threaten a larger bureaucratic structure, which is, we would hope, designed to help the, the most vulnerable people, right?

• 1:11:47Mayim Bialik?

  But it's just very, very hard, very hard to get my head around sort of, you know, the degree to which we're supposed to believe in something. And as a scientist, I completely understand those things change. I mean, there are things in, in my field, there's things in all fields of science that, you know, Jonathan and I love to talk about these things, like the things that hippies said, we promise energy exists, right? You can see it around a person, right? And in some cases, it's technology, in some cases, it's, you know, a transcendental consciousness shift that needs to happen. But those things are happening all the time, and it does, it really, it makes you obviously question truth. We really, really love talking to you. The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion, a terrific read. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for the invitation. It was great to talk to you both.

• 1:12:38Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that I keep thinking about is we all sign that agreement when we sign up for Facebook. Or when you sign up for any-

• 1:12:45Jonathan Cohen?

  No one reads that agreement.

• 1:12:47Mayim Bialik?

  Nobody reads that agreement and for many of us, when Facebook started in particular, it was just an unbelievable opportunity to, I mean, I got to have relationships with my family all over the world that I never would have had. We got to be part of each other's lives. Like, I never would have thought anything negative might have come from that. And of course, there were people who did. But I wonder, when you think about, you know, these kind of algorithmic experiments that we were part of, like, of course, what worries me is in what other ways can we be influenced, right? And is the solution to just kind of throw your hands up and say, "I don't want to be part of anything that might possibly influence my brain."

• 1:13:29Mayim Bialik?

  Is there a way to still enjoy it for what it's good for? But then I'm kind of like, how do you even know that you're enjoying what it's good for when you're part of this algorithm and it could be making you depressed and sending you to the hospital?

• 1:13:42Jonathan Cohen?

  It's impossible to really live in the world while navigating each one of these factors that are feeding and control- because we don't have our thoughts and opinions in absence of the environment that we live in, right? So, someone who follows NBC News and someone who follows Fox News, they're each being influenced in certain ways. So, you know, there are sites now that are trying to have media transparency to say what the bias of the organization is that you're consuming to help the individual sort it out. But it's almost impossible, right? So nowadays, of course, these independent voices have come up

• 1:14:23Jonathan Cohen?

  in contrast to the mainstream voices to offer a counterpoint to help people say, "Wait a second, we should be..." Almost fact checking or reality checking our news diet and our media diet. Is it the carnivore? Should I only be eating carnivore? Should I only be eating plants? Like, where is the middle ground? It's not that we should disregard those institutions. We have to update them.

• 1:14:48Mayim Bialik?

  And life is also constantly going to offer you opportunities to have your truth challenged anyway. For example, I'm a person who does not support the death penalty. That's just me. I don't support the death penalty. But throughout my life, I will be presented with opportunities to say, but do you really think that's true? What if, right? And then fill in the blank. What if they this? What if they that? What if these were the circumstances, right? But I think it's really important also, I don't know. What are three things you hold to be true no matter what? That you think could never, ever be challenged, right?

• 1:15:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Life is gonna serve you up the opportunity to challenge them.

• 1:15:26Mayim Bialik?

  Pretty much. You know, I think what's the most disturbing to me when I think about false confessions? When I think about those sorts of things which happen all the time, especially to communities that are more vulnerable? You think that you would know, I didn't kill someone. But what people don't understand is the circumstances in which a person is placed can literally torture someone to the point that truth itself becomes completely distorted. And your desire to escape the torment you are in is so great that you cannot even rationally think, okay, but I can't confess to something I didn't do, right? Or what's a plea bargain for, right?

• 1:16:10Mayim Bialik?

  It's like, that's what it's designed, right? To try and help people like, here's a way out, but you also have to admit you did it. It's terrifying, terrifying. Anyway.

• 1:16:22Jonathan Cohen?

  There's no hope after that.

• 1:16:24Mayim Bialik?

  I really appreciate the ability to explore this because I really think that what she talks about in this book is literally true on the largest scale and the smallest scale. It's the same kind of question, right? And just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Absolutely holds true with all of these things.

• 1:16:43Jonathan Cohen?

  In relationships specifically, stay connected to your friend group. Have the people outside the relationship you can trust. It is true that people come together and there's a reality that's created between them that can feel exceptionally special, that they know things about each other that the other person doesn't know, or the outside people in their lives may not know. They could have controlling parents that they're trying to distance themselves from, and that person in your relationship may be like, "Hey, you know, try to set some boundaries." That is very different than the reality between the two people is the only reality, and that you start to become isolated, so look for those signs.

• 1:17:24Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you for being here to explore the instability of truth from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.