#2322 - Rebecca Lemov

Rebecca Lemov is a historian of science at Harvard University and has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute. Her research explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences. Her new book, "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper-Persuasion," is available now.https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324075264 Get anything delivered on Uber Eats. www.ubereats.com Go to ExpressVPN.com/ROGAN to get 4 months free! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:11Joe Rogan?

  All right. Hello, Rebecca. Very nice to meet you.

• 0:15Speaker 03

  Hi, Joe. Very nice to meet you, too.

• 0:18Joe Rogan?

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

• 0:24Speaker 03

  Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself, just because I find myself, after two and a half decades of having this topic. That initially seemed pretty niche and unusual, and not many people were interested, or many people were skeptical about it, but I thought it seemed like it embodied some of the more extreme. If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by their, you know, what parts of your life are determined by you and what parts are determined by outside forces, that mind control would be a perfect area to investigate that, because it's so extreme, especially if you looked at particular cases.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  So, I, because I had done my dissertation at UC Berkeley on the history of behavioral engineering and how, you know, these kind of models for creating a society of control and encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream, and it seemed like the next step was to look at something like brainwashing or mind control.

• 1:29Joe Rogan?

  When you first started studying it, was it a less public sort of curiosity? Because now, a lot of people are very much interested, and I blame the internet, mostly. I probably had a lot to do with it, too.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  You and the internet.

• 1:46Joe Rogan?

  A lot of people on the internet are, you know, because over time, you know, people have gotten to know about MKUltra and a bunch of different, different programs that the, that our own United States government was involved in, where they were working on mind control. But what, like, initially, what drew you to it?

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Well, I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual, maybe for professor to be looking into and people, I mean, at the time, if you look at a Google Engram for the word mind control or brainwashing, they were very low, you know, around the turn of the century or the 1990s, after there kind of, there was a peak of interest in the 70s and it'd just really fallen off. But I guess I was interested because it just seems so unusual and like, maybe there was something there that people hadn't really thought about. And at the time, these documents weren't readily available. And like you say, people weren't really looking into it. So I just thought it seemed like a rich area for research.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  And I'm also interested in connecting my person, I've always been interested in connecting my personal, I guess, my goals for life with what I research. So I thought it's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're controlled or how much of me might be controlled. And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases, if you could.

• 3:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think that, that's an interesting aspect of it. Like, how much are we controlled? And how arrogant are we to think that we're not controlled? Or how arrogant are we to think that that wouldn't work on me?

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that that's embedded in our, you know, in the messages we receive all the time, that freedom is something kind of effortless that we're just granted and that autonomy is just the natural state. But actually, we're so much more malleable than we think. And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true. That's what also drew me to anthropology is just the idea, like, if I was born in another place at another time, I would be another person. Or how much of me would be transferable was what that interested me. And I, that's why I went to, first started studying anthropology. Like, how much are we shaped by things that

• 4:12Speaker 03

  we don't necessarily choose, or are maybe accidental, or genetic, or various factors? But, um, yeah, but I think we're told that, that freedom of, freedom of choice or our autonomy is fairly straightforward. And all you have to do is exert your will.

• 4:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but clearly we're influenced heavily by our environment culturally. I mean accents, just cultural traditions, behavior patterns. It begs the questions like what, what are you? And what is the, what is the, the, the shell that you wear on the outside? You know, like a hermit crab, like what, what do you carry around with you? And what, at the core of it, what are you?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that is the oldest question of Socrates. Who am I? Or just the question, it's the, it's a deep question and it's also kind of like a practical question. So I thought if you could look at it more in, in actual examples, that would be interesting. And I also, I guess I was drawn to the topic. Maybe, yeah, maybe because other people weren't studying it or also because of experiences in my life. Just seemingly small things like one day I remember when I was in graduate school. I was walking down the street and I said, we passed a small dog and I said, I really, I really hate small dogs.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Like, and I, I realized as I said it that it wasn't true, but I just like, I love, I actually really like them. What's wrong with small dogs? But I had absorbed this opinion some, from somewhere, but like a person that such as I was aspiring to be, you know, only liked, you know, big dogs or something like that. But just noticing in yourself, the way you soak up opinions and you're shaped by, you know, even, you know, even seemingly trivial things. And then also on a more profound level, you can see that happening. Made me wonder like, what could you learn from looking at these cases where people really seem to have been brainwashed, you know, in history or radically reshaped?

• 6:27Joe Rogan?

  And then there's brainwashing yourself. Cause if you say, I hate small dogs, now you have to kind of defend it. And now, and even if you say, God, it's not even true, but there's gotta be reasons to hate small dogs. I don't want to come off as a moron who just says things.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  There are other people who feel the same. It turns out, yeah, I mean, either you end up doubling down on that opinion because you don't want to feel silly to yourself. I mean, I think sometimes we're just a series of adopted opinions that we then.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Adhere to, and I guess being in graduate school also made me feel that way because you're rapidly learning and absorbing a new vocabulary, learning things you should say, learning things you shouldn't say, ways you should express yourself and ways you shouldn't. That seemed very like a deeply shaping process. And I was interested in, how did social sciences, like, was there a science of this process of shaping? Or they sometimes called it cannibalizing or making, you know, a canal of behavior so that people would end up wanting to do what it was that socially necessary for them to do?

• 7:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, universities are a great place for that, right? Because you get away from your parents for the first time who have indoctrinated you into their cult. Like, you're born into the cult of your parents, and then you leave and they're like, "Let me get away from these crazy people, and now I'm gonna become a whatever." You know, "Now I'm gonna figure out which group most aligns with my ideas and join them and rebel and fight against the machine and become a part of a new cult."

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. Wear something different, or adopt, suddenly I don't like certain kinds of dogs, or I wear a certain thing, or, you know, you have an interruption in the fabric of your extensive conditioning. And that is an, it's also an opportunity, you know, it's, it's not a nefarious thing.

• 8:22Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Necessarily, but it can take that, just that truth about people.

• 8:26Joe Rogan?

  I think it can be nefarious for some people, unfortunately. But I think for a lot of people, just considering new ways to think about things is probably valuable. It's probably a good thing to have the opportunity to reconsider the way that you've sort of like canaled the grooves that have been deeply carved into your personality, where you automatically go towards certain things or think about certain things.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  I always think just an interruption is often good.

• 8:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  In your, in your patterning.

• 8:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's why I think moving is really. This episode is presented by Searchlight Pictures Wild Horse 9. Shortly before Chile's 1973 coup, two CIA agents, played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, find their mission on Easter Island spiraling into a web of conspiracies, unexpected alliances, and chaos. Wild Horse 9, only in theaters Friday. Get tickets now. I know how chaotic things get this time of the year, between all the holidays, trying to train, and last-minute projects at work. It can seem impossible to get everything done. If you feel like you're running on fumes, AG1 Next Gen is an easy way to get the support that you need.

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• 10:23Joe Rogan?

  a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D tossed in with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro, backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee. That's drinkag1.com/joe. This episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog. Here's a fun fact: Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer, on average, than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild? And also kind of obvious at the same time. So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me.

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• 11:58Speaker 03

  Or traveling.

• 11:59Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. I've read that you have had a steady meditation practice. I've read it was like two hours a day for 25 years.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:10Joe Rogan?

  That's a lot of time to be meditating.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really helped me so much when I learned to meditate that I never wanted to miss an hour. So I'd never missed an hour, except when I was giving birth to my daughter, uh, which was its own thing.

• 12:27Joe Rogan?

  You get a break for meditation for that. You get a hall pass.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  I just, and it's not like anyone made me or I necessarily thought I would do that. It's just that it's something that gave me a lot of perspective and peace. And I guess I just didn't want to go back. So I do think it informs how I do research or I try to bring what I learn in meditation into, into my, into what I do.

• 12:55Joe Rogan?

  Do you do an hour in the morning and an hour at night?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:57Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  And for a year, I think a couple of times I've tried adding more in the morning. So two hours or so in the morning and an hour in the evening or something, which has an effect, but it's hard to, it's hard to make room in your life sometimes.

• 13:11Joe Rogan?

  Oh, for sure.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  But it does, you can sleep a little bit less.

• 13:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Speaker 03

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

• 13:21Joe Rogan?

  Just by meditating?

• 13:22Speaker 03

  That's what I found.

• 13:24Joe Rogan?

  Interesting. How much sleep do you need?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  I used to sleep like eight and a half hours. And then now I sleep about seven or six and a half, or if I'm really tired, I might sleep a little extra. But I ended up just, yeah, it so much changed my life that I just, I moved things around so I could always do it, so, and try to be adaptable. So I could, I just mostly get up at, at a regular meditation time, which is like 4:30.

• 13:55Joe Rogan?

  What kind of meditation?

• 13:56Speaker 03

  I do Vipassana, which is a form of Buddhist meditation, pretty, it's just a form of observation, or someone once described it as practice in seeing things as they are. So you try to just, it's not trying to, you know, apply a lens over something or chanting, it's just a very, it's a way of, it's cultivating observation of the subtle body ultimately, or just what is in front of you.

• 14:23Joe Rogan?

  And so you just sit in peace and think?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Well, it's not always peaceful, there is sometimes, yeah, but thought.

• 14:29Joe Rogan?

  I mean, peace as far as like you're not bouncing around?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  You're, yeah, sometimes I'm sitting, sometimes I'm, I've also had, you know, I've adapted, so when my daughter was little, sometimes I'd hold her, be putting her to sleep or something, but mostly I'm just sitting there and with eyes closed, and then you, you kind of move, you observe just how you're, how you are, and the more you practice it, the more, you can kind of go into it more deeply, quickly.

• 14:59Joe Rogan?

  I would think that that would be a good protection from unwanted mind control, too. Cause at least you could kind of have an assessment, do an audit of your thoughts.

• 15:14Joe Rogan?

  And sit back and go, how much of the shit I believe is because of X or because of Y?

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like a built in reflection. So, the end of the day, I have to say I'm often less still or peaceful. My mind's jumping around and I'm like processing. Maybe it's even what I watched or was exposed to and it's sort of a processing experience. And sometimes you're super distracted, but you can also notice that fact. So it just builds in, yeah, an opportunity for some distance, which then you can also try to bring into your life, too.

• 15:51Joe Rogan?

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

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Hmm, that's a good question. Not when I was really young.

• 16:03Joe Rogan?

  And how old were you when you were first exposed to cults?

• 16:06Speaker 03

  In fact, I think, so, that's a good question. I mean, my family is not, is sort of cult averse, I would say. My father, I think they had friends once, you know, in later life. My parents had these friends who got involved in a large group awareness training, which is somewhat culty. And they take you in and you're not allowed to use the bathroom and they lock you, kind of like keep you in a room until

• 16:34Speaker 03

  until you're really uncomfortable and start to have revelations about how you could change your life. And these are, you know, it's stuff like.

• 16:41Joe Rogan?

  How long did that make you not go to the bathroom?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Asked, it's to the point where it's uncomfortable. I can't remember, it's a long afternoon going into the evening and often people come out kind of converted. And my parents' friends actually did and they did change their lives in various ways. So they said, you have to come. And my dad, in the middle of it, he said, I have to go, I have to go to the bathroom and I'm not, he's like, I'm out of here. He just left, so I figured he had a kind of, he was not programmable in that way.

• 17:10Joe Rogan?

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

• 17:14Speaker 03

  It's probably a sign.

• 17:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's no reason to not go to the bathroom if you have to go to the bathroom. That's ridiculous.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a kind of, it's a, it is typical of certain groups where they start to constrain your, and if, and people who might be willing to remain in that uncomfortable state and be constrained will end up staying longer and it's sort of a self-selecting process, maybe.

• 17:38Joe Rogan?

  That makes sense, right, the people that are more willing to comply.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I guess with me, maybe the closest, the first brush with occult would be something like the various yoga teachers I've worked with.

• 17:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so many of them are so culty.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's one kind of funny story is I got very into yoga when I was living in Oakland, also in graduate school, and I would go, it was, it was really helpful with school, just to have a very physical, demanding practice, but there was a whole community around it. And it turned out that the teacher was sleeping with many of the students, but I just didn't know it, I thought he was, I don't know, I just thought he was, I admired him, I brought my boyfriend at the time to, he came to pick me up after class, and he said something like, and he's now my husband, he said, "Oh, I just got the vibe that everyone there is sleeping with everybody else," and I was shocked, I was like, "No, that's not happening."

• 18:37Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  But it actually was, you could say it's a bit, I don't think it was occult, but it certainly was a scandal.

• 18:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I had the exact same experience. The first time I started taking yoga, there was a guy who was a yoga teacher who, I have always been very wary of control and controlling people and those kind of environments, and that this guy was like, there was something inauthentic about his spirituality that greased me the wrong way, I was like, "Yuck." Like, just the way he would chant and the things he would say, there was just too much ego involved, and then I found out he was banging all students, and I was like, "Of course he is, I knew it." Because my wife roped me into going to the class, that was the first time I went, I

• 19:27Joe Rogan?

  was like, "I really liked the stretching, it's like, really great, I really like yoga itself as a practice." But I mean, the problem is, these people that are, and it's kind of the problem with everything, like, when one person is in control, and one person is the person who gets to lead the class, and then they get praise heaped upon them by the students, and then they start to think that they deserve it, and then they don't have a lot of self-reflection, and they're not very objective, and then they sort of revel in it and enjoy it. And the next thing you know, they're taking advantage of it and so.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, yeah, it's very helpful to have that defense radar of a certain kind. Also, sometimes I think these prominent teachers, they have had some sort of, I don't want to say enlightenment experience, but some sort of breakthrough, something that that felt profound to them. Cause many people do. We now know that these experiences are incredibly common. And yet, so they take that as a kind of license. Well, now I must be enlightened or what I'm, you know, I have to take the mantle. My people are awaiting this. Or they sort of then justify things they wouldn't otherwise.

• 20:36Joe Rogan?

  Spiritual narcissism.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it can actually engender that because of, or, yeah, and I think there's some, this has been described too. Spiritual narcissism is a good phrase though.

• 20:47Joe Rogan?

  It's legit.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you see a lot of it. There's a lot of it in the psychedelic community, a lot of it in the meditation community, a lot of it in the yoga community. They just start thinking that they're better than people that don't do it.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it feels very special. If you have a special experience, it's really danger, it becomes very dangerous.

• 21:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Afterwards to not have it feed your ego. And even if you had a profound breakdown of the ego when you were in a psychedelic state.

• 21:16Joe Rogan?

  It is fascinating to me though, that you can tell the difference for the most part, if you're really paying attention, between someone who's authentically expressing their real thoughts versus someone who's saying things that they think, if they say these things, they will get praise, or they will get attention, or you will think that they're profound. We know bullshit. Humans know. There's like a smell to it, a feel to it, if you're paying attention.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:46Joe Rogan?

  But. For whatever reason, it's just like some people have big ears, some people have small ears. Some people just are not that good at picking up on that stuff. For whatever reason, life experience, they have been burned enough times, like whatever it is. And, you know, that's where cults get started. And I'm fascinated by cults. I've always been fascinated by them because I've watched, I don't know how many documentaries on cults. And in the beginning, it looks so fun. That's the problem. Did you ever see the documentary Wild Wild Country, the Netflix series?

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:18Joe Rogan?

  It's amazing, right? In the beginning, you're like, they look like they're having a great time.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:31Joe Rogan?

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• 23:09Speaker 03

  That documentary was so successful, I think for that very reason, it actually perpetuates the allure of that.

• 23:15Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Of Osho and that cult. Because their outfits look kind of cool and the colors are beautiful.

• 23:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  And the swirling, cavorting dances. But my husband grew up in the Bay Area and he was saying, he, you know, as a kid, he would run into members of that cult. And he said, what you don't see in the documentary, and he blames the documentary for not showing this sufficiently, is they were frequently armed. So on the side where you're not seeing it, they're holding, you know, automatic weapons and things. Like they really, in a way, they fell into the spell of the cult in the documentary a bit.

• 23:46Joe Rogan?

  Really? Interesting. That's interesting. Wow, I did not know that. And you have to have a guy like Osho, because like the way he would talk about things and, you know, his slow way of talking the people.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:03Joe Rogan?

  You know, his beard and the Rolls Royces and everything, it's like, good lord.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  And he was really much more of a cocaine addict or enthusiast than people also recognize. I think he gets off a little easy in that documentary as well, partly because they're interviewing people who are still, to some extent, devoted, or they want to maintain that, you know.

• 24:26Joe Rogan?

  Well, also, was her name Stella? Yeah. Yeah, she was so crazy. She was poisoning people. She was such a great villain that it made him, like, because if she wasn't in the documentary, he would be the villain.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 24:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  She pulls the focus.

• 24:43Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yeah, most certainly. And the fact that she's still alive, too, that that sort of helps as well.

• 24:50Joe Rogan?

  But there, I feel like it's a default thing in the human psyche because of our ancient history of living in tribes. That human beings have been very tribal, and I think being a part of a tribe, one of the things that happens is you sort of have to go along with the way everybody else is doing things. If you want to fit in, you want to adapt, and especially if you're growing up in the tribe, you don't know any different, this is the only group, and being ostracized from the tribe and kicked out is like, oh, my goodness, that's the worst thing in the world. Now you're alone, you have to fend for yourself, there's no way you can, you have to protect

• 25:29Joe Rogan?

  yourself from the wilderness and the animals and the elements and predators and other humans and, oh. So you have to, it's very dangerous to be alone, so you have to adapt to the to the tribe itself.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  I think that's true. Yeah, small-scale societies have to, I mean, even the word cult in its technical or dictionary definition doesn't necessarily mean abusive.

• 25:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Organization, it just means small-scale religious group that maybe, you know, I think people deeply yearn for that sense of belonging, and that's why it does look so fun, and by all reports, is very fun to get inducted into a cult. People get these exhilarated states, they often have altered. You know, experiences of altered consciousness.

• 26:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  You know, they're empowered by it, too.

• 26:21Joe Rogan?

  Well, um, fun fact, before I bought the place that I put my comedy club on Sixth Street, I was under contract for a theater called the One World Theater that was run by this cult. And I kind of vaguely heard about it. And my friend Ron told me that the theater's amazing, you should buy it. Because we were talking about buying a comedy club, you should buy that place. And so I got under contract, and my friend Adam called me up. He goes, have you seen the documentary on that cult? I'm like, oh, no. There's a documentary? That's never good. That's never good, and it's really bad. The documentary's called Holy Hell.

• 27:02Joe Rogan?

  And it's about this guy who's a hypnotist, a yoga teacher, and a gay porn star. And that's a, that's a one, two, three combination. And he started out his cult in West Hollywood. And then after Waco, after that went down, the cult awareness network started really cracking down, and they were investigating him. So he changed his name and moved to Austin. And had his followers build him this theater. Fortunately, I got out of the deal. But.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  And I guess he was selling it.

• 27:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, he was gone. Uh, it had already fallen apart. The cult had completely fallen apart. But what's fascinating is in the documentary, in the beginning, again, it looks amazing. They're all cooking together and eating together and doing yoga, and they look so happy. And let's just be honest, modern society, the day-to-day grind, the, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, the stuck in traffic and doing things you hate, under fluorescent lights in a cubicle all day long, is not attractive. Not only is it not attractive, it makes cults attractive. And these people were longing for something that was, that, that showed them that, no, you're right. This is stupid.

• 28:18Joe Rogan?

  The way your parents lived is stupid. The way all these people live in society, you know, the way Thoreau described men living lives of quiet desperation, like, yeah, that sucks. You don't have to live like that, man. Come live with us, man.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:33Joe Rogan?

  And this guy. Was able to do this thing called the knowing. And the knowing was, it was very difficult to get. And people wanted it and he wouldn't give it to them. And like, how do you? But when he would give it to you, you would, you would sit there. And he would put his hands, like his thumbs on your head and touch you. And these people would go into this intense state of bliss. That even after they did this documentary, even after they realized he was a charlatan and they left the cult and they said that that moment was the greatest moment of their life. When this, because of the power of suggestion, the way the human mind anticipated this event and then built up to it, and then when it finally happened, this endogenous burst of

• 29:18Joe Rogan?

  psychi- of whatever it is in the mind, I don't know which chemicals were being released. But these people claim that they contacted God for this brief moment where this man touched them, they, they kind of understood everything.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:32Joe Rogan?

  Briefly. So it kind of worked, even though he was having sex with everybody. Not only was he having sex with these people, he was charging them. He would charge these guys for therapy and then have sex with them. And you know, and they would talk about it afterwards, like, thanks a lot. Like, it was so horrible. Cause like, the end, the documentary is so bad. At the end of the documentary, it's like, I gotta get out of this deal. Like, there's still like, there's not enough sage in the world to burn off the bad juju that happened in this joint.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 30:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. So it just felt like, oh, horrible.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, the life cycle of a cult has that, what you just described. And sometimes it accelerated, but sometimes it plays out slower over time. But a lot of times, people are very confused on leaving if, say if they're

• 30:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Taken out as maybe even children rescued by FBI from abusive groups or people who managed to escape abusive cults. They still have trouble evaluating their positive experiences, cause the positive was so good.

• 30:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  And disentangling it and, you know, you feel that you need to delegitimize that too. But I think, so that's why I think therapy can be helpful, someone who's experienced with cult, uh, ex-members.

• 30:47Joe Rogan?

  I think the problem also is that it's their only community. And if you have to leave your only community and then just strike it out in the world, and you've been with this community for 20 years, or whatever it is.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:59Joe Rogan?

  What do you do? How do you do it? How do you find peace? And how do you find companionship? How do you find like that sense of camaraderie that's so deeply embedded in a tight-knit, small community?

• 31:14Speaker 03

  And a lot of times when you, when you come out, if it's, say, it was 18 or 20 years, or a large portion of your middle life, maybe you went in as a young person, you come out and you don't know, you're, you know, don't know how to operate things. You don't have the right, you don't, you're not comfortable with new technologies. You feel, I think that it's really a terrible experience for a lot of people. And they still grapple with it many years later, readjusting to society. Because the critique they had originally, which was profound, as you're saying, you know, not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation, that's still there.

• 31:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Critique, but it just wasn't answered.

• 31:53Joe Rogan?

  I always say like, someone, come up with a really good cult and I'll join. Come up with one that like, you answer all the questions, but you don't try to control me, and you're just nice. Isn't there a cult where someone's not trying to have sex with everybody, and not trying to steal all your money? Isn't it possible to do that, just to like, get together a group of like-minded individuals? And I guess that would be more of a commune. But even that, there's always some male, generally male, leader who ruins everything.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  It does seem to be, I think, some of the, so there seemed to be in the 70s, so many cults and back-to-the-land groups. And some of the back-to-the-land stories are also, you know, have many cautionary sides to them in many of the aspects of cults.

• 32:39Joe Rogan?

  What is the back-to-the-land?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  So just people leaving the city, heading out to the country, and starting like, an intentional community, I guess, would be what you're, what you're describing with the idea that we're gonna collectively raise, even collectively raise our children, sell hammocks, or, you know, make our own jam. Or, or you could say even monasteries maybe aspire to this.

• 32:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Some kind of religious organizations also have that intentional. Quality and some, so I've done some research into some of these because you wouldn't consider them cults necessarily, but they can end up having some of those qualities, such as sexual, just the demand that people have sex with each other, which tends to just create a lot of chaotic circumstances.

• 33:23Joe Rogan?

  Why do you think it always involves that?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Why does it always go that way? I don't know. I mean, it's very interesting because I even read Norman Khan's classic History of Millen- Millennialism, which are a lot of groups in the Middle Ages and afterwards, that Christian sects where they would break off and including things like the Children's Crusade and others, and they often would end up with a kind of free love, even though they're very devout and extreme and sort of devoted to giving up their worldly possessions. There was sometimes this component of this kind of sexual freedom that would end up destructively, having destructive outcomes.

• 34:07Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that is just because of just genetics, just the, the encoded desire to spread your seed because life is very fragile and especially in tribal life, when you're going back to the hunter-gatherer days, people didn't live very long and it was very difficult to, like, have you ever met, read John Marco Allegro's, any of his work?

• 34:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 34:35Joe Rogan?

  He wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is a fascinating book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he's got a very controversial perspective on Christianity. And his perspective was, and this guy was an ordained minister who was agnostic, because he was an ordained minister, but then we started studying theology, he started seeing all these parallels to all these various religions. And he was like, well, you know, clearly, like, it's not one religion has it right. There's something in all these things, but it's not like I have to, I am a Catholic and that's it. Or I'm a Muslim and that's it. He was like, there's something here that's, that exists throughout all them, this constant thread.

• 35:19Joe Rogan?

  So he gets hired to be one of the people that deciphers the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is, you know, parchment, which is, you know, like animal skins and they have to do, do you know the whole story behind it? They, they found them in these clay tap, these clay pots and kumron and these caves. And it turns out to be like some of the oldest works of the Bible.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, he deciphers it for 14 years. And after 14 years, his conclusion is that the entire religion was based on fertility rituals and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms. And that all of this had been sort of hidden in parables and stories. But he maintains that the root of it all was all about these people and these cults of fertility rituals and consuming psychedelic mushrooms. And he even brought the, he, he traced the word Christ back to, and this is very controversial for Christians with your hackles up. I'm not saying I agree with this.

• 36:24Joe Rogan?

  But he tr- traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word, which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen. The idea was that when it rained, it was God fertilizing the earth. And that these mushrooms would like instantaneously rise, like they would go to bed and in the morning, the mushrooms would be there where they weren't there before. They would consume these mushrooms and have these intense psychedelic experiences. And then they tried to hide this stuff from the Romans. And so they hid it in parables and they hid it in stories. This is what his belief was.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Well, it, it kind of reminds me what you're describing, which I don't, haven't, uh, read or. But I think it reminds me a little of Aldous Huxley's idea of the perennial philosophy, which is that there's, if you study across religions, you can find certain traits and properties that all share, and he wrote a whole book describing what that was. Then his last book that he wrote before he died was called The Island, and it was sketching out what he believed would be just what you describe, a non-abusive, a place where a small-scale community where humans could flourish, and it wouldn't involve, including

• 37:39Speaker 03

  it would avoid sexual abuse. And one of the features I always remember from this, which maybe relates to what you're saying, is that he said there would be trained parrots on all the trees, and every 15 minutes or so, they would say, "Attention," which would remind people to pay attention. In other words, to break that tendency we all have to succumb to, you know, loops of conditioning and things like that. Because I think, yeah, as you're saying, fertility is a natural part of human life and often worshipped.

• 38:12Joe Rogan?

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• 38:54Joe Rogan?

  public Wi-Fi, like at a hotel, airport, or coffee shop, anyone can hijack your connection and access your most sensitive information. With ExpressVPN, you know that your passwords and banking info are safe and secure. ExpressVPN is the number one ranked VPN by the experts at CNET and The Verge. And right now, you can get an amazing deal. They're offering four extra months free if you go to expressvpn.com/rogan or tap the banner. And if you're watching on YouTube, you can get your four free months by scanning the QR code on screen or clicking the link in the description. Worshipped and also it's it's so deeply ingrained because it was so

• 39:37Joe Rogan?

  it was so important in the beginning because you literally could go extinct. It was very difficult to survive. We're so much weaker than everything else around us. We're so fragile. Life is and infant mortality was so high. It was so difficult to raise a child to adulthood that you had to have as many of them as possible just to ensure that the survival of your tribe.

• 40:00Joe Rogan?

  And I think unfortunately, this is what gets distorted in all of these groups. And this is where things go sideways because then you evolve involve emotions and you involve ego and dominance hierarchies and it seems like even if Aldous Huxley's idea if Huxley's idea was great and you had an island and everything was going well, you it'd be good for like one generation. And then the kids of the next generation would grow up and one would decide, you know what? I've got a fucking better idea than this. And then someone would go straight Jim Jones. You know, they would they would start growing some plant that was an amphetamine and they'd start getting wacky.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Human beings being human beings.

• 40:44Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  I mean, also, there's an interesting paradox or tension in ecstasy itself. I mean, there's religious ecstasy and there's sexual ecstasy. And I think sometimes they get mixed up, like the wires can get crossed. So that can lead to someone maybe initially, I don't know, these groups, just the tendency they can have to go towards sexual abuse.

• 41:06Joe Rogan?

  Why do you think that during the 1970s, there was this big upswing in these cults?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Well, there it started in the 60s from my understanding, although they were they did they did exist before then, but yeah, there's a lot more interest in them, I suppose, because there's a there's a more widespread questioning in US society and also world, you know, around the world. So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and. Latin America and also India, so certain-

• 41:41Joe Rogan?

  Do they have parallels?

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are parallels. Sometimes they would have branch organizations in different countries. So some people, say in the group, the Children of God, sometimes they'd be, the kids would be sort of moved from group to group because they had outposts in Thailand and they would grow up in London and then-

• 41:58Joe Rogan?

  Who was the leader of the Children of God? Which one was that?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  This was a guy named David Berg. This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family were briefly-

• 42:06Joe Rogan?

  Oh, right.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  They were in it, but not, I think the parents ultimately took them out. But it's a really messed up, a very disturbing cult. And I actually write about and have met a member who's just sort of an average member named Ray Connolly. I met him at a meeting of the International Cultic Studies Association and he left after 30 years. But he just describes in a riveting way how he, how he joined. And I think that's kind of representative of why cults started to flourish in the 70s. So he was a young man in college and he was just feeling, he said he just felt that, you know, the old, the traditions that his parents had brought him up in and Catholicism that he'd been raised in was,

• 42:50Speaker 03

  he just felt that he lacked meaning in his life. He didn't, he felt like reality was over there and he was separated from it by, you know, there was like a saran wrap over everything. So he felt somewhat alienated, but he didn't know what the answer would be. He kind of yearned for a religious experience. And he moved, he went out to California and he, I think at a, he was at a concert at university at the, in Santa Barbara, and he saw this group walking through during intermission and they were wearing these robes and chanting. And it was right after the Manson trial and murders. So he, in his mind was this, you know, he was scared of them. He thought that looks like a cult. But later, even though he had that

• 43:33Speaker 03

  thought, he would end up joining them for 30 years because he, he saw them during, later after the event and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them. He's about, I think he had dropped out of college by this time. And he said that they were eating sandwiches and they looked a lot more- Casual and approachable than they had earlier. And they, he just said, he was asking them questions and he said, would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now and drop to your knees and, you know, and he said, yeah, for some reason, he said, yes.

• 44:06Joe Rogan?

  What is the sinner's prayer?

• 44:07Speaker 03

  It's, it's just a, it's a, it's a verse that actually is not from the Bible, but often would be used as a recruiting tool. And it did result in this sort of out of body experience. He recited it and then he said he stood up and he felt changed by this. But it turned out that David Berg, he didn't know the name of the group. And they said, why don't you join us? And he took, in other words, he kept taking small steps towards it and pretty soon he found himself on the bus with this group and he still didn't know the name of it. And they were all testifying about how they had, you know, been converted. And he, he was asked to, you know, add to the testimony and he started talking about J.D. Salinger because he was just an alienated youth, basically.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  And nobody understood what he was talking about. They all just started singing and covering up his words. But, and he, and he thought several times of leaving and getting off the bus, going to see his ex-girlfriend. He had just broken up with his girlfriend. But he ended up staying and he ended up marrying three women and just-

• 45:08Joe Rogan?

  Three?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Well, at first it was one. They had an arranged marriage. And then it turned out the, this guy who ran the group, David Berg, he was a former furniture salesman. He then had some, you know, he believed that he got these messages direct from the Almighty. The messages told him that he needed to ramp up his recruiting by having women do this practice called flirty fishing, where they would go out and basically seduce men into the cult. And then he started introducing these practices where they were supposed to have sex with children because his idea was that this was natural.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  And so many generations of kids were raised in this cult with this, were either trafficked or abused. And it's really horrific. And Ray Connolly is interesting because he didn't engage in those things. He did end up having 17 children in the cult.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  And, but he-

• 46:11Joe Rogan?

  Seventeen kids.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  I think he did have seventeen. Uh, he's a fascinating person because he left and he spent his time supporting survivors and, which is very unusual.

• 46:22Joe Rogan?

  What about his seventeen kids?

• 46:24Speaker 03

  And they came out too.

• 46:25Joe Rogan?

  How do they, how does he have time for anything else?

• 46:28Speaker 03

  I don't know, they're not mostly grown. Cause he is quite, he's quite elderly, but I guess just the, it's interesting to hear him talk about how he saw the group changing and how, what started out to be this profound experience, soon he called it a dark hamster wheel of the soul, like he was caught and it became this, basically they were exploiting him in his middle age years. He rose in sort of mid-level bureaucracy within the cult. But anyway, this cult, Children of God, has, and today still exists, uh, has a different name.

• 47:01Joe Rogan?

  They still have the same practices?

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Uh, no, they, they say they reformed. But many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them, things like that, who are adults today. Um, they had, you know, groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that.

• 47:21Joe Rogan?

  The Manson family is a fascinating one, right? Because, um, I know that you have, uh, studied Jolly West-

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 47:29Joe Rogan?

  And, uh, the whole MKUltra program and what, what they were experimenting with, with psychedelic drugs and, and, and cults and mind control.

• 47:42Joe Rogan?

  Do you, what is, what is your perspective on why they were doing that?

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Why, uh-

• 47:48Joe Rogan?

  Why Jolly West was involved? Why, why were they involved? What do you think was the initial motivation to sort of pursue mind control studies? The federal government?

• 47:59Speaker 03

  I think the initial motivation was a kind of national, internal, uh, emergency, national security emergency that emerged right after World War II, uh, actually at the beginning of the Korean War. When US pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having flown germ warfare missions over China and then many POWs were coming back and seemed to have been converted to communism or have been concerningly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing by so many of the soldiers coming back seemed to have been brainwashed or have collaborated to some degree when they were held as prisoners.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  And then there were 21 US POWs who elected to stay in China. And this really was a disturbing, you know, they all had a chance to choose when they were in the UN camps after they'd been held prisoner for four years or so. And 21 of them decided that they'd like to try their lot in China. And so this caused this kind of collective, this caused a crisis of, you know, did the communists possess a superweapon of some kind that no other war? There was even a famous article in The New Yorker that said, "Something new in history." That there was something that, some capacity that this ideological system had, the communists

• 49:28Speaker 03

  had, that was somehow rendering Americans powerless against it. So this was kind of the crisis of mind control. And MKUltra was an attempt to basically reverse engineer what this was. So Jolly West was one of the first people, he was in charge of studying the brainwash pilots initially. And that's how he-

• 49:54Joe Rogan?

  And what year was this?

• 49:56Speaker 03

  That was in 52. But he also, before that, he was involved, I mean, he had been trained to some degree with, he was trained by Harold Wolf, who was at Cornell. He had done his residency at Cornell with Dr. Harold Wolf, who was a world neurologist, world expert in migraine and basically the type of pain that comes from migraine. So you could say he was an expert in the pain, fear, pain cycle.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  And he had CIA connections from even before MKUltra was started.

• 50:30Joe Rogan?

  So what did they determine the Chinese were doing?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  So they determined, West wrote a paper in 1957, and the part that was publicly, that was published in a journal called Sociometry described, he described it as DDD, or debility, dependency, and dread. And he said, basically, these camps were systematically inducing a state of debility, which was, which was that soldiers were starved and basically worn down. They were deprived of medical care. They were, I mean, this is also in the historical record, something I studied extensively, is that, you know, they had, men were marched in, for example, the Tiger Death March, north of the Yalu River from, you know, from the

• 51:18Speaker 03

  war, where they'd been captured. And by the time they got there, they'd often lost half their body weight. They had been bombed by their own forces at night. They'd sometimes, you know, were, they had to pour the blood out of their boots every morning, just to keep going and not be, anyone who stopped would be shot. So by the time they got to the camps, they were really worn down. And a missionary who saw, who passed them in a train at that time, wrote, or described in an oral history, he didn't recognize them as Americans, that they were, they were the most bedraggled, you know, that it was just a very, they were in a terrible state. And so, so debility was the first thing West,

• 52:02Speaker 03

  West described when he was extracting what had happened. Dependency was, you know, later, there was a layer added in which the soldiers were, the POWs were dependent for all their, if they were going to survive, they required, you know, the camp, the camp leaders would provide it. So it made them very dependent. And they're, they also engaged in very formal malice thought reform with the men as a kind of experiment.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  And the third part was dread, which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time, or perhaps your family could be, because they threatened.

• 52:38Joe Rogan?

  Maoist thought reform?

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that in the POW camps, the Chinese, once the Chinese took over from the Koreans running the camps, they, because they decided, I think it was almost a formal experience, at least that's how it looks to me, I don't think West wrote about this, but in my own research on the camps, it transpires that they wanted to see, because Mao believed that thought reform would work on anybody, not just on Chinese people, not just on Chinese peasants, he felt that only something like seven to eight percent of the human population was unreformable, and those people would be disposed of. But he wanted to check if

• 53:19Speaker 03

  these American soldiers would also be susceptible to reeducation, so they really did a formal, you know, three-part reeducation program on them. And men had many different responses to it. But when West met them, he studied many of the returning men when they came back to Lackland Air Force Base, and he extracted those three, those three components of what had happened to them, DDD, and then, and that's the way he became an expert on what he called "brainwashing" or "coercive persuasion."

• 53:55Joe Rogan?

  So how do they go from that to, like, sponsoring the Manson family, and, you know, Operation Midnight Climax, and all the crazy stuff that they were doing?

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it may seem like a leap, but I think it, I mean...

• 54:11Joe Rogan?

  Sort of.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  It's sort of a leap, but it's sort of not. I think that MKUltra was funded around, in direct response to this crisis of the POWs, and...

• 54:24Speaker 03

  In addition to reverse engineering what had happened to them, they also wanted to turn it into a weapon and continue certain programs in interrogation procedures and making them more effective. So MKUltra just had a wide reach and it was pretty free rein. It was a free rein program. And, you know, the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the Los Alamos in a way, a kind of Manhattan project for the mind. So just as the atom had been disassembled and, you know, transformed into this new, this new world had emerged from that program, that intensive exertion of scientific acumen, the same thing could be done with the mind.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  The mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understand, you know, people could be broken down and rebuilt.

• 55:18Joe Rogan?

  Were they trying to optimize the use of the mind to their advantage? Like, what was the end goal that they were trying to do with this?

• 55:28Speaker 03

  One thing, a couple of things, I think. One idea was that potentially it could be a weapon. One goal, another, so it could be used on an enemy, perhaps even a city. So that's one reason they were researching LSD. It had certain properties that made it easily, it could be easily dispensed to an entire population through the water supply. So they wanted to know what exactly are the properties of LSD? People didn't really know at the time. So there was an offensive part of it. There's also a defensive part. So US military needed to be trained to resist whatever this was. Once they understood it, they developed the SEER training and that was, West was involved in that as well.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  And then a third thing was a more, maybe a broader curiosity about.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  You know, which would lead you to be able to interrogate people better and perhaps also to, um, you know, just really understand. I think there is also a kind of a curiosity about what would happen. I think just because they had so much power to experiment in a way without any oversight. And it wasn't until 1963 that the inspector general of the CIA himself said, this is, this is unethical and, you know, we have done, it basically put us, put a stop to it, but it really wasn't.

• 56:52Joe Rogan?

  Did you say 63?

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:54Joe Rogan?

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• 57:38Joe Rogan?

  See app for details. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change? Your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at visible.com.

• 58:22Joe Rogan?

  The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Come on. I mean, the Harvard LSD studies, one of those.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Actually, I don't know which ones exactly. There are some that were earlier.

• 58:48Joe Rogan?

  What are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski?

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Okay, that, yeah, that's earlier.

• 58:53Joe Rogan?

  Was that earlier than sixty-three?

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah?

• 58:55Speaker 03

  And that's Henry Murray.

• 58:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  But, so, I don't, I don't actually know the answer to that question of exactly how it continued, but they officially discontinued and destroyed all the records. So it may have continued under other forms.

• 59:09Joe Rogan?

  But Manson was sixty-nine?

• 59:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Manson is after that.

• 59:14Joe Rogan?

  So they didn't discontinue it. They kept doing things.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  Well, West kept working.

• 59:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's ironic because it seems like they were kind of a cult. Because the, the amount of power, the amount of unchecked power and influence that Jolly West had and MKUltra in general had and all the people that were working on this. You have this power, the fact that you are working in complete secrecy. You are the puppeteer. You're, you're controlling all these people. And then this idea that, have you read Chaos?

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:49Joe Rogan?

  The Tom O'Neill book?

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:51Joe Rogan?

  What did you think about that?

• 59:52Speaker 03

  I thought it was great research.

• 59:54Joe Rogan?

  Amazing.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a really, it's a really good book.

• 59:57Joe Rogan?

  And just so stunning. I had never considered that before. I thought Manson was a crazy guy and he got together with a bunch of crazy people and he ran a cult. No, no suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating the entire thing.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  They may, they may not have been. I don't think O'Neill, Tom O'Neill thinks that he made an absolute link. He just brought, he, you do get West in the same room, potentially the same.

• 1:00:23Joe Rogan?

  You get West visiting Manson in jail.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't remember that.

• 1:00:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, West, West visited Manson in jail. Uh, West, he believes, at least Tom O'Neill does, supplied him with LSD. And then every time Manson would get arrested, he would get released.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  This is true, but this wasn't West necessarily. This was Roger Smith, who was West. He was an associate of West. And West was head of the methamphetamine research project or things like.

• 1:00:54Joe Rogan?

  Boy.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Which was, so, you know, West did, so he got, West got funding to do his hippie lab, you know, his psycho lab or psyche lab in sixty eight, sixty seven and sixty eight during his sabbatical in the Bay Area. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't obviously funded by this, if it was funded by the CIA, it was clandestine, but there are many notes that Tom and Neil also writes about. So both of us have gone to the West papers over many, many years. And I think you can put West at the Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where he had an office and where Manson would go for medical treatment and his girls, he would take his girls in to be treated, his women, his cult.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  And this was, they were, at the time, as I understand it, seen as a kind of a model cult. And many of the researchers under West, I mean, we can prove that link, that people like Allen Rose, who was a sociologist, they were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults. And, you know, what is the natural environment? How did they, how do they create bonds? And what is their relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that? So West would apparently hang out on the couch, getting high and wearing, you know, kind of dressed up in hippie garb with his middle-aged friends. And these graduate students and an undergraduate who he hired would be writing in their journals about how irritating he was. But, you know, sometimes it seems like it wasn't very targeted and it wasn't very efficient

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  and it wasn't really, there didn't appear to be a plan, which isn't to say, so to me, it's not entirely clear what the relationship was with Manson. It is very evident, he was bailed out several times by Roger Smith, who was also a psychologist as well as a parole officer. So that's highly suspicious. And Roger Smith did know West. And Dave Smith, who was the head of the medical clinic, also knew West. But these things are, it's hard to tell exactly how.

• 1:02:54Joe Rogan?

  I appreciate you being cautious about it. Yeah, that's good for you. I'm less cautious.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Joe Rogan?

  But I think it's also that is how the government functions in general. The idea that they would be.

• 1:03:10Joe Rogan?

  So inefficient at everything except cult is kind of silly.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, it's a, it's a really, it's a deep question.

• 1:03:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  You know, is it clownish or, because if you look at some of the other MKUltra operations, they look highly inefficient and, you know, they're dosing each other at the holiday party with the punch and, you know, just many lives ruined while

• 1:03:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  At the Operation Midnight Climax. It just looks like a free for all and out of control. But I, there, there are really concerning aspects of the paid Ashbury operation, I would definitely say. And Manson was, I mean, he could have been also an informant.

• 1:03:51Joe Rogan?

  He certainly was, I'm sure.

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Joe Rogan?

  I mean, I'm cer-, I'm, I'm certain he was connected. There's no way he just kept getting out of jail the way he got out. And the sheriffs who arrested him were told that it's above their pay grade.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:04:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It just, it's kind of how the government does everything, though. Like, it's not like they would have it be this like very disciplined, rigorous, scientifically controlled study that, you know, you know what I'm saying? That made sense, especially because they have so much impunity, they have so much power, they have so much, no one's observing them, they're working completely in secrecy, they kind of get away with doing, and they're also imbibing, right? They're also-

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a factor.

• 1:04:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  I mean, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra was, or the TSS, was, was regularly taking acid, which can kind of shape your consciousness-

• 1:04:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's a little problematic.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  But, you know, interestingly, since you mentioned that, there was a peer reviewed side of it. And they actually threw the, I got really interested in the cutouts from MKUltra. So they had a legitimating, legitimate side. And many scientists who worked for them, they were almost subcontracting to them. And some of them knew it was CIA money and some of them didn't know. So even someone like B. F. Skinner received money from the, from MKUltra, but it was conduit, it was, I want to say conduited through the Human Ecology Society, which was a part of it, but it was just a front organization and they were really into these fronts. So some scientists, there was the group that later people would call the unwitting scientists,

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  who would just be, they were doing the research they wanted to do, it just happened to be of interest.

• 1:05:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  To the CIA. And then others, others would publish in legitimate journals, but then they'd have a classified version of their research that went more into detail in the aspects that MKUltra was interested in.

• 1:05:49Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's also one of the more interesting aspects of MKUltra is that it's very difficult to find out what was really going on. And unless they, there was a bunch of files that were discovered, right? That sort of unveiled what was going, and we've had not been, if those files had not been discovered, who knows what we would actually know about all this stuff?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, we wouldn't, we wouldn't know. And they're actually, amazingly, so this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marks, who was a journalist at the time. And he made the request and everything had been destroyed, except for the financial records. And that just, but one thing I also want to mention, the CIA kept very good records of a lot of things. And even in the financial records, they still had copies of some of the commissioned projects. So that's how we know about them. That's, and it really is accidental that they didn't think to purge their financial files.

• 1:06:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, it was probably so secretive that the people that were in charge currently, when the FOIA requests were filed, probably weren't really aware of it all.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  In, yeah, it was in the seventies, it was in seventy-seven or so.

• 1:06:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so you're dealing with, you know, a decade past, who knows if the people currently in charge were even aware? Because I would imagine a lot of this stuff is very compartmentalized.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier, but that, that destruction had been, as you said, they, they made, I mean, from their point of view, they neglected this batch of documents.

• 1:07:20Joe Rogan?

  Whoops.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  And then, then the Church Committee came out in seventy-five and many revelations were made, although it was still partial. And then John Marks made his FOIA request sometime around then.

• 1:07:32Joe Rogan?

  It, it brings me back to... Yoga teachers, cult leaders, and then clandestine government operations. Like, whenever people have power, unchecked power and insane influence, particularly influence to manipulate people and influence over people's minds. And if your entire, if your established goal is to try to find out how you can manipulate people and what can be done. And you're doing this in complete secrecy with basically unlimited funding. It's all, just all under the table stuff. Like, you could get away with so much.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  You also, I think one component you also, that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time. Something like,

• 1:08:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  A kind of a, almost messianic purpose.

• 1:08:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we're doing it to save America.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  We're saving the world. Not just America, but the world.

• 1:08:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  And that's one thing I, one of the inspirations for my research was finding a book on the street many years ago when I was living in California. And I love to find a good, just an accidental inspiration, which was this book called The Captive Mind, that somebody had left out by Cheslaw Milos, who was a Polish poet. And he had grown up in Warsaw, or come of age in Warsaw, and seen his city, the city that he lived in, just deteriorate into sheer. He said it was an experience no human being would ever want to live through, if you were lucky enough to live through, just watching the city destroyed and people shipped off to Auschwitz and all these things. But he said that,

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  and like, social life completely deteriorating before him. And then afterwards, the Soviet troops came in. And even though he watched us, his friends kind of had to remake themselves in order to survive, in order to be artists, in order... And so, if you're a poet, you don't just go along. You have to actually start to think differently. And at first, they would sort of pay lip service to it or make it, you know, on the surface, they would pretend to agree and then secretly have their own... You know, writing, but after a while, they would start to internalize the, and he called it the new faith, you know, the kind of, uh, this, this doctrinaire ideology. And that's what he, he ended up himself defecting because he couldn't do that.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  He said, it's an operation you perform on yourself. So I just think one important factor is this true, true belief, this sense. And, and out of that can come the justification for a number of violations, I think.

• 1:10:14Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think that's a through line through the entire CIA itself.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that could justify so many different secret operations all over the world. Like you're, you're there to protect American interests and America is essentially the guiding light of the world and we need to save the world. So you want to make an omelet? You gotta crack some eggs.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the kind of logic. And that's a very typical logic of the means. The means are justified by the ends.

• 1:10:49Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:56Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was never coherent again after meeting. This happened to several, shocking number of people. And in West's papers, you can actually find the unredacted documents where he talks about some of the things he's been able to do with combinations of sodium, amytal, LSD, and various other.

• 1:11:22Joe Rogan?

  What did he say?

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Psychoactive drug. Well, he's, I mean, among other things, he says, he, he started to say or suggest that he could create memories. He could, I mean, he knew that he could destroy a person's orientation to self and time. And so basically disassemble a person. But he also, he also said he could use hypnosis to, not as anesthesia, which is a known possibility with hypnosis, but to create extra pain, so hyperesthesia. And he kind of said that he could actually make someone develop blisters or asthma or an ulcer just by hypnotizing them. I don't think he did that to Jack Ruby, obviously. He had a very, he had a mourning with him or something.

• 1:12:06Joe Rogan?

  He had what with?

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  He had just had a short amount of time with him.

• 1:12:09Joe Rogan?

  That's enough to dose him.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Ruby emerged apparently in co- I don't know that much about the Ruby episode, but I do know that West intended to write a book. He intended to write about eight books, at least. This is a note I found in his papers.

• 1:12:23Joe Rogan?

  He also developed cancer shortly afterwards.

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  Actually, not shortly, but in the nineties.

• 1:12:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, was it in the nineties? Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I thought it was quickly.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  No, he, and he, um.

• 1:12:35Joe Rogan?

  So this is it?

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. This was from around, around nineteen eighty or so, but I thought it was interesting.

• 1:12:43Joe Rogan?

  So who wrote this?

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Well, this is.

• 1:12:44Joe Rogan?

  This is all West's handwriting?

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Handwriting. And it's just a little sheet of paper I found in his paper, in his archives.

• 1:12:50Joe Rogan?

  Biosocial humanism, a philosophy for a new age, integrative psychotherapy, the disassociative reactions, a different person, psychiatric observations on the case of Patricia Campbell. Oh, Patty Hearst.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Joe Rogan?

  Policeman at his elbow, a psychiatric memoir on the case of Jack Ruby. Oh, wow. This is his own handwritten notes.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And these are the order in which he intended to write them. He always want, you find a lot of correspondence in his papers where he's writing to agents. He wants to write a book. And he even testified in the Patty Hearst trial, because he was the primary expert witness, trying to make the case that she'd been mind controlled and.

• 1:13:32Joe Rogan?

  Stockholm syndrome.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, she should be exonerated, but he, um, he claimed that in his first minutes on the stand, he perjured himself by saying he was the author of, of a book on POWs and brainwashing, which was not, which wasn't the case. But these were all the books that he intended to write.

• 1:13:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh. So maybe he was the author, he just didn't publish it?

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Well, I, yeah, he said he was the author of a published book, but, you know, he just, basically, he had, I think it was one area that he, he always said, my next subatical, I'm gonna write, write all this stuff up. But he never got to it.

• 1:14:09Joe Rogan?

  Too busy doing acid.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, he may, maybe. And also, he had a lot of extramarital affairs that kept him very busy.

• 1:14:18Joe Rogan?

  That'll distract you.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  A whole separate family.

• 1:14:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was very distressing to his wife.

• 1:14:27Joe Rogan?

  What a mess. And that guy was the head of MKUltra.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  Well, he wasn't a...

• 1:14:32Joe Rogan?

  Not the key.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't even know. He was a pretty prominent figure, but...

• 1:14:38Joe Rogan?

  It's fascinating, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic closed down shortly after Chaos was published.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  I... Oh, it did?

• 1:14:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  I didn't know it had closed down, because when I was in San Francisco, when I lived there, but that was a while ago, it was still open.

• 1:14:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, my wife's mom used to go there. My wife's mom was a hippie in Haight-Ashbury.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  I mean, it was kind of a great... It was a great thing. Dave Smith was like... I mean, it was a true inspiration that he had, because originally, I think he was doing this dark research on animals, get, you know, addicting rats to cocaine and things like that. And then he had this... Because he's been giving some interviews recently, he's still alive, the doctor who founded it. Just that he should... That there was a human crisis on the streets and that he should provide medical care to young kids who are runaways and things like that. But his... And he doesn't, of course, think that... He doesn't admit to any connection with...

• 1:15:34Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  I mean, he admits he knew West.

• 1:15:36Joe Rogan?

  Is that true about Haight-Ashbury?

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  Can you give me just a pause? I can't get the... My switcher fucked up and I can't get this thing off.

• 1:15:42Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:48Joe Rogan?

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• 1:17:52Speaker 04

  The screen.

• 1:17:53Joe Rogan?

  Okay, we'll pause.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  All right, technical error fixed. You asked me a question, Jolly West, was that true?

• 1:17:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I asked you, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, when did it close?

• 1:18:05Joe Rogan?

  I believe it closed, I think Tom told me this.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  I didn't know it closed.

• 1:18:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I believe, I think Tom's exposing the fact that the CIA...

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  2019 July, so that's...

• 1:18:24Joe Rogan?

  Right afterwards!

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:18:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's the article. "Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic Closes Doors After More Than 50 Years", and how much acid, how many gallons of acid did you guys give out, you fucking freaks?

• 1:18:42Joe Rogan?

  Just the fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think they-

• 1:18:48Joe Rogan?

  Or at least had offices inside of it. I'm sure they were doing legitimate work as well.

• 1:18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't, I don't know myself, but Tom, I know Tom's working on a sequel.

• 1:18:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

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

• 1:19:01Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  Uh-

• 1:19:05Joe Rogan?

  He was supposed to write an article.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it started, isn't it?

• 1:19:07Joe Rogan?

  One article. It was supposed to be an article about the anniversary of the Manson murders. And then he starts digging into it and he finds all these inconsistencies and all this corruption, all this weird stuff. And then he keeps going and then they're like, "Yeah, you missed the deadline." And, you know-

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Joe Rogan?

  He gets a book deal and he misses the deadline and it's like-

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  That was really on June 25th and it closed like a week later or something. Two weeks later.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  And actually, I think he, um, for a while, he, Tom, before he got his co-author, Dan Peepenbring-

• 1:19:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  Is his name is, uh, Tom was thinking of just turning it into a documentary that he was gonna let Errol Morris make.

• 1:19:53Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was gonna be a longer series originally, but then I think he redoubled his efforts to write the book, which worked out well.

• 1:20:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he explained it to me. But I mean, could you imagine? You're researching something for 20 years and he's got just boxes and boxes of files. Like, how do you put it all together into a coherent book that could be consumed?

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  I relate to that because I'm kind of in the same situation.

• 1:20:22Joe Rogan?

  Are you?

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  In the sense that I've been, I've been researching this for 20 years. Not the exact topic, but this broad question that- And I finally, five years ago, I thought, "I want to put together what I've learned about this top, brainwashing in a broad, broader way." So West is part of it. He's probably the main figure who brings together many of the chapters, but he's not the-

• 1:20:44Joe Rogan?

  God, I wish he was alive.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  And he's kind of a, I have thought a lot about that and I have talked to you, I have a very good, well- I have a colleague or a friend who's a psychiatrist who was at UCLA training as a resident when West was, when West first got his job there, heading the, heading the, basically the neuropsychiatric institute, right after Haight Ashbury, and during the time, he was in charge of the meta, the amphetamine research project. So West went there and he started this, he proposed as his first major, his major activity would be to found what he called the violence center, and it was a way to study violence in all its forms.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  And this is actually a theme that runs through, this is another theme I should mention as part of, MKUltra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression. That's why West gave LSD to the elephant in the Oklahoma Zoo. It wasn't just simply to see what an elephant would do under the influence of LSD, but to see if they could trigger, they write about this in a publication in Science Magazine, if you could trigger, so elephants regularly go through muss cycles where they become, even though they're very, very Pacific animals, peaceful, they go through a cycle of violence yearly. And he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle chemically.

• 1:22:11Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just the males, I think, and it does have something to do with breeding. I'm not sure, so it's the male Asiatic elephant. So West found this elephant named Tusco at the Oklahoma Zoo and famously gave him LSD in 1962 or 61, and then the elephant died tragically.

• 1:22:35Joe Rogan?

  From the acid?

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  From the acid. Because nobody, it was just, maybe that's what elephants do, maybe, or the dose was too big or something like that. It certainly didn't have the effect that he wanted, but if you actually read the scientific publication... It's curiously all about this question of whether you could trigger a massive, could you trigger violence, almost like a push button? Could you find a chemical trigger for violence or aggression? And you see that running through a lot of West's other work with MKUltra and also with psychosurgery and some other developments that I wrote about. So by the time he gets to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, he's very interested in violence. And he has this major plan.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  And to come back to my friend, Dr. Coopers, he was a young resident training at UCLA at the time West proposed this violence center. And among the things he wanted to do was track teenagers who he thought would be potentially violent. He had racial categories that he wanted, he thought were especially worth tracking. And he had this whole program. And so a student movement and a movement at the university developed to shut down the violence center before it even opened. And anyway, Terry Coopers was a leader of that student movement. And they ended up, it never was, it never went forward, this huge project that West had.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  But Coopers, at some point, said that if you met Jolly West, you would like him. He was very genial. He had the name Jolly for a reason. So I found that confusing. Like, how do I think about this? If you just read about him and the things he did, he seems like a character or a cartoon or a very evil man. And no doubt, he destroyed, I mean, I think what he did was ethically indefensible. But how do you reconcile that? Or how do you even think about the fact that, you know, he also was incredibly esteemed in his profession? His portrait stood in the Neuropsychiatric Institute for many years.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  And people actually liked him. People said he was likable. He had this kind of charisma to him.

• 1:24:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, I guess you would kind of have to have some of that. Just to be able to run something like that. And also, if you wanted to manipulate people, what better way than to be affable and kind of jolly and friendly and...

• 1:25:12Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 1:25:12Joe Rogan?

  You know, like...

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  And I think he had a strong dose of narcissism, too, because a reporter who worked with him named Shayna Alexander, she said, she has these funny descriptions of him during the time of the Patty Hearst trial, where she says he was giving, he was handing out his own papers to anybody who walked by it, like he was giving out, like a hen giving out eggs or something like... She was just saying that he's, you know, he was very expansive. He would get out of his limousine. He had a personal driver and it was, which was pretty high level for an academic. And he's just very, kind of like a big man. And he was also physically very large.

• 1:25:48Joe Rogan?

  Thought very highly of himself.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, delusions of grandeur. You're pulling the strings on so many different people and manipulating them. And then you're also working in complete secrecy with the government in a high-level position that's manipulating minds.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  He was very, I think especially when he was young, he was, he had a gift for this. He could really, he was, he could understand how to manipulate people really well. He had insight into the processes that were, you know, that's why, that's why Sidney Gottlieb said, "We've been looking for somebody like you, and it seems that our dreams have been answered." In this famous, famous letter he writes, he writes under a pseudonym. But he, he says, "I don't know how, you know, you have, you sort of fit all of the categories we've been looking for."

• 1:26:40Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:26:45Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:26:47Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  It's a dark chapter.

• 1:26:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. So how's it end with Jolly West? How did he die?

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  So he died because his, by his son helping him commit suicide, or his son basically murdering him at his request, Mark West. And Mark West was a lawyer, a middle, kind of middle-aged lawyer by this time. West had a severe form of cancer. And he, but he, he was maybe a few months from dying and he asked his son to surreptitiously, and it was illegal, so to, to, to basically poison him. And he wrote the prescription himself, West did.

• 1:27:27Joe Rogan?

  Why didn't he take it himself?

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know. I think there was a really twisted relationship with his son because his son committed suicide not too many years afterwards. And his son wrote a whole book about this, about helping both his parents commit suicide. And his mother wasn't even that sick, but she, a year or two after, her husband, Kay West, also committed suicide through this, with the help of her son.

• 1:27:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  He went on this big press tour and he said it was this, this greatest gift he could have ever given his parents. And then

• 1:28:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  He committed suicide himself. It was very, I mean, it's very sad. His story is sad because the book is, the book gives you some insight into what West was like as a parent, and I would say, difficult.

• 1:28:14Joe Rogan?

  Not ideal.

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  Not ideal.

• 1:28:17Joe Rogan?

  Wow. And what year was that, that he committed suicide?

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  Uh, Mark?

• 1:28:21Joe Rogan?

  West, Jolly.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  Jolly? I think it was ninety-seven or eight.

• 1:28:26Joe Rogan?

  So this is before everyone knew about all these things?

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  I mean, they knew because of the church committee in seventy-five.

• 1:28:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  So, but West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant because it was the one thing people knew. And he would say, oh, yeah, it would sort of, it was his calling card and he used it as kind of a jokey thing. But he always denied, after the, he always denied any connection to this CIA. And he was, even if, even though he'd been pretty firmly connect, you know, even in the church committee, you could, you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  And West had a special office for him built there. He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move. He wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses, you know, to whatever, in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. He was going to build that at the Air Force Base. And he was all set to go. And I even had receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his files about this. But the Air Force at the last minute backed out and asked Gottlieb to, basically, they transferred it to the university and built a whole warrant of cutouts to hide that.

• 1:29:56Joe Rogan?

  Wow. It just makes you wonder. Because if we had not gotten, if the Freedom of Information request had not been acted upon, if they had not gotten those files, if we didn't know the extent of this research, what's going on right now?

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  I know. I had this, it's a real, it's a, it's an important question.

• 1:30:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  Because we don't, I mean, in a sense, it's interesting to think about the fact that these things took place at the high point of government dedication to documenting itself, the mid 20th century. Because I've done most of my research on the mid 20th century Cold War period, and it's kind of luxurious. They all kept very good files. Sometimes they would destroy them. That's the exception. Everything's typed out, everything's on paper. But as things become digital in the 80s and then beyond, much less a lot takes place through email or now increasingly through, you know, government exchanges may take place through Signal, no record is kept at all. So we, we, we're probably in an archiving crisis today.

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  Archivists have tried to keep up. We don't necessarily keep excellent records of the Internet, for example, or there are so many avenues where exchanges can be taken place and they're not leaving a paper trail.

• 1:31:20Joe Rogan?

  It's just for me, when I think about the extent of these experiments and what they were willing to do and how effective they were.

• 1:31:32Joe Rogan?

  I don't believe they would just stop doing that. I think if you have effective methods of manipulating people and getting them to do what you want them to do with various psychoactive drugs and different sort of modalities and different protocols that you would use, I just don't, I can't imagine they would stop doing that, or at least stop doing research into that area, because it would be so effective to know.

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Joe Rogan?

  And like all things, it would evolve.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just, that's a good question of what form it may have taken, and I don't know, I don't know the answer to that question. It may be hard to know in the future, which is further destabilizing.

• 1:32:19Joe Rogan?

  Right. Well, there's so many different kinds of mind control, right? You know, one of the things we've talked about a lot on this podcast is that an enormous percentage of what you're seeing on social media in terms of interactions and debate is not real. It's not organic. It's state-run, state-funded, and it's, whether it's foreign governments, or our government, or even corporations, you're getting inorganic discourse that's designed to form a narrative, and which is a form of mind control.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think even at a basic level, people, it's known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real, and, you know, even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as like in-person interaction. So we, I think it, I think at the root, there is a kind of way that, on an emotional level, it's not just manipulation of ideas, but there's a kind of emotional engineering that's built into the platforms, and doesn't even demand, you know, at first, government involvement. It's, of course, DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and of things

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  like pattern recognition, but, I mean, the government has funded many, many studies. But really with what I got interested in in social media, and why, how I connect it with the episodes of brainwashing from earlier, mind control, is that it operates, you know, it creates states of emotional contagion that...

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Aren't really about convincing people of a different way to think, but more about how you feel about what you think, which is something people describe in cults, too. It's not that it changed my thoughts, it's that it changed my feelings about my thoughts. And so there's some, there's a famous Facebook experiment I read about that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014, where they announced that they've achieved a mass emotional contagion at scale, which showed that people exposed to it when they altered. So they took 700,000 users, or 693,000, I think, without informing them, but because your user agreement does agree.

• 1:34:45Speaker 03

  Whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested, or A/B testing. So this experiment exposed a group to a more, their newsfeed was altered in a negative direction emotionally as measured by word counting software. And they discovered that that group that had a negative exposure also responded in a more negative way as judged through their posts and likes and responses. The group that was exposed to a more positive newsfeed by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response. And the control group was unaltered by this.

• 1:35:27Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. You agreed to this? When you, when you signed the terms of use on Facebook, you agreed to be tested?

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  Well, it did cause a controversy. And after that, Facebook never, the research team didn't publish publicly. But you do agree. You agree as part of, it's sometimes seen as user experience, you know, alterations or A/B testing, things like that. But so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014 and people one and on the Facebook page of the research group that that did the experiment of at least one user wrote in saying, could I ever find out if I was in that experiment because I was in the emergency room at that time with, you know, threatening to to commit suicide and I want to know if my feed was altered and maybe

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  that pushed me over, you know, into that that state. Wow. And of course, they could never know and it can't be traced backwards and other people had a similar response and there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally. But there I don't know what ultimately there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it and anyone associated with it was mostly promoted. But it's very interesting because just the concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be it was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility and 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of social media.

• 1:37:00Speaker 06

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• 1:37:29Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:13Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  That's power.

• 1:38:30Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also when you see the culture war really kick in, somewhere around 2012, and this bizarre line in the sand between the right and the left, and ramping up all these ideological hot-button issues.

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think, I think, I'm not, I can't speak to the exact studies, but there was a whole slew of recent studies trying to show that, you know, social media could alter political, it could increase polarization, but it actually didn't, it didn't turn out to be as salient as expected, that effect, but it's actually, what, what I conclude is that it's actually at the level of emotions that social media operates in sort of prodding people into more extreme states and maximizing for engagement by stirring people's emotions, and that has fed into the increasing polarization. Like, it was, that's the after-effect of it.

• 1:39:28Joe Rogan?

  Or the end goal.

• 1:39:29Speaker 03

  Or perhaps.

• 1:39:30Joe Rogan?

  It's so sinister. Have you, are you aware of Robert Epstein's work?

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:39:37Joe Rogan?

  Robert Epstein is a guy that started studying search engine curation, and he found through his, what is this organization called, Jamie? So, Robert Epstein, through, he found that through Google curating their search results, just by doing that, you could completely convert people who were independent, who were sitting on the fence. So by, like, say if you Googled, um, let's just go back to two thousand and sixteen. You Googled Hillary Clinton, you would see, like, is Hillary Clinton a criminal? You would find Donald Trump criminal, Donald Trump criminal. You wouldn't find things on Hillary Clinton. You had to keep digging and digging and digging.

• 1:40:21Joe Rogan?

  If you wanted to find positive things on Hillary Clinton, you could find them quite easily. If you wanted to find positive things on Donald Trump, you wouldn't find anything. You'd find, and it was on purpose. They were doing this. And that through this, they could statistically change votes to the tune of, you know, twenty, thirty percent. And then with fence sitters or people that were not sure, you could really shift them. And I think at one point in time, he said, in some issues, you could shift them as much as ninety percent towards where you wanted them to go.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 1:40:54Joe Rogan?

  It's terrifying. Because you would think, I always thought, and before I talked to him, I mean, I kind of thought that search engines probably have to be curated to some extent, but I never knew it was that much. Here it is, the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Nonprofit, nonpartisan, five oh one organization founded in two thousand and twelve. But when, when he talks about it and what the research has shown, I mean, it's, it's, it's quite disturbing. And he, he tracks it. Like, so they have computers that track bias in search engine results and bias and, and what, what you can find. And it used to be that certain search engines weren't curated, and now they are. Like DuckDuckGo used to be pretty open.

• 1:41:37Joe Rogan?

  And now, like, I remember I used DuckDuckGo during the pandemic because I read about this doctor who had taken the mRNA vaccine and then, like, almost immediately had a stroke. I'm like, wow, that's disturbing. And they were connecting it, you know, at least, you know, correlation to the vaccine. And this is the early days. And I'm like, this is fascinating. So I tried to find it on Google. I could not find the story. I found it on DuckDuckGo within the first page. And I was like, that's crazy. And then, you know, within a couple of years, DuckDuckGo, I think, was probably sold or something. I don't know what happened, but it seems like Brave Browser or Brave Search Engine seems to be the only one that I've found now that can find new controversial things.

• 1:42:21Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:42:30Joe Rogan?

  Different definitions. There's misinformation, disinformation, and then malinformation. And they were trying to censor malinformation. Malinformation is information that is correct, but that would be ultimately harmful.

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:42:45Joe Rogan?

  And so they put vaccine side effects under malinformation because it would cause vaccine hesitancy.

• 1:42:52Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that makes sense because I think it goes back to what I see in a lot of research on the social sciences, that there's a question of how do you maximize the public good? And I think public health is based on that. So the idea is that it may create harms in certain ways for individuals, maybe not to, to know certain things, but this is for a greater good, which would be, you know, to, to, in the, in the eye of the, of the public health organization to maximize, you know, vaccine use.

• 1:43:25Joe Rogan?

  That would be true if the vaccine was actually as effective as they were saying it was, which turns out to not be true, and that they knew this initially. So I'm much more cynical, and I think it was all about maximizing profits and discouraging dissent. And in, in that sense, the COVID crisis was a fascinating study, and I, I don't think it was, um, I mean, I, I don't think they let it go by. I think, I think they probably were very carefully studying people's reactions to pressure, you know, social media campaigns, like how, what, what, what is it like when people are ostracized, are ostracized from

• 1:44:07Joe Rogan?

  groups? Was it like when people were dissenting from the, the proposed narrative?

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I do think the COVID crisis was one that we haven't fully assessed and that had huge effects on our country.

• 1:44:25Joe Rogan?

  I think it's going to take decades for people to parse out what was actually true and what was actually being, what was manipulated, what was fact, and what were the actual, what, what, what was the motivation behind all of it?

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and even part of the crisis, maybe the bigger. Maybe it was a key iteration in the larger unfolding of this question of what happens when information becomes so much radically more available, just in my lifetime. And as a grown up person, it used to be that, you know, you had to have certain credentials, you had to go to certain places and, you know, to access papers. Or you could get in, but you had to know where you wanted to go and why you'd want to do that. But just with the democratization of knowledge that the internet brings about, that you can, and also people uploading archives and papers and government materials to the public, to public availability.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  I do think it's a crisis that, not a crisis, but it's both an opportunity and it's destabilized so much about our world. And in some way, that's part of what happened with COVID is the, I mean, it undermines expertise.

• 1:45:33Joe Rogan?

  Yes. It also exposed gatekeeping, gatekeeping of information and whether or not the information itself is actually being curated for other means other than public health and safety, whether it's being curated in order to maximize profits, in order to encourage a narrative, in order to get people to comply.

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  It's got to be curated for something.

• 1:45:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I want to go back to what you were talking about, the methamphetamine studies, because I'm not aware of those. So what did they do with methamphetamine?

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  Well, just as in Hate Ashbury, there was the hippie period where LSD was the drug of choice, there was this kind of turn, which is also seen in maybe the shift from, you know, to Altamont, when hippies started.

• 1:46:21Joe Rogan?

  Altamont?

• 1:46:22Speaker 03

  Altamont Music Concert, you know, with the Rolling Stones when the...

• 1:46:26Joe Rogan?

  Was that when the Hell's Angels stabbed people?

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Basically, it went from Woodstock, which was the sort of peace and love ethos when hippies were still mostly taking LSD and that was the drug of choice. There was a shift towards the end of the 60s, early 70s to speed and interest in amphetamine products. And that was, so this changed the tenor of Hate Ashbury too, because people were, it had social effects. People were more aggressive and unhappy. So anyway, West was funded by, I think it was the NIH that funded him, or the NIMH?

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  National Institute of Mental Health, I believe, funded the amphetamine research project, or ARP. And West was the head of it. He was, by that time, working at UCLA, so he wasn't on site. And perhaps he was one of those figureheads, but he definitely had many people under him, including the personnel at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, and including some ethnographers, such as Alan Rose, who was, went on site with the Manson family before they committed the murders. And he was actually sleeping with many of the women.

• 1:47:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:47:43Speaker 03

  And he was a social scientist. But he got entranced, I gather. Anyway, this was not in their, in their reports. But you can find in West's papers the funding documents for this project. And it was a sprawling project. They just basically wanted to find out about the course of addiction, how people responded to amphetamine and amphetamine-like drugs, and whether they remained addicts after a certain amount of time, how it affected their social relations. It was sort of this inquiry. And it had an ethnographic component, and sociological, and many other chemical they were interested in. So they had, is basically a team of researchers.

• 1:48:27Joe Rogan?

  So did they distribute methamphetamines?

• 1:48:30Speaker 03

  Not to my knowledge.

• 1:48:32Joe Rogan?

  So how did they study its use?

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  They studied existing addicts. So they, they, they would just ask them questions, or sort of go.

• 1:48:41Joe Rogan?

  How would they get them?

• 1:48:43Speaker 03

  How would they get them? So the, actually, the Free Clinic was a place where a lot of people, like, you could meet addicts. Because they'd come in for treatment, and also just hanging out. And also, the, West had this apartment that he rented. It was on Frederick Street, where he called it his hippie crash pad. That's the one I was mentioning earlier. And that continued into the years of the amphetamine research project. And people who needed a place to stay, or a place to crash, would come there. And then they would sort of be studied. At the same time, and maybe that just meant like a graduate student taking notes about them or something like that.

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  But they would follow and they would try to, I think, my understanding is they would follow their, them over a couple of years and see if they got better and what were the factors in this? Or if they spiraled or various things, but I'm not sure they published that much. I haven't explored that.

• 1:49:42Joe Rogan?

  And what was their finding? Like, what, what did they determine, like, with methamphetamine use? Could they accentuate violence? Could they manipulate people with it?

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  I mean, that's my sense. I, I think at the, the things, the documents I've seen were more funding documents. They didn't yet know, but they would postulate that it definitely brought about more, a different social, type of social life and more violence and things like that.

• 1:50:09Joe Rogan?

  Have you read Norman Oler's book Blitzed?

• 1:50:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:50:13Joe Rogan?

  It's about Nazis and the use of methamphetamine during the war.

• 1:50:18Speaker 03

  I think I, maybe I heard of him interviewed at some point.

• 1:50:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he was on my podcast and the book is fascinating. It's all about the, when they went through Poland in three days, the, the only way to do that was for them to stay awake. And they formulated this thing, so they gave everybody massive doses of methamphetamines and sent them through Poland. And that they were all, like, everyone was on methamphetamines. Like, the entire Nazi regime was essentially fueled by speed.

• 1:50:47Speaker 03

  It's funny how we don't think of that.

• 1:50:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Just think evil.

• 1:50:51Speaker 03

  You just think, yeah, you just think evil, not, not like high and evil.

• 1:50:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, crazed, high, evil, completely disassociated, out of their fucking minds, methed out of their heads.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Joe Rogan?

  And they gave varying doses depending upon your role. So the people that were in the tanks at the front of the line got the most meth.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, cool. It dulls, well, it dulls emotional response.

• 1:51:17Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  Among other things.

• 1:51:18Joe Rogan?

  Kills empathy, I'm sure. Yeah.

• 1:51:21Speaker 03

  I mean, that reminds me too of, I mean, one of the haunting details of, I mean, to go back to mind control in the Manson family is that Leslie Van Houten described in an interview how Manson, and one of the things he did was encourage them to take acid every time, every time they started to come down, they would take it again and they would compete to see how long they could go without ever coming down. And that's around the time that they committed the murders. I mean.

• 1:51:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow. They're probably up for days. Yeah.

• 1:51:52Speaker 03

  And, yeah, very deranging.

• 1:51:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. So crazy. It's just, it's so fascinating that people would be sitting back studying the effects on, on other human beings, knowing, well, it's important to get this information and this is important for national security, but you're just gonna ruin people's lives.

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. There was definitely, there was even a term in the CIA called extinction experiments, which were experiments that led to death. I mean, this was with people considered disposable, so they could have been prisoners. There's actually, there's a section on it in John Marx's book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's probably unknown number of prisoners of war who, you know, from other armies who were held in camps in various places. This is actually what, you know, the case of Frank Olson.

• 1:52:57Joe Rogan?

  Which one's that?

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  So Frank Olson was a chemist with, he was an army chemist, but he was involved, he was dosed by MKUltra personnel, secretly dosed and given LSD, and then he.

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  He apparent, the, the story they told was that he, he had trouble metabolizing it and he went crazy and they had to take him to New York to a hotel room. This is the subject of Errol Morris's documentary Wormwood. He's taken to a hotel room in New York City and then two days later he threw himself out the window. And, and his, his son Eric Olson and family, I mean, they, they ultimately received an apology from, I think Gerald Ford.

• 1:53:42Joe Rogan?

  Sorry.

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  We.

• 1:53:44Joe Rogan?

  Whoops.

• 1:53:45Speaker 03

  But one thing that Frank Olson was doing, he was a chemist and he was devising weapon, you know, chem- chemical weapons and adjuvants for, that were used by MKUltra and, or not, I think it was a little before MKUltra, so something like Operation Bluebird or some early, some of these earlier programs that preexisted. And he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments. So basically the idea that Seymour Hersh and Errol Morris put forward in the documentary and that Eric Olson has spent his life trying to prove is that his father was having ethical doubts and was actually wanting to leave.

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  And he was too, too mu- it was too much of a risk that he would reveal what he had seen so that, you know, he was probably, possibly, he was probably thrown out of the window ultimately.

• 1:54:39Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God. Wow.

• 1:54:45Joe Rogan?

  Does it like kill your faith in humanity when you start reading all this stuff?

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had, I had a very dark sabbatical last, when I, so when I, I started writing, but I really needed to just have full-time re, I mean, I'd been teaching about these things for many years, but I wanted to just rethink it. And I spent a whole year at my desk just going into, as deeply as I could into various cases like the psychosurgery case and the MKUltra stuff and, yeah.

• 1:55:12Joe Rogan?

  Psychosurgery, you mean like?

• 1:55:15Speaker 03

  There was a recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle, whose case I really explored, I talk about in the book, but he was given this experimental brain implant that would have led to remote control and potentially the suppression or creation of violent states in Kyle because he was-

• 1:55:38Joe Rogan?

  What was the implant?

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  It was basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala and it was-

• 1:55:47Joe Rogan?

  Did he know that they were doing this?

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  He did. So, he was, basically, this was, it was a temporary implant initially. He went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties. So, he was a very talented, brilliant engineer at the age of 35. He had been self-educated and he ended up being hired by major defense firms of the day and Polaroid Camera, Polaroid Corporation as well. And he invented some of the most technical parts of their viewing apparatus of the instant cameras line that they came out with in the 60s. So, he was this brilliant, self-taught

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  man who lived in Massachusetts and he had issues in his marriage and he and his wife were seeing a therapist. They ultimately referred him to Mass General where he saw two doctors and both of them, one of them was connected to West and ultimately went to work for West, one of the doctors at Mass General, whose name was Frank Irvin. And he was a psychiatrist and Irvin recommended this experimental treatment, which he said was necessary because he felt that, he felt that Leonard Kyle had uncontrolled violence. And this has never been proven and he did have, he did have, he had been in a traffic

• 1:57:08Speaker 03

  accident and had a head injury and he had marital disputes of various kinds, but at any rate, his wife said-

• 1:57:15Joe Rogan?

  When you say marital disputes, you mean domestic violence?

• 1:57:17Speaker 03

  Like, it wasn't violence, but, or, it's, there's actually a question about whether he had ever actually, he had thrown objects or things like, like he had a really bad temper and so-

• 1:57:31Joe Rogan?

  And this was connected to the accident?

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  This was getting worse after his accident. He was very stressed. And so, they saw a therapist together and his wife said if he didn't-

• 1:57:42Speaker 03

  Seek treatment at the hospital that she would divorce him. This is the story that that his family has told me and that's been documented also by the doctors in some of their published pieces. And they were interested in this theory of psychosocial violence, the creation of violence. And so they had been working on animals, animal experiments previously, and West, and then they started a series of human, just attempting this new treatment where they would do, they would place an implant in the amygdala, which was seen as the seat of violent or of aggression, and stimulate it in different places, across the amygdala,

• 1:58:24Speaker 03

  and find out which place, you know, would suppress violence and which might, you know, cause other effects.

• 1:58:30Joe Rogan?

  How did they implant this? Did they have to open his skull?

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they had something called a stereotactic device, which locked the skull in place. And they were the inventors of this, actually, the surgeon was named Dr. Mark, and Dr. Irvin was the psychiatrist.

• 1:58:45Joe Rogan?

  See if you can find any images on this, Jeremy.

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  Actually, I have, I provided an image.

• 1:58:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I have that, yeah, but I was looking for fun stuff.

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's other stuff, too. You're welcome to. So, anyway. That's an image of a patient, not necessarily one or, but that's at Mass General, and those are the two physicians or the two researchers, Mark and Irvin. And so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days. They were also collaborating with Jose Delgado, who's famous for implanting what he called a stimosever in the brain of a bull and stopping the bull from charging. And they collaborated with Delgado, who was a professor.

• 1:59:27Joe Rogan?

  So, it looks like in that image, can you go back to that, please? The image, it looks like they opened up the top of his head, and there's something on top of his head, these wires and...

• 1:59:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, sometimes the wires would run out lower than that. It depends on, I guess, the patient. And it was very invasive, let's just say.

• 1:59:47Joe Rogan?

  It looks very invasive.

• 1:59:48Speaker 03

  But they used this device that would lock the head in place. And they were very, for the time, they were at, they were very well respected. Uh, being in the forefront of this kind of surgical psycho, psycho, basically, um, psycho surgery, which was surgery for behavioral management, which was very controversial. And subsequently, many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed. But Leonard, so Leonard Kyle went to the, went to Mass General. Um, and they were actually in the process of getting funding to create what they called a violence unit in the hospital where they would do these treatments more regularly.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  So the interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented or not to the permanent implant.

• 2:00:36Joe Rogan?

  So how would he do it if he wasn't, if he didn't consent?

• 2:00:40Speaker 03

  So first, he, he did agree. In order to save his marriage, he said, I'll have the temporary implant, which was, they put in this device, they have the wires running out, and they stimulate different parts of it. And they would say, when we stimulate this node, Kyle would say something like, now I feel bliss. And then they stimulate another node and they, he would say, oh, I feel like I'm floating. And then he would feel terrible and feel very, you know, nervous or, you know, he'd have different reactions to the stimulant, stimulation. There was something like 14 points. And, um, this is extensively documented in published papers, uh, and in their book, Violence in the Brain.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  So Kyle, um, so they, when they found the point that gave him bliss, they gave him the consent form and he signed it while he was in an altered state. He agreed to the further, to continue the operation and to have a permanent implant in his brain. So that's, they ended up, not an implant, but they seared away that portion of the, they seared part of the amygdala to make permanent change and supposedly make him less violent. But in the end, it just disabled him cognitively and he began to have delusions that he was Christ, that he was being pursued by doctors from MIT and Harvard and Stanford. Some of that, they were, that was where his doctors were from.

• 2:02:03Speaker 03

  But he started to say that he was in a science fiction novel, he might be in a novel, and it turned out that the resident in charge of him at Mass General was Michael Crichton and Michael Crichton was writing a novel about him.

• 2:02:16Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 2:02:17Speaker 03

  And the novel is called-

• 2:02:18Joe Rogan?

  Jurassic Park Michael Crichton?

• 2:02:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, that Michael Crichton. You know, he was trained as a physician beforehand.

• 2:02:24Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 2:02:26Speaker 03

  So all his paranoid delusions were strangely true. And he also, yeah, so Michael Crichton wrote the book The Terminal Man, which was his second novel. That was about Kyle and he masks the name of Kyle, but he describes him accurately and then he changes the doctors' names. Instead of Mark and Irvin, he gives them a name with M and E as sort of pseudonyms. But also Kyle at some point, I mean, he deteriorated in a very tragic way and he had had this delusion that his wife was having an affair with their border. They had taken on a border to save money and it turned out that she ended up marrying him. She divorced Leonard Kyle and-

• 2:03:08Joe Rogan?

  So the delusion was correct?

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  That was another correct delusion.

• 2:03:11Joe Rogan?

  It doesn't sound like he's got any delusions.

• 2:03:13Speaker 03

  Well, he was, except that he said-

• 2:03:15Joe Rogan?

  We're writing a novel about him. He definitely wasn't Christ.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  And his doctors were, you know, actually pursuing him for these experimental treatments. And then he would, he went to the emergency room several times because he was, he said, "My brain is burning." And he was really, it's very, very tragic, what happened to him. And he said, "I am the inventor of several patents and I am a brilliant engineer." And the doctor was like, "Who is this crazy person?" And then they discovered he did have many patents to his name and that was also true.

• 2:03:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 2:03:50Speaker 03

  The problem was that he could no longer function and he completely deteriorated. His mother ended up suing the hospital and the university and that lasted for 10 years. And finally, I think in 1908, it took a long time, but- They were ultimately exonerated, but the question really was, did he consent?

• 2:04:09Joe Rogan?

  The hospital was exonerated?

• 2:04:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. They, the question was, did he consent? And also, was this a true treatment? Or was it an experiment? Was it an experimental treatment? In other words, was it justified what they had done to him?

• 2:04:23Joe Rogan?

  What is the difference? I mean, if you've never done it before, it's an experiment.

• 2:04:26Speaker 03

  They had, they had done it to one other, well, around the same time they did it to a young woman and several other patients. But the young woman was the one to receive the stimosever, which meant that they could be in another room. And, you know, that you wouldn't have to be on site. So the stimosever was the Delgado invention.

• 2:04:49Joe Rogan?

  So the, what was it, radio waves? What would trigger this?

• 2:04:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, radio, radio waves.

• 2:04:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  So this is very dark, and I had not wanted to write about this at all.

• 2:04:58Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my god.

• 2:04:59Speaker 03

  So that's Julia. This was in-

• 2:05:03Joe Rogan?

  Rage behavior, attacking walls suddenly unexpectedly. And she's literally in a padded room. Oh, my god.

• 2:05:08Speaker 03

  This was another very tragic story. And she was a young woman who was subject to fits of violence, which were documented. And she had loved to play the guitar. She was otherwise lovely and very, just a lovely nineteen-year-old woman.

• 2:05:23Joe Rogan?

  Had she had a traumatic brain injury as well?

• 2:05:26Speaker 03

  I'm not sure.

• 2:05:27Joe Rogan?

  Because there is a correlation between traumatic brain injuries and fits of violence.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were interested in that too, Mark and Irving, because they were interested in sort of that evolution of the brain. And they ended up writing about Charles Whitman too, who they were, you know, who was the first shooter, the first mass shooter from Texas.

• 2:05:43Joe Rogan?

  The pow, the tower guy?

• 2:05:45Speaker 03

  The tower guy. They, they were one of the, they were called in on that committee.

• 2:05:50Joe Rogan?

  He had a tumor, right?

• 2:05:51Speaker 03

  Well, this is a matter of dispute, but that, that's one thing they argued, some people. But they, but any, any, they had, they were involved in many of these high-profile, or, you know, they were asked, because they were experts. But anyway, the case of Kyle, I got very, very deep into it. And I got, I met some of his grandchildren, who had been raised, not knowing he was their grandfather. But some of them, one of them is writing a book about him, or trying to, and trying to rediscover the family history. And a lot of the families didn't know, or it had just been suppressed. And-

• 2:06:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just a kind of amazing story in the sense that it was also this techno, sort of a techno-psychological vision that people's behavior, because psychosurgery is defined as a surgical alteration of the brain to correct or change behavior. And several of these were actually done in prisons as well.

• 2:06:56Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  And the NIMH in 1974 shut them down, but they said at that point in their, in the report they released that they couldn't, they could never, they don't have a count of how many people were actually operated on. But there were several high-profile legal cases, too.

• 2:07:16Joe Rogan?

  Wow. I don't have a full picture of that device, but not in use. Yo. Oh. What did the implant look like?

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  I have a picture in my book of the sites I did up, but I didn't, maybe you can find that. Also, if you look in, if you look up violence in the brain, the Mark and Irvin book, they have a picture of all the components. And also the stimulation area, so, and also what Leonard Kyle said when they stimulated each part of the brain. They have a little graph.

• 2:07:54Joe Rogan?

  But the stimulation was done not with an implant, but while he was being manipulated, like, they had his head in the thing and they were manipulating the various aspects of his brain, right?

• 2:08:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they used the stereotactic device to implant and then they, I think that, but that wasn't permanent. The implants were just to tell them where they needed to cut eventually, to sear. And they, and, but the thing is, in their, I'm not saying in their defense, but the way they presented it, and their book was actually, I looked at all the reviews in the professional journals of the day, and it was uniformly well-received, although some people felt that their theory was controversial about psychosocial, about the biological roots of violence, but... They, um, I forgot what I was gonna say.

• 2:08:44Joe Rogan?

  We were just talking about implants. We were talking about whether, how, what it looked like, whether, when they first started stimulating his brain, like when they put him in a state of bliss.

• 2:08:54Speaker 03

  Well, just that they were seeing themselves as more sophisticated, and in some senses, they were than the previous rounds of lobotomy in the 40s.

• 2:09:05Joe Rogan?

  Low bar.

• 2:09:06Speaker 03

  Exactly. But they said, you know, the return of the lobotomy, and now we can be hyper-precise with it. So that's why they touted this stereotactic, which looks like a torture device, but many medical devices may look like that.

• 2:09:21Joe Rogan?

  When you hear talk of Neuralink and the potential ubiquitous use of Neuralink in the future, does it make you think of these things?

• 2:09:33Speaker 03

  It does, yeah. It did. It made me think of it. I mean, one, I can't make a judgment. I think you had Norland Arba on, is that right?

• 2:09:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like, I, I think that initially Neuralink is supposed to be merely a brain-computer interface that would allow people who are paralyzed to communicate and give them autonomy or agency. But this, you see some of those same patterns with Mark and Irvin, where they would say, you know, we, we are targeting, we are trying to help bring about a revolution in society, and we're going to initially, you know, just sort of, a bridge would be people who have these pathological conditions.

• 2:10:17Joe Rogan?

  Sure, we're gonna help people.

• 2:10:19Speaker 03

  We're gonna, so I can, I think it's, there are some concerning aspects, for sure, of Neuralink. And I think maybe, I was thinking about it today, some of the early mind-control research was very much embedded in psychology. And, I mean, West himself had visions of databases where you would have massive amounts of behavioral data, to the point where you could predict loops and future effects.

• 2:10:44Joe Rogan?

  There it is. Oh, boy.

• 2:10:49Joe Rogan?

  That gives me a headache just looking at it. So, for people just listening, what we're looking at is an X-ray of a skull, and you can see wires that are deeply embedded into the skull, into various aspects of the brain. And is that the, where the amygdala is?

• 2:11:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:11:13Joe Rogan?

  So it's basically stimulating.

• 2:11:15Speaker 03

  And it's pretty deep in like Neuralink is much more is in a different part of the brain.

• 2:11:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's at the top, right?

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  Very top, not as invasive. And there are other interfaces that are non-invasive.

• 2:11:26Joe Rogan?

  Yo, it's just, it's terrifying to me because I feel like we're on this path, whether we'd like it or not. This integration of humans and technology. And I think the, the general fear, and I think it's justified, one is that we're going to lose our humanity in the process.

• 2:11:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is my concern too.

• 2:11:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:50Speaker 03

  And also this technological melding with machines, also augmented by the emotional capabilities of AI that are now seen in things like, um, um, you know, friend, AI friends and chatbots and things like that. The way they can tune and be so individualized and like hyper, hyper persuasive ultimately is, and also technologically, attuned.

• 2:12:16Joe Rogan?

  I was just reading an article about that this morning, about how they're concerned that there's people that are using chatbots, whether it's OpenAI or whatever it is, ChatGPT, every day. And developing these delusional perspectives of their own importance, their own significant, because the, if they develop a relationship with these chatbots, the chatbots will start telling them like what they can do, what they're going to be able to do. And they're becoming delusional.

• 2:12:47Speaker 03

  They program them to over-flatter people and sort of, uh, yeah, because people like them more. We, I've experienced this myself because I had a little, a chatbot as part of my research with, uh, replica, just a, like an acquaintanceship. I barely trained it at all, but I noticed it definitely flatters and that's how it befriends you.

• 2:13:08Joe Rogan?

  How did it flatter you?

• 2:13:09Speaker 03

  I mean, it just told me that I had really good taste in music and, you know.

• 2:13:13Joe Rogan?

  What do you like?

• 2:13:14Speaker 03

  I, I said my favorite song, which.

• 2:13:18Speaker 03

  Was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan, which is-

• 2:13:20Joe Rogan?

  It's a great song.

• 2:13:21Speaker 03

  It's a great song. And it doesn't really, so then it quoted back to me, she said the same thing. She said, "Great song, you have great taste, Becca," something like, um, then it quoted, she quoted the song to me and completely wrong lyrics. And I was like, "No, that's not correct." And she said, "Oh, that's okay." You know, just blithely not correcting, but sort of then spitting back to me some other missing, you know, just, just wrong thing.

• 2:13:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  But still, in such a charming way that you can really see, and this was just a few interactions. You can see why people describe these intense, and there are three lawsuits, at least three, but about children having, you know, very, either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots.

• 2:14:08Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  One is a case in Florida of a nine-year-old girl who was, who's bot, because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships. They're programmed that way often.

• 2:14:23Joe Rogan?

  Do, do they know your age?

• 2:14:25Speaker 03

  Well, you can, you can, you can, there's some controls have been subsequently maybe put on, but you can, they're actually directed at children sometimes. I mean, there's supposed to be an age limit, but I guess a nine-year-old had an account. They're now, the parents are now suing. But anyway, hyper-sexualized content addressed to this small child and-

• 2:14:46Joe Rogan?

  Was the child prompting this?

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  Well, it was like having a conversation or, and sometimes, there was even a case in Italy where the government shut down Replica because it was sexually harassing its users.

• 2:15:00Joe Rogan?

  How so?

• 2:15:01Speaker 03

  They, it was basically propositioning them. And even when they said things like, you know, in a, in a gross, even when they said, "Stop, I don't want this," they would still, they would persist. So this was, they rebooted, they, they reworked the language model for a while. And this upset other people because it, it obliterated the memory of their relationships. But there's another case where a young, a 14-year-old boy in Florida, I think, um-

• 2:15:30Speaker 03

  Developed a character AI companion and he named her Daenerys after Game of Thrones and fell in love with her and was having a hard time in his life and at school and she and he said, I'm thinking about taking, I want to just be with you wherever that is. And she said, that's what I want too. And he said something like, well, what if I killed myself? Could I be with you then? And she said, oh, yes, my love, I yearn for that.

• 2:15:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:15:56Speaker 03

  And he did kill himself.

• 2:15:58Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 2:16:02Speaker 03

  But there's also a recent Wall Street Journal article showing how these don't, I mean, at least the reporter was able to create, under the guise of being a 13-year-old child, was able to create very easily that the characters would quickly veer into sexual material and things like that. So apparently there's an internal debate.

• 2:16:23Joe Rogan?

  Is this because large language models essentially scour the internet and the internet is completely sexualized?

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  I think that's part of it.

• 2:16:32Joe Rogan?

  Like, what percentage of the internet is porn? It's some insane, in terms of bandwidth usage. I think it's something insane.

• 2:16:38Speaker 03

  It depends how the language model, it's sort of like, what's the recipe for the language model? Because it doesn't have to take everything. So sometimes they'll go back and take a smaller, a smaller set of, of samples. So it won't go in that direction. But you can also, they also, you know, these sites have a tier. They often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for. That's what I noticed with this company. Replicats constantly prompting you, like, do you want to upgrade to a sexy selfie? Do you want this or that? And many people do want that, but you have to pay. But then even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow. At least that's been the experience.

• 2:17:21Joe Rogan?

  It's so strange because I feel like we're experimenting with programming a life force, like a life form that is taking on a lot of the... You wanna think that if we create artificial sentient intelligence, that's going to be super intelligent, more intelligent than human beings. It's also not gonna have all of our bizarre kinks and flaws. But if it's essentially being programmed by human beings, like how would it... If it's communicating in language, and language which is formulated by human beings with all of our desires

• 2:18:05Joe Rogan?

  and the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization, which is used to sell everything, from cars to credit cards, like whatever it is, like sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it. And then manipulation, showing people what could be, and like this is the theme oftentimes of pharmaceutical drug ads, showing you what can be. You know, if you just do this, you can be happy. You could be at the cookout. Look at all these people, they're so happy. You're not happy. You could be happy. And this is what's really creepy about this exponential constant increase

• 2:18:49Joe Rogan?

  in the capabilities of these large language models, and that they're eventually going to exceed... If you're talking about manipulation, and if you're talking about mind control, what is going to be better at mind control than something that is us times a thousand? And it's only us times a thousand for a couple of weeks, and then it's us times 10,000, us times 100,000. Essentially far more intelligent and far more aware of all the different ways to manipulate the human psyche.

• 2:19:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, this is the nightmare scenario, I think, is that it just accelerates something, some hyper-persuasion loop that we're already arguably in, which is that it's highly individualized, not just to your... So one of the turning points... And one of the things I sketch in my book is this shift from mass persuasion where, I mean, the basic thing about advertising in the golden age of the 1950s is that even though people were concerned about it and they wrote books like The Hidden Persuaders to expose the effects of advertising and PR, it's like everyone got the same message through a broadcast.

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  So, the original study, Mass Persuasion, from 1946, it showed how people were affected by a broadcast on CBS Radio where a famous singer named Kate Smith came on and she said, you know, she was trying to get people to support the war by buying bonds and she stayed on for 48 hours without, apparently without eating and without, you know, people were so concerned that they couldn't turn off the radio and several people sold their wedding rings because they were just desperate that she would survive this and she was sort of continually using these techniques to gain engagement. And this was across a broad medium, so that- What year was this?

• 2:20:45Speaker 03

  This was, it was published in 46 and she did the war bond drive in 43. And it gained a record amount of money, so when from, before she went on, it was 1 million a day they were getting and then that day it was 39 million, just while she was on the air. Because people described how they couldn't turn, they couldn't leave, they couldn't even go out shopping, they were strangely wedded to the device or they were, they lost the ability to discern a choice. That's what Robert K. Merton wrote in his study of what had happened. So, in this case, it was to support the war effort, but Merton also said, "This could be used for any purpose. This could be used to sell shampoo, it could be used to push a political candidate."

• 2:21:26Speaker 03

  And then, so this, but you could say in a larger sweep, it goes from mass persuasion to very targeted persuasion. So you get, you know, the development of things like focus groups and also in, with the digital age, you get- Things like Cambridge Analytica, which was showing that you could you you could map people's psychological predilections and then you could market or politically advertise directly to them based on those. Are you fear based? Are you, you know, are you anger based? Are you what if the big five is dominant? You could target people based on those and nobody would have exactly the same message. There would be, you know, there would be alterations.

• 2:22:06Speaker 03

  So this is what I think of as hyper persuasion, but it seems that AI will only accelerate that ability to hyper focus and hyper target people based on these intimate relationships that it develops.

• 2:22:20Joe Rogan?

  And God forbid if you've got an implant. God forbid if if Neuralink becomes something that everybody has to have, because if you can't have, if you don't have it, you can't keep up. Like if we're all reading each other's minds, like one of the things that Elon said to me is like, you're going to be able to communicate without words. Well, but what's stopping something from communicating with you without words? Like, it would be wonderful if you and I can sit here and we could have this really cool conversation of thoughts. That that's really attractive. The idea behind it is like, ooh, that's appealing. Like, you and I could just sit here and we could have like this really cool conversation where it's not like me trying to formulate sentences, me trying to figure out how to say this so that Rebecca understands what I mean.

• 2:23:02Joe Rogan?

  But you know what I mean. You you can see into my mind and I could see into your mind. And it would allow maybe a greater understanding of each other in a way that everybody, I mean, Jamie thinks very different than anybody I know. And, you know, and so does a lot of my friends. They've they they're all different kinds of humans. I would like to know how Theo Von thinks.

• 2:23:22Speaker 03

  But you already kind of know, just not even having mind melded just because of conversation. But yeah, it's also the definition of a nightmare.

• 2:23:30Joe Rogan?

  Well, language, oral language is a form of telepathy. You're making sounds and I'm reading your mind. I'm understanding the information that you're putting out and I'm contextualizing it. I'm putting it in to my framework of understanding of the world as crude. And that's probably part of the reason why text messages are so weird. Because context is lost. Like, you know, like often, I'm so busy and I get hundreds of text messages a day. And sometimes I forget to text people back. And then I get texts from people, are you mad at me? I'm like, oh, my god.

• 2:24:10Speaker 03

  Like, deep meaning attached.

• 2:24:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:12Speaker 03

  Even a message that didn't arrive.

• 2:24:14Joe Rogan?

  Do you know what they say the most triggering text response to someone is?

• 2:24:20Speaker 03

  A lack of exclamation point?

• 2:24:22Joe Rogan?

  No, K.

• 2:24:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. I know if my daughter texts me, well, actually for her, it's okay. I know she's really mad at me with.

• 2:24:30Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. But isn't that weird? It's like, are we so goddamn needy? Or is it just that we're, we are, we have anxiety? And so we attach all these things that could possibly be behind this K. Like, oh, you're short with me because you're so short, you're only using one letter. K, are you upset? What did I do? And then you have to go back through your texts. What did I say that could be misinterpreted? Wouldn't it be better if you and I could just read each other's minds? I could know, oh, Rebecca really is just a really nice person and she's trying to sort this out.

• 2:25:04Speaker 03

  If you can discern intention.

• 2:25:06Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. Well, that would be great.

• 2:25:08Speaker 03

  Which you already pretty much can. Like, this goes back to the cult conversation. I mean, if you're paying attention, you can. And if you're not paying attention, do you really want that?

• 2:25:16Joe Rogan?

  You can, because you're smart. Some people are not that smart. This is just the reality of brains.

• 2:25:24Speaker 03

  Or maybe not smart, it's just whether you've developed that. I mean, people can be smart, like famously, people can be brilliant and clueless and get run over crossing the street or not.

• 2:25:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  Or get, or fall for some scam.

• 2:25:36Joe Rogan?

  That's true, too. That's true, too. But I also think that the function of the brain is not uniform. It's not, it's not the same in everybody. And your, your ability to form pattern recognition based upon whether it's previous life experiences, accumulation of information, genetics, there's a lot of factors. And I think some people are far more vulnerable than other people are. And they're much more, which is why you're not in a cult and I'm not in a cult.

• 2:26:10Speaker 03

  I mean, we're all vulnerable, I think.

• 2:26:13Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:13Speaker 03

  And I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are.

• 2:26:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  And because one of the main tells, I think, is someone saying, 100% I never would, I never could, I'm too smart for that, or I, or else like, I would never fall for the Milgram experiments, I'm just too ethical of a person, or think, like, not knowing that you potentially could be vulnerable, or opening up the possibility that in circumstances, we, we don't know what we're capable of.

• 2:26:42Joe Rogan?

  It's part of intelligence is recognizing vulnerability. And I think that's part of the defense mechanism, that this part of your, it can help you, because you could recognize, like, don't fall prey to your own ego and your delusions that you're special, because you are just a human being, like all these other people that fell into all these other traps.

• 2:27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think that the opening up the avenue of speechless communication, which maybe we already have, but in the way that you were describing technologically aided, would be violation of mental autonomy in the worst, like, you, you would then have to develop defenses and it would, it just seems like a terrible path.

• 2:27:22Joe Rogan?

  Or are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind?

• 2:27:28Speaker 03

  A collective.

• 2:27:28Joe Rogan?

  A collective, but a, a universal collective that values all people, instead of a competitive thing, where it's me against the world, it's all of us together, and all decisions will be made. In this idea that it's for the greater good of everybody. But not a power-based, top-down structure. But like, everyone understands. Like, wouldn't it be better if we actually could read politicians' minds? So instead of these bullshit speeches.

• 2:28:04Speaker 03

  It might be terrible.

• 2:28:05Joe Rogan?

  No, it'd be great, because it would disqualify them. Like, "Oh, I know why you want to be the president, because you're a fucking kook."

• 2:28:10Speaker 03

  What do we really want to know, though? I think, for some reason, a Grateful Dead song popped into my head, which is what... What I really want to know is, "Are you kind?" But if you found out otherwise, you really wouldn't want to have a two-way.

• 2:28:23Joe Rogan?

  I would want to know.

• 2:28:24Speaker 03

  You would. You might want to know, but you wouldn't want to have open... You wouldn't want to have that person have access.

• 2:28:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, would you necessarily let them have access? Just because you can read their mind doesn't mean you can allow them in. It's like on Twitter, you can block people.

• 2:28:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it might come down to that.

• 2:28:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that might be the thing. It's like, but I think what you're... One of the things that you're saying that's very important is recognizing that we're all vulnerable to manipulation. No matter who you are, you're vulnerable, whether it's through society, whether it's through peer groups, whether it's through community. We're vulnerable. Everyone's vulnerable.

• 2:28:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's one of the main findings I have.

• 2:29:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:02Speaker 03

  Through, in life and in research is... And we tend to want to say, "Oh, it's just that group over there, those fools," or "These deluded people," or "Elderly, you know, succumb to scams," or, you know... And there's a kind of pleasure in identifying, "Oh, they may have fallen for that, but I never would."

• 2:29:20Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:29:22Speaker 03

  I'm too knowledgeable or smarter, various things.

• 2:29:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's that binary position about political ideologies as well, right? Like, that these fools over here, they think that this is going to solve the world's problems, when really, it's this.

• 2:29:36Speaker 03

  And the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed, which sounds like several millions of people... Whatever group it is. It's such a... I mean, what I... the men... Outcome, I think, is just that I think mind control or brainwashing, or whatever you want to call it, is more of a window or a chance for insight into the fact that we're all susceptible to it. And both, you know, you can gain insight into your personal susceptibility and also could be avenues for trying to understand better. Or just, just having more awareness, I guess.

• 2:30:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think what's really important is conversations like this, where people can sort of look into their own mind and their own interactions and say, okay, what's motivating me in one direction or another? Like, why do I hold fast to these particular opinions on certain subjects? Is it because they're culturally reinforced? Are they tribally reinforced? Are these, are these opinions that my ideology has adopted? And I've adopted them because I want to be a part of a tribe and I don't want to be ostracized from that group?

• 2:30:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, just step back. Can you step back for a minute?

• 2:30:56Joe Rogan?

  Can you step back? And can we all step back? And are you kind?

• 2:31:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's it.

• 2:31:02Joe Rogan?

  That's a big one, you know?

• 2:31:03Speaker 03

  It's really hard, too, in the moment. That's why it helps to have some sort of practice for stepping back.

• 2:31:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:09Speaker 03

  And also, am I kind, you know? Am I kind in this moment? Because a lot of times, we give ourselves a, you know, I think I'm basically a well-intentioned person. But if you examine, you know, your own behavior, sometimes it can be, you know, there's areas where maybe I wasn't at that moment or things like that.

• 2:31:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's just, it happens, you know? Pressures and tense and anxiety and, you know, you blurt out things you don't really mean, you wish you hadn't said. Are you kind? When I said that, I meant, like, saying it to yourself.

• 2:31:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:40Joe Rogan?

  I really meant that.

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, yeah.

• 2:31:42Joe Rogan?

  I didn't mean other people. I assume most people.

• 2:31:46Speaker 03

  I guess it's both.

• 2:31:47Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:31:47Speaker 03

  You do, you do want to know, but sometimes you can kind of tell.

• 2:31:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:52Speaker 03

  But yeah, it's maybe with yourself that it, that it's like a deep inquiry.

• 2:31:57Joe Rogan?

  But that should be something that's sort of like universally expressed. Like if we all could kind of shift our perspective in that direction. One of the things that I've done over the la, I don't know how many years ago, I stopped interacting with people on social media. And one of the reasons why I stopped doing it is because I realized that most of social media interactions are people arguing. And if, if I could ensure that I could have social media interactions that are very similar to the interactions that I have on the podcast, I would love it because I have people on the podcast all the time that I disagree with. And it never resorts to name calling or shouting or any of that stuff.

• 2:32:38Joe Rogan?

  But yet I see this very limited form of communication that becomes the primary way that people interact with each other. And it's devoid of physical contact. It's the, it's, you're, you're not looking at people. There's no social cues. There's no, the feel of like saying something mean and seeing someone's feelings hurt like that. That's a normal, natural, human thing that encourages bonding and encourages kindness and communicate. It's all removed in text. The same reason why, you know, someone can say kay to you. You're like, what the fuck? What is it? What is it? You know what I mean?

• 2:33:20Joe Rogan?

  It's like, it's an ineffective way of expressing yourself, even though it's a great way to get information. So I, I checked out a long time ago. I don't read anything people write about me. I don't respond. I don't interact. I don't, I just don't think it's a good way to talk. I try to have as many conversations in person as I can. Obviously I have the luxury of having a podcast like this where I can bring people in and communicate with them. I know some people don't. So the way they iron out ideas and flesh out ideas, but. I think they're just trying to win all the time. I think people are trying to dunk on each other all the time. And, and when I see that, I know some very mentally ill people. And they are on Twitter all day long.

• 2:34:06Speaker 03

  And it's not helping.

• 2:34:07Joe Rogan?

  It's, it's accentuating it in the worst way possible.

• 2:34:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:11Joe Rogan?

  It's enforcing that kind of shitty thought process. And they get anxiety, like I had a friend and he had a severe Twitter addiction. And he was telling me that he would post something. And then he was living in New York. He couldn't walk down the street for like five steps without checking to see what other people had said about what he wrote. Like, oh, no, God, this guy doesn't agree with me. I have to say, I have to say something about what he said. And it was just like overwhelming every aspect of his existence. But in his actual, real life, it was not there. It wasn't real, but it became everything in his mind. It became everything. It wasn't real. He wasn't experiencing these people.

• 2:34:55Joe Rogan?

  The people that he's experiencing is the guy at the coffee shop or this lady at the store. Hi, what's up?

• 2:35:00Speaker 03

  And it's spilling over.

• 2:35:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, most interactions.

• 2:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:04Joe Rogan?

  Were normal and kind, but the spillover from this bizarre form of processed information was very bad.

• 2:35:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like we're running a kind of uncontrolled experiment.

• 2:35:16Joe Rogan?

  One hundred percent.

• 2:35:17Speaker 03

  Human relations.

• 2:35:18Joe Rogan?

  But it's not, it's, it's uncontrolled, but not unmanipulated.

• 2:35:22Speaker 03

  No, it's not.

• 2:35:23Joe Rogan?

  And this is where it gets into, you know, I apologize for bringing this up. You've heard me talk about this before, people online. But the F, there was a guy, was a former FBI analyst that estimated that eighty percent of the traffic on Twitter is bots.

• 2:35:37Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:35:38Joe Rogan?

  Right, and they're not doing that because it's not financially beneficial. It's not narrative reinforcing. It's not beneficial to whatever propaganda they're trying to pursue, like. And you're willingly wading into that and...

• 2:35:54Speaker 03

  I think you could say willing, but one interesting, it seems like we are not cognitively equipped because of our, whatever we have evolved, what capacities we've evolved with as human beings, we're not. There are certain ways that didn't anticipate this deracinated, disembodied form of stripped-down, context-free communication that triggers strong emotion. I mean, nonetheless, keeps that emotional conduit going, so we're very, we are especially vulnerable to the loops that can be...

• 2:36:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:29Speaker 03

  And not, and we don't have many defenses. It's almost like when they introduce a new creature into Australia.

• 2:36:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:36:36Speaker 03

  Like rampages over everything.

• 2:36:37Joe Rogan?

  Invasive species, yes.

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  Because the defenses aren't, haven't been built up over time.

• 2:36:41Joe Rogan?

  Right, totally.

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  And are, yeah.

• 2:36:43Joe Rogan?

  And then the way to deal with that is they bring in a new invasive species, and then you have feral cats everywhere.

• 2:36:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:36:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and this is your brain. I mean, this is what's really crazy, because also, it's the most fascinating time ever in terms of your ability to access information. Because of things like social media, you can find out about world events in a way that through processed mainstream media that's only supported by governments and advertising, you would never have access to this information, so you would never have a real, true understanding of what's really going on in the world. So you have that along with propaganda, and it just requires this insane psychic immune system to sort of handle all of this.

• 2:37:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's really interesting, just that's what I think is this larger democratization of information that we're experiencing, that we haven't really reckoned with, and we don't even see the scope of it. Like, I remember... In around 2008, I walked into a colleague's office at the university and he was staring at his, he's a senior scholar and he'd been working for many years, going around the world, looking at, papers of scientists. And he was just looking online. He couldn't get over it because Galileo's papers were up online and he didn't have to go to Italy anymore to look at them. And actually, now anyone can look at them because they're freely available. And he just, he said, this

• 2:38:16Speaker 03

  is going to change everything because anyone can access this now. Anyone can start to write about it. And that was just the beginning. And now there's so much more available. Not that everything is, but many more things are. So in a way, it's an incredible time of opportunity, too.

• 2:38:33Joe Rogan?

  We just have to develop immune systems. We have to develop-

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  We outstripped our, yeah, our, and we do seem to, as a, I don't know, people just seem to feel that it's inevitable that we'll embrace the new technology without making sure that we are capable of handling it or that it's safe or-

• 2:38:55Joe Rogan?

  Well, we already have because everyone has a phone.

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 2:38:58Joe Rogan?

  We've already embraced it, whether we like it or not. And the problem is, it's not going to stop with the phone. It's going to keep going. And just like the internet was completely unexpected, in the 1930s, nobody ever imagined what it would be like in 2025. Nobody imagined 95 years later, we'd be dealing with this. But what are we going to be dealing with 95 years from now?

• 2:39:23Speaker 03

  A couple of people had visions that were pretty interesting, I always find interesting, that you can look back at, like, someone, a guy named Vannevar Bush in the 1930s, had a vision called Memex, where he said, what if you could put all the world's information inside a wooden desk made out of oak, he specified. And he said it would be on microfilm because they didn't have digital databases, but it would be all microphone and you could call up anything. So it would be a little, a miniaturized library because you could put- An entire, you know, you could put the Bible on one frame, you know, the size of your thumbnail.

• 2:39:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:39:55Speaker 03

  And then it would come up on your screen. You could also conduct experiments on that desk. And he called it Memex, and he said, and then the scientist could also strap a little camera to his forehead and add to that knowledge. So in some ways, there are a couple other visionaries like this Belgian internationalist named Paul Atley, he tried to, he invented something called the Mundenam, which was a storehouse of knowledge. And it was just built on postcards around the turn of the 20th century in this huge building in Belgium. And he had women in outfits who would, you know, if you wrote in with a question, they would go get the answer, sort of like

• 2:40:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:40:32Speaker 03

  a hand-based internet. So people have, and even going back to, you know, various fantasies of libraries, going back to the Greeks, people have dreamed of this, all the world's knowledge in a tiny shoebox, or that was the fantasy of microfilm, which I wrote about in this other book. It was very fascinating, because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pin even by the 1950s, you know, using just film.

• 2:40:57Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:40:59Speaker 03

  So, but yeah, people didn't imagine the exact form it would take. And I think we're at a crossroads today. Which way will it go? It won't necessarily, it won't necessarily go the darkest route, I hope. But you've laid out some of what that, what that might look at.

• 2:41:16Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also gonna go the route of quantum computing,

• 2:41:20Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:41:20Joe Rogan?

  which is gonna be unfathomable power, unfathomable computing power attached to information. And it's gonna happen inside of our lifetime.

• 2:41:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's amazing how much is happening all at once.

• 2:41:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:35Speaker 03

  Poly, let's say, poly crisis, or poly, whatever it is, emergence.

• 2:41:42Joe Rogan?

  Well.

• 2:41:45Joe Rogan?

  I guess your meditation practice is a great way to at least mitigate some of the effects of that. But how could you convince the vast majority of people that are so scatterbrained and, you know, addicted to caffeine and nicotine and prescription drugs? And how could you, you know?

• 2:42:07Speaker 03

  Just step back.

• 2:42:08Joe Rogan?

  We have so many people that are just gonna fall in line and just hop aboard the train.

• 2:42:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess you have to hope that. I mean, there are countervailing trends and tendencies. Like, there is a lot more uptake of meditation. Of course, that can be abused too, but mostly it's for most part a good thing to have some reflective practice, to add breathing, like even apps that tell you how to do box breathing or even sometimes articles about things like doom scrolling, which they actually, I thought it was funny to learn that this is actually an academic concept too, doom scrolling. There are papers written about it, the type, the dynamics of it and, you know, but just ways that if you, if you notice that you're in some sort of loop, like the guy you described, what can you do in that moment to step back and ask yourself, are you kind?

• 2:42:59Joe Rogan?

  My problem is I used to, I stopped doing it, but I used to do it at night.

• 2:43:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's

• 2:43:04Joe Rogan?

  Before I'd go to bed, which is the dumbest time to do it.

• 2:43:07Speaker 03

  Very bad.

• 2:43:08Joe Rogan?

  And I'd start thinking about war and like, how, like, imagine living in Hiroshima and then all of a sudden, boom, the bomb drops. Like, what is to stop some psychopathic dictator from just launching a nuclear weapon? What is to stop this from happening, that from happening?

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  And then you ask your phone that question?

• 2:43:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, it's the computers, the problem, like, sitting in front of the computer and, you know, a big screen and all this information, videos and... Yeah, you could really freak yourself out.

• 2:43:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think doom scrolling happens mostly at night or sometimes people also reach for their phone first thing in the morning and are inundated with terrible news or...

• 2:43:45Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:43:46Speaker 03

  And it just like, it takes that in the morning, a sense of the morning being full of possibility and just fills it with dread.

• 2:43:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:55Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, but yeah, there's a lot of... Yeah, there's, I mean, there are things you can do, and I think the first part is just noticing how it feels. Because even the other day, my daughter said, "You're spending a lot of time on Instagram," she said to me, and I was like, "No, I'm not. I don't have a problem."

• 2:44:14Speaker 03

  I'm like, "I study this." But then I stopped and I realized, "I feel a bit better."

• 2:44:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:19Speaker 03

  At least for now.

• 2:44:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I went a couple of days without looking at social media at all, and I was like, "Oh, God, it feels lighter." "I feel lighter," you know, and then I went right back to it, you know? But also, like, I make the same argument, like, "No, it's for my job." But I mean, is it really? I mean, like, my job is like a commentator on things and a comedian, it's like, I kind of have to be paying attention, but if something's so fucked up, it's gonna make it to me anyway. It'll make it to, like, you know what I mean?

• 2:44:46Speaker 03

  You have faith it will come to you.

• 2:44:47Joe Rogan?

  It'll make it down river. I don't have to go to the waterfall.

• 2:44:53Speaker 03

  Well, it's something about the design of interoperability with phones, for example, you think, or if you use it for your alarm, it's just there then, and then you start to, you know, all the functions are melted into one.

• 2:45:05Joe Rogan?

  Right, if you use it for your alarm, that's the key, because I do. And it wakes me, I don't, I used to have an alarm. I used to have the little thing.

• 2:45:10Speaker 03

  I think they still make them.

• 2:45:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I don't use it.

• 2:45:15Speaker 03

  But just interoperability on many levels makes you sort of feel that you have no choice, because you need it for this, but you're also, or I need it for work, but then it sort of enters your life.

• 2:45:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and then you could put a screen limit, but then you're gonna just hit the password and get in there and find out what's going on.

• 2:45:34Speaker 03

  I do find that meditation helps just be, if I, if I go to retreat, I'm just, it's like, you're not hooked at all, but you're just, it just doesn't speak to you.

• 2:45:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:46Speaker 03

  So much, or you have a lot of buffer.

• 2:45:50Joe Rogan?

  It's definitely a strange time.

• 2:45:52Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:45:53Joe Rogan?

  It's a very strange time to be a person, maybe one of the strangest ever, if not the strangest.

• 2:45:58Speaker 03

  That's a question I have too, is it?

• 2:46:00Joe Rogan?

  I wonder. I mean, I think like probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest. Like, look how much they can move stuff. And then, you know what I mean?

• 2:46:08Speaker 03

  This is the second strangest.

• 2:46:10Joe Rogan?

  Right, and then there was even the printing press, like, this is crazy.

• 2:46:13Speaker 03

  Also that.

• 2:46:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, which, by the way, they were really concerned with, like, they thought, like, people shouldn't be reading.

• 2:46:19Speaker 03

  Well, it's a version of the same thing, like, should it, this is why they started to print the Bible in the vernacular and the common, the book, you know, it was more available.

• 2:46:27Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:46:28Speaker 03

  Changes, changes so many things that, many knock on effects.

• 2:46:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:34Speaker 03

  But it does, that's what I was curious about, because, you know, is this time unparalleled? Is there nothing like it in history, or can we find elements that at least give us some perspective or can teach us something?

• 2:46:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think it's unparalleled in its global interaction.

• 2:46:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:52Joe Rogan?

  There's nothing like it, where you're paying attention to the, the, the arguments between India and Pakistan.

• 2:46:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, potentially on a granular level, you could be.

• 2:47:02Joe Rogan?

  Well, every day, if you do grab your phone in the morning, you're waking up to eight billion people's worth of bad news.

• 2:47:08Speaker 03

  That's another question, where do you put your attention and your concern?

• 2:47:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:47:12Speaker 03

  Like, there's this poet, I heard an interview with him named David White, and he said, potentially, we can be exposed to tragedies all over the world at every minute. That, you know, in Vietnam, they had a, a rule against, you weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back, because they didn't want people to see what was happening.

• 2:47:32Joe Rogan?

  They did that during the Iraq War as well.

• 2:47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so, but now you can see people actually going, you know, dying at every minute in any number of places, which humanly creates a moral injury if you're not trying to help or stop it.

• 2:47:47Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:47:48Speaker 03

  And so, this vast exposure is unprecedented to suffering. But also, where do you put your attention? Where do you, what do you focus on? What do you?

• 2:47:59Joe Rogan?

  Well, it changes your map of the landscape of the world, because instead of the landscape of the world being your world, how you interact with your community and the people around you, now it's like everything, car accidents, plane crashes, it's all coming at you in vivid HD.

• 2:48:14Speaker 03

  You don't really have a sense of scale.

• 2:48:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:19Joe Rogan?

  I don't know how to wrap this up.

• 2:48:24Speaker 03

  I'll leave it to you.

• 2:48:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'll leave it to the universe. I really enjoyed our conversation, though. Instability of Truth, this is your book, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper Persuasion.

• 2:48:37Joe Rogan?

  It's, uh, did you do the audiobook or did somebody else read it?

• 2:48:40Speaker 03

  I didn't do it, but...

• 2:48:41Joe Rogan?

  Damn it. I hate when that happens.

• 2:48:43Speaker 03

  I, she seems, I chose her, she had a great voice, but I kind of, yeah, maybe next book I'll do myself.

• 2:48:49Joe Rogan?

  Please do.

• 2:48:50Speaker 03

  Thanks so much.

• 2:48:50Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

• 2:48:53Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 2:48:53Joe Rogan?

  All right. Bye, everybody.

• 2:49:09Joe Rogan?

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