#2322 - Rebecca Lemov

27:52And they said that that moment was the greatest moment of their life. Because of the power of suggestion of the way the human mind anticipated this event and then built up to it. And then when it finally happened, this endogenous burst of what ever it is in the mind. I don't watch chemicals were being released. But these people claim that they contacted God for this brief moment where this man touched them. They kind of understood everything. Yeah, briefly. So it kind of worked, even though he was having sex with everyone. Now he's having sex with these people. He was charging them. He charged these guys for therapy and then have sex with them.

28:32And you know, and they would talk about it afterwards. Like thanks a lot. Like it was so horrible. Because like the end the documentary is so bad. At the end of the documentary was like, I got to get out of this deal. Like it's not enough sage in the world to burn off the bad juju that happened in this joint. That's true. Yeah. So it just felt like horrible. Yeah. The lifestyle cycle of a cult has that what you just described and sometimes in accelerated, but sometimes it plays out slower over time. But a lot of times people are very confused on leaving. If they're taken out as maybe even children rescued by FBI from abusive groups or people who manage to escape abusive cults.

29:16They still have trouble evaluating their positive experiences because the positive was so good. Right. 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. Next members. 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. Right. What do you do? How do you do it? How do you find peace? Yeah. How do you find companionship?

29:55How do you find like that sense of camaraderie that's so deeply embedded in a tight knit small community? And a lot of times when you come out, if it's say it was 18 or 20 years or a large portion of your middle life maybe went in as a young person, you come out and you don't know how to operate things. You don't have the right. You're not comfortable with new technologies. 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.

30:37You know, not wanting to live a life of quiet desperation. That's still there. Right. Critique, but it just wasn't answered. 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.

31:14It does seem to be I think some of the so there seem to be in the 70s so many cults and back to the land groups and some of the back to the back to land stories. I'll also have many cautionary sides to many of the aspects of culture. What is the back to the land? So just people leaving the city heading off to the country and starting an intentional community I guess would be what you're describing with the idea that we're going to collectively raise, even collectively raise our children. Sal hammocks or you know make our own jam or or you could save in monasteries maybe aspire to this kind of religious organizations also have that intentional quality.

31:53And 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. Why do you think it always involves that? Why does it always go that way? I don't know. I mean it's very interesting because I've even read Norman Khan's classic history of millennialism which are a lot of groups in the Middle Ages and afterwards that Christian sex where they would break off and including things like the children's crusade and others.

32:35And they often would end up with the 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. Do you think that is just because of just genetics just 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 too. Have you ever read John Marco Allegro's? Any of his work?

33:24He 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'm a Catholic and that's it or I'm in Muslim and that's it. He was like there's something here that exists throughout all them this constant threat so he gets hired to be one of the people that decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.

34:15So the Dead Sea Scrolls which is you know a parchment which is you know animal skins and they have to do you know the whole story behind it. They found them in these clay pots and cumron and these caves and it turns out to be like some of the oldest works of the Bible. Well he deciphered 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.

35:03And 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. But he 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.

35:41And so they hid it in parables and they hid it in stories. This is what his belief was. Well it kind of reminds me what you're describing which I don't have a rather but I think it reminds me a little of Aldousuxle'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 was called the island and it was sketching out what he believed would be just what you describe a non abusive a place where a small scale community where humans could flourish and it wouldn't involve including it would avoid sexual abuse.

36:30And one of the features I always remember from this which maybe relates to what you're what you're saying is 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 worshiped with how much a privacy is being invaded online VPNs are no longer just a nice thing to have it's a necessity some people think I don't need a VPN because I have nothing to hide but that's exactly what data brokers want you to think because their profits depend on you having nothing to hide.

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38:12And 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. It worshiped and also it's it's so deeply ingrained because it was so 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 an infant mortality was so high it was so difficult to raise a child to a child. So it was a very difficult adulthood that you had to have as many of them as possible just to ensure that the survival of your tribe.

38:49And I think unfortunately this is what gets distorted in all these groups. And this is where things go sideways because then you involve involve emotions and you involve ego and dominance hierarchies and it seems like even if Alice Huckley's idea if Huxley's idea was great. And you had an island and everything was going well you to 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 can a fucking better idea than that. And then someone would go straight Jim Jones you know they would they would start growing some plant that was an infetamine and they'd start getting wacky human beings being human beings.

39:33Yes. 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 flowers can get crossed that can lead to someone maybe initially. I don't know these groups just the tendency they can have to go towards sexual abuse. Why do you think that during the 1970s there was big upswing in these cults? Well it started in the 60s from my understanding although they did exist before then but yeah there's a lot more interest in them I suppose because there's a what more widespread questioning in US society and also around the world.

40:22So cults flourished also in Japan and Europe and Latin America and also India so certain. Do they have parallels? Yeah they're parallel. 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. Who was the leader of the children of God which comes out? This was a guy named David Berg. This is the cult in which the River Phoenix and his family were briefly. 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 Rae.

41:14Connolly 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 had been raised in was he just felt that he lacked meaning in his life. 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.

41:54He kind of yearned for a religious experience and he moved he went out to California and he well I think 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 we had that thought he would end up joining them for 30 years because he he saw them during a later after the event and he went back to talk to them because something drew him to them.

42:32He'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 who's asking them questions and they said would you like to recite the sinner's prayer right now and drop to your knees and you know and he said yeah for some reason he said yes. What is the sinner's prayer? It's it's just 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 he in other words he kept taking small steps towards it and pretty soon he found himself on the bus.

43:25He passed 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 JD Salinger because he was just an alienated youth basically and nobody understood what he was talking about they all just started singing and covering up his words 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 three 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 and so many generations you know generations of kids were raised in this cult with this were either trafficked or abuse I mean it's really horrific and Ray Connelly is interesting because he didn't engage in those things he did end up having 17 children in the cult and but he 17 kids I think he did have 17 he's a fascinating person because he left and he spent his time supporting survivors and which is very unusual what about a 17 kids and they came out to how do they have time for anything else and then they're not mostly grown because 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 mid -level bureaucracy within the cult anyway this cult children of God and today still exists has a different name they have still the same practices no they they say they reformed but many people are still pursuing lawsuits against them things like that who are adults today they had you know groups throughout the world and they would move kids around and things like that the Manson family is a fascinating one right because I know that you have studied jolly west and the whole mk ultra program and what they were experimenting with with psychedelic drugs and and and cults of mind control um do you what is what is your perspective on why they were doing that why uh 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 I think the initial motivation was a kind of national internal emergency national security emergency that emerged right after world war two actually at the beginning of the Korean War uh when US pilots were coming back or were shown confessing to having shown flown germ warfare emissions over China and then many POWs were coming back and um seem to have been converted to communism or have been concernedly affected by something that was seen as brainwashing by so many of the the soldiers coming back seem to have been brainwashed or have have collaborated to some degree when they were held as prisoners and then there were 21 US POWs who elected to stay in China and this really was a disturbing um you know they all had a chance to choose when they're in the UN camps after they've been held prisoner for 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 this caused a crisis of you know did the communist possess a super weapon of some 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 communist had that would that was somehow rendering Americans powerless against it so this this was kind of the crisis of mind control and mk ultra was an attempt to to basically reverse engineer what this was so Jolly West was one of the first people he was he was in charge of studying the brainwash pilots initially and that's how he what year was this that was in 52 but he also pre before that he was involved I mean his he had been trained to some degree with um he was trained by Harold Wolf who was at Cornell he had done his residency at Cornell with Dr.

49:01Harold Wolf who is a world neurologist world expert in my grand and and basically the type of pain that comes from my grand so you could say he was an expert in the pain fear of pain cycle and he had CIA connections from even before mk ultra was started so what did they determine the Chinese were doing 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 and for example the tiger death march north of the Yalu River from you know from the war where they've been captured and by the time they got there they'd often lost half their body weight they had been bombed by their own horses at night they sometimes you know where 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 that he didn't recognize them as Americans that they were they were the most but dragged you know that it was just a very they were in a terrible state and so so debility was the first thing west west described when he was extracting what it happened dependency was you know later there was a layer added in which the soldiers were the POWs were dependent for all there 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 man as a kind of experiment and the third part was dread which was just the idea that you could be killed at any time or perhaps your family could be because they threatened malice thought reform yeah that in the camp in the POW camps the Chinese once the Chinese took over from the Koreans running the camps they because they they decided I think it was almost a formal experience that's how it looks to me I don't think west wrote about this but in my own research on the camps it it transpires that they they wanted to see because mal believe that thought reform would work on anybody not just on Chinese people not just on Chinese peasants he felt that only something like seven or two eight percent of the human population was unreformable and those people would be disposed of but he wanted to check if 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 he studied some of 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 a coercive persuasion 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 yeah I may seem like a leap but I think it I mean sort of it's sort of a leap of sort of not I think that mk ultra was funded around indirect response to this crisis of the of the POWs and in addition to reverse engineering when it happened to them they also wanted to turn it into a weapon and continue certain programs in in a interrogation procedures and making them more effective so mk ultra just had a wide reach and it was pretty free reign it was a free rain program and you know the historian Alfred McCoy says it was modeled on the Los Alamos in a way 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 a mind the mind could be sort of pulled apart and human consciousness and functioning could be understand but you know people could be broken down and rebuilt 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 one thing a couple of things I think one idea was that potentially 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 supplies 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 sear training and that was west was involved in that as well and then a third thing was a more maybe a broader curiosity about you know which would lead you to be able to interrogate people better and perhaps also to you know just really understand I think there is also kind of a curiosity about what would happen I think because 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 was 63 yeah but it was this episode is brought to you by Squarespace have you ever been shopping online and the website just gave you the egg let me tell you that wouldn't happen if they used Squarespace Squarespace design intelligence empowers anyone to build beautiful more personalized websites 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specialist will help solve identity theft issues on your behalf guaranteed or your money back plus all life lock plans are backed by the million dollar protection package meaning life lock will reimburse you up to the limits of your plan if you lose money due to identity theft you might not be able to control how others handle your personal information but you can help protect it with life lock save up to 40 % your first year call 1 800 life lock and use the promo code JRE or go to life lock dot com slash JRE for 40 % off terms apply I'm on I mean the Harvard LSD studies one of those um I actually I don't know which ones exactly there are some that were earlier that what are the ones that made Ted Kaczynski okay that yeah that's earlier was that earlier 63 yeah yeah and uh that's Henry Murray yeah 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 they may have continued under other forms but Manson was 69 yeah so Manson is after that so they didn't discontinue it they kept doing things well West kept working 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 MK ultra 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 the Tamil Neil book yeah what did you think about that I thought it was great research amazing yeah it's amazing it's a really good book 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 call no no suspicion that the government was involved in orchestrating the 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 West visiting Manson and jail I don't I don't remember that yeah West visited Manson and jail 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 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 met methamphetamine research project or things like which was that 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 68 67 and 68 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 O 'Neill also writes about so both of us have gone to the West papers over many many years and and I think you can put West at the Hate Ashbury free medical clinic where he had an office and where Manson would go for medical treatment and his girls he time as I understand it seeing as a kind of a model cult and many of the researchers under West I mean we can prove that link that people like Alan Rose who was a sociologist they were trying to do an ethnographic study of cults and you know what is the natural environment how did the how did they create bonds and was the relationship to American society and to drug use and things like that so West would apparently hang out on the couch getting high and wearing you know kind of messed up in hippie garb with his middle age 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 and it wasn't really nothing 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 is 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 new West but these things are it's hard to tell exactly how I appreciate you being cautious about it yeah that's good for you um I'm less cautious yeah but I think it's also that is how the government functions in general the idea that they would be so inefficient at everything except cult is kind of silly I mean it's yeah it's a it's a really it's a deep question yeah who is it clownish or because if you look at some of the other MK ultra operations they look highly inefficient and you know they're dosing each other at the holiday party with a punch and you know just many lives ruined while yeah 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 ashberry operation I would definitely say and Manson was uh I mean he could have been an also an informant we certainly was I'm sure yeah I mean I'm certain um 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 and were told that it's above their pay grade exactly yeah um it's 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 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 that's a that's a factor I mean Sydney got lead the head of MK ultra was or the TSS uh was was regularly taking acid which can kind of shape your consciousness yeah it's a little problematic but you know interestingly since you mentioned that there was a peer reviewed side of it and they actually threw the he I got really interested in the cutouts from MK ultra so they had a legitimating legitimate side and many scientists who work for them they're almost subcontracting to them and some of them knew it was CIA money and some of them didn't know so even some of my BF Skinner received money from the and from MK ultra but it was conduit it was I want to say conduit it 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 who would just be they were doing the research they wanted to do it just happened to be of interest right 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 MK ultra was interested in well it's also one of the more interesting aspects of MK ultra 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 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 we wouldn't we wouldn't know and they're actually amazingly so this was the result of a FOIA request by John Marx 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 but was probably so secretive that the people that were in charge currently when that FOIA requests were filed probably weren't really aware of it all in yeah I was in the 70s in 77 or so yeah so you're dealing with you know a decade passed who knows if the people currently in charge were even aware because I would imagine a lot of this stuff is very compartmentalized I think the destruction of the records had happened earlier but that that destruction had been as you said they they made them I mean from their point of view they neglected this batch of documents whoops and then the church committee came out in 75 and many revelations were made although it was still partial and then John Marx made his FOIA requests sometime around then 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 you're entire if your established goal is to try to find out how you can manipulate people and what what can be done and you're you're doing this complete in complete secrecy with basically unlimited funding that's all just all under the table stuff like you could get away with so much you also I think one component you also that helps this develop is to have a high ideal at the same time something like a kind of a almost messianic purpose we're doing the saving the world yeah not just America with the world oh yeah and that's one thing I went 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 loved to find a good just a accidental inspiration which was this book called the captive mind that somebody had left out by Chesaf Milo 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 um 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 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 well I think that's a through line through the entire CIA itself yeah yeah I mean that's I that could justify so many different secret operations all over the world like you're you're there to protect American interests in America is essentially the guiding light of the world and we need to save the world so you don't want to make an omelette you got to crack some eggs yeah that's a kind of logic and that's a very typical logic that means the uh means are justified by the ends I was fascinated also in chaos jolly west's connection to jack ruby right that he visited jack ruby after jack ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald and also jack ruby goes crazy yeah it was never coherent again after meaning this happened to several shocking number of people and in west papers you can actually find the unredacted documents where he talks about some of the things he's been able to do with combinations of sodium amatol lsd and various other what did he say 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 and he knew that um he could destroy a person's orientation to self and time and uh so basically disassemble a person uh 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 morning with him or something uh he had just had a short amount of time with him but that's enough to dose him ruby emerged apparently and I don't know that much about the ruby episode by do you 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 he also developed cancer shortly afterwards actually not shortly but event in the nineties oh was it in the nineties oh okay I'm sorry I thought it was quickly no he and he um so this is it yeah this was from around around 1980 or so but I thought it was interesting so who wrote this well this is all rest his handwriting handwriting it's just a little sheet of paper I found in his paper in his archives bio social humanism a philosophy for a new age integrative psychotherapy the disassociative reactions a different person psychiatric observations on the case of Patricia Campbell her oh patty herst yeah policemen at his elbow a psychiatric memoir on the case of jack ruby this oh wow this is his own handwritten notes 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 herst trial because he was the primary expert witness trying to make the case that she'd been mind controlled and Stockholm syndrome 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 oh so maybe he was the author he just didn't publish it well uh 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 when my next sabbatical I'm going to write all this stuff up but he never got to it it's too as he's doing acid yeah he may he may be and also he had a lot of extra marital affairs that's very busy that'll distract you a whole separate family oh boy oh boy yeah it was very distressing to his wife what a mess and that guy was the head of mk ultra or he was not the key I mean I don't even know he was a pretty prominent figure but it's it's fascinating the uh hate aspery free clinic closed down shortly after chaos was published oh it did yeah I didn't know it had closed down because when I was in San Francisco uh when I lived there but that was a while ago it was still open yeah my wife's mom used to go there my wife's mom was a hippie and hate aspery I mean it's 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 um just that he should that there was a human crisis on the streets and that he should provide medical care to young kids who run ways and things like that but his and he doesn't of course think that he doesn't admit to any connection with interested I mean he admits he knew west is that true about a hate aspery you know just a pause I can't get the what I switch your fucked up and I can't get this thing off this episode is brought to you by visible I want to let you in on 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1:17:02yeah I believe it I think Tom's exposing the fact that the same 2019 July sets right afterwards wow yeah yeah yeah there's the article hate ashbury free clinic closes the stores after more than 50 years and how much acid how many gallons of acid did you guys give out you fucking freaks

1:17:28just in fact that the CIA was secretly running a free clinic or at least had offices inside of it I'm sure they were doing legitimate work as well yeah I can't I don't know myself but Tom I know Tom's working on a sequel yeah where he's trying to shore up these connections and get to the bottom of it you know Tom's whole story how he got started with this book uh who's supposed to write an article yeah it started as one article 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 his corruption all this weird stuff and then he keeps going and then they're like yeah you missed the deadline and you know he gets a book deal and he misses the deadline and it's like that was really some June 25th and it closed like week later she's two weeks later amazing

1:18:25and actually I think he um for a while he Tom before he got his co -author Dan Pippenbring yeah his name is Tom was thinking of just turning it into a documentary that he was going to let Errol Morris make well they did do a recent documentary on Netflix but it was only 90 minutes yeah this was going to be a longer series originally but then I think he redoubled his efforts to write the book which worked out well yeah yeah he explained it 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 I relate to that because I'm kind of in the sense that you are 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 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 she's alive and he's kind of a I have thought a lot about that and I have talked to I have a very good well I have a colleague or a friend who's a psychiatrist who 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 hate asher and during the time he was in charge of the methamphetamine 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 his forms and this is actually a theme that runs through this is another theme I should mention as part of mk ultra was kind of a search for a trigger of aggression that's why West gave LSD to the elephant in the Oklahoma zoo it wasn't just simply to see what an elephant would do under the influence of LSD but to see if they could trigger they write about this in a publication and science magazine if you could trigger so elephants regularly go through must cycles where they become even though they're very very specific animals peaceful they go through cycle of violence yearly and he wanted to see if LSD would trigger that cycle chemically does it coincide with breeding season like it does with other animals like deer when they start fighting each other 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 aziatic elephant so West found this elephant named Tesco at the Oklahoma zoo and famously gave him LSD in 1962 or 61 and then the elephant died tragically from the acid 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 MK Ultra and also with psychosurgery and some other developments that I wrote about but so by the time he gets to the neuropsychiatric institute he's very interested in violence and he has this major plan and to come back to my my friend Dr.

1:22:09Cooper's he was a young resident training at UCLA at the time West proposed this violence center and among things he wanted to do was track teenagers who he thought would be potentially violent he had racial categories that he wanted he thought were especially worth tracking and he had this whole program 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 Cooper's was a leader of that resist of that of that student movement and they ended up it never was it never went forward this huge project that West had but Cooper's at some point said that if you met Jolly West you would like him he was he was very genial he had the name Jolly for a reason and that so I found that confusing like how do I think about this if you just read about him and the things he did he seems like a character or a cartoon or like a very evil man and no doubt he destroyed I mean I think his what he did was was ethically indefensible but how do you reconcile that or how do you even think about the fact that you know he he also was incredibly esteemed in his profession his portraits stood in the neuropsychiatric institute for many years he you know he was and people actually liked him he said the people said he was likeable you have this kind of charisma to him why 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 it's true you know like and I think you 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 like he was giving out like a hand giving out eggs 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 he was which was pretty high level for an for an academic and he's just very kind of like a big man and he was also physically very large thought very highly of himself yeah the delusions of grandeur if you're pulling the strings on so many different people manipulating them and then you're also working complete secrecy with the government in a high level position that's manipulating minds he was very I think especially when he was young he was he had a gift for this he could really he was but 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 Sydney 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 student and 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 oh boy wow wow is a dark chapter yeah so how's it end with jolly west how did he die 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 age 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 you know it was illegal so to to um to basically poison him and he wrote the prescription himself west did why didn't he take it himself 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 k west also committed suicide through this with the help of her son oh god 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 he committed suicide himself is 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 not ideal not ideal wow and what year was that the decommissioned suicide oh Charlie I think it was 97 or 8 so this before every everyone knew about all these things I mean they knew because of the church committee in 75 right 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 he would sort of it was his calling card and he used it as kind of a joky 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 and west had a special office for him built there he was hired there I'm mysteriously when they wanted to move at what he wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment where he could give LSD hypnosis and sleep deprivation incombines doses you know to whatever in whatever increments he wanted to adjust he was going to build that at at the Air Force base and he was all set to go and I even have there are receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his in his files about this but the Air Force at the last minute backed out and asked Gottlieb to basically they they transferred it to the University and built a whole warrant of cutouts to hide that wow it just makes you wonder because if we had not gotten if the freedom of information requests 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 I know I had this comfort it's a it's a it's an important question yeah 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 is on paper but as things become digital in the 80s and then beyond much less a lot takes place through email or now increasingly through you know government exchanges may take place through signal that no record is kept at all so we we in we're probably in an archiving crisis today archivists have tried to keep up we don't necessarily keep excellent records of the internet for example or there's so many avenues where exchanges can be taken place and they're they're not leaving a paper trail 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 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 yeah and like all things it would evolve yeah it's just it'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 right well there's so many different kinds of mind control right you know one of 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 a 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 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 us you know at first a government involvement it's of course DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and things 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 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 that there's some there's a famous Facebook experiment I read about in that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014 where they announced that they've achieved 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 make it whenever you whenever you go on the platform you agree to be tested or AB 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 judge 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 so you agree to this when you when you sign the terms of use on Facebook you agree to be tested 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 experience you know alterations or AB 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 uh 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 that pushed me over you know into that that state and of course they could never know and it can't be traced backwards and other people had a similar response and there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally but there I don't know what ultimately there doesn't seem to have been any sanctions that came out of it and anyone associated with mostly promoted but it's very interesting because just the concept of emotional contagion was in that way operationalized and sort of shown to be it was almost like an announcement that this was a possibility and 2012 was kind of an important point in the development of social media and at Blinds .com it's not just about window treatments it's about you your style your space your way whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right from free expert design help to 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operates in um 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 a that's the after effect of it or the end goal or perhaps it's so sinister have you are you aware of Robert Epstein's work no Robert Epstein is a guy that started studying search engine curation and he found um through his what is his organization called Jamie so Robert Epstein through he found that through uh 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 2016 you googled Hillary Clinton you would see like is Hillary Clinton a criminal you would sign Donald Trump criminal the Donald Trump criminal crop you wouldn't find things on Hillary Clinton you had to keep digging and digging 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 would find and it was on purpose and they were doing this and that through this they could statistically change votes to the tune of you know 20 30 percent and then with uh fence hitters 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 90 percent towards where you wanted them to go that's interesting it's terrifying because you would think yeah i always thought and before i talked to him i may not kind of thought that search engines probably have to be curated to some extent but i never knew it was that much apparently it's the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology non -profit non -bartisan 501 organization found in 2012 um but when when he talks about it and what the research has shown i mean it's it's quite disturbing and he he tracks it look 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 duck duck go used to be pretty open and now like i remember i used duck duck go during the pandemic because i read about this doctor who had taken the mRNA vaccine and then like almost immediately had a stroke and 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 that on duck duck go within the first page and i was like that's crazy and then you know within a couple years duck duck go i think it 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 but if you're looking for what they would call mal information you know so they they came up with different different different definitions there's misinformation disinformation and then mal information and they were trying to censor mal information mal information is information that is correct but they would be ultimately harmful right and so they put vaccine side effects under mal information because it would cause vaccine hesitancy 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 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 i of the of the public health organization to maximize you know vaccine use 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 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're probably we're very carefully studying people's reactions to pressure you know social media campaigns like how what what is it like when people are ostracized are ostracized from groups was like when people were sending from the the the proposed narrative yeah i do think the covid crisis was one that we haven't fully assessed and that had huge effects on our country yeah 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 was the motivation behind all of it yeah even part of the crisis maybe the bigger maybe it was a key iteration in the a larger unfolding of this question of what happens when information becomes so much radically more available just in my lifetime and as a grown -up person it used to be that you know you had to have certain credentials you had to go to certain places and you know 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 i do think it's a crisis that not a crisis but it's both an opportunity and uh 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 because yes it also exposed gatekeeping gatekeeping of information and 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 it's got to be curated for something yeah yeah um i want to go back to what you're talking about the methamphetamine studies because i'm not aware of those so what what did they do with methamphetamine well just as in uh hate ashberry there was the hippie period where lsd was the drug of choice there was this kind of turn which is also seen and maybe the shift from uh you know to altamat when hippie started altamat music concert you know with the rolling stones when the oh is that when the hell is angels saying people yeah it's 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 uh amphetamine products and that was um so this changed the tenor of the of hate ashberry too because people were it it it really it had social effects people were more aggressive and unhappy so anyway west was uh funded by i think it was the NIH that funded him or the n -i -m -h national institute of mental health i believe um funded the amphetamine research project or a -r -p and west was the head of it he was by that time working at u -c -l -a so he wasn't onsite and perhaps he was one of those figureheads but he definitely had many people under him including the sort personnel at the hate ashberry free clinic and including some ethnographers such as alan rose who was went onsite with the manson family before they committed the murders and he was actually sleeping with many of the women oh boy and he was a uh social scientist but he got entranced i gather anyway this was not in their in their reports but you can find in west papers the funding documents for this project and it was a sprawling project that 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 uh so they had is basically a team of researchers so did they distribute methamphetamines?

1:47:25not to my knowledge so how did they study it? I studied existing addicts so they they uh they would just ask them questions or sort of go how would they get them? how would they get them? so the actually the free clinic was a place where a lot of people they could meet addicts because they come in for treatment and also just hanging out and also the west had this apartment that he rented it was a 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 uh but they would follow and they would try to i think my understanding is they would follow their them over a couple years and see if they got better and what were the factors in this or if they if they spiraled or various things but i'm not sure they published that much haven't explored that 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 i mean that's my sense i think at the the things the documents i've seen more more funding documents they didn't yet know but they would postulate that it definitely brought about more um a different social type of social life and more violence and things like that have you read uh Norman Oler's book blitzed no it's about Nazis and the use of methamphetamine during the war i think i heard maybe i heard of him interview at some point yeah he was on my podcast and the book is fascinating and it's all about the when they went through polling 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 polling and that they were all like everyone was on methamphetamines like the entire Nazi regime was essentially fueled by speed it's funny how we don't think of that yeah just you just think evil you just think yeah you just think evil yeah not like high and evil yeah crazed high evil completely disassociated out of their fucking minds methed out of their heads yeah 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 math yeah go with it um dolls uh well it does dolls emotional response sure among other things kills empathy i'm sure yeah probably i mean that reminds me too of i mean one of the haunting details of i mean want to go back to mind control in the Manson family is that Leslie Van Halton 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 wow they're probably up for days yeah yeah very uh deranging 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 going to ruin people's lives yeah there was definitely a there was even a term in the c .a.

1:51:19called extinction experiments which were experiments that led to death i mean this was with people considered disposable so they could have been prisoners uh there's actually there's a section on it in john marx's book the search for the mentoring candidate um yeah so there there's probably unknown number of prisoners of war who you know from other armies uh who were held in camps in various places this is actually what you know the case of um frank ulson which ones are so frank ulson was a chemist with the art he was an army chemist but he was involved he was dosed by mk ultra personnel secretly dosed and given lsd and then he uh 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 a subject of arrow morris's documentary wormwood is taken to a hotel room um in new york city and then two days later he threw himself out the window and uh and his his son Eric ulson and family at i mean they they ultimately received an apology from i think jerald ford sorry sorry we whoops but one thing that um frank ulson was doing he was a chemist and he was devising uh weapon you know chemical weapons and agitants for that were used by mk ultra and or not i think it was a little before mk ultra so something like um uh operation bluebird or some early some of these earlier programs that pre -existed and he was flying around seeing these extinction experiments so basically the idea that see more hersion uh arrow morris put forward in the documentary and that Eric ulson has spent his life trying to prove is that his father was having uh ethical doubts and was actually wanting to leave and he was too too much it was too much of a risk that he would reveal what he had seen so that you know he was probably possible he was probably thrown out of the window oh god wow

1:53:40does it like kill your faith in humanity when you start reading all this stuff yeah i had a i had a very dark sabbatical last one i so when i i started writing but i really needed to i just have full -time read i mean i've been teaching about these things for many years but i wanted to just rethink it and they spent a whole year at my desk just uh going into as deeply as i could into various cases like the psychosurgery case and the mk ultra stuff and yeah psychosurgery you mean like there was an ex uh a recipient of psychosurgery named Leonard Kyle that whose case i went really uh explored uh i had talked about in the book but he was given this experimental um brain implant that would have led to remote uh control and protect potentially um the suppression or creation of violent states in Kyle because he was what was the implant it was uh basically a ring of electrodes that were implanted in his amygdala and it was did he know that they were doing this he did he so he uh he was he basically uh this was in um it was a temporary implant initially he went to the hospital because he was having marital difficulties so he was a very talented brilliant um engineer of at the age of 35 he had been self educated and he ended up being hired by major defense uh 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 that line that they came out with in the 60s so he's this brilliant self -taught man who lived in Massachusetts and he um he had issues um 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 is a psychiatrist and Irvin recommended this experimental treatment which he said was necessary because he felt that he felt that um that Leonard Kyle had uh uncontrolled violence and this this has never been proven and he he did have um he did have he had been in a traffic accident and had a head injury and he had he had a marital disputes of various kinds but at any rate his wife said he see marital disputes he mean domestic violence like it wasn't violence but or it's there's just there's actually a question about whether he had ever actually um he he had thrown object or things like like he had a really bad temper and so and this was connected to the accident this was getting worse after his accident it was very stressed and so they saw a therapist together and his wife said if if he didn't uh 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 the 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 uh west and then they started a series of human uh just attempting this new treatment where they would do it they would place an implant in the amygdala which was seen as the seat of violent or of aggression and uh stimulate it in different places different across the amygdala and find out which place you know would suppress violence in which might you know cause other effects how implant this did they have to open a skull yeah they had something called a stereotactic device which locked the skull in place and they were the inventors of this actually the the surgeon was named Dr.

1:57:37Mark and Dr. Irvin was the psychiatrist actually I haven't I provided an image yeah there's other stuff too you're welcome to you so anyway um that's an image of a patient not necessarily runner but that's at um mass general and those are the two physicians or the two researchers Mark and Irvin and and so this is an example of one of the implants in the early days they were also collaborating with Jose Delgado's famous for implanting what he called a stemoseaver in the brain of a bull and stopping the bull from charging and I think collaborated with Delgado who is a professor so it looks like in that image can you go back to that please the image looks like they open up the top of his head and there's something on top of his head these wires and yes and 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 it looks very invasive but they used this device that would lock the head in place and they were very um for the time they can they were at they were very well respected uh being in the forefront of this kind of surgical psycho psycho basically um psychosurgery which was surgery for behavioral management which was very controversial and and subsequently many ethics panels were convened about whether it should be outlawed but Leonard so Leonard Kyle 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 so the interesting part about it is whether Kyle consented or not to the permanent implant and basically so how would he do it if he he wasn't if he didn't consent 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 you'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 so Kyle um so they when they found the point that gave him bliss they gave him the consent form and he signed out while he was in then altered state he agreed to the further to continue the operation and to have a permanent implant in his brain so that's um 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 but he started to say that he was um in a science fiction novel he might be in a novel and it turned out that the resident in charge of him at mass general was Michael Crichton and Michael Crichton was writing a novel about him what and the novel is called Jurassic Park Michael Crichton yeah that Michael Crichton you know he was trained as a physician beforehand so all those 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 he but he describes him accurately and then he changes the doctor's names instead of Mark and Irvin he gives them the name with M and E as sort of pseudonyms but also Kyle at some point and he deteriorated in a very tragic way and he had had this delusion that his wife was having a fair with her 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 so the delusion was correct that was another correct delusion doesn't sound like he's got any delusions we're writing a novel about him he definitely wasn't Christ 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 is 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 all that was also true the problem was that he could no longer function and he completely deteriorated his mother ended up suing the hospital in the university and that lasted for 10 years and finally I think in 1988 it took a long time but they were ultimately exonerated but the question really was did he consent the hospitals had sounded yeah 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 them I mean if you've never done it before it's an experiment 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 stimulus fever which meant that they could be in another room and you know you wouldn't have to be on site so the stimulus fever was the delgado invention so that what it was at radio waves what would trigger this yeah radio oh boy so this is very dark and I had not wanted to read about this at all oh my god that's Julia this was in rage behavior attacking wall suddenly and expected and she's literally in a padded room oh my god 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 love to play the guitar she was otherwise lovely and very just a lovely 19 -year -old woman she had a traumatic brain injury as well I'm not sure because there is a correlation between traumatic brain injuries and fits of violence 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's the first shooter the first mass shooter from Texas the tower guy the tower guy they they were one of the they were called in on that committee he had a tumor right well this is a matter of dispute but that that's one thing they argued some people but they but 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 yeah it's just a kind of amazing story in the sense that it was also this this techno sort of a technological vision that people's behavior because psychosurgery is defined as a surgical alteration of brain to correct or change behavior and several of these were actually done in prisons as well wow and the end that NIMH in 1974 shot 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 account of how many people were actually operated on but there were several high profile legal cases too in the prison picture that device but not in use yo oh what did the implant look like I have a picture in my book of of the sites I didn't maybe you can find that also if you look in if you look up violence in the end the brain the mark in urban book they have a picture of all of 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 but the stimulation was done not with an implant but while he was being manipulated like they they had his head in the thing and they were manipulating the various aspects of his brain yeah that they use 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 there 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 I forgot what I was going to say we just talking about implants we were talking about whether what it looked like whether when they first started stimulating his brain like when they put it in the state of bliss 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 lobar exactly but they said you know the return of the lobotomy and now we can be hyper precise so that's why they touted this stereotactic which looks like a torture device but many medical devices may look like that when you hear talk of neurolink and the potential ubiquitous use of neurolink in the future does it make you think of these things it does yeah it does it made me think of it I mean one I can't make a judgment and I think you had Norland Arba on right yeah yeah so like I think that initially neurolink is supposed to be merely a brain computer impter face 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 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 sure we're gonna help people are gonna so I couldn't I think it's there are some concerning aspects for sure of neurolink 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 work to the point where you could predict loops and future effects but it is oh boy 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 amiglo is yeah yeah so it's basically stimulating it's pretty deep in like neurolink is much more isn't a different part of the brain yeah it's at the top right very top not as invasive and there are other interfaces that are non -invasive yeah it's just it's terrifying to me because I feel like we're on this path whether we 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 yeah this is my concern too and also this technological melding with machines also augmented by the emotional capabilities of AI that are now seen in things like um you know friend AI friends and chatbots oh yeah the way they can tune and be so individualized and like hyper hyper persuasive ultimately is and also technologically you know attuned 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 open AI or whatever it is chat GPT every day and developing these delusional perspectives of their own importance their own significant because that 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 my program them to overflatter people and sort of yeah because people like them more we I've experienced this myself because I had a chatbot as part of my research with replica just like an acquaintance ship I barely trained it at all but I noticed it definitely flatters and that's how it befriends you how did it flatter you I mean it just told me that I had really good taste in music and you know what do you like I said my favorite song which I was Santa Fe by Bob Dylan which is great song and it doesn't really so then it quoted back to me she's she said the same thing she said great song you have great taste back at 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 lightly not correcting but sort of then spinning back to me some other missing you know just just wrong thing but still in such a charming way that you can really see and this was just a few interactions you can see why people describe these intents and there are three lawsuits at least three but about children having you know very either deadly or extremely damaging interactions with these bots really one is a case in Florida of nine -year -old girl who was whose bot because they tend towards sexualized or intimate relationships their program that way often do they know your age well you can you can open you can know this there's some controls have been subsequently maybe put on but you can they're actually directed at children sometimes I mean you're they're supposed to be an age limit but I guess a nine -year -old had an account there they're announced the parents are now suing but anyway hyper sexualized content addressed to this small child was the child prompting this was like having a conversation or and sometimes there's even a case in Italy where the government shut down replica because it was sexually harassing its users and they they it's 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 reworked the language model for a while this upset other people because it obliterated the memory of their relationships but there's another case where a young a 14 -year -old boy in Florida I think developed a character AI companion and he named her Daenerys after a 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 to 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 oh boy oh my god oh my god 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 is this because large language models essentially scour the internet and the internet is completely sexualized I think that's part of it and what percentage of the internet is porn it's some insane it turns a ban with usage yeah I think it's something insane it depends how the language model sort of like what's the recipe for the language model because it doesn't have to take everything so sometimes they'll go back and take a smaller a smaller set of samples so it won't go in that direction but you can also they also you know these sites have a tier they're often have a sexualized tier that you can pay for that's what I noticed with this company replicates constantly prompting you like do you want to upgrade to a sexy selfie do you want this or that and many people do want that but you have to pay but then that even the unpaid tier starts to get affected by that somehow at least that's been the experience it's so strange because I feel like we're experimenting with programming a life force like a a life form that is taking on a lot of the you you want to think that if we create artificial sentient intelligence that's going to be super intelligent more intelligent than human beings it's also not going to have all of our bizarre kinks and flaws but if it's essentially being programmed by human beings like how would it of if it's communicating in language and language which is formulated by human beings with all of our desires and the the ease of manipulation of people through sexualization which is used to sell everything from cars to credit cards like whatever it is sexualizing things and sexualizing advertisement is a big part of it and then manipulation showing people what could be and like like this is the 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 this is what's really creepy about this exponential constant increase in the 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 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 ten thousand us times a hundred thousand essentially far more intelligent and far more far more aware of all the different ways to manipulate the human psyche yeah I mean this is the this is kind of 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 here so one of the turning points in 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 in PR it's like everyone got the same message through a broadcast so the original study mass persuasion from 1946 it showed how people were affected by a broadcast on CBS radio were a famous singer named Kate Smith came on and she 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 they were just desperate that she would survive this and she was sort of continually using these techniques to to gain engagement and this was across a broad medium so that this 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 one million a day they were getting and then that day 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 came written 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 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 map people's psychological pre -delections 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 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 and God forbid if you've got an implant God forbid if if if Neuralink becomes something that everybody has to have because if you can't 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 can have this really cool conversation of thoughts done that's really attractive the idea behind it is like whoo 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 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 they're all different kinds of humans I would like to know how Theo Vaughan thinks 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 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 like I'm so busy and I get hundreds of text messages today and sometimes I forget to text people back and then I get texts from people are you mad at me and like oh my god like deep meaning attached yeah even the message that didn't arrive do you know what they say the most triggering text response to someone is a lack of exclamation point no okay 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 no that's crazy but isn't that weird as 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 okay are you upset what did I do and then you have to go back through your text what did I say they could be misinterpreted wouldn't it be better if you and I could just read just minds I can know oh Rebecca really is just a really nice person she's trying to sort this out if you could discern intention right right well that would be great pretty much can like wait this goes back to the cult conversation I mean you can you're paying attention you can and if you're not paying attention do you really want that you can because you're smart some people are not that smart this is just the reality of brains or maybe not smart it's just whether you've developed that I mean people can be smart like it's famously people can be brilliant and clueless and get run over crossing the street or not right or get or fall for some scam 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 ability to form pattern recognition based upon whether it's a previous life experiences the 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 which is why you're not in a cult and I'm not in a cult you know but you're all vulnerable I think yes and I think part of having a defense is knowing that you are yes and because one of the main tells I think is someone saying 100 % 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 don't know what we're capable of 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 yeah so I think that the opening up the avenue of speechless communication which maybe we already have been in the way that you were describing technologically it would be violation of mental autonomy and the worst like you you would then have to develop defenses and it would it just seems like a terrible path or are we in a next stage of evolution where we essentially become a hive mind a collective a collective but 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 would be made in this idea that it's for the greater good of everybody but not a power base top down structure but like every one understands like wouldn't it be better if we actually could read politicians minds so instead of these bullshit speeches might be terrible no be great because they would disqualify them like oh I know why you want to be the president because you're a fucking cook 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 want to have a two way I would want 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 well you 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 yeah it might yeah I mean that might be the thing it's like wreck it 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 your community we're vulnerable everyone's vulnerable yeah that's one of the main findings I have yeah through in life and in research is that and that we tend to want to say oh it's just that group of over there those schools are these diluted people right 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 right right right to knowledgeable or smarter various things well that's had 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 and the fantasy that that group could then be reprogrammed right we need to wait them up whatever group it is it's such a I mean what I the main 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 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 uncertain subjects is it because they're culturally reinforced are they tribally reinforced are these these opinions that my ideology has adopted and I adopted them because I want to be a part of a tribe and I don't want to be ostracized from that group yeah just step back can you step back for a minute can you step back and can we all step back yeah and are you kind yeah that's that's it that's a big one you know it's really hard to in the moment that's why it helped to have some sort of practice for stepping back yeah and also am I kind you know am I kind in this moment because a lot of times we give ourselves I think I'm basically a well -intentioned person but if you examine you know your own behavior sometimes it can be you know there's areas where maybe I wasn't at that moment or yes well it just happens you know pressures and tense and anxiety and you know you blurred 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 yeah I really meant that yeah and I mean other people I assume most people I guess it's both yes you do you do want to know but sometimes you can kind of tell yeah but yeah it's maybe with yourself that it that's like a deep inquiry it but that should be something that's sort of like universally expressed like that if we all could kind of shift our perspective in that direction one of things that I've done over the last 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 is because I realized that most of social media interactions are people arguing and it 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 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 it's 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 K to you yeah what the fuck what does it what does it mean 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 long time ago I don't read anything people write about me and 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 it's it's it's accentuating it in the worst way possible yeah it's enforcing that kind of shitty thought process and they get anxiety like 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 were 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 the people that he's experiencing is the guy at the coffee shop or this lady at the store hi what's up most people yeah most interactions yeah we're normal and kind but the spillover from this bizarre form of processed information was very bad yeah it's like we're running a kind of uncontrolled 100 human relations but it's not it's it's uncontrolled but not unmanipulated no it's not and this is where it gets into you know I apologize for bringing this up you heard me talk about this before people online but the the there was a guy was a former FBI analyst that estimated that 80 % of the traffic on Twitter is bots really 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 you're willingly waiting into that and 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 it didn't anticipate this derasinated disembodied form of stripped down context for 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 yeah and um not and we don't have many defenses it's almost like when they introduce a new creature into australia right like rampages because the defenses aren't haven't been built up over time right and yeah and then the way to deal with that is they bring in a new invasive species and then you have feral cats everywhere 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 this 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'd 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 this 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 colleagues 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 you know 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 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 to we just have to develop immune systems we have to develop 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 will embrace the new technology without making sure that we are capable of handling it or that it's safe or what we have because we everyone has a phone that's true we 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 would be dealing with this but what are we going to be dealing with 95 years from now?

2:38:18A couple people had visions that were pretty interesting I always find interesting that you can look back at like someone the guy named Vannevarbush 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 okay specified and he said it would be on microphone because they didn't have a 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 oh wow come up on your screen you could also conduct experiments on that desk they 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 Utley who tried to he invented something called the Munden Am 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 you had women and outfits who would you know if you wrote in with a question they would go get the answer sort of like a hand -based internet so people have been even going back to you know various fantasies of libraries going back to the Greeks people have dreamed of this all the world's knowledge in a tiny shoe box or that was the fantasy of microfilm which I wrote about in this other book it was very fascinating because they really could put the Bible on the head of a pen even by the 1950s you know using just film wow so but yeah people didn't imagine the exact form it would take and I think we're at a crossroads today look 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 like well it's also going to go the route of quantum computing which is going to be unfathomable power unfathomable computing power attached to information and it's going to happen inside of our lifetime yeah it's amazing how much is happening all at once yeah poly poly let's say poly crisis or poly whatever it is emergence well I mean 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 it you know so step back we have so many people that are just going to fall in line and just hop aboard the train 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 most 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 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 to doom scrolling there are papers written about 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 my problem is I would I used to I stopped doing it but I used to do it at night yeah that's a good idea which is the dumbest time to do it and I'd say thinking about war and like 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 and then you ask your phone that question yeah what's the computer is the problem sitting in front of the computer in the big screen and all this information videos and yeah you could really freak yourself out 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 uh -huh and it just like it takes that in the morning uh sense of the morning being full of possibility and just fills it with dread yeah 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 like no I'm not I don't have a problem I'm like I study this but then I stopped and I realized I feel a bit better yeah at least for now yeah I went a couple days without looking at social media at all and I was like God I feel 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 nuts 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 like you know how faith it will come to you it'll make it really messed up down river I don't have to go to the waterfall 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 aren't melting right if you use it for your alarm that's the key because I do and it wakes me I don't I just have an alarm I used to have a little thing they still make them yeah I don't use it 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 yeah and then you can put a screen limit but then you're gonna just hit the pass where it get in there and find out what's going on but do you find that meditation helps just be if I if I go to retreat I'm just like you're not hooked at all but you're just it just doesn't speak to you yeah so much or you have a lot of buffer what's definitely a strange time it's a very strange time to be a person maybe one of the strangest ever if not the strangest that's the question I have to is it yeah I wonder I mean I think like probably the invention of the wheel was probably the strangest look I'm just gonna move stuff and then this is the second strangest right and then there was the printing press like this is crazy yeah which by the way they were really concerned with like they thought when people shouldn't be reading well this 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 comic book you know it was more available changes changes so many things that many knock on effects yeah but I 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 well I think it's unparalleled and it's global interaction yeah there's nothing like it where you're paying attention to the the the arguments between indian Pakistan yeah potentially on a granular level yeah well you every day if you do grab your phone in the morning you're waking up to eight billion people's worth of bad news that's another question where do you put your attention and your concern right 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 rule against you weren't allowed to broadcast the coffins coming back because they didn't want people to see what was happening uh did you get during the Iraq war as well 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 yes and so this vast exposure is unprecedented to suffering but also where do you put your attention where do you what do you focus on what do you what 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 playing crashes it's all coming at you yeah in vivid HD you don't really have a sense of scale yeah I don't know how to wrap this up

2:47:18I'll leave it to you well I'll leave it to the universe um I really enjoyed our conversation though uh instability of truth this is your book brainwashing mind control and hyper persuasion um it's uh did you do the audiobook or did somebody else read it I didn't do it but talent I hate what happens she seems I chose her she had a great voice but I kind of yeah maybe next book I'll do myself please do thanks so much thank you I really enjoyed it thank you very much

2:48:17all right bye everybody

2:48:33you