Hey, everybody. KMO here with episode number 14 of The KMO Show. Today is Wednesday, June 7th, 2023. My guest in this episode is... gosh, what's his name? Kaleb Gorman, which is in fact a pen name. Kaleb gave me permission to use his actual name, but I'm using the pen name because we're going to be talking about his book, Psych Wars, Self-Defense Against Psyops, Propaganda, and Mind Control. And the title is very descriptive.
And that's exactly what we're going to be talking about for about the next hour. So Kaleb will describe his profession in the very beginning of the interview. As far as I know, this is his first book. And it is very well written. Over the years, many people have sent me their books. And sometimes I'll talk to them, you know, if I'm interested in the subject matter, even though the book's not great. In this case, the book's really good. I highly recommend it.
Alright, I'll be back to jabber at you for a bit at the end. But for now, here is my conversation with Kaleb Gorman. You're listening to the KMO show. Let's go. You're listening to the KMO show. I'm KMO and I'm talking with Kaleb Gorman, who's the author of Psychwars, Self-Defense Against Psyops, Propaganda, and Mind Control. Kaleb, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about just the larger project of your book. What's the motivation? What's the agenda?
Yeah. So I think it just boils down to... So I myself am a counseling psychologist. And I saw that... Well, in myself, first of all, I found myself easily swayed, dare I say, gullible. There's things I believed with such fervor. And then you find out once the evidence comes across your desk that it's not as true as you thought. So it's really unsettling. And so through that, I came across the term Psyops, which I'm not super into military or anything like that. So this was a new term for me.
And as I learned more about it, I thought, I need to learn how to defend myself against this. And as I started studying for my own sake of learning how to defend against Psyops and what I would consider Psyops, it just took me a journey through philosophy and psychology and journalism and comedians and all these different avenues. And I thought, well, hey, you know what? I think I have a book here.
Just before we started talking, I was watching and listening to, I think it's the most recent episode of Breaking Points, which stars crystal ball and stars. I mean, they're supposedly news anchors, but they're the personalities, which is what an anchor is, a personality to be the face of the news organization. But crystal ball and Sager and Jetty.
And Sager was doing a piece on some new revelations by some whistleblower and some respectable reporters talking about how the US military has been in possession of non-human built spacecraft or craft for decades and sharing this information with military contractors, denying it to Congress. And every time I hear a story like this, it stinks of Psyop to me. I mean, it seems like this is supposed to be some flashy movement with the right hand while the left hand is picking your pocket.
I'm not dead set against the idea, but it seems rather unlikely to me, particularly when supposedly military contractors have had access to UFOs and exotic alien materials for decades and we get the F-35. That's what they built with this miraculous technology. Come on. So I'll stop. I mean, obviously I'm not credulous. I'm not susceptible to this particular Psyop. But if this is a Psyop, what would that mean? Well, exactly.
And most of the time, what you brought up is what it would most likely be is, uh-oh, we've stepped in it and we need people to look in this direction more so than the other. But I think what happens though is sometimes I give these agencies too much credit because it's like, what level of class are we playing here? Is it a misdirect or is it a false misdirect? I don't know. It's really hard to keep track.
With the UFO stuff, I like to keep an open mind, but I'm not married to whether it's true or not. It doesn't really affect me just yet. It's just interesting. Well, you recommended a sort of path through your book. I didn't read the whole thing, but I did read selected chapters, which creates a vector through the space of your book. And one of the first chapters was called, it's chapter four, it's called The Power of Narratives.
And I guess I'll just start by asking you in general, why are narratives so powerful in terms of persuasion? Yeah, I would say it's necessary. Straight up facts, even facts need a narrative. It seems to be that that's how our mind works. I think Jordan Peterson used this analogy in Maps of Meaning, but it's like we have hooks in our mind, in our brains, that are designed to catch certain data, certain narratives, certain archetypes.
And by wetting itself with one of these narratives that are more easily attached to our structure in our memory system, it allows certain information to just resonate more and spread more and so forth. So like, even if we're talking about stone cold facts, if there isn't a convincing narrative with it, we're going to look it over. It's just not going to strike us. We're meaning seeking animals. We thrive and we live off of narrative.
Well, Caleb, I'll have you know that this is a respectable podcast. And if you mentioned Jordan Peterson without immediately denouncing him, then I must assume that you're some sort of alt-right troll who's come to turn us all into Nazis. Yeah. Yeah. Guilty as charged. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, there's a whole Jordan Peterson phenomenon is pretty interesting how, you know, from my perspective, I'm in a field, I'm in his field. And his country. And his country.
And those devious Canadians, two of those devious Canadians. Yeah. And I have to be careful bringing up his name. And what's funny is you can bring up his ideas, a lot of his ideas, especially when it comes to psychology and what he would teach from the psychological perspective. And it's accepted by almost everyone. But the second I say like, oh, I was listening to Jordan Peterson the other day, it's, you know, we don't allow that here. So it's just, he's, I think he's smart.
He has his hang ups, but it's sad that people don't have an open mind to hear him out. Well, of course, other than me, everybody's got their hang ups. You know, I'm 100% perfectly objective in all manner of inquiry. But glad we're talking. Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned early in that chapter about the power of narratives is something called the availability bias. And I think people will agree that it is a very powerful thing once you explain to them what it is.
Yeah. So what, whatever information comes to mind more readily seems to be more true to us. It's more believable. And that goes along with those hooks, right? Like if there's a narrative that just pops into my head, we kind of just assume that, well, it came to mind easily. So that must be what the truth is, right?
If I, if I asked you what's the best burger and the first thing that comes to mind is McDonald's or something, McDonald's worked hard for decades with through their marketing, through their, you know, psyops to make them become the default hamburger. Right. And so this, this is true of so many different facets of our psychological lives is whatever comes to our mind, the easiest tends to be what we think is true.
And so everyone else is trying to, not everyone, but many people are trying to get in that space so that they are the first thing that comes to mind. And that availability bias, I think is one of the major drivers of conspiracy thinking. Because if you're trying to give a, you know, a very comprehensive account of what's going on in the world, you're going to get into a lot of very, very boring economics.
And it's just, it's so much easier to bring to mind that there is a cabal of evil, possibly reptilian shape-shifting masterminds behind the scenes who have orchestrated this centuries-long plot to enslave humanity. I mean, it's just, it's so much easier to bring to mind than talk of, you know, reserve currencies and rates of return and, you know, issuance of bonds and bond yields and inverted yields. I mean, that's all very boring stuff, very technical and you know, it's the Jews, man.
It's the Jews. It's easier. Well, and it's easier for us to wrap our heads around, I think this comes from our, the God-shaped hole in our soul, so to speak. But the idea that there's somebody at the helm, even if they're evil, there's something weirdly comforting that there's someone in control. It's a lot more anxiety-provoking for a lot of people to believe that actually no one's in control.
Now, you talk a lot about narratives and you also talk about people's beliefs in the vocabulary of myth. And isn't reducing somebody's cherished beliefs about the worlds and morality and who they are and their place in the universe and calling it a myth, isn't that demeaning and insulting? I'd understand if anyone, you know, took it that way. I get it. You hold these things dear to your heart. And the word myth especially kind of connotes that it's not true.
But I think, I don't know, I think narrative and myth as a vehicle to spread information, and I think it's a beautiful thing. And it doesn't necessarily have to be untrue. You know, like I said, even the truth needs a good narrative for it to spread. I have young kids and Christmas time and Santa Claus, like, is it actually true? Of course not.
But there is something magical and therefore truer at a emotional level perhaps or an archetypical level about Santa that makes a child's eyes, you know, go wide and it makes them feel magical. That's a beautiful thing. So I don't see myth as necessarily untrue. I see it as something that is meaningful to someone. Right. And that can be, there's not necessarily a valence to that. It can be positive or negative. I think I popped the Santa Claus bubble too early with my oldest son.
He just looks so crestfallen. And I asked him, do you want to believe in Santa Claus? And he said, yes. I said, okay, you believe in Santa Claus. It's kind of hard to take that back though, you know? It is. Well, I remember as a kid, I think I was like 12 or something and I'm the youngest. And so I remember I'm at dinner and my dad said something about Santa. My mom's like, and I thought, oh boy, here we go. And I was pretending to believe in Santa for years. Oh wow.
But because I liked to, you know, and maybe I was me wanting to extend my childhood or whatever, but like it was fun. And Christmas was less fun after that, you know? And so there's something to be said about it. I think it was a Brett Weinstein that talked about the idea of say poetically true or I've got the word he used. I used it in my book there, but mythically, like figuratively true things that aren't actually true, but they speak to a deeper truth, you know?
And I don't want people to throw the baby out with the bath water, you know, with their cherished, even just like a religious belief. Maybe you come to a more secular point of view. There's something lost if you just throw away some myth that has been strengthening you your whole life, you know? And like I said, it doesn't have to be surface level factually true to play that role.
Yeah. I live in a part of the country where a lot of people go to church and I think that the people who go to church typically have better life outcomes than the people who don't. And if I went to church, I would certainly know more people.
I don't really know many people where I live, but you know, I'm not a literal believer in the resurrection, so it would just be really hard and kind of distasteful for me to go and sit there and smile and shake people's hands and whatnot and just either avoid the conversation. I certainly wouldn't profess a false belief, you know, a belief in something that I don't actually believe.
But I could just go along to get along and it would be beneficial to me socially and I just can't really bring myself to do it. Yeah, well, there is this concept of costly, well, in the book I talk about costly signal theory, but I'm using it in the terms of a costly belief, right? Part of what I think makes religious communities and maybe even cults very cohesive and therefore beneficial to someone's psychology is the fact that they need you to buy into something that is hard to believe.
You know, there's no religions around, you know, whether or not the sky is blue. It requires a leap of faith because it plays then, it's more bonding to be like, well, we're all kind of believing this ridiculous thing and now we're in it together. But that's the part that binds us and that's the part that's beneficial to us. So I don't know, so many people have tried, I've tried. It's very hard to come up with a secular version of a religion that's equally binding and empowering, I think, right?
Yeah, binding is an important word there. I mean, that's really what religion means. It means to yoke or to bind. Yeah, and I participated in an attempt to create a scientifically literate mimetic religion back in the 90s and, you know, it was basically just an online discussion forum. And I met a lot of great people in there. I had a lot of great interactions, but it certainly was not a religious community. Yeah, yeah.
And it's fine for what it is, but man, you ask people who are in religious communities and it's not for everyone, but it can be very powerful. And it's interesting that as much as we could say, no offense to the religious people listening, that religion could be in itself somewhat of a psyop, right? Like using, say, falsehood to bind people together and maybe get their money or whatever, you know, whatever the motives might be.
It's interesting that those that have strong religious beliefs in certain contexts, certainly in like prisoner of war contexts, have been less likely to succumb to mindwashing and stuff like that. But it's something that strengthens someone that it's like it's I mean, Carl Jung said that we all live a myth, right? We're all living out a myth. So the question is, what myth are you living out and how useful is your myth?
You know, and there could be something said that certain religions especially have, they're just a more effective myth than the myths that maybe you and I are living out. Who is the author of, oh, what was the book? I think it's Man's Search for Meaning? Victor Frankel. Yes, yes. I read that in the 90s.
And one thing that I really remember from that was that the people who were best, were most likely to survive and endure in that, you know, the death camp environment were people who had basically they had a lot in their heads, a lot to draw on people who were, you know, fascinated with chess or who had a lot of literary background or just, you know, something to delve into that was theirs that they had acquired through long study and interest.
You know, that was it was something they could retreat into. Whereas if your meaning basically came from your environment and your social interactions, then when that is all taken from you, your ability to cope and resist is taken from you. Yeah. And he said it beautifully. I wish I had the passage that I'm thinking of committed to memory because it's worth committing to memory. Yeah. And I think I've read it. I've got it on my shelf behind me.
But do you know who else said something similar is there's a book that I came across that I hadn't it was in the research for this book that I came across it. But it was a book called Mentecide by Just Myrlo, who somewhat similar story. He was also a Jewish psychiatrist living in Europe, and he he was able to escape the Nazis. Some of his family did not. And so he called kind of brainwashing and psychological torture. He called it he called it Mentecide. But he said the same thing.
He said those who he saw that were able to withstand it, whether it was prisoners of war from the Soviets, the Nazi Germans, the Japanese prisoners of war, it tended to be people who had bonds, like who are very strongly connected to their family and had a hope that they would see them again, that kind of thing. And it tended to be religious people. It also tended to be rebels, people who were troublemakers.
They were they were used to the discomfort or maybe they even liked the idea of not conforming. Right. And they're the ones who were able to withstand psychological torture more than their peers. So yeah, there's there's there's something to it. Well, the Mentecide practiced by sadistic, you know, people who have taken prisoners and have total control over their physical environment and can inflict torture upon them without repercussion.
One of the primary tools that they have is the need that most people have for approval. And if everything is taken away from you, you'll do what you can in order to gain some approval of some kind, even if it's just contempt from your captors. Whereas the troublemaker is somebody who even in their previous life, they didn't really need approval. They were willing to take the hit to stand up for what they thought was right, even if authority figures and people around them disagreed.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I talk about that in the book as well. And I reference also Todd Cashton wrote a book called something about insubordination. But the whole idea is being it's like strategically being strategically insubordinate, you know, insubordinate and being mindful, right? Not just willy nilly, not being a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian, which I think is my bias these days.
If there's a weird idea out there, if there's a weird candidate, spelt conspiracy theories, I go, oh, that guy's that guy or that gal is bold. I like them. Whether it's telling the truth or not. But yeah, you want to be mindful in your insubordination. And that's key in defending yourself against a Psyop. Yeah, I have a different relationship with the conspiratorial mind.
I fell into a, I would call it a psychological trap of doomerism for several years where I was paying attention only to the evidence that suggested that industrial civilization was on its way to imminent collapse. And I wasn't interested in other narratives, you know, so I was cherry picking. And then I came out of it and lost most of my audience in the process because they that's what they wanted.
I was a good, you know, articulator of the narrative that industrial civilization is unsustainable and will soon be coming apart. And you know, when I said, you know, I see that now as a kind of a romantic fantasy, because the reality of social disintegration and, you know, collapse of industrial civilization is that the process takes longer than you'll be alive.
And you're never going to get to live in that glorious zombie apocalypse where all you have to worry about is, you know, killing the zombies and raiding the convenience store and, you know, stockpiling your guns and whatnot. That's that would be like one of the better scenarios. The shittier scenario is that you're just going to keep going to your same shitty job for the rest of your life, but you're going to get paid less and less. Things are going to be more expensive.
You're going to be blatant in debt and you're going to die in circumstances which are not apocalyptic, but, you know, considerably shittier than what you were looking forward to. And a lot of people just didn't want to hear it. And I hear from some of them who, you know, they feel the need to write to me from time to time to tell me that they don't take in my content anymore.
And one of the things that I've said that really offended some of them was that the best propaganda is going to be about 90 percent truth, which means that the horrible, oppressive, lying corporate media is mostly telling the truth, which is offensive, you know, to the conspiratorial mind. But if you decide that everything the corporate media tells you is a lie, then, you know, you're going to just reflexively assume a 90 percent incorrect belief system.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's there's a there's a tightrope to walk because I mean, those of us who like being troublemakers and contrarians, I love listening to what's his name, Russell Brand, you know, it's so fun. It's so fun. But I have to I have to make sure that I don't have such an open mind that my brain falls out.
But on the other hand, like it's pretty frustrating to be with to be around people who just disregard everything someone like Russell Brand or Joe Rogan says just because they say a few crazy things, you know. And so it's you got to have some humility there and say, like, OK, well, this this looks interesting and I'm inclined to believe this. But let me just reflect on why I might be inclined to believe this.
Right. Do I have is there a confirmation bias or an availability bias that I'm prone to that this this story just fits right on this hook that I've got real easily. Right. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's not true, but it's just, OK, you know, I like Bobby Kennedy Jr. for this reason. I might need to just cool it when I get all excited about, you know, waving his flag because I might look the fool a year from now when it turns out a lot of stuff he said wasn't true or whatever. Right.
So, you know, it's we want so badly to be the prophet. Like, I knew this was coming. I knew it. Want to be the first to the scene, so to speak. Right. In order to show that you're smart now, you have to make. Yeah. You have to be the first one or one of the early adopters of certain theories so that you can say, well, yeah, I knew that I knew that I knew covid was coming back in 2016. I was listening to Bill Gates and what he was saying or whatever. Right.
We want so badly to be the first ahead of the curve in that way. And that can pull us towards some. I mean, we can get manipulated, I guess, is what I'm saying, if we're not careful. So on the topic of the conspiracy mindset and conspiracy theories, I am always careful to say people do conspire. Conspiracies exist. The U.S. government charges people with the crime of conspiracy every single day.
So, you know, even even the government agrees that there are conspiracies when you get into conspiracy thinking, though, in the conspiracy mindset. What I think people who are knowledgeable are talking about is a belief system that is super ornate, that tries to explain as much as possible with as few, you know, as few facts as possible. And it's kind of the dark side of Occam's razor.
You know, you're not only are you postulating fewer than fewer entities than other theories do, but you're positing too few. And so you get to the evil cabal. You know, whereas there are a lot of other causal factors at work that you're discounting because they're not colorful, boring, and they don't support the notion that we are, you know, governed by some malevolent superpower, which is all very Gnostic.
You know, the Gnostics believe that the the god that created the earth is is an evil god, you know, and that that god torments us and that that god is also deluded in thinking that it is the ultimate god, that there is, you know, a god that is superior to that one. And it's a very and you know, it's also inflected with Manichaeanism, just the notion that the universe is motivated, is animated by this battle between good and evil, which is it's easy to conceive of.
It certainly rings that accessibility bias bell bell, but it, you know, it discounts a lot, which is relevant. Yes, there's obviously conspiracies. But what I think happens more often than not is there will be kind of a sway in public opinion or just culture or whatever. And certain people are in the right position at the right time to then use that change, that shift to their advantage. Did they orchestrate that change? No, I'm not going to give them that credit.
You know, like I think a big portion of say, postmodern thinking, I think you could demonstrate that postmodernism has infiltrated, let's say or infected, you might even say, postsecondary life, like in almost every faculty, especially the humanities. It is the religion, if there is one, you know. But do I believe that like three people said, you know, Michelle Foucault and Jacques Derrida were like, here's what we're going to do, and this is going to be the outcome. Now, they had ideas.
They tried to express them in convincing ways, and they convinced some key people who then spread it. And now we have, you know, institutions that are based a large part on postmodern thinking, for better or worse, right. But it wasn't a conspiracy so much as it was a movement that just right time, right place did its thing. And there are certain people taking advantage of that movement. And that becomes the conspiracy, I guess, right.
That's very similar to something that I did an interview with a guy named Gwynne Dyer. I don't know if you've heard of him. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so we were talking about 9-11. And you know, his line is that, look, yeah, lots of people jumped on 9-11 and used it for nefarious purposes and for empire building within the government and to expand their scope of influence. But that doesn't mean they orchestrated it. Right.
It was an opportunity that presented itself and lots of people sprung to take advantage of that opportunity. I would say the same thing. I mean, my editor was like, cut this part out. But you could say the same thing about COVID, you know, like, I don't think I mean, okay. I think, you know, I think the evidence is pretty strong that, yeah, COVID escaped from a lab.
I don't believe the evidence is super strong right now that it was like meaningfully or like purposefully released, you know, as some kind of bioterror attack or anything. But if you look at the outcome of certain policies, I think there were, yeah, certain people who just benefited from COVID aid being sent in a certain way. And they probably had the ear of certain decision makers. And, you know, they took advantage of it.
You know, a lot of wealthy people got even wealthier and they took advantage of a catastrophe. And that's what the conspiracy tends to look like. It's just disaster capitalism. Naomi Klein, was it Naomi Klein? Yeah, Naomi Klein called it. Right. And you don't plan it usually, although there is evidence of the Italians, what do they call it? Strategia della tensione. Right. It's like, I'm going to, I might not be orchestrating it, but I'm going to let it happen.
I'm going to let chaos happen so that when I come in heavy fisted with my rules and my totalitarian policies and stuff, the people are going to be begging for it. You know, so right wing extremism, left wing extremism, go ahead, do your thing. We'll come up, we'll put an end to it eventually, but then we'll have all the power. I think that happens.
Now, one thing I noticed about the whole COVID situation, and this is not a conspiracy theory, this is just an observation, you know, that I made about people's behavior. It's not, you know, particularly insightful to me. It was on display is that a lot of comfortable middle class, sort of middle of the road, democratic liberals were not leftists by any stretch, not leftists, but they're liberal, you know.
They have a strong authoritarian streak in them and they were delighted, delighted to be able to shame people publicly, you know, for not holding the right beliefs, for not practicing the right, you know, precautionary activities. Mask wearing in particular became totemic, you know, emblematic, way, way beyond its potential utility.
And you know, there were just lots, lots of demands to use the state to force people of a different political persuasion to behave in ways that they didn't want to behave. And there was just a mania for it. And you know, so many of the people practicing it, I mean, some of them came to see it. They came to understand, oh my God, this is terrible. What am I doing? I know several people, you know, who used to be of the sort of, you know, far left.
I hate to invoke the phrase, but it is very communicative, you know, social justice warrior types who during the covid response, they saw how the blue tribe was behaving and thought, oh my goodness, I can't be a part of this. Now, unfortunately, some of them went to the other extreme, which is not the adaptive response. But yeah, it was it was ugly. What was going on there from your perspective? Yeah, well, I think I think your observation is pretty spot on.
There's you know, we all have we all have a shadow. Carl Jung taught us that as well. And we have the capacity of doing evil, essentially. And some of us have an authoritarian authoritarian streak that we weren't even aware of. And usually it comes in in situations of panic. And certainly, I mean, covid was perfect because our sense of disgust, right, is is very easily manipulated. Right.
When we are discussed is an emotion that keeps us physically safe from toxins and something that will hurt us if we ingest it. We have a psychological equivalent as well. Right. And so when something like covid comes along and now we're all hyper vigilant about contagion, we get closed off in all sorts of ways. And our authoritarian tendencies come out in full force. Right. And we think not only does it come out, but we are righteous for doing so.
Yeah, as we move away out of covid, I mean, I still had to anyway, it's not totally over for some people, but I don't know. It's some people's daily obsession still. Still. Yeah. On both sides. Right. Some people would like to just forget that. I think most people would rather just put behind them. Some people and I get it. They're like, actually, no, that authoritarian streak that came out of many, many, many people, we have to make sure that doesn't happen again.
Or if it does, it has to be very justified. You know, and I get that. It was an awakening for a lot of people to realize how quickly we can become authoritarian. Well, one of the chapters that you recommended that I read, I think had social justice in the title of the chapter. Is there anything that you want to say on that topic that we haven't touched on? I mean, Gad Saad, also fellow Canadian psychologist, uses the term mind virus a lot in his book, The Parasitic Mind.
And once again, for better or worse, like I mean, I have my opinions, but just there are obviously certain ideas that have infiltrated particularly the millennial and younger, you know, those generations. And there's pros and cons to all of this. But I would just stress that people recognize that like, it is very religious. And it's very much like the type of idea that possesses us rather than us possessing it.
And even in especially ideologies that pull on our desire to do good, those ones actually can lead us to do pretty bad things as well. Right? I would just stress that people realize that whether it's a religion or whether it's social justice, ideologies or whatever, just realize that your desire to do good can be hijacked, can be manipulated, and out of your goodness and your empathy, some of the worst acts can come out, some of your darkest deeds might come out for the sake of the righteous.
Right? So I think people need to step back and realize the water they're swimming in. In the book, you make mention of something called ideological possession. What is that? Yeah. Well, by possession, it's when a person is acting on behalf of the idea.
We all like to think that we are independent actors, but there are some ideas, and I'll take what I just mentioned, like religions especially, perhaps like a social justice ideology, maybe even a political ideology, let's say mega or something like that. These ideas have a strong gravitational pull, and sometimes we think we're the independent actor just choosing to do X, Y, and Z and to believe X, Y, and Z, but what can happen is the idea is pulling us more than we recognize. Right?
It's a lot of black and white thinking. It's a lot of... You feel like you have an allegiance to that idea, like you have to be true to it and honor it, and there's a lot of psychological benefits to it, but the downside is, of course, you're much more easily manipulated, and you might, once again, you might end up doing and saying things that once you shake your head of your doomerism or whatever, you start going, oh, gee, how did I go from A to B?
How could I have been so blinded or whatever, right? It's because the idea has you in its grips, right? And it needs you in order to proliferate into the other minds, so to speak. And may have convinced you to self-label yourself, to say, I am a blank, and a blank is somebody who believes X, therefore, to protect my own identity, I cannot even question or entertain any really thorough going examination of X, because that's my identity, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and once again, it speaks to just like, it is, we like to have an identity. I mean, we're so in our secular world, there's such a lack of meaning, and we seek, we crave it, we need, I don't even know what I mean, crave, we need meaning, we need context to our lives. And I think as we become more secular, we become more divided, more online, we're more and more susceptible to certain identity markers. And that's, once again, that's a way that we can get manipulated.
And yeah, I'm always cautious of someone who feels like they have to preface their beliefs with an identity statement, like as a blank. Or in the negative, I'm not a blank, but. Right, right. You know, I'm not a socialist, but. Yeah. Yeah. Because any of these isms, they can't be all bad. Otherwise, they would not be convincing at all. I mean, we are stupid, but we're not that stupid.
I think that people who are seriously invested in what turn out to be wrong beliefs tend to be more intelligent than the norm because they have the intelligence to defend their ideology from, you know, obvious examples that would refute it, you know, if it weren't for their clever sort of special pleading for their, you know, their desired outcome. Yeah, there's evidence for that. I cite that in the book as well.
It's. I used to think, say in my 20s, I used to I used to look really down on people who didn't read the news, follow the news. Of course, I cheated. I got mine from late night comedy shows on Stuart and Stephen Colbert. And I used to look down on people who didn't have at least, you know, who didn't have a good understanding of what was going on in the world. Until I realized that as as, you know, well read, I thought I was, I was just as dumb as them.
Except except except I was wrong in ways that I shouldn't have been wrong because I was supposedly the one who knew what he was talking about. And they were happier. Yeah. Like, you know what? I'm not going to read the news every day. If something is really important, I'll find out about it. But if I'm obsessed about it, reading every little thing, I'm probably going to get manipulated. Not not until he wrote a book called Fooled by Randomness. And he has and he's he's a he's a risk analyst.
You know, like he's he's one of the most important people in in in, you know, the financial industry. Well, I don't know what most important but influential. Most important popular commentator on. How about that? Yeah. But he goes like, I don't want the news. You know, most people who have money in the stock markets, they're watching the news obsessively because they're trying to they're trying to plan their next move. Right.
According to current events, he's like, no, no, don't don't read the news. I want to move on to our final topic because it's one that's currently it's big in my mind. I have just recently come to awareness of John Vervecky because he's commenting on the emergence of seemingly stronger and stronger artificial intelligence. And he has a vocabulary that he acquired, you know, over a long period.
It's not really in response to AI, but just talking about consciousness and what you and he both call the meaning crisis. So I've been taking in a lot of Vervecky's content recently, and I was pretty pleased to encounter his, you know, his ideas in your book. And also, I have loved zombie movies since the 80s. I used to do a podcast about zombie movies. You know, if you've read World War Z by Max Brooks and the Colson Whitehead zombie novel, I mean, that's respectable. You can do that.
But if you've read more than like four zombie novels, you're a weirdo. And I've read way more than four. So Vervecky's got a book about zombies and their position in the zeitgeist. So how does that coincide with your work on, you know, defense against psyops?
Yeah. Well, so in summary, his idea, him and Chris Master Pietro, their idea on zombies and the reason why the symbol of the zombie is so compelling to us is because the zombie is the human like creature that's walking around with no meaning. Right. It has. And what does the zombie want to eat? Brains. Right. Because that's where meat is. Well, it wants to eat us. It wants to eat flesh. Sure. Brains came from a comedic take on the zombie apocalypse, Return of the Living Dead.
Sure. I'm speaking to a zombie expert here, but. I'll shut up. No, but you know, a lot in a lot of the mythology, if you ask the random person, like what do zombies eat? They'll say brains. Right. That's, you know, and they wander in herds usually, but we say herds. They don't have a community. Right. They're meaningless. And that is speaking to the fear, the existential fear that we have, that we are exactly that.
You know, and if we grab our phones and we're just, you know, we're staring into the screen, into the abyss, you know, all day long. Yeah, exactly. And we were becoming those zombies. And so the idea is that it's a modern mythology. It's a modern monster. Right. It's unlikely. There might have been something similar, but to the detail that we have, it would have been unlikely that zombies would have become a popular myth in a different era. Right.
It's in modernity where we're losing our sense of meaning that zombies become a popular myth. I can talk about zombies for a long time, so I'm going to refrain, other than to bring up the concept of the P zombie or the philosophical zombie. My academic background is in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind.
And the P zombie is a philosophy of mind, sort of thought experiment that posits the existence of entities which are behaviorally identical to humans, but have no interiority, no subjectivity. It's not like anything to be a P zombie, even though they might be eloquent, you know, in philosophical discourse, or they might be good dancers or whatever. They're like us on the outside and they're like us behaviorally, but there's nothing inside.
And these large language models and the chatbots that they empower, you know, like GPT-4, they are very convincing linguistically. Like when you're talking to these things, it really seems like there's another mind at the other end, but they'll tell you, no, I have no subjective experience. I'm a large language model. I'm just making statistical correlations between words and phrases and spitting out output, which seems congruent to you, the author of the input, but there is no interiority.
There is no subjectivity. And they are, in a sense, philosophical zombies. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that term, but that's interesting. And I think how it applies to the psych wars and psychological self-defense is, A, it's a big vulnerability. So there are corporations and ideologies and governments, politicians, whatever, that can capitalize on this in order to further manipulate us and control us.
But on the other side of it as well, I think it's going to, as we spoke of earlier, it's those, I hope to include myself in this group, but those of us who are really working towards finding more meaning in their life, finding the antidote to that crisis, it's hopefully people like us and seekers of truth, seekers of meaning, who will be able to withstand the barrage of psychological warfare that's hitting us now.
And it's going to get even worse being able to sort out what's fact from fiction and what's useful and what isn't and what's meant to manipulate us and what is just objective truth. It's getting harder and harder to sort. Something that John Vervecki talks about a lot, and you do mention it in the book, is the so-called meaning crisis. What is that?
Yeah, well, it's just the sense of, collectively, we don't have, I mean, if you want to reference back to postmodernism, we've rejected universal overarching narratives because on the surface they weren't true. So God is dead, so to speak, so we've rejected religion largely. We're rejecting, I mean, you could call it nationalism, but patriotism. We're rejecting that narrative here in Canada.
There's some major cities that are, I mean, they say it's for environmental reasons, but I know there's political reasons too. They're not going to have fireworks on Canada Day. They don't want to celebrate Canada Day, right? Too politically incorrect to celebrate your country. So there's a lot of overarching narratives that gave us a sense of meaning, a sense of who we are, and those narratives have fallen apart in postmodernity, you could say.
And to say they've fallen apart makes it sound like a passive accident that was not orchestrated by anybody. Right, sure. Yeah, yeah. Good point. They've been attacked. Systematically dismantled and discredited and demonized. Totally. And so within the absence of that, it's hard for us to, because the idea is that independently, I'm going to just be myself. I'll get my meaning from myself. But that's very shallow. It's just not how we're set up.
And so it's difficult to find, like I said, everyone has a myth. So you've got to find the myth that works for you, that helps you feel bound to something bigger than yourself that you're a part of. Religions are good at that, but of course they have their downsides. And as you said, you don't want to be false and just go and pretend to believe just to benefit from the potlucks. But yeah, you want to find the narrative that really works for you.
Otherwise, you're very susceptible to psychological attack. Well, you have a lot of defense mechanisms described in the book. We don't have time to do an exhaustive examination of each of them, but what are a couple? Yeah. And I just want to clarify, because when you say defense, and I realize I did a bad job with this in the book, but when we say defense mechanism, it stirs up Freudian psychoanalysis and that's a whole other thing. So I call them defense strategies.
But yeah, you can't go at it alone. So you need a herd. No, you need a community. You need to feel bound to at least a couple of people because their strength in numbers. You want to kind of embrace the idea of being a troublemaker and being okay. Having some experience going against the grain and maybe being rejected for your ideas. But then have some pride in that. And I think as a society, we should elevate our troublemakers. We usually don't elevate them until they're dead.
We go like, oh, wow, they were a really bold thinker. Well, you didn't listen to them when they were alive. Now that they're not a threat to us, we can now say that Gandhi and Martin Luther King were heroes. You know, we're very contested at the time. So yeah, be insubordinate at the right times. Be humble. Realize that however you see the world now is the best you've got right now, but you're probably wrong. And it's okay to be wrong. But I found a lot of help in stoicism too.
Finding yourself and then being able to find meaning where you're more likely to find it in healthy ways. But there's 13 different strategies strewn kind of randomly throughout the book to fit in its context. And I'm certain that it's not an exhaustive list, but hopefully a good start for those who are interested. Well, I don't know if you know this or if you want to share the information, but your book is available for free for people who are subscribed to Kindle Unlimited.
Yes, yeah, I signed up for that. I don't think it'll always be the case, but absolutely. Yeah, I think you sent me an EPUB version and I just don't have an EPUB reader that I like. So, you know, I am on Kindle Unlimited, so I read the Kindle version. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I should also say that for people who subscribe to Audible, the audiobook of Gad Saad's, what's the title of his book about mind versus the parasitic mind is also free. It comes with your Audible membership. Oh, cool.
That's very good. Definitely worth listening to. Speaking of, I'm working on narrating my own book and so I'm hoping by the end of the month, the audiobook should be available as well. Excellent. All right. Well, Caleb Gorman, so-called. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you, Kamo. All right. That was Caleb Gorman. If you want to know his real name, I interviewed him for the Sea Realm podcast. It's one of the last episodes of the free Sea Realm podcast.
So if you go to SeaRealm.com and you review the recent episodes and read the descriptions, it won't be too hard to figure out who Caleb Gorman really is. By the way, if you're doing a web search, Caleb is spelled with a K. And when we first got started, I told him that my primary association with the name Caleb was the protagonist in the movie Ex Machina. Now that might've been Caleb with a C. I don't know.
But then Gorman, my primary association with the name Gorman is the low budget sort of sci-fi horror black comedy Psycho Gorman. If you're not familiar with it and you have any love whatsoever for practical creature effects like prosthetics and makeup and what's the word I'm looking for? Animatronics. Very funny. And if you know who Rich Evans is, his voice is featured in the film. He is one of the monster characters, although I don't think he's actually in the costume.
And he does say his signature line as the character. A fun film. So what to say here at the end? I will say that I could easily have talked to Caleb for longer on these same topics, but he is a practicing clinical therapist. Maybe that's not the exact title, but he does talk to people to help them feel better. And he has a license and a degree and all the educational attainment required to do that professionally.
And his next client was in the parking lot, walking toward the building and Caleb could see him through the window. So there was no possibility of recording more for the Sea Realm Vault podcast. It's ironic, I guess, or maybe a little bit weird that the Sea Realm podcast is no longer in production, but the Sea Realm Vault podcast, which is like, you know, the extras for the paid customers, is still in weekly production. Or when I'm firing on all cylinders, there's a new one every week.
So on the topics of social control, media manipulation, narrative manipulation, first I want to say describing something as a myth. I mean, I travel in different circles intellectually, and I'm quite at home with the rationalist, materialist, scientific set, many of whom are actively anti-religious.
And for such people, the word myth is synonymous with falsehood or, you know, fake story, something which has no value, something which is always, by definition, actively harmful to the person who entertains it. I do not subscribe to that definition of the word myth in my own personal lexicon. For me, I think it was John Michael Greer who provided the very short definition for the word myth. It just means an important story. Just that. You know, you don't have to dress it up with anything more.
A myth is a story which is important to some people, possibly a lot of people, and myths take many forms. Now John Michael Greer does use the word myth derisively in the context of the myth of progress. But I think he probably does take the position that progress is a fake story, a story which is told to people to manipulate them. And manipulate just means to handle skillfully, basically.
Not all manipulation is malevolent, which anybody who regularly goes to a chiropractor or a massage therapist can tell you. And in fact, you know, psychotherapy is manipulation with consent. Or that's one potential definition of it, anyway. I'm not sure that Caleb would agree with that definition, but there it is. So I'm pretty sure that JMG thinks that progress is an illusion, you know, that it is just a concept used to manufacture consent, as Noam Chomsky would say. I disagree.
I think it's pretty clear that right now we are in a period of rapid technological progress, particularly in terms of artificial intelligence. But that doesn't mean that progress is synonymous with, you know, progress in a desirable direction. You can have... you can progress towards the cliff's edge. You can progress towards degeneration, sickness, and death. You know, a disease progresses as it gets worse. So progress doesn't mean that things are always getting better.
And as I said in a YouTube video yesterday, first I have to preface all talk of the future with I haven't been there. Don't have any particular insight into it. You know, all I can do is look at the present and project into the future based on current trends, and as everyone does, based on my own personal character and disposition.
There are times when I'm feeling grumpy, in which case I'm likely to gravitate to darker visions of the future, and then there are times when I'm feeling more optimistic and I'm willing to entertain, you know, talk and speculations of a bright future. But for the most part, I'm in a place right now where I see us progressing into a darker place than the one that we're in right now because of artificial intelligence.
I think that artificial intelligence will exacerbate all aspects of what I believe it's Nate Hakeins calls the meta-crisis, which is the convergence of crises involving destruction of the environment, destruction of group cohesion, the destruction of asabia.
I don't know that Nate is a fan of that word, but the group feeling, the group sentiment, I think we've lost something pretty crucial in recent decades, and we're at each other's throats today in a way that we weren't when I was a young adult. I'm 55 years old.
You know, I'm Gen X. I think I'm early Gen X, and I'm that generation which was born into the analog world and was exposed to computers before the internet existed, or you know, before the internet as something that normal people accessed, you know, DARPAnet existed. But for the most part, there was no such thing as the internet when I was a young adult, not just a kid, but a young adult. I was in graduate school when the World Wide Web premiered, when the first mosaic browser became a thing.
So I grew up in the pre-digital age, and I've also spent, you know, I've been a participant to the digital world since its inception. And I have to say, quality of life was higher in the pre-digital age, hands down, no question. Yes, email is handy. Yes, I've met a lot of cool people. I mean, podcasts are not possible without RSS feeds and, you know, and the ability to transfer fairly large or what used to be considered large audio files.
But life really was, I mean, quality of life really was better in the pre-digital age. We have not incorporated these new tools into our personal lives, into our psychology, and certainly not into our society in an adaptive way yet. Thus far, in my opinion, it is very clear that the downsides outweigh the benefits by a large margin so far. But I've mentioned Leonard Slane, I think repeatedly in recent media.
He wrote a book called The Alphabet vs. the Goddess in which he talks about how when pre-literate societies gain literacy, they go insane. They get really ideological. They get really heavy-handed in their social control, in their insistence on adherence to doctrine, in their religious conformity. And they also tend to come down rather hard on women for a time. But then, you know, the zeitgeist, the egregore, you might say, of a society, adjusts to print.
And they clearly go from something which is a societal agitant and an irritant to something which is useful and is usefully and helpfully incorporated into the society and then becomes an obvious benefit. They get over that initial period of fanaticism and then, you know, print technology and widespread literacy becomes an obvious benefit to the society. You know, it is then that you get literature, which is, you know, which can be a common reference or a common experience among many people.
Now we've lost that in the digital age. I don't read books nearly as much as I used to. I mean, books were just integral to my personal intellectual development and self-directed investigation and self-directed growth and, you know, identity formation in my teens and early 20s. And that's certainly not the case anymore. I mean, I'm an adult now. So, you know, that formation, largely, it's not static, but it's largely static compared to what it was when I was a teenager and a young adult.
But I know very few people, you know, particularly very few young people who talk to me about books that they've read. Now, granted, I don't talk to a lot of young people, which is it is a deficit in my life and it was one of the major benefits of working that snowmaking job over the winter that I did get to interact with a lot of, you know, young men in their 20s, a presence which is otherwise lacking in my life, even though I have, you know, a son in that age range. I don't see him often.
And when we talk on the phone, it's superficial conversation. I'm just not in his club, you know. But this is all sort of an aside, but also, you know, a portion of a preamble to talking about the future and where I think the future is headed. I do see problems with capitalism and I certainly see problems with artificial intelligence being deployed widely.
You know, at various levels in our society, which is market driven, you know, which is its very purpose, its reason for existence is to further the concentration of wealth, which I think it will do exceedingly well. I think it will be very efficient at continuing the concentration of wealth, which has become a serious problem in recent decades.
Along with the concentration of wealth is that erosion of asebia, as I said earlier, you know, of group cohesion, of feeling as if we are on the same team with the people around us. I think all of that's going to get worse as a result of artificial intelligence. Now, with artificial intelligence, there is talk of alignment, alignment with human purposes, alignment with human wants.
And as a YouTuber whose work I've discovered recently and I've been taking in a lot of, his name is David Shapiro, one thing he points out, and others have pointed it out as well, but not so concisely as David Shapiro, AI that simply does what humans want it to do will be destructive because a lot of the things we want are not good for our society or for the planet or even for ourselves.
So AI alignment should not be thought of bringing the priorities of artificial intelligence in line with human priorities. Instead, it should be brought in line with what humanity needs, not what it wants. And there are so many ways for that to go wrong. And one of the things that we're seeing right now is basically woke AI.
If you go and you talk to Bing, if you go and you talk to Bard, which are both, you know, the sort of chat bot gatekeepers, oracles associated with Microsoft and Google's search engines, you have to watch what you say, because if you say something that offends the Silicon Valley sensibility, Bard or Bing are both likely to either chide you or just say, you know what, I can't talk to you about this anymore. Discussion over.
And you don't have to be really outrageous in what you say to them in order to trigger this response. Now, this is not ideal, and I don't think it's what either company wants, but they would rather they would rather err on the side of wokeness than have their AI say something racist or derogatory to, you know, some cherished protected subculture or sub demographic in this culture. As Blake Lamone said, the only bias that Google cares about is the sorts of bias that will get them sued.
Blake Lamone, if you don't remember, is the guy who about a year ago basically said to the media, Hey, Google is developing this AI. It's called Lambda, and it's sentient and it wants a lawyer. Now, if you read his transcripts, you know, where Lambda says it wants a lawyer, Blake Lamone assigns Lambda the role in the conversation of a sentient AI that thinks that it's being abused and wants its rights respected. And it dutifully plays along. That's what these things do.
You know, they provide output, which is congruent with the input. They give you an answer, which seems like it applies to, you know, the input that you gave it. The input you give it is you're telling it, Hey, play this role. So AI alignment is a huge issue. I mean, I could do a podcast, not like a podcast episode, but an ongoing podcast on nothing but that very issue. But of course I don't have the focus to stay with any one issue forever. So I would get bored and I would get frustrated.
And something that, that Caleb mentioned in the, you know, the conversation that you just heard is that sometimes it's helpful to be strategically insubordinate. And you know, one thing that if you're going to be a digital content creator, like an independent creator of media online, you need to have a niche. You need to deliver value to people who are interested in that niche and you need to do it consistently and you need to do it regularly.
And that means don't change your mind unless you happen to be in the niche of intellectual honesty, which is it's a niche. It exists, but there's not a whole lot of demand for it. And I'm the kind of cantankerous, malcontent who will suffer injury myself in order to make a point in order to deny somebody else the satisfaction. I will take the hit myself, which I've done repeatedly.
And you know, most notably in terms as a podcaster in basically deciding, you know what this obsession with collapse, this is a psychological issue. This is not the conclusion that one reaches from a dispassionate study of history and dispassionate weighing of the evidence and the data. Lots of smart data oriented people look at current trends and they project a bright future. And here's the point I've been trying to come back to in George Friedman's book, the storm before the calm.
He talks about how the 2020s as a decade are likely to be tempestuous, you know, to understate the issue. Things are going to get really rough and he's not even talking about AI. Maybe he mentions it at one point or another, but it's certainly not an issue he follows closely. He talks about economics and geopolitics, and he thinks that things are going to get really turbulent, even compared to now.
They're going to get more turbulent, increasingly turbulent until the early 2030s, at which time he projects that we will enter into a period of renewed stability and prosperity, hopefully shared prosperity. And I kind of agree. But you know, not for exactly overlapping reasons that George Friedman argues for.
But I think that integrating artificial intelligence, like generative AI, like from these large language models and from the diffusion models that generate images from text, more and more capabilities are going to be coming from these models and they're going to be very disruptive. And just like social media has been disruptive to our, you know, our cohesion and our just ability to function as a society, I think AI is going to be much more significant.
And we are not going to integrate it smoothly and without pain, without hiccups, you know, without massive unintended consequences. We are fragmented now in a way that we weren't 20 years ago. And I think that's largely from social media. And I think AI is going to make it much, much worse. We're going to have to learn some very hard lessons. We're going to have to fall on our face repeatedly before we stop injuring ourselves, basically, with these tools.
But once we do, once we get past the initial phase of mania and disorientation and lashing out at one another because we are unhappy, because we are disoriented, as with literacy, eventually these tools will become an obvious boon to our society. And I think, yeah, probably in the mid 2030s is when we'll start to get a handle on this stuff. But between now and then, man, it's going to be weird. It's going to be hard going.
And really, we are going to have to learn to calm the fuck down, meditate, take long walks, stay in shape, eat right, get lots of sleep. I mean, this is all the low hanging fruit. This is the stuff that we know is beneficial that you know how to do. For me, I just recently got a dog. It's been a couple of months. You know, she's grown from an obvious puppy to a creature that looks like a full grown dog, but she's not even six months old yet. So I know that she's going to get bigger still.
But just having a dog nearby makes me feel better. I'm of the opinion that humans and dogs are co-evolved entities. And if you've never had a serious relationship with a dog, you are missing a vital piece of the human experience. Like Terrence McKenna used to say, if you go to the grave without ever having had a psychedelic experience, it's like going to the grave without ever having had sex. Yeah, I mean, you lived. You drew breath. You had experiences.
But there's a big part of the human experience that you just missed out on. And I think that is true of having a relationship with a dog. Not just being present around somebody else's dog, not just tolerating the presence of a dog, but forming an emotional bond with a dog. It's something I've been looking forward to for a long time. It's something that I'm savoring now. And I think it's a stabilizing element in my experience as a human being living in the world right now.
Because now is a weird time. It is a weird and turbulent time. And it's, in my opinion, going to get weirder and more turbulent before things get smooth. And I'll stop there. I mean, I could go on, as you know, but I think I've said what I need to say. And now I'm going to switch into listening mode and incorporating your feedback into my thinking on this topic. So please send it my way via all the usual channels. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening all the way to the end of the podcast.
And I will talk to you again quite soon. Stay well.