I get a team. Welcome to another installment of the View Project. I am super excited, and you know that I don't say that very often, so I must be super excited because I do this seven days a week, and you talk to people. I've spoken to thousands of people, and I am excited to talk to our guest today because I've been doing a deep dive on her. I listened to her recently on Rogan and went, Wow, wouldn't I love to talk to her? Wouldn't I love to
talk to that lady? And I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Rebecca, Welcome to the You Project. How are you?
I'm great? Thanks so much for the invitation, Craig.
Well, thanks for agreeing. Thanks for agreeing. Do you want me to call your prof or Rebecca?
Rebecca's fine, Okay, yeah.
Well we appreciate you. Can you give my listeners a quick snapshot of who you are? Obviously we're going to do a deep dive into the newest book and all of your research, but just tell them who you are if you would.
Sure. Well, my day job is being a professor, and I teach in a field called history of science, which is a pretty it's a pretty unique field where we get to study the role of science, technology, and medicine, but from a historical and historical perspective and just trying to understand how these things work. And I teach at Harvard in that in a department, a small department, but as trained as an anthropologist, I have had many other experiences.
I've been a yoga teacher and student of yoga, and I also consider myself a writer and basically a researcher.
Yeah, and I heard your interesting story about so you still do Are you still doing yoga every day? Like two hours morning in like an hour morning hour not or something like that.
I do do the meditation for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. And sometimes my yoga practice has been slipping a little bit. But like you, I have a background in athletics too, so I love that too.
I heard with interest that for you having that practice mains you need less sleep. Yeah, how does that work? What's the science behind that? Do you know?
I don't know the science, and I didn't expect that to be an outcome of learning to meditate. I've heard it reported that other people have had this experience, but also some people have not. And you can't really rely on it happening. But for whatever reason, I went from and it's fortunate because I think otherwise had to have
trouble fitting in the meditation. But I went from needing a good eight eight to eight and a half hours to needing about six and a half to seven maybe, which is still I think a good amount of sleep. It's just the meditation's almost like it satisfies the need for sleep, or as I think of it, it's almost a deep birth state that makes me feel rested. So even when my job, travel or whatever vastly reduces my sleep, if I can meditate, like while I'm on the airplane
or when I get there, it also helps regulate. I don't know the science there, but maybe somebody has studied that.
You are like the picture of equanimity, being the calm and the chaos. I feel like everything that I've read about you and heard about you, like your life is pretty chaotic, Your pretty biggest pretty pretty busy. Is that? So I guess for you to be able to kind of not take all the mayhem and the chaos and the anxiety along with you is important, right.
Yes, it's really challenging. I do think what did I have. I mean, it's kind of a joke at my university that everybody kind of brags about how busy they are and how hard it's going to be for them to find the time to have coffee with you. And this is and even the students highly scheduled, Like it's amazing
we see each other at all. But yeah, I try to just create it human condition for a way that it's enjoyable for myself in different ways, to ground myself and try to create some calm just because otherwise I couldn't stand to do to do it.
Are you still supervising payih stay students.
Yes, yes, definitely.
That's how many of those have you got at the minute?
I have about I've got about three for whom I'm the primary advisor, and then I have about I don't know, maybe six or seven. Quite a few just graduated. They do all kinds of interesting things. It's actually one of the great parts of the job is getting to know these students. And I really love helping students figure out what projects sort of suit them and how they're going to do them. That's been something I didn't expect. So there's and we're a pretty small department too.
I feel like if you can do your payah Dale or whatever research that intersects with something that you genuinely are fascinated with, rather than oh, this is a topic, I'll do this topic because I want to get a PhD and the university wants me to do this or have been pushed in this direction. But like my research, I'm absolutely fascinated with and so it's kind of exciting
and it's fun. It's not I mean, the work, you know is hard on all of that, but it's it's because I'm actually really curious about this, and it kind of spills into my work. I'm a corporate speaker and you know, do this every day. So I'm intersecting with people and trying to understand people and trying to you know, theory of mind and metaperception and metaaccuracy and metacognition, trying to figure out how other people see the world and how they think and process stuff. And that's my research.
Like it all kind of folds in together and this nice little kind of cognitive soup, you know. I love that.
It's nice if you can. I mean, I think we do have more choice sometimes in arranging our lives than we think, and I've often found that it, including myself when I was a graduate student. A lot of people feel constrained by this imaginary you know they. I mean, we all actually have committees that we have to get our work approved by or whoever whatever authorities. But often I found that people would imagine their committee saying, no, you can't do that project, even though you really want
to do it. You have to do this compromise, or you have to you have to suit the market, or you have to project ahead what people will be hiring. But I always think those choices so people seem to be torn between what they really want to do and then what they think will get them hired. But it feels like canceling out just sheer enjoyment, and it should
be enjoyable. So I always try to be someone who advocates for that doing the thing that you enjoy, because then you never really lose out, even if you like it. Took me quite a while to get a job after my PhD, just because I did something pretty unusual.
Yeah, yeah, I've always felt like that. When I was in my early twenties, I was working in fitness centers and gyms, and I realized I wanted to work, but I didn't want to be an employee. So the last time I had a job, as in it i was an employee was when I was twenty six, which was thirty five years ago. So I've the last thirty five years I've just been making shit up doc just figuring shit,
just figuring it out. But I think that when you're kind of what you do, you know, what pays the bills, intersex with what you like and what you're passionate about and what you're curious about, then that sense of drudgery that can come with work or research kind of. I mean, you know, it's periodic. I guess not every day is a Hollywood movie or a Disney sitcom, but but you know it's for the most part. Yeah, I never get sick of what I do, So, you know, I think
that's that's a bonus. So you've written, You've written a bunch of books, but your new book is called The Instability of Truth. By the way, can you understand my accent clearly? Or am I talking too far?
No? I get it.
I like it, okay. So the Instability of Truth brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion. I loved your chat with Rogan, as I said, and that wasn't brief that that was three hours of my life that I actually enjoyed investing, give or take three hours.
The thing I liked about it is it kind of went somewhere like, yeah, even though it's long, I felt like we got you know, made progress instead of sometimes you feel like you're spinning your wheels or a long conversation doesn't pay off anyway, That's how I felt.
Yeah, exactly. Well. The thing is I always say to people, irrespective of like whether or not it's a corporate gig le, listening to Rogan or a podcast or a radio whatever it is, is it good to listen to? Do you want to keep listening? Like that's the you know, that's the litmus test. And I did not want to stop listening. And one because I started listening because I knew I was going to chat to you, and then I went, oh, this, excuse my language, this is fucking fascinating, and then I
couldn't stop listening. But it's great. So everyone have a listen to Rebecca on Joe as well. What does the instability of truth mean? Like, what was the why, what was the premise for that?
Well, I was trying to think of a title basically for a book about brainwashing, mind control and like the question of whether how this connects to our current reality or real you know, digital reality and things like that, social media, and I was so trying different titles. I was talking to my mom about what the book is about, and I said, it's kind of about the way. It's not that we're on truth, but it were, it's an
instability of truth. The truth is not easily available at all times, and it sometimes seems remote or it's sometimes it seems really unstable. Is the word I want? And she said, oh, write that down, and then she actually wrote it down for me, and then that became the title. But it's just that's it's just so just basically came out.
Of a conversation, how great is mum?
She's a great Yeah, she's a raider.
Too, So that was, well, yeah, truth is interesting because there's there's the practical, you know, thing that's happening, the objective truth. You know, it's like the light turned red. That's the objective truth. Then there's my subjective experience of that objective event. So there's my truth. My truth is the world's against me every traffic light's turning red, this
is not fair. So, you know, trying to have an awareness of like where where does the objective thing finish and where does my subjective experience of that start, because I feel like a lot of us lack that consciousness or level of awareness that what's going on in my head is not the truth, the objective, global, universal truths, but rather just my story of something.
Yeah, I think a lot of what we take to be true is our perception. But it's not that I'm a relativist or anything. I just think that we are constantly we kind of create the reality tunnels in which we live. I think that's an insight that even someone like you know, the great psychedelic and psychedelic researchers of the sixties and seventies thought about things like that. But I think there's a lot of truth to that. Also
in my field. I mean, it's really helpful to be in a field like history of science, where they actually have papers just looking at the history of objectivity and it actually meant different things over time. So in the seventeenth century, there was no sense that you know, technical instruments gave you the objective or most exact truth. Truth
was not seen to be something that was exact. It was seen to be something like if you could represent a flower through its essence, that would be objective, not you know, the hyper measure. You know, our focus on measurement only came a bit later through what they call mechanical objectivity. So anyway, it's helpful to be in a field where they think about things.
Like that, trying to understand the mind of individuals and trying to do science around it, you know, human behavior and you know psychology, and it's kind of tricky, isn't it, Because there's it's very difficult to measure and observe other than like we observe, we don't really observe the mind. We observe the byproduct of what's happening in the mind, you know. And even with my mind research, sometimes I go, this is kind of garbage just in terms of measurement
tools and stuff. You know. You like, yeah, yeah, because you know, like you and Tiff and I can all do the same kind of psychological assessment this morning or our time this morning, and depending on how I'm feeling and what I've eaten and how much sleep I've had, you know, I'm going to get completely different data to if the same person does the same test or protocol a day or two or three later, we're going to get different data and then different science. And it's like,
it's a really tricky area of research. I think the mind.
Yeah, that's been my obsession for the past couple decades, aside from the brainwashing stuff, is really how do we measure subjectivity? And how has science kind of dreamed of getting tools that will allow you to actually extract that. I mean, it's one thing to wear someone or physically test them, but if you want to take a sample of their inner life or their inner thoughts, like, how
would they do that? And I got very interested in things like the Rorshach test or dreams, you know, science of dreams, things like that which were which were kind of sampled and turned into scientific objects of study. But it is a difficult it's a challenge that scientists often want to take on, or psychologists especially, but often are it's it doesn't always it's kind of awkward the results sometimes.
What are your thoughts around gratitude? I work with lots of people who or quite a few people who've got some significant disabilities and challenges, and when I spend time with them, I mean when I spent well one. I love spending time with them, but the volume on my gratitude is always turned up a little bit when I leave, because I walk away going I guess I can walk Guess what. I can get up out of a chair, I can open the fridge, I can turn on the tap,
I can you know, I live relatively pain free. I don't have any massive debt, I'm not in threat. You know, It's it feels like when we've got things really good, we don't seem to have the same level of gratitude as when we lose something and then get it back. Perhaps I think it.
Is amazing what we are capable as human beings of taking for granted, like it only takes you know, several times in my life I've had injuries such as a
neck injury, where I can't actually for whatever reason. You know, something you're so used to being able to do, like turn your head, You take for granted that I can turn my head, lift my head, not be in agony, and then suddenly when you lose that capacity you and then hopefully get it back, you have incredible gratitude for it, but we somehow it's elusive to be in that state
all the time. And I notice in myself, I mean, yeah, my capacity to feel gratitude and to it's kind of something you have to cultivate, like you're saying in your work with I think that I think the world provides us many opportunities to be grateful and also many opportunities to complain, so you can, like I have this phrase called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which I feel that
sometimes it's like a curse that descends on me. I'm walking around and you know, I start I usually start the semester where everything seems full of possibility and I'm like, I'm so lucky I get to be paid to do research on the things I want and you know, without oversight to write about it. But by the end of the semester, I feel like everything is heavy and concrete, and I sometimes fine have trouble having gratitude for you know,
just these things. So I think it is well, noticing when that happens is a good first step.
Yeah, it's finding the space between the thing that's happening and us. And also I think sometimes realizing what's changed over the last three months is not so much the thing or the event or the situation or the goings on, but me around it and then leading into that, like what is that about? Even I work kind of a little bit in the personal development space. I hate saying
that because it sounds cheesy, but anyway, I do. But I'm always talking about you know, so much of personal development and self help and all of that is focused on the external situation, circumstance, what I have, what I own, what I earn, what I'm getting, what people think, what I look like, all that visible stuff and trying to or having the awareness that I can build all of that. Perhaps, but maybe the thing that really needs to change is not all the stuff that people see, but maybe the
stuff that people don't see. Because when I'm different, when I am inherently intrinsically different than my experience of the world is different, right, So true, we try to resolve these internal issues with external stuff. If I have this or do that or achieve that, or people think that, or I have a million listeners per episode, or if I whatever, then then I'm going to be X, Y and Z. And then that happens and you're like, oh, I'm still insecure. I've still got a big ego, I
still want people to love me. I feel still feel disconnected.
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't getting the thing you want to be careful what you ask for getting the thing you wanted, even in the positive way. I mean, it's also another opportunity to realize that it wasn't the thing. It wasn't the thing that you wanted, you actually wanted some kind of internal state. I mean, a simple thing that happens to me, I mean I happened to everyone. Is I could walk out wearing an up for that, like the day before I wore it and I felt awesome, and
then I'm We're in the very same thing. But I just feel like I've made a terrible mistake that I don't know. The only thing that's changed is my is my attitude. Probably maybe a couple other factors.
Maybe you donate to get address. After all, Tiff not Tiff doesn't do dresses. Chiff's a self proclimbed tomboy. Well, tell us about your fascination with all the genesis of your fascination with mind control. Where did that start? Did something happen? Did you have an experience like where did that come from.
Well, I think on two levels. I think I when I published the book, I had to go back and rethink all of this because it's been with me for so long, I think about two and a half decades
that I've been Since I was finishing my dissertation. I wrote the conclusion about brainwashing, the last chapter I think it was, and I started to think about brainwashing it because I wrote my dissertation about conditioning and behavioral engineering and the extent to which people can be controlled, or first laboratory animals, and then how that could be extended to people. So I thought brainwashing in a weird way.
I just thought of it as like an abstract Oh, this would be a territory, or this is an extreme version of unfreedom, yes, where you become someone who's not yourself. And I guess I had always been interested in that question, can you become someone? Can you become a different person without realizing it, either slowly or very quickly, which is
brainwashing tends to be radical transformation. But in my personal life, I guess it's a thing where my research question also became personal in the sense that I think around that time I fell into like a addiction just just out of some difficult circumstances in my life, feeling like I disappointed my family and just feeling like I had too much to deal with and I would like to check
out for a while. And I did, and it was kind of combined with a very negative relationship that was involved with the drugs, and that period long, prolonged period of I mean, it was just a couple of years, but still it felt like and it relates to brainwashing in the sense that it became not obvious to me that I would get out or that I deserve to, And so I did become a different person. And then when I did, which was almost accidental in some ways,
I broke the spell of this terrible situation. I did feel incredible gratitude, but also it seemed amazing to me that that had happened, you know, and it seemed like that's worth trying, that understanding that would give me some sort of power or help I could maybe it would be helpful or compassion, I guess, for just understanding that this can happen to anybody.
Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting because everybody wants to belong as well to a group or something bigger than themselves. And sometimes and whether or not that's a church or a social group or a different kind of religious group or like, we want connection, and sometimes in order to stay connected or be part of the group, we've got to conform to a certain ideology or philosophy or way of being or behaving or you know, socializing or worshiping or and then there's all of this pressure and guilt
wrapped around. If you don't think like us or be like like you can't you can't question things because we've
we've found the truth. So you're here, You're in the middle of the truth, right, So you don't need to learn anything more, you don't need All you need to do is like follow the path, right, and you're on the path, So why would you even Yeah, So I have an experience in a church where I went to when I was younger, which was very very culty, very culty, and even now, like one hundred years later, I still feel pangs of guilt when I talk about it, because
I feel disloyal and unfaithful, like and I recognize it for what it is, but there's still that I feel, you know, and there were not everything to come out of that was bad, of course, but so much coeresive pressure, so much manipulation, so much control, and so much like when I was young and quite I was probably an asset to the church. I was young and a bit dynamic and a bit whatever, like I was valuable to them.
And so then there's just a lot of pressure and manipulation and coercion and bullshit, to be honest, to get you to be what they wanted you to be. And the moment that you would ask questions or say look, I don't really agree with that, will, they start to lose their grip and then they panic and then the
screws get tighter. Yeah. And it's only in hindsight that I can look back and go, oh wow, I was in the middle of something, you know, really very very cultish and controlling and manipulative and in a way mind control because you're actually discouraged from thinking critically.
Right, I mean, they can yeah, I think I relate to what you're saying. And subsequently I've been in various yoga groups that have elements of just you know, what you end up submitting to, even just the idea that a teacher should be allowed to say push you into this position, or you note that then there's a culture around that says this is what's acceptable, and people seem to be transformed before your eyes, and there's this idea
that this, oh, this is perfectly. Maybe those other groups are cults, but we're we've found some sort of special route to to you know, personal transformation or whatever it is. Those things do change you, and hopefully they also give you some really really valuable experience. Because I love I love the fact that the word experience in English means in the in the old days, in the early modern period,
it was a synonym for experiment. So you know, we all have these experiences that are in a sense very valuable, very valuable sources of information akin to experiments. And I think it's the most valuable thing is what you've personally experienced, if you can, if you can later make the most of it and not sort of beuh not not be stuck in it.
Yes, you know what you learn from it about yourself and about other people. And for me, I look back more, you know, no regret. For me, I look back and it's just curiosity. And I think, like the like when you think about it, from when we're from when we could reason anything, from when we could process anything around us as children, as babies until now you and me on this conversation and Tiff is that we've been programmed, you know, and influenced and manipulated and coerced, and so
my worldview is only partly my worldview. You know, I'm always looking at everything through the Craig window, thinking like, well, I know better, but most of us think, well, I'm objective. And it's like I say to people, you, really, objectivity on a personal level as almost impossible because you're looking through the subjective Craig window or Rebecca or Tiff window or and so everything that I'm looking at is at least informed or influenced or affected in some way by
the totality of my experiences until now. And so for me, it's like consciousness and awareness is recognizing that, ah, this is just my version of the truth, and then trying to expand on that is the tricky bit.
I agree, I mean, I think so, I agree that we've been programmed or we are being programmed, and I think that can both that that in itself can be
something one wants to break free. And I'll just suxily talked about negative self transcendence and positive self transcendence, and he said, well, you know, it would be ideal if everyone could have positive self transcendence through some way of breaking or programming seeing, you know, being able to think for yourself and free yourself from the assumptions about the you know, the limited nature of the life you should leave or the the what you should accept, because inevitably
it'll be limiting. That's what he felt. But he said, also there's negative self transcendent, which sometimes also breaks the pattern and therefore is to be valued even though it's a harder path. But also what you were saying reminded me of just this line from Walt Whitman where he says, I am a part of everything I have met. Yeah, which I really like because in a sense, we are constantly responding and remaking ourselves potentially at every moment, so
there's some sense there. I think the mistake is to think that we're sort of very autonomous, you know, sort of sealed hermetically sealed.
Yeah, and you like, I think about my beliefs, good and bad, you know, empowering, self limiting. Most of my beliefs I didn't choose them, they're just thereby social osmosis. You know, by like when you're ten years old, you have all these beliefs, and pretty much none of them
you chose. Mum and Dad chose them for you, or your peers or friends or you know, and so you grow up in this world view looking through this window that you didn't choose, and so it's difficult in the middle of that to realize that that you didn't You didn't build this reality. You're just part of this reality.
Right. That's why that's why I wanted to go to I thought anthropology seemed like the most interesting topic when I was preparing to go to graduate school. I thought, well, it would you could ask that question, would I be someone else? Is there some essence of who would I be someone else if I was raised an erratically different place at a radically different time. Just that in itself is kind of profound because we are so shaped by our environment.
Yeah, I grew up in a really Catholic FA family. Initially that was my first part of religious call, right. And yeah, it's like I've said this many times on the show, but by the time I was ten, I knew that there was heaven and Helen purgatory, and I knew that if I died with a mortal sin on my soul. I'd burn in an eternal lake of fire forever. And that wasn't even a question. That was just that's what happened. That was like, that's a tree. It was like I knew that as much as I knew what
a tree looked like. And I never questioned that because there was no reason to, because all the people I looked up to and trusted and loved, that was the you know, so the idea of thinking outside of that programming. Yeah, I don't know if that for some people, maybe that never happens or that never dawns on them.
I think for some people, I think there are every person. I believe every person has invitations too. But sometimes it only comes with uh, with you know, severe grief or something where all of like the loss of a loved one or a spouse or a child, you know, just tragedies often strangely enough, have that effect where it just
breaks the program. You see that nothing, nothing was important that I thought was important, Or you see that the thing you took for granted, uh you know, was was actually the thing you should have or might have focused on. So sometimes it's those things. But other times I think I think we are uh maybe so, I just I just took this course in at the University of Amsterdam, a two weeks two week course on the history of
human consciousness and the psychedelic history of psychedelics research. But really one thing that they were it was quite a formal class, a lot of lecturing, and and these were by religious study scholars, and one of one of the points they were making is we think there are three base human drives, which is what is it, food, reproduction, shelter or something like that.
Yep.
But actually there's a fourth which is the alteration of one's consciousness, whether it's in small ways just through an amazing meal. But we we do seem and you can look back as far as Homo sapien sapient, or further to Neanderthal, the different types of human varieties that preceded, you know that they all seem to have this desire to break this kind of narrow the narrow mold of their programming.
I think it's I think everyone at some stage thinks is this all there is? You know? Is like, is this is all that I know or there is to know? And obviously the answer is not the answers no to that. But I think also sometimes when our beliefs and our ideas and our stories essentially form our identity, then anyone who doesn't align with our ideas or philosophy or theology or whatever, especially when our sense of self is intertwined
with that, it's almost like they become the enemy. Like when you think about anyone who has really strongly held belief or faith, and you know when who they are is essentially that the idea of well, well, you know, this is what I think or believe, but I could be wrong. Well, that's usually not on the table, you know. I think just the idea of opening yourself to the idea. Like I always say to people, I've been wrong thousands and thousands of times, so I'm probably going to be
wrong about twenty things today. So the idea that I know and everyone that doesn't agree with me is wrong is really just an exercise in ego and insecurity and fear. Yeah.
I think that's why brainwashing is an interesting phenomenon because will often mistake it, or even myself when I got into it, You mistake it as an ideal loot, a problem of ideas, someone got the wrong ideas they got bad ideas they got they fell for. They fell for a scam or a scheme or you know, a set a system that is just wrong or is bad thinking,
or they weren't smart enough to see through it. But I think some of it so much of it riads on emotional identification, also the harnessing of trauma and of painful experiences in your life. And that's the thing that we often don't see. So that I try to argue that brainwashing is actually something that if you're only seeing it happening to other people and not applying the window to yourself, then you're probably missing the actual dynamics of how it works.
Yeah, what's the relationship or the insection. I don't know what the right term is. But between the same mind control, if we had a hierarchy mind control and influence and manipulation and coercion, are they all first cousins? Like is it all in the same wheelhouse?
Yeah? I think I would. I would say that sometimes there are just different words and they have different kind of intensity to them. I mean persuasion, I would take out a little bit. I would say there are aspects of persuasion that are and I even think there's possibly a kind of positive brainwashing or self transformation, as long as it's done with full consent, you can always leave.
There's not an abusive relationship. And you could say many you know, there are ways that you could put yourself in a very intense situation and be transformed, but anyway, influence. There's a guy, there's a researcher named Steve Hassan who's also an exit counselor. He used to be a deprogramm, a cult deprogrammer, and before that he was a member of the Moonies and he is I'm actually backing to him on his podcast tomorrow because I actually know him
because he lives in my area. But he used to come guest lecture in my class on brainwashing and he basically he has an instrument called the Influence Continuum, and it's kind of helpful and you can look it up online, but it helps you place identify certain features which would be extreme influence which is pathological on one side, which would be a high demand cult, or a dangerous abusive cult which is characterized by extreme hierarchy, the extreme sanction
if you try to leave, also a abuse of a sexual and other types financial abuse, the use of love bombing thoughts, stopping all these techniques, whereas on the other end of influence would be actually more educational in a benign sense. And so he kind of lays that stuff out that you can so you can. I think it's a useful tool.
Yeah, I think not all influence is bad. And yeah, maybe there is. Maybe there are some forms of mind control of sorts that I guess. Maybe it depends on the outcome for the individual, right is it. Maybe can there be a good outcome depending on I do think yeah.
I mean if you said yeah, I would say definitely. And this is the thing that's tricky, and all this territory is tricky, and if it wasn't tricky and complicated and full of full of potential problems, it wouldn't be worth writing a book about. You could just write a Wikipedia entry and be done with it, like oh, done
with brainwater. You know, it would be simple. But it's actually quite tricky because a lot of people, when they join a group that they would later call a very dangerous or abusive or a terrible cult, at the beginning, they people often feel great benefit and you can see the benefit in their lives, even as they're maybe they're they're bank account might be drained, but they feel freed
of their programming. They feel empowered. Even the Manson girls, many people describe them, you know, later in the trial, so I write about the Manson family.
Yes, so there.
Were several of them when they were observed in the trial. People they used the word brandwashing in the trial to convict them and say they had been they were sort of mindless robots, but they were still responsible for carrying out the will of Charles Manson. But in their lives, many people surprisingly would describe them as extremely empowered and kind of radiating this kind of self assurance, which is
interesting and not what you expect. And that's what really caught the public when they waltzed into the courtroom seemingly free of any type of conscience, wearing looking like hippies. Basically.
Yeah, I remember you and Rogan talking about how when people often, as you said initially, when they go into these cults, they had this transcendent experience, this euphoric experience. And I had that. I had that the first time I went to this place that I told you about where I won't bore everyone with it, but it's like, oh, you know, it was a moment I thought, I don't know if it was spiritual. I thought it was spiritual,
but it was definitely emotional and psychological. It was like there was this whole and yeah, I still remember that experience really quite clearly. And you're like, oh, and so even it's funny how that can happen, even in the middle of something that's perhaps you know, not as altruistic as it might, you know, try to.
I think that's when it's really fascinating, and it makes it hard when you leave. I think people who leave cults often are it's extremely painful, even if they feel lucky to have escaped with whatever remains of you know, people stand for decades sometimes and they feel drained. There's a guy I wrote about named Ray Connolly who's a really wonderful person I met at a anti conference. He spent thirty five years of his life in the Children of God. But he said, at the beginning, yeah, it
was this amazing connections. He felt filled with like a divine presence, He felt connected to others, He felt this love emanating from him, and it seemed it was so obviously true, and that when you leave, it's very hard to abandon those experiences as untrue or as manipulation. So
I think you kind of have to. I believe it's legitimate to still value those experiences and just to say it's too bad that they were in a context of someone or a group that was ultimately extractive and trying to steal my vital yeah, my life forces, which is essentially how those groups do function. But really, sorry, it's just confusing. I think a lot of people do really struggle after they leave, too, because they don't have that connection and they miss it.
Yes, and then you know that, like I had some experiences within my time that were great, amazing, like, and so there's the the like the experience is real, maybe the premise for what set me up for that, or maybe some of the stories around you know, But did you ever read or maybe you've even met But Megan Phelps Roper wrote that book, unfollow I.
Haven't met her. I haven't, and nor have I read it, though I would like to. But I've heard her interviewed, and I guess I read an essay she wrote for maybe for The New Yorker about this experience.
Yeah, such a good book, so great. I listened to it and Tiff, you had to listen to that, didn't yeh yeah, yeah, yeah great, and you liked it.
I'll put it on my list.
No, it's fantastic now something that Australians are not so familiar with. And I know we've got about fifteen minutes to go. So is mk Ultra, which was a secret CIA program that did some testing with mind control and brainwashing and psychological manipulation using LSD and other drugs. And could you unpack a little bit of that, because I mean, I don't know much about that at all. I've heard about it, but it's not something that we grew up
learning about. Could you. Of course, we've got a global audience, but probably half our audience a Rossi's so could you talk to us about that?
Yeah? Sure. And it actually surprises me that mk ultra has become a household word in the US, because when I started studying it, it was quite obscure. Also, it's just it's one of those programs that sounds like it sounds like a conspiracy theory that must be made up, but it's actually a very dark episode in the history of the US Central Intelligence Agency, which was quite new.
So it was one of the first in depth programs that was funded clandestinely by the CIA right after actually during the armistice of the Korean War, so right after World War Two when the os SO, the OSS is the Office of Strategic Services that preceded the CIA, and once the CIA was was formed, initially as an intelligence agency and then quickly it kind of morphed into, you know,
a covert operation organization. So mk Ultra arose out of a crisis about brainwashing that you know, hit the headlines and hit and it became a kind of an international obsession. These US and there are actually some Australian soldiers who were fighting in Korea because it was a UN coalition that sent soldiers and there were several Australians I think that were caught up in the brainwashing scandal too, So
that would be interesting to look into. These soldiers were POW's prisoners of war held for several years behind north of the Yalu River in these prison camps, and many of them had been through experiences that were so really horrendous, at the edge of death, you know, just from starvation and lack of treatment for their wounds and exhaustion and neglect and so by the time they found themselves in these camps, they were they experienced further, they froze to
death at night they were packed in, but ultimately they were Once the Chinese took over the camps, they they experimented and tried to see whether Maoist re education would actually work on Westerners as well as because Mao predicted it would work on all humanity except for the seven percent who were resistant to being properly re educated or thought reform. So it turned out that term that term really educated. Yeah, such a noble term exactly he thought it.
He thought of it as an atom bomb that exploded in the soul of humankind and that but it had to be continually renewed. So they tried it out on these soldiers, especially the less educated, because they felt those were the equivalent of Chinese peasants. And several and at the end of it, twenty one US and I think of possibly a few Australian soldiers decided they would rather not return to their countries and would and they had become communists or at least wanted to try living in China.
And this caused this. In addition to fifty nine pilots for the US Air Force who made these confessions. They made false confessions to having committed war crimes in front of the news cameras, newsreel cameras of the day. This caused in nineteen fifty three the head of the CIA and the head of the Secretary of State and the President of the US to secretly fund a program called
mk Ultra, which took hold in nineteen fifty three. They developed this elaborate structure to fund it secretly through these cutout organizations. In my research, I've discovered several that nobody really knew about before. And their research covered one hundred
something like one hundred and forty nine sub projects. And they specialized in sort of combinations of dragging people, including with LSD pushing into extreme sleeplessness, and also using hypnosis, and then combining the three of those and with many other techniques to see whether a human being could be basically alienated from themselves sufficiently to perhaps become a Manchurian candidate, meaning they could they would carry out a mission without knowing,
without having any memory of it, Like could you turn somebody into basically losing could you get somebody to lose their agency completely? And become alienated from themselves and so dissociated that with a snap of the fingers, they would go into that state and then they would come back when you wanted them to, and they would have no memory of what they had done, perhaps assassinations, things like that.
So this was a really dark program. Many, you know, people died as a result of it, and later the CIA discontinued it in about ten there was about ten years.
Did the subjects or the people who were being who were used within the program, did they realize Rebecca what they were getting into or were they misled?
Well, the subjects mostly didn't know that they were in this program. No, I mean they were sometimes mental patients. Sometimes they were mostly people who had no legal recourse
against what was the experiments being done in them. The scientists, some of them knew very well, some of them were witting, or some of them knew, but they they thought of it as their patriotic duty, or they had some suspicion, you know, it wasn't quite confirmed because they were working someone like BF Skinner actually he you know, sometimes they would just fund they thought of leading scientists who were
doing behavioral research. So maybe the scientists would half know that this Human Ecology Fund was actually the CIA, but in other cases they really had no idea. So because they would want to fund a left wing scientist who maybe didn't really want to participate in this program, but they're they're ended up participating.
I heard you quote Socrates on Rogan. It's funny because in a part of my thesis, I just put you know, the big like because trying to understand thyself. You know, the beginning of wisdom is to know thyself or whatever he said, And my PhD is essentially around self awareness.
But it's funny how the questions that we ask now, most of the questions that we ask about who humans are and how we are and why we are the way we are, and how the mind works and how we work as an organism among other organisms, like not a lot's changed in some ways from those questions from two and a half thousand years ago. I wonder how much we know about the mind that we didn't know then?
That is a good question, I mean, in some ways, in some ways, uh, I think the I think that the investigation of the mind was profound then. I mean, Socrates is an example. You could go back. We don't always have evidence, but we can we have a sense of the types of explorations that were and in some ways, perhaps with cultural rituals that actually, you know, maybe I don't.
I'm not an expert on this, but I could speculate that there's a kind of wisdom that was possible that actually gets becomes more difficult to achieve in modern societies where we don't have coming of age rituals, we have the ritual aspect of life is cut out. And that's another that's another motivating reason I had for becoming an anthropologist. I was curious, you know, what was what would it
be like? Is it possible to think of a life that was I was structured by meaningful transitions instead of these kind of chaotic world that I seem too that you know, that I was faced by. But on the other hand, we do have certain advances and I guess understandings of certainly brand chemistry is more advanced. And also there's this yeah, go ahead, sorry.
I was just going to say, when you like you personally, you look at a person or something that's going on, and obviously you're a renowned research or an academic, and you know, with a very with respect high IQ and all of that. But at the same time, you're a person who's done good stuff and bad stuff and made mistakes and got things right and got things wrong. And which is the lens that you analyze? Is A is it A is it a hybrid? Like when you're looking
at stuff, do you ever rely on gut intuition? Just like I don't know, you know that that not politically scientific kind of lens because I do. But maybe.
No, no, I completely. I actually think I'd be paralyzed if I didn't. And I've always done that ever since I was in college. I would use my intuition, or I will even just when I wanted to write a paper, I would just go to sleep. Half I'd go. I'd read as much as I could go half to sleep, put a notepad by my paper, and you go into
a state called the hypnagogic state, something like that. And I'd always have an idea that would come to me when I was half sleeping that I couldn't even remember, and then when I woke up, there'd be written down, like some word or some little phrase, and then I would use that. And like even now I have to say, because it's so intimidating to think that you have to read every single thing, contemplate everything, and sort of be
complete in your knowledge, I mean at every level. So I always think of it almost like like I think it's the areas where I'm weak or I feel a kind of stupid, or I just don't get things that are actually a strength, because that makes me want to investigate it. Like this doesn't totally make sense to me. It's almost like you have to have confidence in your gaps, in the things that you that you're just not getting, and that maybe that's worth investigating.
And I know we've got to go. But it's so funny because really, when you think about marketing and branding and selling stuff, of course this is like all advertising and marketing is designed to manipulate people's thoughts or feelings to buy whatever it is that they probably hadn't thought about buying. So this is kind of low level mind control. I feel maybe I'm wrong, but it's like, you know, I talk to people about like a serial pack on the front of the cereal boxes, it's not information, it's
it's a story. And on the back in that tiny little box down the bottom right hand corner, in that tiny little writing. That's where the information is. And if they wanted you to see the actual information about the contents of the box, it'd be on the front in big writing. And you know, so the front is mind control, the front is coercion manipulation. Hey, look there's an Olympian on the front of our pack, and it's got all these stars and ticks and all this amazing shits and
it's going to make you five years younger. You should get this. I mean, it's kind of, if not control, it's definitely mind influence. Right, yeah, totally.
But I think the more you know, more amazing than that is that it works. It still works even if you can identify it you still it still works on me, like I want to look like an Olympian or on some level I am buying into it. There's actually such an interesting history too on the where the emotional cell comes from, you know, selling through emotion as well as through information, and they're quite combined. But yeah, we do. We are subject to conditioning. It's sort of a human
a deeply human quality. And the thing I like about the writer chess Off Milosh is he he just really and some great writers I think what makes them. Great is that they understand how deeply we are shaped by these things, even if we recognize it while it's happening.
Yeah, well yeah, so oh, I talked to you for a long time. All right. The Instability of Truth, brainwashing, mind control and hyper persuasion is out now. Is it available on audio? Rebecca, Yes, there's a really nice audio recording. And I think her name's Patty Nolan, but she does she's like a voice artist. She's Okay, I'm going to get the book today. I'm going to listen to the book today, and then I'm going to send you another request in a few months and you'll go, no, I'm
not going on that Australian show again. That was painful, but I don't care. I'm going to badger you.
It's been so fun to talk to you.
Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Tip Are you interested?
Yeah, yes, come back.
I think'll be back. Yeah, we'll say goodbye affair. But Rebecca, we really appreciate you. What time is it where you are.
It's about six in the evening or I guess wait eighteen. I don't know what system aster in Australia uses. It's in the evening.
Yeah, eighteen hundred six o'clock, six pm. We'll say goodbye affair, but for the moment. Rebecca, thanks so much for being on the You project.
Thanks for having me. It was wonderful to talk to you.