CIA, MKUltra: Mind Control Techniques are Being Used Today & How To Protect Yourself

Can you talk a little bit about why someone would say, "I killed her. I robbed that bank. Why would someone admit to something if they didn't do it?" The super weapon of mind control. By the 1960s, the communists had the secret weapon. There was a great deal of effort made to reproduce the weapon, to understand the dynamics of whatever had happened to the 21 POWs who refused repatriation to the United States. It was seen as defensively necessary. So we need to know how they did it. We need to defend against it. So this is why there was a vast program in the military to create survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training. And that's where they started systematically exposing military personnel to the same brainwashing. The military sent a memo to any troops who had been POWs saying, "Don't comment on the Patty Hurst case."

The case of Patty Hurst, a very, very famous case of brainwashing for which she was never exonerated after being brainwashed. She was held in a closet. She was abused. She was held prisoner. How total can control become? Could you have someone so abandon themselves that they would be actually an unrecognizable new creation?

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

We're going to talk about the case of Patty Hurst, a very, very famous case of brainwashing for which she was never exonerated after being brainwashed. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about other stories such as the case of Leonard Kyle who showed up at a VA hospital in the late 1960s and said that the government had implanted something in his brain to control his mind and that he was a genius. And the government was after him. He was declared a paranoid schizophrenic. Turns out he was telling the truth. We're going to talk about that entire series of experiments that he was part of. In addition, we're going to talk about current policies of the United States government, the United States Army that continue to use mind control, hyper persuasion, and many components of brainwashing in order to try and create super soldiers. But in the process, we're seeing how social media uses these same techniques and is impacting people very significantly. In addition, you might be in a relationship that is utilizing mind control and hyper persuasion. You may not even realize it. We're going to talk all about it. Such a pleasure to welcome to the breakdown, Rebecca Lamov. Break it down. Rebecca Lamov, welcome to the breakdown. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. We're very, very excited to talk to you. Um, Jonathan and I talk about uh the instability of truth on like the lowercase t truth kind of all the time. You know, the book it's it's it's a meaty book. I'm not going to lie. Like it's a journey and it's it's like an historical journey through some of the most infamous and chilling examples of brainwashing, of mind control, and of hyper persuasion. I I do want to start though by just reading um from from the first chapter of the book. You you talk about kind of the context of how to to frame this and and you say that this is common. This is common right now in the 21st century. You you talk about ungrounding, right? Kind of as a um a counterpoint to to sort of the notion of brainwashing. But this modern ungrounding occurs because of rapid technologically driven social change via the digital realm. We we may not experience the wartime extremes that Morris Wills did, which is one of the cases you talk about, but our environments are destabilized by small and large shocks nearly daily, hourly. Can you just frame for us a little bit what is happening in the 21st century that should concern us regarding the instability of truth?

Well, that's a that's a great question at at the heart of the book really or what motivated me to write it which was to say how could I connect these large events in the 20th century that were so extreme and so um in a way dark you know asking the question of whether and under which conditions people can surrender voluntary control of their subjectivity or their thinking. um and how on some level do we agree to that or what were cases in which this seemed to happen and then how does that how might that connect to what we're experiencing the 20 experiencing in the 21st century. So that was kind of the the question I asked myself. So I think that one concept I'm kind of introducing is ungrounding as you pointed to which is really a series of successive shocks to the point of disorientation that I think people can intuitively relate to and you can find it in these events that otherwise you might call hard brainwashing or extreme you know these extreme experiences including what happened to POWs including what happened to you know soldiers uh under these certain conditions and also in cults so I try to draw a connection among all of those things but I think ungrounding comes before what what the classic uh psychiatrist would describe as what happens in thought reform which is usually starts with a description of information control or milieu control which is what Robert Jay Lifton talked about. So I think ungrounding precedes it all and I think intuitively we know we we all have daily experience in relative degrees of ungroundedness.

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

Yes. So how I would distinguish among them is that brainwashing well brainwashing is a kind of a colloquial term that emerged on a certain day in a way in the public to the public in the middle of the 20th century uh through the work of an OSS agent and journalist named Edward Hunter and he published an article in a newspaper in Miami that announced this new secret previously secretive technique that seemed to be uh afflicting uh that communists possess that would afflict um anyone they chose to turn it on. And that he called brainwashing and he said it was widely described among the Chinese uh populace. But that actually wasn't really true. It wasn't a popular term. It was sometimes used by intellectuals. But when he used that word in the English language, he was basically, you know, waving a flag that there was some new thing to be afraid of. And it actually did take off quite quickly in the in the public imagination. And then within a year or two uh after 1950 when it first appeared people started uh hearing about troops uh US troops, UN troops, British troops but mostly US troops who had been uh who seem to be uh succumbing to this technique. So So brainwashing a quick definition or a quick synonym for it would be coercive persuasion. Not simply torture, not simply that somebody was forced, but that they also were persuaded it simultaneously. So there is an element of buy-in, even if it's often the person needing to save their life, but needing to change how they think or finding themselves in a a circumstance where it becomes necessary to change how you think. And it's remarkable that this is in the human capacity in my in my opinion, in my experience, that we don't necessarily understand the extent to which we're all capable of this. Mind control is kind of a I I think it's a a a synonym for brainwashing, but maybe it could be more broadly applied to things like cults, although people also apply brainwashing to cults. So hyper persuasion is a word I coined to distinguish it from uh media analysis of uh persuasion you know, mass persuasion which was huge also in the 20th century around the time brainwashing emerged. And what I wanted to emphasize is just the hyper part of it which is uh that it can be highly targeted. And so mass persuasion usually uh relied on broadcast broadcast messages where everyone was hearing the same thing and maybe there were there were highly personalized responses but we all heard the same message from CBS radio or from whatever. That with hyper persuasion, you actually can be exposed to either a set of messages that are in a specific order due to because it's been algorithmically targeted at you or even political ads that may be designed particularly for you. Um, so hyper persuasion is that increasing, you know, targeting.

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Why now for this book for this information? Well, I have been writing it for some time. Um, but I do think that so when I started thinking about this topic which was about 25 years ago and I first stop I first taught a class you know 15 years ago my colleagues a colleague said why would you ever want to teach a class like that? It seemed trivial to her, I guess. But if you even follow the fate of the word through Google Engram, you see that back in the 90s and early 2000s, it really wasn't. it had fallen out of favor and it was sort of like a relic of the 70s, but it's returned as a as a serious concern and people quite seriously insult each other with the term meaning something very distinct and not referring back to some earlier period when it was kind of like this leftover of the Cold War. When we think about the salience of brainwashing right now, if you look on Hulu for example, there are all these how did I escape the cult and let's start a cult. Like media is often a reflection of the zeitgeist and so there's an enormous amount about people who are being coerced in whatever different way. The Manson family has had a resurgence in media as well. What do you think is happening right now in society that is making us so fascinated by this?

I have noticed the uh resurgence of cult documentaries and like you can't really avoid seeing them and a lot of them are really excellent. Totally good. I've seen them all. They're so good. And you know memoirs of people who grew up in cults. I mean one factor is that the there's a phenomenon called second generation or SGAAS who second uh generation of abuse I think is the term but or sometimes third generation people who were born into cults and didn't really their parents made the choice but raise them in a cult cult and just if that happened in the 70s they're now reaching adulthood or middle age and they want to tell their story. So there's a kind of chronological uh connection to this early period, earlier period when cults first became a huge social phenomenon in the US. So the first reaction most people have when you hear someone was in a cult was how could you have fallen for that? And often when I watch those documentaries, I too think like Keith Reer not good-looking. You know why? What were they thinking? Or you want to always distance yourself or with a scam you think I would never have given my life savings. You like to think I wouldn't have fallen for that and create some sort of distance. But part of the appeal of the documentary is it's both distancing and identific and and a kind of fascination with how could that have happened. And it seems like right now we have lost our centralized beacon of truth. Some say for the better, some say for the worse and the destruction of democracy. I'm actually I want to push a little bit further. You know, we we are living in an age where, you know, no matter which side you voted for, the president of the United States has introduced a notion of there being fake news and there being fake media. And there's all sorts of conversations and restrictions about what media is allowed in the White House now. And I know that that's always been an issue, but it's never been so much part of, I think, our social vernacular to be thinking about these things. So, you know, I think if you're asking my opinion, this is the perfect time for this book because we're literally living in an age where we're being told you don't know what's true or we'll tell you what's true or are you sure you know what's true or trust the government. We promise we are doing something in your best interest, but then we're finding things out that kind of aren't true. So, I'm going to push a little bit harder than even Jonathan wanted to. Part of what seems to feed into it is uh polarization that we're all familiar with, but I really think that um also a crisis in the domination of certain forms of media. What I mean, just the fact that we can refer to legacy media as this kind of thing that seems that term just seems to uh place it in a museum. And in fact, the CBS News broadcast no longer gets as many viewers as, you know, many podcasts or many, you know, c distinct points of view that are narrow, technically narrowcast. So, so we're living in a really destabilized environment where many voices um gain attention in a way that's I think that we don't have enough p historical perspective on the moment we live in right now. So this is one of the places that I think you can maybe help us understand.

So, one of the kind of paradoxical aspects when we think about brainwashing, when we think about cults, and you know, I think one of the best examples, you know, for those of us who are older and and have more kind of information about the Patty Hurst kidnapping, one of the paradoxical things is that often times people who are brainwashed, they seem to like their new life. They get along, okay? Right. And even in Patty Hurst's case when she, you know, kind of came back and described she was held in a closet like she was she was abused, she was held prisoner, but at a certain point and I think that the the quote that she gives, which you talk about, she accommodated her thoughts to coincide with her captors. And her other quote was, "They got nicer every day. They didn't kill me." Which is a little bit how I describe my childhood. But I wonder if you can talk about this confusion. I think it happens with cults too and and you talk in the book about it's discussion, criticism, unity. The way we sort of, you know, see people broken down through an elaboration of their story, then a criticism of what they came from and this rebirth of a new identity. What is going on? Because some of us might say, "Seemed like she was okay with it. What's the problem? Like she's guilty, right? Or even with Manson, he brainwashed everybody, but they seemed fine with it. They're guilty. What is happening when people seem okay and then can they use that as a defense? Well, I was brainwashed. Yeah, that's such a great question. And you're getting to the heart of I think the paradoxes that are inherent in this subject matter, which can be painful. Just to get to Patty, so I could focus a little bit on Patty Hurst because she's a great example. um when she was tried. So she was she was held in the closet for 70 plus days um subjected to Maoist uh literature and forced to make um broadcast or tapes, cassette tapes that were then sent out to the media at first just saying how she was and then um addressing her parents and then after a while declaring her revolutionary identity and and she also was a very famous wealthy heir. She was an heiress. She was a she was she was an heir. So she was a 19-year-old kid who was going to UC Berkeley, right? No, but I'm saying there was a there was a ransom component in that she was she was a desirable person to be kidnapped by this organization as they saw it. Definitely. They saw it as a a righteous political operation and I think they put it and they they had several possible wealthy signs of wealthy families but she she was nearby and uh but people might not if they had met her they they might know she was a Hurst but they wouldn't have seen her as you know swanning about or anything. Nonetheless she was abducted and she was forced she was raped and you know the most terrible thing. She couldn't even go to the bathroom by herself. Not and she actually couldn't wash her. I mean, it was her beyond horrific. And in her trial that the juries actually toured the two closets in which she was held for all that time. She was blindfolded. There was sensory deprivation. There was sleeplessness. She lost a lot of weight. The military um sent a memo to any troops who had been POWs saying please don't comment on the Patty Hurst case because it's uh comp it's being compared to your experience and uh the same experts who had studied the POWs or worked with them were also came to testify in her case but nonetheless the attempt to defend her from so she later when she was let out of the closet she was asked to declare she was asked whether she wanted to join them or not. And she said at that moment she realized she wanted to live and if she said no, they would take it personally. They they felt they had a strong bond with her and they felt that she had freely joined them in the closet and that she had freely given her sexual uh favors, things like that. So she knew at that moment that it would be too much of a risk to say I want to go home. She had to make herself also believe in the things they believed in or if she wanted to live and she had decided at some point that she did want to live. When the prosecution was uh bringing up her crime, she had she had assisted in robbing a bank and she had done it at use, you know, using a machine gun or automatic weapon. She had carried a weapon uh thus forever ensuring that she would be on dorm room posters as kind of this icon of revolutionary. One of the defense, one of the one of the prosecutors said, "She looked so agile. She looked like she was eagerly participating." And she said, "Oh, well, behind me they were holding a gun." And not only were they holding a gun on her, she had had to become a revolution. She said, "I had by the time they they were done with me, I really was one of them." But so this defense did not hold up in court. And even today, many people in the public when it's polled, I think PBS did a poll in 2014, nobody thought she should be exonerated because they said she in her her physical body did this. It doesn't matter the conditions of coercion. It doesn't matter the rape. Even her biographer Jeffrey Tubin said like two years ago, she was a willing participant. She was ripe for the plucking. It's this interesting way that her experience people refuse or cannot fully identify with her sufficiently to understand what she went through. And she understood that. She said, "I felt that nobody would ever understood what understand what I had gone through." And trauma really wasn't part of the conversation, you know, for for most of the history of discussions of brainwashing and and mind control. Um, but you you choose to acknowledge it, you know, as this significant feature uh of of trauma and and emotional processing, right, that is involved in I mean, even the Patty Hurst case, it kind of makes me think like, well, I don't know who are we like who was she, right? Like when you look in the mirror and you see Rebecca or I look in the mirror and I see Mamm like there's things that I think I know about myself but when placed in that kind of situation you really begin to not understand right who you are and you know you you quote Vivian Gornick and her memoir about growing up in a very very complicated interdependent sick you know household. Her father died when she was young and her mother never got over it and used her essentially as a bridge for attachment and it became this push and pull and you know her mother said to her you know later in life why don't you walk away from my life I'm not stopping you and you use this to sort of describe the extreme complexity of what happens when we're in a situation where we are told to question who we are and our identity is redefined. ed by the other and in many cases the person who is an oppressor, an abuser, a dominant or an authority figure. So can you talk a little bit about that complexity? Because I'm kind of thinking for anyone who's raised in abuse or alcoholism like you have to do things in order to survive. You have to fawn, you have to freeze, you have to fight or you have to flee. Like those are your choices, right? But what what I kind of saw throughout this book is a lot of fawning happens when you are under threat. You have to in some way restructure your identity so that you can survive. But then again, who are you actually? And when you get out, can you go back to being the person you were?

It does raise the question of who are we? And you can ask I mean if you follow some of some people I've been to uh meetings of the international cultic studies association and for survivors of cults um and for people who work with them uh counselors but also for academics who are interested in these phenomena. That it really is a very difficult thing to find yourself on the other side of one of these. For whatever reason, you you managed to get free of a coercive controlling situation um into which you either were born or you you had certain strategies that allowed you to survive that were functional at least to some degree. Um but afterwards, it's a really confusing experience. Um many people like Patty Hurst, she almost died just from her from physical collapse initially and the one of the experts who examined her said called her a low IQ zombie. She had lost something like 40 points of IQ. Just from the experience, she was so diminished and not not just that, but malnourished. Um, but to people on the outside, she seemed pe like I actually found in the YouTube comments, someone wrote, "I partied with Patty Hurst when she was on the run." Because there was a whole period after the bank robbery where she was apparently free, but she was constantly in fear for her life. But they said, "I met her in on the California coast in a car. We partied all night." It's kind of this theory of the wild ride that she had secretly wanted this to happen or somehow orchestrated her own kidnapping. That's a historical narrative about women also about the the seductress who had it coming or you know even I've been learning a little bit about like witch folklore and like the the political notions of who as a woman was not accepted, right? We had this narrative that she was stealing stealing your babies. She was, you know, causing all sorts of usually like sexual mayhem, right? So, it's kind of interesting that it's also a narrative, I think, that we treat women differently in these situations than men. For sure. Very much so. Her fiancé was uh Steven Weed, who was her math teacher in high school, and he told this whole story of how when she was 15, she was so adult and she had seduced him by just simply waiting around all the time. She's just waiting around and therefore you know he had tried to resist but there was ultimately nothing a human man could do and so that's how she ended up in Berkeley living with her math teacher from high school even before any of this happened uh there was this power attributed to her just simply by you know this sexuality or whatever they wanted to call it but when she was finally arrested she initially said her occupation was urban guerrilla and she gave the the black power salute. I think she was so, you know, deeply in this role. It's not really a return. It's a reconstruction or a construction of a new self really. And um I think for a lot of people who leave cults, it's it's a really it's a really difficult process of re because you've lost so much. Uh you've usually you know if you think about the sunk cost analysis you've sunk everything into this dream and often there are real payoffs of ecstasy you know certain um rituals that people do um the use of meditation the use of bonding uh love that you know this kind of sense being in a community the sense of incredible meaningfulness the sense that you are among the select few who understand the nature of the universe like that these rewards that you're initially given and that are played out while while someone is in a controlling situation. When they're removed, it can make life feel quite bleak.

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

Well, doom scrolling, uh, I was surprised to learn just because I was more familiar with the colloquial term, uh, that it actually is studied scientifically and that it's a phenomenon of being unable to unable to separate yourself from the ongoing flow of um stimuli that you're being presented with on your whatever device you're using. So, I think we're all familiar with it. Even though it doesn't feel good, it's hard to stop doing it. It becomes compulsive, like a kind of a loop. I it feels like you're consuming relevant information I suppose when you're doing it or that it's somehow consoling perhaps but it certainly is compulsive. So anyway, there have been a lot of studies of how this how this operates. Let's talk a little bit about Facebook. Kind of since Facebook started there's been conversation about what are we participating in? How did this start? You know, some of his early comments um you know, about his interest in the social experiment that became Facebook, you know, definitely uh made some people uncomfortable. Uh but what you talk about in the book is that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people were subject to experiments involving manipulation that were only facilitated because of Facebook. Can you talk a little bit about what happened?

Well, I I actually have I have many students who uh take my classes and then go on to work at Facebook or they work at one of the social media um companies during their summer breaks or things like that. And several of them have said things like well for my summer they gave me a data set of 20,000 users and I or you you get to sort of do A/B testing or you know work with that. It's part of the user agreement that as a user you do agree to be have your feed manipulated or your information used in an experimental manner. I think we're we're probably unaware of the extent to which we agreed to this. There was a formal experiment that began in 2012 involving 700,000 or 693,000 users who were not uh notified that they were part of an experiment. And this was actually an unusual so Facebook's research team undertook this and they published it ultimately in 2014. So for a period of months um this subset of users had um they were divided into three groups and one of them had their their news feed altered in a negative direction measuring the emotional content of the news that they were exposed to. Another group had their news feed altered in a positive direction. And I'll go I can tell you later about how they how they gauged positivity versus negativity. And another was a control group. And they discovered that the group that had its news feed altered in a positive direction then posted in response more positive items or responses or emoticons. They discovered that the group that had a feed that was skewed negatively and it was skewed um relatively more negatively for some people. And in those cases, those people posted more negatively. So the degree of skewing also was reflected in the posting that people did or the response. So you really had a stimulus response, kind of classic stimulus response experiment. And it was an announcement that massive scale contagion, emotional contagion had been achieved. And it was not so much the fact that emotional contagion exists that was significant but the fact that it could be done across a network without any social presence without any physical presence and also without um direct interaction and that so sort of an operationalization of contagion. This caused a huge outcry when it was published. The thought that also they may have been encouraged down a negative route that was detrimental to their mental health is kind of shocking to me. It's not shocking to me at all. The digital ecosystem, everything we consume online has a massive incentive structure to promote rage, anger, and that's what drives the bottom line. These companies are immoral in terms of the impact on society and our mental health because they're motivated and their sole concern is to drive shareholder value. They will do that at any cost with any amount of destruction along the way. And in fact, they will actively remove any obstacle in order to achieve that goal. What we as a society have to realize is that is what they are built to do. And so opting in to use the platforms and not understanding that our news and our reality in our digital experience is being curated by those forces is the risk. The problem of course is that there's no alternative. The, you know, counterargument about not having these is that the mainstream or quote the previously trusted news sources have their own problems where their their incentive structure is different in terms of, you know, how they're driving clicks, but but they're equally motivated by outrage.

I Yeah, I think that the outrage cycle does uh apply to, you know, across media outlets. But what was interesting about the Facebook experiment, so one of the responses they got from the public were people writing in saying, "How can I know if I was one of those 693,000 users because I went to the emergency room with suicidal ideation that week or one of, you know, during that time span and I think that maybe I was in that experiment or how how would I know?" And there they're very uh poignant uh responses from people who identified with this possibility. And um what I think is interesting about what I try to argue is not so much that these are playing on um outrage as that it's the emotion that we don't see. I think we think of it as flying people with uh negative ideas or uh or I think we intellectualize it too much. And what the Facebook experiment showed is that it actually pulls on kind of your one's repository which everyone has of unprocessed deep emotion and that that and and the fact that of the way they structured the experiment to me reveals this and that they did cite and Gornick I mean Facebook was citing that book you were referring to May as its model for how emotional contagion works and what they were trying to achieve in this experiment was that level of of a kind of inchoate and deeply path, you know, deeply deeply troubling um issues that we all have that I call trauma. Um, they also used a word processing, a word counting software that actually pulled from people's diary entries that were they were asked to describe the worst thing that had ever happened to them in their lives and diary note journal about it for for the part of the experiment and that was drawn to build the language model on which the word counting software was built and that was what was used to gauge the emotion. So, however that operates, I think it's a good reminder that it's not simply a kind of propagandistic ideas that are being circulated as much as the fact that people are emotionally vulnerable and that to the extent one can be aware of it.

Let's unpack this for a second. I feel depressed. I want to go home. I mean, I don't think it's propagandistic. I think it's exploitive. The there are vulnerabilities in the human consciousness and the human emotional landscape that are being systematically exploited. So explain a little bit more about the journal entries. Are they building those language models to then target news stories that include that to trigger the emotions or they're just using those language models to evaluate people's posts to say where is their emotionality ranking?

In recent years, I think in the last two years, Facebook once again, but less publicly, gave uh researchers some limited access to its data so they could run experiments on political persuasion. And they didn't actually find that polarization occurred more readily through um alteration of the news feed. Uh they actually found that if you made the news feed more boring by just making it chronological, people were just less engaged. But that so it it was more that the significance was found in you know going I feel in the in the harvesting of trauma that that's the area where it's really potent and that I mean there are many people going around talking about how we should be aware of our exposure to social media. What does that mean harvesting of trauma in this scenario? I understand the journaling so that they can build a model to gauge how emotional posts are, but explain a little bit more about about the active use of it now just in in everyday posts.

I mean, I don't think it necessarily applies to everyday posts today, but I use it as a I use it to illuminate what we're experiencing every day because I think that we could be more aware on that level of uh how you re how these things that seem like tiny meaningless decisions, you know, I'll just spend an extra minute on Instagram. This happened to me recently. My family was like, "You're you're spending a lot of time on Instagram." And I and I said, "Surely not. I'm just doing my research." Or something like that. But I really was. It's just I think that we tend So this was the whole design of my project is to say, what is the connection between these seemingly hard situations, these impossible, dire, you know, shocking deprivations of human human liberty and subjective control? And what is the connection between that and the seemingly meaningless choices we're making every day? Uh these tiny clicks and uh interactions and you know and responses and um so the insight I think that I'm gleaning from sitting with this for many years and I have to say I also use uh my meditation practice of 25 years and many hours a day is that there's a that we're being that we're responding on that level. Um and this is what happened with the this is what happened with the people who underwent thought reform in Maoist China. This is what happens with people in cults. This is what happened with Patty Hurst as well.

Okay. So I want to talk about though. Hold on. That different register just went from Maoist China to cults to the social media that I literally am eating seven times a day. Like it's it is what is sustaining most of humanity. Like my children are on their phones half the day. Like when you look at the hours that rack up. So you know I don't mean to be an alarmist here but you just took me from you know POWs being brainwashed and tortured to being given a new identity that might make you murder someone to Fred on the couch to Fred on the couch. By the way, Fred on the couch is having his trauma harvested, you know, through and and and honestly, you know, I I don't think you're wrong and and I don't mean to make this kind of, you know, extreme leap that social media is the same as, you know, Maoist propaganda from the Korean War. However, when I look at the fact, and I'm trying to be super right down the middle, like for most of my adult life, but when I look at the fact that X is controlled by someone who's hanging out in the White House and who's parking his cars on the front lawn of the White House, I'm a little concerned. I'm like really really a little bit concerned about what is happening. And I just and you know this speaks to the point of this book where you're trying to tell people believe people when they say who they are. Understand the larger system you're functioning in. But this is something that seems to have infiltrated everybody's life. No matter what side of the political spectrum you're on and no matter what side of the emotional spectrum you're on and no matter where you fall on the trauma spectrum. It feels like very very vulnerable right now. I don't mean it to be a call for panic or further.

No, we like you to call for panic though because I feel panicked. This is part of how um a lot of extremely controlling situations can operate or change your you know silo people, things like that. But I think it's most useful applied to one's own circumstances at least as a lens for reflection and uh for finding you know that some place some space between the stimulus and the response.

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

His way through it. Right. So, one of the the most startling and tragic aspects of the stories that you tell and the way that you tell them is is it Leonard Kill? Is that how you pronounce his last name? Uh, Kyle. Kyle. Okay. Yeah.

So, a man showed up at a VA hospital in the 1970s and I'm going to cry cuz it I get very emotional about this story. And what he said was he said, "The government put things in my brain and they're listening to my thoughts and they're controlling my behavior." And what they said is, "You're a paranoid schizophrenic and and you should be locked up." And he said, "No, I really mean it." and he was absolutely telling the truth. His name was Leonard Kyle and he was part of a a set of experiments which may or may not have been controlled by the CIA, but he was part of a larger set of experiments that we do know that the government participated in to try and figure out how the human brain works and in many cases how to control people's behavior.

You know, some of the most startling aspects of this story trace back to the experiments done on prisoners in the concentration camps during World War II. And history will keep repeating itself. It's got a really, really good carbon copy that it's making. And what we know, not just from the story of of of Leonard, but through things like what we know about the MK Ultra program, the government has always been involved, at least in the 20th century, with trying to control people with the use of various techniques and methods and drugs. And in many cases it's couched in oh we want to learn more but in many cases it it destroys not only individuals families and communities. For many people it has destroyed their faith in the United States government.

Um I watched the Netflix series Wormwood which details the life of Frank Olsen. um who who was experimented on with incredibly powerful psychedelic drugs and ended up mysteriously dying. And it's a fantastic series. I highly recommend it. I I want you to talk a little bit about the the framework of government mind control and hyper persuasion. And then I do want you to talk about the things that the government still does. And for many of us, the torture of prisoners is never acceptable. and making people give false confessions is not it's not something that I want our government doing and yet it happens all the time. So can you give us a little bit of history of the government's role in mind control and also take us to the present and what is in place today and how are we supposed to reconcile that with even having a structure of understanding truth.

Um that's a great question too. Um yes this well I'll I'll just say that um in the middle of the 20th century and this is one of the great advantages of studying uh people I would call dusty social scientists is that they often were u part of a project that you could argue had to do with the the idea of too much democracy that if everybody had a voice and everybody was expressing their desires you know there was a feeling that society wouldn't run properly. and order in an orderly manner is probably a legitimate concern to some degree and that therefore you needed potentially aories of and behave of behavioral control and there was a great deal of effort put into that. That's what I wrote my dissertation about which is human engineering and social engineering and behavioral engineering. So at the root of that is this kind of just uneasiness with uh with the public. And so the idea that people need to fulfill certain kind of roles and they not only need to fulfill the roles um by by kind of coercion but really more like they need to prefer what we want them to what is you know they need to want to do that role. And like behaviorists were famous for saying things like give me a baby and I can make any kind of man you know a shopkeeper a janitor a scientist by the 1960s um under very you know partly in response to the brainwashing crisis uh it's fairly I mean directly in response to the 21 PS who refused repatriation to the United States and to this announcement by that that the communists had uh these this secret weapon. There was a great deal of effort made to reproduce the weapon to understand the dynamics of of uh whatever had happened.

So sorry just to clarify. So we were basically taking the techniques that we saw worked to turn devoted patriotic young US soldiers into communistbelieving non US citizens. And we said gosh that's a pretty powerful tool. Let's learn how they did it, right? I mean, in part, it was seen as defensively necessary. So, we need to know how they did it and we need to defend against it. So, this is why there was a vast program in the military to create resistance uh survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training, but to really add to the resistance part of it. And that's where they started systematically exposing uh troops or uh military personnel to uh the same brainwashing. When the when the press found out about it in the 50s when something like 100,000 men ran through these early these early trainings, they said these were schools for sadist. actually why do you need to why do you need to subject people to this in order to understand how it works or to to prevent them to protect them? But this was actually seen as a process of inoculation against a kind of the super weapon um of mind control at the same.

So this is an ironic yet, you know, somewhat predictable response from the government to fund MK Ultra. And this was the purpose of MK Ultra was to see how how total can control become and could you ultimately create something like a Manurion candidate. Could you have someone so abandon themselves that they would be actually an unrecognizable, you know, new creation? And there were several there were 143 sub projects at least. And some of them ran you know by were run by psychiatrists. One of them was run by a psychiatrist named Lewis Jollian West and he is connected to the case you mentioned of Leonard Kyle although not directly funded by MK Ultra. It was a case in which this kind of extreme form of behavioral control was through psychosurgery was pursued. And I I hesitated to write about this for a long time because it disturbed me so much and like you it that chapter made me cry. I mean, I I spent a sbatical year just sitting here with these materials. I've met two of his grandsons uh who didn't know he was their grandfather because he was hospitalized and he was seen as a raving madman. But in fact, his two doctors at Mass General Hospital, who were also affiliated with um a Harvard unit for the study of violence, um felt that felt that uh he was a worthy recipient of this new technology, which was a brain implant that would allow remote control and it would it would address people who are seen as problematically violent.

So the question of whether Leonard Kyle, who was an engineer, he was a self-taught engineer who grew up in Cambridge from a working-class family. That was the other thing. When he showed up at the hospital, he's like, "I hold patents. I hold US patents." Which is like what you think mentally ill people say. It's really an astounding story. He show Yeah. He showed up at the hospital raving in the late 60s um in California. And yeah, he said, "My two doctors from MIT and Harvard are after me. They've implanted things in my brain. I'm the inventor of many patents. I'm, you know, I'm a genius and they're coming after me in my brain. They're trying to attack me in my brain. It was actually technically all true, but his doctors, you know, people who saw him just thought he was crazy and and he did become completely incapacitated. One of his doctors was actually connected with West who was one of the most prominent MK Ultra experimenters. And another interesting angle of part of the story is that one of the residents on the case when the operation was performed was Michael Kiteon, the novelist who wrote uh ended up writing the terminal man about this case, but he kind of changed he changed some of the elements. So it was very surreal and it did explore what appears to be paranoia can simply be a real realistic description of what has happened to somebody.

Can you talk a little bit about what you know currently goes on? Um, I'm also mildly obsessed with forced confession stories. Um, like these are the documentaries that I find so fascinating. Um, both because they're they're legally fascinating to me, but it is it's a it is a conversation about psychological persuasion. And you know, depending on either the physical or the emotional environment that someone is placed in, people can confess to things that they did not do back in the news and conversation about Guantanamo Bay. Um, in many cases, this is a technique that is still being used and condoned. You know, to me, when you're torturing people, you are not getting any accurate information. Meaning, how do you tell what's true when the environment someone has been put in is one of physical or psychological torture? Can you talk a little bit about forced confessions?

Yeah, I mean the main connection in my research has been in Guantanamo and the way that um the interrogators and the the uh the dark site that was created at Guantanamo for people that were seen as the most dangerous um I mean were were uh systematically subjected to sleep deprivation and torture and water boarding and all the very same techniques in fact by the very same people who had been trained at SER camps which I had mentioned earlier the survival and resistance training the military developed over back in the 50s but kept refining over the years though they were the most practiced at um these these kinds of techniques of you would say enhanced interrogation so this was done on the Guantanamo prisoners many of them are still there because actually there the evidence they g they gave can't it can't really be used in court because it is extracted under torture yet they also are not they're not allowed to be released many of them so they're in the kind of terrible bond but I think earlier than that um there's a great there's a great book called Guantanamo Diaries which is like a 700page account of a man I think his name is Muhammad Al Guarani I might have his no Muhammad Slahi uh he he's like he's a really incredible writer who happened to be uh subjected to all these techniques. He was ultimately exonerated from any connection to al-Qaeda. But he he he talks about the pressure to that that basically they know you're guilty already. This is the nature of the types of interrogations that go on in thought reform. If the government already knows you're guilty, the main task is simply to acknowledge that guilt and to find the Soviets were also very good at this. And you can break somebody much better through uh a set of techniques that also involve um neglect rather than um simple torture.

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

It is an it is a a real mystery if you look at it from the outside. Uh if you just if you if you imagine yourself as like a floating camera, you say, "Why would someone ever do that?" But you you're not seeing all the steps that led up to that point. And if I the maybe the most the example that springs to mind for me just from my own research is the example of a man named Dr. Vincent who was a French physician who was uh working in China in the this earlier period but I think it applies to today as well. He was trained in French medical school but he always was interested in China. He took his family and settled there and he began treating Chinese patients and he's basically just someone who liked to paint in the afternoons and he was a very good doctor. He treated patients in town. He treated them in the country. But as people started um leaving China around the uh the early 1950s around the time of the you know the Mauist consolidation and things like that. Um he was told he should leave with all the foreigners but he didn't want to. So he stayed around. He said he said they'll never I don't think they'll arrest me because I'm just there's nothing about me that's threatening. I'm just treating people. But in the end, he was arrested and he was put in a cell, a struggle cell with uh 12 other people in a very small space. And he was interrogated, you know, rigorously. And of and of course he said, "I'm not a spy. How could you think I'm a spy?" And the judge would continually reiterate, "We we the government knows you are. we would have never arrested you if you weren't guilty. So it it merely becomes our task to find your guilt. And at first he just said, "Here's what I've done every day." So and you know with within a day or two they had already they put him in chains and he can't um when he goes back to the cell he's not allowed to you know relieve himself. So he has to rely on the other prisoners to unzip him so he can pee in a cup. He has to get down on his hands and knees to eat like a dog. He uh you know he's restricted in his sleep. He has to curl up in a little ball or they say he's an imperialist. At every moment his his wrists and his legs start bleeding from the chains and he's dragging them around. So after a week or two he's just so he starts to think about ways he might be a spy. M he so he starts to mention little conversations he had with passers by where he said you know someone told him that um that you know the shoes had gone up in price and he told another French person that and they said oh well and that was passed on to an American. So they they write that down. They say initially so at first he just start tries to me uh mention little details that will sat satisfy them but after a while he starts to build himself up because he really he says after a while all you want is them to remove the chains. All you want is to be out of the situation and you think the only thing that will satisfy them is a big story. So he says I am actually a spy. I am a big spy. I've done all these things and they won't even believe that because they know that's not true. And so after a you know it's like a period of negotiation where he finally whittleles down his story to resemble reality and it takes it takes shape around the things that he has identified that he actually did but it has a whole new meaning and he says you come to believe that meaning he's he's like I wasn't deluded but in that context I came to believe it. It's a special kind of belief. And with that belief came this kind of elation because when he succumbed to it, they finally removed the chains. He was accepted by his cellmates. He was allowed to live. He was allowed to teach French two hours a day. But, you know, the re-education continued and finally ultimately he signed his confession and he said, you know, and it was worked out together. was a collaborative document and then he was allowed to leave and he went back to Hong Kong and ultimately back to France and at that point he met Robert J. Lifton who's one of the psychiatrists who'd studied brainwashing and he and he uh told Lifton I still don't know which to believe. That's unreal.

And then when you take a system, you know, like we have with, you know, what I believe is systemic racism, systemic homophobia, you know, all these things, when you have people who are then in a position to be already taken advantage of. I I want to talk a little bit about the SEIR program that you mentioned. It stands for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. And this training program um was was started by the government, right, as a way the army as a way to sort of um set up practice scenarios where you might um be, let's say, if you're kidnapped or taken prisoner, um here are all the things we're going to do to you to see if we can break you. But in the process, in my opinion, it becomes an incredibly sadistic and complicated government system by which they are then gaining control of an entire population that they have access to. Jonathan, that show that we watched, Lioness, um the I think the first episode shows kind of one of these programs and this takes place now. Is this still something that soldiers have to go through where they're put in a box and tortured and they in theory are so disoriented that maybe they don't know if maybe they were actually kidnapped by a foreign government and then like after x number of days they're like no just kidding. It's just us testing you. Is this still going on? And does it need to go on?

Well, I think it it does still go on. uh soldiers are instructed not to I mean you're you're not supposed to talk about it but if you I have met people who recently who have been through it and um they changed some they do some screening for psychological uh you know fitness uh there was a study in the 2000s by at Yale about of people who went through the this training this year training and not all of it involves the extreme the extreme the water boarding and the the Syrian box and the physical brutality, but there's a level at which it does involve that level C for people who are likely to be captured uh or you know at some risk of being captured. So this study at Yel showed that everyone who goes through it or pretty much pretty much everyone experiences some trauma traumatic effects uh destabilizing yet also they found that it can be valuable and this is what I found talking to people who have been through it is that they do say and even some people who experienced the worst of it I mean terrible in the early days it was really unmodified by um it it was extremely brutal and even the originators even the originators even Lewis Jolly and West were called in to modify it because people were being destroyed and broken from their own government. And nonetheless, it can teach you something about yourself. So even a guy that I comes to lecture to my class who's a professor named Glenn Peterson, he said, I mean, he deplores it. He deplores what happened to him. It it did draw on his trauma, his own experiences. I mean, it was incredibly destructive, but he also says it taught him something about himself that he didn't break. He found a way not to.

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

You're basically subjected to the worldview of this other person and it it becomes extremely compelling. If that person is a narcissist, person was charismatic and there were certain rewards and there are ways that they felt good and they felt finally whole, there's a way it can shatter or snap and you never quite know how that's going to happen. People have attempted deprogramming. Sometimes friends attempt to, you know, shake you and say like, "Girl, you can do better." You know, all sorts. That actually happened to me. That was very helpful as a friend who said, "What are you doing? you you know he acts like he's smarter than you, better looking and funnier. But the views of people you trust or once trusted even if you're isolated is a very helpful thing. Um if you can do that I think that the danger of such relationships is that you do become isolated and that's part of that their dynamics. You're isolated in this hyperdimensional world that's quite compelling where everyone else seems to be an enemy. Many components of unhealthy relationships literally have exactly that formula. Meaning you're asked to like tell all about yourself and in many cases you're lovebombed and they want to know everything about you and they want to be part of your life and then it's like a slow chipping away especially if you're in a situation where you're being isolated from your family. They didn't do it right. I can love you better. Like don't go talk to that friend, right? And then the unity is like we have something special that no one else can touch and no one understands it and you can't leave because we're meant to be together. Right? Like that's brainwashing.

I mean, there's a there's something I found fascinating which is that uh Mao Dong said he said nobody is permanently thought reformed. Nobody is permanently re-educated. Even myself I have to resubject myself. So there there's a way these relationships I mean this is maybe a cause for hope. They have to be continually re renewed and that's why people get sent off to the countryside. That's why these you know there's an intense uh cycle in in abusive relationships as well where you know the person breaks and they could they might break off but they sometimes end up re rededicating themselves even more so. There's the famous Festinger study of cults and um cognitive dissonance and that like when a predicted event doesn't occur, there's a cho there's a point people reach a choice point where they're either going to leave the group because the world didn't actually end or they become even more dedicated. I think it's a cause for hope that they it isn't conversion is it actually happens. We are changed but that that change is need not be and never really is permanent. Mhm. It just needs to be continually renewed. So you have an opportunity always to break that. I think your true freedom lies in in a sense you where you place your attention and the fact that some things can can I mean a lot of things can be controlled. We can be controlled a lot more than we think but there's always some freedom.

I think before we let you go, I want to ask about kind of one specific example and I'd love for you to give us any, you know, kind of suggestions in this framework of how we frame truth. Um, so Jonathan and I have been talking about the Fiser papers and, you know, what we're learning is what many paranoid people already thought, uh, which was that the government knew about certain aspects of vaccines not being safe, causing damage, and they lied about those things. Like that's just I mean I don't want to say it but like that's just true. It's just now we know that it's true. So I I wonder like how are we supposed to frame that kind of information because it's kind of like I remember when we were told to like wash our vegetables before we ate them during co and I was like I don't know why I was like that's not a thing. I'm not doing that. Like I'm not going to do it. And certain people in my life were like no we are washing the vegetables. we're going to die if we don't wash the vegetables. And they believed that that was true. But then when we were told you don't have to wash vegetables, they then had to say, "Oh, that wasn't true." Right? Or when we were told the only solution is to close playgrounds and churches and synagogues, and then we were told, "Oh, that wasn't the only solution." Or, "Oh, the way they did it in Sweden clearly had different effects." Right? How do we frame like what how can you believe in anything with any veracity if in theory it might shift and especially when the authority that you're relying on is the government?

In a sense public health worked the way it's supposed to work which is to send out be the messages you know which will necessarily obscure some of the truth because they're trying to speak to the greatest good for the greatest number. So they're going to say you should take the vaccines. they're going to probably want to suppress evidence of vaccine injuries. I mean, that's not so surprising. But what I think was regrettable about this time was that the misrepresentation of science and its mobilization and weaponization. So, there was a great disdain for those who were said to be not following the science when the nature of science is an ongoing discussion especially in a situation of an un emerging unknown pathogen. So, there should not have been suppression. there should not have been the the extreme like what you're describing the the mobilization of just neighborhood watches to you know are you are you believing correctly are you if you even question or bring up certain sources it became you know an occasion for disdain and the slogan you know trust the science but the science was and science is this is the nature of science it's an ongoing process it doesn't reach it doesn't reach a solid state it it never really does And that's the nature of it. I think this is also a great example, you know, as you described, of of of mass information, which can lead to mass hysteria. And the fact is one of the responsibilities, at least as the government sees it, is to try and statistically stack the chips in favor of what they believe the greatest good will be for the most people. And the fact is the the nuances of the amount of money that you know the government pays to people who have had adverse effects from vaccines which has been going on since vaccines have existed. The overemphasis on that kind of information does threaten a larger bureaucratic structure which is we would hope designed to help the the most vulnerable people, right? Um, but it's just very very hard very hard to get my head around sort of, you know, the degree to which we're supposed to believe in something. And as a scientist, I completely understand those things change. I mean, there are things in in my field. There's things in all fields of science that, you know, Jonathan and I love to talk about these things like the things that hippies said, we promise energy exists, right? You can see it around a person, right? And in some cases it's technology, in some cases it's you know a transcendental consciousness shift that needs to happen. Uh but those things are happening all the time and it does it really it makes you obviously question truth.

We really really love talking to you. The instability of truth, brainwashing, mind control and hyper persuasion. A terrific read. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for the invitation. It was great to talk to you both. Break it down. One of the things that I keep thinking about is we all sign that agreement when we sign up for Facebook or when you sign up for anything. No one reads that agreement. Nobody reads that agreement. And for many of us when Facebook started in particular, it was just an unbelievable opportunity to I mean I got to have relationships with my family all over the world that I never would have had. We got to be part of each other's lives. Like I never would have thought anything negative might have come from that. And of course there were people who did. But I wonder when you think about you know these kind of algorithmic experiments that we were part of like of course what worries me is in what other ways can we be influenced right and is the solution to just kind of throw your hands up and say I don't want to be part of anything that might possibly influence my brain. Is there a way to still enjoy it for what it's good for? But then I'm kind of like, how do you even know that you're enjoying what it's good for when you're part of this algorithm and it could be making you depressed and sending you to the hospital?

It's impossible to really live in the world while navigating each one of these factors that are feeding and and control because we don't have our thoughts and opinions in absence of the environment that we live in. Right? So, someone who follows NBC News and someone who follows Fox News, they're each being influenced in certain ways. So, you know, there are um sites now that are trying to have media transparency to say what the bias of the organization is that you're consuming to help the individual sort it out, but it's almost impossible. Right? So nowadays, of course, these independent voices have come up in contrast to the mainstream voices to offer a counterpoint to help people say, "Wait a second. We should be almost fact-checking or reality checking our news diet and our media diet. Is it the carnivore? Should I only be eating carnivore? Should I only be eating plants?" Like, where is the middle ground? It's not that we should disregard those institutions. We have to update them. And life is also constantly going to offer you opportunities to have your truth challenged anyway. For example, I'm a person who does not support the death penalty. That's just me. I don't support the death penalty. But throughout my life, I will be presented with opportunities to say, "But do you really think that's true? What if?" Right? And then fill in the blank. What if they this? What if they that? What if these were the circumstances? Right? But I think it's really important also. I don't know. What are three things you hold to be true no matter what that you think could never ever be challenged? Right. Life is gonna serve you up the opportunity to challenge them. Pretty much.

You know, I think what's the most disturbing to me when I think about false confessions, when I think about those sorts of things, which happen all the time, especially to communities that are more vulnerable. You think that you would know I didn't kill someone. But what people don't understand is the circumstances in which a person is placed can literally torture someone to the point that truth itself becomes completely distorted and your desire to escape the torment you are in is so great that you cannot even rationally think okay but I can't confess to something I didn't do right or what's a plea bargain for Right. It's like that's what it's designed, right? To try and help people like here's a way out, but you also have to admit you did it. It's terrifying. Terrifying. Anyway, something else. There's no hope after that. I really appreciate the ability to explore this because I really think that what she talks about in this book is literally true on the largest scale and the smallest scale. It's the same kind of question, right? And just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you absolutely holds true with all of these things. In relationships specifically, stay connected to your friend group. Have the people outside the relationship you can trust. It is true that people come together and there's a reality that's created between them that can feel exceptionally special that they know things about each other that the other person doesn't know or the outside people in their lives may not know. They could have controlling parents that they're trying to distance themselves from and that person in your relationship may be like, "Hey, you know, try to set some boundaries." That is very different than the reality between the two people is the only reality and that you start to become isolated. So look for those signs. Thank you for being here to explore the instability of truth from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two fiction. And now she's going to break down. So break down. She's going to break it down.