Rebecca Lemov and the Instability of Truth
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Harvard historian of science Rebecca Lemov joins to talk about her book The Instability of Truth, which dives deep into the history of mind control, from Cold War POW camps and MKUltra to the quieter persuasion of social media. They get into what really works (and doesn’t) when it comes to changing someone’s beliefs, why we’re all more suggestible than we think, and how “cultish” behavior shows up everywhere, from crypto hype to trendy drinkware.
Produced by Corey Wara
Production Coordinator Ashley Khan
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Monday, August 11th, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:07.6 | It's The Gist. |
| 0:08.4 | I'm Mike Pascar. |
| 0:09.3 | We live in an era of conspiracies. |
| 0:12.3 | And there is a party breaker, icebreaker type question. |
| 0:15.8 | What's the conspiracy you believe? |
| 0:17.9 | And I'm good at parties, but I'm really bad at that question. In fact, I don't really |
| 0:23.3 | believe any conspiracy. Then you can maybe convince me that something is a conspiracy, and I would say, |
| 0:28.8 | oh, yeah, I didn't know that was a conspiracy, but it's usually just a confluence of events that are |
| 0:35.3 | interrelated. And here's my problem with believing conspiracies. |
| 0:39.7 | To believe them, you can almost never sign on to the most reasonable version of the |
| 0:44.8 | conspiracy. |
| 0:45.9 | UFOs. |
| 0:46.5 | Are they flying sorcerers from outer space that the government knows about and is keeping |
| 0:50.0 | hidden from us? |
| 0:50.7 | Can I just say, we don't know what's out there, and it's quite conceivable, |
| 0:55.1 | that given the vastness of the universe, something has at some point happened or flitted across |
| 1:02.5 | the eyes of human beings that are in fact unidentified and flying and objects? Yeah, I'd sign on to the |
| 1:09.4 | ladder, but not the area 51 part. |
| 1:11.9 | So I'm a little too unconspiratorial because statistically speaking, one or two of these things have to exist. |
| 1:18.6 | What's the Epstein conspiracy? I don't know. I'm willing to believe a certain amount of the |
| 1:23.6 | unanswered questions of Jeffrey Epstein. They're unanswered. It is unanswered where he got |
... |
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