Rebecca Lemov (on brainwashing)

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Armchair Umbrella

Tv & Film, Music, Comedy

4.6 • 68.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2025

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rebecca Lemov (The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion) is a historian of science, author, and professor at Harvard. Rebecca joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the meet cute with her husband at the cafe where she was struggling to write her dissertation, how she fell under a romantic spell with anthropology as well as opioids, and the relationship between addiction and brainwashing. Rebecca and Dax talk about how Patty Hearst used brainwashing as a defense for her actions, why it's such an effective mind control tactic to strip someone of their name, and how Korean War soldiers’ health and wellness bounce back after trauma hid evidence of their suffering. Rebecca explains the normalization of brutal torture training of troops, that cult leaders intuitively act out a guidebook of hierarchical dynamics of desire and power, and Facebook’s experiment on emotional contagion as an example of soft brainwashing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.
0:06.5	Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:10.0	Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.
0:14.0	Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert, experts on expert.
0:17.7	I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Leslie Stahl.
0:20.8	And we're all brainwashed. And we're all brainwashed.
0:22.7	And we've been brainwashed.
0:24.7	Our guest today is Rebecca Lamov.
0:28.0	She's a historian of science at Harvard University, and her research explores data.
0:34.1	I'm trying to change the way I say data.
0:37.7	Yeah, because now we...
0:39.3	Because it's wrong.
0:40.1	Are you sure?
0:40.9	Yeah, every scientist we have says data, because it's D-A-T-A.
0:44.7	If it was data, it'd be two T's, or even D-A-D-D-A.
0:49.5	Data.
0:50.6	Data.
0:51.8	Okay, explores data, technology, and the history of human and behavioral sciences.
0:58.2	She's written a bunch about a database of dreams.
1:02.7	You did it wrong.
1:04.5	What part do I do wrong?
1:05.3	Database.
	...

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