My MB Alex breakdown is supported by Helix sleep. Bring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues, night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun with free shipping in the US. They have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus. They're happy with Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. 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 communist had the secret weapon. There was a great deal of effort made to reproduce the weapon to understand the dynamics of whatever had happened. So 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 and 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 POW saying, don't comment on the Patty Hearst case. The case of Patty Hearst, a very, very famous case

of brainwashing for which she was never exonerated.

After being brainwashing, she was held in a closet.

She was abused.

She was held prisoner.

How total can control become?

Could you have someone so abandoned themselves

that they would be actually an unrecognizable new creation. Hi, I'm I'm Biallik. 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 gonna be talking to Rebecca Lemov, 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 gonna 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 Hearst, 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. Rebecca Lamov, welcome to the breakdown. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. We're very, very excited to talk to you. Jonathan and I talk about 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 do want to start though by just reading from the first chapter of the book, you talk about kind of the context of how to frame this. And you say that this is common. This is common right now in the 21st century. You talk about ungrounding, right, kind of as a counterpoint to sort of the notion of brainwashing, but this modern un ungrounding occurs because of rapid technologically driven social change via the digital realm. We may not experience the wartime extremes that Morris Willes 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 great question 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 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 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 in the 21st century? So that was kind of 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, or these extreme experiences, including what happened to POWs, including what happened to soldiers 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 the classic 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 J. Liffton talked about. So I think ungrounding proceeds at all, And I think intuitively we know the 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 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 kind of a colloquial term that emerged on a certain day in a way in the the public to the public in the middle of the 20th century 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, a previously secretive technique that seemed to be a flicking, that communist possessed that would have flicked anyone they chose to turn it on and that he called brainwashing and he said it was widely described among the Chinese populists, but that actually wasn't really true, wasn't a popular term. It was sometimes used by intellectuals, but when he used that word in the English language, he was basically waving a flag that there was some new thing to be afraid of. And it actually did

take off quite quickly in the public imagination. And then within a year or two, after 1950, when it first appeared, people started hearing about troops, US troops, UN troops, British troops. But mostly US strips who seem to be succumbing to this technique. 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 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 circumstance where it becomes necessary to change how you think. And it's remarkable that this is in the human capacity, in my opinion, in my experience that we don't necessarily understand the extent to which we're all capable of this.

My control is kind of a, I think it's a synonym for brainwashing, but maybe it could be more broadly applied to things like cults. A lot of people also apply brainwashing to cults. hyper-persuasion is a word I coined to distinguish it from a media analysis of

mass persuasion is a word I coined to distinguish it from a media analysis of 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 that it can be highly targeted. And so mass persuasion usually relied on broadcast messages where everyone was hearing the same thing. And maybe there were highly personalized responses, but we all heard the same message from CBS Radio or from whatever. But 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. So hyper-persuasion is that increasing, you know, targeting. Why now for this book, for this information? Well, I have been writing it for some time, but I do think that so when I started thinking about this topic, which was about 25 years ago, and I first taught a class, you know, 15 years ago, my colleagues, a colleague said, why would you ever wanna teach a class like that? It seemed trivial to her, I guess. But if you even follow the fate of the word through Google Endgram, 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 and sold each other with the term Meaning something right 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 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 memoirs of people who grew up in cults, I mean, one factor is that there's a phenomenon called second generation or SGA's, who second 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 raised them in a 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 connection to this early period when Colts 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 Reiner, 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 identity 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 are age where, you know, no matter which side you voted for, the president of the United States has introduced a notion of their being fake news and their 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,

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