The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion with Dr. Rebecca Lemov

Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum with Dr. Steve Hassan

Dr. Steven Hassan

Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 684 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

History provides a developmental framework for understanding the evolution of ideas, allowing us to trace their origins and track societal impact. Dr. Rebecca Lemov is a Professor of History of Science at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her timely 2025 book, The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion, offers valuable insights into how the past might influence our future surrounding the topic of Mind Control. The Cold War era saw these techniques in the CIA’s secret MK-Ultra program (1953-1973), which investigated potential offensive and defensive applications of mind control for military purposes. Lemov brought up Dr. Robert Jay Lifton’s work on treating PTSD and different types of “psychic numbing”. This might be the type of numbing one might experience in a holocaust type situation, or “ordinary numbing”. She said, “What you’re saying, a kind of dissociation or hypnotic, you know, out of body. In a sense, you’re literally out of your body, sometimes when you’re infinitely scrolling, or doomscrolling.” Her work delves into the hidden history of these influence methods while exploring their disturbing implications for our AI-driven future, particularly focusing on the emerging development of hyper-persuasion. These include advanced personalization, precise emotional targeting, and behavior prediction. We dissected the mixed blessings of social media and how it can provide some power to the individual voice, as long as the algorithm is designed ethically for pro democratic influence. This is a very important work which all citizens will find to be beneficial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of my podcast,
0:08.3	Colt Conversations, The Influence Continuum, with Dr. Steve Hasson.
0:13.1	And I have a distinguished professor, historian of science from Harvard, who I've had the
0:19.9	pleasure to know for at least 15 years, I think it is
0:23.6	Rebecca. And you have a new book out, which I have read. It's called The Instability of Truth,
0:32.4	brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion, which I have read with great interest because this is my
0:41.4	life work since my own experience, et cetera.
0:47.4	And, you know, I'm going to start, Rebecca, with the fact that I deal with a world where there are powerful
0:58.1	cults that hire so-called experts, most of them are sociologists of religion, who say there's
1:05.8	no such thing as brainwashing. And we shouldn't even call them cults. We should call them new religious movements.
1:13.6	And I see this as like a version of big tobacco hiring experts to say there's no link with cancer
1:21.2	and smoking or fossil fuels. That's my world. So to have a Harvard professor who's spent, you know, literally years and years and
1:33.6	years researching M.K. Ultra and the history of mind control and brainwashing is a welcome
1:41.3	tome. So thank you for this. And welcome to my podcast. Thanks so much, Steve.
1:47.3	It's great to see you and I appreciate your calling it a welcome tone. It really is. And I know
1:54.4	you were interviewed on NPR and Mayam Baylick and gotten a lot of press with the book.
2:01.4	And I guess I want to say since the book has come out, given world events, do you have
2:09.6	any opening remarks about AI and social media platforms?
2:15.3	Because that's the, for me, the last part of the book was the most
2:19.3	new and interesting research hearing from you about the micro-targeting and the manipulation
2:26.8	of emotions. But I'm interested to hear what your take is. We're recording this the beginning
2:32.6	of July, July 8th, actually, of 2025.
	...

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