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Danny Jones Podcast
#330 - Harvard's #1 Mind Control Expert Fears MK-Ultra is STILL Active | Rebecca Lemov
02:50:12
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- [00:00]
Danny
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- [01:14]
Rebecca Lamov
He was the highest paid TV star of all time. When it started to change, it was quick.
- [01:18]
Danny
He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show. Now Charlie's sober, he's gonna tell you the truth. How do I present this with any class?
- [01:27]
Rebecca Lamov
I think we're past that, Charlie.
- [01:29]
Danny
We're that. Yeah. Somebody Call Action, aka Charlie Sheen. Only on Netflix September 10th. Thanks for coming, Rebecca. I'm excited to talk to you.
- [01:44]
Rebecca Lamov
Thanks for having me.
- [01:45]
Danny
Dan, you were just telling me you would show your class the beginning of Clockwork Orange.
- [01:49]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I would show them a special, like a specially selected clip of it for maybe half an hour, though, just where he's getting conditioned.
- [01:58]
Danny
Oh, interesting.
- [01:59]
Rebecca Lamov
To where Alex is behaviorally. Let me see. Trying to remember. Well, it's. Yeah, it's about how he's cured from his violence by the Ludovico technique. It's all coming back to me now. I think it must have been for my brainwashing class, which I started to teach a couple decades ago, but then after a while, I felt like I couldn't really show it in class or maybe when I changed universities or something.
- [02:30]
Danny
So how did you end up teaching a brainwashing class.
- [02:35]
Rebecca Lamov
Ah, that is a good question. So I was at the University of Washington, and I guess I just thought it would be interesting to teach a class because at the time, brainwashing seemed like such an unusual topic that nobody would. It seemed like a way to just ask, you know, these kind of almost philosophical questions about how much people can be controlled or how much, you know, how social systems work, how much our cultural and political systems affect us. But at the time, brainwashing was so out of fashion, and it seemed like a really. Like a relic of another. An earlier era. So this would have been like after. In the early 2000s. And I just thought it was. I love ideas that have really fallen out of favor. So brainwashing just seemed like a joke, basically, in a very niche topic when I started it. And students were drawn to it. Students who like things like Clockwork Orange or who like to think about the difference between 1984 and Brave New World or questions like that were drawn to it. And people were always kind of intrigued by it. But it wasn't an obvious class, so I think it just came out of my dissertation research.
- [03:47]
Danny
What was your dissertation?
- [03:48]
Rebecca Lamov
It was about. It was called the Laboratory Imagination. It was basically about how much first laboratory animals can be controlled in certain environments. So in these kind of behaviorist experiments from the 20th century, and then how that was applied to human society.
- [04:06]
Danny
Is this like something similar to John Calhoun's mice universe? What is it called? The mice. The mice utopia Experiment.
- [04:15]
Rebecca Lamov
Exactly. Calhoun's a perfect example. I mean, I didn't happen to write about him. I wrote about people who came before him. But he's a perfect, like, embodiment of that. That kind of dream.
- [04:24]
Danny
So the idea of his mice utopia, if I recall correctly, was he put a ton of mice in, like, this little city that he created, this little miniature city. And then he kept, like, increasing the population and giving them, like, unlimited resources, abundance of food and. And. And resources. And he found out that the more mice were in there, the more their behavior started to degrade. And eventually they started dying off and they, like, went extinct.
- [04:47]
Rebecca Lamov
They also, I think they. If my memory is correct, they started attacking each other and having.
- [04:54]
Danny
Oh, yeah, cannibalism.
- [04:56]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. Urban. So it was equivalent almost of urban violence. And he was a big. He was very popular in the 60s and 70s.
- [05:05]
Danny
Yeah, they were being, like, hyper aggressive. There was, like, sexual deviancy, cannibalism. They started to go nuts.
- [05:11]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. And so he. In a way, he's a culmination of this longer decades long attempt to model a human society or understand. Understand questions about human behavior control based on animals and how they are conditioned, how they respond to micro environments.
- [05:27]
Danny
And this stuff was funded by the CIA, I believe. Right.
- [05:31]
Rebecca Lamov
I think Calhoun was in fact. Yeah, he actually, I think he was, but I haven't. He wasn't one of my subjects, but he would be a perfect person to look into.
- [05:44]
Danny
So who else did you. Did you study that was doing similar stuff like, like Calhoun in your. For your dissertation?
- [05:49]
Rebecca Lamov
For my, for my dissertation I wrote about these now totally forgotten behaviorists at Yale at the Institute for Human Relations. And they were, you know, they just got the largest grant that has ever been given in the social sciences even to this day. I think if you adjust for inflation, it was a $2 million in 1929. So they're really before World War II, but they, they kind of were, I guess ahead of their time. They were really around the time Huxley was writing Brave New World and behaviorism was being invented. So they're really. The first wave spent a lot of resources. They were funded by the Rockefeller foundation and many other sources eventually. And they just.
- [06:30]
Danny
In the twenties.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, they built. Well, it's. So then the crap. The stock market crashed and in the 30s they just turned. Originally they said we're going to solve the greatest problems of the human mind and philosophy. And they were on the front page of the New York Times, things like that. But then after the stock market crashed and other, they sort of turned just to mouse experiments, rat experiments, animal. Just building these infinite series of mazes and seeing what. How conditioning worked and putting a lot of money into that. So at times the Rockefeller foundation was threatening to ask for its money back because they didn't see a real payoff. So anyway, I went deep into the archives of that project just because it was so ambitious and then it was so forgotten. But it was the basis of people like B.F. skinner.
- [07:21]
Danny
What kind of payoff were they looking for, do you know? And what kind of things were they doing to these rats in these experiments? Were they giving them any drugs or anything?
- [07:28]
Rebecca Lamov
They did give them, yeah. They did give them sometimes cocaine or caffeine, sometimes stimulants. They wanted to see. Basically they talked about the maze the human must run. It was the idea that human society, people may be square pegs equivalent to that and. But they need to fit into their holes. They need to fit into a certain social role. And so if you could properly condition the environment, you wouldn't have to force them. They would make these changes to themselves. They would do it to themselves, essentially. So it was this idea of social engineering, not in the sense of social disruption, but really could you engineer humans to fit the society so that they wouldn't need to be controlled by force? So it was kind of like internalizing. Control was the. Was the dream. And they joined with anthropologists and sociologists and psychologists to make this unified science.
- [08:26]
Danny
Oh, wow.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, So I got very interested in that.
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Danny
I can see why. Have you ever seen any of Adam Curtis's documentaries?
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
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Danny
They're like right along the lines of this.
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Rebecca Lamov
Exactly.
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Danny
What was the one there was one called? I think it was maybe hypernormalization or. No, there was a one. There was one about.
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Rebecca Lamov
I think it's the century. Yeah. Century of the self.
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Danny
Freud and his, like his cousin or something, Bernays, Edward Bernays. He was one of the big advertising executives. He like, created advertising in the west. And from what I understand, like he was doing things like working with brand names to try to get people to consume more. Like he was basically like the ground. On the ground floor of consumerism in the U.S. exactly. And there was this crazy, crazy story in that documentary how he was working with this company that was making like cakes or like, like little, like at home, make your own cakes, like cake mix and stuff like this. And they weren't, they weren't selling. So he was trying to market them to housewives. So he, he said, okay, we're just gonna put in the instructions to add an egg to it. Because it makes these people feel like they're actually doing something and they're being, they're contributing. And they're not just, you know, like taking these shortcuts. They don't. They feel useless. So if you make them add it. Crack Megan to it, they feel like they're actually making something from scratch. So then they started flying off the shelves. Weird. Like little psychological tricks like that.
- [09:53]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
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Danny
Are super interesting.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. Bernays was really a pioneer of that, you could say adding a psychological dimension to.
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Danny
Yeah.
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Rebecca Lamov
To sales, which was pretty new at the time. And that's why he's the father of PR and advertising aspects of advertising. And that's true about the Betty Crocker. The egg, which may. Because women didn't want to. They wanted to feel that they were contributing. It sounds super Freudian contributing an egg to your cake, but made them feel like they were involved in the process. But he was really good. He also led these famous campaigns to sell Ivory soap and associate it with purity. But also he was pioneering the connection of PR to political advertising. And he said you could pretty much sell anything. And so it's interesting that he was Freud's nephew.
- [10:47]
Danny
So that was the beginning of political advertising, too.
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Rebecca Lamov
I mean, he. He did take part in some campaigns, I think, and he saw the potential, which then was later taken up by others.
- [11:00]
Danny
So. And then at what point did you start learning about and digging into all the MK Ultra stuff?
- [11:07]
Rebecca Lamov
So that happened. Let's see. How did MK ULTRA come into my life?
- [11:12]
Danny
Right.
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Rebecca Lamov
Because again, that was not something that certainly.
- [11:16]
Danny
No, well, that started. That started 20 years after those guys were doing those behavioral experiments. If they were doing it at 29. That was. MK Ultra started in like the 50s, right?
- [11:25]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I think. Oh, it's because when I, When I finished my dissertation, I wrote a last chapter about Aldous Huxley and I said, he talked about how in. In this great book, the Devils of Loudon, which is not. People don't read very much, but it's really about this question he asks about how can people be broken? And he says, it used to be in, you know, if you go back to the 17th century, you could take a case like this priest called Urbain Grandier. And he was, he was a, you know, a questionable priest in a French. In a small town in France. But he. He basically was seducing the daughters of the town, and he was not well liked. So eventually they accused him of taking the form of the devil at night and possessing the nuns and raping them.
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Danny
Oh, my God.
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Rebecca Lamov
You know, he denied this, of course. He was mostly just interested in, like, drinking a lot of wine and seducing the young women of the town. So he wasn't a great clergyman, but he, you know, he denied these charges. He was found guilty. And because he had political enemies, he was burned at the stake. And before he was burned, he was like, like pulled apart, you know, in the way they used to do that. Very brutal. And as he was dying, they asked him to confess and he didn't. He refused to confess. And Huxley said, you know, in. In that day, even a middling man could somehow find in himself the, the strength to resist. But today, what were they trying to.
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Danny
Get him to confess? That he was Satan.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, that he had done this, that he had violated the nun, the nuns in particular. And Huxley goes into the whole question of hysteria and things like that. But, but Huxley then says, this thing really struck me. He said, today nobody could resist the way this priest, you know, the way Urban Grandier did. Because we're all subject to this new form of intense conditioning which. And he was talking about, even after Brave New World, a kind of scaling up of intense micromanagement of the. Of the inner life and like, powerful, powerful techniques.
- [13:33]
Danny
What do you mean by that?
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Rebecca Lamov
Well, I wanted to know what he meant by that. And I think that's how I got into, oh, you know, post war, what happened after World War II. How did this kind of dream of social management and behavioral technology, how did that develop? And then I. So when I finished my. When in the last chapter of my dissertation, I wrote a little bit about it, and in my first book also, I started talking about MK Ultra just because there were the three. Three central figures in the kind of life of behavioral. What, you know, extreme behaviorism were working for MK Ultra. So that's kind of how I got into it.
- [14:13]
Danny
Hey, guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video back to the show. And what. What do you think the ant, like, why was that, you think what they were saying about the guy who got pulled apart and burned at the stake, the reason that he was able to not confess, they were interested in how he was able to do that and how they could basically break that. Is that what you're saying?
- [14:37]
Rebecca Lamov
I think Huxley was saying. He said in his basic point, which I don't know if I quite express this as well, I definitely didn't say it as well as he did. He said basically, in the old days, they could pull someone apart in their body, but the mind was.
- [14:51]
Danny
Oh, the mind was solid.
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Rebecca Lamov
The mind was solid. If you wanted it, you know, you could protect your own mind. But he felt that in the 1950s, which is when he published this book, that was.
- [15:02]
Danny
That was the case anymore.
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Rebecca Lamov
It was not the case because it was targeted.
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Danny
Okay. Oh, is this a. Is this a painting of the guy, the Urban Grandier? Oh, wow, look, he's got all of his limbs.
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Rebecca Lamov
He's happily refusing to confess. Wow. As he. And yeah, Huxley was really. He did all this historical research on him, right?
- [15:26]
Danny
Yeah. Well, that makes sense. They would want to.
- [15:28]
Rebecca Lamov
If.
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Danny
If your goal is to teach people to resist torture and not confess stuff, a way to reverse engineer. That would be something like MK Ultra, you know, to break down the mind and like, figure out how to. How to break down the mind and to figure out how to reprogram the mind after that. Whether the question is, are you doing it from an offensive perspective or a defensive perspective?
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Rebecca Lamov
Right.
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Danny
Or where is the Line between that.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, it's quite confusing with MK Ultra because they, they began. It began as a defensive maneuver like our enemy is doing this, so we have to figure out how, how to protect against it, but also how to. It quickly turned into. And maybe even from the very start it was also an offensive weapon the capabilities of which people could imagine, you know, if you could use LSD as a, as a way to. Well, it was also seen as more humane because it was a non lethal incapacitating agent. So there was an interest in weapons that were non lethal so you wouldn't have to, you know, bomb the whole city. You could just. What. If you could just get them high, you could give LSD and they'd be very confused at my side, disrupt, you know, their. Everything about daily life. And that could be a possible weapon. So the whole thing was both combined. I think it was always combining the defensive and the, the operational.
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Danny
Right. And so the story is we first learned about this. What got the United States interested in this stuff was the POWs, right? The Chinese POWs.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, exactly.
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Danny
They came back and they basically some of them stayed. They just decided to stay and then some of them came back with like communist ideologies. Is that right?
- [17:13]
Rebecca Lamov
Exactly. Well, they came back seeming to have been infected by. By communist systems vocabulary. But also they had written letters home where they were praising the great, you know, the great, this great system and condemning capitalism. But also they were, they seemed to be different or that was the idea that they were. That they had. Something had happened to them. A lot of the men who came back who had been POWs.
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Danny
Yeah.
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Rebecca Lamov
But then also 21 didn't come back at all. They just decided to stay in China. So that was very. That really got people.
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Danny
So they were doing it way before we were, which is interesting. I wonder where they got the idea to do that. And what I would be fascinated to hear if there was any, if there was ever any sort of like documented history of when they started it and what specifically they were doing, you know.
- [18:01]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I mean there. So they call it thought reform or re education. And the Chinese were doing that at a large, on a large scale with their own population. So there's a. Yeah, there's some, there's, there's interesting research on how we've underestimated how the Chineseness of brainwashing. But on the other hand, the Soviets had their own version of it. It did come with communism. It seems to come with like a true believer. Yeah. There's a great historian of China named Amanda Smith. Who gave a paper about that that I thought was really interesting that people sort of extracted brainwashing away from this, you know, the way it was inflected through Chinese, through the Chinese system. And what I found with the POWs over the. As I was studying more and more what had happened to them, that they actually did go through a pretty formal system of thought reform, much like the ones that Chinese peasants, Chinese prostitutes, you know, petty criminals, others in Chinese society were being put through, which was.
- [19:06]
Danny
Do we know what type of techniques they were using?
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Rebecca Lamov
We do, yeah. There were many studies of what had happened. Basically the. So there are three steps. One is to. One is to sort of disorient the person, chain them physically, physically restrain them. Second, there's a kind of. And, and there's a beginning of interrogation, so asking and trying to extract confession. And then once a confession is in the second stage, a confession is kind of solidified because nobody if really, if really subjected to the full thought reform, very few people can resist or they'll essentially die. And then they're reintegrated at the end. So it's almost like unfreezing and then refreezing in a new, in a new system. And Mao himself said, you know, 7% of humanity he felt would not were resistant to this, just would never. Seven percent, he thought, 7%. And they should just be killed. But everybody else, he said, you have to continually renew this. Even myself, I have to continually re educate myself. So it was a constant process. And the POWs who did go to China, the Americans, they were sometimes judged, oh, it's slipping. So they would send them back out to the countryside to be re educated sometimes. Wow.
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Danny
Yeah, that's craziness.
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Rebecca Lamov
It's, it's amazing.
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Danny
It kind of is an interesting idea when you think about all this stuff that we're talking about right now, especially with like the mice stuff and like the, the mice utopia, like that's kind of how our society is right now. And the Internet's connecting everyone together and like we're all able to communicate instantaneously. And Google and YouTube are the two biggest websites on the face of the earth, right. Where people consume most of their content. So like, if you were the government and you controlled YouTube and Google, wouldn't you want to re. Educate the people that are putting all the content on there?
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Rebecca Lamov
I mean, even if you weren't the government, I guess they have, there are ways that they would. Let's see. I mean, I guess you would perhaps.
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Danny
If you were the government, right?
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Rebecca Lamov
You were the government. But if you were just a platform, like a, a big tech company.
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Danny
Well, are you familiar with the, the formation of Google?
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Rebecca Lamov
A bit, yeah.
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Danny
Remind me with Sergey Brin. And so Sergey Brin was, when he was first creating Google at Stanford, the whole process was incubated and curated by the NSA and the CIA and darpa. They got the search engine, the, the ranking system came from darpa. And a lot of the funding, you know, a lot of the initial ramp up was pushed by the CIA in the nsa. He was being visited by like a bunch of CIA, NSA and DARPA people in the very beginning.
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Rebecca Lamov
And.
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Danny
You know, it's not, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that like these are two, two pieces of the same pie. You know what I mean? If they were responsible for incubating and creating this whole thing, like aren't they involved in it now? I would imagine they would be, yeah.
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Rebecca Lamov
I mean it's hard to know how much and in what ways, but I would say so it's the perfect way.
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Danny
To surveil a society.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. In fact, the CAA involvement in computer, the development of pattern recognition systems goes back to the 60s. And Oliver Selfridge, I actually have a graduate student who just finished his. Well, he's no longer a graduate student, but he just finished a dissertation about this.
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Danny
Oh really?
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. And the CIA was involved in funding this early, very speculative research about how to, how to optically recognize patterns and do that, you know, through a tremendous amount of data because it was, you know, that became the basis of our current technology.
- [22:59]
Danny
Yeah. How do you do that with, with billions of people doing stuff online? Right. Like how do you, how do you detect patterns and, and drill down to specifics within those, you know, vast swaths of users on the Internet.
- [23:12]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. I think we take it for granted, but it was highly, a lot of work. It was, it used to just be done by, you know, humans through just, you know, what happened was in, in the 60s, they were just overwhelmed with so much surveillance data of different from different, you know, areas of interest. So the CIA had to figure out a way or was interested in a way that they could go and search for patterns among the data instead of having a human, human eyes. So basically mechan that in what year this was in like 62 or 3.
- [23:45]
Danny
Oh, wow.
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Rebecca Lamov
And they weren't sure that it would yield anything. But so it's, I mean that, so that there's a longer history too.
- [23:56]
Danny
So in the late 50s, early 60s is when they first got the money to start experimenting with this stuff. After the POWs came back, they realized, okay, we got to figure out what they're doing, how they're doing this. And that's when it didn't start out as MK Ultra. I think it started out as something else. Right.
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Rebecca Lamov
Well, before MK Ultras, there are a couple different ones.
- [24:20]
Danny
Right.
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Rebecca Lamov
Like Operation. I mean, I think Bluebird, I think there's a couple of them where they were testing drugs.
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Danny
Right.
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Rebecca Lamov
You know, but.
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Danny
And this is with Sidney Gottlieb and Frank Olsen and all this.
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Rebecca Lamov
So that's all MK Ultra. So that starts in 53.
- [24:35]
Danny
Okay.
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Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. So Gottlieb is taken up to run MK Ultra, and he's a chemist, and then he brings on board John Ginninger and many, many psychiatrists, psychologists, many social scientists. So if you look at the. So it ended up, I think, 149 sub projects, at least the ones that were found in the records when it was officially discontinued in 63.
- [24:58]
Danny
Wow.
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Rebecca Lamov
Or 64. Yeah. So of those 149 sub projects, some are not known in their records, but if you look at them, some of them are very mundane. They're like, you know, make sure our billing. You know, they're just really bureaucratic things. But a lot of them also are very extravagant, you know, wanting to, for example, program remote control animals. This is a connection to. Back to my earlier research, but to basically condition, behaviorally, condition a cat and then implant a microphone within the cat so you could remote control this animal. This is so terrible, but remote control a cat. And it would sidle up to people that you wanted to spy on, and it would just pretend to just be a cat, or it would be a cat, but it would have an internalized microphone, could be controlled by its literal controllers. But this cat just died.
- [25:56]
Danny
They tried to do this with birds.
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Rebecca Lamov
Too, I think, and they also tried to behave. So the. This kind of. The building blocks of behaviorism were also used with dolphins to try to train them to be assassins or to. To take them, like to. So this sounds outlandish, but it's in John Mark's book. They were trained to carry a needle, and on the needle was lsd, which I guess is somehow they would be trained to poke people, or at least they wanted this to happen. And the person would either trip or perhaps could be assassinated. There was a whole bunch of dolphin training. And John Lilly was connected.
- [26:36]
Danny
Yeah, John Lilly, he got funded by NASA to try to figure out how to communicate with dolphins.
- [26:41]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, that was after his. His change, kind of. Well, he sort of Transformed in the 70s yeah, he got much more into communication and this idea of some kind of psychic bond between dolphins and humans. Though before then, during the 50s and 60s, he was much more in the sort of tradition of torturing them.
- [27:04]
Danny
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- [29:17]
Rebecca Lamov
Wow.
- [29:18]
Danny
And he's met. That's how he met John Lilly and he befriended John Lilly and that was right when he got that funding from NASA. And, you know, they were like opening up that. The. The skull of the dolphin and like putting probes in there. All kinds of like sick, inhumane things they were doing to try to figure out communication.
- [29:36]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. Lily is kind of a key figure and I think maybe people forget or. I don't know what his reputation necessarily is, but how invasive his research was and how many dolphins died because of it. But he. Yeah, then later he kind of became. He was. Actually. One thing I learned was that dolphins were not seen as specially, you know, peaceful or, you know, interesting animals before Lily. So he did kind of put them on the map.
- [30:04]
Danny
Interesting.
- [30:04]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. They weren't seen as majestic or inspiring.
- [30:07]
Danny
Flipper probably did that. I guess he was part of it.
- [30:10]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [30:12]
Danny
Because I don't know. I don't think many people know about John Lilly, do they?
- [30:15]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, I guess it's sometimes hard for me to tell because in some of the circles I travel.
- [30:20]
Danny
Not in your circles, of course, John Lilly.
- [30:22]
Rebecca Lamov
And of course he was a. He became a. He also, you know, his experiences with LSD and with ketamine I found in his papers because I did visit his papers at Stanford. He was experimenting with ketamine.
- [30:36]
Danny
Yeah. He was bombed on ketamine. I think that's what kind of drove him crazy.
- [30:39]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, that's what I. That's what happened.
- [30:43]
Danny
Yeah. He thought that. He thought that he was talking to aliens or something like that. He was communicating with an alien race. Is that right?
- [30:48]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, he and Louis Jolly on West, actually, they wrote a paper together which they tried to publish and I think it was science they sent in the manuscript. I found this in his papers, but it wasn't. It was never published. But they're really.
- [31:00]
Danny
And you've. You read them? You read them.
- [31:02]
Rebecca Lamov
I have. I have it.
- [31:03]
Danny
No way.
- [31:03]
Rebecca Lamov
I have it on me at this very moment. But I would summarize it as saying. They start off very sober and they're saying, we've discovered these properties of ketamine. It's. It's going to change the world. And only very, very qualified, very mature, you know, evolved human beings such as ourselves should be allowed to have access to it. And they say. But there's. There's really no limit to what it can do it can put us. And then they start to get very carried away with the possibilities of it, including contact with aliens.
- [31:32]
Danny
And so they were doing ketamine together.
- [31:35]
Rebecca Lamov
Yes.
- [31:36]
Danny
Which is Johnny west using a lot of psychedelic drugs.
- [31:39]
Rebecca Lamov
I don't actually know how much, but certainly he was. And so he was an early. So he started off in the. At the very start of MK Ultra. He was working with lsd, sleep deprivation, other psychoactive drugs, and hypnosis.
- [31:57]
Danny
Did you see the photo of that I showed Joe of Jolly west on the set of 2001 Space Odyssey?
- [32:03]
Rebecca Lamov
No.
- [32:03]
Danny
Oh, Steve, pull it up. Have you. Have you seen 2001's Face Odyssey?
- [32:07]
Rebecca Lamov
I have.
- [32:08]
Danny
There's a photo of Jolly west walking in between sound stages with Stanley Kubrick on the set of that movie.
- [32:16]
Rebecca Lamov
Amazing.
- [32:17]
Danny
I mean, maybe you can confirm. I, I, Jamie couldn't. Didn't believe that this was Jolly west.
- [32:23]
Rebecca Lamov
But maybe you can confirm actually the guy right behind. Right.
- [32:26]
Danny
Can you punch in, Steve?
- [32:32]
Rebecca Lamov
It does look like him, but I can't. So what would he have been doing there? And what year would that be?
- [32:38]
Danny
What year did they let's. That's a good question, Steve. Find out what year they were filming 2001 A Space Odyssey. Rebecca would probably be the best person to confirm or deny that this could be accurate.
- [32:51]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, I'm, I'm intrigued because I thought. I tried to figure out everything I could about him, and he does like to talk about himself, so. Yeah, he never mentioned that.
- [33:00]
Danny
Right. Well, there's a lot of conspiracy theories that say that they got Stanley Kubrick to film the moon landing footage. So it was released in 68, so it must have been filmed in 67. Okay, so 60. Yeah, 66 or 67 came out. Usually movies come out a year or two later after they're filmed.
- [33:19]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, interestingly, so this may. May or may not be west, but he, in 67 and 68, who was in Haight Ashbury in his hippie doing his research with. At the Ashbury Medical Clinic. And his other research in the. What he called the psychipad, which was.
- [33:36]
Danny
Can you find a photo of him from 60. From 68.
- [33:39]
Rebecca Lamov
So I think by 68, he might have looked a little.
- [33:43]
Danny
Yeah. Okay, this is, this is a. This is good.
- [33:46]
Rebecca Lamov
But I know he grew out his hair, which is one, One pertinent thing. He was. He said he tried to fit in. And he and his graduate students who are working on the project described how he would. He was wearing these hippie clothes and he was maybe growing a beard.
- [34:01]
Danny
Right? Yeah, this is. Tom o' Neill did a very good job of explaining all this in his book Chaos, how even the students thought he was, like, kind of a wacko because he'd be hanging out with them and, like, getting high all day.
- [34:12]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. Sitting on the couch with his friends.
- [34:14]
Danny
Yeah.
- [34:15]
Rebecca Lamov
What is this project?
- [34:16]
Danny
Any luck, Steve? I think I found. It's not dated. No, there's nothing that. Can't find anything, huh? Well, that looks. This is one. Oh, shit. There we go. This is one that I found, but it's not dated. Yeah, it looks very much like him. I mean, the hairline is identical.
- [34:38]
Rebecca Lamov
That's the Oklahoma period of west, before he went to California. So 67. When this. If that is him, he was in the middle of transitioning from Oklahoma to California. He was spending his sabbatical year.
- [34:53]
Danny
Okay.
- [34:53]
Rebecca Lamov
And Haight, Ashbury and Palo Alto. So. So I don't know where that was filmed either. But of course, he could have gotten around.
- [35:00]
Danny
Yeah. Find out where 2001 Space Odyssey was filmed. You can find all the set locations of it, all the filming locations. Because, you know, just him even being around Stanley Kubrick is. Is suspicious whether it was on the set of 2001 or not. You know, maybe. Maybe this was on the set. Maybe this was on the set of A Clockwork Orange. I mean, you could see how he would be a key contributor to a show like that. Right.
- [35:23]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, this brings us back to what we were talking about. I mean, he'd be a perfect consultant for Clockwork Orange. And it looks more like a set of Clockwork Orange, doesn't it? Then, like, that looks almost like London or something. I'm just massively speculating.
- [35:37]
Danny
I think they actually said that this was London or this was somewhere in the. In Europe. Right, Steve? Oh, I don't remember. Yeah, I think. I think this was supposed to be in. Shot in Europe. So maybe in mgm. British studios in England, Hertfordshire.
- [35:57]
Rebecca Lamov
So it's hard to tell. I mean, that would make it more like. Well, I don't know. So you're saying 2001 was shot there?
- [36:04]
Danny
I don't know. I thought it was. It's most likely Clockwork Orange was shot there.
- [36:09]
Rebecca Lamov
Orange is. We just talked about how it's from the 80s. It's done in the 80s. So this is definitely more. More of this earlier era.
- [36:17]
Danny
So filming locations for 2001 was Nambia, Arizona, Scotland and Hertfordshire. Okay, so. Okay. I don't know. We need to figure out. We need to figure out where that. Where that photo was taken and what year, because that would Give you. It seems way more reasonable that he would be on this, working with him on Clockwork Orange because that's right up Jolly West's alley and he would be the perfect consultant or something like that. But that's too late.
- [36:42]
Rebecca Lamov
And by the 80s he was denying any connection to the CIA.
- [36:46]
Danny
Oh really?
- [36:47]
Rebecca Lamov
Even though it was in the record and it was in all the papers. But he said he had only ever experimented on animals, never on a human being for years and decades. There are still people who think that, that who, who were his friends who.
- [37:01]
Danny
Believe that maintain that he was so.
- [37:03]
Rebecca Lamov
Fervent that he hadn't, you know, he hadn't done any human experimentation.
- [37:09]
Danny
Were there any close confidants of his that ever spoke out about him or any said anything about him other than like his. I think my son wrote a book. Right.
- [37:16]
Rebecca Lamov
His son wrote a book, but it was more about. Well there are. You can read the book and discern that he was a difficult father and extremely given to serial affairs and he had like different families in different places.
- [37:31]
Danny
Oh my God.
- [37:32]
Rebecca Lamov
And it caused his wife a lot of suffering in his, his family. But. And you. So you get some of the dynamics. But he doesn't talk about that. But they're actually. And he was very good friends with Charlton Heston, which is interesting. They were, they went back to the, they had been in the army together and then even they were in Oklahoma City at the same time for reasons I'm not. Oh, I guess maybe Heston was a struggling actor and, and west was, that was in his CIA years and working for the University of Oklahoma. But they remained friends and lived in houses next to each other basically in one in LA at the, @ the top of the mountains.
- [38:13]
Danny
How did Jolly west first get into doing stuff like this?
- [38:17]
Rebecca Lamov
Well that's a, I mean that is a really good question. I think it was through his mentor during his medical training. So he says he, he says he became a patriotic red blooded American physician and scientist because the government paid for his education. This is what he says in one of his statements. And they sent him to medical school. I think it was University of Minnesota. But he did his residency in New York and at the time he did his residency Harold Wolf was there and Wolf was an expert in basically migraine pain but also in stress and sort of the human body at the limits of stress. He even had this scary looking machine where he would invert people and see if it induced headaches and then he would try to cure them. He was very renowned. But Wes went to work for him. And Wolf had. He was Alan Dulles. He was the doctor to Alan Dulles son who had been injured in the Korean War. And so through Wolf, early MK Ultra funding came. Came through, through New York, I think it was Columbia. And then west was. He got trained there to work on subjects like hypnosis and other things. And then he became. Then he relocated to Lackland Air Force Base as a major and he started up his own MK ULTRA program or sub project because he basically had this conversation with Sid Gottlieb about all the things he wanted to do. And he was so ambitious that Gottlieb said, you're just the sort of man I think we've been dreaming of. Because he really wanted kind of this kind of zone of free experiment. He wanted to build a space where he could change the conditions. It's really again harks back to those behaviorist ideas like if you could deprive someone of sleep, but also use hypnotic techniques, but also use drug alter the alteration of consciousness through drugs. Like could you actually totally transform or break a person?
- [40:30]
Danny
Weren't I heard. I don't remember where I read this, but I read that they were building black sites around the world outside of America where they could do these experiments on people and avoid the American law.
- [40:43]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I believe that's true. This was before NK Ultra, but part of the CIA. There were various sites. There was a great interest in interrogation and truth serums. So could you. You know, what could you make somebody confess to or reveal really not false confessions, but could you make. Could you break someone sufficiently that they'd reveal the information they had? So they had prisoners at various sites who could be the subject of terminal experiments. At least this is covered in John Mark's book, which is pretty authoritative that people. And I think also John Lyle talks about it in his new book. Before MK Ultra, there were these experiments where people would basically be killed after being essentially tortured through interrogation.
- [41:39]
Danny
And where did these. Like where were they finding these people?
- [41:42]
Rebecca Lamov
So they were common, you know, from. I think some were from North Korea maybe, and some were. Good Lord, there's. Yeah, I'm forgetting exactly. But there were basically prisoners or spies. Nobody was going to be checking up on her. They felt that. Yeah.
- [42:07]
Danny
And then. What's this, Steve? I found a date. Kubrick himself. This is if he came back. Somebody has a Stanley Kubrick handle on Twitter.
- [42:17]
Rebecca Lamov
Wow.
- [42:18]
Danny
September 1965. NASA's George Mueller, a senior manager on the Apollo moon landing program, visits Stanley and Arthur C. Clark as they prepared to shoot 2001 A Space Odyssey. After seeing the film, blueprints, models and, and sets, Mueller reported, dubbed the studio NASA East. Interesting. What's even more interesting is other people are. They have the same question, like, who's the guy in the back? Hang on, scroll up, scroll up. Let me read the top again. So why is he. So he's visiting Arthur C. Clark to Prepare to Shoot 2001 A Space Odyssey. Wow. 65. Does this reconcile with what you know about where he was?
- [43:03]
Rebecca Lamov
So that it, it interests me only because I don't know what he was doing in 65. There's kind of a gap after MK Ultra. His funding does seem to dry up a bit. He's at the University of Oklahoma. He still does. I mean he does dress in suits at that point. Like later he kind of adopts. In the 70s, you see him more in like lumberjack garb and more casual at ucla. But this would be his look at that period. But I don't know. I don't know all the things he did in that period. So it would be interesting to know. And it will say physically it sort of resembles him. I mean, NASA had a lot of research on, you know, humans at, in extreme micro environments because they had to know about that.
- [43:47]
Danny
Yeah.
- [43:48]
Rebecca Lamov
So, you know, he may have had contact with this. I don't know.
- [43:51]
Danny
This is such a curious thing. This is another thing that, that I was talking about with Joe the other day. The, the MK Ultra stuff, everything that was happening during the Cold War, there was, there was more lying and more like sinister black project experiments that were happening in the US than any other time in history. Like jfk. Right. His assassination, MK Ultra, Watergate. There, there was just so much crazy. The Iran Contra scandal. There was so much stuff going on during the Cold War, like spying. It was like the pinnacle of like spy agency stuff that was happening and, and defectors and moles and, and you know, so many different countries from Cuba to the Soviet Union, all being involved in this just cauldron of deception. And that's right when the moon landing was supposed to happen. That was the space race. But like there's this weird cognitive dissonance thing that happens when people question the moon landing. It's like, like you're a fool for even questioning that. But like if you really just back up from this like cultural programming that we're in and like look at it just on paper, just, just look at it like purely from a statistical point of view, like it's not that unreasonable to say they faked it. It looks fake. And it was in the middle of all this other fake stuff. Right.
- [45:13]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, maybe it, it does seem that. It does seem that people didn't have. They didn't have necessary. They didn't have the information to be able to question these programs. And also they were clandestine. So that's what's interesting about MK Ultra is completely clandestine, even from the CIA itself, even from most of the US Government. So like, for example, one of the cutouts, the Gekter foundation, they received CAA funding to kind of create a conduit by which money scientists. A cutout. But then Georgetown Medical center also received additional funds because they didn't. They thought it was just funded by Charles Geschichter. So they also contributed. So the, you know, they were sort of doubling up the federal funding just because not all the arms were speaking to each other. I mean, maybe the reason the moon landing looks kind of clumsily photographed is just the technology. We see that technology as looking easily falsifiable. And also we do have many cases that just seem outlandish and surreal. That's one reason I've always been kind of drawn to them, just because you can't quite, you know, they don't seem like proper sober, scholarly topics, but.
- [46:26]
Danny
Right.
- [46:26]
Rebecca Lamov
If you can actually find the records and it seems important to do that, you know.
- [46:31]
Danny
Yeah. When it comes to the moon landing, though, it's like, you know, one of the things about it is it's just, it's, it's so. It's one of those conspiracies that like, if the cat ever got let out of the bag, it would utterly destroy the reputation of the United States. Right. We would be like, the, the country would be so embarrassed, I would, I would imagine, on the world stage. Right. Even more so than, like, I don't know, I mean, the Kennedy assassin, like, and then the, the Kennedy thing, it's like everybody knows the truth. Like, everybody knows in general what happened there. We know it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Like, if you took a consensus on every American, it would be a, a vast majority of, of America, of the American population that believes it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Right. Whether you want to say it was true or not, I would say the vast majority believe that there's some sort of conspiracy there.
- [47:27]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [47:28]
Danny
Right. So, like, even though the, even though, like the leaders, like the people who are behind these things are never going to let the cat. Cat out of the bag, there's already this distrust that's been built. Right.
- [47:40]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I, I agree with your Point. But I also. Have you been to the Air and Space Museum in D.C. in Washington? So I think they have. At least I remember seeing it there in D.C. and I think they still have it like one of the capsules that went to the moon.
- [47:57]
Danny
Oh, really?
- [47:58]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. And you can't believe it because it looks like they, it looks literally like a tin can. It looks so un. Impressive. And you're like, human beings actually put themselves in this and shot into space. And so either this could support. I mean, to me it just supports the point that we don't. Yeah. And then you see, they had, they actually invented the checklist for the Apollo, one of the missions. So before that there wasn't even a concept that you should have a checklist because they wanted, you know, because several of them went. There were mistakes and things went wrong and people failed to check like certain, you know, make sure this works. So they invented just this idea of the checklist. So you see these printed out, you know, typed. It just doesn't look like our idea of advanced technology. So I think that's one, that's one thing that undermines this.
- [48:46]
Danny
Right.
- [48:46]
Rebecca Lamov
You know, people's belief in it or perhaps generates these theories. I don't.
- [48:50]
Danny
Well, it's also the fact that we haven't been back since 72 or 73. What was it? Yeah, we went, we went, we went on the first try. We went all the way to the moon. No one's been there since. We went there with less than 1,1 millionth of the technology that's in an iPhone today. All the. And then conveniently, if all of the NASA files and all of the technology was accidentally. You can chat GPT this and chat GPT will pull up like NASA's actual official response to it was that, that they accidentally over did an overwrite on their hard drives and erased all the technology. Now they have no evidence of any of the technology. So what other technology do we have that's ever existed that, that humans have created that has not increased and gotten better over time or like at least stayed the same. Right, right. Not just vanished.
- [49:39]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I mean. Well, one thing though. You do. I mean, I'm old enough to not exactly remember this, but I remember hearing about, you know, just the priorities change so radically. And I do remember in my, in like the 80s and 90s, people just couldn't believe we, the country had ever prioritized going to the moon just because it seems so in a way it became silly, I think, because we're like, we have lots of problems at Home. We've got addicts in the streets. We've got people shooting up in the parks. We've got problems in our school. Why did we spend all this money? It seemed so absurd. And so maybe for a time it just became one of. I mean, there are other cycles of history that made it seem outlandish and strange that it ever happened. So, I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't imagine it didn't happen. But then again, I'm a product of that. I mean, I remember as a child seeing it on tv.
- [50:36]
Danny
Right. Yeah. And another weird thing about it was when they broadcast the way the television companies broadcasted it, they had to go to the location in Houston and NASA put up the feed on a big projection screen. So instead of giving all of the news stations, letting them. Giving them a direct access to the feed individually, they all had to go there and set up their cameras and pointed at this projection screen.
- [51:03]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, that's just, I mean, I think one thing.
- [51:05]
Danny
So it's like third generation to start, you know, to start with the footages.
- [51:08]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, that's just, I mean, so interesting. One of the interesting things about writing my book is about, you know, looking at, for example, the Patty Hearst trial in the mid-70s and the case of Patty Hearst. I mean, when there was a firefight to capture her and the group who held up who had kidnapped her.
- [51:28]
Danny
For people who don't know who she is. Can you give a brief.
- [51:31]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. So the short story is she was. She was the daughter of. She was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, who was immortalized in the Citizen Kane in the fictional. So he was a. He was a publishing magnate, basically a huge. A billionaire equivalent in his day. And his granddaughter was one of the. Of, I think, four or five girls who were brought up in this family. And she went to College at UC Berkeley. At the age of 19, she was living in the town of Berkeley. She was studying art history. She was a sophomore. And this group called the Symbionese Liberation army discovered that she was, you know, this daughter of a wealthy capitalist family, as they saw it was studying, and they wanted to make what they called a righteous arrest of her. So they went by her apartment where she was living with her fiance, who had been her math teacher, actually, in this private school she'd gone to. So she's 19. She's taken out of her apartment. They bludgeon her boyfriend, leave him on the floor. She's, you know, she was watching TV with him. So she's wearing a bathrobe. They shove her in the trunk of their car. They drive off, you know, shooting, shooting up the street. And they keep her in a closet for 59 days, reading Maoist, Reading Maoist propaganda to her, forcing her to listen to broadcasts and covering her eyes so she can't see for that whole time. She's never alone. She has to submit to rape. Or she basically, they say, you know, if you're a person of good faith and you're starting to believe in us. Which she had to kind of pretend that at first. She had to pretend that she was. She had to sleep with various members of this group. So she submitted to rape. She was moved to a different closet. And each. And over the course of these 59 days, she had to release cassette tapes of her reading messages to her parents. And at first she sounds really shaky. And these are broadcast on all the local and national radio stations. And she's saying things like, mom, dad, I'm okay, but they seem like a decent group. You know, she's saying, you know, you should listen to what they say, do what they want. And then after then her, her messages start to transform over the next month or two. And she's saying, you know, they're actually pretty cool. You know, she's, she says, going off script. She said, no. I mean, she just was. She had to convince them that she was starting to believe in them or that she had been converted because she said, I decided I wanted to live because they had just massacred the local superintendent of Oakland schools. So they were definitely. And they were highly armed. They were constantly doing these military exercises. They wanted to. They told her they were just one branch of this paramilitary organization that was revolutionizing the United States and was going to bring about a new system of government. And so she was so disoriented.
- [54:41]
Danny
What was the name of the. The military group?
- [54:43]
Rebecca Lamov
They call themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.
- [54:46]
Danny
Symbionese Liberation army, yeah. Okay.
- [54:49]
Rebecca Lamov
And this, there's a whole story there. Their leader was a former convict named Donald DeFreeze who renamed himself Sinku. And he said that he had been. He was almost like a guru. And he had recruited all these middle class students. He was black and most of the members were white. And he said this was going to create a new system in the United States and basically if they could get Patty Hearst to join them, it would look really good for their cause. And so after the time, after about a month and a half, they sat her down, they took off her blindfold finally, and they let her see them. And they said, do you want to join us? And she said she basically had to. This is why it's known as a brainwashing case. Or they tried to make this argument that she had to make herself into a soldier in their army if she wanted to live, which she could have easily not, because she knew they would never return her to. To her parents. And so in a. In a week or two, she. Yeah, there's a famous picture of her holding a. An automatic weapon, and she ended up robbing a bank with the other members of the group. And she. They. She said 75. Yeah.
- [56:15]
Danny
Wow.
- [56:16]
Rebecca Lamov
And she declared that she had a new name. She was no longer Patricia Hearst. She was going to be called Tanya. And when they. So eventually she went on the run with this group. A whole bunch of things happened.
- [56:29]
Danny
Oh, my God.
- [56:30]
Rebecca Lamov
And people in the country didn't believe that she. You know, they seemed like they kind of forgot that she'd been kidnapped, and they started to assume that she was a willing participant in this. In this gang. And they were associating her with the hippies and with the people, the radicals of that time. And so she. She was tried in 1976, and Louis Jolyon west was the lead expert, who. In her defense. Because he was.
- [57:00]
Danny
How did that happen?
- [57:01]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [57:02]
Danny
That's bananas. So he was defending her.
- [57:06]
Rebecca Lamov
He was, yeah. Actually, all of the main brainwashing Experts from the 50s, from the earlier POW incidents, were then recalled to this trial. They were brought forward again. So Robert J. Lift, Martin Orne, and Louis Jollyan west, but west was really the lead. The lead expert witness, and he was called to describe what had happened to her and hopefully exonerate her. But he failed massively on the stand because he perjured himself very quickly and also because he didn't do a very good job. Well, he basically disqualified brainwashing as a legal defense, even while he was claiming that she was.
- [57:45]
Danny
Oh, no.
- [57:46]
Rebecca Lamov
But, I mean, one of the things is that the entire. Most of the group was killed in a firefight, which is even to this day, probably the largest firefight that was in the. In the city limits of la. And it was the first deployment of a SWAT team.
- [58:06]
Danny
Some people think nature is like this, but actually it's like this. This Mother nature is not all sunshine and rainbows. Nature can be hotter than a sauna and colder than an arctic skinny dip. That's why Colombia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever.
- [58:36]
Rebecca Lamov
You know, at a large scale. And they. I guess my. Originally, why I was thinking about this is so many things were new about technology. Like they never had synced sound to image. So this firefight happened live on television. And people all over the nation saw the Symbione Liberation army members, six of them, burn. You know, they didn't see their bodies burned, but they saw their, their safe house burn on live television with sound synced to the image and with portable minicam. So all these things that, you know, they were totally new in 1975 when that happened. And I think we just assume sometimes that these things have always existed, but actually it was, it was kind of. Things were changing so quickly even then. But anyway, they. They assumed that Hearst had also died in the firefight, but she happened to be out doing errands. And that's a whole other story, which is very amazing.
- [59:40]
Danny
What ended up, what ended up happening, happening to her after all this.
- [59:43]
Rebecca Lamov
So she was left with two other members of the sla, the Harris's, who was a married, who were a married couple. And he, Bill Harris was, you know, he had beat, beaten up Patty Hearst when she was first.
- [59:55]
Danny
Right.
- [59:56]
Rebecca Lamov
He was always beating her up. But they were also working with her. So they went on, they said, we're gonna go on the lam with you because basically the rest of the group died. So they had to go underground and people started ferrying them across the US they ended up spending a whole summer, I think it was in Pennsylvania maybe, and they were helping Hearst. They wanted her to write her autobiography and they wanted it to be a bestseller, talking about her transformation and her belief in the. This new revolutionary army. And it was kind of like the POWs in the sense that she was constantly working on her confession, you know, her, her repudiation of her family, how she had seen the light, how she had changed. And ultimately, though, she was discovered and arrested and people couldn't understand why she hadn't just run away during that. There was about a year when she was on the lam when the security wasn't that tight, and she, you know, arguably could have just walked away.
- [60:52]
Danny
Right.
- [60:52]
Rebecca Lamov
But she said that she was so. I mean, this happens often with people who have been abducted. They're so entrained and so fearful. Like it's a kind of.
- [61:05]
Danny
They start to feel protected by their abuser.
- [61:08]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, they cling to the situation because they're. And she also, you know, when she saw the way the SWAT teams in the LAPD came after her group and slaughtered them on live tv, she thought like. And they thought she was in the building. She knew that they, you know, she didn't feel protected by her own government. So.
- [61:29]
Danny
Yeah, that seems like a, a common thing even in like relationships with. With like husbands and wives where the husband can be abusive to the wife and they've been together for 10 years and he's been abusing her for 10 years. It's like she can't. Some, some women have, have, like, are unable to leave the relationship, you know, where it's just like, I'm so used to this, I can't do change. Like, this sucks, but I'm gonna stick to it. And it's better. It's easier for me to stay here and be abused than to get out of it.
- [61:55]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. I think coercively controlling relationships also have financial elements of control. Like it's very difficult, especially if you have children.
- [62:03]
Danny
Yeah.
- [62:03]
Rebecca Lamov
Like the dynamics of domestic violence are similar. Also the dynamics of people, young women often who are, who are abducted by, you know, when they're really young and held.
- [62:15]
Danny
Right. Yeah.
- [62:16]
Rebecca Lamov
Like the famous case of Elizabeth Smart. You know, at a certain point, years in, there are moments they. And they eventually do break away, but it's hard to know what that moment is. And of course you're risking your life if you try to reveal who you are.
- [62:33]
Danny
Right. Or like, like Jolly west situation. You said that he had like affairs and families all over the world and his wife somehow knew about it.
- [62:41]
Rebecca Lamov
I don't know how many families he had. He. At least one. And he had many, many affairs. So much so that his wife talked about, I think it's in his son's book, how she was so humiliated because they would sometimes show up and. Oh no, he was just, he was, he was kind of a larger than life figure to say the least. And she, but she, she did get used to it and she stayed with him to the, to the very end.
- [63:07]
Danny
That always blows my mind too.
- [63:08]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [63:09]
Danny
How. How people will stay with their spouse after like aggressive, long history of cheating. It's like that's got to be some form of, you know, weird mind control. Something like, like self induced mind control.
- [63:26]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [63:27]
Danny
And how did Jolly west die?
- [63:30]
Rebecca Lamov
He died by his son basically killing him. He asked his son to kill him.
- [63:38]
Danny
Because he had cancer.
- [63:39]
Rebecca Lamov
He had very advanced. I forget what kind of cancer. He was gonna die probably within another.
- [63:44]
Danny
Couple months in the 90s. Right.
- [63:46]
Rebecca Lamov
In the late 90s. But he, but it's really interesting in Mark West's book because he, he went on a press tour afterwards and he gave all these interviews and he wrote the book as a kind of tribute and he talked about how he had to be very secretive. I mean, in a sense he was, he consulted with these societies, the Hemlock Society and others about. It was basically seen as a mercy killing. He saw it as a mercy killing, but he didn't really want to do it. And his father sort of made him. And then, then about half a year later his mother also got him to help her kill herself or basically he killed her by administering, by administering drugs. And she wasn't, she just had, you know, kind of medium stage dementia. So I think the toll was very heavy on him. So even though he, he, he wrote quite an amazing book about it and he, it's, it's. I think it, it's a bit, it's a tortured book because he wants to say that he did this merciful thing and he was helping his parents, but you can't help but see this tortured family dynamic. And then he, he killed himself.
- [65:04]
Danny
How did he kill himself? Same way.
- [65:05]
Rebecca Lamov
I'm not sure how.
- [65:07]
Danny
And also why, why would you, wouldn't you just like if you were gonna overdose yourself, why couldn't you do that yourself? Why would you make your child do that to you? It seems like an easy thing to do yourself.
- [65:17]
Rebecca Lamov
It did seem that my impression from the book because it's quite well written. It's.
- [65:21]
Danny
Oh, do you know the name of it?
- [65:23]
Rebecca Lamov
I forget the name Mark West. And he, I'm just forgetting the title, but he, it's very conspiratorial. It's like his father wanted to have a conspiracy with him. We're doing this together. He had to hide it from his sisters. That was the main thing. And same thing with the mother. She. It was almost like they were bonding over this, this, this task that they, this joint project and that the project would ultimately be both of their deaths. So. And you can see that that was not to, you know, ultimately something he could, he was able to reckon with.
- [66:01]
Danny
That's sick. That's so sickening. I found the book the Last Good Nights Assisting my parents with their suicides. Jesus.
- [66:12]
Rebecca Lamov
The comments, at least last I looked were very interesting because some friends of the family wrote in on, on, on the Amazon.
- [66:20]
Danny
No way left comments.
- [66:22]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah like I love like go down.
- [66:25]
Danny
Let'S read them stuff. Good book. But it shouldn't have said. It shouldn't. It shouldn't have had to be this way. Interesting seeing. Okay. John Stewart west, after killing his parents over a decade ago, took his own Life on October 4, 2014. It's no. I have to wonder if suicide became so normalized for him that this was his answer to his own psychological pain for which he would not get meaningful help. His suicide note, quote, note via email to his friends, was glib and completely cavalier, obviously written by a deeper, depressed, psychologically defended man. Has he not been recruited by his parents to assist them in their deaths? Perhaps he would be alive today. Suicide is not the answer. Nope. It's definitely not the answer, folks. Wow.
- [67:21]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, it's very sad because he's. He's an interesting man and I thought.
- [67:27]
Danny
It would have been interesting to be able to talk to him.
- [67:29]
Rebecca Lamov
He had a tough. He obviously had a tough family dynamic.
- [67:35]
Danny
Oh, yeah. To say the least.
- [67:38]
Rebecca Lamov
Because, I mean, West. Interesting. He just, he's hard to figure out. I was just talking to someone who knew him in the 70s. He said he was. He spoke really slowly. This is what some people say. I mean, even though people were talking about how ebullient he was, called jolly, because that did match his demeanor. But he. Others describe him as speaking very slowly and hypnotically and. But he, yeah, he. He would kind of use the killing. You know, he famously, or maybe not famously, but he. He administered LSD to an elephant.
- [68:10]
Danny
Oh, yeah, Tusko, right?
- [68:12]
Rebecca Lamov
Tusko the elephant. And it's. This is also heartbreaking if you actually read the article, because the female elephant who was Tusko's mate, tried to hold him up while he was dying.
- [68:25]
Danny
Oh, no.
- [68:26]
Rebecca Lamov
Like, ah. But Wes, you know, wrote this paper. I think he wanted to find. So this is an interesting connection. He was interested in the trigger to irrational violence. And male elephants are known to go into periods of irrational elephant violence, like during their must period. So it seems that he wanted to see if the LSD would trigger that, which is very related to his, you know, his kind of questions at the time about LSD and speed. Also whether amphetamines might trigger an lsd, you know, in combination, might trigger violence. They were sometimes, sometimes wondering or seeing that I think in some studies with. Also with mice. So that may have been part of why he did this. But he didn't hesitate for the rest of his career to use the elephant, the Tusko's death as kind of his calling card in a very flippant way.
- [69:17]
Danny
Like he was very proud of it.
- [69:18]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I'm the guy who killed the elephant. You kind of would swagger into a room and he was known for that.
- [69:24]
Danny
And didn't he have like a violence center that he wanted to create, like a center for violence?
- [69:29]
Rebecca Lamov
He wrote. He. It was. That's a short, short word for it. Or the short phrase was at The Violence center. And he considered it his greatest defeat. But in some ways it was. One, it was right after the Haight Ashbury period when he first got to UCLA and it was, he got millions, $2 million of funding. It was all set to go. And it was going to be a center for the study and reduction of violence. There were like 29 affiliated projects within it. It was almost like a above board MK Ultra in the sense that it was public. And one of the reasons it collapsed was that he made it public. But he was, he was really interested in, in, in that, in violence. But it kind of fell apart. He felt he was just attacked by people who didn't understand and who were his political enemies.
- [70:17]
Danny
And how did that stuff tie into what was going on with the Haight Ashbury Clinic and Charles Manson in. Because you can see, like, you know, one of the things that Tom described, which you just described, is that they were not only messing with lsd, but they were also testing amphetamines with this place that was funded by that cutout. That was, that was CIA money. And the Manson murders are one of the most violent murders that's ever happened in, in this country, in the history of this country on American soil. So, like the fact that like, there's a clear tie that I think Tom o' Neill points out in his book with, with all the people that Manson was connected with, bringing the girls there all the time, you know, all the other shady things. So like, what is your, what is your understanding or what is your opinion on what was happening with Charles Manson?
- [71:05]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, well, there are demonstrable studies that were being done involving Manson. So this is true. I mean, he was, at the very least in observational studies, his family. These are. So I was actually just talking with Tom o' Neill last week about this because we're both interested in, I mean, I don't think it's determined yet that west, you can't yet put, you can't put Jolly west in a room with Charles Manson, at least not in a documented way. But it is true that west had an office at the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic from the very beginning. And he was part of the crowd of people who were running the, both the Haight Ashbury Research Project, which was. And his own observational study, which was really like a naturalistic study of these communes of the different families, of how they, how they, how their psychodynamics and social dynamics worked. And so west and some of his colleagues were actually going into the field with the Manson family and others really? In Mendocino? Yeah. And one of them was Alan Rose. And I mean, so there are people such as a graduate student and assistant at the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic named Gary Landes who will. So they are personally links between west and people like Alan Rose. And they were definitely treating the Manson and his family at the clinic. So you can bring them so close, but you don't really know. So it's hard to tell exactly. If you want to trace West's role, what I do see is that people for many years were saying that the hippies turned from LSD to speed later and that this caused the hate to become a violent and unpleasant place after the flower child period. And so the amphetamine research project was tracking and interviewing these young runaways and stuff. Stuff starting in 68, I think it was. Yeah, 68. So one of the people working for West, Gary Landes, talks about how he went into the medical clinic and he saw, he observed them interviewing kids who are amphetamine addicts. Like they were tracking them over time. So west used to say something like. Or people used to say Manson was unusual in that he was a speed. He was a speed addict first and then he got into LSD and then he stopped because he didn't really like needles. But his family definitely, this was the lore, you know, why he. Maybe amphetamines didn't have anything to do with the murders or whatever. This is what people used to say. But actually it does seem that he and his family were increasingly turning to speed at the same time, or amphetamines.
- [73:57]
Danny
And speed injecting it.
- [73:59]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, maybe not injecting it because he didn't like needles, but, you know, they could be orally taking it or it's not. This is just, just something that has come up in various interviews. But there was a curiosity about triggering violence and the potential connection between LSD and violence. And certainly Manson, you know, obviously used LSD in his relationships. I mean, this is, you know, his people like Susan Atkins and others talked about how they would try never to come down. Like they were vying to see who could never come down from one day to another. So they were very addled. And then if you add other substances. So it's interesting. I mean, there are parallels in the NIMH funded research. So you don't see the name CIA. You don't see any of these earlier cutouts.
- [74:50]
Danny
What is nimh?
- [74:51]
Rebecca Lamov
The National Institute of Medicine, Mental Health.
- [74:54]
Danny
Okay.
- [74:54]
Rebecca Lamov
They were funding the. A couple of these projects, right, because they were just interested they were interested and they wanted, you know, on one level, they had an interest in curing addiction. There seemed to be a mass epidemic of amphetamine addiction.
- [75:11]
Danny
Yeah, it's. You know, I always wonder whether or not with the stuff that they were testing on Charles. Charles Manson and the family, like, did they. Were they trying to aim for a specific result or were they just throwing at the wall to basically see what would happen, or were they trying to guide them in any specific way?
- [75:29]
Rebecca Lamov
You know, I'm not sure they were even testing on them. I mean, I don't think that's been proven. I think they were naturalistically observing them.
- [75:37]
Danny
Oh, they were just. They were just observing them as like wild animals.
- [75:40]
Rebecca Lamov
And also. Well, the problem is with naturalistic observation is people, you know, throughout time, they get involved with their subjects. And west himself, in his own diary wrote, I'm getting too close to my subjects. These were many different. He was involved in many different things. And his other of his team also became involved. Like, they not only went to sort of anthropologically observe the family, but they were sleeping with them sometimes the women or they were. They sort of get involved. But I'm not sure there were. I don't believe that there were formal, you know, at least not nothing in the record, nothing that they would have published or nothing that NIMH would have sponsored, which would have. Which would have allowed the actually giving or, you know, testing or experimenting with Manson or anything like that.
- [76:35]
Danny
Well, I mean, one of the biggest questions about that, though, is like, why was he. Why did he kept getting let out of prison by Roger Smith?
- [76:41]
Rebecca Lamov
You know, well, this is such a good. I mean, it's true. It's. It's remarkable. So I, you can say it is possible so that there could be clandestine papers, studies, who knows? But Roger Smith is. It's. It's really odd that he was both, you know, a prominent researcher in amphetamines addiction. He was, was. He was doing these experiments with mice and with complicated protocols. He was also friends with David A. Smith, the. Who ran the Haight Ashbury Medical Clinic, and he was Manson's parole officer. Like, that's very hard to understand. And he kept releasing him, but he says that. I think he said at one point there was a program to try releasing parolees to see if they would do better. I mean, he. It doesn't really like a criminological experiment of some kind. It's not easily explained. I think that's why Tom o' Neill's book is very striking.
- [77:42]
Danny
I mean, did he and he didn't commit any, like, real violent crimes, though, did he? Before that? Weren't they just, like, petty theft and, like, stealing a car and some other things that wouldn't lock him up forever? Or did he actually, like.
- [77:56]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, his family did kill a Buddhist practitioner in a drug deal, some sort of. Right before the murders.
- [78:04]
Danny
Oh, yes.
- [78:05]
Rebecca Lamov
But before that, Manson, actually, his family was known, some people say, at least Alan Rose at one point said, actually they're kind of like model hippies. At least he takes care of them. He brings them to the doctor. They're not just in squalor, but because he was pimping out the women in the family too. But so. And he had this. He had career ambitions, Manson, so.
- [78:31]
Danny
Right, yeah.
- [78:32]
Rebecca Lamov
So, yeah, I don't think he had. He didn't. He didn't have. He didn't have a. He didn't have actually much history of violence that I know of. Like, he. And he. Of course, he didn't commit these murders himself. He. His family did.
- [78:49]
Danny
Right. But he was. He was there. He would. He went there right afterwards. Right. And then there was the. The one after the tate murders, the LaBianca murders. I think that was the next night. Right, right. He was there, I believe. Right. I think he was out front. Or maybe he didn't go inside.
- [79:10]
Rebecca Lamov
It was very nearby.
- [79:11]
Danny
Yeah. Very close by him. And then another weird thing about the. The Tate LaBianca murders is that there was a CIA agent who made a phone call. I don't really remember that from the buyer. It's one of the really curious things about that book was this guy who. Who called somebody, I can't remember who, and, like, told them at, like, 8 o' clock in the morning, or like, first thing in the morning, before the first phone call to the police ever even happened. And this guy was like a legitimate, like, CIA. An a. I don't know if he was an agent or an actual, like, officer. I think it was probably just an agent working for the CIA, giving them information. This guy ended up being a ghost and they never found who he was. But. But I think Tom included photos of this guy in the book, so that's really curious. Were they just following him? Were they just observing him? Like, did they know? Did they, like, see, like, oh, my God, this guy's gonna. What are they doing? And they. They found out, like, this is getting out of control. I don't know. But the fact, you know, also the other thing about how the prosecutor cover, like, the story of the prosecutor and him writing that book. And like, covering up all those really blatant facts and. And really crazy connections to Manson. Yeah.
- [80:24]
Rebecca Lamov
And that's why Tom's book is very compelling. Right. He finds all these.
- [80:29]
Danny
And how he started meeting with Vince and Vince was like, oh, yeah, come on, let's talk about it. And as soon as Tom started digging in too deep, Vince completely, like, shut him down and cut him out.
- [80:39]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. So, yeah, he. He. Yeah, people. I mean, he's reputationally damaging, like, to. Yeah, I gather.
- [80:47]
Danny
Totally.
- [80:47]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. And I think, you know, in the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic did do a lot of amazing things, so it would be frustrating. I mean, they, you know, it's not just one. It's not like it just simply was a front for the CIA or anything. They really.
- [81:03]
Danny
But it shut down two weeks after he released the book.
- [81:05]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. Because his reputation was so damaged by it. So he's quite upset. I mean, I can understand that. You spend your whole life doing that.
- [81:12]
Danny
Yeah. It just makes me wonder, like, all the money and resources and projects that they had devoted to this stuff in the 60s, like, imagine what they could possibly do now with the Internet and social media, you know, to sort of. Because the, you know, the population is obviously growing and more and more people are connected, and you gotta find a way to sort of control the population, especially in this age of.
- [81:40]
Rebecca Lamov
Of.
- [81:41]
Danny
Of just over information there. An abundance of information everywhere. And like, stuff. There's so much truth. Like, the government can't hide stuff as well as they used to. Right.
- [81:54]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [81:54]
Danny
So. So you have one. One problem is stuff can get. Secrets can get out easier. And one of the ways I think they combat it is by letting out a bunch of fake stuff, too, so that, you know, you have the real stuff and the fake stuff all mixed together in this cauldron. And it's impossible to pick out what's real.
- [82:15]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. That's why I came up with the phrase the instability of truth. Or you could also say the instability of the real or that you have. I mean, even going back to the 60s and the idea of Robert Anton Wilson of the Reality Tunnel, that we, you know, a lot of our. As you know about his concept that everyone kind of inhabits a reality Tunnel and that the main. He says something, I think, amazing, like, we. A lot of the world's greatest ills come because we don't understand that so much of our perception is just grasping, in other words, to make sense of reality. So he was an early, I think, someone who understood that we. We do construct a kind of. We Construct our sense of what. Of what's real.
- [83:04]
Danny
Yeah.
- [83:04]
Rebecca Lamov
And it can be highly siloed. But I think one difference between that era, I mean, there are so many resonances and there's a reason we want. I'm. You know, lots of people want to go back to the early Cold War. And it looks so intriguing because these things were happening, but also because they kept really, they did keep really good records. I mean, they destroyed a lot of MK Ultra, but the parts they didn't destroy, the financial records, I mean, they're keeping records down to the scent. They're so. Sometimes so boring. Like, did you make the transfer? Did you. You know how I paid this much for stamps? It's very mundane and, you know, it seems like the, you know, things could be. So there could be a kind of controlled experiment that was done clandestinely. And maybe we're a little nostalgic because we live in a moment, I think, of uncontrolled experiments. I mean, that's what I tend to think, which are just emerging and not necessarily directed on so many levels. Like we don't know what the results will be. And a lot of them are just maybe platforms maximizing for profit and engagement. And then the side effects are certainly psychological, social mind melding and also warping of our, our ability, even our ability to really deal with this.
- [84:22]
Danny
Yeah. And it's, and it's, it's. The more you pay attention. The problem is most people don't have the luxury of paying attention to this stuff because people are burdened by, you know, their jobs, their lives. And people like me, who my job is to pay attention to this stuff, get to get to see it. And I get to see how, like, my mom and my dad live in two separate parallel realities because my mom gets all of her information from, from cnn. She's very left wing. And my dad gets all this from Fox News. You know, he's right wing. So they both have, like, completely separate facts on, on every situation that exists. And it's like, it's, it's, it's amazing to me that, you know, they can't see it, but most people.
- [85:06]
Rebecca Lamov
Are they still married?
- [85:07]
Danny
No, they got divorced when I was five.
- [85:09]
Rebecca Lamov
Okay. I was going to say that would be impressive.
- [85:12]
Danny
Yeah. No, no, no, no. It would be, it would be a miracle if they stayed married. My mom's a, a, a fine arts major and my dad was a mailman. It couldn't be more opposite. Yeah, but, but, yeah, I don't know. I forgot where I was going with that, but.
- [85:28]
Rebecca Lamov
Sorry. To interrupt you that. No, it was very interesting. We're saying a separate reality you can actually find. I mean, I think it is more unique because you were talking about. I mean, there is just such a overabundance of evidence that it's hard to evaluate. It's hard for any. Anyone to evaluate. Even if you have a lot of credentials in historical verification or the vetting of sources. Just because. I mean, I just was hearing about how AI is capable of. So if it generates a hallucinatory story, it can actually then also generate supporting documents and websites that seem to support that story from a web vault or something. So. So once that starts to happen, it really upends the historical process, and it makes you even more maybe reliant on or interested in paper records that are less.
- [86:28]
Danny
Physical records.
- [86:29]
Rebecca Lamov
Physical records which seemed malleable and subject to suppression and all these things, but at least are much more. They offer you something to some sort of verification process.
- [86:44]
Danny
Have you ever heard of the book called the Electric Body?
- [86:48]
Rebecca Lamov
No.
- [86:49]
Danny
Steve, find out who the author of that is. This is somebody Jack Cruz was talking to us about. But. So there's, I guess, like, in all of the devices that we have, like, all, like the phones and the. And the iPads, and even in, like, televisions and stuff like this, there's this. It's all this one spectrum of light which is on the blue end of the spectrum. And there's something about that specific spectrum of light that, like, messes with the chemicals in your brains. In your brain, which it turns it into. It's. It's stimulating, right? So it's not only is it stimulating, but it's. It's feeding you content from social media that you're getting just, like, tiny little hits of dopamine every time you scroll through this thing. And it's designed to keep you on the thing, right?
- [87:38]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [87:40]
Danny
And apparently, like, this started, like, early on when, like, Vegas was first developing with the casinos, and they decided to take out all the windows and take out all the clocks to keep people in there to gamble all the time. And, you know, then eventually, like, we started getting televisions, and then the iPhone came about. And then these social media companies figured, oh, we can make way more money. We keep people on the phones and keep. And. And what's happened is it's exponentially gotten worse because not only are people just, like, constantly being inundated with this blue light that's messing with, like, their circadian rhythm, they're staying up too late. But they are, like. It's like Their brain is, is hijacked by these devices combined with social media because they're optimizing only for money and retention. Right. They want to keep you on their platforms longer. They don't get you. Becker, was it Becker. So Robert Becker. That's Robert Becker. Yeah. Robert Becker did the Body Electric. The Body Electric, right. Which talks about, you know, it's, it's a fascinating. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it's a, it's a fascinating deep dive.
- [88:44]
Rebecca Lamov
It's from 98.
- [88:46]
Danny
Oh wow. It is kind of recent, huh? So, yeah, explores the pathways, you know, and the understanding of evolution and. But it's certainly psychic phenomena and all and healing and stuff like this.
- [88:59]
Rebecca Lamov
But before blue light.
- [89:00]
Danny
But like light. Right, but, but the guy who was explaining this to me was explaining how light is like fundamental to, to human health and, and biology, our evolution. You know, even like, he was explaining like how like we overlooked the circadian rhythm and how this technology has, has taken us so far off the path of that of like our, our. Where human beings are supposed to be like in nature when it comes to the sun and light and all this stuff. We're like constantly. And then Obama did this thing when he was president where he, he mandated that everyone had to have incandescent light bulbs or no LED lights. He banned incandescent lights. Right. Because they weren't energy efficient enough.
- [89:51]
Rebecca Lamov
Right.
- [89:52]
Danny
And, and those, those lights are full spectrum. Right. They have the full spectrum of light. Like, like sunlight has, they don't have uv, but you. Incandescent or the LED lights are all specifically blue light. And when people are spending all their time inside underneath these lights and then, and then having this blue light on your, on your eyes all the time. The argument that he was making is that this is a form of mind control. You're keeping people locked into this stuff. And if you can get, if you can get a population of people addicted to an electronic device in which you're feeding all the information into, that could be very dangerous for sure. Especially on a large scale.
- [90:35]
Rebecca Lamov
I, I agree that. Well, first of all, the larger point that our circadian rhythms are massively disposable, disrupted, and that that has psychological, I mean it affect, it has effects that we don't even, we haven't even begun to reckon with, I think because not only, not only are devices, but long before that with fluorescent lighting and then later, as you're saying, with the, I mean, LED lights, I think that was a, an unintended consequence was of, you know, making incandescent lighting illegal, essentially. Like you can't, you can't even buy those. And you know how depressing it. Even when you tune an LED light to look more warmer in different ways, it doesn't have, it doesn't have the same effect. But also just the way we spend so much time indoors, people have shift work. There are so many ways that our attunement to the. Just the rhythms of day and night are disrupted. Sleep is a massive problem. So this creates kind of a background disruption. You can, could even look at the potential effects of. There's a historian of biology at UCLA who's looking at the effects on age of menstruation because for young people, I've heard about this earlier than it. It's six to seven years earlier than it used to be. I mean, then over historical time you can track this kind of.
- [91:58]
Danny
And why did they say that that was.
- [91:59]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, people. This is as far as I know, not fully understood why. You know, girls as young as 9 to 11 are now starting menstruation, whereas it used to. If you, I was listening to a scholar who was saying that if you look at, in the, in Shakespeare's time, people didn't really come of age until 17. Like women, young women didn't. So, and even in, in recent memory, it was, it was much later. So why, what has been happening? I mean, you could say the chemicals. You could say maybe an enriched diet. People have talked about maybe. I think that the disruption of circadian rhythms can also affect, like, I'm just. This is not my area. I'm just. I think it's. I've seen people write about this and I just think the various ways that our lives are disrupted by, by kind of being in, in artificially lighted environments and not, you know, not being outside enough, essentially not tuning to these cues that maybe through much of human history we were cued to age of.
- [93:07]
Danny
What is this? Oh, menashe. Yeah, menstruation. Okay. So in the, in the 1900s it was 14. This is in the U.S. yeah. So from 14 down to. So now it's down to 12.
- [93:19]
Rebecca Lamov
And if you go back a couple centuries, apparently is even later better.
- [93:23]
Danny
Wow.
- [93:25]
Rebecca Lamov
So this is something that people don't fully. Physicians don't understand. It's just been happening.
- [93:30]
Danny
It probably has to, it has to have something to do with this. Just like the, the overabundance of chemical product, chemicals in our products and our food products and microplastics and everything phthalates, all these things, you know, doctor. You know, Dr. Shauna Swan, she, she, she wrote this book, book called the Countdown which is all about how like things like glyphosate and microplastics and phthalates are, have been reducing. There's a similar chart like this you can probably find Steve. But in men it's reduced sperm count, testosterone and testosterone levels and fertility. And they started studying it in the 50s and like every year it drops by a percent and now it's dropping by like 2% per year. And it's all to do with these, with these types of things, these pollutions.
- [94:18]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I mean our indoor. Sometimes it's a unintended consequence of like a well intended regulation that say our sofas need to be doused in anti inflammatory, in chemicals that will stop them from catching on fire. Because people, you know, this was part of the consumer product safety and you know, movement in the 70s to. Because people, you know, kids, pajamas were catching on fire sometimes. My dad was actually part of this movement to part. It's actually related to also auto safety and the idea that consumer products should be safe. But one effect was that these chemicals were introduced into all sofas. So sofas are often incredibly toxic just because people frequently did used to fall asleep with cigarettes and, and set the sofa on fire. So now.
- [95:09]
Danny
Oh yeah.
- [95:10]
Rebecca Lamov
Anti inflammatory. But one effect is and this is just one among many factors that creates an indoor environment that's full of just massively it's. There's so much ambient chemical, chemical additions that we're constantly interacting.
- [95:28]
Danny
Yeah. And not just that, I mean not just in that kind of stuff but in like food products and stuff in the US and the US is the most guilty of empty country of doing this stuff because like for example my wife was just trying to buy baby formula and we're trying to find the baby formula that's not packed with all like the crazy coconut tree, not coconut but palm oils and all these crazy like super unhealthy oils that are. And all these other like weird ingredients they pack into the baby formula. So we literally, she literally had to go on some weird website and order it from Germany.
- [96:01]
Rebecca Lamov
No, it's true.
- [96:02]
Danny
It's the same brand, same exact brand. But the stuff they sell to Germany they make sure that they, they don't put all that crap in there.
- [96:09]
Rebecca Lamov
They regulate against it in Germany because I had the same thing with my daughter when she was young. She hasn't sensitivity to artificial colors and flavors that are just used to make the yogurts look really pink or whatever it is. But in Germany they don't allow many of the chemicals that are allowed here. So we could get, you know, really colorful things. But they were just made with creatively, like they sourced them out of. I don't know.
- [96:35]
Danny
So we don't regulate them here.
- [96:36]
Rebecca Lamov
We. Well, now, of course, it's an issue with the.
- [96:38]
Danny
And they complain that they won't make money, they won't make enough money. They'll go bankrupt. If they, if they have to take all that stuff out of there because it makes them manufacture, well, you sell it to them.
- [96:46]
Rebecca Lamov
I think it's interesting how. And you might be having this same experience that I had when my daughter was young, which was like a decade and a half ago, but she. It was just. So many things are more concentrated for children, but children and infants are more sensitive. So why is it when you go to a children's movie, it's so loud, you know, or their food is more colored than with an adult's food or. So many things are hyper, you know, they're. They're hyper concentrated. And it was, it was amazing to live in. We lived in Berlin for two years and just be able to find things that weren't so toxic.
- [97:25]
Danny
Yeah. You can tell. You can tell when you go to countries like that that there's a. There's a stark difference in. Especially if you spend enough time there.
- [97:31]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [97:33]
Danny
And the way you feel with the food, you know, like, even. Just like going to Costa Rica and eating junk food. You can eat. I. I could go there.
- [97:41]
Rebecca Lamov
Tastes kind of good.
- [97:41]
Danny
I go there and I, I eat pizza, burgers, whatever, like tacos, whatever it is. And I don't feel like I just pounded for 10 pounds of cement.
- [97:52]
Rebecca Lamov
You feel different.
- [97:53]
Danny
I don't feel like I'm carrying a blood brick in my, in my stomach afterwards, you know, and you just, just. It's so much different and it makes sense. While why countries like Costa Rica are. They have the longest lifespans of. Of any other developed countries. I feel like the more technology and the more convenience and the more, like, convenient foods are available, the less healthy it is and the worse it is for human beings. And I think that that directly correlates with mental health, too. Too.
- [98:25]
Rebecca Lamov
I know that the new head of well, RFK Jr. Just introduced this new legislation banning certain artificial additives to food.
- [98:35]
Danny
Yeah. I think some of this stuff's so funny. Like, it's hard. It's hard to stay optimistic about this stuff when you see, like, you know, they're just focusing on food dyes. And then Trump just says, oh, we're Gonna put. We're gonna bring real sugar back to Coke. Like. Okay, so the people who drink Coke are gonna be a little bit healthier. Like, come on. Is that the best we can do?
- [98:55]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, I think you're. Yeah. The point you're making is one that anyone who eats, if you go somewhere in a different country and you eat their food, it's usually a lot better. And you don't feel you. You don't need to eat as much because it just feels more filling.
- [99:12]
Danny
Yeah.
- [99:13]
Rebecca Lamov
Or at least that's been my experience and as recently in Amsterdam. And it's. Yeah. Just the. Basically the. You realize that our food supply, for whatever, a complex number of reasons, it's not going to be solved by one little. One little change. But that we have for. And it's hard to exactly tell why and how this happened, although I think it did happen in the mid 20th century, maybe around the same period. Not to say it's a conspiracy, but it's like different forces, different incentives, different.
- [99:42]
Danny
It's not like one. One well oiled machine and they're all working together to make this happen. Like the food being processed, the fluoride in the water. We're specifically trying to program you to be our little mind control experiment. Experiment. What is this, Steve? This is, oh, two different versions of Fruit Loops. Same product. Well.
- [100:01]
Rebecca Lamov
Oh, wow.
- [100:02]
Danny
Same marketing. Yeah. Another interesting thing is. Yeah. Like, like Costa Rica, they don't have. They don't have. No. They put zero fluoride in their water. And that's a crazy story behind the fluoride thing in the U.S. yeah.
- [100:14]
Rebecca Lamov
So hyper focusing perhaps on one thing is.
- [100:17]
Danny
Yeah.
- [100:17]
Rebecca Lamov
You know, takes you off the bigger picture. But the bigger picture is compelling.
- [100:21]
Danny
It definitely is. It definitely is. But I don't think. I mean, these people, they aren't as competent as we give them credit for. These people are just trying to figure it out day by day. And it's easier for us to paint some big broad. Connect. Connect all these dots that have no, you know, like. Like I'm trying to do with Jolly west being on this, you know, with Stanley Kubrick to prove the moon isn't real. It's probably. That. Probably has nothing to do with it. But, like, that's where my mind goes.
- [100:46]
Rebecca Lamov
It's tempting.
- [100:47]
Danny
It is.
- [100:48]
Rebecca Lamov
But. But I think. I think, yeah, we should. We should never. It's kind of like. Like what I discovered in my research is we can't underestimate. We're drawn to shiny objects and to brilliant conspiracies and to incredibly you know, into like the. The man behind the curtain. But actually there, you know, that there's a lot of bumblingness in it. And what is so in the case of conditioning, it's like in the case of brainwashing, so much of it is just how susceptible we are to the influence of other people, you know, whether that's orchestrated or not, and how much we, you know, want to. Want to get along kind of. And, you know, and I think that's why I got so inspired by this Polish writer, Czeslav Milos, who wrote a book called the Captive Mind, because he describes how, in his own experience, you know, how the effects of World War II and how his own living in communist Poland as the government was being taken over. You know, how he faced. He faced this dilemma in himself. Like, was he going to find a way to convert himself to sort of. Actually, he said it's an operation you could you perform on yourself or a kind of inner surrender. But could he make himself do that just to get along in his life, or would he end up leaving? But I think that he. One thing, one point he made is that is just that how, how he said, if people were told, if men were told or humans were told that in order to have high social status, they had to crawl around on their hands and knees with a feather sticking out of their hindquarters and act like it was just perfectly normal, they would do it just because that was the mandate of the day or that's the way that you. That's what people assumed. So these things are so powerful, yet that they're hard to identify. Exactly. So sometimes it's helpful to look at a particular concept or a phrase or a set place where you can really focus. And Louis Jolly and West becomes one of those.
- [102:54]
Danny
There's always a slow evolving undercurrent of ideas and ideology in the US and you know, that has to do with politics, it has to do with culture. It has to do, you know, which. A lot of it comes, you know, from the media, obviously. But I often wonder, like, the reason we are where we are in this sort of world. That is, we get where we get all of our information from like four companies, four media companies. And you have the incentives, our incentives, which are to. To make more money, to get ahead, to develop new things, to be the, the number one leader in GDP in the world, to be the, the military superpower in the world is like, I wonder if that's the optimal way or are those the optimal incentives for us to evolve in a good Way, you know, like. Like, if we keep chasing. If we keep chasing these carrots that we are chasing. I don't. Maybe it's not me or you, but the people that are, like, you know, the head of the military or like top executives at Wall street firms, like financial firms or whatever it is, these people are. Are strictly on this. This treadmill, chasing this carrot and. And pushing things from, like, a financial perspective because we have this idea of being an American as, you know, having a big house in the suburbs and driving a nice car, having a boat and. And, you know, this just idealistic view of being a successful American. And I don't think that that is conducive to having a healthy society. But it's not something we can turn. It's not. It's not like you can turn that ship. I don't think. I think we're just on this path, and I think a lot of people, you know, and music. I think music has a big part to do is a huge part of it, too, because, you know, also people want fame and attention, which is a weird thing. And I don't. I don't. I don't know if. If that's, like. If that's inherently in us as human beings or if that's more a part of the culture and how that's gonna evolve over time and how that's gonna get worse, you know, And I. I just don't. I don't see it getting any better. It seems like if. If we want to be the best version of ourselves, I think, like, we have to go back in time and start again.
- [105:52]
Rebecca Lamov
Restart. No, I hope. I hope it's not that. I do think we've reached a critical point of potential incoherence and even collapse, because. And I hope it. I don't. But I'm not a pessimist, I don't think. But I see all the things you're talking about. I mean, the. I mean, you were talking about people's, you know, wanting to prove themselves by living a certain kind of life. Yeah, I think it's. And finding that there's countless stories of people who reach the top of some corporate ladder or music empire or kind of fame or success and then find it empty. And so that's an old story. I mean, that's a really old story. It goes back to the Buddha or many others or Socrates. So it's a question of how do you know yourself? And I think one of the mistakes we're always making is. And this is one thing that got me interested Again, I guess in maybe the crisis over social media or whatever work and AI and things that we're experiencing now and the split in our population and maybe question of ideological manipulation is that these things are never really about the ideas. I don't think they're mostly about the emotion underlying it. And that's one of my central findings, is that what spreads is really. And the way it works is through emotional contagion, and that then the ideas get kind of positioned on top of that. And to the extent that people have trauma and I mean, this is one thing that really stands out with, even to go back to the early Cold war and the POWs, is that that when they came back, the one thing that the experts never saw was that they were traumatized. These men had been through, like, unspeakable conditions and had lot. You know, I call it ungrounding, but really it included conditions beyond what you could even imagine surviving, like losing half their body weight just from not being able to eat their wounds untreated, being bombed by their own napalm, by their own military, dying under degrading circumstances. I mean, I could go. I could. I could go on. But it's just that one thing, when they were studied later that disappeared. The idea that of what the trauma they had experienced was never registered in the records. They were just seen as these kind of freakish and weak men who had somehow capitulated to communist ideology and were now parroting it as if they were this unknown phenomenon in history. And you see that kind of happening in other episodes. That's why I was interested. Could I look at these earlier episodes where it really seems. It seems mysterious to me. Why did they not see that? And then you look at the emergence of social media at key moments and how it seems to be about people adopting ideas or getting stuck on their, you know, in sort of loops, thought loops or silos and things like that. But really, you know, research and what I've observed shows that it. It's feeding on your unresolved emotion, emotional states. And that was shown like, for example, in the Facebook experiment of 2014. And then you could sort of see it happening also in just the way. There's some really interesting research on altered states of consciousness, as, like, you. You sort of do dissociate. Many people dissociate. We all do when we're absorbed in our phone or whatever platform it is. And they each have different effects, but they're on a scale of kind of altered states to some degree.
- [109:45]
Danny
Can you explain what the Facebook experiment was the Emotional Facebook experiment.
- [109:49]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, so it was published in 2014, but the research ran in 2012 and it was a study. So it was published in the PN Proceedings. Anyway, I can't remember the name of the publication, but it's very prominent publication. So in the experiment, about 700,000 users were selected without being told because the user agreement allows one to be. It was in pnas. The user agreement allows you to be.
- [110:20]
Danny
The Facebook, like the general user agreement.
- [110:22]
Rebecca Lamov
Any general user agreement of that platform and really any platform subjects you to a b testing or experimentation. So 689,003 users. Massive scale. So the title's really interesting. And this was the last time that such a. They published the Facebook research team published in such a prominent journal. And I think it was partly they wanted to announce this. It was a little bit of like planting a flag and showing that they had done something that was historic in the field of operationalizing emotion. So the basic experiment was somewhat simple. They divided these users into three groups. The first group was exposed to a more. Their news feed was altered. So instead of receiving the regular algorithmically delivered feed, you got a more negative feed. Then that was measured by word counting software that claimed that measures the emotional state. So it was more negative. And those people then were tracked and how they responded. Did they post more negative things? Did they react in a more negative way as measured by software?
- [111:30]
Danny
So they measured their reaction by their posts.
- [111:33]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, any kind of reaction or emoticon.
- [111:35]
Danny
And these people had no idea they were part of this experiment.
- [111:37]
Rebecca Lamov
Right. And they discovered. And then another group, their feed was altered positively and to a greater or lesser degree or intensity of positivity. And then that group was also traced in its response. And then a third group was a control group, so their feed was unaltered. And the discovery was that the negatively altered group then posted in a statistically significantly more negative way. The positive group was more positive, but less striking. And then the control group was unaltered. But what's interesting too, is that the other the article talks about this, that they say they've operationalized emotional contagion. And emotional contagion was kind of a concept that psychologists have been talking about since the. Since the 90s, or perhaps it had been defined in the 1990s, but really it goes much longer back. The question of how do you spread emotion? And people have always known, of course, that if you're in a room with somebody, you're having a conversation like we are, you could be spreading. This is like the. The essence of a mother, child, bond or something like that, when the question was, could emotion be spread? Could negative emotion be spread? Could it be done if you're not in the physical presence of someone, could it be done across vast distances and could it be done at scale with a massive. That's why they say massive scale. So the article is really kind of triumphantly announcing that, yes, we've proved that this can happen even in the absence of any kind of contact.
- [113:09]
Danny
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- [114:02]
Rebecca Lamov
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- [114:07]
Danny
Wow. Because, yeah, it's not, it's completely not efficient to use actual drugs on, on people because you can't, you can't affect a population. You can't go like, drop, give somebody some acid, you know, every single, what, however many people are on, you know, in the country, what is it like? What is it like 500 million people in the U.S. something like that. But if you have, if you can find a way to manipulate what they already have in their hand 24, seven, they're staring at and use something about, about use the tools that are on their phones already to sort of manipulate the chemical balance in their mind. That would be the perfect way to do this.
- [114:44]
Rebecca Lamov
And what I discovered too was that. So some people wrote into fate when it became publicized because it got a lot of attention. This experiment in 2014, although. So some people wrote into Facebook saying, could I ever know if I was in this experiment? Because I became very depressed during that period. I was in the hospital with suicidal ideas. And I want you know, it was very heartbreaking. And others were outraged. There was an investigation of some of the researchers, but it really came to nothing. As far as I can tell. And everyone was essentially promoted. But what I discovered is that the. I mean, some interesting things. There's not necessarily a direct connection, but the word counting software that was used to measure negativity, to measure the emotion in the experiment was actually trained on people's diaries because they said we need to be able to measure as if we were able to enter the minds of the subject. The software developers said, who are psychologists, they said, so we'll have people write about the worst thing that's ever happened to them in diaries, and then we'll take that and sort of make it a. It's almost like a preliminary language model, you know, 20 years ago. And they use that. This is just the accounting software itself. But what. So it struck me, it's almost more symbolic, but interesting that it was trained on the data of trauma, essentially. And I also discovered that the definition of emotional contagion also goes back to this kind of classic study that was done at the University of Hawaii about trauma, essentially. So what I. It's not simply just trauma, but really just that you also find this in the earlier cases with cults and with POWs. Is that emotional. The unresolved emotions, what, you know, people would say, whatever issues you have, your trauma. And now we understand trauma to be far more pervasive than it used to be seen as. It used to be seen as incredibly rare. Like a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist who was trained in the 60s, he said you would expect to run across maybe one or two cases your entire life, and it would have been someone who'd been in a fire and been burned over most of their body. But of course, the definition and our sense of it has changed radically. But I think it gives us some insight into how everyone has something that can be some emotional tug or trigger or whatever it is. So I try to. To try to shift the focus a little bit away from ideological battles to the sense that these media, these platforms, and I think concerningly, AI companionship, you know, these AI companions really trade on a kind of emotional conduit or contagion between the users.
- [117:32]
Danny
Yeah. And it's funny also how easily people can be swayed online too. Like. Like, for example, there's this phenomena on. I don't know how often you read YouTube comments or read through like, X or whatever, but there's this phenomenon on. On YouTube specifically, if there is like an. A decent amount of commenters on a video. Right. Let's just say it's like a. A political video of something that happened in the News during, like today. And there's out of a thousand comments, the. The top 50 comments, top 100 comments, all are sort of agreeing about one thing. A new person who comes in and starts to read those comments without even watching the video, they are gonna. They're gonna go along with the consensus and agree with them. Them. And it's not, it's not incentivized for somebody to come in and just disagree with everybody. Yeah, they want to feel like they're a part of the group. They want to feel like they fit in. So it's, it's so it. There's this thing, it's called the pylon effect. And you on YouTube. So like, if somebody comes in and says something, everyone starts piling in. It's not necessarily like their independent thought. They're not, they're not using like their critical thinking skills at all. They're just sort of like joining into this group discussion.
- [119:00]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, it's kind of. That's. That's a great. That's a great example. I've definitely seen that. I'm very interested in YouTube. I don't. I'm interested in YouTube comments just because for years, scholars and historians have always wanted, you know, user data or what they call it, reception. Like the. You can never really know. Say you're trying to study a literary text or something, a book someone published. Even like Brave New World, you'd have to look at. You'd have to look at reviews and maybe someone wrote in their diary, like, I read this book. But you wouldn't really get it. You wouldn't really get a lot of data. But now we have this incredible resource. And so I've always. I do think YouTube comments are fascinating. And what you're describing is. I mean, I imagine people have done studies, but I'm not aware of them, of how this, how this contagion might occur. But.
- [119:50]
Danny
And it's interesting. It's interesting too, because a lot of the comments are fake bots.
- [119:53]
Rebecca Lamov
Oh, yeah, that's true. And people don't necessarily. Well, there was that study that was then pulled right by the University of. It's a European university that invent. It was like studying Reddit threads and the.
- [120:06]
Danny
I never saw this.
- [120:07]
Rebecca Lamov
I think it was. Sorry, I.
- [120:10]
Danny
It was a study on Reddit threads.
- [120:12]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. They just had to recently pull it because it was unethical. But I think they were having people misrepresent who they were and then they were trying to achieve a contagious effect and people just aren't. Other users weren't good at evaluating that human or non human status, the botness of who they were interacting with. But also what struck me is if you look at some YouTube, if you look at the comments, for example, on a Joe Rogan episode, which, I mean that they're interesting because you realize it is a community too. Like people are talking to each other. So it's not simply just a group think, but it's actually a thing in itself, which I think is interesting.
- [120:57]
Danny
It really is. Yeah, it really is its own little world in itself. And there, there, there is the group think aspect, but there also, there are a lot of other people that stand out that be like they'll, you know, if the consensus is going one way, somebody will. There's a lot of people that will also leave comments saying what are you guys doing? Like, this is not at all what.
- [121:15]
Rebecca Lamov
I was like, contrarian.
- [121:16]
Danny
There's always. Yeah, they have to be the contrarians.
- [121:19]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [121:19]
Danny
But like are they contrarians or are they just people that are just like objective, like in their own mind?
- [121:23]
Rebecca Lamov
Like they, or somebody who just has like an insight and then it can really move the, it can move the discussion. Pretty interesting.
- [121:30]
Danny
Yeah. And that's what's, that's what's scary about bots and different groups using these things to their object, to their advantage to, to try to, to sway the narrative. Because like, even if something doesn't make, doesn't make any logical sense, they can just push out a bunch of fake bots on a bunch of videos that are like giving one opinion and then it's automatically just statistically it's going to sway a large, vast majority of normal human beings to, to piling onto that. So that's scary. And how, that's scary, you know, thinking about how that could influence society and that how could. And how that could influence like the, the hive mind of people in the country.
- [122:10]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. Because not everyone is good at discerning or people have different abilities to discern. For example, if they're. If it's a fake, if you should even take this to be a human. Right. Or much less be swayed by it. But perhaps, I mean, perhaps it's advantageous too to be able to, you know, like they say with scams like email scams, it's not gonna. Most people won't fall for it. Most people would know not to click whatever link. But if you have poor eyesight and you're elderly and maybe lonely or whatever circumstances, this will end up to be almost like a targeting device. Is the, is the incompetence of your scam or the. The obviousness of it. Or maybe it does make you reflect on vulnerability, I guess.
- [122:58]
Danny
Yeah, totally. Have you ever looked into L. Ron Hubbard at all? All.
- [123:03]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, because he.
- [123:05]
Danny
What's interesting to me, what popped into my head when you were talking about Jolly west and the way that him and his wife asked his son to help them commit suicide. That's the same way Elron Hubard killed himself.
- [123:13]
Rebecca Lamov
Oh, did he?
- [123:14]
Danny
He asked one of his members to build this, like, super powerful eer, which was this electronic device that people in Scientology use, and they hold it and does, like, a little shock thing and like, measures something in your body. I forget what it is. And he told the guy to make one that would kill him. Him. And he. He did it and electrocuted himself. And he died. Like, he didn't die instantly, but he.
- [123:33]
Rebecca Lamov
Did it to himself, essentially. But he had his.
- [123:35]
Danny
He had a guy do it for him. Yeah. Assisted suicide.
- [123:39]
Rebecca Lamov
Wow.
- [123:39]
Danny
Which is interesting. I wonder if there's a connection there with, like, cult leaders or, like, people with this certain, like. Like. I wonder if there was any kind of, like, connection between his personality, like the personality types of these type of people.
- [123:52]
Rebecca Lamov
I'm imagining a cult leader being so egotistical that if they can't live forever, like I've heard stories about, if they can't live forever, there can often be a mythology that they'll either switch bodies or, you know, or, you know, a lot of times it's a mythology that I can't get ill or I can't die. So when they actually do face that they try, they may, you know, find ways to make up either a follower responsible or.
- [124:22]
Danny
Or.
- [124:23]
Rebecca Lamov
Or how. I don't know. There. I could easily see that being more common, though. I don't know any stories.
- [124:28]
Danny
Yeah, that's what David Miscavige said when. When. After L. Ron Hubbard died and he came and did the big speech to all the Scientology people. He was. I think he said he's now left his physical form and he's entered his thetan state where he's now the. Like an invisible. An invisible alien roaming around the earth, I guess. So he's still marketing for. For Scientology even after his death. Even after his death, yeah.
- [124:51]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [124:51]
Danny
They're still running wild.
- [124:53]
Rebecca Lamov
I think they do. I think they do often assure the followers that they'll still be present and.
- [124:58]
Danny
Like Heaven's Gate, where they did the group suicide, where they thought they were going to go up to. What was it, like, hail bop. The hail Bop comment or something. Like this, they, they did that group suicide where they all thought they were going to like take in different. They were going to turn into like an alien life form in another dimension or something like this.
- [125:15]
Rebecca Lamov
Exactly. Crazy.
- [125:16]
Danny
Crazy.
- [125:17]
Rebecca Lamov
That's a perfect example too.
- [125:19]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, it's. It's just bizarre to me that how people are able to be so manipulate, manipulatable to be able to do these things.
- [125:33]
Rebecca Lamov
It's because it escalates and you don't see the escalation, you just see it at the moment of extremity. But the Hale Bop, Marshall Applethwait, I mean, I guess he started off, off with his wife, kind of mild mannered, I don't know. And then it just, you know, you only see later the like purple Nikes and the crazy. This. It just seems there's actually.
- [125:54]
Danny
Well, it seems like the wife was like the mastermind. Right?
- [125:57]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. And sometimes there are these complex dynamics, but there's like interesting phenomenon of, of escalation. And during that escalation period, people will fall off. Some people will fall off. And I heard, right. I heard a description recently in this book on psychic. A psychoanalytical cult called the Sullivanians, which is very fascinating. From the 70s that. So someone who studied them, Richard Offshore, he said that it's like a crowded bus when some people are holding on and some people are not really. And you go around a sharp curve and those people who weren't holding on fall to the ground or they fall. So like when there's a sharp curve and some, you know, things escalate and now everybody has to sign away their personal property or they have to, you know, they have to like send their kids away to like in this case, they had to send their kids away to boarding, these abusive boarding schools and never see them again. Like perfectly nice people doing this. So as it escalates, some people will fall off because they weren't really firmly holding on, but those who were holding on are holding on even tighter. And so as it escalates, the true believers are kind of still on the bus. You see what I mean?
- [127:06]
Danny
Yes, that makes total sense.
- [127:07]
Rebecca Lamov
And maybe they can. That's a great analogy made to or asked to do these things, you know, like assisted suicide or their own, their own death or the leader is apocalyptically inclined and wants to take a whole bunch of people with them.
- [127:23]
Danny
Right. This reminds me, have you ever heard of a gentleman by the name of Whitley Strieber?
- [127:29]
Rebecca Lamov
I have, I have, but I don't know that much about him.
- [127:32]
Danny
So he wrote a book Called God damn it, Communion. Communion. Sorry, I'm brain dead today. He wrote a book about communion that eventually got turned into a movie. And it's basically about his series of alien abductions that he's been through, that he claims to have been through. And. Very nice guy. And his. The story. I've read the book, it freaked me out. And they're like, like just terrifying stories of aliens coming into his room and like, taking him into a spaceship and doing all these experiments on him and stuff. And he's also a prolific writer. He's wrote a ton of science fiction stuff.
- [128:12]
Rebecca Lamov
Is he still alive?
- [128:13]
Danny
He's still alive. Yeah. He's been on this podcast before and speaking about trauma, one of the things that happened to him when he was young, he was living on a military base because his dad worked at like a big top secret military base in, in Texas. And he was subjected to some, like, childhood experiments where they, they put him in this weird type of box, like an isolation chamber, and they were doing strange things to him. And Steve, maybe you can find out exactly what this is because I'm really butchering this description right now, now. And then he was sent off and this was like, right in the middle of all this MK Ultra stuff. I want to say this was in the. The early mid-60s. And apparently there's a bunch of paperclip scientists working at this area, in this. In this part of the world, in Texas too. And he and a bunch of other kids were sent off to Mexico to some place where they were showing these kids violent videos, people of people being like, mutilated and stuff like this, or murdered. A Skinner box. Skinner box. Okay. And find the name, find the name of the, the place that he went to school in Texas, the, the military school. And they were being. Showed this stuff, this really traumatic stuff, and being like, convinced that they were responsible for this sort of like to induce trauma. Trauma in children.
- [129:49]
Rebecca Lamov
He has memories of this.
- [129:50]
Danny
He has memories of this and he's talked about it.
- [129:53]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [129:53]
Danny
And he went on to have, like, crazy alien abductions. And he wrote the number one historical book on alien abductions, which is called Communion.
- [130:04]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, this reminds me of this. I do teach a little bit about a guy, a Harvard professor named John Mack. Have you heard of him? Oh, yeah, yeah. So he. But he didn't work with Striber, but he worked with. With a, an experiencer or, you know, someone who had an abductee early, I guess, in the. He was actually already very famous. He was running the psychiatry department at Harvard and he Had. He's very. He'd won the Pulitzer Prize. He's this amazing.
- [130:36]
Danny
Lawrence in Arabia, right?
- [130:38]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, yeah. So you know him pretty. Pretty well. So he. But he. But to get back to the question of Trump, so he started talking to the. This. An experiencer or someone who had been. Who claimed to have been abducted. And then this guy introduced him to many such patients, and he. And over the years, he ended up talking to many of them, and he became convinced that they were describing something real. He couldn't exactly locate the epistemological ground of it. He said their trauma is unquestionably real and their experiences are real. And I think he started to think that the entire structure of materialist science had to be questioned because it wasn't allowing. So anyway, started Harvard, started an investigation of him.
- [131:24]
Danny
Right.
- [131:24]
Rebecca Lamov
And secretly. And whether they could remove his tenure, which is very un. It rarely happens.
- [131:31]
Danny
Very rude of them.
- [131:32]
Rebecca Lamov
Very rude. He was. Anyway, then he died.
- [131:35]
Danny
He's like a nice guy.
- [131:36]
Rebecca Lamov
He was by all accounts, extremely nice. He didn't end up losing his tenure, but he kind of. He experienced reputational damage. I don't think it necessarily upset him, but he's a really interesting figure just because he was. Then he died in a car accident or being hit by a car. But I think, yeah, his archives include those accounts, and they're interesting just because of his being willing to entertain this question of how to categorize their experience. He was open to. To that or that connection at the ring.
- [132:13]
Danny
Well, it was definitely interesting that all the experiences that these people were having under hypnosis, I believe. Right. They had very similar stories. Like, very, very similar stories.
- [132:23]
Rebecca Lamov
John Max patients.
- [132:24]
Danny
Yeah, John Max patients like Betty and Barney Hill. They explained being taken up, and then she explained them like putting a needle inside of her belly, like taking out her eggs. And he. Her husband described them like extracting sperm from him. And there were like hundreds and hundreds of people that he talked to that explained the same thing. Now, was this just these people hearing it from other people and. And hearing it just, you know, through whatever, like through books or through television. Because I think television was around back when Betty and Barney Hill explained their thing to John Mack. Yeah, it was definitely around. And there was radio and there were stories of this stuff. I couldn't find the name of the school. It doesn't ever seem to name it. He called it a secret school. A secret school in the woods near San Antonio, Texas. In the summer of 54, nine years old, he was taken by visitors. Right. So he was living in San Antonio, Texas. And his dad was a part of this big military thing and he was a part of some secret school that was involved with this military stuff. I know there was a lot of paperclip scientists there and, and what I was getting at was like, have you ever heard of any sort of like, like program similar to MK Ultra where they would take children and show them videos like this, like, like traumatic videos of violence, trying to like break them down?
- [133:47]
Rebecca Lamov
I haven't, I haven't heard of that in associated with MK Ultra or with any other CIA programs, but I have heard of. Of these were just published scientific studies not done on children, but done on adults where they show them disturbing films and see how they respond in different ways. So that was kind of a flourishing area. Let me see. So he would say, so his child would. But that's going further back. I think this. Yeah, I don't know of anything like that he describes there, but it is a bit like that television show, you know the one that. About the.
- [134:28]
Danny
Taken.
- [134:28]
Rebecca Lamov
No, the, the one, Sorry, where they, where the kids are. You know, there's the kids in the 80s.
- [134:35]
Danny
Oh, stranger things.
- [134:36]
Rebecca Lamov
Stranger Things. It's a bit like that kind of plot, but yes.
- [134:40]
Danny
Yeah, it's very similar to that kind of plot for sure. And that's what I've. That's what I've realized from doing this podcast. Most of the crazy stuff that I learn about that's happened in the past of, of this country is closer tied to science fiction than any sort of like real stuff I've ever heard.
- [134:58]
Rebecca Lamov
There's such an interesting intertwining, as you were saying, with you know, scientists feeding off of science fiction projections.
- [135:07]
Danny
Yeah.
- [135:07]
Rebecca Lamov
L. Ron Hubbard too was a science fiction writer.
- [135:10]
Danny
Oh, like the most prolific science fiction writer.
- [135:13]
Rebecca Lamov
And then also, you know, in the case, I have a chapter where I write about this. Leonard Kyle, who was a Cambridge, Massachusetts engineer who was. Who was. Who received these experimental brain implants in the, in the. I think it was like the late 60s, early 70s and he started to feel that his doctors were.
- [135:39]
Danny
Is this the terminal man?
- [135:41]
Rebecca Lamov
He was. Well it turns out he was the sub that Michael Crichton was his.
- [135:45]
Danny
That's insane.
- [135:46]
Rebecca Lamov
Was the res.
- [135:47]
Danny
Can you explain that whole story?
- [135:49]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, so that. The whole story is that I had. So Leonard Kyle was this really gifted self taught engineer in. Who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but from a like a working class family. He briefly was in the military. He had some sort of like. He was also raised in an part time in an orphanage because his Mother couldn't afford to keep him and his siblings at home. So he was possibly exposed to abuse when he was a kid at this church where the orphanage was. But at any rate, he became incredibly successful, especially for someone who didn't have a PhD. He was one of the inventors at Polaroid of patents for their optical devices that were essential for their Instamatic cameras. And he also worked for many defenses defense. Prominent defense industry companies at the time, in the. So in the 60s. So he was his fan. You know, his mother was really proud of him. He started. He got married to his childhood sweetheart and they started to have a large family. And he got. He was flying around the world too, sometimes overseeing. He was instrumental in inventing the triggers for nuclear bombs, test bombs.
- [137:06]
Danny
Oh, wow.
- [137:07]
Rebecca Lamov
Because he. You know, the optical aspect of them. And he. He. Anyway, he was troubled by that and he ended up quitting the defense work. But he. He ended up at Polaroid. At any rate, he was starting to have. As his family grew and as he was experiencing marriage difficulties, there's also. In a car accident. Anyway, he had like the normal run of. It seems like he had the normal run of stresses. He also worried that his wife was having an affair with the border who had come to live with him to save some money. At any rate, they went for therapy. One of his doctors recommended that he check himself into to Mass General Hospital where there was a violence unit. And this was actually ultimately possibly connected. At any rate, it was possibly a violence unit. A violence unit. It was an experimental unit that was being set up by two doctors named Frank. Frank Irvin and Vernon Mark. And Vernon Marks was a neurologist who was a psychosurgeon. And Frank Irvin was a psychiatrist or psychologist too. And they were both interested in whether violence could be controlled because. So this guy, Leonard Kyle, he was. He had these arguments with his wife and there were. Were. There were allegations possibly that he was very temperamental. So his therapist thought that maybe he'd be a candidate for brain implants that would quell his violence. And they were very. So there's kind of like. There was later a lawsuit which alleged that he was not. These were not necessary treatments and that he was actually an experimental subject or a guinea pig. But any rate, he agreed because his wife said it was. If he didn't undergo this treatment, she would divorce him. He accepted these temporary implants initially, and the implants were put in his amygdala. There were many theories at the time that the amygdala is the seat of Violence. So there's an array of electrodes implanted in his amygdala. And his head was stabilized with a stereotactic device, which looks very torturous, but it is actually sort of state of the art at the time.
- [139:24]
Danny
Steve, can you find photos?
- [139:26]
Rebecca Lamov
And they. They would stimulate different parts of his brain. And when they. Of the amygdala, and when he responded, he would say things like, I feel like I'm floating on a cloud. I feel bliss. And. Or, you know, I feel. You know. Or he would seem to get really angry. So they wanted to find those spots that triggered anger. And ultimately. So I won't jump ahead, but basically they found those spots and they got him to agree to consent to a permanent operation that would sever or surgically cauterize those parts of his brain from firing. So hopefully he would become less violent. But the thing is, they got him to sign the consent form while he was in a state of bliss, while his brain was being stimulated in the other area. So this was one thing his family later brought up in the lawsuit. At any rate, these two doctors carried out the operation. And Kyle was never the same. He was never able to work again. And he began. He became paranoid. He became convinced that doctors from MIT and Harvard were pursuing him. He fled across the country to try to see his mother, who lived in California. And he was found wandering around in a parking lot in a dazed state. And the police rounded him up. And he said, no, I'm the inventor. I'm an important engineer. I invented these packages. And it was actually true. He just seemed like a madman. And he never recovered. But he just continued to have these delusions that he was in a science fiction story. And it turns out that actually one of his. The assistant to Drs. Mark and Ervin was Michael Crichton, who was a Harvard medical student at the time. And Michael Crichton ended up writing the Terminal man about him. And if you read the Terminal man, you'll see that the doctor's initials are M and E for Mark and Irvin, but he just changes their name.
- [141:17]
Danny
Oh, my God.
- [141:18]
Rebecca Lamov
So he wasn't delusional, he was paranoid even? Yeah. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean it's not happening. He was both, like, in incredible pain. And then his wife did end up going on and marrying the border in the house.
- [141:33]
Danny
So she was having an affair?
- [141:34]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, maybe not at the time, but maybe there was flirtation or something. We don't know. But I've actually been in contact with a couple of his grandchildren. Who? And they're very, you know, have become interested in the story because they never knew about it. They just thought the border was their grandfather.
- [141:52]
Danny
Oh wow. Oh my God. Is this him? I'm unsure. I don't think that's. This is neuralink. Neuralink goes wrong implants.
- [141:58]
Rebecca Lamov
So, okay, so that might be Leonard, but it might not be Kyle.
- [142:02]
Danny
I only found one actual image of him. He's kind of hard to find. He doesn't exist on, on Google. He is. There's an article. Interesting. Who's that photo of though?
- [142:13]
Rebecca Lamov
That might have been someone who recently.
- [142:14]
Danny
There it is.
- [142:15]
Rebecca Lamov
These Mark and Irvin. So Frank Irvin. Ultimately there was. When the lawsuit happened, Irvin was sub into court, both of them. And they were eventually exonerated. But there was such a scandal in Massachusetts that Irvin took a job at ucla. And guess who his boss was, was the Australian West. Yeah, he was one of the first people who came aboard when the violence center was being planned.
- [142:42]
Danny
Oh my God.
- [142:45]
Rebecca Lamov
So. So later, you know, his mother talked about how she thought the CIA was involved, but there's no, this hasn't been proven.
- [142:55]
Danny
Have you heard of the story about the guy who is the most studied man in brain science? Science. He was a guy who, he had an operation. I think he, he had some sort of a. A traumatic brain injury where something happened and he was, I think he was developing epilepsy or something like this. He was having really bad seizures and having like, as he was getting older, his epilepsy kept getting really, really bad. So he agreed to do some experimental brain surgery where they removed a certain part of his brain and. And when he recovered, they realized it completely wiped out his short term memory. So every single day he would wake up and it would be the same day again. Like he would have no memory of the day before, but he had specific long term memory. And this sort of debunked the myth. They thought like memory was stored in the whole brain. So apparently like this was what they deduced from this was that like different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. And then there was this other lady who took him in and like got him, did all these other studies on him throughout his life and wrote all this stuff on him. And it was fascinating. It was in this book, this book called Moonwalking with Einstein. All about memory. Have you heard of that? I have, yeah.
- [144:11]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. That's interesting.
- [144:12]
Danny
Yeah, it's fascinating.
- [144:14]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, one fascination with this type of psychosurgery is that not, not Kyle, but another patient who was called Julia in the records. She received the same implants, but she. But it was remotely controlled. And these were a special device that this scientist named Delgado had come up.
- [144:39]
Danny
Oh yeah, I'm familiar with that.
- [144:40]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah. So he worked.
- [144:41]
Danny
He did the bull thing.
- [144:42]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, he did the bull thing and he worked with Mark and Irvin. They co published articles together about the stimoceiver. So Julia, I mean, Leonard Kyle didn't receive the stimoceiver. In other words, they couldn't remotely control him. But it did seem that their interest was in violence triggers and remote control. And that with this young woman who is 19, they did achieve that and they wrote. There was actually an article in Life magazine about it.
- [145:10]
Danny
What do they do to her?
- [145:12]
Rebecca Lamov
Well, they just. So she had. She was violent, like episodically. Rarely, but episodically.
- [145:20]
Danny
Yeah.
- [145:21]
Rebecca Lamov
And so her family, you know, allowed this to be done and she was apparently when she wasn't violent, she was a mild mannered, lovely, beautiful young woman who played the guitar. And she came from a suburb of Boston or something like that. And, and so they show her. There are photographs of her in the article in Life, but they showed how she would. They could stimulate her brain and she would fly into a rage. And they sh. And there's a photograph of her throwing herself at the wall.
- [145:53]
Danny
Oh my God.
- [145:53]
Rebecca Lamov
And it's just blurry because she's throwing herself with such force. And then they have another photograph of. And she's wearing the stimuluseiver and her head's all bandaged and she's playing the guitar. It's a really horrifying article which is hard to find online because it's not available in the Google archives. But at any rate, she apparently never recovered fully. I mean, not at all. She didn't really recover at all. But.
- [146:21]
Danny
Have you heard of the story of when there was an experiment done? I think back around this time when they were trying to like figure out how to communicate. I think this was part of like the animal, Human animal communication stuff. Stuff where they were trying to get like a monkey to communicate with a girl and I think they put him in like a room together and then. And then the monkey ended just like tearing the girl to bits, like ripping her apart.
- [146:45]
Rebecca Lamov
Oh no. Was this one of the terrible series of ex experiments that were in the 70s when people tried to raise chimps as their. As children?
- [146:54]
Danny
No, this wasn't a part of that. This was something different. This is what we talked about, about Stephen. Oh, I don't know if you did that one podcast but it was with Len Bear and Robert Duncan. And Robert Duncan was a, a Harvard professor who had a background in studying this kind of stuff. And Len Bear, he was this guy who suffered from this Havana syndrome type thing where he was getting like, he was like the. Apparently there was this voice of God weapon that was developed or theorized about and he said, he seemed to believe. And I think this is still happening to him where he is getting like voices beamed into his mind where he's hearing things like, he's hearing his family members telling him like negative things all the time and he can't control it. And it.
- [147:46]
Rebecca Lamov
That I don't know about that, but yeah, there is a case of. This is something I wrote an article about but Ewan Cameron did experiment. He was, he was funded by MK Ultra, but he would have done these anyway. But he experiment. He was a psychiatrist who experimented with. He called it psychic driving, implanting voices in people's heads. Or he would, he would do therapy with them and he would find a particular phrase or something the parent had said that was very upsetting or, or healing. But. And then he would record it on a tape recorded loop and then he would implant it in people's pillows or on mic, you know, headphones they couldn't take off.
- [148:27]
Danny
Oh wow.
- [148:28]
Rebecca Lamov
And then he would force them to listen to it for weeks, sometimes dosing them with lsd, sometimes putting them in a prolonged sleep. He called that psychic driving. But it's, it's, it sounds like a, it's a, it's an extreme nightmare. And actually the lawsuit pursuits of some of the family members and are still going on today.
- [148:49]
Danny
Yeah, this. So this guy Len Bear, he, he experiences these things in his, in his brain all the time, all day and he took a trip to the, that observatory or there's like some sort of big area in Virginia. It's like a dead zone where there's no radio signals there. There can't be any radio signals because it will, it will affect their. I always forget the name of this place in Virginia where it's like a, it's like a radio, radio wave dead zone. He went there and then all his symptoms disappeared.
- [149:17]
Rebecca Lamov
Really?
- [149:17]
Danny
Yeah. Super interesting. Like what, what? Like maybe it has something to do, to do with radio waves or something like this, I don't know.
- [149:23]
Rebecca Lamov
Or you could say maybe he. Well, who knows?
- [149:26]
Danny
But radio quiet zone. Yeah.
- [149:29]
Rebecca Lamov
Maybe he also believed it would go away there.
- [149:32]
Danny
But yeah, hard to talk.
- [149:35]
Rebecca Lamov
Hell.
- [149:35]
Danny
And then like as far as like the brain chips, another thing Annie Jacobson described in one of her books was that DARPA was working on neural link type devices like neural, neural implants for soldiers to where they would be able to override pain and hunger and fatigue, to where they could basically create super soldiers that could stay out on the battlefield longer and not be burdened by, you know, things like fatigue or not get tired. They could go days and days without sleeping. And this was in the 90s when they were allegedly working on this stuff. And now today, you know, you know, finally we have things like neuralink coming out for consumers to be able to use, which is fascinating. You know, the stuff that they're working on seems to be 20 years ahead of what we see in the public.
- [150:22]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, the brain computer interface. Yeah, I guess. And of course there's a longer history too of soldiers and you know, use of various substances to make them more, what is it? Durable.
- [150:37]
Danny
Yeah, there's a, there was a grant that was given to the University of North Carolina by DARPA to study psychedelics for soldiers and to study like how to take, figure out how to take the psychedelic trip out of psychedelics to be able to. So soldiers could get the benefits of psychedelics for things like PTSD without having, without having to go through the hallucination or psychedelic trip of it. Yeah, this was very recent. I think it's still going on now. And even in the Ukraine war, what they're doing is they're, they're bringing them ibogaine for the Ukrainian soldiers to help them sort of, you know, after they get off the battlefield to give them ibogaine, get them through the trauma, get them to like, like process it all and get back out on the battlefield soon sooner so they can, you know, rinse and repeat and get people out there and keep the fighting force strong.
- [151:27]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [151:28]
Danny
And also I think it's being able, it's being either with. I think the reason they're trying to take, I don't know, this is like my speculation, conjecture is that if they are trying to figure out how to take the trip out of these psychedelics, can they give soldiers these drugs to where they're not hallucinating? This is the study of 27 million dollar project to create psychedelic inspired, psychedelic, psychic psycho psychiatric drugs without the trip. Yeah, this is it.
- [151:55]
Rebecca Lamov
It was interesting.
- [151:56]
Danny
What's the guy's name again? What's that guy's name? The, the head of that department? Brian Roth. Brian Roth. That's what it was.
- [152:05]
Rebecca Lamov
University of North. Well, that's interesting.
- [152:08]
Danny
So I think what they're trying to do is they're Trying to figure out how to give soldiers psychedelic drugs to make them more, more optimal in combat. Right. Yeah, because I know that stuff gives you better edge detection, better depth perception. Who, who knows, you know, what kind of benefits these people can get from these drugs.
- [152:27]
Rebecca Lamov
I suppose also it could be also use. I mean they're well known to be effective, seemingly effective in curing trauma from the battlefield. So it's kind of a double edged sword because even if they are effective, they could also, if employed at scale in certain ways, you could then re. Put the soldiers back on the battlefield faster. From the point of view of the military, that would be of value. But also people do seem to find it effective. So there's both healing and maybe there are. It seems like psychedelics have proven very unreliable in the sense of enhancing war, the ability to fight because there's famous films and studies, soldiers where they're like wandering.
- [153:15]
Danny
Yeah, that's hilarious.
- [153:16]
Rebecca Lamov
Americans also just, you just no longer see the necessity to march in formation or not to go look at a butterfly or something. So they're quite disorganized and their effects are unpredictable. But it is really interesting to think about. Just, I just took a course on the history of psychedelics at the University of Amsterdam. It was very interesting. Well, it's just a short course but you know, if you, if you go back to the introduction of psilocybin into the US from this Maria Sabina, who was a kind of a curandera shaman figure in Oaxaca. She, she really saw them as healing, healing divi children almost. She saw them as her, her as her kin and she initially didn't want them moved or taken. And it's whole long. Her life story is really interesting because her. Then people started to make pilgrimages in the 60s to meet her and everything changed. But then these, it did leave and it's sort of taken out of context and not necessarily used for healing but used more for spiritual insight or transformation or things like that. She thought of it more as like specifically when you have an ailment or you're, you know, something like she was a doctor essentially, but she also to some degree was happy. I think that they proved to continue to be effective. I mean, I think it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing. In other words, I'm getting back to the point of taking away the psychedelic effects to de. Psychedelicize these drugs seems so. Well, it's predictable maybe that people would want to. But it seems like, you know, it could be put to all sorts of uses.
- [155:11]
Danny
Yeah, yeah, it seems like, there's all sorts of different organizations that are trying to use psychedelics to push their. Whatever they're trying to do. Right. They're trying to use psychedelics to their own benefit. Right. There's obviously, there's the military industrial complex that's using psychedelics. There's certain aspects of medicine that are trying to push psychedelics to. And to a degree, I mean, you, obviously, you have. There's lots of pharmaceutical companies that have historically been lobbying to keep psychedelic drugs illegal and keeping them classified as whatever schedule they are so that they can't be used recreationally or can't be prescribed these things, because it obviously takes away from their bottom line unless they can take it and, and, and patent it and make money off of it. But then there's also, like, there's this push to. There's been all kinds of studies. There was a study that was done by John Hopkins where they took spiritual leaders from different religious groups and they gave them all psilocybin and they sort of like, documented their trips and, and how their psychedelic trips mapped according to their spiritual beliefs. Right. Like, if it gave them any sort of. Did it reinforce their belief of God or did it show them something else that was counterintuitive to what their beliefs were? And I haven't read the full study.
- [156:42]
Rebecca Lamov
But, but it's recent.
- [156:44]
Danny
It's, It's. It was done. I think it was done in the early 2000s, but the findings never came out. They buried it. And I, I think what it, what it did was it just reinforced the beliefs that they already had. You know, and that's. Some of the people, some of the psychedelic experts speculate that this stuff all these psychedelics are doing is just making you more of what you already are. They aren't necessarily changing anything they could be using as a tool, but the, the drugs themselves are, are neutral. Right. It's just gonna, it's just gonna reinforce whatever you, Whatever you already believe, whatever your values are. I don't think it, like, will fundamentally change you as a human being, but I mean, obviously it can be used as a weapon and a tool to. With things like MK Ultra to do nefarious stuff. And there's a push to incorporate them into churches. There's a, A push to. There was this book called the Immortality Key.
- [157:43]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [157:43]
Danny
Where they were. He was basically doing an exploration on the Eleusinian Mysteries, and he was trying to make the case that Eleusinian mysteries were being used. These people were all taking urgot, which allegedly can give you a psychedelic Experience. And this was the foundation of Christianity. And we should, we should use. The case that this book was making was that we should use psychedelics to bring back religion in our country and sort of, and sort of revive Christianity. And, you know, one of the dangerous things about that idea, I think, is when you give a church leader or a church father the legal access to psychedelics to be able to be the one that's administering them to people that are going to church who are coming there for answers. Right. And, and the people that are leading these church, these, these pastors or whatever, they believe that they have the voice of God, they have the direct line to God. Now you're giving these people psychedelics.
- [158:48]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [158:49]
Danny
And you're telling them what, what, what God is telling you.
- [158:55]
Rebecca Lamov
Right.
- [158:55]
Danny
Like, these people are probably already vulnerable to an extent. Like I could imagine that could be a very slippery slope and that could slide into something bad.
- [159:03]
Rebecca Lamov
That is one of the areas I'm hoping to investigate next year is this question of the finding that psychedelics can, I mean, one at least claim in a classic, in a recent paper, is that suggestibility is enhanced, advanced. Yeah, Psychedelics. And this can be, I guess, profound for people because they can be. They feel transformed, even if it's within a certain context, or maybe it's shaped by their own religious or their own pre. You know, their own, their own reality tunnel. But, but that perhaps suggestibility can also be abused. If that's even the right word. Yeah, if. If that's even the right way to describe it.
- [159:41]
Danny
So have you ever heard the story of Mary Pinchot Myers?
- [159:45]
Rebecca Lamov
I, I have, but it's been a little while since. Remind me.
- [159:48]
Danny
So she allegedly, she went to Timothy Leary and she told him, hey, I have a friend who's very, very powerful who wants to try lsd. Can you get me some? I can't tell you who he is, but we're gonna go meet with him and, and you're gonna walk him through the psychedelic trip with using LSD or whatever. I can't tell you who he is. I'm just gonna take you there. And, and she, she. There's a book all about this and she allegedly had an affair with John F. Kennedy. So the speculation is that this was John F. Kennedy that she was trying to give LSD to. And. Because he really was interested in it. And this was like, right before he canceled the Vietnam War and wanted to pull everybody out and wanted to, like, disarm. He wanted to nuclear disarm the America and the Soviet Union. He was getting on the phone with Khrushchev trying to, trying to end this whole thing. And literally like, I think it was a couple months after Kennedy was assassinated, she was assassinated on a run. Like she was just like, wow. Yeah, I think she was shot dead while she was on, on like doing a jog or something in the middle of the day.
- [160:58]
Rebecca Lamov
I do remember hearing that.
- [161:00]
Danny
Yeah.
- [161:00]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean it's interesting because people are transformed by this, by LSD in different ways, but in certain, there are certain, certain regularities in it, like to go back to MK Ultra, not to endlessly talk about it, but they were all taking LSD too. So you could observe that their work had this kind of quality of. I mean it was pretty outrageous and outlandish and their thinking probably was affected by the. They're. But what they're taking also like an example is, you know, who is it who was talking about. Oh, David E. Smith, the founder of the Hate Ash Free Medical Clinic. He was a pretty straight laced drug researcher until he took LSD and then he had this idea as he tells it, that he wanted to help people and bring medicine to drug addicts and things like that. So it does change people in, you know, even in these circles, even sometimes the scientists, you know.
- [162:01]
Danny
Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, a lot of these psychedelic studies, I think even this John Hopkins study, which is one of the reasons that the, the results got buried from it, was because some of the donors were going there, participating in the studies themselves because they were personally interested in. And the scientists that were doing the experiments were also taking it, were doing the drugs and like hanging out and like it was becoming this sort of like weird sort of like hippie retreat for people that were wanting to take acid and they were all involved in it and there's like this messianic complex that happens to these people where like, oh, this is going to save the world. This is going to make the world a better place. Like we all have to do this.
- [162:39]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah.
- [162:39]
Danny
And you see this, that gets messy.
- [162:43]
Rebecca Lamov
Someone you might want to talk to is a. We had someone visit our class in Amsterdam who is a psychedelic chaplain. And I guess it's a common, it's fairly common, it's kind of a type of position. It's not a therapist, he's not a therapist, but someone with some religious training. But it doesn't necessarily matter what tradition because what they. They're more like guides who help you process. Help a person who's had psychedelic assisted therapy process whatever experiences they may have had in the cause. Often they May go in for say treatment resistant depression, but they end up having profound experience, maybe that relates to their faith or their lack of faith. And a psychedelic chaplain is someone who's just good at talking them through that territory. Not ne. And sometimes maybe it's something they didn't practice or they were, but they were raised in or this experience had, you know, got them wondering or confused or whatever it is. So a chaplain, I mean the guy who came to our class was just really like a wonderful person. You could imagine he would be very good at helping people in such situations. So I got interest. I mean I think that's a. They would be good people to talk to because they would know to what extent that seems to be happening. That people's experience either conforms to their pre existing training or whether it raises other kinds of questions or whether it completely decimates your. You know, there are cases depending also on the. What the person's been been ingesting. You know, they may, they may seem to have experiences that don't relate to their religious training at all.
- [164:25]
Danny
Oh, interesting.
- [164:26]
Rebecca Lamov
Like with DMT and things. Yeah, but I'm not an expert on that. But it's interesting.
- [164:31]
Danny
Yeah, no, it is very interesting. What, I mean it's fun to speculate, but do you have any idea or do you have any speculation as to what could possibly. What sort of version of NK Ultra could be going on now?
- [164:49]
Rebecca Lamov
I don't, I don't know. I mean it would be hard to. I don't really, I just. Maybe my imagination is failing me here.
- [164:58]
Danny
Yeah, I mean just with your historical knowledge and all this, all the research that you've done in this stuff, like, like what would the most obvious.
- [165:08]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, okay, one thing I've always been struck by is a CIA psychologist. It might have been John Ginninger who said we failed to do the most dramatic things that we want. I mean this is the kind of bottom line is most of our experiments were failed. We didn't create a Manchurian Candidate. We didn't. You know, they could create what one called utter demoralization in a subject. You could really break somebody, but you couldn't necessarily build them up in the way you wanted or transform them in an exact direction or create someone who was their will was an extension of yours. But he said we have been actually successful in creating tiny bits of behavior change at a large scale. So you could get 70% of the population do something 10% more frequently. So like that kind of idea of nudging and seemingly insignificant but tiny adjustments That I would imagine that would be an area and that would seem to sync up with technology and maybe people's embedding ultimately kind of welcoming these devices so intimately into our lives, their connections to our unprocessed emotional, you know, areas of vulnerability. And then, you know, I. I don't know if people are so nefarious as to fund these. And it's also, as you said, it's a difficult environment to fund secretly. It's much more difficult maybe, than it used to be.
- [166:41]
Danny
Yeah.
- [166:41]
Rebecca Lamov
I don't know.
- [166:42]
Danny
Yeah. And was. Was Ted Kaczynski's stuff, was that connected to MK Ultra at all the Harvard experiments that he was.
- [166:49]
Rebecca Lamov
Not that I. I don't think it's connected to MK Ultra, but it is connected to Harry Murray, who was. He did work for the oss, but. But he wasn't. I don't think he was like. By the time he was involved with. He was basically. I think he was part of the OSS during World War II. Testing. Testing personality. Like, how could you evaluate people who would become spies or subversives, basically? So he used all. He's very. He invented the Thematic Apperception Test and other things. But he. Later, after World War II, and I don't have any evidence he was connected with the CIA at all. But he was interested in. And he experimented with Ted Kaczynski. He's interested in what he had developed during the war was interrogation, sort of putting people, interrogating people under stressful conditions and seeing if he could. If he could break them. And he had a number of different psychological conditions under which he would be able to evaluate them. And then later Kaczynski and. And I think he did do that sometimes when the person was administered lsd, whether unwittingly or wittingly, I'm not sure, but because I think that did happen to Kaczynski and he was really harmed by it, it seems.
- [168:14]
Danny
And they were giving him lsd.
- [168:16]
Rebecca Lamov
This is what I remember from. I haven't seen the records myself from those in the. The psycho psychological clinic, I think that he was a part of. And later he was associated with the Department of Social Relations. You know, it's hard to get those records now, but there is a book by. There's a book about it.
- [168:36]
Danny
Okay.
- [168:36]
Rebecca Lamov
That's pretty good research called Harvard and the Unabomber.
- [168:41]
Danny
Oh, yeah, yeah. Wow.
- [168:43]
Rebecca Lamov
But I have done a lot of research on Henry Murray just aside from that, so I kind of know his interests.
- [168:51]
Danny
Yeah. It's fascinating stuff. Something I always think about I always wonder what. What could they possibly be doing now? You know, like, maybe we'll f. Maybe we'll find out in 50 years, but probably not.
- [169:01]
Rebecca Lamov
I mean, one thing is that people don't keep the kind of records that they used to keep.
- [169:04]
Danny
That's true.
- [169:05]
Rebecca Lamov
We probably won't.
- [169:06]
Danny
Yeah, that's true. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for doing this. I. I really enjoyed talking to you. What. What's. What's the name of your book?
- [169:13]
Rebecca Lamov
Find it in the Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper Persuasion.
- [169:18]
Danny
Beautiful. Oh, look at that. There we go.
- [169:19]
Rebecca Lamov
It was great to talk to you, too.
- [169:21]
Danny
Yeah. We'll link this below for everyone. And is there anything else, like a website or anyone, anywhere people can go to to learn more, contact you or.
- [169:28]
Rebecca Lamov
Anything building a website under my name. Name. So just Rebecca Lamov dot com.
- [169:32]
Danny
Perfect. All right.
- [169:34]
Rebecca Lamov
Yeah, thanks.
- [169:34]
Danny
Thanks again. I really appreciate it. Oh, we got Patreon stuff. We do. Oh, we have a couple Patreon questions for you, but this is. This will be after.
- [169:40]
Rebecca Lamov
We'll.
- [169:40]
Danny
We'll wrap up the podcast now, and then if you don't mind, we'll answer a couple Patreon questions. All right, that's all. Good night, everybody. Bundle and safe. With Expedia, you were made to follow your favorite band. And from the front row, we were made to quietly save you.
- [169:56]
Rebecca Lamov
More Expedia made to Travel savings vary and subject to availability.
- [170:00]
Danny
Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.