#2322 - Rebecca Lemov

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

Shrink by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

All right, hello, Rebecca. Very nice to meet you.

Rebecca Lemov (0:15)

Hi, Joe. Very nice to meet you too.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

So first of all, what got you interested in mind control?

Rebecca Lemov (0:25)

Well, so this is a question I've been asking myself just because I find myself after two and a half decades of having this topic. That initially seemed pretty niche and unusual, and not many people were interested or many people were skeptical about it. But I thought it seemed like it embodied some of the more extreme. If you could look at the way people are shaped by their environments and by what parts of your life are determined by you and what parts are determined by outside forces, that mind control would be a perfect area to investigate that, because it's so extreme, especially if you looked at particular cases. So because I had done my dissertation at UC Berkeley on the history of behavioral engineering and how these kind of models for creating a society of control and encouragement in various ways, like a behaviorist kind of dream. And it seemed like the next step was to look at something like brainwashing or mind control.

Joe Rogan (1:30)

When you first started studying it, was it a less public sort of curiosity? Because now a lot of people are very much interested. I blame the Internet, mostly. I probably had a lot to do with it, too.

Rebecca Lemov (1:45)

You and the Internet.

Joe Rogan (1:46)

A lot of people on the Internet are, you know, because over time, you know, people have gotten to know about MKUltra and a bunch of different programs that our own United States government was involved in, where they were working on mind control. But what, like, initially, what drew you to it?

Rebecca Lemov (2:10)

Well, I guess I always have been drawn to topics that seemed unusual, maybe, for a professor to be looking into. And people, I mean, at the time, if you look at a Google engram for the word mind control or brainwashing, they were very low, you know, around the turn of the century or the 1990s, after there kind of, there was a peak of interest in the 70s, and it just really fallen off. But I guess I was interested because it just seems so unusual. And, like, maybe there was something there that people hadn't really thought about. And at the time, these documents weren't readily available.

And, like you say, people weren't really looking into it. So I just thought it seemed like a rich area for research. And I'm also interested in connecting my pers- I've always been interested in connecting my personal, I guess, my goals for life with what I research. So I thought it's almost like a philosophical and existential question of how much we're controlled or how much we might be controlled. And it seemed important to look at some of the more extreme cases, if you could.

Joe Rogan (3:16)

Yeah, I think that that's an interesting aspect of it. Like how much are we controlled and how arrogant are we to think that we're not controlled? Or how arrogant are we to think that that wouldn't work on me?

Rebecca Lemov (3:29)

Yeah, I think that that's embedded in our, you know, in the messages we receive all the time, that freedom is something kind of effortless, that we're just granted.

And that autonomy is just the natural state. But actually we're so much more malleable than we think. And these things, if you look around yourself, or if you observe yourself, you'll often see this to be true. That's what also drew me to anthropology is just the idea. Like if I was born in another place at another time, I would be another person. Or how much of me would be transferable was what that interested me. And that's why I went to, first started studying anthropology. Like how much are we shaped by things that we don't necessarily choose? Or are maybe accidental or genetic or various factors. But yeah, but I think we're told that freedom of choice or our autonomy is fairly straightforward and all you have to do is exert your will.

Joe Rogan (4:33)

Yeah, but clearly we're influenced heavily by our environment. Culturally, I mean accents, just cultural traditions, behavior patterns. It begs the questions like what are you? And what is the shell that you wear on the outside, you know, like a hermit crab? Like what do you carry around with you? And what, at the core of it, what are you?