Re-Air: CIA, MKUltra: Mind Control Techniques are Being Used Today & How To Protect Yourself | Dr. Rebecca Lemov

**Mayim Bialik** (0:03)
Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

**Jonathan Cohen** (0:05)
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

**Mayim Bialik** (0:06)
And welcome to our Breakdown. Today we are revisiting a really, really awesome episode from last year with Harvard historian and sociologist Dr. Rebecca Lemov. Now, Dr. Lemov is not someone who's usually on podcasts talking about her academic work, but her book, The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion is a fantastic topic, and we had such a great time discussing everything from Cold War psychology all the way to today's social media and how it's all an example of the spectrum of mind control.

**Jonathan Cohen** (0:40)
We also unpacked the case of Leonard Kyle, who claimed the government implanted devices in his brain and turns out it was true.

**Mayim Bialik** (0:49)
Dr. Lemov is going to talk to us about the rise of hyper persuasion in the digital age and how social media can manipulate our emotions by harvesting trauma using sophisticated targeted algorithms. It's a really, really great episode. Whether you're a fan of cults, psychology, digital ethics or government conspiracy theories, this is a great episode.

**Jonathan Cohen** (1:09)
As a reminder, check us out on Substack to join the Growing Breaker community and access content you cannot get anywhere else. Mayim Bialik's Breakdown on Substack.

**Mayim Bialik** (1:18)
And now please enjoy our episode with Dr. Rebecca Lemov.

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**Jonathan Cohen** (1:52)
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**Jonathan Cohen** (3:06)
helixsleep.com/breakdown.

**Mayim Bialik** (3:09)
Break it down. Rebecca Lemov, welcome to The Breakdown.

**Rebecca Lemov** (3:14)
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

**Mayim Bialik** (3:16)
We're very, very excited to talk to you. Jonathan and I talk about the instability of truth on like the lowercase t truth kind of all the time. You know, the book, it's a meaty book. I'm not gonna lie. Like it's a journey and it's like an historical journey through some of the most infamous and chilling examples of brainwashing, of mind control and of hyper persuasion. I do want to start though by just reading from from the first chapter of the book. You talk about kind of the context of how to frame this. And you say that this is common. This is common right now in the 21st century.
You talk about ungrounding, right? Kind of as a counterpoint to sort of the notion of brainwashing. But this modern ungrounding occurs because of rapid technologically-driven social change via the digital realm. We may not experience the wartime extremes that Maurice Wills did, which is one of the cases you talk about, but our environments are destabilized by small and large shocks nearly daily, hourly.
Can you just frame for us a little bit what is happening in the 21st century that should concern us regarding the instability of truth?

**Rebecca Lemov** (4:36)
Well, that's a great question at the heart of the book really, or what motivated me to write it, which was to say, how could I connect these large events in the 20th century that were so extreme and so in a way dark, asking the question of whether and under which conditions people can surrender voluntary control of their subjectivity or their thinking, and how on some level do we agree to that, or what were cases in which this seemed to happen?