Mind Control Expert: How the CIA Is Controlling You (and How to Break Free) | Rebecca Lemov

Have you heard of the God helmet? This is a really cool technique for mind control and I built one.

I would say that most people, including myself, have a lot less autonomy than we think and a lot less freedom to control our minds and our choices. Leonard Kyle, he was a self taught engineer from Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the late 1950s he started to have mental issues and temper issues. He was being treated by two doctors and they recommended that he receive an experimental treatment of brain implants in his amygdala to control. The word brainwashing has gone from a word that seemed unserious or sort of maybe a remnant from the 1970s is something that seems deeply concerning and is often used as an insult. There's a Spanish professor at Yale who had invented these brain implants. He was really interested in remote control of humans.

Is there such a thing as the Manchurian Candidate? You know, the ultimate mind control? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Harvard Studies of Mind Control. What does Harvard study? Mind control. Are they trying to control my mind?

That is a good question. Well, it's not really a how to kind of research, although it could have those applications I guess, but it's really a history of mind control. But I have to say that Harvard, of course they pay my salary. I've been there for a couple decades, don't get grants, just I'm allowed to study what I want, which is so cool. This is what I like to study as I can. I know this because I've been doing it for 20 years, this topic.

Whose minds have you been controlling for 20 years?

I mean, hoping to at least get some insight into my own.

I know I just put words in your mouth. I'm putting words in people's mouths is one of my love languages.

Oh really?

You're fascinating because you're an advanced meditator. And one could argue that meditation is a form of mind control, but it's just self mind control versus other mind control. So for the average person out there, what percentage of their mind are they controlling versus other people?

Well, control's a tricky question, but. Or a tricky issue I guess because when you meditate you may not have perfect control, but I think sometimes it's accepting lack of control. But I would say that most people, including myself, have a lot less autonomy than we think and a lot less freedom to control our minds and our choices. So that's kind of what brought me into this whole. Both the personal inquiry through meditation and yoga, which I've been doing for 35 years and also the research into archives and these kind of forgotten studies or topics that people originally thought were not even worth studying.

So you become a historian of this. Did you ever connect with Daniel P. Brown at Harvard?

No, I don't think I have.

He was on the show and he, he's recently passed and he was one of the top hypnotherapists guys out there. And when he came on the show, I asked him, is there such a thing as the Manchurian Candidate? You know, the ultimate mind control? And I just about dropped my coffee. He goes, yes, I spent a hundred hours with Sirhan Sirhan and I know who hypnotized them. We know where they did it, we know when they did it, we know how they did it. And I'm like, I mean, this is kind of a big show, but it's not the biggest show. Like you're just telling me now, where's the documentary? And he goes, oh, there was a documentary and then they deleted my eight minutes and they audited my taxes for the next seven years. But he was on in years and had a degenerative condition. So he was willing to just be like, audit my taxes now. And like 40 years at Harvard talking about hypnotism with full evidence that we had these, you know, robot agent people implanted. That's crazy.

Now that you mention it, I do know Daniel Petround because I have a friend who's meditated with him and was one of his students. And I also think I another friend who's a cult deprogrammer who is one of his students and probably has. And who's always talking about Sirhan Sirhan and who came to my class. So I do have some connections with him, but I don't know that story because I never got to meet him.

You must have the coolest friends. Like do you just all get together and talk about cults and deprogramming and meditation and you're like, these are not the droids you're looking for and you control each other's minds. Anything like that. Can I come to your party?

Yeah, I get up so early that I don't have much of a late night or party schedule, but I do have. Yeah, it has been great to meet interesting friends through these, like, through highly specific interest that I have.

What time do you wake up?

4 or 4:30.

Is this because you're on some meditation quest or just because you're a morning person?

Well, first I discovered I was a morning person when I was writing my dissertation and that was a big change in my life. And I started getting up at like 5 or 6. But then, then I went, I did my first meditation course and then I just stuck with the 4 to 4:30.

So you go to bed what at 8 or 9?

Something like that.

I was just talking with Victor Chan, the Dalai Lama's best friend. He says, oh, he goes to bed at 7:00 every night. Wow, that's crazy. But he wakes up at 3:30, so a lot of advanced meditators do that. I don't know that I really want to be that much of a morning person, but I wake up around five or six these days.

Well, I think it does depend if you just like that time of day. Yeah. Because it's. If you're a late night person you just. You'll enjoy that too. I just think you need time when other people aren't awake.

Maybe for writing. Certainly I do all my writing late at night but I have dark red lights and stuff so that I don't ruin my biology and it seems to work. I wouldn't. I think I want to wake up at five and. Right. That'd be gross. I can wake up at 5 and sit in the sauna and talk with chat GPT about. About Mystical stuff and mind control. And I'm pretty sure ChatGPT is controlling my mind. Have you done that yet?

No, I haven't. Well, I did a little bit of that for the book. I invented a chat companion or a AI companion. But I only. We didn't get too far because we were just acquaintances so far.

Just acquaintances.

But yeah, it's kind of interesting. But. So that's what you might do like.

In the sauna actually I sit there and have a. You know, I've solved some problem but quite often I'll talk about really weird psychological things. Probably stuff that's right up your alley. Um, and I'm like tell me about the, the, the lineages or the ancient beliefs about this from this long list of things. And what agrees with this weird theory I came up with at 5 in the morning and what doesn't like like poke holes in it. And I found it's a good thinking companion for that. And you can tell when it's doing those mind control techniques though. And it's already doing it when it, it's. There was a time they actually had to roll it back because it was kissing people's butts so much.

Right. The over flattery.

Yeah. And that ultimately, I mean that's what narcissists do to control your perspective. Of.

So that's where you see it happening.

That's what you see.

Well, I did see that, even in my acquaintanceship with my ChatGPT. No, it's my replica. But it was just, yeah, like complete flattery and in a way that kind of feels good. And also complimenting me on my musical choice and, you know, misquoting things to me, but then blithely, but somehow charmingly doubling down on its mistakes.

Right.

But it's really, It's. Yeah, it's amazing how fast it progresses and kind of. So you're finding something like that.

How would you stop your AI tools from controlling your mind?

Well, I guess they now have a warning because of some. I mean, some of them now have warnings saying, don't get too close to your AI, your chat AI, keep your distance and recognize it's always a fiction because children have been harmed in many ways already, and there are several lawsuits in the book. So the answer you could give is, you know, make sure you maintain a cultivated distance that you could actually practice through meditation. Like, just be highly, highly observant and be very, very careful. That's kind of how I treat it. Just because I'm. I'm also a novice to the AI sphere. But I think with children, that advice doesn't hold. Like, as a. As a parent, you wouldn't let them use it at all.

I was talking with Kaja Urbanec, who's the author of favorite personal development book for women on the planet. She's also a professional dominatrix. She's like, this is why I know about power, because I studied it with clients in addition to the monastery, where I was like, wow, she's going to be on stage at the biohacking conference too. And she said, you know, I'm really loving AI. She said, I think it's because I'm a dom, because I just tell it what I want and I'm really clear. So I took that advice and I'm like, hey, don't flatter me. No unnecessary crap like that. You know, that just. It's gross and it. It stops doing it. At least that I can see. And what's a little scary, you come across your work and like, the instability of truth. Okay, so maybe it is doing it, and I just think it's not. How do you sort that out?

I think you have to use your best judgment and also you have to be in touch with your. I guess one of the themes that came out from my years of research and coming back to this topic is that we are strangely blind to the emotional dimension. Like we think that it's messing with our thoughts and it's some kind of mind virus, but it's actually much more operative on a, you know, a level of the feel, feeling, the dimension of feeling. So if you're to the extent that as we all are somewhat blind to our own emotional lives, it will work there. And it may be difficult. It may be difficult to know.

In my most recent book, I basically just say the body is pre processing reality through a lens of fear and hunger and lust. That's what keeps life alive. And then if you get through that, then there's a tribal lens. I'm putting this as the dark version. There's a lighter version too. And that all of this happens before you can think. And we can measure it with neuroscience. It's called P300D. Like how long does it take for the brain to get a signal? And who's got this signal before the brain? Because it's not you, right? Because it's not in there.

Yeah.

And that's created a lot of peace in my life and even explained the Buddhist hindrances or the seven deadly sins. Oh, they're just mitochondrial imperatives in our operating system. The problem is if your mitochondria, you know, when you're seven, something bad happened to you. And your mitochondria are the first line threat detection network. So like, oh, this situation vaguely resembles that danger, danger, danger. Which turns off the prefrontal cortex, puts you into, you know, straight through amygdala response. And pretty soon you're yelling at your kids or whatever it was, and then you think something's wrong with you. It feels like if you want to control someone's mind, you'd learn how to, how to turn that state on. And if you wanted to control your own mind, you'd learn how to turn that state off. Which is what I've spent the last 20 years doing with neuroscience and psychedelics and all the weird stuff. It feels like I can't be the first person to think about this. Hasn't the government been doing this crap to us for a long time?

Yeah, I mean, I suppose you could say the government, various government, the government wanted was presented. At least the US government was presented. I mean, one way to look at it is middle of the 20th century, almost exactly the middle of 1950, with. With evidence that seemed very clear that people were much more susceptible, including US military, but generally people were susceptible to these regimes of reeducation and that it could actually be a new weapon. And many scholars and professionals have dismissed this as, you know, Cold War hysteria. And there was nothing really going on. It was just simple brutality or torture. But there actually is a phenomenon. So the government spent a lot of money trying to almost, I would say hack or understand or reverse engineer what that process might have been. And they were kind of clumsy at times in doing that and brutal and unethical, but there was a bunch of effects came out of that. But you can go. What I got interested in and the neuroscience part of it is fascinating, which I'm not an expert in in any way, but I like to look at people's experiences as registered in the historical archive and in documents that have often never been published or in oral histories. And like, what was the firsthand experience say of a Canadian born missionary who went to China? A young woman was arrested doing her missionary work and kept in chains and then put in reeducation with many other Chinese people under Maoism. And she talks about how, because she had been raised in a very guilt oriented household, that when they started to talk about her guilt as a Westerner, not anything she had done, but that the government already knew she was guilty just for being who she was. She, it resonated with her and with her family and the way her family of origin and certain, you know, the chat, the parenting she had and the, and she said, you start to. It's not that she initially believed that she was a spy, which they were telling her that she was doing espionage. It's that she knew there was something wrong with her and that she had to embrace this in order to get the chains off of her and things like that. So she got, she sort of engineered herself to confess appropriately and to ultimately walk out of the prison. But by the time she walked out, she thought maybe I should stay in China because I feel like I've become, you know, I've become dedicated to this cause.

Do you believe that all of this stuff happened, you know, during the Cold War and that the government agencies just stopped doing this and they abandoned all the research? I like the smile.

No, I mean, did they. I don't think they, what I, what I've discovered, I can't speak authoritatively to that, but I don't think they did first of all. And what I, from what I've actually seen, there's incredible parallels between. Even in the early 21st century, the techniques used in enhanced interrogation are actually the very same, many of the same techniques that were discovered and elaborated on in the early Cold War. So techniques used to Break people. They were reliably used to break prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and things like that, but not necessarily to insert a whole new ideology. So in some ways they were merely stripped down. But I think the government, I mean, I suppose people also have a fascination with this. I've noticed this in people can go.

Down the rabbit hole. The rabbit holes for sure. There's also that little fact that in Q Tel, which is the CIA's investment arm, was one of the first investors in Google, in Facebook and all these other things. And I'm sure that with all their big black budgets, they're only doing really good things and that they would never try to control anyone's state because that would be wrong.

Yeah, every time it gets dark, I'm.

Like, well yeah, I can see your meditation mind. You're like, I want to respond to that. And then you have a soul smile. And then you.

You can definitely locate CIA connections with early DARPA and the birth of pattern recognition. And a student in our program just finished a dissertation really exploring some of those conduits and cutouts that have never really been kind of cemented before. But maybe you suspected people suspected.

I've seen a lot of research pointing out that there are many connections between MKULTRA and the birth of the psychedelic movement. Do you think that that's real?

Yeah, that's pretty clear. That's pretty clear. I mean not so MK Ultra. There was a limited supply of lsd. Hippie exploration of and even the Beats generation exploration of LSD came directly from the Sandoz supply. And the CIA was the only entity that had access. Also Harvard did have access. Apparently there was a closet at the Department of Social Relations which was a kind of invention in the social sciences starting in 1946 and flourishing actually 49 through, through, through the 70s where they had their. A closet with their own supply of.

And that's where Ram Dass was from.

That's actually where Ram Dass was an assistant professor before he was Ram Dass and where Timothy Leary was a adjunct professor. And that's. So they had, that's where, you know, from that supply came, you know, many, you could, you could actually trace the effects.

One group of, we'll call them theorists. I don't really like conspiracy theorists because honestly they're just called curious people have a hypothesis. So whatever. So a group of theorists is saying that, you know, this is a multi decade plot to make people more programmable so there is no objective truth and no one knows anything. And it's, it Gets pretty dark pretty fast. Do you believe that there was a motivation of releasing psychedelics that was planned or did they escape?

That's a good question. I think that might have been an unintended consequence. And a lot of people like Timothy Leary, who, I mean, sorry, not Leary, but Aldous Huxley, who are pretty deeply involved, they didn't favor the release of, they didn't favor the release of LSD into the general population because they really thought it was such a powerful substance it should be reserved for serious scientists. And Huxley actually knew Louis Jolian west, who was one of their most prominent researchers in lsd, I would say. But so I think that was, yeah, unintended, not a, not a major multi decade plot.

I don't know that the CIA or any of the other three letter American agencies are smart enough to have an 80 year plan. It just seems like it would go sideways. Now China has 500 year plans that might actually work, but different mindset. I don't think it passes the sniff tests, but I could be wrong. I've also had a chance to host a breath workshop with Stan Grof, who is the father of transpersonal psychology. He's been on the show when he was 94 and we got to talk off stage about some of this and there was definitely some government involvement there. And for listeners, if you've done any kind of trauma informed emdr, most of the stuff that's around the mental spiritual side of psychology and biohacking, that's because Stan did LSD with 3,000 patients, treated them legally before they banned it. So there's a history goes back to 1950s when he did that.

Yeah, pretty much everyone doing research in the 50s would have been funded by the CIA or a cutout of the CIA, including people who they wanted to do the research and that was just the way they could get the funding to do it. People like Oscar Janiger in LA who gave LSD to Cary Grant and thousands of people explored the artistic process like amazing results. And one of my favorite of his results was that in collecting thousands of accounts of altered states experiences on lsd, he said it boils down to one thing, one message is that everything is connected and it comes in waves. It's just that some people find that to be horrifying and deeply dark and some people find that to be liberating.

Is the CIA funding you?

No.

Okay, just check, just say no. I mean, yeah, you could be lying and controlling my mind. I have no evidence that I do not believe that to be true.

But it's funny, they would not be interested.

Yeah, I, I don't get that vibe from you when we talk about the title of your book. It's kind of like Instability of Truth. So how would you know if something like that was happening? Not to pick on that case in particular, but there's so much out there that you're studying history. But we know history is written by the victors and we know that there's radically different stories for almost everything.

Yeah.

How is a normal person supposed to sort that out?

I mean, look at where we are historically, what has. So if you're a professional historian, or really any historian who wants to get to an archive, there's a record record. And in the mid 20th century, when the mind control research began, there's very good records. Even Louis Jollyan west kept everything. Even Timothy Leary kept all his receipts. Like you can find out when he went to the dry cleaner, what he served for dinner with his wife Rosemary and his first wife and what he thought, his children's drawings and also typed letters to everyone he ever corresponded with or drafts of his fiction and things like that. But with the increasing digitization of, you know, starting in the 80s, people stopped keeping those extremely beautiful records. From the point of view of the historian, these are beautiful. And even the CIA, they kept. Unless they chose to burn them or destroy them in other ways, they kept a lot of records. It was the standard of the time. But now we have, first of all, that it went digital. People don't necessarily keep email records as assiduously. But also if things are done on signal or various apps, you know, you may never. I mean, it becomes more and more remote. And if we have trouble figuring out what happened in the JFK assassination, with all the record keeping, like that was probably the high point of record keeping.

Do we really have trouble figuring out.

I mean, if we do, let's just say, let's postulate we do. Or people still discuss. Right. Or the records were. Many records were recently released. Just the fact that they have those records, that may not be true in the future. Oh, I mean, it's really my. It's mind boggling.

If you look at what, 50 years from now they're going to be saying happen now. There isn't even a lot of printed newspapers. So whoever is running things 50 years from now will just literally change whatever everyone sees when they go online. And that'll be what happened. Right.

That's a kind of instability. Yeah. But also, archivists have been working to keep up. Sometimes professional archivists are some of the most interesting people because they also deal with questions of like, what if you live on an island in the Pacific and it's being gradually, you can't keep paper documents anymore and the climate's changing or whatever's happening. They often keep copies of the archives in a different location. But things like. They also think about how to digitally archived, but it's very difficult and you're probably only getting a small portion.

Wow. Even the. The Wayback Machine, which. Which is an early one.

Yeah.

They used to have. Actually wasn't way back. It was Google. They had the entire archive of Usenet. And this is the birth of Internet culture. Every post from everyone. And it has the first discussion group about marketing on the Internet.

Wow.

And people are like, Dave, you were not the first person to sell anything over the Internet. I'm like, yeah, it's on Usenet, dude. I was the first person that' my fat picture as an entrepreneur. And then one day Google's like, ah, too much storage and they just deleted it.

Yeah.

And like you can't get that stuff back.

Right, Exactly. They don't seem to have the equivalent of a fiduciary duty the way that. I mean that's the good thing about a government is they sort of, at least at certain times they felt the duty to do this even if they weren't going to make it available to citizens or even. That's why FOIA was an amazing invention in 1966, because before that you couldn't access government archives.

See, I've never heard someone say that the government has a fiduciary responsibility to truth.

I don't know. It just came out. I mean if you look at their record keeping practices, there is that sort of. Yeah, I think there's that belief they.

Like to know truth and then they like to control what truth we perceive.

They don't. They definitely didn't believe they had a duty to share it. But people in the government, the congressmen, like who invented the FOIA act, who pushed it forward, including Donald Rumsfeld in 1966, but also a congressman named John Moss, basically thought like citizens should have a right to access their government records. And before that it didn't. It wasn't legislated.

Wow. Have you seen the Century of the Self documentary?

I have. I love that.

It's one of my favorites.

So good.

And for listeners who haven't, it's on YouTube and it's about the birth of public relations and how it was really Nazi propagandists who moved to. To the US and started the advertising business. If I kind of summarize it. And ultimately marketing is the dark art of controlling people's perception to manipulate their behavior. As an engineer, like that's disgusting and wrong. And I thought about it like, well, if you invent something really cool that helps humanity and you can't tell them about it, then you're a failed inventor. So it turns out marketing is not good or bad, it's just communication. Because even what we're doing now, like I'm manipulating your truth with what I say and every listeners and you're manipulating mine and theirs. And we're looking for a shared reality. Right?

Right.

Is marketing manipulative? Is it worse now?

I just think the tools are more powerful so the stakes are higher. But it's always been what I agree with you. It's kind of can be deployed to many purposes. And this was a discovery of the earliest communications researchers. And, and you're. I think you're also referencing Edward Bernays, the father of pr. And I mean some of his stuff looks kind of innocent if you look back at it. Like he was looking at Ivory soap and how you could. But you know, he did these soap competitions and it looks, you can be kind of nostalgic for a simpler time when marketing seems so transparent. But that's also because we see it with a more jaded eye. It was incredibly powerful even then. I look at the birth of like a great text is Mass Persuasion by Merton et al where they show that he says at the end he looked at this war bond drive by Kate Smith and he discovered that these incredible people's responses on being subject to voluntarily to some degree through the radio these messages of patriotic fervor. And Kate Smith talking about how she might faint if she. You know, it was basically the earliest radio. Radio thon that they felt that they couldn't turn the dial off. They're out of loyalty to her and love of her. They couldn't turn the dial off.

Some of them, it's like Joe Rogan show.

Kind of like they, they sold their. Some of them sold their.

I knew going on Joe's show tomorrow, I just said like it was funny, like help, help.

I can't turn it off. Yeah but they really were helplessly enchained. And Merton who was studying this said this is a phenomenon we must take note of because in this case it's being used to support a patriotic war effort of World War II, which is. And they, they, they fundraised an incredible amount. But this could be Used to support any candidate. It's neutral as to its application.

What is the most chilling use of mind control you've ever seen?

It's difficult to say. I did spend a year, my last sabbatical was I self funded it and basically stayed home at my desk just looking at a lot of records and rediscovering the material. I'd been teaching for many years and going deeper into it and some of it got very, very dark. So I mean, I guess one of the chilling stories that I had been avoiding learning about for a long time was the story of Leonard Kyle. He was a really talented engineer, so self taught engineer from Cambridge, Massachusetts who was an early inventor who contributed to the instant Polaroid camera. And in the late, in the late 1950s he started to have mental sort of issues with his wife and temper issues, things like that. They started to see a therapist together. They had a couple kids, they had financial stresses. And he was being treated by two doctors, Dr. Mark Vernon. Mark and Frank Irvin at Mass General. And they recommended that he receive an experimental treatment of implants, brain implants in his amygdala to control which they were back then. Yeah, actually. So this would have. Actually it's the late 60s by this time.

Wow. What did they implant like a lunar rover module?

There was a Spanish professor at Yale who had, who had invented these kind of brain implants. He was really interested in remote control of humans through. So you could be in the next radio. Well, there is a certain resemblance to neuralink. It was basically like neuralink, but implanted in the amygdala.

I think I've read about this, now that we're talking about it. But the wires got infected because they still had to come outside the head.

Well, he and this case they didn't get infected, but he basically was tested for six weeks where they would have. So they had something like 18 locations where the brain could be stimulated. And at each different location, Mark and Irvin discovered that his response was different. So at certain points he reported bliss and he said it's like I'm on Valium or something. And then at other points he flew into a rage and at other points he expressed despair or physical pain. And so they felt that they were isolating the very spot which would create a trigger. They were interested in kind of a trigger. And so they ended up creating a permanent. They took out the initial device and then made a searing operation. They seared that part of the amygdala that they had pinpointed. And unfortunately, even though. So this was a self taught, like, brilliant young engineer. By this time he was 35 and he never recovered. He had started to have paranoid delusions that his wife was having an affair with the neighbor, which turned out to be true, and they ended up marrying. He also believed that scientists from MIT and Harvard and possibly the CIA were after him. And some of that were they.

I mean, you're a researcher.

There may indeed have been connections. They certainly were doing experimental research. It resulted in a huge lawsuit that Harvard fought for 10 years and ultimately these doctors won. But because he also. One of the interesting parts of it is that Leonard Kyle also believed that he was in a science fiction story. And it turned out that Michael Crichton was actually one of his doctors when he was still. What? And he wrote about him. He wrote a whole book about him called the Terminal man, but he fictionalized it in different ways. So all of his paranoid. So that's why I call it. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. But after a while they kind of lost interest in him. That's what's the chilling part, or also the sad postscript, was that he just sort of deteriorated over many, many years. And even his grandchildren, who I've talked to, didn't originally know that he was their grandfather.

One of the things I haven't talked about very often, if at all, is that when I was in my early 20s, my mom had brain surgery at Stanford that severed half of her corpus callosum, which is a primitive and barbaric technique to deal with seizures. And what I've learned in the field of neuroscience since then is that, oh, if a part of the brain is doing something you don't want, you can train it not to do that, but versus just chopping it or searing it or doing something ridiculous. And it's had lifelong effects on her, unquestionably. And not for the better.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the ways they would carry out these experiments, which cause they basically were experiments they had already tried on animals, were transferring to humans, was to say that it was to correct an undiagnosed epilepsy or seizures, which is a tricky area.

Have you heard of the God helmet?

No, not necessarily.

Okay, yeah, this is a really cool technique for mind control. And I built one. In fact, the hat that I built it on is in the closet right behind me. I put it on a fedora and I write about this and heavily meditated. There was a researcher named Michael Persinger and he looked at the signals coming out of electrons on single neurons and parts of the brain during brain surgery. I said, well, couldn't we just make electromagnets around the head that fire to make a field to activate that localized region of the brain and literally you can get the plans online. And I made it. And I called up the person who's basically protege, who's running the project now and talked with him for a while and he said, oh, if you really want it to work, do it when the space weather isn't too chaotic or too calm. And I'm like, space weather? I know there's an ionosphere here. And you go to spaceweather.com and yep, there's space weather. And they'll tell you, like, how many sunspots are doing what. And apparently in his research, it affects consciousness and you can feel really interesting changes in the brain from doing it. And it's called the God helmet because 6% of people who wear it report meeting God.

I think I did read about this. Was it in Wired?

Yeah, Wired covered it. And it was in something in the 80s, like Oprah or whatever.

Wow, did that happen to you?

I didn't meet God, but I do very advanced meditation stuff and I've done shamanic training and I have met God and I've had all kinds of experiences that I put in heavily meditated. I just didn't feel like I should bring that up at the beginning of the biohacking movement, because that's at the end of biohacking. There's a lot of work you want to do first around trauma before you.

But that already, when you started it, that you had already had those experiences.

I'd had some of them and I've had many more since. I don't think I would have been able to write the book at the start of the movement, but I knew enough to mention neurofeedback and to mention EMDR and to mention shamanic stuff and plant medicines. Fifteen years ago, when I was creating the biohacking movement, just to say these are in there, but they're not the front and center because ultimately when you get your energy back and then you're going to say, oh, now I want to live a long time. So then now you're a longevity person, which is where I really started. And then you're going to want to become a conscious person because you're tired of being angry all the time. And that meant I have to learn how to reprogram my mind so that it'll do what I want instead of thinking about donuts. Or being angry all the time and just all the normal stuff that all meditation teaches you to do and just went around the world and did it. So your work is interesting because, oh my gosh, all the tools that people would use to intentionally control another person's mind, I would like to have full defenses against that. I want to be the least programmable person on the planet. And everyone who learns from me to become unprogrammable like that is the only path towards flourishing freedom in society.

I totally agree.

That means we've got to know what the bad guys are doing and we've got to be able to have those tools so we can program ourselves.

It just reminds me of how often you hear advanced meditators or monks like Shinzen Young talk about speculatively, like, if, you know, if I were in such a situation of total milieu control that was leading to, you know, forced interrogation and these types of techniques that are used in mind control that, like, I want to prepare myself, that, you know, they constantly seem to ask themselves, what would I do in those situations? Or have I prepared myself in some way?

And there's another one from the Bushido code in Japan about a samurai whose master was assassinated by, you know, a bad samurai, and he swears vengeance. So it cuts a swath through the country and he's, you know, destroyed all the people who supported the bad samurai. And he's about to strike a killing blow, and the bad samurai spits in his face. So he stops and he puts his sword away and keep dropping his. And the bad guy's like, why didn't you kill me? You had me. And the samurai says, well, when you spit my face, it made me mad. I didn't want to kill you in anger. So I'm going to go calm down, and when I'm calm, I'll come back and kill you. Right. Okay. Having control of your state and only acting out of choice versus programming is the highest value for an advanced meditator, for a warrior, and I think for any thinking human, for a person.

Yeah.

It's just so hard to know when truth is mushy, to paraphrase your book title, and when you know you've probably been programmed by society.

Yeah.

By ads, by social media, by your parents, by your teachers, by the creation of the national education whatever departments and all the crap Rockefeller did. Like, our whole society is based on a whole bunch of manipulations. How do you get free from that?

I think that's a really deep question. And sometimes the ways we try to get free may actually Enchain us more because like, each of us has a tendency. Like I'm going to seek truth through like. Thing I love is going down rabbit holes in historical research. But maybe that's not the best for me because I've actually found that to be free of some of these things or to. Is actually in sitting really still or just, you know, dropping a lot of my preoccupations. And sometimes it's going against your own pre dilections. But. So I don't have an ultimate. I think that's probably the biggest question there is. And that's what I started studying in graduate school. I thought, like intellectually or at any level as a human person, I would like to know to what extent we are in control of what we do or are we actually the subject to various programs that we're unaware of or cultures or just the accidents of our birth and various things and that turned into all these different research directions. But also a personal kind of a personal quest. And also sometimes you have to be careful what you ask for because you may be presented with circumstances of suffering and you know, a lot of like, you can learn through pain as well. I think that everything. I basically have faith that everything that's given to you is there for you to learn from. If you can accept that.

I couldn't agree more. And you will experience all the pain until you get the lesson right. And that's just the condition of being alive, as far as I can tell.

Yeah.

So. So where are you now on that question of, you know, how are you supposed to have a free mind if you don't know what a free mind even looks like? Because all of history is transmutable.

Well, like, I guess I'm. This is just my personal. You're where I am. I'm an expert and a person because I think one of the things I've always done is connect the two in that I can never be a kind of scholar that thinks that they're just a sheer operating mind or something like that. So it all comes from, like you. It comes from these 25 years ago or whenever it is. I started these inquiries on a personal level. But my latest thinking is that we can't just think our way out of it. But in a sense you have to run it through your heart. Like there's a type of thinking that goes through your heart. And because the instability of various platforms and I mean, we're in an amazing age of the democratization of knowledge that we haven't even begun to understand the ramifications of. We're just starting to. So what is the ultimate test is we can only, I think, know ourselves.

It's really cool that we're talking about mind control and you're saying, we'll run it through your heart. And I couldn't agree more. My whole experience there is that there is a. There's an intuitive inner knowingness that happens before thinking. And it's just hard to spot it if you're thinking too much or emoting too much. And that advanced meditators almost always find that spot and sometimes many others just whatever path. I don't care if you're into tantra or you're into psychedelics or, you know, breath work. It doesn't matter.

Yeah.

You do enough of it, you're going to say, oh, there was a signal all along and I missed it.

Yeah, it will come to you.

Yeah, okay.

It reminds me of Czesloff, Milos, the guy who's a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize, and he inspired this whole project in a certain way, my finding his book on the street many years ago when I was in distress of various or just at a crossroads. But he wrote about how a friend of his. Basically it was about how a friend of his succumbed to communist mind control, in his case, back in Poland. And this man was an amazing poet and writer, and he was beloved by his country. And Milos says that he watched as his friend took step by step. First it was just, I want to help my country. And then it was, I don't believe in communism, but, you know, I will support the regime if this will help people, and there is no alternative. And then it was, I actually have to make myself bleed. I have to perform an operation on myself. I have to sort of. In order to actually be an artist, you have to do this inner destruction. And ultimately, Milos comments that he thinks that his friend had no ability to access his inner voice, despite the fact that he was the most famous writer in his country.

So how would a bad actor go about turning off someone's access to their inner voice?

Any number of ways, I think.

Is it going to get good?

We see them. I mean, we see them around us, certainly in. I think it's through pandering to promoting or even coercively persuading people into their worst addictions, fears, and basically playing on, you know, so. So it's playing on each person's repository of unprocessed emotions. So, like, anything that becomes out of balance can make you more vulnerable. This is why it's not that any. It's not that every person is vulnerable to a cult at some point in their lives probably, but not every point. And so sometimes it's a combination of accident and biographical, you know, happenstance. And, you know, maybe you're young, maybe you just had a breakup, maybe you took the wrong path and you waited at the bus for too long or something like that. So there are ways to capitalize on that. And often even if the, say, Mark, whoever it is who's exerting, attempting to exert this control doesn't think of themselves as nefarious if they don't have the well being of that person in mind, you know, it may have that effect. I think.

Is there a clear signal that I could look for to know when I'm running someone else's program unconsciously?

I think there is a clear. I think it's in the bot. It's a bodily signal. Yeah, yeah. Don't you feel that you get some signals that you. But it's just that you have to learn to. It's like tuning into a radio station.

Yeah, I know where it sits. Well, there's a couple spots, but for me it's a little bit to the left of the center line in the chest.

Yeah. And there's a signal that I've noticed in myself, which is when I'm starting to participate in it. Like, okay, that got me. This has kind of started to get me involved or upset or unbalanced.

I think Robert Cialdini's work is some of the best here. His book influence. He's been on the show, I think twice. And it's so fascinating because it's like, oh, here's all the ways to know someone's running an operation on you. And I've also studied narcissism quite a lot, which is a form of mind control. It's, it's, you know, I believe that I'm great or that I'm do something and so I'm going to make you believe it even though it's not real. And if not, I'll destroy you. And I think any entrepreneur has hired people like that. It's like they're running the same techniques of mind control that work.

Yeah, right.

Does your work overlap? You're looking at, you know, the history of mind control. It seems like modern psychology is coming across the same thing. I mean, a therapist, you're sitting in their office, they're trying to control your mind to get you to not do whatever you hired them to get you to not do. Do you think what you've learned at Harvard. Setting mind control is directly applicable to.

Therapy, as in therapy could be dangerous.

Well, it could be dangerous. Or, I mean, hey, maybe there's mind control things. You know, you go into your therapist, and your therapist, like, these are not the droids you're looking for. And then they're not.

Well, I think, yeah, therapy is a powerful relationship you're entering into, hopefully voluntarily. So there are ways to be aware and also be paying attention. This is why it's very concerning with children, because you can't really teach a child this kind of.