“Now you have nudge units embedded in governments or advising governments all around the world. And what they’re really trying to do is change the will of the people from the top down. Now, there’s no democratic mandate for this. So, governments are sneakily using pre-conscious subliminal and covert techniques to change the way we behave, to make us model citizens. And maybe it’s supposedly in our best interests, but we haven’t been consulted upon it.”
In this episode, I sit down with Laura Dodsworth, one of the first journalists to expose COVID-era government manipulation and how “nudge units” used fear to change behavior.
“I feel it and I think I know a lot of people do—this feeling of something quite dark brewing, socially and politically. There’s a feeling of a net tightening and of truth being squashed, of more surveillance, more censorship, institutions captured by woke ideology,” says Ms. Dodsworth.
We discuss the new book she co-authored: “Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It.”
“Your mind is wonderous. You do deserve to be sovereign of it. And you can be in charge of your own decision-making capability. You’re not on a sliding scale with a piece of machinery at all,” says Ms. Dodsworth.
What is the real threat of AI? Of social media? Of pornography? Of net-zero?
Watch the video:
“One study in 2007 estimated that the human brain receives the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information every day. So, that’s the first thing. You’re overwhelmed with information. And the human brain simply can’t cope with it all. So, what you do is you depend upon shortcuts—cognitive biases to make sense of the world,” says Ms. Dodsworth.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Laura Dodsworth, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Laura Dodsworth:
Thank you for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
Laura, some years ago you exposed these nudge units in the UK government and revealed how they were seeding fear into the populace in order to affect behavioral change. You were ahead of your time. Since then we have learned this has been happening on a mass scale across the legacy media, and we are being bombarded by propaganda daily.
Propaganda and censorship are two sides of the same coin. Now, you’ve written a book that explains how to inoculate yourself from all of this in a whole myriad of ways. Please tell us about your book, “Free Your Mind.”
Ms. Dodsworth:
“Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It,” is very much my follow-up to my last book, “A State of Fear.” I’ve co-written this book with Patrick Fagan, a fabulous psychologist and behavioral scientist. The idea behind the book is that we do live in quite a unique time where we are bombarded with information and propaganda. It will sound dramatic for people to hear it this way, but there’s a war on for your mind. Your brain is a battlefield.
One study in 2007 estimated that the brain receives the equivalent of 174 newspapers-worth of information every day. That’s the first thing—you’re overwhelmed with information. The human brain simply can’t cope with it all. Therefore, you depend upon shortcuts like cognitive biases to make sense of the world.
We don’t really live in a democracy in the same way that we used to. Democracy is about enacting the will of the people. But now you have nudge units advising governments all around the world. They are trying to change the will of the people from the top down. There is no democratic mandate for this, so governments are sneakily using preconscious subliminal and covert techniques to change the way we behave in order to make us model citizens.
Supposedly it’s in our best interest, but we haven’t been consulted about this. This is a confluence of sophisticated psychology, nudging, and behavioral insights, combined with AI and social media platforms and Big Tech. The world is changing, and we cannot begin to understand the ramifications of all of this. There are thousands of books that teach people how to use propaganda, nudging, persuasion, and advertising.
Until now, no one has written a book that is a defense against these dark arts, and that teaches people how to identify and resist the manipulation. That’s what “Free Your Mind” is all about. Not everybody will want to resist the manipulation. Not everyone will agree that they are under the spell of so much manipulation. It takes quite a lot of humility to admit this has happened.
When I wrote my first book, “A State of Fear,” for me it was such an epiphany to understand that governments could weaponise our emotion and our fear against us, and put us into a state of fear. My book, “Free Your Mind,” looks at how they change all the normal rhythms and rituals of life to make us follow the rules.
Supposedly, it’s in our best interest, but life changed in a way that we never could have imagined. I realized that I had lost all of these essential freedoms. But there was one domain that I could still have freedom over if I wanted to, and that was my mind. That set me on this path of trying to understand how we reclaim sovereignty of the mind.
Mr. Jekielek:
Often there are nudges, but sometimes, there are extremely heavy-handed attempts. Just look at Google Gemini where there was so much ideology embedded in the system. It’s astonishing how heavy-handed that manipulation was in this case.
Ms. Dodsworth:
We’re so lucky to have seen that. It’s one of those moments when the curtain was drawn back. Do you remember all the furor in the media not that long ago when Big Tech and AI leaders and politicians were telling us that AI could develop sentience, write religious tomes, rule the world, and presented a threat to humanity that was at the level of nuclear weapons? It was an extinction-level threat.
I didn’t agree with any of that. I can tell you what the real threat is. In a nutshell, it’s that AI can be sedimented with psychology and nudging. It’s a brainwasher’s dream, frankly. But AI doesn’t have sentience. It doesn’t really generate language. It’s riding on the wave of sentience. It’s riding on the coattails of humanity’s achievements.
You can’t forget that it’s humans that are coding it. People like to think they are above ideological influence, that they can’t be manipulated, that they are not brainwashed, and that they are not brainwashers. But what we’ve seen with Google is the pure, unadulterated, ideological bias of the programmers.
Mr. Jekielek:
They want to change the way we perceive the world, and they want to change the way we think about the world. Over the last five to seven years, every power structure in our Western democracies is full of people that share this ideology, or are ready to be on board with it as a way to success.
Ms. Dodsworth:
You are absolutely right. It is everywhere, and so many of us can sense this. This might even sound a little bit dramatic, but I can feel it. I know many people have this feeling of something quite dark brewing socially and politically. There’s a feeling of a net tightening, truth being squashed, more surveillance, more censorship, and institutions being captured by woke ideology.
I don’t have the answer as to what is causing this. I don’t really know. It’s complex and it’s multifactorial, but we can feel it. But we can see the foot soldiers who are pushing this. They are the technocrats, the behavioral scientists, and the people that are trying to change how we think. They want to get into your brain and change how you think. They want you to imagine the world in the same way they do.
Google AI is a fantastic example, but it’s absolutely everywhere. It was having to wear masks with no decent underlying scientific evidence that it would stop transmission of a virus. They loved the masks because they were signals of danger. There was danger in the air. They made us into walking billboards for danger. There is the fact that we were compliant, and we were conformists. They didn’t like the odd man out.
We also see it with the climate change narrative and this constant push that we must change our behavior to avert some catastrophe. They try to take us down a path that they want us to go down. They have a desire to capture your brain and make you think the right way as a woke citizen of this new, unpleasant, dystopian world. This is what we all need to fight against.
Mr. Jekielek:
There are different personality traits in our society. Some people believe that others should think as they do, that they think the right way and that others should think as they do. But you don’t want to give those people the levers of power. Before we get into how to inoculate ourselves, I want to talk about AI.
Ms. Dodsworth:
TV changed the world. The internet changed the world. AI is going to be another game changer. Aldous Huxley said in, “Brave New World Revisited” that technology had disadvantaged the little man in favor of the big man. He wrote that even before the internet, and that’s a really good point.
There’s something called the picture superiority effect, which means that pictures affect us more emotionally. They are more persuasive than text. If you want to consume information rationally and make the most wise decision for yourself, it’s best to get in writing. Reading a newspaper without pictures would be the ideal way to not be manipulated when you consume the news. But of course, we’re not doing that.
We’re scrolling through video very quickly. If you imagine a world where we are wearing Apple Vision Pro or you can create video just from text, the options for where this could go could be almost endless. What I find concerning is the exact kind of safety mechanisms they want to put in. These Big Tech platforms and social media and this new technology know a lot about you. We stomp around with very heavy digital footprints.
One study that’s about a decade old actually showed that from just 200 likes, Facebook knew you better than anyone except your spouse.
Facebook could detect your sexuality. You can imagine a world where Facebook would know that a young teenager is gay before the teenager knows they’re gay, but actually, that’s pretty old. Now, you have a completely personalized digital footprint.
There’s no such thing as a neutral platform online, it’s increasingly personalized towards us. Not only does it know you, it can predict what you will do, and it can shape your behavior. You can imagine a world where we’re all in separate little, separate digital pictorial worlds that are awash with symbolism, affecting how we see the world, and how we interact with it. It’s not even the real world. That’s really the threat posed by AI, not this nebulous idea that it’s going to develop sentience.
Mr. Jekielek:
A case in point is this work that Dr. Robert Epstein has done showing that based on just simply altering the order of the results in Google around, he created experiments where he was able to demonstrate that for people who are undecided on who they’re going to vote for in a particular set up, that you can actually manipulate them to pick somebody with very high probability without them being aware of the fact that they’ve been manipulated in the first place, simply by reordering the search results.
This is something that happens through something called ephemeral experiences, meaning that no one ever knows what you saw. You don’t even know what you saw actually because you go to your next search and you’ve already been effectively programmed if you were someone who was undecided on a topic. It’s that easy, never mind generative video that has subtle subliminal messages embedded within according to the biases or ideological views of the creator.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Yes, it happens in a more blunt way already. For instance, if I search for knives on Google, I'll probably get some straightforward results about Swiss Army knives for whittling or kitchen knives. But if I was black living in a city and listened to drill music, it’s quite conceivable that I would be getting something about reducing knife crime. This kind of thing already happens, operated by government agencies.
Again, it’s supposedly in our best interests, but it’s not well understood. It could be that if you see a video about knife crime, it might make you more likely to buy a knife and commit a crime with it. Just like there are studies that show that if you put up no smoking signs, you might be more likely to smoke because it reminds you about your life. It reminds you about your cravings. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’m reminded of the Delhi cobra effect. Do you know about this, Jan?
Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us about it.
Ms. Dodsworth:
It’s an old example of nudging. Back during the British Raj in India, the British authorities wanted to deal with the appalling number of cobras.
They incentivised the citizens to bring in a dead cobra in return for money. To their delight, this scheme worked really well. The citizens were bringing in piles of dead cobras and being rewarded handsomely for it. It turned out that the locals had been breeding cobras to exchange for the money. When the scheme ended, what happened was loads more cobras were released into the wild.
All of these schemes that are put in place already, which are quite blunt, may be leading to unintended consequences. But it is going to become a lot more sophisticated. The thing about this confluence of AI with picture superiority effect, with search results, and with social media, is that you'll be living in an increasingly personalized digital world that can be scaled up to reach the whole world like never before.
The statistics say that 83 percent of the world owns a smartphone now, and it can be sedimented with totally unique nudging directed at you, personally. When they were trying to persuade everyone to get the Covid-19 vaccine during the pandemic, that started with nudges. You can learn a lot about the government’s intentions from its gentle nudges. It’s the first tool in a deployment of policies that go from a shove to a cattle prod.
In this country, we were given stickers for getting the Covid-19 vaccine in order to show your social conformity. It was your social proof that you were part of one big group of people that had gotten a vaccine, as evidenced by your sticker. Then there were some other enticing incentives, such as raffle tickets or shopping vouchers for people that got the vaccine. There were some really weird incentives around the world, such as marijuana for vaccines in Washington State and lap dances and even brothel trips for vaccines in Austria.
It got crazy. There were college education raffles in the States. Then it went through to mandates. Imagine a world where your Google search results and everything you see on social media or some kind of metaverse-like world around you is shaped exactly to your particular reasons for vaccine hesitancy. Then it’s not a nudge anymore.
A nudge should be a choice that you’re able to make yourself. It’s supposed to be choice architecture. You can choose one thing or another thing. But you won’t really be aware that it’s a choice when what is put in front of you is totally unique to you and based upon your psychological profile.
Mr. Jekielek:
One of your chapters contains a beautiful phrase, “Social media distancing is required here.”
Ms. Dodsworth:
Absolutely right. We all know we could benefit from less social media time. There is a study that says, on average, people think they pick up their phone 25 times a day, but it’s actually up to 80 or 90 times a day. I really had to confront myself when writing this book on being quite addicted to social media.
I put myself into an experiment where I went into a convent for 24 hours for a digital detox. I'll confess something to you. It was actually supposed to be for two days, but I decided that I couldn’t face it. I made it for only one day, which says a lot. That did allow me to step back just that one day, and it affected my social media consumption for another week or two. But then I went back to my normal habits.
We do have a chapter called Social Media Distancing. It spells out an obvious message that you can be manipulated on social media. It’s designed to be sticky and addictive. There are bots and trolls and it runs on emotion. You can receive personalized messaging to make you buy stuff. The answer for a lot of people would just be to use it more mindfully rather than not use it at all.
But there are all kinds of ways you can hack yourself. While other people can nudge us, we can also nudge ourselves. It’s a technique that psychologists call pre-boosting. You can hack your phone by setting screen time limits or turning your notifications off. You can make your phone grayscale which makes it a lot less enticing. There are lots of things you can do to manage your own social media use as well.
Mr. Jekielek:
But that also takes the will to do it, because these things are inherently addictive. They are manipulating people, thinking that is the perfectly moral, reasonable thing to do. Then it becomes an arms race of manipulation.
Ms. Dodsworth:
You’re absolutely right. I don’t know how long this has been going on. I really became aware of it during Covid. Many people thought the fear mongering and nudging and propaganda was the right thing to do, because otherwise people would be too irresponsible and stupid. They don’t believe in the wisdom of crowds. They don’t trust the individual to make the right decision for themselves or society. The problem is that is exactly how the nudgers think.
David Halpern is the head of the Behavioral Insights team, colloquially known as the Nudge Unit. He was interviewed several months ago at the Covid-19 inquiry about his part in the Covid-19 pandemic. He said that the use of fear was justified if people’s brains were wrongly calibrated.
That really struck me because I thought, “What an interesting word to use. How interesting to talk about calibrating a brain.” We don’t normally talk about calibrating people. We talk about calibrating machinery. It’s as though people are little units to be shuffled around on a board.
I like to joke that we don’t live in the age of misinformation. We live in the age of myth information. These people are totally open, shameless, and brazen about this nudging and how it’s supposed to be good for us.
There is no democratic mandate for this. When all this nudging started, when it became embedded into governments, the behavioral scientists themselves actually talked about the legitimacy of the government influencing the public in this way. Also, these smart people are just as susceptible to brainwashing as anybody else. In fact, there are some studies that show that smart people are even more susceptible to brainwashing.
I know that everybody clever watching this program will be thinking, “No, not me. I’m too intelligent to fall for any sort of brainwashing technique.” But it’s not true. It’s just that smart people are better at justifying it. They have their motivated reasoning. If you are smart, you can intellectually justify an emotional position that you hold.
There’s also the cultural mediation hypothesis. Smart people are very good at working out what norms and ideologies and behaviors they should adopt in order to fall in with the right crowd and do better in life. This is like Rob Henderson’s theory of luxury beliefs. We used to have material objects to indicate our social status, but it has increasingly become about the beliefs we hold, and they can be pure luxuries.
That’s why you get an elite class in metropolitan cities who believe such mad things as men can be women or that you can identify as a cat. These are not the preoccupations of the developing global world. Smart people are very good at taking on crazy ideas and justifying them because they have the brains to do it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Recently, we had the second anniversary of the truckers’ convoy in Canada. Thankfully, the Canadian High Court officially ruled that shutting down the protest through invoking the Emergencies Act was an unconstitutional act. However, the Canadian leaders really believed that there were dangerous people coming to Ottawa to wage an insurrection because a compliant and funded media network pushed this narrative. In effect, the elite class can decide to brainwash itself into believing something this crazy. Is this how societies collapse?
Ms. Dodsworth:
Yes, you make a good point. We don’t exactly know what the politicians in Canada thought about the truck convoy. But you do get these thought frameworks within a group that can perpetuate, and it can become like a sick dog eating its own tail. What you say makes a lot of sense to me. For instance, it would be almost impossible not to see the example of climate change, because that is also something being constantly pushed down our throats.
I’ve seen one review of our book where the reviewer complained that we don’t seem to be on board with the climate agenda. But to anybody like that, I would say, “You may approve of the means justifying the end, if you believe the end is a climate catastrophe.” But we actually need to learn what their means look like, so we can spot them in any situation.
Last summer, quite a few techniques really came to my attention when our book came out.
We had a lot of news stories in the UK about terrifying temperatures. That is using a technique called salience. The news would say that it’s going to reach 48 degrees. They would talk about a predicted temperature. Now, we never reached the predicted temperatures, but that doesn’t matter because they put that one big shocking number in your head. Once it’s there, it’s there, so that uses salience.
They used the picture superiority effect. There were so many pictures and videos of cars on fire or scrubland on fire. With these headlines and the news reports, the news readers would link it to climate change, but no one could prove it was linked to climate change.
Later on, if you remember, there were stories about arsonists being involved in these fires. We know that cars don’t really explode on highways because of climate change. But by then, it’s too late. People have seen the video and the photos and that link has been made in their minds.
Modeling is being used more and more with climate, just like it was used with Covid, and it’s also being used with public health. We heard about the number of heat-related deaths. When I first heard this, I thought, “This is astonishing. How has somebody worked out how many people have died from heat all around Europe and reported it back in real time when they don’t even have the coroner’s reports yet?” I looked into this and it was modeling, so basically, it’s made up. You might as well chuck chicken entrails on the ground.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is outrageous.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Yes, it really was incredible. With the heat modeling, they are trying to create this salient effect. You just get this high temperature posted. How many people look at the report that’s behind the headline and then work out that it is modeling, and how this modeling actually works? I did it because I’m interested, but a lot of people will take it at face value.
The truth is many more people die in the winter from cold than die in the summer from heat. Otherwise, nobody would live around the equator or in the south. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. Then it goes even further than that. It becomes embedded into drama and children’s programming, not just the news, not just weather reports, and not just public health announcements.
In our public health announcements, we now have color-coded warnings for the weather. You can have an amber alert or a red alert which is supposed to be signaling danger. Something that we just would have thought of as quite normal before, like a very hot day or a storm, gets a color-coded alert. That is to sacralise the idea of danger around perfectly normal things like weather.
There was a report produced a couple of years ago by the Nudge Unit, the Behavioural Insights team, and Sky broadcasting, that talked about how to use the power of TV in order to nudge people towards net zero behavior. Quite shamelessly, it talked about using news, drama, documentaries, children’s shows—the whole gamut of TV programming.
They were so brazen they would talk about putting in characters or storylines that would encourage people to have electric vehicles or do recycling. It talked about using children’s programming in order to influence children, but also to create a multi-generational spillover into the family. It talked about using weather reports to explain the impacts of climate change catastrophe.
There is a very concerted top-down effort to program us into being open about environmental issues and anxious about climate change. Because you would have to be fearful and anxious in order to adopt net zero behavior, which is going to involve not having your heating on in the winter, not having cars, not buying many clothes, and changing how you eat. It’s always our behavior that’s the problem.
Even if you go along with the man-made climate change theory, it’s never about China or India. It’s about our behavior right here that is supposed to change. The citizens become the policy problem that requires a solution. That solution involves manipulating us and nudging us into behaving differently.
Mr. Jekielek:
The corollary means dramatically lowering your standard of living. Most people are not going to be on board if you were to tell them this is the plan.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Of course not. It involves donning a number of hair shirts. But by the time you’re living in that world you might be grateful for the hair shirts, because you’re going to be pretty cold. You won’t be able to afford your heating in the winter. I would be really careful about any movement that has a zero in it. I just hear the zero now and I shiver. We just had zero-Covid, and now it’s net zero. To be honest, it reminds me of Pol Pot’s Year Zero.
Beware of the zero. What is a zero? A zero is nothing. It’s a big gaping hole. It’s an eternal nothingness. It’s a moral flatlining. Never aim for a zero.
There isn’t anything necessarily deliberate about this. I don’t think that the people that aimed for zero-Covid and net zero have got some dastardly zero plan going on.
It’s more symbolic of something quite nihilistic. Both zero-Covid and net zero were about a constriction of humans down to a nothingness. You know, to achieve zero-Covid, you had to be cut off from the world into your own hermit kingdom. Never leave your house and never see anyone’s face. There was something so miserly and anti-human about it. It involves rewinding to a pre-industrial era where we live in mud huts and don’t have any heating.
They don’t want the things that have saved us in the past like good diets, heating, and lots of farming. They want us to rewind and live like serfs. These are such unpleasant, miserly visions of the world. I don’t think there’s anything deliberate about it, but the symbolism comes through because these people have this really miserly view of humanity.
Mr. Jekielek:
You talk about dataism as a kind of quasi-religion. I recently spoke with Mihai Nadin, who views our current predicament as a kind of machine theology. We created the machines and then we started imagining ourselves as the machines.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Yes. Dataism is a philosophical, almost religious movement in this pivotal time of entering into the fourth industrial revolution. It’s where the biological and the physical fuse with the technological. The philosopher Yuval Harari writes about this and sees human beings as nothing more than organic algorithms. We are just thought processes. It’s a very bleak and dismal way of viewing people as just a collection of decision-making processes and fleshy algorithms.
It’s not a view of the world that I share. I don’t know what they see coming to pass. But it’s interesting trying to understand these people who advise the World Economic Forum or other supranational bodies or governments. These people have embedded themselves in public health and science. If you see human beings as organic algorithms and you can’t really argue for human agency or the existence of a human soul, that is the complete opposite of everything I believe.
It’s the complete opposite of a book like, “Free Your Mind,” which is all about trusting the individual and saying that your mind is actually unique and wondrous. I believe you have a soul. You may not believe you have a soul, but that’s neither here nor there, really. But your mind is wondrous and sovereign. You can be in charge of your own decision-making capability. You’re not on a sliding scale with a piece of machinery at all.
Mr. Jekielek:
In the book, there’s a chapter, Don’t Be a Slave to Sex. One of the elephants in the room around our social disruption today is this ubiquitous, on-demand availability of extreme, hardcore pornography.
Ms. Dodsworth:
You’re the only person to ask me about the chapter, Don’t Be a Slave to Sex. Patrick and I thought we would get a lot of questions about this chapter, because it’s one of the more controversial ones. People have not been brave enough to bring it up, so well done. You get the prize.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s not that people don’t want to study it. I’ve only covered it maybe two or three times out of almost a thousand interviews on American Thought Leaders, because it seems like people aren’t interested in hearing about it. But I feel like we need to discuss it.
Ms. Dodsworth:
If I’m being really honest, I believe that pornography has influenced quite a lot of people. My first three books, a trilogy about the body, plus my documentary, “100 Vaginas,” were about countering the pernicious effects of pornography. It’s something I had covered before. Patrick and I really debated whether this chapter should go in the book.
Initially, he was very keen on it. I said, “We can’t do it. It’s actually a whole book to talk about sex and manipulation. It’s just so big. How are we going to get it all into one chapter?” But he persuaded me to do it. We really wrote this chapter very closely together, because it was very important that a man and a woman bring equal parts into it.
Pornography is part of it, but it’s not the only part. The first thing we should start with is that rape is a weapon of war and it always has been. The other thing I want to say is there’s nothing wrong with sex. You’re not interviewing some kind of weird prude here who’s not sex positive or whatever they say. Sex is brilliant. I love sex. Sex is wonderful. It’s very pleasurable and very powerful. Maybe it’s so pleasurable and powerful we should be treating it a bit more seriously.
Pornography has always existed in one form or another, but it’s different now. It’s very ubiquitous. It’s on everyone’s phone or computer. The reach of pornography is a very powerful thing. We’ve known since the 1960s that people can be conditioned to develop paraphilias. There was a study where male rats were conditioned to fancy female rats wearing jackets. You can train a male rat to prefer a clothed rat, not a normal, furry, naked rat. It’s incredible what you can do because sex is a powerful reward.
It’s really the classic way to condition people because it has this powerful reward at the end of it. In another study, men were conditioned to find boots attractive by being shown, first of all, pictures of naked women in boots, and then the boots on their own. If you can do that to people and animals, what are we doing with pornography?
I went through some of the major pornography sites in depth one day as research for the book, and I was just astonished at the things that are on there. What was really obvious to me from the homepage of one of the biggest sites was incest. While they’re not pushing actual incest by blood they’re kind of circumventing it by talking about doing things with your stepmom or your stepsister. It’s about these weird little steps. They’re really pushing those frontiers.
There’s a lot of stuff about sex with machines, and you'll see a lot of sex that’s increasingly kind of not real. It’s sort of AI-generated and cartoonish and featuring all kinds of strange activities, which stretch the realms of what normal sexual activity is. We interviewed transgender people who said that they felt that pornography had been complicit in them developing transgender identities.
I’ve interviewed men who developed erectile dysfunction problems. I’ve interviewed women who felt like they needed to have surgery, including labiaplasty after watching pornography. We know it can affect body image. There are studies that show correlation, if not causation, with divorce. We know that it can change sexual tastes, even to the extent of creating paraphilias. Yes, we do advise that people shouldn’t watch it.
Mr. Jekielek:
I don’t know if most people understand what paraphilia means. Please explain that very briefly.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Paraphilia would be a sexual fetish. It’s when you develop a taste for something that is outside of the normal.
Mr. Jekielek:
But it’s associated with sex.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Yes, it’s associated with sex. It’s this furtive thing that people do illuminated by their screens at home. Also in the real world, that’s mirrored by this sex positivity movement, where we’re supposed to say anything goes, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. We don’t really have enough honest conversations about pornography.
There’s a conversation about protecting children from pornography, which hasn’t happened at all and it’s not working. But we don’t talk about its impact on adults or society as a whole. Whatever people do in their bedrooms is up to them as long as it doesn’t harm anyone, but is it harming us? Is it harming society?
Mr. Jekielek:
For my viewers here, this is something that I’m going to be tackling more. I'd love to hear about the people doing credible research around this issue.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Even if isn’t harming the viewer and it’s not harming society, what about the performers? Unfortunately, the current model is very much based on homemade pornography. There’s plenty of evidence, anecdotes, and news reports about people that have been coerced and raped, including underage minors. Is this an industry that relies on criminal activity and the exploitation of people? I just don’t see how that is even in question. The other side of the industry is harmful anyway.
This moment we’re going to get to is what I call the Apple Amish. I was envisaging the Apple Vision Pro community and the Amish community. People like Harari have said that they see society dividing into two. There will be those who are willing to go along with the technological world, be enhanced, and embrace transhumanism and all the technology. Then there will be the Luddites who will step away. For me, there will be a point where I don’t really want to be in that world anymore.
Fertility rates aren’t too good in the Western world. I actually think that people that really go down that road are going to end up dying out, to be honest. If people are in this world where they’re completely immersed in a fantasy AI dream-driven, symbolically drenched, artificial world, they’re not participating. They’re not really having relationships. They’re not really having families and having children. I don’t see it as a healthy, prosperous, long-term way for a society to function. I don’t see how it’s actually possible. Whereas, the Amish keep having babies.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about something that’s age old and incredibly beneficial which is meditation. This is a very powerful tool to inoculate yourself with.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Yes, that’s absolutely right. There are a few places that meditation pops up in the book as a tool. One reason would be that mindful meditation has been shown to reduce your susceptibility to your own cognitive biases.
There’s a chapter in the book about self haunting. Really, it’s the work of a lifetime. But the more you get to know yourself, the less susceptible you will be to any form of manipulation because half of the problem is the message, but the other half of the problem is you.
Whether it’s advertising, online shopping, government propaganda or more sinister nudging, whatever it is, it’s got to play upon you and your cognitive biases. You can learn what they are. We have a whole chapter on those called Get Immunity. But it’s also your weaknesses and your foibles. It could be fear of death. It could be your own issues with body image. It could be your insecurities about your children’s financial future.
If you know yourself, you will be more resistant to the messages. That’s especially pertinent in an online world where we get advertising that is shaped particularly to us because we’re followed around by cookies on the internet, and because we’re known so well by the platforms. Even just taking time out helps you because your cognitive brain can only cope with so much.
We’ve only got so much space for information, which is why we rely upon psychological shortcuts to make decisions. There are good evolutionary reasons for them. There are studies that have shown that if you overload people with information, they can be manipulated more easily. By just taking time out away from that overload of information, meditating in itself makes you more resistant.
Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve been talking for quite a while now, and we’ve only scratched the surface of, “Free Your Mind.” In the chapter, Be the First to Speak Up,where you look at how you can break through conformity, which is important in avoiding manipulation. Let’s touch on that and some of the other tools that you have identified.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Don’t watch porn. Don’t go on your phone and meditate. Now, everyone’s going to think, “Gosh, I don’t want that book. I already know I have to do all that good stuff. Maybe they'll be telling me to eat vegetables next.” Of course, I want people to buy and read my book. I want to influence you to read it, and hopefully it will be quite fun and entertaining.
There may be times you want to go to a festival or to church.
These are places where you could say some degree of manipulation happens and you want to let go and submit to it and enjoy it. But by the time you’ve read this book, you know what to submit to and how you know how to do it.
But there are lots of practical tools contained in each chapter. Be the First to Speak Up is important because it’s this convergence of free speech and free thinking. We hear a lot about free speech and it’s good that we do because it’s really important. But of course, free speech means nothing without free thinking. Free thinking is as vital as clean air and clear water. You could look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and you should put free thinking right on the bottom, because if you don’t know how to think for yourself, you’re basically just a slave. You’re an automaton.
Once you know how to think for yourself, the next thing is you have to speak. You have to be able to influence the group you’re in. We are group animals and we’re very tribal. We conform and there are good evolutionary reasons for it. We don’t eat the berries on the poison bush.
If you see everybody running past you, there’s a good reason. Maybe they’re running away from a tiger and maybe you should join them. There are reasons why we conform. That is how we have successful societies. But you can get these cascades of conformity, which can be dangerous.
One of the best things I’ve taken away from writing the book myself is having the confidence to speak up in a social or professional situation to defend somebody else. We interviewed whistleblowers. You’ve got to have someone who is the voice of sanity and can turn around a cascade of conformity. Nothing good really comes from the center of the pack.
Every innovation, scientific discovery, artistic endeavor, and religious leader in the world has come from those outlying regions. We have to develop the confidence to speak up. Even if it’s hard, even if you’re somebody who’s naturally very agreeable on the big five personality traits or you’re anxious and you like to please, everyone can practice. You don’t have to do something dramatic and cut off all your friends or say something wildly unpopular.
You can practice. You can do little bits at a time. You learn how to do it and then you feel less vulnerable and less fearful. It’s like the story of the emperor with no clothes. If you remember, there are weavers who give an emperor this fantastic outfit which they have woven from magical thread and only really intelligent people can see it. Of course, nobody can see it.
Nobody wants to look stupid or lose their position at court or insult the emperor, so everyone tells him how fabulous he looks. He goes on a parade through the town. It took just one innocent child’s voice to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” We shouldn’t really have to wait for the innocence of a child. We can all be that voice.
Mr. Jekielek:
That is such a powerful story. In this information warfare morass that we’re in, many of these stories are being adulterated or changed. It is so important to keep these old stories because they essentially all talk about the human condition.
Ms. Dodsworth:
That’s right. The emperor’s new clothes isn’t just a story about the innocent child. It’s also a story about remembering that our leaders are sometimes quite foolish, vain, and naked. Draw back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and the wizard is just a very weak, little man. It’s also a story about the fallibility of leaders. There are two sides to that story, which I really love.
Mr. Jekielek:
Any final thoughts as we finish up?
Ms. Dodsworth:
Learn to understand your biases. Again, we explain what the psychological biases are and you can learn to understand yourself better. You need to see the story. Stand up for something or you'll fall for anything. Stop haunting yourself and learn to be the first to speak up.
Mr. Jekielek:
Laura Dodsworth, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Dodsworth:
Thank you very much for having me, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Laura Dodsworth and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
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