American Thought Leaders (2024.04.16) Laura Dodsworth: War on Your Mind

Exposing the ‘Nudge Units’ Helping Governments Control People’s Behavior: Laura Dodsworth

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.
— Laura Dodsworth

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.
— Laura 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.
— Laura Dodsworth

What is the real threat of AI? Of social media? Of pornography? Of net-zero?

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,
— Laura Dodsworth