The MeidasTouch Podcast
Thought Reform and Cyber Security: Where Cult Manipulation Techniques Meet Technology With Dustin Rozario Steinhagen, PhD
23 Dec 2024
Dustin Rozario Steinhagen, PhD is a privacy expert who recently graduated with his doctorate degree in Cyber Defense from Dakota State University. His dissertation is titled “Defending the security of the mind: A mail survey of thought-reform literacy in South Dakota.” This quantitative analysis measured “what everyday people know about thought reform and psychologically manipulative groups.” One of the most powerful defenses a person can have against mind hacking is admitting they are vulnerable to it. After that, skills can be acquired and built upon to teach people how to protect themselves further. However, we mustn’t let our guard down when it comes to our brains and minds coming under attack. Like anti-virus software needing updates to protect against the latest cyber threats, our minds also require ongoing learning to maintain psychological security in addition to adequate rest, play, and sleep. Influences are also more challenging to detect, more frequent in occurrence, from multiple directions, and require vigilance when interacting with different levels of trusted or untrusted sources. Having trusted groups who respect personal privacy and have our best intentions in mind becomes extremely important in such an environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of the Influence Continuum. I have a newly minted doctor as a guest today. I'm very, very excited to have with me Dr. Dustin Rosario-Steinhagen. He's a privacy expert. He just got your doctorate degree in cyber defense. You've published numerous times in privacy literature, including fields of privacy education and neuro privacy.
And we want to talk today about the topic of your dissertation research, which is titled Defending the Security of the Mind, a Male Survey of Thought Reform Literacy in South Dakota. And all I can say is I was very excited to learn about your doctoral research. I know you approached me to be on your committee, which I unfortunately was overcommitted in other ways.
I couldn't serve, but my dear friend and colleague John Atack did serve. John is an ex-Scientologist and a brilliant mind. unto himself. And it sounds like you're really doing cutting edge work. So I wanted to interview you, hear more about what you were interested in, how you got interested in this, its applications, and get more people, especially young people, interested in this topic.
So Dustin, Dr. Dustin, welcome to the Influence Continuum.
Thanks, Dr. Hassan. And first, I just want to say it's an honor to be on your show. I first caught wind of your research in 2019 when I was first researching what's out there in terms of malicious influence.
And we'll get into the backstory of kind of how a cyber defense PhD got involved with thought reform research because it's very unintuitive and might even sound inappropriate without some context. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, please tell us. Sure. So in 2018, I was a senior at Cornell University in my undergrad program.
And the most important course I ever took in my life was this course called Computational Psychology. So the whole thesis of this course is that the brain is literally a type of computer and the mind is computation. And we don't have time to go through all the mechanics of that.
But the citation I would provide would be the professor's book, which is called Computing the Mind, How the Mind Really Works. The author's name? Dr. Shimon Edelman. Okay, thank you. In 2018, as your viewers and listeners might recall, that's when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the news in the spring, so right around the same time I was taking this course.
And, you know, that really opened my mind to, like, how much manipulation there is out there and how our personal data is used to, you know, politically manipulate us. And I mean, that's really just the tip of the iceberg, too. And I didn't realize how deep and broad this subject is until I really dug into the literature.
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