if you want to play this on brave you need to enable drm its spotify that needs that .
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Robert Epstein is an author, editor, and psychology researcher. He is a former editor-in-chief of "Psychology Today" and currently serves as Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. He also founded the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. https://www.drrobertepstein.com/ https://americasdigitalshield.com/
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if you want to play this on brave you need to enable drm its spotify that needs that .
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I got the same result...downloaded Brave, tried to listen to the podcast in differente sites, I get acess only to the first 30 seconds...things are made in a way that either you use google or you can't acess stuff...I put Chrome back again and I'm listening to the rest of the podcast...
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I stopped this episode 12min in and installed Brave. Now I got this notification when trying to listen to the rest of the episode on this site with the Brave-browser: "Tracker and ads blocked: google analytics. Sites often include cookies and scripts which try to identify you and your device (often embedded into ads). They want to work out who you are and follow you across the web — tracking what you do on every site. Brave blocks these things so that you can browse without being followed around." And the episode-list dont show recent episodes, and the player just plays the first 30sec. Btw, this guest is horribel at explaing things.
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Updated after each new episode
Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day first of all thank you for coming really appreciate it this is a
very interesting
subject because I think search engine results have always been a thing that
people kind of
take for granted that the search engine results is going to give you the most
significant results
at the top and they don't really think about the fact that this is kind of
curated and you know
we found it many times because we use two different search engines we'll use
Google and then we'll say
well if we can't find it on Google use DuckDuckGo and oftentimes when you're
looking for something
very specific you'll find that you can't find it on Google like there if it's
in there it's deep deep
deep you know many pages in whereas DuckDuckGo will give you the relative you
know the relevant search
results very quickly so something's going on with search engines and from your
research what you
have found is that it can significantly affect the results of elections well
not not just that it can
affect how people think it can affect your opinions attitudes purchases that
you make pretty much it's
it's it's it's it's a mind control machine it's it's the most powerful mind
control machine that's ever been invented
uh and by the way you should never use the Google search engine never never
why is that because it this is what I call um and this isn't this is an S&M
platform now I'm not sure what S&M means to you I don't want to pry into your
personal life but uh point is that uh but what I mean by S&M is that this is a
surveillance and manipulation um platform uh on the surface there are always
two two levels to everything with Google on the surface
it's a it's a it's like a free public library kind of thing right yes that's
always on the surface
beneath the surface it's something different from a business perspective it's
an S&M platform
it exists for two purposes only and that is to trick people into giving up lots
and lots of personal information notice your public librarian doesn't do that
you notice that they don't actually do that right and then it's also used for
manipulation because they discovered quite a few years ago that if they control
the ranking
of the search results they can control the search results they can control
people's opinions
purchases votes now they can't control everyone's opinions because a lot of
people already have strong opinions so the people they're going after are the
people who are undecided the people who are vulnerable and they know exactly
who those people are and they literally you're you're you're mind is putty in
their hands
uh so you should never ever use google or any other S&M product like Amazon
Alexa is an S&M product or the Google Home device or Android phones
Android phones are bad
Android phones are always recording you are you serious yeah I mean I just I'm
questioning this I mean I believe you but I just want you to elaborate
oh yeah there've been court cases in which the recordings have been subpoenaed
uh from uh whoever's controlling that you know that so-called personal
assistant or that that device and courts have recovered recordings and
transcripts uh when people are not even aware that they're that they're being
monitored
oh that's the case with Alexa right yes but that's the case with Android phones
as well
yes in fact Android phones the equipment to prove this which I didn't bring but
um is so cheap now that literally anyone can confirm this Android phones even
if they're disconnected from your uh your mobile service provider
even if you pull out the SIM card okay as long as the power is on it is
recording tracking every single thing that you do so if you use it to read
things if you use it to listen to music
you use it to shop whatever it is it's it's it and of course your location is
always tracked then when you go back online the moment you're you're reconnected
it it uploads all that information
so some people wonder why their batteries run down sometimes even when you're
not really doing anything with your phone that's because uh with Android phones
it's I think it's
I think it's about 50 to 60 times per hour it's uploading uh it's uploading uh
it's uploading about 12 megabytes of data per hour
so that's a lot of a lot of energy that that that requires energy uh so it I
mean the kind of phone I have is completely different it doesn't do anything
like that
what do you have like a no agenda type phone do you know that show no agenda no
it's uh my friend Adam curry who's the original podfather he's the guy who
invented podcasting and he uh his company develops these de-googled phones
where they take out all the tracking stuff all everything
and it's uh it's uh it's it's basically running on a different operating system
right so I have a phone that runs on a different different operating system it's
completely de-googled and um
what do you got can you show it to me yeah I can show it to you I'm just
interested it just looks like any old regular phone right but it's not
is it running Linux what's it running no it's a it's a different operating
system can you not tell me
well I can tell it seems like you're trying to hide this Robert well the point
is I uh look if if you go if you go to a website it says myprivacytips.com okay
that's an article you get to an article of mine and that article begins I have
not received a targeted ad on my mobile phone
or my computer since 2014. Wow!
so there is a different way to use all the technology that's out there so that
you you are not the product okay so they're actually you know a user making use
of services but you're not the product and it can be done
and it and yeah there's a little inconvenience involved yes very little uh is
there some expense involved
very very little all these services that you get for free quote unquote they're
not free uh you pay for them with your freedom uh if you want to get them in a
paid form so that you're not being tracked we're talking ten to fifteen dollars
a month
literally all of those so-called free services uh that are really again these S&M
services all of them together are worth ten or fifteen bucks a month
and how do you do how do you use your phone though if you want to have a search
engine are you using uh a different search engine like what are you using
well that's that's that's changed for me over time but right now i'm using uh
the brave browser
i use that okay that's good that's really the best one right now and then brave
introduced uh a brave search engine
which uh now fortunately very recently you can make the default search engine
on brave so brave doesn't track at all
brave works faster than chrome chrome is is google's surveillance browser and
uh brave works even faster they're both built on what's called chromium so they're
built on the same tech
except that um brave suppresses all ads so it works much faster than chrome
does and you know now again you can make the default search engine on brave
literally the brave search engine so
do you ever run into websites where they don't work properly because it's
trying to upload ads or something and maybe there's a glitch
uh very very rarely uh and then i will go over occasionally i'll go over to uh
firefox uh because firefox was actually developed by a guy named brendan ike
uh who might be really interesting for you to talk to by the way uh and then he
left uh mozilla which was the non-profit organization that developed firefox
oh by the way the connection between firefox and google don't even get me
started it's disgusting
but the point is brendan got sick of that situation and he founded his own
company and he developed brave so the same guy who developed firefox developed
brave
very much into privacy uh you know really a forward forward thinker he's
amazing guy so when did you first become
interested in digital surveillance and privacy and like what you're giving up
by using these free services like google
i wasn't interested at all i've i've been a researcher for 40 years and i had a
lot of
research underway i've done research on on teenagers and creativity and stress
management all kinds of things i'm still doing all that stuff
but on january 1st of the year 2012 i got a i don't know eight or nine messages
from google uh telling me that my website had been hacked
and that they were blocking access so i thought the first thing i thought was
why why am i getting these notices from google
who made google the sheriff of the internet why am i why isn't this coming from
the government why isn't it coming from some nonprofit organization
so that got my attention and then because i'm a coder i've been a programmer
since i was a teenager
and then i started wondering wait a minute okay they're blocking me on the
google search engine i get
that that's that's them right so they so so they have these crawlers you know
that look at all the websites every day
and their crawler found some malware on my website that happens all the day too
everyone gets hacked i'm sure you've been hacked and google has itself has been
hacked
so i get that they're blocking me on google google.com search engine i get it
okay but i noticed they're also blocking me on firefox which is owned by a
nonprofit
owned by a non-profit they're blocking me on safari which is owned by apple i i
thought that's how could that be these are these are completely separate
companies
took me a while took me a while to figure this out i finally published a piece
in u.s news and world report
uh an investigative piece called the new censorship and i described nine of
google's blacklists this was 2016 so this was a while ago
in detail in detail i described nine of google's blacklists i explained how the
blacklists work i explained google can literally block access
on multiple platforms that aren't even theirs they can block access to any
website that google at one point in time
uh 2009 i think it was i don't know i might get the date wrong let's just say
january whatever 30th
uh google blocked access to the entire internet for 40 minutes google google
google anyway in this article
i mean when you say that if with all browsers when you say blocked access to
the entire internet so like
if you use the brave browser back then did it even exist back then probably
didn't exist brave didn't exist
but no there were well there were lots of search engines google was not the
first search engine it was the
21st search engine so but what i'm saying is with all web browsers it blocked
access to the internet
it blocked access to virtually the entire internet to virtually everyone in the
entire world for 40 minutes
what and this but this was reported in the news so is what's happening with
their their system is because
so many people are searching for things because they're monitoring so many
different things to add to their
search engines do they have some sort of ultimate control over the internet in
some weird way
here it is right here google blacklists entire internet glitch causes world's
most popular search
engine to classify all web pages as dangerous wow google placed the internet on
a blacklist today after a
mistake caused every site in the search engine's result page to be marked as
potentially harmful and
dangerous holy shit the fact that they can even do this i like how it gives you
like a at the top this
article is more than 12 years old okay imagine that like 12 years means like it's
ancient like they
wrote it on stone tablets 12 years ago yeah but but you know this is nonsense
this report is nonsense is it of
course they they this is google is full of geeks okay i'm part geek so i i can
relate i can speak
uh and and and and geeks for fun okay sometimes for profit but most of the time
it's just for fun just
to be cool and get their kicks and show the how powerful they are to be elite
yeah so they do so
they do crazy things so they shut down the internet i i guarantee you it was a
geek thing because you
know you know you know why i figured that out because i kept wondering why did
they shut it down on this
early super early morning on a saturday why what's so special about that little
period of time
and i it took a while and i figured it out it's because that is one of the only
intervals of time in the entire week when every single stock market in the
world is closed
uh so they they did it to show that they could do it and have their fun but
they didn't want to get
attention and if they had if they had interfered with with financial
transactions they would have
gotten a lot of attention so no one was ever caught no one was ever caught but
they never denied
that this happened either so this was done through google for sure they know
this how
they they it's it's it's reported in the news reports and the and google was
queried and google
said yeah yeah that did happen yeah we fixed it so how does google have the
ability to even do
something like that how can that even be done well that that's what i explained
in that article is
it's they they have blacklists uh let me let me jump ahead and then i'll okay
okay but let me just
jump ahead for a second because i you gotta you gotta see really how sinister
this whole thing is it's just
seriously if you knew if you knew a half of what i know about all this dark
tech stuff you would just
say the hell with it and just give up you'd say i don't want to i don't want to
bring up kids in
this kind of world this is too crazy anyway blacklist so i'm i feel like we
need to stop you there and
make you elaborate like what are you saying well there's well what what i ended
up doing
which i think we should get to later in some detail if you're still interested
yes what i ended up doing
was i started doing uh randomized controlled experiments to see what kind of shenanigans
are
out there to see what kind of power these companies have especially google and
i am still almost month
by month making more discoveries running more experiments getting very
disturbing data i mean
so disturbing we we just figured out uh i think within the last month
that a single question and answer interaction on alexa so you ask alexa a
question and let's say it's
about uh i don't know some political issue or political candidate something you're
undecided
about so you ask alexa and alexa gives you back an answer and the answer let's
say has a bias in
other words it favors you know one candidate favors one party favors one cause
right a single
question and answer interaction on alexa in a group of say 100 undecided people
can shift opinions by 40 or more one interaction if there are multiple
questions asked on that topic
over time you can get shifts of 65 or more with no one having the slightest
idea that they have been
manipulated but are they doing it to manipulate you or is it just the fact that
they distribute
this information based on their algorithm it's manipulating you just by default
because the higher
or more likely you find this information from the search engine like that's
what you're gonna that's
what's gonna influence your opinion but are they doing it to influence your
opinion or is that just
the best answer like if you have a question
who is dr robert epstein yes who who is he yes that's you so if i ask that to alexa
and then
it pulls up these results it's going to pull up supposedly the most relevant
result
now are they they have to have some if you're if you have something like alexa
where you're asking a
question and it's just reading it back to you there has to be like some sort of
curation of that information right
confession okay okay i uh have have not followed joe rogan over the years okay
i have five kids my two
eldest sons are like the biggest your biggest fans in the universe my eldest
son is technically a bigger
son a bigger fan than the other son because he's recently gained 60 pounds
because of covid so he's
definitely the bigger of the two fans julian julian and justin yeah you get it
so anyway uh but i i'm
not i don't follow joe rogan right okay so now i've had to bone up and actually
had to listen i was
forced i had to listen to some of your shows and you know i'm thinking wow this
is interesting this guy
is genuinely curious about things you you really are genuinely curious it's
crazy well what's crazy
is that that's crazy that's not it's not crazy to be curious most people are
curious aren't they
uh no not like you because you you actually you you dig in and you really want
to know and i'm i am
i'm now i'm so that's that's all right now now i'm going to say something that's
not so nice which
is on this issue by the questions you're asking me i can tell you have no idea
what's going on well i
kind of do but you have to understand the way i do a show okay one of the
things that i do when i want
you to elaborate on information it's like maybe i know something but i want you
to elaborate to
everybody else that's listening so you pretend you don't know i don't pretend i
don't know i just ask
you questions i don't play stupid but i do ask questions like please tell me
more or elaborate or where
where did you come up with this or how do you know this for sure maybe i know
how you know it for
sure but i want you to tell everybody so that's the question you asked was the
dark stuff well
you're you're saying all this stuff that looks maybe it's biased maybe it might
influence people
you know you know where is it coming from maybe it's just the algorithm uh well
let's say it's
just the algorithm well the algorithm was programmed by human beings okay and
those human beings have
um biases they they have beliefs and there's a lot of research now showing that
uh that bias whether
it's conscious or unconscious gets programmed into the algorithms so the
algorithms all by themselves
have biases built into them there's one way it can go second way it can go the
marius milner effect
you ever hear of marius milner no okay oh this is great this is great okay marius
milner okay
a few years ago you probably heard that google got busted because their street
view vehicles were
driving up and down they're still driving up and down streets all over the
world but they had been
driving up and down streets all over the world more than 30 countries for more
than four years and they
weren't just taking pictures of our houses and our businesses they were also
sucking up wi-fi data
massive amounts i mean we're talking terabytes of wi-fi data passwords
everything including a lot of very
deeply personal stuff so if someone just like me a professor type figured this
out reported them to
the government the government went after them and so this is called this is
called the google street
view scandal and so they got a fined 25 000 for interfering with the uh the
investigation and then
and they blamed the entire thing google blamed the entire operation on one
software engineer his name
is marius milner oh so they fired him oh no no that's not true
he's a hero at google he's still working there if you look him up on linkedin
his his his profession
is hacker he's a hero at google they didn't fire him okay this is they love
this kind of stuff so
another possibility besides the algorithm itself is a single rogue programmer
at the company
can fiddle with what with content can fiddle with any content and when when a
single road rogue programmer
does that guess what that shifts thinking and opinions and behavior and
purchases and votes
a single rogue programmer can do it and then of course there's the executive
level the executives
can pass along a a mandate a policy does that ever happen oh yeah one of the
links leaks rather one of
the leaks from google that you may may have seen uh and i know the guy who
leaked it it's a zach vorhees
who's also a good person for you to talk to because he was a senior software
engineer at google for eight
eight years and then he he just couldn't stand it anymore and he quit but
unlike most of these people who've
walked away he brought with him 950 pages of documents and a video the video is
two minutes long and it shows
the ceo of youtube which is owned by google her name is susan wojjitski and she's
talking to her staff
and she's explaining this is 2017 after the horrible election results of 2016
and she's explaining how
they're altering the up next algorithm in youtube to push up content that they
think is legitimate and to
suppress content that they think is not legitimate so if it's happening at that
level the executive level
again it still has the same effect any of these possibilities and there are
others as well
and there are others as well it ends up giving us content that that impacts us
and our kids especially
in ways that people are entirely unaware of so the way the way i like to put it
is this
you don't know what they don't show now i'm still confused as to how google can
blacklist websites and
how they can shut down the entire internet for 40 minutes because do they have
a switch i mean like
is there a connection that all websites go through google like how is that
possible about three years ago
they shut down all of japan accidentally uh well that's you know that would
take a whistleblower to
figure that one out um they uh it was in the news at one point that the guy who
was
in charge of these making these decisions he actually has left google uh he he
once shut down an entire
domain name which had 11 million websites on it because he thought it was uh
kind of poor quality
poor quality yes poor quality like how how so i don't know he this is just his
his take that it was poor
quality i have a copy of the internal manual i'd happy to send it to you from
from google that showing
the criteria they use in deciding you know which content to suppress and and
some of the criteria are
pretty straightforward having to do with pornography and things like that and
then there's this like
wide open area that that says um or anything else or anything else pretty much
yeah so you it's up to
the discretion of the engineer there's a lot of discretion involved in making
these decisions and a lot of
the decisions that get made in very recent years since since trump was elected
uh they happen to be
decisions for the most part that suppress uh conservative content but not
always not always now
now i'm gonna go now i'm gonna circle back can you please explain again you i
still don't know how
do they shut down the internet how does google have that ability uh let's see
uh let's see
i can answer the question but it's not it's not as it's not a simple answer it's
not like they they
have a switch okay okay but uh i'll give you a couple a couple of clues here
okay okay first of all what's
the most popular browser right now it's chrome by far well chrome is their
browser so obviously anyone
using their browser it's a simple matter for them to to block anything to block
access to anything
through chrome so that one's easy right okay they can block access to anything
through their search
engine which is used for 92 percent of all search around the world so that
takes care of a lot right
there um then we get to uh let's say siri do you use an iphone or apple i use i
why i use both iphone
or android you mean yeah i use both yeah so siri where does siri get all her
answers from
google oh good guess nice yes uh so okay uh let's take uh oh let's take firefox
okay firefox um
before firefox takes you to to the website that you just typed in
uh guess what they have to make sure it's safe so how do they make sure it's
safe
i don't know oh they check check well they check google's blacklist this is
what happened when you
would that day or during that time period when you search something on google
and you clicked it
you would get this warning visiting this website may harm your computer yeah
there might i think maybe you
could continue through like you can it happens from time to time now for
strange reasons i don't know
do not proceed to internet yeah i don't know what happened then what about if
you go through safari
or what if you go through apple's browser safari same thing safari before they
take you anywhere
they've got to check google's blacklist so not only is google getting
information about your search on safari
the fact is if google wants to block you from going there through safari
it's it's it's they just add it to their blacklist in other words if they put
everything on their
blacklist then no one can reach anything really yeah really so all browsers go
through google
except brave except brave yeah that's the only one uh you know there's there
are small browsers out
there no one's ever heard of but i mean uh the google's google's influence on
the internet is
it's it's it's beyond monopoly they're they're they're really in charge outside
of china and north
korea they're in charge of pretty much everything that happens on the internet
um
yahoo let's take yahoo yahoo used to be one of the big search engines yeah and
some people still use it
except yahoo stopped crawling the internet about five years ago or more they
don't crawl the internet
anymore they get their their content from google really yeah so yahoo isn't
really a search engine
it just searches google and your second favorite uh duck duck go is also not a
search engine god damn it
what is it it they they have a crawler they do have a crawler so so but they
and they do a little crawling
but actually what duck duck go does is it it's a database aggregator they're
checking databases
and what is the difference there oh night and day in other words google is
literally looking at
you know billions of websites every day and it's looking for updates and
changes and new websites and
this and that so it's crawling and it's extracting information especially
looking for links because
that's how it gets you good information it looks for what's linking to what
okay uh but duck duck go
doesn't do that duck duck go is looking at databases of information and it's
trying to answer your question
based on information that is in databases lots of different databases that's
not what google does google's
really looking at the whole internet and the brave search engine what does it
do um the brave search
engine is crawling so it is crawling uh it can't do it at the same level that
google can but obviously
but this guy you know brendan ike is very ambitious so he's you know he wants
to do it at that level
so no no they're they're doing brave is trying to do what what google does
except uh preserving privacy
and suppressing ads and it seems like what happened with google before anyone
even understood
that the data is so valuable before anyone is it was too late it was already uh
an inexorable part of
day-to-day life that people are using that and that people are using gmail and
using all these services
and just giving up their data yeah yeah well that's so there's no there's no
consideration like there's
no regulation no there's no regulation there are no laws uh and in fact uh the
courts have ruled over
and over again when someone has gone after google uh that google can do
whatever they want so i'll give you
an example a case i was following very closely and i was kind of working with
these people to some extent
florida company called e-ventures so again someone at google it might have been
that same guy that i
mentioned earlier i think his name was matt cuts or something like that they
they all of a sudden shut
down hundreds of urls that were that were that e-ventures was using for its
business saying they
were not good quality okay that that i mean for you to get that much
information out of google is like
pulling teeth because normally they just don't tell you anything but anyway so
they shut them down nearly
shut down the company the company decided to sue so google of course kept them
hung up in court for
like a couple years because they wouldn't they wouldn't provide any any
information through
discovery and that's google always does that they just they won't they just
stonewall you just even on
discovery which is like preliminary stuff before a lawsuit anyway so e-ventures
keeps pushing pushing
pushing pushing pushing finally goes to court and e-ventures loses and they're
slaughtered literally
the decision of the judge in the case was google is a private company it can do
what it wants it can
demote you in search engine in search rankings it can it can delete you it can
block access to your
websites it can do anything it wants that that literally that was the decision
so let's say if donald trump runs again in 2024 and they have a trump campaign
website google can
decide that that website is a poor quality and deny people access to it so that
when people go to
google donald trump they will never see his website correct that's wild well
they they block access every
day to several million websites so it's not it's this is not a rare thing that
they do and they block access
that's based on their own decisions like they're internal they don't have to
justify them they don't
have to have a criteria that they can establish that they're doing the right
thing they just do it and
in the united states there are no relevant laws or regulations in place to to
stop them do our regulators
and do our elected officials even understand this is this something that is of
concern to them has
this been discussed there are a couple of them who understand uh the the the i
know and there are a
couple of the attorneys general whom i know who understand doug peterson from
nebraska he
totally understands uh ted cruz he's he's he was behind my invitation to
testify you know before
congress a couple months later he invited me to dc we sat down had a four-hour
dinner fabulous we never
stopped talking uh and we never talked politics we did not talk politics the
whole time we just talked
but he's hamstrung he can't how do you fight the most effective mind control
machine that's ever been
developed which also is very rich has 150 billion dollars in the bank right now
in cash makes huge
donations to uh political candidates uh and then can shift votes millions of
votes nationwide without
anyone knowing that they're doing so how do you fight that and it's not
something that they set out
to do when they first created the search engine it seems like because of the
fact that this is something
that was you know it was initially so you could search websites it was that's
what it was right
did they did they know when they first made this that they were going to be
able to have the kind of
power that they have today or is this something that we all have sort of awoken
to okay i don't know uh
sergey brin uh larry page the founders i don't know them i've lectured at stanford
in the same building
where they invented google which was kind of cool but i don't i don't know them
but i
think that i think these guys were were and probably still are utopians i think
they you know they had
the best intentions in mind the first top executive ever to leave google is a
guy named james whitaker
who's gone completely silent by the way in recent years completely silent but
he was the first real
executive to leave google he finally issued a statement he was under pressure
you know why did you leave
why did you leave he issued a statement which you can find online it's
fascinating to watch to see this
and he says look when i first joined google which was practically in the
beginning he said it was just
a cool place and we were doing cool things and that was it he said and then he
said a few years later he
said we turned into an advertising company he said and it was no more fun it
was it it was brutal it was
this is brutal profit driven ad company now if you don't think of google as an
ad company then again
you're not you're not getting it there they are the largest advertising company
by a factor of 20. i think the next
largest one is based in london but google is what it's doing is tricking you
tricking all of us well
not me personally but it's tricking you into giving up personal information 24
hours a day even when you
don't know you're giving up personal information and then it's monetizing the
information mainly by
connecting up uh vendors with potential buyers it's an advertising company and
so whitaker actually quit
because the the nature of the business changed and then of course everyone
knows about google's
slogan right don't be evil yeah but no one seems to know that they dropped that
slogan in 2015.
didn't they just add it to a part of a larger slogan didn't we go over that jamie
there was like
a thing i'm trying to remember what they exactly did because we were sort of
like oh my god they said
they said don't be evil and now they don't say it anymore maybe maybe they're
evil but i think they had
added something and made it longer and so it wasn't it wasn't that it's not
their slogan anymore it's just
their slogan sort of morphed right was that it jamie will find it in a moment
can i can i go back to
something okay i just want to go back to blacklist yes because i wrote this big
piece on nine of
google's blacklists their biggest one is called the quarantine list that's that
list that safari has to
check and that list that firefox has to check everyone has to check that list
before they take you to a
website so that's a simple way simple tool that google uses to block access to
websites because we go to
websites through browsers right okay there we go i had never seen any of those
nine blacklists but i knew
they existed as a programmer and i talked about each one in detail 2019 i'm
invited to testify about my
research uh on my experiments on manipulation and you know how i monitor
elections now and all that stuff so
who who testifies before me uh a top executive a vice president from google
he's under oath you know he's sworn in the senators are asking him some really
tough questions
and he's asked point blank
does google have blacklists i think the full question might be might have been
does google have
white lists and blacklists and his reply was no senator we do not so that was july
of 2016
uh 2019 rather 2019 okay in august literally three weeks later zach forhey so i
mentioned earlier that's
when he leaves google google google sends uh like a what's that called when
when the police oh swat team
google sends a swat team after him i kid you not yep so they were out very
unhappy because he stole all this
stuff okay and he sent it he put it all in a box and sent it to the attorney
general of the united states
okay this is 2019 august this is only less than a month after this hearing
so he's got 950 pages of documents all kinds of documents and three of them
are google blacklists which are actually labeled blacklists now if i were if i
were putting together
blacklists at my company i would call them shopping lists i would call them you
know uh i don't know
makeup lists uh you know lists for my kids uh birthday presents or i i wouldn't
call them blacklist
so there there are actually three of them he walked out with so you can look at
the list you can see
who's on the list you can see these are almost all or many of them prominent
conservative organizations
there there are no left-wing organizations on those lists so this is real this
is this is how they
operate and they operate this way do you think they do this because uh are they
financially driven to put
those people on blacklist is it uh maybe some i mean it's obvious obviously
speculation but is it maybe
some sort of a deal that they've made with certain politicians is it something
they've decided on their
own because this is the right thing to do to suppress the bad people that put
donald trump into office
like why why are they doing that what you just did was amazing
what i do because you got it almost all of it you just yeah that's it came up
with it hypothetically
but you left out one area so the two areas you you you just nailed one is to
make money right so they
have three motives one is to make money and they that they do extremely well
and and no one who's who's
tried to tangle with them has has stopped that process in other words the the
the rate at which
they're making money continues to increase every year so a few years ago when i
was first looking at
them they were bringing in a hundred billion dollars a year now they're
bringing in 150 billion dollars a
year money that's number one number two values okay this this i could i could
talk for hours on this
issue because of recent leaks of videos powerpoint presentations documents and
of course what whistleblowers
have been revealing they have very strong values there because the founders had
very strong
values and they hired people who had similar values and they have really strong
values and they
they want the world to have those values they they really think that their
values are more valuable
than other people's values which means they don't understand what values are
because and so their
values are they're pretty much all of tech is very left-leaning very left-leaning
so 94 96 percent
of all donations out of google go to democrats which i sympathize with i'm from
a family of democrats i lean
left so i say yeah fine that's fine that's fine but it's not fine it's not fine
because they they
they have the power to impose their thinking on other people around the world
in in a way no one has ever
had such power ever so values is second and they really and this is serious one
of the leaks from
google was an eight minute video which you should definitely watch it's so
creepy and it's called the
selfish ledger and it's eight minutes and it was it was put together by their
advanced their super secret
advanced products division it was never meant to leak out of that company and i
i have a transcript of it too
which i've published so i can get you all that stuff but point is what is this
about this is about the
ability that google has to re-engineer humanity
uh according to uh according to company values
re-engineer humanity according to company values yes and this is a directive
like this is something
they're doing purposely well in the videos in the video they're they're
presenting this as
as an ability that we have this is an ability that we have
so that's the second area you nailed it third one you didn't mention the third
one is uh intelligence
because they uh they had some support uh page and brin right in the very
beginning at stanford
they had some support and and had to be in regular touch with uh
representatives from the nsa
the cia and another intelligence agency the intelligence agencies uh were doing
their job
okay they they realized that the internet was growing this is 1990s so they
realized that the internet is growing
and they were thinking hey these are people building indexes indices to the
content so
sooner rather than later we're going to be able to find threats to national
security
by looking at what people are looking up if someone is going online they're
using a search engine to
to find out instructions for building bombs for example okay that's a potential
threat to national security we
want to know who those people are so right from the outset okay and this is
totally unlike brave okay
brave doesn't do this but right from the very very beginning the the google
search engine was set up
to track and preserve search history so in other words to to keep track of who's
doing the search
and where did they search that is very very important to this day for
intelligence agencies
so google to this day works very closely with intelligence agencies not just in
the u.s but other
agencies around the world so those are the three areas money values
intelligence and the intelligence stuff
is legit i mean it's legit you know it is an obvious place if you're if you're
in law enforcement
that's an obvious place to go to find bad guys and girls yeah so google has
this ability that they've
proclaimed that they can court sort of shift culture and direct the the opinion
of things and direct public
consciousness what percentage like how much of a percentage do you think they
have in shifting do
they have like a 30 percent swing like what well see this is what i do now you're
getting now you're now you're
getting close to what i actually do what i've been doing for for now for over
nine years
i quantify this is exactly what i do every single day that's what i do my that's
my my team my staff
that's what we do and it's and it's cool and talk about cool we're we're doing
the cool stuff now okay
google is not we're doing the cool stuff because we are we have discovered a
number of different tools
that google and to a lesser extent other companies use to shift thinking and
behavior and what we do in
randomized controlled experiments which are also counterbalanced and double
blind and all that
stuff we measure the ability that these tools have to shift thinking and
behavior and we pin it down
to numbers percentages proportions uh we we can make predictions in a in an
election about how many votes
can be shifted if they're using this technique or these three techniques or and
uh so we yeah that's
what we do so we've we started with the search engine and uh and we it it took
years and years of work
but we we really i think at this point have a good understanding of what the
search engine can do
uh but then along the way we discovered other tools that they have and which
they are definitely using
and how do we know they're using these tools well we can get to that but what
are the tools
well the first one we called seam search engine manipulation effect and that
means
they're either allowing uh you know one candidate or one party to rise to the
top you know in search
training or they're making it happen and you don't know for sure whether you
know which is which is
occurring unless there's a whistleblower or there's a leak okay but the fact
that it's occurring at all
that's important right i mean we don't in a way we don't care because if it's
just the algorithm
that's doing it well that's horrible that means that that means literally a
computer program is deciding
who's going to be the next president who's going to be the next senator do we
want that decision made
by an algorithm so anyway we we we spent a lot of time on that we're still
studying seam uh then we
went we we learned about sse which is search suggestion effect when you start
to type oh in fact if you
have your phone handy this will be fun if you if you start to type uh a search
term into the box a search
box you're you're there uh suggestions flashed at you as fast as you're typing
that's how fast those
suggestions come right well guess what we learned in controlled experiments
that by manipulating the
suggestions that are being flashed at people we could turn a 50 50 split in a
group of undecided voters
into nearly a 90 10 split wow without anyone having the slightest idea that
they're being manipulated
that's just by manipulating search suggestions just by suggesting yes and and
the reason why um we
started that work because in june of 2016 uh a a news organization a small news
organization released a
video which went viral on youtube and then got blocked on youtube frozen still
frozen uh but then it
continued to go viral on facebook so 25 million views in this little video
there this news organization is
saying we've made a discovery uh when you go to google.com and you look for
information about
um hillary clinton you can't get any negative search suggestions
really really really so if you and they showed this in there what if you google
like clinton body count
you you you you could not get negatives
really yeah it would it would give you nothing probably for clinton body count
but as you're typing you go clinton b it would go you know clinton um um buys
the best clothes i don't
know it would give you something like that it would not give you something
negative so for example
hillary hillary clinton or hillary clinton is you do it on and they showed this
you do it on yahoo
uh you do it on bing and you get hillary clinton is the devil hillary clinton
is evil hillary clinton
you know right poison hillary clinton and literally they they're showing you
eight or ten
items that are extremely negative you can check on google trends that's in fact
what people are
really searching for so bing is showing you what people are searching for hillary
clinton is on google
at that time gives you guess what what hillary clinton is awesome hillary clinton
is winning
that's it two suggestions so that's why we started doing these this research on
search suggestions
because i kept thinking why why would they do that why would they suppress
negatives for a candidate
they presumably support and we figured it out
it's because did you ever hear of negativity bias yes okay so this is also
called the cockroach in
the salad phenomenon so you've got this big beautiful salad you see a cockroach
in the middle
it ruins the whole salad we are drawn our attention is drawn to negatives
negatives right and that's good
for evolutionary purposes good for survival so ruins the whole cell the
opposite doesn't work if you have a
plate of sewage and you put a nice piece of hershey's chocolate in the middle
it does not make the sewage
look any more appetizing so we're drawn to negatives well google knows this
okay and we we've quantified it
basically if we allow one negative to pop up in a list and the rest are neutral
or positive suggestions
that one negative for certain demographic groups can draw 10 to 15 times as
many clicks
as the other suggestions so one of the simplest ways to support a candidate or
a cause
is for your candidate or cause okay you suppress the negatives it's a simple
look up you look at you're
looking up what's called the linguistic valence of the term it's simple look up
takes you know a nanosecond
and if it's if it's your cause your candidate okay you delete it it's gone
people don't see it but you
let the negatives pop up in the search suggestions for the other candidate or
the other cause and what
that does is it draws people who are looking up let's say donald trump it draws
people to to websites to
well first of all it generates search results that make that person look bad
because you just clicked
on um donald trump is evil and so you clicked on that caught your attention
boom you get a bunch of
search results that support that you click on any of them and now you're at a
website that makes him look
terrible very very simple kind of manipulation so subtle all you do is suppress
negative suggestions for the
candidate or the cause that you support and as i say we so we did a you know
series of experiments we
figured out okay to what extent can we mess with a group of a hundred people or
a thousand people and
and yeah we can turn a 50 50 split among undecided voters into nearly a 90 10
split when did they
first start implementing this sort of search engine manipulation when when did
they implement the
suggestion manipulation well we were we were able to estimate that to some
extent and by the way the
this this uh landscape keeps changing so i'll give you an example when they
first came up with search
suggestions uh it was actually one engineer there came up with this thing and
it's it was cool and it was an
opt-in things when it first came out i think it was 2009 and and it was cool
and it was helpful because
that that was the idea initially so then over time i think you know with a lot
of these services a lot of
these you know these little gizmos people figured out that wait a minute we can
we can do things you know
that maybe we didn't intend to in the beginning but we can use these for
specific purposes so anyway
so at some point or other couple years later it was no longer opt-in in fact it
was
automatic and you can't opt out that's the first thing that happened and then
you may remember there
were always 10 items in the list initially but then uh 2010 or so suddenly they
dropped to four items
so in our experiments we actually figured out why they were showing four items
and we went public with
that information in 2017 and three weeks later google went back to 10 items
why do you think they went to four because four is the four is exactly from we
know from the research
is exactly the number of search suggestions that allows you to maximize your
control over people's
searches because look if the list is too long and you've got a negative in
there
they're not going to see it i mean imagine if you had a hundred a hundred
search suggestions and you
had one negative right so it has to be short enough so that they the negative
pops out right but it can't
be too short if it's too short then the likelihood that they type in their own
damn search term and
ignore your suggestions goes up so there has to be this optimal number it turns
out the optimal number
to maximize your control over search is four wow and we also learned that you
are being manipulated on
google from the very first character you type into the search box if you have a
phone handy i can prove
it okay so i'll google and this is going to be by the way the last time
so you're you're all those of you who are watching or listening uh you're all
witnesses is the last
time that joe rogan ever uses google ever really well watch okay okay so you
got google up there right
yes and and you're in the search box yes type a what's it suggesting amazon
yeah well it's doing more than one suggestion what are the suggestions amazon
uh academy sports and
outdoors amazon prime houston astros uh and then a bunch of other people alamo
draft house american
airlines so your first and third suggestions and notably the first position is
the most important
are amazon yes well it turns out everywhere in the world where amazon does
business
if you try to search for anything beginning with the letter a and you type a
google suggests amazon
why is that well it turns out amazon is google's largest advertiser and google
is amazon's largest
single source of traffic it's a business relationship get it if you type t you're
going to get target and so
on but what's interesting is when you type g just type g all right
what do you think i'll get well tell us tell us what you got grand seiko
nothing interesting on there at all no gastronomical and then number four is
google translate
number five is gmail number six is google okay oh it's starting to see a
pattern here yeah but i mean
like the first ones are all like something that i would look up well they know
your history right so
they know they know who you're who they're so the first ones with g they'll
allow you to have a little
like it's they allow you to actually look up the things you're interested in or
suggest things you're
interested in first of all you're joe rogan okay so they may allow you to do
all kinds of things
do you like have specific allows for people like me yeah everything's
personalized but i mean is it
it personalized on purpose or personalized through the algorithm that sort of
represents what you
normally search for yeah that's called on purpose yeah no but i mean like it's
they're not doing it
specifically because it's me like if i was any any other person that was maybe
anonymous but i also
looked up those things for most people to answer your question for most people
and and and folks out
there literally pick up your phones go to google.com which by the way this is
the last time you're ever
going to use google.com and but just type in g and see what you see most people
if they're getting
five suggestions four out of the five will be for google so the the the lesson
there is if you're
starting a new company don't start don't name it with a g right yeah no g
because so that what they're
showing you the point is has to do with their their agenda their motives okay
every single thing that
they're doing has to do with their motives which have to do with money values
and intelligence and
a public library does not do that you go you borrow some books you ask some
questions you get some
answers that's that this is that's what the way the internet was meant to be
it wasn't supposed to be this the the whole you know internet around the world
controlled
mainly by two huge monopolies and to a lesser extent by some smaller monopolies
like twitter
it wasn't supposed to be that way it was supposed to be like the public library
right
and it is possible you see you can set up a company like brave that doesn't
play these stupid games and
doesn't fool you and it's not it's not deceptive this is this is the business
model that google invented
it's called the surveillance business model is fundamentally deceptive because
up here at the
level that you're you're you're interacting with it it looks like public
library free cool and down here
underneath it's something completely different there's no reason for that tim
tim cook who's
the still the ceo of apple has publicly said this is pretty recent publicly
said that this is a creepy
business model and it should not be allowed well that is one area where apple
deserves credit right that
apple has not taken up that same sort of um net like surveillance where they
just kind of cast
the net over everything you do and then sell it to advertisers and you you can
opt out of certain
things in terms of like allowing apps to track purchases or allowing apps to
track your your use
on other devices or on other um applications rather i i wish i could agree with
you but i can't because
the fact is apple is still collecting all this information apple is still
listening
uh it's they're doing the same things it's just that at the moment so far you
know under the leadership
they have right now okay but that can change in a heartbeat let's talk about
microsoft okay so you
probably know that microsoft was google's enemy number one microsoft was sued
google in practically every
courtroom in the world microsoft was submitting regulatory complaints microsoft
was funding
organizations that existed to do nothing else but fight google uh for a long
long time early 2016
google and microsoft signed a secret pact so the fact that the fact that the
pact again you know was
signed that somehow leaked but to this day no one knows the details of what's
in it except here's what
happened simultaneously both companies around the world dropped all complaints
against each other
google excuse me microsoft withdrew all of its funding from all the
organizations that had been supporting
and there are some people who believe because of bing microsoft's search engine
uh which draws about
two percent of two percent of search by the way it's not it's no uh it's no
google it had been bleeding money
for microsoft for years and some people believe that bing as part of this deal
uh started drawing search results from google we don't know but we do know this
that windows 10
windows 10 is a tracking tool windows 11 is a tracking tool these these these
new operating systems are so
aggressive in tracking that it's very even if you're a tech geek like me it's
very very hard
to get rid of all the tracking so i'm i'm still using windows 8.1 believe it or
not or windows 7.
why didn't you switch to linux or unix or something like that
well we use that for certain purposes as well but i mean for general stuff that
you do you kind of
you know if you're if you're using desktops and laptops you you know windows is
still the way to go
except the company shifted it has been shifting towards the surveillance
business model as thousands
of other companies have including verizon just because it's so profitable well
it's so easy you
see you're getting all the information anyway all you're going to do now is
start to monetize it
you're just building this a new new parts of the company that no one even sees
right
and the the real issue here seems to be that this wasn't a thing 20 years ago
it's a thing now and
it's the most dominant thing in terms of the way people access information the
way people get data
the way people find answers what is it going to be in 20 years from now i mean
it it seems like
there's so much potential for control and so much potential for manipulation
and that it could only
just get worse if there's no regulation put in place and there's no way to stop
use of algorithms use of
curated data like what what is this going to be like have you sort of extrapolated
have you looked
at the future and yeah that's what i do that's what i do right every day it's
depressing what do you
think is happening what do you think like when we're looking at 20 years from
now what's going to happen
well uh you might not believe my answer but 20 years from now already happened
how so it's now it's here now
okay eisenhower you're not as old as i am but you probably remember i know the
speech ah famous speech
yeah and everyone always points to certain language from his speech this is his
his retirement speech
his last speech just a few days before john f kennedy became president and it
was a very shocking speech
because this is the guy who was head of allied forces in world war ii this is a
you know i don't
know four-star general i mean he's a you know he's he's an insider and in this
speech he says you know
what this terrible kind of entity has begun to emerge you know and i've watched
it and he called
it the military industrial complex he can and you probably remember hippies
like you know with signs
and screaming no military industrial complex and eisenhower actually warned
about the growth of this military
industrial complex and how it's taking over businesses and it's affecting the
government and blah blah blah
what people failed to note is that he also warned in the same speech about the
rise of a technological
elite that could control public policy without anyone knowing this was 1961
really
technological elite same speech what i mean what technological capabilities
were even available back
then other than the media other than you know broadcast television and radio
well but it means
that whatever he was seeing behind the scenes see oh jesus was scaring him and
i what i have to tell
you is that you're worried about 20 years from now the technological elite are
now in control
so apple google facebook and to a lesser extent the other social media
platforms correct and
google is by far the most aggressive uh the most dangerous uh you know facebook
there's chaos within facebook but you know we had this amazingly from francis
haugen just recently
of documents showing that you know people at facebook are very much aware that
their social platform
creates turmoil terrible turmoil on a massive scale and that they like that
they encourage that because the
more turmoil the more traffic the more traffic the more money but knowing that
you're creating turmoil
is here's my thought on that it's like is it just human nature because you were
saying before about
the like negative negativity bias that people gravitate towards things that are
negative and that's one of the
things that you'll find if you uh use you uh youtube rather when when you go on
youtube if you're a person
who likes to get upset at things and you're a person who likes to you know look
for things that are you
know disturbing or upsetting or the you know political arguments whatever you'll
get those in your suggestions
over and over and over again if you're not interested in that if you're only
interested in airplanes
and you start googling airplanes or or cars or watches or that's what it'll
suggest to you
it doesn't have to suggest to you negativity you
gravitate towards that naturally and so the algorithm represents what you're
actually interested in
so is it facebook's fault that everyone not everyone most people
generally interact more with things that are negative or things that upset them
that's not their fault but it is their fault that they take advantage of that
to manipulate people
that's entirely their but if their business model is to engage with people and
to keep people engaged by
giving them content that makes them
stay engaged and click on links and read more and spend more time on the
platform
and the only thing that it's doing is highlighting what you're actually
interested in
why is what are they supposed to do are they supposed to make less money and
then have no suggestions and
have no algorithm and just leave it all up to chance just leave it all up to
you go find what you're
interested in and then keep finding what you're interested in through a direct
search like to through you trying to find these things directly with no
suggestion whatsoever
because that's better for the human race and for the past year or so we have
been doing controlled
experiments on youtube uh we have a youtube simulator it's a perfect youtube
simulator
and and we have control we're using real content from youtube real videos from
youtube all the titles
everything comes from youtube except we have control over the ordering and we
have control over the up
next algorithm that's where the power lies the up next algorithm so one of the
things we learned
recently not from francis haugen but it was someone else who left facebook is
that 70 of the videos
that people watch on youtube now around the world are suggested by youtube's up
next algorithm 70 70
yeah and that's their algorithm and just like us in our lab okay we have
control over what the up next
algorithm suggests and guess what we can do with our up next algorithm what
well it should be obvious
you can manipulate people yeah we manipulate people we randomly assign them to
this group or that group
and we just push people any old way we want to push them and when you're doing
these tests and studies
like how are you doing this like are you doing how many people are involved in
this are they students
like what how are you how are you doing this okay we we we never do the you
know subject pool at the university
where you get you know 50 students from your your college to take you know to
be your research we never do that
so we're always reaching out uh to the community or we're doing things online
so we do big studies online
and we are getting very diverse groups of people we're getting literally we're
getting people from uh
lists of registered voters so we're getting people you know who who who look
like the american population
and we are we we can mess with them can i say we can with them you just did oh
i guess i just did
oh this is definitely not fox this is no no we're on the internet this is not
fox news uh yeah but the
internet you see the internet though because there are no regulations and rules
it does allow for some
pretty evil things to take place and the fact is in our experiments we we we do
these usually our
experiments have hundreds of people in them sometimes they have thousands of
people and
we can fuck with people and they have absolutely no idea let me just i'll tell
you about something new
okay okay something new brand new okay and this is uh thank god i'm not talking
about google this time
just talking about something else that's happening there are websites that will
help you make up your mind
about something so for example there's a whole bunch of them right now that'll
help you decide whether
you're really a democrat or you're really a republican and the way they do that
is they give you a quiz
and based on your answers to how you feel about abortion and immigration and
this and that
at the end of the quiz they say oh you are definitely a republican sign up here
if you want to join the
republican party and this is called opinion matching and the research we do on
this is called ome the
opinion matching effect and there are hundreds of websites like this and when
you get near an election
a lot more of them turn up because the washington post will give you a quiz and
help you decide who to
vote for and tinder tinder okay which is used for sexual hookups how about
romantic sir oh not just sex
sorry uh my mistake uh so tinder actually set up a swipe the vote option on tinder
during the 2016
election you swipe left if you think this you swipe right if you think that and
then at the end of it
they say oh you should be voting for hillary clinton okay but how do you know
when one of these websites
is helping you make up your mind how do you know whether the algorithm is
paying any attention to
your answers at all how do you know you don't so what we've done is no we've
done two things one is
we've gone to a lot of these websites and we've been typing in random answers
or we've actually set up
algorithms that do it for us so if we want to you know do it 500 times we set
up an algorithm that does
it and then we look and see what the recommendations were and guess what guess
what what sometimes
these websites are not paying any attention to your answers they're just
telling you what they want to
tell you and they're using this quiz to suck you in and then they add in oh
this this we love they add
in a timer so in other words after you finish the quiz it'll go tick tick tick
tick tick computing
computing computing and there's this delay creating the impression that they're
really thinking hard
and then then they give you your answer so they're doing all that is for
credibility to manipulate
you now so over here we're going to websites and we're typing in random answers
on the other side
we're doing experiments in which we are giving people quizzes and then we are
giving people recommendations
and then we are measuring to see whether we can change anyone's mind and we're
getting shifts of 70 to 90
percent with not a single person recognizing that they're being manipulated not
even one person
recognizing that there's bias in the results we're giving them not one because
how could you see the
bias how could you see the manipulation you've just taken a quiz right you're
trying to make up your mind
the thing that's so scary about this kind of manipulation is it attracts
exactly the right people
exactly the right people who can be manipulated right because who's taking
quizzes
the people who are trying to make up their minds they're unsure right they're
vulnerable yeah
and when you so you spoke to congress about this you spoke in front of congress
or was it no yeah
and when you did was there any sort of urgency that was did anybody understand
like what the implications
this are did anybody understand like this is we were literally looking at these
massive technologies that
are used throughout the world that that can completely change the way policy is
directed the way
people are elected who's in charge what the public narrative is on a variety of
subjects
Well, there are some people. There's a guy named Blumenthal. He's a senator
from Connecticut. He gets it. He understands. He's kind of disgusted, I would
say, with all this stuff. But, you know, I said to Cruz, I said, why don't you
work with Blumenthal? And he said, well, no, I don't think that'll work out.
Because he's a Democrat? Because he's a Democrat. So they can't. Here's. So the
Democrats, even the ones who understand this stuff, they won't do anything.
Because why? Because these tech companies support Democrats very lavishly with
donations. So, for example, Google was Hillary Clinton's biggest donor in 2016.
And they're supporting them in these more subtle ways as well.
So the Democrats will do nothing if they even say something, like if they rattle
their swords, they don't actually do anything. And the Republicans hate
regulation. This is a perfect storm for these companies to do what they have
done, which is they have already taken over. You're thinking 20 years from now?
No. They've already done it.
Well, I'm not thinking that they haven't already taken over. But I'm thinking,
like, how much more control can they have in 20 years? If 20 years ago they
didn't have any? Like, as technology advances, do you think that this is going
to be a deeper and deeper part of our world?
Well, look at Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg's trying to get us all into the metaverse.
So, yeah, you have even more control if you get people into virtual realities.
Yes, you have more control. Every single thing they're doing is moving us
farther and farther and farther down the rabbit hole.
Well, not just that. I'm thinking, like, there was a time where Zuckerberg, at
least, was publicly considering cryptocurrencies.
Right.
Like some sort of a Facebook cryptocurrency. Imagine if Facebook cryptocurrency
became the number one currency worldwide. Maybe it was the number one crypto
like Bitcoin is today.
Sure.
What the fuck? You know, so you're in the metaverse. In order to exist and
compete and buy things and prosper, you need Zuck bucks.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah. Oh, I published a few years ago an essay calling for his resignation.
Roger McNamee, who was one of the first supporters financially of both Google
and Facebook, he actually published a book about two years ago saying it was
called Zucked, how Zuckerberg has taken over the world.
And he basically, he said in that book straight out that if he had known what
these companies were going to turn into, Google and Facebook, he would never,
never have backed them in those early days.
Jamie, did we ever find out what Facebook or Google rather changed their?
Yeah. It got moved to the bottom of the Code of Conduct.
But it's still in there, right?
It's on the screen.
Okay, that's right. And remember, don't be evil. And if you see something that
you think isn't right, speak up. So it's still in there.
Sort of.
Yeah.
I think it's really...
Google aspires to be a different kind of company. It's impossible to spell out
every possible ethical scenario we might face. Instead, we rely on one another's
good judgment to uphold a high standard of integrity for ourselves and our
company.
We expect all Googlers to be guided by both the letter and the spirit of this
code. Sometimes identifying the right thing to do isn't an easy call. If you
aren't sure, don't be afraid to ask.
Ask questions of your manager, legal, or ethics and compliance. And remember,
don't be evil.
That was updated September 25th, 2020.
Right.
Can you hold this? Because I have to pee. Unfortunately, I have to pee. I drank
way too much coffee today. So we'll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen, hold
those thoughts.
This don't be evil thing. This don't be evil thing. This is where it gets
interesting to me because the company is notoriously woke, right? They've
adopted these woke ethics. And you hear about meetings that they have. And
there was that there was the one gentleman.
Jamie, what is his name that was? He was fired from Google because he James Damore,
thank you. And we actually had him on the podcast at one point in time because
they asked him questions about why don't women?
Have more prominent roles in tech? And is there some sort of gender bias? Is it
natural? And he wrote a whole paper about choices and why people choose one
thing or another. And they decided he was a sexist piece of shit and they fired
him.
And it was really wild because if you read the actual paper and the paper was
available online, like there was nothing that he said that was it was not sexist
at all.
Yeah, I read it. Yeah. Yeah. So when a company has very clear motives, like
they're they're in it to make money. Like that's that's what they're doing.
What how does that wokeness play into that? Is that just a natural artifact of
people coming from universities and then eventually working for Google or is
this like sort of a strategy that that's encouraged because it's more
profitable that way?
Well, first of all, you have to understand that it's not that simple. So
because Google has had demonstrators, they've had literally their own employees
holding demonstrations.
Not everyone is happy about the policies at Google.
People, for example, who have conservative leanings, which I don't, but people
have conservative leanings there.
They're there. They're they're miserable because the the the the values agenda
is so strong there, you know, that it dominates everything.
Isn't it interesting that you feel like you have to announce that you don't
have conservative leanings?
It's interesting because you've done it a couple of times so far.
Three. Yeah. And you do it because people want to say, oh, all right.
Psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, you know, they would like to do that, right?
Oh, I've been ever since I did the testimony.
I mean, a bunch of things happened to some one of which is very sad, but
Yeah, I've gotten branded. I've gotten branded as some sort of conservative
right wing nutcase and I don't have a conservative bone in my whole body.
So it's really it really bothers me. I'm I'm I'm doing I'm doing what I do
because I put humanity, democracy, America, you know, ahead of any particular
party, any any particular candidate.
There are bigger issues here. It should be obvious that what you're saying, I
mean, what you're saying should concern people.
The idea that you would just be labeled as a part of a, you know, disparaged
political party because it's an easy way to defame you and to discredit you.
That should be obvious, too. We said one of the things that happened was sad.
What was that?
Well, in 2019, one of the things I did run run the same time I did the
testimony as I did a private briefing for state attorneys general
and
So I did my thing and I, you know, I can scare people
Pretty well with my my data. We haven't got to my monitoring projects yet, but
we will
Okay, like so I you know, I did my thing and then I went out into the
Kind of the waiting room there and just waited because I was done and they
started filing out and one of them came up to me
I know exactly who it was. I know what state he was from and he says
Dr. Epstein, I hate to tell you this, but he said I think you're gonna die in
an accident
within the next few months and
Then he walked away now
I did not die in an accident in the next few months, but my wife did
Really yeah, so when this person said that to you what what does this person do
what?
He's an attorney general of a state and
Why did he say that to you because he was concerned? He thought I was pissing
People off who had a lot of power in it
They wouldn't like that
And how did your wife die in an accident? What were the circumstances?
She lots control of her little pickup truck that I had bought her and
got broadsided by a
Massive
Truck that was towing two loads of cement
But her pickup truck was never examined forensically and
It disappeared I
Was told that it had been sold to someone in Mexico and
It just disappeared from sold to some of the Mexico obviously was totaled was
totaled and the the wreck
Which I suppose was technically my property?
Disappeared was never examined and disappeared
Went to Mexico now was this a older truck was it a newer truck? I was an older
truck, but you know older as in like come how old?
Like
2002 but we kept in very good shape had low mileage
New tires the reason why I ask is like what kind of computer systems were
involved in cars?
In cars for 2002 as opposed to do you remember the
The story of the journalist who Michael Hastings who wrote a story about a
general in
During the during the time of
Obama's administration there was a volcano that erupted in Iceland and
He was stuck
Overseas I believe it was like Afghanistan or
Iraq I think it was Afghanistan so he was over there writing a story for
Rolling Stone and
Because he was over there for so long because he was trapped because no flights
were going because of the air cover was so bad because of this volcano
They got real comfortable with him and these soldiers started saying things not
even thinking this guy is like
You know, he's not one of them. He is a journalist and he's gonna write all
these things about so
He wrote this very damning article
the general in question got fired and then this guy Michael has Hastings
started talking about how he was in fearing for his own life and
cut to
sometime in the future he
Sped up there's actually a video of it sped up on Sunset Boulevard
Towards the west side and slammed into a tree going like a hundred and twenty
miles an hour. There was an explosion
the cars engine was you know
Many yards from the the car itself and there was a lot of speculation
that not only did the government have the ability to
Manipulate that the intelligence agencies had the ability to manipulate people's
cars, but it's something they've actively done and people were very concerned
that this guy was murdered
Because of what he had done because that general wound up getting fired
Obama wound up firing him because it made Obama look bad
He was a very beloved general that kind of shit scares the fuck out of people
Well, there's a very good book on this subject. It's called future crimes
and
It starts out saying the kind of things that I've been saying to you which is
the future crimes that they're they're actually here now
And this is an ex FBI guy who wrote the book and he's talking about how tech is
being used
Now to to not only commit crimes, but to and to assassinate people
One of the simplest ways to do it as you hack into a hospital computer and you
change dosages on
medication
You know if the person you're going after is hospital has been hospitalized
That's a really simple way to just knock them off and have it look like it. You
know just some silly little you know
glitch or something
So yeah, a lot of there's a lot of ways now that that you can commit crimes
that have never existed before
And as far as I'm concerned I mean the kinds of things I study in my opinion
should be considered crimes
And and and I don't think it we should ever
Be complacent and just say oh, it's the algorithm
Algorithms are written by people algorithms are modified Google modifies its
algorithm its basic search algorithms
3,000 times a year. That's that's does it. That's human intervention
do you
Think that that's what happened to your wife or do you do you speculate or do
you just not know and just leave it at that?
Like what how do you feel about that? It depends on the day? I you know, I
think about Misty
She's from Texas originally and I think about her
Pretty much non-stop. I'm still wearing my wedding band and even though the
accident was two years ago
I don't know it. I know that
The the accident made news not just here, but in Europe
Because you know, some people thought it was suspicious that you know, this my
beautiful
wife
You know, we've been together for eight years and my beautiful wife was killed
in this horrendous fashion and
You know, obviously I have I have pissed off some people at some big companies
And I have work coming out. I mean the work that I have coming out I have right
now 12
Scientific papers under review and and four that are in press in other words
that have been accepted
So I have stuff coming out
That is over and over again. It's like a sledgehammer is going to make
Certain companies really look
Well, very evil I would say do you think that they have the ability to suppress
the kind of
Coverage of the data that you're putting out to the point where it's not going
to impact them like how much has it impacted them?
Currently, I mean we're talking about committing murder or potentially
committing murder
Like how much have you impacted them if they're still in complete and total
control and they're still
Utilizing all these algorithms and making massive amounts of profit you haven't
put a crimp in that
Well, I have I have I have put a crimp in it. Yes
and
So I do want to talk to you about this about the monitoring stuff because there
is a way there there's there's more than one way
but there's there's there's one very practical way to
to to
Literally just push these companies out of our personal lives and out of our
elections and
Yeah, I've been working on that project since 2016 at that project started
because of a phone call. I received from a state attorney general
general
Jim Hood he was he was attorney general of Mississippi at the time
He called me in 2015 and he and he said could Google
Mess with my reelection as attorney general in that state they elect them and I
said yeah very easily and so how would they do it?
I explained how they do it etc etc and he was very very concerned and
He said but how would you know that they're doing it?
And my mind just started to spin like I'm thinking
Gee, I don't know well a whistleblower, you know a a warrant something
And I became obsessed with trying to figure out
How to know what these companies are actually showing real people?
Now here and there
There's some researchers at Columbia should be ashamed of themselves
There's some reporters at the economist who should be ashamed of themselves
here and there
People have have set up a computer that they anonymize
Okay
And they and they type in lots of search terms and they get back all these
searchers and they conclude that there's no bias
But that doesn't tell you anything because Google
Algorithm can easily spot a bot can easily spot an anonymized computer. They
know it's not a real person
How do they know that because they because it doesn't have a profile you have a
profile?
You know
You have a how long have you been using the internet for that way a long time?
Well roughly 25 30 years whatever it's been night. Was it?
94 I first got on wow almost 30 years. Okay, so Google has a profile on you
That is more than that has more than three
The equivalent of more than 3 million pages of content
Now you're probably thinking well, how could I generate that because because
everything you do
goes into that
profile so
That yeah, it's a lot of content
But the point is they know the difference between you because you have a big
old profile and an anonymized computer or a bot because there's no profile
Right, so it turns out
This is the simplest thing in the world to do is that when they're when they
see a bot
Okay, they just send out
Unbiased content we and we we've we've shown this ourselves. It's there's
nothing to it
But that's but that's not the challenge the general hood was was basically
giving me he was saying
How would you find out?
What real people are seeing?
so 2016 I
Got some funds. I don't even know where they came from but anyway
And we started recruiting people we call them field agents. This is exactly
what
the that company does Nielsen that does the Nielsen ratings they've been doing
it since
1950 they're now in 47 countries and they recruit families and they and they
keep their identities very secret and they
Equip the families with special gizmos so they can keep an eye on what
television shows are watching and that's where the Nielsen ratings come from
Which are very important because they determine how much those shows can charge
for advertising
They determine whether or not a show stays on the air
So it's important
So we started recruiting field agents and we developed custom software
literally from the ground up and when we
screen a field agent and we say okay
You want to join us we install on their computer?
Special software which allows us in effect to look over their shoulders. This
is with their permission obviously
Look over their shoulders and we can take snapshots and we're so when we sign
these people up
We're taking lots of snapshots, you know all day long and then information is
coming in and it's being aggregated
So we can look at what real voters are being sent by Google Facebook YouTube
anybody and
We and we take all kinds of precautions to make sure these people cannot be
identified
We deliberately had a small group of people
Gmail users to make it easy for Google to identify those people guess what?
They got unbiased content
But everyone else was getting highly biased content when we why did the Gmail
people get unbiased content?
Because Google knew they were our field agents
So Google was aware of your study I
I I I probably can't even sneeze without
Google being aware
So you think Google manipulated the results of the people that were Gmail users?
No, I think they show that they didn't have bias. No, I think they unmanipulated
Yeah, but I'm saying yeah, I mean manipulated in the sense of they didn't apply
the algorithm to those people
I had a reporter from DC
I'm not gonna name him
He was doing a piece of my work and then
He contacts me a couple days later and he said that he called up
A woman who he believed was the head of Google's
PR department
He said and I asked her questions about your work and she started screaming at
me
He said that he said that's very unprofessional. I've never had that happen
before
He said I'm going to tell you two things
He said number one you have their attention and number two if I were you I
would take precautions
Jesus
so monitoring
2016 we recruited 95 field agents in 24 states
we preserved
13 000
election related search results
on google bing and yahoo
so it's 130 000
search results so each one has 10 results in it
so that's 130 000 links and we also
then also preserved the web pages so we had 98 000 unique web pages
and then we analyzed it
we found
extreme pro-Hillary Clinton
bias
on google search results but not on bing or yahoo
now here's
number four disclaimer number four I supported hillary clinton
but still I was very disturbed by this extremely disturbed because we knew from
the experiments
we had run that that was enough bias to have shifted over a period of time
among undecided voters somewhere between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes without
anyone having the slightest idea that this had occurred
that's 2016. 2018 we monitor the midterms
we preserved 47 000 searches so we were expanding we're getting bigger
47 000 and we found enough bias on google but not bing or yahoo to have shifted
78 million votes that spread across hundreds of elections though okay with no
one knowing
2020 we went all out we had more money
we went all out and we recruited 1735 field agents just in swing counties just
in swing states because
we knew that's where the action was going to be we preserved 1.5 million ephemeral
experiences
and i'll define that if you want sure on google bing yahoo youtube google's
home page facebook
we at this point know how to preserve pretty much anything we preserved 3
million web pages
and and we're getting to that we're getting to the climax here okay
we decided which we hadn't done in the past on october 30th 2020 before the
election a few days before
the election we decided to go public with some of our initial findings and we
did
and as a result on november 5th two days after the election three u.s senators
sent a very threatening letter to the ceo of google just summarizing all my
work my preliminary stuff
and guess what happened then in georgia we had over a thousand field agents in
georgia
google turned off the bias like that google stopped with their home page go
vote reminders they stayed out
of georgia what does this say this tells you that if you monitor if you do to
them what they do to
us 24 hours a day you do that to them and you look for any kind of manipulation
any kind of bias
any kind of shenanigan and you make that public you expose it
they back down they back down they have to back down so doesn't this highlight
that if our government
is concerned about legitimate threats to democracy and legitimate threats to
the way information is
distributed and free speech and manipulation that they should be monitoring
google but is the problem
money because of the amount of money that they give to campaigns the amount of
money they give to
support causes that these politicians back and the votes don't forget the vote
shifting because some of
these politicians understand that yes you know we the government forget the
government okay forget the
government the government is not going to do this and would we even trust the
government to do it so
who should be doing it this should be done by a probably a consortium uh by a
bipartisan or nonpartisan
uh non-profit organizations and uh you know the there's sure there we should
have hearings we should
have a you know very uh everything should be transparent we should have wide
representation of people serving
on the boards and all that kind of like well the un but except you know but
this is a narrow kind of task
here's what we need we need to we need to set up now because now we know how to
do it we need to set up a
permanent large-scale monitoring system in all 50 states in the united states
that's how we start
eventually we have to help people in other countries set up similar systems
that is how now and in the
future see that that's the real answer to your future question that is why now
and in the future that is
how now and in the future we can get control over emerging technologies not
just google but the next
google and the google after that there is no way to know what these companies
are doing unless you are
monitoring one of the simulators we have now that we developed actually within
the past year which is
fabulous i i'm so proud of my staff we have an alexa simulator
i mean it just works just like alexa and it talks it's fantastic except we
control
what it's going to say and sure enough can we shift people's oh yeah easy easy
peasy nothing
but what that tells you is that's one of the things we have to monitor we have
to monitor the answers
that these so-called personal assistants are giving people because if they give
biased answers
that shifts thinking and behavior and you know what if all of these companies
all favor the same party
right which they do what if all of these companies all favor the same candidate
which they do
you you add you you add up these these these manipulations and basically what eisenhower
predicted
it's it's it's it's here now it's just that you can't see it you you cannot
first of all if i'll give
an example okay 2016 and i bet you mark zuckerberg has been kicking himself in
the butt ever since
on election day if zuckerberg with one click if he had sent out go vote
reminders
just to democrats that day because you know i mean trump won basically by what
47 000 votes in four
states i mean if if zuckerberg had sent out go vote reminders just to democrats
and he knows who who the
democrats are right he could have generated that day 450 000 more votes for
hillary clinton than she got
how do we know that from facebook's own published data they published a study
in 2012
showing how they could get more people to vote in 2010 by sending out vote
reminders if you just take
the data that they published and move it over to 2016 and say okay mark press
the button
hillary would have has absolutely won won the look he's he i'm sure to this day
is kicking himself
because he didn't do it but how would you know see on any any given day any
given election how would you
know whether that kind of reminder is going out number one and number two who
it's going to is it going
to everybody or is it going just to select group is it targeted there's no way
to know that unless you
have monitoring systems in place with a monitoring system you would know you
would know within seconds or
minutes if a targeted message like that was being sent out but if you had a
targeted message like that
is that that's not illegal right which is part of the problem like even if they
did it publicly
and you said all we're doing is encouraging people to vote yeah but what if it's
going just to members
of one party oh i i get it but i mean would they be obligated to send that to
everybody
or maybe they could use the excuse that it's only the people that are
politically inclined
here's what i'm here's what i'm here this is what i believe okay based on the
experience that we just
had a few months ago where we got google to stay out of georgia and by the way
we positively got them
to stay out of georgia because we had over a thousand field agents in georgia
and we were collecting a
massive amount we collected more than a million ephemeral experiences i guess i'm
going to have
to define that in georgia i'm telling you google we have never seen so little
bias in google search
results ever since we started monitoring in 2016. what's an ephemeral
experience okay
2018 a leak to the wall street journal from google a bunch of emails one googler
is saying to others
how can we use ephemeral experiences to change people's views about trump's
travel ban
i know it was i didn't make up this term this is this is from google's
internally this is the kind of
lingo that they use what's an ephemeral experience and why would they want to
use ephemeral experiences
to change people's minds because an ephemeral experience is well most of the
kinds of interactions
we have online involve ephemeral experiences like search you type search term
you see a bunch of
search results it has an impact on you you click on something it disappears it's
not stored anywhere
and it's gone forever so there are these brief experiences like a news feed a
list of search
suggestions an answer box that affect users disappear stored nowhere
authorities cannot go back
in time and figure out what people were being shown that's why internally at
google they want to use
ephemeral experiences to impact people because unless someone like me and i'm
the only one doing this
unless some crazy guy like me is setting up monitoring systems and keeping
everything secret
well it's running no one will ever know that you just flipped an election no
one will ever know
as i say the most powerful mind control machine ever invented and it relies for
the most part on ephemeral
experiences meaning no one knows you can't track it you can't track it you can't
go back in time
the only way to do it is you'd have to be looking over the shoulders of real
users you have to look
over their shoulders and you have to grab it as it's occurring and then you
have to aggregate it
analyze it quickly and no it's not really possible well no that's what we do
but i mean that's not
possible for the entire country uh yeah well that that's why we have to take
what we've done
do you see the irony in that though it's almost like the only way to prevent
this manipulation
is by massive surveillance of everyone no no no all you need is a
representative sample you do you do
what what the nielsen company does same thing so we have uh you know a panel it's
called we have a panel
of field agents around the country in a country like in a state like um california
we'd have to have a lot
because they have a lot of people idaho we don't need so many so you just take
representative sample
from each state like a nielsen thing exactly like nielsen but would they be
aware of who the nielsen
families are or the the the people that you're surveilling you know your your nielsen's
would
they be able to just have them receive unbiased data well that that's the whole
point the point
of nielsen is they have to keep the identities of those families secret because
otherwise people
would mess with them right but if they have the amount of surveillance
capabilities that we're
talking about here yeah wouldn't they be able to know who these field agents
are
well that's why we we're very very careful uh about how we do the recruiting so
you know it's it's
expensive but nielsen has to take precautions in the way they do recruiting and
equipping and training we
have learned from that we take tremendous precautions and so uh you know you're
asking can this really be
done i'm saying yeah i've done it four times so i know it can be done but it
takes effort there's a
lot of security involved uh if if someone is suspicious we dump them nielsen
does the same thing
so how do you find out someone's suspicious well we're we how do we do that
yeah uh for example um
let's say they're uh we're we're aggregating information on that they're
getting on the search
engines let's say so we you know it's coming in our software is set up so that
if if the information
we're getting from any particular field agent doesn't look right okay then then
it goes over to human
review so what could that mean that could mean for example that they are using
an algorithm they're trying
to tilt things in a particular direction so they're not actually typing in
anything they're not using
the computer the normal way they would use it which is what they're supposed to
do
it means they've they've now developed or been equipped with an algorithm to
boom just start
generating a lot of stuff to which would which would mess up our numbers right
uh well those people
immediately are flagged and and when that happens and we can't exactly figure
out what's going on we dump
them and we dump all we dump their data if they if their information is coming
in faster than a person
can type we dump them but there are other other indications too i mean i can't
reveal all that but
we're we're taking precautions exactly like nielsen has been doing since all
the way since 1950.
it can be done what is your goal with all this do you do you think you can
shift the way these companies
do business do you want to just inform and educate the public as to what's
happening and how
divisive and how interconnected all this stuff is
i i it's hard to answer that question because uh as i keep learning more and
and and believe me what
we've learned in the last year easily eclipses what we learned in the previous
eight years we're
learning so much the team is growing our capabilities are growing so you know
uh i could i'll say at one
point in time what i was concerned about was what how can we get google under
control so i published an
article in bloomberg business week there's a great back story there because you
know it was scheduled
to come out and then someone or other made a phone call to someone else and
then boom the piece got pulled
and this was a solution to the google problem literally uh the editor-in-chief
is literally
having arguments with the you know the higher ups the publishers because they
pulled my piece on how
to how to get google under control how to solve the google problem uh i was
scheduled to testify before
congress the following tuesday the article had been pulled the editor-in-chief
was determined to get this
piece out he got it published in their online version on monday the day before
the hearing so what is this
about this is very simple very light touch regulation the way to completely uh
disarm google is to make their
index which is the database they use to generate search results to make it
public
and uh that's there's precedent for that that's the government has done that
before it's very very
light touch regulation uh and google could still sell it you know when people
like bing want to use
a lot of it a lot of data from the database they could still make money but
what hap what would happen
in that case though is that hundreds of other search engines would now be set
up and then thousands
all pulling really good data from google's database and then they would go
after niche audiences and
they'd all be giving great search results but they're going after lithuanians
they're going after
women they're going after gays and so you'd end up with a competitive search
environment like there
used to be when google started out uh and more importantly you'd end up in with
innovation in search
there's been no innovation in search now for 20 years let me look at google's
home page it's the same and
the methodology is the same uh so you'd end up with innovation you'd end up
with competition
all with one very simple regulatory intervention uh and this was uh done with
at&t back in the 1950s
is there any consideration to adopt this as have you had conversations where
you think that this could
actually become a real thing positively this could happen because there are
members of congress who get
it uh they and and they recognize that this approach is is light touch compared
to a million other
things like the the breakups you know they're going to do breakups that's
nonsense uh so yeah it could
happen but it doesn't need to happen here it could happen in the eu because
google has i think 18 data
centers i think only half of them are in the united states uh i think nine of
them are in the u.s and
five of them are in the are in europe and and and brussels they they can't
stand google of course they've
they've fined them you know these billion euro fines they've hit hit them up so
far with three
massive fines uh totally more than 10 billion euros since i think 2017. and
what have they fined them for
um well bias in search results how about that that's that's the first big thing
this is and this is
brussels yeah why does the united states implement some sort of a similar
punishment because of that
because google owns the united states i mean there there's an antitrust action
right now in in progress
against google and it's it's the attorney generals i believe from every single
state in the united states
except california because the attorney general of california his main his main
supporter is google
google's based in california so it's so crazy that they have this massive antitrust
action in progress
and the the ag of california is staying out of it oh yeah his name is uh basara
i think but uh point is
that uh this we're talking about light touch regulation that could actually be
done it could be enacted by
the european union i've talked i've spoken in brussels i've talked to people
there that that's the kind of
thing they could do and if they did it it would affect google worldwide and you
would end up with
thousands of very good search engines but each aiming at niche audiences and
doesn't that sound like
the world of media the world you're in yeah and it doesn't seem like this would
bankrupt google oh no
no not at all no they still make massive amounts of profit absolutely and it
would fall in line with
don't be evil well the fact is that that depending on who the leadership is at
any point in time at
google they might look at that idea and say hey look this will be great for us
really sure but don't
you think that any self-regulatory move like that would set up possible future
regulatory moves like
wouldn't they want to resist any kind of regulations for as long as they
possibly can
but if they thought that they were going to be attacked in some worse way and
that this is a way
out um you know they're they're numbers people they're just numbers people i'll
give you an example
of google look just looking at numbers okay 2018 election day
so because i i already told you we got them to stop doing this in georgia but
now i'm going back in
time 2018 election day google on its home page uh post this go vote everyone go
vote so google does this
now the question is were they sending it to everyone i don't know but let's
assume they were sending it
to everyone okay the first thing that happened that day was all the major news
services praised google
praise google for for doing this amazingly good public service
right and i looked at it and i immediately said that's not a public service
that's a vote manipulation
so i sat down and i did exactly what a data analyst or data scientist at google
would do and i just ran the numbers
okay and by the way this is something we're also studying it's called dde the
differential demographics
effect the fact is google has more democrat users than republican users so if
they sent that to
everybody that day that would give 800 000 more votes it would give you know
more votes to everybody but it would give 800 000 more votes
to democrats than to republicans this is spread across again midterms so it's
hundreds of hundreds of races
so if they send it to everyone they win so if if google is biased towards
democrats in terms of
users what are the republicans using what kind of tech are they using i mean if
you're saying that
they're google sending out these messages right and that most of their users or
the majority of their users
are democrats right so what are what's the majority of republicans i'm not sure
what you're asking there
you're saying google's sending out this message go vote yeah and through that
message because of the bias
because of the uh the difference in the numbers yeah more democrats are getting
it because more democrats use
google yeah right so what are republicans use well they're still using google
but i mean you're is it
there's not more democrats in the country is it less republicans are online
like what is what's the bias
there like what is the difference uh i believe there are a fewer republicans
online that's so that could be a
factor uh last time i looked at the numbers that looked like there were a few
more democrats you
know people registered as democrats then people registered as republicans um so
you know combination
of factors uh as you know in recent years uh uh republicans and conservatives
they have set up uh tried
to set up a number of platforms of their own parlor is one yeah so they're you
know they're social media
platforms yeah they're trying to you know carve out their own their own world
their own niche on the
internet so they don't have to use uh these inherently biased uh platforms now
all this uh search engine
stuff and the the manipulation how much does this apply to social media as well
and is there cross
contamination well social media is more is more complicated because social
media we we're the ones
who are posting all the stuff so we're providing all the all but not
necessarily because if you pay
attention to manipulation right there's a lot of manipulation that's coming
from overseas allegedly that
my position has always been like you know who's funding these troll farms in macedonia
right and how do we
how do we know that it's not someone in the middle of kentucky okay you're
absolutely right there's a
tremendous amount of content that is posted by bots that is coming from
organizations in other countries
you're absolutely right i mean i think uh facebook just in the first quarter of
last year took down
two billion profiles facebook's top 20 christian sites 19 of them are run by
troll farms
right so there's there's a lot of junk out there that's true so when you when
you get to social
media it the picture gets very complicated however here's what you got to know
it's algorithms that
determine what goes viral everyone believes this crazy myth everyone believes
this everyone i know
believes this my kids believe this everyone believes that virality is
mysterious it's like winning
the lottery and that's not true because if i'm if i control the algorithms okay
i determine what's
going to go viral and what is not now that's again a tremendous source of power
and of course they do
want a bunch of stuff to go viral even crazy negative stuff because more
traffic more money but the bottom
line is they control the algorithms that determine what goes viral that's where
a lot of the power lies
uh in the world of social media that's where you know the francis haugen um uh
you know revelations
are extremely important and just having that that underbelly that ugly underbelly
of that company exposed
so no you know no matter how you look at this for for us to sit by eisenhower's
speech actually says that we
that we have to uh we we have to be vigilant he uses the word vigilant we have
to be vigilant
so that we don't let these kinds of powers take over our government our
democracy our our nation
and we have not been vigilant and we're not being vigilant now and the research
you know that we
do in the monitoring systems both the research is over here and the monitoring
stuff's over here
that's that is reminds me every single day i mean as i'm looking at numbers
every single day you're
keeping you're keeping me away from my data and my research by the way but uh i'm
reminded every
single day of just how serious this this stuff is this is deadly serious for
the future of not just
our country but all of humanity and the and the fact that people don't know it
or that that they
sometimes they that i've given speeches sometimes people say i don't care i
have nothing to hide i've
heard that that infuriates me yeah i've heard that about government
surveillance too yeah yeah well look
at that look at the chinese the chinese lives the lives of the chinese are
strictly controlled by the
government and more and more they're using high tech and google has worked with
the government of china
to improve that technology and to limit access to search results that is
correct so so google does
what google what's good for google saying they're not they're not the sweet
little old lady running the
the library okay that people think that's that's not what they are they do what's
good for google
i had a friend who worked at google during the time they were working and
having negotiations with china
and her position was that china was just going to copy google's tech if they
didn't do that yeah
i've heard that yeah yeah so like they were in this position where you know
like tiananmen square
like you cannot bring up like tiananmen square is not searchable you can't find
that in china the results
of it like the guy standing in front of the tank like there's a lot of
information from tiananmen square
that would look terrible that's right so you can't find it no it's suppressed
and you know google's an
expert at bring at doing that kind of suppression they're they're they're the
biggest sensors in the
history of humankind so they but but still look i know i'm i'm i'm i'm a very
idealistic person okay
i've i've i've i've handed out tests of idealism in my classes when these are
these are young people in
their 20s okay and i i outscore them okay i have i've always outscored all my
students i'm very idealistic
i believe in truth justice the american way like superman and you know all that
crazy stuff
but
i i'm going to do my best to get people to wake up okay that that's why i i
that's why i said yes
okay i'll give up a day of looking at my numbers i'm going to come and talk to
you because
i i'm i am trying to get people to listen i'm trying to figure out you know how
to get people
to listen people must people must listen let me put it another way that
monitoring system i keep
talking about that's not optional okay that's not optional that must be set up
if if we don't set
that up we will have no clue we will not understand not only why this person or
that person won an
election we will not understand what's happening with our kids i have five kids
when my daughter
janelle was about 12 and i'm sure you've done this i i think you have kids
roughly that age
so i did the thing a dad does sometimes i went into her bedroom
and just to check on her and i noticed one of her little electronic devices so
i the old ipod or
whatever it was is sitting next to her pillow but then i looked a little closer
and i went
what there were five electronic devices and circling her pillow
it it's our kids that we need to be thinking about here okay it's not just the
their future but
literally how are they being impacted right now what kind of content are they
being shown
is it pornographic is it violent is it i don't know is it are they being pushed
one way or another
politically we we are in the process right now of trying to expand our research
to look at kids and to see what content these kids are being shown because it
doesn't matter how
uh vigilant you are as a parent okay the fact is a 99 of what your kids are
seeing online or
experiencing online you're you're unaware of and that's why as i say solving
these problems is not
optional we must solve these problems we must set up monitoring systems and and
that and it's relatively
cheap by the way because now that we've done it you know repeatedly we know how
to do it uh and if we
don't we are essentially being controlled by big tech we we we have we're
turned over
our democracy we've we've turned over our children we've turned over literally
our minds we've turned
them over to tech companies and algorithms i i i think that's insane it is
insane and where does it go that's
the like how bad can this get yeah but look we got we got google with the help
of some senators we got
google to stay out of georgia yeah that that's to me that's that's a wake-up
call that says wait a
minute we not we know not only how to track these companies okay but we can
stop them have you ever
had a conversation with anybody from google well ray kerswell's an old old
friend of mine his wife
sonia i was on the board of her school for autistic kids for 15 years i mean i
i went to their daughters
bat mitzvah they came to my son's bar mitzvah et cetera et cetera so but he won't
talk to me now
he won't talk he's head of engineering at google so he won't talk to you now
because he's not allowed
to do you know why he won't talk to you i don't know and and even sonia won't
talk to me now
and we i've never had any conflict with either ever ever ever going back i don't
know 20 years
never never i mean they're lovely people they're very nice people i know their
kids and you know
neither of them now will talk to me just because he is an executive at google
he's an executive at
google i i was supposed to be on a panel with another top executive at google
who used to be a
professor like a stanford or some big school and i'm supposed to be on a panel
with him in germany and
he when he found out what it is i do he he pulled out he did not show up there
were a thousand people
in that audience who came to see him the google guy not me he didn't he didn't
show up wow
we they uh i believe i'm pretty darn sure and this upset my uh wife misty at
the time they sent a uh
a private investigator to our house
what posing posing as someone who wanted to be a research intern what what did
he do when he was
in the house i don't know did he leave bugs did i don't know i have no idea
what he did but you know
i was sitting there with a staff person we're asking the guy questions like we
do for anyone who applies
to work with us and the guy first of all he's wearing like a white shirt and a
tie which
no one does in san diego so uh but we were asking him questions and his answers
didn't make any sense
at all also well uh you know i said him so i so you're interested at some point
going to graduate
school in psychology and he goes uh graduate school uh psychology uh i don't
know so none of this made
sense we looked the guy up afterwards he was supposed to get back to us he didn't
we looked him up he worked
for private investigation firm now how do why do i think google sent him
because that i had written
to that executive at google who was supposed to be on that panel in germany and
you know just telling
him about my work giving him links and so on because he's a former professor
okay it was only a few days
after that that that this guy showed up at our house and then it was a few days
after that that the google
executive pulled out of that conference jesus
and so they're not interested in communicating with you um they've obviously
told either told people not to
communicate with you or the people that you would like to talk to are aware of
your work and they feel
that it would negatively impact their job or their career oh there's their
career i'm telling you
they're they're this this is this has just been for me in many ways a nightmare
an absolute nightmare
because they're they're people who won't who won't help us who won't serve on
our board who won't do
this who won't do that i we we had an intern lined up who was very very good
you know we get some really
sharp people they come from all over the world actually and they we had this
person all signed
up her start date was set up and she called up and she said i can't do the
internship said uh why not
my grandmother my grandmother looked you up online and she thinks that you're
like some sort of trump
supporter and she said she'll cut me off if i do this internship jesus so that's
one of the reasons i keep
repeating i did it four times but i keep repeating you know what you lean left
yeah yeah because uh
but it doesn't help it doesn't help they don't care well ever since that ever
since i testified
uh things have terrible things uh have happened my one of my board members said
to me look he said
he said in a way you should be grateful and and please that they left you alone
for so many years
he said but that but that for them was you know that was it that was the final
straw and you know what
happened after the after that hearing was trump tweeted about my my testimony
hillary clinton
whom i've been supporting forever hillary clinton replies to trump on twitter
and says uh this man's
work has been completely discredited it's all based on data from 21 undecided
voters
what what then she said that yeah can you sue her i i i could i could have i
maybe you know but
the you know it would take me away from the research i would cost a fortune yes
i could have and probably
could still sewer yes because that's a factual statement yeah which is false
and defamatory
but you know i have to try to stay focused i really do and i i i understand i i
i keep getting pulled
away and i believe me what's happening right now in our war in our work is
tremendously exciting and
everyone loves what we're doing we love each other we love the whole thing that
we're doing we're
we love the discoveries we're blown away over and over again by the numbers
and uh and we have very ambitious plans moving forward um so i mean we're i
mean
you know as long as as long as i can still function i'm gonna i'm gonna keep
doing this i mean this is
uh it's important it's important i have five kids okay i i someday i hope i'm
gonna have grandkids and
you know it's important for for for the world right now it's important for our
democracy which
as far as i'm concerned is an illusion it's an illusion when you look at the
numbers you realize
no this is you there's there's a player in here that you don't see that doesn't
leave a paper trail
and it can shift millions of votes
and if it didn't exist and someone introduced it nefarious political parties or
nefarious people
would 100 be excited about it like look what we have now yeah yeah yeah yeah
and then if we found
out that someone who was like say if donald trump you know if the democrats
found out that donald trump
had implemented some sort of a system like you're talking about people would be
furious that's right
they would say he is a threat to democracy he should be locked up he should be
in prison for treason
does it concern you that you're the only one
well i don't understand that because this is really good science i mean in in
other words the the work i do
has been published in top journals uh that that initial seam paper that was
published in the
proceedings in the national academy of sciences it has since been downloaded or
acts or accessed from
the national academy of sciences more than a hundred thousand times for for a
very technical scientific
paper that's practically unheard of i've never had that happen before and the
you know the papers that
i have coming out they're in top journals we're submitting more in top journals
this is good science
so why aren't 20 universities doing this stuff you know why because they're
getting funding from google
or they're terrified of google the the the head of europe's largest publishing
conglomerate
his name is dopfner published a piece a few years ago was actually called fear
of google
it's a superb piece it's about how in a lot of industries right now p you
cannot make a move
without taking into account how that's how google's going to react i want to
google fear of google
yeah google fear of google let's see what happens here yeah see if you get dopfner
fear of what's it
suggest fear of rain fear of god g-o-o fear of google here we go yeah what does
it say who's afraid of google
everyone wired magazine why we fear google that's uh some other website that i
don't know um what americans
fear most according to their google searches why are people afraid of google
core quora
well don't forget whatever you're getting has to do with your your history so
someone else is going
to get a different list and that's that's scary because and you know ask a con
artist i don't know
do you know any con artists because i've known i've met one or two uh you ask a
con artist and they
will tell you straight out if you want to do a con the more you know about
someone the easier it is for
sure so that's the problem there is that everything is personalized and
everything you're seeing there is
based on you and your 20 plus year history and the three million pages of
information they have about you
they they build digital models of all of us do you use social media uh i've
been trying to uh
close my facebook page for i think at least three years now they won't let me
close it
uh they won't let me change it it's still up there um i didn't even set it up
originally i think it was
misty my wife who set it up but they won't let me touch it and they won't let
me close it speaking of
which okay um i'm sitting next to a guy on an airplane the other day and he
says um he's saying
how he doesn't he's very proud that he doesn't use any social media i said so
wait you mean you you
don't have a facebook page and he goes oh no positively i do not have a
facebook page i said
you have a facebook page he goes no what are you telling me he says i know i
know i know i don't
have a facebook i would know if i had a facebook i said no you don't understand
every time someone mentions you on facebook or posts a photo in which you
appear
okay that goes into your facebook profile you have a big an enormous facebook
profile except that you can't
see it and what do you say to that well i i said it in a way i guess that was
pretty convincing and he was
upset he he didn't like the the concept that he might have a facebook profile
that he doesn't know
about that you can't have opt out well it's not only that but even when you
even when you think
you're i mean google god god i i do they ever say anything truthful publicly
that's a big question
but i mean google claims for example you can you can delete your google data
you can go through the motions of saying i want to delete my google data and
then from that point on you
can't see your google data but they don't delete it they never delete it even
if they deleted it on one
server it's sitting there and backup after backup after backup and they can and
not only that if you
read i think i'm the only one who reads these things but if you read google's
terms of service and
google's privacy policy it says right in there we reserve the right to hold on
to your data
as we might be required by law or in any other way that protects google
now what about twitter and instagram things like that well with with twitter
ram and facebook are the
same entity right instagram yeah and and uh uh yeah the instagram is part of
facebook so here my main concern
is again the is is this power to suppress so i don't know what your opinion is
like i'd love to know what
your opinion is of of what happened early 2021 i think it was when both
facebook and twitter uh shut down
donald trump what do you think of that i don't think they should be shutting
down people at all and by the
the way he was still president yeah i think that what these things are i think
we're in a time in history
where you can't look at them as just private companies because the ability to
express yourself
is severely limited if you're not in those platforms i think they should be
looked at like utilities and i
think they should be subject to the freedoms that are in our constitution and
the bill of rights and i
think the the way the first amendment protects free speech it should be
protected on social media
platforms because i think as long as you're not threatening someone or doxing
someone or putting someone in harm
or lying about them i think your ability to express yourself is a gigantic part
of us trying to figure
out the truth like when it comes to what are people's honest opinions about
things do we know
you know we don't know if honest opinions are suppressed because they don't
match up to someone's ideology
i think that's it's a critical aspect of what it means to be american to be
able to express yourself
freely and to find out how other people think is educational if you only exist
in an echo chamber and
you only hear the opinions expressed of people that align with a certain
ideology that's not free speech
i think free speech is critical i think the answer to bad speech and this is
not my thought this is many
brilliant people believe this is better speech more thought is more convincing
arguments more logical
sustained reasoning and debate and discussion and i think as soon as they start
suppressing ideas
as soon as they start suppressing and and deleting youtube videos and and and
banning people from twitter for things that have now been proven to be true
right there's a lot of people that were banned because they questioned the lab
leak theory
you know they were their their videos were pulled down they were you know
they were suspended from twitter now that's uh cover of newsweek it's uh
constantly being discussed sure
it's discussed in the senate well this is a very old idea the way voltaire said
it um i'm paraphrasing
is uh you know i may not agree with what you say but i will defend to the death
your right to say it
yeah and uh you know i think it was dead wrong i mean i was happy of course
that this happened but i think it was
dead wrong for twitter and facebook to to literally cut off communication
between the current president of
the united states who's still in office and his his supporters yeah and the
real question too is how much
manipulation was being done by federal agents in the january 6th event like did
they engineer
people going into the capitol did they encourage them and you saw that ted cruz
conversation with the
woman from fbi where she said i can't answer that did the fbi incite violence i
can't answer that
you can't answer that that that should be never would they incite violence
would the fbi
manipulate people to do something illegal that would not have done that look if
you pay attention to
those people like if you watch uh there's a great documentary on um hbo this q
anon documentary it's
into the storm have you seen it no it's worth watching it's a four four parts
something five
something like that uh multiple parts and it's great and you realize like how
easily manipulated
some of these poor folks are they get involved in these movements now if
somebody wanted to disparage
a political party or to maybe have some sort of a justification for getting
some influential person
like donald trump offline that would be the way they would do it that's yeah
now say look at he's
responsible for violence he's responsible for look at this is as bad as pearl
harbor this is as bad as d
day but but you know the bottom line here really goes back to george orwell
which is you know if you
control information you control everything yes and what we've done is we've we
have lost control uh
authorities gatekeepers who are well-trained journalists let's say um you know
we we've lost
control over information information is now largely in the hands of algorithms
which are controlled by
executives who are not accountable to the american public they're accountable
just to their shareholders
so you know i i i just think we're in a terrible position i'm going to you know
you asked me this
before but i'm going to continue i'm just i'm going to do my research i'm going
to keep digging i'm
going to do my monitoring i'm going to try to set up i hope this year this
nationwide system uh you know
and so and so i'm going to point to my hat so it says tame big tech dot com
okay that's your website
could you say it again tame big tech dot com well done well done thank you uh
yes because i i'm i need
help from people i need i need people to provide funds but also to help us find
funds this is the year
where i think we should set up this first large scale nationwide monitoring
system which could be
used not only to keep an eye on these midterm elections but we could finally
start to look
at our kids that that's become my main concern now is our kids because we don't
know we don't
understand what the hell they're doing we don't know what they're looking at
what they're listening to
but i can tell you for sure that a lot of what's happening is is really being
done very deliberately
and strategically by the big tech companies because they're going to do they
have control over the
information that everyone has access to and they're going to do what's best for
them what makes them the
most money what spreads their values and of course sometimes what's good for
intelligence purposes
they're going to do those things and we have no idea what they're doing unless
we track them
so anyway that's my fantasy this is this is the year where we're going to get
this thing
you know running in in a way that it would be self-maintaining that so would
continue year after year
after year um not optional i said that before it's not optional so we we um if
people go to tame big tech
dot com uh they can get more information um i actually created a special uh
booklet that we're going to
give out for free i i had a copy to bring you and i left it in my car but but
we have this booklet i
took my congressional testimony i updated it i expanded it and uh and we and so
and i turned it into an essay
which is called google's triple threat to democracy our children and our minds
and so and it and it's
and it says right on it uh prepared for you know joe rogan's whatever okay uh
and i i cannot you know
i am doing this with the help of all my wonderful team teammates i am i am so
far still the only one
and that's that's disgusting that's horrible that's there's something
fundamentally wrong with that
picture and uh imagine if you didn't exist like if you never had started this
would we be completely in
the dark about this stuff you would you would be completely in the dark because
there's no one
doing these kinds of experiments and there's no one collecting all that but
when you think about the
internet and how many people on the internet are you know interested in
politics and interested in the
influence of big tech and the dangers of big tech you know when it caught when
they talk about
psychological dangers to you know like jonathan hate's work with young girls
and self-harm and suicide and
the rise of you know depression amongst young people you would think that this
would also be something
that people would investigate and dig into the fact that you're the only one
that's uh it's very strange
i don't it's a tremendous responsibility and it's it's horrible i don't you
know i don't like the
responsibility but i'm i'm gone at the moment so that's this so we have um we
have two cats in our
office but this and i'm the poop cleaner so when i'm gone i mean someone else
has to clean the poop so
i said i said to my uh associate director i told her last night i said just
remember that the more
credentials you get the more responsibilities you get the more poop you're
going to have to clean
and that's the truth so it's very tough i don't like uh i don't like being in
this position and
i and i do wonder about misty um you know i'll probably always wonder about
misty and i'll never
know because again her her truck disappeared so well listen man thank you very
much for coming here
and thanks for taking your time and i know you're very busy and i'm glad we
could get this out there
uh i don't i don't know what to say i mean you you've given me a great
opportunity i i i hope
i hope this was you know interesting for you it was okay scary good then if i
scared you i'm
i'm doing my job yeah you scared the out of me good
all right thank you robert thank you joe bye everybody
you
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