Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Dr. Robert Epstein - This Harvard Scientist Was Warned to Stay Silent - E214

Starting point is 00:00:00 Every one of us likes to believe that we're independent thinkers. But what if some of those thoughts were genuinely planted before you ever realized that they weren't your own? Today's guest has spent decades studying one of the most uncomfortable questions of our time. Who is really thinking your thoughts? From behavioral psychology and artificial intelligence to Google search engine and hidden algorithmic influence, today's conversation might permanently change the way you think about thinking. Welcome to the show, Dr. Robert Epstein. Do you notice that the world that we live in

Starting point is 00:00:41 has been doing most of the thinking for you, that your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleepwalking mode and label it. as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things, that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Makes sense. My first question, which I think does a great job of kicking interviews off, is what does it like to be Dr. Epstein these days? It's pretty difficult, actually. The research that we do is very exciting. We make new discoveries all the time about new forms of online manipulation. We were the first group in the world and the only group still to have built a nationwide monitoring system to monitor the content that tech companies are sending to. registered voters and to children. But what it's like to be me, it's pretty, pretty stressful, actually, because we're the only research group in the world doing this kind of work. And the reason why other people don't do it is because they're afraid of Google and to the lesser extent, other tech companies. But there was a remarkable piece written years ago by the head of the European

Starting point is 00:02:22 Union's largest publishing group, which is actually called Fear of Google. Companies these days, every decision they make, they have to take Google into account because they could be eliminated from search results, from search suggestions, and of course, now they could be eliminated from the answers given by AIs. You don't want to offend the people at Google because they will crush you like a bug. You don't even want to offend their algorithms, which is much trickier. It's tough being me, because we are literally butting our heads against the most powerful company that ever existed. And of course, I talk about it on podcasts. I've testified twice before Congress about it.

Starting point is 00:03:03 But all that's stressful, too. It's stressful to testify before Congress. I guess what I'm wondering just right off the bat is, because I always say that humans are value-seeking missiles, meaning we don't think say or do anything unless it has value. Why do all this work? I mean, I've gone pretty far and our team's done a lot of research on you. And, you know, you've been through a lot. It's kind of like you're going off to the Vietnam War while we're all home watching TV and eating popcorn, you know.

Starting point is 00:03:32 Well, it does feel that way sometimes. And it's a very good question. Some people think I have something against Google. I have nothing against Google at all. In fact, I was dear friends for many years with Ray Kurzweil, who's now head of engineering at Google. I served on the board of a school for artistic children that was founded by, Ray's wife, Sonia. You know, I have connections there. I have nothing against the company whatsoever, but I've always been obsessed with doing right. And I think it's wrong that any tech company should have the kind of power that this company has. They have literally undermined democracy. There is no free and fair election. So whatever these rumors are that gets spread about, you know, dominion voting machines and all that, that's all largely nonsense. Those really are conspiracies. theories. But what we study is real. We measure it 24 hours a day. If you go to Americas with an S,

Starting point is 00:04:27 AmericasidigitalShield.com, you'll see the dashboard of the first ever nationwide system to be built to monitor content that tech companies are sending to registered voters and to children. We measure the bias. We measure the tricks, the shenanigans, and we do it on a very large scale. we have now preserved, I haven't looked lately, but at least 134 million different, Google calls them ephemeral experiences. They're showing you something. It affects you. It disappears. It's gone forever. It leaves no paper trail. So authorities can't investigate it. Researchers can't investigate it. But we've developed a way to preserve ephemeral experiences. Now, by definition, ephemeral means short-lived. You know, it means very brief. And then,

Starting point is 00:05:19 So we're capturing the content, the real content that they're sending to real people without them being able to interfere with us. If you look at the dashboard, you will see the political bias in the content that they're sending out. I happen to lean left myself, so I should be happy that the bias is usually very heavily in the direction of Democrats. But I'm not happy at all because that can shift millions of votes in an election. We're also looking at content, for example, that you. YouTube is sending to young children. And, you know, we're finding sexually explicit content. We're extremely violent content. Content that parents are, for the most part, completely unaware of. We're preserving the content. So we're preserving content that normally disappears forever.

Starting point is 00:06:05 I work with all kinds of authorities now who are trying to figure out ways to use the content in creating regulations and laws, but also in potentially going to the courts with the content. We have data streaming in from all 50 states. It's extremely dangerous for democracy. You know, I'm reading a book right now about it's called JFK and the unspeakable. And it's about really overwhelming evidence that the CIA was responsible for Kennedy's, President Kennedy's death. But it also talks about over and over again, it keeps mentioning President Eisenhower's last speech, his farewell speech three days before Kennedy was inaugurated. And this is a very famous speech because Eisenhower was head of Allied forces. in World War II, he was, I think, a four or five-star general.

Starting point is 00:06:51 He was definitely an insider. And yet, in his farewell speech, this whole speech is a warning to Americans about the rise of what he called the military industrial complex and about how it can steer the course of our nation without us even realizing that this is happening. Because he also talks about the rise of a technological elite. And that's what exists right now. I actually wrote a book chapter called The Tenement. technological elite are now in control. It got even worse, believe it or not, when Trump got

Starting point is 00:07:22 reelected in 2024, it got even worse because the tech companies figured out that if they just cozy up to Trump and throw money at him, which is what they started doing, that he would just back off from the concerns he had about these tech companies and their, especially their impact on elections. And it worked. He just backed off. Now, he just says nice things about the tech companies, the Department of Justice backed off on its investigation. They backed off on their lawsuit. In other words, they literally Google figured out how to get this monkey, the federal government, off of their back. And so they now have more freedom than they've ever had before. The monitoring system of a small nonprofit organization, that's the only thing left. Do they care? Well, yes, they do, because we have gotten them to back off on some of their manipulations. I can give you a quick example. On October 31st, 24, we were looking at the messaging that Google was putting on its homepage. Now, its homepage is seen more than 500 million times a day just in the United States. Oh, my God. And they usually don't put messages there. But before an election, they do put messages.

Starting point is 00:08:38 And we found that they were, as of October 31st, five days before the election, the presidential election, they were sending out 50% more go vote reminders to Democrats than to Republicans. Now, think about this. That's ephemeral content for sure, right? There's a go vote message and then you click on something and it disappears and it's not stored anywhere. It's gone forever. Without a monitoring system to capture that kind of content, no one would have known that

Starting point is 00:09:07 this was happening. And that's an incredibly powerful manipulation because it means that you're going to be sending a lot more Democrats to the polls than Republicans. You're getting a go vote reminder. You don't know that your neighbor is not getting a go vote reminder. How would you know that? So we captured that on a large scale and we announced it that night. So we let Google and members of Congress know that this was being done, which could have shifted several million votes in that election over the next few days. And they stopped. We can see when they're using a manipulation. We can also see. see when they stop and they stopped. So from November 1st to the 5th, they sent out go-boat reminders

Starting point is 00:09:50 equally to people in both parties. They literally stopped their manipulation. Monitoring and then disclosing, you know, what's happening, monitoring and revealing what's happening is a very powerful way to make companies accountable. How else can you make them accountable? You have to show the public, show our authorities what they're doing. And that's why monitoring needs to be set up as a permanent and secure system in the United States, that which would require a lot of money, which we don't have. So we need what we call full funding, which is about $50 million. And then that system can be set up so that it's permanent and self-sustaining and it doesn't need me anymore. At the moment, we're not sure where to get that kind of money, but clearly the money is out there.

Starting point is 00:10:36 Anyone who's concerned about, you know, the free and fair election and the integrity of democracy and who has the has the money, you should just write a check or if you, for that matter, if you know people, if you know any good fundraisers, you should send me some good fundraisers and I'm sure they could probably find that kind of money. But monitoring systems, if you're going to have an internet and you're going to give all this power to these companies, you must also have a monitoring system because that's the only way you'll know what these companies are doing. So that's become my obsession now is trying to get full funding for that project. It just keeps going.

Starting point is 00:11:12 I've been asked by officials in eight other countries to help them develop monitoring systems, and I've said no over and over again. I said, no, we have to have in the United States first, right? USA first, America first. Here we first have to have a fully developed, permanent, secure monitoring system. Then I'll help other countries if they still want my help. But the point is we have to do it here first. The fact that we've developed a system that works so beautifully, you know, that puts us way ahead of the game because when I was first confronted by one of the states' attorneys general, and he said to me, commenting on all the research we do on online manipulation, he said, how would you know that the companies are really doing this? And that was back in 2015, and I had no answer, really. As it turns out later, whistleblowers turned up and documents were leaked and videos were leaked. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:09 So that later I could have answered the question, at least talking about whistleblowers and leaks. But at the time, I had no answer. And I really became obsessed. I started to think, well, wait, how could we capture this content? When the content comes to us, it has no identifying information. So we're doing the exact opposite of the kind of surveillance that Google and Facebook and these other companies do. We're doing the exact opposite. We're preserving people's privacy.

Starting point is 00:12:35 We aggregate the data. and then we calculate bias or we look for other kinds of manipulations. At any point in time, according to Facebook itself, 70% of the videos that people are watching online around the world coming from Facebook have been suggested by Facebook's algorithm. 70% of the time people are watching content that has been recommended. So their algorithm has incredible power. So why do I do this?

Starting point is 00:13:06 because I believe in an America. I love America. I believe in our flawed system of democracy. I still think it's the best system there is. All the others are just not as good as what we have. And I believe in right and wrong. And I believe in trying to solve problems. So that's been me my whole life. It's just that in the last 13 years, I've kind of kicked it up a notch. Well, and I've gotten into some very dangerous territory and offended some very, very dangerous and powerful. people. I'll give you one bit of good news that, you know, just the youth of America, my son, my oldest son, he's going to love this episode because he was always, we always thought he's going to be a lawyer because he was always about right and just and things like this. But he decided to go the route of studying cybersecurity, but now he's in cyber forensics on a high level, you know, to the point where he could probably get a job with the big guys if you wanted. And, you know, So there's a lot of kids out there that want to make change as well.

Starting point is 00:14:08 So I think this episode's going to serve them. I have a question. Well, actually, two-part question. How are you getting away with this monitoring system? Because, I mean, first of all, the way I look at it, we have a government that does whatever the hell it wants. I mean, it makes up new rules every day to the point where we don't even know if a reelection is going to happen.

Starting point is 00:14:28 I mean, like, we know that there's laws and rules. So how are you getting away with this monitoring system? And my next question is, who is the boss? Is it an entity or a person? Like, who is in control of our country? Well, it's, it's really a handful of top executives at some tech companies of the most powerful one being Google. God gave us two hands. And the fact is you could count on both hands how many people are in those high positions. And it's really a much smaller group that actually, you know, has the real power. And that's where the power is. don't have to look too far. You know, with Kennedy's assassination, you know, there's no question

Starting point is 00:15:08 that the CIA was responsible, but we don't know the names. We don't know the, you know, who gave the order. But with the tech companies, we know who's giving the orders. They're not hidden. I think they should be ashamed of themselves. But of course, from their perspective, they're making America a better place because they think that their values are better than every other, everyone else's values. And I am not making this up because one of the leaks from Google was an eight-minute video made by their Advanced Products Division that has a strange name. It's called the Selfish Ledger. If you look online, look under the Selfish Ledger and then put in my name, Robert Epstein. Somebody's going to come knock at your door in 10 minutes.

Starting point is 00:15:48 Well, no, that's happened. I mean, no, there have been six very serious incidents that have occurred since 2019, which is since I first testified before Congress, there have been six very, very serious incidents. very serious incidents affecting me or people close to me. And the, you know, 2019 is also when I did a private briefing for attorneys general around the country. It was held at Stanford University. And when I was done, I went out, walked out in the hallway. And then one of these AGs came out to me and walked up to me and said, Dr. Epstein, I don't mean to scare you, but he said, based on what you've told us, he said, I think that you're going to be killed in some sort of accident in the next few months. And obviously I'm sitting here so that I was not killed in the next few months in some sort of accident, but my beautiful wife was.

Starting point is 00:16:36 And still not recovered from that. I've been alone ever since. So it's very difficult being me. But I'm telling you that, can I just shift gears for a minute? Because you mentioned your son. Of course. One of the new areas that we're moving into now very swiftly is education. So I talked to a little bit about monitoring. Absolutely critical. Absolutely critical. It's not an option. want to have a real democracy, you have to have a real large-scale monitoring system that's secure. It must be secure. And that's expensive. And one thing on that is we already know how easily persuaded the people are. They don't even care about facts anymore, which is even a bigger reason that you have to have monitoring

Starting point is 00:17:19 because people are just waiting for their particular leader or their side to say, this is this and they don't check the facts and they just go. So if there's no system, if those people don't have to have their stuff checked for facts, then anybody can, I mean, the whole world is a cult. You know, I mean, the whole world can just go in any direction anyone decides. So I have to make an important point here, though. There's a big difference between, you know, people with extreme views posting their views here and there. But that's competitive. That's not a threat to democracy, not inherently so. But if one of the platforms itself wants to take a position left or right or whatever it may be, however weird and extreme it might be, if they want to take a position, you can't see

Starting point is 00:18:08 what they're doing and you can't counteract what they're doing. So that's non-competitive. The competitive stuff doesn't bother me so much. You know, even even the possibility of, you know, boat machines getting rigged doesn't bother me so much because that's all competitive. That's all part of dirty tricks which have always been played by both sides. That's part of us being free people and that's part of democracy. But the tech companies, that's something new, entirely different. Again, if Google wants to send out partisan register to vote reminders, which we're tracking, partisan mail-in-your ballot reminders and then partisan go-vote reminders at the last minute, which we've caught them doing, you can't see what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:18:52 And there's nothing you can do to come around. You don't even know that it's been done. We know because we're actually. You're monitoring it. But if I'm just, I always say, whatever it is that we consume, we end up assuming. And, you know, with this whole algorithm thing and something widely used, as you said, when you gave those numbers as Google, you could be getting influence without even knowing that you're influenced.

Starting point is 00:19:15 Well, the fact is we know now without doubt that you, if you have. strong opinions about something, then they don't bother with you. But all of us, every single day, there are moments where we're undecided about something. It could be something, you know, no big deal. It could be, you know, where to go shopping, what restaurant to go to, where to go on vacation, what hotel to stay in. We're undecided about something. But we're often undecided about very important things like political candidates or issues, big political issues. And that's where they've got you. They know exactly. who those undecided people are. How do they know that? Because of the surveillance. I mean,

Starting point is 00:19:55 most people are still using Gmail. If you want to see my position on Gmail, I recently published a very persuasive article. And if you go to the case against gmail.com in a prestigious Swiss magazine, which has published pieces by, I think, six or seven Nobel Prize winners and, you know, famous authors and so on. So I just published that recently. You have to. You have to. be out of your mind to be using Gmail at this point. Gmail is an aggressive surveillance platform. So they know from that, from your search history, from, you know, which websites you visit, everything. They know everything about you. And they know moment to moment who is undecided. And those are the people they can very, very easily and quickly nudge, push one way or the other

Starting point is 00:20:45 without people's knowledge. Now, I'm having said all that. I want to get back to the second topic, I mentioned education, because you mentioned your son. Right. Monitoring critical. Also, we have to get, we have to start to educate, not just ourselves, but especially young people. We have to start to educate them about new technologies and how to protect themselves, how to use new technologies safely and privately. Now, I'll give you another link. If people go to MyprivacyTips.com, again, that's My Privacy Tips.com. Again, that's MyPriacy Tips They can read an article of mine, which begins, I have not received a targeted ad on my mobile

Starting point is 00:21:27 phone or computer since 2014. That's how it starts. And that's the truth. I know how to use technology safely and privately. We have to teach everyone how to do that. And we have to get all this content, all this knowledge into the school systems. So we're working now with top educators and with members of state legislatures. and we are going to get this content into school systems,

Starting point is 00:21:53 probably starting with just one state and then going from there. But the point is we have developed a kind of curriculum, and we've developed quizzes, tests that determine how good you are at protecting yourself. So I'll give you another link. This is new. My Digital Hygiene. Hygiene is spelled H-Y-G-I-E. My Digital Hygiene.com.

Starting point is 00:22:17 And you can either take a mini-test, which people can do right now, right when they're watching, you can take a little mini test that you can complete in under a minute, and it will give you a score. And it will tell you how good or bad you are, and most people are terrible, terrible of protecting themselves. They don't know how to use the technology safely. Or you can take the big test.

Starting point is 00:22:38 The big test takes 15 or 20 minutes, but it's educational. And content in that big test can be used in curricula, creating new curricula for our school systems, this has to be in our high schools and middle schools and maybe even in our elementary schools in some simplified form, because people just don't know. So how do you correct the fact that people don't know something? You do it through education. We have over the years, my goodness, we've put in health hygiene courses and, you know, all kinds of things we have in our curriculum, most of which are useless, in my opinion. But digital hygiene these days? I mean, that's beyond the reading, writing, and arithmetic, there's nothing more

Starting point is 00:23:23 essential, no body of knowledge more essential for our children growing up in this tech world to know then how to use new technologies safely and privately. We've got to do that. So we've got two big correctives. Imagine that. Imagine if we were educating our young people throughout the country. Imagine if we had been doing this for the last 10 years, we would be much safer as a society, frankly. I talked to a group recently of a thousand people, and they were, I think they were all conservatives. The conservatives tend to listen to me more than the liberals, even though I'm a liberal, but the point is, so a thousand people. And at one point, I take out of my pocket, my phone, I said, and I said, you know, all of you are using, you're carrying with you surveillance devices. I said that that are tracking everything you do, every call, every word you speak.

Starting point is 00:24:19 And even when you're not on a call, they're still recording everything. And if you read on your phone, all that's being recorded. If you listen to music, all that's being recorded. These are powerful surveillance devices. I said, the one I carry is not. This is a secure phone, the kind of phone that people in the FBI use. And it's not impossible to get a secure phone. The point is that just knowing how dangerous these surveillance devices are and that you're carrying one with you everywhere you go.

Starting point is 00:24:51 It's tracking your location. It's reporting all of this stuff continuously. And even when you turn it off, it's still recording. So remember a few years ago, you could take the batteries out. And then they started soldering the batteries in so you can't take them out. Now, why would they do that? Well, one reason is because if the battery is, soldered in there and you press off and you for you think the phone is off guess what it's not off

Starting point is 00:25:19 i mean this is easy to prove it's easy to prove because you can when you turn it back on if you hook up a device which we have uh you you'll see what the phone does it immediately uploads content that it's been collecting so could could everyone be carrying a secure phone sure could legislation be made to force for the production of secure phones of course could legislation be made to require that batteries be removable. Of course, all that stuff is doable. But if people don't know if they're not aware, you know what really pisses me off. And I had a, I had a meltdown on one of the times I was on Joe Rogan, I had literally, I saw that. I saw the meltdown. Yeah, he looked at me like I was nuts. He said, a meltdown? You want to have a meltdown on my show? I said, yeah, because what pisses me off

Starting point is 00:26:06 is that after I scare the heck out of 1,000 people in an audience somewhere, and they really are scared, I can tell from the questions that I get and then people who approach me afterwards. And then, you know what? They walk out of the auditorium with their surveillance devices operating full steam, and they just go back their regular life, and they just forget about all these very, very serious threats to democracy, to human autonomy, to the minds of our children.

Starting point is 00:26:36 and they just forget and they carry on. Well, I mean, I think that with the education initiative, and I'm just speaking from an observation, you know, I have a certain level of caring and consciousness for what you're talking about, but I can also probably admit that I spend X amount of time during the day not caring about it. And I'm thinking about it. But when I look at the youth right now,

Starting point is 00:27:00 and I'm pretty proud of my children, you know, but I don't think they care. I mean, they might hear this conversation and go, whoa, that's crazy. But they have been programmed and conditioned not to just play with their phones. They've been programmed and conditioned to not care. And I think that's the bigger issue. So you were saying it's got to start maybe, I say definitely, in elementary school, because in the formative years, that's where we learn what we care about and what we don't.

Starting point is 00:27:31 Because once you get a teenager, I mean, they think. it gets a joke, doom scrolling and all of that stuff. And, you know, when they, when they come across something that's like either inappropriate or just like, just really terrible, they laugh. They get a kick out of it because they don't even look at it as it's real. So one of the, one of the initiatives that I talk about quite, I always welcome people to my show. I say, welcome to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. Because the way, that's the way I look at it. I just, I like that. People are all just sleepwalking and they don't even. know. I mean, when you sleepwalk, you can make a sandwich and go back to bed and you have no idea.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Your brain can do things without you involved in it. So I know that you also have some pretty extensive study in human behavior, I believe about 40 years or so. So one of the questions I have for you, and I like to bring these topics to the table so that the Google concept can be understood. Because right now, until somebody hears you speak, Google's just a search engine. It doesn't have any manipulative forces. People don't think that way. You know, if you see something on the top of a Google search, you just assume somebody paid for search engine optimization. That's probably what the majority of people think. They don't know that there's any sort of a tactical thing going on behind it. So my question is, and I know the answer, but I want to hear you answer it,

Starting point is 00:28:54 how much of what human beings believe originates inside of them versus is inherent? and from outside forces or their environment, their belief system. Oh, yeah, people believe overwhelmingly that they're making up their own minds. Yes. So we do, in addition, all the work I've just described, for more than 13 years, we've been doing controlled experiments. This is where my fascination in your work is, by the way. Well, I actually have a book coming out, I hope, within the next six months that

Starting point is 00:29:26 collects all the scientific papers that I've published in peer-reviewed journals, which are entirely on these experiments. And the experiments show how the Internet has made possible a number of new techniques for manipulating people. And the experiments also show that you can use these manipulations on people. You can mask what you're doing very easily so that literally no one is aware that you're manipulating them. In one national study we did in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:29:57 with more than 2,000 people from all 50 states, We had so many people in that study that there was a small number. I think it might have been about a hundred of people who did recognize that we were showing them biased content. So naturally, we figured, of course, that those people would be harder to manipulate. No, their voting preferences and their opinions in that study shifted even farther than the shifts we got with people who were unaware of the manipulation. people seeing the manipulation, being aware of it, does not protect them because they think, oh, this is a computer and it has a bias. It's and computers are impartial. Computers are objective.

Starting point is 00:30:41 So this must be true. So those people shifted even farther in the direction of the bias. And these companies know this. I mean, the fact that I run a nonprofit organization where we've been studying these things, you know, using the best best. methods of scientific, you know, techniques. And that's why we're able to publish in top peer-reviewed journals. By the way, people don't probably know this, but it's very, very, very hard to publish in reputable peer-review journals because you have to go through a peer-review process. You have to go through revisions. It is brutal. From what I understand it, it was made even more brutal for you.

Starting point is 00:31:22 Like you went through a period of time where you couldn't even publish there. You had to publish elsewhere, right? Well, that's true in the popular press. After I testified for the first time in 2019, I got cut off from mainstream media. But with scientific journals, fortunately, no one's ever been able to cut me off from those journals. But the process of getting published, publishing a scientific piece in a peer review journal is extremely difficult. And all of our work, all of it has been published. We have one last study that's under review right. now. And it completes a series of experiments we've been running for 13 years. And so we are able to show in these studies, not only that this new technique exists, but we end up putting a name on it.

Starting point is 00:32:10 So we have Seam, which is search engine manipulation effect. We have SSE, which is search suggestion effect. We have VME, which is video manipulation effect. We not only identify these new techniques, but we name them, we study them. We quantify them. That means, we can figure out if they're being used, how many votes they can shift, how many opinions they can change. So we quantify these things. And again, there's no other group in the world that's doing this. As I mentioned earlier, it's because of organizations and universities are afraid of Google. But it's also because Google provides a lot of funding to researchers.

Starting point is 00:32:57 And when they provide funding to researchers, guess what? Those researchers do not look critically at Google. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. And so they're very, very clever. They control the research community. We have to go to great lengths to get funding. Sometimes we're on the verge of, you know, just collapsing. But for now, for more than 13 years that we've been studying online manipulation,

Starting point is 00:33:21 we have just now and then gotten really lucky, just out of the blue. And when we first started to build the monitoring system, we knew it was going to cost a lot of money just to even figure out how to do it. I had no idea where to get funding. This was early 2016 before the 2016 presidential election. I called up a man I know in Washington, D.C., who I thought had a lot of good connections. He said, well, you should call this other guy. He lives in Central America. So I call the other guy, and the other guy says, yeah, that sounds like something it needs to be looked into, he said. So he said, I think I can get you some funds. Give me your bank.

Starting point is 00:34:03 bank information. And money started coming in through one of the New York banks that was anonymous, anonymous money that allowed us for the first time to figure out how to capture all this ephemeral content and how to analyze it quickly. And the money just came. I still don't know. I mean, that was, that was 2016. 10 years later here, I still have no idea where that money came from. So we've gotten lucky, but your average everyday researcher, they're going to federal agencies. A lot of that money has, of course, been cut back now under Trump, but they're going through the normal process. And when they go through the normal process, or they're getting grants from their university and the money's coming from Google, okay, there are constraints on what they can do.

Starting point is 00:34:52 Tremendous constraints on what they can do. We have no constraints. That is why we have, been able to study what we've been studying and discover what we've been discovering, and that's why we've been able to build the world's first system for monitoring ephemeral content. By the way, it's not just ephemeral. Femeral means short-lived and that it disappears if we don't capture it. It's also personalized. And that's another one of our controlled study was it was on the digital personalization effect, DPE. And we showed that if you send someone personalization, personalized content, you can take the impact you would normally have with non-personalized content. So we always have one group where the content is not personalized, another word is

Starting point is 00:35:38 personalized. So same content. But for the personalized group, we make it appear that the content is coming from news sources they trust. And we can double or triple the size of our impact by sending people personalized content. So the content we are preserving is not just ephemeral. It's personal. It's being sent directly to the computers of more than 17,000 registered voters in all 50 states and many of their children. And it's personalized and ephemeral. So we are actually, it's as if we're looking over the shoulders of people with their permission. We're looking over their shoulders and seeing what these companies are actually doing. And what they're actually doing is outrageous.

Starting point is 00:36:23 It's wrong. And the fact that they can do this on such a massive scale and get away with it, you ask me why I do, why I do what I do. Well, that motivates me. That motivates me. I mean, have some bad things happened? Might there be worse things happening? Yes.

Starting point is 00:36:44 Worse things could happen. But I have never stopped. I have never stopped. I love doing research. First of all, that's just part of who I am. I love doing research. And the fact is this is research, which is critically important for our children, for our future, critically important for literally how we think and behave.

Starting point is 00:37:04 This is important work. It's probably the most important work I've ever done. And that keeps me going. We still have to get over this hurdle. So the hurdle is what I call full funding. We have to be free of this moment to moment to moment need we have for donations. And by the way, if people want to donate and sponsor one of our field agents, because we can't, we can't take on volunteers as to be our field agents. If we take on volunteers, then Google, Google census people.

Starting point is 00:37:34 They've done it. So we know that, and that's exactly what I would do if I were Googled. Right. So we have to, we have to recruit people one by one by one from boating records. And it's very, very, very time-consuming and expensive, very labor-intensive. And so and we and we pay these people a small amount per month, usually $25. So a lot of people have signed up to sponsor a field agent. So if any of you out there have a little bit of fair cash and you, if you go to America's

Starting point is 00:38:05 Digital Shield.com and click on sponsor a field agent, you can sign up and 25 bucks a month and you'll be sponsoring one of these field agents. Some people sponsor for field agents. they're sending $100 a month, and that money goes directly to these people we call field agents or we call them watchdogs. And that's part of making the system permanent. Just having a system set up where we're constantly reminding the public that we need you to be sponsoring these watchdogs or these field agents, because that's what makes this system unique and valuable. that allows us to look over people's shoulders with their permission.

Starting point is 00:38:49 Second time I testified before Congress, I couldn't believe it, but this time it was chaired by a Democrat, the first time it was chaired by Ted Cruz, who's taken enormous interest in my work over the years. Second time I testified the chair was Amy Klobuchar, who's a Democrat. And she said, looking over people's shoulders, I don't know if I like that. That's very creepy. I literally had to send a letter in, so it got into the congressional record explaining, wait a minute, this is with people's permission and we preserve their privacy. We don't ever identify them by name or by email or by phone number.

Starting point is 00:39:24 We're preserving their privacy. I have to literally send in a document correct to the record. It does sound creepy, but we do it in a way that is, in my opinion, absolutely flawless and protects people. That's what we're all about is protecting people. I was just going to ask you, and I think it's important for people to know that without a monitoring system, you know, where are we going to see this go? So what is the most outrageous thing that you've seen Google attempt? There are so many different methods, so many different techniques that they have access to that, frankly, we have more data than we can even analyze. So I can tell you about things we've discovered and have reported and the difference that has made.

Starting point is 00:40:14 But the fact is I think there's a lot more going on that we just haven't even discovered yet. But we're doing what needs to be done. We're preserving the data. That's the key. If you don't preserve the data, you can't go back in time. There's a reporter at The Guardian who's interviewed me before. Her name is Carol Cadwalader, who years ago was doing some pretty intense investigative. of Google and wrote some very critical pieces for the Guardian.

Starting point is 00:40:40 And the time of the when the Brexit vote came up, which was I think, I don't know, 2016, 2017, she was convinced that Google was going to interfere in the Brexit vote. Now, we were not monitoring there, so I don't know for sure, but it's very likely that they did interfere. And I pointed out to Kudwalader, I said, do you realize that the Guardian shares all of its content, all of your emails,

Starting point is 00:41:06 your attachments, all of your docks, your online docs, that they share all of that with Google. And she said, what? And I said, yeah, and I explained to her that the guardian, they use Google for all of their services, which means all of that content, all of these emails. So you're an investigative reporter investigating Google and all of your content and all the attachments and all the names of the people you're communicating with, all of that is going straight to Google. She looked into it and she was told that that's a business decision and she has no control over that. What have I seen that really scares me? There are a lot of things.

Starting point is 00:41:43 But one of them is the fact that Google has in effect infiltrated major companies and organizations and universities around the world. The entire University of California education system, which is the highest level we have of universities here, public universities. They all use Google. So, you know, you're getting something, you're sending something to someone at UCLA.edu and you think, okay, it's UCLA. It's not UCLA. If you look at the routing, which anyone can learn to do, in fact, if you go to my piece at MyprivacyTips.com, I explain how you can look at the routing of an email and seeing where it's going. If you look at the routing of UCLA emails, they all run through Google, which means all of that content is being captured by Google's algorithms and analyze. by them. And when something is important, it's getting elevated to human eyes. And it's not just

Starting point is 00:42:39 universities. It's major news organizations such as The Guardian, but also the New York Times. The New York Times shares all of its content with Google. I've had trouble since I published my last book in 2010, which was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, by the way, I've been unable to get book contracts. I just recently, all these years later, figured out a couple of ways around this, but the point is that publishers, major publishing houses, use Google. They're terrified of Google. So it's been hard for me to continue to publish books. So that's true. That's since I started studying Google in 2013. Before that, I had published 15 books. Since 2013, I have published Zero books. It's Google's reach. That's the scariest thing.

Starting point is 00:43:32 Right. It's not so much what they've done. It's more frightening what they could do. Well, it's what they're doing 24 hours a day that you don't see. Now, for example, a lot of people love Apple products and they love Siri. And what people don't know is that right now, right this minute, it's going to be run by Google's AI, which is called Jen. Gemini. So Gemini is going to be running Siri. This might have been fully implemented already. I know it will be by the fall. And that extends Google's reach, both for surveillance and manipulation, to 2.5 billion Apple devices. Wow. Users who love Apple and love Siri and all that and think that they're getting an extra measure of privacy by using Apple products, they're just falling right into Google's lap with no one aware that this is occurring. I think that's my answer to what's scariest here.

Starting point is 00:44:32 What's scariest here is the reach and the invisibility of what is happening. And these people are serious. that leaked video, I mentioned, the selfish ledger, is all about Google's ability to re-engineer humanity. I use the phrase, re-sequence human behavior. According to, this is right from the video, I am not making this up, Google's values, literally, Google's values, because they think they know better. They think they know how people should think and behave.

Starting point is 00:45:07 And the fact is they're now impacting about six big. billion people around the world 24 hours a day. What are your thoughts on the blockchain? Is this just the same sources of power, just wrapping in a different present? You know, I mean, is because the blockchain is kind of saying this is how we protect ourselves from, from everybody. What are your thoughts? Well, a couple of years ago, George Gilder, who's very well known, published a book. I think it was called after Google or the end of Google or something like that. And he was putting a lot of faith in in blockchain as a way of being able to reimagine a more secure internet where we can do things without being identified. But the fact is it hasn't happened and it's not going to happen. The reason

Starting point is 00:45:51 why it's not going to happen is because these companies are entrenched. These are big monopolies. They are fully entrenched. It doesn't matter how good chat GPT is and how popular it is at the moment. It doesn't matter. Most people are still going to Google. to get information, to get basic information about anything. And Google will keep up with chat GPT or will surpass it in AI capacity. So the fact is that you're not going to switch over from Facebook because you can't, because that's where all your friends and family are. You can't switch over from Instagram because that's where all your peers are.

Starting point is 00:46:34 And TikTok, same thing. Once you're addicted, once you're part of it, you're not going to switch over. to some other apps, someone's built on blockchain technology. Just in August of 2024, again, right before the presidential election, a federal court ruled that Google is a monopoly. Now, when this happens under antitrust law, normally the next step is the courts break up the company. This has happened over and over again for now for more than 100 years.

Starting point is 00:47:04 So the trial went into its remedy phase, which can take a while. And a year later, everyone was expecting, okay, remedy phase is over. Now they're going to break up Google in some fashion. The court did nothing. There was no breakup, nothing. Because at that point in time, Google had figured this out. They had cozyed up to President Trump. They were throwing money at him left and right.

Starting point is 00:47:28 He and his Department of Justice just backed off and they did nothing. You know, we're talking about power that's gotten, it's just out of control and it's wrong. it's wrong. And again, I think, and I know some people at Google, of course, and I really think they should be ashamed of themselves. You know, it's one thing to want to get filthy rich. Okay, if you want money, you know, do what you have to do, I suppose. That's what business is all about. But the fact that they're so systematically obsessed with controlling how people think and behave around the world, you know, they have in their heads what a lot of, of do-gooders have in their heads, which is, you know, I know a better way. So that's we're talking Karl Marx, we're talking Fidel Castro, et cetera. We're talking about Mount St.ung of China, who ended up killing about 30 million of his, of his own people in setting up, you know, his communist government in China. The do-gooders often do a lot of harm.

Starting point is 00:48:36 And that's what I see happening here. But, you know, you could see what Chairman Mao was doing. See the difference? Whereas you cannot see who is going to know that all of Apple products within the next few months are going to be controlled by Google's AI. Who's going to know that? The listeners of my podcast. The listeners of your podcast. Thank goodness for your podcast.

Starting point is 00:49:02 Is that going to be enough to have people throw away their iPads? We got to find that guy with the 50s. million dollar check. I sincerely, sincerely believe that the money is out there. I'm just not a fundraiser. I'm a, I'm a researcher. You know, I, that's what I, that's what I do. When the time comes and I, and I can no longer function very well or I pass away, if I know that that system has been set up so that it is permanent and secure, I would consider that a respectable, respectable, respectable, legacy. That I would like to be my legacy. Without a monitoring system in place, you have no idea what is going on. If we're going to have an internet, then you have to have a monitoring system

Starting point is 00:49:50 that goes along with it. It should be run by a non-profit, nonpartisan organization where there people from, you know, all different perspectives who are involved. So what about laws and regulations and so on? Well, you know, I just testified, I think last week before another state legislature, Yes, I work with legislators. I work with members of Congress and so on. I do, but I don't have much faith in them. They have to, they have to sacrifice a lot to make these deals to get a bill passed. And the fact is that Ted Cruz invited me at one point to have a private dinner with him to talk about these issues, the tech issues. And we talked for almost four hours straight, believe it or not. And at the end, this is what he told me. It's sad, but this is what he's. told me. He said that the Democrats are not going to help to do any of these things you want to do, Epstein. He said because they're getting too much money from Google and other tech companies. I mean, Google was Hillary Clinton's largest donor. Hillary, Google was Biden's largest owner. They get too much money. They're also getting a lot of votes from these tech companies, especially

Starting point is 00:51:06 Google. He said, they're not going to help. He said, and Republicans don't like regulation. He said, so there's no way. He said, I can get a bipartisan, you know, action in the Senate. I can, there's no way I can create this bipartisan group that has to be formed to make something happen. And that's how we left it. You know, since then I know he does now and then bring up my work, which is great.

Starting point is 00:51:28 So does Joe Rogan, by the way. And then Rogan always says, by the way, no relation to Jeffrey. He always, he always throws that in just to put a little tarnish, you know, All we're going to do is say your last name the right way. And that's it. Epstein. That's right. Well, I say Epstein.

Starting point is 00:51:45 So that should take care of that problem. The point is that it's hard to make real change. I don't think that the laws and regulations are going to help us too much. They move too slowly. It's too hard in today's America to get bipartisan support for anything important. But monitoring, that can be done just with money. I mean, Elon could fund this, you know, he wouldn't even notice. Out of his wallet.

Starting point is 00:52:11 You know, out of his wallet. He would not, his wallet would be no lighter. Right. Let me ask you, just kind of come into the close, because this is a lot. And I think that one of the things that causes people to end up saying, wow, this is crazy. We have to do something about it and then do nothing. Is that it's, it, they leave saying like, well, what am I supposed to do? So could you just give us just a couple of practical things that someone can do to make it harder for them to be manipulated?

Starting point is 00:52:47 Oh, yeah, that's easy. And again, if you go to myprivacy tips.com, it's all laid out there. But there are some things you can do that are really simple. One is, believe it or not, you can stop using Google software, which means the Chrome browser. My organization, we all use different browser, which is called Brave. I know the guy who founded Brave. Yeah, Brave seems to be the last of the Mohicans. Yeah, and the guy, because the guy behind it is, he's the real thing.

Starting point is 00:53:16 He's the real deal. He's also the guy who created the Firefox browser as an alternative to Chrome. But then he found out that Google was, Firefox was set up by a nonprofit, and then he found it that 90% of the money that they were getting was coming from Google. Is that guy named Brendan Elch, Elch? Ike, Brendan Ike, E-I-C-H. Okay. And so he left, he left that nonprofit and founded Brave.

Starting point is 00:53:43 So you can switch to Brave. And for emails, we use Proton, which is based in Switzerland. I also know that owner, and he's the real deal as well. Google tried to shut Proton down when he founded it, which was, I think, around 15 years ago. And he fought, he fought, he fought, he fought, and they now have more than 100 million users. They have a free account. If you go to proton.m.m. It's one way to get to it.

Starting point is 00:54:10 They preserve your privacy and emails. They encrypt everything end to end. You can, most people can get by with a free account. If you're a very heavy email user, you might have to get a paid account. So now you're paying, what, $5, $6 a month, which is, you know, which makes sense. We should be paying for the services that we get.

Starting point is 00:54:30 Because if we're not paying, it means we're paying with our data. we're paying with our minds. We're paying with our freedom. See? So, Proxon. And Proton has a new thing, which I don't even know the deal tells about, but they just announced it.

Starting point is 00:54:46 They have something, it's a single click that will switch you over from Gmail to Proton, so you don't lose any of your Gmail. They finally made it super simple. Again, I don't know the details, but if you go to Proton.m. There's supposedly one button. you click it and it'll switch over from Gmail to Proton. There's a bunch of stuff. There's a lot of alternatives to Google.

Starting point is 00:55:12 Your whole life changes. I mean, people, a lot of people now say they don't care about privacy, but the fact is when you get your privacy back or you get it for the first time, your life is different. Because you realize, hey, I can actually do what I want to do without someone recording everything. And it kind of opens you up in some ways. And you do feel better. You feel safer. I know, because I do this. But if you want to get a quick test to see how prepared you are or how prepared you are not, go to My Digitalhygiene.com. This is new. This is part of our effort to educate people and go to

Starting point is 00:55:54 my digital hygiene.com and either take the mini test, which takes under a minute, and see what you score. and if you score poorly, like most of my staff, scores between 30 and 50%. You're not alone. You're not alone. You got work to do. You got work to do. Yeah, I score on that test 100%. And I take it honestly, I score 100%.

Starting point is 00:56:14 So in other words, you can learn how to get some control back in your life when it comes to these outrageous tech companies. I'm thinking in six months when your book comes out, we'll have you back. because you're going to need all the help you can to get that book out there. So we would love to have you back. But I think it's very, very applicable to this show. This show is called Makes Sense. And it makes a lot of sense what you're doing or what you're passionate about.

Starting point is 00:56:46 And I think everybody listening, even the most cognitively biased person, that will erase this from their memory immediately. In this moment, they know that it's important. and that it's true. Whether or not they care about it in five minutes, that we don't control. But at least they have been exposed to something. And for that, I'm very grateful to have a guest like you on our show. We're going to put all of these links.

Starting point is 00:57:16 Everything that he's mentioned will be in the descriptions. And we're looking forward to the book coming out. And we just thank you so much for being on a show. really just valuable information. Thank you in turn. Thank you for paying attention here and for spreading the word because, you know, that's my big frustration is, you know, I've worked so hard and I've made so many discoveries and I found so many disturbing things.

Starting point is 00:57:43 But making change, that takes the courage of people like yourself. Getting the word out, that takes you. That takes you. That's not something I know how to do very well. And so I'm very, very grateful that you not only reached out and you not only asked me fabulous questions, but with you, I can tell you this. You get it. So sometimes I'm on a podcast or a TV show or something, and I realize the host is just going through the motions. They've got some questions that someone wrote down. They're being displayed on a, you know,

Starting point is 00:58:22 monitor somewhere. But you actually get this. You understand this. And those are the people who really can bring about change. You're the guy. You are the man. So thank you so much. I'm trying to raise my children and also trying to encourage my audience to just simply remain curious and be okay with uncertainty. I think certainty is the kiss of death for everybody. Everybody thinks that they know things.

Starting point is 00:58:52 and I just happened to have taken the step of learning about human behavior and how, you know, we've been programmed and manipulated since birth, you know, so it's just gotten a lot fancier the way it's being done right now. So thanks so much for being on the show. We're definitely going to have you back. Thank you. You're very welcome, and I'd be happy to come back anytime. Thank you so much.

Starting point is 00:59:16 This is Dr. Robert Epstein, and this podcast makes sense. That's it for today. To support the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast, be sure to subscribe, like, and share, as well as follow the Make Sense substack for free daily quotes, live streams, and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time. Makes sense.

Starting point is 00:59:54 If you liked the show, please take a moment. to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.

Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Dr. Robert Epstein - This Harvard Scientist Was Warned to Stay Silent - E214

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