Dr. Robert Epstein - This Harvard Scientist Was Warned to Stay Silent - E214

Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick

Dr. Robert Epstein joins Dr. JC Doornick to discuss the invisible ways tech giants like Google manipulate public opinion through search engi

Key takeaways

• Dr. Epstein's team captured 134 million 'ephemeral experiences' to track algorithmic bias.
• Google sent 50% more 'go vote' reminders to Democrats than Republicans in late October 2024.

Main topics

• Online manipulation
• Search engine bias

Notable quotes

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?

Conclusion

The episode serves as a critical warning regarding the invisible power

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) 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 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 Speaker 1 (0:57) as life and reality. Speaker 3 (0:59) Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. JC 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. My first question, which I think does a great job of kicking interviews off, is what is it like to be Dr. Epstein these days? Speaker 2 (1:39) It's pretty difficult, actually. 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 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 a lesser extent, other tech companies. But there was a remarkable piece written years ago by the head of the European 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. But all that's stressful, too. It's stressful to testify before Congress. I guess what Speaker 3 (3:09) 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? You know, 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? Speaker 2 (3:31) 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 autistic 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 get spread about, you know, Dominion voting machines and all that, that's all largely nonsense. Those really are conspiracy theories. But what we study is real. We measure it. 24 hours a day. If you go to Americas with an S, AmericasDigitalShield.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 so we're capturing the content, the real content that they're sending to real people without them being 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 I'm not happy at all because that can shift millions of votes in an election. Speaker 3 (5:46) We're Speaker 2 (5:46) also looking at content, for example, that YouTube is sending to young children. And, you know, we're finding sexually explicit content or 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. 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 intentionally 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. 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 it can steer the course of our nation without us even realizing that this is happening. 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 Technological Elite Are Now in Control. It got even worse, believe it or not, when. Trump got 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 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 monetizing 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, 2024, we were looking at the message 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. And we found that they were as of October 31st, five days before the election, the presidential election, they were sending out 50 percent 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 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 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 when they stop. And they stopped. So from November 1st to the 5th, they sent out go vote reminders 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. Clearly, the money is out there. Anyone who's concerned about, you know, the free and fair election and the integrity of democracy and who has the money 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. I've been asked by officials in eight other countries to help them develop monitoring systems. And I have 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 state's 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. It turns out later, whistleblowers turned up and documents were leaked and videos were leaked. And so 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. 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? Because I believe in an America. I love America. I believe... 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. Speaker 3 (13:37) 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 was 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 he wanted. Speaker 2 (14:03) And, you Speaker 3 (14:03) know, so there's a lot of kids out there. that want to make change as well. So I think this episode is 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. 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? Speaker 2 (14:42) Well, it's really a handful of top executives at some tech companies. 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.