Join Russell Brand as he discusses the latest corruption charges against US Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife, Tammy Mikayla Menendez, and how they got away with it. Plus, a look at how Google controls the public sphere in ways that are just staggering, and why we should all be worried about it. Russell Brand is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. His work has appeared on Comedy Central, HBO, and the New York Times, and he is a regular contributor on the radio show . He is also the host of the podcast and hosts a podcast called which you should definitely check out if you don t already know who he is. He's a good friend of mine, and I think you'll agree that he's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met, and one of my favorite people in the whole wide world. He's also a very funny guy, which is why you should check out his podcast, Stay Free With Russell Brand. Stay Free with Russell Brand! is out now on all of the social medias, if you haven't checked it out already, you won't want to miss it. It's a must-listen to the very first episode of Stay Free: A Call From Russell Brand, available exclusively on RUM! Subscribe to Stay Free on all major podcast directories and listen to the first 15 minutes of the show on your favorite streaming platform. You'll get 20% off for the rest of the entire show, plus an additional 20% discount when you sign up for future episodes starting next week. Stay Free for the full ad-free version of the full show on the next week, available only on Audible, iTunes, Podcoin, Podchaser, and Poshmark, coming soon! You won't have to pay any other option, they won't be able to tell me what they'll be giving you'll get a discount on the show, and they'll get it on that, too! If you're in any of those places, I'm giving you a discount code: stay free for the show. . . . stay free to get exclusive promo code: Stay Freebie at stayfree with me and I'll get 15% off the full-throttle access to the entire service, plus I'll give you access to all of that, plus they'll also get a shout-in discount code .
00:04:33.000Or are Nazis people that are just called Nazis for various reasons?
00:04:38.000Also, we're going to be talking to Dr. Robert Epstein about the phenomenal power of Google and their ability to manipulate the public sphere and conversation in ways that are just staggering.
00:05:06.000New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and his wife indicted by a federal grand jury.
00:05:11.000The senator is accused of using his office to help several businessmen from New Jersey as well as the Egyptian government in exchange for receiving hundreds... That sounds like a sort of 80s Bruce Willis film.
00:05:24.000The Egyptian government, business people from New Jersey.
00:05:28.000What's, I suppose, most troubling about this is that it's not surprising at all, is it?
00:05:34.000Don't you just expect people in Congress and the Senate to be taking bribes?
00:05:38.000Isn't it just understood at this point that this is their function, that all we have here is a more overt and slightly more comical example of what is institutionally true?
00:05:47.000I mean, how far along the gradient is this type of corruption from the ordinary donations and lobbying and ordinary framing of the political obligations of senators and congress people everywhere and our understanding that these people are not representatives of common interests or popular interests they are simply in the service of elite establishment agenda and when some gold bullion turns up or a briefcase full of money or an envelope full of dirty cash it simply serves as a more poetic and easily understandable example of something we all know to be true anyway.
00:06:26.000in gifts, including cash, a luxury vehicle, even gold bars.
00:06:32.000The gold bars was when they were running out of ways to bribe him.
00:06:35.000Here's some gifts, some cash, a luxury vehicle. How about actual just gold?
00:07:02.000Suits, ties, dressed up, the rhetoric of politics, and behind the scenes, gold bars.
00:07:07.000No transparency, no clarity, evident and obvious corruption.
00:07:13.000It accuses the Senator of accepting cash and gifts, including, as you mentioned, gold bars, a luxury Mercedes-Benz vehicle, in exchange, and they call it bribery, for taking official action to benefit the people that were paying the money.
00:07:40.000There was a, uh, there was an Egyptian, uh, figure who had a halal meat business that got an exclusive deal to provide halal meat to the government of Egypt, even as Senator Menendez had significant influence over foreign U.S.
00:08:09.000Look at how the legacy media take the opportunity to present this as a sort of outlier.
00:08:15.000That this is somehow distinct from the kind of corruption that is actually institutional.
00:08:19.000And I'll give you some examples of that in a moment.
00:08:22.000sales and military aid to Egypt and the indictment details a series of allegations where they say Senator Menendez exerted that influence and pressured Egyptian officials even as he was helping this company and then separately it says that the senator intervened in two separate criminal matters involving his associates trying to uh... stop essentially the criminal investigations into those people in exchange for financial compensation in the form of bribes.
00:08:48.000And what's so shocking about this, Ana, is it's coming just six years after Senator Menendez narrowly escaped conviction in a separate and unrelated corruption case.
00:09:00.000The Justice Department decided not to retry him.
00:09:03.000And he was admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for taking gifts and luxury items from a friend of his in exchange for official action.
00:09:12.000You can't get enough of it, can you, old Menendez?
00:09:15.000But how is this significant case of overt, almost comedic bribery distinct from these examples of corruption that you would have to regard as institutional?
00:09:26.000From the world of energy, at least 100 members of Congress own fossil fuel stocks, of which 59 are Republicans and 41 are Democrats.
00:09:34.000So there you go, that's an example, I would say, of corruption that's accepted and legal.
00:09:39.000Pharma, of the $263 million that the pharmaceutical industry spent on lobbying in 2021, it gave 61% to the Democrat party and 39% to the Republican party.
00:09:48.000Again, a type of corruption and bias that is, in a sense, far more influential, impactful, and yet legal.
00:09:57.000In 22, commercial banks spent over 30 million dollars lobbying Congress, 61% to the Republicans and 39% to the Democrats.
00:10:04.000Notice again how both wings of the parliamentary or congressional system are beholden to the same interests, meaning that whoever you vote for, you're voting for a party that is paid for by these types of interests, whether it's banking or Big Pharma or the military-industrial complex or the energy industry.
00:10:18.000Nearly 20% of Congress members, 49 Democrats and 44 Republicans, have been trading shares of companies in industries they are supposed to be overseeing as part of their committee assignments.
00:10:28.000Compared to that, Menendez just looks like a sort of old-school corrupt, like, Mayor of Springfield type politician, rather than an institutionally corrupt and more invasive political operator.
00:11:11.00040 Republicans urged Joe Biden to include a 5% increase in defense spending In his 2023 US budget.
00:11:17.000So this obvious example of corruption really just gives us an opportunity to look at institutional corruption.
00:11:24.000All dear old Bob Menendez really did was did a bit of atavistic, old-school, nostalgic corruption instead of the more slick corruption that passes for ordinary government these days.
00:11:35.000In a way, what stories like this demonstrate is a lack of moral authority and integrity at the heart of our systems, whether they are media, state, institutional, governmental, judicial.
00:11:46.000We already know that's the case, and sometimes you get an obvious, glaring, and almost comedic example of that, Like when a Nazi is honoured in the ultra-liberal and progressive, according to their own declarations, Canadian Parliament.
00:11:59.000Let's have a look at that in more detail and look at how the term Nazi is used to shut down dissent and debate when actual Nazism appears to be literally celebrated in Parliament.
00:12:17.000The establishment and the legacy media are certain that there are Nazis and fascists everywhere, particularly when people oppose their agenda.
00:12:24.000But they're also willing to applaud and fund actual Nazis.
00:12:27.000Does this mean that we live in a truly nihilistic time with no truthful moral centre in any of our establishment institutions?
00:12:37.000Surely you have noticed that terms like Nazi and fascist are used profligately to describe anyone who opposes the agenda of the establishment.
00:12:48.000And yet we find curious contradictions when we look at the funding of the ongoing war.
00:12:53.000We find peculiar anomalies when an Does this mean that terms like Nazi and fascist have lost their tethering, have lost their root, have lost their grounding because we live in a kind of nihilistic time where language is used in order to create narratives that are beneficial and to shut down opposition?
00:13:17.000Are we able to have honest, moral conversations about righteousness and justice anymore anyway?
00:13:28.000Who do we look to now to determine what is right, what is wrong, what is just and unjust?
00:13:33.000Just a few examples of this from recent times of course are the profligate and sometimes casual use of terms like Nazi and fascist with establishment politicians willing to label their opponents as fascists and Nazis simply as a means to shut them down.
00:13:48.000Let's have a look at those terms now, because if you fund actual explicit Nazis in the ongoing
00:13:55.000war, that's not to say that the Ukrainian cause is not just, or that Ukrainians are
00:13:59.000more broadly Nazi. Of course it isn't, it's just a reference to the actual Nazi battalion
00:14:04.000that are funded as a result of this war and the complexities of this war. And let's have
00:14:08.000a look at this extraordinary incident where a real life, genuine, actual swastika wearing
00:14:12.000Nazi was applauded on the eve of Yom Kippur.
00:14:16.000And ask, where is moral authority now?
00:14:18.000And how are we all suffering as a result of the loss of this genuine moral centre?
00:14:23.000I remember as a young student, you know, trying to figure out,
00:14:29.000how did people get basically drawn in by Hitler?
00:15:39.000Because if the term Nazi can be applied indiscriminately or at least conveniently, don't we have to look at Nazis that are declared explicit and obvious and inconvenient Nazis that might be funded by the very establishment they're attempting to use that term to shut down conversation?
00:15:57.000So there is a real pressure and I think it is fair to say we're in a struggle between democracy and autocracy.
00:16:06.000Now of course Hillary Clinton stands for a particular type of neo-liberalist politics that ultimately supports the same financial interests that were ultimately in charge during the Bush-Cheney era and yet uses the rhetoric of progressivism when it's convenient.
00:16:22.000Another political figure that is aligned with those ideals, but also, I would argue, and let me know in the chat and the comments if you agree, quite oppressive when it comes to protest and free speech.
00:16:32.000Take, for example, the Canadian trucker movement is Justin Trudeau.
00:16:35.000I suppose what we're proposing here is there is the rhetoric of liberalism and freedom, and yet the behaviour of authoritarianism.
00:16:42.000Certainly we are not accusing people that we disagree with ideologically of being Nazis, because that is the kind of simplistic, reductive discourse that we need to move beyond.
00:16:52.000What we're pointing out is, there doesn't seem to be any moral centre in any of our establishment institutions, whether that's the media, the government, the corporate world or the judiciary, that allows us to freely trust Their moral position.
00:17:06.000That's why you have people that support their opponents dismissed as Nazis and actual Nazis, as in this clip, applauded in Parliament.
00:17:15.000Not to mention the complexity that we referred to earlier, where the Azov battalion continue to be funded by your taxpayer dollars.
00:17:34.000Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and continues to support the troops today, even at his age of 98.
00:17:44.000In a sense, the mathematics, geography and history could have been looked at before the decision to honour that gentleman, who may well have been brave, but it has to be said, was a brave Nazi.
00:17:54.000And suddenly we're in some very complex moral territory.
00:17:57.000In an attempt to assume righteous posturing, Nazis are being applauded.
00:18:03.000Opponents are being shut down for being Nazis.
00:18:05.000I mean this is Canada where the trucker movement were dismissed as Nazis, shut down, their free speech was controlled because they were alleged to be Nazis for no real actual reason and yet a member of the Nazi party has just been celebrated in Parliament.
00:18:20.000Now obviously this was an error and a mistake but what it shows me, and I wonder if you agree with this, is there is no actual tethering to values and principles anymore.
00:18:46.000What this shows me is there's a kind of nihilism at the core of our culture.
00:18:51.000Our institutions are falling apart from the inside, observably.
00:18:55.000And this kind of peculiar moral morass is the observable symptom of a system that has no moral core.
00:19:04.000Invited by House Speaker Anthony Roda to witness Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's address to Parliament, Yaroslav Humka is one of his constituents.
00:19:12.000He's a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.
00:19:18.000Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, a Nazi hero.
00:23:03.000Just the service of elite interests and the provision of an apparently convenient narrative
00:23:09.000that because it's so hollow and vacuous will occasionally involve applauding Nazis on the
00:23:13.000eve of Yom Kippur because they've got no actual values.
00:23:16.000We continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine as we did last week with
00:23:24.000announcing further measures to stand with Ukraine in Russia's illegal war against it.
00:23:30.000Well as long as the unequivocal support of Ukraine doesn't similarly involve the support of actual Nazis.
00:23:36.000And again you don't have to not be supportive of Ukrainian people or sympathetic to their plight or indeed pray for an end to this horrific and unnecessary war to To still be able to observe that there is a Nazi battalion being funded by your taxpayer dollars fighting within the Ukrainian army.
00:23:52.000There is a degree of complexity and nuance which is way beyond the ability of this current system to navigate.
00:23:58.000Liberal socialists and other progressives often claim that conservatives are in bed with the far right and Nazis.
00:24:03.000This repulsive term is sometimes used to describe conservatives themselves.
00:24:07.000Well that's just not going to work anymore.
00:24:09.000The political left can thank Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals for this after they unwittingly honoured a Nazi in Parliament.
00:24:15.000What an astonishing time it is, this story, just one of the indications of how crazy the world has become.
00:24:21.000Now obviously we can't bring you this evidently contentious content without support from our sponsors.
00:24:28.000That's why I'm incredibly grateful that Sticker Mule, one of the great sponsors of Stay Free with Russell Brand, are offering these six Stunning designs.
00:24:40.000They're all made with Sticker Mule's Magic Touch.
00:24:43.000Sticker Mule has 10,000 of these packs.
00:24:46.000That's right, 10,000 ready to deliver to your address absolutely free.
00:24:51.000Just go to StickerMule.com forward slash Russell and fill out the form.
00:24:55.000Thank you Sticker Mule for continuing to support our content in an extraordinary time, and thank you Canada for being so extraordinary in the people you're willing to honor.
00:25:06.000Antony Rota, the Speaker of the House, recognised one of his constituents, 98-year-old Yaroslav Honka, who was honoured during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's September 22nd visit.
00:25:16.000This is because politics is a spectacle now.
00:25:18.000They realise there's a Ukrainian veteran living in our constituency.
00:25:22.000Wouldn't it be fantastic to honour this Ukrainian veteran?
00:25:25.000Because it will look good and it will feel good, but it won't mean anything except applauding, in this instance, a Nazi.
00:25:31.000And unless you want to get into The complexity of war, the nature of good and evil.
00:25:34.000Solzhenitsyn's term that a line between good and evil runs not between nations, continents, races or creeds, but through every human heart.
00:25:43.000And I don't see any willingness to look at Solzhenitsyn's writing work, because he's Russian.
00:25:48.000Rota depicted Hunka as a Ukrainian-Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians.
00:25:55.000And also called him a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we all thank him for his service.
00:25:59.000I mean, that's actually a considerable lack of knowledge of the Second World War, where it's commonly understood that Russia, the United States, Britain, and others were in alliance against the Nazis.
00:26:11.000Hunker served in a unit which was renamed the 1st Ukrainian Division towards the end of the Second World War.
00:26:17.000That particular division is more well known under its previous names as either the SS Galicia Division or the 14th Waffen-Grenadier SS Division.
00:26:25.000It was a voluntary unit that was under the command of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany and was accused of murdering innocent Jews and Poles.
00:26:31.000So it's sort of pretty frontline actual Nazism.
00:26:34.000This is not the kind of Nazism that is used linguistically to condemn opponents of neoliberalist vacuous politics.
00:26:42.000This is actual execution of innocent people on the basis of their nationality or race.
00:26:48.000Hunker received a standing ovation in the house.
00:27:52.000The same way that they would willingly use a Nazi, they would use other terms for other minority groups and other oppressed groups to leverage and advance other arguments, I believe, in order to cause division and hatred and to mask the fact that there is no ethical centre to any of their actions because they are simply shepherding us towards a globalist, Centralized authoritarian dystopia.
00:28:13.000And if you want to look at some of our other videos, I've got the receipts for that statement.
00:28:18.000A war monument dedicated to the 1st Ukrainian Division was defaced in the St.
00:28:22.000Vladimir Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario in July 2020.
00:28:26.000It was originally treated as a hate-motivated incident by police.
00:28:30.000Jewish groups and human rights advocates were furious, as they are today with the hunker revelation.
00:28:34.000The international media covered it from end to end, yet no liberal media made the connection to this Nazi-aligned volunteer unit that was in the news only three years ago.
00:28:42.000I suppose that's because of their certainty in their moral position, and a lack of true inquiry and journalistic integrity, and a desire simply to push a particular agenda, even when that agenda has inconvenient Nazis in it.
00:28:55.000The Canadian government's blunder played right into the waiting hands of Vladimir Putin and Russia.
00:28:59.000Such sloppiness of memory is outrageous, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
00:29:04.000Many Western countries, including Canada, have raised a young generation that does not know who fought whom or what happened during the Second World War, and they know nothing about the threat of fascism.
00:29:15.000In a sense, this abandonment of history, this abandonment of the memory that there was an alliance between Russia, the United States, the UK, many other countries that stood against Nazism before ideological fissures appeared, is also an obscuring, I believe, of the possibility that peaceful, diplomatic solutions to the current conflict could be reached.
00:29:34.000That Russia Aren't alien and Nazi in spite of the obvious atrocities associated with Stalinism.
00:29:42.000It seems that there's a possibility that they are a nation with their own trajectory, their own agenda, even possibly their own imperialism and colonialism.
00:29:50.000To imagine that the neoliberal establishment of the United States of America in particular doesn't have a comparable agenda is especially naive.
00:29:58.000And it's by use of terms like Nazis and the shutting down of conversation and the closing down of dissent and the convenient appropriation of symbols that conversations like this are able to be continually avoided when they're the very conversations that are required.
00:30:10.000To further present the complexity of using a term like Nazi when Nazism continues to be a real thing in the world,
00:31:49.000Joining me now is Dr. Robert Epstein, a former Harvard psychology professor, author of 15 books and current director of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
00:31:59.000Thank you very much for joining us today, doctor.
00:32:03.000One of the claims that you have made that is most astonishing, difficult almost to believe, is that Google are essentially able to curate and control reality.
00:32:15.000Google, that we all use as an ordinary tool in most people's lives, you claim can be used to drive and direct an agenda, that it can be used as a political tool and even weapon In particular, I'd like to ask you about your claim that Google was able to direct 6 million extra votes to Joe Biden.
00:32:38.000And obviously that's an incredibly contentious claim because talking about electoral fraud and electoral meddling seems to be one of the subjects that's Most difficult to discuss and has to be discussed with incredible caution.
00:32:53.000So can you tell me exactly what it is you mean by Google directing six million extra votes to a presumably preferred presidential candidate and how on earth Google would be able to do that?
00:33:07.000Well, I've been doing very rigorous scientific research on this topic for more than 11 years.
00:33:13.000And what should really shock you here is that people's preoccupation with election fraud and ballot stuffing and all that, that preoccupation, that obsession is actually engineered by Google and to a lesser extent other tech companies.
00:33:28.000There's nothing really there and that's what they do.
00:33:31.000They redirect attention like magicians do so that you won't look at them.
00:34:32.000That means that we had recruited registered voters, equipped them with special software, So that we could look over their shoulders as they're getting content from Google and other tech companies.
00:34:46.000In other words, we were seeing the real content that they're sending to real voters during the days leading up to an election.
00:34:55.000And then we measured the bias in that content.
00:34:58.000We found extreme political bias favoring Joe Biden, whom I actually supported, although I no longer do.
00:35:05.000The point is we found extreme political bias and we know from randomized controlled experiments we've been conducting since 2013 that that level of bias shifted at least 6 million votes to Biden in that election.
00:35:20.000In 2022, we had 2,742 field agents in 10 swing states.
00:35:27.000So in other words, we're monitoring real content sent to real voters by these companies Recording it in real time and analyzing it in real time.
00:35:38.000In 2022, they shifted millions of votes in hundreds of midterm elections throughout the US.
00:35:44.000We know they did this for Brexit by the way in the UK.
00:35:49.000And again, they're very good at redirecting attention.
00:35:52.000What we're doing now is much, much bigger.
00:35:54.000We decided to build a permanent monitoring system in all 50 U.S.
00:35:59.000At this moment in time, we have 11,638 field agents in all 50 states, which means 24 hours a day, we are monitoring and preserving and archiving ephemeral content.
00:36:13.000That's what they use to manipulate us.
00:36:15.000Ephemeral content through the computers of more than 11,000 registered voters in the U.S.
00:36:23.000We're on the verge of setting up a permanent system like this that will keep these companies away from our elections and from our kids permanently.
00:36:34.000Whilst I understand that you're able, with these agents that you described, to monitor the information that Google is publishing, promoting and directing, it does seem to be, given the sort of literally global scale of the endeavor that Google are undertaking, to be a relatively small sample size.
00:36:57.000I will add, of course, that I understand that there are significant contracts that are explicit between Google and the government in areas like data, security, military, industrial, complex, defence.
00:37:09.000There are explicit financial ties, as well as donations and lobbying money, as well as numerous people in Congress and the Senate owning significant shares in companies, big tech companies, particularly in this instance that they're supposed to regulate.
00:37:22.000So the possibility and opportunity for corruption is plainly there.
00:37:27.000But I do wonder how you're able, with that sample size, to deduce such a significant number, specifically 6 million.
00:37:37.000And also the other figure that I've heard in association with your work, that a 50-50
00:37:41.000split among undecided voters, you know, I know we're talking about swing states anyway,
00:39:01.000And so the effects that we keep Replicating over and over again, other teams have now replicated.
00:39:07.000Those are significant, for those of you who know any stats here, at the .001 level, meaning the probability that we're making mistakes is less than one in a thousand.
00:39:21.000We're highly confident about what we've been finding, and the problem here is that we're up against The most powerful mind control machine that's ever been developed by humankind.
00:39:32.000And it's operating in every country in the world except mainland China.
00:39:36.000And it impacts, you know, how people see those companies.
00:39:40.000They're impacting not just our elections.
00:39:43.000They're not just indoctrinating our kids.
00:39:46.000They're literally altering the way we perceive them as a company.
00:39:52.000And most of these manipulations that they have access to now, that they control exclusively because they're a monopoly, most of these manipulations cannot be seen by the people who are being manipulated.
00:40:07.000So your ability to observe them and to track them, it operates against what type of control?
00:40:16.000If you're able to say that people are being sent this information that's highly biased, what would unbiased information look like?
00:40:25.000I'm open, of course, to the possibility that this unprecedented and fully immersive technology would be used by people that have an appetite to control information and it seems quite plain to me.
00:40:36.000That that does happen, but because it's so extraordinary and revelatory, because it's so significant and if it were able to be opposed it could be so seismic in our ability to have true democracy and a public sphere worthy of the name where dissent and conversation could take place freely.
00:40:56.000I feel that it's important that I understand exactly how that, not exactly because of probably the limitations of my ability to understand, but As precisely as I might.
00:41:06.000The way that you're able to say, look, this would constitute neutral information.
00:41:15.000Because I feel that it's very important.
00:41:20.000Again, you're shocking me because you're being the skeptic here, but you know, good scientists are also skeptics, and there's no one more skeptical about the research I do than me.
00:41:31.000So let me give you an example, and I'll just show you exactly how this works.
00:41:35.000In 2020, where we had collected a massive amount of data, we had preserved more than 1.5 million ephemeral experiences on Google and other platforms, and you're asking, Ephemeral experiences?
00:41:49.000Those are those fleeting experiences that we all have online when we're shown search suggestions or answer boxes or search results or news feeds.
00:41:59.000They appear, they impact you, they disappear, they're stored nowhere so no one can go back in time and see what was being done.
00:42:08.000That's what we've learned to preserve over the years.
00:42:13.000We find, again, massive overwhelming evidence of extreme bias.
00:42:19.000We've preserved 1.5 million ephemeral experiences.
00:42:23.000And I sent the data in to the office of Senator Ted Cruz.
00:42:29.000He and two other senators sent a very threatening letter to the CEO of Google.
00:42:34.000This was November 5th, 2020, two days after the presidential election.
00:42:39.000And lo and behold, that same day, Google turned off all the bias in the state of Georgia, which was gearing up for two Senate runoff elections in January.
00:43:23.000No one got Go Vote reminders from Google anymore.
00:43:27.000So, believe me, they have this power, they exercise this power.
00:43:31.000This is now being confirmed by multiple leaks from the company.
00:43:35.000For example, emails that were leaked to the Wall Street Journal, in which Google employees were discussing, how can we use And I can put this in quotes, ephemeral experiences to change people's views about Trump's travel ban.
00:43:51.000This has been confirmed by multiple whistleblowers, leaks of documents, leaks of videos, of a PowerPoint presentation.
00:44:18.000In other words, we're doing to them what they do to us and our kids 24 hours a day.
00:44:23.000We have learned how to surveil them and to preserve that very, very powerful ephemeral content, which normally is never preserved.
00:44:33.000And they never in a million years imagined That anyone would be sophisticated enough, competent enough, audacious enough to preserve that content.
00:44:45.000And as of this moment in time, we have preserved in recent months more than 44 million ephemeral experiences on Google and other platforms.
00:44:55.000We have the data, we have the evidence, and it's court admissible.
00:45:03.000So presumably there are relationships and an agenda where interests converge to the degree where there is an established and undemocratic consensus about the nature of this reality that's being formulated, i.e.
00:45:19.000this is the data that is promoted, this is the information that's amplified, this is the information that's censored, this is the information that people just don't get to see.
00:45:29.000I wonder if when you presumably began to garner your expertise and education in behaviouralism, tools of this magnitude didn't exist and were not available.
00:45:43.000Throughout the pandemic period there was a lot of talk about nudge units, certainly in our country there were, how behavioural nudges could be offered and sort of BF Skinner type nomenclature about how behaviour can be controlled, how certain traits can be amplified, certain impressions can be projected and promoted and others maligned, ignored.
00:46:04.000I wonder how your expertise and background in behaviouralism, Robert, maps onto this new reality, and what advantages they now have, having this kind of utility.
00:46:17.000How does this, how does this, what do I want to say, how does this marry to your conventional understanding of behaviouralism in a normal propagandist state, like in the last century, where there'd been print media and TV media, And can you tell us what techniques of observation and measurement are preserved and have sustained what must be an epochal shift?
00:46:39.000I was the last doctoral student at Harvard University of B.F.
00:46:43.000Skinner, a man who some would say helped to create behavioral psychology.
00:46:50.000And Skinner himself did not anticipate what has actually happened.
00:48:12.000We did research in India, research in the U.K.
00:48:16.000This has been going on now for more than 11 years.
00:48:18.000This is rock solid research and Skinner himself would be flabbergasted.
00:48:27.000Because what we're seeing now are techniques for shifting people's thinking and behavior without their knowledge on a massive scale to an extent that has never been possible before in human history.
00:48:39.000That's what the internet has made available.
00:48:42.000This wouldn't necessarily be that much of a threat, except for the fact that the way the internet has evolved, which no one anticipated, is it's controlled mainly by two big monopolies, to a lesser extent by a couple of other monopolies.
00:48:56.000And because they're monopolies, it means that these techniques of control, we can't counter.
00:49:02.000If you, in an election, you support a candidate, and you buy a billboard, I can buy another billboard.
00:49:09.000You buy a TV commercial, I can buy two TV commercials.
00:49:12.000But if one of these big platforms, like Google, if they want to support a candidate, or they want to support a Brexit vote, or they want to support a political party, there is nothing you can do to counter what they're doing.
00:49:27.000What we've developed are systems to surveil them, to preserve the evidence, preserve the data.
00:49:33.000That's the only way I know of To stop them is by gathering the evidence in a way that is, again, scientifically valid, so that the data are admissible in court, and that is what we're doing right now.
00:49:49.000If people want to know the details, they can go to mygoogleresearch.com, they can go to techwatchproject.org.
00:49:57.000MyGoogleResearch.com will give them lots and lots of links to lots of published papers, lots of talks I've given.
00:50:04.000This is serious work, and what's happening here, again, our attention is being misdirected away from what they're doing, but what's happening here, what they're really doing, is extremely dangerous and very scary.
00:50:20.000It makes democracy into a kind of a joke, and Since you haven't interrupted me, Ed, thank God, I want to just tell you that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was head of Allied Forces in World War II, I mean, he was an insider.
00:50:33.000In the last speech he gave as president in 1961, some people are aware that he talked about the rise of a military-industrial complex and, you know, but that same speech, he warned about the rise of a technological elite.
00:51:20.000Sometimes when I have something of this scale described to me, Robert, I find it inconceivable to envisage that it could ever be opposed.
00:51:30.000And yet there's something oddly traditional about the dynamic suggested by this.
00:51:37.000We once believed that, in a sense, it was the function of the evolved state to preserve and protect the interests of the public Against corporate behemoths and corporate gigantism.
00:51:50.000Now we have a gigantism that's unprecedented, way beyond the instantiations of a previous century where it would have been steel and minerals and resources.
00:52:01.000But attention and consciousness itself is the faculty, is the object of this monopolization.
00:52:11.000And it's extraordinary to hear how effective they are at managing and manipulating. And to
00:52:18.00046% or 66%, these numbers are sort of astonishing to hear.
00:52:23.000I wonder what you think about Google's attempt to overturn that 2.6 billion dollar EU antitrust
00:52:33.000I wonder what you think about, for example, we know we're on Rumble, that when Rumble covered the Republican primaries, it was apparently very difficult to find on Google.
00:52:44.000And I wonder, perhaps most of all, about whether or not, given that it appears that there is a political bias built into the system's current modality, whether or not an alliance with the alternative political party is a possibility in order to regulate and break up these monopolies, because that would seem to be the only way that it could be challenged.
00:53:09.000And that's the sort of traditional component that I'm Referring to unless you have some kind of like other than the state or an incredibly mobilized population even with the information that you are curating and compiling.
00:53:23.000How do you ever challenge something of this scale?
00:53:28.000It can be challenged, but the antitrust actions that are currently being used in the EU and also in the United States were actually designed by Google's legal team.
00:53:50.000Uh, Google works closely with governments around the world, even with the government of mainland China, uh, and works closely with intelligence agencies around the world.
00:54:00.000Uh, the, the, the people at Google know that no one can ever break them up because you can't break up the search engine.
00:54:23.000Yes, but antitrust actions aren't going to do much.
00:54:27.000What could be done though is you could declare, this is very light touch regulation, there's precedent for it in law, there's precedent for it in Google's business practices, is that you could declare the index, the database they use to generate search results, you could declare that to be a public commons.
00:54:47.000In other words, you would allow other parties, other companies, high school students, you'd allow them to build their own search engine with access to Google's index.
00:54:56.000You'd end up with thousands of search engines all competing for our attention, all trying to attract niche audiences exactly like the news media domain.
00:55:07.000That's exactly what happens in news media.
00:55:10.000That could be done simply by giving everyone access to Google's index.
00:55:16.000Google would fight it in court, of course, and we'd see what happens, but that's one way.
00:55:21.000But the only sure way that I know of to stop these companies Because they're affecting not just our elections, but our thinking, what we focus on.
00:55:33.000They're in control of what content we see, such as your content, and what content we don't see, such as your content.
00:55:42.000The only way to really stop them is through monitoring.
00:55:46.000Because by monitoring, what happens is we preserve their manipulations.
00:55:53.000We can make them public 24 hours a day.
00:55:57.000We can share the findings with public officials, both in the US and other countries.
00:56:04.000And give people, give organizations, give government agencies, give political campaigns the power they need to bring effective legal action against Google.
00:56:17.000Because we're talking about massive Uh, massive amounts of data collected in a scientifically rigorous way.
00:56:23.000Give you one quick example of how hard it is to find them if you don't have the data.
00:56:29.000Last year, the Republican National Party sued Google because Google was, uh, was diverting tens of millions of emails that the Republican Party was sending to the Republicans.
00:56:43.000And Google was diverting all those emails into spam boxes.
00:57:16.000Because in 2020, when we shared our data with some U.S.
00:57:20.000Senators, they sent a threatening letter to the CEO of Google and Google stopped.
00:57:26.000They'll have to stop if they know that they're being monitored on a massive scale 24 hours a day, worldwide eventually, by the way.
00:57:34.000We've already been approached by five other countries asking us to help set up monitoring systems.
00:57:40.000If these tech execs know that their data are being captured, that we're doing to them what they do to us and our kids 24 hours a day, that we're monitoring them, we're preserving data that they thought could never be preserved.
00:57:58.000They can still make billions of dollars.
00:58:00.000They don't have to at the same time be messing with our thinking, be messing with our elections, and especially be messing with our kids.
00:58:09.000One of the new areas of research that we've started is looking at data coming onto the devices of more than 2,000 children throughout the U.S.
00:58:19.000We're just beginning to look at that and our heads are spinning because what these companies are sending to kids is just unbelievable and parents are unaware.
00:58:31.000There's a kind of social engineering occurring here on a massive scale that people are unaware of.
00:59:18.000banalized dystopia described both by Huxley and David Foster Wallace to a degree in Infinite Jest, a sort of a corporatized cultural space where the ideologies are masked in the kind of language of convenience, safety, no real moral spikes, no real ideological thrusts, you know, until there are, but mostly it's kind of
00:59:52.000I suppose that in order to significantly change society, you have to change the parameters of
00:59:57.000what people regard as normal significantly. Now, one of the things that you've talked about is the
01:00:03.000possibility of dissent and the likelihood of dissent being closed down in such a space.
01:00:10.000What do you think is the role of independent media within this space?
01:00:14.000How can independent media Succeed in such a highly controlled and curated space.
01:00:21.000And what do we have to do to ensure that independent voices are able to be heard in a space like this?
01:00:30.000I'm very encouraged by the way, by what you say about the monitoring, the effectiveness of monitoring this does seem to, you know, somewhat slow and curtail the proclivities of this organisation in particular.
01:00:46.000And the possibility for sharing that tech and, you know, making Google search stuff open source.
01:00:53.000That does seem like an amazing way of dissolving that power.
01:00:57.000But what do we do in particular about the sort of news media organizations like this one that necessarily exist within a space that's controlled to that degree?
01:01:05.000Well, at the moment, you're in grave danger.
01:01:10.000At the moment, independent media of any sort are in grave danger.
01:01:14.000One of the most remarkable pieces ever written about this problem, long before, by the way, he ever became aware of my research, was written by the head of the EU's largest publishing conglomerate, the German.
01:01:28.000And he published a long letter in English and in German called Fear of Google.
01:01:36.000And it was about how his company, they're in constant fear of Google and every decision they make, every business decision they make, they have to make in such a way as to not offend Google.
01:01:47.000Because when Google decides to suppress content, for example, to demote you in their search results or delete you, there's nothing you can do.
01:02:03.000And that's the environment in which we live.
01:02:06.000So no matter what content you want to contribute to the world, and I'm speaking of you personally here, it's a whim on their part.
01:02:16.000You're literally under the influence of whims at that company.
01:02:21.000about whether you can continue to get your message out.
01:02:24.000They've done this repeatedly with independent news sources.
01:02:29.000They have reduced their traffic to 10% of what it was.
01:02:33.000They can do that with the flip of a switch.
01:02:36.000And by the way, that was confirmed to me by one of the whistleblowers from Google.
01:02:40.000I'm in touch with a lot of the whistleblowers.
01:02:43.000I'm in touch with people at Google who haven't even blown the whistle yet.
01:02:46.000So I know way, way, way too much about what's going on there.
01:02:50.000But they, yes, at the moment, They have that power.
01:02:54.000They decide what more than 5 billion people around the world can see and cannot see.
01:03:01.000And at the moment, there is no way to counteract what they're doing.
01:03:05.000In the U.S., the courts have said over and over again, when they have, for example, shut down hundreds of websites belonging to one particular company, yes, they have that ability.
01:03:48.000In other words, even though I agree with a lot of their values because I lean left myself politically, I don't like the idea of a private company that's not accountable to us, to any public, having this kind of power.
01:04:06.000The problem is not necessarily their values.
01:04:08.000The problem is the power that they have and that they're utilizing without any accountability.
01:04:16.000To us, to any population, any group of people around the world, they're simply not accountable.
01:04:24.000I hope some of your viewers find that to be objectionable.
01:04:30.000I hope some of your viewers will go to mygoogleresearch.com because this big national monitoring system that we started setting up last year, I had raised about $3 million to get us going on it.
01:05:48.000If this system is not fully running next year in the United States, with all of our data being shared with authorities and with the public every single day, if this system is not there, Google alone will be able to shift between 6.4 and 25.5 million votes in the presidential election of 2024 without anyone knowing what they're doing, without anyone being able to go back in time and look at all that ephemeral content.
01:06:33.000I need your help and your audience help in making this happen.
01:06:37.000This horrifying power that you described, already present, already active, already operating according to your data, is as yet un-augmented by a fully capable AI technology.
01:06:55.000What are your thoughts on how the AI component will advance these capacities and what do you feel about, for example, the sort of chatbot story and the talk of sentience and, you know, the sacking of software engineer Blake Lemoine or Lemien or whatever his name was.
01:07:19.000It is also potentially dangerous in its own right.
01:07:25.000It will make these capabilities that they have even more powerful.
01:07:29.000For example, we just finished, in fact, I've not announced this publicly, this will be my first announcement, but we've just finished our first exploration of what we call DPE, the Digital Personalization Effect.
01:07:42.000And what we've shown is that if we show people biased content, we can produce shifts easily of 20% or more in their voting preferences.
01:07:51.000If we personalize the content, which of course Google is famous for doing, if we personalize it based on some things we know about those people and what kinds of media sources they trust and news sources and celebrities, if we personalize the content so it's coming from sources they personally trust, That shift goes up to over 70% from 20% shift to 70% shift.
01:08:28.000So the fact that these companies have always relied on AI to some extent, and now we're relying on it more and more makes them more powerful and far more dangerous.
01:08:39.000All the more reason why we have to capture the ephemeral content that they use to manipulate people.
01:08:44.000And I'm going to say it a third time, MyGoogleResearch.com, because we are desperately in need of help.
01:09:41.000It sounds important in a way that's almost difficult to conceive of.
01:09:45.000When you were talking before about the impact of personalized data, it made me realize that we're simply not evolved to live in a world where information can be curated in that manner.
01:10:01.000I imagine I imagine that the roots of behaviouralism must have, you know, a component that's anthropological and ethnographic and how we are evolved to relate to one another and how we're evolved to trust sources of information, how a consensus between a group is established.
01:10:20.000And to have tools that can wallpaper your reality like a kind of chrome sphere surrounding your mind is...
01:10:32.000It's in a sense beyond sugar in terms of an agent of interruption, stimulation and control.
01:10:42.000So I recognize how important what you're doing is.
01:10:44.000I can hear that you're necessarily evangelical about continuing the work because it sees Mick and pertains to cornerstones of our As yet still called civilisation, like democracy, like judiciary, like the ability to have open conversations, like important principles around which we presumed society was being built but for a while have suspected that in a sense these are simply gestures that are put in place while real power does what real power wants to do.
01:11:15.000And that kind of power with this kind of utility is truly terrifying.
01:11:21.000Can you speak for a moment about the aspect of, from a behaviouralist perspective, how we are not, you know, because in a sense, right, I'm a person, obviously, and I imagine that I'd be able to go, oh, well, I'm getting very biased information here from Google.
01:11:40.000How is it that we simply are not able to discern, tackle, remain objective, keep some kind of distance from this experience?
01:11:49.000Why is it so powerful, almost from an anthropological and behavioral perspective?
01:11:58.000First of all, most people can't see bias in the content that's being presented to them.
01:12:03.000So those people are very easy to shift.
01:12:05.000And in some demographic groups, you can easily shift upwards of 80% of voting preferences.
01:12:13.000Some people are just very, very vulnerable to this kind of manipulation because they trust companies like Google, they trust algorithmic output because they have no idea what algorithms are.
01:12:27.000They trust computers because they think computers are inherently objective.
01:12:31.000So you've got all that working against you.
01:12:33.000And then there's another factor, which is really, really scary.
01:12:38.000In some of the big studies that we've done, there's always a small group of people who do see the bias.
01:12:44.000Now, it's a small group, but with a big enough study, you know, that group is large enough for us to look at them separately.
01:13:04.000Well, because, presumably, they're thinking, well, I can see there's bias here, and of course, Google is objective, or computer output is objective, or algorithms are objective, so, and it's clearly It's clearly preferring that candidate over this candidate.
01:13:21.000So that candidate really must be the best.
01:13:24.000And those shifts, the shifts among the people who can see the bias are larger than the shifts among the people who can't see the bias.
01:13:32.000So, you know, there are no protections here.
01:13:36.000This is a whole new world of influence and manipulation.
01:13:40.000The only protection that I know of for sure that works Is by doing to them what they do to us.
01:13:49.000By surveilling them, capturing the data so that it can be looked at carefully by authorities and courts.
01:14:32.000It's a monitoring system to measure compliance with whatever the new laws and regulations are.
01:14:38.000But there are no monitoring systems in the EU and the UK and Google knows that.
01:14:43.000They completely ignore all of these various agreements and orders because no one is monitoring.
01:14:51.000No monitoring means you can't measure compliance.
01:14:56.000Well, I imagine we're going to have to be pretty clear about how to find your work, because I don't imagine it comes up very easily on a Google search.
01:15:05.000Dr. Robert Epstein, thank you so much for joining us today.
01:15:10.000Thank you for conveying this complex information in such an Easy to understand in spite of the vastness of the task and the scale of the challenge.
01:15:21.000Thanks for giving us some suggestions of what a solution might look like and making it clear this is something that's happening right now and how difficult it is to detect and yet there is a way to oppose it and I would recommend that all of you learn more about Dr. Robert's work by going to drrobertepstein.com and mygoogleresearch.com.
01:15:42.000Doctor, thank you so much for joining us.
01:15:43.000I'm sure we'll be talking again, although these conversations might be difficult to find online.
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