The Charlie Kirk Show - Google vs. America with Dr. Robert Epstein and Victoria Marshall

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today in the Charlie Kirk show, Dr. Robert Epstein goes deep into how Google has manipulated our elections and manipulated our children.

00:00:09.000 And Victoria Marshall walks through how the consultant class is damaging our country.

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00:00:44.000 Here we go.

00:00:45.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:01:30.000 The GOP has a political consultant problem.

00:01:35.000 A phenomenal piece in the federalists at the federalist.com by Victoria Marshall addresses one of the major issues facing Republicans.

00:01:44.000 And Victoria joins us right now.

00:01:46.000 Victoria, welcome to the program.

00:01:48.000 I thought your piece was very well written.

00:01:49.000 You also went to Hillsdale, so we're already on the same page on many different things.

00:01:54.000 I'm a big Hillsdale fan.

00:01:56.000 So walk us through your piece, The Republicans' Political Consultant Problem.

00:01:59.000 Yeah, of course.

00:02:01.000 Basically, in 2020, Democrats used the COVID-19 pandemic to significantly change the election system in our country or election laws.

00:02:11.000 So they allowed for mass unsupervised mail and balloting, as well as a month-long early voting.

00:02:19.000 So because of that, the calculus for winning elections has changed in this country.

00:02:23.000 It's all about collecting as many ballots as possible for your candidate to win instead of generating voter enthusiasm so that voters can come out on the polls on election day.

00:02:34.000 So basically, what that means is that Democrats significantly invest in the ground game.

00:02:41.000 So trying to collect as many mail-in ballots as possible before Election Day.

00:02:45.000 So they fund a lot of those ground game efforts, which includes going door to door, harvesting, and curing ballots.

00:02:52.000 Republicans, on the other hand, haven't really picked up on investing in the ground game because they hire these establishment-backed GOP consultants who basically tell their candidates to invest in the traditional campaign mailers or TV ads.

00:03:11.000 And they do that because one, they're kind of focused on the old model of generating voter enthusiasm to have their voters come out on election day.

00:03:21.000 They're not focused on mail-in ballots whatsoever.

00:03:23.000 But two, because there's a financial incentive for these GOP consultants to advise their candidates to spend money on the campaign mailers or the TV ads because they get a significant cut of the money.

00:03:38.000 So 10 to 10, ranging from 10 to 50%.

00:03:42.000 And so my argument is basically, even though how you win elections in this country has changed since 2020, there is a financial disincentive for these GOP consultants to actually tell their candidates how to win elections now.

00:03:56.000 How much money does the consultant class make?

00:04:00.000 I mean, give us some range.

00:04:02.000 Like, how much are these firms bringing in?

00:04:04.000 Um, it's it's in the millions of dollars.

00:04:07.000 I mean, back in the 2020 uh presidential election, there was like 10 consulting firms that helped Mitt Romney or, well, they didn't, he didn't win the election, but um, were focused on his efforts to uh become president.

00:04:21.000 They grossed a combined $1 billion.

00:04:25.000 Um, I remember in 2020, there was this um GOP House candidate, Kimberly Classic, I think was her name. 0.96

00:04:34.000 I could have, I might be butchering her last name, but she, um, her video kind of went viral on Twitter, but she was in a dead end race.

00:04:40.000 She was never going to win her race. 1.00

00:04:43.000 She paid one consulting firm $8 million and she never had a chance of winning.

00:04:50.000 So they're obviously pocketing a lot of money and they keep getting hired.

00:04:55.000 So there is no incentive for them to change their practices because they're making so much money.

00:05:02.000 And even if they lose all of these elections, it doesn't matter.

00:05:06.000 The Republican candidates will keep hiring them because it's kind of a revolving door.

00:05:11.000 Yeah, it's just a very close-knit world.

00:05:13.000 So if you want to aspire to higher office on the Republican side, you're told who to hire.

00:05:20.000 So, I mean, it would a very provocative idea that probably wouldn't make sense is we should just hire these people on contingency, saying if you win, then you get XYZ.

00:05:30.000 I do know they get at times victory bonuses, but they pale in comparison to the points on the ad buy.

00:05:38.000 And then whenever they're challenged, I know a little bit about this very, you know, not a lot, just kind of peripherally, because I'm, I just hear from candidates and stuff, is that they say, well, this is just the going rate.

00:05:47.000 It's 10 points or 15 points on the ad buy.

00:05:50.000 So despite all of that, though, and in your piece, you talk about how it is more lucrative to run television advertisements.

00:05:59.000 Even with that being said, we were significantly outspent on television by the Democrats as far as just not even just volume of money, but just living here in Arizona, it was five to one.

00:06:12.000 And so I have to wonder, even with that, where did this money go?

00:06:19.000 I, yeah, I don't know.

00:06:21.000 I mean, it just feels like it's a line in the considerable considerable political consulting class's pockets.

00:06:28.000 I mean, obviously, Democrats have way more money to throw around than their Republican counterparts.

00:06:34.000 I mean, they have, you know, billionaires like Sam Bakeman-Fried and Mark Zuckerberg, you know, funding these campaigns and these nonprofits that are just funded by billionaires on the Democratic side.

00:06:47.000 Republicans do not have that kind of money whatsoever.

00:06:49.000 So it surprised me that they expended way more on TV ads.

00:06:55.000 So Democrats had three advantages. 0.78

00:06:57.000 They have more money.

00:06:58.000 They spent it earlier and they had it earlier.

00:07:01.000 And they spent it wiser and better.

00:07:03.000 So they had all three.

00:07:04.000 So is there a similar consultant enriching scheme on the left or on the Democrat side?

00:07:12.000 Or is it that just because they have more money, it just by definition gets kind of baked into their calculus?

00:07:18.000 Or do Democrat donors have more oversight over this?

00:07:22.000 I definitely think there is kind of the problem with the Democratic political consulting class as well.

00:07:28.000 I think the Intercept actually ran a great report on that.

00:07:33.000 But the thing is, is that Democrats actually care about winning.

00:07:36.000 So even though that is a problem, they're going to do anything they can to win.

00:07:41.000 Republicans, they don't care about winning.

00:07:43.000 They're perfectly fine with losing.

00:07:45.000 But Democrats, you got to hand it to them.

00:07:48.000 They know how to win and they're out for blood.

00:07:51.000 Yes.

00:07:52.000 I mean, and so again, no one went to jail for illegally leaking the Dobbs decision, but I don't think we quite have appreciated.

00:08:00.000 So the leak happened in early May and the decision happened in late June.

00:08:05.000 That gave them 60 days to go hyper fundraise and build a machine.

00:08:11.000 It was a perfect time to raise money.

00:08:13.000 So it gave them a 60-day head start where they otherwise would have had to really scramble in July and August and ballots come out in early October.

00:08:23.000 And so what would you recommend, having done some very thoughtful research on this, to be the solution?

00:08:29.000 I mean, where does the RNC come into this, for example?

00:08:32.000 Because now there's a lot of chatter about who should run the RNC.

00:08:36.000 How do we fix this? 0.94

00:08:38.000 We have to invest in the same kind of apparatus that the left has.

00:08:43.000 We have to have, we have to be harvesting and carrying ballots.

00:08:47.000 We have to have the same kind of get up the vote, you know, crazy phone banking, going door to door.

00:08:56.000 I know the Warnock campaign, they were paying people to just call 40 to 50 of their closest friends and family to vote for Warnock.

00:09:03.000 I mean, the Republicans aren't doing that at all.

00:09:05.000 So it's just completely mirror their tactics and beat them at their own game.

00:09:10.000 Yeah, I mean, I was told by an RNC operative recently that they had an unprecedented ground game that was the greatest ground game ever.

00:09:18.000 Do you see any evidence of that?

00:09:21.000 Well, I mean, the Herschel Walker actually came pretty close to Warnock.

00:09:27.000 So it wasn't like a complete defeat, but I didn't really see any evidence of the RNC's ground game.

00:09:34.000 I know there was a Georgian nonprofit group that actually knocked on, I think it was ACTNOW Georgia, that knocked on 4 million doors and made 1 million phone calls to Georgians leading up to the runoff.

00:09:50.000 Their Republican counterpart, which I mentioned in my latest article I wrote about the runoff, only knocked on 400,000 doors.

00:09:58.000 Yeah, okay.

00:09:58.000 I'm sorry.

00:09:59.000 I was just thinking, if a Republican group is telling you that they knocked on 4 million doors, not possible.

00:10:04.000 I mean, we're in the door knocking business at turning point action.

00:10:07.000 We're still small.

00:10:08.000 Our political arm is not where we want it to be yet.

00:10:10.000 We're growing it.

00:10:11.000 And when we hit tens of thousands of doors, we're thrilled.

00:10:14.000 Doors are hard.

00:10:15.000 I mean, so Democrats, 4 million doors, totally believe it.

00:10:18.000 That makes sense.

00:10:19.000 And so, but such an important point.

00:10:22.000 Also, I want to talk about the fundraising splits with you, Victoria, because this is something that people don't realize: that if you donate money to a candidate, that someone might be earning 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 99% of that money very well might not go to your intended target.

00:10:40.000 To elaborate on this a little bit more, the Democrats do have a vetting organization where all their donors get together and they talk about in great detail how they vet progressive pro-democracy organizations and allocate funding from that.

00:10:59.000 And they try to ice out the bad consultants and synergize their strategy.

00:11:04.000 There have been other attempts to do this on the Republican side very unsuccessfully because there's so many ideological differences on the right.

00:11:12.000 You got the MAGA stuff, you got the America First stuff, the Chamber of Commerce stuff, you got the more libertarian stuff.

00:11:19.000 So I want to talk about this here.

00:11:23.000 You talk a lot about some of these races.

00:11:25.000 You talk about Ted Budd, JD Vance, also with Dr. Oz.

00:11:30.000 Walk us through that part of the piece.

00:11:32.000 Yeah, basically, this is kind of a different take on the consultant problem.

00:11:39.000 So the actual advice the political consultants were giving these candidates was kind of in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

00:11:47.000 They were telling people like Dr. Oz, Ted Budd, basically, stay away from the abortion question.

00:11:58.000 Don't talk about it whatsoever because it'll hurt you.

00:12:01.000 And what that ended up happening was that then their opponents, so Dr. Oz' opponents could define him as anti-woman, anti-women's rights.

00:12:11.000 And so his opponent, John Fetterman, kind of got to define the debate instead of Oz basically being able to be on the offense from the beginning and say, no, I'm actually pro-woman.

00:12:22.000 Here's why abortion is egregious.

00:12:25.000 Here's why the Dobbs decision was a good thing.

00:12:28.000 So actually not being kind of on, well, just not being able to define the debate in terms of the terms he wanted to have hurt Dr. Oz and the other candidates who shied away from abortion.

00:12:42.000 And that was the, once again, the GOP-backed or the establishment-backed GOP political consultant class's advice.

00:12:51.000 The kind of consensus amongst a lot of grassroots is there is an enormous amount of capital that is misspent and misallocated.

00:13:04.000 And what you talk about in your piece is exactly right.

00:13:09.000 The problem is that we don't really have the comfortable margin for this to continue.

00:13:15.000 And so the consultants earn money no matter what.

00:13:19.000 You mentioned this previously, but I want you to build this out a little bit more.

00:13:24.000 If consultants were to build out a ground game, they actually get poorer.

00:13:29.000 Is that fair to say?

00:13:32.000 Yeah, I mean, they're not going to be making the kind of money that they make from TV ads or campaign mailers, right?

00:13:38.000 So they can get anywhere from 10 to 50% of the cut of those ad buys.

00:13:43.000 And with purely investing in the ground game, I mean, the consultants are only going to be making money off of their consulting fees.

00:13:52.000 So there's no financial incentive to tell their candidates to invest in harvesting or curing ballots or doing more phone banking or hiring another third-party entity or working with a nonprofit group to try and get as many voters as possible to elect them or to try and harvest as many ballots as possible.

00:14:15.000 There's no financial incentive.

00:14:18.000 The current incentive structure is set up where if they win, all right.

00:14:23.000 If they lose, all right.

00:14:25.000 Runoffs are great, by the way.

00:14:27.000 Runoffs are like consultants' best friends.

00:14:29.000 They banked a whole nother, do you have an idea?

00:14:31.000 If they make 10 or 15% on an ad buy and Herschel Walker did a $25 million ad buy, they're making $2.5 million on that ad buy.

00:14:40.000 And for small dollar donors that are just giving $10, $50, $100, they are just getting feliced by this consultant machine.

00:14:51.000 It's got to change.

00:14:53.000 I hope sometime soon.

00:14:54.000 Victoria, thank you so much.

00:14:56.000 Thank you for having me.

00:14:57.000 Everybody, email us your thoughts.

00:14:58.000 Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.

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00:15:06.000 We may never know the extent that Google has impacted our political discourse, our dialogue, or our elections.

00:15:17.000 But our next guest has done a lifetime of research looking into this topic.

00:15:24.000 He makes some very bold proclamations where he believes that the midterm elections were rigged by Google from mind manipulation to search engine optimization to search engine manipulation effect, S-E-M-E, and all other new types of online influence.

00:15:47.000 Dr. Robert Epstein is brilliant and he understands this issue better than anybody else.

00:15:55.000 And he's going to talk about from a very fair and analytical perspective, how we really don't have elections anymore.

00:16:02.000 We have mind simulation programs brought to you by Google.

00:16:06.000 Dr. Robert Epstein joins us next.

00:16:12.000 The end of the year is right around the corner, and it's time for you to consider a change in your investment plan.

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00:17:13.000 Dr. Robert Epstein, and he has an incredible piece called How Google Stopped the Red Wave.

00:17:20.000 And Dr. Epstein is with us now.

00:17:21.000 Doctor, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:17:24.000 Tell us about your piece, How Google Stopped the Red Wave.

00:17:27.000 Well, sure.

00:17:27.000 Nice to be with you today, Charlie.

00:17:29.000 I remember you from Liberty.

00:17:34.000 In this article I wrote for the Epoch Times, How Google Stopped the Red Wave, which people can get access to directly by going to the midtermswererigged.com.

00:17:47.000 Themidtermsworrigged.com.

00:17:49.000 I tried to come up with something that was memorable.

00:17:53.000 I explain that in this particular election cycle, that we were able to recruit more than 2,000 registered voters, mainly in swing states, and to monitor what the tech companies were sending to real registered voters.

00:18:14.000 And this is a mix of conservatives, liberals, and moderates through their computers.

00:18:20.000 So we were actually looking on the computers of real people and capturing the ephemeral content that companies like Google use to manipulate opinions and votes on a massive scale.

00:18:34.000 Normally, ephemeral content is lost forever.

00:18:37.000 We have, over the past six years or so, have developed a unique system, the first one in the world that does to Google and the gang what they do to us and our kids.

00:18:51.000 That is, we've learned how to monitor them to see the actual content they're sending to real people.

00:18:57.000 And we preserved more than 2.4 million ephemeral experiences on Google, on Bing, Google's homepage, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

00:19:11.000 And we have been in the process of analyzing the data we've collected, looking for signs of bias or manipulation.

00:19:19.000 We have found on Google in particular, extreme forms of manipulation, bias in search results, bias in YouTube videos, and in fact, of targeted messaging on their home page.

00:19:38.000 By that I mean sending go vote reminders less to conservatives, sending fewer of those reminders to conservatives and more to liberals and moderates.

00:19:51.000 Now, that's a very, very blatant vote manipulation.

00:19:55.000 And bottom line is that we've captured a massive amount of information that is normally lost forever.

00:20:01.000 That's ephemeral content.

00:20:03.000 Number one, number two, we found, again, these signs of bias.

00:20:10.000 Number three, roughly speaking, we've only just begun analyzing the data, but that level of bias, if it had been present nationwide and Google had been using these shenanigans nationwide, would have shifted.

00:20:24.000 Now, this is a real number.

00:20:27.000 So I mean, I don't exaggerate numbers.

00:20:30.000 It would have shifted about 80 million votes in the midterm elections.

00:20:34.000 Now, that's spread across hundreds of elections.

00:20:39.000 So it sounds like an impossibly large number, but that's spread across hundreds of elections.

00:20:46.000 This is not, remember, the midterms are not a national election.

00:20:49.000 So the national election 2020, we know that they shifted about 6 million votes, almost all in the direction of Joe Biden, whom I supported.

00:20:59.000 I'm not a conservative.

00:21:01.000 But in the midterms, they're affecting hundreds of elections, local, regional, state elections around the country.

00:21:08.000 And the level of bias that they had in the content they were showing real voters would have shifted roughly 80 million votes without anyone knowing and normally without anyone capturing any of that content.

00:21:24.000 Of course, our monitoring systems have changed that.

00:21:27.000 And I'll just mention here before we get into some details that we are now expanding our monitoring system.

00:21:34.000 Normally, we shut down after each election.

00:21:37.000 Not this time.

00:21:38.000 We are expanding.

00:21:40.000 We're past now 3,500 of these field agents, we call them.

00:21:47.000 And we are continuing to expand every single day.

00:21:52.000 And by the end of next year, we will have a digital shield in place for the United States of America.

00:21:58.000 That is to say, a very large panel of these field agents in all 50 states.

00:22:05.000 And this will allow us to keep the tech companies out of our elections for the foreseeable future and away from our children.

00:22:17.000 So can you give an example of the ephemeral experience?

00:22:21.000 What would that, you said you have 2 million examples of them or instances.

00:22:26.000 Give us a couple examples of what you mean by that.

00:22:29.000 Well, sure.

00:22:30.000 The simplest one for people to picture is that you go to Google's homepage to look something up, and that homepage is seen 500 million times a day just in the United States.

00:22:43.000 And there on the homepage is a big, cute cartoon saying, go vote.

00:22:49.000 It's election day.

00:22:50.000 Go vote.

00:22:51.000 And maybe there's even a link that takes you to information about where your nearest polling station is.

00:22:59.000 So here's the problem.

00:23:01.000 The problem is that even if that went to everybody, it would still be a vote manipulation because of the demographics of people who use Google.

00:23:11.000 They tend to be young.

00:23:13.000 They tend to be more leaning left.

00:23:15.000 So it would still be a vote manipulation if they sent it to everyone.

00:23:18.000 But we know, because we're tracking this now, we know that they're not sending it to everyone.

00:23:25.000 Now, think about how powerful a manipulation that is.

00:23:29.000 If you are sending vote reminders mainly or exclusively to members of one party, you can on Election Day itself generate an additional 450,000 votes for that party or that candidate.

00:23:47.000 And no one will know that you have done it, except for our monitoring system, of course, which is the only one in the world.

00:23:55.000 So that's an example of an ephemeral.

00:23:58.000 Now, what makes it ephemeral is you see it on your screen and then you click on something or type in a search term and then it's gone.

00:24:06.000 It disappears.

00:24:07.000 And there's no record of it.

00:24:09.000 That's why in 2018, when there was a leak of emails to the Wall Street Journal and some employees at Google are talking about how can we use ephemeral experiences to change people's views about Trump's travel ban.

00:24:27.000 In other words, internally in the company, they know the power that these experiences have.

00:24:34.000 They know that they leave no paper trail.

00:24:36.000 So they use them deliberately to influence people, more than 3.5 billion people around the world with no one to stop them.

00:24:46.000 So let me just, I mean, I fully agree with everything you're saying.

00:24:48.000 Let me just play devil's advocate.

00:24:49.000 They'd say, how could you possibly measure the impact of an ephemeral experience?

00:24:52.000 It's short.

00:24:54.000 So how would you respond to that?

00:24:58.000 Well, since 2013, we've been conducting randomized controlled experiments, experiments that are extremely rigorous scientifically with real registered voters, and not just in the U.S., but other countries too.

00:25:15.000 And we've been looking at one manipulation after another that we've discovered and measuring and quantifying the power that each kind of ephemeral experiences has to shift votes.

00:25:29.000 So targeted messaging, we have a paper now under review with a scientific journal that measures quite precisely what the power is of targeted messaging has to shift votes and opinions.

00:25:43.000 It's enormous.

00:25:44.000 You can easily shift the voting preferences of 40% or more of undecided voters using targeted messages with no one aware that this is being done.

00:25:57.000 How would they know?

00:25:58.000 How would they know that they're getting a reminder and someone else isn't?

00:26:02.000 Or how would they know?

00:26:03.000 Yeah, no, but an example would also be if you typed in, let's take someone who ran for the United States Senate unsuccessfully, Adam Laxalt, right?

00:26:12.000 So if you were to type in Adam Laxalt and the top search results would say scandal or meaning recommendations, would that be an ephemeral experience?

00:26:23.000 Or Donald Trump, corrupt, impeached, narcissistic, instead of stance on economy, or would that be the top search query recommendations in the tabs below?

00:26:36.000 It's an excellent question. 0.59

00:26:37.000 And when you go to google.com, go to their search engine, which you should never, ever do.

00:26:44.000 No one should use that.

00:26:45.000 It's their main surveillance platform.

00:26:47.000 It's not an information source.

00:26:49.000 It's a surveillance platform.

00:26:50.000 That's all it is from a business perspective.

00:26:53.000 They're just tricking you into giving up personal information.

00:26:56.000 There are better search engines, believe it or not, faster, better search engines that don't track you.

00:27:01.000 So don't ever use google.com.

00:27:03.000 Again, if there's nothing else you get from this program, don't use that.

00:27:07.000 But here we go.

00:27:08.000 You go to google.com, you start typing something.

00:27:11.000 If whatever you're typing begins with the letter A, they're going to flash suggestions at you.

00:27:16.000 And usually most of those suggestions are going to be go to Amazon, go to amazon.com because Amazon is Google's largest advertiser.

00:27:28.000 And Google is Amazon's largest single source of traffic.

00:27:33.000 So they're starting to manipulate you from the first character you type.

00:27:36.000 They're manipulating you with search suggestions.

00:27:39.000 Then maybe you click on something and now down below you get search results and maybe an answer box or two or three.

00:27:47.000 And those answer boxes are biased and the search results are biased.

00:27:52.000 And we've measured precisely what impact biased search suggestions have on people, what impact biased answer boxes have on people.

00:28:02.000 And most importantly, what impact biased search results have on people.

00:28:07.000 That was our first discovery when we started realizing that the internet was offering these new methods of manipulation that had never existed before.

00:28:19.000 These are extremely, extremely dangerous manipulations because, number one, people can't see them.

00:28:27.000 You know, you can see a commercial or a billboard.

00:28:30.000 You can't see these kinds of manipulations.

00:28:33.000 That's right.

00:28:34.000 Number two is that they leave no paper trail.

00:28:40.000 They're all ephemeral.

00:28:42.000 They vaporize.

00:28:43.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:28:45.000 They just disappear.

00:28:47.000 And number three, they're in the hands of a couple of tech monopolies.

00:28:52.000 In other words, they're not competitive.

00:28:53.000 You can't counteract them.

00:28:55.000 If you, Charlie, you put up a billboard supporting your candidate, I can put up another billboard.

00:29:01.000 I could put up two billboards, in fact, right next to it supporting my candidate.

00:29:06.000 But if Google, if the platform itself is favoring one candidate or one party or one cause, guess what?

00:29:16.000 There's nothing you can do.

00:29:18.000 You cannot counteract it.

00:29:20.000 It doesn't matter how much you pay them.

00:29:22.000 You cannot counteract what they're doing.

00:29:25.000 The danger is how subtle it is, how subtle it is.

00:29:29.000 And it's millions and millions of minor adjustments that are focused on a certain outcome.

00:29:35.000 I want to ask you about, there's several aspects of this that I want to unpack with you.

00:29:41.000 But so you talk about how Google manipulates.

00:29:44.000 Is it a focused and articulated political agenda from Google's engineers?

00:29:53.000 Or does some of this just kind of happen over a period of time?

00:29:56.000 Can you talk about that?

00:29:57.000 I mean, is this something where they know what they are doing intentionally?

00:30:01.000 And now we're seeing the fruit of that.

00:30:04.000 Well, the first few years that I was doing research on ephemeral experiences and learning about the power that Google and other companies have to shift opinions and votes to impact our children.

00:30:17.000 First few years I was doing this work, I really didn't know whether Google was actually using these tools and if they were using them deliberately and systematically.

00:30:28.000 Now that's changed in the last few years because at this point, we have had so many whistleblowers, people who were fired by the company or who just couldn't stand it anymore and who quit.

00:30:39.000 Tristan Harris was one of the first.

00:30:43.000 His title was a design ethicist.

00:30:46.000 And he said straight out, I was part of a team that was manipulating the thinking and behavior and opinions of more than a billion people around the world.

00:30:56.000 That was pretty clear.

00:30:57.000 There are a whole bunch of them now.

00:30:59.000 I've gotten to know some of them.

00:31:01.000 Zach Voorhees, when he left the company, and he'd been a senior software engineer there for more than eight years, he took with him more than 950 pages of documents and a video.

00:31:12.000 And among those documents were manuals having to do with what they call algorithmic fairness.

00:31:24.000 Algorithmic fairness is their internal term for social engineering.

00:31:28.000 In other words, yes, they deliberately and systematically alter content that presents a worldview that they support.

00:31:38.000 So, what worldview do they support?

00:31:40.000 Well, just again, look at the numbers, look at the data.

00:31:43.000 95% of donations from Google employees and the Google company go to Democrats.

00:31:51.000 Now, I lean left, so I think that's just great, but I don't like a private company having the kind of power they have to shift opinions and to undermine our democracy.

00:32:05.000 And we're now figuring out what they're doing to our kids.

00:32:08.000 That's our newest research effort.

00:32:12.000 So, the answer is yes.

00:32:14.000 We know from whistleblowers now, we know from leaked emails, leaked PowerPoint presentations, leaked videos.

00:32:23.000 My favorite one, it's unbelievable, by the way.

00:32:27.000 And if you go to my website, well, you could go to mygoogleresearch.com.

00:32:34.000 That's the place to start if you're interested in what we're doing and you want to help us.

00:32:39.000 Go to mygoogleresearch.com.

00:32:41.000 But, the point is, one of the videos that leaked there is an eight-minute video was never meant to be seen outside the company.

00:32:49.000 It was produced by their advanced products division.

00:32:52.000 It's called The Selfish Ledger.

00:32:54.000 If you look up The Selfish Ledger and then Transcript or Epstein Transcript, you actually get a transcript of it with a link where you can watch this video.

00:33:03.000 This video is about the company's ability to re-engineer humanity.

00:33:11.000 They call it re-sequencing human behavior.

00:33:17.000 And it literally says, according to company values.

00:33:22.000 So, the answer to your question is: hell yes.

00:33:27.000 They are deliberate and systematic in their efforts to alter our thinking and our behavior and the thinking and behavior of our kids.

00:33:37.000 Yes.

00:33:38.000 And we're going to talk about that.

00:33:39.000 No one is stopping them.

00:33:43.000 My team is the only team in the world that does the kind of work that we're doing.

00:33:47.000 So, Doctor, you're talking about our kids.

00:33:49.000 What do you mean by that?

00:33:50.000 I think we're all aware that a lot of there's been a lot of shifting of the way our children think about a lot of topics, especially kind of socially controversial topics.

00:34:06.000 There's been a lot of quick shifting in the way young people think about many things.

00:34:14.000 And, you know, I find that this is a mystery to most parents, especially the speed of the change.

00:34:23.000 We are now beginning to collect data from children, from young children and from teens.

00:34:29.000 And we are going to see the actual content on a very large scale that these companies are sending to young people.

00:34:38.000 I think we're going to find just shocking, shocking content.

00:34:44.000 Not just pornography and violence, but I think we're going to see very deliberate attempts at indoctrination.

00:34:53.000 Again, it's social engineering.

00:34:56.000 I think what seems so mysterious to us when we actually dig into this kind of data is the mystery is going to be gone.

00:35:04.000 We're going to see what they're doing.

00:35:06.000 And we're going to stop them because that's the point now of us building the first ever national digital shield, viewing the content that the tech companies are sending to voters, to kids in all 50 states on a large scale, monitoring that 24 hours a day, looking for shenanigans and bias and manipulations and exposing them as we find them.

00:35:36.000 And we've already seen two instances, one very clear instance, in which when we expose Google, they back off.

00:35:45.000 They have to back off.

00:35:47.000 So this is the solution in the absence of laws and regulations, which Washington is never going to give us.

00:35:55.000 In the absence of laws and regulations, we need to work together.

00:35:59.000 That means me and you, Charlie, and your viewers, we need to work together to build this nationwide monitoring system.

00:36:10.000 And, you know, I've had help from some people with funding.

00:36:19.000 I've had help from some media people without whom I wouldn't even be able to do any research.

00:36:26.000 So people like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, and others.

00:36:36.000 And the fact is, I couldn't do my work unless you folks, you and your colleagues were giving, you know, bringing attention to my work.

00:36:46.000 And frankly, not just helping with the donations, but also putting me in touch with big foundations, putting me in touch with major donors who can provide a lot of funding.

00:37:00.000 And it's very expensive to do what we're doing, but it has to be done.

00:37:04.000 It's not optional.

00:37:06.000 If we're not monitoring them the way they monitor us and our kids 24 hours a day, if we're not monitoring them, the actual content that they're sending to real people, that means we will never know the impact that they're having on our democracy, on our elections, on our children.

00:37:24.000 We will never know because, again, all of these manipulations are largely invisible to people and they all use ephemeral content, which appears and impacts you and then disappears and it's gone forever and it's not stored anywhere.

00:37:41.000 And no authorities can go back in time and reconstruct that content.

00:37:45.000 It's impossible.

00:37:46.000 So I have a couple questions closing here.

00:37:49.000 You've mentioned this briefly, but you say you're on the left, which fascinates me and will fascinate our audience.

00:37:56.000 We're obviously a conservative show.

00:37:58.000 And you admit and acknowledge that this manipulation is currently actually benefiting your desired political objective.

00:38:06.000 So the obvious question is, then why are you fighting so hard on it?

00:38:10.000 Out of principle and out of fear and concern that this is just an immoral or evil leviathan that could destroy us all.

00:38:20.000 I'll take that one.

00:38:21.000 But, you know, I would put it another way.

00:38:24.000 I would say simply that I love America.

00:38:27.000 You notice I'm wearing a, I don't know if you can see it, but I am wearing a White House issued pin that was given to me by someone in the White House.

00:38:35.000 And that was during the Trump administration, not the Biden administration.

00:38:39.000 I love America.

00:38:40.000 I love democracy more than I love any particular candidate or party.

00:38:45.000 I think everyone should be able to agree with that, that we love America more than any particular party.

00:38:53.000 And that's why.

00:38:55.000 And yes, I'm horrified by what we keep finding as we continue to investigate these companies.

00:39:00.000 I am horrified.

00:39:02.000 I don't want private companies that are not accountable to the public to have this kind of power.

00:39:08.000 But by setting up monitoring systems, by setting up National Digital Shield, which we'll have in place fully by the end of 2023, that will make these companies finally accountable to the public, which they've never been.

00:39:24.000 They are so arrogant.

00:39:26.000 They act like gods because they have the power of gods and no one has been trying to stop them. 0.80

00:39:32.000 Nobody.

00:39:33.000 So I'm curious, just from all of your media, you mentioned Joe Rogan, you mentioned Tucker.

00:39:38.000 Do you find a welcome audience for traditional media or activists on the left as much as you would say the traditional right currently?

00:39:49.000 No, in fact, they have blacklisted me.

00:39:55.000 I mean, and that's all the places I've written over the years were for places like USA Today and Time Magazine.

00:40:02.000 And, you know, I mean, U.S. News and World Report and so on.

00:40:08.000 Now these editors won't even respond to my emails because they all think I'm helping the right.

00:40:14.000 I'm not helping the right, not at all.

00:40:17.000 You're helping America is what you're doing.

00:40:19.000 I'm helping America.

00:40:20.000 I'm helping democracy.

00:40:22.000 You know, democracy is a flawed system, but show me a better one.

00:40:27.000 You can't.

00:40:28.000 It's impossible.

00:40:29.000 And yes, I'm fighting hard.

00:40:33.000 And at some cost, by the way, to me personally, I have members of my own family who won't even talk to me at this point.

00:40:44.000 Dear friends of mine, one of whom is the head of engineering at Google, he stopped talking to me.

00:40:49.000 His wife, who ran a school for autistic kids where I was on the board for many years, she stopped talking to me.

00:40:56.000 This is without any conflict.

00:40:58.000 I've never had any conflict with these people at all.

00:41:00.000 They just don't like the work I'm doing and they don't like the wrongs that I am exposing.

00:41:07.000 But I'm not going to stop because the fact that my team is the only team in the world doing this stuff, that means we have to keep going.

00:41:16.000 We have to go harder and faster.

00:41:19.000 And I do need help.

00:41:21.000 I have to emphasize that.

00:41:22.000 So if people go to my googleresearch.com, they can get links to all kinds of information.

00:41:28.000 The work we do is rigorous.

00:41:32.000 It adheres to the very highest standards of scientific principles and research and principles.

00:41:42.000 And, you know, we publish in peer-reviewed journals.

00:41:46.000 We present at scientific meetings.

00:41:48.000 This is hard science that we're doing and it's hard to do, by the way.

00:41:53.000 But we've been doing that now for 10 years and we've been developing monitoring systems now since 2016.

00:41:59.000 And the combination of the two, you see, the basic research tells us the power that these companies have.

00:42:06.000 And that includes, by the way, even Amazon, because we've published research a few months ago on Amazon Alexa.

00:42:13.000 We have a perfect Alexa simulator.

00:42:16.000 It's pretty cool, actually.

00:42:18.000 The point is, if you ask our simulator a question that's politically related, we can give any answer that we want.

00:42:26.000 So we've done controlled experiments showing that a single question and answer interaction on Alexa can produce shifts in voting preferences by more than 40%.

00:42:41.000 And that if over and over again, Alexa gives you biased answers favoring one candidate, we can get shifts of over 65% among undecided voters with no one having the slightest idea that they've been manipulated.

00:42:59.000 And so we now are very close, by the way, to adding to adding equipment and software to our monitoring capabilities.

00:43:08.000 So we're going to be able to monitor sometime early next year.

00:43:12.000 We're going to be able to monitor the answers that they're getting from personal assistants on their mobile phones, on their tablets, and so on.

00:43:23.000 You know, we are doing to them what they do to us and our kids 24 hours a day.

00:43:30.000 And I need help.

00:43:31.000 So my googleresearch.com, that's one place to go.

00:43:34.000 Go to the midtermswererigged.com and you'll see my new article explaining how aggressively we monitored content that was being sent to people during the midterm elections.

00:43:47.000 You know, what we're doing is it's very stressful, but it's also exciting.

00:43:54.000 You know, we have very, very dedicated people working here.

00:43:59.000 And we try to be as conscious as we can about security and safety and privacy.

00:44:06.000 But you have to ask yourself this, and this, I know, bothered Joe Rogan quite a bit.

00:44:11.000 Why are we the only group in the world, the only research group in the world doing this kind of research?

00:44:21.000 Part of it is a little self-explanatory because it doesn't exactly win you friends.

00:44:25.000 In closing here, let's talk about what individual people can do.

00:44:30.000 What can somebody listening right now support you and they should.

00:44:34.000 But what browser should they be using?

00:44:37.000 What competitors should they be using?

00:44:39.000 What behavior should they change?

00:44:41.000 Should they ever use YouTube, for example?

00:44:44.000 Because that's largely unavoidable, but it's an extension of the Leviathan.

00:44:49.000 Walk us through it.

00:44:52.000 Okay, I'm going to walk you through it, but first, let me, since you mentioned YouTube, YouTube is one of the platforms we've been monitoring.

00:44:59.000 And we found that in some of the swing states, more than 80% of the videos being recommended to people, you know, through the up next suggestion, which is that video in the upper right-hand corner, more than 80% of them, 85% or more in some states, are coming from liberal news sources.

00:45:22.000 And it doesn't matter who they're going to.

00:45:25.000 They're highly, highly biased.

00:45:28.000 Okay, now to answer your question, a lot of people ask me this.

00:45:31.000 So what can I do to protect my own privacy, the privacy of my family?

00:45:35.000 So I've summarized it.

00:45:37.000 So if you go to myprivacytips.com, myprivacytips.com, then you can read an essay and it starts with the following sentence, more or less.

00:45:48.000 I have not received a targeted ad on my mobile phone or laptop computer since 2014.

00:45:56.000 That's me, and that's the truth.

00:45:58.000 So there are ways to use the technology, use the internet, and to protect your privacy.

00:46:07.000 The first thing you have to do is give up Gmail.

00:46:10.000 You don't have to give it up exactly.

00:46:12.000 You just have to set up Gmail so it forwards everything to your new private email address.

00:46:17.000 So you just don't have to check Gmail anymore.

00:46:20.000 Your content's still there, but you don't have to check it.

00:46:23.000 So now you're checking for your emails on your new private email, which is I use ProtonMail.

00:46:31.000 So it's at protonmail.com.

00:46:33.000 And that uses end-to-end encryption.

00:46:36.000 It's like the old days where you wrote a letter, you put it in the mailbox, no one can see it until it reaches the recipient.

00:46:44.000 That's how end-to-end encryption works.

00:46:46.000 So Proton, the Proton company, they themselves can't read your emails.

00:46:52.000 So, you know, you have to get, you shift over to a private email service.

00:47:00.000 You shift over to private search engines and private browsers.

00:47:04.000 What we're recommending right now is Brave.com.

00:47:07.000 Brave is fabulous.

00:47:08.000 Brave is faster than Chrome, completely private, and it has its own search engine, which doesn't track you.

00:47:16.000 So if you go to myprivacytips.com, you'll see a whole list there, seven things you can do to protect your privacy and the privacy of your kids.

00:47:29.000 And I have converted, by the way, that I know of, tens of thousands of people, some of whom are very grateful, have expressed their gratitude, you know, and some of them very generously to support our research.

00:47:43.000 And, you know, you've got to do this.

00:47:45.000 This is not an option.

00:47:47.000 And if you tell me I have nothing to hide, you know how many times I've heard that?

00:47:52.000 I can't count them.

00:47:53.000 But if you tell me you have nothing to hide, then you just don't get it.

00:47:58.000 You don't understand what's happening because, first of all, everyone has things to hide or things that would be embarrassing to them.

00:48:05.000 But that's not the point.

00:48:06.000 The point is when they collect all this information, even if you're a perfectly innocent person, they can use that information to manipulate you and your family without anyone knowing because the more you know about someone, the easier it is to manipulate them.

00:48:24.000 And Google literally builds these very elegant, massive digital models of all of us.

00:48:31.000 And those models allow them to predict our wants and our needs and our behavior and allow them to manipulate us very subtly.

00:48:43.000 You used that term earlier, Charlie.

00:48:45.000 And you don't want to give up information to private companies.

00:48:52.000 And there's no reason to.

00:48:54.000 There's no reason.

00:48:55.000 You don't have to be used.

00:48:57.000 These are not what you think they are.

00:48:59.000 These Gmail and Chrome and Android, which is also Google and YouTube.

00:49:04.000 These are not what they seem to be on the surface.

00:49:07.000 On the surface, they seem to be free tools, free, cool tools.

00:49:13.000 They're not free because when you use them, you give up your freedom.

00:49:18.000 That's not free.

00:49:19.000 Nope.

00:49:20.000 And from a business perspective, they're nothing like what you see.

00:49:24.000 From a business perspective, these are surveillance platforms.

00:49:28.000 That's all they are.

00:49:29.000 They're just surveillance platforms.

00:49:30.000 They trick you into giving up personal information.

00:49:34.000 That information is used to make money off of you.

00:49:38.000 It's basically sold, and that information is used to influence you.

00:49:45.000 And you are the product.

00:49:46.000 Dr. Robert Epstein, thank you so much.

00:49:48.000 Appreciate it.

00:49:49.000 We have to have you back on soon.

00:49:50.000 Thank you.

00:49:51.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:49:52.000 You're doing good work.

00:49:52.000 Thank you.

00:49:53.000 Thank you.

00:49:54.000 Everybody, see you guys tomorrow.

00:49:56.000 Thanks so much.

00:49:59.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 09, 2022

Google vs. America with Dr. Robert Epstein and Victoria Marshall

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