Google and Mind Control with Amaryllis Fox and Robert Epstein
In this gripping episode, Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Campaign manager Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, speak with Dr. Robert Epstein, a leading psychologist and expert on digital manipulation, about how Big Tech companies like Google are shifting public opinion and potentially influencing elections. Dr. Epstein explains the tactics used by these tech giants to control what users see and how they think, and he outlines strategies for combating this digital manipulation. Discover eye-opening insights on the fight for fair elections and the future of democracy.
Hey, everybody, welcome to a special edition of the podcast.
And today my guest is Dr.
Robert Epstein.
Dr.
Epstein is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology.
He's the former editor in chief of Psychology Today.
He's a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Dr.
Epstein is a pioneer in the study of new forms of manipulation.
That had been made possible by the Internet.
He has testified twice before Congress about his research in this area, and he's also developed the world's first large-scale system for preserving and analyzing the ephemeral content of Big Ten companies used to manipulate elections, children, and adult human beings.
His new congressional testimony is accessible at HTTPS colon backslash backslash or slash slash 2023epsteintestimony.com.
A dashboard that summarizes the data his new monitoring system is collecting can be viewed at HTTPS colon slash slash americasdigitalshield.com.
His research suggests that without an aggressive monitoring system in place in the 2024 presidential election, Luka alone will be able to shift between 6.4 and 25.5 million votes.
And I first became aware of Dr.
Epstein's research, I think, around 2016 when I was reading about the SIEM, which is the search engine manipulation effect.
Which was just becoming evident at that time at the beginning of the coronavirus endemic and was extensively used thereafter to manipulate public perception, to manipulate public content behavior.
I remember doing a podcast, one of my earliest podcasts, about this theme in which I think it was Dr.
Epstein who said it was the most powerful Propaganda and manipulating tool ever devised by humanity.
And it's really astonishing, his work about the capacity to shift public perception and therefore alter and manipulate public content is truly frightening.
And it's all done Without the targets of this kind of manipulation, ever knowing that they've been manipulated, it can induce essentially a mass psychosis.
And my co-host today is my daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox, who is Amaryllis Fox Kennedy.
Who is also my campaign manager, who did something on this campaign that has got an extraordinary mind.
She's the smartest person I've ever met.
And she was able to do something in this campaign that everybody said was impossible, which was to get on the ballot in every state, to manage 100,000 volunteers and the complexity of that task.
And to do everything else, to write policy papers and generate this huge amount of content for us.
At a superhuman level, Amaryllis spent her early career, joined the CIA after 9-11 and spent a career as a clandestine spy in the weapons of mass destruction program.
After she left the CIA, she became a tech entrepreneur and started a very successful company.
Later sold to Twitter, and then she went to work managing, I think it was communications, right, at Twitter.
Amarillo, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm doing this off the top of my head.
You got it, Bobby.
Consumer commerce.
Yeah, using your heuristics-based natural language processing to identify Product mentions, which in its own way, I think we'll probably delve into later in this conversation, but a great fan of Dr.
Epstein's work and really pleased to be here today.
Anyway, I always tell this story that somebody told me that Amaryllis was the smartest woman that they've ever met.
And I said, no, she's the smartest human being that you've ever met.
So it's a joy to have you back on the show, co-hosting with me, Amaryllis.
And If you want to follow Amaryllis, she's at, what is your Twitter?
Do you do Twitter or Instagram?
I do, I do.
X, yes, at Amaryllis Fox.
Okay, so, you know, that introduction, you can consider it a question, Dr.
Epstein.
Just describe to us how the SIEM works, SIEM is search engine manipulation.
In fact, How it works and, you know, just a brief punchline of the extraordinary power that these tech companies are now wielding to do what the CIA has always wanted to do, which is without ever going into a country And doing all the things they used to do,
assassinating leaders, paying off unions, destroying the credibility of institutions, driving division and polarization between different groups in the society, all of those other tools they developed.
For 20 years of experimentation through MKUltra and MKNaomi and MKDietrich and all the MK programs, MK meaning mind control, which is what they were after, both individual control of individuals to control the entire societies.
And now they can do that much more effectively.
Just by manipulating algorithms at Google.
And so, will you explain how that works?
It is terrifying, by the way.
It is terrifying, and I promise to address all of those issues.
But first, I have to say, this is a tremendous honor for me.
One of the greatest moments in my life was when I was seven years old, and my mom took me to see your Uncle Jack, John F. Kennedy.
On the campaign trail.
And she got there really early.
So we were right up against the stanchions there.
And he was just above us.
And I was seven and I was getting kind of crushed from behind.
So a police officer picked me up and put me in front of the stanchions.
So I was there just a couple of feet away from your...
Your famous uncle.
And that was really one of the greatest moments of my life.
And I've had lots of different contact with members of your family over the years.
Your Uncle Ted helped me to set up my first nonprofit organization, which is called the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.
I think she's your cousin, Maria Shriver, invited me to speak at her last big women's conference.
And that was a great thrill.
That was also scary because there were 16,000 women and me.
So it was very scary.
But I could go on and on.
But there's a second thing I want to tell you before we get to the topic, because I just spent the whole weekend reading your book on Fauci.
Which was superb.
And I recommend that everyone read that book.
And if you're reluctant to read it because, as someone told me last night, because you've heard some bad things about Bobby Kennedy Jr., if you're reluctant to read it, forget all that stuff.
Forget that negative stuff.
I can tell you where that negative stuff comes from.
I'm going to tell you a lot about that during this podcast.
Forget that.
Read this book because this book is not only well written, it is superbly documented.
The reason why I think that our host here has not been sued by Mr.
Fauci, Dr.
Fauci, is because this book is just so well done.
And it tells you, it gives you a perspective on the health system, or you could call it the anti-health system in this country, that I've never seen laid out so well.
And it is terribly frightening.
And then as you get through the book and you get more and more frightened and concerned, it just gets bigger.
It literally just keeps getting bigger.
So I recommend everyone That they read the real Anthony Fauci.
Now, having said that, there's something I need to tell you about before we get to my work on Google and the tech companies.
Google and the gang, I call them.
And that is something you probably don't know.
And you know a lot about The COVID-19 vaccine and all of the horrible things that were done to control messaging.
And again, we can talk about that when we get to Google.
But what you don't know is this.
I was working with a member of Trump's Coronavirus Task Force because I had proposed a plan, which is called the Carrier Separation Plan, CSP. That would not have required any lockdowns or social distancing and would not even have required a vaccine and that would have eradicated the virus, which we've not done.
It would have eradicated the virus and allowed us to completely reopen society.
So I started working with that task force in March of 2020.
What's the plan?
The plan is very simple.
If people go to carriersseparationplan.com or nationaltestingday.com, You'll see it all laid out.
I talked about it on Tucker Carlson's show.
He thought it was amazing.
His mouth dropped, as tends to happen with Tucker sometimes.
Glenn Beck said it was brilliant.
Michael Medved said he hopes the president goes for it.
I was talking to two members of Trump's family about it.
It's very simple, and it's consistent with some statements that are in your book.
And that is, you test everyone using very cheap...
Disposable test devices, and I was in touch with two big companies in China that could have produced these things overnight.
The test devices don't even have to be that particularly accurate, it turns out, for this to work.
The President announces we're going to have National Testing Day.
It's going to be on September 6th, Sunday, September 6th, 2020, which was the 400th anniversary of the day the Mayflower set sail from England to the United States.
And he said, on that day, we're all going to test.
Before that, he would have announced it early summer, we're going to send you all dozens and dozens of these test devices.
They don't have to go up your nose.
You just stick them in your mouth and it'll tell you whether you're positive or not.
And so he said, I'm going to do it, Melania and all my kids and all the members of Congress, and we're all going to do it on that day.
He said, and then if you have, if you test positive, then you need to go into quarantine, not for six months, just a couple of weeks, two or three weeks.
Just let the virus, let your body defeat the virus.
He said, and that same day, Sunday, September 6th, we're going to reopen society.
All the schools and churches and businesses are going to reopen and the virus is going to stop spreading.
Because we've removed from the population most of the carriers.
And there's also going to be secondary screening.
So at the entrance to schools, churches, and businesses, there's going to be barrels full of these test devices.
And it's all voluntary, but we'd like you to test and test negative so you can go inside.
If you test positive, just go home for three weeks.
If you need money to do this, then you're giving up your privacy, but we'll help you.
If you need a place to stay, like a hotel room for those three weeks, we'll help you, but you're giving up your privacy then.
But for everyone else, this is all going to be done in privacy.
I published in Frontiers in Public Health in January of 2021 a mathematical model, detailed predictions.
That's been viewed 35,000 times.
It is taken seriously in the public health and medical communities.
Here's what happened.
And by the way, if that plan had been implemented, and at one point there was a speech for President Trump to give, it was sitting on the desk of his head speechwriter, Vince Haley.
Short speech.
If he had set that in motion, that would have saved 600,000 American lives.
And here's what happened.
On July 15th of 2020, I received an email from a member of the Coronavirus Task Force saying, we're so sorry.
But we've decided to go with the vaccine exclusively.
And that was it.
They just set aside.
They just threw away the plan, which would have made Trump into a hero around the world.
It would have made him into a hero.
So why did he do this is the question.
And the reason is, I was told, is because that summer he got it into his head, not from Fauci, but from somebody.
He got it into his head That he could get the vaccine out before the November election, and that that would guarantee him the win.
And of course, there are also many, many other kinds of pressure on him to go with the vaccine.
And that's what he did.
Well, you know, that's very interesting.
And I know that you talked about that on Tucker.
But it is a, and I don't want to take away from your, you know, your inventive role In devising that, but it's kind of a modern iteration of exactly the protocol that D.A. Henderson, one of the great epidemiologists who is credited with obliterating smallpox, eliminating this deadly disease from humanity.
It was basically the same program that he used without the technology, but it is the It was the classic prescription for dealing with pandemics, which always said you never do mass lockdowns because that ends up destroying society and imposing a lot worse costs than the disease, which is what we saw.
But the way he eliminated smallpox, a lot of people, you know, the modern consensus is that which is an orchestrated consensus, which is the product of propaganda.
Is that smallpox was eliminated by the smallpox vaccine.
But there are many parts of the world where the vaccine never reached.
And smallpox disappeared there, too.
And the way it disappeared is D.A. Henderson's plan, which is to isolate the sick, protect the vulnerable, keep society open, and do systematic isolation of people who have the disease.
And that is what eliminated smallpox from the planet.
And D.A. Henderson, in later years, complained vociferously against the lockdowns during the beginning of COVID, et cetera.
If you never do that, you know, you do you do these protocols that have been proven to work.
And in the small box vaccine had a lot of problems and and, you know, a lot of very, very bad, deadly side effects killing people.
And the real way that history shows and the best literature shows the way that smallpox was eliminated was through these physical protocols of isolating the sick.
And respiratory viruses, as everybody knew before the pandemic, cannot be eliminated through isolating entire society.
In fact, They spread indoors.
So when you lock people indoors, they tend to spread to the families, etc.
And it was really, you know, what we saw here at the beginning of the pandemic was the police shutting playgrounds.
Padlocking basketball courts, throwing sand on the half pipe so people couldn't skateboard, arresting surfers who were out in the ocean when they came to the beach and sending them home where the coronavirus is going to spread.
It was...
It was just a systematic refutation of everything that we know about managing epidemics.
I'm very glad.
I'm happy that you're talking about this.
And I wish I'd known more about that at the time when you were doing it, because I think it would have given a lot of those of us who are skeptical about them, were criticizing the mass lockdowns.
It would have given us all a much better understanding Alternative for dealing with the coronavirus.
Of course, Bobby, I mean, that's exactly the point of our later conversation, which is that you didn't know it, and neither did anyone else, and that wasn't accidental, right?
That's the result of this kind of manipulation.
Amaryllis, thank you so much, because that's the segue that I was hoping to have.
Why did we not know?
And the fact is, there's a lot we don't know, and you don't even know what you don't know, right?
Or as I like to say now, you don't know what they don't show.
And by they, I mean the big tech companies, primarily Google.
And so, you know, I've been studying that.
That's a separate thing than my work on the carrier separation plan.
But I've been studying the ability that Google and other tech companies have to control Our thinking, our behavior, our emotions, our elections, our children.
I've been studying that now for more than 12 years.
It is extremely disturbing.
It's even more disturbing than reading Bobby's new book on Fauci.
That's how disturbing this stuff is.
It's so disturbing.
Because as we keep making new discoveries about the power that these companies have, To manipulate people and to undermine democracy.
It just gets worse and worse and worse with every new discovery.
So now I'll get back to your original question.
Your original question was, how does this work?
How can these companies exercise such power?
Well, there's one way they do it that I think everyone's aware of, and that's what my conservative friends tend to focus on.
I'm not a conservative myself.
But the one way they do it is by censorship.
In other words, they suppress content.
And again, you don't know what they don't show.
So that's the simplest way that they do it.
Unfortunately, my conservative friends then stop.
They get stuck there.
They think that's all there is.
No, no, that is not true.
I have been publishing in peer-reviewed journals, I've been publishing our discoveries on, so far, 10 different methods that these companies use for manipulating thinking and behavior.
And it's just unbelievable.
I can tell you this, that the That the search engine is the most powerful mind control machine that's ever existed.
That when you start to type a search term, you're being manipulated from the very first character that you type.
I said this at a hearing when I first testified before Congress, and Ted Cruz pulled out his cell phone and he said, oh yeah, show me.
I said, fine.
Type the first letter in the alphabet.
So he types A. I said, are they making any suggestions for what you should be looking at?
He goes, yeah.
He said, I got five suggestions.
What are they?
I think three or four of them were for Amazon.
I said, gee, why are they trying to send you to Amazon?
You weren't looking for Amazon, were you?
He goes, no.
I said, because Amazon is Google's largest advertiser And Google is Amazon's single largest source of traffic.
These are business partners.
They are manipulating people literally with every character that they type.
It's not just search suggestions.
It's the answer boxes below.
It's the search results.
But let me just go back to search suggestions for a second, because you'll remember that a few weeks ago, It made national news that when people were searching for information about the assassination attempt on They couldn't get anything.
Google was suggesting that they look at, I don't know, Abraham Lincoln and McKinley, and they wouldn't give you suggestions for learning about that assassination attempt.
And that made national news.
But here's the thing.
That's an anecdote.
That doesn't hold up in court.
It's useless.
But we are now preserving those search suggestions by the millions.
We're preserving ephemeral content, that's what they call it in Google, that they use to manipulate people.
We're preserving that by the millions, the recommendations they make on YouTube, which are 60 to 70% coming from liberal news sources.
For children under 18, or children, young people under 18, it's more like 90% of the content that they're showing people comes from liberal news sources.
We're preserving...
Tens of millions of this type of data of this sort, which has never been done before.
We have the world's first national monitoring system for doing to them what they do to us and our kids.
In other words, we're surveilling them just like they surveil us and our kids.
So there's two big chunks of research here.
One chunk of research, which we've been doing since 2013, looks at the new methods of manipulation that the internet has made possible and that is controlled entirely by a couple of tech companies.
And the second piece of research has to do with the fact that we're now monitoring them to see whether they're actually using these techniques, and they are.
So I'll give you one quick example.
Right now on Google's homepage, they're sending out various kinds of vote reminders, register to vote, mail in your ballot, go vote, to Democrats at about two and a half times they're doing to Republicans.
Now think about that.
Think how that impacts the vote over time.
That's why Google can control so many votes.
But anyway, I'm sorry to be so long-winded here.
I'm tremendously passionate about this.
And I have to say one more thing of a personal nature.
I just have to because you're not just anybody, okay?
You're an amazing, amazing person.
And the fact is, I say in all modesty, that you and I have a lot in common.
First of all, we are both huge fans of an incredibly amazing, beautiful woman named Cheryl Hines.
So that's the first thing we have in common.
Secondly, we each spent some time at Harvard.
I overlapped with Caroline there.
The fact is you and I are both nuts.
We're crazy because we speak the truth.
We don't care whether that offends anybody.
We speak the truth because we want to defeat bad actors.
We want to defeat people who are hurting people.
We're hurting society or hurting elections, hurting democracy, hurting health, and we speak the truth no matter what the consequences, which is a very, very crazy, insane, and difficult way to live.
And that's what you and I have in common.
Let me just read this.
And these are some of your findings.
SEAM demonstrates how biased ephemeral content, such as search results and video recommendations, influence users' decisions.
Just one exposure to the type of biased content can shift the person's perspective by 20% to 80%, with repeated exposures raising that potential to 90%.
The SSE, which is the search suggestion of fact, Refers the impacts of search suggestions in drop-down as an online user is looking up information.
Google search suggestions can shift undecided voters' opinions from a 50-50 split to almost 90-10, all without user awareness.
That is terrifying because that's really the end of democracy.
How does democracy survive that?
I don't think really that...
If you consider the free and fair election...
I mean, the implication is you have one guy, Sergey Brin.
It's not even the 800 people who are giving 70% of the donations, which is terrifying.
One guy, the head of Google, who can decide elections.
Most elections in this country could be decided by that 6%, you know, or more.
I think actually you quantify that, but it's like, you know, you're shifting election results.
I think you find in here that you can, what is it, that you can shift election results by 6.9% typically or more, right?
Well, the margin that is somewhere between 4% and 16%.
So 4% is the absolute bare minimum that Google alone can shift without anyone knowing, except for, of course, now we have a monitoring system in place.
But that 4% is guaranteed.
So if you look right now, as I did a little while ago, if you look at the numbers in the swing states right now, the survey data, You'll find, depending on what the poll is, that Trump is ahead by maybe a point or two in three of the seven swing states.
Harris is ahead by a point or two in four of the swing states.
You know what that means?
That means that Harris will win all seven swing states because that margin is well within Google's ability to control.
They have absolute control.
Any margin, 4% or under, 100% control.
Let me just push back on that because the polling already reflects Google's impact on the outcome, right?
Because the attitudes have already been shifted.
I would also say that the polling is manipulated by the same forces that are manipulating the news.
Wow, you are smart.
My God.
And I've seen it in action because it's been U.S. policy around the world for a long time in terms of Intelligence monkey business in other countries' elections.
You can go back and look even on CIA.gov if you go and look at the special forces and election manipulation handbooks.
There are sections on polling that are still entirely redacted from the 70s and the 80s.
And those are right next to nestled next to the guide for taking over underfunded newspapers in order to provide an unidentified source of funding that then places all of the news stories that the United States government wants for for the candidate of their choice.
So they have always viewed both polling and manipulation of news coverage as the first wave.
If that doesn't work, then maybe you have to go in and cement a coup or do some other criminal act overseas.
But first and foremost, polling and news manipulation is That is correct.
I remember you saying to me one time that if you are an intelligent agent who is in charge of making sure the Italian elections come out, the communist candidate or the left-wing candidate loses the Italian elections, that it is a spycraft malpractice not to use those tools.
You'd be called in by supervisors.
How on earth did this election turn out the way that we didn't want it to?
And you see that all around the world when, you know, these improbable results happen.
But, you know, I remember a DARPA study coming across my desk in probably 2004 when I was, you know, a brand new baby officer who signed up after 9-11 and,
you know, was I wasn't yet even overseas, thinking that I was doing the same thing as, you know, a Marine, you know, a kid who goes down and joins the Marines after 9-11 because you want to do something good to serve your country.
Didn't know what nest of vipers I was walking into.
But I remember this study coming across that came out of DARPA, and they put people reading news stories in an fMRI machine.
And expected that the frontal areas would light up while they were assessing analytically the reliability of what they were reading.
And they did, but they lit up second.
And the first area that they describe, it's over the ear, and they described it as the part of your brain that lights up when you hold up a shirt in a store and think about whether or not your friends would make fun of you if you wore it.
And that in-group, out-group decision is a split-second decision made at the beginning before you even start your frontal lobe, all of your actual analytical assessment.
And so you already know before you dive in whether you're assessing in order to poke holes or you're assessing in order to think it's a brilliant article and share it with your friends.
And of course, they were weaponizing that at that time between the Sunni and the Shia community that they were trying to create this split.
um overseas but we now see that exact same uh methodology at work and i think what dr epstein's describing especially with autocomplete right the subconscious the subtext of that when you begin to write something is oh well this must be informed by what everybody else is searching and what everybody else is thinking exactly And therefore, I should be thinking it too.
And that is an incredibly dangerous road for us to go down as a society.
I just want to add one thing to this issue of the polling numbers, and I agree with what you said completely, but I want to add one thing.
At any point in time, there's still going to be millions of people who are vulnerable, who haven't completely made up their minds, and who can be pushed, who can be nudged one way or the other.
Google has a tremendous advantage over any of us, including a campaign manager, because Google knows exactly who those people are.
I mean, that would be every campaign manager's wet dream to know exactly who those people are, but Google knows exactly who they are.
And it is using these techniques that we've discovered and quantified over the years.
It is using these techniques on these people every day.
No matter what the polls say, there are still people out there who can be influenced.
Google knows who they are, and they're using these techniques.
Now, let me also point out that on election day itself, there are a lot of people who Who are just too lazy to get off the sofa.
In 2012, Facebook and some of my colleagues out here at the University of California, San Diego, published a piece in Nature Published a piece in Nature about what they had done in the 2010 midterms.
They had sent go vote reminders on election day all day long to 60 million Facebook users.
And they had some very clever ways and they had a control group.
They had some clever ways of determining whether that got some more people to vote.
They calculated that that vote reminder got 340,000 more people to get off their butts on Election Day.
So just keep that in mind, that even on Election Day itself, sending out partisan go vote reminders shifts a lot of votes.
And normally, no one would have any way of knowing that they did that.
But because we have a national monitoring system in place, we'll know exactly what they're doing and how many votes they're sending to members of each party.
We'll know exactly what they're doing.
And we're building an archive, which has never been done before, that will allow us to go back in time and look at these manipulations I'm in touch with members of Congress, with a bunch of AGs, with a couple of parenting groups, some election integrity groups.
All of our data are going to be available to all kinds of people who are going to try to use these data in various ways to pressure Google and other companies to stop To stay away from our elections and stay away from our kids.
How do you pressure them?
Well, that brings me to an old quote from Justice Louis Brandeis 100 years ago, everyone knows this, which is that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
The second half of that quote, no one knows, but it's, and street lamps, the best policeman.
That's what he wrote back in, I think, 1917.
That's what we're doing.
We're making these companies accountable to the public for the first time by monitoring them and exposing them and letting them know that we're doing it.
And so we have now preserved, as of a few weeks ago, more than 100 million ephemeral experiences.
That's what they call them inside of Google.
Ephemeral experiences which are normally lost forever, stored nowhere.
Google doesn't store them, but we...
Are storing them?
Do they actually deliberately use ephemeral experiences to manipulate?
2018, there was a leak of emails from Google to the Wall Street Journal, John McKinnon, if you know him.
And McKinnon reported these emails involved discussions about Trump's travel ban.
And specifically, they were discussing How can we use ephemeral experiences to change people's views about Trump's travel ban?
This is how they do it.
And that's what we're preserving and capturing for the first time.
I've been approached so far by people now from eight countries who want me to help them build monitoring systems in those countries.
And this is one area where I do happen to agree with Trump.
No, we do it here first.
How does the monitoring system work?
Is it opt-in, presumably, and do you have people volunteer to have their screen recorded, or how does it work?
I wish we could accept volunteers because it would be so much cheaper to run this, but we can't because in the past when we've called for volunteers of any sort, Google sends us people.
They not only have 100,000 employees, they have 120,000 outside consultants that they use for various purposes.
And we've had them send us people over and over again.
So over the years, we've had to set up very secure systems for recruiting.
We recruit registered voters.
We vet them.
They sign NDAs.
We equip them.
We train them.
This is very expensive.
We're now monitoring the content that's coming into their computers.
So this is not just ephemeral content, it's personalized.
Because remember, everything they send out is personalized.
The only way you're going to know what they're actually sending to people is to look over the shoulders, with their permission, of real registered voters, And capture that content and aggregate it and analyze it.
And we've gotten better and better and better at doing all of that.
And at this moment in time, we are preserving content through the computers of a politically balanced group of more than 16,000 registered voters in all 50 states.
And this group gets larger every day because we do not stop recruiting.
We have court admissible data, most likely, at least according to Ken Paxton.
We have court admissible data now in 21 states.
And obviously, we've got to get that number higher as fast as we can.
The bigger that number is, the more it pressures these companies to stop what they're doing.
Robert or Dr.
Epstein?
Oh, no, no, Robert's fine.
You have the same name, so.
You have a PhD after years and a DR in front of him, so those were hard-earned and well-deserved, and I want to respect them.
Yeah, but I heard you on Tucker's show, and you made a very good argument for saying that you probably have 10 PhDs, given the expertise you have to get to litigate these cases.
So, let's get to this subject, which I think...
I didn't show Amber Ellis any of the documents you showed me, but you did an analysis of my election.
There's nobody who knows more about my polling Amaryllis has done the biggest polls of this election in any campaign.
We've done polls of 26,000 people.
Typical polls are 1,000, 2,200.
But we've done polls 10 times outside with extensive cross tabs.
And she's read every one of them.
She's read every poll that's come out during this and analyzed it.
And with her extraordinary encyclopedic computer mind.
I want you to tell her for the first time exactly how Google has weaponized searches against me.
I am going to tell you, but first I'm going to tell you something that we didn't send you, just for comparison's sake.
We generated a report recently about Elizabeth Warren to see what kind of information Google is sending to voters about her.
Now, she is a, I would say, extreme liberal person.
You know what they're sending to people who search for information about Elizabeth Warren?
They are sending extreme conservative content that absolutely trashes Elizabeth Warren.
Why would they be doing that?
Because Elizabeth Warren has gone on record calling for the breakup of Google.
They want her out.
Now with you, they're sending content that...
On a graph, it looks very blue.
In other words, it's liberally biased, but that's just a graph.
But if you look at the actual content that they're sending people to, if people click on those high-ranking links in their search results, you end up with, I'm not going to say them, but if you want to share them, that's fine.
They are sending people to one piece after another, one website after another, one article after another, one video after another, that makes you look like the devil.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Bobby poses perhaps the most grave threat to their business model as has happened since, you know, its instantiation.
I mean, banning pharmaceutical ads on day one and that alone is probably number two source of ad revenue for them in addition to, you know, all of their defense contracts and so on.
So, yeah.
Even outside of their doing the intelligence agencies bidding, which we know to be the case, just from a business case point of view, we knew right from the outset that we had a pretty serious foe in Google.
And I mean, across the board, they wouldn't let us claim our Google knowledge panel, which anybody, you know, if anyone's done it here, it's very straightforward.
You just, you know, prove your identity by putting in a password.
For one of your social accounts, and it pops right up.
In this case, it was just the old 404 error every time, but only for Bobby.
And we escalated it all the way up the chain there.
And they kept telling us, oh, that's terrible.
We'll get right back to you.
Right up to their C-suite and never solved that issue.
And of course, it brings Wikipedia right up to the top.
And You know, we've gone deep with Larry Sanger on the censorship and intelligence control of Wikipedia.
So we're right there with you.
We understand Google's stake in this for sure.
Another thing that's, by the way, I think is quite interesting in that report we sent you is that they are sending that attack content, that liberally biased content, not just to liberals and not just to moderates, but to conservatives as well.
So that doesn't happen for everyone.
They don't do this for everyone.
You should be greatly honored that they're slaughtering you across the board with people of every political persuasion.
But the fact is that without a monitoring system, you see, no one would ever know.
And we know that when you bias search results and search suggestions in that way, that easily shifts 20 to 80% of undecided voters.
And even on election day itself, there are still undecided voters.
And they know who they are, and they're using these techniques to influence them.
Again, without a monitoring system, you don't know any of this.
Nothing.
Especially those targeted messages on their homepage.
You don't know anything that they're doing.
We're also looking at the recommendations that they make on YouTube tells the same story.
But what's interesting here is that people are not aware that 70% of the videos people watch on YouTube, this is according to Google itself and outside researchers too, but Google has admitted that 70% of the content people watch on YouTube has been recommended by their algorithm.
For children, it's 80 to 90%.
Why is that?
Well, partly because if you don't pick something, they automatically play the Up Next video.
So they are determining most of the content around the world that people are watching on YouTube.
And guess what, Mr.
Kennedy?
They're slaughtering you on YouTube as well.
Again, no monitoring systems in place.
You don't know anything that they're doing.
These people, by the way, are very determined.
Google more than the other companies because Google has a very, very strong progressive left culture.
And it's actually now more than 96% of the donations from their employees go to Democrats.
Now, I lean that way myself, so I should be applauding them, but I don't.
Because I love this country, and I love the system of government that was put in place by our founding fathers more than I love any particular party or candidate.
So, unless you've got other sort of evidence that they used against me, which I'm very curious about, let's talk about how you fix this.
Okay, well...
There are really only three ways, and I can tell you that what the government's been doing, which is antitrust actions—that's the DOJ, that's Congress, and the AGs—will not solve the problem at all.
In fact, I happen to have been working with AGs long enough, so I actually saw Google's attorneys pushing our authorities away from consumer protection issues and pushing them toward antitrust issues.
They have basically gotten control over Everybody.
It's DOJ, it's the AGs, and Congress, and they're all going after Google with antitrust actions.
Antitrust actions will not solve the big problems.
The big problems are surveillance, censorship, and manipulation.
Those are the three big problems.
Antitrust has to do with monopoly issues, which might force them to sell off a company or two.
Big deal.
That Google knows very well that no one will ever force them to break up the Google search engine because it won't work.
And Facebook knows that no one will ever force them to break up the social media platform because that would be like putting the Berlin Wall through the middle of every household.
You can't do that.
So these companies know that antitrust actions are not a threat to them.
So what are the threats?
Well, one, which isn't going to happen, is that you could make the surveillance business model, which Google invented, which turns us all into products that they sell to vendors, you could make that model illegal.
Tim Cook, the head of Apple, has suggested this.
He thinks that model should not be allowed.
He doesn't think it's a legitimate business model.
It's fundamentally deceptive.
Is that going to happen?
No.
Number two could happen.
I published this in Bloomberg Businessweek the day before I first testified before Congress.
Number two is this.
We could declare, our Congress could declare, or a regulatory agency could declare their indexed Which is the database they use to generate search results.
We could declare that to be a public commons.
There's ample precedent for this in law.
Governments have been doing this for hundreds of years because once some commodity or service becomes essential Then there's room for abuse, and that includes air and water and gasoline and telephone communications.
Once it becomes essential, the government at some point always steps in and either takes charge or regulates.
In this case, if our government declared their index to be a public commons, then everyone could build search engines using their data and you'd end up with thousands of search engines competing for our attention, which would be just like the news environment.
There would be competition and innovation.
Because of Google's monopoly, there has been no competition and no innovation in search for 20 years now.
Could that be done?
Yes, it could.
Actually, Ted Cruz and I have talked about this at length.
Will it be done in the US? We're kind of dysfunctional.
That's the problem.
But the EU could do it.
And I've spoken in Brussels.
There are people quite interested in this possibility.
And if it's done in the EU, it would affect Google worldwide.
It would end their worldwide monopoly on search.
And finally, we get to number three.
Number three is monitoring.
No one can stop monitoring.
And monitoring...
Monitoring makes them accountable because it gives us a growing database that allows us to look back in time and see what shenanigans they were using.
And that can be used in court and it can also be used just to put public pressure on these companies.
Monitoring, in my opinion, is not optional.
Monitoring is Essential.
Because in the EU, for example, where they have passed some pretty strong laws and put very strong regulations into place, which you've talked about, I've heard you talk about them.
Vestager is the woman who spearheaded that movement in Europe.
She has acknowledged recently that these companies are not complying as far as they can tell.
The fact is, unless you have monitoring systems in place, you can't measure compliance.
You don't know if there's compliance without monitoring.
You must have monitoring in place.
You must capture all that ephemeral content and analyze it rapidly.
So those are the three solutions.
The one that I've been working on, and we spent $7 million building this nationwide system, obviously, is the third one, which is monitoring.
And it's powerful.
I can tell you that...
A couple days after the November 2020 election, I sent a lot of our data to Senator Cruz's office, and on November 5, 2020, Cruz and two other senators sent a very threatening letter To Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, saying, you testified under oaths that you don't interfere with elections.
How do you explain Epstein's data?
And then it's a two-page letter summarizing our findings in 2020.
In that election, by the way, Google shifted more than 6 million votes to Joe Biden.
So, you know, Pichai did not reply right away, but on that same day, They turned off all of their manipulations in Georgia, which was gearing up for two Senate runoff elections in January.
How do we know that?
Because we had more than a thousand observers.
We call them field agents.
We had more than a thousand observers throughout Georgia.
We were monitoring big tech content through the computers of more than a thousand people in Georgia.
And we saw Google turn off All their manipulations.
The partisan go vote reminders.
The bias in search results went to zero.
Absolutely flat.
We had never seen that before.
They literally just pulled out from Georgia.
I mean, the interesting thing to me is that all three of those, and it's incredible work that you're doing, seem to me to not work without the other.
I don't think they're discrete options.
I think that really, I'm a huge fan of free markets.
I know that Bobby is, it sounds like you are as well, certainly free markets of ideas, of the right to know, to be an informed consumer, which certainly applies to news and to information.
But even when you know, right, with the monitoring capabilities that you're talking about, and I think more and more people do know, you know, they use DuckDuckGo and so forth, but it is a pain in the butt, you know, because of monopolistic practices.
And we saw this with the Apple and the Google judgment, right?
When you buy a phone and you have a pre-built-in search engine, even if you know based on this monitoring, That, you know, what you're seeing is hopelessly filtered and biased.
It is the kind of free ice cream problem where it's just a lot easier to operate with the pre-installed option rather than add your own.
And I think the more, I mean, the middle, the publication of the index, you know, there's Common Crawl, for example, and I don't know if you've used Common Crawl at all, but I mean, it doesn't have as many webpages as Google, but I think it's indexed, I don't know, I want to say a couple hundred billion, and it's public commons.
But as long as you have that monopolistic practice, even really excellent alternatives are hard to come by.
And the solution that I really love is similar to what Jack Dorsey has been talking about, which is giving consumers free market choice between the algorithms that they can use.
Because ultimately, consumers will test out, you know, if Google, for example, were, you Corollary to Right to Know is the corresponding duty to Disclose.
And if you disclose the algorithm that you are using as your default and you open up an API where anybody can take the index as an API and add their own kind of algorithm, consumers ultimately will choose the one that works best for them.
And by messing around the same way that you would try different filters on an Instagram photograph, You try different algorithms on your X feed or on your Google News results and pretty quickly you're gonna wise up to the one that gives you the sharpest and most complete view of the world.
And I think giving people that kind of free market choice It is actually a more efficient enforcer than any kind of government oversight could be and less prone to being infiltrated by censors or government leaders that want to control these algorithms for their own purposes.
Well, Google's not going to give people access to their data voluntarily.
That would have to require some sort of governmental action.
Some interpretation of right to know.
Right.
And that is not, you know, there are legal scholars that propose this, and it's not.
President Kennedy was one of the initial proposers of the Consumer Bill of Rights.
And in there, he talks about how the marketplace has been flooded with all this new technology, new pharmaceutical products, all kinds of things that I think in his words, he talks about forcing parents or the homemaker to become an amateur scientist and chemist and technologist to know what they should and shouldn't buy.
And he was, of course, urging for truth in advertising and for consumer choice.
And, you know, we see that with FOIA.
We see it with even some of our international obligations under, you know, the UN Declaration of Human Rights and so on.
And we've never applied it this way.
But in the end, you know, the position that Google and others take that their algorithms are trade secrets and should be subject to those protections, there are established limitations on the protections for trade secret, especially when it comes there are established limitations on the protections for trade secret, especially when it comes to, you know,
And I would really like to see that be taken up because if, you know, you when you began using a given search engine or a given social media platform, you in your setup process and at any time thereafter could play around with different algorithms and choose the one that you found to be, you you in your setup process and at any time thereafter could play around with different algorithms and choose the one that you found to be, you know, most productive
And of course, one of the challenges that we haven't even talked about is that that's all heuristics based, right?
This is almost like it's almost passe this conversation because pretty soon it will be AI driven.
Some of it already is.
Let's get to AI then, because we're starting to monitor AI content now as well, which is going to become more and more important over time.
And this is just, for me, just a...
It's like...
It's like a tip of an iceberg because there's so much out there that can be a threat to humanity, not just to democracy, but to human autonomy and especially to the minds of children, that we have to be able to look at it, but to human autonomy and especially to the minds of children, that we have to be able to look So we're starting to monitor AI content.
And of course, AI content could at some point in the very near future become a serious threat to our existence.
Stephen Hawking warned about that.
Elon has warned about that at times.
But a monitoring system could be the first line of defense.
It could be an early detection system for AIs that are posing a threat.
So there's another use for monitoring.
We also have designed and built equipment.
We don't have the money to distribute it yet, but we've designed and built equipment that will allow us to monitor, with permission of the users, Answers that they're getting from intelligent personal assistants like Siri and Alexa and Google Home and so on, the Google Assistant.
And so we're very close to being able to monitor and analyze that content as well.
I should emphasize here that when we...
We transmit content from someone's home or someone's device to our computers.
We do that without any identifying information at all.
We preserve people's privacy.
This is the exact opposite of what the big tech companies do.
They're always transferring content with your name on it so they can add it to your profile and they can sell you more things and they can manipulate you more effectively.
You think that, you know, I love everything that you're talking about, and my mind is kind of racing and thinking of solutions.
And, you know, maybe the government should have a ministry that just, or a new cabinet agency that's the Department of Democracy that monitors all of the undemocratic impacts of the internet companies.
And, you know, we were told at the beginning, at the dawn of the internet age, that the internet was going to democratize the world, democratize the spread of information, and it's turned out, and it had that potential, and it's done that, it's accomplished that to some extent.
The most odious effect and the most dominant effect Has been that it's become a tool for totalitarianism.
Correct.
And for the, you know, for this corporate merger of state and corporate power to monetize and to monetize information and to deploy surveillance and control to the systems.
You know, should we have a cabinet host That is constantly monitoring the impacts of technology on democracy and taking steps to expose that to the public, to shine the sterilizing light of sunshine and the police effect of lamplight.
Who monitors them?
Exactly.
Who monitors them?
Who monitors them?
That's the fear, right?
The Ministry of Democracy could get Orwellian pretty quickly.
That's why I like the free market.
Sure.
But look at Fauci.
I mean, there's a perfect example or the kind of regulatory capture that you describe in detail in your book.
I don't know that we can really trust the government exactly.
Administrations, thank goodness, every now and then change, but I don't know if I would trust the government.
I think we need...
We need big things to happen.
And at one point, Ted Cruz invited me for a private dinner to discuss these issues because the man's very smart, obviously, and he wants to solve these problems, these big tech problems.
We talked for almost four hours straight.
We never talked politics.
That wouldn't have worked at all.
But the point is, we talked about tech.
And at the end of it, this poor guy, he actually said aloud, He said, the problem is that we can't, we'll never get bipartisan support to do anything against these companies.
He said that the Democrats control them because of the huge donations, because they helped get them into office.
He said, and Republicans don't like regulation.
He said, I think we're stuck.
How do we get over that hurdle?
The government don't have the tech capability.
I mean, the iterative cycle in Silicon Valley is just so many of these lawmakers are, you know, their kids or grandkids are helping them power cycle their laptop.
I mean, I don't know if you guys have ever played around with chat GBT where you put it.
Now there are different cheat codes, but there used to be a cheat code that was called do anything mode.
And there are a bunch of these, you know, people can go and look online, but there are certain prompts that you could put in there that remove some of the pre-trained parameters.
And when you ask Chet-Cpt to produce its results in parallel, one in its normal state and one with those parameters removed, it's almost like carving David from the marble where you can see the areas that have it's almost like carving David from the marble where you can see the areas that have been massaged It underscores them.
It makes you think twice about them.
Why did they make that change and actually kind of puts a glaring highlighter over them.
And when you have that kind of comparison, I think it does a lot more to inform the public than having no comparison at all.
So that's why I like being able to choose between the models, because then you see the default.
I remember as a young person going to Burma for the first time, and it was in 1999, And it was still under very tight military control, which sadly now is again, but this was prior to the moment of democracy there.
And they had a newspaper called The New Light of Myanmar that was just the most preposterous propaganda you've ever read in your entire life.
And I remember Thinking, what is the point of even printing this?
It's so preposterous.
How could anybody read it and believe it?
And we're almost there with a lot of what you read in the kind of Overton window Google results at this stage.
And the more that it's all people are exposed to, then there's no point of comparison.
And it doesn't seem preposterous in the same way that the New Light of Myanmar didn't seem preposterous to the people who had only ever read that as their news source.
So, to me, as far as we can pursue Jack's proposal, and by the way, what you're doing, Dr.
Eckstein, would be absolutely critical to it, right?
Because you need to be able to see with monitoring what the results are across different...
Well, now I'll give you some information that might make you think twice about what you just said.
When we did our first nationwide study on SEAM, there were more than 2,000 people in the study in all 50 states.
We had masked our manipulation, which Google does as well, so that very few people would recognize that there was any bias in the content they were seeing.
But there were so many people in this study that there were a couple hundred who did suspect there was bias.
Now, here's the problem.
They like it.
The people who could spot the bias shifted even farther in the direction of the bias than people who could not see the bias.
But that's okay.
It's okay to choose to be...
No, it's not.
No, I mean, look, people every day tune into MSNBC and they tune into Fox News.
They don't think they're watching actual news.
And yes, those are problematic.
But we live in a country of free speech.
We can't have a situation where there's some top-down authority saying, this is biased, this isn't, because inevitably that itself becomes biased.
So you have to give people the ability to choose a stupid algorithm that's going to make them less intelligent and have access to less information, so long as they can compare it with another.
Here they're making the decisions for the wrong reason, because They're seeing content which is coming from a computer, and people mistakenly believe that computer content is inherently unbiased and objective.
Right, but they won't if they see multiple options.
If you say, here would be your news today on Google, and in the same way that you're choosing a filter on Instagram, you could go through and you say, you know, chronological order only is one option.
You know, MSNBC, left-leaning bias.
Fox News, right-leaning bias.
I only care about pop culture bias, etc.
So that you are actually, and those should be open source, and they can create some of their favorites, and other people can contribute theirs.
But once you see the same day's news through 20 different algorithms...
I think it will eat away at that idea that because it's produced by a computer, it's trustworthy because you've just seen all of these different iterations of the same set of news all produced by a computer.
I would agree with Amaryllis.
I see what you're saying, which is that it's absolutely hopeless.
Now look at you as a very nihilistic person, Dr.
Epstein, even though you're appropriately skeptical but also really depressing.
You too.
Jack Dorsey, I had dinner with him a couple of times here at the house, and I said, what's the solution?
He said essentially what Amarillo is saying, you let everybody, you make the algorithms transparent.
And right now, If you're a Republican, you're living next door to Democrat.
A lot of it's just financially driven for Google because the algorithms they've trained are algorithms that keep people's eyeballs on the site the longest.
And as it turns out, it will stay on the site longer if they're getting information that fortifies their existing worldview.
If you're a Republican living next to a Democrat and you ask, you know, who is Robert Kennedy, you both ask simultaneously the same question, you're going to get different search results depending on what the algorithm is telling them is going to fortify your view of who Robert Kennedy is.
And so at least if you can choose and say, Give me a Republican bias.
That's what I want to hear.
Or give me a Democratic bias.
That's what I want to hear.
And Google is forced to tell you you're getting the Democratic bias.
You're getting the Republican.
At least people know.
And, you know, there's some choice left there and the illusion of choice.
Let me ask you this, because we got five minutes.
We got to wrap up.
I just want to make observations about two things that I saw during this election that were, you know, that struck me.
One is that I, at the beginning of the election, after I gained my initial speeches and stuff, I had popularity ratings that were beating President Trump, President Biden.
I had polling, national polling ratings in three-way races.
That put me between 20 and 27%.
I remember.
And then we ran really a perfect campaign other than the exposure, periodic exposure of my personal foibles and my colorful life.
But we were doing everything right.
Our engagement, social media engagement, was better than any of the other campaigns.
We were being outspent, in some cases, 1,000 to 1, and we were holding our own.
We were getting bigger crowds than anybody, but Trump, more enthusiasm.
We had 100,000 volunteers more than any other campaign.
So by many metrics, we were extraordinarily successful, but we saw this steady decline in my polling numbers down to 5% to 8% at the end.
And, you know, it was clear to me that this wall of bad media was eroding people's support.
That's one phenomena that I witnessed.
And then the other really pronounced phenomena was this transformation that happened with Kamala Harris when, you know, in one week, She went from somebody who was the least popular person, the Democratic Party.
She was absolutely disdained by Democrats.
She could not get a lunch reservation anywhere in the country.
People were just talking about ways to get rid of her.
And then two weeks later, she was a mix between Beyonce and Jesus Christ.
That's right.
And Democrats adored her and nothing had changed.
She didn't give a single interview for 35 days.
Oh no, that's not true.
Something did change because we measured it.
Because what we saw in our Kamala Harris report going from February through July, see this slope I'm describing?
What we saw is that Google and to a lesser extent some other tech companies were basically ignoring her in February and all of a sudden they're boosting her to the top of search, which has a tremendous impact because it shifts people's thinking and opinions.
And that in turn boosts her more.
It's a synergistic phenomenon.
And that's what happened, that there was an explosion of support literally engineered by algorithms.
We have the data.
We have the evidence.
I mean, even if you searched for your name, Bobby, or Donald Trump's name, the results would come up.
With Kamala Harris plus Bobby Kennedy or Kamala Harris plus Donald Trump, whereas if you search for Kamala Harris, it will come up just for Kamala Harris.
So those shifts alone, you know, look, ultimately, I say this to people all the time, every single thing you know about this election, unless you were in the room, I mean, basically, unless you're you, Bobby, Every single other person who's listening to this, everything you know about this election, you read, saw, or heard on a platform that is owned by someone with a financial interest in the outcome of this election.
And again, I would just urge you, I know you don't have it, Emerilus, but I would urge you to look at the report that we sent to Bobby, because what you'll see is you'll see the enormous bias, but also you'll see the particular news stories that people are being shifted to, and they literally turned you overnight into a kind of a devil.
And they really do have that power and they're not even slightly hesitant about using that power.
These people are unbelievably arrogant.
I mean they give new meaning to the word hubris.
So that's the problem that we face.
Again, I'm doing all I know how to do and all I've figured out how to do.
We're studying these phenomena and we're building a bigger and bigger and more powerful and faster monitoring system.
And we know that this system can be used to pressure them both in the courts and outside the courts.
And I'm just going to stick with that because I know it works.
It's not all that needs to be done.
But it's important.
And can I just give out a couple of websites?
I know you have to run.
I was just going to ask you, where can people play with this data or see your work?
Well, first and foremost, please go to AmericasDigitalShield.com because we built a public dashboard where you can see the data coming in and you can see the bias.
We just added Reddit as a new platform and we keep expanding this system and making it bigger, better, faster.
AmericasDigitalShield.com.
Now, we pay our Field agents, we call them, are our watchdogs.
We pay them a token fee of $25 a month, just like the Nielsen company pays its families to monitor their television watching.
It's a token fee, but think about that.
Once you've got 10,000 of them, we have a lot more than that.
That's $250,000 a month in expenses.
So please click on the button that says, sponsor a watchdog.
And you can sponsor one of our people with a donation of $25 a month.
We have so far close to a thousand people who've stepped up and are doing this.
The only way to make this economically feasible long-term is if tens of thousands of Americans sponsor watchdogs.
We can't take you as volunteers, unfortunately, because then Google sends us people.
But another place you can go is MyPrivacyTips.com.
So if you want to figure out how to protect your privacy and the privacy of your family members, go to my article at MyPrivacyTips.com.
It begins with a sentence, I have not received a targeted ad on my computer or mobile phone since 2014.
And that's me talking.
So there are other ways to use technology that most people are not aware of.
It's not that hard.
MyPrivacyTips.com.
And last but not least, TechWatchProject.org.
TechWatchProject.org.
And you can read all about basically the organization that we've set up to build these monitoring systems.
And these are very brave people who have been doing this work.
