EPISODE 228: “Google’s Utopian Vision and the 2024 Election” with Dr. Robert Epstein and Jenny Beth Martin

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to The Bill Walton Show, featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists and thinkers, fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics, and human flourishing. Interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:00:24):

Welcome to The Bill Walton Show. I’m Bill Walton. Is voter and ballot fraud just a tiny problem compared to the impact of Google search results that are seen 500 million times every day in the United States and the tech companies flip voters and elections any and all ways they please without anyone knowing? How are what they call ephemeral experiences, things like newsfeeds, search results, search suggestions, sequences of YouTube videos that aren’t recorded anywhere, anywhere used to manipulate us? If they are manipulating voters and election results, would breaking up big tech fix the problem or is it possible to monitor big tech’s manipulations and if so, to stop them?

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Here’s one that’s just come up so importantly recently is, how does the rapid spread of artificial intelligence change the game? Joining me today with some answers to these and many, many, many other questions I have is my returning guest, Dr. Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. A Harvard PhD, he is a pioneer in discovering and studying the power of Google and other tech companies to manipulate our elections, indoctrinate our children, and undermine our autonomy and freedom.

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I’ve also asked my friend Jenny Beth Martin to join me as my co-host. Jenny Beth is the leader of the Tea Party Patriot, whose network reaches millions of Americans every week with education and action items to impact our public policy fights for fiscal responsibility, free market principles, and limited constitutional government. What you may not know about Jenny Beth is that her first career was an information technology and she brings tremendous subject matter expertise to today’s conversation with Dr. Epstein. Jenny Beth, Robert, great to have you here.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:02:36):

Thank you so much for having us.

Bill Walton (00:02:36):

Great to see both again and talk about this. Robert, you’ve wandered into this over a period of a decade. I mean, what first triggered your interest in this?

Robert Epstein (00:02:47):

Well, like everyone, I was using Google’s search engine because it worked so good. Then one day, in fact, this was January 1st, 2012, I believe. I got a bunch of messages from Google saying that my website had been hacked and they were blocking access to it. Everyone gets hacked. So, that’s not the big shock, but what got me really intrigued was, why was I hearing from Google? Why was I not hearing from some government agency or a nonprofit organization? In other words, who made Google the sheriff? I was very interested too from a technical perspective about how they were blocking access to my website and a lot of my online psychological tests and other things.

Bill Walton (00:03:41):

What do you mean blocking access?

Robert Epstein (00:03:42):

Well, it turns out that Google has the ability to block access to websites. They block access to millions of websites every day. There was a particular day in 2009, I believe, possibly March 31st, where they blocked access to the entire internet for 40 minutes. They admitted it too. I mean, this was reported by The Guardian. So, they have powers. I started to look at them a little bit differently, not just as some useful toy, but what is there about this company? What kind of powers do they actually have? Who gave them those powers, if anyone? So I just started to get curious.

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Over time and by the end of that year, I was starting to ask specific questions about Google, because coming out at the time in the marketing field, there was research showing the value of pushing yourself somehow up one more notch in Google search results and what that’s worth financially. What happens if you can’t get on that first page of search results or what happens if they demote you? So there was research coming out about the importance of search rankings, and I simply asked a question, which is, “Well, if people are so trusting of high ranking search results, could we use those to change people’s opinions about things and maybe even to change their votes?” I’m a researcher, I started running control.

Bill Walton (00:05:28):

You were an editor of the Psychology Today.

Robert Epstein (00:05:31):

Yes, I was.

Bill Walton (00:05:36):

I mean, I’m a Tea Party guy. You weren’t among us at the time. You’re not a Tea Party guy. You actually voted for Hillary Clinton.

Robert Epstein (00:05:43):

I’ve spoken to Tea Party groups, for sure.

Bill Walton (00:05:47):

I say actually, I mean, really?

Robert Epstein (00:05:49):

But I know I’m not a conservative. I’m not a Republican. In a way, when I started to find out about Google and to a lesser extent some other companies, when I started to find out that they not only lean left, but that they push millions of votes in one direction, that is towards Democrats. I mean, part of me was thrilled, but another part of me was horrified because I realized, “Wait, this company, they have no accountability to the public. I mean, maybe they’re supporting Democrats right now, but what might they be supporting tomorrow? In other countries, are they supporting the left?”

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In some countries, it turns out they support the right. In China, they worked with the Chinese government to help control a billion people. I mean, the point is, the more I have learned over the years through the research I’ve done, the more I’ve learned about them, the more concerned I’ve become.

Bill Walton (00:06:59):

Jenny Beth, why don’t you jump in?

Jenny Beth Martin (00:07:03):

I’ve had concerns about Google for years, but I still use Google. So, I use them understanding that there are issues with them. Back in the 2000s, probably sometime around 2006 or 2007, they were upset with China because of some censorship issue in China. So, I think they were complying with what China asked regarding censorship, but in America, they were not doing anything at all to limit child pornography, at least at the time. I just sat there thinking, “This is so wrong. Why would you be giving into the Chinese government and not doing something to make sure that exploited children, the images and videos of them are not being spread online?” It always just struck me.

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So, this is almost 20 years ago now, I realized this is a company that cares about things differently than I do. That was the first way that I just started going, “There’s a problem here.” We’ve seen that problem in many, many different ways over the years, but the kind of information that they collect from people and the ranking that you were talking about, back before the Tea Party movement started, I had a mommy block. You always had to be very careful that you didn’t get sandboxed in the Google search, because if you got sandboxed, they put you in, it’s like a timeout for 30 days or more and you’re not going up in the rankings. As you’re trying to start a blog that you ultimately wanted to be able to have ads on, to make money on, it is not a good thing for you.

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So, what you were just saying about how the effects of what happens if you’re not on the first page, I was before 2009 working on trying to create websites to land at the top of the search engine for them. In the process, you don’t know exactly what their algorithm is. You never quite know what their algorithm is because they’re not transparent about that.

Robert Epstein (00:09:26):

Well, they’re very secretive and there are some big problems that people are generally unaware of. In fact, Jenny Beth, I was shocked to hear that you are still using Google services of various sorts, because you positively should not do that. I know more about this company and the danger that they pose than anyone in the world. That’s the last thing you want to do is use their services.

Bill Walton (00:09:57):

That would be Gmail. That would be the Google search. Take off what we ought be worried about.

Robert Epstein (00:10:04):

Well, it’s Google Maps. Yeah, it’s Google Docs, which young people use to prepare all their papers for school. In fact, the ones you’ve heard of, Chrome, which is their browser, monitors every single thing you do online. If you have an Android phone, Android is Google. Android monitors what you’re doing on your phone. Even if you’re offline, it’s still collecting information. The moment you go back online, it uploads all the information to Google. So, it’s tracking your location, it’s tracking your voice, it’s tracking every single sound. Not just tracking, it’s recording all the sound that it hears. But those are just platforms or services that you’ve heard of.

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Google is actually surveilling you and your kids and your loved ones over more than 200 different platforms, most of which people have not heard of. So, quick example, most websites, millions of websites use Google Analytics to track traffic to their website. Well, according to Google’s terms of service, I’m probably one of the three people in the world who’ve actually read that.

Bill Walton (00:11:26):

I curl up with it every night to put me to sleep.

Robert Epstein (00:11:31):

If you are using a Google service such as Google Analytics, then they have a right to track you. So, in other words, on all of those websites that use Google Analytics, which Google provides for free to companies around the world, if you visit any of those websites, Google is tracking every single thing you do on those websites. So, there are actually more than 200 different ways in which they’re tracking us. They bought Fitbit a few years ago, so that gives them physiological data 24 hours a day. About seven, eight years ago, they bought the Nest Smart Thermostat company, and the first thing they did after they started making smart thermostats was they put microphones in them.

Bill Walton (00:12:18):

Oh, yes, yes. So, every thermostat in your house, well, the new ones have got the microphones.

Robert Epstein (00:12:24):

But the point is they did this without telling anyone. At the time, they also were filing for patents on how to interpret sounds inside the home, so they could tell whether the kids are okay, whether your sex life is okay. They literally got patents on methods for interpreting sound inside homes.

Bill Walton (00:12:46):

This is The Bill Walton Show. I’m here with Dr. Robert Epstein and Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, and we’re talking about Google and Google’s omnipotence and ability to monitor and manipulate. Let’s talk about the people in Google. I’d like to put a human face on it because people in Google, what’s the culture of Google? We got Sergey Brin and the other fellow is-

Robert Epstein (00:13:14):

Larry Page.

Bill Walton (00:13:15):

… Larry Page, who actually met 12 years ago when they were children, but they were billionaire children. But what’s the culture like and has that changed in the 12, 10 years since you started following and getting into the Google world?

Robert Epstein (00:13:34):

Well, first of all, as you know, as a former corporate executive, corporations have a culture and some have very distinctive cultures. Google’s is extremely distinctive. 96% of the donations of Google employees go to Democrats, which again, I’m all for that, but the point is it’s very homogeneous culture leans extremely left and the two founders are utopians. Now, that’s a problem, because it means you’re going to be hiring people who think like you do. It also means that in your mind, you know what’s best for the world. One of the fascinating items-

Bill Walton (00:14:24):

We seem to have a lot of those people on the planet right now.

Robert Epstein (00:14:27):

Yes, we do. Yes, yes we do, but not who have as much power as they do now. One example, an eight-minute video leaked from their advanced products division a couple of years ago, it’s called the Selfish Ledger. It was never meant to be seen outside the company. If you look online, look up the Selfish Ledger and then put my name next to it, you’ll get a detailed transcript with my annotations on it. This video is about the company’s ability to re-engineer humanity according to… I kid you not. It’s right in the video. … company values. So, their culture is very, very strong. It’s very utopian. We know best. We are going to remake the world.

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We are going to reshape kids around the world, which is one of the things that now my research is looking at directly, is that indoctrination problem. We are going to put into office people we think should be in office, not just in the US but around the world. We are going to impact the thinking and behavior and emotions of right now, more than 4 billion people around the world the way we want to, generally speaking, without anyone knowing what we’re doing and generally speaking, without leaving a paper trail.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:15:54):

Dr. Epstein, like Einstein, Epstein.

Robert Epstein (00:16:02):

I like the comparison. Thank you.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:16:03):

Well, I think it’s a pretty apt comparison. You used to be the editor-in-chief at Psychology Today. When it comes to psychological experiments, aren’t there ethics and morals about making sure that if people are in a psychological experiment, that they are aware of it and they consent to it? It seems like what you were just describing about what Google is doing, that’s a psychological experiment.

Robert Epstein (00:16:34):

It’s gone way past experimentation because they have mastered techniques, which I’ve been discovering and naming and identifying and quantifying over the years, but they’ve mastered techniques which they use without any constraint. They use them to impact our kids. They use them to impact our elections. They use them to impact decisions that pretty much everyone makes, especially if you’re using a lot of Google services, which I think you are.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:12):

Mostly the most important thing that I’m using is I still have so much in Gmail. So, they’re collecting a lot of information, but I don’t know how much they’re manipulating what I’m seeing from my email.

Robert Epstein (00:17:28):

If you’ve been using the internet for 20 years, which probably the people at this table have been, they have the equivalent of more than three million pages of information about you.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:41):

I think in my case with the number of emails that I get, it’s probably more like ten million.

Bill Walton (00:17:48):

Well, you’ve got your whole network of people.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:54):

But I’m careful about what I use for search and for browsers. So, they’re getting it from Gmail, but when I’m searching for things, I use different tools. At some point, I just was like, “Someone’s going to get it.”

Robert Epstein (00:18:13):

But it’s very easy to switch off of Gmails. So, this is a little footnote, I guess, on our larger discussion, but it’s worth bringing up. You can set your Gmail to forward emails that are coming in. What you want to do is set it to forward to your new Proton Mail account. You can sign up for Proton Mail in seconds because they don’t ask you anything about yourself because they don’t survive off of surveillance. They’re based in Switzerland. They’re subject to very strict Swiss privacy laws. They use end-to-end encryption. So, if you’re writing from Proton Mail to Proton Mail, no one can see that message. Not even the people at Proton Mail.

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At Google, it’s just the opposite. Thousands of employees at Google have free access to your entire profile, your whole search history, all the emails you’ve ever written. Nothing within that company is encrypted because they’re so focused on speed, so they don’t encrypt anything. Once you set up that forwarding from your Gmail, everything’s coming in now to your new Proton Mail. So, you’re checking your Proton Mail, now you’re replying from Proton Mail, so everyone immediately gets your new email address. You don’t lose any of that. Your old archive of emails on Gmail is still there for you.

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They never erase anything. They do, however, cut people off sometimes from their Gmails. They’ve done that to millions of people. You’ve probably heard of Jordan Peterson as a colleague of mine, psychologist up in Canada. He’s one of millions of people who has been completely cut off from his accounts. When they cut you off from Gmail, they cut you off from all of your accounts. They can do this with or without cause. They have no customer service department.

Bill Walton (00:20:18):

They don’t have an 800 number we can call and say, “Gee.” No customer service department, period.

Robert Epstein (00:20:26):

Period.

Bill Walton (00:20:29):

Google’s a private company.

Robert Epstein (00:20:31):

That’s right.

Bill Walton (00:20:31):

No shareholders. I mean no public shareholders. So, the two young men, not so young now, control the company. A fair number of venture capitalists from Silicon Valley still got big stakes in Google. Of course, the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley share the values of the founders, don’t they?

Robert Epstein (00:20:53):

But see, two of the key funders who really got them going, one is Roger McNamee, another is Jaron Lanier. They’re both billionaire tech guys.

Bill Walton (00:21:06):

I thought Roger McNamee was a libertarian.

Robert Epstein (00:21:08):

Yes. Well, the point is each of those has come out with public statements and each of them in the last few years has come out with a book. They’ve each written a book saying that if they had known what was going to happen to Google and Facebook, which they both invested in the early days, they would never have invested in those companies. These are very dangerous companies, especially for democracy. So, here are two of the biggest investors in these companies that got them going saying they have turned into monsters. So, it’s not just me. There are people who are in the know, who really understand from the inside what’s going on and who are terrified.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:21:54):

There have been several employees who have left Google or Facebook and come out and said they won’t let their children even have smartphones and they’re opposed to it, but explain why is it dangerous? Why is what they are doing dangerous? I understand, I’ve got to make a 90-day goal to get off of Gmail. I know I can do exactly what you said and forward, but in making sure everything is getting replied to properly.

Bill Walton (00:22:19):

Sounds like it’s far as giving up cigarettes.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:23):

So I’ll take care of that. I’m saying it now, so I’m going to have to, but why is it dangerous? I understand the dangers a good bit, but I’m sure that people who are listening may not.

Robert Epstein (00:22:36):

I could go on forever about the dangers.

Bill Walton (00:22:38):

Start.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:40):

Please.

Bill Walton (00:22:40):

Start, scare us to death.

Robert Epstein (00:22:43):

Some glimpses here. Okay, first of all, you think of Gmail like it’s the United States Postal Service, right? But it’s not. The US Postal Service, they actually do preserve your privacy unless they get a court order and they also have to deliver the mail. They must deliver the mail. Okay. So, Gmail pretends it’s a free postal service, except they’re not subject to any rules or regulations of any sort, and they don’t have to deliver your mail. If they want to, they can take millions of emails coming, let’s say, from the Republican Party that are going out to constituents and they can send them right into people’s spam boxes. So, no one ever sees those. In fact, the RNC sued Google last year, because in fact, they were doing just that.

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They don’t have to deliver mail. They can alter mail, believe it or not. Then of course, there’s the surveillance. They read your emails. The Postal Service doesn’t read everyone’s emails and put all the information into everyone’s profiles, but we’re talking about massive surveillance on the one hand. Number two, we’re talking about massive censorship. A big article I wrote for US News and World Report a few years ago was on nine of Google’s blacklists. I had never seen them, but I knew as a programmer that they existed. I described them in detail. They deny having blacklists. When I testified before Congress in 2019, right before me, Google executive was asked under oath, “Sir, does Google have blacklists?”

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He said, under oath, “No, Senator, we do not.” A few weeks later, a Google whistleblower walked out of Google. His name is Zach Vorhies who I’ve gotten to know very well over the years. He walks out with 950 pages of documents from Google, three of which are labeled blacklists. I mean, talk about the arrogance of this company. Would you label your blacklist blacklists? Because I wouldn’t. But the point is, of course, they have blacklists. A lot of the entities listed on those lists were conservative organizations or conservative personalities. So, again, they have very, very, very strong corporate culture, and they suppress content that they don’t want people to see.

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So, you’ve got the surveillance, number one. Number two, massive censorship. Then number three, which is what I started studying more than 10 years ago, manipulation techniques. They have access to techniques of manipulation, which have never existed before in human history. They’re made possible by the internet. Unfortunately, they’re controlled almost entirely by a couple of tech monopolies. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that is if let’s say you’re running a political campaign and you put up a billboard, well, I can put up a billboard across the street and counter your billboard. You buy a TV commercial. I can buy another TV commercial. In other words, a lot of what happens in elections or for that matter in life is competitive.

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That’s a good part of democracy is that competitiveness. But if Google itself wants to support a party or a candidate using one of these new techniques that we study, there’s nothing you can do. Generally speaking, you can’t even see what they’re doing. Even if you could, you have no way to counteract it. They can implement those techniques free of charge to them, costs them nothing, and they can implement them on a massive scale, not just around this country, but around the world. They do. They do this strategically and deliberately every single day. There is no one stopping them. There are no relevant regulations or laws. They have absolute free hand.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:27:10):

I think that as we watch what has happened with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and the changes that he has made to Twitter to make censorship happen less-

Robert Epstein (00:27:22):

Well, less and more. He’s been very selective about what content he’s allowing, it turns out.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:27:30):

Maybe we can go over that. It seems to me that when you look at a Twitter feed, you see much different things than you did eight or nine months ago. It’s just proof for people who maybe doubt what you’re saying, that things can be manipulated, because look at what a change in what’s happening on his feed is, but we don’t see what’s-

Bill Walton (00:27:58):

This is The Bill Walton Show. I’m here with Dr. Robert Epstein and Jenny Beth Martin, and we’re talking about the endlessly fascinating and terrifying Google. I guess the question is, this is a very, very strong indictment, which I think you’re right. Do you get any pushback? I mean, does Google defend itself and say, “Oh, no, we don’t do this,” or is it just that silent black object on the hill that just doesn’t really respond?

Robert Epstein (00:28:28):

Well, I’ve got more than pushback. I mean, I’ve paid a price. I was contacted by a DC journalist a couple of years ago. He was doing a piece about my work, and he said that he was going to try to get comments from Google. Calls me up a couple days later, said he had talked to a woman who he believed was the head of their PR department. He said, “And she screamed at me when I asked her questions about your work.” He said, “I’ve never seen that before. It’s very unprofessional.” He said, “Based on what she was saying, I want to tell you two things. Number one, you’ve got their attention. Number two, if I were you, I would take precautions.”

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Now, summer of 2019, I had been working with AGs since 2015, but that particular summer, I gave a private briefing to a bunch of AGs. It was at Stanford University. I scared the heck out of everyone, lots and lots of detail, lots of tough questions. Went out into the lobby when I was done. Little while later, the meeting breaks up. One of these AGs, I know exactly who it was, he walked up to me, he said, “Dr. Epstein, I don’t want to scare you.” He said, “But based on what you’ve told us, I’m predicting that you’re going to be killed in some accident in the next few months.” Now, I wasn’t killed, but my wife was. I’m still struggling with that, but there have been other incidents since then.

Bill Walton (00:30:17):

You were on our show in 2019 just before this happened.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:30:23):

What happened to her for people who are not aware? If you don’t mind discussing that.

Bill Walton (00:30:27):

Sure. Well, I think we need.

Robert Epstein (00:30:28):

Well, she was in a car accident. I talked with a woman who was in the car behind her. It appeared that her brakes had failed as she was getting onto the freeway, but there were some aspects of this that were very suspicious. One was her vehicle, which I had bought for her, a little pickup truck, had never been examined forensically. It disappeared very quickly off of the impound lot, supposedly disappeared somewhere in Mexico. When I looked at her phone, I realized that her Android phone had a complete record of every single place she had been, the route she had taken, the number of minutes that she had spent at every place going back years. Then in fact, Google knew the night before, let’s say, they knew exactly where her vehicle was.

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In other words, they could easily have just contacted a security firm who then calls up a contractor. They could easily have tampered with her breaks, but that’s not the only incident. Last year, our managing director, wonderful, very talented woman, married to an extremely handsome guy. I was always jealous of him. They’re walking in Downtown San Diego, 2:00 in the afternoon on a Saturday. A man comes out of the blue, pulls out a knife, slashes her husband’s face from the ear down to his mouth. He’ll never look the same again ever. There was nerve damage as well. But that guy then looks at her straight in the eye and laughs and runs away.

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She only stayed with us another two months. She was terrified. We’ve already had a third incident very recently, which I don’t even want to talk about. But the point is I’ve received warnings and there have been events which are very disturbing. There’s a lot at stake here. The fact is I’m a threat not just to Google, but to some other companies. But I’m an actual threat because I’m actually doing something about what they are doing to us. They left me alone pretty much until I testified before Congress. That was it.

Bill Walton (00:33:12):

That was 2019.

Robert Epstein (00:33:12):

That was 2019. The last few years have been, I’d say, practically the worst years of my life, but we’re making tremendous progress on the basic research, understanding what they’re doing. We’re expanding to kids now. So, we’re starting to look finally at the indoctrination problem.

Bill Walton (00:33:39):

This is at the Institute for Behavioral Research?

Robert Epstein (00:33:43):

Yes, AIBRT is the acronym. But we’re also building systems, which have gotten bigger and bigger each year since 2016. We’re building systems that are forcing these companies, Google especially, to back off on these manipulations. By the end of this year, 2023, we will have in place a large scale, self-sustaining, permanent system that will keep Google and the gang away from our kids and away from our elections, I believe, permanently.

Bill Walton (00:34:25):

I want to talk about your solution, but I also need more context. We’ve got Google. The Twitter files were just dropped a few months ago or whatever, and that revealed that Twitter, in fact, had a lot of federal agencies inside the building instructing Twitter what to do, who to block, who to censor, who shut down. They’re being quite direct about the behavior. There are people from the White House commanding Twitter to do certain things. Does that thing also happen at Google, or is Google in a different category?

Robert Epstein (00:35:11):

Well, I’ve lectured in the building at Stanford where the two founders of Google built the early search engine. Back then, they were getting support from at least two intelligence agencies. The intelligence agencies have always been very interested in Google and really help them with their initial design. That’s legitimate for national security. That’s legit, because in other words, they recognized very early on that the search engine, if it would keep track of people and keep track of their searches, it could be very useful in identifying someone who’s a threat to security. In other words, someone who goes online and types in, “How do you build a bomb?” Well, the intelligence agencies, they want to know who those people are and that’s legitimate.

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So, short answer to your question is, yes, Google has been working with government agencies, not just in the US but around the world since they were founded more than 20 years ago. So, they work very, very closely with governments, not just our government. That’s one of the problems you see with the surveillance that they do. They’re doing surveillance at a massive level that J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t even possibly have imagined. It’s 24 hours a day, and it’s over many, many, many different kinds of platforms that, again, most people haven’t even heard of.

(00:36:49):

But one of the problems there is you don’t know who they’re sharing the information with and you don’t know how they’re using it. We know they’re using it for manipulation purposes, because the more you know about people, the easier it is to just nudge them in one direction or another. But the fact is, if you look at their terms of service, it says they have a right to share the information they’re collecting with their unnamed business partners and as required by law.

Bill Walton (00:37:19):

So this is in their disclosure document?

Robert Epstein (00:37:20):

Oh, yeah.

Bill Walton (00:37:21):

Which you’ve read.

Robert Epstein (00:37:22):

Yes. They also share that information with thousands of outside consultants. So, you don’t know where that information’s going and you don’t know how it’s being used. They’re subject to being hacked like anyone else. So, I mean that information, that massive amounts of information about everything you’ve ever bought, any website you’ve ever looked at, it’s everything about you. It’s everything about your family history, your sexual history, your disease history, even your genetics.

Bill Walton (00:38:01):

So it has access to medical records.

Robert Epstein (00:38:04):

Well, that’s one of the reasons why the COVID pandemic was very, very valuable to these companies, Google especially, because that gave them full access to medical information, which they had never had before.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:38:25):

You go into doctor’s offices and they will use Android devices. They’ll hand you an Android device as soon as you walk in. Maybe sometimes it’s an Apple asking you to check in and then to check a box acknowledging their terms of service. I always fill it out and I get to that box and I’m like, “I’m not checking that.” They don’t know what to do. I’m like, “I’m not checking that. I’m not giving you permission to give my medical information to third parties, the way that you have it designed here, the way you’re saying it here,” because it doesn’t sound like normal HIPAA. We’re giving it to your insurance company. They’re giving it to Google or to whoever software companies to use.

Robert Epstein (00:39:03):

But here’s what you don’t know. See, when they hand me those tablets, I say, “Nope, sorry.” I just hand it right back.

Bill Walton (00:39:12):

I don’t see you filling out one of those tablets.

Robert Epstein (00:39:16):

No, no. I don’t even have a normal phone, by the way. Your phones are all surveillance devices. I have a secure phone, and it doesn’t do that. So, I have the kind of phone that people in intelligence agencies use. We actually build them for our staff members.

Bill Walton (00:39:33):

Where’d you get it? What’s the price point?

Robert Epstein (00:39:35):

The price point’s about the same as any other.

Bill Walton (00:39:39):

Is there a brand? I mean, also, we’re going to sell Proton. I mean, we’re going to push iPhones or phones.

Robert Epstein (00:39:46):

Well, what we do, we do for ourselves. But when people ask me, “Well, where can I get one?”, the main place to go right now is a website called de-googled.com.

Bill Walton (00:39:59):

DeGoogled.

Robert Epstein (00:39:59):

de-googled.com. Just be sure if you’re going to buy a phone from them, don’t buy a Pixel phone because Pixel is Google.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:40:10):

You can’t DeGoogle if you’re buying Google products.

Robert Epstein (00:40:13):

Not really. Not really.

Bill Walton (00:40:15):

Yeah. The thing about Google, I’m big on context. There’s 500 billion of online ad revenues or sales every year. Google’s at least half of that. I mean, they’ve got a 50, 60% share of the ad market online.

Robert Epstein (00:40:32):

I think it’s more than 60%. Yeah.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:40:33):

I think so too.

Bill Walton (00:40:35):

Okay, higher. Google buys a company every week.

Robert Epstein (00:40:43):

That’s correct.

Bill Walton (00:40:44):

If you see a fledgling company doing something different, particularly if Google thinks it might compete with its model, what they do is they go and offer somebody 100 million, 500 million, a billion. It doesn’t really matter to them because it’s play money.

Robert Epstein (00:40:58):

It’s pocket change.

Bill Walton (00:41:00):

They’re buying a company a week. Have they picked up pace? I mean, there’s an incredible website with all the list of companies who are potential competitors who’ve now been either tucked into Google or purchased and killed.

Robert Epstein (00:41:13):

That’s right. They have about 200 billion in the bank, cash.

Bill Walton (00:41:18):

Yeah, but not at Silicon Valley.

Robert Epstein (00:41:21):

Not, no, no, not at that particular bank. Well, no, we’re talking about truly a monster. Again, the more we’ve learned, the more concerned I have become. Now, with me, I don’t know how I would show it to you. I could certainly do it when we’re off the air. It would be easier, but this is brand new. This is just sent to me by one of our data scientists, but I have with me a one-minute animation. It’s a graph and it just shows you-

Bill Walton (00:41:57):

We can probably drop that in. Kenny?

Kenny (00:41:59):

Yeah, absolutely. If you want to talk about it-

Bill Walton (00:42:01):

Talk about it, and we’ll just drop it in it.

Robert Epstein (00:42:04):

Okay. In fact, this was suggested to me that I should take this animation and I should put myself into the lower left corner of it, talking people through it. It’s just one minute long, but this is the way it goes.

Bill Walton (00:42:21):

We’re going to start it running. So, go.

Robert Epstein (00:42:21):

You start it running. So, what you’re seeing is a very simple graph and it’s showing you on Google’s homepage on Election Day in 2022, November 8th. It’s showing you on Google’s homepage, first of all, with red dots and red lines, it’s showing you the proportion of conservatives who are getting go vote reminders on Google’s homepage, which as you said earlier, is seen 500 million times a day just in the United States. So, we’re starting at 10:00 in the morning, and you’re seeing a red dot come on there. It’s showing you the proportion of conservatives that are getting those reminders. It’s close to 100% at beginning of the day. For blue dots and then connected by blue lines, we’re seeing the proportion of liberals who are getting go vote reminders on Google’s homepage.

Bill Walton (00:43:17):

Because of their database and all the information they have, they can reliably determine who’s conservative.

Robert Epstein (00:43:22):

Exactly. They know everything.

Bill Walton (00:43:26):

So this is based on the best stuff about us.

Robert Epstein (00:43:30):

Oh, there’s not even a reason for us to have elections because they know who’s going to vote, who’s not going to vote, how they’re going to vote. They know all that stuff in advance.

Bill Walton (00:43:39):

Well, see, that’s a big concern for us right now as we go into 2024. I mean, we’re worried that we’ll never see another free and fair election.

Robert Epstein (00:43:47):

Well, let me tell you more about this graph.

Bill Walton (00:43:49):

Keep going. Sorry.

Robert Epstein (00:43:52):

To see what you’re up against here. So, some people are getting these go vote reminders, and Google would claim maybe everyone is getting them, except we set up monitoring systems. We’ve been doing this since 2016, and our systems are getting more and more sophisticated. Through the computers of thousands of registered voters, we’re actually looking over people’s shoulders with their permission and we’re actually recording what they’re seeing on their screens. So, this is ephemeral content, normally just appears. There’s a go vote reminder. It disappears. It’s gone forever. It’s not stored anywhere. It can’t go back in time. But we have come up with ways of storing, preserving, and analyzing ephemeral content.

(00:44:43):

All right. So, it’s 10:00 in the morning. Now the way this works is this animation lasts one minute. Every second is another 15 minutes go by. So, we’re speeding up. What would happen in real time if we had this running on real time and it was online for everyone to see? So here come the two points. So, it’s 10:00, it’s 10:15, you get two more dots, it’s 10:30. You get two more dots, and the dots are moving. You’re seeing these curves, these lines build up, and you’re seeing that through most of the day nearly 100% of conservatives and liberals are getting go vote reminders, which is fine. So, the line keeps moving, and now all of a sudden, it’s 5:00, it’s 5:30. Those two points are still very high near the top of the graph. Then around 6:00 or so, this is Pacific Time.

(00:45:41):

So, the poles are still open in lots of places. That’s when a lot of people are getting off work. That’s when a lot of people run to the polls. All of a sudden, the blue dots keep staying at the top. So, 100% of liberals are getting those go vote reminders. The red dots start going down and down and down, and they go all the way down to zero. The last couple of hours, you stay at zero. Now, imagine if you’re, let’s say, Trump and you’re running for president in 2024. Imagine if we gave everyone access to that information as we’re collecting it in real time. Imagine if those dots start going down.

(00:46:30):

Wouldn’t you have your lawyers who’s literally standing there with all the paperwork ready to hand to a judge? Wouldn’t you have your lawyer run to court and say, “Your Honor, we need an emergency injunction. We need to shut down Google. Google is doing something. Google is manipulating right now, millions of votes”?

Bill Walton (00:46:53):

That’s what the system that you’ve created monitors.

Robert Epstein (00:46:56):

Oh, it monitors lots of things. That’s just one example. The reason I mentioned, because we literally just created that graph, created that animation.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:47:08):

The hypocrisy of the left to say they care about equity and equality. They don’t. They’re not giving fair and equal treatment at all. They’re giving weighted treatment to decide who they want to win.

Robert Epstein (00:47:22):

Well, the problem here though is this isn’t just the left. This is a private company, and they’re not asking for anyone’s permission. They’re not discussing it with anyone. They’re doing whatever the heck they want to do. So, what we are collecting now is massive amounts of information that they are sending to practically everyone in the United States. We are collecting it. We’re preserving it. We started out small in 2016. We preserved 13,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. We were looking at search results. At the time, that was quite an achievement. We were monitoring through the computers of 95, we call them, field agents in 24 states. So, 95 field agents. We preserved 13,000 ephemeral experiences.

(00:48:19):

We analyze it. It took a lot of time after the election. We find tremendous bias on Google search results favoring Hillary Clinton, but not on Bing or Yahoo. So, you always have to have comparisons. Enough to have shifted, if that level of bias had been present nationwide, that would’ve shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton over a period of several months before the election. Whose votes are getting shifted? They’re not shifting die hard Democrats and Republicans. They’re shifting the undecided voters. Those are the people they go ask-

Bill Walton (00:48:58):

What besides the go vote piece that they do? We talked about all the ephemeral ways to manipulate and what the search results are and what video shows up next when you look? How do they that?

Robert Epstein (00:49:13):

Well, there’s manipulation occurring on the search engine itself. There’s a lot of manipulation, which we are also monitoring now on YouTube, those up next suggestions. First of all, 70% of the videos that people watch on YouTube around the world are suggested by that up next algorithm.

Bill Walton (00:49:33):

Guess who owns YouTube?

Robert Epstein (00:49:35):

YouTube is owned by Google. It turns out in the 2020-

Bill Walton (00:49:41):

When we’re talking Google, we’re talking YouTube. It’s all one thing.

Robert Epstein (00:49:45):

It’s Google. That’s right. In 2022, those days leading up to the midterm elections, 76% of those up next suggestions were from coming from liberal news sources. Now, Google would say, “Well, that’s just what’s out there. We’re just reporting what’s out there.” But we calculated that and actually only 38% of the videos that are out there, the news videos are coming from liberal news sources, but 76% of the suggestions they’re making are coming from liberal news sources. That’s extremely biased.

(00:50:28):

Those have a tremendous impact on people, and we’ve measured that in experiments. That has a tremendous impact on people who are undecided, but it gets worse because now we’re getting data from children and teens. Those up next suggestions on YouTube, it’s 96% for children and teens are coming from liberal news sources. 96%.

Bill Walton (00:50:57):

I mean, your network’s large. What kind of anecdotal feedback do you get from them about manipulation, about information, about Google searches? Is the person on the street really aware of this? We’ve been talking about it for a long time.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:51:18):

I think that there’s just a sense from people who are plugged in and aware that what you’re going to get might be manipulated, but then if they’re searching something and they still click on the first thing that comes up, they understand it’s manipulation, but they’re still clicking on the first thing rather than digging into deeper into the results or really struggling to type in so many different words that you get what you’re truly looking for and not what it wants to deliver to you.

Robert Epstein (00:51:52):

That’s where they get you because they know people are lazy.

Bill Walton (00:51:55):

It finishes your word for you.

Robert Epstein (00:51:58):

Those search suggestions, we know from our experiments-

Bill Walton (00:52:03):

If you type in crooked, you don’t get crooked Hillary.

Robert Epstein (00:52:07):

Not on Google and Google is all that counts when it comes to search because 92% of search around the world is done in-

Bill Walton (00:52:17):

How does DuckDuckGo work? Is that on top of Google or is that part of it? Because it claims it’s independent.

Robert Epstein (00:52:21):

It’s a private company, small private company, but it’s not a real search engine and it doesn’t really give very good results.

Bill Walton (00:52:29):

Because I’ve used DuckDuckGo, but I don’t see any difference from Google really. I mean, you got to go to the fifth page to find a conservative news source. I’ll have something very specific I’m looking for. I’ll take on an event, and I don’t want the New York Times’ take on it because I know what they’re going to say. I’m looking for somebody who’s independent, who’s writing, and they are out there.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:52:51):

They are out there.

Bill Walton (00:52:53):

But you can’t find them.

Robert Epstein (00:52:55):

Well, at the moment, your best search results are going to be on Brave.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:52:58):

That’s what I do.

Bill Walton (00:52:59):

I’ve got Brave.

Robert Epstein (00:53:00):

Yeah, so you should be using the Brave browser instead of the Chrome browser because Brave preserves your privacy. You should also be using the Brave search engine because that also preserves your privacy. Brave has a completely different business model. They don’t use the surveillance business model.

Bill Walton (00:53:18):

Yeah, I’ve got to flip back that.

Robert Epstein (00:53:20):

If you want to all in one place to get a summary of how you can get away from all the surveillance stuff, go to my article, which is at myprivacytips.com, myprivacytips.com. It begins with a sentence, I have not received a targeted ad on my mobile phone or computer since 2014. That’s how I start out. So, it is possible to use tech and guard your privacy or at least most of your privacy, but most people just don’t even think about these things, especially kids, especially young people. They don’t think about these things at all. They’ve never known privacy.

Bill Walton (00:54:01):

We’re seeing that with TikTok.

Robert Epstein (00:54:03):

Oh, sure.

Bill Walton (00:54:04):

You’re saying, “Gee, 150 million users in the United States, all your information’s going to straight to the Chinese Communist Party.” Most users say, “I don’t care.”

Robert Epstein (00:54:16):

But see, we’re starting to monitor TikTok. We’re monitoring not just Google, but YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram. We’re adding more and more. So, these monitoring systems we’re building are getting bigger and bigger, more and more sophisticated, and that is how you can stop these companies from these manipulations and even from the censorship. The problem with censorship is you don’t know what they don’t show.

Bill Walton (00:54:46):

Sure.

Robert Epstein (00:54:47):

That’s a very, very dangerous kind of manipulative tool. But monitoring systems, that’s a way to fight back because we’re actually capturing all this ephemeral stuff. We’re archiving it, so it can be analyzed either now or later. It can also be submitted to courts as well. This is court admissible evidence, and we do it very, very carefully. We’re monitoring through a politically balanced group of registered voters around the country, and then in recent months, we’ve also been recruiting their children and their teens.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:55:29):

So you’ve talked a couple times about the indoctrination of children. One of the things that almost every time that I’m on an interview or just talking to parents and anything comes up about protecting children, I am constantly saying, “Parents, make sure you are logging into your kids’ accounts and look at what they’re seeing on their device.” Because if you just look at their account, you have a completely different experience than what they actually are getting because of the way the feeds and the algorithms push information to you. What are you seeing? I’m glad that they’re giving you permission to monitor the kids because I think that there are very bad things going on with kids and it’s causing social contagions of very harmful behavior. What are you seeing?

Robert Epstein (00:56:25):

Well, let’s see. How do I explain this? First of all, I have five kids myself. Basically, parents really don’t know what their kids are seeing, because most of what they’re seeing is ephemeral, so there’s no record of it. So, one of the things that we’re going to be doing where it’s the equivalent of Girl Scout cookies, we are actually going to be selling an app that parents can install on their kids’ devices. That will keep track, make a record of all of this ephemeral content, and then the parents can look back and actually see what the kids were seeing.

(00:57:02):

So, so far, parents really don’t know, but I can tell you without any doubt that our children are being subjected to indoctrinations 24 hours a day, that it is so intense that I think it could legitimately be called brainwashing. A lot of the mysterious things that seem to be happening with the thinking of our kids, all these mysteries, this sudden use of all kinds of gender terms or sexual orientation terms or attitudes towards this or that and these massive changes in thinking among young people that seem to happen almost overnight, those are engineered. They are engineered, and we are going to be able to show as our system gets large enough, we are going to be able to document that.

(00:58:01):

More importantly, we are going to be able to expose it and I can give you one clear example if and when you’re ready for it, where we show that by exposing what they’re doing, we can get them to stop. So, by exposing the indoctrination that’s occurring, we’re going to get them to stop. We know how to keep them away from our elections and away from our kids. It’s just a question of scaling up the kind of monitoring systems that we’ve been building, and we’re doing that right now.

(00:58:35):

I mean, literally, on my way over here, I got a notification from the head of our monitoring team. We’re now up to 7,455 field agents in all 50 states. So, remember we started with 95 field agents in 24 states. Now we’re up to 7,455 field agents, all registered voters in all 50 states. I mean, we need a lot more than that, but the point is we are growing every single day. Now, we also have more than 1,500 children and teens.

Jenny Beth Martin (00:59:11):

What if someone wants to sign up with you? Do you have the ability for them to do that?

Robert Epstein (00:59:15):

Nope. Absolutely not. We can’t accept volunteers. You have no idea the number of volunteers we get and I’m very flattered by that, but we can’t accept volunteers. Why? Because if we did, Google would send us thousands of volunteers. Google not only employs 100,000 people that we know of, it actually has 16,000 outside consultants who are used for special projects. I’ve been told by a Google whistleblower that Google has a team. They don’t focus just on me and my team, but at least part-time, they focus on what I do. So, no, we can’t accept volunteers and we don’t explain to people how we do the recruiting. Just like the Nielsen company doesn’t explain how they recruit families to monitor television.

Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:09):

Or just like Google doesn’t explain what they’re doing.

Robert Epstein (01:00:10):

They don’t explain anything.

Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:10):

Right.

Bill Walton (01:00:14):

As usual, we’ve covered about 1% of what I want to get into with you. We need to do this as a two part. I promised Jenny Beth. She’s got another engagement, so we’re going to be wrapping this up. When you’re back, I want to have you back on, so we can explore more in depth how you would roll this out, what technologies you’re using, who else is doing this thing besides Google, how pervasive this is. I want to talk about the Chinese and what their involvement is.

Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:46):

Artificial intelligence, you mentioned that.

Bill Walton (01:00:48):

We didn’t really even touch the artificial intelligence.

Jenny Beth Martin (01:00:51):

I have a feeling that could take an hour or two.

Bill Walton (01:00:53):

We need a part two.

Robert Epstein (01:00:54):

That’s going to make things worse. That’s going to make it easier for Google to manipulate.

Bill Walton (01:00:59):

I know. That’s where I was going with it. This is going to be a vast acceleration of their technologies. Okay. Well, let’s plan to reconvene sometime when you’re next in the area.

Robert Epstein (01:01:12):

Absolutely.

Jenny Beth Martin (01:01:13):

I’d be happy too.

Bill Walton (01:01:14):

We’ll put the team back together for the second half of the game.

Robert Epstein (01:01:19):

Can I give out a link for people who want more?

Bill Walton (01:01:20):

Absolutely. That’s why we’re doing that.

Robert Epstein (01:01:24):

Okay. Mygoogleresearch.com, very easy to remember. Mygoogleresearch.com and people can go there to look at videos, look at documents, and there’s also information there for people who might want to support us, support the research.

Bill Walton (01:01:40):

We can make that as a graphic on this. Let’s do that. Let’s make sure we get that.

Robert Epstein (01:01:45):

Mygoogleresearch.com. Mygoogleresearch.com.

Bill Walton (01:01:49):

Okay. All right, good. So, this is important work, and you’re a brave man. There’s a lot of forces out there that are trying to shape us, and you’re going right up against him. So, thank you. Dr. Robert Epstein, thank you. We’re going to get back. We’re going to dig into this more. Jenny Beth, Tea Party Patriots, thank you.

Jenny Beth Martin (01:02:12):

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

Bill Walton (01:02:14):

Yeah, to be continued. This has been The Bill Walton Show. As always, you can find us at almost all the major podcast platforms, although maybe not this one on YouTube, but we are in Rumble and we’re on Substack and all the audio platforms. You’ll also see this on CPAC now on Monday nights. So, tune in there, and as usual, as I usually ask, send us your ideas for upcoming shows and guests, either through Substack or on a website. We’ll dig into it and hopefully show you the results of your contribution soon.

(01:02:52):

So, anyway, thanks for joining and talk soon. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Want more? Click the subscribe button or head over to thebillwaltonshow.com to choose from over a hundred episodes. You can also learn more about our guest on our Interesting People page, and send us your comments. We read everyone and your thoughts help us guide the show. If it’s easier for you to listen, check out our podcast page and subscribe there. In return, we’ll keep you informed about what’s true, what’s right, and what’s next. Thanks for joining.