Editor’s Note: This is referenced in It Is Now 3 Seconds To Midnight - Do You Know What Your Government Is Doing?

ROBERT EPSTEIN, Ph.D. is a senior research psychologist and media professional. For 45 years, his tireless devotion supporting the human project’s creative evolutionary adaptation into our post-industrial mind epoch is a benefit and tonic to any and all who find their way to his work. See his 58 page CV.

Listed here are references illuminating his some of his projects, followed by a transcript of the beginning and the end of his 11 September 2024 interview on Joe Rogan. A 10:45 recording summary is provided along with its transcript (complete transcript is here). The complete recording is 2.5+ hours (156 minutes, mp3 audio). It is essential homework to elucidate the behind-the-curtain power Big Tech companies wield without a shred of accountability.

Robert Epstein:
I am completely fed up. I have worked day and night—I work about 80 hours a week. I’m directing almost 40 research projects. I’ve been working really hard for maybe 45 years and the last 12 years where I’ve turned my eye to Google and other tech companies have turned into, for me personally, a disaster. Before I started studying Google I had published 15 books with major publishers. Since I’ve started studying Google, and other companies, I can’t publish anymore.

I used to write for and actually work for mainstream news organizations and media organizations. I was Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today for four years. I was an editor for Scientific American. I wrote for USA Today and US News and World Report and Time Magazine.

But in 2019 after I testified before Congress about some of my research on Google, President Trump tweeted to his whatever millions of gazillions of followers, basically some praise for my research; he got the details wrong. But then Hillary Clinton, whom I had always admired, chose to tweet back to her 80 million Twitter followers and she tweeted that my work had been completely debunked and was based on data from 21 undecided voters. I still have no idea where any of that came from. Probably someone from Google because Google was her biggest supporter in 2016 and this was 2019. Then that got picked up by this machine, I’m told it’s called The Clinton Machine, and the New York Times picked that up without fact checking and then a hundred other places did and I got squashed like a bug; squashed.

I had a flawless reputation as a researcher. My research reputation was gone. I was now a fraud, a fraud even though I’ve always published in peer-reviewed journals which is really hard to do and there was nothing I could do about it. All of a sudden I found that the only places I could publish were in what I call right-wing conservative nutcase publications where I’ve actually made friends over the years. I’ve made friends with them but that’s beside the point. I was crushed.

Not only that. I’ve been discovering things. I’ve made at least 10 major discoveries about new forms of influence that the internet has made possible. These are controlled almost entirely by a couple of big tech companies affecting more than five billion people around the world every single day. I’ve discovered them. I’ve named them. I’ve quantified them. I’ve published randomized controlled studies to show how they work. Published them in peer-reviewed journals. We just had another paper accepted yesterday.

And I’ve built systems to do to them what they do to us and our kids. They surveil us and our kids 24 hours a day. Google alone does that more over more than 200 different platforms most of which no one’s ever heard of. People have no idea the extent they’re being being monitored. They’re being monitored when if they have Android phones. They’re being monitored even when your phone is off. Even when the power is off you’re still being monitored.

Joe Rogan:
How do they do that?

RE:
Because remember when we could take the batteries out? Then at some point they soldered them in. Because they soldered the batteries in, even when you turn the phone off it’s not off. It’s easy to demonstrate. It’s still transmitting or it’ll transmit the moment the power comes back on. It’s still collecting data.

What am I trying to say here? Then my wife was killed in a suspicious car accident. This was also shortly after I testified before Congress in 2019. Right before she was killed, I did a private briefing for Ken Paxton, the AG of Texas and other AGs at Stanford University. One of those guys came out afterwards and he said, Based on what you told us, Dr Epstein, he said, I don’t mean to scare you but, he said, I predict you’re going to be killed in some sort of accident in the next few months.

I told you this before when I was on before and obviously I wasn’t killed but my beautiful wife was killed. Her vehicle was never inspected forensically and then it disappeared from the impound lot. I was told it was sold to some junk company in Mexico. And that is one of now six, six incidents, six of violence against people who are associated with me over the past few years. The last just happened a couple of weeks ago.

JR:
What was that one? [7:21-9:18 advertisement]

RE:
This last one is kind of weird and creepy. I was at a meeting in Dallas I think it was—no it was up in Monterey. It was with General Paxton and then with some of my staff, one of my staff members sitting next to me. She all of a sudden just brushed her hand against my computer case—that’s my computer case—and she screamed. We all went, What happened? And she goes, Look. And there was a needle sticking out of the computer case. Which is impossible. It was going a half inch into her thumb, it had gone through the end. Of course I’m thinking, Oh that’s awful but maybe, maybe you just saved my life. Maybe it’s got some sort of weird poison on it or it’s like a Putin thing and it’s got radioactive substances or something. I’m trying to joke around but meanwhile she was terrified. How did a pin get and—and by the way I have a picture of the pin. It’s really creepy.

JR:
When you’re saying a needle, you’re not saying like a syringe. You’re saying a needle like a sewing needle?

RE:
No. That’s what I’m saying. None of us has ever seen a needle like this needle. It’s about 2 inches long, the end is like it’s been sharpened. You can see it sharpened and at the end where there should be a hole for thread there’s no hole. So I don’t know what it is. But we’ve had worse incidents too. I’m just saying this happened to be the latest.

JR:
But that’s in your computer bag. Was your computer bag ever out of your care?

RE:
Not that I noticed but—

JR:
But I mean if somebody wanted to harm you, a little needle it’s not really

RE:
oh I don’t think that’s someone wanting to harm me.

JR:
What do you think that is?

RE:
If it’s anything, it’s someone wanting to scare me and the fact is I have been scared and so have a lot of my staff. This summer we’ve had 26 interns, they come from all over the country. 23 of these people who are volunteers and fantastic young people, extremely smart, helping me run almost 40 research projects. And we take precautions and there is some fear. One of these young men who’s done superb work, he asked that we take his name off of everything. He didn’t quit but ... there have been a number of incidents.

Did you ever hear of John Catsimatidis? He owns a ton of supermarkets in New York; he also owns WABC New York. I was at a luncheon with him. I shouldn’t do this on the air, but he actually said, to make a long story short, that if he were Google he would kill me. He said it straight out.

JR:
But yet you’re still alive.

RE:
Well, I’m alive but I’m in rough shape because when push comes to shove here, I have been making discoveries that are really startling. And they’ve gotten worse and worse and worse. Since I was last with you, which was two and a half years ago, we’ve made probably five, six, seven more discoveries; they get worse each time.

We’ve done something that I was speculating about doing when I was here which was building a nationwide monitoring system to surveil them the way they surveil us and see what content they’re actually sending to real voters and to real kids.

JR:
One of the major issues that you have discovered is the curation and the purposeful curation of information through search engines. Most people that are unaware think that when you do a Google search on something—say if you want to find out about a Kamala Harris rally or a Trump rally—that you are just going to get the most pertinent information in the order in which it’s most applicable to your search.

But that’s not the case. The case is everything is curated and if you want to find positive things about someone who they deem to be negative, to whatever ideology they’re promoting, it will be very difficult to find that information. If you want to find positive things about someone they support they will be right upfront. If you want to find negative things about someone they support they will be very difficult to find and you will be inundated with positive things.

What you have found is that this curation of information from searches has a profound effect, especially on the casual voter on the low information voter, a profound effect on who gets elected and it’s tantamount to election interference. Is that fair to say?

RE:
It’s fair to say that’s where I was two and a half years ago. We have gone so far beyond that because it’s not just search results; it’s search suggestions which we’re capturing now by the millions. It was in the news recently that when people were typing in “Trump assassination”, they were getting crazy stuff like the Lincoln assassination. They were getting crazy stuff and they were not getting information about the Trump attempted assassination.

I looked at that and I said, Oh isn’t this nice. There’s an anecdote about how they may be abusing search suggestions. We don’t have anecdotal data anymore. We have hardcore, large scale scientific data on all of these issues. We know what’s actually going on and we’ve quantified the impact.

It’s one thing to say, Oh look what they’re doing. It’s quite another to say, What impact does that have on people?

JR:
Let’s talk about the Trump assassination one in particular. What what did you find about?

RE:
Frankly, we couldn’t care less about that because that’s one anecdote. We’re collecting these by the millions and what we know—we know a couple of things. We know that first of all, they’re not—It started out as one thing and it’s turned into something else. What they do is they use search suggestions to shift people’s thinking about anything. It’s not just about candidates either, it’s about anything. And we’ve shown in controlled experiments that by manipulating search suggestions you can turn a 50-50 split among undecided voters into a 90-10 split with no one having the slightest idea that they have been manipulated....

It always goes a specific way. But I’m going to show you maybe a little later—if I haven’t put you to sleep or if my meltdown hasn’t gotten too bad, because I’m not quite finished with my meltdown yet—I’ll show you content, data, large scale that we’re collecting now 24 hours a day and I’ll show you what they’re actually doing.

An anecdote, those don’t hold up in court. They grab headlines for a couple of days but that’s about it. They don’t do anything. But we’re actually collecting evidence that’s Court admissible. We’re collecting data now in all 50 states but we actually have court admissible data now in 20 States and we keep building bigger and bigger every day.

JR:
And what is this data about?

RE:
It’s any data that’s going to real people. We’re collecting data with their permission from the computers of a politically balanced group of more than 15,000 registered voters in all 50 states and from many of their children and teens as well. When they’re doing anything on their computers they’ve given us the right to collect it, grab it, zap it over to our own computers, aggregate the data and analyze it.

I want to point out that when we do this, we do this without transmitting any identifying information. We protect people’s privacy but we are getting these increasingly accurate pictures of what Google and other companies are sending to real people.

Why do you have to do it this way? Because all the data they send is personalized. You will never know what they’re sending to people unless you look over the shoulders of real people and see the personalized content.

JR:
And what have you found?

RE:
As it happens, I just summarized our findings over the last 12 years and you get the first Advanced copy of a monograph that’s called THE EVIDENCE. And because we’re so desperate—we need help, we need money, we need emails—we’re so desperate for that that we have set up—we kind of did this last time too—but we have set up a link. If people go to that link, and they’re willing to give us their email, we will give them a free copy of this advanced copy of this monograph. It it goes through the whole thing. It shows all the effects we’ve discovered but it also shows the monitoring we’re doing and what we’re finding out from this monitoring.

JR:
One of the things that I noticed since the last time you were here was I used to use duckduckgo. One of the reasons why I started using duckduckgo is there was a story about a physician in Florida that took the MRNA vaccine and had a stroke shortly afterwards. It was very early on in the pandemic and they were beginning to speculate that some of the side effects of the vaccine are being hidden. I could not find this story on Google. I could not find it. I kept looking and looking and looking. I entered in the information on duckduckgo; it was one of the first articles, instantaneously. I was like this is crazy.

Since then, something’s happened. I think they became aware that duckduckgo was a problem spot for the dissemination of information. Now it appears to mirror google.

RE:
The same has happened with Bing and the same has happened with Yahoo.

JR:
What about Brave?

RE:
No, Brave is still independent. I know Brendan Icke, you you should have him on if you haven’t. He’s the guy who wrote Brave. Before that he wrote Firefox for Mozilla. He left because Google had its tentacles into Firefox.

Last part of interview

It’s another one of my intuitions, call it that, but I think the data are all around us. They’re all around us. And by the way there are a couple people I have turned on to this who just all of a sudden become obsessed. Because all of a sudden you see all around you reminders of all the weird stuff and you realize, Wait, all this stuff that seems so weird. You know what? It’s not weird at all if NTT is valid. If this theory is valid the stuff that we think is weird is not weird at all. In fact it makes perfect sense.

Psychosis, you brought up psychosis. But there’s so many things like that and all of a sudden they’re not mysterious at all. They make very good sense. How about something—one of my favorites is deja vu or how about meeting someone that you feel like you’ve known them forever? I’ve had that happen. It’s an amazing experience. It’s visceral. It’s so powerful. It’s so strong. How could that possibly be? Well, see, if you’ve got Neural Transduction Theory there in your toolbox, you go, Oh that’s easy. Lots of stuff just falls into place.

Now I have to point out that I’m wearing this idiotic Starburst thing TameBigTech.com ... I need help. I desperately need people’s help. We have spent $7 million building the world’s first nationwide monitoring system that is doing to those bastards what they do to us and our kids 24 hours a day. We are surveilling them for the first time. We are finding overwhelming evidence that they are very deliberately and systematically messing with us and our elections especially. I personally believe that as of 2012, the free and fair election, at least at the national level, has not existed.

JR:
It’s just been manipulated.

RE:
It’s just been manipulated since 2012. I say this in part because I met one of the people on Google’s Tech team—on Obama’s Tech Team rather, I should say—which was being run by Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, at the time. I talked to him at great length about what the tech team was doing. They had full access to all of Google’s shenanigans, all those manipulations. And one member of that team asked by a reporter, How many of the four points by which Obama won, how many of those points did he get from the tech team? And the guy said—Elon Krygal (sp?) I believe his name is—he was actually quoted and he said, Two of the points came from us. Now Obama won by 5 million votes roughly and two out of four points came from the tech team. That’s 2 and a half million votes.

By 2016 I had calculated that Google could shift—and it would be toward Hillary Clinton of course whom I supported at the time—that Google could shift between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton in that election with no one knowing. She won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. If you take Google out of that election, the popular vote would have been tied. Couple days after that election, everyone, all the leaders in Google get up on stage—I’m sure you’ve seen this it’s an amazing video—and they’re talking to all of Google’s 100,000 employees and one by one they’re going up to the mic and saying, We are never going to let that happen again.

JR:
Which is democracy. They’re never going to let democracy happen again.

RE:
Exactly. that’s what I’m saying.

JR:
It’s so crazy to be blatantly and openly talking about that.

RE:
We already had a pretty big monitoring system. We preserved 1.5 million ephemeral experiences. Our data show that Google shifted at least 6 million votes to Joe Biden who won the popular vote by about 8 million. So again, take Google out of the equation, that would have been pretty much a tie in the the popular vote and Trump would have won 11 out of 13 swing states instead of five. So going forward from roughly 2012, I think the free and fair election has been an illusion, an illusion.

This is something—it’s very weird and kind of ironic—but this is something that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in that last speech of his, his farewell speech. He warned about the rise of military-industrial complex; everyone’s heard about that. But he also warned about the rise of a technological elite that could someday control public policy without anyone knowing. The technological elite are now in control. That’s what we have. That’s where I get back to my ranting and my pain because I realized no one is paying attention.

Eisenhower said we have to be alert or this will happen. We have not been alert. And the fact is people right this second who I give speeches to, sometimes they get all riled up and then they walk out of the auditorium with their surveillance phones. Mine is not; this is a secure phone. But they walk out with their surveillance phones in their pocket and they use all the surveillance tools that Google has set up for them—and other companies too now—and they think, Isn’t this nice. This company’s doing all this nice stuff for me and giving me all this free stuff. That’s not the business model. All those free things are just apps that trick you into giving up personal data and then they monetize the data and they use it to control you. That’s what’s really happening. That’s the business model and people can’t see it.

I’m telling you, I’ve been working on this for 12 years and it’s gotten to the point where I am wiped out, I am fed up, I am exhausted, I am disillusioned and ... and I’m lonely. Because since Misty was killed 5 years ago I sometimes feel like I’m literally dying of loneliness. The fact that other people around me have been hurt, one quite one quite seriously, makes me a little nervous too. And that’s where I am at this point and it’s a it’s a terrible place to be, terrible.

Now, it took $7 million to build what we’ve built but it’s been really tough. Okay. We’re talking about raising a dollar at a time. It’s been really, really difficult and for us to set this up so that it’s actually permanent and self-sustaining and so we have court admissible data in all 50 states which will make these companies think. It’ll make them think. Think twice maybe.

That is going to require at least another $50 million. That gets us a secure facility and our own servers and a security team. We have virtually no security. Hear that Google? And they know this because a couple months ago they attacked us in an extremely sophisticated way. I’ve never seen this before.

JR:
When you say they, who?

RE:
I don’t know.

JR:
Someone.

RE:
I don’t know, Google has—

JR:
What did they do?

RE:
It was very, very unusual. It was not the usual thing. What they did was they got our accounts, they got our apps to run at ludicrous speed I guess you could say. What they did was they pulled in more and more and more servers until we were running so many servers simultaneously that we actually got shut down in the cloud. We lost access to our own data for almost two weeks. Now we’ve never seen an attack like that. Even our security people had never seen an attack like that. It was really pretty—

JR:
What was the mechanism of this attack? How’d they do it?

RE:
We’re not sure how they got in. Once they got in, all they did was they just created a tremendous amount of activity so that pulled in more and more resources.

JR:
And this is definitely created, this is not organic?

RE:
Oh no, no, no. It’s absolutely created. And now that we know about this particular kind of attack, if it happens again we’ll be up within two days max. But the point is there’s a lot of pressure on us so we need a lot of money to set up a secure facility, have security teams not just protecting our data but protecting our people. We have to protect our people.

JR:
Have you ever talked to Elon about this stuff?

RE:
I’ve never had a way to reach him.

JR:
Well hopefully someone will take this clip and put it on X, and he’s a junkie. He’ll be on it all day. So hopefully someone will put it to his attention and put it up there. Because I’m sure this is very concerning to him. I mean, he has a vested interest in this. Clearly what happened when he purchased Twitter and he found out the extent of government interference in free speech and how many people were being pressured to not talk about certain things that were inconvenient or how many accounts they were trying to get taken down because these accounts were purveyors of misinformation that turned out to be absolutely accurate. He has a deep distrust for sure.

RE:
He has, a few times lately, he has retweeted content about my work.

JR:
So he’s aware.

RE:
He might be aware. And there’s another way also, by the way, to take down Google which I published this in Bloomberg Businessweek. If you if you go to Epstein and Businessweek.com you’ll actually see the article [To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public - The tech giant doesn't have to be dismantled. Sharing its crown jewel might reshape the internet. 15 Jul 2019].

We’ve reached the point where data have become an essential part of our lives. The way to take down Google is to do what governments have been doing for hundreds of years: to declare their index, the database they use to generate search results, to be a public commons. This is exactly what governments do when water, electricity, telephone communications, any commodity, any service becomes essential; governments at some point have to step in. With the electric companies, they were all privately owned. I didn’t know that. I didn’t realize that. They were all privately owned until the government had to step in.

This is where we are now with data and the biggest baddest database in the world is Google’s because it’s the gateway to all knowledge. It needs to be declared a public commons. As I say, ample precedent for that in law. It’s very light touch regulation and what it’ll do is it’ll allow other people to draw from the database to create their own niche search engines. So you’ll create a search engine for people interested in DMT and UFOs. Someone will create one for women, for Lithuanians. We’ll end up with thousands of these search engines, all of which are vying for attention. It would be exactly like the news media, that domain. That’s the way it should be.

Search should be competitive. Google was not the first search engine, it was the 21st. So that’s how you do it and also then search would become innovative again. There have been no innovations in search for the 20 years that Google has dominated search. General Ken Paxton of this great state of Texas, he’s interested in this. Senator Cruz is interested. Other people are interested.

This would be tough to implement in the US but the EU could do it. Because five of Google’s data centers are in the EU. The EU could do it in a flash and they’re very frustrated with Google because they’ve been trying to keep them under control for a long time now and they’ failed.

There are some things that could be done. Permanent large scale monitoring system: that is a necessity. That must be there because if you don’t have that you don’t know what these companies are doing. You don’t know how they’re messing with our minds with our kids minds and with our elections. You have to monitor and you have to have court admissible data in every state and probably in every country. Then they will pull back a little bit because they have to.

They’re violating campaign finance laws when they very blatantly support one candidate or one party. They’re making huge in-kind donations without declaring them. Another thing they’re doing right now, perfect example of something our system is capturing right this second. Right this second, Google is sending Register to Vote reminders to Democrats at about two and a half times the rate they’re sending them to Republicans. How do I know? Because that’s what the monitoring system shows. That’s what they’re doing. At some point that’s going to turn into partisan mail in your Ballot Reminders. Then that turns into partisan Go Vote reminders.

These are just displayed on Google’s homepage. We’re capturing the homepages by the millions. If you don’t capture them, then the content is ephemeral and it disappears and it’s gone forever and you can’t go back in time to figure out what they were doing.

So monitoring is no longer optional. And by the way, monitoring is fast. Unlike regulations and laws, monitoring can keep up with whatever the tech company is dishing out. The next company, the next Google after that, monitoring can keep up. If you’re going to have an internet and it can mess with people’s lives and it can mess with governments and elections and so on, then you’ve got to have monitoring systems in place.

That’s what I’ve been—that’s what this new, my monograph is about. And if people want to get a free copy of it, TameBigTech.com. [Laughter] You crack me up sometimes, really. I’d love to see you do a comedy routine.

JR:
Listen Robert, thank you for being here. I really, really appreciate what you’re doing. If you weren’t doing this, I don’t know if it would get done. I don’t know if we would know as much as we know. I think it would be speculative. I think people would have ideas. I think it would be impossible to prove and I think what you’ve done is a tremendous service for people. So thank you very much. TameBigTech.com.

RE:
Thank you but I’m still fed up, just so you know.

JR:
Okay. Thanks Robert. Bye everybody.