Robert Epstein is an author, editor, and psychology researcher. He is a former editor-in-chief of "Psychology Today" and currently serves as Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. He also founded the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. www.drrobertepstein.com www.americasdigitalshield.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are Robert Epstein's main concerns about Google?
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Chapter 2: How has Robert Epstein's research impacted his career?
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. 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.
And 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. And... 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 5 billion people around the world every single day. And 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 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 over more than 200 different platforms, most of which no one's ever heard of.
People have no idea the extent they're being monitored. They're being monitored when they're, 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.
How do they do that?
Well, because remember when we could take the batteries out? Yeah. And then at some point they soldered them in?
Yeah.
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. So... My wife was killed in a suspicious car accident. This was also shortly after I testified before Congress in 2019.
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Chapter 3: How does Robert Epstein view the role of technology in society?
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.
Wow. And this always goes a very specific way. It always goes.
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. So 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.
You know, 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. So we're collecting data now in all 50 states, but we actually have court admissible data now in 20 states already. And we keep building bigger and bigger every day. And what is this data about?
Well, it's any data that's going to real people. So 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. And so 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. And what have you found? Well, 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. Wow.
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, 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. And 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.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of AI on human behavior?
In controlled experiments, how easily a biased answer coming from an answer bot, like Alexa, can boom, just like that, shift the opinion of someone who's undecided. 40% or more after just one question and answer interaction in which someone is getting back a biased answer. Now, if they personalize the answer, the effect is even larger.
So this is essentially a danger that no one was aware of, no one ever saw on the horizon until search engines were created. Now, search engines are here, and it's something that is not regulated, and it's right in front of us. And what steps have been done to sort of mitigate the effects of this, if any?
Okay, so this is where now we get back to my meltdown.
Oh, I thought you were done melting.
Oh, no. No. Okay. No, I've been melting down for years, so I have a lot to go. Yes, you summed it up nicely. I'll just rephrase what you said a little differently. No one anticipated these kinds of manipulations were possible.
And by the way, we've hardly even scratched the surface of what these manipulations are and what they can actually do, and the fact that we have evidence that they're being used. Forget all that. The point is, yes, our lawmakers, our regulators never anticipated that. When... When your friend, what's his name? You just interviewed him recently. Brett Weinstein? No, no.
One of the early investors in Google and Facebook. Marc Andreessen? Marc Andreessen was one. McNamee. Oh, Thiel. Peter Thiel. These people never anticipated when they invested. In fact, McNamee has said straight out, if I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn't have put a dime into these companies. No one really knew this was going to happen. Right.
But now that people like me and there aren't too many, but now that people like me have been figuring this out and getting the word out for more than 10 years now and getting the word out in bigger and bigger ways, I've testified twice before Congress now. You would think. That lawmakers, regulators, somebody would jump up and say, OK, we're going to fix this problem. You would think. You would.
You would also think that in general, people, people around the world, it's not just Americans. People would say, the hell with this. You know, I'm not going to take it anymore. Like in that old movie, I'm not going to take this anymore. And and they would protest and they would switch over to whatever the alternative.
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Chapter 5: Why do dreams sometimes feel disconnected from reality?
The nose, it's taking airborne chemicals, turning that into neural signals. The tongue is taking liquid-borne chemicals, turning that into... And then the... pièce de résistance is the skin. The skin is an amazing transducer which does at least three different kinds of things. It can transduce temperature, turn that into neural signals, pressure, and texture. head to toe, encased in transducers.
So we've been looking into transducers in the animal kingdom. We've been looking at that for a couple of years now, and it's amazing the kinds of transducers nature has created. So nature is a super-duper amazing expert on creating transducers.
My cat, okay, we recently have been investigating this because it turns out my cat's whiskers, we don't have anything like that in us, but cat's whiskers, they actually can detect Direction. The direction the wind is blowing. The direction a potential predator or insect is coming. Because when they tilt, that actually gives the cat different information if they tilt one way versus the other way.
There are transducers in some animals that can detect magnetic fields. Like how birds migrate. Exactly. So there's so many different kinds of transducers. Now, What if at some point evolution, but I don't see how this could not happen. What if at some point evolution, possibly using a chemical, which I know you have some interest in, called DMT.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of neural transduction in understanding consciousness?
And possibly using a gland called the pineal gland, maybe. What if at some point a baby was born somewhere in Central Africa, maybe 20,000 years ago? We're still trying to pin that down. But what if a baby was born with a special kind of transducer that connected up all the experience it's having with another domain, another universe?
Now, at first that might strike you as a little batty, but it turns out it's not batty at all because there's not a physicist in the world, an astrophysicist, who doesn't believe in some variation on the multiverse idea. In other words, any physicist will tell you that the kind of space that we experience is not space. the nature of the universe.
It is such a pathetically limited view of the way the universe is constructed. It's just outrageous. It's so pathetic. We're just picking up so little information. But again, think about that flexibility that evolution has over a period of billions of years.
You only need one baby that's born with this capability and, of course, that's also able to survive and pass on this capability through its genes. But you only need one because once you have one, you're probably going to have a lot more because this is going to be talk about survival value, this is going to have unbelievable survival value.
If there's a connection to some intelligence in another domain, call it like the Greeks did, the other side, call it the other side. Now, all of a sudden, we become much smarter. In fact, the The brain doesn't change. The brain anatomy doesn't change, so we don't see any change in the structure of the remains we find of bones and so on.
We don't find changes there, but we get a lot smarter all of a sudden. Our language suddenly becomes much more complex. We become suddenly capable of living in larger and larger groups. We become moral. There are no moral animals. except us, and we weren't always moral.
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Chapter 7: How do psychedelics influence our perception of reality?
There seems to be a change that occurred to us, not anatomically, but a change that occurred to humans at some point in the past where we became much more capable. Now, all you need is a transducer that connects up our domain with another one in which we are now connected to a higher intelligence,
And you've got a new way of understanding how the brain works, of course, because we have no way of understanding how the brain works now, but now we have a way. And you have a new way of understanding how the universe is structured as well.
Now, we think that, because I'm in touch with some physicists, some neuroscientists who are very intrigued by this, and we're hoping next summer to have a conference on this. And we're even hoping to have some guy named, oh, Joe Rogan, maybe stop by because of your interest in DMT. Because DMT probably plays a role in this process.
But this would change everything because we could, over time, learn to simulate this connection. If we can simulate the connection, then we can control the connection. We might be able to communicate more directly with these entities.
By the way, this theory, which I call NTT or neural transduction theory, in fact, if people go to neuraltransductiontheory.com, they can read all about it, a piece I published in Discover magazine. The point is that this kind of theory would really help us a lot because of the mysteries. It's the mysteries that we try to ignore and But we can't. The dreams. The dreams. Come on.
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Chapter 8: What implications does neural transduction have for communication with extraterrestrial intelligences?
Why does a dream sometimes have nothing to do with your daily life? Sometimes it's just so amazing and so wild. And then you get up because you have to pee and you're struggling because you want to continue this dream. You want to hold on to this dream. This dream is amazing. But by the time you reach the toilet, it's gone. And you can't get it back. Why? Because it was streaming. That's why.
It was streaming. And the stream stopped. That's why you can't get it back, because you weren't generating it. It was being generated through this point in time. You know the famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? I think it's Adam, and I think there's God, and there's two fingers like that. You know that there's some communication happening there that's extremely important there.
That's what I'm talking about. I'm saying let's find out where that is happening, where that connection is, and how it works, and let's test our ideas empirically because I think this is a testable theory. And most important of all, let's figure out how to simulate this because now we can talk directly to these other intelligences and really find out things that we just know nothing about.
I'm very, very fascinated by dreams. And I think it's always it's very interesting how we kind of dismiss them as just being hallucinations or it's just, oh, it's just a dream. You just had a dream. But some of them are so realistic and so bizarre. I've always wondered, like, why do they seem so much like reality? And how do I know what the difference is?
Like maybe reality, like as in waking life, is a more persistent dream. So when you're saying that it's streaming and that's why you can't get it back, what do you think it is? What do you think a dream is? And have you ever talked to like lucid dreamers or people that use techniques to try to master the traveling back and forth into the realms of dreams? Oh, absolutely.
I'm talking to all kinds of interesting people these days. Near-death experiences fits beautifully. I actually had my staff make a list of these mysterious phenomena. They came up with a list within a few hours of 58 items. There are so many weird things that we experience. Dreams... probably top of the list. What do you think they are? I think they all have to do with this transduction.
I think they're all indicators of transduction. I'm not the first person, by the way, who's kind of thought of an idea like this, but I think I am the first person who's pointed out that now we actually have laboratories around the world, neuroscience labs, where we could test this. And I think that's what we're going to do.
So I'm getting this group together, and we're going to figure out ways of testing this. And because we have so many wonderful neuroscience labs now around the world, I don't think it's going to take 50 years. I think it's going to take a few years. I think we're going to find support for this theory. And then engineers are going to start working on how to simulate it.
But to answer your question, I think that the... the other intelligences or intelligence that we're communicating with, and that elevated us, just like in the movie 2001, right? We got elevated. There were these black monoliths that appeared and people went up to them and, you know, the chimp-like creatures touched them. And I think that we were elevated through neural transduction.
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