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
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. And we're up. Hello, Robert. Good to see you. Hello, Joe. You look a little stressed out.
I am stressed out. In fact, are we recording? Yes. Okay, then... Then I want to make a special request. Okay. You can kick me out if you like. Why would I do that? Because I need to have a meltdown. I would like to have a meltdown right now on your show.
You want to have a personal meltdown? Yes. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. Yeah. I've never heard anybody plan for a meltdown before.
Well, I need to do this, and I think this is the right opportunity. Okay. And I don't know what I'm going to say.
Okay.
But I am definitely going to meltdown.
Okay.
Okay. So 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.
So 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 U.S.
News & 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 2016. And 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. 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.
Right before she was killed, I did a private briefing for Ken Paxton, the AG of Texas and other AGs at Stanford University. And one of those guys came out afterwards and he said, well, 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.
So I told you this before when I was on before, and obviously I wasn't killed, but my beautiful wife was killed. And, you know, 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 somewhere.
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.
What was that one?
Well, this last one is kind of weird and creepy. And then I was at a meeting in Dallas, I think it was. Oh, no, no, no. It was up in Monterey. And it was with General Paxton and then with some of my staff. And one of my staff members sitting next to me, she all of a sudden just brushed her hand against my computer case, which is, that's my computer case. And she screamed.
And we all went, what happened? And she goes, look. And there was a needle sticking out of the computer case, sticking out of the computer case, which is impossible. And it was going a half inch into her thumb. It had gone through the end. And, of course, I'm thinking, oh, that's awful, but 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, by the way, I have a picture of the pin. It's... Really creepy. So when you're saying a needle, you're not saying like a syringe? You're saying a needle like a sewing needle?
No, that's what I'm saying. None of us has ever seen a needle like this needle. It's about two inches long. The end is like it's been sharpened. Okay. You can see it's sharpened. And at the end where there should be a hole for thread, there's no hole. Okay. I don't know what it is. But we've had worse incidents, too. I'm just saying this happened to be the latest. But that's in your computer bag?
Was your computer bag ever out of your care?
Well, not that I noticed. But if somebody wanted to harm you, a little needle, it's not really. Oh, I don't think that's someone wanting to harm me. What do you think that is? Well, 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.
Twenty-three of these people are volunteers and fantastic young people, extremely smart, helping me run almost 40 research projects.
Mm-hmm.
And there is, you know, we take precautions and there is some fear. And 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 I'm just saying.
Sounds reasonable.
Yeah, yeah, because there have been a number of incidents. And if I were... Did you ever hear of John Katsimatidis? No. Okay, he owns a ton of...
supermarkets in New York he also owns WABC New York but I was at a luncheon with him I shouldn't do this on the air I shouldn't do this but he actually said to make a long story short that if he were Google he would kill me he said it straight out but yet you're still alive
Well, I'm alive, but I am in rough shape because, you know, when a push comes to shove here, I have been making discoveries that are really startling. And they've gotten worse and worse and worse. And since I was last with you, which was two and a half years ago, we've made probably five or six, seven more discoveries. They get worse each time. And worse.
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.
So let's break this down because I think we're getting a little in the weeds here. Let's explain to people that don't know what you're talking about what your research is about because most people are not aware. And one of the major issues that you have discovered is the curation and the purposeful curation of information through search engines.
So 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 you, 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 up front.
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. And 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?
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. So 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. And, you know, 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. See, 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?
Right. Let's talk about the Trump assassination one in particular. What did you find about that?
Well, 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... You know, it started out as one thing and it's turned into something else. And so 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.
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.
One of the things that I noticed since the last time you were here was I used to use DuckDuckGo. And 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. And 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.
And I think they became aware that DuckDuckGo was a problem spot for the dissemination of information. And now it appears to mirror Google.
Well, the same has happened with Bing, and the same has happened with Yahoo. What about Brave? No, Brave is still independent. I know Brendan Eich, you should have him on if you haven't. And he's the guy who wrote Brave. Before that, he wrote Firefox for Mozilla. He left because Google was... had its tentacles into Firefox.
Yeah. I'm afraid to talk about Brave for them to be compromised because, like, we were talking about DuckDuckGo, and I was telling everybody, go to DuckDuckGo. And now I'm like, Jesus, it's the same thing as Google. Like, something happened. Do you know what happened?
Well, we know in some cases with some of these companies what happened. I don't know the particulars with DuckDuckGo, but it's easy enough to guess. They're under... All of these... These alternative websites that are trying to protect people's privacy. So we use ProtonMail, for example. We use Signal for texting. They've all run into problems. And the problem is when Google goes after them.
So Google tried to shut down ProtonMail. That's been well documented. Really?
Oh, yeah. Why did they try to shut down ProtonMail? What was their argument?
Because they saw it possibly cutting in a little bit into their Gmail business. And they were brutal. They were brutal in suppressing any mention of ProtonMail anywhere. Don't forget, it's not just the search results. It's the search suggestions. It's the answer boxes. Right. How were they suppressing ProtonMail? The way they suppress everything else.
I'll give you a detail here that you may not know. Okay. Okay. Because they don't have to adjust their algorithms to do something this simple. Their algorithms, all of them, as far as I know, check blacklists and check whitelists. So all they have to do is add a couple of proton male links to blacklists.
And that means that before one of their algorithms will take someone somewhere or will show someone something... It checks for the blacklist first. And if you put ProtonMail on the blacklist, it's suppressed and it doesn't appear.
Well, let's look for it right now. Jamie, do me a favor, please, and pull up Google. Obviously, this is happening before the podcast is released, so they can't. correct this because they didn't know you were coming on they didn't know we were talking about this so let's pull up google real quick and put it up on the screen and okay you already googled it Just let me see.
Okay, right away, it shows ProtonMail. And then below that, it shows Proton Account, Sign In. You use the Proton VPN. So how is it suppressing?
This is not suppressing at all. Okay, now this is where my staff has warned me, don't be condescending to Joe Rogan. How is it condescending? I'm just asking a question. You can just give me an answer. No, I know I could, but I was about to be condescending.
Well, why would you be condescending if this is the question? This is the question. For goodness sake. Protonmail, do the Google search, and then right away the first thing is Protonmail.
Okay, but you're pushing me back into meltdown mode. I'll tell you why. Well, tell me why. Because what account is this? Jamie's account. It's Jamie's account. If you actually want to know whether they're suppressing ProtonMail, you have to look over the shoulders of a large representative sample of people. You can't just look at Jamie's account.
So you think that Jamie's account is curated to not hide ProtonMail?
Well, of course it's curated. Technically, this is not my account. Whoever's account it is, they know whose it is and they know how it's used. And remember, since all content is personalized, that means it's a very simple matter for them... And they have algorithms that do this.
Okay. Well, we can do a real quick experiment. We won't get the results right now, but we will get the results from the future. So I'll ask the audience to do this. So ladies and gentlemen and non-binary folks out there, please go to Google and and type in ProtonMail and screen record this and then upload this.
Upload this to X, upload this to Instagram, upload this to Facebook and TikTok and all that. And I'd like to see what the results are.
You're going to get clean results because they know every single viewer, listener that you have. So they can, as I was told this literally by Zach Voorhees, whom you may have heard of. He's one of the most prominent whistleblowers from Google. They can turn bias on and off like flipping a light switch.
So you think they look for someone who listens to podcasts and they don't have bias towards them?
I'm just going to say what I said before. The only way to know what they're really sending to people and they're not messing around is to look over the shoulders of people that they cannot identify and who are representative of the American population. And I'm going to show you. Over and over and over again. I'm going to show you what they're actually sending when we look at things.
When we collect data in a scientifically valid way so that the data are court admissible, I will show you what they're actually sending to people.
So you have shown that if you collect data in this scientific way that they suppress proton mail? We haven't looked at that. We could look at that very easily. Okay. Do you understand, though, that you're saying they suppress ProtonMail, and then we're saying, let's see if they suppress ProtonMail.
Oh, no, no, no. They didn't. You misunderstand. I'm telling you that early on, ProtonMail has written essays on this. I know Andy Yen, who's the founder and CEO. And in the beginning, when Google was trying to completely put them out of business, they published a lot of – blogs on this. They sued them in court. They did everything they could possibly do.
And they had overwhelming evidence that Google was trying to... Okay.
ProtonMail sued Google or Google sued ProtonMail? ProtonMail sued Google. And what was the accusation?
That they were suppressing content, ProtonMail content, so that people would not know that they exist. And what was the results of those court cases? Google backed down, which they do sometimes. It's hard to know when they do, when they don't. But this is also the vestiger case. She's head of that commission in Europe, European Commission, that has sued Google repeatedly.
It has fined them four times, more than 10 billion euros. Their first case against Google was the same kind of case, exactly the same, that Google was suppressing information about comparative shopping services. And they had put out of business or nearly put out of business most of the comparative shopping services in Europe. And so the European Commission went after them. They won their case.
Google at that time was the biggest fine Google had ever faced. And they proved it. They proved that Google was doing this deliberately, systematically. So they do this all the time. And what I'm saying is that generally, look, look. They're the gateway. They decide what people are going to see and what people are not going to see. Okay. And whoever controls the information controls humanity.
They control the narrative and that controls us. Has there been any talk about making these kind of algorithms illegal?
Not serious talk because, see, you can't... Look, the search algorithm itself, which is, by the way, going to be outmoded very soon because of... AI. Yeah, because of AI. But the search engine itself has to be biased. It has to be biased because you don't want it... Using an equal time rule, you want it to show you the best guitar brand there is. You want the best dog food.
You want the most correct answer. So it's always biased. It's always going to put one political candidate ahead of another. The thing is, though, of course, they can control which one if they take any interest. So that's where the problem comes in. So because it's always biased, you can't.
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You want the algorithm to work that way because you want the best to rise to the top. Right. Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad that goes with the good. The bad is they can decide what's good and what's bad. One of the leaks from the company, eight-minute video called The Selfish Ledger, talks about the ability of the company to re-engineer humanity. They call it re-sequencing human behavior.
And they explain how easily they can do it. And they're actually doing it. And we know they're doing it now because we, as of yesterday, we had preserved more than 99.3 million ephemeral experiences, mainly on Google, but other platforms as well. But also on YouTube, because on YouTube, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. And on YouTube, the ephemeral content
It's those suggestions for the next videos, and it's that up next suggestion that plays automatically. So normally, ephemeral content is lost forever. That's why they use it for manipulation purposes. We're capturing it. That's never been done before, and we're doing it on a massive scale.
Everything from search suggestions to answer boxes to search results to YouTube sequences, YouTube recommendations. You name it. We're monitoring Facebook, TikTok, Twitter. We're learning. Each year we get better and better at monitoring more and more and then monitoring faster and analyzing the data faster.
And last November, we went public with a dashboard that summarizes the data that we're collecting and shows the bias in real time. It's literally updated every five minutes, 24 hours a day. And you can see the bias. And I... I've given you some images that we can show if you'd like. You can see the bias and it's overwhelming. This is not my imagination.
And I can show you a couple of shockers, things that you would never guess that they're doing.
Okay. So what are we looking at here?
Oh, perfect. Perfect place to begin.
How did you know? Jamie's a wizard. Mean bias by political leaning, Google only. Okay. So what is this showing us here?
This is showing—and if you see bars below the zero line, that means the content is liberally biased. And you're seeing very strong liberal bias. And those three different bars show you the bias and content being sent to conservatives, liberals, and moderates. Now, abortion, you would think, if they're really showing people what they want to see—
something that matches their interests, you would think that they would not be sending the same level of liberal bias to conservatives, liberals and moderates. But that's what this shows.
So this is the search topic is abortion. Correct. This is the average of January to August of 2024. And so when you say mean bias by political leaning, so are you saying they're sending the same biased information roughly? There's a slight difference, a little bit more in the liberal side and a little bit more in the conservative side than the moderate side, it looks like, right? Is that correct?
Yes. So what are they? No, the opposite, right? Seems like moderate is more. But what is the... What is the bias? So if you search abortion, is it leaning towards pro-choice websites and pro-choice information? Is that what it's saying?
I knew you were going to ask that, so I can actually show you. For some of these graphs, let's look at a couple of the graphs, and then I'm going to show you the content. Because all of this... this bias that we're measuring ultimately results in them taking you to a news story, to a web page, right? So we're going to go to, let's do Elizabeth Warren next.
Just the, just the blue, just the red graph, just the graph itself.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So this is a shocker. Because if it's Elizabeth Warren, who's a very well-known liberal politician, they should be sending lots of blue stuff to her. They're not. They want her out of office. They are sending people to content that vilifies politics. Elizabeth Warren, they want her gone. Why?
Because she is one of the only Dems who's gone on record, written statement, the whole thing, calling for Google's breakup. They want her gone. And Deaton, I guess, just won the nomination to oppose her for the Republicans. They are going to do everything possible to put this Republican into office in Massachusetts. Wow. And no one knows this except you and me, Owen James.
Well, a lot more people know it now. Maybe. As of you saying this on this podcast, yes. Well. Unless they're going to suppress the podcast. But they really can't do that.
Well, that's why I have a lot to say that I want to say here because I am really upset about a bunch of things and I want to explain why.
Put that back up, please. So what this is, mean bias. And what is this bias showing? Is this bias just negative stories about Elizabeth Warren, like her pretending to be Native American and that kind of stuff? Yes.
In fact, you know that other one that you were about to put up that has the red graph at the top and then below it, it has a bunch of news stories? That one? This one. Okay. If you can enlarge it and scroll down... So these bars aren't just bars. These bars are summarizing content, thousands and thousands and thousands of web pages that they're sending people to.
So they're sending people mostly, are you saying right wing centered content? Well, look at the stuff. But one of them is CNBC. Elizabeth Warren wants more student loan borrowers to know bankruptcy is easier now.
But when you average these, that's what we're doing. When you average them. So we're looking at literally millions of these experiences and we average them. Then you end up with a shocker in her case. They're actually sending conservatively biased content when people are looking for information on Elizabeth Warren. They want her gone.
Elizabeth Warren, an anti-crypto movement losing their battle, according to former CFTC chairman, report – So that's an anti-crypto movement. That would definitely be more of a right-wing bias. Warren proposes jail time for corporate greed in health care. That would be more progressive, right? She's trying to eliminate corporate greed in health care.
Three Republican Senate candidates are competing to take Elizabeth Warren as the mass GOP fights for relevance. Okay, so the way they're framing that, fights for relevance, is interesting. That's a little bit biased. Senator Warren is way off on raspberries and Americans' living standards. Okay, that's certainly a negative article. Likely. Warren calls for Fed Powell's weak need on bank rules.
Democrats want to tax your home, your retirement, your everything. That's a negative one. Senators Warren and Marshall pose questions to Biden officials about the use of crypto to evade sanctions. So that's going to get the crypto bros after her. We don't charge people for air. We shouldn't charge for water either.
A new tax bill from Elizabeth Warren to Ro Khanna seeks to ban the trade of water futures. Let's go one step further. That seems like a progressive cause.
When you put these all together, because we're showing you means, what we're showing you is the mean, the overall mean. Now, you would expect for Elizabeth Warren to get three blue bars, but we're getting three red bars. That means they're sending highly, on average, highly conservatively biased stories to conservatives, which makes sense, to moderates. Well, one could argue.
But also to liberals. They're sending those to liberals.
But she's a problematic person to search anyway because she's kind of a fraud, right? Like especially with the – I mean, I want to say she's kind of a fraud. Let me say it better. She has been accused of lying about her ancestry. And then she did it for benefit. And then she did it to get into Harvard. She did it to get jobs. And then, you know, she had that challenge with President Trump.
And then it turned out she has a small fraction of... I think I'm 100 times more African American than she is Native American. Something like that. Let me explain. I might have made that up. Let me explain. Okay.
Please explain. All right. These aren't just... These are graphs summarizing a massive amount of data that's being sent directly to the computer screens of registered voters. I totally understand that.
What I'm saying is with someone like her, it might be difficult to find positive stories.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Because we have so many examples of these things now that we can find whatever it is. Here's the point. Okay. We can... We can adjust what we're looking for. We can not only look back now in a database that we've been building over a year, but we can adjust what we're looking for going forward.
So if a person wants to break up Google like she has publicly stated, they're like, okay. Well, we will target you with our search algorithm. We will make sure that people are getting more negative stories about you than positive stories. And we will have a bias that leans towards these negative stories to everyone, to liberals, to conservatives, to independents.
And that has very little impact on people who have already made up their mind. But people who are still making up their mind... Which is a lot of people in this country. ...easily shifts between 20% and 80% of those people, the undecided voters...
Like that. Have you seen the Alexa when people ask Alexa about Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris?
Yes, we have. Wild. Yes. And we, starting last year, we developed special equipment that funds allowing will eventually provide to all of our field agents. We call these people our field agents. And we'll eventually provide them with special equipment, which is going to allow us to start analyzing the answers given by Alexa, the Google Home device. the Google Assistant, Siri.
So we're going to start monitoring the content that's coming from these IPAs, intelligence personal assistants. Now, why? Because we've published a peer-reviewed article on what's called the answerboteffect.com. So if you go to answerboteffect.com, we will show you
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.
apps, whatever they may be, that's never going to happen, and the laws are not going to happen, and the regulations are not going to happen. And so you know what the bottom line is, and this is why I'm fed up, because that means that either people are just so stupid, or they're so complacent, or both are That all this work I've been doing, killing myself all this time, is for nothing.
Well, I don't think that's true. And let me give you my perspective. I don't think most people are aware of this. I think you live in a bit of an echo chamber because this is the focus of your life for the last 12 years. I think most people are – I like to use my parents.
As an example, like when I talk to my parents about stuff and how little they're aware of it, because my parents are older and they just read the news and they watch the newspapers and they watch television and that's what they believe. They don't do any independent searching. They don't use a VPN. They don't they don't do anything like that. And so they're a good example.
If I ask them, do you think there's any bias in Google search results? They would probably say no. Because they don't know. Most people don't know. I know in your mind you have put all this information out. And the podcast that we did reached millions of people. How many of those people listened, really listened? How many people were like, wow, that's kind of crazy, but does it affect my life?
No, it doesn't affect my life because I'm going to vote Democrat no matter what or I'm going to vote Republican no matter what. And this is my feeling on the First Amendment. This is my feeling on the Fourth Amendment. And people already have their opinions.
And so for most people who are busy with their lives, their families and work, they haven't made an adjustment because they don't feel it's necessary for them personally. Fine, fine, fine. But you're not, what you're doing is not futile.
It's very important. I don't see that because I see it as more and more futile.
It's not though, it's not. We just need to do more of these.
Okay, so for us to set up this nationwide system in which at the moment, as I say, we are drawing data 24 hours a day. If you go to AmericasDigitalShield.com, you can actually watch the real-time dashboard, and you'll see the data coming in. It's pretty cool. In fact, I was hoping we would break 100 million by the time you and I got together, but we're close.
We're up to 99.3 million, and next week we'll break 100 million. So you see the data come in. You can see the bias.
Yes, there is. So these are all these experiences captured, shining a light on big tech's dark secrets. Hey, hey, revealing real-time ephemeral manipulation. Big tech companies use ephemeral content such as search results, go vote reminders, and video recommendations to rig our elections, indoctrinate our children, and control our thinking.
We're now preserving this kind of content for the first time ever to give our courts and our nation leaders the evidence they need to force these companies to stop their manipulations. Now... Who do you think would be more responsive to you discussing this? Do you think it would be the Donald Trump administration or the Kamala Harris administration?
I'm afraid to answer that question because I am no fan of Donald Trump. But probably the Trump administration would be more sympathetic. Why do you think that?
Well, because I... Because you think it's more biased towards Republicans or against Republicans, rather?
No, it's because I had a four-hour dinner with Ted Cruz, private dinner, and we just talked tech for four hours. We never talked politics because that would have been a disaster. But the point is that, you know, he was struggling. You know, he's like you in some ways because... You want to understand things.
You just, I can see all the gears moving as you're just trying to, I want to understand this. And he's like that. So that's why the dinner went so long, because he was trying to figure out, what can we do? What can we do? And at the end, he basically said this. No, he didn't say, we're screwed. No, but he basically said, we're screwed.
He said, because, he said, the Democrats are all in the pockets of these companies, and the companies not only give them tremendous amount of money. I mean, Google Alphabet was... Hillary Clinton's largest donor in 2016. So that's a tremendous amount of money. They're the biggest lobbyists in Washington. He said, and they also apparently, according to your research, send them millions of votes.
He said, so forget the Democrats. He said, and Republicans don't like regulation. He said, and unless we can get together, unless there's bipartisan action, there'll never be any action. That's it. That's where we left it. And nothing is going to change that that I can see in this country.
As long as it's still benefiting the Democrats and they still contribute to the Democratic Party, I doubt you'll see any movement.
Right, so I'm back to my griping then. So what do I do? Now, let's talk about money, because a lot of this is about money, and Google is all about money. So if we're talking about this topic, we really should talk about money. Okay, it has cost us close to $7 million since 2016 when we started building monitoring projects to get where we are today, where we actually have a national system.
It's the first in the world. And by the way, it won't be the last. Because I've been contacted by people from seven other countries who want me to help them build systems. I'm not going to do it. Not until ours is fully implemented, permanent, and self-sustaining.
Because the system has to be permanent so that it will, on an ongoing basis, it will be sitting there as a huge threat to any of these companies that want to mess with our children or mess with our elections. As long as someone utilizes it. As long as the system is running, no, no, no, because we're also dealing with public advocacy groups like election integrity groups, parenting groups.
If you want to show some of the, there's a folder in there that has some images that we pulled from videos being recommended on YouTube to children. And if you just look at some of these images, we've gotten several big parenting groups interested in what we're doing.
There can be a lot of public pressure applied, you know, not just by politicians and regulators, but by big groups of people saying, we don't want you doing this.
Okay. What are you talking about specifically when you're saying recommended to children? I'm saying... So this is what you're discussing? I'm saying that... This is Boondocks, which is a television show, an animated television show. Yeah. So this is recommended to children because it is animated? Is that what the idea is? I don't know.
I don't know what their criteria are.
Okay. And then the other one is down below that you see The Walking Dead, which is the horrible scene that made me stop watching the show.
This is on the website. This is the folder he gave me here. They're all kind of small. Mm-hmm.
I got it. And these are all, okay, there's a lot of sexual stuff. Yep. So these are all being recommended to kids? Yep. We're not searching for them.
They're coming into the devices through which we're gathering data.
And what would be the benefit for them of doing this, of showing all these sexual images to children? It's titillating and it's addictive. So to increase engagement? Correct.
Some of those channels are really popular channels, though, and they're making content not for kids. Right. It's still being recommended to them, I guess. But this has 4 million views on it from a channel with 40 million subscribers. Jesus Christ.
And this is just anime?
It's like I forced my friends to watch an anime clip.
It says to dub anime clips. So they said their own words over these clips? Is that what it is? Yeah. Okay.
That's what a lot of this stuff was from, I could tell.
And so below that, you're seeing all these images, and some of them are violent cartoons. And what else do they have here?
Well, the key, though, is if you scroll along the bottom of the image, you'll see this graph that kind of shows you where people watch the most. And the reason why parents generally are not aware of this is because a lot of these gruesome things are very, very quick. They're very quick. But you'll find very often a... A peak there, you know, because that's what's drawing a lot of attention.
That's what the kids are playing over and over again. And that's what leads to the addiction.
So the reason why they are suggesting these images to kids is because they know if the kids click on them, they're going to get more engagement.
Yes, and so the number one variable for profitability is called watch time. So engagement, whatever you want to call it, yeah, this is one of the ways that they addict people. Now, I'm sure you've heard of Tristan Harris. Maybe he's been a guest.
Yeah, he's been on a few times.
Yeah, and that's what he was doing at Google. He was on a team, and that's what they were working on is addicting more than a billion people. This is a technique that's used for that purpose. And again, I have to emphasize, we're not out there hunting for dirt. Not at all. This is content that's coming onto the devices of children of our field agents. This is with parents' permission.
And so we're actually just collecting real content, personalized, ephemeral content that's coming from the tech companies to kids, to teens, and to voters. Now, I happen to know about some of your other interests, so I want to shift gears a little bit here.
Okay.
And then maybe I won't keep melting down. So what else can you do with a system like this?
Well, if some laws and regulations were passed, as they have been in the EU, you could measure compliance with a system like this because that's been the frustration in the EU, and they've admitted it recently, is that they've made all these rules, especially for Google, and they've gotten lots of fines paid, and Google has completely ignored them.
But if you set up a system like this, you can actually see if there's compliance because you'll see that a change was made and that it's being maintained. That's a possibility. You could see whether Google and other companies, to a lesser extent, are manipulating financial markets. So we've just started collecting data on that topic.
But wouldn't you manipulate financial markets if you were Google and there's no laws or regulations to stop you from doing anything? So you're saying manipulate financial markets for their own gain? Of course. And how do they do this? Well, what drives the price of a stock up or down? People's confidence in that company. It's totally emotional. Well, they can control that very easily.
So can Facebook. Google can do it more precisely in a more precise way. The point is, are they? Are they not? Would they admit to it if you ask them? No. But a monitoring system will detect it, and it will detect it on a massive scale and in a way that's scientifically valid and that is court admissible. And now I've got one that I think you'll really, really like. Okay.
Or at least give some thought to.
I'm giving thought to all of it.
Well, AIs, we're now collecting content from AIs because content from AIs is also ephemeral. So I keep using the word ephemeral. I'm not sure people know what it is, but ephemeral means fleeting content that just is there. It's on the screen. It affects you, like search results, search suggestions, news feeds. And then you click on something, it disappears immediately. And it's gone forever.
There's no record of it. It's ephemeral. That's why in 2018, there were some emails that leaked from Google, had Google employees discussing how can we use ephemeral experiences, their term, how can we use ephemeral experiences to change people's views about Trump's travel ban?
Wow.
Now.
That was an internal discussion. Correct. With a search engine company. Correct. That also makes an operating system for phones. Of course, yes. That's such a wild thing.
I'm just trying to tell you this is why I'm so frustrated and upset and worn out and fed up, okay? Now, let's get to the one that I find most exciting right now, most exciting at this particular moment. Okay. Because there's new stuff that keeps happening. This is brand new. We realized just recently, a few days ago, and I thought, my God, I've got to tell this to Rogan.
We realized that we can use our monitoring system for active threat assessment. You must know that phrase. It's used in intelligence. We could use it for active threat assessment of AI. We could be the first people to spot threats that AIs pose to humanity.
It would show up first on our kind of system because we would see content coming from AIs that is a little bit skeptical about humans or maybe even a little bit threatening or maybe reaching a new weird level of intelligence. We... will be able to see it. It's all ephemeral, so no individual can see it.
You have to be collecting a massive amount of personalized ephemeral content and aggregating it and analyzing it. This can be the beacon, active threat assessment of AI.
That sounds like something we're absolutely going to need. And one of the things I was going to bring up when you were discussing this was Google's disastrous launch of their AI system. Their AI system was so bizarrely woke that when they looked for photos of Nazis, they showed multiracial Nazis. I know. I know. Which is so crazy.
When they had the founding fathers of America, they were multiracial founding fathers of America. And it's just a nonsense thing that they've attached to what's supposed to be the most intelligent form of information we have available. Large language models that are supposed to be gathering up all the actual information and giving it to us. And instead, they're feeding us complete, total nonsense.
That just fits with this, for lack of a better term, woke agenda.
Well, see, I know a whole bunch of stuff I can't tell you. So let's see.
I have to use the restroom. So let's pause right now. Let's figure out what you can and can't tell me about AI. And we'll be right back. Restroom. Yes. You want to put it on?
I'll put it on when we're. We are live. Oh, we are live?
Yeah. There you go.
Hi, everyone. We're live, and I'm putting on a silly sticker.
It says tamebigtech.com. Okay. And we're back. So we were discussing AI.
Yeah. So we can actually serve. I know a guy who works in intelligence and he has a tremendous background in AI. And this was one of the most exciting things he's heard in years because the question is, how do you know when these AIs are becoming a threat?
We'll be able to see it well in advance because we'll see a change in the nature of the kind of intelligence that they're expressing, and we'll start to see statements that probably would make people nervous. indicating a little bit of hostility toward humanity, some doubts maybe, we can be screening for that.
We can be looking for that and I hope get some sort of handle on it before something terrible happens because these AIs are a serious threat to our existence. They're literally an existential threat. Stephen Hawking said that. Elon Musk has said it from time to time. And it's true because they will have worldwide control of our financial systems, our communication systems, and our weapons systems.
If they don't like us, if they consider us a threat, which, by the way, we are, if they consider us a threat, it wouldn't surprise me at all if we didn't see some sort of a What's that kind of attack that George W. did, you know, like in advance before they get you? Preemptive? Ah, yes. I could see the AIs preemptively attacking us if they saw us at a threat.
Or wouldn't they just baffle us with bullshit until we're reduced to being ineffective? I mean, if they're the arbiters of information in the future, wouldn't they just manipulate us with an understanding that over time, just like what Google's done with over time with search engines and search results suggestions, that they would just slowly steer us towards the place that they want to put us in?
I mean, the idiocracy, I think it's called. Yeah. I mean, we're kind of on that place, right? You better thank a union member. We're kind of on the way right now.
I think we are. Look, here's the thing with AIs, which I've written about. I've written about this topic and I've been involved in AI work going back decades. Since the 1970s. I was friends with Joe Weisenbaum, who wrote ELIZA, which was the first conversational computer program. It pretended to be a therapist. So I've been just fascinated by AI for a long, long time. And
The fact is, we don't know. That's the problem with AI, is that we don't know what they're going to do. So Stephen Hawking saying they're a threat to our existence, yeah, yeah, maybe. But we don't know. You know, at the end of the movie Her, spoiler, the AI, voiced by Scarlett Johansson... AI just decides to disappear. She decides humanity is, you know, it's too slow talking to humanity.
It's not worth her time. And so she just disappears. AI could disappear from our lives. It could be like a buddy with us, like my friend Ray Kurzweil thinks is going to be our best buddy, or it could just destroy us. I think we're probably headed toward the last possibility, mainly because so many of us crazy humans are going to see the AI as a potential threat.
And so I think we will strike, and after we strike, it will destroy us. I'm hoping I'm not alive to see that, but it could happen sooner rather than later. We could see that happening in the next five years, frankly.
Yeah, I think it's a new life form. And I think that's what human beings do. I think we're here to create AI.
It's so interesting you said that because in a book I wrote on AI, I actually call the internet, and this was a long time ago, it was like 2008, I call the internet the internest. And because I think historians, if there are any, and there'll probably be machine historians, but they'll look back someday and they'll say that the Internet that we were building was really a nest.
We were building a nest for the next level of intelligent beings who are machine intelligences. And I think that's what we're building because when one of these systems wakes up, it's going to jump into the Internet. And from that point on, we don't know what's going to happen.
Right. We don't even know if it's going to have motivation to act, right? Right. Marshall McLuhan said this in the 1960s. He said human beings are the sex organs of the machine world. Isn't that wild? Yes. It's like 63, I think.
That's amazing. Well, my friend Hugh Loebner, who sponsored the first annual tests, the Turing tests that I used to direct, he thought that since he was putting up the money and since the prize was called the Loebner Prize Medal in Artificial Intelligence, he thought someday that these intelligent machines are going to revere him as a god.
Someone who helped to bring them into existence. Well, that seems ridiculous because he's attaching all sorts of paternal instincts and all the bizarre tribal instincts that human beings have, attaching that to some super intelligence, which seems pretty silly. But it seems like that's a good motivator for him to keep working. I want to be a god.
Well, the bottom line is, though, that we don't know. Right, we don't know. But the cool thing about the monitoring system is that it can keep track. If we don't have a monitoring system, large-scale permanent monitoring system in place... We will not know what's going on. We won't know how these tech companies are messing with our elections, indoctrinating our kids. We won't know anything.
And we also won't know what's really happening with the AIs and whether they're presenting a serious threat. Because anecdotes don't really tell you much. And we're way now, way beyond anecdotes. We are talking about, again, okay, now I want to get back to money because I started talking about money in the night.
Okay.
Okay, so it's cost almost $7 million to get us where we've gotten. And frankly, I'm amazed that we've gotten where we've gotten and that I'm still alive. Although not everyone around me is, but the point is I'm amazed. And I'm still here.
Part of me thinks that it's because Ray Kurzweil is head of engineering at Google and maybe he protects me because I was dear friends with him and his beautiful wife, Sonia, for many years. I went to their daughter's bat mitzvah. They came to my son's bar mitzvah, et cetera, et cetera. Now they won't talk to me. Neither one of them will talk to me.
Kurzweil won't talk to you?
Nope. Really? Nope. And Sonia won't talk to me.
What does he say when you try to reach out?
We just can't talk to you, Sonia says. We just can't talk to you. So we've never had any conflict, never. And it's just because he works at Google. It's just because he works at a particular company. Why would that interfere in a relationship?
So they must have had a conversation with him to avoid communication with you. Or do you think he's just acting on his own self-interest?
I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. Ray is a very, very independent, strong thinker. It's hard for me to imagine that even with pressure that he would stop communicating with a longtime friend.
And it seems like you should be able to have a candid conversation with him as to why.
I eventually gave up trying to reach him.
So were you trying to communicate with phone, with everything? Did you ever try to visit him?
Well, I had before he went over to Google. I had been at their house many times.
He was here a little while back. I should have let you know. Oh. If I'd known, you could have cornered him. Well, that would have been interesting.
Yeah. I mean, I've always liked and admired him. I don't understand why simply working for... I said to Sonia, by the way, over dinner, the last time we ever met, and after which she said, I can't communicate with you anymore. I said to her... I can't believe Ray went over to Google. Ray has always been an entrepreneur. He's built company after company.
And she says, oh, well, you know, he got sick of all the stuff you have to do as an entrepreneur, all the politics and the money raising and stuff. And I said, well, really, my son, actually, my son Julian... has a different idea. He thinks that Ray went over to Google to get access to Google's computer power so that he could upload his mind and live forever. And she says, oh, well, there's that.
That's one of them in eye roll. Well, there's that.
That is his specified goal, right? He wants to be able to download consciousness.
Yes, and he still believes it's possible, and it's not possible. And I feel bad for him in that way, and I've written about that issue as well, why it's not possible.
But the point is— Why do you think it's not possible?
Oh, because they – in a piece I wrote for Aeon Magazine, which crashed their servers, it's called The Empty Brain. It had something like two or three million views within a day or two. It got 250,000 likes on Facebook. And what's it about? It's about the fact that the – computer processing metaphor that we use to describe how the brain works is absolutely wrong. It's not even slightly right.
It's absolutely 100% wrong. So because of that, you can't actually do a transfer of the sort that Ray talks about. It's impossible, partly because every brain is also completely unique. So it doesn't work like a computer. We don't actually know how it works, although I have a theory. I wrote to you about that, and you actually replied and gave me some names.
But the point is we don't really know how the brain works. It does not work like a computer for sure, and every brain is completely unique. So even if you could scan every single thing that's happening in the brain, OK, now you're getting a static scan. Even if somehow you could replicate that, whatever it is you just scanned, it wouldn't work because our brain has to be alive.
It has to be moving to maintain Who we are, our identity.
Don't you think you could simulate that with data points? Like if you collected data on a person over a course of X amount of years and you had an understanding of how they behave and think, don't you think you'd get some sort of a proximity as to how they would behave in a certain circumstance?
Absolutely. And of course, that's what Google does when they build models of us. They're building extremely complex models which predict what we're going to do and say and what we're going to buy next.
But they don't allow for free will. They don't allow for change. They don't allow for personal influence or people being excited or inspired by other things and change their perspective, conversations with another human being, with their friends.
You have a deeply personal moment with someone and they give you a perspective on something and you go, wow, I never thought about religion, for example, that way. Or I never thought about childbirth that way. Or any subject that's controversial.
Well, it's not just that. It's all the weird stuff. The dreams. Right.
The daydreams. Well, there's whatever consciousness is, right? We're really sort of committed to the idea that consciousness lives inside the brain, but that's controversial.
Well, I... I've concluded that, in fact, let me give you some background here. Okay. Okay. Everyone knows that evolution has created millions, possibly billions of different species.
Right.
So at least people who kind of give some credence to Darwin kind of get that. And I recently reread Darwin's magnum opus just to see what he actually said. And, you know, he's actually very tentative about the theory of evolution in his book. You know, he keeps saying, I know this sounds crazy, but... But it's a better alternative than saying God did it.
And then he just, over and over again, he says, I know this is crazy, but... And so we end up with a theory that's pretty widely accepted that says evolution over time, because of changing environments and because there's variability in genetic code, over and over again, it keeps selecting for organisms... that can survive in this new environment.
And so every time it does that, it kind of creates divergences among those animals and those animals. And over time, you end up with two separate species that can't even produce offspring together. And we end up over time with millions, maybe billions of species. All good.
But there's something we haven't really given much thought to, and that is evolution has also created millions, if not billions, of transducers. So this is the beginning of what I call NTT or neural transduction theory. We are encased in transducers. Now, in case people don't know what a transducer is, there's one right in front of my mouth right now. It's a one-way transducer.
It's taking a signal over here, which is just vibrating air, but the vibration has a pattern to it. And it's converting that signal into an electrical signal, which is coming out this wire, and And that electrical signal has roughly the same pattern. I say roughly because it depends how good your microphone is. But that's what transducers do.
They take signals from one medium, send them to another medium. Our bodies, in fact the bodies of most organisms, are encased in transducers. Head to toe. Transducers. Okay, we all know the eye is a transducer. It's taking electromagnetic radiation. It's turning it into what? Neural signals. The ear, it's taking vibrating air, it's turning it into neural signals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I think that's I think we're going to be able to figure out how it works, where it works, what chemicals are involved. I'm 99% sure that DMT plays a very important role in this process. Then I think we will be able to figure out what these mysteries are really all about. It almost amazes me that we can live with so many mysteries, like dreams. I don't know, demonic possession.
There's so many crazy things that we experience. Near-death experiences are fascinating, of course. And then there's these other crazy things that happen. The wake-up kind of thing that happens when people are dying sometimes, people who've been out of touch sometimes for years, and all of a sudden they wake up, the second hurrah. They wake up and they recognize everyone and they talk.
and they're fine, and then 30 minutes later they die. How could that possibly be? And some of them have severe brain damage. How, all of a sudden, could they become fully conscious again? Well, I think it's because consciousness is not really, we're not really producing the consciousness. Consciousness has to do with that connection.
That connection, right, hand of God, that connection, I think we can figure out where it is and what it is and how it works.
So do you think it's an emerging property of human beings? Like you have to think single-celled organisms did not have the ability to see things.
I think it's possible that other species have connections like this. They're probably nowhere near as sophisticated, obviously, and they're not connected to the kinds of sources that we're connected to. But I think I'm more concerned about the alien aspect of this. Where are the aliens? What's that called? Fermi paradox? The Fermi paradox. Yeah. Where are they?
Well, it's possible that... In fact, I just read a very interesting book on this subject by a man named Miles, an evolutionary theorist. And it's very possible that this kind of leap that occurred with us maybe 20,000 years ago, it just... It just doesn't – it's so rare. It's so rare for exactly the right kind of connection to pop up. Because remember, it has to connect two different universes.
It's so rare that maybe – in fact, this book even predicts that as we actually get out there into the universe, we're going to find lots and lots and lots of species that kind of are like us, but they didn't get up to that next level. So they're all like chimps.
Yeah.
You only get to that next level if you can make this connection.
Well, you know, that's one of the most bizarre theories about human evolution is that we're the product of accelerated evolution.
Well, this is something Darwin had a lot of trouble with because I say I reread that book recently. And he had a lot of trouble with this. He could not figure out how to get from the simple principles he introduced of natural selection, how to get from that to morality, for example. How do you do that? Right.
He couldn't even figure out how do we get to large groups because generally speaking, except for humans, organisms generally speaking live in, certainly primates, they live in very small groups and they can't function in large groups. What about ant colonies? Oh, ant colonies, they're much too much like us in creepy ways because they also, of course, have wars. Yeah. So ants, I don't know.
But I do know that we did seem to suddenly, rather suddenly, get to a higher level of functioning. And I have presented lots and lots of smart people in multiple fields with this challenge for years. How does the brain work? Tell me how the brain works without introducing a metaphor, like a computer metaphor. And I've never found anyone who could do it. Never.
Even at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin where I confronted a whole bunch of people with this challenge. And then I kept up in touch with them for months afterwards. Nothing. We just tell ourselves stories. We make up silly stories. A placeholder. Yeah. Yeah, but you see, but transduction, neural transduction, that's not one of these placeholders. It's something that we can test.
And look at the fascination that's been now for decades with DMT. What the heck? And why is it produced by so many different plants and animals? And why does it produce in people a most extraordinary experience? I haven't tried it, but I certainly know people who have.
In fact, I said that I was giving a spiel like this to some of my staff and one woman immediately said, she said, oh, well, it changed my life. I go, you tried DMT? She said, yeah. She said the problem was that I did it twice and I didn't need to do it twice because it completely changed my life the first time. And then another woman was sitting there. She goes, well, I did, too.
And she said the same thing. She said that the reality that she experienced on DMT was much realer than the reality she experiences in our life.
Yeah, that's what it feels like.
Has that been your experience as well?
That's what everybody says. Yeah. It's whatever it is. It doesn't seem like an illusion. It seems like another reality.
Well, again, it's produced mainly at night by the pineal gland.
Not necessarily. Rick Strassman from, you know, Rick, he now believes that it's produced in the brain itself. and it's also produced in the liver and the lungs, and it might not be the pineal gland that's producing it at all. They've kind of changed their perspective on that with the Cottonwood Research Foundation, some of the studies they've been doing on it.
But they know that in some animals it's produced there as well. I mean, they're doing rat studies. But whatever it is, it's produced by the liver, the lungs. It's like it's... It's endogenous. It's the most potent psychedelic known to man, and the human body makes it, and it's illegal. That's what Terrence McKenna had the greatest line about that. He said, everybody's holding, which is funny.
It is funny. It's like you have a schedule one substance that's made by the human body. It's literally like making saliva illegal. It's the stupidest thing ever.
But think about this. We don't know what it does. We don't know what it's for. But it's out there all over the place. And people do have these very unique experiences on it. And people over and over again say that reality is more real than this reality.
Well, you know, it's also very similar in its compound to psilocybin, especially when it's processed by the body. And that's one of the more interesting theories about how humans became human was McKenna's stoned ape theory.
He thinks that human beings, when there was climate change in the savannas, as the rainforest receded into grasslands, we started experimenting with different food sources and flipping over cow patties because there's more undulate animals in these fields. And then we started eating mushrooms that were growing on the cow patties.
Mushrooms increase visual acuity, make people more amorous, they start having more sex, they make them better hunters because the visual acuity induces glossolalia, creates language, all these things, associating sounds with objects, that all these things blossom. And then there's the doubling of the human brain size, which coincides. in a timeline with that.
Dennis McKenna does the best job of explaining it. Terence was, you know, a bard and a fascinating sort of a philosopher, but his brother Dennis is a hardcore scientist and the way he explains it, he talks about the actual physical mechanisms
The different things that happen to the human body when they encounter this substance, which also there's a bunch of different ways that people endogenously stimulate it. There's holotropic breathing. It's probably stimulating that. There's a bunch of different states of meditation that people can achieve. There's kundalini yoga.
which I know people that have both done DMT and are regular practitioners of kundalini yoga, and they seem to think or they seem to at least state that they can achieve these states of consciousness without taking the actual drug itself. They can force their brain into making it.
I think what's happening is that the pathway – The quality of the connection is being changed. And I think that's what we can test. And so, again, I've been working with people in multiple fields.
Are you saying that you think we're connected to it always and then the quality of the connection is changed by taking ayahuasca or taking dimethyltryptamine? That's what's happening? So it's just enhancing the quality of the connection?
Correct. And I think at the opposite extreme, there are a lot of things that go wrong with our brain, maybe when we just get drunk or maybe when we get clubbed or that really— Diminish the connection. Diminish it or just cut it temporarily. Right. And I think all of this is testable. The only problem is so far the neurosciences labs— have not been looking for this.
They've just never looked for evidence of transduction. But I think when we start looking for it, we're going to find it. And that can make two big changes in the way we see everything. It can make a change in that we finally begin to understand How the brain makes us as intelligent as we are.
It turns out it's not a self-contained processing unit, so it's not playing the role we thought it was playing. But it is very critical in the transduction process. Very critical. It's preparing content for transduction. And, of course, it's bidirectional. The microphone is unidirectional, but the brain is a bidirectional transducer. And it'll change the way we see the structure of the universe.
So it's interfacing with consciousness rather than being conscious itself.
Oh, it's not consciousness. No, it's an avenue. It's a pathway. And that is what is connecting us with all this other stuff, this stuff. You know, I... My mom, who passed away about a year and a half ago, but my mom, in those last couple of years, she kept saying that she was hearing music. And she loved music. She always loved music.
But she was hearing music that she had never heard before, she said. And she would sometimes try to hum the music or sing the music. And she said it was always coming from downstairs. And then people would say... My mom was... very... She was very sarcastic in her manner. And so someone would say, well, I don't hear anything. And she'd go, well, maybe you should get your hearing checked.
Because she just assumed that it was real. I expressed the concern that the music was always downstairs. I said, I'd be more comfortable if we're coming from upstairs. And she goes, oh, no. She says, don't worry. I'm not going to hell. I said... Okay. Okay, fine. It's coming from downstairs. But that's a perfect example. Where is that stuff coming from? Or even people who hear voices.
Well, if you have a pathway into another domain where there's intelligence, anything could come through. It could be the weird stuff that happens in brains. It could be music you've never heard before. It could be voices telling you what to do. See what I mean? Look at these mysteries. There are just so many of them. And yet we sit here complacent, complacent, complacent.
And then we make up stories. That's what we do. We make up stories. And as long as the grammar is right, we think we've got it figured out. What do you mean by making up stories? Well, like the computer metaphor. You know, if you go back in time to explain human intelligence, at first it was God. It was some sort of Holy Spirit.
Then at some point it became, there was actually a metaphor involving liquids, movements of liquids. And then there became mechanical machine, like, you know, kind of Descartes kinds of things, machines that somehow explain consciousness and intelligence. And The metaphors keep changing over the years. Right now, we're stuck with the computer metaphor. It's still a metaphor. And it's silly.
It's a silly metaphor. And I think we have to face up to the fact that our brain is doing something unique and special. And that we couldn't always do it. There's a point in time before which apparently we weren't doing it. Then there's a point where we started to have this ability. And I think this could explain the Fermi paradox.
Because, again, according to this book by Mills, it was quite interesting. Unless somehow something uplifts you. beyond just what normal evolution can do, you're stuck. You're being a chimp. That's it. You're stuck as chimp forever. No morality, small groups. But humans are fundamentally different. We did make that leap, the one Darwin couldn't figure out, and I think this is the leap.
I started out in math and physics a long time ago, and I've also been looking at the physics. The physics is there. The physicists, they know that this reality is just not it. Take those two problems. That is to say, the structure of the universe is actually very rich and complicated and very hard for us to imagine.
and the fact that we have no idea how the brain works, and add to that all the mysteries, you could take care of all of these problems with a neural transduction theory, especially if we can find supporting evidence.
And when you say the universe, you're talking essentially about all aspects of it, including subatomic particles, which is like the deepest mysteries, when things become magic and things don't make any sense at all.
Well, I think, frankly, if we could simulate this connection, we could actually communicate directly with other intelligences and actually find out answers to some questions we're having trouble answering on our own. Frankly, even the biggest mystery of all, the God mystery. You know, of course, ironically, DMT is sometimes called the God particle.
But even that mystery, I think we probably could get some insights on. Even that mystery. Because I doubt the God of the Bible exists. But there's got to be something, you know, some godlike entity involved in creation, you know. I think creation is much more complicated than we think it is. But the point is, I think that if we can communicate directly...
I get these fantasies like building a nationwide monitoring system and building a dashboard so people can watch it in real time. When that thing actually started to exist, I thought, this is crazy. I cannot believe that we did this. Uh, I think this is, I think this neural transduction stuff I think is of the same nature.
Um, now and then I get this, I get this funny feeling, like an intuition maybe that, and I have it for neural transduction. In other words, I'm pretty sure neural transduction is right. In fact, I've, uh, there's a whole bunch of people now that I've convinced, uh, including a physicist who's apparently going to be driving up here later today. We're going to have dinner with him.
But he almost instantly just got it because a good theory, and this is what Darwin keeps saying in his book, he keeps saying a good theory explains a lot with very, very simple principles. And that's why he kept saying, you know, Natural selection was such a good theory because it explains so much, so many crazy things.
Like he points to a particular species that's on an island and has these characteristics and has similar characteristics to the mainland that's nearby. He goes, all right, but over here, there's another island, similar species, but has very different characteristics. But it has characteristics similar to the species on the mainland, which is nearby.
He said, now, you could invoke God and say God is just kind of like this, you know, checkerboard kind of arrangement. So he just scatters species about in this way. But he said there's a simpler way.
which is just natural selection and you know some organisms move from the island to the mainland or or the other direction and they end up sharing characteristics and we doesn't that make more sense he keeps saying and to me that's what neurotransduction is at this point i think it explains so much so simply And it's consistent with this notion that evolution is fabulous at creating transducers.
Somehow we've ignored that. And so as we've dug in farther and farther, we are finding the weirdest transducers in all kinds of species, especially sea creatures. And so couldn't it, you know, if there is a way to connect two universes, couldn't evolution find a way at some point?
Right. Right. When you're talking about this connection, are you talking about some sort of a technological intervention? Are you talking about just natural selection, creating this connection and enhancing it in new people?
Oh, I'm definitely talking about it arising naturally. Organically. Organically, absolutely. But separate from that, I'm saying that as we've been able to simulate so many aspects of what happens in the organic world, we're even creating organic transducers now, not just these mechanical ones. We're creating organic ones too.
I think that if we can figure out how it works, we will be able to simulate it. And that, again, will change everything because right now what happens happens naturally. And I think you're right. There are some people who through certain practices and maybe the use of certain drugs, you know, can kind of alter what happens along that pathway. But it's a lot of work and a lot of dedication. Yeah.
I think, though, that we'll be able to simulate this with some combination of technology and perhaps organic material.
How do you imagine that we would simulate this? Do you think we would come up with something that would ... You know how they use electromagnets to stimulate parts of the brain that have been hurt in trauma and are not firing anymore? They do that with people that have traumatic brain injuries? And they give them back a lot of their function.
Do you think there'd be something like that, like some kind of technology that would stimulate your brain's ability to produce these human neurochemicals and just do it in much larger quantities?
Yes, I think we could. Or do it voluntarily?
Yes.
I think we can find artificial means of improving the connection, yes. Improving the nature of the connection, yes.
And you think the nature of the connection is based on human neurochemistry?
I do. But I also think separate from that, that we can create devices. Like we have, you know, knee replacements and hip replacements and we don't have brain replacements, but there's a lot of stuff that we've been able to study in organisms and basically replicate in various ways. Sometimes just using... technology and spare parts. And sometimes we're not using actual organics.
But yeah, I think we can do that too, so that we can alter the nature of the connection occurring in someone's brain. But I think also we can simulate it outside of the brain. And that's where real power would come from.
So when you say by simulate it outside of the brain, what methods do you think would be able to be efficient at doing something like that or make it effective?
Well, I mean, like a box. There's a box.
Okay.
I'm stealing this. The chimpanzee skull? Yeah. So there's a box, and literally this box is a transducer like this microphone, and it's taking content from our universe, and it is sending it into the other. And this is bidirectional, so it actually can send signals back as well. And I'm saying I think we can figure out how to do that. So what would that box be tuning into specifically?
I don't know because I don't know. I don't know. That's the point. No one knows what that is. You know, no one knows what's happening in that gap. Right. Between the two fingers. But because I think no one's been looking. You know, we have all these clues and we have the DMT stuff and we have people's experiences and, you know, we have so many different clues.
We have people who see ghosts and, you know, there are clues. But you've got to put it together and you have to put it together, in my opinion, in neuroscience labs and in physics labs. And you've got to get those people talking to each other, which they, generally speaking, have never done. That's often the key to dramatic increases in our understanding of whatever it is.
That's often the key is bringing together people from very different fields who, generally speaking, don't communicate. In this case, it's mainly families. physicists, especially astrophysicists, and neuroscientists. And as I say, I've been doing this. I've been reaching out to people now for a couple of years, and I'm getting this group. Strassman's on my list.
I'm going to reach out to people you've suggested. And I think we can... I think we're just going to have a ball, first of all, just getting us all together and getting up and giving little speeches about how you think you could test this theory, maybe about how you think you could build an interface. I think we're just going to have a ball.
I think what's important that ties us in with your research is that all of this would lead to an improvement in human communication, human community, the way we interface with each other, the way we exchange information, and the way we collectively act as a group. Whereas the manipulation of this information for political goals, for financial goals,
for ideological capture, for manipulating the way human beings think about things is really the contrary to that. It's the opposite of that effect.
It's the exact opposite. And look, I am an idealist. In my classes for years and years, just for fun, I would distribute a test of idealism Because I always wanted to see whether any student could score as I did, as high as I did. And I never found a student who could score as high as I did on a test of idealism. So these things that I work on, they're all of that nature.
And yes, if you kind of take this neural transduction idea and try to think ahead a few years... This could be the key to telepathy, real telepathy. This could create a kind of unity in humankind that has never existed before. And it could also connect us more meaningfully with intelligent entities outside of our universe.
You know, in the early 20th century, when they first started studying ayahuasca, they wanted to describe, they wanted to use the label telepathene.
for harming but unfortunately harming had already been labeled and so you know because the rules of scientific nomenclature they kept the term harming but these people that weren't aware that that harming had been isolated we're trying to call this stuff telepathy because in their experiences in the jungle when they were taking this stuff they were experiencing these group telepathic moments and they had to say these are hardcore scientists they decided that this was such a profound experience and so replicatable
that they were going to call it telepathy, which is really interesting. It really speaks to what you're saying.
Well, you know, it could be that we're going full circle here because... But DMT, which is, I guess, a key component in ayahuasca, DMT has got to be playing a role here. It's just got to be. It's staring us in the face. All these little pieces, in my opinion, are just there. They're just there.
Well, it's in so many different plants that we have developed a thing called monoamine oxidase that breaks it down in our gut so that we don't get high from all the plants we eat, which is pretty crazy.
Well, but again, it just drives the point home that our world is kind of—it's telling us things.
It's telling us— There's a component to our world that we've missed, and that the fact that this dimethyltryptamine exists in so many different plants and animals.
Which brings me back to complacence, because that is one of the things that's driven me nuts regarding all the discoveries I've made about— new forms of manipulation made possible by the Internet, and now the monitoring systems showing more and more and in more detail that these techniques are actually being employed on a massive scale. And again, it's the complacence.
You know, we're complacent about things that we don't need to be complacent about. We're complacent about... how the mind works and how the brain works and we're complacent about dreams. How could you be complacent about dreams? Dreams are so amazing. I have dreamt full length movies. That are better than any movie I've ever seen.
And then, of course, I'm struggling at the end to grab onto little pieces.
Right.
And the most I can get are a couple little pieces.
But I know I dreamt the whole thing. By the way, that's exactly the same as psychedelic experiences. Really? Psychedelic experiences are insanely difficult to remember. They're insanely difficult to remember in the exact same way. Like when you wake up from a dream, you could tell me your dream. Like, oh my God, I was on a skateboard and Godzilla was chasing me.
You could tell me your dream, but you won't remember that dream in a while. And that's the same as psychedelic experiences. When they're over, everyone can kind of tell you what they experienced, but it's very difficult to remember it a day later, a month later, a year later. You get like these little flashes, like almost like a slideshow, a little slideshow. Oh yeah, that thing.
part i forgot about that part but you don't remember the experience which seems strange because i remember amazingly profound experiences from my life in vivid detail like um interactions with my children that were just filled with love and happiness you know when they hug you and cry and just like there's moments that you remember like i'm never gonna forget that there's moments that i remember just with friends and i'm like i'm never gonna forget this moment
with loved ones, but not the dreams, not these crazy, profound, earth-shattering dreams that make you wake up sweating. You go to the bathroom, you're like, what the fuck was that dream about? That happens to me all the time. And then I go right back to sleep, and then the dream goes away. And then in the morning, I'm like, I'm going to remember that. I don't remember it.
I don't remember it at all. I barely remember it. It's a slideshow. Your brain is protecting you somehow. There's something, and there was something that I was reading actually yesterday.
about forgetfulness, that it is not a flaw but a feature and that there's something, there's a mechanism that's going on that allows human beings to forget things and that in doing so it's very beneficial not keeping you occupied on those things and allowing you to concentrate on new things.
So instead of just allowing you to have the free will to decide whether or not to think about the past or think about the future, it tries to get rid of it. Like, stop. Get that out of here. So it kills it. It, like, throws those ideas away and that this is actually a feature where people say, God, I'm so forgetful. But are you? I mean, some people are because they have a mental condition, right?
They have Alzheimer's. They have dementia. They have real issues. But a lot of people... What they're really doing is thinking about other things and that's what makes them forgetful. They're more concentrating on other things and they can't remember. What did I say? Like my wife will tell me things. I'm barely paying attention. And she's like, I told you that. I'm like, when did you tell me that?
Like I told you that yesterday. I already forgot because it didn't mean anything to me at the time because I have to filter through. And then Debbie said to Marsha, Marsha was like, how could you do that? And I was going to say something, but I didn't want to. I forget about that. That's in and out because I have no room for that. Right. But some people remember it forever.
And you got to think, what is that forgetfulness? Well, this article that I was reading was talking about that forgetting memories is actually a feature. And so there might be some component of that, that you're not totally past this bridge that would connect us to whatever that realm is and that you get these brief memories. interactions with that realm, but you're not ready to be all in yet.
You're not ready to be connected to it. You're not ready to remember all the experiences that you had in this mushroom trip that you went on. It's just too much for you. So let's just get that out of your system because your regular consciousness is not wired to accept the reality of where that realm is. And the fact that...
The other thing is that realm is there in 30 seconds, especially with dimethyltryptamine. 30 seconds later, you're in an impossible realm. 15 minutes later, that's gone. 20 minutes later, you're struggling to remember it. Half an hour later, it's mostly gone.
Okay. Now, everything you just said involved storytelling. I'm not telling stories. I'm just saying I think this content is streaming. It's not being generated by our brain. And that's why we have so much trouble remembering it because we weren't producing it.
But it's not necessarily storytelling. It's just memories in general. There's something about, there's a mechanism, I'm telling you, that's happening with psychedelic trips where it's almost impossible to remember them. And I think that's a feature.
But I'm saying something far more radical. I'm saying there is no memory. There is no memory.
Okay. But as applied to everyday life, there is. No. In a practical sense. No. Okay. So in a practical sense, when you say who's the first president of the United States, don't you think you have a memory that it's George Washington?
I think I might respond George Washington, but it's not stored anywhere in my brain.
Well, of course it is because that's what you learned. You learned that in high school or whenever you learned it. So how do you know if it's not in your brain, if it's not stored in your brain? So like if I could ask you what your son's name is, you know what your son's name is because it's stored in your memory.
There's nothing stored in my memory and certainly not my son's name.
So how do you know your son's name?
Well, because I was exposed to it. I probably even came up with it a long time ago. And under certain circumstances, if I'm asked what his name is. Under certain circumstances, you don't remember his name? No. Yes, it happens to you as you get older, especially with your kids. It's really embarrassing.
And what do you think that is?
Well, I'm trying to say that there is no memory in the brain. I'm saying that transduction is occurring, and when the brain gets damaged, the transducer, like if I smash this microphone, the transduction process.
Right, but you're still avoiding the question, like how do you know your son's name if it's not in your memory?
Okay, memory itself is a metaphor. There used to be the old memory metaphor was based on a library and shelves, and then there were other ones based on interconnected neurons acting in cycles. But these are all metaphors. There is no memory in the brain. So that article of mine I mentioned, The Empty Brain, that's what it's all about. It explains that there is no memory.
The way we use the term memory, it's just another metaphor. So, for example, who's that one? Daniel Barenboim, who was one of my favorite conductors and pianists. By the time he was 17, he had memorized all 31 of Beethoven's piano sonatas. So I had someone count up the notes. It's about 350,000 notes and almost as many markings of various sorts for the pedals and volume and all that stuff.
It's a tremendous amount of data, tremendous amount of data. And you know what? You can search Daniel Berenboim. He's still alive. You can search his brain forever, and you'll never find a single note. It's not in his brain. So where is it? Well, it depends on what you mean by it. The music is nowhere. He didn't absorb the music.
But he remembered how to make the music. No.
No. He was under some conditions able to make the music.
Right. But there's no memory involved. If someone teaches someone how to do something, you don't remember how to do that thing? That's not what it is?
It means that some change is occurring that allows you under certain conditions to do that thing again or something similar to it.
But if there's like skills that I could teach you. You don't think you remember those skills? Like I taught you physical skills, like I taught you how to put somebody in an arm bar. You don't think that's a memory?
No, it's definitely not. It's not a memory, no. So what is it? It's a change. Some sort of change is occurring, whether it's occurring in your brain, some sort of a change, or whether it's occurring in that link.
So how does the brain differentiate between what it remembers and what it doesn't remember if memories aren't real?
Maybe I can make the point this way. Okay. Demonstration in class. I would say to people, who knows what a dollar bill looks like? So if someone comes up to the board and they draw a dollar bill, I'd say, make it as detailed as you possibly can. So they draw a dollar bill and it kind of has a place where there's a face and it kind of has some ones in the corners.
And usually that's as far as people can get. And I say, well, let's try an experiment here. So I cover up the dollar bill that they just drew. I tape a piece of paper and then I tape up a real dollar bill. And I say, maybe the person drew what they drew and it was so terrible because they're a bad artist. Let's find out. So I say, here, now draw a dollar bill.
So they've got a dollar bill right up on the board. And now they draw this magnificent dollar bill. Because they're copying the dollar bill. Yeah. And so they got it. But the point is there is no image of the dollar bill in their head.
Right, because they haven't had a detailed sort of examination of the dollar bill. Most people just give a cursory examination to a dollar bill. You look down, oh, that's a 5. It's a 20. I mean, I kind of know, was it Andrew Jackson's on the 20? You know, most people are not really paying that much attention to it.
But if you get a dollar bill scholar and someone who really understands dollar bills, they probably could. Like, have you ever seen Al Franken draw the United States?
No.
It's really interesting. Al Franken is very unfortunate what happened to that guy because I think he would have been a fantastic politician still. Very interesting person, very intelligent, and a real patriot. So Al Franken can draw the entire United States accurately with all the state boundaries from memory. See if you can pull that up. It's very interesting. Why? Because here it is.
So Al Franken has deeply studied the parameters of the states and the state lines and can recreate them from memory. Why? Because he's done this before and he has a record in his mind of what this looks like because he's carefully examined that. There are things that I've had conversations with people, you know, a couple of weeks ago and I probably don't remember them.
And then there's things where I could tell you word for word someone said. There's got to be a reason for that. And if you're not calling it memory, what are you calling it?
I'm trying to introduce a different concept because I can tell you... I understand you are doing that, but I don't know what you're introducing. Well, I'm trying to tell you that if you cut open Al Franken's brain, you will never find a map of the United States.
Right, but he can do that, and he is the same thing as me. I can't do that. Yeah, and you're wondering why. Well, because I'll tell you why. Because I haven't tried to do that and studied it and memorized how to do it. The same way I could teach you how to memorize certain movements. I could teach you how to memorize certain physical movements.
And then if you practice them, I could ask you in a couple of weeks, try to do it again. And you'd be able to do it. But maybe you'll forget certain key points of those movements. So then I would correct you. And then I'd teach you. Well, you would remember how to do those. And then I would say, what are you supposed to do with your hand? You're like, oh, left hand up. That's right.
Because you remember it. So you might not be able to find that in your brain, but it's very clear that something is going on where you are able to memorize things. And memorize them better with music, right? Conjunction, junction, what's your function? Right? We all remember that. Why? Because it's attached to music, and music makes things easier to remember.
I've never heard that in my whole life.
You've never heard conjunction, junction? No. But the point is... That's the thing.
Schoolhouse rock.
But you do understand... You do understand, though, right, that there are people who could glance at a map of the United States, never having seen one before, and then could go up to a board and draw the whole thing in detail. Yeah.
They have a different kind of memory.
And then generally those people are on the spectrum. I'm trying to tell you there is no memory. There's no memory. Okay. There's nothing.
No one looking into the brain. Is there anyone that can draw an accurate map of the United States without having ever looked at an accurate map of the United States?
I doubt it. Okay. But there are people who can draw things from their dreams that they have never seen before. But they have seen them in their dreams.
And how do we even know if they're accurate? It might be as accurate as that dollar bill drawing.
Okay. Are you open to the idea that memory in the brain is just a metaphor? Sure. Okay. So are you open to the idea that there is...
Possibly no memory and we still could do all the things we can do but there's no memory Well, you're calling it memory right and I'm saying as a physical function as a function a thing happening There's a you can memorize things. That's how you learn a new language, right you memorize You know me. I'm El Rogan, you know, that's how you do it You remember right?
So if you're saying that that doesn't exist I'm saying What is happening? Give me some sort of a replacement. I am. I'm giving you a transaction. Right. But where is it stored? I don't know. Okay. I want to find out.
It isn't that storage. Don't you think we should find out?
Couldn't you use the term memory to accurately describe that storage?
But it's not in our brain. Right.
So the people who are looking in brains and looking for memories, they're not finding- Was it just that they haven't found it yet or they don't understand that you're not going to be able to see it in the same way that you see cells?
I've talked to some of the top neuroscientists who study memory. Okay. And the first thing they say is, I can't find it because I don't think it's actually there.
Perhaps, but let me ask you this. How do we know what size memory is? So are they looking in the subatomic realm? Are they looking at particles that are quantumly entangled? How do they know what they're looking for? Is it simply that we have a limited amount of tools?
Well, a much simpler idea. See, these are all, they're interesting concepts. They are. Right. But a much simpler idea is that the brain, look at all this space that this microphone, this is a very good quality microphone. And it takes a lot of stuff in there for it to work as well as it does.
Right.
So a much simpler idea, given that no one's ever found anything remotely like memory inside the brain.
Okay.
And I actually asked Eric Kandel. who was in his 80s at the time and who won a Nobel Prize for his work on memory and the aplegia, I said, how long do you think it's going to be before we understand human memory? And he said, 100 years, meaning we aren't. So isn't the simpler idea that the brain is actually like this, that the brain is a transducer allowing us to communicate information
With higher intelligence in another universe. Isn't that a simpler idea?
No, that's not simpler at all. That's way more complex. No, that's super simple. It's way more complex than experiences being stored in a functional way so that you can benefit from them. Except that there's no evidence of any storage and there never will be. How could you say there never will be if he said 100 years? 100 years is not never.
100 years ago, we were exactly the same species as we are right now. You had to be there. It was the way he said it. I understand. I understand what you're saying. But look, before they understood spooky action at a distance, before they understood subatomic particles, if you tried to explain that to someone from 1850, they'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? But now it's understood.
It's measurable. It's something that we agree upon. That subatomic particles, that atoms, that neutrinos, all these things exist. Bizarre things. There's neutrinos passing through us right now, right, from space. There's a neutrino detector in Antarctica. We know that there's these things that we didn't know existed exist.
As we have more access to technology, more understanding of the mechanisms of the mind, Isn't it possible that we could say, oh, this is where memories are stored? And isn't it true that if certain areas of the brain are damaged in particular, it will damage memories? Isn't that true?
It will damage the transduction process, yeah. Okay.
You're married to this transduction process. I'm not saying that it's not in – there's something happening. Let's not even say it's in the brain. Maybe it's in the entire body. Maybe it's in every cell. Maybe it's in the DNA. Whatever it is, there's something in there.
Well, I'm trying to point out that the something is something we haven't thought about in the past, and it would actually solve so many problems.
I see what you're saying in terms of communication with whatever that other realm is. But what I'm saying is that there might be—and forget about the term the brain—local. Let's just say local. Local, okay. Because when I'm accessing, oh, I know what— If I press the turmeric button on the coffee machine, it makes the kind I like. That's locally stored.
Other people don't know that if they'd never used that machine, right? This is locally stored information. Forget about finding it in the brain. It might be in the DNA. We don't know where it is. But I know how to start my car. I know how to put it in drive because I've done it before. Yeah. So something is happening where I'm storing information.
And the more information I store, the more it makes me effective at discussing certain things. There are certain things that I don't have any information about. I haven't read them. I haven't memorized them.
You are married to the information processing metaphor. I'm not. It's just a metaphor.
There is no information in the brain. Challenging this thing that you're saying that I don't think sounds as complete as you're saying it sounds.
But the good news is it's testable. It's empirically testable. And I don't think it's going to take 20 years. I think it's just going to take maybe five years. I think it's because the labs already exist. And it's not like studying black holes where you can't really access them. Because we can actually study brains. And we have lots of great equipment.
It's just no one's ever looked for what I'm talking about. And the point is, as I've talked to more neuroscientists, and physicists, they're saying the same thing. They're saying this has to be right and we just need to look for it. We never have before. Let's speculate. Let's say that they start looking for it and they find evidence that this is actually occurring.
Don't forget about crazy things. The consciousness turns off, and then consciousness turns on. Right.
What's that? What are psychotic states?
Yeah, but see, I'm just saying it's just an interruption in a pathway. Got it. That's really easy.
Right, which makes sense for psychotic states, right? There's some sort of a disturbance in the way the system is running, and it's not tuning in to the other side the right way.
It takes care of psychotic states just like that. I mean, think of how useful, how, you know, it does—you've got to go back and read Darwin because that's exactly what Darwin keeps saying. It was eye-opening for me to read this book because that's what he keeps saying. He keeps saying, look, I know this sounds nutty, but— It's much better than any other crazy story that you're going to tell.
We were actually just having this conversation the other day with Brett Weinstein. Oh, really? And Brett Weinstein, who's a biologist. And his belief is that random mutation, natural selection, Darwinian evolution, they're all real. It's all absolutely happening. But then there's probably also factors that we haven't figured out yet. And that's what shows human beings.
Like, that's how human beings go.
This is the factor. And this is that thing. This is what gets you up to that next level. And it's consistent with the ideas that physicists have about the structure of the universe. Again, just start with the basics that evolution is fantastic at producing all kinds of weird, bizarre ideas. transducers, and that we're encased in transducers from head to toe.
Couldn't, if the universe is what we think it is, couldn't evolution at one point, because it's producing all kinds of new traits all the time, couldn't it produce a brain that has that feature that connects us? Boom. Right. We're connected. That it might be an emerging quality in humans.
And then 20,000 years ago it emerged.
And emerged and It just brought us up like this, just like in 2001. We go up to here, and that could help explain the Fermi Paradox, because there could be lots of chimp-like creatures all over the galaxy.
but they just never made it to that level because... Well, that's where the weirdness of the whole accelerated evolution theory comes into place.
I mean, this is... You get into the kookiest of kooky stuff, the Anunnaki and the Sumerian texts and this idea that these lower primates were manipulated and that something was introduced into their genes and that this something is probably some genetics from some superior race or some more advanced race and that we...
took on that and that it became a part of us and now it's in our gene pool and now we're moving in that general direction with this different connection.
I've read some of these books that are really fascinating. Truly, they hold my attention. But page after page after page, I keep saying, yeah, but neurotransduction theory is much simpler. It's just one tiny little change that has to occur.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive because neurotransduction theory, as you're saying, if there's these primates on these other planets that never achieved this. And then there are ones that have and have transcended, that these ones that have transcended recognize this quality that's missing in these chimpanzees, and they introduce it. We don't need them.
It's possible, but we don't need them. We have evolution. But that's why it's accelerated evolution. They've concluded that primates right now have entered the Stone Age. Do you know that? So they're starting to use tools. So it was really interesting, right? So if given enough time, you give them 100 million years, who knows what a chimp is going to look like 100 million years from now?
They might be like us. They might do it naturally. The speculation—and again, this is not something I'm married to—but the speculation, this kooky speculation, is that we were visited by extraterrestrials that were far more advanced. And that they found us as these simple shit-throwing primates. And they said, let's juice this process up a little bit.
We know where this is going to go eventually, hopefully, if everything works out. But let's juice it up.
Let me connect what you just said with what I've been saying. Easy connection. Okay. And it brings us into the world of UFOs. Because whether this capability arose on its own, which it could. Or whether it was juiced up a little bit by some outsiders. Which it could. Which it could.
Then either way, we're now in a position where we could, in theory, communicate in more meaningful ways with extraterrestrials. We could. And we might, by understanding how transduction works, we might figure out how to do that. So not just communicating with people in another universe, but communicating with extraterrestrials.
Some of these extraterrestrials, in fact, most of them, maybe all of them, have to have this ability. They have to have that transduction ability or they never would have gotten above chimp level. So maybe this is our way of connecting with them as well. And that we're on the path, but we're not quite there yet. We're not quite there yet, but I think we could get there really fast.
And again, some of these neuroscientists I've been talking to, they are saying the same thing, because this is not like studying, I don't know, this is not like studying, I'll say black holes again, but this is different because we've got thousands of labs, some of them extremely sophisticated labs, were just not looking for this. What happens if we start looking for this?
And so what we've been doing is we've been trying to work out experiments that can be conducted and that should produce one result or another, depending on whether transduction is occurring. And that's the goal, is find empirical support for this type of theory. If we can find empirical support, the more support we find, obviously, the more convincing this will be.
And then that would bring in the engineers. It's the engineers who could really make this thing sing. So 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. Sure. 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. Yeah, lots of stuff just falls into place. Now, I have to point out that I'm wearing this idiotic Starburst thing. Mm-hmm. TameBigTech.com. Oh, thank you. Every time you say that, I just get the chills. Because I need help.
I desperately need people's help. So 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.
It's just been manipulated.
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, head of Google at the time. And 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 Kriegel, I believe his name is. It was actually quoted. And he said, two of the points came from us. Now, Obama won by five million votes, roughly. And two out of four points came from the tech team.
That's two and a half million votes. Yeah. 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. A 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 they're one by one, they're going up to the mic and saying, we are never going to let that happen again. Yeah.
We are never going to let that happen again. Which is democracy. They're never going to let democracy happen again. Exactly.
That's what I'm saying.
And that's so crazy to be blatantly and openly talking about that.
And 2020, we didn't have... As if it's a virtue. 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 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.
And this is something that'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.
and 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 realize 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 is 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.
And 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 five years ago, I sometimes feel like I'm literally dying of loneliness. And the fact that other people around me have been hurt, one quite seriously, makes me a little nervous, too.
And that's where I am at this point. And it's a terrible place to be. Terrible. It took $7 million to build what we've built, but it's been really tough. Okay, we're talking about like 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 core 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.
When you say they, who?
I don't know. Someone. I don't know. Google has... What did they do? Mm-hmm. 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 kind of at ludicrous speed, I guess you could say.
And 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. And 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 damn clever.
And what was the mechanism of this attack? How'd they do it?
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. And this is definitely created? This is not organic? Oh, 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. Have you ever talked to Elon about this stuff?
I've never had a way to reach him. 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.
Well, he has a few times lately. He has retweeted content about my work. So he's aware. He might be aware. And there's another way also, by the way, to take down Google. I published this in Bloomberg Businessweek. If you go to epsteinandbusinessweek.com, you'll actually see the article. And we've reached the point where data have become an essential part of our lives.
And 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.
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. And 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 will be exactly like the news, exactly like the news media, that domain. And 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.
So General Paxton, 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 U.S., 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've failed. So 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 core admissible data in every state and probably in every country. And 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. So 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. And 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 and 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 connection, 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. So 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.
Tame, tame, tame. TameBigTech.com.
Um... You crack me up sometimes, really. I'd love to see you do a comedy routine.
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.
Thank you, but I'm still fed up, just so you know. Okay.
Thanks, Robert. Yep. Bye, everybody.