Sarah Westall is Not a Porn Star Conversation w/ Stuart Brotman

➡ The power of digital media can help you gain support quickly, but it’s important to take action if you find yourself in a difficult situation. Be aware of scams, like gold IRAs, and ensure you’re working with a trusted company. Stuart Brotman, a leading scholar in free expression and digital media, has an impressive background and has worked under four presidential administrations. Lastly, be cautious of impersonation accounts and inappropriate content linked to your name on search engines, as it can damage your credibility and violate safe search protocols.
➡ The speaker discusses how they were targeted by hackers due to a vulnerability in Google’s system, which led to inappropriate content being associated with their name. They argue that Google should have prevented this, and their failure to do so is equivalent to Google attacking them. The speaker is now planning to sue Google to prevent this from happening again. They also discuss the importance of free speech and the threats it faces from censorship, social media moderation, and government pressure, highlighting the need for more discussions on these issues.
➡ The text discusses the power of big tech companies and the role of Section 230, a law that protects these companies from legal liability. It highlights the influence these companies have, including their ability to avoid lawsuits and control information. The text also discusses the challenges individuals face when trying to fight these companies in court due to their vast resources. Lastly, it touches on the weakening trust in the judicial process and the need for substantial revisions to Section 230.
➡ The speaker discusses their frustration with the legal and political systems, feeling they are controlled by money and time-consuming. They share their personal experience of being wrongfully censored and misrepresented online, particularly by Google, which has led them to file a lawsuit. They also mention the potential of AI as a tool for truth, despite its potential misuse. The speaker encourages public opinion and going viral as alternative ways to seek justice.
➡ The text discusses the impact of AI and digital technology on learning and brain development. It highlights the need for more understanding and literacy in AI, as it can both aid and hinder learning. The text also emphasizes the importance of questioning the source and meaning of information in the digital age. Lastly, it suggests that educators need to be trained in AI and that limiting digital device use in classrooms could improve learning outcomes.
➡ The text discusses the impact of technology on brain development, particularly in children, and the need for more awareness and education on this issue. It also highlights the importance of having an Office of Technology Assessment in Congress to guide lawmakers on technology-related policies. The text further emphasizes the need for more scientists and engineers in government and the risks of not having informed decision-makers in the face of rapid technological advancement.
➡ The speaker emphasizes the need for the United States to invest in technology and policy development to keep up with other countries. They express concern about the suppression of free speech and the decline of entrepreneurial spirit, which they believe hinders innovation. They suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) could be a useful tool for gaining more information and fostering dialogue. The speaker also promotes their book, “Free Expression Under Fire,” which discusses the importance of free expression and the need for cultural change to address these issues.

Yeah, we do see, the power of digital media is that you can go viral very quickly. And when you go viral, all of a sudden you have loads of people who are now protecting you or at least have you have their back or have your back. So, yeah, there is sort of a countervailing force that’s there, which is pretty good. But at the end of the day, it still means you need to do something. And it’s an awful situation that you’ve been put in. And I think the question you’re asking is, why me? Why, why, why did this happen to me? And obviously you want that situation to change and you need to have some way to remedy that.

So one way to do that is to go to court. Another is to, I would say, go viral in a way to get people to hear what you went through. And of course, people can be. And I am very sympathetic to what I’m hearing. Just a quick break from the program. I need to share with you an urgent manner about scam gold IRAs and the important need to make sure that you’re working with a trusted company in the precious metals space. I have had hundreds of people come to me now where they have lost 50, 60, 70% of their life savings in these scam gold IRAs.

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Welcome to business Game changers. I’m Sarah Westall. I have the honor of having Stuart Brotman come into the program. He has extensive background in the First Amendment and freedom of expression, and he’s worked under four different presidential administrations. And I’m gonna. I’m just gonna read his bio directly to you because I think you’ll be impressed with it. Stuart Brotman is America’s leading public scholar and free expression and digital media laureate at the Media Institute. He served in four presidential admin on a bipartisan basis, which it should be, and was the first visiting professor of Entertainment and Media law at Harvard Law School with concurrent appointments at Harvard’s Berkman Klein center and MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies.

An elected member of the American Law Institute, Brotman has participated in several First Amendment Supreme Court cases and provided expert counsel to government agencies and major media companies. His expert commentary has reached over 500 million readers globally, along with audiences on major networks such as abc, NBC, cnn, C span, and npr. And I’m really glad that he’s here, because this is the kind of conversation that I want to have with people when it comes to freedom of expression. Most of you know that I have been a targeted person when it comes to being unpersoned for and for being censored.

I wrote an article about what it means to be unpersoned when I was unpersoned, literally all over the place, the Internet. My website was taken down. My Patreon account was taken down. My X account was really Twitter at the time was taken down the same day Donald Trump’s was. And I never got it back. My YouTube account was taken down. I finally got it back just a couple weeks ago, which I. I talk about in this interview. I’m scared to even know what to publish because I, I mean, I honestly don’t know what I can talk about.

I can’t talk about. So now I just publish whatever is the most vanilla thing I can because I’m scared of five years of persecution for just talking about issues that are really important to the American people. And so I was really glad to be able to have this conversation because I don’t believe this is a partisan issue. I think this is an issue that it’s the First Amendment, for God’s sake. It’s an issue that affects all of us. And in my case, you know, I share the for the first time, what happened to me, not only did YouTube take my channel down, but starting in the summer and it probably happened actually it started at the beginning of or the end of last year where I had impersonation accounts on YouTube.

Actually, there was one from four years ago, but it wasn’t very big and there wasn’t much on it. But the impersonation accounts, there were four of them that I identified, two of which were posting my my original work and were monetized in the the YouTube partnership program. One was posting every single video that I do and was monetized for it. And some had tens of thousands of views and were part of the YouTube Partner Program. I tried to bring it to their attention during the summer and they ignored me with their customer service. And then I did DMCA takedown Request, I sent it to multiple organizations with Inside Google and YouTube following their official process.

I sent certified letters and I was ignored and told that they don’t take down entire channels that impersonate. They need to look at specific video. Whole channels don’t count. I sent it directly to their legal organization so they should have been able to see that the entire channel was impersonating me. But that didn’t work either. And then I had to hire an attorney, which costs quite a bit of money. And they had to send not only 1, 2, but they had to send three letters before they even acknowledged that it existed. So that’s the amount of effort I had to go through to get impersonation channels down.

In that process, I was able to document that not only the impersonation channels were coming up on the first page of Google results and YouTube results. I went to Google Gemini and asked them if those channels were legit. And Google Gemini confirmed that those channels were legit and had all these reasons why those impersonation channels were legit, pointing back to my own website, using the proper terminology and so on and so forth. So if somebody went to Google Gemini and asked the same question, are these real channels than they would believe that they were. I had multiple people deny wanting to come on my program because they thought I was too small or too insignificant because my own work was not being displayed.

Only these fake impersonation channels were being displayed. So I lost a lot of credibility during that process. But to make matters worse, I haven’t been using Google Search. I use a different search engine. But during that process of doing my research, I realized that not only were these coming up on first page, there was also relation of me my likeness to porn videos. And there was on the first page of Go Google Search there were eight references to porn videos. And I I’m showing you them here. There was also another reference to an obscene video, which is even worse.

I’m not even going to respond or say it out loud. What it is, if you’re watching this on video, you can read it yourself. And then there was smear pieces. There was Even one from 2019 that I didn’t even know existed that was on YouTube on the front page of the Google search results that was was from somebody from this. It was an obscure channel with not that many views and the person who led that organization was murdered. And that was on the first page of the Google search results. That’s what I had to look at.

And that’s what people were seeing when they searched my name. And so I did more research on this. Why was this enabled to happen? I went to Google Gemini and I said, what in the world is going on here? Google’s safe search failed to protect not only me, but it failed to protect the users who are using their search engine. So what Google Search does, or safe Search does, is when it comes to porn, it automatically weeds that out for people because it’s not safe for the general public to see. It’s not safe for a 12 year year old to do Sarah Westall podcast and have a bunch of porn stuff come up.

That’s not a safe search result. And so it has been put in place to make sure that it doesn’t happen. So when I saw it and it came up with my name, something failed with Google SafeSearch. I asked Google Gemini how could SafeSearch fail? At first it said that it’s very highly unlikely that SafeSearch would fail. It is very well done. You know, they got the top engineers in the world, they know how to do these things, right? Okay, so then why did it fail? Well, Google Gemini told me that it failed because of a known vacuum in the world of cyber hacking.

Which is true. It’s a vacuum and they exploit it. Hackers exploit it. When somebody is highly censored like I am, they know that there is a vacuum in SEO and they can do a targeted attack against someone like me, and then porn related material can bypass some of their safeguards. The problem is, is that Google, who has some of the top engineers in the world know that’s a vulnerability, according to Google Gemini, they know it’s a vulnerability. The fact that it happened anyways means that they allowed it to happen in my case, and it’s the equivalent of them doing the attack themselves.

That’s what Google Gemini told me. So for someone like me, who was a lead plaintiff on a federal lawsuit at the ninth Circuit against Google, who is being censored highly, and then suffered an attack, equating myself and my likeness to a porn star is something that rises to the level of a targeted attack. And at the very minimum, it means that we need to look and see why this happened and we need to protect the general public and protect others like me from being targeted like this. So that means we need to look at Google’s own information and figure out what the heck happened.

And they are going to hide behind section 230 immunity because for some reason our government has allowed them to get away with activity like this under section 230. And I highly doubt that the public wants this kind of attacks and these kind of results to be able to be protected. It’s past time that we look at these issues and we remedy it. Because someone like me should not have to suffer through an attack like this. And Google needs to step up and be better. Because someone like me or any other citizen in the country should not have to be on the front page.

A Google search being related to a porn star. It is highly disparaging for a journalist or someone like me to be equated to a porn star. And it has been shown that 70% of people in studies who see material like that will instantly discredit who I am. So that is why we have decided to open up a lawsuit against Google that is forthcoming. Because I have no other recourse then to make sure they eliminate the ability for anything like that to ever happen to me again by fixing the censorship issues that are surrounding me. Take me off those lists.

So a vacuum no longer exists and hackers can no longer look at me and exploit that vacuum that exists because of their censorship. Okay, with all that being said, this is the first time I went public with that. And I hope people listen and take warning. Take heed to this, because it’s a very serious, real situation that not only think of me as a canary in the coal mine, this happened to me, but this can happen to any public figure and anybody who is during doing journalism, who are innocent from these kind of attacks. Okay, that being said, I want to get into this really important discussion.

These are the kind of discussions that need to occur and we need to have a lot more of them. And I want to tell you, he has a new book that’s out. It’s called Free Expression Under Fire. And I will have the link below for you. And let me read a little bit of a summary of this book because I think it’s valuable reading for anybody. As America approaches the 250th, 250th anniversary, free speech and press freedom face unprecedented threats from campus censorship, social media content moderation and government pressure campaigns from college students afraid to voice opinions in classes to journalists facing investigations.

The First Amendment foundations of American democracy are under multiple threats in ways the founders never imagined. And I gotta tell you, this is not a left right issue. This is an American issue that all of us need to care about. One of the things that he talks about here is he served four different presidential administrations, two on each side of the aisle. And he, he tries to look at this in a nonpartisan way. And we need to look at this in a nonpartisan way because it affects all of us. Okay. I will have the link below to where you can find a copy of his book.

And here I go. My conversation with Stuart Broad. Hi Stuart, welcome to the program. Sarah, it’s a pleasure to be here. Well, I’m really glad that we’re having this conversation. You have in depth experience in media and freedom of speech and government and institutions and all these things. And you have a new book out about this on freedom of expression under fire. I think I said that right? Free expression under fire. Right, yeah. Can you, before we get into this, can you explain and share and I explain share what your background is so people have a good idea of just your extensive experience in this area? Well, I’ve really tried to combine a variety of different disciplines over the years.

I’m trained in communications and media and then I went to law school afterwards. Then I was in government for a period of time. Then I was in the private sector for many years. And then parallel to that developed an academic career and began to write and lecture and teach. And I was the first visiting professor of entertainment and media law at Harvard Law School. Very importantly in government, I’ve served on a bipartisan basis in four presidential administrations, which is relatively rare because typically people are going on one side or the other. But I actually have been on both sides and I think that’s really helped my perspective.

Well, and hasn’t freedom of expression and freedom of speech been a tenant just across the board for all of the of America? Pretty much. I mean, there’s always the extremes that want to shut people down. But hasn’t it been really an anchor of our country? Well, hopefully, obviously we have the First Amendment of our Constitution, but I mean even behind the scenes it has been. Go ahead. Well, part of it is the difference between what we have in the First Amendment and sort of the cultural aspect of free expression. And one of the aspects that I try to underline in the book is there is a difference between what the First Amendment says and what we do in our day to day lives, which are not necessarily controlled by the First Amendment.

And so a lot of this is really cultural norms. How we feel about free expression, how we’re willing to express ourselves, whether or not we’re going to self censor, whether or not we’re going to try to censor other people. That often is not a First Amendment issue because typically the government is not involved. And I think one of the misperceptions or least understood aspects about the First Amendment is that it’s a barrier between the government and people of the United States, not people relating to each other. And so there’s a lot of, obviously action now happening in terms of government trying to control free expression, but there’s an awful lot of people trying to control the expression of others.

Well, the people controlling the expression of others, I guess you can’t really get rid of that. It’s politics. The problem is when you have platforms that have power like we’ve never seen before, coupled with government trying to coerce them to do what they want, and behind the scenes, we won’t. Don’t even know really how much they’ve been coercing unless we can get into full exploration. Right. I mean, we really need to get to the bottom of this. But what it’s doing is, it’s chilling freedom of expression to the point where we’re fearful just to do normal communications, where we used to have a sense of, of, you know, we were empowered to speak.

Now we’re, I don’t even know. Like, when I go on YouTube, I got my channel back. Like, I don’t even know what I can and cannot talk about. Well, you’re absolutely right. I mean, we have what is called the chilling effect. And part of the chilling effect are these platforms and private entities which are chilling. And some of it, as you suggest, is government cooperating or encouraging these private platforms to interfere with the expression of others. I mean, that’s often called the raised eyebrow. So there’s not a formal government role. But when government begins to suggest things to private platforms, private platforms often will listen to that because they understand government has a lot of power and they don’t want to face that power.

Particularly when you’re talking about concentration of power. Obviously we have something called the antitrust laws, and you could figure out whether or not you want to move ahead with an antitrust suit. We just had a major one, obviously, with Meta, you know, which was resolved in Meta’s favor. But the idea of having to potentially face an antitrust suit, something that most of these platforms are not relishing. And so therefore, some of them may be more willing to essentially say to the government, what do you have in mind? And the government may tell them, and obviously we have examples.

We’ve seen that. So I think what you’re saying is not just your perception. I think it’s the reality as well. Well, Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi, infamously, while she was speaker of the House to probably the most powerful speaker of the House. We’ve ever had, at least the most effective. Even if you don’t like her, few people disagree with that. As far as getting everybody doing what they want them to do. She came in front publicly said, if you don’t do what we want, I’m paraphrasing, your section 230 immunity is going to be at risk. She said that publicly.

I mean, what the heck is going on behind the scenes if she’s willing to say that publicly? And that’s the last thing these big tech companies, monopolies, I would say, want to lose because that gives them so much power. Well, there’s a great example of the raised eyebrow, which is essentially not filling in the blanks in terms of what might actually happen, but suggesting something. And by suggesting it, whether it’s done in private or in public, again, these platforms are going to pay attention to this. And you’re absolutely right. One of the major aspects here is section 230.

And section 230 essentially right now gives these platforms immunity, broad immunity, not absolute immunity, but broad immunity from legal liability. And so if you begin to say, maybe we should reconsider that, that essentially will resonate with some of these platforms and they may say, well, what do you have in mind for us to be able to essentially avoid that fate? Well, and I don’t know how they’re getting away from not being able to do exploration and really see what’s happening, because Twitter files, we know this was happening. Even Meta Zuckerberg CEO talked in Joe Rogan about what was happening behind the scenes.

How is Google able to get around at this point not having to do disclose exploration in court? Well, again, right, exactly. There you go. And so that’s why many of these companies really don’t want to face this idea of an antitrust suit or some other type of suit, because guess what? Then you’re going to have very, very broad discovery. Obviously, that discovery takes place under oath. And so it’s a little different than just having to testify before Congress, which doesn’t necessarily have the same ramifications as testifying under oath in court, so. Absolutely right. Discovery is something all of these platforms want to avoid.

And one way to avoid that is to essentially avoid a lawsuit from taking place. Again, the raised eyebrow is in place. That’s right. Well, in my particular case, I had impersonation channel. Like they wouldn’t let my channel. Google, for example, wouldn’t let my channel up on YouTube for five years. Right. And but meanwhile, there was impersonation channels that were up there, two of which were monetized on YouTube, one of which was. Was publishing every single one of my videos and I couldn’t get them to take it down. And I went through multiple channels. It took three letters for my attorney before I actually got them to pay attention.

And I went through the DMCA process and everything. And these channels were up on the first page of Google results and YouTube results. And none of my own legit stuff was. Was even on the first page, just that. And it was all. And they were monetized. How can they get away with stuff like this? I mean, at what point is there things not going to crack and say this is just. This is beyond. And this is so harmful for people. I mean, how do they get away with this? With. How does Section 230 protect them from something so harmful like that? Well, Section 230 is a broad provision in the law.

Obviously we now see that section 230 is being tested in the courts and we have had a couple of Supreme Court decisions which have narrowed that. So over time, section 230 may be narrowed, but fundamentally I think it would have to basically be revised pretty substantially. So one of the other issues of section 230 is let’s imagine the world where there was no section 230, where these companies did have liability. Would that necessarily change things? I’m not sure of that for a couple of reasons. One is because a number of states have essentially caps on tort damages.

And so you wouldn’t be able to get sort of the level of damages that’s going to hurt a company like Google or Meta. So that’s one. A second is this area of class action lawsuits. So they’re relatively difficult to be able to certify a class. You may have been hurt in this situation. I’m sure you were, but you are an individual, so you would have to find hundreds or thousands of people just like you in order to be part of a class action. That’s only. That would be the only real way that you would be able to mount the type of case against one of these companies.

So even if there is lesser liability, I’m not sure that that’s necessarily going to change the behavior of these companies. Remember, they have enormous, enormous resources. And I’m sure you have experience just having to pay some legal fees and going through the process of takedown that it’s, it’s expensive and for individuals to bear that cost, it’s really something they’re not going to be doing. And you have the big companies essentially who have armies of not only lawyers, but other experts who essentially can be part of the defense. So I think the Section 230 area is important, but I don’t think it’s necessarily going to create an entirely new environment.

Well, the concern that I have is the courts not taking very serious things into account that they actually have control of the courts, Especially in California in the ninth circuit, where the. A person can’t get anywhere because they control the court legitimately, the judges are controlled and won’t even look at it properly because there’s too much power and influence over these, you know, because they have so much power and influence. I, I’m. I’m almost the point where I don’t even know if there’s justice in this country anymore. Well, I have a little more faith there. In fact, I have quite a good deal of faith in.

In our rule of law and our justice system. I do understand why people have less faith. And certainly we see all of the public survey data showing that the courts are basically declining up from the Supreme Court. So I think the trust in the judicial process is really weakening. And obviously that undermines our whole system, our rule of law. But particularly in the area of the first amendment, the courts have been actually quite good and really across whoever appointed those judges and across circuits and including the Supreme Court. So we still have, I think, a relatively good judicial process for free expression in this country.

Of course, it takes a while to get a case up. It’s expensive, as you suggest. You have to go through an appellate process. You may or may not reach the Supreme Court. So there are. There are all sorts of obstacles. But the system was created to have a number of obstacles. You don’t want everyone essentially going to court immediately, but at the end of the day, I think the rule of law is a good system. Well, is it? If you. If a person can’t fight, if the law. If you come with a case that is legitimate and somebody with a ton of money always wins, how can that be a justice system? How can.

Why is it that we need. Why wouldn’t a case stand for itself? Why can somebody with so much money and power overwhelm. The case should stand for itself. You shouldn’t have to have all that money and power in order to win a case. If you have a good case and you bring it forward in a justice system that’s operating, it should still stand on its own. You shouldn’t have to have so much money and power if a justice system works properly. No, I agree with that. There are procedures within the judicial process, we have something called summary judgment.

And of course, you know, about 95, 96% of cases never go to trial, so they settle. So part of, part of our judicial process today is not necessarily going to court. It’s essentially saying, I have a dispute and then trying to work that dispute out with whoever you suing. And so disputes do get worked out. That’s why we have settlements. Some of those could be relatively easy, some of those could be a lot more difficult. But most of what goes on behind the scenes and what we call the judicial process takes place outside of the courtroom, takes place really in private negotiations.

And a lot of courts now are really private courts. So of course there are a number of parties who realize it’s going to be very expensive, very time consuming to go to court. So we now have a number of different, I would call them companies or firms which do what is called alternative dispute resolution. That means that you can essentially bring the case to them and the two parties agree when that case is resolved, we will not go to court. We’re essentially going to respect whatever that decision is going to be. Of course, we have the TV version of that, which is Judge Judy or People’s Court.

But if you listen to the end of the show, they will always say that everyone on that show has agreed that whatever is resolved on the show will be the final decision. You can’t go to court after that. So there are ways to sort of streamline the process. But I, I do agree the, the judicial process can be very, very expensive, very time consuming, and very much controlled by money. But I think more broadly, the political process is just like that as well. But that’s where the anger stems from, is because the people feel the system is broken for them.

And it essentially is. If you can’t, like for example, in my situation, we are putting a lawsuit forward against Google because of some of the things I have on their letterhead that they reinstated my channel and it does not violate their policies. And I’m back up there, then why did you take me down this whole time if I never followed, you know, if I didn’t violate your policies. But the other thing is on the first page of Google search results they had, not only did they have all the impersonation channels, they had my name coming up with porn videos and stuff.

All I like 8 instances of porn videos next to my names. I have, you know, really obscene things, hit pieces, all these stuff. None of my own work, just all of that. And then, you know, other random crap. How. And I search into that more. The reason that happened is because I’m so shadow banned and so censored that it creates a vacuum. And hackers know this is true. Software engineers know it’s true. You know that’s my background. And so they exploit that and Google’s engineers from what I because it’s so known in that industry that they know that’s a, a loophole that they can exploit.

And then Google Safe search failed, which almost never fails. You don’t have someone like me come up next to porn videos without their tools failing. And their tools wouldn’t fail unless they didn’t do their job. I mean there are some serious questions there of how a journal I journalists like me comes up on the first page next to a bunch of porn stuff. Right? That’s very damaging. How, how can they get away with doing things like this? I mean that those things need to be fixed and I shouldn’t have to, I shouldn’t have to mount my case all but you know, that shouldn’t be something I have to bear to get a large multi trillion dollar corporation to stop doing things like this.

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I’m very excited about this so I hope you join me in this Journey and try some of these peptides. Okay, so I’ll have the link below, or you can go to sarahwestsalt.com under shop. I wish I had an easy answer for you. I know I’m sharing something big like, holy crap, how could you be in that situation? But that happened to me. I got screenshots. I had people all around the country looking at it for me, like, how the heck is this coming up? I’m very sympathetic to what you’ve described here. And obviously there is a way to try to move ahead to get that resolved.

It sounds like you either filed a case or will file a case. The other aspect that you have is you can be out on other platforms. You could be telling people about what happened. Well, I’m in the process. Yeah, which you are in the process of doing. And so essentially, you know, creating a wave of public opinion sometimes can, you know, create essentially a reaction that you might not be able to. To get in court. I mean, we saw that, you know, recently with Jimmy, what we call the Jimmy Kimmel incident, which is where you had a wave of public opinion after potentially he was going to be taken off the air.

And that wave of public opinion, which was also backed by about 3 million people canceling Disney plus and Hulu, essentially, that Disney said, well, wait a second, we. We hear you and we’re not going to be taking them off here. So there was no lawsuit there. There could might have been a lawsuit, but in that case, public opinion prevails. And, you know, we do see the power of digital media is that you can go viral very quickly. And when you go viral, all of a sudden, you have loads of people who are now protecting you or at least have you have their back or have your back.

So, yeah, there is sort of a countervailing force that’s there, which is pretty good. But at the end of the day, it still means you need to do something. And it’s an awful situation that you’ve been put in. And I think the question you’re asking is, why me? Why, why, why did this happen to me? And obviously you want that situation to change and you need to have some way to remedy that. So one way to do that is to go to court. Another is to, I would say, go viral in a way to get people to hear what you went through.

And of course, people can be. And I am very sympathetic to what I’m hearing. Well, and nobody, no one should have to go through what I just saw. Nobody. And that we can’t have a situation where somebody can be attacked so so badly for whatever political reasons you want to attack somebody for. We can’t have a civilized society and be in a situation like that. I mean, it’s just not acceptable. So I think one of the brighter aspects of AI and we could talk about that, is that I, I, I think AI can potentially be a countervailing force because people will be able to access different AI platforms and ask questions about, you say, is she really involved in, Is she really a porn star? Exactly right.

And of course then AI is going to be giving a little different answer than what people are seeing or hearing about, and that may then lead people to question exactly what’s happening. So I know a lot of people talk about the downsides of AI, but I think the more that we have AI systems now, of course, one of the dangers there is who is going to control those systems. Well, that’s exactly right. Well, okay, well, let me tell you, I asked Google Gemini, are those impersonation channels real? And they said, yes, those are real. And it showed all these.

So if somebody went to Google Gemini and asked if the impersonation channels of my name were real on YouTube, it would have told them yes. And I had to correct it and say no, I But it did tell me that Google Safe search, when it came to the porn stuff, Google Safe search failed. You were a leading plaintiff in a federal lawsuit, so they should know who you are. And they know this is what it said. They know that this is a vacuum and that they’re suppressing you. And that’s essentially like doing even if they didn’t do it themselves, that’s essentially like them pulling the trigger and attacking you themselves.

That’s what Google Gemini told me about. Right, right. So there’s a great example where AI can tell you a little more about the story than what people would just think about. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. And so people can look at it, but it’s pretty incredible that we’re in this situation. You’re right. Now, if the people who control AI are feeding it. There’s an example where my sister, I was having her look at some science, you know, with Tesla, which is a, you know, one of the most famous scientists in history. And I had her look at some, some of his stuff and I wanted her.

And in our country, the ChatGPT and other AIs said that something was conspiracy theory and not true about Tesla. And I said, I don’t think so. And then I had her go to Yandex, which I know it has its own issues but it’s a Russian based search engine and it not only said this was about scalar waves, it said Tesla showed that. Tesla showed that scalar waves was true. And then it brought up a whole list of university studies all around the world. Whereas our AIs shut that down and said nothing exists. That’s an example of where information is blocked.

Yeah, I think, yeah. And again, something in the book there is, you know, we need to have a lot more literacy in this area. So you know, AI is an area that, you know, it’s not going to be one particular platform and you’re really going to have to become relatively sophisticated in terms of what you’re asking and how you’re correcting. I mean you’re basically in a dialogue with a system as opposed to being a dialogue with a person. But if you were talking to a person, you wouldn’t necessarily just listen to a person and accept everything that they’re saying, especially if they were saying something that wasn’t correct or you thought differently.

And so you should exercise that free expression with AI in the same way that you exercise it as we’re talking right now. But, but we’re not at that point now because I don’t think as a society we’re really sensitive or trained in how to use AI. We don’t have that. What’s going to be really key. That’s the key. That is right. And what’s going to be really interesting, obviously we talk about digital natives and so these were people who grew up with the Internet. You know, they have tremendous digital skills. This is probably, you know, generation Z.

But, but now there is that generation of kids who are in elementary school who will be the AI generation. They’re going to be kids who started out with AI and as they grow then I think we’re going to have a lot more literacy. There’s going to be a lot more sophistication in that area. Well, I think that’s really important. And I want to say something. When I, when I was talking to Chad GPT, I talked to it and I push back, I’ll push hard. Say you, just because you don’t have access to the information doesn’t mean it’s not true.

And amazingly it comes back and says, oh well, these are all the things I do have. And so you are right, Michael, why didn’t you bring that up the first time? So you are right that you have to do that. But I had a pediatric neurologist come on my show. He also has his PhD in history and he has all these things, but he was talking about children’s brains are actually changing. The structure of their brain is changing based on what we value in society, and that using these AI systems are actually changing their brains. I really highly recommend everybody watching that video that I did with him because what you’re saying is actually more important than people even realize.

I think it’s going to change us for centuries to come if we’re not careful on what it is that children are growing up with and how much it can change their brain development based on they’re developing skill sets or not. Absolutely. And I, you know, I experienced this in the, in the classroom and there are a lot of studies, but clearly when students come into the classroom and they’re bringing their laptops and they’re just online during the discussion and lecture, you know, it changes the entire learning process. But I think a lot of studies have shown that if you get students to take notes by hand as opposed to do it on a laptop, and if you just get them to close their devices during class, you’ll find a lot better retention, a lot better performance.

Obviously that goes back into how your brain is operating. And I think you’re right. It’s going to essentially change the neurobiology of how we think and act. And we’re not focusing on that right now. Well, we don’t even. Yeah, we’re totally just meandering and stumbling into a future that we have no idea what we’re stumbling into. Yeah, I think we are beginning to at least recognize part of that. You probably know that a number of school systems now are banning cell phones in the classroom or even bringing cell phones into, into the school. And so that’s a recognition that maybe we shouldn’t have that sort of full time digital connection because it is affecting how we learn, how we think, how we interact.

So one of the chapters I have in my book is I forgot what it’s titled. But essentially I recommend that everyone think about two questions to ask in this whole world of information. So the first question is, how do we know that? And so typically we’re surrounded by all sorts of information, but we never ask the question, how do we know that? Where is that information coming from? And then of course, the second question is, what does it mean? And so even though we have a lot of information coming at us, we sometimes don’t really process what the meaning of that information is.

I think if we can begin to retrain our minds and retrain those we’re educating into those two questions, we’ll probably be able to advance this to another level, to a better level. Well, and I think so. And I think that just the banning the cell phones, the issue and that’s another reason why people need to watch that conversation, is that it’s coming too fast and that by the time we catch up to what it is that we need, there’ll be whole generations that have already gone through this and it, it’ll have such a profound change. Maybe we can have some pockets that aren’t affected so that we have a chance.

Because cell phone usage is one thing, but like whole universities don’t know how to use chat GP. So chat GPT or some of these other AIs. So these professors are. For example, my daughter wrote a paper and she wrote it herself and she gets a B. She has CHAT GPT, writes it and she’s out of college now, but she was just, okay, screw it, I’m gonna have Chat GPT write it. She gets an A. Right. That kind of reward system is not going to work. Right. You can’t teach students that they need to use ChatGPT other in that kind of to that whole degree, like they just did to my daughter and to a whole generation of college students.

What they need to do is do. What we Talked about in McCollum, Dr. Jack McCollum we talked about, is that you use CHAP GPT as a tool to write papers. And he. But it takes professors a heck of a lot more effort and they have to put this effort in. And what they do, and this is how I use ChatGPT, is they make, he makes them write the paper first and then and learn because you have to learn what the concepts are. You might use Chat GPT and other AI to come up and help you develop the concepts, but you have to write it and then you have chatgpt fix it for you or clean it up and then afterwards you clean that up again and then you document what you learned in the process.

It’s a lot of work for a professor, but it’s how you start. And I don’t know if that’s the best way to use a tool or not, but it’s a heck of a lot better than what they’re doing now. And it actually makes you a better writer. Yeah, no, I agree. And I know you’ve been in the classroom as well teaching students, but I think part of it again goes back to professors and what there are incentives and it takes a lot of time to go through that whole process. And so many of the professors now have no idea about what’s happening with AI.

So not only do we need to sort of look at the generation that’s coming up with AI, but we need to train the people who are educating those students now. And so it’s a, it’s a large sort of multi generational problem. But I think the way, I think, I think the way you begin to attack that problem is probably with some baby steps. And you know, as I said, one of the baby steps might be let’s not bring the digital device into the classroom and maybe we will. And again, many school districts and some states are now doing this.

So I think probably within the next few years we’re going to see some real impact in terms of certain areas not having this exposure versus other areas that continue to allow it. And I think there’s going to be data and studies which will show the difference. And I would suspect the difference is going to be pretty dramatic, which is that, you know, if you don’t have the devices, you’re probably going to be doing just fine. I would suspect that you grew up in an era where you didn’t have those devices. I grew up in the era where I didn’t have them.

And guess what? We’re doing just fine. Right? Well, we’re, I’m the last generation, Generation X that didn’t grow up with it at all. And so you get to see the difference and it’s pretty profound. The issue is, is that we don’t have, and I don’t want to say it’s, you know, we’re just. I don’t want to have another emergency, but I don’t know if we have the time. I mean, we’re going to have to, to write off entire generations then of not getting proper brain development if we don’t wake up to some of this stuff. I, I agree it’s, it’s very scary.

And, and clearly some of the guests you’ve just talked about and some of your ability to discuss this with others, I, I think is great just in terms of being able to expose some of these areas. Yeah. Well, Eric Meter, who I just think is wonderful. He’s young, he’s in his early mid-20s now. He’s putting a whole program together for kids and how to use technology. And he’s, he got, I got him hooked up with the Moms for Liberty and they, they’re working together on what to put into schools and having programs and that’s the kind.

But we need a bunch of Erics, we need a bunch of Moms of liberties all over the country. We need a bunch of these conversations so that people can understand what it is that we’re actually looking at. Because like you were saying, a lot of these university professors, a lot of these teachers in schools just have no idea what they’re dealing with. And perhaps they shouldn’t even really, for the most part, use these tools maybe until they’re in junior high or high school, and they just really develop their basic skills. Not that they shouldn’t. I mean, I have a systems computer science background.

I’m a big tech background. So I don’t want to say don’t. And my kids are all in that. Don’t not learn this stuff because it’s, it’s so important. It’s running the entire world. But you’re not developing your brain. If you use it from day one, you develop your brain first and then figure out how to use these tools. Absolutely. And you know, we do that just in physical development. There certain things that were not having kids in elementary school because their bodies are still growing and they’re not capable of doing that. And so you wait until another period of time, and it doesn’t seem that there should be any difference between physical development and cognitive development.

Right. You’re absolutely right. And so I think these are just profound questions that we don’t have all the answers to, but we better start asking them and we better start looking at it. And we got to stop walking into this blindly. And so I’m just thankful that you’re, you are looking at it seriously. You have a new book that’s looking at. Freedom of speech is a big component of this. But this is, you know, when you look at the investment in AI, we’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve never seen companies the size like we have in the world.

I mean, this is something so I keep using the word profound, but it is so different than anything that we’ve experienced in human history, of our history that we know of. Unless there’s other cycles. We don’t, we don’t know necessarily how to navigate forward with this kind of environment. And what, something like 70 per 67 or 70% of all new in venture capital has gone into AI over the last, you know, few years. That is absolutely massive. And we just don’t know how to navigate this. So I’ll tell you something that’s scary. So there used to be something in Congress called the Office of Technology Assessment, ota.

So this was the group in Congress, essentially was the office that was there to study the development of new technologies and to advise Congress on potential policies that might relate to them. Sounds really good, right? It cost about at that $100 million a year to support that office, which, as you know, within the scope of the federal budget is not even a rounding error, such a minuscule amount of money. Congress abolished that office 30 years ago. 30 years ago. Why? Right. This is the major, major question. And so we don’t have within Congress today any capability for senators or representatives to be able to go to an office and say, tell us about some of the questions that you’re talking about.

Tell us about the research that’s going on with cognitive development and AI. So we, we essentially have put handcuffs on our legislators. The legislators did it themselves by abolishing the office. So I have spoken out for many years asking the question you just asked, which is, why don’t we have an Office of Technology Assessment in Congress? I mean, we have all other, we have a budget office in Congress. So when Congress is putting together a budget, they go to the, you know, Congressional Budget Office and ask them to run the numbers. We don’t have any group in Congress that you could go to to say, tell us about these issues.

Well, that’s so important because, and I don’t, I don’t want to, but I’ve been saying, and I’ve gone to conference presentations, the structure of the world has changed. And the governing body that we have, that’s governing the structure of the world, or at least our country, as is not equipped, they don’t have the background, they don’t have the skill sets or whatever. And this, what you’re talking about, is a way to help them bridge that gap. Now I think that we need to get a heck of a lot more scientists and engineers and other people, but I do think that smart people can learn it.

But yours, what you’re talking about here is so critical to deal with what I’ve been shouting at the rooftops over. And I think most people never heard of this office. But if you go back to the history, you’ll see that there was so much good work that was done and there was a sense that people in Congress at least had a place to ask questions and could get some guidance in this area. But right now we’re flying blind in terms of some of these things. And as you say, the risk of flying blind could be catastrophic.

Well, it needs to be a bipartisan, truth oriented organization as much as humanly possible, because right now we’re just being affected by the lobbyists with the People who have the most amount of money trying to get their stuff through versus actually informing the people who are making decisions. Right. And that’s just not okay. I had Mike Harris on just recently, and he was talking about how he put together a deal with for semiconductors on Motorola. And back in the late 90s, they had the. They were the largest company in the world for semiconductors, and he was selling a division of Motorola and ended up being that.

And they know they’re no longer in. The entire industry is gone for Motorola. It’s another company or whatever. But the. He was selling a division and he got an offer for 1.6 billion. And what happened is that they had to sell it to a Chinese company for 1.3 billion, $300 million less. And the Chinese, what happened, he found out later and he explained the story in that video is that in an interview is that the Chinese infiltrated the board and they have decade plans, hundred year plans. So they slowly infiltrated the board, took over the board, and then sold it to a Chinese company for $300 million less than the other bid.

Nobody would reasonably do that if you were stewards of the company. But because it was less than 5% of the overall revenue of the company, they. It didn’t trigger an audit or any suspicion. And so they could do it. And so they just strategically kept it below the 5% so that nobody would raise eyebrows. And then the Chinese took over that technology. Now, if you had a board like what you were talking about and people are actually astute and aligned with where the future of our country and needs are, from an intelligence standpoint, we wouldn’t have things like that happening, or it would be a lot less likely because our politicians and the people who are actually stewards of this country would be more informed.

Well, and if you go back and look at the history of the Office of Technology Assessment, it was truly bipartisan. It was very objective. They brought in the best experts. I mean, we still have elements of that. We have the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine. So we do have the academies out there, but they don’t have the direct line to Congress. Congress needs to have its own group that it could say, here are the questions we have. Can you give us information? Because we are developing policies in this area. And when you speak about China or other governments, guess what? Every other government has an enormous capability to essentially assess technologies and to develop policies based on those assessments.

And we don’t. We are the United States of America, and we don’t have it because we’re not willing to spend $100 million a year on this. Just crazy. Well, and they, not only do they know it’s important, I mean that they know when the largest companies in the world are in this area. They know it’s the future of the world. And so their policies, all the way down to their children, is to develop people with these skill sets. Their children, their number one thing they want to be as scientists and engineers and astronauts, our kids want to be influencers.

They don’t want to be a nerdy scientist or any of that. Right. We, we just, we are putting ourselves in such a dumb future situation by not paying attention to these things. Well, we’re not future oriented. We live in the moment. And obviously the moment could be gratifying or it could be disappointing, but whatever happens, happens while we’re doing it. And I think we’ve lost the sense of looking towards the future. I mean, so much of what built this country was the idea of creating for the next generation. And I don’t think we have our eye on the ball at this point in terms of what’s going to happen with the next generation and the generation beyond that.

Most of the other countries we’re competing with have the eye on the ball. And not only are they looking to the future, they’re basically navigating the pathway to the future and they’re being doing it smarter. Now freedom of speech does come into that because if the most powerful organizations decide that they’re going to suppress anything that challenges their cash cow and that is suppressed, and entrepreneurs aren’t, because we’re not in the best, we are not in the best entrepreneurial environment anymore either, where young people don’t feel that they can just bootstrap their way to making things happen.

It’s not like it used to be. And so we, with that, with freedom of speech being so curtailed, people don’t have access, like I was telling you with the Tesla. They don’t have access to the science that they should have. They don’t have access to these things because if it, if it puts any kind of pressure on a cash cow of some of the most powerful organizations, they shut it down. That shuts down entrepreneurial spirit, that shuts down the information flow to create the next generation of things. How, how do we deal with that? Well, again, I’m not suggesting AI is a panacea, but at least AI will give us more capability to get more information.

Not only more information, but be able to have a dialogue with that information to do what you do with ChatGPT, which is to say, is this right? Is there better information out there? I just heard there might be something. So what I like about AI, and I think is promising is again, you need a level of sophistication, how to use it. But once you, once you have that sophistication, it’s a tool. You can begin asking those interesting questions and challenging those questions, getting better information. Again, we need to think about AI as, as a resource that we’re utilizing, just like when we talk to people.

But I think we’re looking at it sort of as this distant technology that we need to figure out how to control it right now. Okay, so this obviously is just the beginning of a long conversation that needs to and actions that need to occur. Where can people find your book and learn more about your work? And maybe, maybe you can even help people get engaged in what it is that we so desperately need citizens to start stepping up into, you know, playing some of these roles. Well, Sarah, I really enjoy, I think this is such a great conversation.

I’m really happy that we’ve had it. So my book is called Free Expression Under Fire and it’s defending free speech and free press across the political spectrum. And so part of it is we need to start creating some common ground around the area of free expression. So that’s not just considered something that’s another element of the partisan divide. The book now is on Amazon. In pre order, it’s going to be an ebook form which releases in December, but again you could go on Amazon and order it now. It also will be in trade paperback and that’s going to release in January.

And one great part of the publishing process is I’ve really encouraged this to be a low price book because I think this is something that virtually everyone should have or talk about. I’ve always said that free expression should be something that’s talked about at the kitchen table. So we have a number of topics. We talk about the economy, talk about health. I think every family needs to sit down and talk about some of the issues we’ve talked about today and the idea about free expression, particularly parents and grandparents who are sending their kids off to college and elsewhere to begin to say, here are some things that might happen when you go on campus and sort of get them prepared for some of the issues that they’re going to face in free expression.

So those are a couple of quick ways to get the book. I have a lot of different themes in the book. I’ve suggested a few of those, but ultimately so much of it, as we talked about, is a cultural change. We need to sort of grab a hold of these issues as a culture, as a society, because these are not going to be legislated, they’re not going to be resolved in courts. We need to essentially do a little bit of self help here. That’s right. Thank you so much for joining the program. I really appreciated the conversation.

I did, too, Sarah. It’s just been terrific. Thanks, Sa.
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