There's a New York Times article in which they have acknowledged that Google can brainwash citizens at will. Have you seen that? You know, I floated the idea the other day — was it yesterday? — in which you could have the social media platforms identify people who are starting to get radicalized by what they're watching and what they're typing, what they're saying, and what they're responding to. And if you identified them sort of in a digital way, if the system identified them, you could, if you chose to, start feeding them content that would deprogram any bad impulses.

And I said I'm pretty sure that we already have the technology that could do that. And it's confirmed. So the New York Times confirmed it, that Google does have the technology to identify what you're watching and reprogram your brain any way they want. It's a big article about it.

Now, the context was not the way I just described it, but it says that pretty clearly. What it says is that there was some liberal who got radicalized by watching a bunch of YouTube by people who were, we'll say, associated with the right but they're more edgy. And that once this person — the subject of the article — once that person was exposed to things that are from the right, sort of the Steven Crowder, Stefan Molyneux kind of stuff, that YouTube started suggesting things that were even further to the right.

So YouTube actually reprogrammed this guy from watching fairly innocuous content. You know, Steven Crowder and Stefan Molyneux, they're provocative but they're certainly not racist in any way that I would recognize that word. But YouTube was feeding this poor guy edgier racist stuff until he started watching it. So YouTube actually turned a non-racist into a racist. And they essentially admit that they have that technology.

Think about it. YouTube, through their algorithm — and according to the New York Times reporting and according to the person they were talking about — actually brainwashed a liberal into a racist. That actually is what the reporting happened.

Now, you could ask yourself, you know, would that have happened anyway? Was he leaning that way and it wasn't really what he watched on YouTube? Maybe. Maybe internally he was already gonna go that way and it didn't matter. But I don't think so. I mean, that might be true for this individual, but I'm fairly certain that if they can cause you to watch different things based on the recommendation algorithm, they can reprogram you. Because what you watch is what you become.

Did you hear that? What you absorb in terms of information and content is what you become. It does turn you into a different person. So think about that. Should it be legal for a platform to brainwash you?

Well, let me put it in the starkest terms. It is now. It is now, I would say, demonstrated beyond any doubt that I have. And I think it would be easily demonstrated beyond any doubt that Congress would have if they looked into it. In fact, there's a critic, Tristan Harris — yes, that was the name I was looking for — who's worked on this kind of stuff and says directly that it's brainwashing people.

Now, somebody says isn't advertising brainwashing? The answer is it's a hybrid. When you watch an advertisement, you know what their intention is. Tristan Harris. When you see an advertisement, you know it's an advertisement. You know that somebody is trying to persuade you to buy a product. And you can feel it working or not working. You know in real time that is brainwashing. It's influence. It's persuasion. You could put whatever word you want on it.

But what's different is it's above board. They're saying here's an advertisement. If you watch this, we're going to try to talk you into our product. We all get that. We understand it. It's ubiquitous. That doesn't seem evil simply because you have an option of turning away and they're telling you exactly what it is. There's no deception whatsoever.

But if YouTube is giving you a recommendation algorithm that's taking you down a channel that you would not have gone and the result of that is brainwashing, that's not full disclosure. That is them brainwashing you for profit, because that's why they do it. They do it to measure how long you stay in the video, how many of you click, that sort of thing. That is pure brainwashing.

Now, why is that legal? Ask yourself why that's legal. Let me ask you this. If somebody had a brainwashing website in which they said, okay, I'm a hypnotist and I'm gonna brainwash people coming here, and let's say it was above board. They said I'm gonna brainwash you. Would it be legal? I don't think it would.

Now, I don't know what specific law that violates, but I think if an actual hypnotist had a site and said I'm just brainwashing people, I'm reprogramming you people — I'll even tell you I'm doing it because it's still gonna work — would that be legal? I've seen a number of cases where I thought I was going to find a site like that and they seemed to be banned in some way. There's some kind of ban against actually intentionally brainwashing people.

Think about the internet. If you do a search for somebody who says, okay, I'm gonna brainwash you, now I don't think you'll find it. And you can find anything on the internet. So I think there's something illegal about it, but I don't know the details.

So if Congress were presented with this proposition, how would they act? The proposition is that Google is intentionally brainwashing citizens without their consent. What would Congress do about that? Well, I don't know if that's even illegal. Is it illegal? Should it be illegal? Feels like it should be illegal, but I don't know. There's so much other influence in the world. Where do you draw the line?

See, the problem is the influence used to be something that not too many people were good at. As long as people were not good at advertising and you didn't notice it that much, if people weren't good at manipulating you, yeah, it doesn't really matter because they weren't good at it anyway. But now we have the science. Google in particular has literally brain scientists looking at all this stuff to ridicule which will cause you to be brainwashed by those things you're addicted to.

Now, so we've taken a skill — persuasion — that was just sort of hit or miss, wasn't that powerful, and raised it to a professional, you know, military level literally. So at that point that's just brainwashing. And I don't know how that remains legal except maybe the Congress doesn't understand it or the public doesn't understand it.

All right. So certainly we have, I think we have strong evidence that Google could brainwash people against violence if they chose to set their algorithms to do that. But we don't know if they will.

Here's the question for you. I'm gonna give you a — oh, and also in that same article I watched the continued conflation of the people on the far right, or I don't even like to call them far-right, but it's the people who are literally the KKK, it's racists and stuff. And they get conflated with YouTube stars that are just concerned.

So the Crowders and Molyneux, you know, they inhabit kind of their own space. But the New York Times likes to throw them in with the worst people in the world just to make it all sound like it's the same thing.

But the worst part about this is they're talking about this kid who got, a young guy who got radicalized by looking at YouTube videos, and they throw Joe Rogan under the bus. Joe Rogan? What has he got to do with anything?

And here's the problem. And I saw this coming a mile away. Do you remember when you first heard the term intellectual dark web? I guess it was Brett Weinstein who came up with it. I'm not sure who came up with it. But there was a notion for a while that there was a certain group of people that they would put in this category. So Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, and I guess Jordan Peterson, and they threw Joe Rogan in there. And I don't know who else was there.

But for a while people were asking me, you know, do I belong in that group? And Dave Rubin. Yeah, he would be in the group, usually considered that group. The last thing that I would ever want is to be associated with a group, doesn't matter what the group is, unless I've intentionally joined. Because I didn't want to get the treatment that Joe Rogan just got.

Joe Rogan is as far as you can get from whatever these bad ideas are that are being associated with the far right. I'm pretty sure he doesn't embrace any of that. But because he got lumped in — here's how it works. He got lumped in with the intellectual dark web, which people have illegitimately conflated with being right-wing, which then people continued to conflate illegitimately with being neo-Nazis. See how this works?

I could see this coming from a mile away. Just so when it first came up I was like no, no, no, I'm not in that group. Poor Joe Rogan, who has done nothing but talk to some people. Literally, that's all he's done. He's talked to a few people who were in this intellectual dark web. And that gets him associated in an article with somebody who got radicalized into a neo-Nazi. Is that fair? Is that fair to Joe Rogan? No, that's about as unfair as you could possibly get.

It's like my head almost exploded when I read that the New York Times was throwing Joe under the bus. I mean, that's despicable. There's no other way to say that. You know, you want to call it news? Maybe it's news-ish. But it's despicable to do that sort of thing. It's just despicable.