https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY7Azb1sPu0
Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a financier moving through elite social circles. He was deeply connected to the origins of modern artificial intelligence, through government-backed programs designed to collect, store, and analyze human data at scale.
In this episode of Off Air, Attorney Ron Chapman traces the real origins of AI surveillance, from DARPA’s abandoned LifeLog program to the rise of platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Spotify. What the public rejected outright in the early 2000s didn’t disappear, it was rebranded and privatized.
This episode breaks down how:
•DARPA’s LifeLog program was designed to track the lives of entire populations
•The program was shut down just as private tech platforms emerged to do the same thing voluntarily
•Key figures in Silicon Valley were tied to intelligence-backed funding pipelines
•Data collection, not social connection, became the real product
•Jeffrey Epstein positioned himself at the center of early AI research and elite tech networks
Ron explains why this wasn’t coincidence, why the government didn’t abandon total information awareness, and how Americans were ultimately convinced to hand over their data willingly.
If you want to understand the true origins of AI, mass data collection, and Epstein’s role in shaping the digital world, this episode connects the dots the media never fully explained.
Chapters:
00:00 Why this story changes how we understand AI
01:42 Jeffrey Epstein and the origins of modern artificial intelligence
02:25 DARPA’s LifeLog program explained
03:06 The day LifeLog ended — and Facebook began
05:10 How Silicon Valley replaced government surveillance
08:44 Peter Thiel, Palantir, and intelligence-backed tech
12:30 Why data, not innovation, was always the goal
15:40 Final thoughts
Additional Resources:
Official website: https://ronaldwchapman.com/
here is the transcript
What I'm about to tell you is going to
change the way that you look at AI
forever. It's not going to be pleasant
to hear, but it's going to be very
important. I intended on waiting until
we hit 100,000 subscribers to release
this episode because of the amount of
research I did into it. I want to make
sure that everybody has a chance to
receive this and to completely
understand it. I'll start with the fact
that everything everybody's been talking
about when it comes to the Epstein files
is wrong. Dead wrong. And the real issue
with Epstein hasn't even bubbled to the
surface yet. It's a much deeper, darker
story. It starts in 2002 and it involves
some of the most famous tech
billionaires we have in our country
today. Peter Teal, Elon Musk, Mark
Zuckerberg, Larry Page. Now, I'm not one
to bring you conspiracy theories. As you
know, every single episode that I bring
you here on Offair Air is thoroughly
researched and vetted and factual.
That's the same with this episode.
Everything I'm about to tell you is 100%
absolutely true and it's vetted and it's
unfortunate and it is our new reality.
If you spend your day on artificial
intelligence, if you regularly log into
chat GPT, if you ask it questions and
you receive answers and it tells you how
to do your job on a daily basis, there
is a very real chance based on what I'm
about to tell you during this episode
that technology is changing your life
for the worse, not the better.
I'm Ron Chapman, federal criminal
defense attorney, former Marine Corps
lawyer, and an investigator. And I'm
going to bring you the story of the new
eugenics Jeffrey Epstein, the godfather
of artificial intelligence. There was a
DARPA program. For those who don't know
what DARPA is, it's the CIA backed
research wing that does a lot of
research into technology and it's been
the godfather of many very famous
technologies including Facebook as I'm
about to show you right now. DARPA
lifelog was a program that was launched
by DARPA. You can go online and look for
the request for proposal. The design of
this program was supposed to capture all
Americans information, put it into a
lifelog, track it, build it over time so
that you can create an electronic
database of every American and in fact
almost everybody in the world. Well,
when congressional hearings started
related to lifelog, it was quickly
killed by DARPA. Why? Because it came to
the surface, because people learned
about it, and because people became very
concerned about the impact of all of
their information online. This was 2003.
This was back when we were a little bit
more concerned about what we put into
the computer. We weren't too far away
from dialup modems and AOL and Bill
Gates was still a name that was
regularly talked about. As soon as
Lifelog became public, DARPA quickly
killed it. And they killed it on
February 4th, 2004. That date is
significant because that's also the date
that a young hoodieclad Mark Zuckerberg
sitting in a Harvard dorm room launched
what he called then the Facebook. The
Facebook was designed as just a Harvard
campus project. That's all Mark
Zuckerberg intended it to be. But then
of course he met the Wlvoss brothers,
two relatively wealthy and backed
individuals who worked with him on the
project. And if you believe the movies,
Mark Zuckerberg went in a different
direction than the Wlvoss twins. But
that's not the real story. The real
story is right after Facebook launched,
it got tens of thousands of users. 50%
of them were on Harvard campus and it
struggled to get off the ground in other
campuses. It wasn't until a tech CEO
Peter Teal then of PayPal and a
relatively famous figure in the
conservative party now today came to
Mark Zuckerberg, a relatively unknown
individual on Harvard campus and offered
him $500,000.
Now, the one thing that you should all
understand about Peter Teal is at that
point he was what's called an angel
investor, but he was a different kind of
angel investor. He actually paid
individuals to drop out of college and
commit themselves to his causes. Teal's
Club has launched some of the most
famous tech startups. He's been behind
nearly every single one of them. Reed
Hoffman with LinkedIn was started right
around this time period. Now, if we go
back and look at Peter Teal and say, why
did he spend $500,000 on this project?
Why was he one of the first venture
capitalists? Why was he offering this
kind of money to people like Mark
Zuckerberg? You have to understand about
what he built at that point in time. You
see, Peter Teal was the founder of a
program called Palunteer. Palanteer is
the connector. Palanteer is the brain.
But the brain doesn't have the data that
it needs in order to figure out
artificial intelligence. Palanteer is a
company that takes existing information
and it connects that information
together to draw conclusions. It's been
going for a very long time. I used it
when I was in the Marine Corps in
Afghanistan and I've spoken widely about
Palunteer because of how much I know
about it. But Palanteer is nothing
unless it has users to put in data.
That's where Lifell log came into play.
The intent was people like John Po
Dexter of DARPA, the CIA, and the US
military, Department of Defense, felt
that they would be able to just get a
project to collect this information that
was government funded. But when there
was push back by the American public,
they had to go a different way. and
DARPA playboy Peter Teal decided to go
the way of a young hoodieclad college
kid to get the information that he
deeply sought to make the connections he
needed in order to control so much about
our environment. For those of you who
think the rags to rich's story of Mark
Zuckerberg is some amazing tale that we
should tell our grandchildren, think
again. Just about every social media
entrepreneur back in the day of Peter
Teal's tech startups was blessed by
DARPA. Why didn't MySpace win over
Facebook? It didn't have DARPA backing.
Why did LinkedIn win over the dozens and
dozens of programs that were available
that did similar things around that
time? It was because of Peter Teal and
DARPA. Why did Instagram become so big?
Peter Teal and DARPA. Spotify. Peter
Teal and DARPA. Just about every single
aspect of your digital life, Peter Teal
and DARPA backed blessing people in
exchange for one thing, a backdoor of
information to be collected from users,
cell phone location, and a tremendous
amount of user data. Now, what does this
have to do with Jeffrey Epstein? That's
the curious part. A lot of people aren't
aware that Jeffrey Epste is one of the
first godfathers of artificial
intelligence. Back in 2002, he had a
conference where he supported some of
the most famous names in artificial
intelligence who were intending to solve
a problem at that time. If you wanted a
clean, reassuring origin story for
modern artificial intelligence, you'd
probably start with a university lab, a
whiteboard, and a grad student surviving
on ramen noodles. You'd not start with a
private Caribbean island owned by
Jeffrey Epstein. And yet, in the spring
of 2002, a group of prominent computer
scientists met with Epstein on his
property for what was dubbed a common
sense symposium. This was later
documented in a 2003 AI magazine paper
that Epstein for his generous support.
What were all these AI researchers
gathering for? It was to solve a problem
in AI. The topic itself was academically
respectable. how to give machines the
everyday common sense humans use
consistently without even noticing. The
venue for solving this problem was
uniquely Epstein and it's the kind of
venue that institutional ethics would be
very concerned about. The 2002 symposium
located in the Virgin Islands founded by
Jeffrey Epstein was a gathering that was
later described in print one that
brought together the most influential
artificial intelligence figures
including Marvin Minsky MIT's AI lab
founder Ken Ford, NASA and DARPA ties.
Their shared goal was technical to solve
the common sense problem. the gap
between machines that can recognize
patterns and machines that can reason
like a normal human being about normal
human things. Like why you shouldn't
store ice cream in the oven. This is
very important because the common sense
problem has always been a yeah but of
AI. It was never really addressed but it
failed many projects. Pattern
recognition can be astonishing.
Reasoning about the world like a person,
that's where AI tends to trip up. And in
order to solve the common sense problem,
it's common sense that you need a lot of
money. And that's where Jeffrey Epstein
was very skilled. Some people in fact
said that he collected scientists like
some people might collect art. Why was
he doing all of this? Well, it's because
he had his own nefarious motives. So, in
2002, the AI researchers gather. They
talk. A paper is published that thanks
Jeffrey Epstein
for all of the support. And then the
researchers scatter the globe and start
working in their individual tech
companies and outsprings Facebook,
LinkedIn. The technology from PayPal
spiraled across the globe and started
collecting data for Peter Teal and
Jeffrey Epstein himself. But Jeffrey
Epstein didn't stop there. According to
MIT's commissioned investigation,
Epstein donated roughly $850,000
to MIT, between 2002 and 2017. After the
Virgin Islands meeting, it was very
important that this research gets done
and Jeffrey Epstein paid for it, but he
paid a lot more to others. He even paid
$750,000
to MIT after his 2008 conviction that
everybody's well aware of. Now, the
donations to MIT pald in comparison to
what he purportedly gave to Harvard.
Harvard had an investigation after it
was found that they received such a
large donation from Jeffrey Epstein.
$6.5
million donated by Jeffrey Epstein, most
of it in the hands of a researcher named
Martin Novak. I'm going to talk a bit
about Martin Novak because he's very
important here. Martin Novak was the
founder of the peed laboratory at
Harvard. This was the laboratory that
Jeffrey Epste had a private office in.
He had a swipe card and access to the
entire building. And even after his
conviction, he was able to visit many
times, over 40 times. The peed
laboratory was part of the program for
evolutionary dynamics. Now, you could
hear the words evolutionary dynamics and
think that this is a groundbreaking
concept, but what it really is is a
dressed up version of eugenics. Martin
Novak is originally a mathematician. And
most of his research was based on the
idea of cooperation. Why some parts of
the species might cooperate with others
even if it ultimately leads to their own
demise. You see, people like Epstein and
Novak were absolutely obsessed with the
future of the human race and the
problems of the human race that are
caused by reverse Darwinism. The idea
that as we become more technologically
advanced, we as a people will begin to
fail. And I think to some extent we do
see some of that evidence present. But
they took it to an extreme extent.
Investigations later described Epstein
as being physically present, treated as
a known quantity, and given
institutional accommodations that go
well beyond a pat on the back and thanks
for your support and look a lot more
like integration into Harvard itself.
With Jeffrey Epstein entrenched at peed
and also at MIT, he had commanded
respect in two of the most important
institutions that were developing
research in the area of AI and
ultimately eugenics. MIT's media
laboratory famously referred to Jeffrey
Epstein as Voldemort or the one who
should not be named. They avoided saying
his name because they knew who he was.
They knew what he was about, but they
just couldn't stop taking his money for
research. The logic's almost poetic in
its cander. If a donor's name must not
be spoken, everyone already knows where
the money is. If the plan is anonymous
and not publicized, the institution's
admitting it's not proud of where it's
getting its donations. Epstein had
positioned himself globally as a
connector and certainly inside of the
United States as a connector in many
different institutions, but he was
ultimately the funer of artificial
intelligence and this sort of research.
Starting in 2002 in the Virgin Islands,
moving forward to large donations, he
kept very firm relationships at MIT and
Harvard even after his convictions.
But what's more troubling are some of
the statements that Jeffrey Epstein
would later make that reveal what he was
really trying to develop with all of
these donations. Now, before we get into
that, I want to take a second. I would
certainly appreciate it if you would
consider subscribing and potentially
becoming a member. I along with Legacy
Podcasting put together this program for
you and it takes a lot of resources and
that subscribe means so much to me and
your membership does as well. Now you
might say, "Okay, Ron, what's the
connection between Jeffrey Epstein,
Facebook, and DARPA?" And that's where a
gentleman named John Po Dexter comes
into play. He's a former NASA director
who led DARPA. He led the information
awareness office. He was actually the
founder of the information awareness
program that I mentioned to you earlier.
He founded the total information
awareness initiative. That was the
program designed to get information on
nearly every single American citizen.
And of course, when that went out of
favor, he had to find a way to get
Americans to willingly give up the
information themselves. And according to
Wired's reporting, Po Dexter met with
Peter Teal and Palunteer co-founder Alex
Karp in 2004 and told them that he had
an interesting idea to apply data mining
techniques from fraud detection to
counterterrorism
operations. Experts like Po Dexter were
really trying to solve post 911 problems
and that's where total information
awareness came about. Of course, they
had the benefit of a law passed by
Congress at the time that George Bush
was president and signed by President
Bush allowing almost complete access to
the public's information and instilling
FISA courts. At that point in time, the
government was at the most powerful. The
CIA, DARPA would be able to get as much
information as they possibly could. And
with the aid of Facebook and fast
forward over 20 years, CIA officials
would tell you that the number one
source of information on the American
public are apps like Facebook, Spotify,
and LinkedIn. Shortly after, we would
learn that Reed Hoffman, the founder of
LinkedIn, would sponsor a dinner in
PaloAlto, placing Epstein at the table
with Musk, Zuckerberg, and Teal, all of
which who would move forward and
champion cryptocurrency
as a tool for the future. They realize
that the information is great, but the
financial system is still tied to
governments and deleveraging the
financial system from the government
would allow this sort of technocrat
explosion to occur and ultimately give
them the power that they need. Now
great, you've got Bitcoin spiraling
forward. You've got all of the
information that you want on Americans.
You have them willingly giving over
their information. and you no longer
need the total information awareness
program. You're moving a forward full
steam ahead. But then a gentleman named
Edward Snowden, who I once would have
villainized, but now I might consider
championing, came forward with
information about a program called
Prism. I've done episodes before on the
startup of Prism and how that came from
a software that was stolen by the
government around the time that Bill
Clinton was in office. had the ability
to connect information on all Americans
and also collect information overseas.
Edward Snowden was a whistleblower and
told us how the CIA and the NSA would
have the ability to collect information
on every single American through all the
digital devices that they had. That's
where your information from Facebook was
going. Now, there's a law that prevents
America from spying on its own citizens.
But when they give that information up
willingly, all you need is a back door.
That's one of the reasons why it was so
important for Peter Teal and John Po
Dexter to start these sorts of
operations. That's another reason why
Donald Trump pushed so hard along with
Joe Biden and a unanimous effort to try
to reduce Tik Tok in the United States.
You see, if your government has control
of Facebook, if your government has
control of Google and the Chinese don't
have control of those, you're safe. But
when a Chinese application starts to
come into the United States and collect
just as much information, that spells
problems. In fact, I think what we did
with Tik Tok is almost the greatest
admission that your government is behind
the information collection of Facebook
and Google. And so, of course, Edward
Snowden blows the whistle. We finally
learn what Prism is, and some of the
information that we can gain from that
is absolutely alarming. But that still
wasn't a signal that it was used
domestically. and we wouldn't find that
out until the Cambridge Analytica
scandal. I'm going to talk a bit about
Cambridge Analytica, but I think it's
important that we get to it in another
episode as well. So, make sure you hit
like and subscribe on this one so that
you can get notification of that. Also,
in my last book, Truth and Persuasion, I
wrote an entire chapter on the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. And while I'm going
to give you some new information and new
research, it would be important to get
some background in that book, Truth and
Persuasion. It's essentially how the
digital environment has changed us
drastically. If you got a copy of the
book or if you read it, let me know in
the comments, make sure you tag me in
it, and I'd be happy to hear your
thoughts about the book. The Cambridge
Analytical Scandal, for those who don't
know, started well before it hit the
United States. You see, Facebook and
Peter Teal connected a backdoor inside
of Facebook software. That back door
allowed certain other institutions and
entities to get a hold of information.
Cambridge Analytica paid Facebook a lot
of money for a contract that allowed it
to get not just the information on the
individual user but also get information
on their friends and data that might
have been already located inside of
their phone. That meant that when you
logged into Facebook, Facebook was
storing not just your data, not just
your user data, but also data from the
friends that you'd connected with,
whether or not they'd opted in on those
privacy settings. Facebook settled a
very large lawsuit with its users and
immediately tightened up after the
scandal. But the problem is not just
that Facebook leaked the information.
It's why. You see, as you know, Peter
Teal was early in on the founding of
Facebook. And those back doors are very
important, especially when they go to
his friends. Now, most of you know that
I'm a relatively conservative person,
but I fight power wherever power is,
especially if it gets corrupt. And I
take issue with what happened here. So,
I hope you're a bit patient with me.
Peter Teal, a well-known conservative,
but also somebody who believed that
Brexit was a good thing, and also
somebody who believed that Donald Trump
should get in office in 2016. And while
I will not say the Cambridge Analytica
scandal was the result of Trump's
presidency, what I will say is that it
is the result of a database of
information that very well can be used
for bad. And it's very possible we may
not have another free and fair election
in our country's future. The founder of
Cambridge Analytica was from a marketing
firm and he teamed up with a very smart
programmer. They decided that they would
try to influence some elections
overseas, which was a great way to make
a lot of investors a ton of money. They
tried it on a few countries, Singapore
and others, with some mixed results.
They were refining it before they
brought it into the UK and also to the
United States. When they had almost
50,000 data points on every single
American, enough to know just about
everything about you, they decided to
spring it loose to the highest bidder.
What does that lead to? And what's the
impact of that? Well, when Facebook
knows a lot about you, Cambridge
Analytica knows a lot about you, they
know that they can split you off into a
silo. If I drive down the street and I
see a billboard, I feel one way about
it. Another person may feel another way
about it. If it's a lawyer billboard, I
probably want to punch it in the face,
being a lawyer myself. But these aren't
billboards. These are little personal
signs that can be individually consumed,
which means if you look for the fear
signals that somebody normally reacts
to. If you put a bunch of different
types of advertisements in front of them
until you finally get them to react, you
will know exactly how they react to a
certain stimulus. I talk about this in
my book, Truth and Persuasion, but
there's two types of thinking. System
one and system two thinking. And the
first type of thinking is the sort of
quick reaction sort of thinking that we
don't even really think about. The
second type of thinking is the type of
thinking that is very intentional and
logical. We sit down and we chart things
out. You probably don't remember your
drive to work very well because you were
engaged in system one thinking. But if
you sit down to solve a problem at work,
you very well may be engaged in system
two thinking. When we react to these
fear signals on the internet, the
Cambridge Analytica signals that get put
in front of us, they appeal to our
system one thinking, which means we
aren't as conscious of what we are doing
and the choices we're making. I've often
said when I'm looking at a jury of 12 as
a lawyer standing up in front of them
arguing in a case for the first time in
history, these 12 people may have
absolutely nothing in common with each
other. They may be operating from very
different algorithms. They may be
basically speaking the same language.
One person may be getting a whole bunch
of Russian misinformation. Another
person may very well be getting a lot of
liberal misinformation and another
person may be getting some fear signals
that are just completely out of left
field. It's one of the reasons why at
Thanksgiving when you ask your uncle to
pass the gravy, he might respond with
something like, "If you believe that the
Charlie Kirk shooter did it, no." And he
throws it in your face. That's because
these algorithms are crazy and they're
designed to silo individuals and get
them to react to their own different
fear signals to get them entrenched into
a belief. This is one of the reasons why
on my program I spend so much time being
fair and balanced and showing you all of
the information. I want my viewers who
appeal to system two thinking. I want
you to logically sit down and be
critical and analyze this. I love it
when people question me in the comments
or even offer a correction if I get
something wrong. This is a community
that builds the right way, not based on
fear signals. You won't see that from
me. So, if you want more of that, feel
free to click subscribe. So, Cambridge
Analytica has a database. It knows how
to operate on fear signals. It knows how
to get people's attention. And it starts
using advertisements to start swaying
the way people think, the way people
vote, the way people interact with each
other. Now, this information finally
became available to us because of a
whistleblower. But if that hadn't
happened, we wouldn't know that
Cambridge Analytica was silently
influencing most people in America in a
way that prevents us from having control
of our elections in the future.
You might question that, but the reality
is a lot of us are powerless with strong
appeals to system one thinking. That's
not from me. That's from a researcher
Daniel Conaman who's been very prominent
in the field cited widely developed
these types of thinking and he developed
them directly from test cases in World
War II. All right, so we've covered
Cambridge Analytica, we've covered
Facebook. Now, it's important that we
wrap all of this together by discussing
Epstein's worldview and the worldview of
many of his supporters, including
potentially Peter Teal himself. I think
that we can sum this up the best way by
discussing a breakfast gathering at
Jeffrey Epstein's 50,000 square f foot
mansion. He was surrounded by former
heads of state executives from Google.
He was in the presence of a former
Israeli prime minister. When he was
asked about Novak, about the Harvard
research, he said something that was
very curious.
He informed this group of distinguished
guests that Novak was doing research
into cancer. But the way he explained it
was very curious. He said, you know,
when you want to find a suspected bad
actor on the global stage, one of the
things that you might want to do is
collect all the information about them,
the signals, the connections that they
have with other people. He said that's
the way that you would want to treat a
cancer cell. And then one of the things
that you want to do is you want to
starve out that cell by destroying the
connection. You see in conversations
with many highups, Jeffrey Epstein had
repeatedly referred to this sort of
eugenics in very odd ways. In many
conversations, even with Novak himself,
he referred to our species similar to
the way that he would refer to
biological organisms. And he would say
things like, you know, dead organisms
need to be washed away. Those that
aren't useful to the body or useful to
the system or are cancerous need to be
wiped away. When he would talk about
cancer, he was routinely not actually
talking about cancer, but he was talking
about those things that are harmful and
no longer serve a purpose. Now, there's
a lot of other things that you could say
about Epstein. Certainly, he wasn't a
very good guy. But one of the things
that you should be very suspicious of is
that he was the founder and in fact the
influencer who originally started
deep research into artificial
intelligence and this sort of mindset
that he shared along with Novak along
with Peter Teal the idea that democracy
is dead that humans are heading in the
wrong direction that there's going to be
this rise of artificial intelligence
technology that will likely take over
starts to get him and other people
somewhat concerned that the human race
is not up for the challenge. And that's
where dangerous thinking starts to come
into play about tuning the human race in
to something that might be sustainable,
even if that isn't all of us. These were
the same ideas that were shared by
Nazis. These were some of the ideas that
Adolf Hitler equated to Nichi's thinking
that was essentially incorrect. It
appeared that Jeffrey Epstein was really
obsessed with the survival of the
species. In fact, in an email between
him and Glain Maxwell talking about
another individual who I won't name, she
said, "Wait, she's key. She has all of
the DNA research. Jeffrey Epstein was
obsessed with freezing his sperm." And
one of the things that he wanted to do
was be able to recreate himself later.
He was also obsessed with the way that
organisms interact with each other
through Novak's research and he was
obsessed with the way that society
interacts. He was working on some very
deep projects along with very
intelligent individuals. Individuals who
all shared the same eugenicist mindset.
Now that's a lot for one episode. And
the next episode I'm going to get a
little bit deeper into Peter Teal. I'm
going to get into Edge, the secret group
that is promoting all of this research,
and I'm going to dig pretty deep into
the mindset of some of these powerful
people and why they think the way they
think and why it is so incredibly
dangerous. But one thing's for sure,
your use of AI, your use of artificial
intelligence, putting information into
the machines that we've been putting
information into was not designed to
help us or save us or help us do our
jobs. It was designed to give pieces of
your freedom over so that it could be
observed, manipulated, and fed back to
you in a way that allows individuals
like this to control. On the next
episode of Offair Air, we're going to
talk a little bit more about Peter Teal,
the Greenland acquisition, a secret
society that he's been involved in.
We're going to talk about Edge and
Jeffrey Epstein, and why these people in
this inner circle think the way they do.
My name is Ron Chapman. Thank you so
much for joining me on Offair
What I'm about to tell you is going to
change the way that you look at AI forever. It's not going to be pleasant to hear, but it's going to be very important. I intended on waiting until we hit 100,000 subscribers to release this episode because of the amount of research I did into it. I want to make sure that everybody has a chance to receive this and to completely understand it. I'll start with the fact that everything everybody's been talking about when it comes to the Epstein files is wrong. Dead wrong. And the real issue with Epstein hasn't even bubbled to the surface yet. It's a much deeper, darker story. It starts in 2002 and it involves some of the most famous tech billionaires we have in our country today. Peter Teal, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page. Now, I'm not one to bring you conspiracy theories. As you know, every single episode that I bring you here on Offair Air is thoroughly researched and vetted and factual. That's the same with this episode. Everything I'm about to tell you is 100% absolutely true and it's vetted and it's unfortunate and it is our new reality. If you spend your day on artificial intelligence, if you regularly log into chat GPT, if you ask it questions and you receive answers and it tells you how to do your job on a daily basis, there is a very real chance based on what I'm about to tell you during this episode that technology is changing your life for the worse, not the better. I'm Ron Chapman, federal criminal defense attorney, former Marine Corps lawyer, and an investigator. And I'm going to bring you the story of the new eugenics Jeffrey Epstein, the godfather of artificial intelligence. There was a DARPA program. For those who don't know what DARPA is, it's the CIA backed research wing that does a lot of research into technology and it's been the godfather of many very famous technologies including Facebook as I'm about to show you right now. DARPA lifelog was a program that was launched by DARPA. You can go online and look for the request for proposal. The design of this program was supposed to capture all Americans information, put it into a lifelog, track it, build it over time so that you can create an electronic database of every American and in fact almost everybody in the world. Well, when congressional hearings started related to lifelog, it was quickly killed by DARPA. Why? Because it came to the surface, because people learned about it, and because people became very concerned about the impact of all of their information online. This was 2003. This was back when we were a little bit more concerned about what we put into the computer. We weren't too far away from dialup modems and AOL and Bill Gates was still a name that was regularly talked about. As soon as Lifelog became public, DARPA quickly killed it. And they killed it on February 4th, 2004. That date is significant because that's also the date that a young hoodieclad Mark Zuckerberg sitting in a Harvard dorm room launched what he called then the Facebook. The Facebook was designed as just a Harvard campus project. That's all Mark Zuckerberg intended it to be. But then of course he met the Wlvoss brothers, two relatively wealthy and backed individuals who worked with him on the project. And if you believe the movies, Mark Zuckerberg went in a different direction than the Wlvoss twins. But that's not the real story. The real story is right after Facebook launched, it got tens of thousands of users. 50% of them were on Harvard campus and it struggled to get off the ground in other campuses. It wasn't until a tech CEO Peter Teal then of PayPal and a relatively famous figure in the conservative party now today came to Mark Zuckerberg, a relatively unknown individual on Harvard campus and offered Now, the one thing that you should all understand about Peter Teal is at that point he was what's called an angel investor, but he was a different kind of angel investor. He actually paid individuals to drop out of college and commit themselves to his causes. Teal's Club has launched some of the most famous tech startups. He's been behind nearly every single one of them. Reed Hoffman with LinkedIn was started right around this time period. Now, if we go back and look at Peter Teal and say, why did he spend $500,000 on this project? Why was he one of the first venture capitalists? Why was he offering this kind of money to people like Mark Zuckerberg? You have to understand about what he built at that point in time. You see, Peter Teal was the founder of a program called Palunteer. Palanteer is the connector. Palanteer is the brain. But the brain doesn't have the data that it needs in order to figure out artificial intelligence. Palanteer is a company that takes existing information and it connects that information together to draw conclusions. It's been going for a very long time. I used it when I was in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan and I've spoken widely about Palunteer because of how much I know about it. But Palanteer is nothing unless it has users to put in data. That's where Lifell log came into play. The intent was people like John Po Dexter of DARPA, the CIA, and the US military, Department of Defense, felt that they would be able to just get a project to collect this information that was government funded. But when there was push back by the American public, they had to go a different way. and DARPA playboy Peter Teal decided to go the way of a young hoodieclad college kid to get the information that he deeply sought to make the connections he needed in order to control so much about our environment. For those of you who think the rags to rich's story of Mark Zuckerberg is some amazing tale that we should tell our grandchildren, think again. Just about every social media entrepreneur back in the day of Peter Teal's tech startups was blessed by DARPA. Why didn't MySpace win over Facebook? It didn't have DARPA backing. Why did LinkedIn win over the dozens and dozens of programs that were available that did similar things around that time? It was because of Peter Teal and DARPA. Why did Instagram become so big? Peter Teal and DARPA. Spotify. Peter Teal and DARPA. Just about every single aspect of your digital life, Peter Teal and DARPA backed blessing people in exchange for one thing, a backdoor of information to be collected from users, cell phone location, and a tremendous amount of user data. Now, what does this have to do with Jeffrey Epstein? That's the curious part. A lot of people aren't aware that Jeffrey Epste is one of the first godfathers of artificial intelligence. Back in 2002, he had a conference where he supported some of the most famous names in artificial intelligence who were intending to solve a problem at that time. If you wanted a clean, reassuring origin story for modern artificial intelligence, you'd probably start with a university lab, a whiteboard, and a grad student surviving on ramen noodles. You'd not start with a private Caribbean island owned by Jeffrey Epstein. And yet, in the spring of 2002, a group of prominent computer scientists met with Epstein on his property for what was dubbed a common sense symposium. This was later documented in a 2003 AI magazine paper that Epstein for his generous support. What were all these AI researchers gathering for? It was to solve a problem in AI. The topic itself was academically respectable. how to give machines the everyday common sense humans use consistently without even noticing. The venue for solving this problem was uniquely Epstein and it's the kind of venue that institutional ethics would be very concerned about. The 2002 symposium located in the Virgin Islands founded by Jeffrey Epstein was a gathering that was later described in print one that brought together the most influential artificial intelligence figures including Marvin Minsky MIT's AI lab founder Ken Ford, NASA and DARPA ties. Their shared goal was technical to solve the common sense problem. the gap between machines that can recognize patterns and machines that can reason like a normal human being about normal human things. Like why you shouldn't store ice cream in the oven. This is very important because the common sense problem has always been a yeah but of AI. It was never really addressed but it failed many projects. Pattern recognition can be astonishing. Reasoning about the world like a person, that's where AI tends to trip up. And in order to solve the common sense problem, it's common sense that you need a lot of money. And that's where Jeffrey Epstein was very skilled. Some people in fact said that he collected scientists like some people might collect art. Why was he doing all of this? Well, it's because he had his own nefarious motives. So, in 2002, the AI researchers gather. They talk. A paper is published that thanks for all of the support. And then the researchers scatter the globe and start working in their individual tech companies and outsprings Facebook, LinkedIn. The technology from PayPal spiraled across the globe and started collecting data for Peter Teal and Jeffrey Epstein himself. But Jeffrey Epstein didn't stop there. According to MIT's commissioned investigation, Epstein donated roughly $850,000 to MIT, between 2002 and 2017. After the Virgin Islands meeting, it was very important that this research gets done and Jeffrey Epstein paid for it, but he paid a lot more to others. He even paid to MIT after his 2008 conviction that everybody's well aware of. Now, the donations to MIT pald in comparison to what he purportedly gave to Harvard. Harvard had an investigation after it was found that they received such a large donation from Jeffrey Epstein. million donated by Jeffrey Epstein, most of it in the hands of a researcher named Martin Novak. I'm going to talk a bit about Martin Novak because he's very important here. Martin Novak was the founder of the peed laboratory at Harvard. This was the laboratory that Jeffrey Epste had a private office in. He had a swipe card and access to the entire building. And even after his conviction, he was able to visit many times, over 40 times. The peed laboratory was part of the program for evolutionary dynamics. Now, you could hear the words evolutionary dynamics and think that this is a groundbreaking concept, but what it really is is a dressed up version of eugenics. Martin Novak is originally a mathematician. And most of his research was based on the idea of cooperation. Why some parts of the species might cooperate with others even if it ultimately leads to their own demise. You see, people like Epstein and Novak were absolutely obsessed with the future of the human race and the problems of the human race that are caused by reverse Darwinism. The idea that as we become more technologically advanced, we as a people will begin to fail. And I think to some extent we do see some of that evidence present. But they took it to an extreme extent. Investigations later described Epstein as being physically present, treated as a known quantity, and given institutional accommodations that go well beyond a pat on the back and thanks for your support and look a lot more like integration into Harvard itself. With Jeffrey Epstein entrenched at peed and also at MIT, he had commanded respect in two of the most important institutions that were developing research in the area of AI and ultimately eugenics. MIT's media laboratory famously referred to Jeffrey Epstein as Voldemort or the one who should not be named. They avoided saying his name because they knew who he was. They knew what he was about, but they just couldn't stop taking his money for research. The logic's almost poetic in its cander. If a donor's name must not be spoken, everyone already knows where the money is. If the plan is anonymous and not publicized, the institution's admitting it's not proud of where it's getting its donations. Epstein had positioned himself globally as a connector and certainly inside of the United States as a connector in many different institutions, but he was ultimately the funer of artificial intelligence and this sort of research. Starting in 2002 in the Virgin Islands, moving forward to large donations, he kept very firm relationships at MIT and Harvard even after his convictions. But what's more troubling are some of the statements that Jeffrey Epstein would later make that reveal what he was really trying to develop with all of these donations. Now, before we get into that, I want to take a second. I would certainly appreciate it if you would consider subscribing and potentially becoming a member. I along with Legacy Podcasting put together this program for you and it takes a lot of resources and that subscribe means so much to me and your membership does as well. Now you might say, "Okay, Ron, what's the connection between Jeffrey Epstein, Facebook, and DARPA?" And that's where a gentleman named John Po Dexter comes into play. He's a former NASA director who led DARPA. He led the information awareness office. He was actually the founder of the information awareness program that I mentioned to you earlier. He founded the total information awareness initiative. That was the program designed to get information on nearly every single American citizen. And of course, when that went out of favor, he had to find a way to get Americans to willingly give up the information themselves. And according to Wired's reporting, Po Dexter met with Peter Teal and Palunteer co-founder Alex Karp in 2004 and told them that he had an interesting idea to apply data mining techniques from fraud detection to operations. Experts like Po Dexter were really trying to solve post 911 problems and that's where total information awareness came about. Of course, they had the benefit of a law passed by Congress at the time that George Bush was president and signed by President Bush allowing almost complete access to the public's information and instilling FISA courts. At that point in time, the government was at the most powerful. The CIA, DARPA would be able to get as much information as they possibly could. And with the aid of Facebook and fast forward over 20 years, CIA officials would tell you that the number one source of information on the American public are apps like Facebook, Spotify, and LinkedIn. Shortly after, we would learn that Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, would sponsor a dinner in PaloAlto, placing Epstein at the table with Musk, Zuckerberg, and Teal, all of which who would move forward and as a tool for the future. They realize that the information is great, but the financial system is still tied to governments and deleveraging the financial system from the government would allow this sort of technocrat explosion to occur and ultimately give them the power that they need. Now great, you've got Bitcoin spiraling forward. You've got all of the information that you want on Americans. You have them willingly giving over their information. and you no longer need the total information awareness program. You're moving a forward full steam ahead. But then a gentleman named Edward Snowden, who I once would have villainized, but now I might consider championing, came forward with information about a program called Prism. I've done episodes before on the startup of Prism and how that came from a software that was stolen by the government around the time that Bill Clinton was in office. had the ability to connect information on all Americans and also collect information overseas. Edward Snowden was a whistleblower and told us how the CIA and the NSA would have the ability to collect information on every single American through all the digital devices that they had. That's where your information from Facebook was going. Now, there's a law that prevents America from spying on its own citizens. But when they give that information up willingly, all you need is a back door. That's one of the reasons why it was so important for Peter Teal and John Po Dexter to start these sorts of operations. That's another reason why Donald Trump pushed so hard along with Joe Biden and a unanimous effort to try to reduce Tik Tok in the United States. You see, if your government has control of Facebook, if your government has control of Google and the Chinese don't have control of those, you're safe. But when a Chinese application starts to come into the United States and collect just as much information, that spells problems. In fact, I think what we did with Tik Tok is almost the greatest admission that your government is behind the information collection of Facebook and Google. And so, of course, Edward Snowden blows the whistle. We finally learn what Prism is, and some of the information that we can gain from that is absolutely alarming. But that still wasn't a signal that it was used domestically. and we wouldn't find that out until the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I'm going to talk a bit about Cambridge Analytica, but I think it's important that we get to it in another episode as well. So, make sure you hit like and subscribe on this one so that you can get notification of that. Also, in my last book, Truth and Persuasion, I wrote an entire chapter on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And while I'm going to give you some new information and new research, it would be important to get some background in that book, Truth and Persuasion. It's essentially how the digital environment has changed us drastically. If you got a copy of the book or if you read it, let me know in the comments, make sure you tag me in it, and I'd be happy to hear your thoughts about the book. The Cambridge Analytical Scandal, for those who don't know, started well before it hit the United States. You see, Facebook and Peter Teal connected a backdoor inside of Facebook software. That back door allowed certain other institutions and entities to get a hold of information. Cambridge Analytica paid Facebook a lot of money for a contract that allowed it to get not just the information on the individual user but also get information on their friends and data that might have been already located inside of their phone. That meant that when you logged into Facebook, Facebook was storing not just your data, not just your user data, but also data from the friends that you'd connected with, whether or not they'd opted in on those privacy settings. Facebook settled a very large lawsuit with its users and immediately tightened up after the scandal. But the problem is not just that Facebook leaked the information. It's why. You see, as you know, Peter Teal was early in on the founding of Facebook. And those back doors are very important, especially when they go to his friends. Now, most of you know that I'm a relatively conservative person, but I fight power wherever power is, especially if it gets corrupt. And I take issue with what happened here. So, I hope you're a bit patient with me. Peter Teal, a well-known conservative, but also somebody who believed that Brexit was a good thing, and also somebody who believed that Donald Trump should get in office in 2016. And while I will not say the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the result of Trump's presidency, what I will say is that it is the result of a database of information that very well can be used for bad. And it's very possible we may not have another free and fair election in our country's future. The founder of Cambridge Analytica was from a marketing firm and he teamed up with a very smart programmer. They decided that they would try to influence some elections overseas, which was a great way to make a lot of investors a ton of money. They tried it on a few countries, Singapore and others, with some mixed results. They were refining it before they brought it into the UK and also to the United States. When they had almost 50,000 data points on every single American, enough to know just about everything about you, they decided to spring it loose to the highest bidder. What does that lead to? And what's the impact of that? Well, when Facebook knows a lot about you, Cambridge Analytica knows a lot about you, they know that they can split you off into a silo. If I drive down the street and I see a billboard, I feel one way about it. Another person may feel another way about it. If it's a lawyer billboard, I probably want to punch it in the face, being a lawyer myself. But these aren't billboards. These are little personal signs that can be individually consumed, which means if you look for the fear signals that somebody normally reacts to. If you put a bunch of different types of advertisements in front of them until you finally get them to react, you will know exactly how they react to a certain stimulus. I talk about this in my book, Truth and Persuasion, but there's two types of thinking. System one and system two thinking. And the first type of thinking is the sort of quick reaction sort of thinking that we don't even really think about. The second type of thinking is the type of thinking that is very intentional and logical. We sit down and we chart things out. You probably don't remember your drive to work very well because you were engaged in system one thinking. But if you sit down to solve a problem at work, you very well may be engaged in system two thinking. When we react to these fear signals on the internet, the Cambridge Analytica signals that get put in front of us, they appeal to our system one thinking, which means we aren't as conscious of what we are doing and the choices we're making. I've often said when I'm looking at a jury of 12 as a lawyer standing up in front of them arguing in a case for the first time in history, these 12 people may have absolutely nothing in common with each other. They may be operating from very different algorithms. They may be basically speaking the same language. One person may be getting a whole bunch of Russian misinformation. Another person may very well be getting a lot of liberal misinformation and another person may be getting some fear signals that are just completely out of left field. It's one of the reasons why at Thanksgiving when you ask your uncle to pass the gravy, he might respond with something like, "If you believe that the Charlie Kirk shooter did it, no." And he throws it in your face. That's because these algorithms are crazy and they're designed to silo individuals and get them to react to their own different fear signals to get them entrenched into a belief. This is one of the reasons why on my program I spend so much time being fair and balanced and showing you all of the information. I want my viewers who appeal to system two thinking. I want you to logically sit down and be critical and analyze this. I love it when people question me in the comments or even offer a correction if I get something wrong. This is a community that builds the right way, not based on fear signals. You won't see that from me. So, if you want more of that, feel free to click subscribe. So, Cambridge Analytica has a database. It knows how to operate on fear signals. It knows how to get people's attention. And it starts using advertisements to start swaying the way people think, the way people vote, the way people interact with each other. Now, this information finally became available to us because of a whistleblower. But if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't know that Cambridge Analytica was silently influencing most people in America in a way that prevents us from having control of our elections in the future. You might question that, but the reality is a lot of us are powerless with strong appeals to system one thinking. That's not from me. That's from a researcher Daniel Conaman who's been very prominent in the field cited widely developed these types of thinking and he developed them directly from test cases in World War II. All right, so we've covered Cambridge Analytica, we've covered Facebook. Now, it's important that we wrap all of this together by discussing Epstein's worldview and the worldview of many of his supporters, including potentially Peter Teal himself. I think that we can sum this up the best way by discussing a breakfast gathering at Jeffrey Epstein's 50,000 square f foot mansion. He was surrounded by former heads of state executives from Google. He was in the presence of a former Israeli prime minister. When he was asked about Novak, about the Harvard research, he said something that was He informed this group of distinguished guests that Novak was doing research into cancer. But the way he explained it was very curious. He said, you know, when you want to find a suspected bad actor on the global stage, one of the things that you might want to do is collect all the information about them, the signals, the connections that they have with other people. He said that's the way that you would want to treat a cancer cell. And then one of the things that you want to do is you want to starve out that cell by destroying the connection. You see in conversations with many highups, Jeffrey Epstein had repeatedly referred to this sort of eugenics in very odd ways. In many conversations, even with Novak himself, he referred to our species similar to the way that he would refer to biological organisms. And he would say things like, you know, dead organisms need to be washed away. Those that aren't useful to the body or useful to the system or are cancerous need to be wiped away. When he would talk about cancer, he was routinely not actually talking about cancer, but he was talking about those things that are harmful and no longer serve a purpose. Now, there's a lot of other things that you could say about Epstein. Certainly, he wasn't a very good guy. But one of the things that you should be very suspicious of is that he was the founder and in fact the influencer who originally started deep research into artificial intelligence and this sort of mindset that he shared along with Novak along with Peter Teal the idea that democracy is dead that humans are heading in the wrong direction that there's going to be this rise of artificial intelligence technology that will likely take over starts to get him and other people somewhat concerned that the human race is not up for the challenge. And that's where dangerous thinking starts to come into play about tuning the human race in to something that might be sustainable, even if that isn't all of us. These were the same ideas that were shared by Nazis. These were some of the ideas that Adolf Hitler equated to Nichi's thinking that was essentially incorrect. It appeared that Jeffrey Epstein was really obsessed with the survival of the species. In fact, in an email between him and Glain Maxwell talking about another individual who I won't name, she said, "Wait, she's key. She has all of the DNA research. Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with freezing his sperm." And one of the things that he wanted to do was be able to recreate himself later. He was also obsessed with the way that organisms interact with each other through Novak's research and he was obsessed with the way that society interacts. He was working on some very deep projects along with very intelligent individuals. Individuals who all shared the same eugenicist mindset. Now that's a lot for one episode. And the next episode I'm going to get a little bit deeper into Peter Teal. I'm going to get into Edge, the secret group that is promoting all of this research, and I'm going to dig pretty deep into the mindset of some of these powerful people and why they think the way they think and why it is so incredibly dangerous. But one thing's for sure, your use of AI, your use of artificial intelligence, putting information into the machines that we've been putting information into was not designed to help us or save us or help us do our jobs. It was designed to give pieces of your freedom over so that it could be observed, manipulated, and fed back to you in a way that allows individuals like this to control. On the next episode of Offair Air, we're going to talk a little bit more about Peter Teal, the Greenland acquisition, a secret society that he's been involved in. We're going to talk about Edge and Jeffrey Epstein, and why these people in this inner circle think the way they do.
My name is Ron Chapman. Thank you so
