Christy

Hey, it's Christy from Lululemon and I'm here at the office checking out the Shake it out shorts. These have been my go tos and I kind of think of them as a middle ground between a true run short and a more playful, athletic, sporty short. They have all the performance you want for running, so a comfy liner, our lightweight swift fabric, even a pocket for your keys. But what I really like is the flowy fit and layered hem. It gives it a little bit of volume, a little bit of fun so they feel as good on a run as they do just at coffee afterwards. You can find the Shake it out shorts in store now or online@lululemon.com I

Jillian Michaels

get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or

Ad Voice

more headache days a month, each lasting

Botox Ad Voice

four hours or more Botox Onobotulinum toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for Those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

Ad Voice

Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more.

Ashley Reinsberg

A small cluster of editors on the platform worked to cast Trump as an authoritarian, which is a very extreme claim to make about an American president, even one you may really, really dislike. To call him an authoritarian in an encyclopedia. We're not expressing an opinion on X or an Instagram. These editors relied on Marxist sourcing, far left, hard left sources, sources that were working with Obama, former obama Officials in NGOs. They launder it through Wikipedia. So you, as the user of the site, don't really know where the information's coming from. You just get this blank statement who

Jillian Michaels

decides what you're allowed to believe? Well, every day millions of people trust the evening news, the corporate media and open source platforms like Wikipedia to tell them the truth. But behind the scenes, there is a quiet war that's being fought for control of your mind. And the bad guys are winning. What happens when the truth doesn't just get manipulated? It literally gets deleted? Well, today's guest has spent his career finding that out. Ashley Reinsberg is the investigative journalist exposing how narrative manipulation, digital censorship, and institutional bias are rewriting history in real time. From the hidden forces editing global knowledge platforms to the AI systems being poisoned downstream by corrupted information, Ashley pulls back the curtain on the trillion dollar information warfare industry. As always, if you're liking the show, please be sure to like and share and comment and subscribe because it helps us a ton with the algorithm. Here we go. Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels. Hey, Ashley, welcome to the show. How are you?

Ashley Reinsberg

I'm doing great, Gillian. How are you? Good to be here.

Jillian Michaels

I'm doing well. Thank you for coming on with me. I've watched several of your interviews with very close friends, including Dave Rubin, and been greatly disturbed. And it's absolutely imperative that we share your work with the world because we're all being brainwashed by digital media platforms. So I want to start with the, the most obvious, which is Wikipedia. I've personally dealt with nightmares caused by Wikipedia. And that's why when I started to watch your interviews, it was like light bulbs were going off. Let's just start at the very beginning. How did you even get into this? You're an investigative journalist. What made you decide to start investigating Wikipedia?

Ashley Reinsberg

It was really kind of a coincidence. I was working with someone, a really great researcher, a machine learning researcher named David Rosado, who did this. Very simple. The results were simple. It was a study about Wikipedia bias. The results showed that there's a clear bias towards the left. If you take American politicians, Supreme Court justices, even journalists that are mentioned on Wikipedia, they tend to be associated with more favorable language on the platform. On the right, you have got the opposite effect. They tend to be. People on the right tend to be associated with negative terms and negative sentiment on Wikipedia. I was like, okay, we all kind of know that you kind of like have a gut sense that that's the case. But why? That's what I wanted to understand. How did it get to that point? How does it work? And what does it mean for the bigger information ecosystem?

Jillian Michaels

Okay, let's, let's start first with some examples of what you're talking about. And again, you know, I could show mine, but that's just so nominal. I mean, we're talking about Trump, Elon Musk, Iran, Israel. I mean, this is literally impacting the way the globe thinks about things. Wikipedia is not just available in America. So can you give the audience some glaring examples of what you're talking about that they might be able to identify and recognize immediately?

Ashley Reinsberg

Yeah, I mean, there's so many. It's the entire platform, in a way. And just to your last point that you kind of touched on, it is the globe. It's the entire information ecosystem, it's what feeds Google results. And most important of all, it's what feeds AI disproportionately, more so than any other single Knowledge platform. The AIs that we are relying on today get their training from the training data from Wikipedia, and they get their reference data. When you ask a question, oftentimes it will pull the data straight from Wikipedia. So on Trump, for example, I did some reporting about how a small cluster of editors on the platform worked to cast Trump as an authoritarian, which is a very extreme claim to make about an American president, even one you may really, really dislike to call him an authoritarian in an encyclopedia. We're not expressing an opinion on X or on Instagram. These editors relied on Marxist sourcing, far left, hard left sources, sources that were working with Obama, former obama Officials in NGOs. They launder it through Wikipedia. So you as the user of the site, don't really know where the information's coming from. You just get this blank statement and then you go over to the Supreme Leader of Iran at the time at least, or Xi Jinping, whatever they call him, the paramount leader, the leader of China. And you don't see the term authoritarian. They call Trump an authoritarian, but not an actual authoritarian. This is just one example. In the Iranian stuff, we have systematic infiltration by Iranian media, state media, irgc. These guys are terror supporters, the biggest sponsor, state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Wikipedia relies on their data on their information to prove facts about what you, as a consumer in the United States are learning about the world. We see the same thing with China. We see the same thing. Even with Al Qaeda media being cited as sources on Wikipedia, it goes on and on and on. The more you dig, the more you find.

Jillian Michaels

This used to be like kind of a joke. Oh, your Wikipedia page a decade ago. And then I'll say this, I started to notice it taking a very bizarre turn when it came to my reputation. And my business partner and I would struggle to try to clean up the page and we would find it impossible. And it had been like completely commandeered. But the part where this is relevant and not just my personal sour grapes about this is at the time I was working with the Clinton foundation and literally working directly with the Clintons in the Clinton Global Initiative with their Health Matters program. And their people were like, oh yeah, no problem, we can lock the page. And they locked my page for a long time, by the way, so that nobody could mess with it. And I never thought anything of it until now. So let's then table that and go back to the beginning. How did this start? Was this intended to be a propaganda machine utilized by bad actors? How does this happen? How did we get here?

Ashley Reinsberg

Great question. And we're definitely gonna have to come back to the Clinton piece. Cause it's really, really significant. But to answer the question of how we got here and where it came from, Wikipedia started in the early 2000s. It was 2001. And it was. The idea was kind of to put an encyclopedia on the Internet, which is a very novel idea at the time. They did that initially by trying to do it in a very traditional manner. They had editors and review process. And they found out it was extremely slow and extremely expensive to do it that way. And then I believe it was Larry Sanger had the idea, was a co founder of Wikipedia, had the idea of using this concept of a wiki, which was a website that anybody could edit, and marrying it with the concept of a encyclopedia so that anybody could edit the encyclopedia. And it just, it took off. It was lightning in a bottle. And because of this incredible growth rate that they saw early days and that sustained itself for quite a long time, it really became this amazing media story. Like for the media, it was novelty, it was Internet back in the day. Today the media kind of has like an this kind of animus against tech, like kind of an anti tech attitude that pivoted after the first Trump election. But before then it was very. The media was largely pro tech and anything that was seen as a tech innovation was really celebrated. And they hyped it up and they made it out to be this great solution to the age old question of how do we know what we know? And it seemed like we had a solution. If you crowdsource the knowledge and you get a bunch of different perspectives, you can actually flatten out the bias and the noise and elevate the signal. Like in. On paper it's a pretty good idea and sort of it worked. I mean, already early, early days you had problems. There was a famous case with a journalist named John Seigenthaler, who was a very senior journalist in the American press. And Someone just decided to, to take to his Wikipedia page in the early 2000s and lie and say he was involved in the assassination of Bobby and John F. Kennedy and he happened to actually be a close friend of Bobby Kennedy. So this was a slander that hurt him personally. And he was one of the first to really raise the red flag to say something is wrong with this because he couldn't get the page changed. He was as important and distinguished and influential figure in American society as you could possibly be, and he had no recourse. And that's what really outraged him. So over the years, the story built and built and built and we had this really great myth about Wikipedia. Somewhere along the lines, 2015, 2016, we started to understand that the Internet is not just fun and games anymore. And knowledge platforms like Wikipedia were susceptible to all kinds of manipulation, to hijacking, to ideological manipulation, to state backed or state linked operations. And this only increased as Wikipedia positioned itself as what it described as part of global knowledge infrastructure. That's something that happened around 2016. A very deliberate pivot. That is where we have the Clinton element in the story.

Jillian Michaels

I see. Okay, now to me, when you say, oh, we're just going to let people take care of this, I would never think that that would, you know, elevate the proper sign and extrapolate the most honest answer. Maybe because I've been a public figure. But that to me is a recipe for disaster from Go. Because you're going to get the most bias. Hateful. It's like a Yelp review. Nobody who likes you is gonna take the time to go on there and say, this restaurant was superb. I mean, just to get a good review for a product that you might sell, you have to send like 15 emails asking for a good review. You gotta incentivize with a discount code. It is a nightmare. But man, if somebody upsets, you are the first one on that fricking Yelp review giving a zero star review. So off the top I would have thought, all right, this is ridiculous, this is such a bad idea. And you're gonna get a very biased result. But somehow this became the top result on a Google search. How does that happen?

Ashley Reinsberg

How?

Jillian Michaels

That's worth billions of dollars in search engine optimization. And for anybody listening who doesn't know what that means, you have to spend a hell lot of money to come up anywhere within the first several pages of a Google search. When even when someone searches my name, I have to spend a Fortune to get jillianmichaels.com to come up. But my Wikipedia page man is front and center. How is that happening?

Ashley Reinsberg

That that is sort of the crux of the matter, which is the this relationship between Google and Wikipedia. And that's why Wikipedia actually matters. If Wikipedia didn't appear as a result in the first spot on basically every topic search you can imagine on Google, if you, if you Google a specific kind of bird or a French pastry, or a mathematical equation or a person like Jillian Michaels, you will get the Wikipedia result is the number one spot. What that means for Wikipedia is traffic. And traffic means money because they rely on donations. So those hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in SEO value translate directly into influence, power, visibility and revenue for Wikipedia. Going back, if we think about 10, 15 years ago, not just about Wikipedia, but about Google in those early days, we're kind of accustomed to thinking about Google as this giant, right, $3 trillion giant, unlimited money. But they weren't always that. They were startup in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, they didn't have money to pay for great content. And great content is really what they needed more than anything else. They needed their users to come and search google.com and when they did, the user wouldn't get as the first result something that looked really tacky or advertising all over the show or super partisan, something that looked hyper, hyper reliable. And like it or not, Wikipedia does look reliable. It looks verified. It seems like it's kind of trustworthy. Whether or not it is separate story. But for Google, what it meant is they got all that free content and for Wikipedia they got all that free traffic. So this was kind of a symbiosis. The two existed by virtue of each other. Wikipedia was extremely important for Google and Google was extremely important for Wikipedia.

Jillian Michaels

Okay, but it's still going. Do they have any legitimate relationship on paper at this point or it's just like, yeah, we've been doing this forever, why stop?

Ashley Reinsberg

Almost certainly this is a, a formalized, managed relationship. We don't have access or insight. I've tried to figure out who specifically, like, what is the name of the person inside of Google whose job it is to manage this relationship? How does that contract work? We actually have no idea. Which is a little bit ironic for Wikipedia because they're kind of built on the principle of transparency. But in terms of this incredibly important piece of the Wikipedia puzzle, we know nothing about it. We don't know how it works, we don't know the revenue model between the two of them. What we do know is we, in 2016, Wikipedia underwent this massive transformation. They shifted their Entire mission, which previously was build an encyclopedia on the Internet for everybody, to becoming a social justice movement based in dei. And this was something led by Catherine Maher, who was the CEO at the time. She's now CEO of npr. And as part of this process, they established an endowment. Yeah, she was a, she's an important figure in the sort of the NGO space. A George Soros acolyte disciple for her entire career, ascended to the top of Wikipedia in 2016. That same year, 2016, they established an endowment at Wikipedia to raise $100 million is a lot of money in six years. And they put this endowment, for some reason, which I still don't quite understand, inside of the Tides foundation, which is a far left foundation, a billion dollar foundation. It's funding the most extreme activism on the left that you can imagine. They put this inside of Tides and they raised that money not in six years, but in three years. And the biggest donor to one of the biggest donors to Tides foundation in those three years was Google, which donated $200 million over the course of three years. You know, we don't have direct evidence that that money went directly to Wikipedia from Google, but if you do the two plus two equals four kind of math, it adds up.

Jillian Michaels

Obviously, I want you guys to exercise, but fitting a workout into a busy schedule just got easier. Enter the LifePro Waver vibration plate. So now you can use it to enhance the intensity of your current workout regimen. Or if you're a total newbie who can't find the time or who's intimidated by fitness, 10 minutes on a vibration plate can make a pretty big difference. Simply standing on it or sitting on it helps support muscle activation, blood flow, lymphatic flow and drainage and can help to ease muscle stiffness. Now, having said that, of course I do my squats and my lunges and my push ups on it to add that little extra intensity that I just mentioned and give my workouts an edge. But no matter who you are or what your level of fitness, there's a limited time offer for our listeners where you can get $20 off the waiver vibration plate, plus free shipping with code Jillian at LifeProfitness. That's LifeProfitness.com and use the code Jillian for $20 off. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Please support my show and let them know that I sent ya. You know, so Tides is under the Arabella Network and Arabella again for, you know, again, I don't say this to you, Ashley, like you don't know. But just for anybody that's watching that doesn't know is the largest dark money funding organization in the world. And they have companies, these companies under it, like tides or the 1630 fund, and then they have all these different little shell companies and it makes it look like these, you know, it provides anonymity, hence the concept of dark money, because it flows through and it gets laundered and you don't know who's giving what to who. And a perfect example of something that Arabella does that's unrelated to this, there was a group called the Committee to Protect, and they had started this letter that had thousands of Dr. Signatures saying that RFK was a to civilization essentially. And I had to go talk about it on the news. So I had to investigate this letter. And it turns out anybody could sign this letter. Committee to Protect was a total shell organization and they fell under the 1630 Fund and Tides, which was all under the Arabella network. And that is the first time I learned about Arabella and Tides, but I did not know that they were connected to Wiki, which is really scary. So now having said that, do you think that somebody like Soros looked at this tool and said, wow, what an awesome vehicle to spread my tremendous ideas around the globe. And he was just the first one in. Like, why is it just the radical left that has managed to co opt this platform where, where, why is the right not fighting back? Why don't they have their own group of editors that are going in and playing the same game? It's just, it's a completely asymmetrical platform now. That's all far left. Why?

Ashley Reinsberg

Well, so we know for sure Soros was looking at it because the endowment that I just mentioned for $100 million, he's personally gave $2 million. Not from his foundation, from his own money. This was a really big deal for Wikimedia foundation, the NGO that owns and operates Wikipedia. They did a press release, they did a news announcement. Catherine Maher, the CEO at the time, now the NPR CEO, she had this like gushing statement about, she referred to him by his first names and George and the concept of openness, which is the, the heart of sources political philosophy, was all over the Wikipedia's revamped mission powered by this endowment. And that's where the Clintons came in. Back where I mentioned the Clinton and what you said about the Clintons being able to intercede is extremely interesting. I did not know that. I had never heard them doing that directly. But it doesn't surprise me because when they underwent that transformation 2016, it was pulled off by two Clinton operatives. The first was Craig Minassian, who at the time was the CMO of Clinton Global Initiative. And at the same time as the being CMO of Clinton Global Initiative, he was the PR agency for Wikimedia Foundation. He had two jobs. He recommended a revamp centered around the concept of openness. Again, this is the George Soros political philosophy, the major term in the open society that he believes in. And then they handed over the implementation the strategy around this new revamped model of Wikipedia, which they called the movement strategy, to a woman named Whitney Williams, who was Hillary Clinton. Clinton's one of her top aides when. When Hillary Clinton was First lady in the White House. So we have two of these very important Clinton world figures pulling off this transformation in 2016, 2017. Why? Because Trump had just been elected. And the election of Trump was for these people. It wasn't a signal that the country was sick of the direction it had gone in previous. It was a signal that we had all been infiltrated by Russia by misinformation, disinformation. This like what Hillary Clint and declared in front of Congress to be a fake news epidemic. That's what she said right before the Obama administration brought in a bunch of new legislation about misinformation, disinformation. So to answer your question, how does the left get such a stranglehold or capture of this particular institution? A lot of it is because, yeah, they were paying attention and the right was not paying attention at all. They have different interests, I think, as communities. Wikipedia is extremely academic. It really is sort of located within the broader academia ecosystem. So going back to what I said about Trump and authoritarianism, they're really drawing in a lot of these academic journals. They're very obscure, and maybe they only have 20, 30, 40 subscribers or readers in a given edition, but for Wikipedia, it's a great way for them to bring in these ideas to the mainstream. So academia and paying attention to these things and really understanding the power of information, the power of knowledge, long before the rest of us did, I think gave them that natural edge.

Jillian Michaels

I find that the right is just. They must have been out to lunch for decades, Ashley, because it's not just Wikipedia, it's almost all of the liberal media. All of the media which happens to be liberal. And then I heard you talking on another interview about the fact that even if you try to source a source of journalism that isn't to the left, it gets blocked. Like the Daily Mail. Can you elaborate on this? Because now they've effectively locked out sources that are not leftist.

Ashley Reinsberg

Yeah, correct. That's exactly how it works. So Wikipedia has this list called Reliable Sources, the Reliable Sources to list, and that powers the entire site. Anything having to do with culture or politics or society. You need what they call what they deem a reliable source to make a given claim about a topic. So the list has mainstream media, and virtually every single mainstream media news outlet, I would say actually every single one, is considered to be reliable. So they color code it green, and then they have color coded red for unreliable. And then they even go farther than that, which is deprecated, so you can't even mention the source on the site. So when you look at the New York Times or cnn, cbs, ABC and NBC, even stuff that's quite on the left of the spectrum, like Mother Jones and stuff like that, you will see that they're all green, all of them. Then you go over to the right and you start to look at Breitbart, which is deprecated. It's black or gray. Daily Mail, which is considered a bit right of center, deprecated. You look at sites like Fox News, which is red for unreliable. So it's a pretty clear skew to the left. And this is really what, what, what matters on the site when editors are using these sources. And again, we have in the same time period, in the same context, the community never voted on this list. There was no ratification. There was no consensus. It was one guy. It was extremely, extremely partisan editor on Wikipedia named Mr. X and Mr. X. Right around the same time period where Wikipedia is implementing their. Their movement strategy, kind of swinging it towards dei, makes the list. He puts two outlets on it. New York Times, green, Daily Mail, red. And that was the basis for the entire list. He then disappears. He then completely vanishes into the. Into the ether. We have no idea who this was, who did this, when, why they did this, but they did it and it worked. And that's how runs today.

Jillian Michaels

Why can't it be undone? How come you have no recourse? Like, there has been stuff on my Wikipedia page. Jillian Michaels is a white nationalist. I mean, I'm just based off of what. Because some guy said that on Piers Morgan. And it's like, look, this guy said this on Piers, who by the way, happens to write for the New York Times. And all of a sudden they're like, aha. Called a white nationalist. She's a white nationalist. It is, it is just like, like that. Done.

Christy

Poof.

Jillian Michaels

Little Wave of the Wikipedia wand and you're a white nationalist, and then it gets laundered, as you said, through all the large language models and into the mainstream legacy media. And once that happens, you're. You're screwed. Why can nobody fix this? Or is it just that they don't want to and there's no recourse? You can't sue anybody. I've never even seen anything like that. How did they manage to build this fortress where they're impenetrable to lawsu? Because it's like, oh, we didn't put that up there. Some Mr. X did and Mr. X is gone. Like, what is the law that gives them this kind of protection?

Ashley Reinsberg

Fortress is a great word. It really is that way. We go all the way back to the case of John Siegenthaler, who was falsely accused of killing Bobby Kennedy, his friend, right up until today, where we have people in a situation just like yours and people who talk to me about this kind of thing almost every single day, who are desperate because what they see on their, their Wikipedia biography is flatly untrue or defamatory. The reason it's like this is exactly what you identified. It's anonymity, right? The accounts are anonymous. And then Wikipedia itself as a platform is protected by a law called section 230, which you may have heard of, maybe people out there have not, but it's a, it was an amendment to, or was a section to a telecommunications law, the 1990s. And you cannot sue, you cannot hold any Internet based service or sir or platform accountable for anything that is on that platform that they themselves didn't post. So if a third party posts something on the platform, no matter how bad it is, and this extends even to stuff that is pretty close to supporting, providing material support for terrorism, even that in most cases will not trigger an ability for them to be held accountable. So Wikipedia has this gigantic legal blanket covering it from any kind of accountability in America overseas. That's not the case. So there was a case, I think it was last summer in Portugal, where a Portuguese businessman who lives in New Jersey decided to sue Wikimedia foundation for defamation. And he won. He won. It went all the way to the Supreme Court of Portugal, which determined that he indeed had been defamed and that Wikimedia foundation was held accountable for that. But it's very rare and it's very expensive. And if you're not that, if you don't have those kinds of resources and that kind of determination, you're going to have no Chance.

Jillian Michaels

That's fascinating. I've come up against 2:30 before. It's the same thing with, like, fake AI generated versions of me selling fake products that people think I'm actually hawking. And I can't get the fricking AI down. And I can't go after the platform because of section 230. I did not realize that they fell under 230. Now that makes perfect sense. Ashley, who are these people that are editing this stuff? How do you get the clout to do so? I've trusted to fix my own page. And you. You can't. It locks out your ip. I and I provide the evidence. Like, there was one thing about, oh, Jillian Michaels got sued for something, and all the lawsuits were dismissed because they were frivolous. We submitted that through Wikipedia, and they were like, oh, this person has an affiliation with the account. It's like, yes, because I have the information that's actually true. And they blocked my IP and denied. Denied the evidence. So who actually is able to do this? Because a lot of us are locked out from being able to make changes. You have to, like, build cloud. Oh, hold on. And then if you get blackmailed, so it's like, oh, do you want to fix your page? You've got to pay, like, wiki five blocks or whatever the hell that is. Some group that will charge you, like, extortion money to police your page. What in the hell is that? So who has the power to make these changes? And who is this group that claims that they can police it?

Ashley Reinsberg

The people who actually have power to make changes are whoever the anonymous account is that's decided that they're gonna make their life mission to patrol Gillian's page, and they're gonna spend hours a week or maybe hours a day doing this, because that's what they do with these people. Some of them are on the eight or ten hours a day. They are on weekends. And they know the rules, they know the systems. They know how to manipulate them, maneuver. They have these just very esoteric skill sets. They have allies. They, in some cases, are communicating off of the site, which is not allowed, but there's no way to track or to prove it, so it doesn't really matter. So they're building little alliances and blocks and voting blocks, and they're just. They will just outlast you, outgun you, outsmart you. Because this is kind of like their. It's more than a hobby. It's like, some cases a passion, some cases an actual job. And to your other point, there is an enormous Cottage industry. Enormous. Of these agencies, editors, paid editors, paid administrators on the site that I personally have cataloged at least, least 200 agencies that I can track. There's way more than that. There's multiples of that operating. This is probably at this point a billion dollar industry of paying people to edit your account. And these might be the same people that are defaming you on the, on the platform. You've got no idea. Right? They could be using a separate, a separate identity on the platform to write the negative stuff and then you get paid, you pay them to, to fix what they've written negatively about you. Who knows? We don't know anything. What we do know know is that Wikimedia foundation takes no meaningful action on any of this stuff. They, they know about it. I know they know because I write about it and I go to them for comment and they don't respond to me. But they know about it. They know about all these problems. Every single issue that I've mentioned today and a lot of the other ones that I haven't mentioned yet like State, State linked or what appears to be editing on behalf of or in alignment with foreign terror organizations, they know about these things. They just choose not to act on it because the moment they do, they make themselves responsible. And that's what they don't want to be. They don't want to be responsible for anything that happens on that site.

Ad Voice

When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha chings from every channel right in one spot. And turn real time reporting into big time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today

7-Eleven Ad Voice

when you're seven eleven's hottest fire chicken sandwich. People think you're intense.

Jillian Michaels

Well yeah, I'm hot.

7-Eleven Ad Voice

So yeah, intense. I want to see if you can handle the heat. Then try me with pickles or spicy mayo and jalapenos. Oh, and it's all just 4.99. That's a deal. Almost as hot as I am.

Ashley Reinsberg

Almost.

7-Eleven Ad Voice

Sweets? No spicy. See for yourself. $4.99 and only at 7:11. Ballot through 8. 2546 participating stores only while supplies last visit store for full terms.

Jillian Michaels

Let's talk about these state actors. Let's get into that. And does that tie back to this group that I put in my notes called the gang of 40? I've heard you Talk about this, is that related to foreign actors, state actors, or something similar?

Ashley Reinsberg

Separate Gang of 40 are a group of about three dozen plus editors whose mission in life is to give a negative, a highly negative impression of, of anything to do with Israel and a very positive impression of anything to do with Palestine, including Hamas. So they have completely revamped the entire what on Wikipedia it's called Palestine Israel articles. Pia. They have edited over 10,000 articles among themselves. That's over a million edits that they've made in just a few years. So anything you can think of, so you know, as broad as the Zionism page down to the page having to on Jaffa oranges or pages on ancient texts, the smallest, most trivial detail is not too small for them to take on as part of their mission of flipping the entire narrative of on its head, which they have done very successfully. And a lot of the times this is very, very clearly pro Hamas, pro Hezbollah. These are foreign terror organizations. They're Islamist groups that are, that are designated as terror groups by the United States and by many countries around the world, including Europe. So in some cases they will go through pages, dozens of pages, and delete, erase any mention of a Hamas terror attack or Hezbollah terror attack, or they will remove wholesale mention of Hamas's 1988 genocidal charter, which called for the of all Jews. They're just erase it off the platform because they don't want it to be seen, so they delete it. And all the same issues that you face personally with that thousands of other people, people's people face in this regard, it's the same story. You can't get it changed. There's no recourse, there's no accountability, there's no sense of fairness. There's no, there's no sense of objectivity and there's no justice. And that's how the platform works. We see the same thing with regard to China. We see a lot of Chinese editing. And these are editors who they don't make you guess. They will tell you straight up on their user page. This editor editor is a supporter of the ccp. This editor lives and works in China. And they're making these edits about China. And that's incredibly significant because you're as a Chinese person in China, it is illegal for you to access Wikipedia without the approval of the Chinese government. So if you're doing this, you're doing it with the approval of the government. And if you're saying I support the CCP and you're editing all this stuff about the United States about national security issues, about American political figures and Congress people, and about the United States President, about our military. This is just happening across the board. And it's just like you said before, it fly. It's just flying under the radar because nobody's paying attention to it. Because it's just Wikipedia. Right? But what we are not taking into account that it's not just Wikipedia, it's AI, it's Google. It's our entire knowledge infrastructure.

Jillian Michaels

Running a business means that you're always reachable until you're not. And we all know the exact second that you miss the call or the text or a follow up and you know that your competitor is waiting right there to jump in the minute you're unavailable. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. This is the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. All your calls, all your texts, your voicemails in one single place. And that means that anyone on your team can jump into a conversation, see the full history and respond immediately. And you can set it up in minutes on any device. You can keep your existing number and just add teammates as your you grow. No it, no hassle. Plus they've got a built in AI agent that handles your after hour calls, answers questions and even books appointments. So when your team is offline, you're still capturing the leads. And it also integrates seamlessly with the tools you're using, like HubSpot, Zapier, Claude. It saves you time and it keeps you from constantly chasing information between different systems. Money is on the line here guys. So say hello to Quo and you can try quo free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com Jillian. That's Q-U-O.com Jillian. You know what's crazy? Sometimes like Fletcher, who's my producer and I, we were putting together a segment the other day on. This is going to seem totally unrelated, but just hear me out here for a second. We were putting together a segment on gender affirming care for kids. And because I've read large portions of the cast review, which is like the most important work on the topic, that had like seven systemic reviews of all the different studies across the globe. This has aggregated the data, right? And I was simply trying to find an image or a headline to cover this one cut in the episode where we're talking about bone density issues that are created for kids who are on puberty blocker. I've read the studies. I could not find one headline to make the cut. Not one headline. I'm like, side effect, gender affirming care, puberty blockers, bone density issues. And it kept giving me, like, all of the antithetical. Oh, you know, this is not a. We don't think this is a problem. We don't really know. I could not get. Even though I know these studies exist, I had to go. We had to go into the cast review and, like, pull out a section of the actual meta analyses. And it's becoming more and more difficult for me, by the way, to find the information. So I'll give you one more example on Arabella Advisors. I have a book coming out about Big Ag, big Food, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and the ways in which the system is kind of rigged against the average American. And my editor writes me back, and he's like, I can't find anything on these different shell companies that you've listed here that shows the ways in which they're acting nefariously or they're actually harming the everyday American. I cannot. Ashley. I spent three days digging through, like, having to find judges that they had backed that were then lobbied by groups that they supported to then push through decisions that favored protecting Big Pharma. It was a nightmare. Like, they have impossible to get to this information, and instead I can find the exact opposite on Wikipedia and in all the top pages of the Google search. So when you go to try to tell people this information, they look at you like you have three heads, like you're wrapped in tinfoil and you've crawled all the way down the rabbit hole, because this is what they see, and it's actually terrifying. So what do we do? Because the truth of the matter is, I'm sure that this actual podcast will get choked, so have to chop it into pieces and put it up in little clips on different platforms. But I already know, because of the things we're talking about, it will get inherently suppressed. What do we do? How do we educate each other? How do we protect ourselves against this? Because they're just. They're rewriting reality with this.

Ashley Reinsberg

We have to just keep raising the. The. The issue as a critical issue, as something that is important to everybody. This is not it. This is information. We all rely on information. It doesn't matter if we are parents, educators, lawmakers, policymakers, professionals, whatever you are. You're depending on information to make decisions. And this information is being tampered with by a whole array of different kinds of groups and actors, and we are not tracking it. We don't know who they are. We don't know where they come from. We're just allowing it to happen every single day. So we are seeing some progress. There is a congressional investigation right now into foreign influence on Wikipedia and the House Oversight Committee, there's another investigation in the Senate at Commerce into the same topic. There is a lot of pressure coming from, from bottom up, coming from people online who are seeing the same issues, whether it's. I just did a big piece this week about an attack against Hindu groups by leftists and Islamists who have allied together to attack this one Hindu group, Hindu American foundation, whether it's Israel, whether it's gender issues, which is a huge. As you correctly point out, the bias regarding gender issues on Wikipedia is absolutely, absolutely pronounced the same thing with COVID It's. I, I had. I had a similar experience. Yeah, it. It 100 is. I mean, I, I did a lot, and I don't want to say the COVID word for the same reason. It'll. It'll get flagged and choked. But the reality is I reported extensively on Covid origin, where the virus came from, and it's clear that it very well could have come from the lab in Wuhan that was making those kinds of viruses. When you read the Wikipedia article about this topic, you will see the word conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory, again and again and again and again, because this is the narrative, and the narrative cannot be violated. So we have to just work harder to raise awareness about this. And we also need to think about solutions. We need to think about, okay, we have this moment in history where everything is shifting from search on Google to query and questioning on AI. What is a better way to do this? How can we create better, more reliable information that's not going to have this kind of suppressive effect from the government that we saw under Biden? And it's also not going to have the kind of infiltration and hijacking that we're seeing on Wikipedia. We have to find some way to navigate those waters.

Jillian Michaels

You know, what's crazy is I'm now getting opinions from AI. So, for example, I was working on a podcast about the California primary election. And of course, you know, you've got the fact that they are. There are groups that are being paid to go and register homeless people to vote in California. And if they don't have a Social Security number, if they don't have a driver's license number, it's no problem. The DMV is going to assign you a tracking number that doesn't go back to any federal database. And the AI, as I'm researching this actually gives me an opinion on why this is justified. And I had to tell it. I'm like, listen, I don't need your opinion on the facts. I just need the facts. And I'm like, I don't need you to justify why these things are the way that they are. But thank you. Just give me the facts. Like, when did this start? How long has this been going on? Who passed these laws? But Ashley, what is that? When the AI is now starting to tell me what I should be thinking about the facts?

Ashley Reinsberg

That is part of the training data. So when it's ingesting what it considers to be good sources like Wikipedia, New York Times, a lot of NGOs, the UN, they speak a certain way about these topics. And the AI actually learns from the sources. It, it gets a worldview, essentially. And then on top of that, you have another, you've got like a, a trust and safety layer, like I said, so that it's not giving you answers that, that its creators consider to be inadmissible or invalid. And part of that will be like, we can't, they will actually program the, the, the AI to say we cannot speak in a certain way about a certain topic. This is how we have to talk about the topic, and we can't speak otherwise about this topic. So there is a, I think a good argument for a certain level of both of these things. Like the AI has to learn from something. It's, again, it's a question of what do we consider to be a high quality source? Why is the New York Times just automatically a high quality source? Why is Wikipedia automatically a high quality source? It partly comes back to the fact that for Wikipedia, it's free, it's free data. They don't, you know, the New York Times is suing OpenAI because they, OpenAI used their, their reporting for similar purposes. Wikipedia is free data. And that's what gives it such amazing influence. It's really rich. It's quote, unquote, verified, even though it's actually not verified. It's well structured for the machine to learn on. And that's what makes it so available for these companies to use it. The downside is that we're learning from a source that has been in some cases deliberately contaminated by, by what we would call misinformation, disinformation, what I call propaganda.

Jillian Michaels

Can you talk to me about some of these secondary sources? Because they'll make stuff up like, oh, Jillian Michaels is a Racist, even though, go ahead, show me where I said that other races are inferior to my race. Oh, but she had a conversation here at the, like how what are these secondary sources? And then they'll like, they'll generate a blog or something and then point to the blog they wrote and say, oh, this is a source. This blog here says that Jillian Michaels is a racist or Trump is a fascist. Like what is that?

Ashley Reinsberg

That is exactly that kind of information laundering. Like, exactly. With Trump, it doesn't matter how obscure how far left the Marxist journal is. It's a journal, it's academic, therefore it's a source. A friend of mine who you probably know, his name is Andy Ngo, he was the most important reporter on Antifa. He had the same effect and he fought this for years. So what happened was some blogger in Portland on the far left wrote a blog post about him saying that he's white nationalist or whatever. These names even white. He's Vietnamese.

Jillian Michaels

Yeah, no,

Ashley Reinsberg

saying all these things about him, saying that he's like aligned with the proud boys and he's not a journalist, etc. Etc. Etc. Some other than slightly less insane Portland newspaper picks it up, reprints it, then that's good enough for Wikipedia, which imports it into the article. And by the way, the, when it comes to doing this kind of things, Wikipedia editors are very, very, they take a very generous view of what can actually be a source. When this, when it suits them. When it doesn't suit them, it doesn't matter how good the source is, they won't admit it. So it's an agenda, it's a bias driven activity and they're just able to manipulate the rules and just like a corrupt parliament, you know, you have a dictator who runs a parliament. Sure, the parliament exists. Exists, theoretically. Does it actually do anything? No, it's just for him to manipulate. It's very much the same kind of process.

Jillian Michaels

Why the Jews? And now you're telling me, oh, the Hindu people got attacked. Like, who are they deciding, these ethnic groups that they're going to go after? Because we all know it doesn't stop with the Jews. It always starts with the Jews and then it expands from there. But now you said the Hindus, that's, that's the first I've heard of that one. Is there like an agenda? Is there like, is there a way to say, oh, this is the group that's doing this, it's funded by, let's say Qatar, for example, and these are the enemies of the Qatari nation. So like, like who decides this? That who gets targeted? Just it's all far left Marxist period. But Hindus don't fall under into that bullseye. So that throws me off, off a bit.

Ashley Reinsberg

So the, the Hindu question is it's very geopolitical because in the last, whatever it's been 10 to 15 years, India has gone, gone through this real reorientation. So the Indian government and the elite have really, for a long time they were socialist. You know, there was kind of the Gandhi type socialism. And that changed under the current Prime Minister Modi. And India became much more nationalist under Modi and much more, more about Indian sovereignty and less about universal values and principles and that kind of thing. So there's a group of people who are seen to be more aligned with that attitude towards India, meaning they're much more, they're stronger about Hindu heritage, Hindu nationalism as, as a anchor for the country. And that's something that the left, the people on the left. So that could be white people on the left, Jewish people on the left, as well as Muslims who are aligned with those groups on the left that really reject that and are fighting hard against that. They're aligned with Pakistan, they're aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, and they target the Hindus for the same exact reason that these groups target those kinds of Jews. The Israel supporting Jews. They're okay with the Jews on the left because the Jews on the left reject these ideas of nationhood and sovereignty and this kind of thing.

Jillian Michaels

Okay, I get it. So it's a, it's a, it's a much bigger net that they're casting and it has to do more with a globalist Marxist worldview versus a nationalist sovereign worldview. And whoever falls onto that side of the line. I see, okay, I've stopped believing almost anything anymore. And I just wait it out. I see you know, what comes of it. But I'll give you an example. And I'm worried that it's making me stupid because I don't know what to trust.

Ashley Reinsberg

So.

Jillian Michaels

Oh, there are thousands of civilians in Iran. And I'm like eh, I'll see. Which I'm like Jillian, like this would be obviously very upsetting if it was the case if the US and Israel were just intentionally wiping out thousands of people.

Christy

People.

Jillian Michaels

But the sources are questionable and there's no way to verify how many people are being if they're IRGC or if they're actually civilians. And I just don't, it's like well, the, the UN and the human Rights Watch Group. I'm like, I don't, I just don't I just don't know anymore. And I, I'm starting to worry that this is making me dumb. Is it like, all right, Jill, you've gone too far. This is a credible source. You should believe it. I don't believe anything anymore until I see it with my own eyes. It's like the US launched a Tomahawk and it killed all these girls at a school. Now it does seem at this point we did do that by accident, of course, but I waited all the way till the very end until somebody was like, it says Tomahawk on the missile and there are images of it. Is there anything you think that we could sort of credibly lean into and believe? Because this is, this is almost worse. I'm becoming almost black pilled and untethered and, and that's, that's not good either.

Ashley Reinsberg

I think it's a matter of being very narrow in the things you are, are wanting to know about and wanting to decide about. We, we're facing just this gush of information and decisions that you have to come down one side or the other side on a conflict that really happens has nothing to do with you and won't affect you. Some cases they do. Like the Iran war is going to affect us because of the prices of everything. It's, it, it makes, it's made things more expensive. We have to decide most of the time we don't have to know, we don't have to decide. And what we can do instead is do what you have done on the gender affirming care question, which is go deep on a. Go deep on a topic you really care about. Choose to two topics, three topics that really matter to you. Your beliefs, your life. Go deep. Do all the research that you can do on your own, make your own decisions. Everything else, just don't worry about it because it doesn't actually matter to your life and there's no way you're going to be able to pull it apart. The propaganda networks are so deep in all of our information platforms that you, you are not capable as a, as a person with a family and a job, job and a life. I was spending five hours a day or eight hours a day like I do, trying to figure out what's what. And I, I can only do that on one or two topics. We just cannot do it. So I think choose carefully. Go 2 inches wide, but 2 miles

Jillian Michaels

deep comfort is one of those things you don't fully appreciate until you find pieces you actually want to wear every day. And that's why skin skims has become such a long standing go to for me. Their cotton collection is soft, it's lightweight, and it's comfortable without sacrificing fit. It's easy to reach for whether you're relaxing at home or you're heading out for a day on the town. And one standout is their cotton rib tank. It's the kind of basic that works with anything for every occasion, and the fit holds up throughout the day. It's soft, it has just the right amount of strength stretch, so it stays comfortable without losing its shape. I've worn it to the gym, I worn it under a blazer, and it's easy to see where these cotton essentials become everyday favorites. So for anybody who's looking to elevate their everyday essentials, Skims Cotton delivers on both comfort and fit. So shop Skims Cotton and all my favorite pieces@skims.com and after you place your order, be sure to let them know that I sent you sled podcast in the dropdown survey and then select my show in the menu that follows. So is it also sort of safe to say, listen, take the information with a grain of salt, but, but just, you know, hold it in your mind somewhere, but don't solidify an opinion on it unless you do that two mile deep to just. Is that what you're saying? Like you can hold it, you can think about it, but really don't act upon it until you've done that two mile deep dive.

Ashley Reinsberg

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I, I think it's, I think we're able to say, okay, this is, this is interesting. There's something here. I don't know what it is. And that's okay to have that. It's actually really good. It's a kind of a modesty and a discipline to be able to just reserve that little piece to say, maybe one day I'll know more. Maybe one day I'll have enough to make a decision on. I think there are cases where we are able to sort of make something more like a moral principle or first principle type decision where someone who's coming from a religious background can look at some issues and say, that's not for me. And I don't, whatever the information is, I still have a moral core and I'm going to make my decisions on, based on those principles. But for the rest of it, I would say in general, it's not our job to make every single decision that the media puts in front of us or social media puts in front of us a million times a day because they Monetize that way. That's not good for us, that's good for them, and we can just stop doing that.

Jillian Michaels

Right? Right. Ashley, is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?

Ashley Reinsberg

I think we covered a lot, if not all of it. I mean, we could always go deeper on this topic and longer because there's so much of it. But generally speaking, I think what people should be aware of is so much of what we're seeing online today way is just not real. It's product of somebody's operation or somebody's campaign or somebody's effort to convince us, people like us, of something that we don't understand. We don't understand why they're doing it. There's so much calculator that goes into these things. There's so much money in these things that just to put that kind of lens on it that you're looking through glasses that tell you this isn't quite real. And a lot of it is flat out fake. Yeah.

Christy

And.

Jillian Michaels

And last but not least, would you say that it is safe to say Wikipedia is just one arm of this octopus? Whether it's NPR or the New York Times, whether it's podcastistan, whether it's academia at your Ivy League. I'm seeing the exact same. Same narratives.

Mike Baker

Yeah.

Christy

And.

Jillian Michaels

And okay, okay. I just kind of wanted to establish that because it's like the same. Oh, Hamas? No, the. The charter to kill the Jews. What are you talking about? That's what I don't, I don't recall that. That's a Zionist narrative. And it just. I see it everywhere. I see it coming out of college professors. I see it coming out of the woke. Right. I see it coming out of fricking the far progressive woke left. I see it on Wikipedia. And it all seems to be a different arm of the same ecosystem.

Ashley Reinsberg

Yeah, 100%. And Qatar is a great example that you mentioned specifically because it's infiltrated college campuses through billions in dollars of donations and payments to Ivy League and others. It has. It has done the same in sports and entertainment. It has created Al Jazeera, which is now considered a legitimate source. It's owned and operated by the Qatari government and autocratic. Talk about authoritarian. That's authoritarian when you go on Wikipedia. When we come back to the reliable source sources list, green and red. Al Jazeera is green. It's not red. It's a. It's a state run, state operated, quote unquote news source. And this stretches all through that entire Qatar kind of is this beautiful cross section of all these things at one time, because it is all these things. Qatar is a massive influence operation. And you see how that works perfectly. If you go onto the. The Qatar, the. Sorry, the Al Jazeera Media Network Wikipedia page. That's the Wikipedia page for, for Al Jazeera. You'll see it's been entirely crafted by a single editor who appeared on the scene just 19 days before October 7th. You'll see that same editor created a whole theory about how Al Jazeera has had a democratizing effect on the Middle east just because it is exists. Same editor. So all these things have been beautifully crafted as these unbelievably powerful narratives, but they're not real. They're just influence operations that are extremely effective, extremely successful.

Jillian Michaels

Ashley, thank you so much for giving me your time and for educating all of us. Where can we learn more from you? Where can we read your work? How can we stay on top of all of this? Tell. Tell us everything and I'll put it in the show notes as well. Please send it to me and I'll put it all in the show notes as well.

Ashley Reinsberg

I'm on X Ashley Rinsberg and you can check out neutralpov.com that's our substack where we break a lot of this kind of stories. News, investigations. I think that's probably. And on Instagram, if people like Instagram. It's also actually Ginsburg.

Jillian Michaels

Fantastic. Thank you so much and I hope you'll come back on. Please, please keep me in your podcast circuit. I just, I really appreciate your work and everything you're doing.

Ashley Reinsberg

Thank you so much. Likewise.

Jillian Michaels

Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please, like, comment, subscribe and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future.

Mike Baker

Future. Hey there. You listen to this show because Gillian keeps it real and cuts through the noise, right? She asks the questions that you'd like to ask. She's always curious, always thought provoking. I'm Mike Baker, host of the President's Daily Brief. And every day the PDB reports on the key crisis, the geopolitical concerns and national security matters that are happening around the globe. It's named for the brief that lands on the President's desk. And it runs every day, 20 minutes in the morning, morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon. We give you the facts without opinion. We'll tell you what's happening. You decide how to think about it. If you want it straight, follow the President's Daily Brief on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast stuff?