Johnny Vedmore discusses Molly Crockett’s dystopian suggestion during the Epstein-funded Edge event, HeadCon’14.
“Imagine we could develop a precise drug that amplifies people’s aversion to harming others; on this drug you won’t hurt a fly, everyone taking it becomes like Buddhist monks. Who should take this drug? Only convicted criminals—people who have committed violent crimes? Should we put it in the water supply? These are normative questions. These are questions about what should be done. I feel grossly unprepared to answer these questions with the training that I have, but these are important conversations to have between disciplines. Psychologists and neuroscientists need to be talking to philosophers about this. These are conversations that we need to have because we don’t want to get to the point where we have the technology but haven’t had this conversation, because then terrible things could happen.”
Read Epstein’s School of Shame for the full coverage of HeadCon ’14:
Extract from Johnny Vedmore’s article Epstein’s School of Shame: The Edge Foundation was not simply a forum for elite scientists to discuss what interested them most; a clear agenda was at play. The Masterclasses and Seminars tackled three main subjects: how to alter or affect human cells and genes; how to predict the future social order; and how to change people’s decision-making and behaviour. If you were to question any of the Large Language Models about Edge’s major events, they’ll currently tell you that everything was innocent and professional. They are also very quick to belittle and dismiss the uncomfortable fact that much of Edge’s activities were funded by Jeffrey Epstein.
Between 2001 and 2015, John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, Inc, has acknowledged that the organisation received at least $638,000 from Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein-controlled foundations. During the period in question, from 2011 to 2015, Edge received $200,000 alone to fund the study of extremely controversial and questionable subject matter directly related to controlling human behaviour at scale. This period is also extremely notable because it is after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of child abuse.
In my first articles covering the Edge Foundation’s courses, I examined Elon Musk’s involvement in the Edge Masterclasses in 2008 on Behavioural Economics and, in 2009, the Edge Masterclass on Synthetic Genomics. These two courses focused on behavioural change and genome reprogramming, respectively. Some of these seminars had very questionable sections, including the section in 2008 entitled “The Psychology of Scarcity”, and 2009’s section on “Humans 2.0”, which has since been deleted from the records. Again, well-programmed AI models will present this information in a positive, optimistic manner, regardless of the connotations. The most infamous child-abusing intelligence asset in human history was funding the study of extremely controversial science.
Molly Crockett – Shall We Put It In The Water Supply?
Many of the debates and discussions in which the Establishment faithful are actively engaged are controversial at best. However, when these discussions are being funded by an international money man of mystery who was financing such controversial programs on behalf of the CIA and its allies, the same conversations can suddenly be viewed as significantly more sinister.
Molly Crockett’s HeadCon ‘14 entry is a fine example of a conversation which has been a repeated theme of the ruling Establishment for decades. Crockett’s conversation at HeadCon was entitled “The Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making”. At the time, she was an Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford; before that, she was a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, studying human decision-making at the University of Zurich and University College London. Molly Crockett’s Doctoral Advisor at Oxford was Trevor Robbins, a highly notable figure in modern cognitive neuroscience research.
She has also received various awards, including the Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, which is awarded by the Wellcome Trust; the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, established in 2000 by a $210 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the APS Rising Stars award, which is awarded by the Association of Psychological Science.
Side Note: If you’d like to understand more about the Wellcome Trust, you can read my 2022 article: The Wellcome Five – The Proximal Origin of COVID Control.
“Imagine we could develop a precise drug that amplifies people’s aversion to harming others; on this drug you won’t hurt a fly, everyone taking it becomes like Buddhist monks. Who should take this drug? Only convicted criminals—people who have committed violent crimes? Should we put it in the water supply? These are normative questions. These are questions about what should be done. I feel grossly unprepared to answer these questions with the training that I have, but these are important conversations to have between disciplines. Psychologists and neuroscientists need to be talking to philosophers about this. These are conversations that we need to have because we don’t want to get to the point where we have the technology but haven’t had this conversation, because then terrible things could happen.”
It is true that such conversations should be happening. However, contextually speaking, the conversations should not be funded via the Central Intelligence Agency’s finest child trafficker. Crockett presents the subject matter as though no one has had these conversations before. Even though the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Government have been asking “maybe we should put it in the water supply?” for many decades.
One of those occasions was via Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute after being tasked by the State Department in 1967 with various projects. This included The Year 2000, which attempted to predict all the technology which was expected in the foreseeable future. In the video below, Herman Kahn discusses sedating an entire city’s population using such a method.
The normalisation of these conversations, and the potentially controversial solutions which are suggested as simple ways to tackle extremely complex issues, is a key tactic of those who want to coerce the early adoption of such technologies. As well as those who intend to dominate the market by co-opting key technological patents as they are being conceived of and invented.
Molly Crockett is heavily involved with Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, where she was promoted to a full professorship in 2025. At the UCHV, Crockett is the co-organiser of the Future Values Initiative, which promotes its purpose as:
“Leveraging Princeton’s strengths in the sciences and the humanities, the Future Values Initiative supports scholarship that expands traditional approaches to normative inquiry and applied ethics of science and technology, critically examining present injustices by imagining and co-creating radically different futures. We envision new modes of scholarship where scientists are given tools to understand how values shape the production of science and how its benefits and costs are socially distributed, and where humanists are partners in the innovation process rather than critics after the fact. Ultimately, we aim to evolve normative thinking and scientific practice to meet the challenges of the present age.”
Molly Crockett is also part of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is exploring how AI research shapes understandings of human cognition. She is also jointly affiliated with Princeton’s AI Lab, which is part of the Natural and Artificial Minds initiative. The latter is an initiative launched in 2024 to re-envision “theory-driven cognitive science research in the age of artificial intelligence”.
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