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June 5, 2025 - Epoch Times
01:16:02
Michael Shellenberger: How China Gained Control of Solar—And Why It Matters
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It's now been revealed that the Chinese who manufacture virtually all of our solar panels, they have been installing cellular radios inside the inverters, which can act as kill switches.
In this episode, I'm sitting down with Michael Schellenberger, an investigative journalist, author, and CBR chair of politics, censorship, and free speech at the University of Austin.
He's the author of San Francisco.
And Apocalypse Never.
We dive into America's energy revolution, vulnerabilities in the grid, and the current status of the censorship industrial complex.
We saw an enormous amount of programming of people.
The most extreme example of it was this idea that Biden was fine.
Well, now the media is falling all over itself to talk about how, oh, they were deceived.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kjellig.
Michael Schellenberger, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Great to be with you.
I can't help but notice that not a few days ago, as we're filming right now on the 23rd of May, President Trump signed four executive orders related to nuclear energy.
When we first met, I was interviewing you about Apocalypse Never, and I know how serious you are about energy.
Energy density of fuel and so forth.
So what's your reaction to this?
I'm thrilled.
I mean, it's long overdue.
I think he probably needs to go further and create a whole separate government agency, separate from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has done a good job regulating a particular technology, which is the water-cooled reactors.
But the technology is so complex, and the staff there and the regulations they have are so focused on this amount of technology, they're probably, in my view, going to need a separate agency to really take nuclear to the next level.
But the big story, as you probably know, is that energy demand is growing very quickly and will increase even more due to AI.
I use AI every day.
I rarely use Google search anymore.
I believe the I'm already being limited by my subscriptions to AI, by how much I can upload, for example.
I've been uploading the recent RFK files and hit my capacity very quickly.
And that's an energy capacity.
I'm mostly very happy with where this administration has gone on energy.
It has an energy abundance vision.
They say energy dominance, but really what matters is just quantity.
Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy.
So a nation that is energy rich is a rich nation.
There is no poor nation that's energy rich, and there's no energy rich nation that's poor.
So the commitment by this administration to expanding, in particular, natural gas and I'm extremely thrilled with it.
I'm also happy to see the paring back of these big subsidies for renewables.
I was in particular concerned about a large wind farm.
trying to large wind projects have been trying to build off the East Coast, which we know had been hurting an endangered whale species that could go extinct if they continued.
And Trump has He's allowing at least one project to go forward.
But this commitment to cheap and reliable energy might be the most important part of the Trump legacy.
I don't think there's a lot of appetite for creating new agencies at the moment.
Yeah, fair enough.
But give me the entire case of that.
Because really, we're talking about the technology around nuclear has advanced quite a bit beyond the technology you were describing, right?
You know, nuclear is our most complex technology.
It uses, obviously, a tiny amount of fuel.
There's no combustion.
You're just splitting atoms and releasing all this heat.
It's still miraculous when you think about what nuclear is.
I'm not suggesting any additional bureaucracy.
I'm just suggesting what Lockheed Martin at one point called a skunkworks project.
That was the name of a sort of separate place in their area.
I think it was in Southern California.
They just had a separate building set up to develop new technologies that would be separate from the bureaucracy that could start fresh, fresh leadership, fresh set of rules.
So it would really be a skunkworks for the Nuclear Regulatory Committee.
What about these technologies like thorium reactors?
I mean, that's not necessarily a new technology, but it's not a technology that we're very familiar with.
And there's a lot of skepticism around the new technologies, and there's reasons to be.
There's a long history of nuclear.
We could spend a lot of time on it.
But the basic story is that there was a lot of experiments by the Department of Energy in the 1950s.
Actually, going back to the '40s of different ways to cool the uranium and also to slow the uranium fission process from occurring.
There was particular some chemical salts that could be mixed in with the uranium that are very promising like fluoride or beryllium that could be mixed in with the fuel and sort of keep it cool so there would be no meltdown because the fuel itself would be melted.
You can also use gas, helium gas or carbon dioxide gas to keep it cool.
And then there's water and the water technology was developed to develop submarines and it's perfect for submarines because they're in water and so they're in water.
And some people felt like that was an error in moving towards a water-cooled nuclear power system.
I think they're great.
They've worked really well in the United States.
Contrary to the perceptions that people have had, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, really only one of those accidents was extremely serious.
With Fukushima, it was a huge overreaction.
But the water technology is the technology we know how to use.
I compare the water-cooled nuclear to jet turbines, which we've had since the 1940s and 1950s.
Our jets and air travel has become much safer, much better, much more efficient over time, mostly due to what's called human factors.
So for nuclear, that's still the main event.
These new technologies do have promise, but there's been so much hype on them.
And not recently.
There's been hype on them really for decades that I think that you just have to do both at the same time.
We should continue to build the large There's been so many things happening with the Trump administration, this record number of executive orders.
Trump declared a national energy emergency, which I Of course, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement, as expected.
This National Energy Dominance Council, which you referred to.
And then these executive order, protecting American energy from state overreach.
And there's others, but is there anything specifically that you've noticed, and obviously you follow this very closely, that you think is particularly important?
And why an emergency?
Well, look, the most important thing he did is he made his energy secretary, Chris Wright.
Chris Wright is a real shining star from the world of oil and gas development.
First of all, he's very successful in commercial terms, successful in the oil and gas business.
But more than that, he has a ton of heart.
Somebody that has viewed lifting people out of poverty as his life's mission.
We know that we still have a billion people in the world that are entirely dependent on wood and dung and biomass for their primary energy source.
Two billion people that still rely on it for cooking and heating.
That's a brutal life.
The kids have to go and gather wood from the forest.
And of course, it's also bad on those ecosystems.
Just giving people, people having access.
To propane fuel to burn for cooking saves time.
It massively reduces the smoke in the village huts.
He's somebody that's always been committed to that.
He's been committed to bringing cheap abundant energy to poor countries.
He also understands that this is, again, the lifeblood, the power of the United States is in cheap energy.
And he's somebody that really knows the industry, has the confidence of the industry.
So personnel's policy and Chris Wright was a really intelligent choice by the president, the right choice by the president, who has made excellent choices The other thing to keep in mind is that energy is a national priority.
We have 50 states.
I'm a big believer in having governance be as local as possible because people know their communities best.
But energy is a national priority.
We are in a competition, a very serious competition with China, heavily around artificial intelligence, We need to be on equal footing and be very competitive with China and with Europe and other countries in terms of energy supply.
So those measures that you mentioned are Trump making efforts to establish that energy policy has to be a national priority and these states that come in and are blocking very legitimate forms of oil and gas development, nuclear development, that needs to end.
Hopefully it'll end at the state level, but the president's measures will, I think, move things in the right direction.
So one of these executive orders was strengthening the reliability and security of the United States electric grid.
Something that's been in the news in multiple ways.
There's been these blackouts in Spain, presumably because of over-reliance on renewables.
I'd like you to get me to tell me about that a bit more.
But also there's these kill switches in the Chinese inverters that talk about vulnerability, especially if you're very reliant on the solar panels.
Unpack that for me, please.
Well, sure.
The myth of solar is that there's no consequences.
It's good for the environment.
There's no downside to it.
And solar is amazing.
When you walk down here, you see little solar panels that we use outside.
So, of course, it's a wonderful niche technology.
The problem with solar fundamentally gets to the physics of energy.
all fuels or flows, in the case of sunlight and wind, their environmental impact is determined by the density of those fuels or flows.
And so when you go from wood to coal, You go from coal to oil and natural gas, another huge increase of power density, and then you go to nuclear and you're talking a million times more energy dense.
And so when you go back to solar, you have to spread huge amounts of solar panels across landscapes.
Just go and Google search these pictures of it.
Anybody that loves the natural environment.
You see in China, they're just coating entire mountain ranges with these solar panels, which just destroys all life underneath them.
As an environmentalist, You can significantly reduce your environmental impact.
The other thing is that we know that China's making its solar panels using effectively slave labor from Uyghurs who are being persecuted in China.
And we know that they're using a huge amount of coal.
And we know that the They've used numbers from Europe rather than from China.
So we know that solar is, in fact, not as environmentally friendly on the just straight pollution level as people have thought.
All of that's before you get to the problems created for the electrical grid.
The thing that you have to understand about the electrical grid is that you have to very If you have too much energy, too much electricity on the grid, you can blow out transformers, and then that can lead to a whole set of other consequences.
If there's too little energy on the wires, then you get the depowering and the blackout, the entire collapse of the electrical grid like we saw in Spain a few weeks ago.
Well, as soon as it occurred, it was obvious what had happened.
They were at this very high amounts of solar on the system, and they don't have enough inertia on the system.
So what is inertia?
Inertia has basically been a way to stabilize those electricity and energy fluxes on the grid.
And with a traditional power plant that's creating steam or hot air to power turbines, there's a lot of built-in inertia in those machines so that you're not going to get those huge fluctuations of electricity on the grid.
So it was obvious to everybody.
That knows anything about electricity, that the Spanish blackout was caused by lack of inertia on the grid, which is a way of saying too much solar, since the solar requires these inverters, which convert the electricity from direct current to alternating current, which is what travels across the electrical wires.
So the Spanish government has been dishonest in ways that are almost humorous, pretending like they don't know.
What caused it, whereas everybody really does know that it's due to lack of inertia on the system, which is a serious problem that is not going to be solved by more batteries or more solar.
It's something that you really require huge heavy steel plants that are really the backbone, the foundation, not just of the electrical grid, but of the entire society.
So that is the fundamental problem in terms of the blackouts.
Now, in terms of this other issue, completely separate issue, which is that it's now been revealed that the Chinese who manufacture And you might think, well, that sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Not a conspiracy theory.
There was actually a Chinese solar company that turned off the solar panels.
And sent up a little message to its users saying, we've turned this off because these solar panels are only authorized to be used in certain countries.
They can't be used in Pakistan, the United States, and a few other countries.
It popped right up on the monitor.
It was a huge discussion about it.
So we know that the Chinese solar companies, all of which are essentially can be used as arms of the Chinese military.
There's really no daylight between them.
The Chinese government has made it clear that there can be viewed as extensions of the Chinese security state.
They are able to switch off large amounts of solar.
And if you are able to do that, then you are able to cause the depowering, and thus the blackouts of the grid.
How big of a problem is this?
we don't know.
I mean, there's been...
Obviously, the Chinese government wants to continue to be able to sell solar panels to us.
I think most national security experts view this as something that the Chinese could do if there was, for example, an invasion of Taiwan and the United States decided to defend Taiwan.
The Chinese could potentially trigger blackouts in the United States and Europe.
As crazy as that sounds, that is the reality.
And in fact, there's not any debate about that.
That's where we're at.
And so the only question now is, I haven't yet asked, haven't yet gotten answers from the Department of Energy, but we're hoping to get that within a few days, actually.
Give me a picture of how is it that China achieved total dominance in basically this technology, in manufacturing this technology?
Because the United States was in dream world.
We're in dreamland.
Obviously, they're able to make solar panels cheaper than anywhere in the world, in large part due to the coerced labor from these Uyghur Muslims who were in these concentration camps.
Again, not a conspiracy theory.
This has been very well reported.
That's where the vast amount of solar cell manufacturing and panel manufacturing is occurring are in those areas.
We know the Chinese government has been massively subsidizing the investment on solar.
Precisely so they can, you know, dump the solar panels in other countries to destroy other nations' indigenous solar manufacturing.
And then we've just, look, we've been, you know, in Dreamworld.
We've imagined that it's okay to let the Chinese manufacturer, not just solar, but I mean, we're talking drones, we're talking critical military technology.
I mean, imagine the country that removed So the good news is I think there is a bipartisan agreement now in Washington that that's a huge problem.
The biggest, or maybe one of the biggest, of course, is the fact that most of our semiconductors, which also means then our microchips, are being manufactured in Taiwan.
So China takes Taiwan.
You know, then we are in very serious trouble.
There was a CHIPS Act passed under Biden.
It did have bipartisan support.
It's a good thing to create incentives to return the semiconductor and chip manufacturing to the United States.
but we are nowhere near where we need to be in order to be self-sufficient.
So I do think it's that the hypnotic I mean, so many of our products do come from low-cost China, but it just went too far, and the pendulum swung.
Way too far in one direction and I think we are now starting to see it hopefully swinging back in the other direction.
Well, and the CCP did this with a whole bunch of very critical industries, notably steel is one of them, but also telecom.
Huawei, for national security reasons, has been massively subsidized and there's a whole bunch of countries.
Think of this like 140 countries that rely on Huawei for their telecom.
Well, it's incredible.
And of course, there was the, you know, Congress did act to then, you know, restrict U.S. reliance on Huawei.
But then Huawei also made the solar inverters or made the inverters that are used in solar projects.
and the scandals kind of keep going on and on.
It turned out that Huawei was sort of the main partner with the government of California in something that was called, I think it was called China SF, or it was an initiative basically to increase ties between California and China at a time when we were doing a big solar build-out.
So, I mean, one of the places that is most vulnerable to a potential Chinese sabotage is California because of our high dependence on solar.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think the other On the American political system.
So I think that we have been asleep at the wheel for really decades, arguably 30 years or longer.
The fact that just the drones example, the microchips example, certainly the solar inverters example, that ought to be a very harsh wake-up call and require some emergency action.
Well, and just on another note, the sort of the other side of it, these giant transformers that are, I think, manufactured only in China right now for the high-voltage grids that, you know, basically to kind of keep the grid together, I've kind of understood that one of them was taken apart in Los Alamos, I don't know, somewhere, and some pretty things were found in there that shouldn't be in there, let's just say.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
And they justify the cellular radios in order to provide information in terms of how to manage grid electricity, and there may be some benefit to that.
But there's got to be a technical fix to this.
It's not clear what it will be because there are so many inverters.
I think it's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inverters in the United States.
Not sure what it will be, the solution, whether it's signal jamming or something else, but obviously that's sort of heavy reliance.
Again, another reason to go to nuclear because nuclear, it was funny because, you know, the story from since the 1960s from anti-nuclear activists posing as environmentalists is that solar would make the grid less nuclear, And that nuclear somehow, because it was just a few big plants, would make it more vulnerable.
That turned out to be completely the opposite.
having these big plants really is a stabilizing factor in the grid.
I mean, you can kind of The surface attack area for solar, because of the low power densities, because of the dilute nature of sunlight, are spread over much larger areas.
So, you know, and you don't have to reduce, I was mentioning before that perfect matching of supply and demand of electricity, you don't have to reduce supply by very much to depower the electrical grid and send it into cascading failures and blackout.
Just come to think of it, because this is something that's been on my mind a lot lately, have you tracked at all the CCP's influence on American media, legacy media and so forth?
I'm not an expert on it.
I've only heard about it in part from Epoch Times and from reading you guys, but certainly it does seem like there's a huge amount of it.
Obviously the big story has been TikTok and what it's been doing, but no, I think it's a serious concern.
Ongoing information operation.
We now know that the Chinese intelligence community is by far the largest intelligence community in the world.
We know that there are a large number of Chinese spies in the United States working at all levels in our universities, in our government agencies.
It's a huge problem.
I mean, we do want to remain an open society in the United States.
That's why it's so special.
But it is clearly something that we've also been asleep at.
It's very difficult because it's like the things that make open societies, like you said, special is a good word, invaluable and something we want to believe in and support, they can also be weaponized against us and our being to the nth degree.
That's right.
It is so special.
I've been going back and rereading my American history.
and just relearning how special this country was, and in particular the commitment to freedom of speech.
But just this commitment to self-governance, it seems like something And remember, there was a whole story in the 1990s, and I bought into it, by the way, which was the whole end of history story that comes out in the late 80s after the fall of communism in the early 90s.
The sense was that China and other And that democracy, it's not an emergent effect of prosperity like many people thought it was.
It's not something that emerges necessarily out of modernization.
It can, but it really is a foundational value.
It's really got to be in the culture of the people who create that country.
And we have to keep reminding each other why it is so special.
It never occurred to me that we needed to, you know, continue to teach kids and to teach our kids and to remind each other about what freedom of speech is and why it's so special and why we have to defend.
But we clearly do, because I don't think it's intuitive.
What's intuitive is to want other people to shut up.
And we see a lot of that.
That's the intuitive response.
That's the base response.
That's what we call fast thinking.
Slow thinking, deliberative thinking, is the thinking that protects freedom of speech.
And obviously in a social media society, in a highly polarized society, in a highly ideological society, there's a lot of fast thinking.
Not enough of that slow thinking that we need in order to defend our freedom of expression.
It's the perfect moment for me to mention this lecture that I watched of yours that you did about Rusty Reno's 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, which I kind of had forgotten about.
And as I was preparing for this interview, I came across this interview.
And by the way, congratulations on being the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin.
To add to your quite extensive acumen, you're now a professor.
It's a real pleasure.
Yeah, my wife and I are building a home in Austin.
We love Austin.
It's really culturally and sort of politically aligned with our values, and it's a very libertarian culture.
The parts of it that are liberal are the parts of it for me that are still liberal, and the parts of it that are more conservative are also the parts of me that are conservative, so it really represents.
I think a really special place is obviously a tech center.
And this is a really interesting university.
It is extremely, it's so hard to start a new university in the United States that nobody even thinks about doing it.
This is a group of very big thought leaders, Barry Weiss from the Free Press, Joe Lonsdale, who's one of our most successful venture capitalists behind Palantir and a number of other high-tech companies, Neil Ferguson, who's a truly great historian out of Hoover Institute at Stanford.
They felt that we needed a new liberal arts.
University because of the totalitarianism that has overtaken so many other universities in the United States.
So, you know, it's a startup.
I just taught my first quarter there from January through March of this year and it was so special, Jan.
I tell you, you walk into the campus and some student is playing piano and there's a big atrium and some kids are playing chess and they're debating politics.
The very high premium, not just on free speech and the students themselves, high premium on making sure that people understand both sides of every argument.
The students would be demanding that of me.
Are we really hearing all sides of this?
We don't want to get a single perspective.
So that core value has really taken hold in the university.
So I've got really high hopes for it.
The first year is only going to be coming to an end right about now.
No, and I've had the opportunity to visit and interview a few key players, and I loved everything I saw.
Watching this lecture, you said that you expect America to basically start depolarizing in the next 10 to 15 years.
That's fascinating.
Before we go there, just tell me a little bit, give me a picture of what this book is about, and then I want to come into why you're so bullish on depolarization.
His author title is R.R. Reno, and the book is called The Return of the Strong Gods.
And as you mentioned, the book came out several years ago.
It actually came out, I think, would you say 2018, 2019?
2019.
2019.
And he is an editor at First Things, which is a very fine journal that has a lot of religious-inspired writings, but also a journal of politics.
It's a small book, you can read it in one sitting, but it is maybe the most And what he's describing is, on the one hand, it's the rise of nationalism, the return of nationalism, most dramatically in the form of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, also the rise of populists and nationalists in Europe.
But I think he's tapping into something deeper, too.
He basically describes the story where, after World War II, The United States and Europe and global leaders quite understandably wanted to pursue a policy of sort of weakening national cultures, national traditions, which they had viewed as the cause of fascism and the driving force behind World War II.
They wanted to weaken them and also open up countries and open up them to globalization.
And that made a lot of sense in 1946, 1947 when the Over time, it just went too far.
And you get to the end of communism and after 1990, the bringing in of China into that system with this huge amount of confidence that China would behave like European nations had and moving more towards reprimandions.
And things didn't work out that way.
And we saw that globalization both deindustrialized the United States.
It also opened up our borders to a very rapid influx of immigration.
On the one hand, the United States is a better position than any other country in the world to absorb and assimilate immigrants.
Europe has had a much harder time of doing that.
But even here, it just, you know, obviously went too far.
You know, I think Donald Trump could not have been reelected.
A second time had the Biden administration not overreacted by opening up the borders in the ways that they did.
But the strong gods just refers to the fact that there's just something much deeper around national identity, around religious traditions, around cultural traditions that had for a long time kind of been repressed or put down and have now emerged in ways that the ruling elites Don't even really understand.
That's why they don't really understand the return of the strong gods.
They think it's, you know, Trump has just tricked everybody or that the Americans somehow became fascists and all sorts of absurd things.
And he's pointing out that, no, there is a true American tradition.
There's things like the work ethic.
There's a laissez-faire, libertarian, egalitarianism in the sense of equal opportunity, not equality of outcome.
A strong sense of individualism that makes the United States distinctive as a nation.
And other countries have their own strong gods, but that's what's coming back at a time when globalization imagined that it was basically going to erase the differences between countries.
Those cultural, you know, culture's real.
It's not always, you know, the boundaries between cultures is obviously fuzzy, but culture is very real.
Now, there's obviously, you know, obviously or not, obviously, there can be a dark side to this.
You certainly see things that the Trump administration has done that I don't agree with, things around using things that students have said as the basis of denying them a green card.
That's a case where the strong gods, so to speak, trump the Liberal or individual enlightenment sort of rights, which are just weaker forces.
So to recognize these strong gods is not to suggest that we should just obey them or disregard hundreds of years of the enlightenment.
We should not, but we should just recognize that this return of the strong gods, this return to nationalism, this return to tradition, the move in particular by young Americans.
towards Trump and young men in particular back towards a sense of masculinity a sense of manliness even and often again too far sometimes when you get a character like Andrew Tate but can be very positive in a case like Jordan Peterson and others who are trying to elevate a sense of gentlemanliness return to a sense of manliness and a sense that there are real differences between genders as though they need to be said so even there you see masculinity and And
femininity in some sense of that there are real differences that are not just cultural, that have some root in biology and in nature, that those things are still real and that the effort to kind of homogenize all of us and turn us all into what online people call NPCs, non-player characters, people without an identity, people without a national identity, the idea that you can just sort of live anywhere, that traditions don't matter.
That world, I think, has gone as far as it could.
And it did have a positive impact for the first, I'd say, 50 to 60 years after World War II, but it's just clearly gone too far.
And so now we're seeing that return of strong odds.
Well, so it's very interesting.
I read what NPC means a little bit differently than you do, I think.
And it actually dovetails to exactly my question about you being bullish on 10 or 15 years, I think you said, of depolarization.
I want you to explain that.
But what I see, watching, you know, you've written extensively about the censorship, disinformation industrial complex, censorship industrial complex.
The other dimension of it is the ability to propagandize people and effectively propagandize people.
In fact, very quickly, effectively propagandize people with some portion of the population seemingly being I don't actually know what it is exactly, but it's very concerning because if you hold these large messaging systems,
you can take 10% or 20% and convince a whole bunch of people very quickly that, for example, Another group of people want to kill them, or hurt them, or do damage to them, or something.
But I find it very difficult to imagine when such a mechanism exists, how we can achieve, and social media creating these silos of information and so forth, how we get to this depolarization.
So I'm excited to hear, and how do we overcome that?
Because I don't know the answer.
Well, that's such a great question.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think first just to, I agree with you in the sense that, uh, Go ahead.
No, no.
I was just going to say an NPC.
To me, NPCs mean people who lack agency and are just kind of these people that can be programmable or something like that.
A little bit different from what you said.
Just to be clear.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So much to say in there.
I mean, we saw an enormous amount of programming of people, you know, and again, you can see it on both sides, but just to, you know, pick on the side that we're talking about now, I mean, there were millions of Americans who were convinced that Trump was like Hitler, that he was like fascists and that his supporters were fascists, you're talking about people who, literally just years earlier,
The reputation traditionally has been that the right is constitutionally literalist, meaning that they want a literal interpretation of the Constitution.
They want to go see...
They want to go back to see how people thought about those things in the 18th century.
So the idea that somehow Republicans just wanted to disregard the Constitution, I think, is really wild.
And this easy rhetoric turned into belief.
And you can blame social media.
You can blame MSNBC, you know, and the most extreme example of it, They called them cheap fakes.
now the media is falling all over itself to talk about how, oh, they were deceived by the Biden family.
But that was a very scary situation where you had somebody that was not copus mentis, like running the country, supposedly representing the United States in various crisis situations, and he wasn't entirely there.
So that, and I think social media then also played a role.
It reinforced people's views.
It gave them too much certainty that...
For the first hundred years, the Catholic Church loved the printing press because they print all these Bibles and they had control of it.
Well, as soon as Martin Luther got a hold of the printing press and was able to print his denunciations of Catholic Church corruption, It was game-changing.
At that point on, the church wanted to censor and literally get rid of printing presses and chased printing presses all over Europe.
My view is that Twitter, before Elon Musk bought it, was a lot like the printing press when the Catholics had control of it.
It intensified existing media power.
That was when you saw this cancel culture emerge, this demand for censorship.
Once Elon Musk bought it, a number of things happened that were important.
The first was that he allowed us into the Twitter headquarters to report on the Twitter files where we discovered not just cancel culture, biased culture, censoring people for insisting that biological sex was real, for example, but also discovering the role of the Department of Homeland Security in creating a censorship industrial complex.
The role of FBI in running an information operation aimed at convincing people that Hunter Biden's laptop was not real when it was real.
And then he removed the special privilege given to mainstream journalists and extended that to other people.
So you were able to open up the debate much more widely.
He allowed more speech that people disagree with, misinformation, hate speech, and instituted a community notes model, which is crowdsourced fact checking rather than committee expert driven forms of fact checking.
So I think that's been transformative.
But I mean, at the time, a year ago, 2024, summer of 2024, The media really was in control.
I mean, the media decided, once they saw Biden in the debate, the media decided that he had to step down.
There's a way in which the media was the sovereign power, and it was programming huge numbers of Americans about how to think about all sorts of things.
Coronavirus, climate change, transgenderism, race.
And it was a real programming.
I mean, we're not computers.
We're biological and spiritual beings, ultimately.
But it is easy to program people.
You know, you provide certain kinds of information and certain sort of narratives.
And I think that's what we saw on a whole range of issues.
I think, I mean, even get further down that rabbit hole, I mean, there's a way in which I think we knew, you always sort of know the media is biased and this person has a point of view.
But I think there's a different view, which is that it was really the whole establishment was actually just programming people on how to think on a whole range of issues.
And the Overton window, meaning the window of what's acceptable conversation, was so narrow.
Now it's much wider.
It used to be that New York Times and Walter Cronkite decided what could fit and what couldn't fit.
Well, the new Walter Cronkite is Joe Rogan, and he's not telling you...
He's just introducing many people that are way outside of the Overton window of acceptable discourse and allowing that conversation to open up again.
That's why I do have hope, actually, is I do think we're in a transition from just a highly, overly globalized system.
Overly closed system in terms of information and programming to a rebalancing, a much more nationalist system with a much more open media and discursive environment.
You know, I'm just thinking about, this is something you just wrote about, is these newly declassified documents, declassified by the Director of National Intelligence, Tilsey Gabbard, you know, basically opponents of COVID mandates, broadly speaking.
Being actually considered domestic violent extremists by DHS and the FBI.
Maybe explain to me what these documents reveal exactly.
Sure.
Well, these were documents that were created by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center, which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which manages and oversees all 17 of the intelligence agencies.
And to her great credit, Director Gabbard declassified these documents.
And what they showed was that they were, I mean, essentially...
I mean, these were analysts who wrote this warning, essentially, to other analysts in the intelligence community, saying, we expect people who are critical of the COVID mandates.
Remember, it's not even skeptical.
These are not vaccine deniers.
These are people who are just saying, I don't think that we should be required by law to inject this experimental vaccine, which turned out didn't stop.
Infection or transmission anyway, and now we're seeing various negative health consequences.
They wanted to label those people domestic violence extremists.
They said on the little alert, they go, of course, we don't want this to violate First Amendment free speech rights.
Well, the whole thing is based on one's free speech, one's view of vaccine mandates as a bad thing.
So what was that about?
Well, when we interviewed former FBI people, including FBI whistleblowers, they said this was a predicate first to being able to censor people on social media companies.
The FBI would be able to go to the social media companies and say, hey, look, you've got people here that are opposing the vaccine mandate.
Potentially, you know, incurring or inspiring violent action.
And then also it would be a way to open up a potential investigation.
It could be the first step for an agent to sort of see somebody online, see criticism online.
You know, begin the process towards an investigation.
In that article, there's a specific language, I can't remember what it was, but there's like a phase before a formal investigation by the FBI where an agent can target somebody.
So it appeared to be creating predicates for both censorship and potentially entrapment.
It's really shocking.
so outside the American tradition.
I mean, this is a country where...
There was a debate, by the way, when they were writing the Constitution.
Jefferson said, representing a lot of other people too, we want a special amendment.
We want a Bill of Rights and a special amendment protecting free speech.
And Hamilton in the Federalist Papers points out, he said, you know, there's nothing, you know, the Constitution already will protect that.
There's nothing, there's no need for it.
And they said, no, we'll take an extra, we'll take that extra Bill of Rights and that extra emphasis.
That's how important free speech is to us.
And that tradition is held.
So the Supreme Court has held such a high bar.
That your free speech rights extend all the way up until really directly threatening people with violence, immediately inciting violence against people.
But otherwise, we're allowed to say very extreme Hateful things.
You're allowed to lie in most situations unless it results in you stealing somebody's money or deliberately destroying somebody's reputation in ways that has financial consequences if you can prove you know it.
but even in politics, because politicians lie all the time, we allow a huge amount of free speech rights.
So that just...
I mean, there's no other word for it.
This idea of labeling millions of Americans essentially terrorists, domestic violent extremists, for their opposition to What struck me with it, though, is that it's not that you necessarily expect that everybody who's an opposer of mandates to be investigated, but it allows you to create a predicate for certain people that you would like to investigate.
Yes.
Does that… Yeah, no, you absolutely nailed it.
I mean, this is, if you don't have free, if you don't have First Amendment protections, then basically, Whatever political party comes into power can just start persecuting their political opponents.
I mean, to some extent, that's always the case.
The point, you want to create laws that reduce the ability of prosecutors to engage in that sort of selective prosecution.
But no, you're 100% correct.
I mean, we saw it with the lawfare against Trump.
I mean, this thing of turning several, counting multiple with the parent Clearly, that was not about what it was about.
That was clearly an effort to prevent Donald Trump from being able to run for president.
Similarly, the enforcement of the law against him for having some classified records in his home, even though we know Biden had classified records in his home.
And the prosecutor said, well, we can't try, we can't prosecute Biden because he's too The finding was he just couldn't remember enough stuff to prosecute him.
So then why would you be prosecuting Trump for doing nothing differently?
And they say, well, because Trump was less cooperative.
well, yeah, but that's just how Trump is.
So you're basically, they were finding things in the case of Trump to prosecute him on.
That would have been what would have been opened up to many Trump supporters.
I think the other thing that was going on there, Jan, was that there was an effort to, it was basically part of a propaganda information, they call them information operations, which was to do more of those charges so that they could paint supporters of President Trump and the MAGA movement as domestic violent extremists to create this perception
The other thing I want to mention, you know, it's this kind of media support when this weaponization happens.
It's like it couldn't happen without a considerable amount of media or some media being involved because it's almost like it validates it.
I don't know if you've heard about that.
No, you're spot on.
I mean, actually, this is a theme across all of the weaponization of government.
And I should say, too, stepping back, because it's now been two and a half years since we did the Twitter files and sort of discovered the censorship industrial complex.
And, of course, you were discovering it firsthand.
You have the scars to show for it of the censorship before that.
It was counter-populism.
It was clearly an effort, particularly after 2016.
It did have some beginnings before then.
But it was clearly an effort to run a long-term propaganda campaign to paint supporters of Donald Trump as a threat to democracy.
And that it was the Russiagate hoax.
The censorship industrial complex, the Hunter Biden laptop.
It was all around creating a perception that Trump supporters were a threat to democracy and they were somehow on the payroll of Putin or they were somehow controlled of Putin.
And that was particularly important because...
It's something that really binds us together as citizens.
It's our kind of core community when you kind of go, you know, family, nation.
I mean, it's right after family as your kind of core community.
It's where you have your sense of identity and protection.
And, you know, nationalism, according to Leah Greenfield, who I think is one of the greatest thinkers on it, Fundamentally equal individuals with a shared identity.
So you can be rich, you can be poor, but we're all equally citizens.
Elon Musk and I are equally citizens.
We have equal rights.
That's the power of nationalism.
So to suggest and paint a whole group of people as somehow controlled by Russians is a strategy to undermine that.
And that was a strategy by these organizations that have been weaponized.
by a particular, I think, radicalized faction of the federal government.
But yeah, it was working hand in glove with the media so that, remember the whole Russiagate thing would start because what they would do is they would
So it's just a completely circular process of which the media is complicit and a part of this effort to demonize and to disparage and to basically spread disinformation for political purposes.
You're just reminding me, again, something that you said in this wonderful lecture, which I'd love for people to watch at some point.
But you said there's this kind of irony that it's really kind of Trump's enemies that gave him the victory.
And that basically speaks to the kind of eternal cycle, nemesis follows hubris, the tragic hero, all of it.
It's just like a fascinating insight.
Well, it's like a head-slapping moment, right, where you kind of go, you know, that, I mean, Trump may not have been elected, probably wouldn't have been elected if they had not tried to put him in jail, if they not engaged in all the censorship against him.
It made him a much more sympathetic character.
And more importantly, I think a lot of Americans, including the ones who were on the fence, felt like they needed this sort of anti-hero type, a kind of Walter White type or a kind of Sopranos type figure, a tough guy.
You know, a rough guy to protect them from this abuse, massive abuse of power occurring.
So yeah, I think that the left, and it was both the weaponization of government, it was also the open borders.
You know, it was also inflation, certainly, but there's a sense in which, yeah, the left were really the agent of their own downfall.
And of course, that's a very old story, as you noted.
That's the story of the tragic downfall is due to hubris.
Pride is the only crime, as Sophocles says in Antigone.
Pride is sort of the mother vice over all other vices, and it was this overconfidence.
We're the smart ones.
We're the experts.
We're the ones that should be in charge.
Trump and the MAGA people are deplorables morally, intellectually.
And I'll add another final irony here, Jan, and it comes out in this new recent book that everyone's talking about around Biden's old age and his infirmity being hidden from the public, is that by the Democrats manipulating their own internal primary process, I mean, the Democrats have not had a free primary since 2008.
It's been manipulated ever since then, first to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton, then to give it to Joe Biden.
By doing that, they ended up with two extremely weak characters.
Well, I'm sorry, three extremely weak characters.
First in Hillary Clinton, second in Joe Biden, and third in Kamala Harris.
Because if they had actually had a contest within the Democratic Party, they probably would have ended up choosing the person that was, I think, Democrats in their hearts favored, which was Bernie Sanders, who again also represented a little bit more of that populist nationalist spirit that proved to be so appealing.
Not just to the Republican base, but also to swing voters.
So let me go back to that original question, which was that you see a future where things do get depolarized.
And despite this ability to influence significant portions of the population, It's a small portion, relatively, but it's still extremely significant.
Tell me what you see happening.
Yeah, how does polarization end, right?
Because I don't think that, you know, things that can't go on forever don't, as they say.
So I think that we're in a transition period.
It is a dangerous period in that sense.
I don't know if the Democrats are going to make it, to be perfectly honest, as a political party.
Or I'll say it this way, if the Democrats do survive as a political party, it is going to look very different than the way it looks now.
Why do I say that?
Well, just look at what the Democrats are doing.
I mean, the Democrats over the last 10 years have said that the highest priority issues are racial justice, climate action, transgenderism, you know, open borders.
Well, why are the Democrats not defending any of those things?
Trump is in the process of dismantling every major part of the Democrats'agenda.
The parts of the agenda that Democrats said were must-haves for human survival.
They said that you had to have this really bloated subsidy policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, green energy subsidies.
They said we have to be able to do this.
Or there will be a transgenocide?
They said that we have to have strict racial quotas in every single institution in society so that every single profession, every single institution had a racial composition that exactly matched the population.
These were supposedly core values to Democrats.
They're not defending them.
When you saw that when Trump gave his first and only speech so far to Congress in February, sort of the State of the Union, but they didn't call it that because it's the first year of his presidency, but Democrats held up little placards, little protest placards with different slogans on them.
They didn't say any of those things.
They didn't talk about any of the core agenda.
What about the protests that we've seen?
They've been protesting Elon Musk.
They've been lighting Teslas on fire.
I mean, they've lost the plot, to put it mildly.
They're actually attacking one of the technologies that they had celebrated for purely personalistic reasons.
Their agenda's shot.
They're not defending it.
And now we're starting to see people like Gavin Newsom move away from the transgenderism.
We're seeing a very weak defense of the climate subsidies.
You know, no defense.
Of DEI, racial quotas, which Americans absolutely hate.
I mean, it is really amazing to think about how racist, how openly racist people were in this country over the last 10 years, just openly willing to say hateful things against white people, things that were, frankly, essentialist, engaged in racial separatism.
I mean, it's just quite shocking when you think about it in the history of America.
So the Democrats haven't just lost politically, they have lost morally.
They've lost any moral high ground that they once had, particularly when you look back at like the Obama years when the left was maybe at the peak of its power.
So then the question is, because you are going to have to have political diversity, it's a democracy, you're not going to have, you know, Republicans aren't going to be the only ones in power, the Democrats or some other party will have to emerge.
What will it look like?
Well, it'll probably be a nationalist party.
Maybe a softer form of a kind of left MAGA-ism.
I hope, personally, that it embraces things like free speech, that it is liberal in the best sense of the term, of a focus on individual rights, probably a little bit more globalist.
But nonetheless, maybe on all the things you would imagine, but I don't think it's going to look...
And that gives me some hope because I do think that it's important to have that political difference in conflict.
But I also think countries, there needs to be some agreement on a set of things between the two parties.
And I do think that that's where we'll be moving.
It'll probably take about 10 years, but I expect it'll happen.
You alluded to the fact earlier that this censorship industrial complex has weakened.
There are whole agencies that were central to it, like the Global Engagement Center, that are gone.
What's the status of this censorship industrial complex?
Is it gone?
Is it dismantled?
I mean, I'm thrilled, very happy with what President Trump has done.
I mean, there's, I'm not happy with everything he's done, but on the things that I'm I mean, he comes in the first, you know, within hours of being inaugurated, he signs an executive order on free speech that should never have had to be signed because he's basically just affirming the First Amendment to our Constitution.
But unless he signs that, they moved quickly to end the Global Engagement Center, which was part of the State Department, which had funded an organization.
That had targeted media, the Global Disinformation Index, a little outfit out of Britain that was just smearing media and trying to basically run advertiser boycotts, trying to get advertisers to boycott perfectly legitimate, mostly right-of-center media outlets.
They've gone after the National Science Foundation, Track F, funding for censorship activities.
Misdescribed, of course, as fighting misinformation.
But this is a very scary effort to basically pour millions of dollars into universities to develop censorship tools for social media companies.
It was actually a continuation of tools that were developed by DARPA, our great Defense Department R&D laboratory.
They have shut down, I think, the beating heart of the censorship industrial complex, which were these four organizations that were all, or I think most all of them, if not all of them, were receiving or going to receive National Science Foundation money.
I mean, the Stanford Internet Observatory, due to pressure that we and others put on them, that shut down last year before Trump was elected.
And he's also come out, been critical of the head of the DHS agency that oversaw the censorship, which is called the Cybersecurity Information Security Agency, Chris Krebs, somebody who was involved in that censorship activity.
You mentioned GARM.
Also, the advertiser censorship effort has disbanded, though we're concerned it's restarting up again.
Just huge success.
There's strong rumors that we will see actions to sanction the Brazilian Supreme Court judge who is behind the censorship in Brazil.
And I am myself under criminal investigation under Brazil for the Twitter files Brazil.
So I'm very happy to see that.
We saw concerns expressed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the persecution.
And the censorship of British citizens, some of whom said some ugly things online that are reprehensible, but nonetheless should not result in two and a half years in jail, which is the situation of a 42-year-old mother in Britain right now.
So I'm thrilled.
Now, is it game over?
Not quite.
I wish it were.
the censorship industrial complex has always been very strong in Britain and in Brussels as part of the European Union.
The European Union has an free speech content, that they would declare misinformation or hate speech, and with the punishment of 6% of global revenues.
Of social media platforms, which could bankrupt them because the profit margins of social media companies are so thin.
So they've decamped to Britain and Europe.
The censorship industrial complex really mirrors the Five Eyes intelligence.
We're the Five Eyes, English-speaking nations, United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, have all collaborated on intelligence.
They also collaborated on censorship and on, really, I would call them defamation and disinformation and demonization campaigns against people, including myself, by some of those organizations who are funded by the censorship industrial complex, such as Institute for Strategic Dialogue, one of the worst.
Actors in that space demanding censorship by social media platforms of completely legitimate and accurate information.
So we should be very concerned and worried about what's happening in Britain and also what's happening in Brussels.
But I do think the wind is to our backs, and that's not a reason to stop fighting.
That's a reason to really continue to build those alliances.
So we do a meeting every year in London, in Westminster, the Westminster Free Speech Forum.
In 2023, we did a Westminster Declaration for Free Speech, which many public intellectuals, maybe yourself and other journalists, have signed, which opposes censorship of legal speech by social media platforms and any government pressure to do that.
So Australia killed legislation that would have done censorship last year.
Ireland pulled legislation that would have caused censorship.
You know, two steps forward, one step back in a lot of these places.
There's still things that they're trying to move forward.
They're often using, you know, protecting children, you know, protecting racial minorities as the excuses.
But it does feel like the wind is to our back.
So I'm in a much more positive mood than I was just a year or two ago.
So your other book that I interviewed you about some time ago was, of course, San Francisco.
And there's been some remarkable developments in San Francisco when it comes to the realities around homelessness.
So tell me about that.
I mean, it's amazing.
So 2022, they recalled the radical left district attorney of San Francisco, Soros Funded District Attorney, because of the chaos that he created.
And then last year, November 2024, they voted out their mayor and voted in a mayor who promised to crack down on the open-air drug dealing and rampant homelessness.
And just yesterday, he announced that San Francisco was now a recovery-first city.
That's amazing.
Just to put that language in context, recovery first is the replacement to so-called harm reduction.
Harm reduction is an Orwellian euphemism for enabling addiction, which is about enabling death and destruction and sexual assaults and drug dealing and murder and all horrible, horrible things on the streets of San Francisco.
Recovery first.
elevates a proper vision of how to treat addiction, which is the main driver of homelessness, but also mental illness.
Recovery comes out of the 12-step program.
Recovery from addiction is still the most inspiring vision.
I mean, people, the cynicism promoted by the enablement agenda is that people can't quit becoming addicts.
It's just not true.
Most people that Most addicts are able to quit on their own.
Only a tiny percentage of people become so addicted and so sick that they become homeless and live on the street.
Those people require an intervention.
When they break the law, which is inevitable, if they're camping illegally or using drugs publicly or defecating publicly or doing many other things, breaking the law in many ways, the right approach is that they be arrested and offered the choice of rehabilitation.
Or jail.
That's the only thing that is proven to work.
And then from there, it's a set of carrots and sticks to help people to recover from their addiction.
The fact that the mayor has announced that San Francisco is a Recovery First City is just a huge victory.
It's of enormous satisfaction for me.
It's not perfect.
The Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, unfortunately, weakened and corrupted.
Much of that initiative.
But the fact that the city has now made as its goal recovery is a huge achievement.
So I'm really quite thrilled with it.
And we hope it's the beginning of the end of this awful addiction and drug death crisis.
Well, and frankly, I can see why you're optimistic, because a number of the key areas that you've spent quite a bit of time doing advocacy around have kind of come to fruition, haven't they?
Or at least the beginnings of it.
Yeah, I mean, it's good to remember, it's always good to remember, I have to remind myself, that, you know, trends are nonlinear, that, you know, things that feel like it's just going awful in one direction, that they can turn around.
I think it's also a testament to free expression and free speech and democracy, that if you can make the case and bring the evidence and appeal to basic humanity and values, that it does get through.
Most people are not radical or extreme.
Most people want safe They want a compassionate alternative.
They don't want this thing of reviving people 13 times from Narcan and never giving them the help they need.
It's inhumane.
It's also just completely, basically, us spending taxpayer money to make people sick.
somehow nihilistic if I may, right?
Yeah.
That's like the word of the, nihilism is a word, I see it being used more and I think it's great because it really does describe, and nihilism, there's so much going on in that idea, but it's just a, yeah, it's a really, It's a negation of humanity, of our basic humanity, of our cities, of our civilization.
I mean, if you love people, you know, Because civilization, by which I mean, you know, law and order, meritocracy, cheap energy, just, you know, the equal justice under the law.
That's the best way to take care of people.
I mean, that's just, we, it's not, you don't need a lot of research to see that.
But yeah, I mean, I think you get into places like California and people enter into a dream world.
'Cause I always ask myself, man, how do you, How do you permit that and still think that you're a caring person?
And it just shows how ideological people have become, that they've constructed this elaborate dream world where police officers are somehow not required anymore.
It's a fantasy reality made worse by the media, but really a result of our cities, our progressive cities, falling into the hands of what I think ultimately you have to call a cult.
I mean, it's a kind of cult mentality that has all of the characteristics of a religious cult.
I want to ask you, so speaking about cults, I want to talk to you as we finish up about testimony that you did last year about UFOs, actually UAPs we call them these days.
And it's just kind of an interesting area, something that I don't follow very much.
I don't know why, maybe because I can't deal with sort of I don't deal well with mixes of fact and fiction.
I need either fact or fiction.
And this one is just very difficult to tease apart.
But, you know, I trust your vision and your kind of understanding.
Where are we at with this?
You know, what do we know?
What do we not know?
Well, my testimony was pretty straightforward, which was that I don't know what the unidentified anomalous phenomena are.
I mean, that's why they're called.
Unidentified.
They did make a change, and we're calling them phenomena as opposed to objects.
There are reports of the government having captured a craft.
We haven't seen them.
On the other hand, we haven't really gotten the access to them yet.
What I wanted to point out, as my, This is from a presentation from the UAP Task Force, which is a U.S. government task force to investigate this.
And, I mean, why can't we know these things?
Okay, nobody's saying that we should be able to know, you know, secret government technologies or special sensor equipment.
But, I mean, you know.
Potential explanations.
Okay, so three hypotheses.
Unknown weather or other natural phenomena is number two.
But the first two hypotheses are blacked out.
Why can't the public know the hypotheses?
I mean, I think we all kind of know what the other hypotheses are.
But it's so taboo.
And there's been so much stigma and ridicule built around it that I think has declined quite a bit.
But nonetheless, it's still there.
But we're being treated like children.
If there is non-human, if there's evidence of non-human beings on our planet, we have a right to know that.
It's our taxpayer money, and the Constitution, of course, requires congressional oversight of that.
But, you know, plan of action, we can't know.
The letters, by the way, just refer to different parts of the legal code that justify the censorship.
But, I mean, there's dozens of these documents.
We know the documents exist.
We also, I reported on, a whistleblower had come forward to describe a program called Immaculate Constellation, which is essentially a very large database of many videos and photographs.
Some have been released.
I have heard from multiple whistleblowers who I trust, sources in the intelligence community or contractors, who say that we have very clear videos, videos of orbs in particular.
In the past, I don't know why, this is another thing we're very curious about, there used to be a lot of disks, you know, flying saucers, and now we see a lot of these balls and circular orbs, they're called.
Sure, some of them are balloons, some of them might be ball lightning or plasma.
And if that's the case, then we should know that.
So I think that, you know, we've had, really since World War II, this has been an issue.
There was, you know, in 1952, there were huge UFO sightings over Washington, D.C. Really, the government has never stopped studying it.
We don't know what else.
My view is, whatever it is, including if it's misinformation or psychogenic explanations or natural phenomenon, that we should know about it.
So the suspicion should be around the lack of transparency.
The other thing I'll say is that President Trump has promised to reveal more about this.
The last big wave of UAP sightings.
Yes, were many of them jet planes, of course.
Were many of them human drones?
100%.
There was also a lot of unidentified anomalous phenomena.
We should get to know what that is.
And President Trump has promised that.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has promised that.
We now have multiple former So we're all getting a little bit impatient and I think we need this administration to go further than it has.
We're entering into late May and we have not had the disclosure of information that has been promised to us.
We've had some, and I want to compliment the administration on some of the JFK files, some of the RFK files, but we are still waiting for Russiagate, censorship files, Epstein files, UAP files.
There's a lot there that's hidden and overclassified, and we have a right to know.
Okay.
Well, wonderful conversation today, Michael.
A final thought as we finish?
Well, no, just congratulations to Epoch Times.
And you have come through some genuine persecution against your company by nefarious forces.
So I want to compliment you on keeping the flame alive and fighting for free speech and for independent journalism.
Well, Michael Schellenberger, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you all for joining Michael Schellenberger and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
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